MEXICO CITY STRETCHES OUT toward the south into that proletarian world of San Angel, Puente Sierra, Tizapan, and Contreras, towns connected to the city by the thin umbilical cord of the Tacubaya streetcar line. Labyrinthine cobbled side streets invariably lead to the doors of the great textile mills in the converted shells of old haciendas: the Abeja, the Carolina, the Eureka, the Magdalena, the Alpina, the Santa Teresa, with their French, English, or Spanish owners-sweaty mills reeking with the stink of the dyes, surrounded by hundreds of ramshackle hovels the companies let out to their workers and small vegetable gardens where the men and women from the factories spend a few hours each week trying not to lose touch with their country roots.
It was raining in the south. But the rain was too much for this city that was born in the rain, for the rain. The rain drives it crazy. The streets turn into rivers that run down toward the little plaza at the center of San Angel, rivers of mud swirl around the autos and horse carts, wash out bicycles and spook the horses of the mounted police that regularly patrol the town.
Covered with a gray rubber poncho, Tomas jumped across the puddles from cobblestone to cobblestone, slipping constantly but somehow managing to keep his balance. Finally he stopped in front of a small cafe where three or four workers sat eating at the tables farthest from the door. One of them, a thin man with a narrow nose topped by thick eyebrows that practically grew together in a single line, sat reading volume two of Les Miserables. His railroad hat lay on the table next to an untouched bowl of soup.
"Sebastian," said the Chinaman as he approached the man.
"Well, hell, Tomas, they didn't tell me it was going to be you," the man answered with a big horselike grin.
"What's it been? A yeal at least..."
"Something like that," said Sebastian, motioning for the Chinaman to take a seat. "Since May 1921."
"Did it take you long to get back in?"
"I was in Guatemala six months, doing some organizing down there, and then I just walked back over the border. Shit, down there the mosquitoes're thicker than the trees. I spent the rest of the year in Atlixco under another name. The scabs were playing for keeps, and I got mixed up in a hell of a gunfight. So I had to get out of there and I went back on up to Tampico. But things there just aren't the same anymore, not like when you and me were there. You got to keep in the shadows all the time, can't work out in the open. I'd give a speech and then have to spend the next two weeks hiding out. But all the same, things are heating up just fine. Every day there's more men catching on to the idea out in the oil fields. It won't be long before they've got a union going. It's a matter of months or a year at most, my friend."
"What bungs you to Mexico City?"
Sebastian stood up and gave the Chinaman a big hug. Other people's emotions always made Tomas nervous, but in spite of his uneasiness he returned Sebastian's embrace.
"You'le awful thin. Don't you evel eat?"
"Hell's bells, man, after I left Tampico I stayed a couple of days in San Luis Potosi with some comrades and there wasn't a crumb in the cupboard. What was I supposed to do?"
"Ale they after you hele?"
"I don't think they know I'm in Mexico. But if anyone recognizes me and tells the law, I'm done for. I was in touch with Huitron and Rodolfo Aguirre and they told me to stick to the south and not make the city. Any chance of getting work as a mechanic around here?"
"Thele's always wolk alound fol a good mechanic, boilel loom wolk mole than anything else. But unless you've got a lecomraendation, the pay's pletty bad. That's the way they wolk it."
"No problem there, buddy. I've got the best fake recommendations in all of Mexico. Papers are the least of my worries right now."
"Ought to be easy enough to find you a gig, then. We'll just have to find someplace whele they don't know youl face. Maybe the Plovidencia of the Aulela. You going to wolk in the union?"
"No, just with affinity groups. I asked them for somebody to connect me with the ballsiest group around. I've got a couple of ideas I want to try out."
"You talking about some kind of dilect action? We've got a good tough gloup, but it's stlictly fol plopaganda wolk. Sometimes thele's nothing fol it but to hit the stleets, but we'le not in fol any individual actions."
"Well, you can at least hear me out before you say no, eh?" asked Sebastian San Vicente, looking steadily at the Chinaman.
"Of coulse."
"That's the way. You got a place I can stay until I cash in?"
"Sule, you can stay at my place, but thele's only one bed between the thlee of us," said Tomas. The bed was going to be awfully narrow with three of them, he thought, and they'd have to work out another head-to-foot rotation. Rosa wasn't going to be any too thrilled about it.
"Don't worry, brother, I can sleep on the floor. It won't be the first time. You get married or what?"
"I've got myself a paltnel. It's a long stoly, I'll tell you about it some othel time."
"You think you can find a place for another comrade who's coming in from Puebla? He can be trusted, you've got my guarantee."
"I don't think it'll be any ploblem. Let me talk to the comlades this Satulday."
Tomas sat and looked at Sebastian San Vicente, the Spanish anarchist deported from Mexico in May 1921. He was a true comrade if there ever was one, a man who could be trusted without reservation, but prone to respond to the violence of the system with violence of his own. Still smiling, San Vicente looked out onto the rain-drenched street.
It was also raining heavily outside the Cafe Paris where a flower seller had taken shelter in the doorway, blocking Pioquinto Manterola's view of the street. The rain usually left Manterola feeling blue, but now he could feel it in his recently mended leg as well, a subtle diffuse ache in the muscles around the bullet wound. Whether it was from the sadness or the pain, he couldn't seem to concentrate. It was that way with almost all journalists in their late thirties, the rain reminded them of old love stories, romances ruined by the impatience and possessiveness that come with love.
"Have another one, sir?" asked the waiter, with the bottle of Spanish brandy in his hand.
"No thanks, Marcial, I think that two is just about enough for a rainy day. But pour a glass for my friend, will you? In another minute she's going to be crossing the street, step in that puddle there, and walk in the door."
"How do you know that?"
"Because ever since I've known her she always comes half an hour late," said the reporter, pulling a Swiss watch from his vest pocket. The watch was inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He'd had to have it repaired once after it was damaged in the line of duty, and it bore a pair of deep scratches across its silver cover.
The reporter looked up toward the door. The flower seller leaned to one side, and he caught a glimpse of Elena Torres getting out of a taxi and running across the street between the puddles.
They'd first met in 1919 when the Yucatecan school teacher came to Mexico City as the personal representative of Carrillo Puerto and the Socialist Party of the Southeast. She was the only woman delegate to the Yucatan socialist congress, but she'd left her mark in the formation of decrees on divorce, working women, and women's suffrage. Once she came to Mexico City, she'd worked alongside such figures as Evelyn Roy, editor of the newspaper Woman and one of the foremost leaders of the first Mexican Communist party, who at one time had run El Comunista, one of the party's first newspapers. The Agua Prieta Revolt had ended with both Elena and Carrillo Puerto on the winning side and she'd worked for a time as an aide to Mexico City Police Chief Ramirez Garrido during his brief tenure in office. Later on she'd joined the feminist bloc inside the Revolutionary Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM). She'd broken with the CROM only recently over disagreements with the sinister Napoleon "The Pig" Morones, the Mexican Sam Gompers. She still had strong connections with the Socialist Party of the Southeast and now worked as chief of staff for the Yucatan congressional delegation.
Shaking a boot filled with water from the puddle in front o
f the door, she stepped into the cafe, headed straight for Manterola's table, and downed the glass of cognac in a single gulp as though she were in a great hurry.
"Hello there, reporter, what can I do for you?"
She was a short blond woman with a memorable deeply carved face and a heavy voice. She almost never smiled, and when she did, watch out.
"Take a seat, Elena. I need some information," said the journalist, standing up and waiting for the small woman to sit down.
"That I take for granted, Manterola. What I want to know is what do I get in return?"
"I don't have anything to trade, Elena. You'll just have to put it on my tab."
"If you owed everyone in this town as much as you owe me, you wouldn't dare show your face in the street."
"What do you know about Colonel Gomez? How did he get from being one of Pablo Gonzalez' cronies to commander of the Mexico City gendarmerie?"
"Is Gomez the saint you're praying to these days?"
"A week ago someone shot a hole in my leg, Elena. I need to know if Gomez had something to do with it."
"You picked a hell of an enemy, I'll tell you that much. The man's a snake, I don't even think his friends like him. Have you ever met him?"
"One time in Pachuca he gave the order to have me shot by a firing squad, but I don't think I've ever been any closer to him than maybe about ten yards."
"And the firing squad?"
"Let's just say I was lucky," answered the reporter, and his hand rose unconsciously to his chest to finger yet another ancient scar.
Elena laughed, her blond curls falling in front of her face. She brushed them aside with a flick of her hand.
"They say that before Gomez went into the army he was a foreman in an American-owned mine in Coahuila. He took up arms late in the game and that's why he never made general under Carranza, who always sent him out to do his dirty work. Then he was part of Pablo Gonzalez' inner circle. Paymaster of the Northwest Division. Military governor in the oil country. The truth is that if he ever fought in a battle I don't remember it. That's something you'd have to ask a soldier. I do know that he was in Tampico in 1919 and that he was the one who gave the order for the troops to fire on the strikers. That's his specialty: executioner, firing squad commander. But I guess you know about that firsthand. With the Agua Prieta uprising, he climbed on the donkey with the rest of the insurrectionary generals. At first he stuck with his old protector Gonzalez, but once he saw which way the wind was blowing and that Obregon's troops were going to get to Mexico City first, he buddied up with Benjamin Hill, turning over the garrisons under his command in the Huasteca. The word is that his wife died somewhere around then, under rather suspicious circumstances. I heard someone say once that he shot her because she nagged him too much. I wasn't ever sure whether it was a joke or what. He's a tight-lipped sort, always got some scam going, too. The man's got a dirty look and a dirty mind."
"You're starting to sound a bit puritanical, Elena." The reporter laughed.
"What do you want? The guy makes me sick. Once at a party he asked me to dance and I didn't last more than half a polka. When Obregon became president, he was looking for just that sort of man to run the gendarmerie here in the city, so he installed Gomez under General Cruz. Birds of a feather, you know. A few months back a friend of mine told me Gomez has got some shady deal going with the government, something to do with fodder for the army's horses in the Valley of Mexico-he's got the concession wired, something like that. But that wouldn't be anything new."
"How much money'd be involved in something like that?"
"Probably six or seven thousand pesos, after he pays off the other five or six people he's got down the line. Is any of this what you're looking for?"
"Gomez and oil, Gomez and jewels, Colonel Zevada and Colonel Gomez. Do any of those combinations ring any bells?"
"You do ask a lot, don't you? No bells there. Back a couple of years ago when I was working with the police, I could have gotten you more information, but today I'm just a harmless provincial schoolteacher serving her country in the Chamber of Deputies."
"Provincial maybe, but harmless never, Elena... even your own mother wouldn't go for that one. I heard you kicked some poor bastard in a restaurant the other day and broke his leg."
"The idiot slapped his wife in public."
"Maybe you and I should get married, Elena."
"Me marry a journalist? Never, Manterola."
"Well, at least I tried," said the reporter. He looked out at the rain still falling hard against the window, the words CAFE PARIS spelled out in reverse.
I LOOK AT MYSELF in this broken mirror and think about another mirror, tall and set in a white, scented wooden frame. I'm a different person and I'm not. My body lies to me, tries to fool me, forgets about me, hides itself. It's almost like this memory of the mirror belongs to someone else. Other eyes looking at me naked, admiring this pale skin and the breasts pointing up at the sky as if they were hunting for birds and ready to shoot. Birds painted on paper screens in Chinese houses in exile.
I look at myself in the mirror and think that nobody wants to be different. Nobody. I never asked to belong to a place I never knew, this naked body of mine never lived in Canton, Shanghai, Hangchow, Peking. Two-syllable words without any memories, but with plenty of rules of their own.
I look at myself in this new mirror and I remember the other one, the other woman, and even though I don't want to I can't help remembering that the mirror doesn't only reflect a naked body but also a naked face, another face that doesn't belong to me. A face looking at this body as if it owns it, and it does. Owner by right of sale, one woman for three IOU's signed with the name of that wrinkled old man who was my father.
And I break this mirror in front of me into pieces, but the other one I can't destroy, and it remains shaken but in one piece in my imagination, in my memory.
FERMIN VALENCIA AND THE LAWYER Verdugo had agreed to combine both their business and their investigations. The poet had gone along with the lawyer to the seventh-district court house to file a complaint against a bullfighter for the rape of a chorus girl. And the lawyer had accompanied the poet to the offices of the Peltzer Tire Company so that his friend could draw his pay and protest his treatment at the hands of the lieutenant with the itchy trigger finger.
In between, they made a stop at the "National Armory" gun shop-following the advice Pancho Villa had once given the poet-expanding their arsenal to the tune of a pair of shotguns, ammunition, and a German-made Walter repeating pistol.
Now they motored through the rain down San Juan de Letran in the lawyer's bulletproof Packard, without any particular destination in mind.
"The lieutenant's name's Estrada," said the poet. "Juan Carlos Estrada. They said he was there to buy tires for the gendarmerie fleet."
"Gomez."
"That's right. And besides that, I've got the idea there was more to his visit than just tires."
"What'd he tell Peltzer about why he was trying to pick you of?"
"He said I'd insulted him."
"Dammit, poet, this thing gets more confusing all the time. Are you sure you've never seen the guy before? Maybe you killed his dad or laid his sister or something."
"Well, I couldn't swear one way or the other about his dad, but I'm sure no Estrada's ever gotten between my sheets, or me between hers, for that matter."
"So what's next?"
"Let's try the jewelry store. I've got the feeling there's a thread there that'll lead us to something more solid."
With the windows closed, the Packard started to fill up with steam and cigar smoke until it finally pulled to a stop, casting up a silent curtain of spray in front of the El Democrata offices on Humboldt Street.
The poet and the lawyer paused in the waiting room of Weiss Bros. Jewelers and automatically turned to stare at the window over the street. A new pane had replaced the one through which Colonel Zevada had taken his fatal fall. The rain tapped placidly against the glass.
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"I don't ask too many questions these days. It's the Revolution. Everything's gone shady, strange, unpredictable. One guy sells a gem for train fare, the next guy trades it for three horses and a suitcase. A house burns down and a child saves his mother's jewelry from the fire. A soldier steals the ring off a dead man who stole it off another corpse the day before. A maid sells off her former employer's jewels. Nothing's like it used to be. These aren't normal times. It's been ten years now since I asked to see a sales receipt or certificate of ownership. I buy and don't ask any questions. Possession is ownership these days-I give the seller a receipt and a fair price. You shouldn't be surprised. Nothing's the same anymore. I run a straight business, above board, it's just that these are strange times for a man in my trade," announced the wrinkled jeweler in one long paragraph.
Except for the enormous strongbox sitting on four stout iron legs, with the words STENDHAL AND COMPANY scrolled across the front, the office could easily have belonged to any type of business at all. The walls were bare, the oak desk empty, the many grooves in its worn surface poorly covered by a coat of glistening varnish. There wasn't even a jeweler's glass or a velvet pouch, a pair of pliers or a hand lens in sight. Weiss, a little man with white hair that stood straight up off his head, sat behind the desk smiling at our two friends. They stood in the middle of the room, there being nowhere to sit except for a ridiculous pink velvet love seat pushed up against the far wall.
"What about Zevada?"
"I'd never seen him before. It would have been the first time he came to do business with me."
"The name doesn't ring any bells?"
"None at all. The second time the police came they showed me a photograph of his brother. I didn't know him either. They showed me some jewelry, too. I'd never seen those pieces before."
"How about Margarita Roldan, the widow of the fellow who used to run the Industrial Printworks."
"Margarita Herrera, the Widow Roldan. Yes, yes, of course."
"She buy or sell?"
The Shadow of the Shadow Page 12
