“I don’t know why the Chinese guy wanted to go to the United States. It’s much better down here. We’re the ones who ought to be jumping the green fence, not them,” he said. Then he sat down at the next table and in Spanish ordered a pitcher of sangria.
Mexicali at that time was a way station for refugees from all over Europe who were seeking permission to enter the United States. It had been, and probably still is, the trampoline for thousands of Mexicans who illegally cross the border to make themselves a few dollars in the north. Above all, it was a languid city; dirt was everywhere; clouds of dust tried to cover the poor tracks of progress and return the city to its ancient desert condition. It was a city where you heard songs in many languages, songs that were almost always melancholy.
That first day on Alex’s tracks turned into a pilgrimage that seemed absurd, erratic, but at other times motivated by some obscure design. He entered a shoe store and spent hours trying on Mexican boots, only to end up not buying anything. He stopped by the local newspaper and placed an announcement (for two dollars I got hold of a copy: “I’ve already arrived, Ana. I’m at the Palacio. Alex.”). He visited three doctors. (I duly noted the names and addresses and promised to stop by later on. One of them had a marvelous bilingual sign in the window: “We cure incurable diseases, the others cure themselves.”) He went to the fair on the outskirts of the city and with absolute seriousness dedicated himself to winning rounds in the shooting gallery, in between flirting sessions with the gypsy woman who ran the booth.
At the end of the afternoon, with his white linen suit and my black shoes covered with dust, we went walking toward the border, bound for the hotel like a pair of defeated gamblers. As we went inside, he looked at me with curiosity. His two blue eyes were shining with a strange intensity. I entered the bar to kick around some ideas and get rid of the taste of dust with a pair of margaritas.
“Marlowe, you work for that guero, that blond guy?” a man at the next table asked me as I was finishing the first drink. I should have looked up before. The tables around him were empty. I never liked Mexican police, but Mexicans liked them even less than I did. The man had a big scar that went from his right eye to his throat. Through his open jacket you could see the butt of his .45.
“I don’t know. It seems he doesn’t like me very much.” I laughed.
The policeman smiled. “I don’t like him either.”
“And me?” I asked, returning the smile and signaling the waiter to bring me the next margarita.
“No, amigo. You’re in the business. With you, we always know what’s going on, and if we don’t, we guess, or we ask. No, the one I don’t like is that blond guy. He came here to go crazy. Do you know what he has in that suitcase?”
I kept on smiling. There’s nothing like candor when engaged in chitchat with the police.
“He’s carrying a pile of dollars and a Thompson submachine gun. ’Ta loco el pendejo ese. That asshole’s crazy.”
“And why didn’t they take it away from him at the border?”
“He must have paid a mordida, a bribe. You figure it out.”
The heat kept me from sleeping.
The morning of the second day I ran into Alex in the corridor. The bathroom was around the corner and we were both on the way to shave. Alex wasn’t wearing a shirt; an enormous whitish scar crossed his back.
“You can call me Alex,” he said, turning his back to me, knowing that my eyes were mesmerized by the scar. “I’ll call you Marlowe. It doesn’t matter to me if that’s your name or not. It’s the name you used to register, and that’s good enough for me. By the way, if you talk to the doctors I saw yesterday, they’ll tell you that I have a fatal disease. There’s no point trying to cure me; it’s a matter of months.” He was speaking without looking at me, not even granting me a gesture over his shoulder. He presumed that I, with my towel on my shoulder and my shaving brush and razor in hand, was following him.
“Try not to cut yourself shaving. There’s nothing that bothers me more than blood in the bathroom sink,” I said.
He laughed forcefully. Neither of us could shave. There was a Mexican in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet and playing the guitar. He had the face of a man with few friends. Disturbing him didn’t seem like a good idea.
In the afternoon he took off in his Fleetwood at seventy-five miles an hour down the terrible roads that go to Ensenada, crossing canyons and desert. Every once in a while, despite the best efforts of my Oldsmobile, I lost sight of him.
We got to Ensenada as it was getting dark. At the entrance to town he swerved off the road and drove directly onto the beach. I took all the time in the world to light a cigarette, because I hadn’t been able to enjoy one during the roadside chase that afternoon. Alex appeared in between the shadows; he seemed annoyed that I hadn’t followed him.
“I’m in love with a woman who lives around here. Her husband is a famous Mexican poet. He threatened to kill me if he saw me near his wife again. What do you plan to do, Marlowe?”
His eyes sparked with fury. He was about to take a walk when I landed a direct hit on his jaw. He collapsed in silence onto the white sand. I walked along the beach, guided by the lights of a cabala some two hundred and fifty yards away.
“I saw Alex’s car a while ago. Did he come with you?” asked a young man with curly hair who was smoking on the cabaña porch.
I nodded.
“Are you his doctor?” the man asked.
“No. I’m a kind of nursemaid.”
“In my country they’re called bodyguards.”
“It’s specialized work. More like soul guards.”
“Raul Cota,” he said, extending his hand.
He must have been about forty, with a full beard capped by a mustache. There was a sad look about him.
“Marlowe,” I answered, extending my hand. “How do you know Alex?”
“He comes around here; he spends his time roaming around my cabaña and telling everybody that he’s in love with my wife. But that would be difficult. I’ve been a widower for two years. Maybe he knew her before. . . .I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
I sat on the porch, pushing the sand around with the tips of my shoes. Cota went inside and returned a little later with two cups of coffee. I could hear the sea. Alex suddenly appeared in front of us, rubbing his jaw. I smiled.
“A cup of coffee?” offered Cota.
Alex nodded.
As the sun came up, Alex drove his Fleetwood north at full speed bound for a port on the Pacific called Rosarito. There we had lobsters with tortillas and frijoles for breakfast. I didn’t pay more than two dollars for mine. If things kept going like this, I would never get my expense money from the lawyer in Los Angeles.
Alex began to walk along the beach. I was getting fed up and stayed at the shack where they had served us the freshly captured lobsters. I was ready for a second cup of coffee with cinnamon. Alex, seeing that I wasn’t following him, came back looking like an angry child.
“Come, Marlowe, let’s walk along the beach and I’ll tell you about the caves and the rock drawings.”
“What’s the hurry, gringo? Let him drink his coffee,” the fisherman who had waited on us said.
“We have important things to discuss,” Alex said in his rapid Spanish.
I left the coffee to one side. At any rate it was too hot. I lit a cigarette and tried to catch up to Alex, who was walking in a great hurry at the edge of the sea. The doves began to keep us company.
“Miles south of here there are prehistoric caves, full of rock drawings. They were painted thousands of years ago by a tribe of tall men, much taller than the guaycuras who later settled in this area. You know what we can do, Marlowe? We can get a couple of good cameras and cross the sierra. The caves are incredible: men of two colors, turning themselves into animals with horns . . . ”
He waited an instant for my answer. Then he seemed bored and left me still smoking a cigarette while he went toward the sea, getting his shoes
wet every time the cusp of a little wave would reach the shore.
Alex was getting drunk, like a soldier who just realized he had been fighting on the wrong side. Mezcal after mezcal; not even enough time to warm his tongue.
I was sitting at the next table surrounded by the noise of fifty simultaneous conversations and a mariachi band whose cornet player tried to blast my brains out by playing his instrument four inches from my ear. The Club Camalias had been the one and only stop after Tijuana. The Fleetwood, full of dust, was parked outside the den, which was a center for nervous drug addicts, sailors from San Diego, pimps and their merchandise, Mexican workers from a nearby construction company who didn’t have the time to remove their hard hats, and a group of policemen headed by my old friend, whose name was Ramirez. After distributing his boys throughout the club, he came to sit at my table. I couldn’t make out his words through the noise, only his smile.
Alex took note of the presence of my companion and sent for a double mezcal to welcome him.
“The Mexican police are putas, whores,” said Alex, looking straight at our table and taking advantage of the break in the mariachi music.
Ramirez smiled, raised his cup, and toasted Alex.
“Your friend is completely crazy. Surely he wants to commit suicide.”
“Seems like that to me,” I responded.
“Why doesn’t he do it on the other side?” asked Ramirez.
I was left looking for an answer. After all, it wasn’t such a bad question.
Alex’s eyes were glassy; his jaw slightly disconnected. Seeing that Ramirez wasn’t reacting, he looked for something else to grab his attention. He found it easily. One of the American sailors was sitting at a nearby table, absolutely enthralled with a prostitute. Alex stood up and walked toward him. The mariachis began to play “La Paloma,” possibly the only Mexican song to which I know the lyrics, but Alex gave me no time to enjoy it. He was arguing about something with the sailor. Suddenly Alex slapped the woman in the face. I jumped out of my chair. Ramirez didn’t even make an attempt to follow me. The sailor took out a knife and stuck it in the first thing he found—Alex’s left hand, resting on the table.
Violence, as always, provoked screams and abandonment. Nevertheless, the mariachis continued to play. I pushed the sailor aside and pulled the knife from the table, freeing Alex’s left hand. Blood gushed out profusely. At his table, Ramirez limited himself to a smile.
Alex insisted on being treated in Mexicali, which is how the front seat of my car became full of blood. I knew I should be mad, but I wasn’t. Alex’s behavior just made me feel melancholy. While he was resting in an overstuffed chair in the waiting room, I spoke to Dr. Martinez about Alex’s supposedly incurable disease.
“Incurable? It would have been fifty years ago, amigo. Now it’s perfectly curable. All he has is a venereal disease, syphilis, and it’s not even an advanced case. He’s already being treated for it.”
The nights in Mexicali are dark. Music lures you, like bait, from several places at once. Every once in a while a group of drunks crosses you, or a taxi driver stops to try to convince you that the doors of his automobile lead to the gates of paradise. There’s a sense of asphyxiation, from the dirt in the air, the dry heat. It’s a small city, stolen from the desert. Without my hat and jacket, I went walking in the night looking for answers. Maybe the questions applied to me, too. We went down to the south to leave our nightmares there, our worst dreams. Instead, we found ourselves, looking in the mirror, face to face with the dark side of our sadness and our solitude. What fault was it of the Mexicans that Alex had chosen their country to go crazy in?
“If I swim out there for a hundred and eighty-one days, I’ll be back . . . ” Alex said, pointing to someplace on the other side of the Pacific where he had left a piece of his soul.
“You should probably wait until your hand is better,” was the only thing that occurred to me to say.
We returned to Rosarito, this time the two of us in my Oldsmobile. We were eating lobsters on the beach, and Alex allowed himself to drift off to sleep in the hammock. I decided to fight my drowsiness by walking on the beach. I had a few cigarettes with a group of women and gave them a hand cleaning sea snails. In return they gave me a couple of dozen for supper. When I returned I found that Alex had disappeared from the hammock and from sight. His suitcase was still in the automobile. I opened it.
There really was an old Thompson submachine gun, unloaded and rusty. There were also four or five stacks of Japanese money, printed during the occupation of the Dutch East Indies. Underneath them was a pile of photos of ragged English soldiers, Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders, saluting their flags, probably right after they had been liberated from a concentration camp. Many of them were covered with bandages, or they were on crutches, their hands in slings, with months-old beards, long hair, skeletal bodies consumed by fever, dysentery, and malnutrition.
Alex offered me a match to light the cigarette hanging from my lips. I accepted it.
“They want me to return, but I’m staying here. They want to put me in a cage in Los Angeles. Have you heard the Mexican song ‘Jaula de oro,’ about a cage of gold?”
He started to walk toward the ocean. I tried to take him by the hand, but he freed himself with a quick movement.
“Don’t you realize, Marlowe?”
He turned his back to me and continued toward the sea. Then he turned and looked at me with his ice-blue eyes. A wave broke near the shore; the sun was beginning to set.
I saw him hurl himself into the water, swimming madly straight into the horizon, foam rising with every stroke. The sun floated over the sea. Alex was going further and further away. Fifteen minutes later you could hardly see his head in the distance. Then it disappeared.
The sunsets in Baja California are unforgettable. I would have to return the money to the lawyer in Los Angeles. I turned my back to the sea. My joints ached. It must have been the humidity. I walked toward the Oldsmobile.
The first Spanish edition of The Long Goodbye appeared in 1973. I read it three times. I added it to what I had learned from Simenon, Durrenmatt, Hammett, and Le Carré, and was certain that crime literature offered me the best possible scenario for the stories I wanted to tell. Three years later my novel was published. I don’t know how much of Chandler was left in it; probably little, because what I was trying to do with Dias de combate was launch a new genre, the new crime novel in Mexico, and not simply follow the tradition of the hard-boiled with a change of scenery. But no doubt Chandler was there; in stories built on dialogue and characters and atmospheres, rather than anecdotes, but which still managed to tell a story. For me, influenced by the Mexican baroque and magical realism, neorealism in the style of Chandler was the best option. Maybe no one can find traces of these influences in my books; it’s not that important. I know how to recognize my debts; I know that Chandler is there somewhere in my novels, and I’m grateful to him.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
CONSULTATION IN THE DARK
* * *
* * *
FRANCIS M. NEVINS, JR.
1946
IN THE DEPTH of night I gave up trying to roll over the edge into sleep. It had been dark for a year and I had tossed around in the lumpy bed in unit six of that isolated auto court for six months. Too many hours behind the wheel of the U-drive coupe, too much road grub, gallons more coffee than I could handle, endless time to stew in the juices of loneliness—sleep was out of reach. I twisted free of the blankets and flicked on the bedlight. My watch curled on the nightstand read fourteen minutes after two. I decided to stroll around the auto court, breathe in some of the night’s peace, look up at the stars I never could see in L.A. Later I wished to God I’d stood in bed.
The thirteen months since Hiroshima and the Jap surrender had been boom times for private investigators. Hundreds of newly discharged vets, maimed by the war in ways the military didn’t care to deal with, were wandering across the map in a search fo
r the missing pieces of themselves. Some of those guys had families willing to spend a little money to find them. A few lucky Joes had come into inheritances while they were overseas, and the banks and law firms that were handling the estates needed their signatures on the paperwork. One of those banks happened to be my client. Which explains why a peeper by the name of Marlowe had boarded the Santa Fe Super Chief in L.A. and changed trains in Chicago and taken a local into the heart of the upper Midwest and hired himself a U-drive jalopy to follow a cold trail, and also how this same peeper wound up huddled in his prewar trenchcoat and pacing the perimeter of an auto court in the middle of nowhere on a crisp and star-speckled night in October 1946. The trail I was following turned out to be the wrong one. I learned weeks later that my lost vet had taken a new name and drifted east early in ’46, and that in a fit of the screaming meemies he had jumped off the twelfth-floor ledge of a downtown Poughkeepsie hotel on Mother’s Day, tying up traffic for an hour. The guy had been raised in the upper Midwest, the bank had a report that he’d been sighted there, but in fact there was no reason for me to have traipsed across that turf, none at all. Life likes to play cute tricks on us like that.
The auto court sat on a gentle rise a few hundred feet off the state highway. Most of its customers these days were relatives or buddies visiting one of the thousand-odd discharged servicemen using the G.I. Bill to pick up a degree at the branch of the state university a mile to the east, beyond the highway and some hills. In October the auto court was a graveyard. Keeping the line of cabins between myself and the road, all I could see was the night and a wedge of moon and the twinkling stars. The only sounds came from crickets, except when a trailer truck growled along the invisible highway. An owl swooped down from nowhere in total silence, almost brushing my face. I froze and waited for the scream of a rabbit being torn apart in the woods and heard nothing but the crickets. Maybe the owl was on a false trail too.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 19
