An Easy Thing

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “What are we going to do with the house? Where are you going to live?” asked Carlos, gazing out the window at the street six floors below.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” answered Elisa.

  “Why don’t we wait and see what this joker has to tell us, and then we can sit down and talk about it together in peace,” suggested Héctor.

  And as if Héctor had spoken the magic words, the lawyer appeared, entering through a hidden door in the paneling behind the enormous mahogany desk.

  “Señora, Señores…” he began ceremoniously.

  Elisa and Héctor acknowledged him with a slight nod of the head. Carlos moved his right hand in a short arc, like a politician waving in a parade.

  “Would you prefer a full reading of your mother’s will at this time, or just a summary of its contents?”

  The three of them looked at each other.

  “Just the basics would be fine,” replied Héctor.

  “Well, then…What we have here is your mother’s last will and testament, accompanied by a notarized letter addressed to the three of you.

  “The letter discusses the origin of the items distributed in the will; it gives a detailed account of the inheritance which she received from her parents in 1957, and the diverse ways in which the inheritance was invested, in various banks and investment firms. It also gives you the information you need to gain access to a safe-deposit box your father left for you upon his death, with the condition that it not be opened during your mother’s lifetime…I have the keys to the box, and a letter from your father which gives the three of you the rights to its contents. Finally, your mother’s letter gives a complete accounting of all lands and cash monies that she left you.”

  He paused, before continuing:

  “The will is very simple. It’s written with a primary clause that takes precedence over the rest. This clause states that the rest of the will be considered null and void if the three of you together are willing to organize the distribution of the estate. In that case, her remaining instructions are to be ignored, although she does ask you to be generous in remembering her longtime servants.

  “At this point you need to decide whether you want to take responsibility for distributing the estate yourselves, or if you’d prefer to accept the provisions laid out in the second part of the will. If you want to study the details of the document or discuss it first, you’re welcome to do so…”

  “There’s nothing to discuss,” said Elisa.

  Her two brothers nodded their heads.

  “All right, then, I’ll turn over to you a notarized copy of the will, an inventory of the estate, your father’s letter and the key to his safe-deposit box, and the letter from your mother. There is, by the way, a second letter from your mother, of a personal nature, with instructions that it be opened in the presence of all three of you.”

  Elisa took the various items from the lawyer, the last of which was a sealed letter, which she tore open.

  “There,” she said, “it’s been opened in front of the three of us. I suppose that fulfills Mama’s wishes.”

  The lawyer nodded, and the three of them got up to leave.

  ***

  He loved to watch the tiny reddish glow of his cigarette in the total darkness. It was strange how not being able to see the smoke made him feel as though he weren’t smoking at all. All the same, he could feel the cumulative effect of his habit on his throat and lungs, and for the hundredth time he asked himself if it wouldn’t be better to quit once and for all, to say good riddance to the annual bronchitis attack, the taste of copper on his teeth when he woke up in the morning, the craving for tobacco in the middle of the night. He thought about it, shook his head, and went back to staring at the lonely spark of his cigarette in the blackness.

  He listened to the approaching steps of his siblings, felt the click of the light switch, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the room was filled with light.

  “You sure you don’t want something to eat?” Elisa asked him.

  “Na. I’ve still got a lot of work to do tonight. Were you guys able to make any sense out of it?”

  “It wasn’t too bad. The lawyer left it all pretty clear. We just inherited somewhere in the neighborhood of a million and a half pesos.”

  “Puta madre…” swore Héctor.

  “Can you believe it?” said Elisa. She sat down on the rug, eating a plateful of ham and eggs.

  “What are we going to do with it all?”

  “Let’s burn it…burn it and forget all about it. I was plenty happy without any money up until now,” suggested Carlos.

  “Me, too,” said Héctor.

  “Me, three,” said Elisa.

  “Of course…I’m sure that if we think about it awhile, we’ll each be able to come up with about a dozen different things to do with the money.”

  “No doubt,” said Héctor.

  “I still can’t believe it,” said Elisa. “I think that tomorrow it’s still going to feel to me like a big joke.”

  “It’s just that…” Carlos began.

  “The hell with it,” said Héctor.

  “Because if we burn it…” interjected Elisa.

  “…money corrupts. It’s not right to have that much money…” continued Carlos.

  ***

  It was like in Ecclesiastes: There was a time to sow and a time to reap, a time to keep and a time to throw away. It didn’t feel to Héctor like a time to work, there with the black night all around him. But what could he do? Three enormous piles of paper waited for him on his desk.

  He crossed to the window and looked down at the street, sad and black, black as coal. A cigarette burned between his lips. The moon was lost behind a pair of clouds, and the streetlights had all gone out. There was a power outage. Far away, the parts of the city that still had power glittered vaguely. A soft, sweet drizzle was falling and Héctor couldn’t resist the temptation to open the window, letting the water splash his face and the sound of the rain permeate the room.

  “Here’s the candles, amigo,” said a voice at his back.

  Héctor turned his head slowly, raindrops dripping from his eyelids, trying to hold on to that vision of the night. What a night for romance, he thought, and with all that work stacked up on his desk.

  Three candles shed a furtive light around the office, like a triangle of fire burning in an ancient cave. It made Héctor feel like the Neanderthal Man.

  “Got a lot of work tonight?” asked his nocturnal office mate, the infamous engineer, “El Gallo” Villareal, an expert on Mexico City’s sewer system who sublet the plumber’s portion of the office at night.

  Héctor stared at him fixedly for a moment: he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, with a bushy mustache, jeans and cowboy boots, and a heavy jacket that he always wore draped over his shoulders. He sat permanently hunched over his maps, except when he went out on his strange, subterranean explorations of the city’s sewer system. A yellow hard hat with a headlamp, a pair of asbestos gloves, and a pair of fire fighter’s thick rubber boots occupied a chair beside his drawing table.

  In the flickering candlelight he looked like an ancient alchemist puzzling over the riddle of the philosopher’s stone.

  El Gallo looked up from his maps and stared inquisitively at the detective who stood in dark profile in front of one of the winking candles.

  “How did you get started in this stuff?” asked the detective.

  “You know how it is, neighbor, shit happens. That’s life.” He searched through his jacket pockets for one of his small, thin cigars. “You think I don’t get excited about my work, is that it?”

  Héctor nodded.

  “Did you see The Phantom of the Opera when you were a kid?”

  Héctor nodded.

&n
bsp; “I suppose it never occurred to you that the single basic difference between a city of the Middle Ages and today’s capitalist city is the modern sewer system.”

  Héctor shook his head.

  “Hell, I’ll bet that it never even occurred to you that someday you could wake up floating in shit up to your eyeballs if there wasn’t somebody out there making sure it didn’t happen…I’ve seen your kind before—you’re the kind of guy who shits and forgets, the kind of guy who never thinks about where his shit is going.”

  Héctor nodded.

  “You hate technocrats, don’t you? Engineers, scientists…”

  Héctor nodded.

  “Well, so do I. I couldn’t care less if the whole damn city filled up with shit—more than it is already, I mean. I couldn’t give a flying fuck if the whole damn sewer system all the way from the Miramontes Canal to the Deep Drainage Network fills up with crap!”

  Héctor nodded, a smile stealing across his face.

  “The deal is that I get two thousand pesos for every one of these maps that I analyze. You know, for capacity, resistance, that kind of thing…It’s a living, what can I say…?” He lit a cigar.

  “And I’ll tell you something else. If you’ve got to spend your life making a living at something, you might as well do your best to glamorize it a little. You know, I try to think about the Phantom of the Opera living in the sewers in Paris, or that movie about the Polish Resistance in World War II, where they had this whole battle down in the stinking sewer. You’ve got to find a way to care about what you’re doing, that’s all I’m trying to say.”

  “Look, I used to be an engineer, too. I was an Efficiency Expert, if you can believe it,” Héctor began. But he balked at the thought of dredging up the not-so-distant past, and returned to his desk before he went on. “And you know what? There are some jobs that they can just take and stick up their ass.”

  “I hear you.” The sewer specialist and expert in fecal flooding nodded.

  El Gallo Villareal started humming the victory march from the opera Aïda, as if they’d been talking about nothing more than the weather, or the power outage, or the blackness of the night.

  Belascoarán took his seat in front of the pile of reports, and reached for the closest one.

  The oscillating candlelight flickered rhythmically across the page in front of him. He felt a promise in the night.

  Chapter Three

  In Which Héctor Studies

  The Three Case Files:

  A teenager’s diary and a supposed suicide attempt; the still-warm body of a murdered engineer; and a hero from the past who threatens to rise up from the grave.

  It is necessary to follow the trail throughout the night.

  —Paco Urondo

  The investigation should take each detail of the material into account.

  —Marx

  Héctor spread the material from the first stack out in front of him: the photocopied pages of a diary, filled with an irregular scrawl; a small bundle of newspaper reports about the second “accident,” held together with a rubber band; two photographs, one a typical studio portrait, the other a snapshot showing a smiling girl dressed in a school uniform; and a leather-bound scrapbook full of newspaper clippings.

  He lit a cigarette and singled out the second photo, placing his hands closely around it in a protective gesture. He was touched by what he saw.

  In the background, the door to the school could be seen, slightly out of focus; a man selling sweets from a cart stood with his back to the camera, while three girls walked arm in arm across one of the upper corners. A traffic cop occupied the opposite corner of the picture. In the center stood a seventeen-year-old girl in a white blouse, plaid skirt, and knee socks. She had lively, alert eyes and hair that fell thickly over her shoulders, a medium complexion, and a wide forehead. There was an air about her that was very reminiscent of her mother, hard to put a finger on exactly, but unmistakable all the same.

  In the studio close-up, the characteristics of adolescence had begun to disappear from her face. The overall impression was of a young woman, who, if not beautiful, was quite pretty, likeable, and something more.

  He considered whether to turn next to the girl’s diary or her mother’s scrapbook. Finally, he chose the scrapbook. He wanted some kind of context to fit it all into, sensing that there was something more to the affair than a simple case of attempted suicide.

  Marisa Ferrer’s scrapbook contained an illustrated history of her career, one actress’s sad trajectory from oblivion to stardom, Mexican style.

  The story started with a series of small clippings from provincial newspapers, mostly from Guadalajara, with a name underlined in red pencil, always at the very end of the article.

  At that time she still used her full name: Marisa Andrea González Ferrer. All of her roles were small ones in student productions, and there was no mention of her individual performance or abilities. Finally she landed a small part in a play by Lorca. The clipping included a grainy, faded photo, in which he could barely make out a skinny girl in the background, dressed in black, with arms outstretched.

  Next, there was a brief commentary on her performance of a minor role in a commercial production, One Husband for Three Sisters. This was followed by a dormant period that lasted six months, only to be broken by three spectacular full-page magazine photos in which the skinny girl reappeared as a svelte woman in a bikini, captioned: “all the ingredients for success”. It was followed by an interview in which neither the interviewer nor his subject had anything much to say. The last question was meant to be funny: reporter: “And what about men?” woman in bikini: “For right now they don’t enter into my plans. I’m not interested in men…They just get in the way of your career.” Next came two pages of cinema listings, with a pair of movies underlined in red, in which she apparently had some bit part too small to get her name in the credits: The Hour of the Wolf, and Strange Companions. According to the promotion, the first was a movie about professional wrestlers, and the second a teen romance. After that her picture started to appear in some of the magazines from around Mexico City.

  The quantity of her clothing diminished with each successive appearance. She shortened her name, discarding the Andrea and the González, and the size of the print increased by ten points; she allowed a glimpse of her left breast in front of the camera, and the size of her panties grew progressively scantier. Learning to sing passably well, she made the night-club circuit, and recorded an album of rancheras, showing up eventually in the gossip columns as the current companion to the owner of a recording studio. Shortly thereafter, she displayed her naked backside for a photo session in Audaz, and then won her first starring role in a feature film.

  Thirteen glowing reviews in a single week testified to her success. It was followed by her first all-nude spread in a trendy skin-mag, accompanied by a lively interview. Héctor took note of some of her answers: “In this business, war is war, the army with the best guns wins…” “Loneliness? What’s that? There’s never any time to feel lonely…” “I don’t like to have to pose naked for very long. The photographers never pay any attention to the heating and it’s too easy to catch cold…” “I like what I’m doing.”

  He was halfway through the album before he stopped. Where was the daughter?

  Calculating that if she was seventeen years old today, she would have been born in 1960, he thumbed back through the album, scrutinizing the clippings more carefully until he got to the blank space of six months way back at the start of her mother’s career. Apparently the actress had pursued her career and raised the child all at the same time.

  Figuring he’d gotten the basic idea, he closed the heavy book. If he had to look at any more pictures of his client in the nude, he was going to get all caught up in her naked breasts, her smooth buttocks, and never be able to look at her again with he
r clothes on.

  On the other side of the room, El Gallo was still hunched over his maps, taking notes. Belascoarán walked to the hidden cupboard and took out a soda pop.

  “I’ll have one, thanks,” said the engineer, without looking up from his work.

  Héctor got out another tamarind soda and used the upholsterer’s scissors to pry the tops off both the bottles.

  Returning to his desk, he took up the girl’s diary, glancing first at the smiling face in the photo, as if to apologize for invading her privacy.

  The photocopied portion was only a small section of the original diary. It started on page 106 and ended on page 114. The handwriting was careful and elegant, as if taken from a calligraphy manual, and appeared to have been written entirely with the same fountain pen. It looked like a typical teen diary, jealously guarded under a pillow, or hidden in a bottom desk drawer under a mountain of old papers, where nobody else would ever look, to be removed from its hiding place every night before bed, and receive the secret thoughts and feelings of its young owner.

  The entries, separated from one another by a pair of minute crosses, were each very brief. Some of them were in code, giving Héctor the impression he was dealing with some indecipherable children’s game. There were no dates, although sometimes a day of the week was mentioned.

  I can’t keep taking it all the time, holding it in. Never saying anything. It’s like they just threw me into the water and said: Go ahead, bitch, swim.

  What should I do? What’s going to happen? There’s nothing to do but wait.

  Read p. 105 for Thursday.

  That stupid history teacher. What a conceited pimp. I wish I could tell him how much I hate him. He’s got that stupid tic, I wonder if he even knows it. I’m sure he’s impotent and he probably has the hots for his own mother. Ever since he was a little kid, I bet. Besides which, he doesn’t know a damn thing about history!

  I don’t think Mama knows that I know. How can I keep her from finding out? I’m such an idiot. What should I do? I just spent the whole day bouncing back and forth around the house like a stupid ball. If I keep up like this she’s bound to suspect something. I’ve got to just pretend like everything’s normal, go to school, go to the movies, find a new boyfriend, read books…