An Easy Thing

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  c) The story that Zapata’s horse didn’t recognize the body. His horse was said to have loved him tremendously.

  d) Don Emiliano had both a mark on his chest and a wart on his right cheek. The corpse at Chinameca had neither.

  The rumors circulated in the newspapers of the period, and the government did its best to eradicate them. A film of the body, taken in the plaza in Celaya, was distributed, along with a series of photographs in which the flies hovered thickly over the corpse.

  In recent years, social anthropologists had been busy recording the myriad stories involving the survival of Zapata. One bizarre version that surfaced now and then had don Emiliano escaping from Morelos with a band of Arab merchants whom he traveled around the world with, selling cloth.

  Belascoarán shook his head wearily. It was no good. There was nothing consistent. Just wild rumors produced in desperation by a people deprived of their leader; it was a natural defense against an enemy that controlled both media and myth.

  Patiently, he scrutinized the pictures included in the books on Sandinismo. Only in one did he see the glimpse of a possibility: in the foreground, General Sandino with his lieutenants, faces sunk in shadow beneath their wide-brimmed hats. Agustín Farabundo Martí smiling behind a thick mustache, the Honduran general Porfirio Sánchez, the

  Guatemalan general María Manuel Girón Ramos. And in the background, a dark face, a small, clipped mustache, eyes completely hidden beneath his hat brim: “Captain Zenón Enríquez, Mexican,” read the caption.

  It was the only clue he could find.

  If the cases of the Ferrer girl and the murdered engineer seemed at first glance to be extraordinarily complex, at least they made some sense, at least he had some idea of where to start, which leads to follow; but this craziness about Emiliano Zapata seemed to have neither beginning nor end.

  Raising his tired eyes, he looked to the three photos on the wall for inspiration, as if they might offer him some clue.

  He set the material on Zapata’s old compañero Rubén Jaramillo aside, promising himself that he’d finish it tomorrow. Then, extinguishing the candles on his desk, he got up and headed straight for the old leather armchair where he sometimes slept.

  “Time for bed, neighbor?”

  “Time for a little snooze,” answered Héctor. “Say there, Engineer, how late do you work anyway?”

  “Oh, until about six, Ex-engineer.”

  Héctor lowered himself into the armchair and wrapped his gabardine coat around himself. He lit a cigarette and watched the first mouthful of smoke float lazily up toward the ceiling where shadows danced in the candlelight. He shut his eyes.

  “What are you working on now?” he asked.

  “Oh, nothing much. I’m just checking to see if another heavy rain like the one we had yesterday could overload the network in the Northeast…and leave everybody in Lindavista knee-deep in a lake of piss.”

  “Man, I love this city. It’s magical, you know? I mean, where else? You never know what crazy-ass son-of-a-bitching kind of thing is going to happen next…”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t talk like that when you were an engineer,” said El Gallo.

  “That’s just part of the magic,” answered Héctor.

  Chapter Four

  It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

  —Roberto Fernández Retamar

  “Milkman time,” his sister used to call it years ago when they walked together to school in the early morning, long before the sun dared to show its face. Even at that early hour the streets would be thronged with people. Now, Héctor left the office with El Gallo and they walked down to the corner, where the sewer expert said good-bye and disappeared into the fog. The cold oppressed Héctor; the cold, and the fact that he’d slept for barely two hours. The streetlights had come back on again, after the night-long blackout. Héctor lit a cigarette and walked with a brisk step, trying to guess the occupations of the men who huddled at the street corners waiting for their buses.

  That one’s a teacher; that one there’s a builder; that one’s a laborer; that one, a student; that one, a butcher’s helper; that one’s a reporter going home to sleep. That one looks like a detective, he thought, catching his own reflection in a store window. The blackness of the night began to give way to a grayish false dawn.

  As the light changed, the street noise stepped up its violent pitch. Héctor paused in front of a mirror outside a drugstore, and examined the dark bags under his eyes. His pupils were two bright points of light. He felt good, in spite of his fatigue and the cold. It was the city, the city he loved so intensely, so selflessly, welcoming him with that dirty gray dawn. And more than the city, even more, it was the people.

  Maybe what had happened was that the combination of the cold and the hostile dawn had awakened people to a sense of their common humanity. Already he’d run across six smiling faces in the six blocks he’d covered so far. It was the kind of smile you give away early on a cold morning, to the first stranger you see.

  He squeezed onto an Artes-Pino bus bound for the Refinería. In the crush of commuters, he held his arm to his side, trying to hide the gun in its shoulder holster, but it was all he could do to keep from mashing gun, holster, arm and all, in a secretary’s face, while trying simultaneously to dislodge someone else’s briefcase from his asshole and dodge a large T-square that threatened to knock his teeth out at the first sudden stop.

  He got out at Artes and walked along Sadi Carnot in the direction of the school. Small groups of girls stood here and there in the street, and by the time he was half a block away, the sounds of traffic were drowned out by the happy chatter of young voices. He stopped across from the school entrance, next to a cart of steaming tamales, and propped himself up against a wall to wait. The heat rising from the tamale cart made him even sleepier than he had been before.

  A group of girls stood talking on the steps, gesturing dramatically with their hands, taking advantage of the last few minutes left before the start of another day in “jail.” Now and then, an incredibly nearsighted young nun would appear in the doorway, with the sole intention of showing herself to the dawdlers outside.

  It was a quarter to seven, and already the dawn, its clean light struggling against the gray, seemed to have the upper hand.

  A pale green Rambler wagon pulled up a few yards past Héctor, and two young men got out. They opened the back of the station wagon, took out two bottles from a full case of soda pop, and pried off the tops with a screwdriver.

  Héctor saw what he was waiting for at a distance. She walked with a hurried step, her arm still in a cast, and with a purple ribbon hung around her shoulder as a sling. Her uniform beret was cocked to one side of her head, and the long plaid skirt billowed around her as she walked. Under her good arm, she carried an awkward load of books; a gray bag hung from her shoulder. Her face was serious, and her hurried manner was reflected in the lines that wrinkled her forehead. Héctor let her walk past him without moving. Suddenly, the two youths left the Rambler and walked toward the girl, blocking her path before she could cross the street. She raised her eyes and stared at them in surprise. One of the boys threw his pop bottle to the ground, and it exploded at her feet, scattering shards of glass across the sidewalk. The other boy stood directly in front of her and grabbed her good arm. Her load of books fell to the ground.

  Héctor unglued himself from the wall as the first boy took the pop bottle out of his partner’s hand, and crashed it down in front of the girl. Bits of broken glass flew through the air.

  The tamale seller left his cart and followed after the detective.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Héctor saw a third boy get out of the station wagon, carrying three more bottles in his hands.

  The terrified girl struggled wordlessly to free herself from her attackers, without making a sound, like a charact
er from a silent movie.

  “Game’s over,” said Héctor as he reached them.

  “Mind your own business,” growled one of the youths. He wore a green corduroy jacket over a dark red sweater. He was tall, with chestnut hair, and a small scar under his right eye.

  That’s where Héctor aimed his first blow, a backhanded slap that sent the boy reeling backward. Then he turned and kicked the other boy in the calf. The boy shouted in pain, let go of the girl’s arm, and fell to the ground, on top of the broken glass.

  The third youth was stopped short by the tamale seller, who brandished an iron bar that he’d pulled from who knew where.

  Greenjacket took the screwdriver from his pocket.

  “Who asked you to butt in, asshole?” scowled his partner.

  “The archangel Gabriel,” answered Héctor, glancing at the sister who watched the scene in surprise from the school steps.

  Then he kicked him in the chin. He could hear the jawbone crack.

  It was this way of attacking unexpectedly, and without warning, that made it possible for Héctor to keep control of the situation. He stood casually, with one hand in his pocket, not looking at the others, but staring absentmindedly at the books scattered across the pavement. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, he kicked the kid in the face.

  Greenjacket backed away. “What’d you have to kick him for?” he whined.

  “I’m an asshole, what can I say? Life’s rough,” Héctor answered, and without thinking, he took out his gun and shot into the case of soda pop in the back of the Rambler. The bottles burst, spilling their dark liquid onto the street. Three late-arriving students ran shrieking into the school.

  The three young thugs made a break for their car.

  Greenjacket clutched the screwdriver and Armgrabber held his chin in one hand, spitting blood.

  Héctor stowed the gun in his jacket pocket and turned to smile at the tamale man.

  “It was a lucky shot,” he confessed. “Normally I can’t hit a thing at this distance.”

  The tamale man smiled back at Héctor and returned to his cart. The Rambler lurched into reverse and raced backwards all the way to the end of the block.

  The girl gathered her books from the sidewalk, watching Héctor with a mixture of admiration and astonishment.

  “Who are you?” she asked him, taking a step toward the safety of the school yard.

  “My name’s Belascoarán,” mumbled Héctor, staring at the ground and crushing little bits of glass under his toe.

  “Belascoarán, my guardian.” She laughed, taking another step in the direction of the school.

  “Belascoarán Shayne,” he said, raising his eyes to look at the girl. “What time do you get out of school?”

  “Two,” she said, and stopped.

  “Wait for me here. I might be late.” He shoved his hands down into his pants pockets and walked slowly away, without waiting for an answer, and without looking back. The girl watched him for a second, and then turned and ran up the steps to the school. A nun waited for her in the doorway, and she took the girl into her arms and hugged her tightly.

  The man with the tamale cart watched Héctor disappear down the block.

  He caught a North Freeway bus at the Monument to the Revolution and rode standing, holding on to the bar with his right hand. The back of his left hand hurt and it was turning red. At Avenida Hidalgo he changed his mind and got off the bus, sorting his way through the mass of people coming and going from the Mexico City headquarters of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, until he got to one of the used-book stores that lined the avenue. If he was going to spend the whole morning on a bus, he wanted to have something to read. He rummaged for a while through a pile of old books, until he picked out a well-thumbed copy of Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. Inside the torn front cover someone had written: To Joaquin, from Laura Flores P., with love. Héctor haggled the price down to eight pesos and paid for the book.

  Then he got onto another North Freeway bus and found a seat in back, where he rode as far as Rancho del Charro. He read a couple of chapters, taking time out now and then to notice what a dump the north end of town had become since his student days, when he used to go on geology field trips all the way up to Indios Verdes.

  A great big smile spread across his face every time he thought about the fight.

  He wasn’t a violent man. He never had been, having managed more or less to survive the violence that surrounded him without getting involved, like a spectator watching from a distance. He couldn’t remember more than maybe a couple of fights toward the end of his university days, and then one fight years later, in a movie theater, when some guy tried to snatch his ex-wife’s purse. In that one, he’d come out the worse by far, with a split lip after the guy hit him with an umbrella. In the end, it was the style of the fighting rather than the actual result that interested him the most. His own style was dry, cold, detached. And now, every time the pain in his hand reminded him of the morning’s fight, he smiled, until he finally felt embarrassed by the amount of childish pleasure he got out of the incident. At Indios Verdes he transferred to a green San Pedro–Santa Clara bus, and read another whole chapter as the vehicle lurched its way slowly through the industrial suburb of Xalostoc, dodging potholes and menacing cyclists. Pulling the cord, he descended the steps and, holding on to the handrail, leaned out of the moving bus, with the wind rushing across his face. At Brenner Street he jumped off. A light rain was falling.

  It wasn’t as though he’d never been there before. Twice a day for four long years he’d driven that same stretch of highway, with his eyes fixed on the road ahead of him, hating the dust, the open-air market, the never-ending road work, and the masses of men that stormed the buses at five-thirty every afternoon. He’d tried to ignore it all, driving home in the evening toward the comfortable security of his nauseatingly middle-class neighborhood, trying not to let himself be distracted by the multitude of things he half-felt, guessed at, intuited. Trying to separate himself from that industrial wasteland raised up amidst the dust and the misery of one hundred thousand new immigrants from the countryside, the sulphurous puddles, the air thick with dust, the drunken cops, the rampant land fraud, the illegal slaughter of infected cattle, the sub-minimum wages, the cold that rides in on the east wind, the unemployment.

  Out there, modern industry took a step backward into the nineteenth century, to the days before the invention of hard hats, to the era of rusty steel, lost time sheets, cheap raw materials, and thieving bosses who stole with impunity from the workers’ savings accounts. There in Santa Clara the intrinsic filth of Mexican capital, in other places hidden behind white-washed walls and hygienic facades, was laid open for all to see.

  But, for all the time Belascoarán had spent there, he knew he’d barely even scratched the surface, never really wanting to see any more. At the end of every day his car waited for him at the factory gate, and he drove the next three miles without ever leaving the main road, with his windows rolled up and the stereo on.

  His eyes and ears had been closed.

  Now, as he got off the bus, he was filled with a vague feeling of guilt, and he made a beeline for a roadside juice stand where four or five workers stood finishing their breakfast.

  “Orange juice, please.”

  “You want an egg in it?”

  The combination had never appealed much to Héctor.

  “Plain is fine.”

  He took the glass of juice, but his eyes were on the cloud of dust disappearing down the highway.

  The workers moved to one side to make room for Héctor, who picked up scattered bits of their conversation. Something about somebody’s fat ass, a foreman’s pimply face, and a quack government doctor who recommended aspirin for rheumatic attacks. It all mixed together in Héctor’s mind.

  He paid for the juice, a
nd ventured a weak smile in the direction of the workers. They ignored him. He made his way on foot farther into the industrial zone.

  “Go ahead, boss,” said the security guard at the gate.

  Héctor committed the man’s face to memory.

  The inner courtyards were painted a lead gray, in sharp contrast to the blue outer wall covered with red graffiti: down with lira. better wages or strike. down with dog zenón. strike…

  Behind the gatekeeper stood a pair of especially tough-looking guards, one of whom carried a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun under his arm.

  Héctor guided himself through the maze of buildings, courtyards, and walkways, ending up at the large, high-ceilinged factory, where partially uniformed workers in overalls or dark blue shirts moved about without any apparent order.

  Farther on, at the back of the main yard, past a loading dock filled with six or seven semis, he found a row of small, two-story buildings painted a creamy white with dark blue trim.

  “Licenciado Duelas, at your service.”

  “Belascoarán,” said Héctor, shaking the lawyer’s hand.

  “We weren’t expecting you…”

  “I decided to accept your offer.”

  “The management’s meeting right now. Come with me, and we can talk it over.”

  Héctor followed him through the inner offices, drawing curious glances from the secretaries he passed.

  Which was the one who was eating a doughnut? he wondered.

  They went through a polished wooden door into a conference room where four men sat in black leather chairs.

  “Señor Guzmán Vera, company accountant”—a thin, affected man with a pair of wire-frame glasses perched on his nose. “Señor Haro”—young junior executive, fresh out of school with a degree in engineering. Héctor knew a hundred more like him. “Señor Rodríguez Cuesta, president and general manager”—silvery hair, dark complexion, bushy white mustache, tailored English suit. “Engineer Camposanto”—a stupid smile plastered onto a round face, too closely shaved for Héctor’s liking, forty-ish.