An Easy Thing

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  Héctor stood up.

  “Which one’s the guy from the ironworkers?” he asked a fat worker wearing a wool hat with a blue pom-pom, who motioned to a table at the front of the diner.

  A hush fell over the room as all eyes turned to stare at Héctor. There was only the soft clink of soda-pop bottles on tabletops. He stepped forward decisively.

  “I wanted to talk with someone from the union.”

  A tall man with a Zapata-like mustache motioned Héctor to a chair. Two other men sat at the same table: one balding, forty-ish, in blue coveralls, with sparkling eyes, and lips set in an eternal half smile around an eternally burning cigarette; the other a small bearded man with a cherry-red sweater and pants, and a pair of enormous, callused hands.

  Héctor glanced toward the door, expecting to see his brother walk in at any moment. The flow of men from the factory hadn’t stopped, and the lonchería got more crowded and quieter by the minute, in contrast to the noisy street outside.

  “Delex has hired me to find out who killed the engineer Alvarez Cerruli…What they’re probably going to try and do is frame you for the murder…Even though I’m working for them, I want to try and make sure that doesn’t happen. The only way I can see to do that, is to find out who the real murderer is…And I need your help.”

  The three men looked at one another.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Héctor Belascoarán Shayne.”

  The name produced no reaction.

  “Why don’t you go ask Camposanto who did it?” shouted someone from one of the other tables.

  The three men laughed.

  “Why don’t you go ask Camposanto to invite you to one of his parties?” asked the fat man with the wool cap at Héctor’s back.

  More laughter.

  “Tell them we don’t give a shit what they try and say we did,” said the tall man. That was the end of the conversation.

  Héctor got up from the table, walked over to where he’d been sitting before, laid a few pesos down beside an empty bottle of soda pop, and left.

  The brightness of the sun outside made him blink. He felt sleepy. A group of young workers stood in front of the plant gate under the dark stare of a pair of security guards escorting a nonunion worker inside. They were selling copies of The Vulture, a small union paper. Héctor took a copy and tossed five pesos into the black-and-red can they held out in front of him.

  “Gracias, compa.”

  With the paper in hand, he passed by the gatekeeper, who greeted him with a glance of obsequious recognition mixed with annoyance.

  Was the air inside the plant charged with tension? Or was lack of sleep starting to have its effect?

  After phoning for permission, one of the secretaries agreed to make up a list of the home addresses of all the nonunion employees. Héctor smoked a cigarette while she typed.

  “Who was Señor Alvarez’s secretary?” he asked.

  She pointed to a desk ten yards down the hall, where a young woman of about twenty-five was trying to reach some folders stacked on top of a file cabinet. Héctor looked at the smooth legs showing under her emerald-green skirt.

  “Need a hand?”

  “Yes, please…Just those yellow folders there. Thanks a lot.”

  Héctor passed them down to her.

  “Were you Alvarez Cerruli’s secretary?”

  She looked at him for the first time.

  “Police?”

  Héctor shook his head.

  “They tell me he wasn’t very popular.”

  “He was very impersonal. Very, how should I say…rigid.”

  “What was the name of the other engineer who died a couple of months ago, do you remember?”

  “Engineer Osorio Barba, yes, of course. He worked here until about two years ago. Alvarez Cerruli knew him well.”

  “Were they friends?”

  The woman dropped her gaze.

  “They knew each other very well.”

  “How did your boss act when he found out that Osorio was dead?”

  “He spent the whole day shut up in his office.”

  “One last question.”

  “Excuse me, please, I’ve got to bring these…”

  “Just one question.” Héctor held her by the arm. Her muscles tensed under the pressure of his hand.

  “Did anyone seem to be particularly saddened by Alvarez’s death?”

  “I’ve got to go now, I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, and disengaged herself from Héctor’s grasp.

  Héctor walked back to the first desk and took the list of addresses from the secretary.

  Carlos was waiting for him at the plant gate, chatting with the men selling the union paper. He flagged Héctor down.

  “I went over to the diner, but the guys from the committee had already left. Sorry I was late, but I couldn’t get a hold of the guy who could have put me in touch with the people here.”

  “I can’t figure out what the hell’s going on around here. Why don’t you tell me what’s happening with the union? Maybe that’ll help.”

  They walked together down the dusty street, leaving the two union men selling newspapers at the factory gate. The only other people left in the street were a pair of workers tossing coins with a jicama seller down at the corner.

  Héctor couldn’t help feeling like an outsider, strangely alien to the whole environment. It was starting to get on his nerves.

  ***

  The Foreign Service office was closed afternoons, so after catnapping on one of the return buses, and reading The Vulture on the other (collective bargaining rights or strike! management calls on scabs. night-shift workers shut down machine shop. electrical workers pledge solidarity), he rented himself a car at an agency on Balderas, then bought a newspaper, hoping to find a movie theater where he could kill some time until seven o’clock. If things kept on going as they had so far, Héctor had another sleepless night ahead of him. It sounded like a rotten idea. He was about to give up on the movie, seduced by the thought of a shower and a decent meal, when he spotted an ad for a new Gabriel Retes film called Chinameca: The Death of Zapatismo.

  He checked the time and smiled. Now wouldn’t that be something, to find old don Emiliano waiting for him outside the movie theater? Come to town to see how they told his life in pictures?

  His smile grew broader as he thought about the strange triangle he was caught up in now.

  ***

  As he dried himself off brusquely after his shower, Héctor realized there was something about the whole tangled mess he didn’t like. The music on the radio faded in and out. He ought to have his neighbor the electrician take a look at it. Outside the wind was blowing the dust around, and the tree in front of his window shook its branches melodiously.

  He didn’t like the fact that so many different characters had entered the story in such a short time. It felt as if he’d seen a thousand and one new faces in barely two days. He had a strange vision of a gigantic carousel filled with countless unknown faces, spinning endlessly around and around.

  On the one hand were the boys with the Rambler wagon, on the other, the engineers from Delex, the men from the union. There were the faces of all the Sandinistas who may have fought alongside Zapata. There was Elena Ferrer’s father, Alvarez Cerruli’s ex-wife, and his maid still living in his house in Navarte, and Zenón, the “fag dog” foreman. But above all else, was the face of his mother; it wouldn’t go away, appearing with every lurch of the bus, or in the pages of his book. And then there were the letters from the woman with the ponytail.

  A parade of names: Duelas, Camposanto, Guzmán Vera, Osorio Barba…Other names insinuated themselves out of the mythical haze around Emiliano Zapata: Farabundo Martí, Porfirio Sánchez, Girón Ruano…Or in the girl’s diary�
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  And somewhere in all of that, a secretary’s legs under her emerald-green skirt, a woman in Italy in somebody else’s bed, Elena’s soft smile, her arm in a cast, Marisa Ferrer’s see-through blouse.

  All of that, plus the fatigue. It was enough to bring the whole thing crashing down on top of him.

  But first, family, and then dinner. Putting on a white shirt, he hunted around in his closet for a necktie until he found one stashed away in a box of socks. It was gray knit, the child of another time. He put it on and started to tie the knot, then changed his mind. The time for compromise was over. He stripped the tie off and tossed it in the trash.

  He left the house without turning off the radio.

  ***

  Carlos was explaining to Elisa how the Echeverría government had tried to rebuild the economic base of the middle class after 1968. Héctor took a seat on the floor of the tiny roof-top apartment, poured himself a cup of coffee, and listened to the conversation. His sister leaned over and gave him a kiss.

  “…For instance, just take a look at what happened to your classmates. Or yours,” he said, motioning to Héctor. “Fifty percent of them ended up with high-paying jobs in some obscure government ministry created just for them, filling the ranks of bizarre, pointless institutions where there’s never any work to do, and whose only purpose is to provide these people with jobs. For them, Echeverría reinvented the wheel. Instead of rebuilding the economic infrastructure, he simply ended up adding fat to the bureaucracy. Now, I’m not saying that some of these people didn’t go into it with good intentions…but their good intentions didn’t last for long. They got swallowed up into a new technocratic elite. And that’s where they are today, feeding worms at the National Nopal Cactus Conservation Center…Slaving away at the Center for Resource Recovery…The Center for Partial and Inexact Studies, or The Sweet Potato Harvest Data Center…”

  And he continued with a litany of names of real and made up institutions, which sounded to Héctor like the magical recitation of the holy rosary.

  “…The Mongoloid Training Center…The National Center for the Study of Flatulence…The Center for the Development of the Grasshopper Harvest…The Natural Resources Institute…The Center for Retarded Studies…The National Banana Trust…A buddy of mine is writing his thesis on it. He’s put together a list of sixty-three different institutions. Add that to the eighty-six or so I made up and you’ve got enough for a whole directory…”

  “In Canada sometimes, when I was bored to death I’d make up names of imaginary saints,” Elisa said, “like Saint Calvin Klein, Saint Van Camp, Saint Yves Saint-Laurent, there’s a good one, or how about Saint Garbanzo of the Jolly Green Giant.”

  They all laughed.

  “I’ve got a big can of tuna fish. Is anybody hungry?” asked Carlos.

  “Sorry,” said Héctor, “I can’t stay long, I’ve got a dinner to go to.

  “How are you doing?” Elisa asked him.

  “Mixed up in other people’s problems, as usual.”

  “Need any help?”

  Héctor shook his head.

  “So, what are we going to do about this?” She meant the inheritance.

  “This whole thing’s really upsetting to me, you know. But I’m not sure why.”

  “Hey, I hear you. It’s got me all turned around, too. It’s a weird thing. I suppose Héctor feels the same way.”

  “Well, one way or another, we’ve still got to deal with it.”

  “All right then.”

  Elisa took a pair of envelopes from her bag, while Héctor got up and went into the kitchen to look for an ashtray. He found one buried under some dirty dishes and rinsed it off.

  “Go ahead,” he said, “I can hear you.”

  “This one’s a letter from Mama. Do you want to read it yourselves, or does someone want to read it out loud?”

  “You read it,” said Carlos.

  “Fine with me,” said Héctor from the kitchen.

  My dearest children:

  I know that by the time you read this letter I will no longer be alive. I hate the literary forms for this kind of thing, that’s why I’m not going to write: ‘I will have passed on,’ or some such nonsense. I will be dead, and I hope that mine is an easy death, without complications. Unfortunately, my life was otherwise. You only know parts of the story. But I don’t want to burden you with memories now. Each of you has your own. But now I’m getting off the subject…The story is a simple one: over the years and in the course of my life, I’ve acquired a modest amount of wealth.

  By now, you will have already decided whether to distribute my estate yourselves, or to accede to the distribution as set out in the will. I’m not going to worry about it, since I know that none of you are too much in love with money. Now it’s my responsibility to see that your father’s wishes are also carried out. He asked me to give you a letter, and with it, the key to a safe-deposit box. I’m including these for you here. That’s how he wanted it. So be it.

  I wish you each the very best always. Think of me.

  Shirley Shayne de Belascoarán.

  “Wow,” muttered Carlos.

  They fell silent. In the apartment below them someone turned a TV on at full volume.

  “It makes me feel like crying. I guess it doesn’t hurt to admi it…” Elisa said after several minutes. “Now what?”

  “Open the letter from Papa.”

  “It’s just a short note, and a key. It says:

  ‘The more complicated, the better. The more impossible, the more beautiful.’

  Box # 1627, Bank of the Americas, Central Branch. With this letter I authorize any one of my three children to open and use the contents of the aforementioned safe-deposit box.

  José María Belascoarán Aguirre.

  “What’s the old man got waiting for us?” wondered Carlos.

  “How much do you remember him?”

  Héctor emerged from the kitchen, checking his watch.

  “The only thing I can think of for the money is that you should keep it,” he said to Elisa. “You need it more than either of us.”

  “I don’t want it,” she answered firmly, shaking a stray lock of hair from her face.

  “I’ve got to go now. What are we going to do?” asked Héctor.

  “When can we get together and talk about this without you running off after five minutes?”

  “How about tomorrow morning, at my office?”

  “Twelve o’clock,” suggested Elisa.

  “Fine with me.”

  Héctor kissed Elisa on the cheek, patted Carlos on the back, and went out into the cold.

  ***

  After driving around in circles for a while in the well-to-do neighborhood, he finally found the street and then the house. Two stories, set off by itself, with a small garden in front. The upper story was lit up as if there’d never been a rate increase. He rang the bell, thinking that the first thing he’d do when he got inside was turn off the lights in the den where no one was watching TV. Then he’d go around shutting off the rest of the lights, in the bathroom, the breakfast nook, the two bedrooms. The past three months of celibacy somehow connected in Héctor’s unconscious mind with the pictures from Marisa Ferrer’s scrapbook and the idea of turning out the lights. He saw himself switching off the light on the bedside table, and then rolling over in the bed to cuddle up against his client’s naked body. He rang the bell again, thinking that it was all the same to him whether the lights were on or off when he made love. Actually, he preferred to have the lights on. Elena opened the door, smiling timidly, and the detective blushed.

  “It’s my guardian angel…”

  “I hope I didn’t miss dinner.”

  “So it’s you…you’re the special guest…” she said, showing him into the house.

/>   “Awful” was the only word Héctor could think of to describe the place, and he completely forgot his fantasy about turning out the lights. It was full of porcelain deer and lamps that didn’t give off any light, ashtrays that never held any ash, and pictures that didn’t tell a story. It was all very familiar to him; he even recognized the smell, like the smell of another house he’d been in once. That house had belonged to an engineer pulling down 22,000 pesos a month, married to a woman whose foremost thought was to get a new carpet for the dining room. He even remembered that he had once lived in that other house. But he managed to see that other Héctor as someone else he’d known once, a long time ago.

  “You’re very punctual, Señor Shayne.”

  “Belascoarán Shayne. The name’s Belascoarán.”

  “You’ll have to forgive Mama, she hasn’t had time to study her script,” said the daughter with a smile.

  “What do you do when you’ve got a daughter who’s too smart for her own good? In my parents’ day, you sent her to a good Catholic school. It seems that in this case, it hasn’t worked.”

  Marisa Ferrer was dressed in a resplendent black evening gown. The phrase “fits like a glove” came to Héctor’s mind. As she moved, Héctor thought he could hear the melody of a far off rumba, like a movie sound track. Héctor imagined himself with a butter knife, slowly spreading the black material over the woman’s skin. And she, either guessing his thoughts, intuiting them, or perhaps out of a sense of professional gallantry, paused silently for the detective to look her over. Then she took him by the arm and led him into the living room, which was separated by a folding screen from the dining room where three place settings were laid out on the table. A giant portrait of his hostess hung over the sofa. She was naked, lying sensuously across a polar-bear skin. Beside it were two pictures of a girl at five and then ten years old, and a painted seascape.

  “Isn’t it horrible?” asked Elena.

  “Your mother’s got remarkable taste.”

  “Mama, I told you to take it down from there.”

  “Darling, I’m sure Señor Belascoarán will have noticed,” she pronounced his name slowly, smoothly, pausing after every syllable, “that I wasn’t born to be an interior decorator.”