Norte

by Edmundo Paz Soldán

  “I got some lucha libre masks at home,” he said. “We could use them for protection. Just in case someone sees us.”

  “You learn fast little cousin,” Medardo said.

  They finished working the market and went back to the bridge. There was enough sotol and glue for the party to last through the night.

  It was 4 a.m. when Suzy got out of the cab and made her way to her apartment building, the heels of her boots clacking in the night air.

  She opened the door to her building with a flick of her wrist, holding the key like a blade in her hand. She felt a little woozy. Not a day went by that she didn’t imagine herself free of the stinking puddles of the California’s floors, the smoke that stung her eyes all night, the ear-splitting Van Halen and Prince, the rancheras, the drunk men constantly groping her.

  Suzy was closing the door when she heard a familiar voice.

  “What’s the rush, bitch?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “How quickly we forget.”

  “Oh, it’s you . . . You scared me.”

  “Don’t move,” Medardo said flashing his knife.

  She took a few steps backwards, clutching at her purse, until she felt the cold tile of the wall behind her. There were bags of trash heaped up in the corner.

  Medardo, Justino and Jesús entered the building and closed the door behind them.

  “What you chamacos want? It’s late and I’m tired. Please just let me be. Don’t make me have to call Patotas.”

  Medardo grabbed her and threw her into the stairwell. Suzy felt a sharp pain in her back when she fell against the edge of one of the steps: she wanted to scream but a hand covered her mouth. She tried to squeeze out of Medardo’s grip and crawl up the stairs; they struggled until he finally turned her over to immobilize her. Where was her purse?

  “Please, please don’t.”

  Medardo pulled down her tights and ripped her thong off. Suzy continued to struggle, though her strength was quickly draining. She felt him penetrate her and tried to scream. Maybe the couple who lived in the room next door would hear the noise?

  Justino tore open her red blouse and sucked at her tits, licking and smearing his saliva all over her. By now she was letting them do what they wanted without putting up a fight; the knives terrified her. She conjured up images of her daughter Yandira, who was with her mother in Tlaquepaque—imagined her running around the courtyard at home with her blue skirt and black hair, the only good thing she’d inherited from her prick of a father. Her baby’s hair was gathered in a splash of colorful barrettes. She’d get out of this alive and report them all to Patotas.

  Now it was the last one’s turn, the one who hardly ever spoke.

  Jesús climbed on top of her. She had curled up into a ball and couldn’t stop crying. Her clothes were ruined and she covered her face with her hands.

  Now was his chance to show his cousins a thing or two.

  He grabbed her by her wrists, forcing her arms open wide, and had each of his cousins hold one arm while he unbuckled his pants and told her to blow him. He struck her on the cheek so hard it made her bleed. He could see Medardo’s and Justino’s shocked expressions just out of the corner of his eye. They never thought he had it in him. Fucking bastards.

  Suzy opened her mouth and started sucking Jesús’s dick. She was trembling and had the hiccups. “Careful she don’t bite you,” Medardo sniggered.

  Jesús watched her face transform into María Luisa’s.

  He closed his eyes and opened them again.

  Still María Luisa. “So you didn’t want to sleep with me, huh?”

  He forced the handle of his knife up Suzy’s ass. She squealed like a scared pig and Justino covered her mouth again, cursing her mother and telling her she don’t deserve to be alive, she’d better shut the fuck up or things were going to get really ugly.

  Jesús penetrated her with his fist and Suzy shrieked. He moved it around inside of her more and more viciously, as if he were feeding off her growing desperation. He opened his fingers as wide as he could and plunged them into the soft, gummy inner walls. Then he punched her in the face with the same fist.

  “You didn’t want to sleep with me, huh?”

  The pain in his knuckles made him stop.

  Suzy’s cheekbones were black and blue and her nose was shattered. Nearly unconscious by now, she slumped against the stairs. She was lucky though: she hardly felt the blade puncture her heart.

  “What the fuck you do that for?” Medardo asked Jesús.

  “She was gonna rat on us.”

  “Primo, you shouldn’ta done that.”

  “Better safe than sorry, wey.”

  “I never thought you . . . ,” Justino stammered.

  “Me neither.”

  2

  Landslide, Texas, 2008

  Last night I went to Wünderbar with Sam and La Jodida. We hung out for a while on Sixth Street, getting drunk and arguing over whether Joy Division or Nirvana had been the most influential band of our generation. They said Nirvana, I said Joy Division. There’s a before and after Cobain’s death, La Jodida said, flirting with a redhead at the table next to us. It’s not about a single defining moment, I said, it’s about the long haul, being influential. Ian Curtis carved a space for himself over time. Sam looked at me with a twinkle in his eye, putting on his telltale satyr’s face, insinuating that he might just come back to my studio and who knows, stay the night, see what happens.

  We took off and headed for the Underground. Fergie’s voice belted out a techno arrangement. The air was so humid my glasses fogged up, and I took them off as I walked toward the bathroom down a dark hallway where there were couples making out. I bought a few hits of ecstasy from a kid who had just finished vomiting, and then locked myself into one of the stalls. Sitting there, I was overcome by a shining vision of Fabián in his better days. I shut my eyes hard, until the ache let up a little. Sam was standing there, waiting for me at the bathroom door when I walked out. An Oasis song played over the loudspeakers. He hugged me and I suddenly felt tenderness toward him.

  “Knock it off, Michelle.”

  “Why does your gaucho accent always come out after you’ve had a few drinks?” I quipped.

  “What can I say? Time in Paradise never comes without strings.

  Sam had spent a semester in Buenos Aires researching his thesis. He was surprised to find it the most anti-American city on the continent, yet it didn’t stop him from falling in love with the cafés, the women, and the chaotic university scene. He came back with an Alan Pauls autograph, Sarlo’s email address, and a colossal stash of books in boxes he hadn’t yet had a chance to open.

  He kissed me. I didn’t want to be alone, so I figured what’s the harm in fooling myself for a few more hours.

  I liked the softness of Sam’s kisses, the frisky look in his eye, his clever conversation, and the way he giggled when he came. He was four years older than me, just twenty-nine, but in many ways he was less mature. We were too close as friends to make it work as a couple; I had come to terms with that by now, but he hadn’t, though he tried. He made an effort not to take me seriously, and La Jodida warned me not to fuck him if I didn’t want anything to come out of the relationship. I would nod in complete agreement, then do whatever I pleased.

  We scanned the place trying to locate La Jodida, but she showed up again when a Killers song came on, grabbed my hand, and pulled me out onto the dance floor. She took a swig from a pocket flask of cane rum. Her eyes were glassy, she’d had a fight with her girlfriend Megan the night before and had taken off clubbing, snorting coke with a pleasant but ugly waitress she’d picked up to avoid having to go back to her apartment. They partied in the girl’s Nissan until La Jodida passed out around six in the morning, but the waitress woke her up when she had to leave for class. La Jodida killed time traipsing around the streets of Landslide, waiting until she was sure Megan had gone. But when she was finally home she couldn’t get to sleep, so she went back out a
nd caught up with her hardcore party buddies like Tennessee, who had tried to kill herself last winter with rat poison. They kept the bender going in her room with shots of tequila and more lines. Now I regretted having invited her out. The last thing I felt like doing was looking after her.

  She hugged me in the middle of the dance floor and said, “I love you, you’re like my little sistah.”

  “I love you too, hermanita.”

  “I know you don’t like partying with me anymore, getting shitfaced. It’s all my fault, I admit it. As of New Year’s I’m done with all my vices, I promise. I’m gonna throw a macrofiesta to say goodbye to the life and never smoke another bong again.”

  “You know it’s not that, it’s that nobody can keep up with you. Don’t forget it was me who called you to go out in the first place.”

  “Please don’t leave me alone, pretty please?”

  “Nobody’s leaving you. What’s up, niña? What’s going on?”

  She hugged me. I wanted to make her feel better but didn’t know how, what to say. I patted her on the back a few times, as if she were a child.

  “We’re in this together, tu sabes. You got me into it in the first place.”

  “I didn’t get you into anything. Nobody forced you.”

  “You’re so much more rational than me. You cut out in time.”

  “There’s a point when it takes you over, you lose control . . .”

  “I can still control it,” she countered immediately. “It’s just that I don’t want to yet.”

  I didn’t answer. What for? Nothing I said would make her stop kidding herself.

  She turned around and ran back to the table with Sam. I just stood there on the dance floor a little while. I met La Jodida at a party in one of the university dorms our first semester in Landslide. She’s Puerto Rican and was studying biology; we hit it off from the get-go and ended up getting drunk and going back to my dorm room. I gave her a joint, it was her first time.

  By the time I walked back to the table, she’d gone.

  “She told me to tell you she’s taking off,” Sam said, “she didn’t feel well.”

  “Good. She should never have come out in her condition.”

  “She left her purse, but it doesn’t really go with my outfit. Can you get it back to her?”

  I nodded. It wasn’t the first time I heard La Jodida say she was in control when obviously she wasn’t, going on about how I shouldn’t feel guilty. Regardless, I couldn’t help feeling responsible.

  The whole situation with La Jodida depressed me. Sam could tell and tried to make things better by telling bad jokes. He made me smile and in a way it did cheer me up.

  I called Mamá after Sam left that Saturday morning, and she told me Papá was bent on going back to Bolivia. He was tired of repairing televisions for Best Buy. I told her not to pay attention to his ranting, that he’d been saying the same thing since we first set foot in Texas. Papá was incurably homesick, but he was also a practical man and knew what was best for them. He blew off steam by insisting on returning to Santa Cruz, especially when times got tough there; it helped take the edge off his guilt and made it easier to stay put. “There’s nothing easy about it,” Mamá said. “He’s home now, but it’s as if he weren’t here at all. His head is always somewhere else.” “So what else is new?” I asked. “Don’t make fun.” “Tranquila, mamá, if he were really serious, he wouldn’t be talking about it, he’d just buy the tickets and that’d be the end of it.”

  I was eager to finally sit down and draw out the story that had been on my mind for a while. I had to take advantage of my day off from Taco Hut, not having to deal with sticky-fingered kids asking for crayons all day, or fat ladies complaining that their chicken fajitas were cold, or rowdy fratboys spilling beer on the tables and asking for my phone number behind their girlfriends’ backs. The working title isn’t very original: The Living Dead. It’s a zombie story: adults turn into dead people when they lose their will to rebel, they adapt to the system, marry, have kids, hold down a nine-to-five job. A world full of the living dead: only a few would be able to survive. My heroine, Samantha, fights the zombies. She infiltrates their nests and destroys them with a silver dagger. The problem is that the zombies always come back to life; that’s why they’re called zombies.

  I’m looking for the way to end the story, the narrative that will allow Samantha to kill the zombies once and for all, and forevermore.

  I read a chapter of Laurell Hamilton’s novel for inspiration. Her books about Anita Blake and True Blood helped give me a structure to follow. They’re vampire and zombie stories, or paranormal episodes set in the ordinary, everyday places of middle America like Walmart and Denny’s, instead of gothic cities like New Orleans. Her novel Guilty Pleasures is pure kitsch—there’s even a striptease in a vampire club—but I could salvage a few things from it, like how her vampires behave like mundane fixtures in the routine life of the city.

  A zombie devours Samantha’s boyfriend, so she goes on a crusade to avenge him. That’s the point where the two of us diverged: I wasn’t on a crusade and didn’t have anyone to avenge. We shared some of the rage, true, and maybe a touch of helplessness.

  By noon I had eight pages completed. I drew my zombies with fangs, like vampires. Now I had to color them in. Samantha’s dress will be blood red and she’s wearing boots. My brother Toño would want me to give her Hispanic features—he discovered his Latino identity in his last year of high school and hasn’t stopped criticizing my illustrations since then, saying they don’t deal with “the struggle of a minority against the oppression of the Anglo majority.” And I won’t pay any attention.

  Samantha is an unassuming superheroine, thanks to her job as a librarian in the state university. But what sort of powers should I give her? And what will they call her?

  All superheroes have a mythical origin. Tony Colt became “The Spirit” after he was buried alive. So there you have another case of the living dead. All roads lead to Will Eisner.

  A mythical origin. The first chapter will have to tell that story.

  I was catnapping when my cell phone rang and pulled me out of my afternoon dream. I grabbed my cell phone from the night table without opening my eyes, and heard Sam’s voice say:

  “About last night . . .”

  Silence.

  “You know how I feel about us,” I said. “Let’s not complicate our lives.”

  “Why do you have to be so difficult? Look, we could just . . .”

  “We could just what?”

  “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone.”

  “I never said I wouldn’t.”

  “Fine. Let’s change the subject then.”

  “That’s what I always say.”

  Sam’s voice brought me back to our first week of school, when I sat down next to him in Professor Camacho-Stokes’s class on Transculturation. I had already noticed him around campus. He let weeks go by before getting up the nerve to make a first move, but by then I was completely absorbed into Fabián’s world. And that was that. We might have spared ourselves all this suffering if only I had got up the courage to approach him myself, or Sam had acted on his instincts.

  Sam went on and on about his thesis. I was so thankful to have gotten out of there in time, before the tyranny of critical thinking completely took over my way of approaching things, narrowed my vision. My ex-colleagues only read to analyze, while I preferred to enjoy reading, to leave room for the whimsical. “But I really enjoy it,” Sam said as justification when I accused him of allowing the study of literature to get in the way of feeling the joy of it. “It’s just a another way of enjoying it. So get off your moral high horse, already. Remember what Blanchot wrote about Heidegger in that article.”

  “Aha.”

  “Oh come on, who says you can’t have it both ways?”

  Sam was proud of Tabloid, a university radio program he anchored on Monday nights at midnight, about sensationalist crimes and the “pure pulp” of s
erial killers, the violence of the Mexican cartel wars, or legendary stories like Bonnie and Clyde. He had built himself a respectable audience for the program, and it was his escape valve for the pressures of academia.

  I told him I was delighted that I’d quit; by shunning a cushy scholarship, I could now explore my own “inner voice.”

  “Oh don’t give me the inner voice crap,” he said, “and drop the new age vocabulary. You left because you were afraid of running into Fabián in the hallway, or having to take his tests or his classes.”

  I didn’t respond, and Sam realized how rude he’d been and tried to apologize. He needled me into agreeing to meet him at a café near my studio. I was in my autistic mode and really wanted to spend my time alone, drawing, but I gave in and said yes.

  Sam and I met up in Chip & Dip, which was just next door to Comics for Dummies (Chuck, the owner, talked me into buying Fun Home, about a lesbian girl who discovers that her father is gay, “very Proustian”). The weekend micro-story was already posted on the café windows: Nortec musicians at the Palladium, a Julieta Venegas lookalike contest was taking place at the bar Bring Me The Head of Joseph Wales, and a professor from Nuevo Laredo was giving a talk on violence along the border.

  Sam went back to talking about his thesis on figurations of the intellectual and the writer in contemporary Latin American literature. He commented on Respiración Artificial by Ricardo Piglia (the intellectual as an exile), Our Lady of the Assassins by Fernando Vallejo (the intellectual as a deracinated figure), The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño (the poet as a vitalist, an antiestablishmentarian, capable of choosing not to write to avoid being co-opted by the institution), and La fiesta vigilada by Antonio José Ponte Mirabal (the intellectual as the last survivor of a postapocalyptic world). His early conclusion centered on how the traditional role of the intellectual was being discarded by a reconfigured cultural system.