by Rolo Diez
I’m surrounded by people of little faith. People incapable of knowing what they want, and if by chance they do stumble on the answer, too scared to say “I want this”. I know them well, because I used to be one of them. Perhaps you need to have been shot in the back of the head and to have had your third eye opened to be able to see, I mean to really see, without pay-cheques and school fees, without nine-to-five and Christmas holidays, without all the smokescreen we’ve had injected into our veins, without what we are not, and are not even interested in, preventing us from remembering the only true being we have ever been: the magical shadow of what was once a child. The child who imagined the impossible and hoped to grow up to achieve it. The same being I am now, restored thanks to a hole in the head, with the eyes of a reptile that can see the world is green, someone determined to recover what all those who have fed off my flesh and my life have stripped me of: the Commander, Lourdes, Gloria, my children, the shopkeepers of this city, the banks, the teachers, my colleagues at work, all those who were close to me and banded together to turn me into a donkey and then all lined up to jab the donkey with a cattleprod. All those who said: “Work, Carlos, bend your back, grind your bones, earn money, I expect it of you because I’m your boss, it’s your duty because I’m your wife, you can’t abandon us because we’re your children, you have to watch over us because we’re inhabitants of this city, you have to have your papers in order, you have to make your payments on the money you’ve borrowed, take out insurance, pay for your own funeral, don’t stop and rest, Carlos, you’ve got to go on working.” Let’s be clear about it: not even those who most cared for me or loved me, not one of them was ever capable of saying: “Have your cake and eat it, live it up, bet all your money, the world is covered in a cloud of stupidity and resignation, don’t breathe it in, be yourself, set off for Abyssinia, be like the bird and the tiger, don’t just die underneath your TV dinner tray, don’t die either in your office or at home, and don’t let the tears of women stop you, there are other women and other parties to go to, there are seas to cross, adventures to live. They’ve robbed you of everything, Carlos: look at your grey face, your yellow teeth, your wrinkles, your shifty eyes, take a good look at your frozen bones, how death is rising through your flogged animal’s flesh, look how you’re dying on your feet, Carlos Hernandez. Get on with it.”
The Commander said something. His lips moved, but I couldn’t catch the words. Arganaraz and Quasimodo grabbed me from behind and took away my gun. Everything went black. It’s harder to die than to live.
Chapter eighteen
Bingo. Full house. Case closed. The murderers showed they had the kind of intelligence and skill that could leave all clues at a dead end. Anyone who can do that, whatever his motives or aims, is bound to create a state of affairs which for the average Mexican policeman (or the police of any other country) will be as indecipherable as classical Arabic and will end up with him collapsing in the first bar he comes across, anywhere he can drown his despair and bewilderment in tequila. Someone always appears to knock over the amateurs’ chips and make crime what it should be: a game for professionals, people who, thanks to their lengthy experience, their local knowledge and the means they have at their disposal, are the only ones who can see things through to the end, even an investigation. Science, in other words. And wielding power.
Jones – sadistic pornography – money. Mr and Mrs Accountant see the opportunity and recruit Valadez to do the deed. On the night of the crime Mrs Accountant goes out with Jones. She hides her auburn hair under a blonde wig. She’s done her make-up differently. “Today I want to be a new woman for you. I want you to make love to me as if we had just met, as if you had just picked me up in the street.” That’s what she says to him, or some other similar nonsense. Pornophiles like games of that sort. All men do, in fact. Which, following strict Aristotelian logic, must mean that all men are pornophiles. Mr Accountant or Valadez, or both of them, follow her to the hotel where she goes with Jones. Mrs Accountant kills him, wipes off her make-up, changes her wig for a man’s. Leaving the hotel, she speaks in a gruff voice, makes her gestures and gait more masculine. She puts on an act, and convinces the hotel porter she’s a transvestite. Two hundred yards from the hotel, she gets into a waiting car. An auburn-headed woman pretending to be a blonde who turns into a fair-haired man. Too much.
Quasimodo looks at me sadly, and I discover that sadness goes hand-in-hand with ugliness. The least sadness in the world must be Kim Basinger’s, because she is so beautiful even when she cries. Kim-smile, Kim-glasses, Kim-tears are simply different versions of her lips, her eyes, her skin. But the sadness of an ugly person is pathetic because it’s so pure. Which explains the success of Frankenstein, Quasimodo (Victor Hugo’s) and all the other “good” monsters. They convince us by being both ugly and sad. Their ugliness simply becomes part of their sadness, adding to it and increasing its intensity.
“You looked so out of it, I decided to help you, Carlitos,” he tells me. “Even against your will, and knowing you wouldn’t like it.”
I feel like kicking his head in. But I need him to finally resolve a case I have to close. I’ve got this evening and tonight to find the proof. Tomorrow, even though Jones, Victoria Ledesma, Valadez and Mr and Mrs Accountant will still have open files, they will disappear into the silent stacks of the archives, carefully classified and labelled, where they’ll sleep the endless winter of those who simply appear as a record of the facts, memory and, occasionally, as a launching pad for possible future vindication.
The first thing is to get my hands on some beer. They kept me prisoner in a clinic for three days, feeding me injections and food for sick people. A white ghostly place filled with sexless nurses, as bad tempered as old maids and programmed not to give any information to their victims. I had never been in that penitentiary before, and hope never to be there again. They kept me on fruit juice and pap for three days, as if I were a baby rather than a hardened criminal.
I’m thrilled to see that Quasimodo has regained his normal rat-grey colour and that the air and sky have gone back to their usual soot and ozone. I’m even more thrilled to have left that secret clinic where I was afraid that any of the injections they gave me might send me to sleep forever. The robotic nurses who were in charge of my body – not so much as a finger touching me that suggested anything personal, much less female – aroused such a powerful nostalgia in me for the caresses of Lourdes, Gloria and Rosario that if any of them gets wind of it, they can start choosing the colour of the noose to put around my neck right now. I was thinking the whole time that the satanic Doctor No or Mengele would look in on me and decide that the moment had come to neutralize me. I suppose I’ve been lucky, and I’m pleased to be breathing in three hundred parts per million of polluted air while I savour a beer that would be perfect if it had been left to chill only three minutes longer.
I explain to Quasimodo that I care about my friends, and that’s the only reason why I haven’t sent him to the cemetery. I know no one is perfect, and I don’t think I’m in any position to go around judging my neighbour. If he ran out, abandoning me in my hour of greatest need, and if he thought that his betrayal was for my own good, so be it. I’m not one to split hairs or to call into question other people’s word of honour. All I want to get clear is that I can decide for myself what suits me. It’s for me to say what it is in my best interest. I’ve got a mouth, and when I need help I’ll shout for it. Although I can’t imagine myself asking to be disarmed so that my chief enemy can toss my bones into a dungeon.
Quasimodo looks so sad that even for me his ugliness becomes unbearable. And since I can’t bear to see a monster cry, I continue to reassure him that we’re talking among friends, and that Arganaraz is a completely different matter – laying aside the fact that it was Quasimodo who brought him along unasked – because Arganaraz is not only not my friend but is a first-class bastard, a rogue who sells his sisters as whores, a spider who should be crushed: something I’ll be hap
py to do as soon as I lay my eyes on his cheating face.
We knock back four beers in La Cotorra, and I tell him of my plan. He hesitates, considers my concussion and the possibility that I am permanently deranged. I can see he is in the grip of a desperate struggle between feelings of loyalty and guilt (at having failed me when I needed him) and the certainty that this new adventure is even crazier than all those that have gone before, and that Carlitos seems determined to lead him to prison or death.
Things get more complicated still when I notice that one of the Mengele nurses is sitting at a nearby table, observing me and shaking her head.
No chance. We are what we are. We drink a few tequilas to settle our stomachs, to get rid of that bloated feeling a gut full of beer gives, then I push Quasimodo into the car, and we head for the house in Copilco.
“This makes us quits. This is the last time I’ll listen to you, Carlitos,” he says wearily.
I let it drop. I don’t give him the reply he deserves. Being sensitive gets you nowhere, and I need him to help me raid Estela Lopez de Jones’s house, wring a confession out of her and find proof.
I know she didn’t kill Victoria Ledesma, or Jones, or Mr and Mrs Accountant, or Valadez. She was simply in the eye of all the storms. Nobody can accuse her of anything, there’s no clause in the penal codes that condemns opportunism by someone who adds to all the filth but does not get their own hands dirty, someone who tolerates things with a smile, who subtly makes things worse when they speak. I know her style. I can see her wiping away a tear in honour of the person who built up a pile of money for her and heaving a sigh at the thought of the other, already deceased acquaintances. Calm, serene and dignified after the tears. Catwoman at the banquet. Owner of a large share of the business. A retired millionairessassistant in a cheap clothes store who will now be able to live off her investments for the rest of her life. Or so she thinks. And if I know all this, it’s because there’s no one else left. Just her and the people who ordered the death of three kamikazes threatening the bureaucratic dream in the Jones case. If I know this, it’s because there’s money in it. I know what’s going on, so I can see that, for now at least, Estela Lopez de Jones is the key to unravelling a story of filthy money and violence.
We reach the place. Everything is as it should be. Which would be terrible if it weren’t so comprehensible. The Oaxacan maid comes to the door as usual, asks “Who is it?” and lets us in. Her mistress appears, charming and friendly, not in the least bit surprised. When she sees me there’s no nervous outburst; she doesn’t fling herself on the floor to confess. What the lady of the house does is offer us coffee. She doesn’t fling herself on me clutching a kitchen knife, or even kneel down to stick her face between my legs.
I make the first move. I tell her what I’m looking for and see her become wary. Quasimodo follows the instructions I gave him. His role is not to talk but to show the lady a perverse, repugnant incubus ready and willing to unleash more sexual sadism on her body than that shown by her husband in ten thousand feet of film. The beast looks at her lasciviously, rolling his obscene yellow eyes as he studies the face, mouth, neck, breasts, stomach and legs not only of our anxious hostess but of the terrified Oaxacan maid too. His tongue traces lewd graffiti on his mandrill’s snout. One paw fondles his testicles, monstrously huge and abominably shaped in their imagination. Impossible to turn back now. I have to go on with the farce until we uncover fear, because it’s in the magic of fear that the truth is revealed. The maid is peering at us from the kitchen, probably wondering whether she should call the police, and what she could say about a perverse policeman who, apart from having to put up with the most ghastly face handed out by the Devil, has done nothing to anybody, and who, even though he is stroking his balls and leering at them with the eyes of a billy-goat on heat, has not touched a hair of anyone’s head, or even said an improper word.
“What videocassette?” asks the lady of the house, apparently determined to bluff things out and determinedly not looking at Quasimodo.
“The one related to the Jones murder,” I say, looking straight into her eyes, as is required in cases like these. She is still calm, too calm. She must have taken sedatives. She must have done, because no one can be that calm with Quasimodo around. She’s putting on this show because she doesn’t want to admit she’s scared.
“As I already told you, I don’t know anything about that.”
“Jones filmed sadistic pornography. He organized orgies and blackmailed naive senators who somehow thought that getting a gorilla up their arse would cost them nothing.”
She flushes. I am gratified to see that for the first time I have succeeded in imprinting anger on her stupid porcelain face.
“You’re a very coarse person, and I hope never to have to see you again,” she says faintly.
“I couldn’t give a damn. What I want is the cassette.”
“I found one, in a hidden space in a desk drawer. Perhaps that’s what you’re looking for, because it’s disgusting.”
“Where is it?”
“I’ll bring it for you.”
She stands up and goes upstairs to her bedroom. I’m frozen in my tracks. On the verge of victory, dumbfounded at the possibilities, each of which forks in front of me, offering different, even opposing, outcomes. Have I solved the case? Will I get to know who is behind the crimes? Will I get my hands on an object worth lots of money or blood? Will it be my turn to bet on all or nothing now: money forever, or six feet underground? One thing is certain: Carlos Hernandez will rise to whatever occasion might present itself.
Like a mechanical automaton in a house of horror, my colleague is still licking his disgusting chops, squinting to suggest his idea of a deranged assassin and continually pawing his bulging trouser-front. Seeing that the widow is no longer present to enjoy the show, he is dedicating his talents to the maid from Oaxaca, who every ten seconds or so comes to the kitchen door and stares at him in terror.
“That’s enough, Quasimodo,” I tell him. “You can stop now.”
He puts his tongue away, folds his arms and adopts the stern expression of a public official.
“Aren’t we going on with it?”
“There’s no need. We’ve got what we wanted.”
When the widow comes back down, the maid brings the coffee and pours it for us, taking great care to stay as far away as possible from Quasimodo.
“This is it,” Estela says in a neutral tone. She hands me a black oblong which for a split second reminds me of the black spot – the sign of having been condemned to death – that the wooden-legged pirate gives Long John Silver in Treasure Island. In itself it’s nothing: a videocassette. But premonitions of the future glitter in the dark plastic surface the size of my hand.
“Take it and leave,” she goes on, in that tone of voice I find so pleasant whenever a suspect gives me orders.
I take the cassette and stand up. I gently squeeze her cheek between my thumb and forefinger. She tilts her head back, so I squeeze harder. It hurts. It humiliates her. I want to hurt and humiliate her. I want to hand her over to Quasimodo so he can rape and flog her all night, while I film him at it. No, that’s not true. What I really want is to punish and rape her myself. I want to see her sobbing and begging me to stop, and I’ll only forgive her when her misery and surrender are complete. She utters a short yelp, and her eyes brim with tears. I must look the picture of hatred, because the maid starts bawling too. Estela Lopez de Jones calls me an animal, a brute, a murderer and promises she’ll get me thrown out of the police. “Shut up,” I tell her. “When you’re quiet, we’ll talk.” Quasimodo advances towards the maid, a finger on his mouth commanding silence. Immediate success: about to pass out, the maid turns white and becomes a statue. The widow is quiet too, sobbing gently. Her cheek really hurts. It will do for several days. At least I hope so. After I let go, she raises a hand to the white spot. Then she collapses into an armchair and goes on crying.
“We’re going to watch the film h
ere,” I say. “All four of us. Where’s the video?”
“. . .”
“I asked you where the video was.”
Estela chokes back her tears, pouts. I put one finger under her chin and can feel her quiver.
“Upstairs. In the bedroom.”
“Let’s go, then.”
A few minutes later it’s all organized. Married life with Lourdes has led me to become an expert in unstable women. You need strength and patience in equal measure to create an atmosphere in which the woman no longer questions who’s boss, and realizes the benefit of staying calm in order to prevent things getting even worse. Soon we’re all installed in the bedroom. Quasimodo and me on the bed, Estela in a chair, and the maid sitting on the floor. The welcoming, plump, round altar presides over the scene. The film begins.
Snow White looks eighteen going on fifteen, with her short skirt and plaits, breasts like apples and 110 pounds of a mixture of innocence and sensuality all wrapped in tissue paper. There are only four, not seven dwarfs, and they are not real dwarfs, just very short men. Half-hidden behind false white beards, their faces are vicious and disturbing. The opening scene shows them having a meal in a clearing in a wood. One of the dwarfs is serving wine. He offers it to Snow White but switches the bottle without her realizing it. The four freaks wink and make obscene gestures to one another. They watch lasciviously as the woman-child sips from her glass. As she finishes her drink, Snow White falls into what appears to be a catatonic trance. The dwarfs pull a mattress out from under the table. They lay Snow White down on it and start to undress her. For three minutes, they fondle her avidly. Then they go to work with their mouths. One fastens onto a breast; Two sucks the other one; Three goes down between her legs. Bewildered, Snow White enjoys it. Four puts his prick in her mouth; she starts to suck. Four more minutes. The dwarfs strip off. They all have enormous pricks. In every imaginable position, sometimes one by one, at others all together, they fuck Snow White in the vagina, arse and mouth, performing their gymnastics for a further fifteen minutes. Two cops appear. The dwarfs run off naked into the wood. Snow White lifts a feeble hand. “Help me,” she cries then screams.
