Some Clouds

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “So Anita got married to this guy and they went off to the U.S. to go to medical school. The other two brothers stayed home and spent their time throwing away their old man’s money. One day Anita’s husband got a phone call and rushed back to Mexico City. His father had died. A heart attack. Nothing unusual. But that’s where things started to get complicated. On the day of the father’s funeral, while Anita’s husband was still on his way to Mexico, they found the other two brothers in the old family house. One of them was shot to death, and the other one, the youngest one, they found him sitting in front of his dead brother like a vegetable, totally out of his mind. He couldn’t talk, it was like he’d forgotten how, they couldn’t get him to say a word. Now he’s living in a nuthouse in…where is it…Cuernavaca, I think, just the same as he was the day they found him. Doesn’t say a damn thing. What do you think about that?”

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s just the beginning,” said Elisa, hoping that Héctor would take the bait: three brothers, one a doctor married to redheaded Anita, one of them shot to death, and the other one out of his mind, sitting in front of his murdered sibling.

  “What happened next?”

  They were sitting on the porch of the little house two hundred yards from the ocean. Héctor had brought out a bottle of Pepsi. Elisa had brought along two more, as if to say that the story was going to be a long one, demanding all of her brother’s deductive abilities, stimulated by the Pepsi-Colas. Héctor, who didn’t believe in logical thinking, hadn’t even brought a notebook. He just sat and listened. Waiting for something. Waiting to know where to start, a street, a corner. Something to lead him into other people’s lives, other people’s deaths, other people’s ghosts. One way or another it all boiled down to a question of streets, avenues, parks, it was a question of walking, of pecking around and sorting out. Héctor only knew one method. He’d throw himself bodily into someone else’s story until the story became his own. He tried to picture the streets around the insane asylum in Cuernavaca. He didn’t like the idea.

  “Later on, Anita and her husband went to see the younger brother, they talked to the doctors. Nothing. The kid never said a word. He’d gone away and he wasn’t coming back. At least that’s what the doctors said. The cops said it was a burglary, they said there’d been a rash of them lately and that the other brother probably tried to resist and got himself shot. They figured the nutty brother saw the whole thing, but as long as he couldn’t talk there wasn’t anything they could do about it. That’s as far as it went where the police were concerned.”

  Héctor decided not to ask any more questions. Elisa was going to tell the story in her own way and it was better not to interrupt her.

  “Anita and her husband went back to the U.S.”

  “Where?” asked Héctor, breaking his promise to himself.

  “Where what? Where’d they go?”

  “Yeah.”

  “New York. They worked together in the kidney ward at the hospital at some university.”

  “Hmm,” said Héctor. New York sounded a hell of a lot better than Cuernavaca.

  “They’d been back in New York a week when the papers arrived from the lawyer, along with the bank statements and the rest of the stuff about the inheritance. That’s when they got the big surprise. The old man, Anita’s father-in-law, had owned a few furniture stores in downtown Mexico City. Three of them, I guess. Anita’s husband figured he had some money coming his way, because there’d always been enough in the family, more than enough really, plus a little extra for vacations, cars for the kids, private universities, that kind of thing. But he had no idea how things really stood. It turned out the old guy had over one hundred and sixty million pesos in stocks, nearly twenty million in his checking account, fifty-six million in an account in another bank, and I don’t know how much more in real estate. He had a house in Guadalajara, another one in Guaymas, he owned a bottling plant in Puebla. The old guy was rolling in dough. It was incredible. Everywhere they looked there was something else. He owned shares in a bunch of companies that they’d never even heard of. There were safe deposit boxes in a bunch of different banks, boats in Mazatlán, clothing stores in Monterrey. And it was all spread out across the country. Anita’s husband went back to Mexico City to take charge of the estate, have his brother declared legally insane, and find out what was in the safe deposit boxes. Ten days later he went back to New York. That night somebody stabbed him to death in the lobby of their apartment building. In just two months the whole family was wiped out, the dad, the three brothers, all of them. Anita was scared to death.”

  Héctor remembered how Elisa and Anita used to lock themselves in Elisa’s bedroom, smoke cigarettes, play the guitar, and sing Joan Baez songs. He’d complain that he couldn’t get any studying done, but they always ignored him. He tried to remember which one played the guitar.

  “Which one of you played the guitar?” he asked.

  Elisa looked at him for a few long seconds. Héctor smiled at the absurdity of his question.

  “Me. Anita was a better singer, but she didn’t know how to play the guitar. How’d you remember?”

  “I must have been a real jerk back then. Instead of hanging out with you guys and singing Joan Baez songs I spent all my time reading bullshit books about soil science.”

  “Whadaya know. I thought you’d never admit it.”

  “So what did Anita do then?”

  “First she tried to find the rest of the family, but there wasn’t any. She was the only one left. There weren’t even any distant relatives. All that was left was their big old house in Polanco, complete with bloodstains on the rug, and the bedroom where the old man had died in his sleep. She shut herself up in the house and tried to pretend nothing had happened, that all she had to do was wait around for someone to come and wake her up from her nightmare, take her out to a double feature of cowboy movies, and buy her a box of popcorn and everything would be okay again.”

  “And?”

  “Finally, one day the family lawyer showed up and told her she was a millionaire, and I mean millionaire. He said he’d help her clear up the whole mess with the inheritance. Anita went and checked into a hotel in the Colonia Roma. I guess she felt really lonely, because she started going through the phone book and calling around trying to find her old friends from ten years ago. That’s how she found me.”

  A hotel in the Colonia Roma in downtown Mexico City. That was something Héctor could relate to. It was a lot better than Cuernavaca or New York.

  “Where’d she find you?”

  “I was over at Mama and Papa’s old house one day to pay the caretaker and pick up a couple of books. I just happened to be there when she called.”

  “So what’s Anita want from me?”

  “Hold on, I’m not finished yet,” Elisa said. She got up and went into the bathroom. Héctor polished off his first bottle of Pepsi with a long swallow, took out a cigarette, knocked it on the table a few times, and lit up. The Delicado straights he’d been smoking lately were full of little sticks and branches. He had to shake the garbage out before he could smoke them. Héctor looked at the cigarette in his hand with distrust, waiting to see if it burned like a peace pipe or simply refused to draw at all. An idea crossed his mind.

  “Elisa.…Did they kill Anita?”

  “Almost.” Her voice came indistinctly from the other side of the bathroom door.

  Shit. That was too much, too complicated. Just complicated enough for the story to start to draw him in, hypnotize him. But he didn’t want Anita dead. To get himself going he needed to feel something, some kind of sympathy, and he needed someone alive to feel it for. He was sick and tired of so many corpses. He’d had his fill of love for the dead.

  Elisa came out of the bathroom, drying her hands on her scarf.

  “Almost, they almost killed her, but that comes late
r. She called me up and we got together and had lunch. We had a lot of fun. The poor girl was in shock, she was like a sleepwalker. Then one day she called and said she’d been to talk with the lawyer and that she wanted to see me. I went to her hotel and she told me what had happened. The lawyer showed up all nervous and sweating and told her she’d be able to keep a few million but if she wanted the rest of the old man’s money she’d have to go talk to a Mr. Melgar, Mr. Arturo Melgar. The next day they came after her.…”

  “The Rat,” said Héctor.

  “One and the same.” Elisa nodded. “Your old college buddy.”

  “Shit,” was all Héctor said. He let the cigarette go out between his fingers.

  Chapter Three

  “Too many things happen in the foreground,

  and we don’t know anything about what

  happens in the background.”

  —Heinrich Böll

  Elisa left the next morning and Héctor felt her absence in the house. It wasn’t her warmth he missed so much. The weather was hot enough to make up for that. It had more to do with certain vibrations in the air, a lack of peace. The days had been sweet and slow in the week Elisa was there. Now he felt the rush again, the city insinuating itself into the tropical air, the inevitability of his return slipping in through the open windows while he chewed his eggs and bacon on the porch, staring out at the sea.

  “I’m going to miss all of this,” he told himself. This was the sea. He didn’t want to waste a lot of time in good-byes, so he packed his suitcase in less than half an hour, filled three cardboard boxes with things he didn’t care if he lost on the bus trip home, and walked into town to say so long to his friends at work, the old woman at the corner store, and the guy who ran the movie theater (one show per week plus a Sunday matinee for the kids). He didn’t bother going down to the dock; none of his buddies would be around at that time of day anyway. He skipped city hall and only went over to the construction company office to pick up his last check and let them know he was going away. The secretary tried to get him to wait until the boss arrived, so he told her that his grandfather had just died and left him an inheritance.

  He returned the keys to the car the co-op had let him use sometimes and, without looking back, he said goodbye to the sea.

  ***

  Héctor could go for hours without thinking, feeling no need to string one coherent thought after another. He’d let his mind run on on its own, rambling, connecting stray images, visions, birds, butterflies, memories, day-dreams. Now he tuned into the fog channel and didn’t tune out again until, sixteen hours after saying good-bye to the last lonely palm tree in Puerto Guayaba, he stepped out of the elevator and stood in front of his office door in Mexico City.

  A fat man in an ill-fitting suit stood in front of the frosted glass painted with the familiar names: Belascoarán Shayne—Detective. Gilberto Gómez Letras—Plumber. Carlos Vargas—Upholsterer. Gallo Villarreal—Sewer and Drainage Expert. Héctor vaguely remembered seeing the man somewhere before.

  “It’s about time,” said the fat man. “When do they open up around here anyway?”

  “Nobody home?” asked Héctor innocently.

  “Nobody answered when I knocked.”

  Héctor took out his keys and unlocked the door. He was met by a comforting wave of disorder. A half-stripped lilac armchair sat on top of his desk where Carlos Vargas had presumably been working on it. Everything was reassuringly familiar. He smiled at the wall with the pictures of Zapata and Fernando Valenzuela, the newspaper clippings, the girlie pictures from the afternoon papers.

  Someone had drawn a hopscotch game in chalk on the wooden floor. Probably El Gallo, in one of his fits of lyricism.

  “Make yourself at home,” said Héctor to the fat man. “You looking for the upholsterer or the plumber?”

  “I’m looking for the goddamn detective. You think I’d stand around and wait all this time for a friggin’ plumber?”

  “¡Jefe, jefecito santo! It hasn’t been the same around here without you,” shouted Carlos Vargas from the doorway, and without wasting time he rushed over to grab Héctor’s hand in a firm and solemn grip. “It’s been boring as hell since you went away. No braless dancing girls, no knifed old ladies with their guts hanging out.”

  “I guess the detective’s me,” Héctor said to the fat man as he gave the upholsterer a big hug.

  “My wife’s a no-good whore,” said the fat man in the rumpled suit, shooing a fly off Héctor’s desk with a hand the size of a baseball glove. He looked at Héctor blandly.

  “Excuse me?” asked the detective. He realized where he’d seen the fat man before. He was Don Gaspar, the owner of a sandwich shop halfway down the block.

  “She’s been whoring around on me. She goes out and spends all the dough I give her on black and red panties and frilly bras and stuff, but she never uses ’em with me.”

  “Maybe she’s shy,” said Carlos the upholsterer, pretending to concentrate on a black leather executive-style swivel chair, its insides spilling out.

  “Shy my ass, she’s a friggin’ whore.”

  “That’s all very well and good, Don Gaspar. But a detective’s got to work with facts,” said Héctor soothingly.

  “That’s why I came here. I want you to get me the proof and then I want you to beat the shit out of her…”

  “Let’s get one thing straight, Don Gaspar…” began Héctor.

  “I’ll pay you for it. I don’t care what it costs.”

  Héctor stared. The fat man made like he was going to pull a flask of brandy out of his hip pocket and break into tears.

  “Look, Don Gaspar,” said Carlos from his corner of the room. “Don’t you worry about a thing. We’ll take care of everything, and it won’t cost you very much either.”

  Don Gaspar stared at the upholsterer who stood smiling, his mouth half full of upholstery tacks.

  “This guy work with you or what?”

  “Something like that,” said Héctor, glaring at Carlos. The smile froze on the upholsterer’s face.

  “It’s a deal, then,” said Don Gaspar.

  “We’ll need twenty thousand up front,” said Carlos.

  Don Gaspar stuck a thick hand into his pants pocket and pulled out a wad of wrinkled, sweaty bills. He licked his thumb and counted out the money.

  “What’s your wife’s name? And what’s your address?” asked Héctor.

  “Amalia, Amalia the friggin’ whore. We live in Colonia Moderna. I’ll write the address down for you. I’m in the restaurant all day, see. That’s how come she got to be such a friggin’ whore.”

  Don Gaspar scribbled his address down on an old newspaper and stood up. Without saying another word he trudged toward the door, his enormous shoulders sunk under the terrible weight of Amalia the whore. He shut the door gently behind him.

  “Now, do you want to tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?” said Héctor, turning on Carlos. “Just who do you think’s going to go figure out if Don Gaspar’s wife’s been screwing someone behind his back? And who’s going to kick the shit out of her once we figure it out? You’re always getting me mixed up in this kind of crap. Here I am, I just get back to town, and you’ve already got me running after some asshole’s cheating wife. I’ve got a job to do, I don’t have time to waste hanging around in lingerie departments trying to find out what color underpants this guy’s old lady buys.”

  “Don’t worry. Leave it to me. I’ll let you know what happens,” said Carlos in a businesslike voice. He picked up the twenty wrinkled thousand-peso notes off the desk and counted them out into two separate piles. Then he picked up the piece of newspaper with Don Gaspar’s address, aimed another broad grin at the detective, and walked out the door.

  Héctor didn’t really mind. He was as curious as Don Gaspar to find out if Doña Amalia was wh
oring around or not, and why she had bought all that fancy underwear if she wasn’t going to use it with her husband. Life, after all, was one part curiosity and one part commitment. The commitment part came in making sure Don Gaspar didn’t beat up his wife. Héctor figured everybody had the right to screw around a little now and then, as long as they didn’t hurt anybody else too much. He picked up the ten thousand pesos Carlos had left him. If the old lady was innocent, he’d take the money and buy her a whole bunch of brassieres, garter belts, and panties in all the colors of the rainbow.

  He stuck the money in his pocket and went over to the office safe. He got out his gun and shoulder holster and put them on. Then he signed a fake autograph on the Valenzuela poster on the wall, dedicating it to his other officemate, Gilberto Gómez Letras, and headed out for the hospital.

  It was raining. It was the end of February and it was raining already. Every day the city became more hostile toward its children. During the bus ride Héctor listened to a pair of passengers talking about the different kinds of viruses in the air: mutant viruses all around them in the smog-filled Mexico City air, the thick rain that stained your clothes when you hung them out on the roof top to dry. He raised his jacket collar and weaved his way through the puddles. The city was saying hello, the same as always. It had been waiting for him. Tough as ever, although maybe not that much tougher than a lot of the people who lived there. Héctor misjudged his step and came down flush in the middle of a big puddle. He couldn’t help but smile. The city was welcoming him home.

  ***

  Anita lay in her hospital bed. The television was on, but she wasn’t listening; she was ignoring the faces that flashed across the screen. It was only on so that she wouldn’t have to spend too much time alone with herself. It was a familiar relationship for Héctor: woman-television set. He’d seen it before, when his father had taken sick for the last time. A motor oil ad boomed into the room, distracting him, but he knew enough not to turn off the set.