Some Clouds

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  Anita looked vulnerable, lying there. Her pale arms stretched out over the too-white sheets. Bruises on one arm above the wrist. Her chin swollen and sutured. Her combed-out red hair streaming across the pillow. The picture was perfect, irresistible, anguished. Without hesitation, Héctor added himself to the list of Anita’s admirers and protectors. Elisa had told him how they’d beat her with brass knuckles, raped her, and then left her bleeding in the street on another rainy day like this one.

  “What’s up, Red? You look like you’re straight out of ‘General Hospital,’” he said, taking his eyes away from the window, the fat drops falling and breaking against the glass.

  “So you’re my detective. Who would’ve guessed? You always used to be such a brat.”

  “No, I was just older and you looked up to me.”

  “What else could I do? I was only about five-three back then.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m probably not even five feet, after what they did to me.”

  She started to cry, big tears that could have turned the rain green with envy.

  “Come on, you don’t need to do that.”

  Anita kept on crying, unembarrassed, without trying to hide her face, immobile, her hands still at her sides.

  Héctor shot an angry glance at the TV with his good eye and banged his fist two or three times into the bathroom door.

  He needed the right dose of curiosity to draw him into a story. But he needed them, the others, to help him finish it off, pushing him along to the bloody end. That or a good pinch of hatred to chew between his teeth. And now he had it. If he ever found the men who’d hurt Anita he was going to squeeze their heads until the shit came out their ears.

  Anita watched him through her tears and Héctor watched back. They stayed that way for several seconds. Not out of any particular sense of melodrama. Not because the abused woman’s pale green eyes continued to feed his new-found hatred. Héctor just didn’t know what else to do.

  “Sit down,” Anita said. Her voice sounded like she was dying.

  Héctor looked around for a chair, but the only one was taken up by a vase of faded roses. And the window sill, where the rain dappled melodically, was too narrow to sit on.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t bite,” she said, the beginnings of a smile growing in her teary eyes.

  Héctor went over to the bed, stroked the young woman’s face with a hand he knew was too dry to transmit the affection he felt.

  Anita moved her arms for the first time since Héctor had walked into the room, motioning for him to sit by her side on the bed.

  “Now you know how it feels.”

  Héctor nodded.

  ***

  “You’re the only one I’m going to tell this to, Héctor. I told Elisa some of it, but I couldn’t…it’s too much. So I’m going to tell you the whole thing, get it out…and then I’m going to try and forget all about it. Forever. It already feels like it wasn’t me, like it happened to somebody else. And it was only two weeks ago.…They were inside my hotel room when I got there. When I opened the door they grabbed me. It was dark, but I could see them with the light from the street. The first guy, the one who grabbed me, pulled me by the hair across the room. I mean he really pulled me. When they found me later on the doctor said I was bleeding from the roots of my hair.… They yanked me across the room. They said I was a fucking bitch and to get the hell out of Mexico. That’s all they ever said. One of them turned on the lamp by the bed. I screamed. But then this other one, who’d been sitting in a chair, he got up and hit me in the face with one of those things in his hand—what do you call them, brass knuckles. Oh, Héctor, you don’t know.…I screamed and screamed, and I can’t believe that no one heard me. I screamed until I couldn’t scream any more. I was too scared to talk. I felt like I was going to die, I couldn’t breathe. The first guy, the one who pulled me by the hair—he was blond, with acne all over his face—he threw me on the floor. Then the one with the brass knuckle thing kicked me. I could feel my ribs break. It’s strange, but that actually helped somehow, it made it so I could breathe again. He was strong, really strong, he had big muscles. Like Chelo. Do you remember Chelo, your neighbor’s old chauffeur back at the house in Coyoacán? Like that, short, stocky, with black curly hair, dressed real fancy, with this checkered sport coat and a thick mustache. He kicked me in the ribs and then yelled at me to quit screaming. But I’d already stopped, it was all I could do just to keep breathing. Then the blond guy started to pull off my clothes, he just tore them off. When they raped me I still had little pieces of my clothes on, my belt, my socks, one shoe. I don’t know why I remember things like that. And they both yelled at me the whole time. Not the third one, though. He didn’t say anything until the end, when he told me I had to get out of Mexico. He said I had enough money already and that if I wanted to stay alive I’d better get the hell away from here. They had a bunch of papers, whole stacks of them, and they sat me down at the desk, in front of the mirror, and they put a pen in my hand and told me to sign or they’d kill me. Sign or you’re dead, bitch, like that. So I looked at myself in the mirror and I signed, but with a fake name, not with my own. And not because I was being brave or anything. It’s just that I couldn’t remember what my name was. It was like I’d forgotten who I was. And all I could think about was revenge, getting back at them somehow, the three of them, whoever they were. To hurt them like they’d hurt me.…After I’d signed the papers the third one made a phone call, said something like, ‘Okay, it’s all taken care of,’ then it was like he was listening to someone for a while. And then the blond guy, the one with the acne, took out a knife and stabbed me in the leg and I started to scream again, and then he threw me back down on the floor and he stuck…he stuck my bra in my mouth so that I couldn’t scream anymore. And my bra was all bloody, I could taste it. That’s all I remember. They went away; I wanted them to go away, and they went away. When I woke up, I was out in the street. These two paperboys found me, it was raining, and then I remember the lights from the ambulance, but I didn’t hear a thing.”

  Anita stopped talking and looked out the window.

  “You got it out. Now you can forget about it,” said Héctor.

  “No, I can’t forget.”

  “Sure you can. Give it another week and you’ll be just fine. As soon as they let you out of here I’ll take you dancing.”

  “You don’t even know how to dance.”

  “I’ve got a week to learn.”

  “I’m scared, Héctor.”

  “Why don’t you go away?”

  “Where to? New York? To the place where Luis died? There’s nowhere else I’ve got. And with who? Who’s going to go with me?” asked Anita, the tears coming back to her eyes. “I’m alone a lot here. Sometimes Elisa comes to keep me company, but I’m afraid they’ll do something to her too.…You know, it was raining when they found me, I was completely soaked, and I didn’t even know it.”

  “I’m going to bring you the best pair of baby-sitters you’ve ever had. You’ve got nothing to worry about. As long as you stay here, you’ll be all right. How much money have you got?”

  “Plenty. I was in the middle of fixing up things with the inheritance. The lawyer put five million pesos in my account.”

  “Write me a check for fifty thousand.”

  “With the right signature this time?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Your new bodyguards.”

  “What about you?”

  “My services are free. You just tell me what you want me to do.”

  “I want to know what’s going on. I want to know who killed Luis and his brothers, who did this to me.”

  “We’re going to do more than just find out what happened,” said Héctor. Suddenly he felt arrogant and cheap. But he didn
’t take back what he’d said. He turned to look at the rain out the window. “Can you ask them to put another bed in here? I’m going to sleep here tonight.”

  Anita nodded.

  ***

  “Anita, you awake?” asked Héctor in the darkness.

  “Yes. Do you want me to turn on the light?”

  “No, that’s okay.…What were the three brothers like?”

  “The oldest one, Pancho, the one they shot to death, was a pathetic sort of asshole. It feels awful to say it now that he’s dead, but I said it to his face more than once when he was alive. He talked about people like they were things. His car, his friends, his waiter, his chauffeur, his desk, his airplane ticket. He studied architecture for a while, but he flunked more classes than he passed. He was always a real joker, too proud for his own good, a fancy dresser, and a real mama’s boy, although in this case it was with his father. The mother died I don’t know how long ago. I always thought the old man had another house somewhere, because every now and then he’d disappear without telling anyone where he’d gone to. The family was from Guadalajara, at least that’s where Luis’s mom was from. The old man started out managing one of those big department stores, Salinas and Rocha, or Palacio de Hierro, I don’t know which, and that’s where he met his wife. Luis never talked about her. He didn’t remember her very well. Luis was a wonderful man, always in a good mood, always ready to do something for somebody else. He never got along very well with his father or Pancho. He was the middle brother. He was only thirty years old. We got married two years ago and went to the United States to study. To tell you the truth, we went because Luis wanted to get away from his family. They were a bunch of assholes, I really mean it.…I don’t even want their money. How did I get mixed up in this?”

  “What about the younger brother, the one who’s in the mental institution?”

  “Alberto was the dumb one. He wanted to run a nursery and sell flowers, like Matsumoto. I always thought maybe he was gay. He was shy. He would spend hours sitting in front of the television set. He was a good driver and he used to drive his dad around a lot, as his chauffeur. He kept dropping out of school. He wasn’t a bad sort of person, really, it just didn’t always seem like he was playing with a full deck.”

  “Did Luis ever say anything about his father’s business?”

  “I knew that he had a bunch of furniture stores. But Luis didn’t know any more than I did. When he got that letter from the lawyer, when we were back in New York, I swear his eyes nearly popped out of his head. He couldn’t believe it. He thought there was some mistake, he never knew his dad had anywhere near that much money. That’s all I know. Believe me, I’ve spent hours and hours trying to think of something, trying to remember something that might help. Anything. Some friend of the old man’s I might have met sometime, something he might have said, something Luis would have told me. But there’s nothing. I swear it, I can’t think of a thing.”

  “Where’s their house?”

  “Here in town, in Polanco. They had a maid. I tried to find her when we came back to Mexico, but she’d disappeared. Elisa went and got my things out of the hotel, she can give you the keys to the house.”

  “Do you know anything else about the maid?”

  “They called her Doña Concha, she’d been with them for years and years. She was the one who raised the boys, really. I think everything that happened was too much of a shock for her. The police questioned her, but it turned out that the day Pancho was killed was her day off and she wasn’t around. Luis talked to her, too, but he didn’t find out anything either. I don’t think she had anything to do with it. Who knows where she’s gone to now.”

  “Did you try and talk to Alberto?”

  “We went to see him in the hospital. He won’t talk, it’s like he doesn’t even see anything. Luis tried to bring him out of it, but finally the doctors told him to stop, they said he was just upsetting him unnecessarily. They said he was gone and wasn’t coming back. Hell, I’ve got to remember to send a check to the hospital.…”

  Héctor was silent. He’d run out of questions. After a while he lit a cigarette. A light flashed momentarily over Anita’s bed as well.

  “You know what, Héctor?”

  “What?”

  “The whole thing’s been like a nightmare. A nightmare’s the same way: weird, senseless, terrifying.”

  Héctor nodded, but Anita couldn’t see him.

  Chapter Four

  The Rat’s story, as far as Héctor knew it,

  and a few other things he didn’t know

  Maybe it was just because Héctor never turned around to look at his classmates in the back row, or maybe there was simply nothing to call his attention to the fish-faced kid in the blue or gray hand-me-down suits that hung loosely off his shoulders. Maybe it was because Melgar never opened his mouth in class, didn’t really seem to belong there. The fact was that in that third dull year of engineering school, when the two of them shared the same classes, Héctor barely even noticed that Arturo Melgar existed. At least not until the end of the year, when three weeks before exams, after asking the professor’s permission, the candidates of the Self-Improvement Slate filed across the front of the classroom. Melgar came at the end of the line, with his sad puppy-dog face and fish eyes behind thick dark lenses which he only took off once, to mop up the sweat that ran off his forehead. Héctor and his classmates recognized the boy from the back row. But it was all the same to them. The Self-Improvement Slate sponsored a school-wide dance and went on to win over an uninspired CP slate whose rhetoric about university democracy rang hollow in those years of student apathy. So Melgar flunked his classes and passed on to politics.

  That was the last time the two of them shared classes or lab time and, for Héctor, Melgar became just another obscure footnote from the past. Part of the crowd that used to hang out and get drunk in front of the east wing of the main faculty building. Parading around campus in a flashy new suit and tie, just for the sake of being seen. Slowly Melgar started to take on an air of authority. Now and then Héctor heard rumors about his strange exploits: how he’d led a gang of thugs in an assault on the School of Sciences building to stop a showing of Fellini’s 8 ½; how he sold grass on campus, not a very common thing back then before the student movement of ’68, when a couple of bennies and a glass of rum was still the biggest thrill around. People said Melgar was paid for his services by someone in the dean’s office (although it was never very clear exactly what those services were, beyond the rumored ties to the growing university mafia).

  In the days before the student movement, Melgar acquired a certain notoriety. Everybody was already calling him “The Rat” by then, and his name climbed several points in the always erratic campus popularity ratings. There were all kinds of rumors: they said he’d organized a student strike in a high school that ended with the firing of the principal; they said he was on the payroll of the PRI, the government party; they said he ran an extortion racket on the colectivo drivers whose routes crossed the university; they said he carried a gun and a knife everywhere he went.

  Héctor remembered seeing him twice. Once, in a student assembly where he was heckled out of the hall, only to come back half an hour later with a gang of friends, tossing ammonia bombs into the crowd. The other time, which was the one he remembered best after all those years, came when Héctor was walking across the green zone in back of the campus, thinking about what a mess everything had become, how something had gotten lost, broken, and how maybe if he bought some flowers for a girl named Marisa everything would be okay again. The Rat was lying on the grass, his broken glasses next to his clenched fist. Looking at Héctor without seeing him, fat tears rolling down his cheeks. Héctor helped him stand up. “Thanks, bro, I owe you one,” said The Rat, wiping the snot from his nose. Héctor didn’t say anything, just helped him walk to the edge of campus where The Rat pulled brusq
uely away from him. No matter how hard he tried, years later, Héctor couldn’t remember Marisa’s face, but The Rat’s myopic stare and his fat tears came back to him like yesterday.

  Every Christmas for the next two or three years a giant basket of fruit arrived at Héctor’s door, accompanied by a simple card that said only: Arturo Melgar. Elisa used to tease him about his dubious friendship with the student gang leader.

  Héctor never saw The Rat again, outside of an occasional newspaper photo. The first time was when he’d tried to break up a student demonstration in ’68 and someone had shot him through the liver. The second time there was a prison number across The Rat’s chest. He was accused of organizing a band of urban guerrillas! Each time, Héctor put the paper aside and thought, for a few seconds, about how life in Mexico was a mystery worthy of its own rosary.

  That was The Rat’s story as far as Héctor knew it, and although in itself it was an acceptable summary of the man’s remarkable biography, it barely scratched the surface of the intricate political alliances which Arturo Melgar had managed to form during those turbulent years.

  What Héctor didn’t know was that by the time The Rat was twenty years old he’d discovered a political modus operandi through which risks and loyalties carried him along an erratic path toward the center of power. He’d learned to play a game in which the rules changed constantly, where the players changed their skins, kissed ass, trampled on the law, accumulating a kind of personal power which gave them the freedom to operate, to negotiate, and to sell themselves to the highest bidder.

  At the start he’d offered up his loyalty and anti-Communist zeal to the university authorities, but his intuition and his friends told him it wasn’t a good idea to serve only one master, unless he wanted to end up as a bureaucrat lost in an office somewhere or as somebody’s errand boy. He set up a petty extortion racket, preying on the street vendors on the west side of the campus. He learned to be both strong and servile, despotic and obedient, cruel and brave. His balls were his biggest commodity. He learned to be a smooth talker, he learned to deal, he found his place as the intermediary between the buyers of certain services and the Neanderthal thugs who provided those services, he became a leader, learning what it took to hold a gang together.