“Who are you, sir? Whom are you representing?”
“Why wasn’t Vinueza’s wife named as his legal representative?”
“Has the body been found? The police haven’t said so.”
“Does this mean the presidential campaign is over, because there’s no need for a run-off now?”
“According to Article 193 of the Civil Code, it takes ten years after a disappearance for an individual to be declared legally dead.”
“Paragraph three of that same article defines disappearance by violent means and says in that case the delay is three months. Why is a mass being held when less than a month has gone by?”
“Is this being treated as a political kidnapping?”
José María’s skin was now covered with a cold white substance that gave off an evil smell, his mouth frozen into a dead man’s rictus. The reporters took a few steps back to get away from the odor but they kept up the barrage of questions. He hadn’t answered any when a small woman, less than five feet in height, stepped forward and threw her arms around his waist. Her eyes were red, she was sobbing, and her mucus began to stain the white percale of his Galliano dress shirt. Under most circumstances he would have shoved her away, but at this point her interruption was more than welcome.
“Ay, Don José María, my baby Andrecito, why did this have to happen to him?” she whimpered.
Where did he know this woman from? He tried in vain to remember, all the while stroking her back in condolence while the cameras rolled.
“You’re a true friend,” she said through her sobs. “Not even his wife is here, but you are, you are. Oh my God, how can this be happening, but this is when we see who our true friends are.”
That wrinkled face, those forearms shaking like jelly, that scent of fried fish and rancid, reheated oil—now he knew! This was the woman who raised Andrés, his nanny, who was still employed in the kitchen. He’d seen her gliding like a shadow through the hallways of the mansion when the Vinuezas were entertaining guests. How had she heard about the mass? Using her as a shield, he pushed through the crowd and into the church. He went over to the other priest, the one he’d hired to conduct the service, and told him to get started. When the clergyman stood in front of the altar there was sudden silence, though the cameras continued to flash like lightning that José María willed himself to ignore. He concentrated on summoning his best expression of suffering, a desolation beyond words.
“Oh Lord, we commend to you the soul of your servant Andrés Vinueza, and we pray, Jesus Christ, Savior of the World, that you do not deny him entry into the lap of your patriarchs, for this is why you mercifully came from heaven unto earth.”
A murmur of surprise and then of assent could be heard, followed finally by a few sobs.
“I told you it was for the guy who disappeared,” one voice asserted.
“Who croaked,” another voice corrected.
José María sank his head toward his chest and covered his forehead with one hand.
“Lord, fill his soul with joy at your presence and disregard his sins past or present, and the excesses to which heedlessness or lust may have led him.”
“Justice is beautiful in its symmetry.”
“It is wise and cruel.”
“Its law reigns by day and by night.”
“It punishes the sinner.”
“And rewards the just.”
“The just are like trees planted beside flowing water.”
“That give fruit in their season.”
Day after day, a group of squatting men repeated this strange litany that was driving Andrés Vinueza out of his mind. For the first few weeks, he tried to interrupt with questions, since this was the only moment of the day when he had contact with anyone, but the kicks to the stomach he received in response soon dissuaded him from trying to find out anything. Nonetheless, as time went on and he grew more accustomed to the conditions in which he was living, he was able to tie together the few loose ends that his dulled senses managed to grab on to: There were five men in a circle (this he could conclude from the sound of their voices in the cavern). Sometimes they squatted, sometimes went down on their knees, though he’d never been able to glimpse the transition. They wore bells that produced a dull sound, bells that must be hanging from some part of their bodies and that allowed him to sense their comings and goings. The sound reminded him of Swiss cowbells. After considerable thought—because he had plenty of time to think—he concluded that this distinction must imply some rank in a hierarchy. There were other noises in the cavern that sounded like they were made by something that was crawling, and he was sure those must be human beings too. Or the approximation of humans who kept him trapped here underground, with god only knew how many tons of earth above his head. Although he could not see, he had felt every inch of the place where his kidnappers had put him and where it was impossible to stand up. The tunnel, the cavern, whatever it was, was less than a meter high in this part and had to be very far from the surface because of the bone-chilling cold. Whereas for the first few days he had been stifling hot, now he shivered and expected that a case of pneumonia would soon put an end to his suffering. No one had said a word about a ransom, and the only thing he knew for sure was that his captors spoke an archaically accented Spanish in deep and rasping voices. And that he was never going to see the light of day again.
“Oh good Lord Jesus, we firmly believe that you, who pitied the pain of others throughout your life, will look with mercy on the souls of our loved ones in Purgatory. Oh Jesus, hear our prayer, and in your mercy grant to those whom you have taken from us the gift of eternal rest in the bosom of your infinite mercy and love. Grant them, Lord, eternal reward in the everlasting glow of your countenance.”
The priest went to the niche that held the chalices and a small, egg-shaped urn with several chains attached to its upper half. When he opened it, smoke rose from inside and the small chapel filled with the scent of incense and aromatic wood. The priest pushed his way through the crowded chapel until he reached the coffin, where he began to swing the censer like a pendulum.
“Thou, beloved Father, pity our tears as well. Accept them, Lord, as the blood of the wounded soul, flowing for the loss of him who was your beloved servant, your loyal friend, and your faithful Christian.”
Outside, a thunderclap of nearly cataclysmic proportions seemed to split the sky in two. The crowd, already filling the narrow limits of the chapel, found itself pushed forward by newcomers who, seeing the open door, dashed in to escape the sudden downpour and then, curiosity aroused, tried to get closer to the altar to see what was going on. The priest, unaware, continued with the service.
“Behold our tears, Lord, the heartfelt tribute we offer for his soul, that you might purify it in your precious blood and raise it promptly to heaven, if it is not enjoying that rapture even now.”
By now, it was becoming impossible to breathe. The priest, standing at the far end of the coffin, was waving the censer with heartfelt passion. Someone had closed the door in order to shut out the tropical cloudburst, but water flowed in underneath and the door began to shake like someone in the grip of an epileptic fit. The hinges popped. Those closest to the coffin were coughing with streaming eyes, while those behind them pushed forward to get away from the water, creating a moving wall with no defined shape but plenty of force, a wall that soon crashed into the priest, who fell onto the coffin and toppled it from the improvised base on which it had been resting. When it hit the floor, the poorly joined boards tore apart. The old woman seated at José María’s side began to scream. The videographers who had turned off their cameras and the reporters who had stopped taking notes because they could barely breathe all sprang back into action. Just then, as someone opened the doors wide and water flooded in, soaking the attendees who were blinded by the camera lights and suffocating from the smoke, José María slipped away.
“My child, what have they done with my child! My God, what kind of monster would do this?” screamed t
he woman while she watched the fragments of the empty coffin being trampled by the people jammed inside the chapel.
José María drove off, proceeding with extreme caution through the whirling crosswinds that descended on the city. He was stuck in a line of traffic again, now moving toward the north. It occurred to him that he should have ordered a metal coffin, which would have survived the fall, but he didn’t spend much time on that. He tried to dry his hair with his hands and, finding this impossible, gave up and pressed number seven on his sound system. Soon the voice of Ricardo Arjona had drowned out both the noise outside and that within José Maria’s worried brain. He sang along with his favorite performer as if he had not a care in the world.
“Thou camest and conjoined heaven and earth and thou hast broken the cycle of the snakes. Now is the hour to rise into the presence of the angels,” said one of the voices.
“To tarry with the lizards in the world of the present. It is time, thou art the envoy, the promised one. All the signs have been given,” continued another.
“So spoke the old ones, in truth, and in truth I say that thou wilt see the sky open and the angels of God rise and fall upon the Son of Man,” the third intoned.
The man who had been sunk in the mud and his own excrement for—was it two weeks? three?—could not understand anything but he realized that this time they were speaking to him and doing so with deference, as if something had changed. The oldest, the fourth one with the broken voice, came closest to offering an explanation.
“In the beginning a void was opened in the rock and issued forth things inanimate, senseless, and flames, and other creatures with only the barest of intellect, and then came men and then at last the angels who can be heard singing and fluttering but whom no one can touch.”
The words offered him no reassurance. Flames? Angels? He was surrounded by a band of madmen.
“Thou art the Envoy, he who will allow us to leave these walls that oppress us and to feel the air once more upon our heads,” the fifth man uttered. “An enormous room where a hundred men, one atop the other, will not reach the roof of soft rock that protects us from the void.”
Andrés Vinueza decided that this was not a moment to ask questions but rather to listen to what was being said. Soon he would escape from this gang of imbeciles who mixed biblical texts with the most esoteric beliefs. Lizards? Snakes? Celestial beings? Once they were outside, it would be a different story, but until then he was in their hands. As he listened, from some remote corner of his brain came the parable of Jacob’s Ladder. What these brutes were saying reminded him of catechism classes. Did they take him for some minor Messiah? The incarnation of a deity? If so, why had they mistreated him so? Just before they left him, he heard —mixed with sound of their rattles— something that diverted him from those thoughts.
“Thou shalt provision us with women and we will be strong once more. Thou shalt see, we will protect thee, and thou too shalt prosper,” proclaimed all five in a ragged, unsynchronized chorus that added a strange resonance to their words.
Women? Why?
VIII
The Spur
“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Varas began.
Some say they’re free because no one controls them.
When I’m told of horses with no owners, I think of their riders.
Whoever nails your shoe and cinches your saddle
Has a rider on his back with a sharp-spurred boot.
“You want to explain that to me?”
“Explain what?” Benito looked up from the book he was reading
“Why this isn’t published. And why the paper is torn and damp and has a soda bottle stain.”
Benito shrugged and went on reading. After a minute he answered.
“Because we ran out of beer, the only thing in your pinche fridge is a quart bottle of flat Coca-Cola, there aren’t any napkins, and I didn’t want to stain the wood of your favorite table.”
“Not my favorite, güey, my only one.”
Varas crossed the room and sat down on the floor facing his friend, who was sprawled face down on the couch.
“Can I ask what it is you’re writing?”
“A book of aphorisms.”
“And that’ll put food on the table?”
“I’m pitching some editors the idea that aphorisms are about to be the flavor of the month. Flash fiction is done, aphorisms are next. They’re the germ that produces everything else: story, plot, dialogue, characters. Condensed information for people in a hurry. And, another hook, no royalties to pay. Tell me how these sound to you:
“Not even a cannonball in your face could wake you up,/if you’re the calculated result of instantaneous repetition.
“I regret trading cinnamon for a shell with no smell.”
“Still starry-eyed at thirty? An idiot disguised as a mule.”
Varas stretched out and stared at the ceiling, where he saw enormous green stains. He thought he ought to do something about this because there had to be a leaky pipe and any day now the ceiling would collapse. But what he did instead was to go on talking with his friend, though without taking his eyes away from the shapes he was finding amid the green.
“And how is that going?” he asked while discovering a belly dancer standing on one leg, which made his question sound a bit lackadaisical since he was concentrating on figuring out what kept her from falling.
“Badly. So far I haven’t convinced anyone. Maybe in Barcelona, but here nobody will take the bait.” Del Pliego sat up in the couch and looked at his friend. “Speaking of which, what are you doing here at home? Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“I got fired. If you can’t sell anyone on the book of aphorisms or publish those poems, we’ll be on the flat Coke diet for a while.”
“What happened?” del Pliego asked, following Varas’s eye toward the stains on the ceiling where he spotted a palm tree that made him think of Veracruz.
“Nobody cared that I found a woman dragging herself through a tunnel of slime, or that there are any such tunnels, because all they want to know about is Vinueza. It’s less than three weeks to election day.”
“But didn’t you tell them Vinueza was carried off by those blind guys? Didn’t you tell them about that article by Binns?”
“I told them all that, plus what I think, which is that the missing women have a lot to do with those guys, and that houses are collapsing all over Poso Wells because of the tunnels, which are almost everywhere by now. There’s a city under the city. But you know what my editor said? That he was sick and tired of me and I’d better get my ass over to police headquarters to investigate some refrigerators and TVs stolen out of the cops’ own warehouses by the janitors.”
“And you said?” With an effort Benito tore himself away from the magnificent waterfalls and jacaranda trees he’d found on the ceiling, so he could look his friend in the eye.
“That there was never anything worth finding out at police headquarters but if he wanted some street corner scribbler to quote official statements . . .”
“And that was the end of your job . . .”
“Poet, your powers of discernment never cease to amaze me.”
Just then the apartment door opened and the woman came in with the dog. Varas had made a leash from a piece of rope, and since the third day after their arrival, the pair had been taking daily walks around the neighborhood, with Varas always hoping that something they saw would provoke some kind of reaction from her. Témoc watched out for her and took charge of leading her back to the house. Varas’s finances were in a state of collapse because he’d spent all his savings on clothes and shoes for her.
“Güey, close your mouth before a fly gets in. Go get her a glass of water,” Varas said, while he got up and led the woman to the couch. Benito handed her the glass, then took Varas by the arm and over to the window.
“You’re going to find out who she is and where she came from, right?” Benito asked.
“If you decide to help me,
it’ll get done sooner rather than later,” Varas answered in a whisper.
Benito gave him a long look.
“You want me to help you? To go out there with you?” he said, his voice cracking.
“Are you deaf, poet? That’s what I said.” Without another word he walked over to the stereo. He put on the Café Tacuba CD. He returned to the window, pulled out a pack of Belmonts with only one remaining, lit it, and heard, “You say I’m crazy because I laugh when maybe I ought to cry/you say I’m crazy because I’ve cried when happiness was like a lullaby,” but the words were obscured by the downstairs neighbor’s raspy cough starting up just as it did every day at this time—the cough, then the loud clearing of his throat, then the sound of him spitting phlegm out the window. Neighborhood noises, nothing new, yet they always took him by surprise and sent his thoughts in strange directions. Today those had to do with Benito. Varas was thinking that if anything could push his friend into picking up the thread of his life where he’d dropped it, this would be the ticket, because clearly the woman interested him. He was also thinking that he knew more about Benito and his family than about himself or his own. While the cigarette burned away, he went over Benito’s story again. He’d been born in Veracruz, not Mexico City, but his true fate would have had him born in Guayaquil, if not for the maneuvers of a bureaucrat with a grudge who’d decided to twist his life story out of shape. Benito’s grandfather, as his friend had told him the story, was a supporter of the Spanish Republic who had escaped from the Old World with nothing but a book of Antonio Machado’s poetry under his arm. The book was worn out from reading, and it opened to the most-fingered pages:
Poso Wells Page 6
