Mexico City Noir

by Paco Ignacio II Taibo

  The altar boy with the small brazier appeared, scattering dirt and toluene around the fornicators. The neighborhood’s residents curled up to sleep, hotels cautiously opened their doors. The local dives turned down their music to an intimate proletarian hum. Unaware of having lost a war—only one, and on Mexican land—San Fernando continued on his altar carved by Indians.

  Nausícaa wanted to hang herself with San Francisco’s pebbly cord until Father Próspero explained that the altar boy was the pastor of his congregation out in the streets, the one who chose the lambs whose souls would go to Chichihualco, Limbo, Tlalocan, Seville, or wherever.

  Commander Pérez completed his part in the death of the queer cannibal. A hate crime, pure homophobia perpetrated by officially sanctioned killers. The guilty were predetermined. A patrol car took the commander home to a garish marble-andaluminum subdivision with swimming pools and a golf club. His wife was sleeping. He gave her a kiss. He went to his children’s bedroom, tucked them in. They’d left him their notebooks, as always, so he could check their homework. He went to his mahogany-walled study, with its diplomas from the Mossad and FBI, each framed by ninja stars. He reviewed the homework; he never let his kids down. He threw himself in an easy chair to watch Law & Order—he had the entire series on DVD—and tried in vain to read The Odyssey, his only book, which he owned in seven different editions. He had never read anything else in his life. Now an hourglass indicated it was time to deflower Nausícaa, of the snow-white arms, with his declaration of love: Who takes you as a wife is the boldest of all. No mortal, neither man nor woman, has ever come before me like this, overwhelmed me like this at mere sight. That very dawn he would tell her; that night they would leave for Cancún. He would buy a table dance and they would fuse orgasmically right there on stage. Oh Nausícaa! If only she’d already returned from the nave.

  He left again for San Fernando, this time without escort.

  “We are like angels; God made us, but not to marry or reproduce. Unlike the others, we were created individually—he put us in the hands of a surgeon so that each of our parts could be modeled, considered. We are neither cherubs nor seraphim; we don’t marry or reproduce. We are simultaneously impersonal and celestial, but adventurous when it comes to sex. We are expelled from paradise and, because we live in Mexico City, we make rounds with the spirits of Huitzilopochtli, a brotherhood which San Fernando curses and about which he can’t do a thing, even though his spirit comes to us from Seville. We are like the native witch doctors who have the ability to change into other beings, because God is fanatical, hija.”

  Father Diego Tonatiuh was hiding in a corner behind the altar, next to the photo of the dead bank robber disappeared by the state police. The decomposed corpse had been discovered unrecognizable in a sewer’s foam. A red battery-powered lamp illuminated the photo, which was signed by Sister Reckless of the Nuncas, nicknamed La Conversa.

  The priest walked through the nave to the choir, crossed himself under the cupola with the Immaculate Conception surrounded by angels with violins, lauds, and zithers. In the Expiatory Chapel, he said the Xochicuícatl: “Begin, singer. Play your flowered drum. Delight princes, eagles, and ocelots. It’s only for a brief time that we are on loan to each other.” He went to the inner door in the darkness shot through with lights, undid the bolt, and let the shutters fall on each other. He entered the confession booth and waited as he had on so many nights since he’d first seen Nausícaa in the neighborhood. On loan to each other, the phantom of the nuncas said to himself, immune to the blackness of the kettle in which his resentments were boiling over. The time we’re on loan to each other is so brief. The bank robberies had only been emotional crises, prequels to a loving eternity that had disgusted Commander Pérez when he saw the effeminate lover in a cell in that wretched police station. Father Diego Tonatiuh sucked rancor from the depths of his hatred, let slip the rest in threads of saliva that thickened the broth of his miseries.

  Nausícaa entered the furnished apartment building next to San Fernando. The façade had slumped from all the quakes. The waning moon lit the four-story stairway, nahui-four, a tangle of steps, a bridge of silver and obsidian between Seville and Tenochtitlán, Paradise and Mictlán.

  “This is Mexico City, officer,” said the altar boy with the brazier, who appeared on a landing. He was holding a bundle of dirty laundry smeared with the glue used by the congregation he shepherded. Father Próspero’s door was open at the end of the hall. It was an anonymous wasteland like so many other apartment buildings. It smelled of lard, yerba santa, onion, chili peppers, and thyme. The girl entered her apartment dizzy from the smell and the altar boy’s expression when he recognized her as the cop she’d once been. She cried sitting on the single bed; there was a thick Formica table, a hot plate, a piggy bank, a suitcase filled with clothes from the street market, her dancing lingerie.

  She searched but didn’t find her 9 mm. On the bilious and peeling wall, there was a photo nailed with thumbtacks of Commander Pérez embracing her, back when she was a he. They were dressed in black. Neither smiled. The bathroom door was open. The tiles were soiled, the shelf and her cosmetics, the mirror and the toilet. A single naked bulb cast shadows that darkened the skin. The commander had told him that his stay here would be temporary, only while the hormone treatment took effect so that nobody would notice the changes. But he never came back. He had food delivered from Chinese restaurants. She accepted the order not to leave until a messenger brought her an envelope with the address for the table dancing. She danced Monday to Friday, heading home in a cab at the end of each show. They paid her enough. She didn’t need the extra money her colleagues made by taking clients to hotels. She was a virgin. She spent her weekends looking for company inside the bathroom. The more Nausícaa’s eyes moistened, the more the space absorbed her emotions and became filled with the emptiness that she exuded … She didn’t dare flush the toilet and empty it of the nothingness accumulating there in the bowl.

  Bang! The shot rang in the nave of San Fernando as if it were from an ancient rifle instead of a Browning 9 mm. Three and a half centuries of walls cushioned the shot. The altar boy tolled for the dead in the bell tower. When Commander Pérez had come in search of Nausícaa, he’d found the door of the church slightly ajar. He’d been drawn to it. He’d pulled it open to let his corpulence through.

  “God is fanatical, hija.”

  This was the nasally voice Pérez heard when he’d first entered the darkness. He had removed his pistol, aimed, and the echo had bounced off the columns of the altar, flown toward the vault, fluttered in the choir.

  The cop still couldn’t figure out where to point the barrel.

  “God is fanatical, hija, that’s what the Creator, whatever It is, will say to your beloved when It sends him to Hell.” The voice was coming from a drain to the River Styx. Commander Pérez remembered it now. It was the same person who had claimed the bank robber’s body. It was a woman who had transformed herself into man, wearing a nun’s skirt, a black coat, and a priest’s collar—he had seemed back then like a boy in his thirties, his adolescence bizarrely extended. The commander’s obscene sense of smell had drawn him to the river, where some children led him to a dam, to the swollen body laying there in the foam. He hadn’t officially registered the body, which had begun to decompose. The nun, or whatever it was, then threatened to tell the Vatican about the theft of the gold keepsake. But the cop had nullified the threat with an offer of papers that would accredit him as a priest anywhere. In the days that followed, the corpse crumbled apart in the dirty water like pastry dough. Sister Reckless didn’t try to salvage the body, but her apparent indifference was in reality an expression of her abiding love.

  “We have a deal, you demonic whore. I made you a priest. Nausícaa gave you the papers herself.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. I chose the Castilian monastery at Cantalapiedra, which is a Claretian convent, though none of that mattered squat to them since you gave me a forged passport. So I r
eturned to San Fernando a man, thank you. What I forgot was the deal itself. I agree, I broke it.”

  “What do you want, you filthy nun? Do you want to send me to jail because I killed your pathetic lover?”

  “My resentment is blacker than the darkness of this church.”

  “Where is Nausícaa?”

  “You’re looking for her in the wrong place. She’s around the corner. As always.”

  “The church door was half-opened.”

  “Or half-closed. Go on your way.”

  The cop turned, each swell of darkness illuminated by candles forming a niche of shadows. A voice told him: “There is no greater pain than to remember happy times in misery. That’s not me, commander, but Dante, and your misfortune is not having had any happy times, and your tragedy is realizing now, in this instant, that you will never have them, nothing to remember, and that in itself will become an eternity like a shot in the head.”

  In Father Próspero’s kitchen, the altar boy finished shredding the meat from the street urchin. It was dawn. The priest sliced cheeks, guts, and eyes for a cocktail, escabeche style, to go with the cous cous. Hunger had given these delicate creatures big apple cheeks. The altar boy went outside to throw the viscera in a ditch. Exhausted from all her weeping, Nausícaa sniffled quietly in her own room and sought refuge in the bathroom. The priest hummed, chose a red onion, coriander, white vinegar, salt, enough lemon juice to clear the foul odors, cleaned the jalapeños, sprinkled black pepper with his thumb and index finger, waved some aromatic herbs, and got everything ready for the marinade. The altar boy returned with the news that there was a dead body inside the temple, surrounded by police, uniformed and plainclothes. “They won’t have had breakfast yet,” said the priest with the torn sneakers, so that the boy would prepare lunch for them. First, however, he needed to tell Nausícaa to go down to Father Diego Tonatiuh’s confessional wearing a veil like María Magdalena.

  Morning arrived downtown, and the children of the desert slept in the hope that the sun would wake their agonies in the open grave. The church door was wide open, but the passage to the shadows of San Fernando was blocked by yellow police tape. Nausícaa lifted it to step inside as two uniformed officers looked on indifferently at her purple table-dancing veil. She carried the guilt of the falsely devout. She crossed herself three times. Commander Pérez’s corpse lay at the other end of the nave, the open sleeves of the raincoat making him look like a spoiled angel. A group of dusty judges stood to the side of the pulpit with Saint Michael and the stolen spear.

  In a confessional down the other way, a red light flashed. Stop! the priest called out to Nausícaa, raising the sleeve of his habit, a light in the midst of a storm guiding the shipwreck as the tide moaned.

  “The angels on the cupola are happy,” said the shadow of the priest, gesturing toward the slipping light. Nausícaa collapsed when he removed his hood. He dragged her into the confession booth, where he sat and she knelt; he lifted her face to him. “Why are you here?”

  “For my confession.” Behind the opacity of her pupils, there was a view of a tiled and sticky room upstairs at the police station, the sound of Commander Pérez’s laughter and boasts about how he’d handled the electric drill like a skilled swordsman. Nausícaa had admired the way he grabbed her head and forced her to lick the bank robber’s nobler parts. The two cops outside the booth had a mutual orgasm, then basked in the silence of their brotherhood.

  “No, Nausícaa, you have already confessed everything. The rape of the maid’s son isn’t even worth a Mass. You’ve come to return the borrowed spirit whose body is no longer among us. You sent it down to the sewers, to that Great Canal that cleaves this city like an infected vein, through which runs the waste that equalizes all of the inequities of those who live here. You couldn’t take my lover, and you wanted me to lend him to you because, oh, how aroused you got when your big man fucked him up the ass! Cry now, you cheap whore—you’re the only case I know of a rapist whore. Scream, you hag!”

  Father Próspero came through the sacristy wearing dark clothes, his Roman collar, and tattered shoes. The altar boy set a table in the Expiatory Chapel, incense smoke trailing his small steps through the many pews of the nave. The police surrounded the priest. His waxen face shone. A commander said something about drug trafficking while the organ on high played, Pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis mysterium, sanguinisque pretiosi, and the rest of the conversation became inaudible. The officer who was speaking had taken part, along with Commander Pérez, in the investigation of a sacristan who, years before, had been assassinated while stealing an eighteenthcentury gold talisman. The murder suspects were Próspero and Diego Tonatiuh; the police never returned the gold.

  The altar boy served the vegetables. He set out chips with escabeche, cous cous tacos marinated in guajillo, and morita chili spiced with epazote and yerba santa. A detective brought cognac and Coca-Cola. The last bit of smoke from the incense slithered from the confessional.

  “Only for a brief time are we on loan to each other, said the elders, back when this was a lake and the volcanoes had to always be watched. My penance will be the pain of remembering happy times during the misfortune, but you won’t even have that.” Father Diego Tonatiuh paused to catch his breath, then continued: “My loan was never complete, but during the bank robberies I had moments of happiness, even if I was only stealing for love. Your loan was never approved, and you were always unhappy. So go do your penance. You will never find the child you’re looking for. You don’t have your commander anymore, they’re going to cut you to pieces during your table dance, and you won’t have any way to make a living other than becoming a street walker. You certainly won’t be able to afford your hormones. When your beard starts coming in again, no one’s going to give a shit about you.”

  Mimicry flows like beauty from Mexico City’s faucets, space and time are relative, and instead of the usual floral-and-stone façade, there’s dahlia and obsidian. In the course of time, what was yesterday a lake of water becomes asphalt today, and the past is a perpetual duplication that drowns the future. Yesterday’s omens come back, the same substance in a different shape. The city is a nagual that becomes a wall of skulls, an intelligent domotique structure: the Huitzilopochtli temple in a cathedral and Castile roses in cactus bouquets. Time is measured simultaneously with the Aztec, Julian, and Gregorian calendars and the cesium fountain atomic clock; the heart of Mexico City is made of mud and green rocks, and the God of Rain continues to cry over the whole country.

  Father Próspero died from toluene inhalation. Father Diego Tonatiuh catechizes monks in the mountains of Songshan in China. The altar boy with the small brazier has grown a beard and moved east. More than five hundred years ago, Emperor Moctezuma was brought a heron with a mirror on the back of its head. In the reflection, the tlatoani saw bearded white men on red deer coming from where the sun rises. The altar boy returned mounted on a Harley, ordained a Franciscan in Cantalapiedra.

  Through the west door’s empty vestibule comes a ragged bearded woman with a turbid glance, shedding dirt like those thin pigs that don’t eat anything but mud and grass. Her skin is a sallow olive. She sits on the floor, ignores the glue-addicted kids with vacant expressions, raises her eyes toward San Fernando, purses her lips with each breath, and shrugs off the tightness that causes such sorrow in her hormone-free chest. She smiles with a thin line of spit at the little winged angels that offer San Fernando to the winning king of the pagans in Úbeda, Jaén, Baeza, Cordova, Seville, defeated by the spirits of New Spain. None of the angels in the temple façade is the boy child she’d hoped to find. Behind the threshold, a different altar boy in a ragged habit sets down the small brazier; the incense drowns in the nave. The boy moves up to the tower, rings the bell, and tolls for the dead.

  OF CATS AND MURDERERS

  BY VíCTOR LUIS GONZÁLEZ

  Colonia del Valle

  It’s hard to write about cats after Cortázar’s Teodoro W. Adorno; Kipling and his cat w
ho walks by himself; Poe’s black cat; Hemingway’s, who runs in circles in the corner; Lewis Carroll’s cats. Therefore, since I’ve set out to write about cats in the next few hours of confinement, I will touch upon some facts involving my own cat: Wilson (that’s the name I imagine represented by the W. before Adorno in Julio Cortázar’s story) was yellow and big. Despite being fixed, he covered a lot of ground and would disappear for days at a time. When he returned, after he ate and drank plentifully, he’d sleep eighteen hours in one stretch. I imagined him telling me where he’d been and who he’d seen, including these four cases: Sinué, the Egyptian cat who lived with a neighboring family and had been run over at the corner of Patricio Sanz and Popocatépetl, torn in half when he tried to expand his territory. Did I remember the gray cat from the house across the street, the one with the gemstone necklace? He probably disappeared, precisely because of the necklace, after he sniffed a female and set off toward Félix Cuevas, where he then took a little jaunt down Amores Street. It was perhaps best that he not tell me what they say happened to the chunky little kitty from the corner, the one who used to like to cross Insurgentes Avenue and then Manacar theater and beyond. Good thing Wilson was fixed: no females and no territorial ambitions.

  Then there was the fourth cat, the one belonging to a neighbor who was a foreigner—like me—an old and lonely American. During my stay in the snooty district called Colonia del Valle, this guy didn’t talk to any of the other neighbors and actually had some sort of problem with most of them. It was during the early ’80s and he had been there almost twenty years. He had a Mexican wife, who left him after more than a decade and a half of ill treatment, and they had two tall blond children who, because of their looks, acted untouchable and could have become telenovela actors. I began to know too much about this neighbor just before my return to the United States. Events in Mexico had conspired to destroy me in three short years, and they were about to complete the job when I filed for bankruptcy and my responsibility with my family’s businesses ended.