by Nas Hedron
A new feature that appears as we move deeper into El Paraíso is the soap-box preacher. I notice one, then another, and then suddenly they seem to be everywhere, screaming, hollering, bellowing, pronouncing, intoning, and every single one of them sweating like crazy. The babble of voices is too much for the kaikki to keep up with, though I can catch words and phrases here and there with the directional mic as I direct my gaze at one street-corner savior and then another. Some wave Bibles. Others have only tracts, or no written material at all, but invoke the names of ancient Aztec or Maya gods, describing their powers and their roles according to each religion or cult. There is Cihuacaotyl, the Aztec god whose howl signals the beginning of war; Kisin, the Mayan god of earthquakes and death; and Yum Kaax, the Mayan god of maize and bounty. The preachers—if that is the right word—spread their messages, using these symbols to threaten doom, promise food, seek converts. Some hold up texts I can’t identify, likely from cults that have flourished here as the poverty intensified over the centuries. One book’s cover shows a woman riding a ray of light. A poster portrays three old men arm in arm, staring out at me like fates. A leather-bound volume has nothing on its cover but a gold-embossed bull.
There are also stalls where women sell potions. Most likely such things are sold in the nicer neighborhoods as well, but indoors, in shops. Here the people’s mythology invades the streets. There are multi-colored bottles filled with colored liquid and stuffed with amulets and magical herbs, all intended to ward off the evil eye, attract a mate, get revenge, make money, or fulfill any of a thousand other dreams. I can understand why Suarez has located his cult here. Aside from growing up here, he has a natural population from which to draw converts. Like the poor anywhere they are made superstitious by their desperation, open to anything that might improve their lives or solve their problems.
As though the thought of Suarez has brought me closer to him, I realize that we're approaching our destination. The symbol of the Suerte is a red hand print, symbolizing the bloody mark left by the murderer who steals the luck of his victim. I notice one on a wall, then on a doorway, then several on the scarred hull of a wheel-less, abandoned car. Soon they are everywhere, sometimes random, sometimes arranged in patterns. I know from my research that the rules concerning their display are very strict: you do not make the mark unless you have committed the murder it stands for. Every handprint I see—and as we walk further there are hundreds upon hundreds of them, forests of them—represents a human being slaughtered for the sake of the killer’s own good fortune.
The girl leads me across a street and we pass through a no man’s land where an earthquake has completely leveled the buildings for a hundred meters or so. On the other side of this gap my guide comes to a stop. She looks back at me, points forward, then opens her hand. There’s no need to resort to a translation, obviously we’ve arrived. I hand her a fifty peso note then, as an afterthought, give her another. She looks at me and I see a bouquet of expressions cross her features: shock, gratitude, envy, cunning. She’s surprised by the bonus, she loves the money I’ve given her, she hates me for the ease with which I can hand it out, and she would like to get closer to that roll of fifty peso notes in my pocket. She takes my hand and squeezes it gently.
“If you come back this way... ” she says, forcing herself to be inviting. I can almost hear her thinking. Maybe if I see him again I can get him in bed, maybe the fifties will keep coming, maybe he will even want a girlfriend. I let her hand go.
“Maybe,” I say, intending no such thing but not able to bring myself to crush her hopes. She’s street-smart, though, and she knows a lie when she hears one. Angry, she spits at my feet and stamps back toward home.
I turn and look back at the other side of the open space cleared by the quake. There the will and the resources to rebuild do exist. Every building has been repaired, resurfaced, repainted. Perhaps it’s a mistake to say ‘every building,’ as there don’t seem to be individual buildings. Each house or apartment building has been joined to the next by a network of walls, bridges, and struts that have turned several blocks of real estate into a single, walled complex: a palace, a fortress, and a church all in one. Here there are no red hands—that's for the outside world. Here there is simply a grand, quiet, imposing structure. At first it seems to be unpopulated, until I realize that I’m being watched by sentries on several rooftops.
A moment later a door opens in a wall nearby and a figure emerges, a man with shoulder-length dark hair, dressed in jeans and a white, gauzy shirt. He approaches me purposefully, confidently, and as he gets closer I realize to my surprise that it’s Suarez. I had expected that some underling would take me to the great leader, like a foreign emissary being led to a king, but here is the man himself.
He has an angular, sculpted face—more indigenous than European—a bright smile, and cheerful brown eyes. When he’s within steps of me I realize he isn’t going to stop and suddenly he’s embracing me warmly. It lasts only a moment, then he holds me at arm’s length, like a father regarding a son he hasn’t seen in a long time.
“Gat Burroughs, welcome. Welcome to my home, to the home of the Suerte. You are a guest here and our hospitality is yours. I’m Vicente, as you must have guessed.”
“Your English is very good,” I say, removing the headpiece and stowing it back in my pocket. Machiko hadn’t told me Suarez spoke English—maybe she assumed I knew.
“I’ve had a long time to learn it,” he says, then laughs. It’s not a madman’s laugh, just a laugh. If anything it’s a little understated. This is a man who knows he has nothing to prove. He can afford to be good humored. I notice that he’s not tall, only about five foot seven or eight, but he doesn’t have to be. His presence is commanding enough without height.
“So I’ve heard,” I say, “although one never knows what to believe and what is just rumor.”
“That is so true,” he says, as though I’ve said something he’s often thought himself. “Come in, come in. We’ve been expecting you—Machiko contacted me of course. There’s food inside, a room for you if you need to rest.”
He leads the way back to the compound and we enter through the door from which he emerged.
Seventeen: El Paraíso Perdido
Inside the compound I find that the interconnected buildings form a labyrinth. My initial view is of a large empty courtyard. The walls of the buildings which border it are decorated with elaborate murals. The paintings are very well executed—very realistic and created with a truly imaginative, artistic touch—but their subject matter is a mixture of the ecstatic and the grotesque. Mural painting has a long and honorable tradition in Mexico, but here it has simultaneously been lifted to new heights of beauty in its execution and plunged into new depths of horror for its subject matter.
In one long, all-encompassing panel of images, beautiful young men and women hover over the injured and dying, the protoplasm of suerte flowing from victim to murderer. The faces of those who receive the gift have the expressions of saints transported to heaven. The faces of the dying wear the abysmal aspects of men and women suffering their first foretaste of hell.
This drama is repeated again and again, while in the background the slums of Mexico City are rendered in great detail: the wrecked buildings, the poverty… crime, celebration, sex… the hungry street dogs, beggars, and preachers. Street toughs lounge on corners smoking marijuana while ogling young women. Mothers huddle their infants close to their bodies, as though they could somehow shield their offspring from the dangers around them with nothing but their arms.
The background is, I realize, not merely a setting, but an essential part of the work. It is only against the backdrop of poverty that the murders in the foreground can be seen in their proper context: as the desperate measures resorted to by a lucky few to escape the terrible, anonymous fate of the many. The Suerte are drawn from this ghetto, and while they might be ruthless, their primary reason for doing what they do is the same desperation that causes some people
to rob or kidnap. The others do it for money while the Suerte do it to steal their victims’ good fortune, but the monsters they’re running from are the same: poverty, hopelessness, and fear.
Suarez leads me from the courtyard through narrow, winding alleys amongst the buildings, and the murals follow us, seemingly unending, their portrayal of both the city outside and the triumph of the Suerte over their victims repeating endlessly. I notice, too, that each figure, no matter how minor, is clearly an individual. Each face, whether of the Suerte, their victims, or the general population, is characteristic and unmistakable. I suspect that they are, in fact, modeled on real people, perhaps on real events. My suspicion turns to certainty when I recognize the face of the girl who led me here. In the painting she is looking idly out a window, her shoulders bare, as a man dresses—or perhaps undresses, I can’t tell which—in the room behind her.
“You are admiring our murals,” Suarez says. “Or perhaps admiring is not quite the right word.”
“I’m impressed by them.”
He stops and runs his fingers over the face of a dying woman.
“Every person you see here is real, every event happened, every death is a real death, and every transport of suerte from the dying to the living is genuine.” He looks at me. “You find it disconcerting, I think.”
“Yes, I do,” I answer honestly.
“You’ve seen death before. You served in Tijuana.”
“How did you know that?”
I’ve been careful to wear long sleeves while in Mexico, despite the heat, to cover up my tattoos. Suarez smiles lightly.
“Lucky guess.” He pauses a beat, then laughs. “I’m joking. Did you think I let you into my home without researching your background a little?”
“I served there, but I don’t remember much. What I do remember makes me sick, to be honest.”
“The taboo against death, yes. What you have to realize is that death, to me and to everyone in this compound, is a constant presence. It is something as close as our own skin, as intimate as our lovers, and at times as hated as our own faults. To us, death is ordinary, part of the world. You Californians are no strangers to death—you deal it out easily enough—but you don’t like to see its face. You try to forget it, to banish it from your thoughts, but death won’t be banished, you know. That’s why you remember some of what happened at Tijuana, despite the Brace and Erase.”
“You know about Brace and Erase?”
“Sure,” he shrugs, as though being aware of California’s military secrets was commonplace to him. “The thing is that you think it protects you, when really it only weakens you. If you’re going to deal in death, you need to accept it, understand it.” He pauses and looks at the murals around us. “Let me tell you something—look at the background figures. Those are the poor people of Mexico City, the people of our slums, but they could be the poor anywhere. Do you think the poor aren’t familiar with death? Here and in places like this throughout the world we have cholera, murder, monkeypox, malaria, sometimes the bubonic plague. We have starvation and suicide. We are steeped in death up to our eyeballs and down to our bones. You Californians, Texans, New Yorkers, even wealthy Mexicans, have hospitals where your people go to die. We don’t. A poor man dies in his bedroom, with the whole family gathered around. Or he dies in the street, with everyone watching. Women die in childbirth, in robberies, in rapes. Nothing is private.”
He runs his hands along the length of a wall, taking in all the deaths portrayed there.
“For the poor there are no big white hospital walls” he spits these words out “between us and death. Nothing hides it or cleans its face before we look at it. For us, death is everywhere, always. When you can’t see it, you can still smell it on the air. You’re shocked by what you see here,” he spreads out his arms, taking in the paintings, “but no new convert is ever shocked. They come from out there, just beyond those walls, and they’re used to death. What they notice,” he raises a finger to point, “is that there are some figures here who are not dying. There are some people who are experiencing great joy, whose lives are made better.”
“And that’s why you have converts.”
He shrugs.
“Don’t you know where you’re standing Mr. Burroughs? This is the edge of the world. Anything beyond this—anything worse, more dangerous, crazier—is a Gray Zone, a black hole. Everything is pressing these people toward the edge, then further, until they fall. The only way not to fall is to climb over others.” He pauses for a moment. “Come on, we’re almost at my house.”
I follow him further down the alley until it opens into another courtyard. As before, the space is surrounded by walls covered in the same type of mural that we’ve seen along the way. Here a group of thirty or so Suerte wearing the traditional gi of the martial artist are gathered around the walls, while in the center a young man and woman fight, using moves that are a blend of Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Judo, Capoeira, and other arts. Most impressive is that I recognize stances and techniques from Tarantella. To pilfer moves from the Tics is audacious. Still, I don’t understand why they need to master any martial art.
“What is this?”
“Training,” Suarez says simply.
“Training? Why do you need to train? I thought your luck was supposed to take care of you. Why should your people know how to fight?”
Suarez shakes his head, looking amused.
“One never knows what to believe and what is just rumor,” he says, quoting my own words back at me. “You see, you have been listening to California propaganda. The Suerte steal luck from others, preying on the weak he intones, making his voice sound like a sim newscaster. The truth is, it’s not enough to steal luck, you must know how to court it, how to seek it out, how to let it find you. We take good fortune from others, that’s true, but much of the art of luck is learning how to make it yourself, to create it from thin air. You must learn how to read a situation, how to take advantage of it, how to position yourself to benefit from it. That is what they are learning. The combat is incidental, it’s merely an exercise. They are learning how to be in the right place at the right time, how to take an adverse moment and turn it around and make it advantageous instead, how to capitalize on the mistakes of an enemy.”
I watch the couple in the center of the group fight for a moment, their bare feet kicking up puffs of dry dust from the ground. It’s the most genuine sparring I’ve seen since the Forces. Their punches are not pulled, their kicks land hard and make deep thumping sounds when they hit. Both participants are sweating, both are struggling, both are concentrating, but both are smiling. They are enjoying themselves, enjoying the learning process, and perhaps enjoying the violence too, it’s hard to tell.
There’s something unusual about the fight, though at first I can’t put my finger on it. Then I notice that, even though it looks superficially like any fight, it isn’t. Blows that should land, and that should be crippling or even fatal, are averted or deflected, or simply fail to have the effect they ought to. Sometimes they connect, but far less often than they should, and with far more meager results than I would have expected. I realize that this is exactly what Suarez has described. It’s not just a battle of physical skills, but of strategic ones, and maybe, just maybe, of one combatant’s suerte against another’s. I start to wonder if it’s true, if it’s their good fortune, amassed through murder upon murder, trained and honed under Suarez’s tutelage, that allows them to dodge blows they shouldn’t be able to dodge, or shake off ones that ought to break their bones. Suarez watches with me for a moment, then starts walking again.
“Well,” he says over his shoulder, “you didn’t come here to see this.”
I hesitate a moment, fascinated by the fight, then move to follow him through another alley. Partway down the lane he opens a door and enters, leaving it open for me to follow him. I do, shutting the door behind me.
As my eyes adjust to the inside light, I see that it’s a computer facility. Twenty or so Suert
e are at work at holo terminals, some apparently gathering information while others are clearly involved in complex programming projects. Suarez is well ahead of me, headed for a door on the other side of the room, but I’m curious.
“You train your people on computers?” I call out, still catching up with him. He stops and looks around the room as though he hadn’t really noticed it when we first came in.
“Well of course,” he says. “We aren’t some backward little church,” a word he pronounces with derision. “We are a community and we take care of our own. Everyone here trains and becomes proficient in computer use. Most are illiterate when they arrive, so they have to be taught to read first.”
Watching the speed with which they carry out their assignments it’s hard to believe that anyone here was ever illiterate.
“I’m surprised the electricity doesn’t go out,” I say.
“We have our own supply. It’s necessary.”
“It’s necessary, so therefore it happens, is that it?”
He smiles.
“Yes, exactly. That is the nature of suerte”
I look around at the multitude of computers, an intent operator bent over each one.
“You scoop?”
“We keep abreast of events,” he says, admitting the fact without actually saying so. “Information is an important resource.”
“Of course.”
“Come,” he says. “We need privacy, I think.”
He leads me through a doorway that leads out of the computer center. On the other side is a set of stairs. He climbs and I follow him. At the top we reach a suite of rooms, apparently his own apartment.