by Nas Hedron
“If their good fortune protects them, why don’t the whips miss them?” I ask.
“The same reason their suerte didn’t allow them to hit me with the knives,” Suarez answers between calling out lashes. “My power was greater than theirs. In the same way, the ones who are administering the punishment are senior and have more power. Their fortune overwhelms the ones who are being hit.”
Suarez keeps patiently meting out the punishment. At the count of twenty-five, one of the men falls, then gets up again. Is he angry? Ashamed of having fallen? Can he think of, or feel, anything beyond the pain? A young woman falls next, but like the man before her she forces herself back to her feet and resumes her position against the wall. By now their blood is spraying with each stroke. Not a lot of it, but enough to stain their leggings, the wall, the ground, even the people wielding the whips. I look at Suarez. If anything, his face is serious and a little sad.
When the last blow falls I see them each sag a little, no longer having to brace themselves for another lash, but they remain on their feet and turn slowly around. Adalia did not fall and for some irrational reason I feel proud of her. Why I should feel anything about her, I have no idea. Suarez goes to them then, speaking with each one, touching each one, comforting them with a touch on the shoulder or cheek. Friends approach them and offer them back their shirts. They slowly disperse, holding their shirts in their hands, not wanting to put them on and stain them with blood. When they’re gone, Suarez claps his hands loudly.
“Practice please,” he calls out, and the remaining members of the group return to sparring. Then he approaches me.
“Where are the others going? The ones who were whipped?”
“To clean themselves up. They’ll be back in a few minutes. They’ll resume their training. I don’t expect you to understand us Mr. Burroughs. I don’t expect you to approve of what you see here. But I imagine your doubts are gone.”
“It was impressive,” I say, unwilling to commit myself to belief entirely.
“Suerte is impressive, but that isn’t the point,” he says, not turning to face me but watching his people resume their training. Why do something so cruel? That’s what you’re really wondering. You think I’m some kind of despot, crazy, whatever. I will tell you. The point of our movement is to celebrate all of human existence. Being human can be ecstasy, and we indulge ecstasy, but it also means pain. It includes death as much as it includes life. To cut yourself off from any portion of that spectrum, from any of the colors of life, is to amputate yourself. It makes you less than human, and we won’t settle for that.” He shakes his head emphatically. “No, if anything, we would like to be more than human, but if we’re stuck being human we’re certainly not going to do it in half measures. We want the whole thing, Mr. Burroughs, every taste, every fragrance, every emotion, every sensation, all knowledge, all experience, all power, and life everlasting.”
“Amen,” I say, not being entirely facetious. He turns his head then, just enough so that I can see his eyes. His expression is calm, but those eyes are alive with a fierce faith.
“You can ‘amen’ ten thousand times and it won’t be enough.” He turns back to look at his people. “Look at them. These children come from nothing, from nowhere. They’re born to dogs in the street, to ghosts, to the wind—certainly not to parents who can protect them and care for them. When they get here they barely exist, cringing and growling and pissing themselves all at once. Hungry, dirty, mistrustful but needy. Here they take control of their lives. The point is to be someone Mr. Burroughs. To have an identity, authority, a place where you belong. And the point is to swallow life whole, not in tiny bites.”
He pauses for a moment, as though he hadn’t meant to enter into this sermon, then his mood turns light again.
“I will tell you one thing, the point is certainly not to put on shows for foreigners. Generally no one comes here. The few times journalists dared to approach us, shaking in their boots, we simply sent them away.” Finally, he looks me directly in the eyes. “It isn’t a matter of showing off, it’s a matter of survival, and character, and dignity.”
“And life everlasting.”
He smiles.
“Yes.”
“We have life everlasting too,” I say.
He looks thoughtful.
“Of course, in a way. You have the vats and the shells, decanting your ka over and over. But of course first one must have money, true?”
“True.”
“These people can’t afford anything like that. They can’t even afford a dentist. And then of course your life everlasting is tenuous, I would say. The shells are not indestructible. What if a person is in a car accident, for instance?” I can’t tell whether or not he’s making an oblique reference to my own past, to the death of my parents. “Or what if a person is shot? I understand you were involved in an incident before you came here. Many people died.”
“That’s true. I didn’t kill them but I saw them die.”
“I’m sorry that it troubles you. Still, the point is that suerte helps to protect against such eventualities, not just old age, but accidents and attacks.”
“Life everlasting,” I say, starting to believe.
“Amen, Mr. Burroughs. Amen to that. Now, come and wash.”
Twenty: Wanna Buy Some Shitty Tomatoes?
I leave the compound washed and wearing a fresh shirt, donated by the Suerte. As I walk through el Paraíso, I think about what Suarez said: born to dogs in the street. The hive of humanity around me—all of them struggling, begging, working, fighting—feels suddenly claustrophobic, and I have an intense desire to be back in L.A., or at least in a clean, air-conditioned room at one of the airport hotels. Maybe the abrupt change in the weather is a factor: the sky has clouded over in the last few minutes and the air has the heavy, close feeling that comes before rain.
I look around for a taxi but there are none in sight. In fact the only vehicle I can see is an old pickup truck, the back half-full of vegetables, sitting by the side of the road. A young man lounges against the truck’s flank, smoking a joint as he waits to make a sale. He’s wearing a bright orange bandana like a kerchief on his head, no shirt, dirty jeans and sneakers. I head toward him.
“How’s business.”
His head jerks back slightly and I realize that, like the girl, he’s probably never heard a machine translation before. Maybe on TV, if he has one. Still, he only pauses a moment, then expels two streams of bluish smoke from his nostrils.
“It sucks,” he says in Spanish, correctly assuming his words will be translated. He gestures toward his truck. “Wanna buy some shitty tomatoes?” He takes another long hit off the joint and smiles at me around a lungful of smoke, holding it in.
“No thanks.”
He exhales and laughs.
“How about some really good weed.”
He takes a last drag on the joint, then pops the roach into his mouth and swallows it.
“Tempting, but no. I’ll tell you what, though. I need a ride to the Cordoba.”
“Downtown? That fancy place?”
“That’s the one. I’ll give you fifty pesos.” He quickly sizes up my need and my ability to pay.
“Need gas money too,” he says.
“Fine, seventy pesos.” That much gas would take us to the border and back. He smiles a huge, toothy smile and bangs the side of his truck.
“Fuck man, I’d drive you there for free just to pull up in front of the doorman in this shitbox.” He laughs, then looks serious and points a finger at me. “We made a deal though.”
“Seventy pesos,” I confirm.
“Cool. I’m Ramon. Get in man. It’s gonna rain in a minute anyway.”
He opens the driver side door and climbs in.
“Does the weather always turn this quickly?” I ask, opening the passenger door.
“In the D.F.? Does this every afternoon, man. It’ll rain for half an hour and then get sunny again, you’ll see.” He breaks into a cack
ling laugh for no obvious reason except that he’s stoned. Still, he seems competent behind the wheel as he starts up the truck and begins driving. He swerves expertly back and forth, avoiding pedestrians, stray dogs, and potholes. The seats are overly springy and we both bounce slightly whenever we hit a rut or a depression in the road.
“So you got out alive, huh?” Ramon says.
“What?”
“That Suerte joint, you got out alive. I almost bet against you. Now I’m glad I didn’t.”
“Someone was giving odds?”
“Sure man, eighty to one against you. I actually would have bet, but I didn’t have any money.”
I look for a sign that this is another joke, but it doesn’t seem to be. Big drops of rain begin to spatter the windshield, at first just a few, then suddenly a torrent of them. Ramon and I both roll up our windows.
“So, what? Everyone in El Paraíso knows I was in there?”
“Well, everyone knows some gringo’s coming and nobody’s supposed to fuck with him. The order comes from Suarez, so obviously everybody’s curious. Then Damita brought you here. You’re the only gringo showed up today. Then you come back out, but someone fucks with you anyway. Got to be Vicente, right? Because no one would touch you if he said not to except him or his people. Then, after they shock you and all that, you fucking go back in man. I thought that was it for sure. But no, here you are. Big mystery.”
“You’re really serious that no one would disobey Suarez? I mean not even the Chicahuaque or someone like that?”
“Hey, those guys are a little weird, you know, but they’re not crazy. I mean, maybe they’re crazy but they’re not suicidal or anything.”
“You believe all that Suerte y Muerte stuff, about stealing people’s luck and the rest of it.”
“Hey man I don’t know. Do I look like some scientist or a priest or whatever? I know my grandmother believes in Jesus Christ and some preacher cured her legs, so who fucking knows? All I know is I got vegetables, I sell them, I go home, mind my own business. Who needs to worry about stuff like that? They sure as hell kill people though. Everybody knows that. They don’t even hide it. I’ve seen one of them kill a guy right in the street, some gringo that was looking for some ass. Nobody’s going to stop a Suerte, you know, so he’s not worried, just does it right back there, middle of the street. Used a knife man, fucking ugly.”
I watch the rain for a few moments.
“So someone stunned me and dragged me off in the middle of the neighborhood and no one did anything?”
He looks at me quickly, puzzled, then looks back at the road.
“What’d I just tell you? I figured it was the Suerte. Everyone else figured the same thing. So who’s going to stop them?”
We’re entering a nicer neighborhood now. Small, clean shops and restaurants. People are standing in the doorways here and there, watching the rain.
“But the thing is, it wasn’t the Suerte.”
Ramon looks surprised.
“Then they’re dead, my friend. I mean like already, right now. Suarez said don’t touch you.”
The woman has been dead for a while, but I don’t see any point in mentioning it to him. Now I suppose the men have been killed as well. I don’t relish the thought, but I can’t muster up a lot of sympathy either.
“You sure it wasn’t the Suerte?” Ramon asks.
I think of the throwing knives, so accurate one moment, so blind to their target the next.
“Pretty sure.”
He whistles.
“That is fucked up man. Why would somebody do that?”
“That’s what I’m wondering.”
“Only thing is if they weren’t from Mexico, you know? Nobody from Mexico is going to screw around with Vicente.”
“They had Mexican accents.”
“Yeah?” he says, smiling broadly. “You can tell a Mexican accent from a Columbian accent? A Chilean accent?” He has a point. “Hell,” he says “for all you know they came down from L.A. on the same plane as you. Lots of Latinos up there, right? Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, whatever.”
“Yeah, it could have happened that way. How’d you know I came from L.A.?”
“That was the message: don’t do anything to the gringo from L.A. You got enemies up there might want you dead or whatever?”
An image of the ‘homeless’ assassins flashes through my mind, but I don’t answer.
“Hey, whatever. Just making conversation,” Ramon says when I don’t speak.
“Don’t take it personally.”
Suddenly he looks worried. Maybe I look pissed off, though in fact I’m just trying to work things out. Suarez treated me like an honored guest, so maybe pissing me off is bad karma.
“Don’t worry Ramon, I was just thinking, that’s all. Better you don’t know too much though, ok? Like you said, sell your vegetables, go home, live your life.”
“You got it man. I like to stay away from trouble. I mean, you don’t even have to pay for the ride, you know? Suarez says to treat you right so…”
“It’s ok. We have a deal… business. I don’t mind paying for the ride.”
Ramon looks relieved.
“Okay, cool. I could use the money, you know?”
“Going out on the town tonight?”
“Oh man, seventy pesos? You better believe it. Buy some girl a bunch of drinks, dance, you know? Might even get lucky.”
He has that huge, goofy, stoned smile on his face again. Looking out the window I realize we’re almost at the hotel.
“That girl? Damita?” I say.
“What about her?”
“You know her? I mean, you knew her name.”
“I seen her around. Everybody has, you know.”
“She going to be okay, you think?”
“What do you think man? She’s fourteen and she’s already pulling dates. Not like that’s rare in El Paraíso. You really sure you want to know what will happen to her?”
“Yeah,” I say, not certain I mean it but unable to back down.
“If she’s lucky she’ll be pregnant before she’s sixteen and spend the rest of her life whoring or begging, or maybe even working, all to raise her kid. If it’s a boy, it’ll end up like me. If it’s a girl, it’ll end up like her.”
For the moment I say nothing about the fact that he’s drawn a parallel between Damita and his own mother, although silently I wonder how she supported him: whoring, begging, or working.
“And if she’s not lucky?”
“Then she’ll be dead before she’s sixteen and won’t have to worry about any kid. Girls get killed all the time. I mean, the Suerte won’t hurt her ‘cause she’s too unlucky, you know? What could they get from her? But guys get crazy, fucking lunatics come around sometimes. Mexicans, sometimes. Guys from California or Texas sometimes. They come down here just to get laid you know, so sometimes it’s one of them. Or from wherever. What’s up man, you feel bad for her?”
“Yeah, of course I feel bad for her.”
His good humor seems to desert him for a moment.
“You want to save her or something? There’s about half a million girls like her in the city man. I mean literally half a million. You going to save them all?”
“Can’t hurt to help one of them, you think?”
He seems to make a conscious effort to lighten his tone.
“Sure man, helping one is good I guess,” he says, sounding unconvinced.
Outside, as promised, the rain has slowed to a trickle and the sun is beginning to appear from behind the dissipating clouds. Suddenly Ramon’s face lights up.
“Hey, here’s the fucking doorman. He’s gonna hate this.”
We pull into the driveway of the Cordoba and sure enough the doorman steps forward, trying to wave us off. Ramon cackles and continues driving, only stopping once he’s directly in front of the main doors, where he revs the engine loudly a last time, then cuts it. The doorman is at the curb now, livid, yelling at us in Spanish.
I lean out my window.
“I’m a guest here,” I say in English. The yelling stops immediately. Technically I’m not a guest yet since I haven’t actually checked in, but I intend to. I might not spend the night, but I at least want a shower before I get on a plane back to L.A.
“Certainly sir. It’s just… unusual. The truck. Most of our guests use taxis or come on the shuttle.”
“No taxis around at the time,” I tell him.
He tips his hat and returns to his post. Ramon laughs louder than ever, nearly choking.
“Oh man, fuck. That was great. That guy thinks he is king shit, you know. Wouldn’t have the time of day for a guy like me. Look at that stupid uniform. I’m a guest here. I love that.”
I take out seventy pesos and hand the bills to him. I recall giving Damita her money. I can’t seem to get her out of my mind, come to a quick decision.
“Thanks man,” Ramon says.
“A deal’s a deal. Listen, about Damita. I’m going to talk to the doorman. On the first of every month I want you to drive out here and you can laugh at him all you want, okay? But he’s going to give you a hundred pesos. Thirty is for you, for gas. The rest, I want you to take it to Damita.”
He looks skeptical.
“Sure man. If that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want. Tell her it’s from the gringo she took to the Suerte. Tell her she’ll keep getting it as long as she doesn’t pull dates any more, all right? She can support her mother or her brothers or get a boyfriend or whatever, but you’re watching her and if she starts whoring around again then the money stops coming.”
“Hey man, no offence, but for thirty pesos a month I can’t watch her every day. I got to sell my vegetables, right?
I turn to him.
“You don’t actually have to watch her Ramon. Check in on her once in a while just so she thinks you are, that’s all.” I get out of the truck and lean in the open window.
“And if she starts again?” Ramon asks.