The Shadow of the Shadow

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  "Stand back!" he shouted at a pair of grief-stricken trumpet players. "What's the dead man's name?"

  "Sergeant Jose Zevada," answered the captain and conductor, savagely twisting his baton between his hands.

  The poet leaned over the dead man and pulled his eyelids shut. Then he stuck his hands into the dead man's pockets and emptied out the contents, naming each item out loud as he sorted through them:

  "One snotty handkerchief, one photograph of a beautiful young woman, one darning egg, one peso, fifty-five cents in change..."

  "... O N E S I LV E R FORK, one bundle of newspaper clippings held together with a rubber band, one sapphire ring, two diamond rings with silver bands, and two large turquoise rings..."

  "This trombonist of yours sounds like a walking jewelry store," observed Verdugo, setting the two/three onto the marble tabletop. His plan was to force the Chinaman to play the antepenultimate six, so the journalist could crucify the poet on the double-sixes.

  The Chinaman avoided the trap, playing a one.

  "And the newspaper clippings, what were they all about, my esteemed collaborator?" asked Manterola, leaving off taking notes for a minute to wipe his sweaty face with a handkerchief. The poet made an elegant wave of his hand, like a magician performing a trick, inserted two fingers into his vest pocket, pulled out the bundle of clippings, and dropped them onto the table.

  "Ask and ye shall receive."

  "Now that's no ordinary helper,"said the lawyer, impressed. The journalist played the three/five, to the lawyer's great consternation. If anyone was going to be crucified at this point, it was going to be him.

  "Pay attention, man," he admonished Manterola. "The moment of truth is at hand and you've got your mind on your work."

  "Sorry," apologized the journalist, while the poet played the double-fives, a big grin on his face.

  Manterola picked up the bundle of clippings. With Verdugo forced to pass, the Chinaman played the two/four. The journalist went on the offensive with another three.

  "Have you read them yet?" he asked.

  "Of course. In all the world there was never born another man as impatient as I."

  "Do you realize it's getting to the point again where you have to carry a gun in this town?" the journalist asked the others. "Seems like we let ourselves get out of the habit for a while."

  "Not me," said the lawyer, drawing his .38 automatic. "It cost me thirty-two pesos at La Universal. I clean it and oil it every month, and take it back once a year for a complete going-over."

  "How about you, Tomas?" Manterola asked, losing interest in the game now that he'd practically got it in the bag. Without showing any other sign of having heard, the Chinaman drew a large Spanish switchblade from his boot. He pressed the button and a polished steel blade, nearly a foot long, sprang out with a clean snap.

  "General Villa used to clean his fingernails with one of those," said the poet.

  "They must have been vely dilty," said the Chinaman without changing his expression and without taking his attention off the game.

  "Game's over, gentlemen," declared the journalist, slapping his last domino onto the table with a sharp crack.

  The echo ran the length of the nearly empty cantina and mixed with the forced laughter of three officers drinking at the bar.

  "I never understood where you got your accent from, Tomas," said the poet, getting up from the table. "After all, you were born in Sinaloa."

  The lawyer counted the remaining dominoes and jotted the score in a small notebook he kept just for that purpose.

  Manterola suspiciously eyed the three young officers, two captains and a lieutenant. From the very last batch to come out of the Revolution, no doubt. Probably from one of the last campaigns against the Zapatistas and the final Agua Prieta Revolt, where they would have won their stripes. They'd reached a thoroughly advanced state of inebriation and waved their hands about dramatically as they talked. Manterola didn't like them. He didn't like soldiers in general, men in uniform. It was an aversion he shared with his three friends, though perhaps for different reasons.

  "How'd you get onto the bandstand in the first place?" he asked the poet.

  The poet climbed onto the back of his chair. "Let's just say that in spite of my size, people manage to perceive something of my inner strength. And besides, the place was a complete madhouse."

  Verdugo started to mix the bones. The Chinaman stood up, crossed the room, and leaned his elbows on the bar.

  The bartender got the message, followed his eyes just to make sure, and took down the bottle of Havana brandy.

  "You serve Orientals in this place, mister?" slurred one of the officers.

  "They say they're absolutely the filthiest creatures that ever walked the earth," added the lieutenant, smoothing his trim little mustache. "I hear they all live in those nasty little shops of theirs and fight the rats over the crumbs for dinner. Then they go to sleep on the countertops." The officers had spent the earlier part of the evening drinking second-class aguardiente at first-class prices in the ballroom upstairs. Obviously, they weren't familiar with the house rules. Two different worlds made up the Majestic, one upstairs and one downstairs. There was no love lost between them and they didn't mix. Maria Conesa might be singing upstairs for some high government minister while downstairs, when the pool tables were really jumping, you might run across half a dozen of the toughest, ugliest Spaniards that ever cursed the face of the earth, and with more blood on their hands than the whole rest of the city put together. And this was a city with a blood debt you couldn't clear up in a very long lifetime.

  The Chinaman looked the officers over one by one. His disdain could easily be misinterpreted as fear by the drunken men. It would be a big mistake.

  "Don't you officels have any medals?" he asked.

  "The Mexican Army doesn't need to put its honor on parade for some slanteyes like you," scoffed one of the captains. Back at the table, the poet and the journalist exchanged looks. Verdugo got up and walked toward the bathroom, near the front door. He unfastened two of the buttons on his vest and with the same motion released the safety on his gun.

  "What about in youl house? Don't you have any medals in youl house even?" asked the Chinaman, fixing the men with a withering stare.

  "My friends here each have two citations for valor and a medal for being wounded in the line of duty, you lousy Chink," sputtered the lieutenant, feeling incomprehensibly trapped by the absurdity of the Chinaman's question.

  "Tomas!" the journalist shouted from his seat at the table. "Let's not have any bloodshed, please." He turned his back to the bar and took over where the lawyer left off, shuffling the dominoes. The poet kept his eyes on the officers.

  "You gentlemen ready to pay for your drinks?" the bartender asked the three soldiers, well aware of what was about to happen.

  "I was only going to suggest you take youl medals and hang them flom youl fucking mothel's asses," said the Chinaman.

  Tomas found himself obliged to deflect the lieutenant's fistwith a quick chopping blow to the forearm. At his post near the door, the lawyer drew his gun and shouted in a booming baritone:

  "Keep it clean, gentlemen. The first one who goes for his gun is a dead man."

  The two captains turned to look at Verdugo while Tomas smashed his fist into the lieutenant's face. Two bloody teeth dropped from the officer's mouth and he staggered backward. One of the captains hung back with his eyes on Verdugo while the other went to the aid of his fallen comrade, who fell underneath the bar spitting blood. The Chinaman stopped the captain in his tracks, butting him in the stomach with his head. The poet got to his feet. Walking calmly to where the first officer lay on the floor, he placed a foot over the hand slowly inching its way toward the gun at the man's belt.

  Gripping his stomach, the captain dropped to his knees and started to vomit. Then the Chinaman moved toward the third man, who grabbed the bottle of Havana brandy off the bar and, brandishing it in front of him, backed toward the d
oor. But the lawyer came from behind and brought the barrel of his gun down hard on the man's temple. He fell in a heap on the floor.

  "Sorry to spoil your fun, Tomas, but I was afraid you were going to hurt the poor guy," he said.

  The bartender came out and saved the rest of the bottle of brandy from spilling onto the ground.

  Tomas walked back to the bar, rubbing his right hand.

  "You missed the party," said the poet to Manterola, who continued to scramble the dominoes.

  "Not on your life. I turned around when the action started. I was just keeping quiet a little for show. I've known Tomas for three years now and I've seen him do this two or three times. It's always the same. I tell you, the man's made of iron inside. And I love to watch the way he fights with his hands. It's like nothing I've ever seen.

  "That may be true enough, but when there's gunplay involved, the guys in the white hats don't always win," said Verdugo the lawyer, returning to his place at the table.

  "That was a good move on your part, no doubt about it," acknowledged the poet.

  The Chinaman continued to rub his hand while the bartender poured him a drink from the salvaged bottle.

  "Have you got a pan you could put some cold watel in fol me?" he asked.

  "The thing that gets my goat," said the poet, "are these boys who get their heads all swelled up when they get inside a uniform. They act like every civilian's a second-class citizen."

  "But that's exactly what we are, second-class citizens. Haven't you ever figured that out? You can't expect to get any more out of this country than you're ready to give," pronounced the lawyer, lighting up one of his short cigars.

  Two of the officers lay passed out on the floor, while the third threw up under the bar. The Chinaman took the washbasin from the bartender and stuck his swollen hand into the water. The bartender went back out and stripped the three soldiers of their weapons.

  "Anothel game?" asked Tomas, taking his seat.

  Using the bandana from around his neck, the poet wiped the sweat from his hands. It had always been that way for him, this same cold sweat breaking out in the face of violence.

  "Second-class citizens? I think not, gentlemen," said the reporter. "Third-class is more like it. The second-class citizens are the ones running all over each other to spit-polish the boots of the first-class citizens. After all, who were the real losers in this little Revolution of ours? The old Porfirian aristocracy? Hardly. They're all busy marrying off their daughters to Obregon's colonels. The outcasts, the pariahs, they're the real losers, same as always. The campesinos who made the Revolution in the first place. And us, too, we lost the Revolution without even firing a shot."

  "Speak for yourself," said the poet. "You're forgetting all the years I rode with Pancho Villa."

  The newspaperman slowly unbuttoned his vest and then his shirt. A whitish scar ran across his chest. He touched it gingerly, as if it belonged to someone else.

  "What about the ones who got it from the sidelines? Do we count, too?"

  "Naturally," said the poet.

  The Chinaman placed his hand back into the water and slowly spread his fingers.

  "Is it broken?" asked the lawyer.

  Tomas shrugged his shoulders.

  "Third-class citizens," insisted the journalist.

  "Don't get all worked up about it, okay?" the lawyer said as he drew his seven shiny dominoes from the pile. "After all, what about the fourth-class citizens? Didn't you read how the other day fifteen thousand Roman Catholics came together to pay homage to good old Agustin de Iturbide on the hundredth anniversary of his crummy little empire? For Chrissakes."

  "I'm not getting all worked up about it. That's just the way it is, and believe me, I know. If all the third-class Mexicans left town, there'd be no one left to turn out the lights, let alone grow the food for the rich man's table."

  "Remember you're talking to a poet," the poet reminded him. "I have a hard enough time putting food on my own table."

  "I suppose I just feel like talking, that's all. And unlike our friend Tomas here, I can't get it out of my system by beating up on a few helpless soldiers."

  As the friends talked, the three officers staggered to their feet and with the bartender's encouragement made their way to the door. One of them turned to fire off a last threatening glance, but the bartender mercifully sent him on his way with a friendly shove. The double door swung back and forth, squeaking softly.

  The Chinaman extended his long fingers one at a time, his hand continuing to swell in spite of the cold water.

  "See what you get for fooling around with the Mexican Army?" the poet scolded him. "And what for? Just because the guy said you sleep on a countertop? If what our friend Manterola here says is true about us being nothing but a bunch of third-class citizens, what the hell's it matter if we sleep on countertops anyway? I sleep in an armchair, and Verdugo here"-he gestured toward the lawyer-"never sleeps at all. He's a vampire."

  "You want to go first, or you want me to?" Verdugo asked Manterola.

  The cuckoo clock chirped out three in the morning.

  MY FULL NAME WAS ORIGINALLY Alberto Verdugo y Saez de Miera, and I suppose it's only natural that after thirty-five years I should have discarded a fair amount, if not all, of so much nomenclatural baggage. That's why it's all the same to me if they simply call me "the lawyer Verdugo," or "licenciado Verdugo,"which means the same thing. It's always amused me that what I ended up with after all these years is my father's ancient surname, which has likewise become my nickname: El Verdugo, which literally means "the executioner," the hangman, the one who kills within the law. And it doesn't matter too much either that I've fallen short of certain expectations, certain illusions-if that's what you want to call that conglomeration of vague aspirations we inevitably turn into pretexts for living instead of rules to live by. The only thing that makes any consistent sense is a certain stubbornness on my part, the overwhelming desire to move on. The executioner of dreams, you might say. But above all, the executioner of the plans they had for me-that's more like it-the future they so carefully prepared. The killer of my parents' dreams, that would have had me as the administrator of giant haciendas, overseer of masses of campesinos, a factory owner with the obligatory annual holiday pilgrimage to Europe on a Ward Line steamship. On the other side of the balance was my own rebellion and the bet I'd made with myself. Like a runaway vehicle on the Paseo de la Reforma, I ran in the opposite direction from where they wanted me to go, and here I am, still running today, in spite of the fact there's nowhere I'm running to and the absence of any real victory is painfully obvious. Gone now are the father and mother who made the straightjacket in the first place, gone is the last trace, the last scrap of cloth the straightjacket used to be. As for me, I've simply gone and turned my lawyer's degree into the modus vivendi for a streetwalker's attorney. There's nothing either better or worse I could have done with that sacred scrap of paper originally destined to hang on some wall in the graveyard of the Porfirian establishment where the rest of my family lived and died. Of course, there's still the three years I spent studying in Italy. Or better yet, there's still my translation into Spanish of the great anarchist writer Enrico Malatesta. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. I can still see my Uncle Ernesto foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog when I put a signed and dedicated copy in front of him on his desk. I remember reading out loud to him in a honeyed voice where it says: "The enemy is not he who is born beyond our borders, nor he who speaks a language different from our own, but he who, without any right, seeks to strip away the liberty and independence of others." And now that the old family home lays in ruins, struck by a stray cannonball in the fighting back in `13, the rubble crumbling underfoot, I can go home dressed as myself and wearing my own wide-brimmed hat, telltale symbol of a man of the night. The same pearl gray hat that's known and recognized in cabarets, cantinas, and bordellos all over Mexico City, stolen off a hat rack from the son of one of old don Porfirio's own government m
inisters (he only wore it on Sundays). Now I can take my hat off, wave it through the air, call out in greeting to the ruins, and say: "Here where you see me now I have triumphed. I have become nothing of what they wanted me to become, I have none of what they wanted me to have. I've left nothing behind. Nothing remains. Nothing remains."

  PIOQUINTO MANTEROLA HAD JUST finished writing up the bloody murder of officers Filiberto Sanchez and Jesus Gonzalez, shot to death in the backseat of their black Ford, license number 4087, the same two officers who only a month before had been showered with praise following the capture of the infamous "Black Hat." Today the men were nothing but a pair of bloody corpses in the back of a squad car. They had been quietly lying in wait for Tufiabla the Arab, who had turned the tables on the two policemen and not so quietly emptied the chambers of his revolver into the back of their car before they could take him in.

  With this routine piece of work out of the way, the journalist turned his attention back to the bundle of newspaper clippings his friend the poet had given him the night before. A stiff breeze was blowing down from the mountains, and Manterola got up from his desk on the third floor of the El Democrata building at 15 Humboldt Street to go close the window. A cigarette hung out of one corner of his mouth. He was feeling particularly beaten down, washed out, old, and maybe just a little bored.

  He walked over to the window and looked down in time to see a shiny new Exeter pull up in front of the building. The breeze that had so annoyed him a minute ago refreshed him now. He went back to his desk and looked at the desolation all around him. At the other end of the office, Gomez was relating the latest escapades of the Soviet Nine, the sports reporters' baseball team. Two desks farther on, Gonzaga dozed at his drawing table. Manterola tried to concentrate on the clippings in front of him. They all seemed to be more or less the same, brief single-column pieces that over a period of ten years followed the somewhat dubious career of a certain Colonel Froilan Zevada (the brother of the murdered trombonist?): his contribution to the struggle against the Maderistas, his timely about-face following the Juarez treaty, his bloody triumph against the forces of Emiliano Zapata, his less than exemplary participation in the events of the Decena Tragica, his belated crossover to the side of the Carrancistas, his union-busting police work on behalf of the oil companies at Mata Redonda, his ties to Pablo Gonzalez. His promotion to the rank of colonel during the fight against Pancho Villa, his once again belated switch over to the opposing side, along with an entire garrison under his command at Tampico during the Revolt of Agua Prieta. And mixed in with everything else, the occasional mention of his presence at some military academy ball, his success in a marksmanship competition, rumors about a midnight duel in the Alameda, an article about a ballistics course he attended in Germany..