The Shadow of the Shadow

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  Comes that birthday sadness, and crime reporters like this one tend to go transcendental, to look back over their life as if it were a drawerful of old debts, goals unmet, moribund illusions, wasted loves.

  He glanced at his bald reflection in a polished chrome tube near the bed and took off his glasses to neutralize the effect. He thought about the cigarettes he'd got stashed under his pillow, and about the manuscript of a novel hidden under his pillow at home. His reflection in the tube was satisfactorily neutralized in a myopic blur, but the sadness stayed with him. A stubborn, sticky sadness, with a good dose of self-pity and idiot melancholy mixed in. A pair of tears rolled down Pioquinto Manterola's cheeks and, with his gaze fixed on the opposite wall, he let them go.

  "May I?" she said, already stepping through the door into the room.

  Manterola wiped his tears away unhurriedly and looked at her: he had seen her twice before already and held her photo in his hand. Dressed mostly in black, as before, she now wore a broad brimmed hat that surrounded her face and set off its brilliant whiteness. A short necklace with a single emerald in its center hung around her neck. She wore a tight-fitting long black skirt that nearly touched the floor and a white blouse covered by a knitted shawl embroidered in black.

  "Where would you like me to put the flowers?" asked Margarita Herrera, the Widow Roldan. She picked up a glass and filled it with water from a chipped washbasin. The flowers were a half dozen sad-looking magnolias with fragrant open blooms. She took her time arranging the flowers, her back to the journalist. He watched her and she let herself be watched.

  "And to what do I owe this visit?" asked Manterola, taking a cigarette out from underneath his pillow. He couldn't think of a better time to have a smoke.

  "I told you we'd be seeing each other again," answered the woman, turning to face him.

  She glanced around for a place to sit and finally opted for the bed, settling herself at the reporter's feet.

  "The left side please," Manterola said quickly. "My right leg's not quite better yet."

  The woman did as he asked and, sitting down again, pointed inquiringly at the silent figure in the other bed.

  "They tell me he's dying. He's been in a coma for days, ever since they brought him in here. A hod carrier who fell off the fifth floor of a building. They say he's not going to wake up again."

  The two of them looked at each other for several long seconds: Manterola trying to find in this woman the signs of another woman he'd lost a long time ago; the Widow Roldan searching for some opening into Pioquinto Manterola's soul, or maybe just looking for some way to start the conversation.

  "I know you're not going to believe me, sir, but I want you to know I had absolutely nothing to do with what happened to you and your friends," she said, getting right to the point. She let her shawl slip partway off her shoulders.

  "That sounds more like a confession than a denial, ma'am," answered the reporter. He wasn't about to give anything away without getting something in return.

  Margarita's eyes shone violet. Her whole face seemed to revolve around those eyes and the intensity of her gaze.

  "I don't know how much you know about me or my friends, but I can assure you we had nothing to do with this.. .this attempt on your life."

  "Are you sure about that?"

  "Absolutely. And I came to let you know, so there wouldn't be any doubt. Now, I won't deny that there's been a certain amount of friction. Or that on occasion your presence has been somewhat, shall we say, inopportune. What I mean is that your interest in me has caused a certain amount of suspicion among my friends, but that's far from being a motive for murder..."

  Manterola sat up in the bed and, without taking his eyes off the violet sparks flashing in hers, reached out for her hand and kissed it.

  "We should have met several years ago, sir," said Margarita, letting her eyes wander around the room until they settled stubbornly on the flowers, their sweet odor filling the air.

  "That's nothing we can't start to make up for now, Margarita. Do you mind if I call you Margarita?" he said.

  "That's what my friends call me."

  Manterola remained upright in the bed despite the throbbing pain that shot up his bad leg, holding on to the woman's hand and obliging her to lean toward him to ease the tension between their two bodies.

  "You know what's the worst thing about being a reporter?" he said. "It makes a man forget his own preconceived ideas just for the sake of curiosity. The search for the truth takes the place of everything else..."

  "It's hard to know the truth..."

  "The search for truth, or anything that looks like the truth, the best approximation, what each of us thinks might have happened... You see, I accept alternatives..."

  "I've got the feeling you're leading me into risky territory, Senor Journalist."

  "Your eyes have had me in risky territory for a while now, Margarita."

  Manterola was starting to enjoy this melodramatic dialogue, reminiscent of the most tawdry newspaper serials. And he'd read enough Dumas fils, Montepin, and Victor Hugo to be able to hold up his end of the conversation without any trouble.

  "I read your article. You didn't say who actually killed those men who attacked you... Was it you?" she asked, taking away her hand and drawing back slightly.

  "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but if I killed anyone it was pure luck. Somehow I lost my glasses when the shooting started and I just fired at the biggest thing I could see, which happened to be the car they were driving... By the way, you do own an Exeter, don't you?"

  The widow stared at him intently. Then she glanced over at the man in the next bed to assure herself he hadn't moved since she'd gotten there. He lay motionless as before, his face to the wall, and she let her shawl fall completely off her shoulders onto the bed.

  The reporter's instincts were highly tuned from so many years of working in out-of-the-ordinary situations, and that apparently casual gesture was all he needed to realize that this woman was about to undress in front of him.

  And while the journalist was pulling that unlikely conclusion out of thin air, several miles away in the village of Contreras, Tomas Wong the Chinaman sat down to a plateful of eggs and chorizo prepared for him by Rosa Lopez Chang.

  The Chinaman lived in a miserable two-room shack, with an outhouse he shared with his next-door neighbors. One room was taken up by a bed, books, photographs, keepsakes, a table and chair, maps on the wall, stacks of newspapers. The other room held his clothes, hung from an old sawed-off broom handle, another slightly larger table, and the stove.

  A certain intimacy had grown up between the two of them, enough for them to share a bed but not enough to overcome their mutual walls of silence. In his own reticent way, Tomas had explained to Rosa the basic rules of the game: not to interrupt the meetings of the anarchist affinity group that came together each week in the house, overflowing into both rooms, and occupying the three chairs, the table, the bed, finishing off his meager store of coffee, and filling the whole place with a cloud of smoke. Not to let herself be seen too much in public, in case her former "owners" came looking for her. Not to feel that she owed anything, especially not to feel that she owed anything to him. Rosa, who was as prone to silence as Tomas himself, listened quietly to his three recommendations and then suggested she be allowed to use a corner of one of the rooms to prepare essences for sale to a local perfumery, bringing in a little extra money to help out with expenses. So far so good. Then there was the problem that there was only one bed which the two of them had to share for four hours every night. Tomas worked from 11 to 7 and they shared the bed from 3 or 4 in the morning until about 7 a.m. when Rosa got up.

  It had nothing to do with a lack of imagination. Without having had to work it out beforehand, they'd taken to sleeping in shifts, and on separate halves of the bed, head to toe.' he problem was more fundamental, more essentially pragmatic. A foot is capable of provoking as much erotic attraction as a face, and Tomas dreamed he was nibbling on
Rosa's tiny toes. For several days now they'd both slept poorly and little during the few hours when they occupied the bed together.

  While the journalist was busy thinking that any minute the widow was going to start taking her clothes off in front of him, and while Tomas thought lovingly about Rosa's toes, in nearby Tacubaya, on the outskirts of town, the poet Fermin Valencia lay on his bed and listened ecstatically to the esoteric theories of Celeste the Mysterious.

  "...I'm talking about inner fortheth. All around uth. You get it?... Do you believe in magnetithm? It'th a thientific fact," Celeste explained to him. She was a different sort of poem, this woman. About thirty years old, speaking with a lisp, slightly cross-eyed, red hair, overflowing breasts (the right one a little bigger than the left, the poet wondered, or was it just a question of perspective?), a superb pair of legs. A run in her right stocking captivated the poet's attention. He nodded his head vehemently as she spoke, lying across his bed on top of the complete works of Voltaire, smoking a cigarette.

  "It'th abtholutely thientific. Electric waveth connecting your mind with mine. It all dependth on whothe energy ith thtrongetht."

  The woman had appeared unexpectedly at his door, smiling, dragging her lilac-colored shawl over the dust-covered chairs, scattered papers, dirty glasses, finally dropping it over a washbasin filled with tequila the poet had used to disinfect a cut on his leg where he'd been hit by falling glass the night of the gunfight.

  She'd introduced herself as Madame Thuareth and, after confirming that her host was in fact the poet Fermin Valencia, she'd started in with her story about mysterious electric forces.

  "And that'th only part of it.There'th other fortheth that neither of uth will ever be aware of. Do you believe in God?"

  The poet shook his head.

  "But thertainly you believe in natural fortheth?"

  The poet shook his head, trying to look serious, blowing smoke up at the ceiling.

  "In thienthe? Do you believe in thientific thinking?"

  the poet shook his head again. He looked at her suspiciously.

  "Don't you believe in anything at all? What a thilly quethtion... everybody believth in thomething."

  "You've got a run in your stocking, ma'am," the poet said, tracing his index finger softly along the inside of her leg.

  He almost thought he could see her leg vibrate slightly under his touch, and wondered if maybe there wasn't something to all this talk about magnetic fortheth after all.

  The woman giggled, inching away from the poet's probing finger and brushing back a curl of red hair that had fallen flirtatiously across her face.

  Pioquinto Manterola glanced cautiously at the dying hod carrier and confirmed that the man continued his slow slide away from life, eyes glued to the wall seeing nothing, lightless eyes, he thought, looking out onto the other side. Reassured, he returned his attention to the widow, who sat mechanically unbuttoning her blouse, her eyes on his face and her smile blooming like the flowers in the vase. A smile whose tremendous beauty-the inkslinger told himself-accustomed as he was in his line of work to making this sort of appraisal-contained a certain aftertaste of cruelty.

  "Tomas, we could sleep together, you know. I mean really together, instead of hiding from each other in the same bed... Even if there were two beds here I'd say the same thing...," said Rosa, looking straight at the Chinaman chewing slowly on his eggs and sausage.

  "Look into my eyeth," Celeste ordered the poet. "Look deep into my eyeth. You will thee a lake, the blue thea."

  But the widow Margarita's eyes were violet and her skin under her white blouse was even whiter still.

  "Ale you sule?"

  "A thtitl, calm othean of blue water, with jutht the thoft rocking of the waveth."

  "What about your friend there in the other bed?" asked Margarita, demonstrating that she was not only cold but cautious, too.

  "Maybe a pair of theagulls floating over the water, thwaying back and forth in the air," murmured the hypnotist.

  "Maybe we should get anothel bed."

  "You feel thleepy, a thoft thleepineth, a power moving into your body..."

  "He's been lying there like that in a coma for days, looking at the wall. He never moves. They say it's only a matter of hours now...

  "You mean two beds?"

  "Are you feeling thleepy now?"

  "No, just one, a biggel one."

  "How's your leg?" asked the widow, letting her black skirt fall to the floor and revealing a pair of long legs in smoky silk stockings, the latest in German fashion judging from the girlie magazines that arrived occasionally by steamship from Hamburg.

  "Very thleepy. You are feeling very thleepy."

  "Speaking of legs..." said the journalist, who couldn't pass up a chance to mix life and art, "you've got a pretty nice pair there yourself, Margarita."

  "You are thinking into my eyeth."

  "Which end are we going to put the headboard at, yours or mine?" asked Rosa, shedding a single tear. Tomas abandoned his eggs and sausage and stretched his hand out across the table. Their two hands were more brown than yellow. Their children would be even darker still, and none of them would speak with an accent. It was the effects of the climate. But they could just as well live in Australia, or Vienna, or even China. There was talk about a revolution in China... They'd have to learn to speak Chinese... But which one, Cantonese or Mandarin?

  "What would you think about slipping into something a little more comfortable?" asked the poet, breaking the oceanic enchantment glowing inside the eyes of redheaded Celeste.

  "Here, move your leg a little over that way," said Margarita, climbing onto the bed, her hat still on her head.

  The next day the poet confessed that he was on the point of succumbing, but he didn't see how anyone could feel sleepy with all those thh's buzzing in his ears. The journalist, on the other hand, kept the fact hidden in some far corner of his memory that his gaze had wandered from the widow's violet eyes down to her white brocaded panties only to discover they had a small perforation sewn into them. It was the first time he'd ever been seduced by a woman with a fly in her underwear. Tomas didn't tell anything because there was nothing to tell.

  Perhaps the most transcendental of all these crossed stories was that half an hour later a pair of stretcher bearers walked into the reporter's hospital room, and after discovering the death of the hod carrier, carted him away. They took him down two flights of stairs and deposited him on a slab in the basement.

  There the construction worker stood up, took a shiny tenpeso coin out of the pocket of his robe, and handed it to the stretcher bearers. Tugging surreptitiously at his underwear, he did the best he could to conceal the hard-on pushing up from underneath his robe.

  A SMALL CLOUD OF MIST rose up from where the horses stood pissing onto the cobblestones. A pair of gendarmes jousted playfully with their swords.

  Tomas walked between the horses toward the factory door where the strikers stood watching the policemen with distrust.

  A banner hung over the door denouncing the two foremen whose ouster was demanded by the union: "Pierre's never read a book in his life and Rodriguez is a disgusting satyr who thinks he's handsome."

  The Chinaman smiled. Illiteracy and personal vanity hardly seemed like sufficient grounds for firing a pair of foremen and paralyzing a 500-worker factory. But behind the banner there was another story, the story of a bitter struggle with the owner, a Frenchman named Donadieu who-with the aid of his two foremen-attempted to run his mill with an iron hand, in repeated violation of the workers' contract. So when you took into account the fact that one of the foremen had outlawed newspapers inside the plant (even the reactionary Excelsior) and the other one was famous for making passes at the women workers, the spark justified the size of the blaze.

  "What's up, companelos?" he greeted the strikers at the gate. There were about forty workers from the Abeja, and another fifteen or so from nearby factories who had come out in solidarity.

  "They want
us to open the gate, Tomas," said Ciro Mendoza.

  The Abeja strike was the first in the history of the Valley of Mexico in which the workers not only walked off the job, but took over the factory itself, closing the doors to scabs and nonunion workers. That's what had brought out the half dozen mounted police and given rise to the "red guard" of workers at the gate (inaugurating a grand tradition that was to last throughout the coming years). That's what had attracted the Black Marias and the gendarmery colonel, sitting in his convertible discussing the situation with the mill's manager.

  "Who wants you to?"

  "Colonel Gomez. He says it's illegal for us to shut the place down. But what's really going on is that Donadieu's been busy recruiting scabs since yesterday, and he's got them all in a house a couple of blocks from here, waiting for his chance to get into the factory."

  Tomas looked at the officer, the same man whose name had been circulating around the domino table. He'd changed very little since Tomas had first encountered him three years ago in Tampico: a small dark man dressed in tall riding boots, tight-fitting pants, military jacket, his mouth like a single fine, nearly lipless, line across his face, short bristly hair fighting to stick out from under his kepi. His small, almost delicate hands toyed absentmindedly with a riding whip.

  "Let's tuln the tables on them, what do you say? You go tell the colonel that we'le going to open the dool to the mill, and me and the companelos'll head over to the house where Donadieu's got his scabs and we'll cut them off befole they evel get hele."

  "Sounds good. I'll give you ten minutes. They're over in a house on the side street by Satanas's store, a great big place with a red door. You can't miss it. The place belongs to Zacarias the accountant."

  Tomas went over to talk with the rest of the workers.

  "How many of you men ale alined?" he asked. "Meet me in five minutes in flont of Satanas's stole."

  And he sauntered off, staring over at the colonel. Their eyes met for a moment and Tomas remembered the old song about Tampico.