"This time, Gomez, you'le going to get it. And if the bosses aleady paid you off, you'le just going to have to give them theil money back," he thought, grinning at the officer getting out of his car, still playing with the riding whip in his hands.
THERE SHE WAS in that pink tulle sundress, a broadbrimmed hat on her head, bare feet playing in the waves, digging her fingers into the sand, the salt water bleaching the bright red from her nails. He remembered how her dress swayed around her hips, how she used to sing to him, how the straps of her tulle dress slipped off her shoulders, how her white breasts danced in the open air. He remembered the palm trees, the evening light, the sun setting behind the refinery towers of the Huasteca Petroleum Company. It was all connected in his mind with that same song everybody was singing back then. He remembered the first time he'd heard it, from some drunk singing in the street: Oh, beautiful Tampico, tropical paradise, the glory of the republic, wherever Igo, I'll remember you. He remembered. And he thought that a man's memory was a pointless game created by idle gods.
Her name was Greta. At least that's what she called herself, and she wore a white leghorn hat. She blamed the heat. But Tomas, he liked the sticky heat, the blazing sun that burned their skin, that made them sweat, that dried them off. She killed herself with arsenic. Meticulously distilled from ten sheets of flypaper. Like a good German, disciplined and precise. He wasn't the type for suicide. But hers was another story. And now all that was left was his memory of the woman on the beach in the evening, soaking her feet in the wide ocean, half slipping out of her pink tulle dress so that her huge white breasts glowed in the last rays of the setting sun. And in the middle of all that, a patriotic song about the glories of Tampico.
"THREE MASKED MEN TRY TO KILL US, thewidowsays she's got nothing to do with it, the trombonist and his brother are dead, not to mention the Englishman who despite all indications to the contrary didn't commit suicide. Does anybody have any idea what's going on here?" asked the poet as he helped Manterola lean back in the hospital bed.
"No, but that's nothing new, not for me and not for Mexico. You show me one person who understands anything around here. Who the hell knows anything about what's going on in this wonderful country of ours? Everybody pretends like they know, they try and fool everybody else, but they're just as much in the dark as the next guy. How about you, do you understand any of it?"
"Don't look at me, I couldn't agree with you more," said the lawyer Verdugo, throwing the flowers into the wastebasket, and the water back into the washbasin so he could use the vase for an ashtray.
Tomas, sitting on the bed recently vacated by the deceased hod carrier, stared out dreamily at the late-night traffic filling the street below. With his left hand, he scratched the fuzz above his upper lip.
"You growing a mustache, Tomas?" asked the journalist.
The Chinaman nodded and flashed the quickest of smiles.
"I didn't think you people could grow a mustache," said the poet, dragging the small night table in between the two beds.
"By this time I think you should have figuled out that I'm a lathel apochlyphal Chinaman. The kind of Chinaman who leads Celvantes, Tolstoi, Blasco Ibanez, and Balzac. If I wele you, I might stalt asking myself if youl domino paltnel wasn't a spy for Alfonso XIII."
"The fact of the matter is, at this point I'm ready to believe just about anything... except that," said the poet.
"Like I said, it's a hell of a country!" sighed Verdugo.
"Now gentlemen, let's not start blaming the country for all our problems. The truth is, she's somewhat the worse for wear after so many years of bullets and blood, but it's certainly not her fault."
"The problem isn't too much bullets, but not enough," said the poet. "That's what happens with these halfway revolutions. They're like a tree without any leaves. The country's suffered for it, hell, we all have. When you come right down to it, it's all a matter of hope..."
"If that's where this conversation's going, you can count me out. I'm too much of a cynic to be able to handle that rot," said Verdugo, pulling the box of dominoes out of the pocket of his gabardine coat (English-made, and purchased at the Correo Espanol with forty pesos won in a dice game). He spilled the bones out onto the night table, but it was too small to hold them all. Tomas got up, took a picture down from the wall, a Diirer reproduction, and laid it on top of the bedside table. The bones slid along the glass a fraction of an inch above the surprised faces of the apostles and the leftovers from the Last Supper.
"The winners were the ones with the most resistance, the guys with the thickest skins, the hardest shells," said the reporter, unwilling to leave the poet hanging alone in the Revolutionary balance. "Obregon won in the end because, if you don't count the time he was military governor in Mexico City and had the priests out sweeping the streets, he was always the most adaptable, he was always the one who could find himself a place inside the system."
"Of course. That's what it took to come out on top. The Revolution was lost long before it was over. It was lost as soon as the generals decided it was better to get married to the landlords' daughters than to rape them."
"I'm sorry to say I don't agree," said Verdugo, taking a pack of cigars out of his jacket pocket and offering them around. Only the journalist took one. "Obregon and his officers would much rather have them as their whores and mistresses. That's one of the great moral advances of the Revolution. The aristocracy has taught them how to do business, not how to sit at table. They've simply learned how to turn power into money, not into good manners."
"You really believe that the generals won the Revolution?" asked the poet, slapping the double-six down on top of Diirer's apostles. "Well, they didn't. The licenciados, the professionals, lawyers and the like, were the ones who won it in the end... these newfangled creatures crawling out from under the rocks everywhere you look. Lawyers... jolly types, with a little bit of education under their belts.. .but not too much, of course... And every one of them's got their own personal little story about the Revolution to whip out just in case.. .field secretary to some general, author of this or that treaty or subparagraph of the constitution; ex-quartermasters, organizing troop trains from who knows where, editing some newspaper somewhere..."
The reporter rapped his knuckles on the glass tabletop, passing the hand.
"What are you passing for?" the poet interrupted himself. "Looks like that busted leg of yours has affected your brain."
"Listen, poet, the only bad bones I've got to worry about right now are these ones sitting here on the table in front of me."
Then Tomas knocked on the picture frame, passing to the lawyer Verdugo who laughed out loud.
"Now you've done it, Fermin. That's what you get for badmouthing lawyers when you've got one sitting right next to you."
The poet stopped to think. He had two sixes left, meaning that Verdugo had the other four. It was going to take a bit of maneuvering to get out of this one.
"I didn't mean anything personal, you understand," said the poet.
"Of course not. And if I beat your pants off, I'm sure you'll understand it's got nothing to do with my professional pride."
"It's all part of the game."
The metallic clatter from the streetcar yard drifted in through the window. Then it started to rain, the soft drops slapping against the glass and muffling the sounds from outside.
"My problem's always been that I never really believed," said the reporter. "I liked Ricardo Flores Magon, but he was always too far away. The Villistas and Zapatistas were my type all right, but they always moved too fast and shot too much, so that I either never had the chance or never wanted to get too close. I suppose it's got something to do with my being a reporter, always too caught up in the details, the little stories, not with the big ideas. Always the observer, always watching from outside. Of course there were individuals I liked well enough, the way they went into the Revolution and when it was over came out the other side without selling out. Colonel Mugica in'17,
de la Huerta when he was provisional president, Lucio Blanco in '15, Ramirez Garrido when he was chief of police. Hell, I never thought I'd be partial to a police chief, but Ramirez Garrido's a good man. He made the cops join the union, protected the prostitutes, and organized cooperative kitchens in the jails."
"What's Ramirez Garrido up to now?" asked the poet. After two more rounds, the lawyer had turned the game back to sixes, and he had no choice but to play one of his.
"I think he wants to be governor of Tabasco or something like that. Pass," said Pioquinto Manterola. Besides his abominable hand and the fact that he'd gone and gotten himself thinking about his tangled and foggy relationship with the Mexican Revolution, it suddenly dawned on him that he was in love.
Verdugo watched the Chinaman play a five, blocking off his sixes, and forcing him instead to play a four, giving the poet a brief respite.
"I'm still a Villista at heart," said the poet, setting the four/two down on the glass. "I'll always remember how the world changed with every charge of Villa's cavalry, how the whole world became undone somehow. We were fury on horseback, the destruction of the old order. What'd they call Attila the Hun? The scourge of God? I used to make up poems on horseback, riding alongside illiterate peons, traveling photographers, ex-cattle rustlers... Do you understand? In front of us, the federales, the machine guns, the men with their shiny buttons, falling down like toy soldiers.
"A revolution's fought with ideas and violence. We had plenty of violence but not too many ideas. That's what made me doubt all along. I hated things the way they were as much as the next guy, but I didn't know how to turn that hate into something else. Maybe it's just that I didn't really want to change things, I just wanted them to stay the way they were, only with different people running the show."
"Well, if that's what you wanted, Verdugo, that's what you got. All we have today is a sort of modernized version of the same thing as before, full of words, and graves you've got to go visit every Sunday," said the journalist. "But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe what really happened is that we opened the doors of change. Maybe what all those years of war were about was to just open the door a little bit, so the changes could start to happen. They've given land to the campesinos, haven't they? We've got a new constitution, don't we? They took the power away from the Church, they outlawed the company store."
"You'le wasting youl bleath, fliends.lhat levolution did what it had to do. Now comes the second one, the leal one, the wolkel's levolution."
"I'd like to believe, you, Tomas," said Verdugo, playing his last six and losing control of the game. "But faith is something you've got to nourish to keep it alive. It's been too long now since I turned into a sort of a beggar of the heart and mind, living like a parasite on borrowed ideas."
"If General Villa rises up again, I might just go and join him for another go-round."
"I suppose that sooner or later a man's got to stop being an observer and take a stand. Although maybe there is such a thing as an active observer, maybe it's not such a bad thing to have somebody around to tell what happened," said the reporter, turning the game to threes, making everybody pass, and then going out with the double-threes and the three/one.
"Well, will you look at that? Maybe you don't know too much about levolution, Newsman, but you sule do know how to play dominoes."
"A man's got to be good at something..."
I N T H E WAIT I N G R 0 0 M outside the company president's office, Fermin Valencia sat and wrote with a pencil stub inside the little notebook he always carried with him: I stitch my soul to my skin/overcome with despair/life bleeds white/and still/no Singer was ever made that could mend it/ with fine needlework/ while I lament/ these things in me/I've lost/left/behind.
Fermin's notebook was filled with short poems, and every now and then some friend would take one and get it published in the newspaper or in one of the many magazines that had begun to appear in Mexico City since the Revolution. It made him proud to receive recognition as a poet and there wasn't anything else he'd rather do with his time than write poetry, but all the same every time he wrote a poem he felt like a poacher, like the perpetrator of some criminal act, an outlaw. So when the secretary came out of the office and told him to go inside, he hid the notebook behind his back in embarrassment, almost as if she'd caught him masturbating.
Henry Peltzer's office was lined with photographs of automobiles and full of shiny new rubber tires on pedestals, reflecting the light with their capricious geometric tread.' he German-GringoMexican entrepreneur sat behind an enormous mahogany desk, smoking an oversized cigar and playing with his gold watch chain. Peltzer was a living caricature of the new industrial bourgeoisie, as though he'd modeled his own image on Robinson's drawings of porcine bosses that illustrated John Reed's articles in Metropolitan Magazine.
"Mr. Valencia, good to see you. I sincerely hope our relationship will bring us as prosperous results as before."
"I sincerely hope so too, mister. What've you got for me?"
"What I have got, Valencia? What I have got? New Mexican tire, very soon, exceptional sales opportunity. Real good, real nice one.
"Well, I'll need more than that to work with. What's so special about it, how's it different, what's it cost?"
"A wonderful tire, just wonderful. Absolutely. Best tire in Mexico. Fits every car, every make, every model, good for all. Peltzer model 96-C. We call it THE ONLY ONE."
"The only one?"
"THE ONLY ONE."
"Okay. So what's the deal? Does it cost less, last longer?"
"No, costs more, lasts less. But very good tire, excellent tire. Imagine a car floating on air... Have a cigar."
"No thanks."
"Made in Papantla. Excellent. Just like tire."
"So how do you want to run it? You want to use the same angle as last time? A little cheap nationalism, the only Mexican tire, etc..."
"Not cheap nationalism, expensive nationalism. You leave spaces, we put in prices."
"Speaking of prices, how many lines are we talking about?"
"One, two, three good phrases. We take care of the rest right here, writers, artists. You just give us one, two, three good ones..."
"Five hundred pesos, a hundred up front," said the poet, preparing himself for Peltzer's counterattack.
"Pesos... Mexican pesos? This is a fortune. Impossible. Mexican industry cannot keep up with foreign competition, terrible situation. Better we do ad work here. No can do, my friend Valencia. Mr. Valencia. So what's it going to be?"
"Look, if you ask me to do twenty ads, it'll cost you thirty pesos each. But if you just want me to write the jingles, which is the most work, then my price is fixed, set, solid, good, excellent, the only one, but not cheap, just like your tire. Five hundred pesos."
"Listen to me, poet. I see you do not understand the situation of Mexican industry. We are still suffering the disaster of the Revolution. Any day, another one. Instability everywhere, bad for roads, bad for tires. Foreign competition is terrible. From Detroit come tires, many tires, terrible quality, but cheap, very cheap. Cars, there are many cars, five thousand imported last year, but competition terrible. Textile crisis, mining crisis, crisis crisis. No money. Lots of rumors. Rumors everywhere. Less money every day."
"What kind of rumors, Mr. Peltzer?"
"Rumors, problems, United States. Rumors, problems, petroleum. Rumors, army, coup d'etat. Again, again. Rumors everywhere, soldiers everywhere, even here."
The industrialist's voice took on a conspiratorial tone. He looked at his watch and pointed with a fat finger toward the door.
"Ten minutes and I have a visitor. You will see. Visitors come, visitors go."
"Five hundred," said the poet.
"Four hundred and not a cent more."
"Five hundred, or I go to work for Detroit for free, out of spite."
"Have a cigar. From Papantla, like tires."
"Five hundred."
"Everywhere rumors. Bad times. Strikes everywhere. Anarchists i
n the factories. One day yes, one day no, riots, insurrection."
The poet sighed. It figured that the owner of the only tire company in the country would haggle just like the owner of the corner store. Mr. Peltzer would never become a millionaire at that rate. Or who knows? Maybe that's what made a man a millionaire. The truth is, it was a three-hundred-peso job, but from Peltzer he wouldn't take anything less than four hundred. And whatever he could wangle out of him above that he'd give to the "riot and insurrection" anarchists Peltzer was so worried about. Probably some of Tomas' friends.
"I'll tell you what. Since you gave me a few ideas yourself about the product, I'm going to give you a ten-percent discount. Only I don't want you to get the idea that's the way I usually do business. But seeing as how you're a Mexican company"-the poet bit his lip-"competing with the foreign monopolies, and especially from such a rotten city as Detroit..."
"You have been to Detroit?"
"No."
"Okay, four hundred and forty, a nice even number, or better yet, four-fifty. Better, no?"
"Better yet four-sixty," said the poet, helping himself to a Papantla cigar.
Peltzer smiled broadly.
"Good advertisement, good, like tire, excellent tire."
"The best, my friend," said the poet, feeling a little bit like Diego de Alvarado selling glass beads to the Tlaxcaltecas.
Peltzer signed a voucher for the cashier and, after ceremoniously shaking hands, led the poet to the door.
Fermin smiled at Peltzer's secretary who he could just see through the partially opened door to the broom closet adjusting her stockings. He was heading through the swinging doors that led to the salesroom when he walked smack into a uniform. To be precise, he suddenly found his nose pressed against the upper button of the uniform tunic of a thin young army lieutenant. The poet mumbled an "excuse me,"but the officer stood staring at him for a moment and then suddenly went for his gun. Fortunately for the poet, the lieutenant carried a long-barreled Mauser automatic in a showy leather holster. While he wrestled to work the gun free, the poet kicked him in the shin and ran back the way he'd come. He had a vague idea of seeing a second man following behind the lieutenant, a blond dandy with a waxed mustache.
The Shadow of the Shadow Page 9