‘That testimony is borne out by the mayor of the Totonaca hamlet of San Antonio Ojital, whose wells and plant-life carry the tell-tale signs of oil pollution: shrivelled mandarins, water thick as molasses, and air that tastes of smog.
‘Apolonia Xanat Benítez claims that two weeks after refusing a compensation offer from Ajenjo for her land, a known member of local organised crime – masquerading as a Veracruz State police officer – attempted to force her family out of their home.
‘“He told us, ‘We’ve made a generous offer, and if you’re here when we come back, you’re dead’,” she explained. “But we’d rather die than leave.”’
Yet another buzz: Jon. ‘You bastard. Now we all have to go to Poza Rica.’
‘A drilling crew formerly employed by Ajenjo have also attested that fracking equipment – purchased from a US multinational oil concern for use at a site outside Tamiahua – was used to dispose of the bodies of people murdered by Puccini’s local Zeta faction.
‘“We stuffed binbags full of people’s limbs into the wells and switched on the motors,” said one former driller. “Cut up, it’s hard to know how many bodies there were.”
‘Both the driller and his colleague confirmed that a Zeta employed as a lawyer by the local petrol workers’ union and another gang member, who had infiltrated the local police, oversaw the disposal operation, which took place in May 2014, just before the elite Guardia Civil police force was called in by the state government to deal with spiralling violence in the city.’
Francisco left a voice note. You could hear the relief in his voice, and the wheels of his car speeding on the road.
‘Great news,’ he said. ‘Everyone wants to talk. I’m off to see a bunch of oil workers now. Later, I’m off to the port – some documentary makers flew in from Colombia.’ He paused. ‘You know, Carlos really did something amazing.’
‘Cartel members have attested to the continued alliance between Ajenjo and local law enforcement, with murdered gang member Abel “Dientes de Tiburón” Carranza being involved in the murder of Mexican photojournalist Carlos Arana, and the disappearance of student activist Julián Gallardo, dashing Poza Rica’s hopes that a clean-up on crime might lure investment and employment back to Mexico’s former oil capital, as well as confirming fears that pollution and a nexus of organised crime and corrupt members of the elite Guardia Civil police force will continue to poison civic life for some time to come.’
Flicking through the tabs on my browser, I saw that all the main news websites were running us as a top story – me and Carlos, our names everywhere, in places we’d always dreamed of.
After not a very long time, I switched my phone off before taking my coffee up to the roof terrace, then shut the window and sank back against the metal frame of the chair, my head in my hands.
‘I’m so not ready for this,’ I said, turning the tape recorder over in my pocket.
From the terrace I could see right through the door of a semi-derelict church on the corner. Red wax dripped and fumed and caught fire on a tray by the altar. Opposite the church, beside a portico ruined in the 1773 quake, Mayan women sat with corn and chayote and chillies spread out on red-pink blankets zigzag patterned like the crop fields all around the town. Watching them calmed me down enough to head downstairs and make for Veronica’s house.
Antigua’s a central node of the region’s backpacker trail, so the clubs were already loud with the yawp of happy tourists and the thud of dance music, but Veronica’s street was a solid dozen blocks from all that, backing onto a lush hillside. The only sounds were the odd motorbike blatting past, the pulse of crickets, birds chittering from their nests in the hollowed-out ruins of churches. Under the sodium lights the collapsed naves and domes could have been the little gravel arches my poor dead fish used to swim around. The sky’s eastern corner was all mute white flashes from the Pacaya volcano erupting in the distance.
The house lay at the very end of the street – a colonial-style villa painted blue, behind a huge seamed wood door, whose knocker was a massive steel ring that hung from a lion’s mouth.
‘Three knocks is enough, right?’ I said to nobody, then did what I’d flown all this way to do.
Veronica didn’t take long arriving at the door. When she did, she had a tea towel in one hand a mug in the other.
‘Andrew.’ The look on her face was pretty much what you’d expect: three kinds of What the hell are you doing here? – angry, surprised, touched – all mixed in together, but she pulled wide the door all the same. ‘Well, come on in.’
‘Thanks, Ms Arana.’ I followed her into a high-ceilinged stone hall bristling on all sides with small wooden school chairs. Pointing at them, I said, ‘These chairs, they’re one of your exhibitions, right? Carlos showed me a photo once. Turned out great.’
She nodded. ‘From late last year. For the anniversary of the ceasefire. They’re all from Nebaj.’
‘Where the massacres happened.’
‘That’s right.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Schools couldn’t afford furniture up in that neck of the woods, you know. Used to have to bring their own chairs. One for every kid murdered in Nebaj during the war.’
The breath she sucked in sounded hot, and she turned her eyes on the floor.
‘I never thought—’ She cut herself off. ‘Excuse me.’ She turned away for a moment, pinching her nose, her thick-rimmed red glasses resting on her fingers. ‘OK. I’ll make coffee.’
We walked past a door in the hallway that opened onto her studio. Part of a large wooden Pieta stood at the centre of the room. Mary’s face was stained black. The hair cascading from under her blue wimple was real. She had no son in her arms.
‘It’s from 1541,’ she said. ‘First year the city was destroyed. This was all they could rescue from the cathedral after the eruption.’
On my left side the terrace lawn was a lush green, pocked with deep purple azaleas. A fountain splashed at the centre. More saints hung on the walls: Saint Lucia offering forth her eyes on a plate, Saint Sebastian’s mute groan and livid wounds, Saint Jude’s brass medallion of Jesus in profile.
‘Must get pretty quiet around here,’ I said as we skirted around the terrace to her kitchen.
‘That’s the way I like it,’ she said. ‘Usually.’
Huge yellow clay bowls hung on hooks all over the terracotta tiled walls, beside old cast-iron skillets, tongs, pokers. The stove in the corner was an Aga. A wooden Jesus with hinged limbs sat on one of the chairs.
‘Sorry about this guy,’ she said. ‘He’s too heavy to hang on the walls.’
I sat down next to Jesus. His lapis lazuli eyes glittered in the kitchen’s dim wattage. ‘That’s the rest of that Pieta, right?’
‘Yes,’ she said, clanking a pot onto the stove. She stood there, wordless, until the water boiled, then said, ‘How was your flight?’
‘Slept all the way,’ I said. ‘Didn’t expect that.’
‘Oh, I’m not surprised.’ She carried a brimming cafetière to the table. ‘You had a hard couple of weeks.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Nothing compared to … You know.’
‘Pain is pain.’ Veronica pressed down the plunger and poured us a cup each. For a moment she stared at her coffee, her long white hair shining in the light. She and Carlos, they had the same strong-boned face, fierce eyes, sceptical eyebrows.
Carlos, if you get this, you take after her like you wouldn’t believe.
‘How have you been?’ I said.
Her gaze slowly lifted to the Jesus statue sitting next to me, then moved across to meet my eyes. ‘I don’t know.’
The fountain’s splashing grew louder as a fine rain began to fall.
‘Every morning,’ she said, and took a breath. ‘Every morning, all those years he was working, I’d check for a message from him. First thing I did, every single day.’
The coffee cup on the white saucer was the pupil of a staring eye.
She looked at me sidelong
and raised the cup to her lips.
‘You can smoke if you want, by the way,’ she said.
‘I think I’m all right.’ A shiver uncoiled from the base of my skull, and I rapped my knuckles on the table until I was ready to say what I’d come to say. ‘I’m sorry for what I did to your son. If I hadn’t gone to him four years ago, we wouldn’t be here. And he’d still be here.’ I folded my arms, stared at my lap. ‘I took him from you. Like he was mine.’
Her long-boned hand was cool on my forearm.
‘Well, he was yours,’ she said. ‘Naturally, I was happy he’d found someone, but the thought of him going back to that kind of work?’ She shook her head. ‘Of course I blamed you. And I thought I’d never stop doing that.’ Her voice went quiet. ‘But then I started to see him. Nights like these –’ she pointed out the window ‘– the rain, it’d be his voice whispering. Telling me it was OK. To go to sleep. That he was safe. That he was something like happy. And, you know,’ she said, ‘you get to my age, you think everything’s early-onset dementia.’ She laughed. ‘Or maybe it’s not even that early any more. I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘Last few days, I’ve been waking up with his hand on my head, stroking my hair. Telling me you’d probably turn up here sometime. That I should be nice about it.’ She sighed through her nose, her eyes shut, shaking her head. ‘And look, really, I knew you didn’t have to twist his arm for him to leave El Paso.’ Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. ‘You and me put together couldn’t have kept him away from his work. Day he stole his first camera from my studio and came back with a copy of the paper, with his photos, that’s when I knew. The look on his face when he showed them to me. Like a bird of prey.’ She made a crease of her mouth. ‘No way to coop that up. No, he wanted to solve the world or die trying. And in Mexico, you die trying.’ She stared at the table. The tears brimmed but didn’t flow.
My knuckles tapped the table in time with the rain blattering on the roof. ‘I didn’t know you knew about – you know. Us.’
She smiled. ‘When it’s your son, the closet is see-through. I think I knew how he felt before you did. The day after you met, I couldn’t shut him up on the phone. All came spilling out of him – “Ma, I met this writer, he’s even more desperate than me, he’s polite enough for you to approve, and we’re going to save Mexican journalism”.’
‘Sounds about right.’ I scratched the back of my head. ‘I mean. You know. Like something he’d say.’
‘It sounds about right, too.’ She looked up at the rain teeming the glass. ‘I read the story. You boys did well.’
‘We did OK.’
I took my tape recorder from my pocket and laid it on the table.
‘Is that …?’
‘Yeah. Day we met,’ I said. ‘Beyond a certain point it’s just the sound of us making terrible drinks, to be honest. But, you know. It’s his voice, or whatever.’
She picked up the recorder and pressed play.
There it was again: the door shutting on Room 404 at that El Paso hotel; Carlos sniffling with his cold, swearing about his hangover, asking, ‘Is that thing on?’; and the sound of a lighter flaring once, twice.
‘Can we listen to it?’ his mother said over the hiss of the tape’s wheels turning.
‘The whole thing?’
She nodded.
‘Sure.’
Outside, the night darkened, and Jesus’ statue cast a shadow on the floor. Carlos’ mother, she laughed, smiled, cried a little at times. Me, I just patted her hand and listened to our story go tapering up into the light, gentle as candle-smoke.
‘This is my favourite part,’ I told her, about an hour into the recording.
‘How did you get into the job?’ I heard myself ask.
Carlos’ voice was cottony with held-in smoke. ‘So back when I was young, my mother was so careful with me. Never let me outside. Understandable, you know? My dad wasn’t in the picture, she’d moved from Vermont, and so I was the only home she had. But when you’re sixteen, you’re an asshole. All you want to do is your own thing. And I’d ask her, “C’mon, I want to hang out in town.” And she’d say, “Not if they pay me.” And one day I asked her, “What if they pay me?” And she said she guessed that was fine.’
Carlos’ mother laughed, sniffed.
‘So what I did was I took one of her old cameras, started walking around Juárez looking for cool faces,’ he said.
‘The brat,’ said Carlos’ mother.
‘And me, I knew a lot about the narcos,’ said Carlos. ‘Way most kids know footballers is the way I knew narcos. My room was this, like, cave of posters of those bastards. I had Carrillo Fuentes, I had Arellano Félix, I had El Güero Palma. I wasn’t allowed have El Chapo, but I didn’t like him, anyway.’
She held her face in her hands. ‘That room was horrifying.’
‘That first day in Juárez, with my mother’s camera, first face I find, it’s this old lieutenant from the Carrillo Fuentes years.’
She watched the tape turn in the deck. Her smile was warm and absent.
‘One of the old generation,’ said Carlos. ‘One of those guys like they used to have in every town, right up there with the priest, the mayor, and the teacher – except this guy, this kind of narco, he’d plough real money into the town. Fly weed bales across the border, fly back with bales of dollars, and sit in his house all day waiting for people to ask for his help.’
‘I was furious when he told me,’ his mother said. ‘But so proud, too.’
‘So this guy I saw, he was one of them. And he was just working in a car park. Old and leathery and moustached. And I just walked up, asked him for a photo, and he was so flattered that we did an interview. Sent the pics to the Diario. And the rest is history.’ He sucked smoke. ‘I got a glittering career behind me, cabrón.’
When the tape clicked off it was nearly dawn. Veronica heaved a sigh so long and deep that you could hear kilos of grief lift and drop inside her.
‘You can keep the recorder,’ I said.
Her eyes flicked to meet mine. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t. That’s yours.’
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Honestly. I have my ways to remember him.’
She turned the recorder in her hand. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah. It’s nice to have his voice around. Most of the time,’ I said. Outside, the roar of the pre-dawn storm was falling quiet.
She got up from the chair. ‘I have something for you as well.’
Her footsteps creaked up a dark wood staircase lined with more saints: Maximón with his drooping moustache and sad gaze; placid, bearded Hermano Pedro; Saint John gripping the shoulder of Jesus.
‘Here you go,’ she said in the doorway, yellow light spilling over her from behind. She held out an envelope-shaped cardboard parcel tied with a rough wool string. When I took it from her hands the contents sifted into the corner.
‘Not all of him,’ she said. ‘I want to scatter some in the desert.’
When we hugged she shook crying in my arms for a long time, and I kept my eyes on the parcel in my hands, running my thumb along the smooth cardboard, and for a moment it was the three of us all together.
The sky was sheer Kodachrome blue that morning on the terrace of my hotel room, the mist and cigarette smoke and my own sleepiness so thick around me that I could nearly imagine Carlos sitting beside me on the other wrought-iron chair, his eyes red, his neck ringed in bruises. The envelope of his ashes lay on the table beside my phone.
He pointed at the envelope with a broken finger. ‘You know where to go with that, vato?’
A cloud of starlings scattered through the air. Down below, a couple of white tourists snapped pictures of the ruined portico where the women had been selling their wares the day before. The starlings formed a ‘V’ in the air above the soaked green hotel garden of palm trees and banana leaves.
‘Shit, man,’ I said through a yawn, hugging his jacket around myself. ‘I’m really going to miss you.’
Carlos exhale
d smoke, and his outline shivered. ‘You know I’m not really there, right?’
The star-shaped holes on his chest, the ones rimmed in blue fire, those holes widened now, and sent grey smoke fraying up to join with the cigarette between his shapeless tapering fingers.
‘But that manager of yours might be.’
He was a cloud now, floating above his chair, and then his cigarette was between my lips like it had been all along, and it was just me and the waking town.
The dial-tone went for ages, seemed like.
‘No way,’ you said at last.
‘Ah, yeah. Story’s done. On holidays.’
‘Well, congrats. Whereabouts?’
‘Guatemala,’ I said. ‘My room still free?’
There was a smile in your voice. ‘Could be. Thinking of coming back?’
Carlos’ last threads of smoke widened and frayed and were gone.
To get from Guatemala to Uruguay, all you have to do is get the night-flight on LAN as far as Chile. Then it’s a one-hour hop to Montevideo and a bus to Colonia.
‘Kind of.’
‘When?’
The starlings rose breaking into empty blue air. I was fifty-five kilos of blood and muscle, a single backpack, and a couple of impending paycheques.
‘Well, today, to be honest.’
‘Wow. Well, OK,’ you said through a laugh. ‘Te espero acá.’
In Spanish, the verb esperar, it means ‘to hope’, ‘to wait’, and ‘to expect’. Which one you meant, I didn’t know, but I guessed it was maybe all three.
A dedication to ‘the real Carlos’
They say you have your whole life to write your first book, but I really have been trying to write this one for almost a decade.
Back in 2008, Mexico was two years into the piecemeal armed conflict that would leave over two hundred thousand people dead or missing over the decade to follow, and I was a second-year literature student at Trinity College, Dublin, trying to write a book about two men whose love for one another was very much a hurting thing.
Call Him Mine Page 19