Mexico

by Josh Barkan

  The professor could feel the gonging again, the knocking at his temple.

  “Why did you sell the coke to my daughter?” he said.

  “Because she was a client. Because she wanted to buy, and we don’t ask questions. But she didn’t always pay, you know. One time she slept with me and I banged her white pussy and I gave her some coke for free.”

  The gangster reached into his pocket, and he threw some keys in the direction of the professor, hard, making the professor want to protect himself. The gangster fell on the ground and rolled and pulled out a gun, and the professor shot once, twice, a third time into the chest of the gangster while a bullet came out of the gangster’s gun, missing the professor, hitting the tin of the roof, breaking a hole through to the dark night outside. The gangster’s body lay, spread wide on the floor, the peach fuzz on his face covered with sweat, the hair gel perfectly combed back like he had just looked into the mirror. How could he have shot this man? How? The gun dropped from the hand of the professor and he lay over the body of the gangster and cried. He held the body in his arms and rocked back and forth weeping. He took blood from the chest of the body and went up to the white canvas staring at him like the blank walls of his mind and he smeared the blood on the canvas and rubbed it into the white surface and scratched the blood deeper and deeper into the white paint until the white and the blood dug into his nails. He wanted no part of the blood, but the blood was now stuck hard into his skin, and even after he cleaned his hands he would never be able to clean the blood.

  —

  For a year, in the neighboring town over from Puebla of Cholula, the professor climbed the remains of one of the highest pyramids in the world, the Tlachihualtepetl. The pyramid was built by the native Indians and then the church built a sanctuary to the Virgen de los Remedios on top. He did not believe in Christianity, or no more so than he believed that all the gods were the same, but people went to the church to find remedies and he supposed he did the same. From the top of the pyramid, where there is a balcony that gives a view out over the plain that runs until it reaches the base of the giant volcano of El Popo, and in the other direction to the peak of Orizaba, he looked out at the vastness of nature and at the people who dotted the ground. What difference did it make that he had killed one person out of the multitudes, when that person was a gangster? What difference did it make when so many—over seventy thousand—were dying in the drug war? That is what some of his friends told him. The police said he had acted in self-defense and they refused to judge him. There was an investigation. The case was clear, the gangster’s weapon was found in the studio, and the shopkeeper had seen the shootout with the gangster the night before. No one blamed the professor. But he blamed himself.

  He had practiced meditation before with his elder daughter, but never with his younger. It was exactly one year, to the day, since the shooting—June 15. He asked his younger daughter to come with him up to the top of the pyramid. He thought it would help both of them to heal on this one-year anniversary. The two daughters came with him. All three of the family walked with yoga mats, and they lay the mats on the ground at the top of the pyramid, on the balcony, in a place they could look out at the width of the valley, with green spreading into the distance until it slowly curved into a darker hue up the majestic mountains. A year ago, El Popo had exploded, but the volcano was calmer now, the lava contained, though there were recent signs of abnormal activity. The professor had been painting for a year, and he would have a show in Monterrey that his gallery owner said would be seen as brilliant. The professor sat on the ground and felt the rays of the sun falling peacefully on his chubby cheeks. He was plumping out more. He was returning to a state of near contentment. His younger daughter sat next to him and she imitated the movements of the elder daughter, folding her legs one on top of the other. All three of them faced the sun, closed their eyes, and held their palms gently in their laps, imitating the pose of the Buddha. The professor felt the presence of his younger daughter beside him. “I have been blind,” he said. “I have been so blind. I was blind to the man I shot. And I was blind to you. I could never see the suffering my affairs with the students had on you, growing up.” He reached over, with his eyes closed, and touched his younger daughter gently, and she held his hand for a second, her hand warm, then it fell to the side, cold.

  He opened and closed his eyes, and he could not get out of his sight the color red. It was the color of blood and his personal weight to bear. He asked for forgiveness from the heavens. He asked for his daughters to always be beside him. He asked for their love and understanding, and for the power to pay enough attention to them. He asked for his home to no longer be a fortress, to open his art up to the world. He had understood this from the gangster before he was killed. He asked for his mind to be stable. He asked for all of this, silently, and then he turned up to the sky radiating hard and pure light on him, light of judgment and forgiveness, and though he would have to ask for this forgiveness every day for the rest of his life, and though there was much for him to work on, he felt a bubbling lightness inside, a lightness perhaps too strong, too giddy, perhaps unstable, again, perhaps a delusion, his mind sluicing in and out, and he knew the universe was good, and with medication coursing through him his mouth opened partway and formed a vacant, distant smile, and it was not easy to see the trees in the distance.

  THE AMERICAN JOURNALIST

  For twenty years I have been a bounty hunter. Not a guy tracking down bodies, but a journalist based in Mexico City tracking down stories. I’ve seen it all, drug kingpins strafing bodies with machine guns, firing bullets out of a Hummer while the narcos they’re firing at shoot back, until both cars go up in flames. I’ve seen the nastiest prostitutes working the streets of La Zona Rosa at night, giving blowjobs for a simple sniff of glue. I’ve seen mothers claiming the Virgin of Guadalupe came to them in a dream, delivering their child immaculately, without sex with their husbands. I’ve seen swimsuit contestants dive off the cliffs of Cabo San Lucas in Mr. Universe–type contests. I’ve seen child acrobats beg for money on the streets of Mexico City, at the streetlights, while their fathers swallow flames and show off how resistant their skin can be to glass as they press their backs into broken beer bottles on the hot pavement. I’ve seen mothers with babies strapped to their shoulders walk a hundred miles to protest the lack of food back home, to politicians who wouldn’t give them the time of day. You name it, I’ve seen it down in Mexico during my time as the main correspondent for the Houston Chronicle. And while I was a Marine once, who huffed and puffed carrying a hundred pounds of rocks on my back, in my youth, running through whatever foreign lands they sent me to, I’ve seen shit down here in Mexico that would make you weep.

  The editors of the paper wouldn’t let me file the story about Ernesto. I think because it didn’t fit into any of the neat categories I’ve just described. The papers are fine with stories of poverty or violence, as long as it all fits into a neat bow. A story that fits what we already think is golden. Ever notice that all the roadside bomb stories in Afghanistan are A-OK? Or the stories about drones that have gone astray, killing a few collateral-damage villagers? Stories that make you feel safe, glad you’re secure and cozy in the U.S., rather than in some godforsaken place like rural Afghanistan or caught up in the drug war in Mexico, those stories are all right, as long as everyone plays their role correctly. But Ernesto was a bit of an odd tale.

  First, there was how he looked. Tall, with a big, hairy beard, a white guy with forehead wrinkles who looked like a nightclub bouncer, but he was an insurance agent who worked to save his company a lot of dough in big cases, and he was also a member of a punk rock band. The punk rock part is what ruined it for my editors. What’s an insurance company guy doing in a punk rock band? Ernesto collected fine art. He would hang out with some of the top visual artists in Mexico City. He had some of the best oil paintings in his apartment, and he liked conceptual art, like a thousand gold necklaces grouped together, hanging from the
ceiling in the shape of a phallus.

  Bottom line: Ernesto didn’t fit the image of a brown Mexican caught up in the violence of Mexico. Which is why they killed the story I sent about Ernesto when he was murdered two days ago. It didn’t help that I was with Ernesto when he was shot. The editors told me I was his friend. They said I was writing a biased story from the gut. They told me to take a few days off and then get back to writing “real stories.”

  —

  I met Ernesto a couple of years ago in the port of Veracruz. Some big tanker ship had banged into the pier at one of the enormous port facilities. The case seemed open and shut: a storm had pushed the boat sideways until it smashed into the pier, causing a few million dollars of damage to the pier and sinking a fifty-million-dollar boat. I was already in Veracruz, covering a story about dead bodies showing up from drug violence in the city, and editors always like it if you can get two stories in one location, and they love it even more if there’s a story about a natural disaster. Natural disasters fill readers with awe that after all the science we’ve developed, after all the robots and moon landings, we’re still at the mercy of the heavens. Any immense natural disaster story is good, but one in which a complex, expensive machine gets destroyed is even better. It hits home at our vulnerability. So I went over to the port to get the story, as extra gravy, during my time in Veracruz.

  Ernesto had on a button-down shirt, to give off a look of professionalism, but he was a professional in action, too, his collar wide open, his sleeves rolled up showing off his hairy arms, a clipboard in his hand, and wearing a hardhat. He had half a dozen divers in the water beneath the pier, checking exactly how the hull of the boat hit the dock. He gathered photos. He collected evidence. He proved there was doubt the ship had actually smashed and drowned because of the storm. It could have been due to a drunk captain. The angle of the impact against the dock wasn’t congruent with the angle of the prevailing winds and the damage from the storm. In the end, he saved his insurance company fifty million dollars, and only the dock was paid for under the policy.

  If Ernesto had to hire undercover cops to go through garbage in the dumpster behind a bank to prove his case, he would happily do so. He always wore sunglasses, aviator-shaped and large, with a mirrored cover to make it impossible to see his eyes and what he was thinking or calculating.

  I’m not sure he ever planted evidence to suit his cause, but I wouldn’t put it past him. I kept in touch with him because he was the kind of guy who could give you the kind of dirt, the kind of background information you sometimes needed to finish a story, to give it the color of the panties found from a lover inside the room of a politician, or whatever else the editors in Houston thought could “sex up the story.”

  But over time, what I liked about him most was that he would always invite me to the performances of his band, and I’d go.

  I wouldn’t say his music was punk, per se. It was rock, but with the kind of hammering repetition and rough voice that came out of punk. The drummer of his band had stripes carved on the side of his hair, giving him the look of an attacking tiger. The bass guitarist was round in shape, cutting hard on the rhythm, a fairly well known visual artist. And Ernesto would stand ramrod straight, in a dark nightclub with his mirrored shades on, in the seedy joints he and his pals chose to perform in, where there were sometimes prostitutes. The crowd was upper-middle-class friends from their high school days. The music was a release, a reminder of my own old high school days, a way out of the pressure of the “real” stories of one more child caught in the crossfire in a place like Ciudad Juárez.

  —

  I was writing a story about collectors in Mexico. Carlos Slim is widely known as the richest man in the world, worth personally seventy-five billion dollars. He owns the main telephone company in Mexico, Telcel, a monopoly he was given. He owns bakeries and malls and a chain of fast-food diners. He owns so many things, you can go to malls down here and every single type of shop in the place belongs to him. He’s also a collector of art, and he just built a large museum, called the Soumaya, that’s so tacky, in many respects—the typography for the name of the museum is the same as the typography for the name of his fast-food restaurant chain, and he has one of the restaurants in the basement of the museum, beneath multimillion-dollar paintings by Van Dyck and Rubens. Slim let his son-in-law design the building, so it ended up a complete disaster of nepotism, a structure with no natural light inside, which makes it almost impossible to see the otherwise fairly good collection. In one of the galleries, there’s a silver model of the architectural design of the museum, which rests in a leather case made by Bulgari—part of the whole self-congratulatory monument.

  Ernesto told me he knew another collector in Cuernavaca who he was willing to introduce me to. It was a politician, a local governor, who collected life-size dolls of Star Wars characters and Superman, all made by a Japanese company called Hot Toys. I had vaguely heard about these kinds of collectibles. I knew there were people who paid a lot for these toys on eBay. But I had no idea just how rare and valuable these kinds of dolls could be. Ernesto told me the governor was paying fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a month on these toys. Some of the individual dolls, with details as precise as the acne scars on a character like Han Solo, were going for as much as ten grand. It was the kind of story that seemed like it could go over well with the editors back home: goofy collections with pop culture dolls that everyone in the U.S. would know about, with the added twist this was all happening in Mexico. My hope was to try to get in the angle about corruption in Mexican politics, the idea that who the hell knew where all the money for this kind of collection was coming from?

  I asked Ernesto if the politician was independently wealthy, if he’d had money before he became a politician.

  “His money’s all new,” Ernesto said.

  So I asked Ernesto to introduce this politician to me the next time he went down to Cuernavaca.

  A month later, Ernesto called out of the blue. He and his buddies were going to be doing a concert in Cuernavaca, so he invited me down. He set up an appointment with the politician for us to see the doll collection, in the afternoon, the day of the concert.

  Some people like to hide their wealth when they know they’ve acquired it illegally, but others can’t help themselves, and they need an audience. That’s how a bunch of corrupt guys ultimately get caught. In Mexico there are guys, sometimes, driving three-hundred-thousand-dollar Ferraris around Mexico City, and when you see one you know the guy stole his money, somehow.

  I went to the house of the governor with Ernesto, and the governor’s maid opened a large wood door, from the sixteenth century. The house was just up the block from the Robert Brady Museum, the home of an American collector who established himself in Mexico in the 1960s, and who was a major friend of the collector Peggy Guggenheim. Brady did a painting of Guggenheim once, with her sunglasses on, holding her three white Maltese poodles. Brady had Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera paintings mixed in with sculptures of clay penises he’d found around the world. My point is, even the good collectors have some weird taste, a mix of good taste with the bad. It’s the rare collector who doesn’t have some secret fetish lurking in the background.

  Ernesto and I went into the home of the governor, and after we made it past the Spanish Colonial door, we entered a stone courtyard where monks used to roam, when they were living behind the main cathedral, and the courtyard was filled with life-size statues of Princess Leia, robots like R2-D2 and C-3PO, and a perfect replica of Sigourney Weaver panting with her sweaty shirt in Alien as she tried to escape from the deathly spaceship. There were figures from Blade Runner and of the Transformers. Each doll was handcrafted in Japan in limited edition, sent by airplane to Mexico City, and then brought to Cuernavaca.

  “Nice dolls,” I said to the governor. “How long have you been collecting them?”

  “They’re not dolls,” he told me. “They’re life-size action figures.” He slapped the back of a figure sha
ped like Darth Vader, minutes before Vader fights Luke Skywalker almost to the death.

  The governor looked a bit like a life-size character himself, his hair combed up and back Elvis Presley–style. His cheeks were scarred from what looked like bad skin as a child. He had on a kelly green Polo shirt, with the large figure of a polo rider on a horse. This kind of shirt, with the Polo insignia blown up to be three inches high, is well known as the kind of clothing a certain type of narco likes to wear.

  The violence in Cuernavaca had been getting much worse, lately. There were military checkpoints throughout the city. Rival narco groups were fighting in the streets. Not all the time, like up in the north near Juárez, but more and more. The son of a famous poet was killed, but in his case by the police, after some police working for some of the local drug gangs saw the son catching a glimpse of them. Rather than leave potential witnesses alone, the police just knocked off the son of the poet and his friends. They were found dead in a car.

  It was strange to see these action figures from dramatic, violent scenes when all around Cuernavaca you didn’t need action dolls to feel the tense moments of Hollywood; you could just go out your front door and into the main streets of the city.

  “Come here,” the governor said. “I’ll show you one of my favorite parts of the house.” He took us into the basement, down ancient stone steps with Roman arches overhead, where cobwebs were growing in the corners. I expected him to want to show us his wine collection. Some of these politicians love wine, and they like to show off how—supposedly—sophisticated they are.

  He came to a large wood door with metal plating, with spikes coming out the plating and with iron bars in the center of the door. The door looked like the entrance to an old debtors’ prison. The governor pulled out a metal key about a half-foot long, and he twisted an ancient lock open. He opened the door and brought us into the dank space. There were old wheel-racks of the kind they used to torture the early Christian saints; there were metal pincers hanging on the walls, which he explained were used to pinch the genitalia of bandits and free thinkers during the days of the Inquisition. There were hoists to lower prisoners onto hot, burning embers until they cried out in confession. There were handcuffs with chains attached to the walls where prisoners were whipped, until they fell with the weight of their body in exhaustion to the ground, to the point of suffocation. Some cheap flickering lights wavered back and forth, giving the whole place the look of a haunted house. There were some life-size action torture dolls of prisoners attached to the walls, suffering as a branding iron was placed onto their naked flesh. The doll figures had ripped burlap and old cotton clothing, their hair splayed wildly back, their mouths open in terror, as they were abused.