My ideological education and my childhood traumas have everything to do with this macho anguish about the anus. In the place I come from (but also, I guess, in any other place) the anus is the god Janus, the flower of the two faces of deceitful masculinity. When I was a teenager, I would regularly hear the men in my neighborhood saying the only true macho was the macho calado: the macho who knows what’s on the other side of the track.
“A real macho,” Don Carmelo would say, drunk as a skunk the night he’d been paid, “is the man who’s been poked and didn’t like it.”
It was meant to be a joke. But Don Carmelo would always, at some point in his drunken binge, kiss Melitón, his eldest son, full on the mouth, slipping his tongue in too.
Don Carmelo was in the construction business. Melitón and I were his assistants. On certain Wednesday evenings, sweaty and completely beat after toiling over a job, we would attend a discussion group on People’s Power that had been set up in the La Sierrita neighborhood, presided over by Méndez, a former militant in Proletarian Line, and Don Tereso, a retired railroad worker we all respected for his rigid pessimism: twice a week, he dined on a page of an ancient, leather-bound copy of the Mexican Constitution, wetting the mouthfuls of paper with swigs of water.
Proletariat Line was a Maoist movement that, from the midseventies to the early eighties, successfully infiltrated the unions of the Mexican steel industry. It was part of a much vaster mass project encompassing both the working classes and the rural sector, and whose last flowering was the Chiapas Zapatista movement of the nineties. It was, naturally, always grafted onto neoliberalism: hardly one of its leaders still alive today is anything other than a crappy PRIista.
I came into contact with the Mexican left through begging. When we were living in absolute poverty, my brother Saíd and I would sometimes go from door to door asking for anything people saw fit to give us: an old bedspread, a can of beans. At one house, the door was opened by a man dressed in the classic, fleece-lined denim jacket that was part of the uniform of the AHMSA foundry. The alms he gave us was Marta Harnecker’s The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism, a horrendously untruthful book I continue to love with childlike passion. He said:
“Come back good ‘n’ early tomorrow. If you help my son clean the yard, I’ll give you a few centavos and more books.”
My indoctrination began that day. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain; in the afternoons I’d read slogans, old copies of El Talache, and Maoist or Marxist-Leninist texts in the worker’s home. But at night, in the glow of the oil lamp in my rickety shack, desiring, beset by lust, I memorized Wilde’s Salome.
Honest unionists are always going on about their assholes. They don’t mention the orifice by name: they refer to it by the actions the boss, the strikebreaker, or the government-appointed union leader practices in that sewer of class consciousness. The two most common phrases in this dialogue are:
“He made me take it up the ass.”
And:
“He made me take it up the ass but I shat on it.”
The first is an apology. The second, an enigmatic consolation. In both cases, the one sticking it up is a son of a whore. The class of son of a whore I’ve never wanted to be.
Don Carmelo, for instance.
One time, Don Carmelo tried to cross a line with me just like he did with his son. It didn’t work. Not because I was lucky, quite the reverse: it was because, by that time, I’d accumulated more than enough experience battling with the sexuality of very manly men. I’m sorry to speak badly of my mamá now that she’s on her deathbed, but the truth is she didn’t always take care of me the way she should have. And the problem with being the son of a whore is that, when you’re young, many adults act as if the whore was you. My elder brother had to save me from being raped on at least three occasions before I finished elementary school. He explained the risks I’d have to run until I acquired the complexion and strength of an adult man, and he taught me how to defend myself from abuse. But to save his anus, a child has to be prepared to receive other, equally hard knocks. For example, the time—I was around nine—when someone dispatched me to the Red Cross hospital, down for the count after refusing to perform fellatio on him.
I like to think I was successful in safeguarding my asshole. Although maybe I’m fooling myself: maybe one time they made me take it up the ass and I’ve forgotten. They made me take it, but I shat on it: my mind blocked the event to guarantee a happy future for myself. Could be so: my mind is a second mother.
I woke to a particularly bleak morning hangover. The phone was ringing. It was near the end of my affair with Renata: the summer of 2002. I lifted the receiver, but didn’t recognize the voice of the man who spoke.
“I’m an editor,” he said without introducing himself. “I’m putting together a collection of crónicas about violence in Mexico for the Fondo de Cultura Económica. The title’s going to be The Red Book. Remember? Great, right?”
“Of course.” I said. “It was the collection of novellas with monkeys that Navaro published in the seventies: pure horror stories.”
“No, no; no, no,” the editor said in an annoyed tone from the other end of the line. “The Red Book, man: in homage to the great nineteenth-century author Vicente Riva Palacio.”
“I’ve never read Vicente Riva Palacio.”
“Ah,” he said. “Right.”
That was, for me, a sexually pleasurable time, but in terms of literature, depressing: I longed, on a daily basis, for any editor at all to call and share his bland geniality with me.
“We want to invite you”—I still had no idea who he was—“to write one of the pieces. We already have the big names on board: Monsiváis, Sergio García Rodríguez, Aguilar Camín … But we want to make room for young writers. You live in Monterrey, right?”
“In Saltillo.”
“Yeah. You’re in Monterrey …” He elongated the gaps between the syllables, like some well-intentioned J. J. Jameson trying to buy time while looking on his crowded desk for the folder at the bottom of the pile: hard-boiled Marvel comic aesthetic. “Ah, here it is! You can help us with the crónica about the murder of the railways union leader Román Guerra Montemayor.”
“Of course I can,” I replied, feeling first relief and then an icy deposit in the back of my neck.
I am (for a moment I was uncertain whether the editor on the other end of the line knew this in advance) the grandson of a Marxist alcoholic who betrayed the railways movement.
In the late fifties, Román Guerra Montemayor was a member of the Mexican Communist Party and president of the Monterrey branch of the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México union. He was kidnapped from his home on August 27, 1959, and—according to Pilar Rodríguez, who survived the same raid—taken to the barracks of the 31st Army Battalion. There, he suffered a prolonged period of torture, until, on September 1 of the same year—the date of President Adolfo López Mateos’s First Government Report—he died from the accumulated abuse. To continue his humiliation after death, and to fabricate a supposed line of investigation that would discredit the movement, the murderers—army personnel who had never had to undergo any form of punishment, as was historically the case, and still is, in this country—threw his body into a ditch alongside the Monterrey-Hidalgo highway. They had stuck a broom handle up his rectum and put lipstick on his mouth with the evil intention—doubly evil—of making the death look like a crime of passion between homosexuals.
Román Guerra Montemayor was assassinated at the age of twenty-six. That’s what my mother told me. She in turn had gotten it from grandfather Marcelino, who had known the young union leader personally. At that time, my mother’s stepfather was working as a locomotive mechanic in Monterrey. A few weeks after Román Guerra’s body was discovered, Marcelino left the railways movement. He was promoted to chief mechanic and relocated to the repair workshops of the Casa Redonda—now a contemporary art museum—in San Luis Potosí, his home turf. The dirty side of this story has alwa
ys weighed on my mother. Not in terms of my grandfather’s dignity (dignity, according to my friend Carlos Valdés, is a petit bourgeois Utopia), but because of the pain the years following the movement caused him. He’d been a steady drinker since his youth. It was, however, those last fourteen years (1960 to 1974: from the age of forty-three to fifty-seven) that destroyed him. He drowned the ideological guilt in alcohol, and this brought with it humiliation, poverty, and, eventually, death.
I immediately accepted the commission to write Román’s story. Not for the money. Nor was it (although I wish I could say otherwise) out of literary passion or loyalty to my biological or political origins. I did it out of lust: it was a good excuse for increasing the frequency of my visits to Monterrey to fornicate with Renata’s anus.
I organized the preliminaries: making appointments to visit the city archives, the Fourth Military Zone, the offices of the newspaper El Porvenir, and Section 19 of the railways union. I also set aside time for a carnal session with my lover: 6:00 p.m. in a three-hour motel with porn and a Jacuzzi.
No one knew anything about Román Guerra. No one wanted to know anything. As if asking about one of the thousand corpses we owe to the PRI implied an insult to the Sweet Nation. As if the question mark had been classified as a federal crime. In the newspaper offices, I did manage to unearth the statements (very much after the event) of Pilar Rodríguez and Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, and an article containing an accusation made against four of the alleged murderers: Captain Bonifacio Álvarez, the assistant deputy judge Félix Estrada, and the union bosses Agustín Gómez and Alfonso Escalera.
At the union headquarters (beige walls, the smell of cheap maize, Olivetti typewriters, and black imitation-leather chairs, falling apart and with chewed gum stuck to the lower sections of the metal frame; Radio Éxitos: hits from the eighties) I was received by a bearded PRIist disguised as Tony Montana who, standing up and straightening his jacket to show off his gold bracelet, his gold Guadeloupian medallion, and the nickel-plated revolver at his waist, introduced himself as the secretary general.
“What a frigging stupid plan, my friend. Who the fuck remembers about that now?”
I explained: the aim of the crónica was precisely to release that injustice from its state of oblivion.
“Well, yes, my friend. But there are problems nowadays too. There are injustices. For example: those bastards in Section 23 in Saltillo go around unjustly, unjustly, making life fucking hell for my national secretary general, Don Victor Flores. And you come from Saltillo, right?”
I nodded.
“You see what I’m getting at …?”
I nodded again.
He slapped his palm on the table.
“I’m glad we understand each other.”
He was getting up to shake my hand in farewell when I blurted out:
“And what if I had credentials? As a journalist or researcher. Or had an official letter: something that proved to you my intentions are reasonable and exclusively academic?”
(Academic was the only word I considered might give rise to a little respect in a union leader; fool that I am.)
Halfway out of the chair, his hands on the table, after thinking it over for a moment, he spluttered:
“That’s fine then. But make sure the top boss of the institution you work for signs it, not just some nobody. And you bring it to me before you talk to any of my union members, okay? Otherwise, I can’t be held responsible.”
I agreed. I thanked him servilely and left his office silently cursing, convinced I’d never return. I was almost out the doors of the building when a woman of about sixty caught up with me.
“Pssst. Young man.”
I turned, and she slipped a scrap of paper into my hand.
“Look him up. The poor man’s very ill, but maybe he’ll see you. He knew Román well. He remembers it all clearly.”
She walked away without giving me a chance to thank her.
I unfolded the paper. It read: Daniel Sánchez Lumbreras, followed by an address in the Ferrocarrilera neighborhood and a telephone number.
I waited two anxious weeks for the credentials: letterhead stationery, the signature of Consuelo Sáizar, who was at that time director of the Fondo de Cultura Económico. The document never arrived. The editor of The Red Book had forgotten about me; I’ll never be one of the “great pens.” And I wasn’t doing much better myself: the crónica was beginning to feel like a drag, and the last sex session with Renata had left a lot to be desired. She kept saying:
“Fuck my ass. Tell me you like putting it in there. Tell me I’ve got a gorgeous ass.”
But without conviction. I repeated her words in an identical monotone. I began to suspect Renata had found a new lover, someone who really did know how to hold a dialogue with that part of her body, as if it were a living animal and not a sock puppet.
I decided to make one last effort and, surreptitiously defying the union leader, phoned Daniel Sánchez Lumbreras to arrange a meeting.
“Yes, speaking,” answered the tinny senile voice on the other end of the line. “What can I do for you?”
Feeling ill at ease due to a kind of diffuse anguish that was making me stammer, I tried to explain the project to him. He didn’t interrupt, just politely limited himself to giving the odd grunt of approval while listening to my vague speech. When I’d finished, he replied, with a slight trembling in his voice:
“I don’t know if this old man’s memory is any use to you, sir. But I’m at your service.”
A strange mixture: he seemed at once excited and skeptical. He agreed to see me the following Sunday. I contacted Renata to see if she was free too. She hedged, but eventually said yes, adding that we could only meet for an hour and a half: she was going to the movies with her boyfriend that night.
Daniel Sánchez lived in a clapboard house located in a run-down enclave of old Monterrey, two blocks from the tracks. His house looked not so much decrepit as moribund: it was clear it had been imported prefabricated from the United States decades before. The successive layers of oil-based paint covering the planks were flaking and peeling under the midday sun, giving the building the appearance of being covered in a decaying coat of litmus paper. Don Daniel was waiting for me on the porch, sitting on an austere, rusty metal chair. I guessed he was getting on for eighty. He was wearing faded steel-blue polyester pants and a white, almost transparent shirt, unbuttoned halfway down to his belly, revealing his completely white chest hair and the neck of a sleeveless cotton vest, also white. On his head was a Monterrey Sultanes cap.
“Are you the compradito?” he asked, getting to his feet with some difficulty and an obliging air. I nodded, and he added, “Would you like a coffee, compradito? I’ve got some Bustelo the whippersnappers send me from Florida. Good for the heat.”
“Thank you kindly, Don Daniel,” I said, just to confirm I was talking to the right person.
We went into the darkened house. All the curtains were drawn. It was almost impossible to cross the rooms, as they were cluttered with furniture, cardboard boxes full of oddments, and papers. In contrast, the kitchen, to the rear of the building, was bright: the door and window looking onto the small backyard were open, and the fittings consisted of nothing more than a circular Formica-topped aluminum table, an old white cupboard, a wooden chair, and an orange electric hot plate resting on fruit crates.
“Let me explain something,” he said as he boiled water and put spoons of sugar into each of the two American ceramic mugs. “I was widowed ten years ago. I had two kids, one of each, but it’s years and years since they went over to the other side. I’ve got a girlfriend, though I almost never see her ’cause so many ailments are enough to make you ashamed of being old. So all that’s left to me in the world are my compraditos. Know who they are?”
I said I didn’t.
“Anyone who comes here. They’re almost all old men like me: when we can, we get together to play dominos on Thursdays. How’s that sound?”
“
It sounds good.”
“Other compraditos,” he continued, “are like you: red-blooded young guys. An’ sometimes, like you, they come ’cause they want to know things from before.” He emptied two generous spoons of Bustelo into the boiling water, switched off the hot plate, added a little cold water to the mixture, and, holding the pewter pan with a cloth, poured the coffee through a sieve into the two mugs with a surprisingly steady hand. “But that doesn’t happen often. Usually it’s pious people sent to us by that bastard of a priest, or relatives of relatives who come visiting to pay back a favor … Whatcha think about that?”
“Sounds good,” I said again.
Sánchez Lumbreras smiled, showing me his perfect set of dentures.
“Hey, now. See how quickly you’ve started humoring me.”
“No, no way,” I replied nervously.
He shook his head, still smiling.
“So, you agree?”
He handed me one of the mugs.
“With what?”
“Well, to be my buddy.”
“Of course I do.”
We went back toward the porch.
“Grab one of those folding chairs, compradito,” he said as we crossed what had once been the living room of his house, and now seemed more like a junk room organized any old how.
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