An Easy Thing

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  I loved the sea as few have ever loved her, but I loved the struggle even more.

  With the amnesty, I went home to San Sebastián and participated in the reorganization of the unions there. But the fascist uprising took me by surprise while I was nursing my sick father in a mountain village. My father died two days later, but I couldn’t be with him. I had already gone to enlist, and asked to be assigned to the front lines. I served as a militia captain with a brave company of hard-fighting socialists and anarcho-syndicalists. When the Northern Front fell, I took charge of the evacuation of many comrades, slipping them through the blockade by boat, and safely on into France. I then crossed back over the border and was assigned the task of supplying the rest of our troops by sea.

  Constantly outwitting the fascist ships, as well as the German and Italian, we kept Loyal Spain in supplies and ammunition.

  I’m proud to say that during those two years I never took a day’s rest, nor did I want one. There were many who acted otherwise. But this is not a time to point fingers. There were many who did their duty the same as me. And there were many more who died. Their blood is still on our hands, a debt unpaid.

  The war ended with our defeat, and I sailed out of Valencia on a fishing boat called the María Engracia, which we had fit with two English motors powerful enough to run an armored gunboat. There were seventeen of us lucky enough to escape together, and out in the middle of the

  Mediterranean, along the African coast, we swore never to forgive, never to forget, and always to continue the struggle.

  With the war over, our comrades in Africa were put into concentration camps by the French, who wished to avoid any problems, and wishing to avoid them, ended up with more than their share.

  With the help of some old friends we changed our ship’s registration to a port in Costa Rica, and received false documents through a network operated by the Communist Party out of Casablanca. The operation was run by a much loved pair of comrades, German Jews, who knew more about the art of forgery than María Castaña Castaña herself.

  In the months following the end of the war in Spain, and before the beginning of the Second World War, we spent our time improving the condition of our ship, smuggling cigarettes through the French ports just to have something to eat, running freight along the coasts as far north as Albania, and stockpiling arms and ammunition. Two of our comrades left us during this time, hoping to reunite themselves with their families.

  When I left Valencia, I left behind a tremendous love for the woman who is now your mother. We met while she was singing for the International Brigades, and we spent several days together, discovering love in the midst of the hurricane of war. I told her I would go to her country and find her again some day when I was free to do so. As you already know, she was Irish, from a good family. Her father was a scholar of ancient letters who was proud that his youngest daughter chose to go perform for the fighting men of Spain.

  I wrote to her every chance I could, throughout the course of the long war that followed, keeping our love alive.

  We were pirates. We attacked Italian freighters both in port and on the open sea. Once we even sank a German Coast Guard vessel off the coast of Tripoli.

  We had no flag, and time and again we changed the name and the appearance of our ship. We were lone wolves. Two of our good comrades fell in these early battles, Mariano Helguera and Vicente Díaz Robles, both anarcho-syndicalists from Cádiz. Another, Valeriano Corral, was wounded very badly and we were forced to bring him ashore. We left him behind and never heard of him again. He was Catalan, belonging to no party, but as good as gold, and more dedicated to the struggle than anyone.

  The English wanted to make use of our experience, and we cooperated with them. Within the framework of that struggle, there was no room for petty differences. We smuggled arms to the Yugoslav partisans, and carried Canadian commandos to missions in Northern Africa, and later on, to the coast of France.

  Two boats eventually made up our pirate armada. The first was nicknamed El Loco, and we called the second The Dawn of the People, although it was officially called The Bearded Fish, written in Arabic on the hull and registered in Liberia. On ship we lived in absolute democracy and freedom, and although I acted as captain, it was by the open agreement of my comrades. As a group, we decided to carry out several actions against Spanish ports in the hands of Franco’s soldiers. We attacked an armed customs post on the Baleares Islands, and later sank two small fascist gunboats in the port of Alicante.

  In spite of the diversity of our actions, and our connections with the many different antifascist groups in North Africa, we felt very strongly drawn to the struggle of the French Resistance, where many of our countrymen were fighting as well. We worked particularly closely with a Greek named Tsarakis, whose nom de guerre was Christian. Together we participated in a successful attack on the German naval command in Marseilles, and in the transport of arms to the French Resistance. In this period we lost three more of our comrades. I will tell you their names to keep their memory alive: Valentín Suárez, a socialist mechanic from Burgos; Leoncio Pradera Villa, a communist from Leon, a wonderfully warm-hearted man and a loyal friend; and a one-eyed fellow named Beltrán, a unionist from Andalucia.

  In 1944, near the Albanian coast, we encountered an Italian gunboat. They thought we were carrying fresh fruit, and tried to board our ship with the intention of commandeering our cargo. We fought for twenty minutes, our boats lashed together, until not one of them was left alive.

  Inside we found 23 kilos of gold coins from different countries, bound for Italy under the orders of Marshal D’ Ambrosio. We took the treasure and hid it on the north coast of Africa, with the idea of using it after the victory in Europe to finance the liberation of Spain. We fervently believed at that time that no one would deny us aid once the fascists were driven out of Europe.

  In 1945 I put ashore in France and joined a battalion formed almost entirely of Spaniards, which went on to fight at the head of the Leclerc division. Disembarking with me were Simón Matías, who was killed in a German counter-attack in Czechoslovakia, and Gervasio Cifuentes, from Mieres, a very close friend who died without family a few years ago here in Mexico.

  Six of our comrades stayed aboard El Loco, helping the English sweep for mines in the sea around Malta.

  When the war ended we found out they had been killed, gone down with our beloved ship in the middle of the Mediterranean.

  Somehow, my destiny brought me to Mexico. I had married your mother, and after so many years of blood and war I only wanted to rest. I was discouraged by the defeat in Spain and the treachery of the Allies, and I ended up like so many others: dropping anchor in a friendly port, and turning my exile into a period of waiting without end.

  Cifuentes and I often spoke of the twenty-three kilos of gold coins. He worked as an accountant in a shoe factory, I got a job in a publishing house, in which I still work today as assistant manager.

  That’s my story. Now you are grown-up. I don’t want to set an example, since there’s no better example than the one you set for yourselves. I just wanted to leave you with a handful of stories so that you won’t say your father was always a peaceful old man who spent his evenings reading in the garden in the house in Coyoacán. I wasn’t always old. It’s just that time passes.”

  ***

  “What do you do with a story like that?” Héctor asked himself. “How do you fit it into your life, how do you connect the past with the present?” The papers in the folder were clippings from French, English, Italian, and German newspapers, interviews and articles, confirming bits and pieces of the old man’s story. There was even a pair of documents issued by the French Army, testifying to the activities of El Loco in support of the Resistance, and conferring upon Captain Belascoarán and his crew the Medal of the Resistance.

  The map covered a highly magnified portion of the North African
coast, showing the location of the buried treasure.

  “So now what?” asked Elisa. “Are we supposed to go to Africa and dig for buried treasure?”

  “I’m going to go out of my mind,” said Héctor.

  “It all sounds kind of like an adventure story, but I guess if Papa wanted us to go find the gold, then I’m willing to do it,” said Carlos.

  “Open up the letter, Elisa.”

  She tore open the envelope and removed a single piece of paper.

  My dear children, it is my desire that, since my good friend and comrade Cifuentes died without any descendents, you three should fulfill our last wish. Read the notebook I’ve included with this letter and go find the gold. After paying for your costs, give the rest of it to the Spanish labor unions fighting openly against the regime in the name of the working people.

  I know that I can trust you to pay this debt for me.

  —JMBA

  “How about a soda pop?” asked Héctor.

  “Coffee for me,” said Elisa.

  “The old man’s got a point: it’s the right thing to do. It’s just that the last thing I need right now is to start dreaming about the coast of North Africa,” said Héctor.

  “Don’t worry, Brother, we don’t have to leave tomorrow.”

  “Well, why not?” asked Héctor, smiling.

  Chapter Nine

  It was a vast thicket of sinuous and winding paths called labyrinth.

  —R. Ocken

  Inaccessible to the light, with infinite detours and a thousand treacherous, confusing, and tortuous paths; it was impossible to enter into it and find the way back.

  —M. Meunier

  He had a name now, which was more than he’d had before, plus the hope that the old man hadn’t changed it at some point in the intervening years. Isaías Valdez. Entering the market, Belascoarán wandered from stall to stall, guided by a magic hand that pointed the way: “Go talk to don Manuel, he was around in those days…” “They say that doña Chole’s been here since they opened the market. And don Manuel, he knew Rubén Jaramillo.” He wandered from vegetable stalls to butcher’s stalls, spoke with aged fruit sellers, and the owner of a chicken shop, but without result. After a while he changed his tack, and stopped trying to salvage the name Isaías Valdez from the mists of people’s memories.

  “A buddy of Jaramillo’s? He had plenty, let me tell you. They used to come in from the country all the time, he’d bring them in, and give them some fruit or some bread, and show them around the market while they talked…What’s that? Somebody from the market, from right here?…Let me see, there was a lot of them…in his late sixties, huh?…sixty-seven…Oh, you must mean don Eulalio Zaldívar. Sure, that’s it, he and Jaramillo were real tight. He didn’t talk much, though…Let me see if I’ve got a picture of the vendors from back then. Here we go, this here’s Jaramillo, and over here on the right side, you almost can’t see him, that’s don Eulalio—he always wore a hat, and a bandana around his neck, like he was sick. He had a real hoarse voice. Sold fruit, in that stall over there…He went away in ’forty-seven, but then he came back. Only, he went away again about six years ago. He was terribly old by then, poor guy, didn’t have any family either. An address? No, he didn’t leave an address…”

  A shadow, a ghost, a grayish blur in the background of an old photograph. Could that really be Zapata, reduced to a gray blur, while his life was rewritten in government textbooks, and on commemorative plaques.

  The fairy tale of don Emiliano. Where to look next?

  ***

  “So let’s have it, what’s the story?”

  The girl eyed him blankly. It was the old family house in Coyoacán, where Elisa was living for the time being. They sat together in a shady corner of the garden, sipping an agua de chía prepared by the maid. Héctor hung his coat in the branches of a tree, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The butt of his .38 protruded obscenely from its shoulder holster like a bird of ill omen.

  It was a stain under his armpit that no antiperspirant could remove. He hung the gun and holster from another branch.

  “I can’t tell you, not now.”

  The girl walked over and put the tree between herself and Héctor. The detective watched her through the lower branches. She circled her good arm around the trunk and held on.

  “You never tried to kill yourself, did you?”

  “Never.”

  Héctor collected his jacket, and the gun in its holster. He would have preferred the sunny courtyard, full of dazzling reflections, a cold glass of lemonade, a good cigar, a novel by Salagari. It could have been a good afternoon. He would have preferred…

  ***

  “I’m all ears,” said the company president in the artificial hush and semidarkness of his office, infringed upon only by the bright rays of sunlight filtering through the edges of the venetian blinds, and the distant hum of the factory.

  The air at the plant was full of tension. Groups of scabs lurked around the front gate, and shotgun-toting security guards patrolled the grounds. As he passed by one of the bays, Héctor noticed there was work stoppage in progress. The workers stood motionless in front of their machines, as if observing a moment of silence for a fallen comrade. Foremen ran from one man to the next, threatening, intimidating. The work stoppage only took effect in one section at a time, so that while one group of men lay down their tools, the others kept working. After exactly five minutes, the group Héctor was watching went back to work and the forklift operators shut down.

  He overheard a discussion between an engineer and a lift-truck operator: “Get this heap moving, you idiot.” “You get it moving.” “You’re getting paid to drive this thing, not me. What the hell do you think you’re doing?” “Haven’t you noticed there’s a work stoppage going on, you idiot?”

  The president’s office was a backwater separated from the boiling current, like a stage set belonging to a different play, another story, or a different scene in the same TV drama.

  “I’ve come to ask you a few questions.”

  “Fire away,” answered the president, removing a pack of Philip Morris from his vest pocket.

  Where else had Héctor seen the same brand? On the table next to the fat man’s bed…

  “What are you afraid of? What is it about the guy you have me looking for that’s got you so rattled? How come you don’t just tell me who it is? What’s his name?”

  The other man glanced at him momentarily, his eyes hidden behind a cloud of smoke.

  “I’m paying you to find the answers.”

  “Is that what you want, the answers to these questions?”

  “I want the murderer’s name, and the proof that he did it.”

  Héctor stood up.

  “I don’t like you, Belascoarán,” said the president.

  “The feeling’s mutual,” said Héctor, and he threw his half-smoked cigarette onto the rug, and walked out the door. He didn’t look back.

  ***

  “Make yourself comfy, neighbor,” said Gilberto the plumber, wheeling the swivel chair out into the room, while Carlos the upholsterer dusted it with a rag.

  “Care for a soft drink?”

  “What’s going on? Did I win the lottery or something?”

  “Lottery?”

  “One soda coming up.”

  “Someone called to leave a couple of messages and since…”

  “Go on and tell him,” urged Carlos, handing Héctor a tamarind-flavored soda pop.

  “They said you’re dead meat. They said they’re going to kill you.”

  “Who says?”

  “On the telephone.”

  “How many times did they call?”

  “Twice.”

  “Oh, well, if it’s just twice,” Héctor said, and took a big swig f
rom the soda.

  “There was something else…” The plumber picked up the newspaper where he’d written the message and read, “‘Did it ever occur to you that police commanders can be faggots, too?’”

  “What?”

  “If it ever occurred to you that police commanders could be faggots, too.”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “How am I supposed to know? The guy calls up and asks if you’re here and I say no, that you’re probably out farting around somewhere like you always are…”

  “That’s the pot calling the kettle black,” interjected the upholsterer.

  “…but since your secretary and I just happened to be in the office, that if he wanted to leave you a message, and the guy says to me to tell you this thing about if it ever occurred to you that…”

  Héctor glanced around until he found the newspaper from two days before sitting on top of the armchair:

  …The police action was carried out by Comandante Paniagua, head of the Sixth Squadron of the Judicial Police for the State of Mexico…