Death in Veracruz

by Hector Camín

  Copyright © 2015, Héctor Aguilar Camín

  Original Title: Morir en el Golfo

  Translation Copyright, 2015 © Chandler Thompson

  First English language Edition

  Trade Paperback Original

  License to reprint granted by Guillermo

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  Cover Design: Dan Stiles

  Interior Design: Darci Slaten

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  ISBN: 978-1-936182-92-3 (Paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-936182-93-0 (Mobipocket)

  ISBN: 978-1-936182-94-7 (EPub)

  ISBN; 978-1-936182-95-4 (Adobe)

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  Printed in the United States

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1: The Rojano File

  Chapter 2: Anabela’s Return

  Chapter 3: Pizarro’s World

  Chapter 4: Around the Pyramid

  Chapter 5: Chicontepec

  Chapter 6: The Sacrificial Doe

  Chapter 7: Death by Water

  Chapter 8: The Emissary

  Chapter 9: In the Flow

  Chapter 10: The Upshot

  Chapter 11: A Trumpet for Lacho

  Chapter 12: Rojano’s Widow

  About the Author/Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  THE ROJANO FILE

  What more is there to say about Rojano? It’s a sob story better left untold. It consists of our two years as high school chums in Xalapa, then four as rivals at university in Mexico City where our shared obsession was Anabela Guillaumín. Rojano won. He left her, then he married her (I simply lost her.). He went in for Macazaga suits and political breakfasts at the Hilton. He joined the eternally governing PRI and became a minor functionary in the administration of López Arias in Veracruz. I went to work as a reporter on the police beat and took up the vice of journalism with all the trimmings. It was the 60s. We had come through the railroad strike and were headed towards the Tlatelolco massacre and the end of the Mexican miracle. Our lives as grownups were beginning.

  After not seeing her for two years, on August 14, 1968, I ran into Anabela in the Arroyo Restaurant near the Olympic Village where she was working as a guide. She was as tall, slender and irresistible as ever with the same dazzling eyes. She owed their smoky green color and the surname of Guillaumín to the French occupiers who settled in Veracruz a century ago.

  She skipped work, and we drank coffee all afternoon. She talked about Rojano, who was organizing student gangs and their leaders (“social services”) at the University of Veracruz and who, in drunken pre-dawn phone calls, accused her of slighting him. For dinner we had skewers of Chihuahua beef and beans cooked peasant-style with chiles at Pepe’s on Insurgentes. She joked infectiously about working as a guide for peace. She spoke of her father’s death a year earlier-her mother died fifteen years ago-and of Rojano, his jealousy, his threats, the blow that almost tore her lip off one night, of how he had Mujica, a classmate she’d gone out with three times, beaten up. We drank vodka and danced until three in the morning at La Roca. She made fun of my qualms about being a reporter, and she talked about Rojano, the abortion he forced her to have, his demands, and his neglect. Drunk and talked out in the early morning hours, I lost her again, this time in the entrance to the Beverly Hotel, which reminded her, one more time, of Rojano.

  They married two years later, the same month that Luis Echeverría rose to power and the Institutional Revolutionary Party recognized Francisco Rojano Gutiérrez as undisputed leader of the CNOP, the National Confederation of People’s Organizations, for the state of Veracruz.

  I moved up from the police beat to city hall, then covered the airport for a few months. In early February 1971, I was just starting out on the agriculture beat when I ran into Rojano again in the main office of what was then the Department of Agrarian Affairs and Colonization. We hadn’t seen each other for four years, since Christmas 1967 when we got into a fight at the Monteblanco Bar on Monterrey Street in the Roma District.

  He had sprouted a mustache that hung like a horseshoe from his lips to his chin and was dressed in a double-breasted white suit, an orange shirt, and a tie of what were then called psychedelic colors. He had a fistful of papers in his hand and was in the process of authenticating a land deed. He was talking non-stop straight into the ear of a clerk.

  “You’ve got to understand me, paisano.” He waved the sheaf of papers in the face of the hapless clerk and, by calling him paisano, appealed to the consideration one expatriate from Veracruz supposedly owed another.

  As an ex-swimmer, he still had broad shoulders and a flat torso. When he threw his arm over the clerk’s shoulder, he engulfed the man in his enormous chest as if he were about to devour him. I tried not to be noticed, but Rojano caught a glimpse of me over the head of the beleaguered clerk.

  “Is that you, brother?” His eyes lit up. The appeal of his vulgarity was impossible to define. He smiled and held up the papers. “I’m almost through here. Don’t go away.”

  I got what I’d come for and left without waiting through the door of the neighboring office. He ran after me and caught up with me in the parking lot. “You don’t need to run, brother. I’m not a bill collector.” He grabbed my arm, gasping for breath.

  He sucked air and loosened his tie. “I didn’t greet you properly up there because I was working.” He moistened his lips, readjusted his tie. “I was dispatching my daily lawyer. I don’t have to tell you the world is full of assholes, and, if you don’t knock off at least one a day, then one of them will knock you off. Where are you going to eat?”

  We ate at El Hórreo, a Spanish restaurant with a lively bar that overlooks the Alameda. Rojano ordered malt whiskeys and octopus sauteed in Rioja wine. He went on and on about politics in Veracruz, an endless parade of friends, enemies, crooks and assholes. He had detailed plans for his rise to governor and then to a federal cabinet post. First he’d become a mayor, then a state cabinet secretary, then a federal legislator; from there he’d go on to governor and federal cabinet secretary. He laid out a twenty-four-year career in politics free of setbacks or delays but with variations if necessary. If becoming mayor proved impossible, then he’d settle for a job in the state executive branch that would pave the way to the federal legislature. If that didn’t work out, then president of the PRI or a position in a state-owned enterprise from which, with a bit of effort, he’d become a cabinet minister. If the cabinet were out of reach, then.., and on and on.

  We ordered cognac and coffee after dessert. He offered me a huge cigar from his coat pocket. On the band it said: Especially wrapped for Francisco Rojano Gutiérrez, Atty.

  Rojano had dropped out of third-year law (I got fed up after four), so I asked him. “When did you become a lawyer?”

  “When we graduated together,” he replied smiling. “Don’t tell me you can’t remember. We did that thesis on mass politics and the Mexican state that was later plagiarized by Arnaldo Cordova. We even drew a mention from Flores Olea, don’t you remember? Then you went into journalism and I took up government service. That’s what got us where we are, brother, each serving the Republic in his own way. Let’s toast to that, we’re both doing fine.”

  We matched each other drink for drink all afternoon, cognac and coffee until seven when we moved on to the Impala to hear Gloria Lasso sing. I woke up in the Silver Suites on Villalongín next to a woman I
neither recognized nor remembered. In the bed next to mine Rojano lay snoring atop another woman. He had one sock on and the other off and a two-strand platinum bracelet on his wrist.

  I changed to a newspaper that offered me the political beat and a daily news column called “Public Life” that became self-supporting in a matter of months. I set up a file system and stocked it with the exact sources and details of things hinted at over working breakfasts or dinners, in press offices, or in the columns of colleagues. In 1973, my column drew an honorable mention in the annual competition held by the Press Club of Mexico. The following year, I won the club’s national prize for timely news coverage.

  I stopped seeing Rojano, but I didn’t lose sight of him. He returned to his post at the University of Veracruz in Xalapa, then ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the state assembly from the district of Tuxpan. On February 4, 1972, Rojano was involved in a shootout in Juarez Park in Xalapa. The lone casualty was attributed to him, but though the victim was seriously injured (he didn’t die), the charges against Rojano were thrown out in the course of a complex legal proceeding. In the year that followed, Rojano dropped out of local politics. He bought land in Chicontepec and got himself named an inspector for what was then the Rural Cooperative Credit Bank. In 1973, he resurfaced as a federal legislative hopeful in local newspaper columns and even in the column “Political Fronts” in Excelsior. The scheme failed although its real purpose was not to get elected but to make noise, to gain credibility within the party for achieving his real goal of becoming mayor of Chicontepec in elections to be held the following year. That didn’t work out either, and he left the Rural Credit Bank in one of the anti-corruption purges the bank undergoes every couple of years. When the Veracruz state government changed hands in 1974, he returned to Xalapa as private secretary to the government secretary, a college friend who had previously been the private secretary of the incoming governor.

  In 1975, I covered part of the PRI presidential campaign that every six years floods the country in a frenzy of ostentation and hope. The campaign of Treasury Secretary José López Portillo consisted, like all campaigns since Cárdenas in the 1930s, of a wide-ranging tour of the Republic, town by town, city by city with a retinue of local políticos, favorite sons, leaders, bosses, bureaucrats and orators in tow. This time the tour began in Querétaro, then moved on to the Pacific Coast. It rang in the New Year in the south with an enormous banquet at the base of the Chicoasén Dam in Chiapas (guests and food flown in by helicopter). The campaign proceeded through northern and central Mexico, then rolled through the southeast and down the Gulf Coast before winding up in my home state of Veracruz, which we entered through Agua Dulce in March 1976.

  The pressroom was barely set up at the Hotel Emporio in the port city of Veracruz when Rojano came looking for me. I had trouble recognizing him. The two-strand platinum bracelet was gone along with the horseshoe mustache and the psychedelic colors. His face and waistline were beginning to fill out, the pleats of his guayabera and the creases in his pants were painstakingly precise, and his brown moccasins were freshly shined.

  “Is that you?” he asked, leaning his elbows on my typewriter.

  He spoke warmly without the least hint of sarcasm. Somehow it touched a chord in me. It brought back the years we hung out together in the hilly streets between his house and mine in Xalapa. Walking home from school together, we shared our dreams and ambitions to achieve, accomplish and succeed. We’d go to Mexico City, come back with degrees that would dazzle the neighbors, and ring in a new era for the politics of Veracruz. We’d stamp out bossism, rein in the cattle ranchers, beautify Poza Rica, pave the port of Veracruz, and get rid of pollution in Minatitlan. It was as if my affection for Rojano would suffice to transform the world we were about to leave and to which we would inevitably return.

  “It is,” I said.

  He pulled up a chair, sat down next to me, and placed a mollifying hand on my thigh.

  “I have something I need to talk to you about,” he said.

  “For more than two lines there’s a fee,” I replied.

  “No joke, brother. This is serious. It’s all about politics and the press. Something a professional like you can use.”

  He ran out of words, but his eyes were still lit up.

  “You want to run for the legislature again?”

  “No, this is personal. All I ask is an hour in private. What can that matter to you?”

  “It can’t, but there’s a fee for more than two lines.”

  He gave up with a smile of submission and pulled himself together.

  “If that’s how it has to be, then so be it. What time do I pick you up?”

  At ten that night, I climbed into the frigid air conditioning of his black Galaxy.

  “Anabela wants to say hello,” he said. “Do you mind if we take care of this at the house?”

  “I do, but that’s all right.”

  “What’s done is done, brother.”

  “How’s Anabela?”

  “Fine. We’ve got a five-year-old boy and a girl, four. We live a quiet life, a boring life in the provinces. I’m in Xalapa and come home every weekend, sometimes more often. It depends. Anabela couldn’t handle Xalapa. It brought back bad memories. She’s right. I really screwed up, you have no idea how much. Now I’m paying the price, I’ve stopped drinking.”

  “Who are you screwing?”

  “No one, brother. Like I said, I lead a simple provincial life.”

  “You don’t even get any from your wife?”

  “Watch it, Negro. Don’t screw around with me.”

  “You’re no family man. The disguise doesn’t suit you.”

  “It’s no disguise, brother.”

  “Then call it a facade. It still doesn’t fit.”

  “If that’s what you say, then it must be so. But the other stuff was killing me. Now I’m at least in limbo. It’s a thousand times better, I swear.”

  He seemed overcome by an excess of caution, an angelic slowness. He even drove like an old man. It was both amusing and hard to believe. We went slowly around the soccer stadium and entered a recently opened subdivision with vacant lots between many of the houses. Rojano’s took up two lots and had a pitched roof in the architectural fashion then popular with the provincial nouveau riche. The fence was a row of heavy iron bars topped with sharp white finials. The front of the house combined imitation marble walls with sliding windows of smoked glass and aluminum molding. Inside were easy chairs with woven upholstery and carved wooden arms, a plaster reproduction of the Venus de Milo, and miniature porcelain footmen in a glass showcase.

  As soon as we entered, he shouted for Anabela to come down, then removed the plastic coverings that made the easy chairs awkward to sit in. He went to a corner of the room occupied by a piece of furniture meant to resemble the bar in a saloon. He looked over the bottles and again shouted at Anabela to come down. He needn’t have. For several seconds she stood on the landing of the stairway, nervous yet composed, silently watching me with nothing better to do than moisten her lips and pull the sleeve of her dress down over her watch.

  Eight years and two children later: Anabela de Rojano. Beneath the modest elegance of her tropical chiffon dress, her bodily perfection, the symmetry of legs and shoulders, remained intact despite the first visible bulges of a what in a few years would turn her into another kind of living statue, a matronly Venus of ample proportions.

  “Is that you?” she said just as Rojano had.

  It annoyed me to hear her echo him-and to realize that my adolescent jealousy still smoldered. She stepped away from the stairs and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Are you going to want whiskey?” Rojano asked from the bar.

  “Offer him something to eat, too,” Anabela said. Turning to me, she added, “Nothing comparable to the restaurants you’re used to, but the food here will remind you of home.”

  “I brought caviar,” Rojano trumpeted from the bar.

  “You see?” Anabel
a said ironically. “He brought caviar. And we have Oaxaca tamales made by the mother of one of Ro’s godchildren.”

  She never called Rojano by his first name. She always used his surname or in more familiar moments Ro.

  “We have deviled ham, too,” Ro added from the bar. “And candied chestnuts for dessert.”

  He approached with a bottle of Old Parr and an ice bucket on a large tray. There was a Coca Cola for Anabela and for him soda water with no ice. He made a show of pouring it with the glass held at eye level, at my eye level actually.

  In the next hour I consumed three whiskeys and twenty crackers with caviar and deviled ham while enduring a conversation about schools and the consolations of provincial life. Around eleven, using the wail of a child upstairs as an excuse, I attempted my getaway. By then I estimated that festivities would be well under way in Mocambo where the city government was throwing a party for the press.

  “Don’t leave,” Anabela begged as she headed for the stairs and the source of the wailing. “At least wait till I come down.”

  “That’s right, brother. Wait for her to come down,” Rojano reiterated as if reading from a script.

  Once Anabela had disappeared up the stairs, he reminded me, “I’ve still got something to show you.”

  As he spoke, he regarded me intensely with a stare held over from another time, then he made a nervous exit through a door in the back of the house. His demeanor confirmed my suspicion that his newfound respectability and stability were pure show, the appropriate backdrop for a proposal of whose nature I was, for the moment, unaware.

  I went back to the ice bucket for a fourth whiskey and waited.

  He returned from the back of the house with a package under his arm but would not let me see it in the sala. Instead, he took me into a small room, a combination pantry and office that we entered through the garage. Inside was a desk, a pair of dusty file cabinets, an empty bookcase, and several crates of mangos and oranges stacked in one corner. An enlarged photo of Anabela sat on the desk. It showed her running towards the camera with her hair blown back from her forehead by the wind and her thighs clearly defined under a black skirt with a blur of forest in the background.