Death in Veracruz

by Hector Camín

  “You’re the one that sits down with him, and he’s the one who collects dead people.”

  “To feel him out, brother. To get to know him.”

  “What other reason could there be?”

  “Stop wising off for a minute and listen to me, Negro. That’s not the whole story. The problem is there’s almost no way I can avoid having him as a political ally.”

  I got up and served myself a sixth shot of the whiskey whose therapeutic effects were increasingly hard to resist. “Congratulations on your ally,” I said as I sat down again.

  “It’s not up to me,” Rojano said. “He carries a lot of weight in the municipalities in the northern part of the state.”

  “And what do the elections in the northern part of the state have to do with you?” I said. “You’re from the south, from the coast at worst. What do you have to offer as a candidate in the north? Aside from planning the future of the children of Veracruz.”

  “That’s what the governor wants.”

  “Is it what you want?”

  “That doesn’t matter. I’m a politician, I go where I’m needed. But if you want to know what I want, I’ll tell you. Besides, you know perfectly well what I want. I want to go back to Chicontepec as mayor.”

  “The better to plan for the future of the children of Veracruz.”

  “You’re jerking me around,” Rojano said.

  “I’m not jerking you around. Just let me guess: you want to go back to Chicontepec so you can fight from within.”

  “God damn it, Negro. You’re jerking me around.”

  “To wage war on your ally from within. I mean so you can plan a better future for the children of Veracruz.”

  “The better to screw your mother, Negro.”

  “Of course, why else?”

  “Stop playing games with me, damn it. You’re just jerking me around, that’s all you’re doing. I’m speaking from the heart, I’m baring my soul to you, and you’re just jerking me around.”

  He sat down in the chair behind the desk and ran his hand wearily through his hair as if his fatigue would rub off. Enervated and half asleep, he took a swallow of the highball I put on the table, then another and another until he’d emptied the glass, ice and all.

  “For a man who doesn’t drink, you have a taste for whiskey,” I said.

  “One more thing,” he replied, picking up where he left off. “Anabela owns land in that same area.”

  I stepped to the orange crates to refill what Rojano had drunk, but the ice and the soda were gone. I poured myself straight whiskey and took a drink. It was absurd how the same old rage kept coming back, the feeling that Rojano’s entanglements meant trouble for Anabela, that he was unfairly putting her at risk. “You just finished showing me a collection of photos of women and children who were killed for nothing,” I told him. “And now you’re telling me Anabela could be involved. What’s going on? What are you getting at?”

  “Anabela owns land in the same area as the Martín and Garabito families,” Rojano said. “She could be part of the same scheme.”

  “Has she got an offer?”

  “An offer? No.”

  “So?”

  “Like I say, her land borders the widow Martín’s. It’s mostly hills, just a few hectares that don’t amount to much at all. But they do share a boundary. And farther back, away from the river, towards the foothills leading to the Sierra Madre is El Canelo.”

  “What’s El Canelo?”

  “My farm.”

  “Then there’s a farm?”

  “You know perfectly well I bought land a few years ago, 100 hectares on the way to the mountains.”

  “And Anabela’s 25. That makes 125.”

  “125.”

  “Of awful land I suppose. An emporium of hardscrabble caliche.”

  “It’s excellent land,” Rojano said. “But I didn’t bring you here to talk about that or to have you laugh at us. Anabela inherited from her family, an old local family. I managed to buy next to hers. I did it the Mexican way. For my kids, as insurance against political unemployment. What’s wrong with that?”

  I served myself another small shot of whiskey and drank it, keeping an eye on Rojano over the rim of the glass. His hair was mussed as if he’d just gotten out of bed. His guayabera was soaked with sweat. His bloodshot eyes stared down at his hands and watched his thumbs rub obsessively against each other. I realized once again that I was watching a show, a display of Rojano’s political will as he started down another twisted path and came to a turn that in one way or another had begun to include me. I served myself a last thimbleful of whiskey, feeling as if I were part of a bad dream in that strange office with its stacked boxes of oranges and mangos next to metal file cabinets and a desk. I swallowed, then, without the least bit of sarcasm, asked in a spirit of solidarity attributable to two doses of whiskey in quick succession,

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “To keep your eyes open,” Rojano said anxiously. “Help me investigate this whole business. Let something drop in the national press when the time is ripe and there’s something for us to gain. For the time being just keep it to yourself. We’re talking about someone who’s no fool. We’re talking about a force that has to be stopped now before it’s too late.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?” I asked.

  “He’s not my friend, he’s my enemy.”

  “Your enemy and ally, your benefactor. What’s his name?”

  “Lázaro Pizarro.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “The oil workers’ union up north.”

  “Poza Rica?”

  “Poza Rica.”

  “Can you send me copies of those files? We go back to Mexico City tomorrow.”

  “They’ll be in your room by 10 tomorrow.”

  I managed another thimbleful on the way out. It was almost midnight, and Anabela was no longer in the sala. I didn’t make a point of trying to see her. She’d be upstairs with her children, worn out by the maternal drudgery of rattles and diapers, just beyond the shadows where Rojano pored over files behind her back.

  I returned to the Hotel Emporio, bathed, and headed for Mocambo. That night the city government was throwing a party for the national press corps at a ballroom called the Terraza Tropicana. The festivities were still in full swing as the new day dawned. There was music, dancing, an open bar, and girls. A young chorus girl was drinking mint juleps at the bar. She had a fine and noble nose just like Garabito’s wife whose smooth and bloody countenance still floated in my head.

  At noon the following day the press caravan returned to Mexico City according to plan, but neither Rojano nor his files showed up in my room. The prolonged orgy of information and money with which, every six years, the nation invents its president moved on. Nothing stops the presidential campaign. It gives the candidate seven or eight months to project and amplify his voice, his force of will, his face and his gestures. It lets him proclaim his innocence of past disasters and his patriotic determination to put things right as he marches in triumph from one town to the next. He is heard on every radio station and seen on every television screen until he becomes the great idol, the newly mythologized president of Mexico.

  We were boarding the plane when news reached us of the assassination of peasant leader Galvarino Barría Pérez in northern Veracruz. He was mowed down by gunmen in an ambush near Martínez de la Torre. I recalled Rojano’s files and the bloodshed typical of rural Gulf Coast politics. Then I forgot about it.

  Chapter 2

  ANABELA’S RETURN

  On the first Sunday of July 1976, the PRI candidate, whom we in the press had helped construct, was elected president. His victory was unopposed since none of the other legal parties chose to take part in the contest. The months between the election and the inauguration were fraught with greater tension than in the previous interregnum. Senior business leaders conspired among themselves and sought to trigger a coup for the first time in the modern era.
There followed the first public disclosure of a coup attempt, the first devaluation of the peso in twenty-two years, and the first ovation ever afforded such a measure in the Chamber of Deputies. Rumors abounded. The country was seemingly on the verge of Chilean-style destabilization. No one doubted that on November 20, 1976, on the 60th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, a coup would bring the long post-revolutionary era to an end. The fated day arrived, but the army didn’t occupy the Zócalo in Mexico City, and it didn’t evict the civil authorities from the presidential palace. What happened instead was that Anabela de Rojano made her unexpected reappearance in my life.

  By then I was living in my apartment on Calle de las Artes-the street that passes in front of the legendary public baths whose remains consist of a cold, comfortable rectangle of high roofs and broken pipes. The apartment was enormous, and I used only one of the three bedrooms. I turned the sala into an office next to which there was a breakfast nook that easily accommodated a table for eight. The office contained a desk, bookshelves and file cabinets plus two black leather chairs and two old-fashioned hardwood chairs with pigskin upholstery.

  Doña Lila, a 50-ish Indian woman from the city of Tuxpan, kept the place clean and did the cooking. She cordially welcomed my overnight guests and picked up after them in the morning. Her one quirk was a tendency to disappear with no prior warning in pursuit of such adventures as an older woman might find. Two or three days later she’d be back, ready and willing to describe her exploits in irrefutable detail.

  On the 20th of November 1976, Doña Lila was preparing a supper of tamales with stewed peaches for dessert. In my office I was dictating an update to my column for the following day over the phone. I’d written about the rumored coup and its supposed instigator, Monterrey industrialist Andres Marcelo Sada, irreverently dubbed the Marquis de Sada by the press and the political class. My back was to the door when the doorbell rang, and I took the time to finish dictating and hang up. By the time I turned around Anabela was already seated in one of the chairs smoking a cigarette with a white filter. “Did you watch the coup on television?” she asked.

  Her crossed leg bounced nervously from side to side, and she smiled through the cigarette smoke. Around the white filter was a ring of bright red lipstick. Everything about her resembled the excessive brilliance of that red stain: the layer of makeup, her youthfully cropped hair in the style of Mia Farrow, the leather outfit, the long nails, the impeccably separated eyelashes, the blue eyeshadow.

  By contrast, my hair was uncombed. I was dirty and sweaty with a day-old stubble, and my shirttail was sticking out the back of my pants.

  “I asked if you watched the coup on television,” she persisted.

  I managed to ask, “What are you doing here?”

  “I told you, I came to see the coup,” Anabela said. The bounce of her leg from one side to the other grew more agitated. “Since there was no coup I came to see you. Tell me something. Why do they announce these things then let everyone down?”

  “How did you find my place?”

  “In Rojano’s address book, my dear, He’s got everyone in there. He even has an address for Nixon’s chief aide, the one who lives in Illinois and wears bullet-proof underwear. Can you believe it? How are you doing? You look like you just ate an alligator.”

  “I just did.”

  “Then spit it out. Aren’t you going to offer me anything to drink? It’s six in the evening, you know. I’ll take a drink instead of a coup, even if it’s only a vodka on the rocks.”

  It was a gray afternoon, a bit on the cold side, and just as disheveled as I was. I put the Baroque Beatles on the stereo and went to the kitchen for ice.

  “If you’re going to have sex, I’m leaving,” Doña Lila said while keeping an eye on her tamales and peaches.

  “Let me have some ice, Doña Lila.”

  She took some ice cubes from the refrigerator and put them in an ice bucket. “Do you want mixers too, or are you drinking it straight? That way it goes to the head faster.”

  “Mixers too, Doña Lila.”

  She pulled out the box she kept them in next to the refrigerator and dusted them off with a damp cloth. There was no dust on them, but she wanted to talk. “That’s a lot of woman you have there. At least a politician’s wife, maybe even a bullfighter’s.”

  “I’d also like you to buy me some cigarettes, Doña Lila.”

  “You dresser’s full of cigarettes, but I’ll buy you some anyway. Do you want short, medium or long?”

  I gave her three hundred pesos. She enjoyed going to the Prado Floresta, and the money, which she stowed in her ample bosom, was enough for both the early and late shows.

  “That’s what I like about this place,” she said. “The politics.”

  She took off her apron, turned off the burners on the stove, and left.

  I returned to the office. Anabela had lit her second cigarette. She took a thirsty swallow of vodka. I served myself a whiskey and soda in a tall glassful of ice.

  “Is this where you work?” Anabela asked.

  “I work at the paper. This is where I keep my files.”

  She took another swallow.

  “Are you doing well at the paper?”

  “With the column, yes.”

  “But you’re living alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why do you live alone?”

  She took another drink, and I did likewise with my tall whiskey. It was my first one after three hours at the typewriter working on my column. “It gives me freedom of movement,” I said.

  “Do you need freedom of movement?” Anabela was being playful.

  “Absolute freedom of movement.”

  “To bring anyone you want in here?”

  “Anyone who can be brought.”

  “And to drop them whenever you want?”

  “So they can drop me whenever they want. They never last more than three days.”

  “That would be nights. More than three nights.”

  “Three days. Two nights only.”

  “That’s all you allow?”

  “More would be too much.”

  “That’s why you live alone?”

  “And why did you marry Rojano?”

  She gave a quick laugh, a sound echoing the full force of her 60s’ wildness. I remembered the trail of admirers that followed her through the Humanities wing at the university inspired by her body and her careless high spirits.

  “But what if you had married me?”

  “I’d have given one of my balls to marry you.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Yes, you do, but it’s too late now.”

  “It’s been less than ten years,” Anabela was quick to point out. “How old are you?”

  “Two years younger than Rojano and two years older than you.”

  “If you’re two years older than I am, then you’re only twenty-nine.”

  “Twenty-nine plus the presidency of Echeverría.”

  This brought another burst of sonorous laughter.

  “You know politics don’t interest me,” she said. “I don’t have a single gray hair. If you’re two years older than I, then you’re twenty-nine. You can’t count your age by presidents.”

  “Alright then, twenty-nine. More vodka?”

  “Make it a double so you won’t have to get up again. And if you have a José Antonio Méndez record, you can play that twice, too.”

  I put the record on, and poured the double shot. José Antonio Méndez began crooning in the background:

  Anyone can have a blemish,

  nobody is spotless…

  Anabela removed her leather jacket. Underneath she was wearing a sweater that accented the width of her shoulders and her small, perfectly formed breasts. Small rolls of flesh had begun to form just below her bra strap and across her stomach which was once as flat as a ballerina’s.

  “A toast to your twenty-seven years,” I said as I handed her the vodka. “May you still be tw
enty-seven when the new president is long gone. And may old Smiley go fuck his mother.”

  (Smiley was the nickname of the ex-governor of Veracruz, whose sister-in-law shot him in the face, and left him with a indelible smile that couldn’t be wiped off.)

  Once again Anabela smiled her smile from another time, and once again the Anabela that used to be flooded my memory. Entering the coffee shop in the Political Science faculty, she was like an apparition, her body lean and athletic, her gait full of energy as she crossed the room on long, slender legs, the curves of her arms and neck crowned by the democratic naturalness of a face with no makeup and a head of boyishly short hair.

  She drained her double vodka before starting in again.

  “Are you a corrupt journalist or do you just have a price?”

  “I’m a journalist from Veracruz.”

  “Is that an obstacle or do you make it pay?”

  “I follow Arteaga’s rule to the letter.”

  “And what is Arteaga’s rule?”

  “If the money won’t corrupt you, take it.”

  “And how do you know if it won’t corrupt you?”

  “You don’t know.”

  “So do you take it or not?”

  “Only if it doesn’t corrupt you.”

  “And who’s this genius Arteaga?”

  “He’s a reporter for Excelsior, the author of the universally applicable aphorism that ‘There’s no such thing as a small hangover or an idiot without a briefcase.’ And you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Is being married an obstacle or do you make it pay? Are you a faithful wife or just a wife?”

  “I’ve always been a dutiful wife.”

  “Night after night?”

  “Child after child, though I have no idea why you ask. It’s not as if it mattered to you. I get the impression that in the years since we’ve seen each other, what with politics and all, you developed other tastes. When journalists get mixed up in politics, they all end up semi-queer. At least that’s what I think because politicians are all queer. They court, hug and seduce each other, and then they fight like the natives in Africa, like spurned lovers.”

  “I’m not a politician.”