Death in Veracruz

by Hector Camín

  “It doesn’t matter. Explain to me why you’re living alone in this apartment if you’re not queer. This looks to me like a place to bring your boyfriends, and when they get their claws into me, they’ll tear me apart. Tell me the truth. Are you an honest bachelor or do you have a thing for boys?”

  I poured a third round and put on a Pérez Prado album.

  “So why don’t you invite me to eat somewhere?” Anabela demanded. “You don’t want to hold me hostage until the police find me here, do you?”

  “Maybe I’ll invite you for stuffed tortilla pockets and a bowl of soup.”

  “I haven’t eaten that kind of peasant food since I started wearing shoes, boy. And don’t tell me you got that Rolex by saving the labels from Aunt Chucha’s soup cans.”

  “They don’t give prizes for soup labels any more.”

  “You just told me the prizes come in envelopes from Arteaga. Take me to the Champs Elysees.”

  “They don’t serve stuffed tortillas.”

  “Ask for the menu and select a white wine from France to go with the fish. White wine goes with fish, doesn’t it? The waiter comes by, you snap your fingers, and you ask for a 1928 vintage. And for me Smirnoff on the rocks because as far as I’m concerned all that French piss is for queers, right?”

  It was about seven when we emerged into the strangeness that holidays bring in Mexico City. Though cars were few and far between, the streets were brimming with people, large young families with children climbing up the backs and arms of their fathers and women with bodies made for having babies. The women looked prematurely worn out, their bodies fresh, new and, at the same time, devastated.

  We went to the Champs Elysees, a restaurant with a terrace overlooking Paseo de la Reforma. The place had become a haven for politicians and deal making, and it featured a menu whose offerings to Mexican diners varied from the ostentatious to the refined. Anabela asked for an inside table and the imported wine list.

  “Pick a white to go with the fish like we agreed.” She held out the list to me when it came. “And choose the fish, too. Whatever. Just make sure it’s good and dead.”

  I ordered trout sauteed in butter and a bottle of Chablis that went down like water.

  “That’s pretty good grape juice.” Anabela drained the last few drops from her glass. “Tell the little queer looking after us…”-she meant the waiter-”…that he can bring another bottle.”

  Another bottle was uncorked and dispatched as quickly as the first. It was gone before the trout arrived. We talked about the newspaper, about politics, and Anabela’s female acquaintances in Veracruz. The wife of the government secretary ordered a Mercedes Benz with purple velvet upholstery direct from Germany. The governor’s secretary collected 100 peso gold pieces and had them engraved with her name. The governor’s sister-in-law amassed a collection of 204 live insects, called maqueches, from Yucatan with emeralds encrusted in their carapaces. At a fiesta in honor of the President’s wife, the chief delegate from Oaxaca was so eager to be seen that he agreed to play the part of a giant ahuehuete tree during a medley of Oaxacan folk dances. The mayor of the port of Veracruz was a known homosexual, and his taste for gangbangers from the district of La Huaca was duly catered to. And the number one provider of both boys and girls in the port was an old woman who enjoyed the protection of the governor. She also went through the motions of presiding over the local Red Cross and named herself godmother for life of the Veracruz Sharks, a professional soccer team renowned for its record of 14 consecutive defeats on its home field.

  “When you get a close look at those limp-dicked soccer players,” Anabela said as she finished off the second bottle of Chablis, “you can see they’ve all lost their toenails from kicking and being kicked so much. They’re all bruises, scrapes and scars. From the waist down, I mean. But in case you haven’t noticed, they’re a bunch of queers. Why do you think they hug and pound on each other the way they do over a silly goal? They make huge pile-ups and weep for joy. I think the real reason they fall all over each other is they’re queer.”

  The Chablis lubricated her smooth coastal accent, erasing the s’s from most words and softening the d’s.

  “So are you going to let me disappear among all the little queers waiting on us or are we going to dance? Because what I need is a damn good rumba to clear out my fallopian tubes. And it’ll be good for your kidneys.”

  She caught the waiter’s eye with an elaborate set of gestures and, when he came, said, “I think you brought us domestic wine because it gives me an urgent need to go to the bathroom. The gentleman is very angry.”

  “It’s Chablis from France, ma’am.”

  “Then why does it make me want to pee so badly? It tastes like domestic piss to me. Where’s the restroom?”

  At 11:00, in a climax of trombones and bongos audible from the street, we entered the Nader, a sports center in the La Merced district with a ballroom that on weekends drew huge crowds for the best dance music in the city. It was a two-story hulk with a central dance floor that could accommodate as many as 500 couples. The bands came from everywhere. There was New York salsa, Jorrín and his band plus the Mexican groups then reviving music from the tropics.

  The Náder was rocking:

  Your case makes me so sad

  So sad

  How sad I am

  your case is mental

  The group La Libertad was performing in a huge cage at the rear of the ballroom. A sweating mass of humanity writhed about the dance floor in its own confusion. Waiters circulated in the aisles, and groups of half-drunk teenagers imbibed and argued heatedly among themselves. La Libertad overflowed with sweat, chaos and insousciance as its patrons commemorated 60 peaceful years of Mexican Revolution.

  For 100 pesos the waiter got us a corner table. We ordered drinks and danced, that is, Anabela danced with a precision and rhythm I had forgotten. I remembered her dancing with Rojano at a competition in Villa del Mar during a carnival that featured Lobo and Melón. I watched them move among the other dancers, circling each other, moving their feet and hips with dazzling speed and without ever missing a beat. At times they danced counter-rhythms to the music, at others they picked up on themes that were inaudible until they were expressed visually in their dancing. They didn’t win, but, as I watched them holding onto each other bathed in sweat, I saw them as a couple for the first time and realized how blind I’d been to the intensity of Rojano’s pursuit of Anabela.

  “It’s been ten years since I so much as danced in my own living room,” Anabela said over the rim of her vodka. “Ten wasted years in the middle of nowhere, letting the music empty out of my body. Because music is like the muscles in your body. You either use it or lose it. It’s not like women or houses that stay with you forever.”

  She took a drink, put her elbows on the table and leaned forward the better to look at me.

  “Maybe you’ll turn out queer on me after all too, just like the politicians and soccer players. But I’m going to tell you something. Do you want me to?”

  “If you like, tell me.”

  “No, no, no. Don’t come onto me with platitudes and all that queer stuff. Say you’re dying for me to tell you, that waiting for me to tell you is driving you crazy.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Are you desperate for me to tell you? Or do you just want me to tell you as if I were one of your usual queers, just to humor me?”

  “I’m desperate for you to tell me.”

  “Then I’ll tell you.” She raised her glass and fixed her gaze on me again. She was quite drunk, quite young. “I’m getting to like you.”

  “I’m getting to like you too.”

  “No, no, no. Don’t echo me like that. When I say I’m getting to like you, it has to drive you mad as if the moon were rising out of your skull. You don’t have to say a thing. It just has to drive you mad for it to work, that’s all. Are you getting it? Because what’s going on here is I’m getting to like you. And that has to be celebrated l
ike year one of the Mexican Revolution that the queers all made. I dare don Pancho Madero to say it isn’t so. He’s the one they all betrayed, the bunch of lesbians.”

  She danced and talked until the curtain came down at midnight and then she demanded to go somewhere else. We headed south. At one in the morning of the 66th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, Insurgentes was packed with cars, and there were prostitutes on every corner. A blur of letters still streamed across the legendary marquee above La Roca: Scooby-Doo and the band. The Fellove Trio. Dinner and dancing 10-3 a.m. We were bound to end up here, where I’d brought Anabela during our first years in college, where I’d first seen her cling appropriately to Rojano during a slow dance, where I tried to regain her attention one night in 1968 when she kept on talking to Rojano. I dutifully brought her back to the place where we drifted apart.

  She held onto my arm as we passed through an entrance lined with enforcers and bouncers. “Don’t let me go.”

  Inside the song sung by the lead singer for Scooby-Doo was both timely and unfortunate:

  Though you let me go

  though you let my dreams die

  though I know I should curse you

  in my dreams I smother you with blessings

  We went straight to the dance floor and continued to embrace well after the song ended. I don’t recall the next song, but then they played Don’t ask me for more.

  “Now I’m going to tell you something,” Anabela said as she started her next vodka. “Do you want me to tell you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Don’t talk dirty. If you want me to tell you, all you have to do is go mad. Do you want me to tell you?”

  “I’m crazy for you to tell me.”

  “What I’m going to tell you comes in parts. You don’t mind if I tell you in parts?”

  “If you don’t tell me in parts, I’m not interested.”

  “Then pay attention because what I’m going to tell you may be enough to shrink the Himalayas and let you catch a yeti. I mean you have to consider it in light of all the vodkas you’re plying me with. I really can’t imagine yetis dancing the rumba. Can you imagine a yeti dancing the rumba?”

  “I can’t imagine them dancing the rumba.”

  “Can you imagine a drunk yeti?”

  “Super drunk in the heights of the Himalayas.”

  “You don’t imagine anything. You’re just leading me on, distracting me from the things I want to tell you.”

  “I’m distracting you, that’s all.”

  “See? You’re going to turn queer on me like the soccer players and politicians. And the Himalayan yetis. But I am going to tell you. Do you mind if I tell you in parts?”

  “If you don’t tell me in parts, I’m not interested.”

  “Then I’m going to tell you some things forbidden to queers and people like that. First, you don’t snap your fingers the way you should have at the little queer in the Champs Elysees. A political columnist like you snaps his fingers to call the little queers who wait on tables in restaurants. Is that clear?”

  “Very clear.”

  “Second, you have lead feet. They weigh you down as if you were the last of the Mohicans, the one, you know, that was killed because he couldn’t run away. Third, you’re mixed up with your friend Rojano in the whole Chicontepec business, right? I mean they’re taking me for a country girl from Veracruz, aren’t they? You’re taking care of the paperwork here, and then you’re going to divide my 2,500 hectares 50-50 between you while I just sway in the sunshine like the palm trees in the Agustín Lara song, right?”

  She was actually quite drunk. Her vitreous gaze originated from beneath a heavy layer of mascara and a tangle of eyelashes. She had the look of a disenchanted 40-year-old, and it excited me just as much as the gymnastic transparency of her body when her unblemished adolescent features made it impossible to imagine her with bad breath. This was her other side, the version beneath the makeup where the flesh under her shadowed eyes had gone slack. She could still be playful, but she was a woman who had stopped believing in Santa Claus, who could play the hand that was dealt her without giving up anything of herself no matter how hard the game. She looked invulnerable and tough in a way I hadn’t seen before, but which I always suspected might lie beneath her surface optimism and submissiveness.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Don’t act like you’re talking to the Virgin Mary. Are you in cahoots with this Rojano guy or not? They’re trying to screw me, right? You can tell me because, after all, I’m good and drunk. Tomorrow I won’t remember a thing, so don’t be afraid. Can’t you see I’ve been in cahoots with you ever since high school? What kind of columnist have you turned out to be on me? And tell that bastard to shut up because the booze is making me think you got the asshole who’s singing to lace my drink with yumbina. You give women yumbina, and they go for you just like that, right? You’re the love I can’t resist, and the yumbina makes them fall like flies one after the other. That’s right. Why don’t we go there, what do you think?”

  She put her hand over her half empty glass and looked around, supporting herself with her elbows on the table. One elbow slipped. She raised it, it slipped again, and she smiled. Finally, with great effort, she said, “Let’s get out of this rotten place, alright?”

  The same 66th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution we stumbled back to the apartment on Artes. Pitcher ready, batter up. We made it onto the sofa where the evening had begun. I took off her shoes and began to massage her feet. She pulled my hair to make me climb on top of her, and I obliged. We kissed very slowly at first, then in a fit of overacting, I began stroking her thighs and breasts, and she yielded to my touch. When I again tried to kiss her on the mouth, I discovered she’d fallen asleep. Her makeup had run, her lips were parted and dry, her skirt was hiked high over her knees, and one of her earrings hung loose on its open clasp. Her wrist was pulled up next to her chin as if she were resting on it. Her breathing was normal and rhythmic at once rigid and peaceful like a little girl. I watched a while, for a long while, as she slept on the sofa. Then I got a blanket and put it over her, making sure not to disturb the placement of her wrist under her chin. I made myself another drink and continued to watch her, her loose earring, her wrist, her breathing. For half an hour I wandered about the apartment full of illusions and discoveries, of loose ends to tie in the column, of possible sources. I pulled the blanket back over Anabela: she was snoring.

  Daylight and Doña Lila woke me up around ten. I lay sprawled over my bed minus my shirt, dying of cold, and with a dry throbbing in my throat.

  “She left early,” Doña Lila said as she gathered up the sheets.

  “Where is she?”

  “I told you. Like a vampire she left with the dawn.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “To a luxury cemetery, I’d say. Because that woman belonged to a bullfighter at least, not a reporter.”

  “She didn’t leave a message?”

  “No message, no tip. What do you want for breakfast? You can have the tamales from last night, fried bananas, soft tacos, lime juice with lots of ice. And your tub is full of water hot enough to boil the skin off a chicken.”

  I gave in to the ministrations of Doña Lila and the morning papers. I checked my notepad which contained long paragraphs of my scribbles from the previous day that I no longer understood and three intelligible sentences: “In a fight with Ro over Chicontepec / I’m being nailed / It’s even possible he sent her.” At one a messenger came to the door with a package from Mrs. Rojano. The bundle was held together with metal bands and had been delivered by taxi from the Hotel Reforma. I called the hotel right away, but she’d left for Veracruz on the one o’clock plane.

  Doña Lila cut the strapping with pliers and handed me a cigar box. The outer label, which hadn’t been removed, said: “Special selection for Atty. Francisco Rojano.” Inside was a pouch identical to the ones Rojano had shown me months earlier at their hou
se in Veracruz: Destroying to create. He who can add can divide. With the pseudo-Aztec border. Also in the packet were the three files Rojano had promised and an enclosure wrapped in onion paper. I tore open the enclosure and saw the photo: the small charred body and exposed teeth of a six-year-old boy totally consumed and shrunk by fire. On the back in block letters drawn by Rojano: “José Antonio Garabito, age 10, died in fire, Poza Rica, January 14, 1976. With the usual trademark.” There was a small, barely visible yet obvious hole in the right temple. There were four more photos of the burnt house, the coroner’s report, and a final note from Rojano. “This is the last member of the Garabito family. The others died in the market in Papantla at the hands of gunmen who were after Antonio Malerva.”

  I felt as if I was being manipulated by remote control from the port of Veracruz.

  I went back to sleep after I ate. I dreamed I was with Anabela in the pastures along the shores of Lake Ostión. We were walking on the strips of solid, brilliantly green turf built up from the marshes along the inlets to the lagoon. Purebred Brahma cattle with their humps like hillocks of cannon balls hid among the banana palms and pawed the ground. Suddenly, a band of cowboys on horseback burst onto the sandy shoreline. They pursued us for several meters, then lassoed Anabela. I ran after her trying to free her but sunk up to my chest in a bed of quicksand. One of the cowboys approached me and held out his saddle cinch for me to grab onto and keep from sinking. I clutched the cinch with both hands, and the cowboy pulled me towards him. He drew a pistol, shoved it in my mouth, and ground it back and forth so that my teeth left marks on the barrel. He kept twisting the pistol while muttering: “Whoever can add can divide.” I woke up tangled in the bedcovers and chewing on the belt I was in the habit of draping over the headboard.

  Two days later I had the same dream all over again.

  Towards the end of the following week I chased down Rojano at a phone number in the state Palace of Government in Jalapa: “Lots of birds on the wire,” he said to warn me his line was tapped. “What do you want me to tell you?”