Death in Veracruz

by Hector Camín

  During elections four years later another fanatic tried to kill him with a bullet that passed cleanly through the middle of his chest with no damage to vital organs. In 1961, he was fired on again, but this time the three attackers were mowed down on the spot by his embryonic corps of bodyguards. In 1962, the first Lázaro Herón Pizarro primary school opened in what had been the city’s red light district after its transformation by the union into a green residential zone. In 1966, he was elected general secretary of Local 35 for the first time. A year later the first agricultural complex, Egipto de los Tuxtlas, was founded followed by the 1968 founding near Rinconada de Tenochtitlán. During the Echeverría presidency, there were three attempts on Pizarro’s life, the last of which occurred in May 1973.

  From 1966 to 1976, under Pizarro’s leadership, the budget of Local 35 increased a hundredfold (from seven million to seven hundred million pesos). It developed two more residential districts, 35 union stores with prices 40 per cent below the market, seven movie theaters, 17 schools, eight packing plants, and the two agricultural complexes. The deaths of four political rivals (an auto accident, a bar fight, a plane crash, and a drowning in Veracruz) were never fully explained. But during those years, not a single political campaign turned bloody in Poza Rica. There were no pitched battles in the streets and no meetings whose outcomes were determined by pistols or submachine guns.

  Pizarro first won recognition as Poza Rica’s favorite son, and then he became the favorite son of the whole state of Veracruz. His name adorned the entrances of two more public schools in the state, and, in 1975, his birthplace, the hamlet of Pueblo Viejo near Chicontepec, was officially renamed Pueblo Viejo de Pizarro. That was the year he began the creation of his third agricultural complex, “La Mesopotamia.” A year later, upon the election of Rojano as mayor of Chicontepec, he’d begun to develop his fourth complex, “Babilonia,” to whose construction we were on the way to becoming a bloody footnote.

  In October 1978, René Arteaga died from overindulgence and substandard medical care in the ward of a Social Security hospital. We went to his burial in a new cemetery behind the heights of Tecamachalco along with his dumbstruck children and his devastated wife whom he’d left with no resource except her own tears. The paper he worked for covered the funeral expenses and in black on gold letters named its newsroom for him.

  In January of the following year, Anabela used money from the Chicontepec settlement to buy a house above Cuernavaca. It sat on a lane lined with bougainvillea across from the military encampment and near the access ramp to the Mexico City expressway. It was called The Hideaway, and it had three bedrooms, a red tile roof, an unusable fireplace, and a small orchard of rubber and avocado trees. On a terrace above the house, surrounded by carob trees and jacarandas, were 600 meters of unkempt garden with an abandoned, empty and dirty swimming pool in the middle.

  She had the garden spruced up, painted, and filled the pool, turned the adjacent cabana into a studio, and converted the central sala into a kind of terrace. Light flooded in from all sides, and there was a long carved wooden bar, and a rectangular table of varnished planks. Both Mercedes and Tonchis had their own rooms. Anabela and I had the other. Honeysuckle and azaleas poured through a large window with a panorama of blue sky. Sometimes, on a clear day, you could see the volcanoes in the distance.

  The house drew Anabela, and Anabela drew me. This led to a routine of leaving for Cuernavaca at noon Fridays with the children’s friends, and on Sundays with our friends for meals and barbecues.

  “I’m moving here,” Anabela announced one day. She was wearing the gardening gloves she used when pruning and weeding the dwarf banana trees in the planters.

  This would have been in March 1979. The hearings on political reform were in full swing, and the greatness of Mexico as a petroleum power was the topic of the day. She started to look for a school for Tonchis and Mercedes. In Cuernavaca she found the most expensive one in Mexico, the summer program of a Swiss school whose curriculum included a yearly term in Geneva. It was trilingual, with a riding program, courses in computer science and set theory, and tuition of a 100,000 pesos (the exchange rate at the time was 24 to the dollar) plus 40,000 for what was termed menage (supposedly uniforms but in reality a wardrobe).

  She put the children in school and bought herself a Chrysler van with a wooden dash, adjustable steering wheel, power windows and locks, and cruise control. You could go 80 mph on the highway and still not feel as if you were going very fast.

  In early June, she began moving out of the apartment on Artes and into The Hideaway. Every Friday she filled the back of the station wagon with small mountains of clothes (her staggering accumulation of clothing over the past two months). She also transferred her jewelry to safety deposit boxes in a Cuernavaca bank. One Saturday they extended her the courtesy of opening the vault so she could check her belongings (at the time banks weren’t opening Saturdays), and I accompanied her and the manager who handed her the keys and left. Anabela opened the first box and began verifying its contents against a typed checklist, a task that clearly delighted her. She furrowed her brow as she touched each piece, rubbing it like a lucky charm.

  I left and, while I waited, read newspapers in the cafe across the street. Later, we had a pre-dinner drink at Casino de la Selva.

  “King Solomon’s mines,” I said over the first martini.

  She had now acquired the habit of drinking martinis made from imported gin.

  “You can’t lose with jewelry,” she said, oblivious to the joke.

  “Especially if they reproduce themselves the way yours do. They’re more prolific than Mexicans.”

  That struck her funny.

  “You were playing the reporter, right Negro? You think I’m rich, don’t you?”

  “And your tastes are expensive.”

  “Do you consider yourself to my taste?”

  “I’m from the press. It’s above class, perfectly objective.”

  “How much do you have in the bank, Negro?”

  “You are as close as I’ve come to having something in the bank.”

  “Seriously,” Anabela persisted. “How much?”

  “Maybe twenty thousand in my checking account. Of course I haven’t gotten my commission for the Chicontepec deal yet.”

  She laughed again. Heartily. It was our first joke about Chicontepec since Rojano’s death.

  By late July the apartment on Artes was finally all mine, unoccupied and twice as empty as before.

  “It should serve as your office in Mexico City,” Anabela contended. “Make Cuernavaca your de facto residence. You can live at The Hideaway and work here weekdays. When you have to stay late or have dinner commitments, you can spend the night here. When nothing’s pending, you can go to The Hideaway. You can have an office there, too, with a phone and peace and quiet.”

  “If you agree,” she went on, “Doña Lila can come and go from Cuernavaca as you wish.”

  “And as I wish,” Doña Lila said. She took part in the deliberations with Mercedes in her lap. “I can’t let this little tramp grow up like a wild flower. Right, little tramp? And it’s time to start keeping an eye on Tonchis too or the little shrimp will be putting his tool where it doesn’t belong.”

  In the end, Doña Lila didn’t go. At least not permanently, just weekends. And the apartment on Artes almost reverted to what it had been before. I gave up the office on Hamburg Street and relocated my files and desk back to the space Anabela had made into a diningroom. I put a photo of René Arteaga where Anabela had a photomural of San Juan de Ulúa. On August 19, 1979, a beginning reporter from the cultural desk at El Sol de Mexico spent the night at Artes. Come the second week of September 1979, we were duly surprised upon finding ourselves separated by the move, by routine, and by mutual abandonment. One Sunday night Anabela phoned from Cuernavaca.

  “Let me remind you my door is open,” she said. “It’s been three weeks since you stopped in.”

  “Too much work, ma’am.�
��

  “That’s pretty lame, Negro. I’m not calling to criticize you, but I’m not your suffering wife, remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “That’s exactly what I want you to remember. Even cars need to be serviced. How many girls have you taken to Artes?”

  “It’s all news all the time.”

  “Just little lady reporters. Isn’t that right, you bastard?”

  “I told you nothing but news.”

  “Oh, Negro, I wish you were here.”

  “Get a grip, ma’am. This line is tapped.”

  “Your cock’s been tapped, Negro. Tonchis says hello. They’re teaching him show jumping. When are you coming?”

  “Next week.”

  “Not next week, Negro, because next week I’m going to Mexico City. I’m warning you now to set aside five days for me. I have travel plans and things to tell you.”

  She did indeed show up the following week. She arrived at the apartment around 8:00 Friday evening in a black silk pant suit that was open in back, revealing an expanse of tanned skin all the way down to her buttocks. She’d had her hair cut short again, and her face was as toasted as her back, intensifying the brilliance of her eyes. She was also wearing gold earrings and a matching necklace engraved with pre-Hispanic motifs, red lipstick, and a beauty spot on her left cheek.

  “You owe me this night and five days, as we agreed,” she said.

  She went straight to the bedroom. She turned on the shower, then selected, and laid out on the bed a suit and tie, a shirt, and socks and shoes. Half an hour later we climbed into her Chrysler van, and by 9:00 we were at the Champs Elysees. The night was cool and clear, and by 9:00 we were seated on the terrace overlooking Reforma. We ordered fish and shrimp, and from the wine list a vintage dry Chablis. We went through the first bottle in a hurry just as we had in the past, then we ordered the second.

  “This dinner’s on me,” Anabela said. “You know why?”

  “Because you’re the rich widow.”

  “You don’t have to be a widow to be rich. You invited me to dinner here once, and you’re still the bachelor outcast.”

  “But you’re the Queen of Sheba now.”

  “And now you’re a maker of national opinion who doesn’t understand a damn thing. You know why I invited you to dinner?”

  “I already said I did.”

  “And I said you didn’t. I’m inviting because you put my life in order. That is, you straightened out all the problems one person can solve for another. It’s a given that the rest is nothing but booze and Chicontepec. Agreed?”

  The wine was beginning to have its affect, making her tongue careless and loose as it always did.

  “Agreed.”

  “There’s no way out, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And remembrances aren’t worth much. Vengeance may help, but it doesn’t bring back the past, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t”

  The trout came garnished with almonds as requested, and Anabela ordered a third Chablis.

  “You’re the one who introduced me to these European delicacies, Negro. Before I was just a Little Red Riding Hood from Veracruz. How was I to know about European wines and first class restaurants? I want to ask you something.”

  “Ask me something?”

  “And I want you to answer as if you really were a national opinion-maker. Not as the fag you actually are. Understand?”

  “What’s the question?”

  “Just one, Negro, here and now between the two of us, looking each other in the eye.”

  We looked each other in the eye.

  “I want to know if you like the way I am,” she said with her gaze fixed on me.

  She was very tan from the sun. Her eyes were brilliant and clear, and the elongated oval of her face glowed from the wine that reddened her cheeks and dilated her eyes. Her lipstick was smudged from eating, and the meal left a film of grease on her lips.

  “You’ve seen better times.”

  “No, no, no,” Anabela said, beginning to crack up over her own joke. “What I mean is would you let your cock be cut off just to get a smile out of me? Would you hock the fucking newspaper that made you a national opinion-maker if I asked you for money? Would you die for me or are you just screwing around with me? That’s what I want to know.”

  “I’d give up the column.”

  “All right,” Anabela said. “What else?”

  “There is nothing else.”

  “No, no, no, that’s just the beginning,” Anabela said. “You’ve got to keep going. You need to trade the newspaper for my earlobe, your apartment for my used underwear, your birth certificate for a piece of my tail. Something romantic, Negro. Because I’d give anything. Believe me. No, you don’t believe me, but I would. That’s what I came to tell you tonight, and now I’ve said it.”

  We drank the rest of the wine. Unburdened and relaxed, Anabela dug into the desserts and liqueurs with a relish born, she said, of the four months of diet and exercise that turned her into a tanned and rejuvenated jet-setter as slender and robust as a beach bunny.

  We went to hear Manzanero at Villa Florencia and rented a suite at the Fiesta Palace at 3:00 in the morning. At seven we sipped the last of the cognac we’d brought with us, and I felt Anabela fall asleep with her head resting on my legs.

  She woke me up at noon, freshly bathed and in full voice. “Let’s go, Negro.”

  She had two tickets on the afternoon flight to Cancún. In the suite’s sala a breakfast with cold beer and huevos rancheros awaited us, luxuriously served under a silver cover.

  She refused to go by the apartment on Artes for clothes, preferring that we buy beachwear, sandals, and a pair of travel bags at the store in the hotel. We were in the airport waiting area long enough for two drinks apiece, and we had another two along with the in-flight meal. We landed as night fell on Cancún. We checked into the Hotel Presidente and went for a nighttime swim on its blissfully quiet beach where we remained until our legs were shivering. We ate a candlelight dinner at Casablanca in the Hotel Krystal, a dive stuffed with Bogart memorabilia and assorted pieces of the usual Hollywood kitsch. Anabela ordered a bottle of champagne.

  “Love me, Negro, and don’t forget me,” she said by way of a toast, “because after me they broke the mold.”

  I toasted the mold.

  “I’m going to show you my refuge, Negro. And once you’ve been to my refuge, you’ll know everything there is to know about me.”

  Very early the next day we set out for the refuge in an automatic min-van driven by a man with a small mustache. His name was Julio Pot, and he treated Anabela with the curious and attentive familiarity of a driver and secretary.

  “Did you say we were coming?” Anabela asked after we boarded the min-van.

  “I went yesterday to see for myself that everything was in order,” Julio Pot said. “All that was needed was gas for the generator and more of the insecticide that was used up and never replaced. How long has it been since you last came?”

  “A year and five months, Julio.”

  “You left in January of last year.”

  “January of last year,” Anabela admitted.

  We headed towards Tulum on the road that also goes through Carrillo Puerto, formerly Chan Santa Cruz. In the 19th century, this was the center of the Maya rebellion known as the Yucatán Caste War. We drove for an hour next to a curtain of jungle through which an endless array of foxes, iguanas, and armadillos broke out onto the highway.

  At the Tulum-Pueblo crossroads, on the far side of Akumal and Playa del Carmen, Julio Pot turned into a corridor that stretched down the middle of a long tongue of land separated from the mainland by a lagoon called Boca Paila and from the open ocean by a reef that fended off the tempests of the Caribbean.

  Coconut trees lined the beaches on either side, tall slender palms bent inland by the prevailing sea winds. They created a landscape punctuated only by patches of mangroves along the lagoon and
an abundance of wild almond trees. It was a spur of land occupied by copra farms and waterside fishing villages under gradual invasion by fishing resorts, meaning bungalows with no electricity and the other rustic charms that attract tourists seeking a way back to nature.

  Julio Pot maneuvered the mini-van onto one of the side roads. We stepped out into a weeded clearing planted with perfectly aligned palm trees forming a lush walkway that led to a cluster of small dwellings topped by thatched roofs. They were built to look like palapas-the simple shelters characteristic of the region since time immemorial. A slender white woman stood in the middle of one of the paths drying her hands on her apron. Her broad smile revealed a pair of gold incisors.

  Anabela kissed her.

  “Are you coming to la Punta?” the woman said.

  “Yes, Güera,” Anabela said.

  “Have Julio let me know when so I can make you a meal.”

  “We want to go to Punta Pájaros,” Anabela said. “And Cayo Culebras. How is your brother?”

  “You know, either hungover or drunk. There’s no middle ground with him. But when it comes to fishing, he can’t be beat. I’ll tell him to get you some snails and lobster for tomorrow. He’s sure to get us something.”

  Julio Pot went to the back of the largest palapa and started a generator. He unloaded the luggage and several boxes of groceries from the mini-van.