Death in Veracruz

by Hector Camín

  Behind the large palapa was a long strip of beach edged with snail shells. A ribbon of white sand curled southward for some two kilometers, ending at a rocky point with waves breaking over it. In the shallows the water was emerald green. Farther out it turned turquoise, then purple some three hundred meters offshore where it washed over the ragged barrier of the reefs.

  There were three palapas with stone and masonry walls and thatched roofs supported from within by beams whose lower ends came together in an inverted cone. The two smaller palapas were rooms with baths. The third and largest included a diningroom with a bar, an empty bookcase, and wicker sofas. A mounted sailfish hung on the wall. Next to the bar were a kitchen and a room housing the generator that provided electricity and a shadow box in which the acrylic paint was peeling off a boat named the Mercedes. Salt-caked green lettering identified the spot where the craft was beached as Paradise.

  Julio Pot placed a dish of abalone with Havana chile and a pair of Tom Collinses on our table. Shadows of palm trees swaying in the breeze moved back and forth across its surface.

  “This is my refuge, Negro,” Anabela told me. “We bought it five years ago.”

  “With funds from the Veracruz CNOP?” I asked.

  At the time Rojano headed the state chapter of the National Confederation of People’s Organizations.

  “Funds from the Guillaumín family. They sold seventeen hectares of copra here for three million pesos. For four hundred thousand I was able to get the five least profitable, the beachfront that was of no interest to the buyers. Later we built the palapas. We built the big one first, and we used to sleep here one on top of the other. Then we built the other two.”

  It was not yet noon. The day was a bit overcast, but the sun beat down hard. We walked a kilometer towards the tip of the reefs. There were pelicans and heron, a thick anchor rope washed up by the sea, and blindingly white sand as far as the eye could see. Anabela picked up the plastic thigh of a doll, cleaned the seaweed off it, and put it in the pocket of her huipil. The beach took an unexpected turn and curved inland in a semicircle.

  “This is the refuge of my refuge,” Anabela said, pointing to a small green inlet, a sort of natural swimming pool. “Come.”

  She dropped her huipil on the sand and entered the water naked.

  When we returned to the palapa, Julio Pot had prepared a ceviche of snail and mullet. There was also a bottle of cold Chablis.

  “I got my taste for this from you,” Anabela said by way of a toast.

  We made love one more time in the palapa before the siesta and again upon awakening as the sun began to set. We did it with an intensity that came not from ourselves but from the place, from a need of nearly adolescent urgency.

  We stayed three days. On the last one we went to the point with la Güera for the excursion to Cayo Culebras in the middle of Bahía de Ascensión. It was an irregular agglomeration of islands on the way to becoming overgrown with mangroves, a huge natural snake nursery. Clouds of frigatebirds with inflatable red throat pouches wheeled overhead, and those in flight were a small fraction of the thousands perched nervously on the canopies and branches of the mangroves. In places clusters of birds blotted out the green foliage with their white breasts and black flanks.

  “They’re suicide birds,” Anabela said. “When they can’t find food, they nosedive into the trees and break their own necks by getting them snagged in the forks of the branches.”

  “Like politicians out of a job,” I said.

  La Güera laughed.

  “Like widows abandoned by the leaders of national opinion,” Anabela said.

  In her house la Güera prepared a Belize dish called fish cerec (fish broth with coconut milk), and we had drinks with her brother, who by that hour of the day had already downed half a bottle of Viejo Vergel rum. We returned to the palapas at nightfall in the mini-van. Shadows stretched seaward as the sun set over the lagoon. A stiff breeze came up, rippling the water with waves and rustling the palms. Anabela put on a blue turban, and the lotion on her face glistened. Her green eyes seemed larger and brighter than ever.

  We drank without speaking.

  “Did you come here with Rojano?”

  “Is that the best question you can come up with in a place like this?”

  We fell placidly, refreshingly silent once again.

  “Who was I going to come with if not Rojano?” Anabela said after several minutes. “With Rojano and the children. We came to fish. You can go deep sea fishing or fish in the lagoon. Rojano preferred the lagoon. He went crazy over bonefish. You know what a bonefish is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a flat fish with the face of a piranha. It’s harder to catch than a sailfish. You have to get very close and drop the hook right in front of it. But if you get too close, it swims away, and if you keep too far away, you lose it. You have to do all that just so they’ll bite. Once they bite, nine out of ten get away because they’re very strong and it can take a whole hour to land one. You break the line if you pull too hard. You have to use a very small hook to keep from injuring them, which is why they can fight so long. That was the fish Rojano liked to catch.”

  The kind of fish that cost him his life in Chicontepec.

  “And you?” I asked.

  “Deep sea fishing for sailfish. I caught the one mounted on the wall of the palapa in 1975. I got it in January, two months before you showed up in the port with the López Portillo campaign.”

  She closed her eyes as if she were about to fall asleep, then, keeping them closed, she began to speak shortly afterwards.

  “There’s something I want you to know.” Her voice remained smooth and relaxed as it had throughout the conversation. “It’s something you ought to know, and I’m going to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I just want you to know, that’s all. In case anything happens. I’m not asking for anything. I just want you to know.”

  There was a long pause. Her eyes still closed, she began to trace the profile of her nose with her finger.

  “I’m going to have him killed,” she said in a rasp as if her throat had gone dry.

  “Kill whom?” I said slowly, deliberately ignoring the obvious.

  “Kill Pizarro,” Anabela answered in the same tone of voice.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “We’re in Quintana Roo in southeast Mexico. You’re gazing out over the Caribbean. What’s the matter with you?”

  “It’s taken me a year to find the right person,” Anabela said.

  “In the want ads of El Universal?”

  “I’m serious, Negro.” Anabela opened her eyes and turned to look at me.

  “I’m serious, too,” I said. “Anyone who tells you he can kill Lázaro Pizarro is a second-rate con artist.”

  “This one’s a professional,” Anabela said.

  “Who’s a professional?” I sat up straight, jerked upright by the news that she had a candidate.

  “The name doesn’t matter,” Anabela said. “He came to see me at the house in Cuernavaca so I could tell him about Chicontepec.”

  “How did he get to Cuernavaca?”

  “Through a friend in the government of Veracruz.”

  “A shithead.”

  “A friend.”

  “A shit-head,” I repeated angrily. “What made you and this shithead think you could get to Pizarro?”

  “You start by wanting to do it,” Anabela said reproachfully.

  “Wanting, my ass,” I said, getting to my feet. “Drop it, Ana. Forget about it. Just forget it, damn it. Let the dead bury the dead.”

  “In my world, the dead are alive, Negro. They let me make fun of them, but they don’t let me live.”

  “No, that’s not so. It’s crazy. You can’t kill Lázaro Pizarro. How many times do you want him to get the better of you?”

  “Always or never.” Anabela withdrew once again into herself. “Not any more.”

  I slept badly and woke up several times durin
g the night. At 5:00 in the morning, I’d chain-smoked one cigarette after another for 20 minutes while staring at the ceiling. Anabela slept without twists or turns. She lay tanned and moist on the sheet, glistening with sweat. Her perfect ears, the oval of her face, and her smooth straight jaw shone under a film of perspiration. It shook me to imagine her unbridled rage, the bloody memories that were still alive despite her relaxed face and body. Her maturity and composure made her look more beautiful than ever.

  We didn’t speak over breakfast.

  “I want to ask you to rethink that crazy idea,” I finally said.

  “The emissary is on the way,” Anabela replied. “There’s no way to stop him now.”

  Chapter 9

  IN THE FLOW

  We returned to Mexico City two days before November 20, 1979. We thought about spending the 20th together in Quintana Roo to celebrate the renewal of our acquaintance on that date three years earlier. It was the same memorable day a coup was supposed to have solved the crisis at the end of the Echeverría government and brought to a close the long era of civilian rule following the Mexican Revolution. Three years later, Rojano had been killed, more crises was brewing, and Anabela and I had been together, then separated. Now we were back in the dark playing a new game whose unreality made it all the more unnerving. Like the country, we were burning up in mid-air, set ablaze by the speed with which things were happening. Anabela’s inner turmoil and chronic fever were becoming apparent in her face and gestures, unmasking the rage she’d been able to contain up to now. In retrospect, it seemed as if the whole Rojano affair were simply the tragic outgrowth of her cold and unyielding will that was rivaled only by the fury seething beneath Pizarro’s equally impassive exterior.

  I couldn’t get her to name the emissary, but I did piece together the history of his alleged triumph over Pizarro eight years earlier. It all began in March 1971 with the union elections at the Atzapotzalco refinery in Mexico City. It was the first time Lázaro Pizarro fell prey to temptation and ventured beyond his natural sphere of influence in Poza Rica. He cast his lot with a slate of Veracruzan immigrants that he supported with money, organization, and his by then notorious clout with the union’s national executive committee. He circulated confidential information about the corrupt doings of the rival slate and offered PEMEX a sweetheart contract with the Poza Rica local in exchange for supporting his candidates at the refinery. He also activated a so-called “security detail” which accomplished its pre-election mission by threatening key workers (departmental delegates whose influence and prestige could swing the election). Certain members of the rival slate were roughed up in bar fights or on account of supposed romantic rivalries. Shooting broke out at a meeting of the rival slate, and the gathering turned into a pitched battle. Several of those present suffered bullet wounds and one man, the brother of the candidate for secretary general, was stabbed to death.

  The brawl on May 15, 1971, drastically altered the tone and strategies of the pending election. The dead man’s family was sufficiently extended to include a group of secret service agents who, thanks to the sacking of a police chief and the ensuing moral renovation campaign, had been fired. Driven by the affront to family honor and the promise of soft union jobs in the event of victory, the out-of-work cops sided with the slate being harassed by Pizarro. Before the week was out, news reached Poza Rica of the death in a bar fight of the leader of the security detail Pizarro had dispatched to the plant, and the disappearance of two subordinates following a night of carousing. The tale was credible except for the fact that the deceased, like each and every one of the bodyguards hired by Lázaro Pizarro, didn’t drink.

  Pizarro swore to avenge these deaths with others and to restore union autonomy to the refinery by eradicating the non-union violence besetting it. The commando related to the opposing slate didn’t wait in Mexico City for Pizarro to take the offensive. They correctly surmised that recent losses and the dispatching of additional security to the capital would leave Pizarro lightly protected in Poza Rica. They hit the road at nightfall and by dawn, with help from another foursome of fired cops, proceeded to occupy Quinta Bermúdez. They caught the guards on the loading docks and the ones dozing in a van near the main entrance by surprise and tied them up. They climbed over the walls and subdued the guards inside who also were asleep. At 6:00 in the morning, they broke into Pizarro’s own office just as he and Roibal were meeting to plan their day. They beat, bound, and blindfolded Roibal and sat Pizarro in the chair behind his desk. The leader of the assailants sat down in front of him, put one submachine gun on the desk within Pizarro’s reach and another within his own reach. Then he slowly lowered his hands until they rested on his legs.

  “I know you ordered me killed,” he told Pizarro. “Here I am so you can kill me.”

  Pizarro didn’t move.

  “This is between you and me,” the commando leader said. “No outside interference.”

  Pizarro didn’t flinch. The scene lasted half an hour with the submachine at his fingertips on the desk while his rival waited for him to make the first move. Finally Pizarro said, “What do you want in return?” Under the arrangement that followed he capitulated. The opposing slate gained control of the refinery local in a peaceful election, and the union’s national leadership, having feared division and unseemly violence, breathed a sigh of relief.

  The chief of the commando who had challenged and subdued Pizarro was Anabela’s emissary.

  “Is that the emissary’s version?” I asked shortly before our plane landed in Mexico City.

  “It’s my friend in Xalapa’s,” she replied.

  “He’s not your friend,” I said. “He’s an idiot. He’s your enemy.”

  “I go by what he does,” Anabela said. “I’m not afraid of what might happen, the worst has come and gone already.”

  “You and your children are left,” I said, purposely excluding myself from the survivors’ list.

  “My children aren’t in this fight,” Anabela said. “I’m the one left, and it’s going to cost him.”

  She wanted to go straight from the airport to Cuernavaca upon landing, but I wouldn’t let her. I had the children brought from The Hideaway to the apartment on Artes and then called Internal Security. My contact was out of town, so I spent the afternoon tracking him down and finally caught up with him by phone in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, where a noisy split in the state chapter of the ruling PRI was heating up. The affair would later trigger riots and an electoral triumph for the very moribund Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution.

  “Delighted to hear from you,” my contact said. “Is it something urgent or can it wait for me to get back to Mexico City tomorrow?”

  “It’s urgent for me.”

  “What’s up?”

  “More of the same.”

  “Our friend in Poza Rica?”

  “He’s broken his agreement with the widow,” I said.

  “Broken it, how? Has something happened?”

  “It has.”

  “I’d rather not talk about it on the phone,” my contact said.

  “Just answer my questions, yes or no. Has anyone been hurt?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Answer me—yes or no,” he demanded. “Are you together in Mexico City?”

  “Yes.”

  “At your place of residence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the place of residence where you are under pressure or surveillance?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sending a protective detail to stand guard until tomorrow when you can explain the situation to me in person.”

  Comandante José Luis Cuevas came with two of his men. He checked the apartment and the accesses to the roof, explained that the entrance would be under constant watch, and left a walkie-talkie with which we could reach him at any time.

  “What’s going on?” Anabela asked when the commandante and his men had left.

  “An Internal security detail.”

&n
bsp; “You called Internal Security?”

  “I did.”

  “Why did you call them?”

  “As a basic precaution,” I said.

  “What kind of precaution, Negro? What did you tell them?”

  “That’s what we need to talk about.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. Everything’s been taken care of. Don’t get in the way. There’s something else you ought to know. I didn’t send the emissary. He came to make me an offer on his own, and told me what he was going to do. He was going to do it anyway.”

  I nodded towards the table in my office where Tonchis was listening intently to our conversation while pretending to skim an issue of National Geographic. Anabela took him to the bedroom where she and Doña Lila had improvised cots for him and Mercedes. She got him into his pajamas and turned on the television, then resumed her complaint.

  “We can’t stay too long in this apartment. We seem like gypsies. Our house is in Cuernavaca. We have nothing to do here.”

  “You’re not leaving here until security has been arranged for you and the kids,” I said, refusing to drop the subject.

  “What are you talking about, Negro? Under the circumstances the worst thing I can do is seem concerned.”

  “The worst thing you can do is try to look smart. Who do you think you’re dealing with?”

  “I’m not afraid, Negro. I already told you I didn’t do anything.”

  “This is a battle I don’t want to fight. I want to stop it.”

  “You want to stop it? That’s why you called Internal Security?”

  “No.”

  “What did you tell them then?”

  “That Pizarro was breaking the agreement to leave you alone.”

  “Did you tell them about the emissary?”

  “I told them you were in danger, but tomorrow we’re going to discuss it face to face.”

  “And you’re going to tell them about the emissary?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You can’t do that, Negro. I told you that because I love you.”

  “I have no idea why you told me.”