by Hector Camín
“There’s talk about a settling of scores within the ranks of the oil workers,” I said, purposely trying to annoy him.
“There’s talk from where, my friend?” Loya replied haughtily. “Who says that?
“Rumors in Mexico City,” I said.
“Malicious rumors, unfounded,” Loya said.
“What more do the rumors say?” Roibal asked.
“That Quinta Bermúdez was attacked by gunmen in December of last year,” I said, “and that Pizarro died as a result of serious injuries suffered in the encounter.”
“False,” Loya said. “Pure fantasy.”
“And who could have carried out this attack?” Roibal said.
“I’m telling you it’s false,” Loya shouted. “Even talking about such a thing is offensive.”
“The motherfucker capable of overrunning Quinta Bermúdez has never been born,” Roibal said with somber pride.
“Edilberto Chanes?”
Roibal smiled. “That’s old news.”
“Lies, lies!” Loya overreacted, violently cutting off the banter for a second time. “Let’s get to the point, to reality. You’re a journalist not a storyteller. Stick to the facts, sir.”
He was a far cry from the obsequious driver who ferried us around “La Mesopotamia” in March, 1977. Brimming with self-assurance, he had more than enough energy and vigor to cool the heated exchange Roibal was spoiling for. He brooked no interference with his lecture about union gardens and cattle ranching operations, union successes, and how the union resisted management’s proclivity for handing top jobs to people from outside the oil industry. He boasted of the union’s ability to censor the governor of Veracruz and dictate the contents of a message to the President of the Republic. His bizarre and disjointed ramblings were faithfully transcribed and reproduced in the series of interviews published two weeks later.
Roibal said nothing more, but he came looking for me that night in the hotel. We took our seats, and he proceeded without further ado.
“Pay no attention to those rumors,” he said. “They’re false. Nobody attacked anybody at Quinta Bermúdez, least of all Edilberto Chanes. He caught us off guard one night in Mexico City, that’s all. Then he went around saying he’d stormed Poza Rica.”
“Loya was fuming this morning,” I said. “Did he order you to come and see me?”
Roibal nodded. I watched his good eye jump up and down in its socket.
“You’re telling me all this on his orders?”
“It’s the truth.” Roibal looked away from me.
“The truth has no need for messengers,” I said.
“I’m being disciplined,” Roibal said glumly. “He wants to humiliate me, to make me cower and bow down before him and his henchmen. Loya’s the new boss, and he’s trying to break me. That’s why I’m here.”
“How did Pizarro die?” I said.
“Cancer of the pancreas,” Roibal answered without a second’s pause, but once again he looked away. “And where did you lose your eye?”
He squirmed nervously in his chair and folded his arms as if retreating into his shell.
“On a mission,” he said, “but that’s none of your business.”
“Defending Quinta Bermúdez?”
“No.” Roibal sounded withdrawn. “I already told you. Quinta Bermúdez couldn’t be overrun, not by anybody.”
“But it could be attacked.”
“He never saw the dawn of another day,” Roibal said.
“Are you referring to Edilberto Chanes?”
“I’m referring to anyone you like,” Roibal said. He got up to leave, but, adjusting the patch over his eye, he added, “I want you to know it was a good fight. Chicontepec, I mean. Even though nobody won.”
“I’m asking you one last time.” I got to my feet and looked him straight in his good eye. “What killed Pizarro?”
“And I’m telling you for the last time…,” He smiled as if now it was his turn to mock me. “…it was his pancreas, and that’s the truth. And if Loya should ask, you tell him mission accomplished.”
Anabela returned to Mexico City on June 4 with the tickets and paperwork necessary to put Rojano’s sealed coffin on Mexicana’s noon flight to Los Angeles. At 9:00 in the morning of June 6, Anabela, Doña Lila, and I arrived at the French Cemetery with a hearse. Followed by groundskeepers, we made our way along the paths lined with willows and eucalyptus to the plot where Rojano’s mortal remains lay buried. Though the spot was at the cemetery’s edge four years ago, now it was well within the rows of graves creeping ever nearer the high outer wall that enclosed the place’s eternal occupants. By way of preparation, the marble headstone had already been removed, exposing hard, freshly turned earth. The groundskeepers started digging, and Anabela clung to Doña Lila, who was dressed in black with a hat and a spotted veil. In short order the sweating workers reached the cement slabs separating the coffin from the surrounding earth and began hammering at the mortar that had sealed the slabs. There was a pale sun overhead, and a chill breeze blew through the trees and raised small puffs of dust on the ground.
“I want you to check the headstone,” Anabela told me without loosening her grip on Doña Lila. “I want to be sure it’s Rojano.”
The headstone had been shoved aside face down. I turned it over and placed it where Anabela could see. It said Francisco Rojano Gutiérrez, Mayor of Chicontepec. Remembered by his children, Francisco and Mercedes, and his widow, Anabela Guillaumín.
“This isn’t where I remember the grave,” Anabela said. “It was nearer the wall.”
“Others came afterwards,” I said, pointing to the new rows.
“If it’s not him, he’s playing games with us,” Doña Lila chimed in to support me. “If anyone came to give me the ride this man’s getting, I’d make it a party even if there were nothing left but my bones.”
It took a lot longer to break through the slabs than to remove the earth, but the final chunk was finally tossed out. We looked down into the hole and saw the black coffin covered in dirt and weeds, engraved by the vegetation that stayed stubbornly alive in spite of slabs and headstones.
“Clean it first,” Anabela said. “I want to see the color.”
Using masons’ trowels, the groundskeepers removed the white clay and the weeds that snaked across the top of the casket like climbing plants. Little by little, its iron gray finish became visible together with its raised and totally rusted crucifix.
They cleared the remaining weeds away. Around the edges of the grave they laid out the gear normally used to lower coffins into the ground: a rectangular frame of nickel-plated iron bars attached by green strapping to a set of pulleys that would now work in reverse. The groundskeepers hooked the straps to the handles on the coffin and began to raise it. The machinery squawked and wobbled as the bands tightened, straining to hoist so much dead weight. The coffin rose a few centimeters, then dropped back into its bed.
“Something’s holding it down from underneath,” the lift operator said. First he dug around the base of the coffin with a trowel, then he took a crowbar to the weeds rooting it in place. He reattached the straps, and the machinery started squawking again. But this time the pulleys continued to crank unimpeded. With every turn they let out another groan as Rojano’s remains arose from their eternal dwelling for the second time. When the coffin reached the surface Anabela grew pale and stepped falteringly towards it, gripping Doña Lila’s arm for support.
“I want to see him.” Anabela said haltingly. She lost control her voice, and it cracked as she struggled to get the words out.
“Quiet, girl,” Doña Lila said with loving firmness. “You must neither offend God or desecrate the work of His hand.”
The groundskeepers took the coffin by its handles and carried it to the gurney on the path nearby. Anabela put a hand on the crucifix, then removed the few sods stuck to the skirting at the coffin’s base. We followed the path and one of the cemetery’s inner avenues to the waiting hearse. Once t
he coffin was loaded, I tipped the groundskeepers, and then we were alone with the driver biding his time behind the wheel.
I took Anabela’s arm, and we walked towards the exit where our car was parked next to the administration building. Anabela’s pulse beat unevenly as she signed the final papers, and her normally cold hands were even colder than usual. We walked to the car with Doña Lila beside us, and I opened the front door for Anabela to get in. Several meters away, the hearse idled at the entrance to the cemetery.
“I want to go with him,” Anabela said, pulling away from the car and towards the hearse.
“Doña Ana,” Doña Lila said sorrowfully, “he’s not there any more.”
“I’m going with the coffin.” Anabela corrected her coldly.
And she did. She got in the front seat next to the driver. Doña Lila and I rode in my car, making a truncated cortege en route to the airport.
“For a few minutes she brought him back to life,” Doña Lila said. “You should have felt the way she trembled.”
I saw her tremble one more time while signing the forms required for the hearse to gain special access to the airport. We spent the hour before boarding in the bar, silent or nearly silent in a pungent cloud of Doña Lila’s perfume. At one point she excused herself and left, rooting through her handbag as she walked towards the airport’s main corridor.
“You’ve got everything arranged?” I asked.
“Yes.”
She was dressed in white with black piping just as she’d been for Pizarro’s burial. Her hair was tucked beneath a cap that lengthened and enhanced her face.
“What are you going to do, Negro?”
“I need to write tomorrow’s column,” I said.
“I don’t mean that. What are you going to do, generally speaking?”
“After I do tomorrow’s column, I’ve got to do one for the day after.”
She took my hand. The bags were gone from under her eyes. She looked plain and serene. She wore no jewelry and seemed unconcerned with her appearance. Part of the effect was thanks to an absence of lipstick and only the slightest touch of eyeliner highlighting the shape of her eyes.
“I ought to apologize to you,” she said.
“There’s something good to investigate this week,” I replied. “The dope trade is on the upswing again. I got a report about it yesterday.”
“Thanks, Negro.”
“I have some letters for the children.” I took them out of my coat pocket.
“Yes,” Anabela said.
“And I think Doña Lila’s bringing something.”
What she brought was a plush doll for Mercedes and a giant puzzle that assembled into a minutely detailed representation of the Iztacíhuatl volcano for Tonchis.
“Since he likes rocks and landscapes,” Doña Lila explained, “here’s a picture of some very old ones that ought to interest him. And the little girl still loves stuffed dolls more than the things big girls lust after.”
It was nearly two when Anabela boarded after a long embrace with Doña Lila and the few seconds when she melted into me as if we were dancing.
“If it has to be a Gringo, let it be a journalist,” I said with a forlorn sense of professional loyalty.
“Thanks, Negro,” Anabela repeated. She headed down the boarding tunnel past the scanner for hand luggage, smiling, walking erect, full of athletic freshness and her seemingly eternal youthfulness.
Doña Lila wiped some tears away. We crossed the pedestrian bridge to the parking complex without speaking, then she said, “There are lots of women and men. All that’s missing are real live love affairs.”
Every day I wrote my column for the following day, and every week through the end of August I got letters from the children. Then, with my saint’s day approaching, a letter from Anabela came too. The night before the ex-reporter from El Sol had returned to Artes. She was now editor of the entertainment page for one of the capital’s major dailies, a young, even-tempered woman and a close reader of newspapers, friendly, warm-hearted, loving and inclined to domesticity. In the morning we went through the daily papers over breakfast, and I waited for her to leave before picking up the mail and getting close to Anabela again. It wasn’t a long letter though Anabela’s clear and expansive handwriting made it seem to be. Two pages were taken up with descriptions of greetings from the children and of the suburban house they’d moved into from their apartment. The paragraph about Rojano said the following:
“He’s buried in a new cemetery with lawns and trees everywhere on a hill overlooking the city of Los Angeles. I’m still alone and happy. I don’t miss corrupt journalists, but, unlike Tonchis who’s just scored his first Gringuita, I do miss some things. Mercedes is taking modern dance at the city art school. The house has a swimming pool, and you can’t imagine how calm it is. I think a lot about you and what we went through together. Sometimes I dream about it. But the nightmare always goes away in the morning. The days are so sunny. You can’t imagine the peace and quiet, the way the wind blows through the trees where Rojano is now. I go every Sunday and just sit there in the wind which, as I said, is softer than you can ever imagine.”
Despite what she said, I could imagine the wind perfectly well and Anabela too, secure and at peace on her Sunday visits to the new headstone on a hill looking down on Los Angeles, seated with her arms folded, gathering in the years spent preserving the memory of Rojano.
About
HÉCTOR AGUILAR CAMÍN
Héctor Aguilar Camín (born July 9,1946 in Chetumal) is a Mexican writer, journalist and historian, and author of several novels, among them Death in Veracruz and Galio’s War, of which Ariel Dorfman (Death and the Maiden) has exclaimed, “Without hesitation, I would call either one of these a classic of Latin American fiction.” His most recent novel, Adios to My Parents was published in Mexico to great critical and popular acclaim in 2014. Death in Veracruz is the first work of his fiction to be translated into English.
Aguilar Camín graduated from the Ibero-American University with a bachelor’s degree in information sciences and techniques and received a doctorate’s degree in history from El Colegio de México. In 1986 he received Mexico’s Cultural Journalism National Award and three years later he received a scholarship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation while he was working as a researcher for the National Institute of Anthropology and History.
As a journalist, he has written for Unomásuno and La Jornada (both of which he also coedited), the magazine Proceso, and currently for Milenio. He founded and is nowadays the editor of Nexos, one of the leading cultural magazines of the country, and hosted Zona abierta, a weekly current—affairs show on national television, and has written articles for prestigious publications as El país and Foreign Affairs.
He has written a classic boook on Mexican history: La frontera nómada. Sonora y la Revolución Mexicana, (in translation from U of Texas Press) and numerous books and essays on contemporary Mexico. In 1998 he received the Mazatlán National Prize of Literature for his book, A breath in the river. He is married to Angeles Mastretta and has three sons. Other novels by Héctor Aguilar Camin: El error de la luna, El resplandor de la madera, La conspiración de la fortuna, and the collection of novellas and short stories: Pasado pendiente y otras histories conversadas.
About
CHANDLER THOMPSON
Chandler Thompson acquired his translating chops in the 1960s as a Peace Corps Volunteer, then while writing news stories in English from raw copy in Spanish and French. He’s covered Mexico as a stringer for The Christian Science Monitor and as reporter for The El Paso Times. He translated Death in Veracruz between hearings while working as a court interpreter.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to my daughter Elsi, the first reader in English of Death in Veracruz. She kept me going by always wanting to know what happened next. My partner Pauline Curry whose admiration for the work of Héctor Aguilar Camín is alway an inspiration.
/>
Hector Camín, Death in Veracruz