No matter how much he insisted, they wouldn’t let Héctor switch from cheap Madero brandy to grapefruit soda, so somewhere around the third glass he suddenly found himself embarked on an uncertain path through the intricate labyrinth of his own self-reflection.
If life is that period of time that runs from the instant the doctor picks you up by your feet and waits for you to start crying, until the moment when your old friends raise a glass in memory of your passing, then the measure of a man’s life comes down to how many old and good friends he’s been able to make and hold on to over the years. It was a complicated equation, because it meant not only that your friends should be truly faithful, but that they should remain alive, in the best sense of the word. And for a man to have truly noble friends it was necessary for him to live on noble terms both with them and with his country. The carpenter who had owned the little rooftop shop on Bolívar Street had evidently failed this ultimate test, if he was to be judged by the pair of hardened alcoholics who today toasted his demise. But what about Héctor? How many lunatics would take the death of Héctor Belascoarán Shayne as an occasion for reunion, remembrance, and love? He asked for another Madero, knocking it back in a single shot before the hostile gaze of the bartender, who, no matter how hard Héctor tried to disguise it, saw him for the unrepentant teetotaler that he normally was. Then he started to count off on his fingers. There were his three officemates, Gilberto the plumber, Carlos Vargas the upholsterer, and the sewer engineer El Gallo Villareal. Over the last three years they’d built an intimate bond out of their diverse professions and attitudes toward life; but theirs was more than a simple friendship, it had to do with a way they had of maintaining a certain perspective toward the country as a whole, of isolating themselves from all the screwed-up shit it threw at them every day. Then there was his deejay friend, El Cuervo Valdivia; and Carlos and Elisa, his brother and sister, with whom he had formed a sort of familial redoubt of Mafia-like solidarity. There was Father Rosales, the priest from Culhuacán, with whom he’d gotten involved in that mess at the Basílica; and the singer Benigno Padilla, Benny the King, whose life he’d saved; and the Reyna brothers, union activists he’d worked with; Mendiola, the reporter, who’d reemerged from the forgotten past of his school days, just like El Cuervo had; and Maldonado too, a lawyer and heroin addict, permanently flirting with the abyss, with whom Héctor was united by a common faith in the constant, inevitable proximity of death. That was it. All of them were either new friends he’d met during the last three years of detective work, or old friends he’d recovered in that same time. He’d salvaged nothing else from the remote past. And what about all the women he’d loved, and who’d loved him, Belascoarán wondered. Could he also add them to the list?
No one but the two carpenters had shown up for the old man’s wake. The cantina was strangely quiet. A university student sat at a corner table downing glass after glass of tequila, convinced that was the only appropriate activity for a man whose girlfriend had just left him. An elderly bureaucrat played solitaire at another table. The only other people in the cantina, besides the bartender, were the two carpenters and Héctor, downing one Maderito after another.
“Didn’t Don Leobardo have any other friends?” asked Héctor.
“Stupid old fart. Sorry, was he a friend of yours?”
“No, I just knew him in passing.”
“He was from Durango, and he’d done just about everything there was to do, been just about everywhere. And he still didn’t have any friends. That’s how much of an asshole he was.”
“He didn’t have any friends at all?”
“Well, sure, he used to hang out with those two wackos he worked for Zorak with. What were their names?” the younger one asked his partner.
The older carpenter burped. “Those were his glory days. When Zorak used to let him carry his fucking suitcase.”
“What did he do for Zorak?” asked Héctor, intrigued.
“He used to blow on his balls to cool them off when he came through the ring of fire,” the man answered mysteriously.
“He filed down the locks for him.”
“He sealed up the barrel when they dumped him into Lake Chapultepec.”
“I’ll bet he was even the one who hooked up the cable on the helicopter.”
They kicked the ball back and forth, while Héctor tried to imagine who Zorak was, and what his connection had been to the dead man.
“He was definitely the one who tied the cable,” said the younger of the two, and he let out a rough laugh.
“Where can I find Zorak?” asked the detective shyly.
“He’s with Don Leobardo,” said the younger one.
“He’s dead?”
“He fell from a helicopter six years ago. In the middle of one of his stupid shows.”
“He wanted to be an angel,” said the younger one, who was pretty drunk by now.
“He got his wish,” said the other one.
“What did Don Leobardo have to do with it?”
“He was one of Zorak’s flunkies…You know, bring me my cape, Don Leobar, bring me my sharp knives so I can stick them up my beautiful assistant’s butt, fix me the trick with the British handcuffs and the ankle chains…And Don Leobar would do it for him. They were both from Durango, that’s why Zorak gave him the job.”
“Who were the other two friends you mentioned?”
“Gimme another one,” said the older man, exiting the conversation and walking, glass in hand, toward the man playing solitaire at the far end of the bar.
“One of them was Zorak’s cousin, his bodyguard. A real jerk, he thought he was a big shot, with that forty-five of his…”
“And the other one?”
“His manager, PR man, whatever you call it. Nowadays he’s got this joint over on San Juan de Letran…Zorak was their meal ticket…The three of them used to sit around for hours back in the shop, shooting the shit and talking about all the money they’d have when Zorak made it really big, and then, bam, Zorak takes the plunge and they got nothing…The sons of bitches spent a whole week crying and drinking fancy tequila…and do you think they ever offered me a drink? Hell if they did…Have another drink on me, dammit!”
Héctor took the refilled glass. What did another one matter after four or five? The barroom floor started to tilt slightly.
“What’s the name of the place on San Juan de Letran?”
“La Fuente de Venus…They’ve got some goodlooking babes there, that’s for sure. Wow…Hey, compadre, let’s go, I gotta take a leak…” he called out to the older man, and pointed at his crotch.
***
Héctor walked, drunk and alone, through the Colonia San Rafael. In the midst of his alcohol-induced fog his ideas took on an unusual density, everything was transparent, crystal clear. The problem was—what was it? That was the problem right there, he couldn’t connect this clarity with anything real. It was like being incredibly smart but with nothing to think about. He laughed at himself a little bit as he walked in his Maderito maze, past the taquerías and the store windows full of shoes and records and toys, through the noise of the crowd. It had gotten dark. A purple aura stained the horizon in the direction of Tacuba. Suddenly Héctor stopped. It occurred to him that he was actually going somewhere in particular, toward a destination, not just walking aimlessly. His drunken rambling was carrying him in the direction of Mendiola’s house.
The realization lifted his spirits at the same time that it carried him deeper into the mists of his drunkenness. He smiled from ear to ear and topped it off with a burp. Then he headed down Miguel Schultz toward the funeral home. Mendiola lived on the second floor of a tenement next door to a funeral home, and from the kitchen window you could watch the loading and unloading of the deceased, the comings and goings of hearses, and the fancy floral wreaths, polished coffins with shiny brass fittings, uniformed attendants, teary-eyed men and women clutching at wilted flowers.
Maybe that’s what made Mendiola what he was, that and
his work as a reporter. When he got fed up with all of it, Mendiola would go to professional wrestling matches and get it all out of his system. For thirty-five pesos’ admission he saved himself the cost of a psychiatrist.
That’s where Héctor had met him, a couple of years ago, while Héctor was on a case, tailing Mil Máscaras’s corner man. Mendiola was there, screaming insults at the top of his lungs (between falls and gouged eyeballs and flying kicks) at the government bureaucrats who bribed him, at the editors who eviscerated his stories and sent him off on humiliating assignments, and at himself for accepting it all. His cries and curses were absorbed into the collective howl inside the arena, harmonizing with those of his fellow spectators, like the elderly woman at his side who shouted ringward: “Kill him, kill him, finish him off! Kill the little faggot!”
It was all fresh in Héctor’s mind when his friend’s round, swollen face appeared in the doorway.
“Sonofabitch. How you doin’?” The newsman spoke laconically, leading the way back into the tiny apartment, where he collapsed onto a bed littered with books and dirty dishes.
“I’m drunk,” said the detective, dropping down onto the bed next to the reporter and knocking a plateful of moldy pork rinds onto the floor.
“I thought you didn’t drink.”
“I don’t. I just get drunk.”
“For professional reasons?”
“For professional reasons. In the line of duty.”
“Well, okay. Okay okay.”
“Okay okay what?” asked Héctor and he started to laugh.
“Getting drunk. I also only drink for professional reasons.”
“You’re drunk too, Mendiola.”
“Completely, Belascoarán. I’m totally shitfaced. But all in the line of duty.”
They both started to laugh. The reporter pushed himself onto his feet and went over to the window.
“Look, Belascoarán, a funeral.”
Héctor stood up, tripped over a pair of shoes and stumbled to his friend’s side.
A funeral procession was forming on the street below.
The shiny black coffin jogged Héctor’s memory. “Hey, Mendiola,” he said. “You ever hear of a guy named Zorak?”
Chapter Three
Zorak
You thought that life was spoils, a treasure for the taking. The country certainly encouraged that kind of ideological excess. Still, it was a treasure for which you had to pay a price: through merciless training, long suffering, gnawing poverty; combined with an overriding sense of patriotism of the pledge-of-allegiance variety, and a hefty dose of brownnosing, bootlicking, and kowtowing.
You thought all this throughout a career in which myth steadily outpaced reality until it finally obscured it completely. Lies and inventions took the place of real events in your memory until they acquired the status of old and venerated truths, which were, in turn—through time or convenience—displaced by new falsifications.
It was easy enough, then, for you to forget the milk truck you drove through Durango’s dusty streets, erasing it completely, once and for all. Just like you expunged your real name with that same precise and pitiless eraser: Arturo Vallespino González. And the public grade school, and the little house in the Colonia Dos Aguas (onto which no one ever built the planned addition—just one more wasted, useless dream). You erased your dad, your mom, and your brothers and sisters. On the other hand, you didn’t erase the impression that Hollywood’s brief incursion into Durango made on a simple milkman: John Wayne seen leaving his hotel, Robert Mitchum pulling the trigger on a sawed-off shotgun during filming, a whole herd of horses let loose in the city streets, a two-dollar tip received from a cameraman’s assistant. All this was allowed to remain in the attic of real and imagined memories. And along with them there, in a far corner, was a fantasy that ended up taking on the full weight of reality. The one where you walk out of a steam bath and bump into Jack Palance. Palance gives you a dirty look and swears at you in English, and you spit on the floor and slap him across the face. You told that story so many times that it became a fixed part of your pseudoreality.
Still, none of this really mattered. What mattered, as time went by, was a balanced diet, plenty of fresh vegetables, and several large glasses of creamy milk every day (a lone vestige of the past).
All that, your second life, began with the Filipino. He came to Durango from San Francisco, fleeing from a crime of passion so terrible its memory would sometimes shatter him like a pane of glass. You met him in a Durango whorehouse, where he liked to follow his feats in bed with a strenuous series of calisthenics, buck naked in the middle of the room.
Who knows how you knew, but you saw there the page on which your destiny was written, and you grabbed it and held on.
The Filipino showed you how to build up your body, how to stretch it and harden it and make it respond to your commands, to tone it, to form it into an efficient and powerful machine.
Life split into two distinct parts: the routine milk deliveries, done every morning at top speed, and the afternoons dedicated to gymnastics and muscle training.
The Filipino enjoyed passing on his art, and you were a good disciple. After the course in gymnastics, you went on to karate, and from there (once again the hand of fate) to the esoteric secrets of the escape artist, magician, and daredevil. The Filipino had once worked as assistant to an Indian contortionist, touring bars and clubs in California, and he knew some unusual and wonderful tricks. So unusual and so wonderful, in fact, that you would spend entire sleepless nights contemplating the subtleties of escape from a sealed coffin, from a straitjacket, or the dangerous motorcycle jump through a ring of fire.
A year and a half passed in strenuous training, and then one day the Filipino disappeared. You got drunk and stayed that way for three days, and the hangover lasted a week. When you finally showed up again at the dairy, you were out of a job; the assistant personnel manager had personally ripped up your time card.
You shut yourself up in your parents’ house and refused to talk to anyone. Nobody knew what was wrong with you, not your mother, not your father, not your brothers and sisters. He always was a little strange, they told each other, doesn’t drink, won’t eat meat, only vegetables, goes running early in the morning, the little faggot never had a girlfriend, no meat, only vegetables, no cigarettes, no booze, ay hijo mio, this isn’t food you eat, and on and on.
Finally you got a job teaching gymnastics in the local grade school when the regular teacher got sick, and it was there that you discovered your second great talent: you could talk the talk. You’d never known it. You had it in you all along but you never knew it until now. You had your students to thank for that. From the very beginning they had a nickname for you, El Clavillazo, after a television clown, and even today many of them, office workers and factory workers, shopkeepers, policemen, and truck drivers, might remember, if someone were to jog their memory, the gym teacher with the funny way of talking that they’d had once for six months back in grade school, who used to say things like “eggsercises,” and “germnastics,” and would talk about the importance of staying fit for a better “Meggsico.”
El Clavillazo, stupid nickname that it was, was soon relegated to the dustbin of erased memories.
After that you lucked into a job in the Club Laderas del Norte, where the wives of Durango’s politicians and captains of industry went for exercise. There you fine-tuned your gift for gab, and took in three thousand pesos a month. That’s right, señora, see how easy it is to slim up the hips…
A cheap grade school patriotism and the spiel of a housewives’ weight loss trainer were the twin elements that would define and enliven your language for the rest of your life. Faithful companions, they would never leave you.
It was at the health club that you gave your first big public performance, churning out six hundred consecutive push-ups without showing signs of fatigue. It was the scene of your first private performance as well: finally, late one afternoon in the locker roo
m, you got laid by the wife of the general manager of Vinícola de Durango, S.A.
In 1967, at the age of twenty-four, you decided that it was time for the final, decisive, most daring leap of all. And you disappeared for an entire month.
Durango died there, forever, and with it, Arturo Vallespino González.
And, in a cheap hotel in Irapuato, Zorak was born—after a lot of back and forth with different names and esoterica. The new name was accompanied by a turban, a blue Mao jacket, white slacks, and a golden cape.
One month to the day after Arturo Vallespino disappeared from Durango, Zorak made his first appearance on national television, live from Mexico City.
If someone today were to say that it was all pure chance, and if you were alive to contradict them, you would tell them about the importance of perseverance and dedication, about the payoff of sweat and hard work. But the fact is, it was pure chance, and you aren’t here to say otherwise.
Raúl Velasco had an opening in his weekly Sunday extravaganza, and a guy who could do a thousand pushups live on the air was just what he needed to fill the hole.
And now here in our studios, the incredible Zorak, the world’s greatest bodybuilder and master of mental control.
You came on stage accompanied by four torch bearers and a slightly cross-eyed but shapely young woman whom Raúl Velasco had hired to speak for you.
Dr. Zorak has taken a vow of silence and his beautiful assistant will serve as intermediary.
She explained that you were about to give a small demonstration of the potential of the human body by doing one thousand push-ups without a break, in front of the studio audience. She said that you were from Bombay, that you were not a charlatan but, in fact, a medical doctor who had advanced to a high level of spiritual development.
And while Raúl Velasco announced that they would be checking in at regular intervals to observe your progress, and that the studio audience would serve as witness, you made an overt display of gathering your concentration, controlling your breathing, and then went to it.
No Happy Ending: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel (Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novels) Page 3