Gilberto Gómez Letras once dreamed of opening up a used-car lot. His other dream jobs have included doorman in a luxury apartment building, owner of a welding shop, quality-control manager in a gin distillery, and manager of a brothel in Zihuatanejo. Instead, he’s worked in a plastics factory, for a bathroom fittings manufacturer, and as a plumber’s assistant.
El Gallo loves bossa nova and samba. He never misses a concert, and he’s got every record ever put out in Mexico by Jobim, Edu Lobo, Laurindo Almeida, Vinicius de Moraes, Badem Powel, Stan Getz, Chico Buarque de Holanda, Joao Gilberto, Carlos Lyra, Luiz Bonfa, Charlie Byrd, and Marcos Valle. And he dreams about Astrud Gilberto. He’d like to live with her in an isolated house (which he’s drawn the plans for and sketched out dozens of times) in Baja California, near Cabo San Lucas. The house’s distinguishing characteristics are all acoustic: the constant low roar of the breakers on the rocks, and a stereo system with enormous speakers in every room. In his dreams, he’s having breakfast with Astrud Gilberto in a very large, entirely white kitchen. He’s wearing a cream-colored pajama, and she has on a yellow camisole. They’re both barefoot; the gray light of a sunless day filters in through the window.
Self-Portraits: Carlos Vargas
If they come at me from the front, I’ll give it to them straight on. But around here, they always hit you from the side, or they stick it to you from behind.
That’s what made me change myself, to put them off their guard, so that they wouldn’t ever know what I was up to, so that…
I don’t even like the music, but I’ve got a shitload of ranchera records under my bed, Negrete, Pedro Infante, Aceves Mejía, Cuco Sánchez, that whole crowd. Just to throw them off. Or, who knows. I’ve also got two black leather jackets, the kind that everybody was wearing around ’69–’70. The way it works is that sometimes I make fools out of them, sometimes I make a fool out of myself, and sometimes I just end up taking it in the rear. That’s how it’s been lately. Or just about always. When I was born, in 1946, my dad immediately thought to himself: “Here is a son to learn my trade and earn money for the family”; I’m sure he was already thinking it when they took me and laid me on my mother’s breast for the first time, before they’d even given me a name, a little newborn baby. Because that’s the way it is in the Morelos, you’re born with your fate already laid out for you. Later on you can take your fate and change it, but not because you’re any tougher than anybody else; it just turns out that parents are rotten fortune-tellers. If my folks had to make a living predicting the future, they’d die of starvation. That’s the only reason I became an upholsterer instead of a shoemaker, or some other trade. They made me this way, I didn’t do it myself. They made me quit school after the sixth grade, and they made it so I never trusted anybody; and it was from them that I inherited my small hands and soft skin that kept me from becoming a boxer. Because of them. Later on I made myself different. The normal thing was always just to get tougher as you got older. Me, I made myself different, and I learned to get along, but I also learned how to change. I went out drinking with the guys, and I went to the whorehouses and all that, but I also read encyclopedias, and books about Freud, the ones they sell at the newsstands on the street. And I got as much out of it as I could, and that was where I started to understand this thing about how they’re always trying to make you one way, and you’re trying to make yourself into something else. That’s why I’m always changing jobs or getting fired. That’s why I joined the union, and became an organizer, and slept out on the ground with the strikers. And that’s what got me sent to jail too, and not for ripping somebody off, which would have been the normal thing from where I come from…Sometimes I think I really am my own boss, that my work belongs to me, and my tools, and the books I buy every time I get paid for a job, and my crazy ideas…Sometimes I’m positive that the only thing that really belongs to me is the right to say no, no I won’t sell out, no I don’t like it, no I won’t stand for any more. I’ve been fired three times in twelve years from jobs in factories and other people’s shops, and all that belongs to me too. I swear, sometimes I think that if I didn’t like people as much as I do, I’d bash them all over the head with a hammer, all of them. Starting with myself.
Basic Facts
El Gallo leads a double life, or rather, a life split in two. He works nights in the office, calculating flow levels and reviewing sewer expansion plans. In the morning he goes home to sleep. In the afternoon he studies psychology at the university. That’s where he met his girlfriend. It’s not clear whether he stays in school out of a real interest in clinical psychology or a fondness for the open spaces and greenery of the campus. At first it seemed like a good idea. Now, more than anything, it’s become a habit.
Gómez Letras frequently leaves work in the middle of the afternoon and goes to a nearby cantina called El Mirador. When the bartender sees him coming through the swinging double doors, he pours out a double tequila anejo. Just like that, without even having to ask.
Carlos Vargas has a scar on his head. Not very big, about an inch and a half long. They hit him on the head with a hammer. They were waiting for him just inside the shop door. It cost his boss almost nothing to have it done: a couple of bottles of rum and a slap on the back. And after the beating, they fired him, so he never was able to organize anything in that rotten little shop after all. Now the scar itches just before it rains.
El Gallo Villareal once stayed drunk for six months. When he was around fifteen, he acquired a taste—partly as a dare and partly as the consequence of a poorly trained palate—for Don Pancho brand liqueurs, especially the crème de menthe, crème de banana, and tangerine. After a couple of parties in which he cleaned out his parents’ modest liquor cabinet, he was forced to raise relatively large amounts of cash every week washing cars, making runs to the supermarket, saving his allowance, and mooching off his grandparents, in order to maintain his vice. The sudden, exorbitant consumption of Don Pancho (eighty-six proof) at the Villareals’ was grist for the rumor mill in his comfortable, middle-class neighborhood: some said his father was fooling around behind his mother’s back, driving her to drink; others insisted that Don Pancho was an aphrodisiac; or that it made delicious cakes…His six-month binge was carried on both in public, drinking with his gang of friends, and in private, drinking alone in vacant lots, crashed out in the back of his older brother’s car, or in his room, full of posters of American baseball players. It cost him his girlfriend and his first year of high school.
Gilberto Gómez Letras always fudges the numbers when he bills his clients. It’s a compulsion for him, an irresistible necessity. He can never allow himself to add a column of numbers properly. More than just a habit, this systematic, Pythagorean fraud is central to his sense of morality.
Javier Villareal always dresses in a sort of uniform: blue jeans, checked shirt, brown leather jacket. It’s a way of establishing his identity as a northerner, a stranger to Mexico City, a way of marking himself as an outsider, a provincial, in a city in which everything becomes the same, a city that wipes out all differences.
Carlos Vargas is a connoisseur of chewing gums. There isn’t a brand he isn’t familiar with, and he judges them all with the aplomb and expertise of a true gourmet.
Neither Carlos, Gilberto, nor El Gallo voted in the last election.
Self-Portraits: El Gallo
I’m really only good for simple things. Like riding a horse in a Marlboro ad. But Marlboros taste like shit, so not even that. In my case, the system broke down. I could have been a hell of an engineer; I might not have known a whole lot about anything else, but I’d have made a great engineer. Not like now. They tell me I’ve lost my ambition. But how are you going to learn to be a good engineer if the cops suddenly take over your school one day, start shooting everywhere, and poke out your friend’s eye with an iron spike rolled up inside a newspaper? That’s no way to learn engineering, and I don’t give a shit if we’d been on strike and had the whole place shut down for nine
ty-six days. Besides, what’d they ever have to offer me? Not like the pigeons that eat the breadcrumbs at La Santa Veracruz. Nothing like that. But I did get something out of it: fear, fear of my country, fear of power, fear of the system. And I lost something too: the ability to remain innocent, stupid, pure. My girlfriend says that’s why I stay in school. She says I don’t give a damn about psychology, but that what I want is to feel like a student again, to go back to being young again. Belascoarán, on the other hand, says that what it is is that, being from the north, I’m naturally drawn to the campus, with its esplanades and open space, which is the closest you can get in this city to the flatlands of La Laguna, or the great, wide open expanses of Chihuahua. Carlos has his own explanation; he says that, according to Freud, the reason I stay in school is that I secretly hope that the cops come back (it was in the Casco de Santo Tomás, it was night, there was a blackout, the street was dark, everything frozen by the incredible sound of the sirens), and that this time, instead of running like a pansy I’ll stand my ground and grab a knife and kick some ass. Gilberto Gómez Letras says that’s where the babes are, so, naturally. I like everyone’s explanation, and in a way I wish they were all partly true. This is what psych has done for me, it helps me to look at everyone else’s reasoning and make it pass for my own. My mother says that I just never grew up and that I don’t have the right temperament. The fact is that the pigeons in the plaza of La Santa Veracruz couldn’t give a shit if I have the right temperament, as long as I bring them breadcrumbs.
Famous Sayings
It’s not that Javier Solís has a good voice, it’s the way he puckers his lips when he sings. —Gilberto Gómez Letras
You didn’t really think it was that easy, did you? Go back and do it again, and if it comes out all right this time, then you’ll know it was luck all along. —Carlos Vargas
It isn’t the pissing that matters, it’s how much foam you make. —Carlos Vargas
A great blueprint is as good as a great novel, you just have to know how to read it. —Javier Villareal
I should have been a secretary. —Gilberto Gómez Letras
Basic Facts
Gilberto was operated on twice for appendicitis. The first time was a wrong diagnosis: “woops, just a hernia.” The second time was the real thing. Nothing was explained to him very clearly either time, so to this day he swears that human beings have two appendixes. He ought to know.
Carlos has a deeply ingrained fear of glue. Years ago he worked in a shop where all the carpenters sniffed glue. They would get high and spend hours lying underneath their work benches, sunk inside the drug’s sickly dreamspace. Carlos always kept his distance from their part of the shop, overcome with a mixture of fear and pity for the three master carpenters and their assistant.
El Gallo is a fanatical baseball fan. His favorite team: the Unión Laguna. But despite his enthusiasm, and the fact that he follows the season closely from start to finish, and holds impassioned discussions with Gilberto (the only one in the office who’ll pay him any attention), he’s never seen a single game, not even on television. Occasionally he’ll go so far as to listen to a game on the radio. In this way he’s formed a magical relation with the sport, turning baseball into a part of his private reality. El Gallo himself suspects that real bats and balls and strikes and slides into second and squeeze plays and diamonds and pop-ups don’t have much in common with the way he imagines them to be: a completely private reality.
Carlos lives alone in an enormous and decrepit apartment behind the Opera Cinema. The apartment was passed on to him by a friend, a retired professional wrestler who went away to start a pig farm in Michoacán, leaving Carlos his trophies and photographs and other mementos of his profession. Sometimes one of the waitresses from the sea-food restaurant on Hidalgo climbs the stairs and goes to bed with him, and Carlos, all one hundred twenty-two pounds of him, strips down and poses for her under the knowing gaze of the heroes of the ring, and he does the camel clutch and the full nelson on her, the cradle and the sleeper hold, the atomic kneedrop, the two of them in bed.
Gilberto’s father passed away two years ago, El Gallo’s father is mayor of Saltillo, and Carlos’s dad is a seventy-year-old blind shoemaker.
The three of them agree in their love of soda pop, and hot chocolate and donuts.
Self-Portraits: Gilberto
They must think that I still want to make it big, that I’m still thinking big. But that’s just a front. I know, and they know too, that I’m never going to hit the big time. I’ve already gotten as far as I’m ever going to get. Sometimes I think I’m already old, worn out. Sometimes I think that it’s not so bad the way things are going. Last month I got away with charging this condo on Doctor Balmis triple what they really owed me; I balled a housewife in Polanco, and then the servant in the house next door; I got good and drunk twice; I beat the shit out of this guy whose kids beat up on my kids; I did a helluva job on this one bathroom installation on Parral Street; I visited my mom’s grave; I bought myself a black-and-white-checked sport coat; I dreamed I was making it with Irma Serrano; I bought my wife a new record player; I taught one of my daughters how to add; I didn’t pay any taxes; I almost saw a dead Roman with his throat cut in the bathroom at the office…
It’s all right. Maybe I haven’t made it, but I don’t have to lick anybody’s boots to put food on the table, I’ve got friends I’d give my life for, I sleep with whoever I want to and I don’t have to answer to anybody about it, I don’t owe anything. After all, this is Mexico, cabrones…And let’s face it, I’m an irresponsible bum.
Chapter Seven
Our luck has turned,
the light’s come on and the chaos is revealed.
—Francisco Urondo
It seemed as though life was stuck in a continuous loop of nights and dawns. Nights, with tired feet tripping to the city’s nonstop beat, dawns full of harsh light and a sense of uneasiness. While the elevator rattled down the six floors to the street and El Gallo hummed a ranchera, Héctor decided the time had come to push the story forward, to force things into the open. Hammer away until the killers had a face and a shape, or at least a motive. What did Zorak have to do with all this, six years after his death? He fascinated Héctor. He had just the right dose of a uniquely Mexican type of glory. A glory bordering on the ridiculous: ephemeral, commercialized, prostituted.
An army of paper delivery boys milled around in front of the doorway to the building. Some were busy folding in the day’s supplements, others tied up bundles with string or traded bundles back and forth, and others consulted grimy notepads full of numbers and illegible script.
Héctor raised his arms over his head and stretched. El Gallo, at his side, stifled a yawn, and stuck his hands into his jacket pockets.
Two men moved away from the soda cooler in the restaurant across the street. Their movement caught Héctor’s eye. The sun was barely up, and their dark sunglasses were like a warning signal that shook him awake. Instinctively, he raised his hand to his gun in the shoulder holster under his arm.
One of the men had on a worn-out gray suit and a blue shirt; the other one, his greasy hair uncombed, wore a blue plastic raincoat. They both had their hands in their coat pockets.
“Get out of the way,” Héctor said to El Gallo when the two men took out their guns. They were twelve yards away, coming toward them across the street, dodging paperboys loaded down with stacks of today’s news.
El Gallo smiled at Héctor and it wasn’t until he noticed the gun in his hand that he turned sharply to see what was the matter. A paperboy, with a three-foot stack of papers loaded on the back of his bicycle, pedaled in front of Héctor. His balance was precarious and Héctor pushed him off and grabbed the bicycle by the rope that held the papers in place.
The first shot hit the stack of papers. Thousands of words flew in all directions, leaving the smell of fresh ink in the air. El Gallo separated himself from Héctor, and a long-barreled Colt revolver appeared in his hand. Th
e bicycle wobbled and fell over, and Héctor let himself be pulled down behind it. As he fell he sighted down the barrel of his gun toward the belly of the greasy-haired man, but he hesitated as a woman crossed his line of vision carrying a small boy in one arm and a stack of papers under the other. A second bullet ricocheted off the pavement, leaving a hole in Héctor’s jacket. The paper hawkers ran for cover, and the gray-suited man was left in the open in the middle of the street. Another shot sounded. Héctor fired at the same time and the man clutched his stomach with both hands. The detective fired again. Blood spurted from the man’s chest and he fell over backward. Three yards to the right, greasy head lost a precious second watching his partner go down. When he turned back to locate Héctor, a piece of his jaw exploded and his face became a bloody grimace. Héctor hadn’t had time to fire. El Gallo stood behind a La Prensa pickup truck, smoke curling from the end of his revolver. Shouts and cries filled the street as the echo of gunshots faded. The screaming had started when the first shots were fired, but Héctor hadn’t heard it, only the sound of the shots, and the soft hum of the freely spinning bicycle wheel behind which he’d taken cover.
Suddenly, a silence descended, and the only sound was from the traffic a block away on Bucareli. Then someone started to clap, and others joined in. Surrounded by applause, Héctor approached the two bodies, while El Gallo covered him, like a gunman out of the novels of Marcial Lafuente Estefanía, squeezing the Colt in both his hands.
They were both dead. One of the men stared skyward through his dark glasses, his two hands still trying to plug up the hole in his stomach. The other bullet had probably hit him in the heart; he lay in a huge pool of blood. Héctor took off the dark glasses and stared into his lifeless black eyes. The other man’s face was a bloody mess. Héctor checked his pockets. Just a few pesos and an ID card from the subway police. It was the same for the other one. Héctor had blood on his hands, and he wiped them off on the dead man’s pants leg. The crowd of paper vendors gathered around, ignoring the detective’s .45 and El Gallo’s Colt, forming a circle with Héctor and the two corpses at its center and El Gallo, still aiming over the La Prensa pickup, at its periphery. Now that the shooting was over they seemed entirely unafraid. Maybe because this was their stock-in-trade, just another story for tomorrow’s paper; maybe because blood flowed every few days anyway between Donato Guerra and Bucareli, in knife fights, fist fights, fights with broken bottles; or maybe because they’d decided that Héctor and El Gallo were the good guys in this particular story. Curious children hovered around the bodies, and three men were already arguing over the guns that had fallen to the ground. Héctor left to join El Gallo.
No Happy Ending: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel (Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novels) Page 6