This Love Is Not for Cowards

by Robert Andrew Powell

  I loitered inside the penitentiary for more than an hour before stepping back onto the pedestrian path. The path had started at the main cathedral, in the center of town. When I reached the end of the trail, about a mile later, I found myself at the foot of yet another impressive cathedral, this one built specifically to honor the Virgin of Guadalupe. Once a year, every year, pilgrims crawl to the cathedral on their knees, offering penitence before the same painting of the Virgin reproduced on a silk cloth and taped to the Indios’ locker room wall. San Luis Potosí was built on faith, too.

  MARCO FEELS THAT he can’t be touched in Juárez, that he’s not in particular danger. “First, I’m not in the drug business,” he tells me. “Second, I’m a soccer player in the Primera. If they killed me it would really bring the heat, and they know it.” I feel untouchable, too. I’m a tall, pale gringo, an American. I’m a journalist, the writer of a couple stories for the New York Times (even if I wrote those stories years ago). If I were killed, President Obama might get involved. The State Department would really bring the heat.

  At least that’s what I tell myself. Actually, several Americans have been murdered in Juárez this year, and Obama has yet to show up. Still, I choose to feel protected, as if I float inside a bulletproof force field. I’m not in the drug business. I never honk my horn. I stay on the line. Juárez would completely shut down without these kinds of rationalizations. Marco and I believe what we must to feel secure. So does everyone else in the city. For most people, the sense of protection is faith-based.

  “We prayed. Maybe you cannot believe that, but we prayed,” said Sandra Rodríguez Nieto, a friend of mine who reports for El Diario. She was scared after a newspaper colleague was shot to death in the parking lot of the shopping mall near my apartment.

  Monica Ortega crosses over to El Paso almost every day to work as a nurse. She’s also a member of El Kartel, the only one I’ve met who refuses to drink alcohol or take drugs, which, as I understand it, goes against the very purpose of El Kartel. I sat next to her for several hours on the long bus ride to Monterrey.

  “I feel a connection with the Virgin of Guadalupe,” she told me. “I feel like she watches over me, and has always watched over me.”

  I MADE IT back to the hotel right after the team’s pre-game meal. Marco, energized by the cold shower he always takes before games, joined his teammates in Salon Azteca Dos for a video study session. Everyone in the room wore black Indios sweatsuits. Like Catholic schoolgirls forced into uniforms, the players personalized their outfits with accessories: Ed Hardy baseball hats worn backwards or white running shoes with red laces or perhaps a bulky block of a wristwatch. Marco carried a white Armani Exchange satchel that he defensively calls a toilet kit. The murse worn by the guy next to him was sewn from Burberry plaid.

  A video projector hummed atop a small table covered in a white cloth that made the table resemble a magician’s stand. The video flashing onto a white screen, to my surprise, was from the Monarcas game a week ago. They hadn’t gone over that yet?

  “Normally we’d show it no later than two days after the game,” an assistant coach told me, “but with this team we’ve learned we need motivation more than information. Some teams, you tell them something and they’ve got it—snap. But with this team, we have to be …” He searched for the right word. “Encouraging,” he finally said.

  Pepe Treviño wielded a laser pointer. As game footage flickered on-screen, he drew circles around what he called the Indios’ “defensive recovery zone.” Who should sprint forward on the attack? Where should everyone stand when the play shifts back to the Indios’ end of the field?

  “That was a very good conversion,” he said, referring to a sudden counterattack from defense to offense. “Muy bien. Excelente. But Edwin, cut straight to the goal next time.” Individual responsibility, people. Teamwork, too. Jair Garcia will take the corner kicks. Listo, Jair? Ready? Edwin will start as always. King Kong is our striker. Marco will start, too. He’s locked down his spot supporting Edwin in the midfield.

  “La vida es lo que hacemos,” Treviño declared. Life is what we make of it. He dipped his head slightly, a signal for an assistant working the video projector to hit a button.

  Twenty killed in one day. A child orphaned after his parents are gunned down at a traffic light. The projector illuminates scenes of violence in Juárez. Newspaper headlines about teenagers shot to death outside their schools, about assassinated police, about an ever-growing body count in the most murderous city on the planet. It’s gruesome footage, morbid stuff I’d pretty much forgotten about during my pleasant afternoon in San Luis. What other team shows videos like these? The video horror show segued into snippets from the movie Invincible. Mark Wahlberg anchored the true story of an unemployed teacher invited to walk on with his hometown Philadelphia Eagles, un equipo de fútbol Americano. The movie was in English with Spanish subtitles.

  “Man can only take so much failure,” Wahlberg said, in character as Vince Papale. The key scene took place in a locker room. Eagles in green uniforms huddled before kickoff, eager to play the first game of a new season. Greg Kinnear stepped forward in his role as former Eagles head coach Dick Vermeil.

  “Starting today, we are on a path towards winning,” the coach told his team. A list of old Eagle greats followed, from a heyday the current team wants to recapture. “Those players weren’t just out playing for themselves, they were playing for a city. The people of Philadelphia have suffered. You are what they turn to at times like these. You are what give them hope. Let’s win one for them. Let’s win one for us!”

  Police escorted the Indios to the stadium.

  “JESUS HAS A purpose for me,” Sergio Bueno once told me. He’s the father of Adir Bueno, from the Indios’ media department. Sergio’s a dentist. I’ve paid him to fill a couple cavities I’d been living with longer than I should have. Until I moved to Mexico, I could never afford to fill them. Dentistry is cheap in Juárez, much cheaper than in the United States. So cheap I also asked Sergio to install a crown, which he did for $2,500 less than I paid—even with dental insurance—for a similar crown in Boulder. And Sergio did a better job.

  Dental tourism was, until recently, a huge borderland business. The university prepared scores of oral surgeons and root canal specialists to meet foreign demand. Then Americans stopped crossing over. With the violence spiking in Juárez, once-crowded clinics directly across the bridges have been abandoned. Practices have also closed near my apartment, deeper into the city, often after the dentists fled—or were murdered—in the wake of extortion attempts. An office complex across López Mateos that once housed several dentists sits as empty as the shuttered Italian restaurant up the block and the Chinese buffet down the street—the one with the banner still advertising live music—that closed after gunmen shot those five patrons dead.

  It’s not just dentists (or restaurateurs). A plastic surgeon I met at an Indios game said the drop in medical tourism has thrown her practice onto life support. An emergency room doctor told me he was busy when the violence first escalated, in 2007. Back then, he’d regularly treat patients wheeled in with five bullet holes in their legs or perhaps in a shoulder or a buttock. Work for even him has dried up.

  “They’ve gotten much more professional,” he says of the sicarios who had kept him busy. “Now they’ll shoot thirty or more bullets to the chest. They make sure they’ve killed him off.”

  Sergio and his wife, also a dentist, had at one time owned and operated a chain of three clinics in Juárez. Their son Adir, before falling in love with the Indios and changing careers, had inspected and repaired bicuspids, too. Adir got out at the right time. Business has fallen off so severely that Sergio has pondered relocation to El Paso or farther into Texas. He wants to move someplace safer, a city where “Am I going to get shot today?” is not a top-of-mind question. His research discouraged him. The relicensing process in Texas—in a foreign country—is long and expensive. Sergio’s too old to start fresh, but a
lso much too young to retire. So he stays. He feels he has no choice. He stays in Juárez as a working dentist even though ladrones recently burst into one of his clinics demanding the wallets, purses, and car keys of everyone in the building.

  No one was killed when the ladrones broke in. No one in the office was even hurt, at least physically. That Sergio and everyone else escaped with their lives is proof, he proceeded to tell me, that Jesus won’t let him be killed. Sergio is protected.

  AFTER WARM-UPS, THE Indios file back into the locker room. Whisky hands out tape to secure shin guards. Eminem’s relentless “Lose Yourself” on the boom box now, loud, a mash-up with Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” Orange Gatorade slides into green cups. Jair climbs onto a massage table that has been draped in white towels decorated with Gatorade logos. A trainer rubs Jair’s calves, hamstrings, and thighs, liniment radiating a proper locker room smell. The referee and his two linesmen duck inside with wishes of good luck.

  Pepe Treviño sits on the bench in front of an empty locker, his elbows on his thighs. His assistants aim the video projector at a white dry-erase board, which has been scrubbed clean. The plays Pepe covered back at the hotel slide onto the board, sliding off every fifteen seconds. In his corner locker, Christian, the goalie, cuts holes in the toes of his game socks so he can pull them over his knees. Whisky hands plastic insoles to Coco, to be slipped into his spikes. Marco laces up a pair of Adidas, which the shoe company pays him a small amount of money to do. King Kong unboxes new Pumas: red, white, and black, in a design intentionally evoking the superhero Spider-Man. A slow song comes on, inappropriately. Kong hops over to the boom box and presses a button, advancing the set list to Guns N’ Roses: “Sweet Child of Mine.” Still kind of slow, but turn it up. Raise the energy in the room. We can win this game! Kong hops on the balls of his feet. Gabino, the traveling secretary, claps his hands. Slash segues into a guitar solo.

  Outside the locker room, fans find their seats. Bass and snare drums from San Luis’s arriving barra brava snap and thump. In a tunnel leading to the field, schoolgirl cheerleaders wave pom-poms. Little boys in white uniforms and cleats wait to march onto the field holding hands with the players, one of soccer’s nicer traditions. Inside the locker room, more Guns N’ Roses. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” another slow song, but still, Guns N’ Roses, man. The energy is up! Edwin kicks his legs high in the air like a Rockette, rotating at the hips on the descent to stretch his flexors. The whole team joins him, loosening, limbering up. Old man Coco finishes a black pot of hot herbal tea, his youth potion. Pepe Treviño claps his hands together, which wins everyone’s attention. It’s time for the big speech. Yet Pepe merely looks over to an assistant, who presses the Play button on the overhead projector. It’s the same pep talk from the movie Invincible, shown back at the hotel, Greg Kinnear as Dick Vermeil again pumping up his troops.

  “Pepe’s not the rah-rah type of coach,” an assistant confides to me. “He’s just not that type of coach.”

  When the movie clip wraps up—win one for Philadelphia!—a circle forms in the open space in the middle of the room. Arms hang over shoulders, hands fall to the small of each other’s backs. A prayer is offered. Crosses are signed. All hands join in the center for a cheer.

  “Indios! Indios! Indios!”

  Running out of the locker room, Christian the goalie pauses to touch the tapestry of the Virgin of Guadalupe. So do players named Danilo and Alejandro. Jair touches her as well. Marco touches her, too.

  “THEY HAD GUNS, but they weren’t real guns,” Sergio Bueno told me. I’d stopped by for a routine cleaning at his current office on the seventh floor of Hospital Angeles. It’s a new, private hospital at the entrance to Campestre, an upscale neighborhood fronted, to my amusement, by a full-scale replica of the Arc de Triomphe. Classy! Like Campestre, like all of the better parts of Juárez these days, the hospital is mostly empty, a gleaming ghost town operating on a skeleton crew. American soft rock music played on Sergio’s laptop when I arrived. Perhaps listening to Mister Mister and John Waite helps him improve his English. Or maybe all dentists simply like that kind of music.

  “One of the men fired his gun, and as soon as he did I felt relief. It was obviously a—how do you say it?—a starter gun? A starter gun, like in track and field. I could see my daughter over in another room, curled under a cubicle desk. I had been worrying about her, but right then I relaxed. It wasn’t a real gun, so I knew nobody was going to get hurt.”

  Sergio and his grown daughter were working at their clinic near the Zaragoza Bridge, a location convenient for bargain-hunting Americans. It was not yet lunchtime when the ladrones stormed in. They moved with a military precision. Had they been police in the past? Were they policemen still? They took Sergio’s car keys and also his wallet. They also took the keys and cash from every other person they could find, which was everyone save Sergio’s daughter. She had dashed into that other room, curling up under that cubicle desk.

  “I remember thinking, Just don’t go in there,” Sergio recalled, referring to the side office where his daughter hid. “Don’t harm her. Don’t scare her. And don’t scare anyone else in the office, either, of course.”

  When one of the cops—er, robbers—fired his gun, apparently in an attempt to command attention, Sergio relaxed. He’s firing blanks. Nothing to worry about. They just want our cars and money. Nothing truly important. Sergio surrendered everything they asked for. So did everyone else.

  After the men fled, Sergio darted around the office, checking to see if his patients and staff were okay. His daughter threw her arms around him; she had been worried Sergio would be kidnapped. Sergio called 066 as a formality, out of a sense of routine. The police showed up to record the narrative and to write down victim names. That was it. No one is ever going to be arrested for the break-in, which Sergio already knew. The incident wasn’t even mentioned the next day in the crime briefings of any of Juárez’s several daily newspapers.

  That next day, Sergio returned to work. He needed a ride to the clinic, but he still made it there at the usual time. He was alone after he was dropped off, and he spent a few minutes scoping out the reception area. Nothing particularly amiss. He walked back to his office desk, which was where the men had confronted him with their guns. It was all quiet, morning, the beginning of a new day. Sergio stepped over to his chair and sat down. He just sat there for a while. At one point he dropped his head. He stared at his feet. He stared at the ground.

  “And that’s when I saw it, right under my chair.”

  A bullet. The guns had been real after all. At least one ladrón had fired a live round that ricocheted around the room, settling on the floor beneath Sergio’s office chair.

  “At that moment, when I saw that bullet, I was overcome with the calmest calm I have ever felt,” Sergio told me. “I knew with certainty that God does not want me to die. God does not want me to leave my family or to leave my city. I felt closer to God than ever.”

  NO MUSIC PLAYS in the locker room after the game. It’s somber, like at a funeral. Pepe Treviño and his assistants talk quietly, lamenting the fading health of their team. Heads nod. Pepe fingers his mustache. The players, as they undress, stare straight ahead. Christian ices a knee. Marco and Maleno linger at their lockers, in their underwear, saying nothing. Jair walks over to a massage table to have a trainer slap lactic acid out of his thighs. The flame on the Virgin of Guadalupe candle flickers as he passes it.

  It was going to be a good night. For a while it was a good night. Guadalupe delivered the first Indios goal of the regular season, and it mattered little that no one on the Indios had actually scored it—a San Luis player accidentally kicked the ball into his own net. Unfortunately, the 1–0 lead Juárez carried into the second half came attached to two red cards. It’s very hard to play high-level soccer even one man down. With two Indios players ejected for rough tackles, it was only a matter of time before San Luis equalized. The tie arrived with fifteen minutes left in the game. Pl
ain luck prevented San Luis from scoring more: Twice the Gladiators hit the crossbar on open nets. A tie is worth a point in the standings, and a point is usually better than nothing. But the Indios absolutely needed all three of the points that would have come with a win. This was a bad game, a blown opportunity. Pepe Treviño slumps onto the bench of a vacant locker. I watch him scribble in a pocket notebook.

  Balls of grass-stained athletic tape roll across the floor. Players dry off after showering. Kong dresses silently; the Cameroonian showed nothing on the field, as usual. A functionary from the Federation pokes his head into the locker room, catching Pepe’s eye. The man is very young, practically a boy. He has been assigned to the least important game in tonight’s national schedule. His blue blazer with the Federation’s tricolored crest on the pocket is too big for his body, and he swims inside it while Pepe hits him with the usual conspiracy theories. It’s always the Indios getting called for penalties. Two red cards in one game? Come on. The Federation doesn’t want Juárez in the Primera anymore. The refs are afraid to travel to La Frontera, and so are the teams. The whole world would rather pretend Juárez doesn’t exist.

  The players, dried off and dressed, make their way to the bus, their egos shielded by bulky stereo headphones. Whisky flies around the emptying room. He stuffs muddy leather cleats into one bag, plastic shower flip-flops into another. Voit soccer balls bulge inside a red cotton travel bag adorned with the logos of a team that has now gone twenty-two straight games without a win; lose or tie their next game and they’ll be the worst team in the history of Mexico’s top division. The balls and a stack of orange plastic cones are tossed into the storage hold of the bus, along with the watercoolers and the massage tables and a duffel bag ripe with dirty uniforms.