I understood, continuing my pragmatic forensics course, that minors were kept between life and death in the great subterranean pool, left to the accident of death by water or a Tarzanesque survival. Now I learned that older criminals were confined on the upper floor, with devices that meticulously picked up the sounds of the city outside, a true metropolis of liberties and joy compared to the Dantesque city of sorrow—the cittá dolente—that awaited me on the upper floor, where it was difficult to hear the voices of the convicts over the snare of urban sounds, horns, motors, the squeal of tires, insults, the shouts of vendors, the silences of beggars, offers of sex, sighs of love, childish songs, school choruses, kneeling prayers, all amplified by perverse loudspeakers intent on torturing the prisoners with the memory of freedom.
I armed myself with courage to complete not only the requirements of the university course—“forensic practice”—but also to honor the decision of my respected teacher Sanginés. The upper prison of San Juan de Aragón, above the children’s pool, was a large space on one floor. “Here nobody empties chamber pots down on us,” said the unsmiling guard who was my guide now, but on whose shoulders a polished and repolished cleanliness shone with a faint perfume of shit.
Siboney Peralta was a Cuban mulatto about thirty years old with long hair arranged in twisted braids, naked to his navel with the clear intention not only to display his musculature but to frighten or forestall with the power of his biceps, the profound throb of his pectorals, and the menacing hunger of his guts. He wore no shoes and his trousers were rags wrapped around an indistinct sex that could just as easily have been a long hose or a little knob. His crime was not one of passion. It was, according to Siboney, an enigma, a mystery, chico.
“A small mystery?”
“No, very big, chico.”
Siboney didn’t know why he was in prison. He loved music, so much it turned his head, he said, flexing all his muscles, to the point where he couldn’t help doing what the music said.
“I’m a child of the bolero, compay.”
Siboney obeyed the bolero. If the words said “Look at me” and the woman didn’t look at him, Siboney filled with holy rage and strangled her. If the song indicated “Tell me if you love me as I adore you” and the woman didn’t turn around to look at him, the least she received was a Siboneyera beating. If he asked her at a distance if she had a thought for him and if at a distance she remained silent, the mulatto attacked with chairs, windows, plates, flowerpots, what he found at hand in the silent universe of his desire.
“And knowing your trouble, can’t you control it?” I asked uncertainly.
Siboney bellowed with laughter that meant it isn’t my trouble, it’s my joy, my pleasure. What is? I told myself it was nothing less than believing in the words of songs, as I at this moment believe in what I am writing and transmitting to you, curious reader, with all the unpunished fatality of Siboney Peralta strangling the innocent women who did not take his songs literally.
Brillantinas and Gomas were placed in the same cell with the perverse intention of having them argue over the jars of brilliantine and envelopes of gum tragacanth that were the criminal obsession of the pair. Each one, not yet knowing the other, robbed pharmacies and beauty salons to obtain the scarcer brilliantines and ancient envelopes of gum for the hair that was their uncontrolled and uncontrollable fetish. The jailer explained to me that the original intention of the penitentiary’s authorities was to bring together the two rivals to argue about the object of their desires until they annihilated each other over a jar of pomade. This was, he added, the guiding principle of the prison of San Juan de Aragón: to provoke the convicts into killing one another, thereby reducing the prison population.
“Each time one dies, one less mouth to feed, Licenciado,” using the formal title for a lawyer.
“I’m not—”
“Licenciado.”
He looked at me with his sewer eyes.
“Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
However, Gomas and Brillantinas agreed not to argue but to coexist peacefully, smearing repulsive unguents on their hair.
“Can you suggest a way to have them kill each other?”
“Shave their heads,” I said in an evil humor.
The jailer had a good laugh. “They’d put brilliantine on their balls and under their armpits, Licen.”
Speaking of licenciados, I was introduced into the cell of the attorney Jenaro Ruvalcaba, whom I knew by name as a penologist of some fame in the Faculty of Law. When he saw me come in he stood and did his best to smooth his prison uniform: gray short-sleeved shirt and trousers far too big for the licenciado’s small stature.
“He says he’s committed no crime,” the jailer remarked with a wink.
“It’s true,” Jenaro said calmly.
“So you say,” the guard replied, mocking him.
Jenaro shrugged. I knew right away that asking him why are you here, what crime are you accused of, meant entering a labyrinth, with no exit, of excuses and injustices. Jenaro himself must have understood this—he was a slim, blond man about forty years old—when he sat down on the cot and patted it gently, inviting me to have a seat.
He said very calmly that the prison was filled with querulous, stupid people who want their freedom but wouldn’t know what to do on the outside. Resignation? No, adaptation, said Jenaro. The punishment of prison, my young friend (that’s me) consists in separating you from the world and then one of two things happens: either you die of despair or you invent new relationships inside what the Gringos call the Big House, which is what it is, after all, a house, a different kind of home but yours as much as the one you left.
“How do you manage?” I asked from behind my mask of a disciplined student.
“I accept what prison gives me.” Ruvalcaba shrugged.
He saw the query in my eyes.
“Once you disregard what you shouldn’t do,” he continued, “in order not to be humiliated.”
He anticipated my question.
“For example: Don’t accept visitors. They come because they have to. They’re always looking at their watch, they want to get away as soon as they can.”
“In Mexico we have conjugal visits.”
His smile was somewhere between cynical and bitter.
“You can be certain your wife has already found a lover—”
“Yes, but in any case she comes to—”
Jenaro raised his voice but grumbled.
“They’ll both betray you so you’ll stay in prison.”
Crazed, he shouted and stood, clutching at his head with both hands, tearing at his ears, closing his eyes.
He came at me, arms flailing. The guard clubbed him on the back of his neck and the licenciado fell, weeping, on the cot.
El Negro España and La Pérfida Albión were two homosexuals incarcerated in San Juan de Aragón for the crime of solicitation exacerbated by robbery and murder. The institutional powers had not obliged them to reestablish their undesired masculinities. On the contrary, both had at their disposal makeup, tweezers, rouge, false eyelashes, and lipstick, which allowed them to feel comfortable and at the same time serve as a vice-ridden and contemptible example for the guards, who are all …
“Full-fledged hypocrites,” said El Negro España, applying a false beauty spot to his cheek and adjusting his expensive comb.
He pointed at it. “I got this when I went to the Feria in Sevilla.”
“Years ago,” murmured La Pérfida Albión, an Englishman, I supposed, colorless, with very short hair, whose only mark of identity was the portrait of Queen Elizabeth stuck to his chest.
The flamenco dancer said that at first they had wanted to put them in separate cells in the hope the “normals” would beat them to a pulp. Except that just the opposite occurred. The most macho prisoners succumbed to the charms of La Negra España and La Pérfida Albión when they shouted “Lover,” and though they called them, when they caressed, “Priscila” or “Encarnación,” t
hat only excited the men more, for which reason, the Englishman interjected, the authorities were resigned to putting them together again so they’d “do harm” only to each other.
They burst into laughter, caressing each other without shame, La Pérfida crooning arias from Madrid operettas in honor of La Negra, and La Negra, to please La Pérfida, singing tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan.
“Who protects us?” they sang together.
“We protect ourselves on our own,” they signed off.
Ventanas, whose name came from his predilection for robbing by liberating windows, laughed a great deal when I asked him the reason for his incarceration. He had no teeth.
“I gave my teeth to the public welfare. I love philanthropy. I go even further, boy. I not only love all men, I love their possessions. For that you don’t need teeth.”
He guffawed between showers of saliva and thunderous coughs. He must have been sixty. He looked as if he were a hundred, and his hands did not tremble. He moved his fingers constantly, with the artfulness of a pianist.
He realized what he was doing.
“They called me Chopin. I would answer: Chofuckyomama.”
This was his story:
“There are thieves who don’t know how to get out of the house they’re robbing. I was always very aware that the problem wasn’t only getting in but getting away with no noise, no trace, not even a smell. And for that you have to work alone or with kids under ten so they can squeeze between the bars and open the windows for you.”
He gave a distorted belly laugh, like the impossible music of a piano with no keys or only the black ones, so great was the depth of his throat, made even deeper by his lack of teeth.
“I always worked alone, for years and years, not carrying unnecessary baggage, light as one of those birds they call Phoeniz, and even if you burn them they’re born again. Except they never burned me. What can you do?”
He sighed with breath like a squall. He was a solitary thief. Until the ailments of age obliged him to hire a boy of twenty to facilitate matters.
“Yes, he was agile, young, and an asshole. He knew how to get in. He didn’t know how to get out, Señor Licenciado. He couldn’t find the exit. After such a nice, clean entrance. After such an efficient robbery, the idiot got confused, he lost his way and led me from here to there and from there to here until the alarms went off, the lights went on, and the two of us were standing there, our spirits naked, surrounded by the police of Pedregal de San Angel, cursing the Esparza family and their damn security system.”
“And your young accomplice?”
“I killed him in the paddy wagon on the way to prison.”
“How?”
He raised his hands and let them fall on an imaginary nape of the neck.
I set down these facts because they had a decisive influence on how I saw society, the nation, and its people.
LUCHA ZAPATA. WAS it an announcement or a call? A proposal or a memory? Mein Kampf, Mi lucha or Lucha of mine? Lucha Zapata tonight at the Arena México. There was nothing of the fighter in her, I told myself when I rescued the presumed aviator and put her in a taxi, tremulous and diminished, curled up against me in a gesture that was not childlike. It was a declaration: Protect me.
From what?
From myself.
Words were not necessary to understand what she wanted. Her utterly helpless gaze, her radical lack of protection, delivered her into my hands. Not to my charity, because on the basis of compassion only the transient is constructed, to which is added resentment. Perhaps pity, only a little, the mercy that has been the emotional weapon of Christianity and the stage setting for the irresistible melodrama of Calvary. Was Lucha Zapata wearing a cross that hung between her breasts? The impenetrable leather top prevented certainty and condemned me to guesses. Everything I’ve said ought to convince your excellencies my readers that I have never once abused sentimentality. Instead, I’ve tried to be simple, direct, reducing myself from the beginning to this double visiting card: a decapitated head and a naked, unprotected skin. This, someone wrote a long time ago, is not serious: Tragedy is forbidden to the modern world. For us everything turns into melodrama, soap opera, newspaper serials, cowboy movies. The success of westerns (the modern epic, Alfonso Reyes would say, the saga of the plains, no longer of the sea) is the direct simplicity with which the spectator distinguishes Good from Evil. Evil wears black. Good wears white. The villain has a mustache. The hero is clean-shaven. The good guy brushes his teeth. The bad guy spits foul breath. The hero looks straight at you. The bad guy squints out of the corner of his eye.
The readings of the Greek classics that Jericó and I did as boys impressed on us a certain idea of tragedy as a conflict of values, not an opposition of virtues. Both Antigone and Creon are right. She has the values of the family. He has those of society. The law of the family demands the burial of the dead, the law of the state forbids it.
“Then,” Jericó remarked, “tragic balance isn’t quite as just as you say.”
I asked him why.
“Because the law of the family will survive while the law of the city is temporary and revocable, isn’t it?”
I recalled all this in the rattletrap taxi that drove the “rescued” woman and me to a destination I didn’t know.
“Where to, chief?”
Where to? It was enough to look outside the car at the vast desert of the Anillo Periférico, the outer beltway that foreshadows the funeral that awaits us if we don’t choose to turn ourselves into ashes first. Sacrificed after all, we die on the cement perimeter that reflects and celebrates a new city that has shed its old skin, its lacustrian sensuality, its igneous sacredness, displaced first by another beauty, baroque, name of the pearl beyond price, the misshapen jewel of the unborn oyster that Mexico City ostentatiously displays in its second foundation of volcanic rock, marble, smiling angels and demons even more jovial as if to compensate for the tears of blood (this isn’t a bolero) of its tortured Christs in adjoining chapels so that the altar will be occupied by the tears that are pearls of his mother the Virgin who floats above the horns of the Iberian bull, our sacred animal. Sacred and for that reason, necessarily, syllogistically, sacrificial. Patient tombs and banished waters opening in avenues of pepper tree and willow, ascending mountains of pine and snow, proclaiming itself that region where the air is clear. Until it lands here, on the Periférico, an indecent sausage of funereal cement, scaffold and grave of two million broken-down taxis, materialist trucks, secondhand Volkswagens, insulting Alfa Romeos losing their way in the great urban tunnel, buses invisible under clusters of passenger flies, at once stoic and desperate, hanging any way they can from the armpits of the conveyance.
How was so much naked ugliness adorned? With advertisements. Commercial announcements were the only decoration on the Periférico. A world of gratifications, if not within reach, then within view of the consumer. A succession of images of desire, because none of them corresponded to the physical reality or economic possibility or even the psychic makeup of residents of the capital. The Periférico where I drove that night in a taxi with a defenseless and, I believe, valiant woman, her arms around my chest, looking out of the corner of my eye at a succession of invariably blond women used for everything: They advertise beer, cars, underwear, bathing suits, condominiums on the coast, films, audiovisual devices. Advertisements. Waiting for the uncommon but fatal catastrophe: One day, a small plane crashed into a vehicle filled with purebred horses. Nobody remembers the pilots. Only in advertisements of seaside vacations and sales in distant residential districts did the Mexican family appear, a happy grouping of the father in shirtsleeves, the modest, neat little wife, and two children—male and female—rosy-cheeked, smiling, happy to have found paradise in Satellite City, a guarded prison they will never leave, not in the advertisement and not in life …
Where would I go with my solitary companion? To the high-floor apartment on Praga? Didn’t she have her own place?
I asked h
er.
She curled up more and more into my chest, not speaking.
She smelled of leather. Of alcohol. Of burned pot.
I raised her goggles and everything became concentrated, the taxi driving us, the speeding tomb of cement, the fixed, successive smiles of my compatriots happy because they had a terrific house in Colonia Lindavista, beach vacations without light or water, noisy cereals at breakfast, underwear that guaranteed sexual ecstasy, where? where? on the mattress, the mattresses that made the fortune of the Esparza family and built a huge residence in Pedregal, the stony and glassy mansion of mattresses … At this moment of enemy voices, visual offenses, commercial distractions, and cemented realities, I was the human mattress of the woman who, at the intersection where we finally left the Periférico, murmured her name in my ear:
“Lucha Zapata.”
She looked at me with eyes so transparent and so clouded at the same time, so ravaged by age, declaring themselves as young as I wished, as old as I desired, that the fragility of the body embracing mine was transformed, by the art of sudden affection, into my own body of a (relatively) vigorous young man of twenty-four. I’m trying to say that whatever her fragilities and my strengths, at that moment in the taxi she got under my skin through the sorcery of her gaze and I got under hers, I confess, through the not very magical temptation of touching her breasts and finding there an immediate responsive promise, as if the nipples I caressed that night in the darkness of the damn dilapidated taxi had been waiting for me a long time and were, from now on, mine alone no matter how many other hands had caressed them before.
How could I find out about Lucha Zapata’s past? Should I even try? Was it forbidden to me? Wasn’t she demanding it: Find out about my past? Or was she affirming, in her extreme helplessness, in the worshipful abandonment of a little street dog, take care of me, you, whatever your name is, I’m exhausted, take me wherever you like, save me today and I promise to save you tomorrow.
I carried her like a rag doll up the stairs. Her head sheathed in the aviator helmet rested on my chest. Her swooning bird’s arm hung inertly around my neck. Her jacketed torso smelled of damp. Her damaged legs hung from my arms. Her shoes were falling off. I did nothing to retrieve them. It was urgent for me to carry her upstairs, lay her down, care for her, protect her.