“What do you see?”
I felt an unexpected desire to cry. I controlled myself.
“I see a woman who wants to fly again.”
She squeezed my arm.
“Thank you, Savior. Do you know what I’m going to do?”
“No.”
“I’m free and I can choose. A ranchera singer? A poet?”
“You decide.”
“Do you know I’ve been invited to be on a reality show?”
“No. What’s that?”
“You have to show the most humiliating aspect of your character. You ask to eat on your knees. You fall down drunk.”
El Salto de Agua. Los Arcos de Belén. José María Izazaga. Ancient domes. Modern ruins. Nezahualcóyotl. La Candelaria.
“You pretend,” Lucha Zapata continued. “Don’t pretend. It’s like living in a Nazi concentration camp. That’s television. An Auschwitz for masochists. You deprive yourself. You animalize yourself. You eat rancid food. Your towels are smeared with shit. Your clothes are infested with bugs. They don’t let you sleep. Ambulance sirens sound day and night.”
She shouted: “They turn night into day!”
The driver didn’t stop driving but turned to look at me.
“What’s wrong? Is the señora all right?”
“It’s nothing. She’s just sad.”
“Ah,” the driver said with a sigh. “She’s going on a trip.”
He whistled some of “Beautiful, adored Mexico, I die far from you.”
I calmed her. I caressed her.
“You know? In the United States they call women a ‘number.’ What’s my number, do you think?”
“I don’t know, Lucha.”
It seemed useless to talk. She, dressed as an aviator, looked very tired, very disillusioned, like Dorothy Malone in 1950s films.
“I don’t know how to reason anymore.”
“Easy, Lucha, take it easy.”
From Calzada Ignacio Zaragoza we drove onto the long avenue that leads to the airport.
“I don’t want to end up a fly in a bar.”
“A what?”
“A barfly, Savior,” she said in English.
The driver whistled, “Let them say I’m sleeping and have them bring me here …”
We arrived. The lines of taxis and private cars made me think that heaven was far too small for so many passengers.
I helped her out.
She adjusted her helmet and goggles.
“Where shall I take you?”
“With women you never know.” She smiled.
“Shall I wait for you to come back?” I said as if I hadn’t heard her.
“Aviation teaches you to be fatalistic,” she concluded, and began walking away alone, hugging herself, and she staggered a little. I moved forward to help her. She turned to look at me with a negative gesture and moved her fingers tenderly, saying goodbye.
She became lost in the crowd at the airport.
And once again, as in one of those dreams that recur and dissolve into oblivion only to be sketched out in the second repetition, my eyes met those of a woman walking behind a young porter whose movements were gallant, as if transporting luggage inside the airport were the ultimate glamorous theatrical act. This woman, modern, young, swift, elegant, with the movements of a panther, an animal of prey, worriedly followed the porter.
I looked at her just as before. Except this time I recognized her.
It was the new Señora Esparza. La Sarape. The hostess at the wake of Nazario Esparza’s first wife. The successor to the mother of our old buddy Errol. But now, when I saw her again, I knew something thanks to the prisoner in San Juan de Aragón, Miguel Aparecido.
The woman was a killer.
It’s possible I vacillated for an instant. It’s possible that when I “vacillated” I lingered too long on the word that among Mexicans acquires the meaning of rowdiness, anarchy, mockery, disorder: vacile (fun), vacilador (carouser), vacilón (spree), a verbal avenue that leads directly to the plaza of “dissipation” and its side streets “dissolute” and “disorderly,” which reduce the world to chaos, ridicule, and senselessness, leaving behind another paraphrase, “hazard,” whose straight meaning is chance or risk but in recurrent Mexican speech is a play on words with double and triple meanings, don’t fuck with my asshole, then don’t be a freeloader, then don’t jerk off so much, will you pass me the pan? pancho’s fucking tonight, don’t fuck around, no ticket no fucking, no fucking way, and fuck you very much, ay Sebastián! done, which tests street ingenuity because in the salons it is dangerous and can lead to violent quarrels, duels, and assassinations.
“Do you see that woman going into the bar? Well, in the old days she couldn’t get enough of my dick.”
“Listen, that’s my wife.”
“Ay, how she’s grown …”
I’ve said all this so survivors can understand why I wasted precious minutes after seeing Nazario Esparza’s second wife following a porter, knowing she had killed Errol’s mother according to the more than reliable version of Miguel Aparecido in the San Juan de Aragón pen and being immediately obliged to stop her by force, drive out any fear the porter would defend his customer (why did something so improbable occur to me?), confront her, if not with facts then with my sheer physical strength (would it be superior to hers?), and take her to the security office in the airport, denounce her, bring justice to my pal Bald Errol and his dear deceased mama, all this crossed my mind at the same time that a mariachi band interposed itself between my vacillation and my haste, six characters dressed as charros, striped trousers and black jacket, silver buttons and six roof-size hats embroidered in waves of gold, hiding faces I didn’t have the slightest desire to see, perhaps fearing I’d recognize the famous Maximiliano Batalla escaped or freed unjustly from the previously mentioned prison and the presumptive killer of the similarly cited Doña Estrella de Esparza …
The criminal Sara P. disappeared among the mariachis who advanced (as if their outfits and hats were not enough) with the resonant outrage of their instruments, far from their historical origins as wedding bands, musique pour le mariage of the occupation troops of the French, Austro-Hungarian, Czech, Belgian, Moravian, Lombard, and Triestine Empire who contracted matrimony with pretty Mexican girls to the sound of the marriage-mariachi and now were passing by, interfering with the justice of my desire to apprehend the presumed or proven criminal, made impossible by the stanzas bellowed out by the musical advance of the band as it sang:
Out walked the torero in
his canary and silver suit,
handsome, anointed, valiant
flaunting his great good looks
to welcome the slim man, smiling though melancholy, with a fresh scar on his cheek, his hair plastered with gum tragacanth, lifted high by the mob of admirers who carried him shouting “torero, torero” while the above-mentioned bullfighter seemed to doubt his own fame, scattering it with an airy wave of his hand as if he were prepared to die the next time, as if he were laughing sadly at the glory given him by the aficionados who carried him and the mariachis who now attempted to play an out-of-tune pasodoble while the bullfighter reluctantly waved and rather than celebrating a victory seemed to be bidding farewell to the world at the opportune time to the uncomprehending astonishment of the flocks of tourists, Gringo, Canadian, German, Scandinavian? tanned, immune to climate changes, who formed into groups of young people and old people who wanted to be young, in beach sandals, T-shirts with the names of hotels, clubs, places of origin, colleges, first, second, third, and no ages confused in the forced gaiety of having enjoyed vacations, coming from a country, the USA, miserly in granting them, fatiguing its workers with the challenge of crossing an interminable continent that extends from sea to shining sea, while the Europeans formed a line as if they were receiving a well-deserved prize and a summer consolation won, without their knowing it, by the French government of the Popular Front and Léon Blum (who was Léon Blum?) in 1936, when paid vac
ations were first granted.
I made my way through mariachis, tourists, fans and the torero, in an intuitive search for an oasis of peace, since the object of my persecution had disappeared forever in the cloud of rank food and tepid drinks emanating from the transient dining rooms like foul air that had never seen the sun: The immense tunnel of an airport identical to all the other airports on earth exuded sweat, grease, flatulence, evacuations from the strategically placed WCs, but everything made sanitary thanks to large, intermittent gusts of manufactured air with subtle fragrances of mint, camomile, and violet to receive and support the next stampede of schoolgirls going on a collective vacation, not yet identified by their diminutive bikinis but still by their navy blue jumpers, flat shoes, heavy stockings, straw hats with a ribbon, the emblem of the school recorded on their cardigans. They smelled of sweet childish perspiration, of mouths irrigated by bean soup, of teeth tempered by Adams gum. They made an infernal racket because of the clear obligation to show their joy at the prospect of a European vacation, for all their faces said “Paris” and none said “Cacahuamilpa.”
This wave was followed by one of boys in soccer shirts who sang at the top of their lungs incomprehensible slogans, partisan codas older than they were, sicketybooms, bimbombams, rahrahrahs, reminding me of secondary school, the start of my life of connection to Father Filopáter, Bald Errol Esparza, and my soul brother Jericó with no last name: The tumult of young people brought me closer to the past but I was established in the most present of present times when a group of boys grabbed me from behind, stripped off my jacket, and put me in one of the red shirts of the team, school, sect, league, union, alliance, federation, band, clan, tribe, order, brotherhood, guild, club, squad, firm, division, branch, chapter, and common market of the strongest and fastest of nations: Club Youth, which is a kick in the ass and a delirium of the soul, believing you are immortal and knowing you are a badass, in possession of everything and owner of nothing, irrelevance of the passing, celebration of the moment, seminal potency, lost opportunities, rivers in the sand, ocean of the future, sirens that weep: I saw them and I saw myself, all the days of a youth that was dying, harassed, came back to me surrounded by a mariachi band, a melancholy torero, some young girls on vacation, some adolescents in soccer shirts, and a lost woman whose residence, however, I knew. It was enough to go to the house on Pedregal with an arrest warrant arranged by the lawyer Sanginés to have the shameless Nazario Esparza and his consecrated concubine shit volcanic rock.
On the other hand, I was captive to the huge crowds coming in and going out of an airport with only two runways for twenty million locals and who knows how many foreigners. I stopped counting. The useless anarchy defeated me. The secret tremor of self-destruction. The chaos that appeared with no exit, drowning me in its mere existence.
I wanted to urinate.
I went into the strategic bathroom, asking myself How did I get here?
I produced my usual kidney beer.
I washed my hands.
I looked in the mirror.
Was it me?
Behind me, someone was sitting on the toilet.
He hadn’t closed the door.
His trousers eddied around his ankles.
His shirt covered his noble parts.
I looked at his face reflected in the mirror.
He looked at me with great melancholy.
It was the face of a sad clown.
He looked at me asking me without speaking: How do we respond to a senseless world?
It was the voice of a sick clown.
An undulating light fell on his head.
I felt ill.
I wanted to throw up.
I made a mistake.
I opened the door of a closet instead of the door to a stall.
I was stunned.
In the closet, a dark, good-looking young man, his pants around his ankles as if he were going to take a shit, was fucking a woman with her skirt bunched around her waist and her panties entangled in the high heels of her shoes.
She looked at me with a strange start, as if she were expecting to be caught and liked the idea of a third person seeing her fornicate.
She was a modern woman, young, with the attitude of an animal of prey, but she no longer had the elegance I had once attributed to her.
I looked at her buttock. She had a bee tattooed on it.
I took off the soccer club’s red shirt.
WHEN WE ENTERED the house on Pedregal de San Angel together—Errol, Jericó, and I—we didn’t know what awaited us.
Sara was detained there. I had the advantage over Jericó of having seen the bee on her buttock. I said nothing to him because at that moment there was a certain tension between us. And besides, “circumstances” push us to keep some secrets without really distrusting each other. I abandoned the house on Cerrada de Chimalpopoca, uninhabitable without the life I had shared with Lucha Zapata. I took the liberty of going and leaving the door open, as if chance would be the next inhabitant of the modest little house of the woman who had filled me with so much passion. Passion becomes diseased if it counts only on an empty house for commemoration, as if past love were a phantom. I decided that the intensity of my relationship with Lucha required a final act that would not be like a stage curtain. She had left. I was going. The house would remain open, as if summoning a new couple. As if the destiny of our “nest” was to call to future birds.
I don’t know. Only when she left did I realize how much I needed her, how much I loved her. There was a certain cynical disloyalty in this feeling, since, with admitted ingenuousness, I had already decided to fall in love with the svelte, elegant Asunta Jordán. What I couldn’t foresee is that the trio of women who concerned me would eventually join another ghost from a past in some sense remote, for between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five a galaxy intervenes.
“Operation Sara”—for it was an entire operation—implied deciding first between returning to the prison to speak with Miguel Aparecido so he could enlighten me, or consulting with the lawyer Sanginés so he could orient me, or looking for Errol in some cabaret in the center of the city, or consulting with Jericó since in our erotic life we had shared the whore with the bee on her buttock.
This last proposition was the most difficult. I’ve already recounted how my life with Lucha Zapata had moved me away from Jericó and the apartment on Calle de Praga. The situation seemed to suit both of us on the basis of this premise: Jericó didn’t ask me about my constant absences and I didn’t inquire into his activities when he returned to Mexico. Except now my absences had become presences. Without the house on the Cerrada (without Lucha), I returned to my normal life (in the apartment on Praga). Except now I was living again with a Jericó who had taken advantage of my absence to envelop his presence in a mystery that daily life threatened to dispel.
To the preceding I should add that I multiplied my activities as an employee of Max Monroy’s company in Santa Fe and as a law clerk obliged to write a thesis on Machiavelli, while Jericó had entered the presidential residence of Los Pinos, where the president himself, in an act that could appear to me as unusual or irrelevant, had given my friend—he told me about it without moving a muscle in his face—the responsibility of organizing something like festivals, commemorations, and national entertainments for a “depoliticized” youth. Was it important? Was it trivial? As Jericó didn’t ask about my activities, I didn’t look into his. The fact is that the arrest of Nazario Esparza’s second wife obliged us to locate our old comrade the formerly bald Errol who, according to the presumptive criminal, played drums in a dive in the oldest section of the city.
His having told me that he had gone into the president’s office and received the assignment placed me in a circumstance of disloyalty. Jericó trusted me. And what was I going to tell him? My relationship with Lucha was mine alone, it was something almost sacred, it couldn’t be talked about by me or pawed over by other people, not even my fraternal friend Jericó. Was I betrayi
ng him with my secret? Should I open up to him? Was I inviting him to betray me as well? In fact, Jericó had told me he was collaborating at Los Pinos, something I already knew because Sanginés had told us so, and he already knew I was working for Max Monroy. Jericó didn’t know about Lucha Zapata. Now he didn’t know about Asunta Jordán. I had two advantages over him in the persons of two women. Was I the disloyal partner in our old friendship? Or was he not telling me more than I knew about or more than I was hiding from him?
With this kind of suspicion I realized, thanks to small signs (attitudes, greetings, goodbyes, calculations that raised their heads then disappeared like small snakes in our shared domestic life), that our friendship was being muddied and I sincerely lamented it: Jericó was half of my life and his companionship was a way of expunging myself from my own past …
The incident in the airport and my decision to report the woman and the porter fornicating so happily in the men’s bathroom in reality created the opportunity for me to reconcile with Jericó and avoid a break, and for the two of us together to reinitiate a search that meant, in the long run, reknotting a lasso, tying up a thread before it broke, and coming together at the point where we had left the story: the burial of Señora Esparza and Errol’s truncated destiny.
“Where is Nazario Esparza?” was Don Antonio Sanginés’s first and logical question when we told him about a case whose precedents he knew better than we did and possibly its consequences as well.
Although he didn’t answer his own question, he did supply us with some antecedents. Sanginés had handled several matters for Esparza, especially the testamentary situation caused by the demise of Doña Estrellita, who had brought her own fortune to a marriage with a division of property and an inheritance provision between the surviving spouses, while the matrimonial contract with Señorita Sara Pérez Ubico provided for community property, that is, upon Don Nazario’s death, his second wife would come into possession of two fortunes: her husband’s and Doña Estrellita’s.
“Don Nazario should take good care of himself,” Sanginés said with a sigh, interlacing his fingers in front of his chin.