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Living in this desert, thought
Lalo Cura as the car, with Epifanio at the wheel, left the field behind, is
like living at sea. The border between
Sonora
and
Arizona
is a chain of haunted or enchanted islands. The cities and towns are boats. The
desert is an endless sea. This is a good place for fish, especially deep-sea
fish, not men.

•

The
dead women of March prompted the
Mexico
City
papers to ask some questions out loud. If the
murderer was behind bars, who had killed all these other women? If the killer's
lackeys or accomplices were behind bars, too, who was responsible for all the
deaths? To what extent were Los Bisontes, that terrible and improbable youth
gang, a real phenomenon and to what extent were they a police creation? Why had
Haas's trial been postponed over and over again? Why didn't the federal
authorities send a special prosecutor to lead the investigations? On April 4,
Sergio Gonzalez got his paper to send him to write a new story about the
killings in Santa Teresa.

On
April 6 the body of Michele Sanchez Castillo was found, next to the storage
sheds of a soft drink bottling plant. The discovery was made by two company
employees assigned to clean the area. Some fifty yards from the body an iron
bar was recovered, bloodstained and with bits of scalp adhering to it, which
led to the conclusion that it was the murder weapon. Michele Sanchez was
wrapped in old quilts, next to a stack of tires, a place where it wasn't
unusual to find people on their way through town or neighborhood drunks asleep,
more or less tolerated by the bottling plant. Peaceable people, according to
the night watchmen, but if they got angry they might set fire to the tires,
which could make the situation even more difficult. The victim exhibited facial
trauma and minor lacerations to the chest, as well as a fatal fracture of the
skull just behind the right ear. She was wearing white-beaded black pants,
which the police found pulled down to her knees, and a pink blouse with big
black buttons, pulled up over her breasts. Her shoes were heavy, with
tractor-tire soles. She had on a bra and panties. By ten in the morning the
place was full of onlookers. According to Inspector Jose Marquez, who was in
charge of the investigation, the woman had been attacked
and killed where she was found. The
reporters who knew him asked to be allowed to come closer and take pictures and
the inspector didn't object. It wasn't known who she was because she wasn't
carrying any kind of identification. But she seemed to be under twenty, said
Jose Marquez. Among the reporters who approached the body was Sergio Gonzalez.
He had never seen a corpse. At intervals, the stacks of tires formed something
like caves. On a cold night, it wouldn't be a bad place to sleep. You'd have to
crawl in. And it was probably even harder to get out. He saw two legs and a
blanket. He heard the Santa Teresa reporters asking Jose Marquez to uncover the
body and he heard Jose Marquez laugh. Sergio Gonzalez had seen enough. He
walked back to the highway where the Beetle he had rented was parked. The next
day the victim was identified as Michele Sanchez Castillo, sixteen. According
to the forensic report, the autopsy had determined that death was due to severe
head trauma and that she hadn't been sexually assaulted. Bits of skin were
found under her fingernails, so it could be argued that she had fought her
attacker to the end. The trauma to her face and ribs was more evidence of the
fight she had put up. And the vaginal swab proved conclusively that she hadn't
been raped. Her family said Michele had visited a friend on April 5 and gone
from there to look for work at a maquiladora. According to the police press
release, she was probably attacked and killed sometime between the night of the
fifth and the early morning of the sixth. No fingerprints were found on the
iron bar.

Sergio Gonzalez interviewed
Inspector Jose Marquez. He arrived just as night was falling over the city and
the judicial police offices were almost empty. a man who acted as custodian
showed him the way to Jose Marquez's desk. He didn't pass anyone in the hall.
The doors to most of the offices were open and the sound of a photocopier could
be heard coming from somewhere. Jose Marquez talked to him with one eye on the
clock and after a while he asked Sergio to come with him to the locker room, to
save time. As the inspector undressed, Sergio asked how it was that Michele
Sanchez could have reached the rear grounds of the bottling plant alive. Why
not? answered Marquez. As I understand it, said Sergio, the women are kidnapped
in one place, raped and killed somewhere else, and finally dumped in a third
place, in this case behind the storage sheds. Sometimes it's like that, Marquez
said, but the killings don't all follow the same pattern. Marquez put his suit
in a bag and changed into sweatpants and a warm-up jacket. You must be
wondering, he said as he adjusted his Desert Eagle .357 Magnum in its holster
under his jacket, why the building is so empty. Sergio said the logical answer
was that the inspectors were all out working. Not at this time of day, said
Marquez. Why, then? asked Sergio. Because today is the indoor soccer match
between the Santa Teresa police and our boys. Are you going to play? asked
Sergio. Maybe, maybe not, I'm a substitute, said Marquez. As they were leaving
the locker room, the inspector told him he shouldn't try to find a logical
explanation for the crimes. It's fucked up, that's the only explanation, said
Marquez.

•

The
next day he visited Haas and Michele Sanchez's parents. Haas struck him as even
colder than before, if possible. And taller, too, as if in prison his hormones
had gone haywire and he had finally attained his true height. He asked about
Michele Sanchez, whether Haas had any opinion on the subject, and he asked
about the Bisontes and all the dead women who had been springing up in the
Santa Teresa desert since his arrest. Haas replied listlessly, with a smile,
and Sergio thought that even if he hadn't been guilty of the most recent
killings, he was guilty of
something.
Then,
when he left, he asked himself how he could size someone up by his smile or his
eyes. Who was he to judge?

•

Michele
Sanchez's mother told him that for a year she had been having terrible dreams.
She would wake up in the middle of the night or the day (when she worked the
night shift) with the certainty that she had lost her little girl forever.
Sergio asked if Michele was her youngest. No, I have two younger children, said
the woman. But in my dreams the one I lost was Michele. And why is that? I
guess I don't know, said the woman, in my dreams Michele was a baby, not the
age she is now, she was two or three at most, and suddenly she would disappear.
I never saw the person who took her from me. All I saw was an empty street or
yard or room. One moment my little girl was there. And when I looked again she
was gone. Sergio asked her if people were afraid. The mothers are, said the
woman. Some fathers, too. But not people in general, I don't think. Before he
said goodbye, at the approach to the Arsenio Farrell industrial
park, the woman said her dreams had
begun around the time she first saw Florita Almada on TV, Florita Almada, La
Santa, as she was called. A crowd of women arrived on foot or got off the buses
run by the park's different maquiladoras. Are the buses free? asked Sergio,
distracted. Nothing here is free, said the woman. Then he asked her who Florita
Almada was. She's an old woman who's on Hermosillo TV every so often, on
Reinaldo's show. She knows what's hidden behind the crimes and she tried to
tell us, but we didn't listen, no one listens to her. She's seen the faces of
the killers. If you want to know more, go and see her, and when you've seen her
call me or write me. I'll do that, said Sergio.

Haas liked to sit on the
ground, against the wall, in the shady part of the yard. And he liked to think.
He liked to imagine that God didn't exist. For three minutes, at least. He also
liked to think about the insignificance of human beings. Five minutes. If pain
didn't exist, he thought, we would be perfect. Insignificant and ignorant of
pain. Fucking perfect. But there was pain to fuck everything up. Finally he
would think about luxury. The luxury of memory, the luxury of knowing a
language or several languages, the luxury of thinking and not running away.
Then he opened his eyes and contemplated, as if in a dream, some of the
Bisontes, who were moving around the sunny part of the yard, the other side, as
if they were grazing. The Bisontes graze in the prison yard, he thought, and
that calmed him like a fast-acting tranquilizer, because sometimes, though not
often, Haas started the day as if his head had been pierced with the point of a
knife. El Tequila and El Tormenta were next to him. Sometimes he felt like a shepherd
misunderstood by the very stones. Some inmates seemed to move in slow motion.
The one with the sodas, for example, who came over with three cold Coca-Colas.
Or the ones playing basketball. The previous night, before he went to bed, a
guard had come to get him and told him that Don Enrique Hernandez wanted to see
him. The drug lord wasn't alone. With him were the warden and a man who turned
out to be his lawyer. They had just eaten and Enriquito Hernandez offered him a
cup of coffee that Haas turned down, saying it kept him awake. Everyone laughed
except the lawyer, who gave no indication of having heard. I like you, gringo,
said the drug lord, and I just want you to know that someone's looking into
this business with the Bisontes. Is that clear? Totally clear, Don Enrique.
After that they invited him to sit down and asked him how life was for the
prisoners. The next day he told El Tequila that the whole affair was in
Enriquito Hernandez's hands. Tell your brother. El Tequila nodded and said:
that's good. Isn't it nice to sit here in the shade, said Haas.

According
to Santa Teresa's Department of Sex Crimes, a government agency barely a year
old, the male-female ratio of killings in
Mexico
was ten to one, whereas in
Santa Teresa it was ten to four. The head of the department, Yolanda Palacio,
was a woman of about thirty, fair-skinned and brown haired, formal in manner,
although her formality betrayed glimpses of a yearning for happiness, a
yearning for good times. But what are
good
times'?
Sergio Gonzalez asked himself. Maybe they're what separate certain
people from the rest of us, who live in a state of perpetual sadness. The will
to live, the will to fight, as his father used to say, but fight what? The
inevitable? Fight against whom? And what for? More time, certain knowledge, the
glimpse of something essential? As if there were anything essential in this
shitty country, he thought, anything essential on this whole self-sucking
motherfucker of a planet. Yolanda Palacio had studied law at the
University
of
Santa Teresa
,
and then she had specialized in penal law at the
University
of
Hermosillo
,
but she didn't like trials, as she had discovered a little too late, and didn't
want to become a litigator, so she had gone into research. Do you know how many
women are the victims of sex crimes in this city? More than two thousand a
year. And almost half of them are underage. And probably at least that many
don't report being attacked, which means we're talking about four thousand
rapes a year. In other words, every day more than ten women are raped here, she
said, gesturing as if the women were being assaulted in the corridor. a
corridor dimly lit by a yellow fluorescent tube, exactly like the fluorescent
tube that was turned off in Yolanda Palacio's office. Some of the rapes end in
murder, of course. But I don't mean to exaggerate, most rapists just do their
thing and move on, that's all folks, next customer. Sergio didn't know what to
say. Do you know how many people work here in the Department of Sex Crimes? Just
me. There used to be a secretary. But she got fed up and moved to
Ensenada
, where she has
family. Shit, said Sergio. That's right, shit, it's always shit, it's always
Jesus, fuck, you're shitting me, but when it comes down to it no one remembers,
not a word, and no one has the balls to do anything about it. Sergio looked at
the floor and then he looked at Yolanda Palacio's tired face. And speaking of
shit, she said, want to get something to eat? I'm starving, there's a
restaurant near here called El Rey del Taco, you should try it if you like
Tex-Mex. Sergio got up. My treat, he said. I assumed that, said Yolanda
Palacio.

On April 12 the remains of a
woman were found in a field near Casas Negras. The people who came upon the
corpse realized it was a woman by the hair, black and waist length. The body
was discovered in an advanced state of decomposition. After the forensic
examination, it was determined that the victim was between twenty-eight and
thirty-three, five foot six, and that the cause of death was massive cerebral
contusion. She wasn't carrying identification. She was dressed in black pants,
a green blouse, and tennis shoes. Car keys were found in one of her pockets.
Her description didn't match that of any women missing from Santa Teresa. She
had probably been dead for a few months. The case was shelved.

Without
knowing very well why, since he didn't believe in seers, Sergio Gonzalez went
looking for Florita Almada at
Hermosillo
's
Channel 7 studios. He talked to one secretary, then another, then to Reinaldo,
who told him it wasn't easy to get to see Florita. Her friends, said Reinaldo,
protect her. We protect her privacy. We're a human shield around La Santa.
Sergio explained that he was a reporter and said Florita's privacy was
guaranteed. Reinaldo set a time to meet with him that same night. Sergio went
back to his hotel and tried to write a draft of his article about the killings,
but after a while he realized he couldn't write anything. He went down to the
hotel bar and spent a while drinking and reading the local papers. Then he went
up to his room, took a shower, and came back down again. Half an hour before
the time Reinaldo had indicated, he hailed a taxi and asked the driver to
circle around the center of town a few times before taking him to his
appointment. The driver asked where he was from.
Mexico City
, said Sergio. Crazy city, said
the driver. Once I was attacked seven times in the same day. The only thing
they didn't do was rape me, said the driver, laughing in the rearview mirror.
Things have changed, said Sergio, now it's the taxi drivers who attack people.
So I hear, said the driver, and about time, too. Depends how you look at it,
said Sergio. The meeting was at a bar with a male clientele. The place was
called Popeye and the bouncer outside was well over six feet tall and weighed
more than two hundred pounds. Inside there was a zigzagging bar and tiny tables
lit by little lamps and chairs upholstered in purple velvet. New Age music was
playing over the speakers and the waiters were dressed as sailors. Reinaldo and
a stranger were waiting for him on overly tall stools at the bar. The stranger
had a fashionable haircut and was well dressed. His name was Jose Patricio and
he was Reinaldo's and Florita's lawyer. So Florita Almada needs a lawyer?
Everybody needs one, said Jose Patricio very seriously. Sergio didn't want a
drink and soon afterward the three of them got in Jose Patricio's BMW and drove
down darker and darker streets to Florita's house. Along the way Jose Patricio
wanted to know what it was like to be a crime reporter in
Mexico City
and Sergio had to confess that he
actually worked for the arts page. He gave a very general explanation of how he
had come to write about the killings in Santa Teresa and Jose Patricio and
Reinaldo listened with rapt attention, like children hearing the same story for
the thousandth time, a story that terrifies and paralyzes them, nodding
seriously, in on the secret. Later, however, when it wasn't much farther to
Florita's house, Reinaldo asked whether Sergio knew a certain famous Televisa
talk show host. Sergio said he knew him by name but had never run into him at a
party. Then Reinaldo said that this host had been in love with Jose Patricio.
For a while he came to
Hermosillo
every weekend and took Jose Patricio and his friends to the beach, spending
money right and left. At the time, Jose Patricio was in love with a gringo, a
law professor at
Berkeley
,
and completely ignored him. One night, said Reinaldo, the famous host asked me
up to his hotel room and told me he had a proposal to make. He'd just been
rejected, and I thought he wanted to sleep with me or take me under his wing
and launch me on a new TV career in
Mexico
City
, but he only wanted to talk, with me as audience.
At first, said Reinaldo, all I felt was disgust. He isn't an attractive man and
he looks even worse in person than he does on TV. At the time I hadn't met
Florita Almada yet and I was living the life of a sinner. (Laughter.) The point
is: I despised him and I was probably also a little envious, since I thought
he'd gotten luckier than he deserved. Anyway, I went with him to his room, said
Reinaldo, the best suite at the best hotel in Bahia Kino, our base for sailing
trips to Tiburon or Turner Island, every possible luxury,
as
you can imagine, said Reinaldo, as he stared out the window of
Jose Patricio's BMW at the modest houses they were passing, and there was the
famous host, Televisa's star of the moment, sitting at the foot of the bed,
with a drink in his hand, his hair a mess, and his eyes so squinty they almost
vanished, and when his gaze fell on me, when he realized I was in the room,
standing there, waiting, he blurted out that this would probably be his last
night on earth. As you can imagine, I was petrified, because immediately I
thought: this fucker is going to kill me first and then kill himself, all to
teach Jose Patricio a posthumous lesson. (Laughter.) That's the word, isn't it,
posthumous? More or less, said Jose Patricio. So I said to him, said Reinaldo,
listen, don't be ridiculous. Listen, maybe we should go for a walk. And as I
was talking, my eyes were searching for the gun. But I didn't see a gun
anywhere, although he could easily have had it under his shirt, like a hit man,
although he didn't look like a hit man just then, he looked desperate and
alone. I remember I turned on the TV and found a late-night show out of
Tijuana, a talk show, and I said to him: I'm sure you could've done a better
job, given the same resources, but he wouldn't so much as glance at the TV. All
he did was stare at the floor and whisper that life was meaningless and he
might as well be dead. Blah blah blah. Anything I might say, I realized then,
would be useless. He wasn't even listening to me, he just wanted me nearby, in
case, but in case of what? I don't know, but definitely in case of something. I
remember I went out onto the balcony and gazed at the bay. There was a full
moon. It's so pretty, the coast, I reflected, but the sad thing is we notice it
only at the worst of times, when we can scarcely enjoy it. The coast and the
beach and the sky full of stars, all so pretty. But then I got bored and came
back in and sat in the chair in the bedroom, and so I wouldn't have to look at
the host's face I started watching TV again, where some guy was saying that he
stood in possession, those were his words,
stood
in possession,
like somebody talking about medieval history or politics, of
the record for most expulsions from the United States. Do you know how many
times he had entered the
United
States
illegally? Three hundred and
forty-five! And three hundred and forty-five times he had been arrested and
deported to
Mexico
.
All within a span of four years. I admit that suddenly my interest was piqued.
I imagined him on my show. I imagined the questions I would ask. I began to
think about how to get in touch with him, because there's no denying it was a
very interesting story. The guy from Tijuana TV asked a key question: where did
he get the money to pay the
coyotes
to
take him to the other side? Because considering the frantic rate at which he
was expelled it was clear there was no way he had time to work and save up
money in the
United States
.
His answer was breathtaking. He said at first he paid what they asked, but
later, maybe after the tenth deportation, he bargained and asked for discounts,
and after the fiftieth deportation the
pollens
and
coyotes
brought him along out
of friendship, and after the hundredth they probably felt sorry for him, he
thought. Now, he said to the Tijuana talk show host, they brought him as a
good-luck charm, because his presence in some way relieved the stress for
everyone else: if anyone was caught that someone would be him, not the others,
at least if they knew to steer clear of him once they had crossed the border. Put
it this way: he had become the marked card, the marked bill, as he said
himself. Then the host, who was bad, asked him one stupid question and one good
question. The stupid question was whether he planned to get into the
Guinness Book of World Records.
The man
didn't even know what the fuck he was talking about, he'd never heard of the
Guinness Book of World Records.
The good
question was whether he was going to keep trying. Trying what? asked the man.
Trying to get across, said the host. God willing, the man said, so long as he
was in good health he would never give up on the idea of living in the
United States
.
Aren't you tired? asked the host. Don't you want to go back to your village or
look for a job here in
Tijuana
?
The guy smiled like he was embarrassed and said that once he had an idea in his
head he couldn't get rid of it. He was a crazy guy, crazy, crazy, really crazy,
said Reinaldo, but I was in the craziest hotel in Bahia Kino and next to me,
sitting at the foot of the bed, was the craziest talk show host in Mexico City,
so what was I supposed to think, really? Of course, the host had given up the
idea of killing himself. He was still sitting at the foot of the bed, but his
eyes, the eyes of a tired dog, were fixed on the TV. What do you think? I asked
him. Can a person like that really exist? Isn't he the most charming thing?
Isn't he innocence personified? Then the host got up holding the gun that all
this time he'd had hidden under his leg or a buttock, and the color drained
from my face again and he made a gesture, a barely perceptible gesture, as if
to say I had nothing to worry about anymore and he went into the bathroom
without shutting the door and I thought oh, fuck, now he's going to kill
himself, but all he did was take a long piss, everything was so cozy,
everything
made
sense, the TV on, the open door, the night like a glove over the hotel, the
perfect wetback, the wetback I wanted to have on my show and who maybe the host
in love with Jose Patricio wanted to have on his show, the appalling wetback,
the king of bad luck, the man carrying the fate of Mexico on his shoulders, the
smiling wetback, that toadlike creature, that dumb, helpless greasy illegal,
that lump of coal who in some other reincarnation could have been a diamond,
that untouchable born in Mexico instead of India, everything made sense,
suddenly everything made sense, so why commit suicide now? From where I was I
saw the Televisa host put the gun away in his toilet kit and then he closed the
kit and put it in a bathroom drawer. I asked him if he wanted to get a drink at
the hotel bar. All right, he said, but first he wanted to see the end of the
show. On TV they were already talking to someone else, a cat trainer, I think.
What channel is this? asked the host.
Tijuana
35, I answered.
Tijuana
35, like someone talking in his sleep. Then we left the room. In the hallway
the host stopped and took a comb out of his back pocket and combed his hair.
How do I look? he asked. Divine, I said. Then we pressed the button for the
elevator and waited. What a day, said the host. I nodded. When the elevator
came we got in and went down to the bar without saying a word. Shortly
afterward we parted and each of us went to bed.