Death in Veracruz (16 page)

The town council members left with the party notables who were to be their overnight guests. Pizarro didn't budge. When they had gone, he spoke to Anabela. “Now, ma'am, if
you would kindly offer us a glass of cognac, we'd be grateful. We're family now.”

A small circle gathered about Little Darling and Pizarro. Rojano, by now somewhat drunk, remained at Pizarro's side with Anabela and me facing them. Roibal disappeared along with Echeguren. Pizarro handed his glass to Little Darling and began to speak.

“People around here say we all have doubles in the animal world. The ones who never give up are tigers, the cowards are rabbits, the strong are lions, the gullible are colts, and the peaceful are deer. I want to tell each of you what I think you are because it's a way to tell you what I expect from all this.”

He pretended to take a sip of the cognac Little Darling was holding. Though he feigned a swallow, he only wet his lips.

“The Guillaumín girl is a part tiger and part deer,” Pizarro declared, looking past me as if I didn't exist. “I'm not saying she's wants war, but she's no peacemaker either. His Honor the mayor of Chicontepec is a mix of tiger and chameleon, which means exactly what it seems to mean. Don't interrupt me,” he said when Rojano tried to defend himself (he didn't sip the cognac, he drank it). “Our journalist friend,” Pizarro went on, “is what's called a
wa' yá
in Totonaca, a hawk or vulture. He glides along looking for a meal, then soars back into the sky. Cielito here is a
maquech.”

“I'm your
maquech,”
Little Darling said, clinging to his hand.

Pizarro explained that the
maquech
was a species of cricket or scarab found in Yucatán. People decorated the living insect with stitching or precious stones three or four times its own weight. Thus burdened, the
maquech
remained so strong and well trained that it would perch on shoulders and necklines, serving as a brooch on a woman's blouse or
bosom without releasing a drop of its poison.

Once again Pizarro feigned a drink, then continued his lecture. “This town of Chicontepec will be, or ought to be, like Noah's arc.”

“At least it's raining enough,” Rojano said in alcoholic jest.

“My point is we must learn to live together without hurting each other,” Pizarro paid no attention to Rojano. “Like any ship, this one must be kept upright and there has to be someone at the helm who knows where the ship's headed. Together we'll bring Chicontepec back to life and rescue it from backwardness and injustice. Even if others don't care, we'll do the caring for them. That's our goal.”

“That's right, my love,” Little Darling blurted sweetly.

“Fate is an arc,” Pizarro said. “Think about it. The animals we know about are the ones who got off Noah's arc, not the ones who got on. Because on board, someone had to get rid of the ones who rocked the boat. Someone put an end to that animal world to make way for the one we have now. And no one knows how many of the animals that got on the arc never got off. But we all know the job was done right, and nobody misses the ones that wouldn't help keep the ship upright and on course. They tried to make trouble and weren't around to tell the tale when the storm cleared. They didn't get off. As the saying goes both here and elsewhere, whoever can add can divide. Which is another way of saying that whoever is going to unite must know how to weed out anything that disunites.”

He spoke in the flickering yellow light of the oil lamps. The poorly hung doors let in drafts of damp outside air that wafted through the big house, chilling its interior. We began to sweat as a stifling brew of humidity and embarrassment permeated the atmosphere. While speaking, Pizarro's eyes had remained focused on Anabela. Then his gaze turned to
me and, finally, to Rojano who managed to station himself where Pizarro could barely see him out the corner of his eye.

“That's what I wanted to explain to you,” Pizarro said while again pretending to sip the cognac.” Rather than drink it, Little Darling discreetly, though in plain sight, poured the liquor onto the floor. “And I ask you to understand my comparisons.”

When his speech ended, I asked Pizarro which animal was his double. He paid no attention. I heard Roibal open the door behind me at almost the same moment that Pizarro got up and began to leave. He let Little Darling go ahead of him while saying a ceremonious goodbye to Rojano and Anabela. Upon shaking my hand, he ventured a smile that ended just below the cold sparkle of his eyes in the semi-darkness. “I don't play this game,” he said. “I, my journalist friend, am the dealer.”

They left, and Rojano served himself another cognac before letting himself collapse triumphant and relaxed onto the rustic sofa. “Pizarro is the hyena,” he said before taking yet another long drink. “A political hyena.”

“I need to get your rooms ready,” Anabela said as if avoiding a disagreeable subject. Her face was suddenly overcome with fatigue. Her mascara had smudged, the bags beneath her eyes had swollen, and her high cheeks had paled.

She picked up one of the oil lamps and made a solitary retreat into the depths of the big house.

I
n November 1977, the daily
unomásuno
made its debut with René Arteaga as its economics correspondent, a post he held to the day he died. We gathered in the early morning hours to toast the first edition, and everyone got drunk on liquor and incredulity. We drank until noon with a group of reporters. Arteaga and I kept at it until nightfall, then he pressed on by himself until dawn of the following morning. I found this out that same day when he showed up at my apartment on
Artes
with bloodshot eyes and the shakes. He hadn't shaved or changed his clothes, and he couldn't remember where he'd left his glasses. I served him a Bloody Mary in the bathroom where he spent more than half an hour under a steaming shower. An hour later he appeared before my work table poached, freshly shaven, fragrant, and clean. He demurely asked for another Bloody Mary. I got up to make it, but we'd run out of tomato juice. Doña Lila wasn't around, so I went down to the Rosas Moreno store for more. When I got back I heard the typewriter going full blast. I prepared the Bloody Mary and took it to Arteaga who was just about to finish his three-page news story.

It was a gem of a piece, a scoop of the agreement the government had signed with the International Monetary Fund the previous year. It went on to sum up in two dry and succinct paragraphs how the discovery of oil and its earlier than stipulated sale on the world market violated key clauses in the agreement. The energy sector alone had borrowed more than the three billion dollars approved by the IMF. Up until then, no one knew the exact nature of the agreement with the IMF though it was known that some sort
of agreement had been reached. Nor did anyone know until then that in the two preceding months PEMEX on its own had borrowed more than the whole Mexican government in all of the preceding year. It was, as the years would come to show, the first journalistic foray into the inner workings of the López Portillo administration. It laid bare the machinations and expectations that would come to characterize the new government over the next six years. Where, I asked, did this come from.

“The Negresco Bar,” Arteaga answered with no hesitation. He finished his report and recounted its history. He'd run into a former treasury official at the Negresco. The man was as drunk as Arteaga himself but was far more distraught. The ruin and disaster awaiting Mexico had brought him to tears.

“He had a copy of the IMF pact in his jacket pocket,” Arteaga said. “He was carrying it around like a Dear John letter from his girlfriend. He left it behind for me to read while he was taking a leak. He's still looking for me.”

“And the bit about PEMEX?”

“I've had that since last week. All I needed was something to confirm it. The IMF stuff isn't exactly relevant, but it will do. It's as good as an admission from Díaz Serrano.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“If you don't understand that, you'll never make it as a reporter,” he said.

Tremulously, he held out his glass. It was empty again, and he wanted another Bloody Mary. “I'll trade you for the document,” he said, and I took the deal.

That afternoon the first fissure in the López Portillo administration came with the resignation of Carlos Tello and the firing of Rodolfo Moctezuma, respectively ministers of planning and finance and among those closest to the president. For the first time in many years, a genuinely
political resignation letter reached the news desks of the dailies. Tello offered a tart explanation of his differences with the López Portillo regime. Only
unomásuno
ran it in an exclusive that, fortunately for me, blunted the impact of the piece Arteaga composed in my apartment while I plied him with Bloody Marys. I underlined the document he'd given me and that evening began a gloss of it for my own column. A sensation came over me as if I were entering a different world, one where you could see with absolute clarity what had happened to the country and its people during those months. An agreement signed almost a year ago had gone unreported in the Mexican press until the previous day when Arteaga disclosed and expanded upon it in copy he cranked out on my typewriter. Beyond transcribing the agreement, I did little more than interlinéate a few sarcastic remarks to avenge the feeling of powerlessness that overcame me as I wrote. For at least twelve months, according to this evidence, the country had been ruled by deceit, its future in hock to an accord which had never been made public but which nonetheless dictated the rules the new administration was bound to follow. It was to our obsessive observation, praise, and deciphering of this regime that we, as Mexican columnists, journalists and reporters, owed our spurious slice of glory. (“The stuffed envelope, a higher state of commentary,” Arteaga said, parodying Lenin. It was his way of referring to columnists and to the bribing of journalists as practiced in the days before moral renovation—after moral renovation the practice continued but under a different name.)

My disconsolate summary ran to three columns. I sealed it in one of the envelopes I used to send columns to the paper and had Doña Lila deliver it by taxi. A half hour later Doña Lila returned, but she wasn't alone. Francisco Rojano walked in behind her. His big mustache was back, and his hair was
long and loose. Having also dispensed with his glasses, he looked as ostentatious and overbearing as ever. He had two bottles of aguardiente and a sackful of cheeses slung over his shoulder and a blindingly white Panama hat on his head. Folded over his arms were a garish
huipil
blouse and a muslin shirt with the colors of the flag embroidered on the front. He also had a wicker basket with pre-Hispanic statuettes from the Olmec region. He placed these presents on the floor with a theatrical flair worthy of Marco Polo and with due ceremony announced, “Brother, let's get shitfaced.”

He was wearing an extravagant linen outfit and a cowboy-style shirt with pink stripes and yoke. A perfectly knotted and triangulated silk tie filled the gap between the collar points. As he hugged me, I caught the sharp yet delicate scent of the old Jean Marie Farina lotion we regarded as the quintessence of elegance and good taste during our university years.

He extracted from his pants a wallet bulging with bills and from his jacket inside pocket a billfold from which he released a torrent of credit cards. “Tools of the trade, brother. I've come to work with you because big things are happening beneath the skies of Chicontepec.”

“Especially to your bank account.”

“Especially when it comes to righting historic wrongs, brother. But I've got things to tell you. May I invite you to eat?”

He insisted we dine at the Passy in the
Zona Rosa
and that we be given a table in the middle of the restaurant. We sat facing the lobby with our backs to the windows and started in on the whiskeys. Before we'd ordered a second round, half the major players in Mexican politics and journalism had passed through that lobby. We were on our fourth round when the director of PEMEX appeared with four top figures from the energy sector, among them Pizarro and
La Quina,
in tow.

“Did you see them? Did you see them?” Rojano asked eagerly. “They're all there, aren't they? Only Cárdenas is missing, damn it. Do you know Díaz Serrano?”

“We met at a journalists' lunch.”

“If you approach him, will he recognize you?”

“I'm not approaching him.”

“But if you did approach him, would he recognize you?”

“I don't think so.”

“But, brother, you're right in the thick of things. There can't be more than a couple of thousand guys that are in as deep as you, that make things sizzle as President López Portillo likes to say. If you approach Díaz Serrano and tell him who you are, there's no way he can blow you off, damn it. You're one of the top half dozen columnists in the country for Christ's sake. Who doesn't recognize you, brother?”

“Díaz Serrano doesn't know me.”

“So, I mean, what harm can it do? I need a meeting with Díaz Serrano. Because of my job, brother. Couldn't you give me a bit of help? For you it's no big deal, for my town it could be a matter of life or death. Put it in perspective.”

“The fish is excellent here, and so are the Mexican dishes. The imported wines are also first class.”

“Don't jerk me around, brother. Get some perspective.”

I ordered another drink and the menu from the waiter.

“How are things in your Totonacan fiefdom?” I asked. “Ready for the leap to petro-modernity?”

“Ready for the plunge into isolation and misery, brother. It's something you can't even imagine. It's like a colony except the Spanish empire's been gone for four hundred years. It's a fossilized remnant from the nation's past.”