Death in Veracruz (19 page)

“Laboratory prophecy,” said my contact. “The photo's from your military registration card. The body is real but obviously not yours. The blood, the bullet wounds, the shadings of gray, the montage are also ours. The magic of an expert I should say.”

“What did Rojano's expert add?”

“You can tell by the red lines,” my contact explained. “He didn't add much, just the shots to the temple, but it was
done systematically. An execution-style shot to the temple was added to each photo. The rest—the photos and the corpses and the dates—that's all real. But, as I understand it, that's the crucial detail.”

It was.

“There are coroners' statements documenting those shots,” I said.

“There are, but they're not decisive. They could also have been arranged. My point is, minus the shots to the temple, what's left? What's left is the piece of the truth that's in your column. And what is that truth? What it amounts to is this. Several property owners around Chicontepec died violent and bloody deaths. Their holdings were contiguous, and they owned the best land in a region of good lands. It cannot be said that this is normal for the area, but it wouldn't frighten anybody in the foothills of Veracruz.”

“And who bought these lands?”

“The oil workers' union did. So did Lacho Pizarro. But what does that prove?”

“It indicates that those deaths had a sole beneficiary.”

“Sole, no,” said my contact. “There were two other buyers. Do you know who they are?”

“That you'll have to prove to me,” I said, anticipating the answer.

“I have proof.” He removed a third envelope from his coat as if laying a final card on the table. “Francisco Rojano Gutiérrez and Anabela Guillaumín de Rojano are the other beneficiaries.”

In the envelope were photocopies of records from the land registry in Tuxpan documenting up to three land purchases by Anabela and Rojano. Between the two of them they bought a total of nearly a 1,000 hectares.

“These are in addition to the 800 I first told you about,” my contact said. “Pizarro and the union made
similar purchases. But Pizarro didn't doctor any photos to incriminate his friends. Do I make myself clear?”

I understood all too well. My stomach churned uncontrollably. I'd been taken advantage of. It made me angry, but as usual it was too late to do anything about it.

Some two weeks later, Anabela returned to Mexico City and sent word that once again she was at the Hotel Reforma. I stayed away. I didn't go to her room, and I didn't answer the phone that rang incessantly in my apartment for the next two days. Finally, she spent all of an afternoon and evening waiting for me in the newsroom of my paper, which is where we ran into each other at nine o'clock on February 20.

“I spent two days going mad looking for you,” she said once we were in my car. “What's the problem?”

“What news are you bringing?”

“I've been looking for you for two whole days. I came to Mexico City to see you. I've spent two days shut up in a furnished room waiting for you to call me, wanting to be with you. You make me feel like a character in some awful soap opera. What's going on?”

“Lots of work, that's what's going on. Didn't you go the Museum of Modern Art?”

“Listen, you bastard.” Anabela was livid. “I'm not your typewriter that you can bang whenever you damn well feel like it, and I'm not your bitch either. You don't get to feel hurt and offended on my account. What the hell do I owe you, anyhow?”

“You refer to the column?”

“No.” Anabela's eyes welled up with tears. “I mean your use of my ass, creep.”

She got out of the car and slammed the door. For a moment I watched her in the rear view mirror. She walked as fast as she could down the sidewalk past a brightly lit shop window. She wiped her eyes. I watched the stride of
her long firm legs moving precariously atop her high heels. I activated my door locks and pulled away.

The next day a messenger brought a letter and package from Anabela. The letter said:

“It's possible you know who I am, but you don't know what I feel. I missed you those nights just as I've missed you other nights when you're not around. In Chicontepec, that is. I don't know what's happening, I don't know what's the matter with you. I know you hurt me. I hated you for it, then I again began needing you at night. I have fresh news for you. The situation is critical. Your column stirred up the hornet's nest. The wasps are on the loose and ready to sting. This is all important as you'll see. But, I repeat, I missed you, and you weren't there.”

The package documented a new case, the death of a Chicontepec notable in a bar fight in El Álamo. According to Rojano, “Negotiations with Lacho over the use of some community lands had broken down. The package included a crude map of the disputed lands, practically the whole east side of the municipality, a total of some five thousand hectares. In his impeccable block lettering in red ink, Rojano commented, “He told his loyal followers that he now has his Mesopotamia, and this is where he wants his Babylon.”

Lázaro Pizarro, leader of the people, founder of civilizations. I picked up the new file together with the others that I had on my desk and threw them in a drawer in a closet I never used.

O
n March 18, 1978, I attended the festivities marking the anniversary of the expropriation of the oil industry in Ciudad Madero. Lázaro Pizarro sat on the reviewing stand next to
La Quina,
but in a clearly subordinate position. Roibal sought me out halfway through the proceedings. Characteristically, I didn't notice as he slipped up behind me and poked me in the rib. His finger might as well have been a pistol.

“The boss wants to know if you'd like to have a word with him.” There was an edge of sarcasm in his voice.

“Wherever he'd like,” I answered before Roibal could say more.

“Wherever you say.”

“At the bar in the Hotel Inglaterra,” I said without hesitation. It was the most centrally located hotel in Tampico.

“Are you spending the night in Tampico?” Roibal asked.

“I'm flying out at seven this evening, on the President's plane,” I stressed.

“Then in the bar at the Inglaterra. At four?”

“At five,” I said. “After the dinner.”

“At five then,” Roibal agreed.

The meal for 300 people was served at union headquarters. I drank giant Cuba libres over ice from glasses made from the bottom half of Bacardi rum bottles, and acquired through a friend in the presidential entourage. They held nearly half a liter of liquid. We drank three of these as pre-meal refreshment and three more while dining on a profusion of crustaceans, fish, ribs, shrimp and tripe on taco shells, corn and flour tortillas, and a variety of sauces
and marinades. Shortly after 5:00 I requested a car from the chief of the press office and a driver from the presidential entourage.

I told the driver whom I was going to see and asked him to leave me at the back of the hotel, then go around to the front and enter the bar like a normal customer. That way he could keep an eye on our meeting. When I entered the bar at exactly 5:30, or half an hour late, the driver was already there nursing a beer. Pizarro was alone at a corner of the bar. He was seated with his back to the wall and a bottle of iced mineral water on the table. Roibal was waiting for me by the street entrance, and two guards stood in the doorway to the hotel. Pizarro remained absolutely motionless as he watched me approach as if I weren't there, or as if he just hadn't noticed me. I'd brought my glass from the dinner with me and was just beginning to feel an alcoholic buzz, “euphoric and ecumenical” as René Arteaga would say. I asked the waiter to refresh my drink over a large dose of ice. On my way to Pizarro's table, I changed my mind and went straight to the bar to have my glass refilled with rum, ice and Coca Cola. Only then did I go to the table where Pizarro had been waiting for half an hour.

“How've you been, chief?” As I spoke, I spun a chair around and sat down spread-eagled on the seat in front of him.

“Waiting for you, my journalist friend,” Pizarro said in a nasal monotone that resonated with anger.

“We were delayed by the President,” I said after a swallow of my drink. “How are you?”

“I've been slandered, offended, and plotted against, my journalist friend.” He spoke in a low voice, nearly a whisper. “The national press says I covet the job of Joaquín Hernández Galicia. They even say I've overshadowed him, that the disciple surpassed the master. Have you read anything like
that in the national press, my journalist friend?”

It was hard not to admire his style and his irony. He was indirect and at the same time precise in the way he got to the heart of our dispute without so much as alluding to it. His tone of voice, because it was so flat and impersonal, made any criticism seem doubly hurtful and unfair.

“I've read things like that, chief.”

“And what do you think of these accounts?”

“They've been proven false for the most part, chief.”

“But there hasn't been any retraction, any effort to repair the damage in the court of public opinion, my journalist friend.”

“There has been where it counts. The President was informed as soon as he inquired.”

“It's a relief to hear you say that, my journalist friend,” Pizarro said. “I worry about your failure to understand, your impudence. Did I mistreat you in Poza Rica? Didn't you like what you saw? Did your brief visit displease you? So why haven't you come back? The door was open for you. Or were you just distracted by visions of doe flesh?”

“That was probably it,” I said, then took a long drink.

“If that's the case, it's understood. All you have to do is look at her,” Pizarro said. “But you worry me, friend, because I don't think you listened to what I told you. Either that, or the most important part didn't get through to you. You listened to the tales told by your friends instead, the ones they're still telling you. And to what's passed on to you between the sheets. But here's the truth. None of you know what you're getting into, you least of all. You don't know the size of the battle or the size of the force needed to fight it and not lose. Your friends are trying to start a fight they have no business getting into. I told you this before, but you didn't listen. Where these things are concerned, they're amateurs. They think they know what they're doing, but they don't.
They think they see what they're looking at, but they don't. They think they can, but they can't. They hear the sound of the river, but they have no idea how much water it carries, and they know nothing of the streams that form the river. I do know, friend, because I dug the trench that made the river. I know exactly why I did it and what I want the river to irrigate. You people come along with a thimble and think you can change the course of the river by the thimbleful. Just because it's in front of your nose, you want to own it. But you don't know what it took to get the water to where it is and to irrigate what it irrigates. You don't know how much work it took to build that river drop by drop, providing help as needed and getting obstacles out of the way. It takes years of work, my friend. Every month of every year, every day of every month, every hour of every day. And then you people come along and want to take over. You become one of the obstacles that get in the way. And you know why? Simply because you're a bunch of amateurs. You think it's there for the taking by whoever sees it first and decides to grab it. That's not how it is, my friend. There's no such thing as an asset nobody owns or has any claim to. Whoever wants it has to push the prior owner aside and usurp that claim. And that's what I've spent my life doing. It's what I've lived for, it's my profession. What I've learned is simply this. What makes the difference in this game isn't who wins or who gets to keep the assets. The issue, my friend, is who survives because this game is about survival. First, you take care of your enemies, then you look out for yourself. This second form of survival is what really matters, and you can only achieve it by what you build, by what you leave behind for others. Now do you understand?”

“I was bewitched by my diet of doe meat,” I said.

“Stings like these last longer than the pain,” he said. Once again Pizarro withdrew into himself as if anger had
drawn him out of his cave and now, having returned fire, he was staging a cautious return. “Don't declare victory.”

He got to his feet, and Roibal was immediately at his side. “I told you what I needed to tell you,” Pizarro said. He took leave of me without shaking hands. “I just don't know how long it will take for it to sink in.”

He stared at me long enough to make me feel ridiculous, a drunk holding a huge, half empty glass of Cuba libre. “You owe me one,
paisano.”
He touched the palm of one hand with the index finger of the other. “I'm making a note of it right here.”

He left, and I stayed behind, fixated by his river metaphor. As a snapshot of the way Lázaro Pizarro viewed his earthly mission, it was unequaled. The certainty that buttressed his will had reached the extreme of making him see himself as a kind of god who brought streams together and turned them into a river of his own creation. He was right about that, but what did it have to do with his aspirations as a puppeteer? How many of the strings that moved the plot really were in his hands? He controlled the region with an iron fist. He had Rojano elected mayor, had prior knowledge of what PEMEX was up to, and was in a position to exploit the company's plans for his own ends. In Chicontepec, where he was born, his word was the unwritten law. He'd found jobs for half the youths who left the town, and in it he'd stationed machine-gun-toting guards to watch every move Rojano made. Was he wrong to consider himself a sort of supreme architect, the man in charge of the world around him?