Imperial (139 page)

Francisco Cedeño sings “The City of Hawaii.”

He dreamed in his delirium
of being free like the wind,
escaping the Presidio.

What happened to the dreamer, who was looking at a long, long stretch of prison years? Why,
his dear wife,
accompanied by a loyal friend, rescued him!

Sinaloa, pretty land,
I sing you goodbye.
I’m off to the Sierra
in the state of Durango,
because the law
looks for me everywhere.

And Francisco Cedeño? Would he win back his valiant policewoman whom he wouldn’t trade for ever so many eggs, or testicles? What would the next stanza of his ballad reveal?

Some say she’s in prison, others in Italy,
in California or Miami, somewhere in America.

“I SPEND THE NIGHTS FLYING”

As for Emily, oh, as for Emily, she worked at the Thirteen Negro as a
waitress,
not as a
dancer,
she required me to understand; and Mario, the
waiter
who actually brought the drinks, made it clear to me once he was already drunk and I then bought him another beer that although it was over between them he still loved Emily.

I bought Mario a drink, and behind him a fat dancer swerved her fatter bottom from side to side and leaned into a field worker’s lap. Streaks of silver and white like phosphorescent fishing line caught everyone’s looks from her symphony of hair. Mario was still speaking of Emily. Then the fat dancer’s black shoulderstrap slipped diagonally down and she struck her quarry with one giant breast.

I thanked Mario for introducing me to Emily.

She’s not a prostitute, said Mario.

Of course not.

She’s not a prostitute!

If I don’t feel like it, Emily had proudly said, they can ask and ask and I won’t do it.

She was talking about dancing.

Last night a man had tried to put his hand up her skirt and she punched him, so he scratched her.

She worked from noon to eight, after which she sometimes went out with friends until three in the morning. I first met her at three in the afternoon, when neither the scathing white light of the streets nor the red side of the beverage truck seen through the open door were as alive as the banks of red bulbs winking in cycles of seduction; but the Thirteen Negro was still asleep enough for the televisions and the white ENTRADA sign to remain almost significant, although already a few men in cowboy hats had swaggered in; and two thin men in moustaches sat side by side in the darkest corner drinking their beers. Before I knew it, a line of straight and bent white-shirted backs conquered the bar stools, and Mario spectacularly twirled my two-hundred-peso note at the bartender to get change. He was still sober then; he was the one who brought me Emily.

Emily gazed up at the ceiling to consider which
narcocorrido
was her favorite and why, smiling, her fingers moving as she recited it, that fine, pale face of hers as fine and pale and silvery-white as her thighs. She had just turned nineteen when she heard her first
narco
on a compact disc in Sonora; she had liked it.

What’s necessary to make a
narcocorrido
?

Oh, a good story, said Emily. Her rings were as long and silver as her fingernails.

She was twenty-four. When she was twenty, she had experienced certain problems with her mother. She liked her work except when the men were not respectful. While President Bush looked hunted and evil on the television, Emily waved down Mario for another beer, and then when the black athlete came on, Emily summoned Mario to bear away her beer, which had received the scantest lip service, and to bring her the next beer. I tried to return our paid conversation to the subject of the prohibited ballads, and Emily languidly allowed: Sometimes I’ll clean my house and whatever music there is, I’ll listen . . .

Would you like to be a drug queen?

She laughed and shook her head.

How about if a drug king fell in love with you and gave you money?

No, because if he had some problems with his friends he would have a problem with me.

Who is worse, the Federales or the Border Patrol?

I’ve heard the Border Patrol, said Emily, but the Mexican police are just as bad.
²⁶⁴

If your boyfriend did drugs and then came off them, would you love him?

No. I don’t like drug addicts.

In came a musician with his tuba. He was the lead scout of the Sinaloa band Koely, who in a twinkling had lined up and let loose with the horn and tuba so spectacularly loud that it shocked my heart, and my ears began to sing as if I had just shot off my .50 caliber without using earplugs; and the daylight was safely shut out and the night officially began, Emily now smiling and swaying her head from side to side, showing her white teeth and hopefully as happy as she could be, thanks to those lady-priced beers she kept ordering without asking me—what a predatory little thing! On the other hand, she was nice to Terrie and followed her into the women’s restroom to bring her a gift of toilet paper.

It was only 4:41. Now the dance floor held two couples, one with the cowboy’s hand on his girl’s waist; they looked as if they had grown old together, and it was nice that they had come in together; the other was a more commercial couple with the girl’s hand on the man, who smilingly gripped his girl’s hips, trying to kiss her while she counter-smilingly shook her head. This was my heaven: a fat blonde waiting on the inner, red-cushioned bench, the band Koely playing
norteño
music; and outside was hot and a dead dog had just begun to stink in the street, but the door had closed and the blonde girl’s hair went dim, pulsing in accordance with the curtain of lights within the great wall mirror, and now the bloody red nipples of light begin to wink in the ceiling. An emissary from the band trolled the room for requests at fifty pesos each. Why not a
narcocorrido
? I proposed, but he wanted me to be more specific, because there were an awful lot of those, so I requested “Camelia la Tejana” and he said:
Ohhh,
because everyone knew that one—one of the first, Officer Caro had said; he thought that it dated back to 1972. Accordingly, “Camelia” got enacted. The guitarist in his Hawaiian shirt stood singing very gravely, pleasantly and knowingly this song about a female narcotrafficker who falls in love with a colleague who in turn loves somebody else.—So after they come there from their business in Northside, he says he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her again, related Officer Caro, and you will be happy to know that Camelia then showed what she was made of.—He was a real person, said Officer Caro; his name was Emilo Videlo; they only found his body; they never found her.—Camelia’s song blared on, while poor Terrie sat at attention, trying to write down and translate a word or two; it was too loud and too distorted there beneath the happy satanic light which flushed and flashed over the drinking men whose stolid expressions did not alter although a few of the dancing girls on the barstools began smiling at Camelia’s naughtiness.

Fifty pesos more for Emily’s next beer, and fifty more pesos for another
narcocorrido,
which happened to be called “Entre Perico y Perico”—“From Nostril to Nostril.”
²⁶⁵

The sun comes up again.
I don’t know what happens to me.
From nostril to nostril
I spend the nights flying.

Life grew nearly as grand as the blocky man in the shirt of unearthly whiteness who was blowing out shrieking sounds over the white drum. Field workers in baseballhats stared at me with gaping eyes, wondering perhaps if I was a DEA agent; and I lost myself amidst the tubas and drums; when they got especially deafening, Emily’s somewhat morose face lit up and she swayed her head from side to side, then called for another five-dollar beer. The hilariously blowing tuba player, the long line of men under the red lights and the violinist who sometimes sang slyly or even angrily but usually with nothing more or less than
knowing melodiousness
elaborated the loudness into something crystalline. Most of the drinkers sat in dignified silence, watching the horns and tubas oriented like flowers toward the red lights. Occasionally I did see that
narcocorrido
smile which Lupe Vásquez had first showed me, no doubt on account of the double entendres about airplanes and the feel-good aspects of high altitudes:

There are cantinas here
that I run to constantly
with a beeper in my pocket
that never stops beeping
because all my friends
also want to fly.

But as was the case for so many of the other prohibited ballads, the humor grew bitter and at times left the bitterness entirely naked. Emerson’s dictum that
to be great is to be misunderstood
got borne out in the defiant chorus:

Death is looking for me.
I don’t want to hide from it.
On the contrary, I want to find it.
I know it will understand me.

Emily heard
narcocorridos
every day. She said: When bad words are sung, the men shout along. A lot of them work in the fields on the other side, harvesting lettuce and onions . . .

She was never tempted to fall in love with them.

Sure, she said, sometimes I’ll be dancing with a certain guy, but after awhile he dances with someone else. Sure, there are women who believe they own a man, but that’s just a way to get hurt.

Then the song was over, and the two men at the table against the wall sat staring at the bright triangles of light across which a poxed woman in a miniskirt glided.

Once upon a time, one of the ladies who sold tacos outside the Thirteen Negro had told Emily about a place for rent in the Colonia Aguas Calientes to the west of the Río Nuevo and past the man selling Mexican flags for Independence Day; so that was where the silverskinned girl lived, in a place which reminded me of a slave barracks I’d seen in New Orleans: a long shedlike structure with many separate doors—and, by the way, in the Mexican sunlight her skin was actually a lovely reddish-brown. Inside Emily’s door there was a stifling concrete-floored kitchen with two chairs, utensils hung neatly on the wall, and bedding piled up against the wall; behind a curtain lay the sanctum, kept by Emily’s air conditioner at seventy-eight degrees on that hundred-and-ten-degree day, so Emily definitely wasn’t poor; recently her old air conditioner had died and she’d been able to buy this one, not to mention sending money home to Obregón all the time for the betterment of her parents and her four children, whom she visited every three to five months; and it should also be mentioned that Emily owned three cell phones, one of which was used only to chat with her Mama. Why ask what the other two were for? From beneath the mattress of one of the two double beds, she withdrew a heavy-gauge transparent sack of photographs: Here was her favorite uncle, there her seventy-eight-year-old father the rancher, on horseback beside a giant saguaro. Here was her pet goat, whose mother had been killed by a car; her brother had cut the animal’s belly open, saved the baby and fed it with bottles of milk. And to complete the entertainment, Emily put on music: pirated compact discs of this band and that, a few of whom, such as Cabrona and Los Tigres del Norte, I now recognized as creators of
narcocorridos.
—What are some of the stories from the
narcocorridos
which stick in your mind? I asked her, and she said without much interest that a lot of them told how drug dealers were killed by the police. It was evident by now that Emily was the sort of person who paid more attention to tunes than to words. But the tunes she never tired of. I will always remember how she began to smile whenever the music at the Thirteen Negro grew so loud that my entire skeleton vibrated; and Emily allowed that last night in this very room she had turned up her music as absolutely loud as it would go even though the landlady didn’t really like it (what the landlady
really
didn’t like was buying or selling crystal on the premises; the first thing she had asked Emily was whether she had that habit). Probably to please me, Emily now played one of the Tigres del Norte discs, reserving for another occasion the one entitled
Pacto de Sangre,
pact of blood. She was singing along with a
corrido,
her ringed finger dancingly upraised. Oh, yes; her fingers were ornately cylindered with silvery rings which bore the names of her father and her children; she felt naked without them and never took them off, she said, slipping one down an inch to show me the ring of untanned skin beneath like a bikini line; recently she had lost the thumb ring and couldn’t rest until she’d bought a replacement. Then she went back to singing. The words of the
corrido
were:
If you’re going to leave me, don’t come back.

Happily, she opened and closed the drawer beneath the makeup table, whose most prominent adornment was the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It took Emily an hour to put her makeup on whenever she went to work. The hardest part was painting on her eyebrows. Sometimes she didn’t like the way they looked; sometimes a friend opined that they weren’t quite right; then Emily had to do them all over again. She had the same blood type as her daughter, which was why she chose not to tattoo her eyebrows on, for that would have tainted Emily’s blood.

That afternoon, Emily, whose birthday was Valentine’s Day, was wearing a white outfit, the gift of some man; so I called her the White Queen and she laughed. She had beautiful young breasts, and did not in the least resemble someone who’d borne children. All her sisters were fat, she said; she was the only slender one. She said that it was a shame that Terrie and I hadn’t been at the Thirteen Negro last night because we would have had a laugh to spy the woman who’d come in wearing a see-through dress with a bathing suit beneath it, displaying in the red lights her tattooed boobs and ass. I asked if the men had enjoyed it, and Emily replied that unfortunately the lady had been just a little bit older and also obviously an addict, and sometimes men aren’t so attracted to addicts. I asked her how many addicts she saw at work, and she said that there were more here in the
colonia,
in the bar La Baja.