The Black Minutes (24 page)

“You want a serious story? Vicente, I’ll tell you the story of a police officer who let a guy with no papers go in the thirties.”

Rangel thought, What are they talking about?

“You know, your uncle knew who B. Traven was and didn’t turn him in. All around the world, the press would have paid to find out who Traven really was. Even though your uncle knew, he let him go. A long time after that, when Dr. Quiroz Cuarón discovered Traven’s identity, he boasted about being the best detective in the world. I had to tell him: But you aren’t, Dr. Quiroz. The first one to find out was Don Miguel Rivera in the port of Paracuán, more than thirty years ago.”

“More than forty,” said his uncle.

“Who’s telling this story, you or me?”

“Well, if you’re going to tell that one again, you’ll have to forgive me but I’m going to go lie down. Will that hammock hold me, Vicente?”

“Yeah, go right ahead.”

His uncle stood up. “Excuse me, skipper,” he put his hand on the older man’s shoulder. “This officer is retiring from circulation.”

“Go and relax, you deserve it at your age.”

His uncle laughed loudly and patted his friend on the shoulder, then headed off to the hammock.

Torsvan sang a few verses in a foreign tongue, which made Rangel’s ears perk up. “Excuse me, sir, where are you from? Are you German?”

“What? You don’t understand me when I speak Spanish? Is my pronunciation that bad?”

“Of course not, your Spanish is very good.”

“Then I’m Mexican.”

And since he could see Rangel was surprised, he told his story.

“I came to Tampico in 1929. I got here in the cargo ship
Alabama
, with no money and no papers. They had kicked me out of three countries. I was in the Alps, between France, Belgium, and Holland. At that moment, they were kicking me out of Belgium, so I considered my options. If I went to Holland, the sentence for traveling without papers was six months in a nasty prison, sharing a cell with a lot of shady characters with bad food and the chill of the cold at night. That was the punishment in Holland. In Belgium, it was eight months, but I knew the Belgian police were looking to give me a good beating if I went back to cross the border again. If I waited for my escort to leave and went back to Belgium, most likely they’d still be waiting for me, and before locking me up for six months with only bread and water, they’d torture me: those
border guards were a mean lot. If I returned to France, they would sentence me to ten months in jail, but I’d be well fed, with decent food and a blanket. So I went to France. After they kicked me out of Spain, I went to Portugal and then to Mexico, as I already told you. I lived between Tampico and Paracuán, and then in Acapulco and Chiapas.

“I met your uncle in ’twenty-nine. I was able to avoid deportation that year. Someone who wanted to do me harm reported me as illegally in the country. The average cop would have taken advantage of the situation, but your uncle came to interrogate me, understood my case, and didn’t bother me again. Curious, no? I’ve only told the story of this part of my life twice, and both times Lieutenant Rivera was present. I’d say the circle is closing, wouldn’t you?

“Imagine it’s 1928, a little before the Great Depression. Imagine a young German playwright—handsome, strong, intelligent—and imagine an actor. Do you know who Peter Lorre is? No? It’s not really important, but he was of his best friends. The playwright is becoming very popular. At that point in his life they are mounting his third production in Germany, and people wait in long lines to get in to see it. Offers from producers rain down; he has to push actresses away, everyone wants to work with him. His girlfriend is one of the most well-known blondes of the stage. They swore their eternal love for each other, and he’s thinking of writing a drama so she can play the lead.

“One day at the end of the play they tell him a producer wants to meet him. Usually, the playwright would not have seen him, since those matters were his agent’s responsibility, but the playwright was about to have a birthday and thought it was a joke by the owner of the theater. So he received the visitor in his girlfriend’s dressing room, and instead of the ostentatious millionaire he was used to dealing with, he found three men dressed with
a marked simplicity; they hadn’t polished their shoes and one of them had a suit with patches on it. From the start of the conversation, the playwright behaved as if he were playing a role, and that was his error; it’s enough to fake your belief in something to make that something become reality.

“The playwright asked in an exaggerated tone: ‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?’

“‘Mr. Torsvan, I presume? A pleasure. We are Misters Le Rouge, Le Jaune, and Le Noir.’

“‘I guess they’re fake names.’ The playwright was pleased with the apparent joke.

“The one who seemed the most together says to him, ‘they told us to come and see your work and we weren’t disappointed. We enjoyed it quite a bit, and we’d like to make you an offer.’

“The playwright appreciates the kind words but doesn’t know how to respond. These guys want to hire him? How are they going to pay him? Do they really not know how much he charges? They ask him if he thinks the same way as the play’s main character and he explains to them that the author always identifies with his characters, but that in this play in particular, his favorite character is indeed the young idealistic lawyer who defends the poor. The playwright notices them nudging each other, and they decide to continue. They ask him very intelligent questions about the background of his stories, very honest questions like simple people ask.

“With his interest piqued, he asks them what their offer is all about. They look at one another, and one of them sticks his hand in his suit jacket and hands him a paper. When he unrolls it, he notices the poster is printed in red ink, with a hammer and sickle. They were members of the German Communist Party, which at the time was underground. They defended the workers, organized
resistance groups, and wanted to build unions, and that was why their lives were in danger.

“‘You haven’t realized it, but your plays have a lot in common with our struggle. We want to hire you to write a play for us.’

‘Yes, the other visitor added, your new play could change a lot of lives.’

“‘Change lives? That’s not my project,’ the playwright argued. ‘I’m looking for other things. Besides, a writer requires a certain comfortable environment to write peacefully.’ He thought this was going to scare them off, but one of them, wearing worn-out shoes, stepped forward and offered him an envelope. The playwright opened it and looked through its contents. ‘Ha, you must be joking. I’m very sorry, but it’s too little. I spend this in a weekend!’

“‘What for some is very little, for others represents a lot of work,’ they told him. ‘Thirty of our most dedicated comrades worked extra hours for months to collect that money. It represents the sweat and toil of three dozen workers.’

“The playwright stutters. He says he already has deals for his next two plays and he doesn’t have time to write on request, but they insist. They tell him that his play is going to be important, it’s going to change many people’s lives, and he has to write it. To clear up any doubt, they invite him to attend one of their clandestine gatherings. When? Right now. Always looking for new subjects, he accepts the invitation and leaves the envelope on his girlfriend’s dressing table, hidden behind a number of actors’ photos and bottles of makeup.

“OK, so as not to draw the story out, he ends up accepting. What he sees in the meetings moves him and reveals a part of the world he didn’t know about until then. Inconceivable stories for a civilized country, incredible injustice, regions of suffering he
should have known about. So he drops everything and sets to work on that play, he helps mount the production, and he even participates in the rehearsals. A week before the opening, there’s an important meeting. The playwright attends the meeting with his actors, but they’re attacked by the police and many are shot. They take him for dead and throw him in the truck with the other bodies. He saves himself from being killed, because he jumps out of the truck as soon as it starts up.

“He crosses the border into France; he’s illegal in five countries in Europe. Finally, he’s able to board a ship in Portugal and get to the United States, but they don’t let him in. He takes the cargo ship
Alabama
and gets off in the Gulf of Mexico.

“He gets to a town, Tampico: What a town! Afterward he moves to Paracuán. He sends a letter to his girlfriend using a false name. He tells her what happened and asks for her help. With the money he earned on the ship, he rents a little room on the docks and waits, but the money disappears quickly. He has to do any and every job just to make it as an illegal. He becomes a stevedore on the docks, a delivery man in the market, a worker in the oil wells. A hard, hard life! He lives in horrible rooming houses, on flea-ridden cots, sharing a room with twenty other people. When there’s no work, he begs for money from foreigners. He ends up fighting over a cigarette butt with other bums.

“Every Friday, he goes to check the mail to see if he got a letter. There is no response for months. Once, he gets a contract to work in the most remote of the oil wells. He has to work fourteen hours under the relentless sun, in a place where tigers are heard roaring at night. He’s there for two months. He loses more than twenty pounds.

“When he gets back from the oil well, they tell him he got a telegram from the United States. The playwright almost tears up
the envelope, he’s so excited. The letter is from his girlfriend, who was able to leave the country and is living in New York. She doesn’t give any address. If you are alive, she writes, send a letter to this post box. A week later, she sends him a money order for two hundred dollars (a fortune for someone who doesn’t have a cent) and asks him to wait for her in Tampico at the Hotel Inglaterra.

“He goes to the barber shop, buys a new outfit, lives in a cheap but more respectable hostel than the ones he used previously, and a week before his girlfriend arrives, he moves to the designated hotel. The white room seems huge and empty to him. He knows that everything is OK, but as the days pass, he is overtaken with doubt:
Why didn’t she tell me to meet her at the border? Why didn’t she tell me to meet her in New York? Why couldn’t she drop everything and come look for me?

“When she finally arrives, the playwright goes to meet her at the docks. They hug for a long time, and she tells him that he can’t go back to Germany. Officially he is said to be dead, but the police are waiting to kill him. They read his Communist play and know he supported the organization. ‘This has to be very clear,’ she says, ‘you can’t go back. They know you’re alive. They’re looking for you to kill you.’

“He tells her he doesn’t care; the best thing is that she has found him and finally they are going to be together again. ‘Oh, Torsvan,’ the girl explains, ‘I have to tell you something,’ and she pulls loose from his arms. While he was in jail in France, she met a movie director, a Mr. Lang, and they were married. ‘Understand, we thought you were dead. I’m at the prime of my life, it was a huge opportunity. We don’t have a future together. The best thing would be for you to stay in this country and forget about me.’ He doesn’t respond, but goes out onto the balcony for a cigarette, watching the ships take up their anchors and set out from the
docks. He stays there for a long time, even though she calls for him from inside. He realizes the Communists were right; his play changed at least one life—his own.

“He decides to turn his life around. Back inside, he asks his girlfriend, ‘And the money? Were you able to take out my savings?’”

“‘I’m sorry, Torsvan. They canceled your accounts; the only thing I could recover was this. Do you want me to lend you money? No? Then take this.’ And she hands him the envelope he left in her dressing room, the envelope from the three Communists. What a paradox! He, who used to spend that amount in a weekend, is now forced to make it last for a while.

“When she leaves, he decides to grow his own food. In all, he lives for a year on the money from the envelope. He buys the basics to hunt and plant crops and he goes to the country, between Tampico and Paracuán. He rents half the fields from an Indian. He lives in a wood hut, where there are scorpions as big as his hand. Every morning, he takes an insect out of his shoes. To get water, he has to walk almost two miles. He writes a novel living like that—really, autobiography disguised as fiction—in which he tells the story of his escape from Germany. Then he writes two others about his experiences in the jungle. There comes a time when he decides to do something with them, and, using a pseudonym, he sends them to his former theatrical agent. He knows he’s playing with fire and this could cost him his life, but despite it all he signs with his mother’s maiden name, that almost no one knows, and instead of his first name he uses the single letter B. Inventing that initial, he thinks it through like this: until they killed me, I lived on the A side of my life; now I’m on the B side.

“His agent responds with an enthusiastic letter, saying that he likes the books but that he only works with plays, but B. Traven
insists: They have spoken very highly of you; they say you are an honest person. The agent doesn’t promise anything but tells him he will try.

“A year and half later, the writer receives another telegram. He has a contract for his first novel. A year later, it’s a bestseller in Europe. He sells a hundred thousand copies in the United States. There’s an offer to make a movie out of the third novel; they want John Huston to direct. He gets mountains of letters, and the most frequent comment is: Your novel has changed my life. At that moment, the author says, I don’t understand anything anymore, and he moves to Mexico City.”