The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (27 page)

Doña Queta remembered Pablo from their interview and greeted him enthusiastically, and he introduced me. When he asked her if she knew anything, or had heard anything, or had any opinion about the Heavens case, her expression hardened. She said she had heard nothing, and she turned away from us.

Lomnitz writes, “Although the cult of La Santísima Muerte appears to have begun in that no-man’s-land between society and the state that is organized crime (including its connections among the police), it is extending to working people of various classes. As a local Tepiteño intellectual has declared: ‘They want to scare the Mexico City public about Tepito, without realizing that Mexico is becoming the Tepito of the world. Tepito is the synthesis of Mexico.’” This idea of that intellectual, Humberto Padgett, a well-known journalist, interested me more than La Santa Muerte itself. Of course, Holy Death is a part of the synthesis, but not necessarily, I would come to think after a few more visits to the shrine, in so spiritual a way. But then again, it isn’t always evident what’s spiritual and what isn’t. For some crime can be spiritual, or can be an essential component of life’s spiritual fabric.

Even though he was no longer mayor, Marcelo Ebrard still had his security detail, all of its members selected from various branches of the Mexico City police. Almost always there was at least one of his
guarura
in our lobby, and frequently, when Ebrard was in the building but going somewhere soon, there was a whole team. At night some always slept on cots in a little room carved from a storage area in the lower-level parking garage. The
guarura
in their black suits stood out in front of the building by the attendant row of SUVs, and staked out the corners of the park and side streets. I’d gotten to know a number of them over the past year. I didn’t have a television in my apartment and sometimes went downstairs to watch
fútbol
matches with them on the cheap television set with bad reception behind the doorman’s reception desk. Fernando looked like a prototypical
guarura
, a burly hard guy with a mustache, probably in his forties. Reading
The Mongolian Conspiracy
, Rafael Bernal’s classic novel about the veteran Mexico City police
pistolero
Filiberto García, I kept picturing Fernando. It was always kind of touching to see the surly-looking Fernando out front in the park mornings or evenings, walking the Ebrards’ prim little schnauzer. Some of the other security men looked like college professors or lawyers. Fernando told me that one of the tests given to applicants trying to qualify for the security corps is to have their jumping ability measured on a trampoline. This is to ensure that they have the leg strength and agility to hurl their bodies into the air to shield or even catch a bullet meant for their charge. It can be a treacherous job, being an official
guarura
in Mexico. Once I was watching the news with Fernando when a story came on about a team of bodyguards who were ambushed and assassinated after letting the man they protected off at the airport in Coahuila. Fernando said that sometimes—though not necessarily in this case—a corrupt politician or businessman will set up his own
guarura
to be killed because they’ve witnessed or learned too much about his dirty deeds.

As a former Mexico City chief of police, Ebrard doubtless chose an elite, trustworthy group of men to protect him. When I came back from Tepito that Saturday evening, I found a number of them crowded onto the leather couch in the lobby, including one I thought looked like a law professor, a trim man with black-framed eyeglasses, always in a crisp white shirt and suit, who seemed to be their unit’s leader. He seemed not only intelligent but also shrewd and sharply alert. We spoke about the Heavens case. I told them what the merchant policeman had said about the
levantón
, that it was unlikely that any such commando operation could have been carried out in the heart of the Zona Rosa without police complicity. The professor agreed, and said that it wouldn’t be the first time something like this had happened in Mexico City over the years. Only this time it was front-page news. He laughed, and so did his companions.

“Do you think there was a political motive behind it?” I asked. “Do you think the PRI could have an infiltrator high up in the police?” “It’s possible,” said the professor. He looked amused, but his expression was knowing. I asked, “What if it’s Mancera who’s the infiltrator?” The professor laughed again and said, “Stranger things have happened in Mexico.”

July 25: At seven in the evening I go down to the Jesuit church on the corner, to the Mass at which Aura’s name will be spoken during the prayer for departed souls, and sit alone, near the front, choosing a spot that offers a direct view of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s side chapel off to the right of the altar. Because of Aura’s professed devotion to La Guadalupana, whenever I step into a church or cathedral anywhere now, I always pray, in my manner, at least briefly to the Virgin, and ask her to look after Aura. It’s a different priest this time, not the ancient, jovial one who officiated last year. This priest is younger, seventy or so, silver-haired, European, his cheeks rosy; he seems pleasant enough and leads a crisp, straightforward Mass. Although this year I’m alone, as I’d wanted to be, my mind is all over the place, I can’t concentrate at all. I can’t even sustain my silent beseeching prayer to the Virgin. I am thinking about Tepito, the case, this
crónica
, my impatience to get back to my novel, everything I need to do to prepare for the move with Jovi in September to Brooklyn, my own inability to concentrate, and whatever else.
Concentrate,
cabrón
! But today I have the attention span of a goldfish, darting after every drifting thought-crumb. Then I hear, almost like a continuation of my own thoughts, “Aura Estrada de Goldman” . . . and then other names. The priest is offering the prayer for the departed much earlier in the Mass this year than in others, practically at the beginning. And I’ve missed it! I slump back in the pew, fuming. What the fuck! The way I’ve thought about these yearly Masses is that I should be able to at least build a silent altar for Aura inside myself and sustain it there until that climactic moment when her name is spoken, along with those of others, during the prayer for the departed. Now what? I stand when the rest of the congregants stand, and sit back down when they sit, and stay seated when they kneel. I don’t cross myself, and I remain silent when the others recite their parts of the prayers or sing along with a hymn. My concentration doesn’t improve. I feel bored and restless. I’m not a practicing Catholic, not a practicing anything, what am I doing here? I get a call on my phone from Yoshua and hurry outside to tell him I’ll call him after the Mass. For a moment I stand on the church steps and consider not going back inside but heading to the bar across the street. I have the novel I’ve been reading
with me.

But I go back inside, and sit in the same pew, and find myself still unable to concentrate or listen to the Mass. Then I hear again, just audibly enough to surprise my attention, “Aura,” and a run of other names—the priest is apparently reciting a second prayer for the eternal souls of the dead, as if somehow he knows that I missed the first one, but this time naming the departed only by their first names. “Sacred Sacrament,” he says with finality, among other words, when he is done. I feel totally flummoxed. I’ve missed this prayer too. When the congregants again drop to their knees, onto the narrow planks at the bottom of the pews in front, I drop to my knees too. Why did I do that? Inside the moment and later, I honestly don’t know. I just did. I have a bad knee and it aches sharply against the plank. I clasp my hands atop the pew in front practically just to hold myself steady as I shift my weight and try to position my knee so it won’t hurt. And I also reflect that, really, I never find myself in this particular posture, of humility or submission, down on my knees. When was the last time? At Aura’s funeral, which I barely even remember, I was so out of my senses that day? In this posture faithful Catholics humble themselves before or open themselves to their God. I don’t have a God, but the posture itself works like a genetic muscle memory imprinted by millennia of religiously faithful ancestors. I don’t know how else to put it, really—I feel Death pressing down on me. I feel Death’s weight in my bones, feel clamped and pinned by it, there as I kneel. Finally I’m absorbed by what is happening, all senses focused on this one event, which is a humbling before Death, the Truth and fact of it. It happened. Six years ago today, death altered my life in a way I had never imagined anything could alter it. I am filled with a heavy sensation of resignation, and even something like exhausted but grateful submission, like that of someone long on the run from the law who finally turns himself in. There’s no shaking you, Death. I’m not who I was before I met you, and now we go everywhere together. It’s my duty to know you, Death. In the moment I understand all of this almost wordlessly. I’ve unexpectedly supplied my own rite, made it with my body by kneeling, which opened me for what came. I kneel before Aura’s death like a medieval knight kneeling before his queen to make a vow. What vow? Just to keep going, but also to try to live responsibly with my knowledge of Death, and to try to be good, and also fearless when it counts. I’ll fail, but not always. Try to quit smoking again, I think, but that comes under trying to be good, as does so much else. Those are my vows.

We are all back in our seats again. We are nearing the end of the Mass because it’s the part, which I always like, when you stand and wish peace on your neighbor, shaking hands with whomever you can reach. I shake hands with a diminutive elderly lady dressed in black, and her smile is wonderful. When I sit down again, I shift my gaze to the Virgin of Guadalupe and the words, silently, come out of me, Take care of Aura, take good care of her wherever she is, Virgencita, and help her to be happy if you can, if she knows what happened to her, if she’s conscious of all that she’s missed out on, if she knows, please help her Virgencita, and tell her that she’s always with me. . . . A sweet-sad gush of prayer is what that felt like—the priest says the Mass is over, and I’m getting up to leave—and I look back at her again and think that I truly am fond of the Virgin of Guadalupe and that if I were much younger, I’d even get myself a big radiant tattoo of her image. But I instantly reject the idea, out of some awkward sense of filial duty to my late Jewish father. This only reflects how conventionally my mind can work, since what has my father or my age to do with it? And then I think I should get the Virgin of Guadalupe tattoo, if only on the chance that someday, in a morgue, I can befuddle a coroner or medical examiner who with the reflexes of his own conventional mind will suppose that the wrong name tag has been affixed to my corpse’s toe. And then what will he do? I leave the church grinning.

Minutes later, in the bar across the street from the church, sitting at a table outside, sipping my first
mezcal,
I write all this down in my notebook.

On May 26, Sunday afternoon, within hours of the morning’s
levantón
, and on the next day, family members from Tepito, individually and in groups, had gone to CAPEA, the Procuraduría’s missing persons office, to report the kidnapping of their sons and daughters. The spokesman for the Procuraduría, the chief prosecutor’s office, told Pablo de Llano that the reason four days had passed before the possibility of a mass kidnapping outside the after-hours club on Calle Lancaster was even acknowledged by his boss was that in CAPEA it was initially assumed that those missing persons reports weren’t connected to the same place or to any one group of people. Just an honest mistake, according to the spokesman. But the family members knew that their missing had been taken from Heavens, and had told this to the people at CAPEA. On Monday, June 3, Pablo and I went to the Federal Human Rights office in Coyoacán—believing we might find the families there, since that morning in Tepito we’d been told that this was where they were—and spoke to a woman, Guadalupe Cabrera, who was assigned to the Heavens case. Members of ten of the families had met with her that morning, she said, but now they’d left. Cabrera had copies of their original CAPEA statements on her desk, and after a bit of badgering by the two of us, she confirmed that the family members had individually reported that the young people had been in the after-hours club, and that they had vanished together.

From the start, the Mancera government’s handling of the case, in both actions and statements, established a pattern that constantly left you suspecting either incompetence or malfeasance. On Thursday, June 6, after an armed commando group assassinated four people in a Tepito gym called Body Extreme, the sense grew that the city was reeling out of control. The media fanned that impression, and not just in the pro-PRI Televisa and TV Azteca mainstream. On June 9 the cover of the influential left-leaning weekly magazine
Proceso
blared the headline “The Emergence of Criminal Violence. The True DF.” It was accompanied by a color photograph of Mayor Mancera, whose ears stick out, looking less like George Clooney and more like Gollum in a suit and a tie, forehead sweaty, eyes reddened and glaring, lips sharply pulled down at the corners. Inside there was another photo of the mayor, flanked by his chief prosecutor and police chief, seated at a press conference, looking pale and despondent, staring down at the floor. In its cover story,
Proceso
revealed, as did other news reports that week, that in 2010 groups of armed young men had begun turning up around midnight at Condesa and Zona Rosa nightspots, telling owners and managers that they were there to sell drugs, and threatening reprisals against those who refused them entrance. “Any owner who opposes their coming inside gets lifted,” a man told another newspaper, “
y le dan en la madre
”—and they fuck you up. Ismael Rivera Cruces, president of the National Association of Owners of Licensed “Discotecas, Bares y Centros de Espectáculos,” told
Proceso
that about 150 of the 250 nightspots in those two neighborhoods received such visits. (Heavens was one of hundreds of unlicensed clubs in the zone.) “The drug dealers had to abandon many of the places because there was little business,” said Rivera Cruces. He spoke about the problem to officials in Ebrard’s government, including Rodolfo Ríos Garza, who was personal secretary to then Chief Prosecutor Mancera; and to Jesús Rodríguez Almeida, then a sub-prosecutor and now Mancera’s chief of police. He said he received little response. But, he said, “Curiously, [the drug dealers] retreated for a while and the space was tranquil throughout 2011.”