The Shadow of the Shadow (15 page)

"You are thinking into my eyeth."

"Which end are we going to put the headboard at, yours or
mine?" asked Rosa, shedding a single tear. Tomas abandoned his
eggs and sausage and stretched his hand out across the table. Their
two hands were more brown than yellow. Their children would be
even darker still, and none of them would speak with an accent.
It was the effects of the climate. But they could just as well live
in Australia, or Vienna, or even China. There was talk about a
revolution in China... They'd have to learn to speak Chinese...
But which one, Cantonese or Mandarin?

"What would you think about slipping into something a
little more comfortable?" asked the poet, breaking the oceanic enchantment glowing inside the eyes of redheaded Celeste.

"Here, move your leg a little over that way," said Margarita,
climbing onto the bed, her hat still on her head.

The next day the poet confessed that he was on the point of
succumbing, but he didn't see how anyone could feel sleepy with
all those thh's buzzing in his ears. The journalist, on the other hand, kept the fact hidden in some far corner of his memory
that his gaze had wandered from the widow's violet eyes down
to her white brocaded panties only to discover they had a small
perforation sewn into them. It was the first time he'd ever been
seduced by a woman with a fly in her underwear. Tomas didn't tell
anything because there was nothing to tell.

Perhaps the most transcendental of all these crossed stories
was that half an hour later a pair of stretcher bearers walked into
the reporter's hospital room, and after discovering the death of the
hod carrier, carted him away. They took him down two flights of
stairs and deposited him on a slab in the basement.

There the construction worker stood up, took a shiny tenpeso coin out of the pocket of his robe, and handed it to the
stretcher bearers. Tugging surreptitiously at his underwear, he did
the best he could to conceal the hard-on pushing up from underneath his robe.

A SMALL CLOUD OF MIST rose up from where the horses
stood pissing onto the cobblestones. A pair of gendarmes jousted
playfully with their swords.

Tomas walked between the horses toward the factory door
where the strikers stood watching the policemen with distrust.

A banner hung over the door denouncing the two foremen
whose ouster was demanded by the union: "Pierre's never read a
book in his life and Rodriguez is a disgusting satyr who thinks he's
handsome."

The Chinaman smiled. Illiteracy and personal vanity hardly
seemed like sufficient grounds for firing a pair of foremen and
paralyzing a 500-worker factory. But behind the banner there
was another story, the story of a bitter struggle with the owner,
a Frenchman named Donadieu who-with the aid of his two
foremen-attempted to run his mill with an iron hand, in repeated
violation of the workers' contract. So when you took into account
the fact that one of the foremen had outlawed newspapers inside
the plant (even the reactionary Excelsior) and the other one was
famous for making passes at the women workers, the spark justified
the size of the blaze.

"What's up, companelos?" he greeted the strikers at the gate.
There were about forty workers from the Abeja, and another fifteen
or so from nearby factories who had come out in solidarity.

"They want us to open the gate, Tomas," said Ciro Mendoza.

The Abeja strike was the first in the history of the Valley of Mexico in which the workers not only walked off the job, but took
over the factory itself, closing the doors to scabs and nonunion
workers. That's what had brought out the half dozen mounted
police and given rise to the "red guard" of workers at the gate
(inaugurating a grand tradition that was to last throughout the
coming years). That's what had attracted the Black Marias and
the gendarmery colonel, sitting in his convertible discussing the
situation with the mill's manager.

"Who wants you to?"

"Colonel Gomez. He says it's illegal for us to shut the place
down. But what's really going on is that Donadieu's been busy
recruiting scabs since yesterday, and he's got them all in a house a
couple of blocks from here, waiting for his chance to get into the
factory."

Tomas looked at the officer, the same man whose name had
been circulating around the domino table. He'd changed very little
since Tomas had first encountered him three years ago in Tampico:
a small dark man dressed in tall riding boots, tight-fitting pants,
military jacket, his mouth like a single fine, nearly lipless, line
across his face, short bristly hair fighting to stick out from under
his kepi. His small, almost delicate hands toyed absentmindedly
with a riding whip.

"Let's tuln the tables on them, what do you say? You go tell the
colonel that we'le going to open the dool to the mill, and me and
the companelos'll head over to the house where Donadieu's got his
scabs and we'll cut them off befole they evel get hele."

"Sounds good. I'll give you ten minutes. They're over in a
house on the side street by Satanas's store, a great big place with
a red door. You can't miss it. The place belongs to Zacarias the
accountant."

Tomas went over to talk with the rest of the workers.

"How many of you men ale alined?" he asked. "Meet me in five
minutes in flont of Satanas's stole."

And he sauntered off, staring over at the colonel. Their eyes met for a moment and Tomas remembered the old song about
Tampico.

"This time, Gomez, you'le going to get it. And if the bosses
aleady paid you off, you'le just going to have to give them theil
money back," he thought, grinning at the officer getting out of his
car, still playing with the riding whip in his hands.

THERE SHE WAS in that pink tulle sundress, a broadbrimmed hat on her head, bare feet playing in the waves, digging
her fingers into the sand, the salt water bleaching the bright red
from her nails. He remembered how her dress swayed around her
hips, how she used to sing to him, how the straps of her tulle dress
slipped off her shoulders, how her white breasts danced in the
open air. He remembered the palm trees, the evening light, the
sun setting behind the refinery towers of the Huasteca Petroleum
Company. It was all connected in his mind with that same song
everybody was singing back then. He remembered the first time
he'd heard it, from some drunk singing in the street: Oh, beautiful
Tampico, tropical paradise, the glory of the republic, wherever Igo,
I'll remember you. He remembered. And he thought that a man's
memory was a pointless game created by idle gods.

Her name was Greta. At least that's what she called herself,
and she wore a white leghorn hat. She blamed the heat. But Tomas,
he liked the sticky heat, the blazing sun that burned their skin,
that made them sweat, that dried them off. She killed herself with
arsenic. Meticulously distilled from ten sheets of flypaper. Like
a good German, disciplined and precise. He wasn't the type for
suicide. But hers was another story. And now all that was left was
his memory of the woman on the beach in the evening, soaking
her feet in the wide ocean, half slipping out of her pink tulle dress
so that her huge white breasts glowed in the last rays of the setting
sun. And in the middle of all that, a patriotic song about the glories
of Tampico.

"THREE MASKED MEN TRY TO KILL US, thewidowsays
she's got nothing to do with it, the trombonist and his brother are
dead, not to mention the Englishman who despite all indications
to the contrary didn't commit suicide. Does anybody have any idea
what's going on here?" asked the poet as he helped Manterola lean
back in the hospital bed.

"No, but that's nothing new, not for me and not for Mexico. You
show me one person who understands anything around here. Who
the hell knows anything about what's going on in this wonderful
country of ours? Everybody pretends like they know, they try and
fool everybody else, but they're just as much in the dark as the next
guy. How about you, do you understand any of it?"