This Love Is Not for Cowards (9 page)

The owner concludes with a line cribbed from Mike, of all people. The El Kartel captain has printed the phrase on those T-shirts he sells outside the stadium before every home game: ESTE AMOR NO ES PARA COBARDES. The line is El Kartel's rallying cry, a testament to the strength of their bond with the Indios. It's Francisco Ibarra's rallying cry now, too, a statement that clearly speaks to a struggle that has nothing to do with soccer, and to a commitment to more than just a sports team.

Chapter 6

Faith

When you are at your highest, when you are rich and successful and you have everything, you don't need God.

—JOE GRAJEDA, INDIOS TEAM PRIEST

First, whisky unfolds the tapestry, affixing it to a concrete wall. It's a bolt of silk two feet wide and three feet high, held at the corners with strips of white athletic tape. La Virgen de Guadalupe hovers in the clouds, the sun and the moon at her feet. Her head bows to the left, eyes drowsy but still open, hands raised and clasped in prayer. She is the symbol of all Catholic Mexicans. Gold robes cover her dark skin. Gold stars pretty her indigo shawl. Light radiates from her body, signaling holiness with blond rays as sharp and spiky as the spines of the maguey agave. She has faded after years of locker room consecration. Her colors are muted now, her fibers thin.

Whisky, the Indios' equipment manager, drags an orange plastic Gatorade tub beneath her. He places two candles atop the tub's white lid. One candle is a wide, round wheel of red wax, bent from previous burns. The other candle sits inside a tall glass jar embossed with a second image of the Virgin, the sort of thing S-Mart sells for about a dollar. Whisky lights the candles. Alain N'Kong, back in tonight's starting lineup at striker, hits Play on a boom box. Def Leppard opens the set.

Players snake their way to lockers set up with tonight's uniforms of long-sleeved white jerseys, white shorts, and white socks. One of the corner lockers, prime real estate, is commandeered by starting goalkeeper Christian Martínez, probably the Indios' best player. He tears off two strips of athletic tape, overlapping them to form a cross on his locker's back wall, “JHS 16” markered onto the crown. He dangles two rosaries from the handle of a toiletry cabinet. On top of his yellow padded bench, Christian opens a Bible, saving his page with a small and silver third rosary. Four tiny pictures of Jesus Christ flank the Bible. A candle embossed with Jesus's face won't be lit until just before kickoff, so that it can burn throughout the game. Also on the bench: a pair of padded white goalie gloves.

New music, still cheesy. The Black Eyed Peas ricochet off the walls, popping up to a concrete ceiling that slopes like the bleachers the locker room hides beneath. Fluorescent bulbs glow the X-ray aura of a basement bomb shelter. Trainers unfold two padded tables in an anteroom between the lockers and the urinals. An official from the Mexican Football Federation steps forward. Yes, the Indios are dressing in all white, as mandated. Good. He pulls aside Gabino, the traveling secretary. The two men synchronize watches to ensure Juárez will take the field at the proper time for warm-ups, and then for the game itself.
Tonight's going to be a good night.

Warm-ups. Those already dressed jog out to the field for stretching and light wind sprints. Waves of yellow and blue plastic seats wait for fans to arrive, about an hour from now. Billboards advertise Banorte bank, Mexicana airlines, and Voit soccer balls, a brand I didn't know still existed. When an Indios defenseman from Mexico City emerges onto the field, he pauses at the goal line to pick up a tuft of grass, cross himself, and then point his index fingers skyward. He's left his own small shrine back in the locker room. There's a photo of his beautiful wife taken at a street carnival and another photo of his wife with their three kids. In front of the pictures, atop an open Bible, the defensemen has placed two small crucifixes, his personal picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and a list of the three Bible verses he studied in his hotel room before the game.

It's a Saturday-night away game in San Luis Potosí. The Gladiators are a bad team, which is good news for the Indios. Every game is a must-win at this point, but this game especially so. This whole week is crucial. On Wednesday the Indios will play their third game in eight days, against Atlas in Guadalajara. Rather than fly back from San Luis on Sunday just to fly south again on Tuesday, the team will spend two nights at a mountain resort in the state of Jalisco. A nice break, actually. A fun trip, though also a business trip. The realistic, attainable—and very necessary—goal is two wins, six points in the standings.

After a short practice on Friday morning, back in Juárez, players dressed in identical black business suits with Indios soccer-ball logos sewn onto the breast pockets. The team looked like a professional outfit, which I sometimes forget they are. A quick meal in the clubhouse commissary, then a shuttle to Aeropuerto Internacional Abraham González. It floors me that Ciudad Juárez has its own airport. Not that it's too small to justify one; it's just that El Paso's own international airfield receives and dispatches planes only fifteen miles away. Such duplication is common along La Frontera. There are two city halls with two different mayors (though both mayors actually live in El Paso), different local news channels covering the same stories, and different state universities employing, in several cases, the same professors. The reasons for the duplication are sometimes less than obvious. When Amado Carrillo ruled the Juárez Cartel in the 1990s, his jumbo jets of Colombian cocaine unloaded at the Juárez airport without incident, something he probably couldn't have gotten away with in El Paso.

It was a two-and-a-half-hour flight to Mexico City, an hour layover, and then a thirty-minute hop to this mountain mining town. The players sat in coach, three to a row. Headphones delivered music. Suit jackets dangled off the backs of seats. When the plane's wheels lifted off the ground, every player crossed himself. Every one of them.

JUÁREZ, LIKE MOST of Mexico, is Catholic. Seeds of faith planted by Spanish missionaries still bloom, full and lush. CIUDAD JUÁREZ: THE BIBLE IS REAL. READ IT was painted without permission onto a mountain face visible everywhere in the valley. Juárez officials have let the message stay up for years, claiming no one really disagrees with it. The Juárez Cathedral defines El Centro. A second big church, San Lorenzo's, is an Indios landmark. Two years ago, prior to the team's huge championship game against León, fans placed Indios jerseys and candles at San Lorenzo's door. It's the same church that hosted the victory party after the win over León elevated the Indios into the big leagues.

It's a coincidence the Indios name can be parsed to “In dios,” with
Dios
being the Spanish word for “God.”
In God. In God we trust.
Back when he bought the minor league Pachuca Juniors and relocated them to Ciudad Juárez, Francisco Ibarra held a rename-the-team contest. “Indios” won in a landslide, as expected. Every team in Ciudad Juárez is named the Indios. A professional baseball team that plays to only a few dozen fans calls itself the Indios. The volleyball, basketball, and track teams at the university are the Indios. That's just what teams are called in Juárez. While the name is a mandate from the people, the link to God pleases Ibarra immensely. He's set up a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe in the foyer of his El Paso house. A painting of the Virgin has been baked onto tile and set into a wall of the Indios' home locker room. Olympic Stadium billboards advise fans to GO WITH GOD TODAY. On the rare occasions when the Indios score a goal—I've only see it happen in the preseason—Ibarra rises from his padded club seat, points to the sky, and offers up
gracias a Dios
. In a promotional video assembled by Ibarra's radio station employees, the “In Dios” connotation is spelled out plain as day, flashed repeatedly on the screen: IN then DIOS, IN then DIOS. His club is on a crusade.

“God bless you, my brother,” Gil Cantú tells me every time we shake hands. An assistant coach wears one of those WHAT WOULD JESUS DO wristbands. Whenever Marco Vidal steps onto the pitch, even for practice, he does that same pulling-up-a-tuft-of-grass thing, crossing himself and then pointing two index fingers to the heavens. Riding around Juárez with Marco in his beat-up Mercury, I've noticed him make the sign of the cross when we pass a church. He does this even though he doesn't sit for mass nearly as often as his wife would like, and when I once asked if he ever attends Easter services, he replied that he attends only when Easter happens to fall on a Sunday.

“God has a plan for this city,” Gil has told me. “God has a plan for the Indios, too.”

GAME DAYS INVOLVE as little activity as possible. Players do almost nothing besides eat and rest. In the room they always share on the road, Marco and Maleno Frías watch Primera games on television. Like everyone else on the team, they allot plenty of time for shut-eye.

“I'm a champion napper,” Marco has boasted. “I really like to sleep.”

The team hotel—a generic Courtyard by Marriott—sits on the strip-mall fringe of San Luis. While the players rested up, I hailed a cab into the Colonia city center, which is a much nicer area. The Mexican Revolution started in San Luis, in 1910. One million Mexicans subsequently lost their lives (out of a population of only fifteen million). Two million more Mexicans fled to the United States, setting up migration trails that remain to this day. The city twice served as the national capital. On the short connecting flight from the current capital, head coach Pepe Treviño told me that in addition to the Revolution and also the silver mines advertised on the city seal, San Luis is most famous for its tuna. Tuna? I thought he might have been pulling my leg, or testing the limits of my Spanish. San Luis is landlocked. While walking around the city's many plazas, I didn't see any fishmongers. But what I did find were slices of sweet cactus fruit grown on San Luis's semiarid hills. Gringos would call this cactus the prickly pear. For centuries, Potosinos have enjoyed such desserts as
tuna
honey and
queso de tuna
, or cactus cheese. The soccer team's nickname, before it was switched to the more manly Gladiators, was the Tuneros, or cactus growers.

Plaza de Armas is the main square in San Luis. I sat for a while on one of the square's green park benches, taking in everything. A married couple amused a toddler. A very attractive woman in a white sweater kissed her
novio
—boyfriend—between shared spoons of soft ice cream. A young girl carried a silver balloon shaped like a crescent moon. Her sister carried a balloon of a monkey wearing boxer shorts, both girls' father trailing with a camera stuck to his face.
Tap, tap, tap
—a drummer tested his snare in advance of a free rock concert scheduled to start in half an hour. The scene fascinated me. It kind of overwhelmed me. So many people outside, recreating, living. Away from the border, Mexico seems like a pretty sweet country.

The plaza fronts an enormous orange cathedral with twin spires and baroque flourishes paid for with mining money. Shops fan out along tight streets tiled with limestone and open only to pedestrians. I walked the streets, inhaling vapors of tamales and of roasted corn slathered in mayonnaise and dusted with chile pepper. I stumbled onto the Calzada de Guadalupe, a long pedestrian path lined with green trees. Stepping off the path at one point, I explored the old penitentiary where imprisoned politician Francisco Madero drafted his plan for revolution. Seven barracks inside the jail have been retrofitted into loft-like schools for different artistic disciplines. I watched ballerinas stretch in the dance wing. In the music hall, a woman flipped through a composition fanned across her desk. I could hear a full opera company belting out Italian lyrics. Space in the complex serves sculptors and painters and photographers. There's also a literature wing with quiet writing rooms, which got me to daydreaming. As in Monterrey, I again felt a powerful attraction. I could live here, happily.

I loitered inside the penitentiary for more than an hour before stepping back onto the pedestrian path. The path had started at the main cathedral, in the center of town. When I reached the end of the trail, about a mile later, I found myself at the foot of yet another impressive cathedral, this one built specifically to honor the Virgin of Guadalupe. Once a year, every year, pilgrims crawl to the cathedral on their knees, offering penitence before the same painting of the Virgin reproduced on a silk cloth and taped to the Indios' locker room wall. San Luis Potosí was built on faith, too.

MARCO FEELS THAT he can't be touched in Juárez, that he's not in particular danger. “First, I'm not in the drug business,” he tells me. “Second, I'm a soccer player in the Primera. If they killed me it would really bring the heat, and they know it.” I feel untouchable, too. I'm a tall, pale gringo, an American. I'm a journalist, the writer of a couple stories for the
New York Times
(even if I wrote those stories years ago). If I were killed, President Obama might get involved. The State Department would really bring the heat.

At least that's what I tell myself. Actually, several Americans have been murdered in Juárez this year, and Obama has yet to show up. Still, I choose to feel protected, as if I float inside a bulletproof force field. I'm not in the drug business. I never honk my horn. I stay on the line. Juárez would completely shut down without these kinds of rationalizations. Marco and I believe what we must to feel secure. So does everyone else in the city. For most people, the sense of protection is faith-based.

“We prayed. Maybe you cannot believe that, but we prayed,” said Sandra Rodríguez Nieto, a friend of mine who reports for
El Diario
. She was scared after a newspaper colleague was shot to death in the parking lot of the shopping mall near my apartment.

Monica Ortega crosses over to El Paso almost every day to work as a nurse. She's also a member of El Kartel, the only one I've met who refuses to drink alcohol or take drugs, which, as I understand it, goes against the very purpose of El Kartel. I sat next to her for several hours on the long bus ride to Monterrey.

“I feel a connection with the Virgin of Guadalupe,” she told me. “I feel like she watches over me, and has always watched over me.”