Mexico City Noir

Bang! The shot rang in the nave of San Fernando as if it were from an ancient rifle instead of a Browning 9 mm. Three and a half centuries of walls cushioned the shot. The altar boy tolled for the dead in the bell tower. When Commander Perez had come in search of Nausicaa, he’d found the door of the church slightly ajar. He’d been drawn to it. He’d pulled it open to let his corpulence through.

“God is fanatical, hija.”

This was the nasally voice Perez heard when he’d first entered the darkness. He had removed his pistol, aimed, and the echo had bounced off the columns of the altar, flown toward the vault, fluttered in the choir.

The cop still couldn’t figure out where to point the barrel.

“God is fanatical, hija, that’s what the Creator, whatever It is, will say to your beloved when It sends him to Hell.” The voice was coming from a drain to the River Styx. Commander Perez remembered it now. It was the same person who had claimed the bank robber’s body. It was a woman who had transformed herself into man, wearing a nun’s skirt, a black coat, and a priest’s collar-he had seemed back then like a boy in his thirties, his adolescence bizarrely extended. The commander’s obscene sense of smell had drawn him to the river, where some children led him to a dam, to the swollen body laying there in the foam. He hadn’t officially registered the body, which had begun to decompose. The nun, or whatever it was, then threatened to tell the Vatican about the theft of the gold keepsake. But the cop had nullified the threat with an offer of papers that would accredit him as a priest anywhere. In the days that followed, the corpse crumbled apart in the dirty water like pastry dough. Sister Reckless didn’t try to salvage the body, but her apparent indifference was in reality an expression of her abiding love.

“We have a deal, you demonic whore. I made you a priest. Nausicaa gave you the papers herself.”

“I haven’t forgotten. I chose the Castilian monastery at Cantalapiedra, which is a Claretian convent, though none of that mattered squat to them since you gave me a forged passport. So I returned to San Fernando a man, thank you. What I forgot was the deal itself. I agree, I broke it.”

“What do you want, you filthy nun? Do you want to send me to jail because I killed your pathetic lover?”

“My resentment is blacker than the darkness of this church.”

“Where is Nausicaa?”

“You’re looking for her in the wrong place. She’s around the corner. As always.”

“The church door was half-opened.”

“Or half-closed. Go on your way.”

The cop turned, each swell of darkness illuminated by candles forming a niche of shadows. A voice told him: “There is no greater pain than to remember happy times in misery. That’s not me, commander, but Dante, and your misfortune is not having had any happy times, and your tragedy is realizing now, in this instant, that you will never have them, nothing to remember, and that in itself will become an eternity like a shot in the head.”

In Father Prospero’s kitchen, the altar boy finished shredding the meat from the street urchin. It was dawn. The priest sliced cheeks, guts, and eyes for a cocktail, escabeche style, to go with the cous cous. Hunger had given these delicate creatures big apple cheeks. The altar boy went outside to throw the viscera in a ditch. Exhausted from all her weeping, Nausicaa sniffled quietly in her own room and sought refuge in the bathroom. The priest hummed, chose a red onion, coriander, white vinegar, salt, enough lemon juice to clear the foul odors, cleaned the jalapenos, sprinkled black pepper with his thumb and index finger, waved some aromatic herbs, and got everything ready for the marinade. The altar boy returned with the news that there was a dead body inside the temple, surrounded by police, uniformed and plainclothes. “They won’t have had breakfast yet,” said the priest with the torn sneakers, so that the boy would prepare lunch for them. First, however, he needed to tell Nausicaa to go down to Father Diego Tonatiuh’s confessional wearing a veil like Maria Magdalena.

Morning arrived downtown, and the children of the desert slept in the hope that the sun would wake their agonies in the open grave. The church door was wide open, but the passage to the shadows of San Fernando was blocked by yellow police tape. Nausicaa lifted it to step inside as two uniformed officers looked on indifferently at her purple table-dancing veil. She carried the guilt of the falsely devout. She crossed herself three times. Commander Perez’s corpse lay at the other end of the nave, the open sleeves of the raincoat making him look like a spoiled angel. A group of dusty judges stood to the side of the pulpit with Saint Michael and the stolen spear.

In a confessional down the other way, a red light flashed. Stop! the priest called out to Nausicaa, raising the sleeve of his habit, a light in the midst of a storm guiding the shipwreck as the tide moaned.

“The angels on the cupola are happy,” said the shadow of the priest, gesturing toward the slipping light. Nausicaa collapsed when he removed his hood. He dragged her into the confession booth, where he sat and she knelt; he lifted her face to him. “Why are you here?”

“For my confession.” Behind the opacity of her pupils, there was a view of a tiled and sticky room upstairs at the police station, the sound of Commander Perez’s laughter and boasts about how he’d handled the electric drill like a skilled swordsman. Nausicaa had admired the way he grabbed her head and forced her to lick the bank robber’s nobler parts. The two cops outside the booth had a mutual orgasm, then basked in the silence of their brotherhood.

“No, Nausicaa, you have already confessed everything. The rape of the maid’s son isn’t even worth a Mass. You’ve come to return the borrowed spirit whose body is no longer among us. You sent it down to the sewers, to that Great Canal that cleaves this city like an infected vein, through which runs the waste that equalizes all of the inequities of those who live here. You couldn’t take my lover, and you wanted me to lend him to you because, oh, how aroused you got when your big man fucked him up the ass! Cry now, you cheap whore-you’re the only case I know of a rapist whore. Scream, you hag!”

Father Prospero came through the sacristy wearing dark clothes, his Roman collar, and tattered shoes. The altar boy set a table in the Expiatory Chapel, incense smoke trailing his small steps through the many pews of the nave. The police surrounded the priest. His waxen face shone. A commander said something about drug trafficking while the organ on high played, Pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis mysterium, sanguinisque pretiosi, and the rest of the conversation became inaudible. The officer who was speaking had taken part, along with Commander Perez, in the investigation of a sacristan who, years before, had been assassinated while stealing an eighteenthcentury gold talisman. The murder suspects were Prospero and Diego Tonatiuh; the police never returned the gold.

The altar boy served the vegetables. He set out chips with escabeche, cous cous tacos marinated in guajillo, and morita chili spiced with epazote and yerba santa. A detective brought cognac and Coca-Cola. The last bit of smoke from the incense slithered from the confessional.

“Only for a brief time are we on loan to each other, said the elders, back when this was a lake and the volcanoes had to always be watched. My penance will be the pain of remembering happy times during the misfortune, but you won’t even have that.” Father Diego Tonatiuh paused to catch his breath, then continued: “My loan was never complete, but during the bank robberies I had moments of happiness, even if I was only stealing for love. Your loan was never approved, and you were always unhappy. So go do your penance. You will never find the child you’re looking for. You don’t have your commander anymore, they’re going to cut you to pieces during your table dance, and you won’t have any way to make a living other than becoming a street walker. You certainly won’t be able to afford your hormones. When your beard starts coming in again, no one’s going to give a shit about you.”

Mimicry flows like beauty from Mexico City’s faucets, space and time are relative, and instead of the usual floral-and-stone facade, there’s dahlia and obsidian. In the course of time, what was yesterday a lake of water becomes asphalt today, and the past is a perpetual duplication that drowns the future. Yesterday’s omens come back, the same substance in a different shape. The city is a nagual that becomes a wall of skulls, an intelligent domotique structure: the Huitzilopochtli temple in a cathedral and Castile roses in cactus bouquets. Time is measured simultaneously with the Aztec, Julian, and Gregorian calendars and the cesium fountain atomic clock; the heart of Mexico City is made of mud and green rocks, and the God of Rain continues to cry over the whole country.

Father Prospero died from toluene inhalation. Father Diego Tonatiuh catechizes monks in the mountains of Songshan in China. The altar boy with the small brazier has grown a beard and moved east. More than five hundred years ago, Emperor Moctezuma was brought a heron with a mirror on the back of its head. In the