“Do you know how to swim?” said the jailer, whose face I looked at for the first time, having been so attentive to the small juvenile hell in the cement swimming pool.
He didn’t give me time to answer.
Four streams of water came from the top of the sides of the tank-prison, splashing against the bodies and heads of the children and young people trapped in this pit, in the midst of shouting that was savage, happy, agonizing, surprising, under this downpour of rough, muddy liquids, channeled here from a dead river that emerged into life to subdue the children and young people who rapidly were floating, waving their arms, moving their heads, shouting, crying. The agitation of that small prison sea obliged me to swim, fully dressed, as the water rose, and I noted, in the confusion, that while some children swam, others, the smaller ones, it’s true, sank, were trapped, and drowned with a howl at once personal and collective.
“This is how we force them to bathe,” said the guard.
“And those who don’t know how to swim?”
“This is how we control the excess penal population.”
“What do you have to say about it?”
“I say too bad for them.”
“Are you a demographer, Senor?”
Who offers up Mexico’s prayers at the foot of the altar to its children?
DEAR SURVIVORS: I would be lying if I told you that the departure of my friend Jerico condemned me to irremediable solitude. I’ve mentioned that his absence coincided with the years of my university studies, culminating in the guardianship of Don Antonio Sangines and my ghastly visit to the juvenile pit at San Juan de Aragon in the name of “forensic practice.”
I haven’t lied. I’ve omitted. I should remedy the fault. In my spirit, I tried to associate the absence of Jerico with a willed, ideal solitude, which reality took care of proving false as soon as I said goodbye to my friend in the airport. I can deceive the living. Who among all of (or the few of) you can disprove what I’m recounting here? Everything I’ve said may be pure invention on my part. You, Senor, Senora, Senorita who read me, there is no proof I’m telling you the truth. There isn’t even proof I exist outside of these pages. You can believe me if I declare that my sex life, without the usual company of Jerico, was a desert without salt or even sand: an emptiness comparable to the children’s pit, so deep, desolate, and cruel, a Sahara of cement… Imagine, if you wish, that I looked for and found the nurse Elvira Rios, that I became her lover even though she was married, that I didn’t become her lover because she was married, that she turned me down because she had sex only with the sick to console them, and I seemed as healthy as socialist realism in a poster from the Stalinist era whose pop art was on display, at the time, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. You can deny it if I tell you I went back to the brothel on Avenida Durango a few more times to fuck the whore with the veiled face and the bee on her buttock. The truth? A lie? I didn’t know her name. She was gone, she had left, “retired,” according to the chaste expression of the madam and whoremistress Dona Evarista Almonte, alias La Hetara.
I could, then, deceive discreet readers and still ask them, as an act of faith in me, my life, my book, to believe that in the very act of saying goodbye to Jerico in Terminal One of the Mexico City Airport, in the midst of the infernal din characteristic of that elephantiastic building that extends in all directions, exits, entrances, cafes, restaurants, liquor stores, sarapes, trinkets, mariachi hats, books and magazines, pharmacies, silverware shops, sweets shops, sports shoes, baby clothes, and the life you live from day to day, like a lottery ticket, my country, admitting and expelling thousands of national and foreign tourists, the curious, pickpockets, cabdrivers, porters, police, customs officials, airline employees, in uniform, out of uniform, until in that enormous bowl of oats a second, simultaneously local and foreign city was formed, and I encountered an accident that changed my life.
In an instant a clamor was added to the aforementioned din, which I’ll tell you about now. That’s what happens at the airport, everyone’s city: You think you’re there for one thing and it turns out you were there for something very different. You think you know the direction, the route of your destination within the belly of the aerial ogre, and suddenly the unexpected erupts without requesting permission. You think you have everything with you, and in an instant madness takes the place reserved for reason.
The fact is I was walking calmly though sadly back to the Metro that would take me to my neighborhood, when a person fell into my arms. I don’t say man, I don’t say woman, because this individual was all leather-at least that’s what I felt as I embraced without wishing to the person whose face was hidden behind goggles-or rather, aviator glasses that came down from the leather helmet covering the head of the person who kicked, embraced me in order to escape the police who were holding her, and screamed so they would know her sex. A woman’s piercing voice shouted insults, called the police pricks, pigs, bums, dogs, half-breeds, brutes, sons of the original great whore, first among whores, Mother Evarista, Matildona in person (the name sounded familiar), bastards of all bastardom and of bastardly bastardhood, to make a long story short.
I embraced her. The police had their hands on her back.
“Let her go, please,” I said, carried away by an instinct for sympathy.
“Do you know her?”
“She’s my wife.”
“Well, take better care of her, young man.”
“Lock her up in La Castaneda,” said the oldest and most outdated of the policemen.
“My colleague meant to say she’s crazy.”
“What did she do?” I summoned the courage to ask while the woman clutched at me as if I were a pillar in a storm.
“She wanted to take off in her own small plane on the runway reserved for the Er Franz flight.”
Which was my friend Jerico’s flight to Paris.
“What happened?”
“We stopped her in time.”
“We confiscated the plane.”
“Aren’t you going to charge her?”
“I’m telling you we confiscated the plane.”
I’m not sure if the policeman winked when he said this. His eyes with no cornea, the eyes of an idol, did not move, his lips traced an unwanted complicity. I did not have enough money for a “taste,” and bribery repelled me morally though not philosophically. They made my life easier. All they wanted was to get rid of the woman, and the gods of the Aztec Subterranean, Airport stop, had sent me. I couldn’t imagine, as the Untouchables turned their backs on me, the fate of the requisitioned plane, the tribal division of spoils.
“My name’s Lucha Zapata.”
I embraced her and moved away through the crowd at the air marketplace. I exchanged glances with another woman walking behind a young porter who made gallant gestures, as if pushing a cart of luggage in an airport were the most glamorous piece of acting imaginable. I didn’t know why this modern, young, nimble, elegant woman who moved like a panther, like an animal restlessly tracking the porter, looked at me with such fleeting and intense interest.
“My name’s Lucha Zapata,” my companion repeated. “Take me with you.”
I stopped looking at the elegant girl. I was conquered by minimal solidarity.
THE ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD of San Juan de Aragon, at least from Oceania to Rio Consulado, had been razed in a joint action of the City and the Federation in order to erect right there, in the heart of the capital and a few blocks from the lawless district of Ciudad Neza, the largest penitentiary in the republic. It was an act of defiance: The law would not go to distant wastelands where new prison cities with their own regulations are formed. It was a provocation: The law would be installed in the center of the center, within reach, so criminals would know once and for all that they are not a race apart but citizens of prison, with ears that hear the movement of traffic, with noses that smell the aroma of frying food, with hands that touch the walls of the nation’s ha-ha history, with feet a few meters from extinct rivers and the dead lagoon of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
I understood, continuing my pragmatic forensics course, that minors were kept between life and death in the great subterranean pool, left to the accident of death by water or a Tarzanesque survival. Now I learned that older criminals were confined on the upper floor, with devices that meticulously picked up the sounds of the city outside, a true metropolis of liberties and joy compared to the Dantesque city of sorrow-the
