when I asked him the reason for his incarceration. He had no teeth.
“I gave my teeth to the public welfare. I love philanthropy. I go even further, boy. I not only love all men, I love their possessions. For that you don’t need teeth.”
He guffawed between showers of saliva and thunderous coughs. He must have been sixty. He looked as if he were a hundred, and his hands did not tremble. He moved his fingers constantly, with the artfulness of a pianist.
He realized what he was doing.
“They called me Chopin. I would answer: Chofuckyomama.”
This was his story:
“There are thieves who don’t know how to get out of the house they’re robbing. I was always very aware that the problem wasn’t only getting in but getting away with no noise, no trace, not even a smell. And for that you have to work alone or with kids under ten so they can squeeze between the bars and open the windows for you.”
He gave a distorted belly laugh, like the impossible music of a piano with no keys or only the black ones, so great was the depth of his throat, made even deeper by his lack of teeth.
“I always worked alone, for years and years, not carrying unnecessary baggage, light as one of those birds they call Phoeniz, and even if you burn them they’re born again. Except they never burned me. What can you do?”
He sighed with breath like a squall. He was a solitary thief. Until the ailments of age obliged him to hire a boy of twenty to facilitate matters.
“Yes, he was agile, young, and an asshole. He knew how to get in. He didn’t know how to get out, Senor Licenciado. He couldn’t find the exit. After such a nice, clean entrance. After such an efficient robbery, the idiot got confused, he lost his way and led me from here to there and from there to here until the alarms went off, the lights went on, and the two of us were standing there, our spirits naked, surrounded by the police of Pedregal de San Angel, cursing the Esparza family and their damn security system.”
“And your young accomplice?”
“I killed him in the paddy wagon on the way to prison.”
“How?”
He raised his hands and let them fall on an imaginary nape of the neck.
I set down these facts because they had a decisive influence on how I saw society, the nation, and its people.
LUCHA ZAPATA. WAS it an announcement or a call? A proposal or a memory?
From what?
From myself.
Words were not necessary to understand what she wanted. Her utterly helpless gaze, her radical lack of protection, delivered her into my hands. Not to my charity, because on the basis of compassion only the transient is constructed, to which is added resentment. Perhaps pity, only a little, the mercy that has been the emotional weapon of Christianity and the stage setting for the irresistible melodrama of Calvary. Was Lucha Zapata wearing a cross that hung between her breasts? The impenetrable leather top prevented certainty and condemned me to guesses. Everything I’ve said ought to convince your excellencies my readers that I have never once abused sentimentality. Instead, I’ve tried to be simple, direct, reducing myself from the beginning to this double visiting card: a decapitated head and a naked, unprotected skin. This, someone wrote a long time ago, is not serious: Tragedy is forbidden to the modern world. For us everything turns into melodrama, soap opera, newspaper serials, cowboy movies. The success of westerns (the modern epic, Alfonso Reyes would say, the saga of the plains, no longer of the sea) is the direct simplicity with which the spectator distinguishes Good from Evil. Evil wears black. Good wears white. The villain has a mustache. The hero is clean-shaven. The good guy brushes his teeth. The bad guy spits foul breath. The hero looks straight at you. The bad guy squints out of the corner of his eye.
The readings of the Greek classics that Jerico and I did as boys impressed on us a certain idea of tragedy as a conflict of values, not an opposition of virtues. Both Antigone and Creon are right. She has the values of the family. He has those of society. The law of the family demands the burial of the dead, the law of the state forbids it.
“Then,” Jerico remarked, “tragic balance isn’t quite as just as you say.”
I asked him why.
“Because the law of the family will survive while the law of the city is temporary and revocable, isn’t it?”
I recalled all this in the rattletrap taxi that drove the “rescued” woman and me to a destination I didn’t know.
“Where to, chief?”
Where to? It was enough to look outside the car at the vast desert of the Anillo Periferico, the outer beltway that foreshadows the funeral that awaits us if we don’t choose to turn ourselves into ashes first. Sacrificed after all, we die on the cement perimeter that reflects and celebrates a new city that has shed its old skin, its lacustrian sensuality, its igneous sacredness, displaced first by another beauty, baroque, name of the pearl beyond price, the misshapen jewel of the unborn oyster that Mexico City ostentatiously displays in its second foundation of volcanic rock, marble, smiling angels and demons even more jovial as if to compensate for the tears of blood (this isn’t a bolero) of its tortured Christs in adjoining chapels so that the altar will be occupied by the tears that are pearls of his mother the Virgin who floats above the horns of the Iberian bull, our sacred animal. Sacred and for that reason, necessarily, syllogistically, sacrificial. Patient tombs and banished waters opening in avenues of pepper tree and willow, ascending mountains of pine and snow, proclaiming itself that region where the air is clear. Until it lands here, on the Periferico, an indecent sausage of funereal cement, scaffold and grave of two million broken-down taxis, materialist trucks, secondhand Volkswagens, insulting Alfa Romeos losing their way in the great urban tunnel, buses invisible under clusters of passenger flies, at once stoic and desperate, hanging any way they can from the armpits of the conveyance.
How was so much naked ugliness adorned? With advertisements. Commercial announcements were the only decoration on the Periferico. A world of gratifications, if not within reach, then within view of the consumer. A succession of images of desire, because none of them corresponded to the physical reality or economic possibility or even the psychic makeup of residents of the capital. The Periferico where I drove that night in a taxi with a defenseless and, I believe, valiant woman, her arms around my chest, looking out of the corner of my eye at a succession of invariably blond women used for everything: They advertise beer, cars, underwear, bathing suits, condominiums on the coast, films, audiovisual devices. Advertisements. Waiting for the uncommon but fatal catastrophe: One day, a small plane crashed into a vehicle filled with purebred horses. Nobody remembers the pilots. Only in advertisements of seaside vacations and sales in distant residential districts did the Mexican family appear, a happy grouping of the father in shirtsleeves, the modest, neat little wife, and two children-male and female-rosy-cheeked, smiling, happy to have found paradise in Satellite City, a guarded prison they will never leave, not in the advertisement and not in life…
Where would I go with my solitary companion? To the high-floor apartment on Praga? Didn’t she have her own place?
I asked her.
She curled up more and more into my chest, not speaking.
She smelled of leather. Of alcohol. Of burned pot.
I raised her goggles and everything became concentrated, the taxi driving us, the speeding tomb of cement, the fixed, successive smiles of my compatriots happy because they had a terrific house in Colonia Lindavista, beach vacations without light or water, noisy cereals at breakfast, underwear that guaranteed sexual ecstasy, where? where? on the mattress, the mattresses that made the fortune of the Esparza family and built a huge residence in Pedregal, the stony and glassy mansion of mattresses… At this moment of enemy voices, visual offenses, commercial distractions, and cemented realities, I was the human mattress of the woman who, at the intersection where we finally left the Periferico, murmured her name in my ear:
“Lucha Zapata.”
