2666 (98 page)

And
you, Klaus, how long have you known all this? For a long time, said Haas. So
why didn't you say anything earlier? Because I had to verify the information,
said Haas. How can you verify anything in prison? asked the reporter from
El Independiente.
Let's not start that
again, said Haas. I have my sources, I have friends, I have people who hear
things. And according to your sources, where are the Uribes now? They
disappeared six months ago, said Haas. Disappeared from Santa Teresa? That's
right, from Santa Teresa, although there are people who claim to have seen them
in
Tucson
,
Phoenix
,
even
Los Angeles
,
said Haas. How can
we
verify this?
Very simple: get their parents' phone numbers and ask where they are, said Haas
with a smile of triumph.

On
November 12, Inspector Juan de Dios
Martinez
heard over the police scanner that the body of another woman had been found in
Santa Teresa. Though he hadn't been assigned to the case, he headed to the
scene, between Calle Caribe and Calle Bermudas, in Colonia Felix Gomez. The
dead woman's name was Angelica Ochoa and, as he was told by the policemen who
were cordoning off the street, it looked more like a settling of scores than a
sex crime. Shortly before the crime was committed, two cops saw a couple
arguing heatedly on the sidewalk, next to the club El Vaquero, but they didn't
want to intervene, thinking it was a normal lovers' spat. Angelica Ochoa had
been shot through the left temple, the bullet exiting her right ear. a second
bullet had pierced her cheek and exited the right side of her neck. There was a
third bullet in her right knee. a fourth in her left thigh. And a fifth and
last bullet in her right thigh. The sequence of shots, thought Juan de Dios
Martinez
, was probably
fifth to first, the coup de grace delivered to the left temple. At the moment
the shots were fired, where were the policemen who had seen the couple
fighting? When they were questioned, they couldn't give a coherent explanation.
They said they'd heard the shots, turned around, returned to Calle Caribe, and
by that time the only people there were
Angelica,
on the ground, and a few onlookers who were beginning to come to the doors of
nearby businesses. The day after the occurrence the police declared that it was
a crime of passion and that the likely murderer was Ruben Gomez Arancibia, a
local pimp also known as La Venada, not because he looked like a deer but
because he claimed to have
venadeado
many
men, which was like saying he had hunted them down, treacherously and at an
advantage, as befitted a second- or third-rate pimp. Angelica Ochoa was his
wife, and it seems La Venada had heard she was planning to leave him. Most
likely, thought Juan de Dios sitting behind the wheel of his car, parked on a
dark corner, the murder hadn't been premeditated. At first La Venada probably
just wanted to hurt or scare or warn her, thus the bullet in the right thigh,
then, upon seeing Angelica's expression of pain or surprise, he felt not only
rage but amusement, the darkest expression of humor, which manifested itself in
a desire for symmetry, and then he shot her in the left thigh. After that he
lost control. The floodgates were open. Juan de Dios rested his head on the
steering wheel and tried to cry but couldn't. The attempts of the police to
find La Venada were in vain. He had disappeared.

At nineteen I began to take
lovers. My sex life is legendary all over
Mexico
, but legends are always
false, especially in this country. The first time I slept with a man it was out
of curiosity. That's right. Not love or admiration or fear, the way it is for
most women. I could have slept with him out of pity, because ultimately I
pitied the kid I fucked that first time, but the honest truth is it was
curiosity. After two months I left him and went off with someone else, an
asshole who thought he was a revolutionary.
Mexico
has an abundance of these
assholes. Hopelessly stupid, arrogant men, who lose their wits when they come
across an Esquivel Plata, want to fuck her right away, as if the act of
possessing a woman like me were the equivalent of storming the
Winter
Palace
.
The
Winter
Palace
! They, who couldn't even cut the
grass of the Summer Dacha! Well, I got rid of that one soon enough, too, and now
he's a fairly well-known reporter who, every time he gets drunk, likes to talk
about how he was my first love. My next lovers were chosen because they were
good in bed or because I was bored and they were witty or entertaining or
strange, so extravagantly strange that only I found them amusing. For a while,
as I'm sure you know, I was someone with a certain stake in the university
Leftist movement. I even visited
Cuba
. Then I got married, had my
son. My husband, who was also on the Left, joined the PRI. I began to work in
journalism. On Sundays I would go home, I mean to my old house, where my family
was slowly rotting away, and I would wander the hallways, the garden, look at
photo albums, read the diaries of unknown forebears, which were more like missals
than diaries, sit quietly for hours next to the stone well in the courtyard,
deep in an expectant silence, smoking one cigarette after another, not reading,
not thinking, sometimes even unable to remember anything. The truth is I was
bored. I wanted to do things, but I didn't know exactly what. Months later I
got divorced. My marriage didn't last two years. Of course, my family tried to
dissuade me, they threatened to leave me in the street, saying, and it was
completely true, incidentally, that I was the first Esquivel to profane the
holy sacrament of marriage, one of my uncles, a ninety-year-old priest, Don
Ezequiel Plata, wanted to have a talk with me, an informational chat or two,
but then, when they least expected it, I was overtaken by the demon of command
or leadership, as it's called now, and I put them in their place, each and
every one of them and all together. In short: beneath these walls I became what
I am and what I'll be until I die. I told them that the time for pieties and
mealymouthed platitudes was over. I told them I wasn't going to stand for any
more limp wrists in the family. I told them that the fortune and properties of
the Esquivels had only dwindled with the years and that at this pace my son,
say, or my grandchildren, if my son turned out like me and not like them, would
be left without a penny. I told them I didn't want to hear any muttering while
I was talking. I told them that if they didn't agree with what I had to say,
they should leave, the door was wide open and
Mexico
itself was open even wider.
Beginning this stormy night, I said (because lightning really was flashing all
over the city, and we could see it from the windows), there would be no more
alms for the church, which promised us heaven but for more than one hundred years
had been bleeding us here on earth. I told them I wouldn't marry again, and I
warned them to expect even worse gossip about me. I told them they were dying
and I didn't want them to die. They all turned pale and gaped, but no one had a
heart attack. When it comes down to it, we Esquivels are tough. A few days
later, I remember it as if it were yesterday, I saw Kelly again.

That same day Kessler was at
Cerro Estrella and he walked around Colonia Estrella and Colonia Hidalgo and
explored the area along the Pueblo Azul highway and saw the ranches empty like
shoe boxes, solid structures, graceless, functionless, that stood at the bends
of the roads that ran into the Pueblo Azul highway, and then he wanted to see
the neighborhoods along the border, Colonia Mexico, next to El Adobe, at which
point you were back in the United States, the bars and restaurants and hotels
of Colonia Mexico and its main street, where there was a permanent thunder of
trucks and cars on their way to the border crossing, and then he made his
entourage turn south along Avenida General Sepulveda and the Cananea highway,
where they took a detour into Colonia La Vistosa, a place the police almost
never ventured, one of the inspectors told him, the one who was driving, and
the other one nodded sorrowfully, as if the absence of police in Colonia La
Vistosa and Colonia Kino and Colonia Remedies Mayor was a shameful stain that
they, zealous young men, bore with sorrow, and why sorrow? well, because
impunity pained them, they said, whose impunity? the impunity of the gangs that
controlled the drug trade in these godforsaken neighborhoods, something that
made Kessler think, since in principle, looking out the car window at the
fragmented landscape, it was hard to imagine any of the residents buying drugs,
easy to imagine them using, but hard, very hard, to imagine them buying,
digging in their pockets to come up with enough change to make a purchase,
something easy enough to imagine in the black and Hispanic ghettos up north,
neighborhoods that looked placid in comparison to this dismal chaos, but the
two inspectors nodded, their strong, young jaws, that's right, there's lots of
coke around here and all the filth that comes with it, and then Kessler looked
out again at the landscape, fragmented or in the constant process of
fragmentation, like a puzzle repeatedly assembled and disassembled, and told
the driver to take him to the illegal dump El Chile, the biggest illegal dump
in Santa Teresa, bigger than the city dump, where waste was disposed of not
only by the maquiladora trucks but also by garbage trucks contracted by the
city and some private garbage trucks and pickups, subcontracted or working in
areas that public services didn't cover, and then the car was back on paved
streets and they seemed to head the way they'd come, returning to Colonia La
Vistosa and the highway, but then they turned down a wider street, just as
desolate, where even the brush was covered with a thick layer of dust, as if an
atomic bomb had dropped nearby and no one had noticed, except the victims,
thought Kessler, but they didn't count because they'd lost their minds or were
dead, even though they still walked and stared, their eyes and stares straight
out of a Western, the stares of Indians or bad guys, of course, in other words
lunatics, people living in another dimension, their gazes no longer able to
touch us, we're aware of them but they don't touch us, they don't adhere to our
skin, they shoot straight through us, thought Kessler as he moved to roll down
the window. No, don't open it, said one of the inspectors. Why not? The smell,
it smells like death. It stinks. Ten minutes later they reached the dump.

So what do you think of all
this? one of the reporters asked the lawyer. The lawyer bent her head and then
looked at the reporter and at Haas. Chuy Pimentel took her picture: she seemed
short of breath, as if her lungs were about to burst, although she wasn't red
in the face but deeply pale. This was Mr. Haas's idea, she said, and I don't
pretend to have anything to do with it. Then she talked about Mr. Haas's
vulnerable position, about the trials that kept being postponed, about the
evidence lost, the witnesses coerced, the limbo in which her defendant was
living. Anyone in his place would lose his head, she murmured. The reporter
from
El Independiente
looked at her mockingly and with interest. You're
romantically involved with Klaus, aren't you? she asked. The reporter was
young, still in her twenties, and she was used to dealing with people who spoke
bluntly and sometimes harshly. The lawyer was past forty and she seemed tired,
as if she had gone several days without sleeping. I'm not going to answer that
question, she said. It has no bearing.

On November 16, the body of
another woman was found on the back lot of the Kusai maquiladora, in Colonia
San Bartolome. According to the initial examination, the victim was between
eighteen and twenty-two and the cause of death, according to the forensic
report, was asphyxiation due to strangulation. She was completely naked and her
clothes were found five yards away, hidden in the bushes. Actually, not all of
her clothes were found, just a pair of black leggings and red panties. Two days
later, she was identified by her parents as Rosario Marquina, nineteen, who
disappeared on November 12 while she was out dancing at
Salon Montana, on Avenida
Carranza, not far from Colonia Veracruz, where they lived. It just so happened
that both the victim and her parents worked at the Kusai maquiladora. According
to the medical examiners, the victim was raped several times before she died.

Kelly's reappearance was like a
gift. The first night we saw each other we were up till dawn telling each other
our life stories. Hers had been mostly a disaster. She tried to be a theater
actress in
New York
, a movie actress in
Los Angeles
, tried to be a model in Paris, a photographer
in
London
, a translator in
Spain
. She set
out to study modern dance but gave it up the first year. She set out to be a
painter and at her first show she realized she had made the worst mistake of
her life. She wasn't married, she had no children, no family (her mother had
just died after a long illness), no projects. It was the perfect moment to
return to
Mexico
.
In
Mexico City
it would be easy for her to find work. She had friends and she had me, her best
friend, don't you doubt that for a second. But she wasn't obliged to turn to
anyone (at least anyone I knew) because she soon found work on what you might
call the gallery circuit. In other words, she planned openings, designed and
printed catalogs, slept with artists, talked to buyers, all of this for four
art dealers who in those days were
the
dealers in
Mexico City
, the phantom figures behind the
galleries and the painters, pulling all the strings. By that time I had given
up my activities in support of the ineffectual Left, no offense intended, and
was nudging closer and closer to certain sectors of the PRI. Once my ex-husband
said to me: if you keep writing what you're writing you're going to be
ostracized or worse. And I didn't stop to think what he meant by
worse
but
kept writing and turning out articles. As it happened, not only was I not
ostracized, I received signals that the people on top were increasingly
interested in me. It was an incredible time. We were young, we didn't have many
responsibilities, we were independent, and we had plenty of money. It was in
those days that Kelly decided that the name that suited her best was Kelly. I
still called her Luz Maria, though everybody else called her Kelly, until one
day she brought it up. She said: Azucena, I don't like Luz Maria Rivera, I
don't like how it sounds, I prefer Kelly, that's what everybody calls me, will
you too? And I said: fine. If you want me to call you Kelly, I will. And from
then on I started to call her Kelly. At first I thought it was funny. A
typically American affectation. But then I realized that the name suited her.
Maybe because Kelly had a hint of Grace Kelly about her. Or because Kelly is a
short name, two syllables, whereas Luz Maria was longer. Or because Luz Maria
had religious associations and Kelly had no associations, or its association
was a photograph. Somewhere I must have letters from her signed Kelly R.
Parker. I think that was even how she signed her checks. Kelly Rivera Parker.
There are people who think our names are our destiny. I don't believe that. But
if they are, when Kelly chose that name she somehow took the first step into
invisibility, into a nightmare. Do you think our names are our destiny? No,
said Sergio, but then I wouldn't. Why not? asked the congresswoman with a sigh,
without curiosity. I have an ordinary name, said Sergio, fixing his gaze on his
hostess's dark glasses. For a moment, the congresswoman put her hands to her
head, as if she had a migraine. Do you want me to tell you something? All names
are ordinary, they're all vulgar. Whether your name is Kelly or Luz Maria, it
makes no difference in the end. All names disappear. Children should be taught
that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them.