The Shadow of the Shadow (3 page)

The poet strolled past groups of workers from the nearby
munitions factory, bank tellers, and lonely senoritas shouldering
bright parasols, until he came to the place where don Alberto the
butcher sat along with his family on the chairs they'd brought with
them into the park.

"Take a load off, don Fermin. Pull up a chair," smiled the
butcher.

"Thanks, don Alberto, but I think I'll walk awhile. I'm just
trying to get the blood going and shake off some of this melancholy." He smiled out of the corner of his eye at the butcher's
daughter Odilia, who had recently had the honor of being elected
"Miss Congeniality" by her coworkers at Munitions Factory
Number Three.

The poet strolled on to the beat of the band in his high-heeled
boots, hands clasped behind his back, weaving his way through the
crowd. He glanced around at the musicians sweating in their heavy
uniforms, Odilia with a pair of enormous yellow bows tied around
her braids, and a gang of boys trying to fly a small toy airplane but
succeeding only in knocking men's hats off or crash-landing into
the round bellies of good-humored petit bourgeois picnickers.

"The sun up/ every day it comes/ a gift/ Gladly we would repay
it/ but our hats are empty," the poet wrote in his head, trying to memorize a little piece, a few words, a single line so that he could
retrieve it again later on. Maybe it was true for other people that
writing was the act of giving life to the blank page. But the poet
lived a life filled with invisible pages all covered with his invisible
thoughts which he tried in vain to recapture, late into the night or
mornings round about dawn, with a real piece of paper on the desk
in front of him, disconsolately empty.

He dropped anchor at a little juice cart near the bandstand.
"What'll it be today, boss?" the vendor asked him. "I'll have a glass
of lemonade, Simon."

The vendor, wagging his little goatlike beard back and forth,
poured out a glass of lemonade and made another mark on a
wrinkled piece of paper. He had agreed to pay the poet twenty-five
glasses in exchange for the lines that graced the front of his cart in
a multicolored gargoylish script:

The poet took a sip of lemonade and glanced at the band as
it hurried through the final strains of the Alvaro Obregon March.
A sudden movement caught his eye. A man whose face the poet
couldn't quite make out was climbing the stairs at the back of the
bandstand. He approached the trombonist from behind, pulled a
small gun from his vest pocket, and without the slightest hesitation
held it to the musician's temple and pulled the trigger.

The killer looked out into the crowd and for a moment his
eyes met with the poet's myopic gaze. Fermin Valencia rubbed his
hands vigorously over his face while the band played on unaware of
what had just happened in the back row. The murderer jumped over
the bandstand railing and ran off through the groups of Sunday
strollers. The poet brought his hand to his waist, confirmed that he was unarmed, and watched as the man crossed the avenue and
disappeared into a side street. The music stopped and the startled
cries of the crowd rose to replace it. As the shocked musicians
hovered around their murdered comrade, the poet tried to get a
grip on what he'd seen. A man had climbed onto the bandstand,
approached the trombonist from behind, and shot him through
the head. He was wearing a vest, the poet remembered that much.
And his face? There wasn't any face, just the vague image of a
peaked cap, the kind a rich man's chauffeur might wear. And he'd
held the gun in his left hand. A southpaw. Wouldn't this be a hell
of a story for Pioquinto Manterola, the poet thought. If only his
eyes were better...

He approached the bandstand and climbed up through
the crowd, swinging his elbows to clear the way. In spite of his
diminutive size, the poet commanded respect, maybe because of
his magnificent mustache or the look of uninhibited desperation
burning in his eyes.

He saw how the blood oozed from the small black hole in the
dead man's temple, pooling up on the bandstand floor. He stared
for a long moment into the dead man's wide-open eyes-"the stare
of death." How many times had he seen it before? He'd never been
able to decide whether that look reflected the final brutal pain of
death, the slipping off of the mortal coil as it were, or whether
it was the first glimmer of what lay beyond. In the face of this
uncertainty the poet had become an atheist: something told him
the blank stare of death corresponded to the first glimpse of God,
and if that was the case, he'd decided long ago he didn't want to
have anything to do with Him.

"Stand back!" he shouted at a pair of grief-stricken trumpet
players. "What's the dead man's name?"

"Sergeant Jose Zevada," answered the captain and conductor,
savagely twisting his baton between his hands.

The poet leaned over the dead man and pulled his eyelids shut.
Then he stuck his hands into the dead man's pockets and emptied out the contents, naming each item out loud as he sorted through
them:

"One snotty handkerchief, one photograph of a beautiful young
woman, one darning egg, one peso, fifty-five cents in change..."

"... O N E S I LV E R FORK, one bundle of newspaper clippings
held together with a rubber band, one sapphire ring, two diamond
rings with silver bands, and two large turquoise rings..."

"This trombonist of yours sounds like a walking jewelry store,"
observed Verdugo, setting the two/three onto the marble tabletop.
His plan was to force the Chinaman to play the antepenultimate
six, so the journalist could crucify the poet on the double-sixes.

The Chinaman avoided the trap, playing a one.

"And the newspaper clippings, what were they all about, my
esteemed collaborator?" asked Manterola, leaving off taking notes
for a minute to wipe his sweaty face with a handkerchief. The poet
made an elegant wave of his hand, like a magician performing
a trick, inserted two fingers into his vest pocket, pulled out the
bundle of clippings, and dropped them onto the table.

"Ask and ye shall receive."

"Now that's no ordinary helper,"said the lawyer, impressed. The
journalist played the three/five, to the lawyer's great consternation.
If anyone was going to be crucified at this point, it was going to
be him.

"Pay attention, man," he admonished Manterola. "The moment of truth is at hand and you've got your mind on your work."

"Sorry," apologized the journalist, while the poet played the
double-fives, a big grin on his face.

Manterola picked up the bundle of clippings. With Verdugo
forced to pass, the Chinaman played the two/four. The journalist
went on the offensive with another three.

"Have you read them yet?" he asked.

"Of course. In all the world there was never born another man
as impatient as I."

"Do you realize it's getting to the point again where you have
to carry a gun in this town?" the journalist asked the others. "Seems
like we let ourselves get out of the habit for a while."

"Not me," said the lawyer, drawing his .38 automatic. "It cost
me thirty-two pesos at La Universal. I clean it and oil it every
month, and take it back once a year for a complete going-over."

"How about you, Tomas?" Manterola asked, losing interest
in the game now that he'd practically got it in the bag. Without
showing any other sign of having heard, the Chinaman drew a
large Spanish switchblade from his boot. He pressed the button
and a polished steel blade, nearly a foot long, sprang out with a
clean snap.

"General Villa used to clean his fingernails with one of those,"
said the poet.

"They must have been vely dilty," said the Chinaman without
changing his expression and without taking his attention off the
game.

"Game's over, gentlemen," declared the journalist, slapping his
last domino onto the table with a sharp crack.

The echo ran the length of the nearly empty cantina and mixed
with the forced laughter of three officers drinking at the bar.

"I never understood where you got your accent from, Tomas,"
said the poet, getting up from the table. "After all, you were born
in Sinaloa."

The lawyer counted the remaining dominoes and jotted the
score in a small notebook he kept just for that purpose.

Manterola suspiciously eyed the three young officers, two
captains and a lieutenant. From the very last batch to come
out of the Revolution, no doubt. Probably from one of the last
campaigns against the Zapatistas and the final Agua Prieta Revolt, where they would have won their stripes. They'd reached a thoroughly advanced state of inebriation and waved their hands
about dramatically as they talked. Manterola didn't like them. He
didn't like soldiers in general, men in uniform. It was an aversion
he shared with his three friends, though perhaps for different
reasons.

"How'd you get onto the bandstand in the first place?" he
asked the poet.

The poet climbed onto the back of his chair. "Let's just say that
in spite of my size, people manage to perceive something of my
inner strength. And besides, the place was a complete madhouse."

Verdugo started to mix the bones. The Chinaman stood up,
crossed the room, and leaned his elbows on the bar.

The bartender got the message, followed his eyes just to make
sure, and took down the bottle of Havana brandy.

"You serve Orientals in this place, mister?" slurred one of the
officers.

"They say they're absolutely the filthiest creatures that ever
walked the earth," added the lieutenant, smoothing his trim little
mustache. "I hear they all live in those nasty little shops of theirs
and fight the rats over the crumbs for dinner. Then they go to
sleep on the countertops." The officers had spent the earlier part
of the evening drinking second-class aguardiente at first-class
prices in the ballroom upstairs. Obviously, they weren't familiar
with the house rules. Two different worlds made up the Majestic,
one upstairs and one downstairs. There was no love lost between
them and they didn't mix. Maria Conesa might be singing upstairs
for some high government minister while downstairs, when the
pool tables were really jumping, you might run across half a dozen
of the toughest, ugliest Spaniards that ever cursed the face of the
earth, and with more blood on their hands than the whole rest of
the city put together. And this was a city with a blood debt you
couldn't clear up in a very long lifetime.