The Shadow of the Shadow (4 page)

The Chinaman looked the officers over one by one. His
disdain could easily be misinterpreted as fear by the drunken men. It would be a big mistake.

"Don't you officels have any medals?" he asked.

"The Mexican Army doesn't need to put its honor on parade
for some slanteyes like you," scoffed one of the captains. Back at
the table, the poet and the journalist exchanged looks. Verdugo
got up and walked toward the bathroom, near the front door.
He unfastened two of the buttons on his vest and with the same
motion released the safety on his gun.

"What about in youl house? Don't you have any medals in
youl house even?" asked the Chinaman, fixing the men with a
withering stare.

"My friends here each have two citations for valor and a medal
for being wounded in the line of duty, you lousy Chink," sputtered
the lieutenant, feeling incomprehensibly trapped by the absurdity
of the Chinaman's question.

"Tomas!" the journalist shouted from his seat at the table.
"Let's not have any bloodshed, please." He turned his back to the
bar and took over where the lawyer left off, shuffling the dominoes.
The poet kept his eyes on the officers.

"You gentlemen ready to pay for your drinks?" the bartender
asked the three soldiers, well aware of what was about to happen.

"I was only going to suggest you take youl medals and hang
them flom youl fucking mothel's asses," said the Chinaman.

Tomas found himself obliged to deflect the lieutenant's fistwith
a quick chopping blow to the forearm. At his post near the door,
the lawyer drew his gun and shouted in a booming baritone:

"Keep it clean, gentlemen. The first one who goes for his gun
is a dead man."

The two captains turned to look at Verdugo while Tomas
smashed his fist into the lieutenant's face. Two bloody teeth
dropped from the officer's mouth and he staggered backward. One
of the captains hung back with his eyes on Verdugo while the
other went to the aid of his fallen comrade, who fell underneath
the bar spitting blood. The Chinaman stopped the captain in his tracks, butting him in the stomach with his head. The poet got to
his feet. Walking calmly to where the first officer lay on the floor,
he placed a foot over the hand slowly inching its way toward the
gun at the man's belt.

Gripping his stomach, the captain dropped to his knees and
started to vomit. Then the Chinaman moved toward the third
man, who grabbed the bottle of Havana brandy off the bar and,
brandishing it in front of him, backed toward the door. But the
lawyer came from behind and brought the barrel of his gun down
hard on the man's temple. He fell in a heap on the floor.

"Sorry to spoil your fun, Tomas, but I was afraid you were
going to hurt the poor guy," he said.

The bartender came out and saved the rest of the bottle of
brandy from spilling onto the ground.

Tomas walked back to the bar, rubbing his right hand.

"You missed the party," said the poet to Manterola, who
continued to scramble the dominoes.

"Not on your life. I turned around when the action started. I
was just keeping quiet a little for show. I've known Tomas for three
years now and I've seen him do this two or three times. It's always
the same. I tell you, the man's made of iron inside. And I love to
watch the way he fights with his hands. It's like nothing I've ever
seen.

"That may be true enough, but when there's gunplay involved,
the guys in the white hats don't always win," said Verdugo the
lawyer, returning to his place at the table.

"That was a good move on your part, no doubt about it,"
acknowledged the poet.

The Chinaman continued to rub his hand while the bartender
poured him a drink from the salvaged bottle.

"Have you got a pan you could put some cold watel in fol me?"
he asked.

"The thing that gets my goat," said the poet, "are these boys
who get their heads all swelled up when they get inside a uniform. They act like every civilian's a second-class citizen."

"But that's exactly what we are, second-class citizens. Haven't
you ever figured that out? You can't expect to get any more out
of this country than you're ready to give," pronounced the lawyer,
lighting up one of his short cigars.

Two of the officers lay passed out on the floor, while the third
threw up under the bar. The Chinaman took the washbasin from
the bartender and stuck his swollen hand into the water. The
bartender went back out and stripped the three soldiers of their
weapons.

"Anothel game?" asked Tomas, taking his seat.

Using the bandana from around his neck, the poet wiped the
sweat from his hands. It had always been that way for him, this
same cold sweat breaking out in the face of violence.

"Second-class citizens? I think not, gentlemen," said the reporter. "Third-class is more like it. The second-class citizens are
the ones running all over each other to spit-polish the boots of the
first-class citizens. After all, who were the real losers in this little
Revolution of ours? The old Porfirian aristocracy? Hardly. They're
all busy marrying off their daughters to Obregon's colonels. The
outcasts, the pariahs, they're the real losers, same as always. The
campesinos who made the Revolution in the first place. And us,
too, we lost the Revolution without even firing a shot."

"Speak for yourself," said the poet. "You're forgetting all the
years I rode with Pancho Villa."

The newspaperman slowly unbuttoned his vest and then his
shirt. A whitish scar ran across his chest. He touched it gingerly, as
if it belonged to someone else.

"What about the ones who got it from the sidelines? Do we
count, too?"

"Naturally," said the poet.

The Chinaman placed his hand back into the water and slowly
spread his fingers.

"Is it broken?" asked the lawyer.

Tomas shrugged his shoulders.

"Third-class citizens," insisted the journalist.

"Don't get all worked up about it, okay?" the lawyer said as
he drew his seven shiny dominoes from the pile. "After all, what
about the fourth-class citizens? Didn't you read how the other day
fifteen thousand Roman Catholics came together to pay homage
to good old Agustin de Iturbide on the hundredth anniversary of
his crummy little empire? For Chrissakes."

"I'm not getting all worked up about it. That's just the way it
is, and believe me, I know. If all the third-class Mexicans left town,
there'd be no one left to turn out the lights, let alone grow the food
for the rich man's table."

"Remember you're talking to a poet," the poet reminded him.
"I have a hard enough time putting food on my own table."

"I suppose I just feel like talking, that's all. And unlike our
friend Tomas here, I can't get it out of my system by beating up on
a few helpless soldiers."

As the friends talked, the three officers staggered to their feet
and with the bartender's encouragement made their way to the
door. One of them turned to fire off a last threatening glance, but
the bartender mercifully sent him on his way with a friendly shove.
The double door swung back and forth, squeaking softly.

The Chinaman extended his long fingers one at a time, his
hand continuing to swell in spite of the cold water.

"See what you get for fooling around with the Mexican Army?"
the poet scolded him. "And what for? Just because the guy said you
sleep on a countertop? If what our friend Manterola here says is
true about us being nothing but a bunch of third-class citizens,
what the hell's it matter if we sleep on countertops anyway? I
sleep in an armchair, and Verdugo here"-he gestured toward the
lawyer-"never sleeps at all. He's a vampire."

"You want to go first, or you want me to?" Verdugo asked
Manterola.

The cuckoo clock chirped out three in the morning.

MY FULL NAME WAS ORIGINALLY Alberto Verdugo y
Saez de Miera, and I suppose it's only natural that after thirty-five
years I should have discarded a fair amount, if not all, of so much
nomenclatural baggage. That's why it's all the same to me if they
simply call me "the lawyer Verdugo," or "licenciado Verdugo,"which
means the same thing. It's always amused me that what I ended up
with after all these years is my father's ancient surname, which has
likewise become my nickname: El Verdugo, which literally means
"the executioner," the hangman, the one who kills within the law.
And it doesn't matter too much either that I've fallen short of
certain expectations, certain illusions-if that's what you want to
call that conglomeration of vague aspirations we inevitably turn
into pretexts for living instead of rules to live by. The only thing
that makes any consistent sense is a certain stubbornness on my
part, the overwhelming desire to move on. The executioner of
dreams, you might say. But above all, the executioner of the plans
they had for me-that's more like it-the future they so carefully
prepared. The killer of my parents' dreams, that would have had
me as the administrator of giant haciendas, overseer of masses of
campesinos, a factory owner with the obligatory annual holiday
pilgrimage to Europe on a Ward Line steamship. On the other
side of the balance was my own rebellion and the bet I'd made with
myself. Like a runaway vehicle on the Paseo de la Reforma, I ran in
the opposite direction from where they wanted me to go, and here
I am, still running today, in spite of the fact there's nowhere I'm
running to and the absence of any real victory is painfully obvious.
Gone now are the father and mother who made the straightjacket in the first place, gone is the last trace, the last scrap of cloth the
straightjacket used to be. As for me, I've simply gone and turned
my lawyer's degree into the modus vivendi for a streetwalker's
attorney. There's nothing either better or worse I could have done
with that sacred scrap of paper originally destined to hang on some
wall in the graveyard of the Porfirian establishment where the rest
of my family lived and died. Of course, there's still the three years
I spent studying in Italy. Or better yet, there's still my translation
into Spanish of the great anarchist writer Enrico Malatesta. The
proof is in the pudding, as they say. I can still see my Uncle Ernesto
foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog when I put a signed and
dedicated copy in front of him on his desk. I remember reading
out loud to him in a honeyed voice where it says: "The enemy is not
he who is born beyond our borders, nor he who speaks a language
different from our own, but he who, without any right, seeks to
strip away the liberty and independence of others." And now that
the old family home lays in ruins, struck by a stray cannonball in
the fighting back in `13, the rubble crumbling underfoot, I can
go home dressed as myself and wearing my own wide-brimmed
hat, telltale symbol of a man of the night. The same pearl gray hat
that's known and recognized in cabarets, cantinas, and bordellos
all over Mexico City, stolen off a hat rack from the son of one of
old don Porfirio's own government ministers (he only wore it on
Sundays). Now I can take my hat off, wave it through the air, call
out in greeting to the ruins, and say: "Here where you see me now
I have triumphed. I have become nothing of what they wanted me
to become, I have none of what they wanted me to have. I've left
nothing behind. Nothing remains. Nothing remains."