Trial By Fire (10 page)

They eat at the human tissue. Eventually, the tragafuegos lose all feeling in their mouth, followed by their teeth.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, lightly, “And of course, ulcers on the tongue are not at all unusual.”

Jan’s

expression was slowly turning to disgust. “That, however, is only the beginning, Ms. Fields. The worst is the brain damage. The speech becomes slurred as they become brain dead, unable to fend for themselves. The process is slow, taking eight to ten years. Eventually, they will simply disappear, their places on the streetcorners taken by younger men who are still able to perform.”

Jan was becoming uncomfortable. In part Guajardo knew that it was because she was no longer in control. Like most Americans, Jan was used to having things her way. That she couldn’t, bothered her. Even more disturbing, though, was the fact that she no longer had the option to pick those things that fit neatly with her preconceived ideas and images. She had not been ready, or willing, to face the reality of Mexico. That face, one easily ignored, was not pleasing to her. Guajardo could see this and was quite pleased. The trip was paying off. “And what, Colonel, is the government doing? Aren’t there social programs, or welfare, or something better than that? Doesn’t he know what he is doing?”

Turning his face away from Jan, he looked out the window as he answered. “Yes, Ms. Fields, he knows.” Then, looking back to her, his eyes narrowed. “But he is a man, a proud man. What you just saw was the result of failed or sham programs that the former government used to justify its existence. I have no doubt that somewhere along the line, a politician or social worker arranged a mediocre job for the tragafuego that we saw. And no doubt, the tragafuego worked at it until the funds ran out or the program closed down after the politician was re-elected. As for welfare, I shouldn’t need to remind you that we are a proud people. Your North American ideas of welfare serve only to break the spirit. That man, the tragafuego, would rather die a slow and miserable death than lose his pride.”

No sooner had Guajardo said that than the sedan stopped. Jan turned to see where they were. She had been so absorbed in her conversation that she had not noticed they had driven into an area that was little better than a shantytown. The sudden transition, from the clean, broad boulevards of the city center to the squalor of this slum of Mexico City, was unsettling to Jan. She was not ready to deal with this. In her travels, she had been in such ghettos before. Still, she never grew used to them. She had a great deal of difficulty accepting that people had to live in such conditions, and that there was nothing she could do to change that. Whenever she knew she would need to go into a ghetto or into a place like this, it took her days to condition herself to deal with the despair, filth, and poverty she knew she would see. She had not been able to prepare herself for this trip, and it threw her mentally and emotionally off balance, a condition she was struggling to correct as Guajardo prepared to leave the safety of the sedan.

The driver opened his door, jumped out, and ran to open Guajardo’s.

When Jan looked back at the colonel, he smiled a sly smile, one that reminded Jan of a cat eyeing a bird. “At the Palacio Nacional you asked what motivated us to do what we did, Ms. Fields. Come with me, and I will show you.” Without waiting, Guajardo turned away and exited the sedan.

The stench hit Jan before she even left the car. A dizzying combination of decaying garbage and human waste assaulted her nose, irritating its lining like pepper and causing her to gag. Pausing, Jan instinctively brought her hand up to her mouth and nose. Guajardo, waiting for her several feet from the sedan, watched in amusement. For a moment, he felt like calling out a snide comment, but decided to wait. There would be ample time to rub her nose into the reality of Modern Mexico.

Regaining her composure, Jan swung her legs out of the sedan, planting her feet into the discolored goo of the unpaved and rutted street.

Again, a momentary expression of disgust registered on her face, causing the smirk on Guajardo’s face to broaden.

Jan, looking up at Guajardo, realized that she was not only making a spectacle of herself, but was reacting in a way that Guajardo, no doubt, had anticipated, perhaps even had counted on. This, and her own inability to control her reactions, suddenly angered her. Determined to show that she was made of sterner stuff, she sucked in a deep breath, distasteful as this was, and forced herself to stare back at Guajardo with a face that was as determined as it was defiant.

The change in Jan’s demeanor wiped the grin off of Guajardo’s face.

Realizing that she had managed to rally to his first challenge, he decided it was time to press on. Time was valuable and he was already falling behind. In a tone that was, for the circumstances, artificially polite and sweet, Guajardo invited Jan and her crew to follow his driver, Corporal Fares.

As if on cue, Ted and Joe Bob came up, equipment at the ready, on either side of her. Placing a free hand on her left shoulder, Joe Bob leaned over and whispered in Jan’s ear, “You okay, Miss Fields?”

Reaching across her chest with her right hand and lightly grasping the hand Joe Bob had on her shoulder, Jan nodded. “I’m fine. Now let’s go see what the good colonel wants to show us.” With that, she let go of Joe Bob’s hand and stepped off.

The strange procession caused the people in the streets of the slum to stop what they were doing and watch as it went by. Corporal Fares, wearing a nervous look on .his face, led the group. Every so often he looked to the side, nervously nodding his head at a neighbor who recognized him. Behind him came Guajardo, walking tall, erect, and seemingly unconcerned with the squalor of his surroundings. Several feet behind the colonel were Jan, Ted, and Joe Bob, all traveling in a tight little knot with Ted and Joe Bob holding their equipment at the ready.

Only the soldier who had driven the van for the camera crew remained behind, occasionally shooing away dirty children dressed in rags when they came too close to the sedan and van.

The tumbledown shanties, shacks, and hovels that lined the filth-strewn dirt street were constructed of every imaginable material. Some were made with cinder blocks, either loosely piled up one upon the other or cemented together with uneven layers of mortar used by the amateur builders who laid the blocks. Scattered between the hovels made of cinder blocks were other homes built with irregular scraps of plywood or wooden boards. These, like the cinder-block homes, varied depending upon the skill of the builder. All were no more than six or seven feet high, had a single door, often without a frame, and few if any windows. Their roofs, flat and barely visible to Jan, were either boards covered with a thin layer of tarpaper or loosely connected strips of corrugated metal.

As they trudged along, Jan began to take note of the people. They parted as Corporal Fares and Colonel Guajardo approached, slipping away into their homes or into the dark, narrow spaces between them. Jan looked at them as she passed. In the spaces between the homes, amid heaps of rubbish and discarded building material, small children and women watched as she went by. In one alley, Jan was shocked to see a woman, her back to the street, squatting over an open hole, relieving herself. That, no doubt, Jan thought, accounted for part of the stench. For a moment, Jan wondered why she was doing that in the open. Then, looking back at the size of the houses, she realized that they were far too small and crude to hold a bathroom inside. For the next few feet, Jan looked between the homes, searching for any signs of an outhouse, but saw none. Satisfied, and disgusted at the same time, she stopped looking.

Other details began to jump out at her. Above the houses, a wild patchwork of electric wires and extension cords running from telephone poles crisscrossed, running into access holes in the houses. On the ground, running between the houses, garden hoses of every color and size snaked in and out of other holes chipped or cut through the walls. It took no great genius to figure that this was how those fortunate enough to afford the material provided their homes with water and electricity.

In their wanderings, Jan could not find any street markings or numbers on the houses. She began to wonder if there were any. While she was working on this problem, Corporal Fares stopped in front of a cinderblock house, no different than many of those they had already passed.

Sheepishly, he looked up at Colonel Guajardo. The colonel, without changing expression, simply nodded, giving permission to, or ordering, Fares to enter.

Turning to Jan and her crew, Guajardo finally spoke. “Before, Ms.

Fields, you asked me what made me decide to raise my hand against the government to which I had pledged undying loyalty. I tried to think of the words that could describe this to you.” He paused, stretching out his arms, palms up, and rotating his torso as he looked away from Jan and at the crowded slum in which they stood. Dropping his arms, he turned back to Jan. “But I could not. How, I thought, could I describe this in words that a well-bred, cared-for, and educated yanqui woman such as yourself could understand. Better, I thought, that I allow you to see, for yourself, what it meant to be a Mexican under the callous rule of the
PRI
. So I have brought you to the home of my driver, Corporal Fares. Perhaps, when you have seen this, you can better understand what is causing not only me, but millions of others like me, to take desperate steps. You may, if you like, film this. Perhaps you can think of the words that have escaped me.”

Suddenly, the confrontation with his driver, the nervous silence in the sedan, and Corporal Fares’s uneasiness as they had walked down the street, made sense. The corporal, obviously ashamed of his home, was being forced to expose it to strangers. That, and the fact that Jan realized that the colonel was making a crude effort to use them for propaganda, angered her. Her dark expression, displaying the anger and contempt she felt for Guajardo, was returned by the colonel, who, for his part, felt hatred for a person who sought only the truth that fit her own clean perception of how the world should be.

Jan turned toward Joe Bob and barked out her instructions in a tone that betrayed her disgust with Guajardo. “All right, let’s get on with this.

Give me a hand mike.”

Pulling out his earphones and sliding them over his head, Joe Bob turned on the recorder, listened for a moment, then reached into a side pocket and pulled out a mike for Jan. While he was doing so, Ted hoisted the camera onto his shoulder and waited for Jan’s cue to start shooting.

Without any of the normal preliminaries, except for a quick check of her long reddish-brown hair, Jan gave the cue to start shooting. When she saw the red record light and Joe Bob give her a thumbs-up, indicating the mike was hot, Jan began without really knowing what she was going to say. “Jan Fields from Mexico City. About an hour ago, while interviewing Colonel Alfredo Guajardo, a member of the council of colonels responsible for today’s dramatic coup here in Mexico, I asked the colonel why he decided to turn against the popularly elected government of Mexico. His response was to take me, and my camera crew, to this slum in the suburbs of Mexico City. The home we are standing in front of, barely better than a shack, supposedly belongs to his driver, a corporal in the Mexican Army. While it is not unusual for rebels to claim that they represent the will of the people or justify their actions by publicly displaying the plight of the people, thought it would be appropriate to allow the colonel an opportunity to state his case. So here we are, at the home of Corporal Fares, Mexican Army.”

Giving Ted the signal to keep rolling, Jan turned to enter the cinderblock house. For a moment, she felt good. The brief piece before the camera, her little introduction, had had a calming effect on her. For a second, she felt she was back in control, running the show. All she had to do now was maintain the edge and keep Guajardo from dominating the interview. Like a fighter entering the ring, she was ready.

The scene that greeted her, however, shook her. With the trained eye of an observer, in a single sweep of the one-room house, she took everything and everyone in, and was appalled. A single light bulb, precariously dangling from a cord in the center of the room, provided the only source of light. Guajardo, standing just inside the door to the right, was silently watching Corporal Fares as he hugged a girl of six or seven. She was thin, bordering on scrawny, with jet black hair pulled together in a braid. Her big eyes, wide with fright, were turned up to her father as she held his leg with a viselike grip.

Across from Fares, on the wall to the left of Jan, was a small portable two-burner stove, the only kitchen appliance in evidence. Next to it stood several wooden boxes, neatly stacked and attached by boards on either side, creating a shelving unit in which pots and pans occupied the lower section, or box, while other cooking utensils and boxes filled the top two.

In the corner, next to the stove, was an old kitchen table with a broken leg, surrounded by four chairs, none of which matched. Against the far wall was a mattress sitting on the floor. Though Corporal Fares partially blocked Jan from seeing the entire mattress, she could see that someone was on it. Curious, and anxious to see what was so important about this particular home, Jan moved around the corporal.

As she made this move, Jan’s head struck the bulb, causing it to swing haphazardly from its long wire. Distracted, she moved farther into the room, almost up to the edge of the mattress, before looking down to see who was on it. When she did, she gasped in horror.

The child lying there was little more than a skeleton. It was hard to judge her age because her face was distorted by bulging eyes sunk deep into their sockets and surrounded by black circles and hollow cheeks.

Still, based on her length, the girl had to be ten, maybe eleven. Her arms and legs showed no sign of muscle; the joints, both kneecaps and elbows, were clearly visible. The only indication that she was alive was a shallow, raspy breathing that caused her chest to rise and fall ever so slightly.