What more is there to say about Rojano? It’s a sob story better left untold. It consists of our two years as high school chums in Xalapa, then four as rivals at university in Mexico City where our shared obsession was Anabela Guillaumín. Rojano won. He left her, then he married her (I simply lost her.). He went in for Macazaga suits and political breakfasts at the Hilton. He joined the eternally governing PRI and became a minor functionary in the administration of López Arias in Veracruz. I went to work as a reporter on the police beat and took up the vice of journalism with all the trimmings. It was the 60s. We had come through the railroad strike and were headed towards the Tlatelolco massacre and the end of the Mexican miracle. Our lives as grownups were beginning.
After not seeing her for two years, on August 14, 1968, I ran into Anabela in the Arroyo Restaurant near the Olympic Village where she was working as a guide. She was as tall, slender and irresistible as ever with the same dazzling eyes. She owed their smoky green color and the surname of Guillaumín to the French occupiers who settled in Veracruz a century ago.
She skipped work, and we drank coffee all afternoon. She talked about Rojano, who was organizing student gangs and their leaders (“social services”) at the University of Veracruz and who, in drunken pre-dawn phone calls, accused her of slighting him. For dinner we had skewers of Chihuahua beef and beans cooked peasant-style with chiles at Pepe’s on Insurgentes. She joked infectiously about working as a guide for peace. She spoke of her father’s death a year earlier-her mother died fifteen years ago-and of Rojano, his jealousy, his threats, the blow that almost tore her lip off one night, of how he had Mujica, a classmate she’d gone out with three times, beaten up. We drank vodka and danced until three in the morning at La Roca. She made fun of my qualms about being a reporter, and she talked about Rojano, the abortion he forced her to have, his demands, and his neglect. Drunk and talked out in the early morning hours, I lost her again, this time in the entrance to the Beverly Hotel, which reminded her, one more time, of Rojano.
They married two years later, the same month that Luis Echeverría rose to power and the Institutional Revolutionary Party recognized Francisco Rojano Gutiérrez as undisputed leader of the CNOP, the National Confederation of People’s Organizations, for the state of Veracruz.
I moved up from the police beat to city hall, then covered the airport for a few months. In early February 1971, I was just starting out on the agriculture beat when I ran into Rojano again in the main office of what was then the Department of Agrarian Affairs and Colonization. We hadn’t seen each other for four years, since Christmas 1967 when we got into a fight at the Monteblanco Bar on Monterrey Street in the Roma District.
He had sprouted a mustache that hung like a horseshoe from his lips to his chin and was dressed in a double-breasted white suit, an orange shirt, and a tie of what were then called psychedelic colors. He had a fistful of papers in his hand and was in the process of authenticating a land deed. He was talking non-stop straight into the ear of a clerk.
“You’ve got to understand me, paisano.” He waved the sheaf of papers in the face of the hapless clerk and, by calling him paisano, appealed to the consideration one expatriate from Veracruz supposedly owed another.
As an ex-swimmer, he still had broad shoulders and a flat torso. When he threw his arm over the clerk’s shoulder, he engulfed the man in his enormous chest as if he were about to devour him. I tried not to be noticed, but Rojano caught a glimpse of me over the head of the beleaguered clerk.
“Is that you, brother?” His eyes lit up. The appeal of his vulgarity was impossible to define. He smiled and held up the papers. “I’m almost through here. Don’t go away.”
I got what I’d come for and left without waiting through the door of the neighboring office. He ran after me and caught up with me in the parking lot. “You don’t need to run, brother. I’m not a bill collector.” He grabbed my arm, gasping for breath.
He sucked air and loosened his tie. “I didn’t greet you properly up there because I was working.” He moistened his lips, readjusted his tie. “I was dispatching my daily lawyer. I don’t have to tell you the world is full of assholes, and, if you don’t knock off at least one a day, then one of them will knock you off. Where are you going to eat?”
We ate at El Hórreo, a Spanish restaurant with a lively bar that overlooks the Alameda. Rojano ordered malt whiskeys and octopus sauteed in Rioja wine. He went on and on about politics in Veracruz, an endless parade of friends, enemies, crooks and assholes. He had detailed plans for his rise to governor and then to a federal cabinet post. First he’d become a mayor, then a state cabinet secretary, then a federal legislator; from there he’d go on to governor and federal cabinet secretary. He laid out a twenty-four-year career in politics free of setbacks or delays but with variations if necessary. If becoming mayor proved impossible, then he’d settle for a job in the state executive branch that would pave the way to the federal legislature. If that didn’t work out, then president of the PRI or a position in a state-owned enterprise from which, with a bit of effort, he’d become a cabinet minister. If the cabinet were out of reach, then.., and on and on.
We ordered cognac and coffee after dessert. He offered me a huge cigar from his coat pocket. On the band it said: Especially wrapped for Francisco Rojano Gutiérrez, Atty.
Rojano had dropped out of third-year law (I got fed up after four), so I asked him. “When did you become a lawyer?”
“When we graduated together,” he replied smiling. “Don’t tell me you can’t remember. We did that thesis on mass politics and the Mexican state that was later plagiarized by Arnaldo Cordova. We even drew a mention from Flores Olea, don’t you remember? Then you went into journalism and I took up government service. That’s what got us where we are, brother, each serving the Republic in his own way. Let’s toast to that, we’re both doing fine.”
We matched each other drink for drink all afternoon, cognac and coffee until seven when we moved on to the Impala to hear Gloria Lasso sing. I woke up in the Silver Suites on Villalongín next to a woman I neither recognized nor remembered. In the bed next to mine Rojano lay snoring atop another woman. He had one sock on and the other off and a two-strand platinum bracelet on his wrist.
I changed to a newspaper that offered me the political beat and a daily news column called “Public Life” that became self-supporting in a matter of months. I set up a file system and stocked it with the exact sources and details of things hinted at over working breakfasts or dinners, in press offices, or in the columns of colleagues. In 1973, my column drew an honorable mention in the annual competition held by the Press Club of Mexico. The following year, I won the club’s national prize for timely news coverage.
I stopped seeing Rojano, but I didn’t lose sight of him. He returned to his post at the University of Veracruz in Xalapa, then ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the state assembly from the district of Tuxpan. On February 4, 1972, Rojano was involved in a shootout in Juarez Park in Xalapa. The lone casualty was attributed to him, but though the victim was seriously injured (he didn’t die), the charges against Rojano were thrown out in the course of a complex legal proceeding. In the year that followed, Rojano dropped out of local politics. He bought land in Chicontepec and got himself named an inspector for what was then the Rural Cooperative Credit Bank. In 1973, he resurfaced as a federal legislative hopeful in local newspaper columns and even in the column “Political Fronts” in Excelsior. The scheme failed although its real purpose was not to get elected but to make noise, to gain credibility within the party for achieving his real goal of becoming mayor of Chicontepec in elections to be held the following year. That didn’t work out either, and he left the Rural Credit Bank in one of the anti-corruption purges the bank undergoes every couple of years. When the Veracruz state government changed hands in 1974, he returned to Xalapa as private secretary to the government secretary, a college friend who had previously been the private secretary of the incoming governor.
In 1975, I covered part of the PRI presidential campaign that every six years floods the country in a frenzy of ostentation and hope. The campaign of Treasury Secretary José López Portillo consisted, like all campaigns since Cárdenas in the 1930s, of a wide-ranging tour of the Republic, town by town, city by city with a retinue of local políticos, favorite sons, leaders, bosses, bureaucrats and orators in tow. This time the tour began in Querétaro, then moved on to the Pacific Coast. It rang in the New Year in the south with an enormous banquet at the base of the Chicoasén Dam in Chiapas (guests and food flown in by helicopter). The campaign proceeded through northern and central Mexico, then rolled through the southeast and down the Gulf Coast before winding up in my home state of Veracruz, which we entered through Agua Dulce in March 1976.
The pressroom was barely set up at the Hotel Emporio in the port city of Veracruz when Rojano came looking for me. I had trouble recognizing him. The two-strand platinum bracelet was gone along with the horseshoe mustache and the psychedelic colors. His face and waistline were beginning to fill out, the pleats of his guayabera and the creases in his pants were painstakingly precise, and his brown moccasins were freshly shined.
“Is that you?” he asked, leaning his elbows on my typewriter.
He spoke warmly without the least hint of sarcasm. Somehow it touched a chord in me. It brought back the years we hung out together in the hilly streets between his house and mine in Xalapa. Walking home from school together, we shared our dreams and ambitions to achieve, accomplish and succeed. We’d go to Mexico City, come back with degrees that would dazzle the neighbors, and ring in a new era for the politics of Veracruz. We’d stamp out bossism, rein in the cattle ranchers, beautify Poza Rica, pave the port of Veracruz, and get rid of pollution in Minatitlan. It was as if my affection for Rojano would suffice to transform the world we were about to leave and to which we would inevitably return.
“It is,” I said.
He pulled up a chair, sat down next to me, and placed a mollifying hand on my thigh.
“I have something I need to talk to you about,” he said.
“For more than two lines there’s a fee,” I replied.
“No joke, brother. This is serious. It’s all about politics and the press. Something a professional like you can use.”
He ran out of words, but his eyes were still lit up.
“You want to run for the legislature again?”
“No, this is personal. All I ask is an hour in private. What can that matter to you?”
“It can’t, but there’s a fee for more than two lines.”
He gave up with a smile of submission and pulled himself together.
“If that’s how it has to be, then so be it. What time do I pick you up?”
At ten that night, I climbed into the frigid air conditioning of his black Galaxy.
“Anabela wants to say hello,” he said. “Do you mind if we take care of this at the house?”
“I do, but that’s all right.”
“What’s done is done, brother.”
“How’s Anabela?”
“Fine. We’ve got a five-year-old boy and a girl, four. We live a quiet life, a boring life in the provinces. I’m in Xalapa and come home every weekend, sometimes more often. It depends. Anabela couldn’t handle Xalapa. It brought back bad memories. She’s right. I really screwed up, you have no idea how much. Now I’m paying the price, I’ve stopped drinking.”
“Who are you screwing?”
“No one, brother. Like I said, I lead a simple provincial life.”
“You don’t even get any from your wife?”
“Watch it, Negro. Don’t screw around with me.”
“You’re no family man. The disguise doesn’t suit you.”
“It’s no disguise, brother.”
“Then call it a facade. It still doesn’t fit.”
“If that’s what you say, then it must be so. But the other stuff was killing me. Now I’m at least in limbo. It’s a thousand times better, I swear.”
He seemed overcome by an excess of caution, an angelic slowness. He even drove like an old man. It was both amusing and hard to believe. We went slowly around the soccer stadium and entered a recently opened subdivision with vacant lots between many of the houses. Rojano’s took up two lots and had a pitched roof in the architectural fashion then popular with the provincial nouveau riche. The fence was a row of heavy iron bars topped with sharp white finials. The front of the house combined imitation marble walls with sliding windows of smoked glass and aluminum molding. Inside were easy chairs with woven upholstery and carved wooden arms, a plaster reproduction of the Venus de Milo, and miniature porcelain footmen in a glass showcase.
As soon as we entered, he shouted for Anabela to come down, then removed the plastic coverings that made the easy chairs awkward to sit in. He went to a corner of the room occupied by a piece of furniture meant to resemble the bar in a saloon. He looked over the bottles and again shouted at Anabela to come down. He needn’t have. For several seconds she stood on the landing of the stairway, nervous yet composed, silently watching me with nothing better to do than moisten her lips and pull the sleeve of her dress down over her watch.
Eight years and two children later: Anabela de Rojano. Beneath the modest elegance of her tropical chiffon dress, her bodily perfection, the symmetry of legs and shoulders, remained intact despite the first visible bulges of a what in a few years would turn her into another kind of living statue, a matronly Venus of ample proportions.
“Is that you?” she said just as Rojano had.
It annoyed me to hear her echo him-and to realize that my adolescent jealousy still smoldered. She stepped away from the stairs and kissed me on the cheek.
“Are you going to want whiskey?” Rojano asked from the bar.
“Offer him something to eat, too,” Anabela said. Turning to me, she added, “Nothing comparable to the restaurants you’re used to, but the food here will remind you of home.”
“I brought caviar,” Rojano trumpeted from the bar.
“You see?” Anabela said ironically. “He brought caviar. And we have Oaxaca tamales made by the mother of one of Ro’s godchildren.”
She never called Rojano by his first name. She always used his surname or in more familiar moments Ro.
“We have deviled ham, too,” Ro added from the bar. “And candied chestnuts for dessert.”
He approached with a bottle of Old Parr and an ice bucket on a large tray. There was a Coca Cola for Anabela and for him soda water with no ice. He made a show of pouring it with the glass held at eye level, at my eye level actually.
In the next hour I consumed three whiskeys and twenty crackers with caviar and deviled ham while enduring a conversation about schools and the consolations of provincial life. Around eleven, using the wail of a child upstairs as an excuse, I attempted my getaway. By then I estimated that festivities would be well under way in Mocambo where the city government was throwing a party for the press.
“Don’t leave,” Anabela begged as she headed for the stairs and the source of the wailing. “At least wait till I come down.”
“That’s right, brother. Wait for her to come down,” Rojano reiterated as if reading from a script.
Once Anabela had disappeared up the stairs, he reminded me, “I’ve still got something to show you.”
As he spoke, he regarded me intensely with a stare held over from another time, then he made a nervous exit through a door in the back of the house. His demeanor confirmed my suspicion that his newfound respectability and stability were pure show, the appropriate backdrop for a proposal of whose nature I was, for the moment, unaware.
I went back to the ice bucket for a fourth whiskey and waited.
He returned from the back of the house with a package under his arm but would not let me see it in the sala. Instead, he took me into a small room, a combination pantry and office that we entered through the garage. Inside was a desk, a pair of dusty file cabinets, an empty bookcase, and several crates of mangos and oranges stacked in one corner. An enlarged photo of Anabela sat on the desk. It showed her running towards the camera with her hair blown back from her forehead by the wind and her thighs clearly defined under a black skirt with a blur of forest in the background.
He pushed the photo aside and lay the package, a bulky manila envelope marked remittances, on the desk.
“I’ve been working on this for two years,” he said.
He undid the red string between the seals on the flap and the body of the envelope, then took out what looked like a leather saddlebag. It was, to be more exact, a square leather letter file with a rigid center panel and four flexible dividers that closed like an accordion over the documents between them. On each divider there was an engraving: a pasture; a factory smokestack; an oil well; and the head of an Olmec statue next to an Indian woman with long braids. Each divider bore the caption Destroy to create in large rustic lettering with the motto Whoever can add can divide in smaller letters below. Each image was framed by a border composed of intertwined pseudo-Aztec figures.
Rojano opened the leather dividers exposing three file folders, each wrapped in different-colored onion paper. Nervously and with painstaking care—he’d begun to sweat—he opened the first packet.
It contained a set of photos of semi-nude cadavers still fresh and bleeding from wounds to their skulls and bodies as they lay on stone slabs in what had to have been a smalltown morgue. Eight photos of eight bodies, among them a child of about ten, his lips pulled back by rigor mortis to expose his teeth, his small eyelids half shut. The caption in crude white lettering beneath the photos read: Municipality of Papantla, Veracruz, July 14, 1974. Also in the packet was a photocopy of the death certificate issued by the office of the public prosecutor, a file of some twenty pages, and the plat of a parcel of rural property with the surveyor’s seals and notations in the margins.
Rojano pushed the letter file and crepe paper to one side of the desk and slapped the photos down one by one in two rows of four as if dealing a deck of cards.
“There they are,” he said without looking up. His demeanor spoke volumes about hours wasted poring over this macabre game of solitaire. “What do you think?”
“What do you want me to think?”
“Don’t you see something strange about them?”
“That you’re collecting them so meticulously.”
“I’m serious, brother. Does the date mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“It’s the carnival of Corpus Cristi in Papantla.”
“Did they get killed at the carnival?”
“In part. They all died in the same incident.”
He waited for me to ask about the incident. I asked, “What incident?”
“At the market in Papantla,” he explained. “The police report said a group of armed men burst into the market screaming insults against Antonio Malerva. This guy.”
He pointed to a naked man with a big belly on the top row with two punctures in his ribs. He had a large mustache and a thinning curl of pompadour.
“He was eating lunch at a food stall when they caught up with him,” Rojano went on. “Witnesses said shooting broke out, and the death toll is what you’re looking at. But there’s a problem.”
He paused, waiting for me to ask what problem.
“What problem?” I asked.
“Antonio Malerva was unarmed,” Rojano said and again fell silent as if certain of the effect this revelation would have.
Granting the effect of the revelation and with due curiosity, I asked the required question. “Then who did the shooting?”
“No one knows. The fact is that none of the attackers were killed. The other fatalities were the woman who owned the food stall and her daughter.”
He pointed to the photos on the right in the lower row: a woman with Indian features who had been shot in the neck; and a girl with full lips and two bullet holes in her adolescent breasts.
“The two customers eating next to Malerva were also killed,” Rojano continued. “Prospero Tlamatl, a local Indian who helped at the church during carnival. He was identified by the priest.” He pointed to the left end of lower row: two shots to the neck, a blood soaked dress shirt, and a jaundiced complexion that contrasted with a scruffy whitish beard.
“And this last guy’s nameless. He was never identified.” He now pointed to the emaciated effigy of a peasant with leathery skin and no teeth whose blazing, half-open eyes recalled the photo of the dead Che Guevara.
“What makes this guy last?” I asked. “You’ve got three photos to go.”
From left to right next to the shot of Malerva were the photos of a man, a woman, and the child who caught my eye first.
“That’s precisely what I’m getting to.” Rojano said. He placed them in the middle of the desk. “What strikes you about them?”
First of all, they were bloodier than the others. The only blood-free part of the woman’s face was the tip of her nose. It was a classical face, the kind an artist might draw with a straight nose descending from a rounded forehead to flaring nostrils. Her widely spaced eyes lay deep in their sockets, and her high cheekbones all but disappeared in their final ascent to her temples from which a liquid seemed to flow, covering her lifeless features with a patina of wax.
“They belong to the same family,” Rojano said. He pointed to the adults. “Raul Garabito, who was a farmer, and his wife. The child is theirs. Now look closely. There are bullet wounds in the Garabitos’ bodies just like the others. The women and the child have wounds to the chest, the man’s are in his abdomen and ribs.” He pointed with his pen to the wounds in the photos. “But look carefully at their heads.”
There followed the requisite pause.
“Do you see the problem with their heads?”
I nodded mechanically.
“I’m talking about the source of the bleeding.” Rojano sounded vaguely impatient.
“From the wounds,” I said.
“From the wounds to the forehead,” Rojano asserted. “That’s exactly the problem.”
I drained what remained of my drink and once again put myself on the line. “What exactly is the problem?”
“They were all killed, but the only ones they made sure of were the ones they were after,” Rojano stated with conviction.
“They claimed they were, but the ones they made sure were dead were the Garabitos, not Malerva.”
“You’re saying that because of the shots to the head?” I asked.
“I say it because they were executed,” Rojano replied.
Acts of bloodshed have a peculiar kind of loquacity. I’d seen it often as a police reporter. People get run over minus their socks but with their shoes still on, shots penetrate a lung but cause only minor hemorrhaging, suicides who fire a .45 at their forehead wake up at home the next morning with a new part in their hair. There was no reason for the Garabitos’ head wounds not to follow the coarse logic of bullets.
“That’s what happens when people get caught in a crossfire,” I started to say.
“What crossfire?” Rojano insisted heatedly.
“You said there was a shootout, and these people got caught in the crossfire.”
“That’s what the witnesses said,” Rojano noted. “What I said was that Malerva was unarmed. What’s more, the Garabitos were also unarmed. So the question then becomes which of the victims fired? The Garabito kid? His mother? The woman with the food stall? Her daughter? Prospero Tlamatl? The unidentified guy? Tlamatl and the unidentified guy don’t have twenty pesos in their pockets between them. Can you imagine them with pistols in their waistbands?”
What I needed to do was not to imagine them but to follow Rojano’s logic. “So according to you, what happened?” I asked.
“The same thing that happened the following month in Altotonga,” Rojano said as he reached for the second file.
He unwrapped the (purple) crepe paper and spread the file’s contents over the desktop. It was a collection of newspaper clippings that explained how a drunk had fired into the crowd in Altotonga during the festival in honor of the town’s patron saint on July 22, 1974. He wounded five and killed two before fleeing, Rojano explained, growing increasingly agitated. “He’d fired at least a dozen times because he hit twelve targets,” Rojano declared. “Unheard of marksmanship for a drunk.”
“He fled almost four blocks, and the mounted police who supposedly gave chase couldn’t catch up with him. At the very least he was a surprisingly fast drunk,” Rojano surmised, “and they didn’t catch him later either.”
He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and dried the sweat from his lips and cheeks.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“What didn’t happen. Read on.”
He handed me the autopsy reports on the cadavers. Certain passages were carefully underlined in red. In stilted coroner’s prose, the documents described the deaths of: Manuel Llaca, age 29, by shots from a .38 caliber pistol that struck him in the right groin area, the rib cage, and the left shoulder; and of the widow Mercedes Gonzalez de Martín , age sixty-four, from wounds to the abdomen, left arm, right gluteus and left temple (the latter enclosed in a double red circle). The report went on to detail the wounds inflicted on the other five casualties.
“Count the shots,” Rojano said. “Twelve shots counted one by one.”
I asked about the shots.
“They show the same pattern as in Papantla,” Rojano said, drying his hands with the kerchief. “Shooting breaks out, several people get killed, but only one gets the finishing shot to the head.”
“The woman shot in the head?”
“The woman they made sure was dead, yes.”
“What makes you think they’re the same?”
“Look at the circumstances,” Rojano started to say. The facade of domestic tranquility was cracking, and his habitual vehemence began to show through. “A drunk fires twelve shots from a .38 revolver, kills two, and injures five. But the .38 with a twelve-round magazine hasn’t been invented. The biggest ones have eight. Sot…, the drunk changes magazines in the midst of the shootout or someone other than the drunk is shooting.”
“Maybe he had two pistols.”
“He didn’t have two pistols. According to all the witnesses, he had one. But even if he had two pistols, how was he going to finish off the widow Martín? He never got that close to her.”
“You’re saying they were all shot in the head to make sure they were dead. So what? If you’re killed by gunfire, bullets are what kill you.”
“No, no, listen to what I’m saying!” Rojano leaped from his chair. “The Martín woman was already down when she was shot in the head. The shots came from in front of her. First she was shot in the abdomen, then in the left arm, and the impact flipped her over. That’s why the next shot got her in the butt. But she was shot in the temple in cold blood when she was already on the ground. They took advantage of the confusion to finish her off.”
His version was admirably descriptive and precise. It also betrayed many imaginative hours reconstructing what happened from a blur of forensic data.
“She could still have been hit in the shootout,” I insisted.
“What shootout, brother?” Rojano began pacing about the office, wiping his collar with his kerchief. “You’re looking at an execution, damn it! Don’t you see?”
“I see, but I’m out of whiskey. Is the bar closed?”
“Of course not. Whatever you like.”
He left the room, and I took a closer look at the files. The surveyors’ plats identified properties belonging to Raul Garabito and Severiano Martín. The former consisted of 300 hectares in the municipality of Chicontepec; the latter nearly 500 wedged between the eastern spur of the Sierra Madre and the Calaboso River in the municipalities of Chicontepec, Veracruz, and Huejutla, Hidalgo.
I opened the third file and saw more photos from provincial morgues. These were from Huejutla, five bodies cut down during the town carnival (November 1974) a few months after Papantla and Altotonga.
The accompanying newspaper clip from El Dictamen said that gunmen (i.e. the henchmen of local political bosses) mowed down the Arrieta brothers whom it described with characteristic editorial impartiality as “leaders of smalltime communist pseudo-peasant organizations.” The gunmen “achieved their objective at no risk to themselves by firing into the crowd at a cockfight killing five and wounding four. Except for the Arrietas, who were notorious communist agitators in rural Hidalgo, the remaining victims of the shooting were innocent bystanders.”
A typed list of the dead summarized Rojano’s very different version of events. Rather than the Arrieta brothers, he put check marks next to the names of Severiano Ruíz and Matías Puriel. I looked them up in the coroner’s report. Rojano had underlined the same sentence where it was repeated in two different paragraphs: “Projectile penetration is also visible in the left parietal area with severe disruption of the encephalic mass and superficial external burns characteristic of a projectile fired from a distance no greater than thirty centimeters.”
I was beginning to study the surveyors’ plats when Rojano returned with ice and mineral water which he placed on the stack of orange and mango crates next to the desk.
“The pattern is identical,” he said with a nod towards the third file while opening the bottles. “The Arrietas died in the shooting, but they weren’t the ones executed.”
He was already into his story so I served myself and asked about the executions.
“They were half brothers,” Rojano said, beginning to drink from one of the water bottles. Then, surprisingly, he added, “They were both sons of Severiano Martín, the man whose widow was executed in Altotonga.”
“All from the same family?”
“Sons of Severiano Martín, a dirty old stud who knocked up every woman around and sowed the whole area with sons. He didn’t give them his surname, but he gave his land to the two who got killed in Huejutla.”
“In Chicontepec?”
“Exactly. You looked at the plats already?”
I nodded.
Rojano continued: “Old man Martín had 1,500 hectares of the best land in the area, and he died without a will like all the other old-time bosses. But between them Severiano Ruiz and Matías Puriel owned some 350 hectares. They killed the widow who had 500 and executed the half brothers. That makes 850 hectares in all.”
“And who wound up with the land?”
“That’s the thing, nobody did. The lands went unclaimed.” Once again Rojano grew excited by his own words. “It turns out there are no heirs or relatives left to file valid claims to these lands. In a nutshell they can be easily acquired with a combination of money and the right political connections.”
“What do you mean in a nutshell?”
“In a nutshell I mean that two whole families have been executed in cold blood with alibis built in to divert attention at a cost of nine dead and nine more wounded.”
“That’s absurd. How did you manufacture this information?”
“How did I manufacture it?” Rojano bellowed as he leaped out of his chair. “Don’t fuck around with me, brother. I didn’t manufacture it. Ask me how I found out, not how I manufactured it. There’s nothing slanted in what you’re looking at, nothing inconsistent or made up.”
“Then how did you find it all out?”
“Anabela was the godchild and niece of the widow Martín whose maiden name was Mercedes González Guillaumín.” Rojano pulled out his kerchief as he spoke. “Aside from that, there are the letter files, the leather saddlebags the folders came in.”
I picked up the folder on the desk. Rojano kept talking.
“Everyone who was executed received one of these letter files months before receiving a bullet in the head. The one you have in your hands reached the widow three weeks before the bullets in Altotongo. Here are the others.”
He groped behind the orange crates and retrieved two tooled leather letter files covered with dust and pseudo-Mexican artwork. He ran his fingertips over the one he had in his hands. The quality of the leather was extraordinary, thick but smooth and malleable to the touch like cloth. Whoever can add can divide.
“In the leather letter files there were offers to buy the lands described in the documentation,” Rojano said. “I found them in their houses afterwards. Garabito’s widow had hers sewed up the sides to make a handbag. She had it with her at the market in Papantla when she was executed. Here it is.”
It made a horrible handbag. There was a strap attached to the letter file with gold staples so it could be worn over the shoulder.
Rojano continued: “A servant of the widow Martín had it, a servant who was sort of a nursemaid to Anabela. There are close ties among the families with French blood. They don’t say Martín, they say Martán, and not Guillaumín, but Guillomé. The nursemaid said the stepsons had received the same kind of folders. According to her, the evil eye came with them.”
“But you said that what came in them were purchase offers.”
“Each one was actually an ultimatum, a final offer that was the last in a series.”
“How do you know that?”
“From the best possible source.” Rojano rubbed his kerchief between his hands. “I was told by the buyer himself.”
The whiskey had had its effect. I didn’t react, but the tale with all its scaffolding struck me as quintessential Rojano: overblown and labyrinthine with an agenda shrouded in shadows. I was glad to see him return with more liquor. I set my suspicions aside and relaxed for the first time all night.
“You mean to say you know the buyer?” I asked. “You know the would-be benefactor of these ex-landowners?”
“That’s not all I know, brother.”
“A schoolmate?” I went on. “A childhood friend?”
“Not quite, brother. For the last two years we’ve been having coffee whenever he’s in the city. That’s where the story begins as far as you’re concerned.”
“You mean the man behind this massacre?”
“Yes, the brains. We have long conversations whenever he comes to town.”
“To plan the future of the children of Veracruz?”
“Don’t fuck around with me, brother. It’s no laughing matter.”
“You’re the one that sits down with him, and he’s the one who collects dead people.”
“To feel him out, brother. To get to know him.”
“What other reason could there be?”
“Stop wising off for a minute and listen to me, Negro. That’s not the whole story. The problem is there’s almost no way I can avoid having him as a political ally.”
I got up and served myself a sixth shot of the whiskey whose therapeutic effects were increasingly hard to resist. “Congratulations on your ally,” I said as I sat down again.
“It’s not up to me,” Rojano said. “He carries a lot of weight in the municipalities in the northern part of the state.”
“And what do the elections in the northern part of the state have to do with you?” I said. “You’re from the south, from the coast at worst. What do you have to offer as a candidate in the north? Aside from planning the future of the children of Veracruz.”
“That’s what the governor wants.”
“Is it what you want?”
“That doesn’t matter. I’m a politician, I go where I’m needed. But if you want to know what I want, I’ll tell you. Besides, you know perfectly well what I want. I want to go back to Chicontepec as mayor.”
“The better to plan for the future of the children of Veracruz.”
“You’re jerking me around,” Rojano said.
“I’m not jerking you around. Just let me guess: you want to go back to Chicontepec so you can fight from within.”
“God damn it, Negro. You’re jerking me around.”
“To wage war on your ally from within. I mean so you can plan a better future for the children of Veracruz.”
“The better to screw your mother, Negro.”
“Of course, why else?”
“Stop playing games with me, damn it. You’re just jerking me around, that’s all you’re doing. I’m speaking from the heart, I’m baring my soul to you, and you’re just jerking me around.”
He sat down in the chair behind the desk and ran his hand wearily through his hair as if his fatigue would rub off. Enervated and half asleep, he took a swallow of the highball I put on the table, then another and another until he’d emptied the glass, ice and all.
“For a man who doesn’t drink, you have a taste for whiskey,” I said.
“One more thing,” he replied, picking up where he left off. “Anabela owns land in that same area.”
I stepped to the orange crates to refill what Rojano had drunk, but the ice and the soda were gone. I poured myself straight whiskey and took a drink. It was absurd how the same old rage kept coming back, the feeling that Rojano’s entanglements meant trouble for Anabela, that he was unfairly putting her at risk. “You just finished showing me a collection of photos of women and children who were killed for nothing,” I told him. “And now you’re telling me Anabela could be involved. What’s going on? What are you getting at?”
“Anabela owns land in the same area as the Martín and Garabito families,” Rojano said. “She could be part of the same scheme.”
“Has she got an offer?”
“An offer? No.”
“So?”
“Like I say, her land borders the widow Martín’s. It’s mostly hills, just a few hectares that don’t amount to much at all. But they do share a boundary. And farther back, away from the river, towards the foothills leading to the Sierra Madre is El Canelo.”
“What’s El Canelo?”
“My farm.”
“You know perfectly well I bought land a few years ago, 100 hectares on the way to the mountains.”
“And Anabela’s 25. That makes 125.”
“125.”
“Of awful land I suppose. An emporium of hardscrabble caliche.”
“It’s excellent land,” Rojano said. “But I didn’t bring you here to talk about that or to have you laugh at us. Anabela inherited from her family, an old local family. I managed to buy next to hers. I did it the Mexican way. For my kids, as insurance against political unemployment. What’s wrong with that?”
I served myself another small shot of whiskey and drank it, keeping an eye on Rojano over the rim of the glass. His hair was mussed as if he’d just gotten out of bed. His guayabera was soaked with sweat. His bloodshot eyes stared down at his hands and watched his thumbs rub obsessively against each other. I realized once again that I was watching a show, a display of Rojano’s political will as he started down another twisted path and came to a turn that in one way or another had begun to include me. I served myself a last thimbleful of whiskey, feeling as if I were part of a bad dream in that strange office with its stacked boxes of oranges and mangos next to metal file cabinets and a desk. I swallowed, then, without the least bit of sarcasm, asked in a spirit of solidarity attributable to two doses of whiskey in quick succession,
“What do you want me to do?”
“To keep your eyes open,” Rojano said anxiously. “Help me investigate this whole business. Let something drop in the national press when the time is ripe and there’s something for us to gain. For the time being just keep it to yourself. We’re talking about someone who’s no fool. We’re talking about a force that has to be stopped now before it’s too late.”
“What’s your friend’s name?” I asked.
“He’s not my friend, he’s my enemy.”
“Your enemy and ally, your benefactor. What’s his name?”
“Lázaro Pizarro.”
“Where’s he from?”
“The oil workers’ union up north.”
“Poza Rica?”
“Poza Rica.”
“Can you send me copies of those files? We go back to Mexico City tomorrow.”
“They’ll be in your room by 10 tomorrow.”
I managed another thimbleful on the way out. It was almost midnight, and Anabela was no longer in the sala. I didn’t make a point of trying to see her. She’d be upstairs with her children, worn out by the maternal drudgery of rattles and diapers, just beyond the shadows where Rojano pored over files behind her back.
I returned to the Hotel Emporio, bathed, and headed for Mocambo. That night the city government was throwing a party for the national press corps at a ballroom called the Terraza Tropicana. The festivities were still in full swing as the new day dawned. There was music, dancing, an open bar, and girls. A young chorus girl was drinking mint juleps at the bar. She had a fine and noble nose just like Garabito’s wife whose smooth and bloody countenance still floated in my head.
At noon the following day the press caravan returned to Mexico City according to plan, but neither Rojano nor his files showed up in my room. The prolonged orgy of information and money with which, every six years, the nation invents its president moved on. Nothing stops the presidential campaign. It gives the candidate seven or eight months to project and amplify his voice, his force of will, his face and his gestures. It lets him proclaim his innocence of past disasters and his patriotic determination to put things right as he marches in triumph from one town to the next. He is heard on every radio station and seen on every television screen until he becomes the great idol, the newly mythologized president of Mexico.
We were boarding the plane when news reached us of the assassination of peasant leader Galvarino Barría Pérez in northern Veracruz. He was mowed down by gunmen in an ambush near Martínez de la Torre. I recalled Rojano’s files and the bloodshed typical of rural Gulf Coast politics. Then I forgot about it.