We got a new president, and his economic stabilization program had unexpected teeth. It featured salary caps and the first public disclosure that Mexico’s finances were in thrall to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund. We played the chess game that comes with each new administration as the press and the government sound each other out.
In late February 1977, I received a hand delivered envelope marked confidential with a message advising me of the possibility of an interview with Lázaro Pizarro during the first week of March. On the back of the card I wrote: “With the sole condition that I may write about whatever I see and hear.” The following day the same messenger returned with another card: “March 6 in Poza Rica. The interested party should be at the Hotel Robert Prince.”
I wrote a detailed report on the whole affair (protocols, sources, contacts, conditions for conducting the interview). I sent the original to the editor of my newspaper along with the files from Rojano. I also made sure my friend on Bucareli Street got a copy. Then I planned my trip. Doña Lila was on a month-long vacation to her home in Tuxpan, a few kilometers from Poza Rica. I phoned and asked her to reserve me a hotel room. On the morning of March 1, I took the seven o’clock flight to Tampico, rented a car at the airport, and completed the two-hour drive along the road that follows the sparkling Tuxpan River as it winds its way to the sea. Shipyards lined the right bank, and on the left stood the eponymous Tuxpan de Rodríguez Cano, so named in honor of the politician regarded as the city’s most illustrious native son. From Tuxpan it was less than an hour’s drive to my final destination in Poza Rica.
Doña Lila was waiting in the lobby of the Hotel del Parque, immediately in front of the park itself, eating a guava.
“You came alone in all this heat?”
From the window in my room you could see the sandbar at the mouth of the river and in the distance-at once vast, dirty, and brilliant-the iron gray of the Gulf.
“Do me a favor, Doña Lila.”
“You name it.”
“Find out where Lázaro Pizarro has his office in Poza Rica.”
“And what have you got to do with Lázaro Pizarro?” Doña Lila said. For a moment she ceased gnawing her guava. “Do you know who that man is?”
“You know him?”
“Around here everybody either knows or knows of Lacho Pizarro.”
“Can you find out where his office is?”
“I don’t have to find out. His office is in the Quinta Bermúdez in Poza. Anyone in Poza Rica can take you there. Why are you going to see Lacho, if I may ask?”
“I’m going to interview him.”
The following day, March 2, I left Tuxpan very early. Four hours before the appointed time I was on my way to the Quinta Bermúdez. Just as Doña Lila said, everybody in Poza Rica knew where it was. It was the hulk of an old mill dating from the time of Porfirio Díaz. It had a high mansard roof perfectly painted cinnamon brown. A white stripe along the upper slope led the eye around the building as a whole. Rather than a mill, it was now a huge warehouse bursting with perishable produce such as citrus, vegetables, and fruits as well as grain and bales of hay. Half the structure was taken up by docks for unloading the produce. When I arrived at seven in the morning, the day’s activities were already on the wane, but trucks continued to pull in, rolling over the moist green droppings from prior deliveries and crushing them. Behind the loading docks and storage facilities were the mill’s living quarters. The large, rough-hewn wooden door in the front was held shut by thick bolts and wrought iron hinges. A detail of armed guards kept watch over the entry, walkie-talkies in hand.
As previously agreed, I showed them the business card of my paisano on Bucareli Street. That got me admitted to what at first glance looked like a garden where another guard detail stood watch. A second look made it out to be rather more than a garden. A dense grove of India laurel trees filled much of the space. Their shiny roots snaked in and out of the ground like the tentacles of an octopus, and their fronds kept the fierce sun of Veracruz at bay. There were also clumps of bamboo and oleander bushes spilling torrents of red down the walls. A system of paths led over a reinforced cement bridge. In one corner of the garden was a small kiosk with wooden grillwork and the pinkest honeysuckle imaginable wherever it managed to take hold. One of the guards went to request instructions. I waited with the others, hypnotized by the honeysuckle.
A quarter hour later I was let into another small patio, an enclosed orchard flanked by the rooms that made up the house’s interior. We followed the corridors-all painted cinnamon brown with white striping-that led past the rooms to an even smaller patio that in times past must have been the stable. A handful of people waited there. Next to the wash tubs an enormous oleander bush arched over one wall so lush and red that I at first failed to notice the small doorway through which I was led by the guard.
I entered the penumbra of a large room with an opening at the back leading to a kitchen and another brightly lit patio. In the room was a small parlor set plus a dining area with two glass china cabinets. The room was separated from the two rooms to its right solely by a pair of curtains that revealed, as they waved in the breeze, an old box-spring bed with a brass headboard and a studio with wicker rocking chairs and a large desk where two men were conversing.
What was most distinctive and in a way most disconcerting about the place was the lack of decoration. The dining table expressed even greater austerity than the whitewashed walls. All the chairs had been pushed back against the walls except for the one at the head of the table where there was a plate, on top of which was a lone jar of yogurt or whey. A spoon, a salt shaker, and a sugar bowl were deployed around the plate along with a slender water glass and a honeysuckle bloom from the kiosk.
A man emerged hurriedly from the studio, his pace so rapid he seemed to float. He was wearing a tee shirt and sandals, and his hair was wet from recent bathing. He looked about fifty, his skin leathery from long exposure to the sun. He was short and very dark, his posture decidedly erect. He glanced at me as if I were a piece of furniture and proceeded to the lone chair at the table.
“Have a seat,” he said without looking at me. He took the place at the head of the table.
It was Lázaro Pizarro. Three men followed him into the room. One pulled up a chair for me; one gripped my arm, directing me to sit; and the third took his place behind the seat of the man in the tee shirt. I seated myself as I’d been told and began to observe him. He had a low forehead, and his hair had gone white at the temples. The narrowness of the space between his slightly hooded eyes added to the intensity of his stare which was magnified through his bifocal glasses.
“Have you had breakfast?” He sounded stern and still refused to look at me. He stared into his jar of yogurt, or perhaps whey.
“No.”
“Give him some breakfast.”
One of the men went to the kitchen. Pizarro reached for the sugar bowl and made a precision task of carefully removing the lid. As I watched him jiggle the spoon in his right hand, I saw that half his little finger and a phalange of his index finger were missing. It was an extraordinarily strong hand, a strange instrument of calluses and hard curved nails. There was a malarial whiteness to the skin of its palm, and its sun-cured back was lined with nerves, wrinkles and tendons. His arms and neck matched the hand as did his collarbone and face, especially the forehead. He had the look of someone long acquainted with effort and adversity. They had left their mark on a body that seemed both dignified and mutilated by much hard work.
He put the first spoonful of sugar into the jar and stirred.
“Yogurt or whey?” I asked.
I listened to the echo of my own voice which failed to affect Pizarro’s concentration.
“Fresh cream,” he replied. His voice was thin but resonant, his words clipped. “Cream fresh from the barn. Do you want to try some?” Once again the stern question. He sounded cordial though very much accustomed to giving orders.
“Give him some fresh cream,” he commanded, still without looking at me.
The crackling sound of hot oil and the smell of lit burners wafted from the kitchen where two women and a boy with bare feet were hard at work.
“You weren’t supposed to come until next week,” Pizarro said, poking at his cream.
“That’s right,” I said. “But I was on vacation in Tuxpan. It was nearby, so I decided to come sooner.”
“Once I went to a celebration of the saint’s day of a paisano named Manuel Talamás,” Pizarro said. He continued to work at his cream and had yet to look up from his plate. “He was a very dear friend, and we agreed that I would arrange a serenade to begin after midnight. But it was raining, so I decided to start early. I changed the time to Wednesday, June 10, 1971, at 10:30, and he didn’t hear us arrive. Manuel lived outside of town where there were no street lights and no sidewalks. We got there around 10:20. We began setting up, and people started to gather for the serenade. But that’s not what it sounded like to him. He thought a fight was brewing because he didn’t expect us until later, and he’d had problems in the neighborhood that day. Somebody was after him, or that’s what he thought. The point is he heard us and got confused. He started firing his carbine out the window to defend himself against the mob he thought was coming to lynch him.”
“The woman who keeps house for me is from Tuxpan,” I said. “She came to spend a few days with her family, and I came to see if we could do the interview ahead of time.”
Pizarro’s aide brought a large bowl of heavy cream from the kitchen and put it next to me. “Serve yourself, sir.”
Behind him the barefoot boy brought me white bread rolls—toasted and sliced in half—on one plate and my own sugar bowl, not the one already on the table for Pizarro, but a different one. I praised the fresh cream and served myself generously.
“Juice and fruit.” Pizarro’s order sounded purposely frugal as if he disapproved of my portion of cream. “The climate of Poza Rica is ideal for work,” he said, starting in on his carefully doctored cream. “The gas flares and the natural heat put people in a bad mood so they work harder.”
“In the heat you tire faster,” I said.
“You don’t need to worry about getting tired. Around here nobody’s working so they can live longer. They work because they have to. Being in need is humiliating, and humiliation turns to rage. When you’re angry, you have more energy and you work better. The heat helps sustain the anger. When did you get to Tuxpan?”
“Yesterday”
“You got tired of Tuxpan in a hurry.”
His people brought in an enormous dish of fresh tropical fruit, mangos, pomegranates, melons, bananas, small sapotes, guanábanas, and a plate with cubes of papaya, watermelon disks, sliced lemons. And a glass of orange juice. It was all laid out to my left well away from where my right arm brushed the space occupied by the sugar bowl, the plate, the flower, and Pizarro’s conversation.
“Did you stay at a hotel in Tuxpan?” Pizarro said in the stern voice that made questions sound like statements.
“The Robert Prince, yes.”
“That’s in Poza Rica,” Pizarro said.
“The Hotel del Parque. Excuse me.”
“It’s on the river,” Pizarro remarked as if testing me and requiring an answer.
“Overlooking the shipyard.”
I took some papaya cubes. Before I could finish, the boy in the kitchen was back with a plate of small Veracruzan meat pies oozing with lard, sauce and cheese plus a beaker of atole made from beans.
“Are you from Veracruz?”
“From around Córdoba.”
“But not from Córdoba itself.”
“Not exactly.”
“Then from where?”
“Near Huatusco has a name.”
“I was born in Coscomatepec.”
“Then you’re Veracruzan to the bone. Small towns are the real Veracruz. I’m from Chicontepec.”
He pushed his dish of cream aside, and one of the men immediately removed it from the table. He also picked up the napkin Pizarro had just used to wipe his mouth and the sugar bowl from which he served himself. He was then served carrot juice on a new plate with a fresh napkin. I in turn was served fried eggs swimming in a red sauce laced with an herb called epazote. The boy who brought them placed the fruit dishes a comfortable distance to my left alongside the platter of eggs and a basket of fresh tortillas wrapped in a white cloth. One of the women from the kitchen also appeared and set next to the basket a new plate of very small, perfectly arranged stuffed chiles. Before I could react to the abundant spread before me on the table, the boy brought a steaming mug of atole and another of coffee. The combined aroma brought back memories of my childhood full force.
“Who are your relatives in Tuxpan?” Pizarro said upon taking a first sip of his juice. He continued to ask questions in a tone of voice that made them sound like statements, and he still wouldn’t look at me.
“A family by the name of Ceballos,” I replied. It was the surname of Doña Lila’s family.
“Your relatives or your servants?” Pizarro said after a second sip.
“Relatives of a woman who works for me in Mexico City.”
“It’s an old Tuxpan family. There’s an old lieutenant colonel named Ceballos who fought with Pelaez in the mountains,” Pizarro said, gazing at the sprig of honeysuckle in its fragile vase. “She must be related to those Ceballos.”
“She must be. There aren’t that many Ceballos to chose from around here. Do you live in Mexico City?”
“For the last fifteen years.”
I was served a new basket of warm tortillas though I’d barely nibbled at one in the first basket, which was promptly taken away.
“Fifteen is a lot of years,” Pizarro said, then resorted once again to his odd way of asking questions. “Don’t you like your breakfast or did you lose your appetite?”
He took another sip of his juice and dried his lips with his napkin. One of the men quickly removed the glass, the dish, and the napkin. I understood that breakfast was over. What remained in front of him were the things that were there when he came in, the corolla of honeysuckle in its solitary vase.
“You must be a good journalist,” Pizarro said. He slowly looked me over, facing me for the first time. His black eyes were small and set close together. They seemed extraordinarily alive and at the same time ice cold, twice distorted by his bifocal lenses. “And we’re going to let you into our small world. We’ll do it despite your attempt to catch us off guard by showing up early. But I have nothing to hide so long as you’re a man of good will. All I ask is that you try to understand rather than catch us off guard. And you will understand if you try. Otherwise, we’ll just put up with you, but you won’t surprise us again. Eat your eggs while I put my shirt on. People start coming in at eight.”
He got up and left. Alone at the table, I suddenly realized I was totally surrounded by trays laden with fruit, eggs in chile sauce, atole, beans, bite-size meat pies, tortillas and mugs of assorted liquids. It was the exact opposite of the place where Pizarro’s sat. The space he left at the table looked frugal and untouched. It was utterly empty now because, upon getting up, he had also taken with him the vase with the honeysuckle.
I ate some of the eggs in chile sauce and drank some of the atole before Pizarro’s aide approached and told me to follow him. I entered the room with the wicker chairs and the desk. The desk was huge, fit for a pharaoh, though it consisted solely of one broad plank. It was thick and unvarnished but very well polished. Its legs were similarly thick. There were no papers, no drawers, no decoration except a wedge of opaque glass nameplate. Against its red background was lettering the color of aluminum. In lieu of a name it read: Don’t criticize. Work.
Pizarro was seated behind the desk reading newspapers when I entered. He’d put on a white guayabera. Next to him was a man I hadn’t seen before. The man had a clipboard with a ballpoint dangling off it, and whenever Pizarro finished with a newspaper the man set it on a small table against the wall.
“This is from the governor. Someone needs to talk to his pal,” Pizarro said, pointing to a story with a red check mark next to it. All the papers were checkmarked in red or blue. “You can handle the guy from Diario de Xalapa. Don’t let him stay too long. Don’t let him think we’re being defensive. Come in,” he said to me before turning back to his aide. “This is a reporter from Coscomatepec. He’s based in Mexico City. This is my friend and secretary Genaro Roibal.”
The man named Roibal extended his hand without saying a word. He looked about forty. He was white and impeccably shaved with a quasi-military haircut. Though no taller than Pizarro, his muscular physique attested to a serious commitment to the martial arts.
“He’ll be with us,” Pizarro explained, “the same as you, the same as everybody else. Let him see and hear everything. So if he’s willing to understand, he can.”
“Whatever you say, Lacho,” Roibal said as he recovered the last newspaper from the desk. Then, in movements that brooked no nonsense, he gestured for me to sit in the wicker chair beside the desk to the right of Lacho Pizarro. An armed man stood at my side, and there were two more in the doorway to the diningroom. There were no windows, just the intense glare of two neon tubes in the middle of the ceiling. On the white wall behind Pizarro was a heavily retouched portrait of Lázaro Cárdenas with the presidential sash across his chest. He looked very young, his eyes sweetly melancholy as if lost in post-coital contemplation. Beside him was another portrait which, though also large, was considerably smaller and whose subject was José López Portillo, then President of the Republic. To the sides, above and below these two objects of devotion, were far smaller portraits depicting the presidential succession from Ávila Camacho to Echeverría. A purple rag covered the face of Miguel Alemán from the nose down, endowing the former president with a comical resemblance to a bank robber in a western movie.
“What have we got?” Pizarro said.
“El Negro Acosta is back. He came very early,” Roibal replied.
“Money?”
“No,” said Roibal. “The usual.”
“Send him in,” Pizarro said. He pulled a rubber band from the pocket of his guayabera and began fidgeting with it.
El Negro Acosta came in, a huge, dark-skinned Veracruzan with African features and curled eyelashes. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his eyes were bloodshot. He wiped the sweat-and possibly some tears-from his face with a handkerchief that darted in and out of sight between his hands.
He stood before the desk (enormous back, enormous gut, enormous buttocks) trembling like a child. The handkerchief shuttled from one side of his face to the other as he gasped for breath. Finally, he collapsed sobbing into the chair in front of Pizarro.
“What’s the trouble, Negro?” Pizarro said.
“You already know, Lacho. I don’t have to tell you.” El Negro Acosta dabbed his eyes with his handkerchief. He seemed horribly ashamed and out of control at the same time.
“I want you to tell me,” Pizarro said. “Tell me exactly what the trouble is.”
“My wife Antonia, Lacho, the day before yesterday she slit her wrists. She did it in front of the children, and now she’s in the hospital.”
“Where are the children?”
“With their grandparents.”
“You mean Antonia’s parents?”
“Antonia’s, Lacho.”
“And why did your wife slit her wrists?”
The spasm of grief that overcame el Negro Acosta made him bounce up and down in his chair.
“You know why, Lacho, you know already.”
“I know, but I want you to tell me,” Pizarro said. He ran the palm of his left hand across the top of the desk. “Now quit crying. You’re not even crying for real. You’re crying for a drink because you’re hung over, and I want to talk to you, not your hangover. So talk to me, tell me the whole story.”
El Negro Acosta sat up straight in his chair, smoothed his handkerchief, and wiped his face one last time. “Right, Lacho. I’ll tell you just like you want me to.”
He launched into the sordid tale of a prolonged bender. He drank with friends for two days non-stop, then went home for more money. He was after the savings for his daughter’s quinceañera. He beat up his wife, Antonia, to get it, then left. But the next day he returned with a friend to continue drinking at home. His wife wasn’t around, but his daughter was. He forced her to sit down and drink with them, and then he offered his daughter to the friend as a gift. The girl ran out of the house. This frightened his two small boys, and when they began to cry, el Negro Acosta beat them. Thinking that her daughter, who wouldn’t stop crying, had been raped, his wife stormed back into the house. She grabbed a kitchen knife and accosted the two men who were still drinking. She tried to attack el Negro with the knife, but when he threw her on the floor, she began to slit her wrists. The two boys raced out of the house shouting that their mother was dying, and that brought the neighbors out. They took the wife to the hospital and the children to their grandparents. That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday el Negro Acosta stopped drinking, and today he’d come to see Pizarro. It was the fourth time this sort of thing had happened in the past year.
“If there were any justice in the world,” Pizarro said very slowly in his thin precise voice, “you’d have been castrated before you ever had a daughter, Negro. But there is no justice in this world, so there you sit, sorry for what you did and humbly begging for help. You make it hard to remember that you’re a brother of ours.”
“I want you to help me get Antonia back,” el Negro Acosta said. “I want my kids back. What am I going to do without Antonia and my kids, Lacho?” Once again he was overcome with sobbing, his suffering so intense it couldn’t be ignored.
“I’m going to ask your wife to go back,” Pizarro said after several twists of his rubber band, shaping it into one form after another between his fingers. “I’ll have a talk with her and the children.”
“Yes, Lacho.”
“And they’re going to go back.”
“Thank you, Lacho.” El Negro got to his feet and stepped towards Pizarro to shake his hand. Roibal stopped him with a single move that ended in a knuckle jab to the sternum.
“I’m going to tell them they can go back because you’re never going to take another drink,” Pizarro continued as if Roibal hadn’t lifted a finger, his gaze fixed on the rubber band stretched between his hands.
“I won’t have another drink the rest of my life, Lacho. I promise you. I swear by my children.”
“That’s right, Negro. But this time you’re quitting for real,” Pizarro said. “And you know why? Because the last time I lied to your wife for you was the last time you got drunk.”
“Yes, Lacho.”
“This time I’m telling her the truth. You’re never going to have another drink as long as you live because we’re going to make sure that you don’t. Because nobody in Poza Rica is ever going to serve you another drink, and if anyone anywhere ever does, somebody’s going to be right there to keep you from drinking it. And every time we hear about you ordering a drink that we keep you from drinking, you’re going to get beat up at least as badly as you beat up Antonia in each of your last four drunks. And if you do manage to get a drink down before we can stop you, just one drink, it will be your last one because we’ll make sure it is.”
El Negro Acosta was still on his feet, staring down in horror and exhaustion at the little man in the guayabera who never raised his voice. His eyes remained fixed on the rubber band he wove between his fingers as with no further ado he sentenced the man standing over him to sobriety or death.
“Lacho,” el Negro blubbered. “You’re like a brother to me, aren’t you?”
“Like a brother, Negro,” Pizarro said. “And we’re going to cure our brother who’s been terribly sick. We’re going to drag him out of the hell where he’s been living and where he’s left his wife and kids. And the hell he’s put us through, too. Because we suffer with him and with his wife and children. We’re going to cure you.”
“Yes, Lacho.”
“There’s nothing for you to worry about because you’re in our hands now,” Pizarro said. “Any time you’re thinking about having a beer, just think about what you heard here where we love you. And don’t give it another thought. Just make sure you behave yourself. We’re going to get you out of the hell you’re in now.”
As if hypnotized, el Negro nodded. Pizarro continued:
“Go home and wait. I’ll go by the hospital to see your wife today. And to your in-laws’ house to see about the kids.”
“Yes, Lacho.”
“Take a bath, shave, and put on some clean clothes. Get someone to clean the house for you, and be sure there are flowers in the diningroom. Your family will be home this evening or tomorrow at the latest.”
“Yes, Lacho.”
“So get going.”
Demolished, El Negro staggered off. Pizarro turned to Roibal, who promptly approached him.
“Go tell Antonia we had a talk with el Negro. Tell her to go home, that this is the last time I’ll ask her. And if she won’t go today, then tomorrow. Pay the hospital, and keep an eye on el Negro all afternoon. He’s going to get nervous waiting, and he’s going to want a drink. If he tries to get one, work him over. Work him over so he won’t be able to get out of bed tomorrow or the day after. And then put the word out on the street that el Negro Acosta doesn’t get a drop to drink in Poza Rica. And if he leaves town, I want to know about it. And I want to know where he’s headed.”
“Yes, Lacho.”
“And for every month that he’s sober send him thirty thousand pesos from me, a thousand for every day he stays dry.”
Roibal made an entry in his notebook.
“Who’s next?”
“Your friend Echeguren and your godchild, his oldest son. They’ve been waiting for more than an hour.”
“Send them in.”
“Echeguren wants to come in by himself first, to explain.”
Echeguren, Pizarro’s friend and the father of his godson, entered in a redolent cloud of lavender water. He had a large bracelet on his right wrist and a gold watch on the left. There were large rings on his fingers. His chest and forearms bristled with hair, and more hair sprouted from his ears and nostrils. He wasted no time extending his hand to Pizarro, who shook it without getting up.
“What can I do for you, my friend?” Pizarro said.
“It’s my bonehead kid, brother.” Echeguren spoke without sitting down. He stood gesticulating in the middle of the room, then began pacing from one side to the other, visibly discomfited by my presence. “He’s thinking with his prick, Lacho, and I can’t control him. He’s been out of his mind for two or three months. He wants to marry his girlfriend, and he wants to do it by law, in church, and with the blessings of both families.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Pizarro said.
“The punk is barely sixteen years old,” Echeguren said with all the emphasis he could muster, “and the girlfriend’s fifteen. They’re nothing but a pair of brats who don’t even have full crops of pubic hair.”
“They have to start sometime.”
“I know that, friend, but they can’t live on illusions.” Echeguren looked me slowly up and down. “He’s a great kid, you know that, but he hasn’t even finished high school. He wants to drop out, find a job, and get married. I keep telling him, screw your little darling on the sly so you can both feel what it’s like and then take it easy. Take the time to grow up. I’ll tell you how to do it without getting her pregnant and so her parents won’t find out. I tried to tell him one day, and he chewed my ass out. He’s thinking with his prick, and he’s out of his mind, but he’s so damn pious and self-righteous, the little punk. You know what I mean.”
Once again Echeguren turned to look at me, disturbed by my presence and his own vehemence.
“And what do you want me to do?” Pizarro said.
“I want you to convince him I’m right.”
“And are you right?” said Pizarro.
“Suppose I’m not,” Echeguren said, looking back at me. “Suppose the little prick’s right. Fine, I’m asking you as a friend to do me the favor of convincing him he’s wrong. I’ve already tried everything. All it’s done is make him more determined to be stupid. The reason we’re here now is because, according to him, you’re the only one who can get him a job. As far as he’s concerned, we came to ask you to get him a job. So tell me I’m not screwed.”
“So what do you want me to tell your kid? I’m not a marriage counselor. I’m not his confidant.”
“You’re Lacho Pizarro,” Echeguran said, hands flailing. “Tell him whatever crosses your mind, whatever sounds good to you. Otherwise, he can go to hell. But you’re my last resort.”
Pizarro smiled. “Tell your kid to come in. I’ll have a talk with him, but you stay outside.”
“I’ll stay wherever you tell me to, but you tell it like it is to that little creep,” said the father of Pizarro’s godson. He gave me one more look and fled from the room. Young Echeguren came in, a strapping adolescent in a tight red shirt without an ounce of fat underneath it. He had blue eyes and the kind of youthful shyness that made it hard for him to do such simple things as walk without stumbling or shake hands or say good morning.
“Sit down,” Pizarro said while getting to his feet and beginning to pace about the room. He made a point of moving in and out of the boy’s line of vision.
“I want to congratulate you,” he said from behind Echeguren’s back. “According to your father, you’re a person who knows what he wants.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me. I mean what I say. Some assholes spend their whole lives screwing around without ever deciding what they want. People in their eighties, seventies and forties who go through life like a piece of seaweed floating with the waves wherever the tide takes them. You’re just sixteen, and your father tells me you’ve made up your mind. You know what you want.”
Praise made the youngster blush. Pizarro continued. “The world is full of small-minded people who never own up to what they want because trying to get it would be risky and they refuse to take risks.”
Young Echeguren buried his chin in his chest and stared at the floor.
“Above all,” Pizarro went on in the same tone of voice, moving placidly about the room as if strolling though a large garden, “you’ve convinced your father you want to marry and in order to marry you want to work and in order to work you have to drop out of school. What’s your girlfriend’s name?”
“Raquel,” young Echeguren said in a hollow, dry-throated voice.
“Raquel,” Roibal hastened to add by way of reinforcement.
“Who’s her father?” Pizarro said.
“Raquel Mandujano,” young Echeguren said upon getting his voice back.
“Chito Mandujano’s girl?”
“Yes,” said the boy.
“You’ve got good taste,” Pizarro said. “And so does the girl.”
“Thanks.” The boy’s voice rang hollow once again.
“It just so happens that your father talked me into doing things your way, and that’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get a job, and then you’re going to marry Raquel Mandujano. What do you want to do?”
“Nothing,” the boy said. “I want to get on with PEMEX and begin at the bottom. Be a grunt, whatever. Just to get started.”
“That’s what I thought,” Pizarro said. “That’s how it has to be and how it’s going to be. But there’s one thing I need to tell you first. Can I tell you?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said.
Pizarro stopped pacing. He stepped towards the desk and set himself directly in front of the youngster.
“If you’re going to work for PEMEX and start from the bottom, there’s one thing you ought to know,” he said, fixing him with his stare. “You don’t need to live the lesson in order to learn it, and plenty of others learned it before you. It’s as true as the earth is round. Even though experience tells us it’s flat as a witch’s ass.”
The kid gave a nervous, involuntary laugh. Pizarro sized up the laughter before sharing in it.
“And for flat asses, cocks at the upright,” he went on, evoking from the kid another nervous laugh. “It’ll have to be like a drill to get where you want to put it.” Pizarro persisted, sensing he’d found a weakness. “Do you know about Japanese cunts?” Young Echeguren squirmed and let out another laugh. “Do you or don’t you?”
The kid shook his head, still staring at the floor.
“Well, they’re sideways,” Pizarro said with a comic flourish and a horizontal slash of his hand.
Echeguran held his head up for the first time. He had a beautifully radiant smile and perfectly straight white teeth.
“What are they like?” Pizarro said in a commanding voice but without turning to Roibal, looking straight at the kid.
“They’re sideways,” said Roibal.
“And if you stare at them sideways, you know what happens?”
“No.” Echeguren scratched at one of his nipples.
“They wink.” Pizarro made a wink-like gesture with his fingers.
Young Echeguren relaxed in his chair and burst into open uninhibited laughter. Pizarro stepped closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder as if to congratulate him while also setting him up for some serious advice.
“You’re a good wholesome kid,” he said with a pat. “You’re the new blood that will wash us all away one day. It’s the world’s best cleanser. But there’s something else I was going to tell you about the job. Are you ready to listen?”
“Yes, sir,” young Echeguren replied.
“Here’s the deal,” said Pizarro. He stood with a hand on the boy’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “Around here work is hell. It’s dirty, it’s sweaty, and people get hurt. They burn out. They lose their energy, and then they lose hands and legs. They squander their lives in the muck. They have accidents, and they’re underpaid. In the Second World War, it’s said that a leader offered the English blood, sweat and tears. Here it’s like that on the job. Except this is a war without great speeches. It’s an everyday war of workers against their work, against gears, shafts and grease. The daily grind. You’re still getting over one day when the next day comes and you’ve got to get up and do it all over again whether you want to or not. Even though you’re bored and don’t have enough to eat, you go back for another shift that lasts all day and sometimes into the night. You just keep going. So there you are working like a fool, drenched in sweat and dreaming of a clean shirt or a Japanese girl with a sideways snatch. And suddenly, wham!” Pizarro took his hand off the kid’s shoulder and waved his mutilated fingers in the boy’s face. “Wham! The drill shaft got you. Wham! It went right through your leg. Wham! You get blown into the air, and when you land, you bust your ass on a rusted pile of castoff machinery.”
Once again he started walking back and forth. He paced the floor behind, around and next to the boy, holding his attention in a clipped voice meant to impress him and also me. “Then on the night of your day off, you leap on your old lady with a shout of glee, then you wake up crying because the fucking horn hasn’t gone off to end your shift. You wait and wait for it to go off. But you’re not in the factory, you’re at home enjoying your day off. You’re resting in bed next to your old lady. The trouble is you can’t even rest there. You sleep in fits and starts. You cuddle up to the little Japanese girl with the sideways snatch, you put your hand in the groove, and all of a sudden the groove is between the gear teeth on the drill shaft where your hand got caught. You’re not dreaming now, you’re on the job, and you just lost two fingers. That’s the war of the workplace wherever you are. And like any war, you only fight it out of need. You know who the smart ones are?”
“No,” the Echeguren kid said. He’d sunk back in his chair and was staring at the floor.
“The deserters,” Pizarro said. “The ones who don’t go in the first place, the ones that take off running the minute they can and who refuse to get stuck in hell. And that’s what I want you to understand if you’re able to. And this as well. The sweat, blood and tears from this war are what the world is made of, what you see in the street, what you eat, what you wear, the things you buy in stores, the special panties Japanese girls wear. And the fucking job is the only goddamn thing on earth worth respecting. The only thing.”
He planted himself in front of the boy one more time and glared at him with his cold inimitable stare. “If you want to volunteer for that, all right. You can have the whole fucking thing, don’t worry. It’s your blood, your dirt, your nightmares. You’re going to plead for titty and beg to get out of there like all the others. And like all the others you’ll have a houseful of kids and a wife with a big belly and a loose twat by the age of eighteen. I married my girl, and she died in childbirth. Did you know that?”
“No, sir,” the Echeguren boy said.
“The baby died, too. You know why?”
“No, sir.”
“Because I didn’t have enough money to take her to Mexico City where they could have saved her life. Because I was just a temporary day worker with no hospital benefits and no money to pay the fee. You’ll have your share of that. Sooner or later everybody does. They get their share because there’s no way out of it. No one chooses this shit. It hits them, and they can’t get out of the way. I didn’t choose to have my wife die from being poor. She died from being poor because that’s what we were. But if I’d been able to, I’d have sent her to get better not in Mexico City but New York. You want to volunteer for hell and take your wife with you. That’s not love. We have another name for it around here. But if that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get.”
He began pacing the floor again, rubbing his hands together as if purged by the outpourings of his own sermon. He pressed his hands to his temples and pushed the heavy shock of hair that had fallen over his forehead back into place. He massaged his eyes like someone suffering from conjunctivitis or prolonged sleeplessness. I had the feeling I was looking at an insomniac, a man who slept little and badly. It added unexpected meaning to his repeated descriptions of hellish nightmares and dreams in his talk with young Echeguren.
“I don’t intend to die of hunger,” the boy said, breaking a long silence. “How did you get out of that hell?”
“By shafting whoever got in my way, son.” His words sounded melancholy and paternal. “Stomping on other people, making them pay for my wife’s death as if everyone I screwed over was guilty of killing her. So I gave them the shaft, I got back at them, but to this day it hasn’t helped. It didn’t get her back because what matters most in the world is what you let go of and don’t have any more.”
“Then I’ll stomp too, sir,” young Echeguren said, summoning the courage to stand up to Pizarro.
The reply took Pizarro by surprise. He looked pleased and at the same time disconcerted. He paused for a moment.
“You may have the balls for it,” Pizarro said. “Being hungry helps just like it does for bullfighters, but it’s not everything. You just may have the balls to do it.”
“I want to prove that I do,” young Echeguren said.
“Then you’ll have your chance,” Pizarro said. He returned to his chair behind the desk and resumed fidgeting with the rubber band. “Give me two weeks to tell you where and how,” he added in a tone that made it clear the interview was over.
The encounter ended with a handshake. Young Echeguren left, and Roibal stood at attention before Pizarro awaiting further instructions.
“Let’s find out what this young stud is made of,” Pizarro said, sounding mildly sympathetic.
“Yes, Lacho.”
“Get Imelda after him, and once she’s got him milked out, make sure they hear about it at Chito Mandujano’s house. Have a talk with him. Tell him my godson’s father came to see me, tell him about Imelda, and, if he’ll listen, get him to understand.”
“Yes, Lacho.”
“Then, after he breaks up with Chito’s daughter, find him something to do. He may be mean enough to be useful. Who’s next?”
The brother of a woman whose son Pizarro had baptized came in to ask for a temporary job in the oil fields then opening up near Villahermosa, where his wife was from.
“Write a letter to the local in Villahermosa,” Pizarro told Roibal. “Have them give him a temporary job. I’ll sign it tonight, and they can pick it up tomorrow. Who’s next?”
A woman brought in tamales, as she did every week, because Pizarro had pulled strings to get her son a scholarship for the Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City.
“I hear you were by last week and didn’t come to see me,” Pizarro complained. “Tell him I don’t care about him, just his grades. When he gets them, I want to see them. Next.”
Two farmworkers from the El Álamo cooperative came in to see if Pizarro could help with a heretofore impossible tangle of red tape in the Veracruz governor’s office in Xalapa. “Have them see Idiáquez. Tell him to get it all straightened out and put it on the local’s bill. Have him get back to you right away. Who’s next?”
A woman from the red light district came in to complain that the mayor’s office wasn’t letting her work due to the whim of a councilman who wanted her all to himself. She asked Pizarro to do something about this obstacle. “Call the distinguished councilman and tell him the young lady’s working for us from now on. Tell him the right to work is inalienable. Who’s next?”
A PRI youth leader sought help in buying ten sewing machines and ten typewriters to raffle to his constituents. He got them. A mother of three children whose husband worked in the oilfields and had abandoned her asked Pizarro to guarantee payment of her food allowance. The union was resorting to legal maneuvers to deny her benefits, she said. Pizarro gave her a memo to give the union. A group of striking workers asked for help because their strike fund had run out, and management was sowing dissension with handouts of cash. They got 300,000 pesos.
By ten o’clock the heat in the office was unbearable.
“How many more?” Pizarro asked as if about to shut up shop.
“Ten or twelve.”
Pizarro headed for the door and signaled me to follow him. The guards in the entrance stepped out in front of us. In the blinding light and heat of the orchard, beneath the jagged shadow of the huge oleander and the row of banana palms behind it, was Lázaro Pizarro’s waiting room. Two Indian women from Zongolica rushed to kiss his hand as if he were a priest. A widow clung to the arm of her adolescent son. Also among the waiting were a group of temporary PEMEX workers, two representatives of the local Red Cross, a municipal police officer, and a circle of peasants. They held their hats to their chests, and their hair either stuck up from their heads in sweaty spikes or lay plastered to their foreheads by the heat. Pizarro greeted them one by one and explained they could either leave their requests in writing with Roibal or come back tomorrow. “You can go to union headquarters,” he told the temporary workers. “And you’ll get your full pension, don’t worry,” he said to the widow.
He lowered his voice to address the Indian women from Zongolica. “You don’t have to kiss anybody’s hand.”
Minutes later we were in the main patio. Ahead of us were some four, six or eight men who served as his escorts in the vehicles Pizarro used to get around in. His car waited at the entrance to the main house. Pizarro and I climbed in back, and Roibal got in front.
“Dinner party at Mostrador,” he told the driver over the intercom. “L-1 on Zero. Expect fifteen casings at Mostrador. All on the way, in 4.”
A vanload of armed men pulled out in front of us, and two Galaxies fell in behind.
“Leave me at union headquarters, and go back to take care of those people,” Pizarro told Roibal. “I’m taking our journalist to La Mesopotamia, and we’ll be back to eat this evening. That’s all. When we get back we’ll have dinner with Cielito and our journalist if he’s willing to dine with us. One more thing. Find out if the piece in the paper came from the governor or from his asshole security chief.
Rojano worked for state security in Xalapa. I got the message without blinking an eyelash.