She stayed in Mexico for two weeks. The first was celebratory and euphoric, the second bureaucratic and anomic. The first week ended with a prolonged meal at Champs Elysées inevitably accompanied by lots of Chablis and much needling of waiters.
“The only reason we’re back is because we ran out of restaurants,” Anabela told the maitre d’. “Don’t think it’s because we like French.”
We ate out every night that week, then went to some show or other that didn’t let out until after midnight. Inebriated, with no purpose except our own amusement, we were erotically inventive, content to let the days slip by without the shadow of Pizarro hanging over us. We awoke hungry and still excited by a lingering alcoholic buzz from the night before. By two in the afternoon we were on our way to the restaurant of the day where we ordered fresh seafood, restorative libations, and lavish meals culminating in long strolls on Reforma or through the center of the city window shopping. We browsed the exclusive stores where Anabela picked out dresses, scarves, handbags, and finally a sable coat in the hidden corner of a shop on Luis Moya.
There was in her spree an element of gloating that she never openly admitted. She simply let the evidence pile up slowly in her wake. By week’s end the first signs of satiety set in, an upset stomach, a measure of erotic overload, the touch of sadness that always accompanies an excess of euphoria.
We drank the first bottle in silence on the open-air terrace at Champs. Clouds blurred the moon as it made its way through the trees on Reforma.
“There’s something I didn’t tell you about my last interview with Pizarro,” I said to Anabela while uncorking the second bottle.
She raised the chilled wineglass to her face and began to rub it back and forth as if caressing her own cheek.
“On the way back from the interview our friend from Internal Security pulled over at a spot where we could talk in private,” I said. I’d left this part out of the letter, but the omission didn’t seem to bother her. She half closed her eyes and smiled, taking a first step into the soft haze brought on by the Chablis.
“He arranged the meeting,” I explained. “He went with me.”
“Your guardian angel,” Anabela said. “What did he tell you?”
“We talked about Chanes.”
“About Chanes?”
“According to our friend from Internal Security, Chanes didn’t attack Quinta Bermúdez.”
She smiled a gentle smile. She looked skeptical and just a bit drunk.
“Pizarro died of cancer,” I went on.
“Cancer from a .38 pistol,” Anabela said.
“Of terminal pancreatic cancer diagnosed a year ago.”
“Diagnosed by Edilberto Chanes?”
“I’m serious.” I took a quick drink. “According to our friend from Internal Security, Chanes was one of the thieves that got ripped off and killed off by the police. The story was in the papers.”
“In your column yesterday?”
“It also ran yesterday in La Prensa, the piece about the robbers robbed by the police.”
“Chanes wasn’t named,” Anabela said. “You didn’t name him in your column.”
“Neither did La Prensa because the names haven’t been officially confirmed yet. But according to our friend in Internal Security, Chanes was involved. He had nothing to do with events at Quinta Bermúdez.”
“And you believe your friend in Internal Security?” Anabela continued to rub the wineglass against her cheek before taking a drink.
“I argued with him about all the coincidences in the case.”
“And what did he think about all the coincidences in the case?”
“That they were coincidences. According to him, Chanes is just what he seemed, a small-time extortionist who saw a chance to make money by promising to attack Quinta Bermúdez and get rid of Pizarro. When he saw there was no money in it for him, he dropped it. But it’s possible, according to our friend in Internal Security, that he sent you the pouch in December in hope of scaring you into giving him money later on. He was biding his time on that when the Jaguar Group from the metropolitan police caught up with him and disposed of him in the Tulancingo car crash.”
“More.” Languidly, she held out her glass for me to fill. “What else does your friend in Internal Security have to say?”
“Nothing else. That Pizarro died of cancer, not at the hands of Chanes. That Chanes was killed not by Pizarro but by the police. And that we got our signals crossed.”
“Oh, Negro,” Anabela sighed. “There’s nothing like Chablis to smooth the rough edges. This must be our eleventh bottle of Chablis in the past four days, right?” She stretched slightly. Her cheeks were red, her eyes half closed as if she were rocking herself into a daze. Then she snapped out of it, took a drink, and continued. “So you believe the version of your paisano on Bucareli?”
“The unanimous version in Poza Rica is that Pizarro died of pancreatic cancer. I checked that out this week.”
“So you believe him?” She rubbed the full glass against her cheek, making a point of looking half asleep while at the same time mocking me. “Have you already forgotten what he told us in December?” Imitating our paisano’s ceremonious speaking style, she said, ‘You won the fight, ma’am. Pizarro will die of the wounds inflicted by your emissary.’ Then in her own voice. “I didn’t send any emissary.” Then our paisano’s. ‘Leave Mexico, and wait for your enemy’s corpse to be put to rest, ma’am. I have no interest in putting you on trial, ma’am, justice isn’t my job. My job is to keep the peace.’ Don’t you remember that, Negro? What kind of big-time columnist are you turning into? Every few months they tell you another fairy tale, and you go right along with it. More.”
Her manner turned sarcastic as she held out her glass and shrugged her shoulders. We had a third bottle chilled, then ordered oysters, trout almondine, and the Alaskan crab legs from the display tank in the foyer.
“Does it sound ridiculous to you?” I said, returning to the version of our paisano on Bucareli.
“It sounds to me like something out of a movie. Why ply me with such nonsense in December if it was all a lie?” Anabela said, again working the glass back and forth over her cheek.
“To get you out of the crossfire. To keep you from trying to find another Edilberto Chanes and insisting on getting even with a corpse.”
“In order to help me, then?” Anabela said ironically.
“To help himself and keep things from getting too complicated. Suppose Pizarro gets shot. How do you explain that to public opinion? And how do you make amends with the oil workers?”
“Suppose Pizarro got exactly what Rojano got.” Anabela put her glass down on the table with an air of exasperation. “What would your paisano on Bucareli and his bosses and accomplices in the government do then? They’d do what they did with Rojano. Try not to notice, bury the whole episode, then cover their tracks with dirt because exposing the guilty would make waves, and they don’t like waves. What they want is to calm the sea. That’s their job, to still the waters. Suppose there weren’t any coincidences, that Pizarro was shot in the dark of night when Quinta Bermúdez was attacked. What do your paisano on Bucareli and his lackeys do then? They cover it up. They make up a story about cancer of the pancreas or the asshole, and, on top of that, they get you to believe it. You know why? Because you’re a star witness, and part of what they have to do is discredit the witnesses. So they tell you to calm down, that nothing happened, that it was all a misunderstanding, a series of very strange coincidences. And that takes care of everything, no problems no witnesses. And don’t even think about writing your memoirs some day, don’t get the idea you could fight them by spilling the details about Chicontepec. You follow me? They quietly negotiate a deal with the oil workers by offering them some kind of perk in return for keeping their mouths shut and chat you up with a bedtime story that puts everyone back to sleep. They hustle off to their office and close the file once and for all. Then it’s onward and upward with tales of the heroes and exploits of the Mexican miracle. The truth has nothing to do with it, and, as your paisano said in December, justice doesn’t either. It’s strictly about security and keeping the peace. He said it himself. He doesn’t care about Pizarro’s death, he just cares about the trouble it could stir up. And when Rojano’s death had repercussions that got your paisano’s attention, he gave us escorts, gave us tips, and, when we asked him to, he looked after us like spoiled daughters. The only reason he helped us negotiate with the union was because of what you wrote. You put it in the paper and shook them up. Otherwise, Rojano would have been just another incident—something from the police blotter, and my children and I would have joined him in his cave at the French Cemetery. Pizarro would be king of Chicontepec, and you’d have a vague memory of our time on earth. If that’s not what happened, it’s because we didn’t let it. You, I, and Edilberto Chanes, may God bless him and keep him in gunslingers’ heaven.”
They brought the oysters and crab and the bottle we’d had chilled. Anabela grew calm again. She relaxed, and went to work cracking open the crab legs, but her version of events continued to float above the table like a revelation, one of the many that blossomed from my long and nearly always clueless relationship with her. She was implacable and tough, her version strictly the result of having survived. In the years since Rojano’s downfall in Chicontepec, she’d never stopped assuming that she was locked in an all-or-nothing struggle, a nerve-wracking game of chance in which the only way she could assure her own safety and the safety of her children was by making Pizarro disappear. The game’s favorable outcome—whether due to pancreatic cancer or the doings of Edilberto Chanes—was the reason she was sitting in front of me with her children and her inheritance safe in Los Angeles and with her nemesis buried before her eyes a week earlier. The only visible remains of her ordeal were the two small pouches under her eyes. Poorly hidden under a layer of mascara, even they were in part attributable to the alcoholic and sexual excesses of the past few days. This was her saga, her version of events. It was a triumphant and concise chronicle of revenge by survival and of plans carefully laid and carried out in order to survive. To achieve her ends she’d exploited both the press and her friends, myself included.
The Bucareli version with its long chain of coincidences, misunderstandings and myths about petty criminals seemed more like real life, full of the dramatic flaws that always appear in the loosely woven fabric of human existence. I knew certain things were true, among them the key fact of Rojano’s execution in Chicontepec. But everything else vanished in a stew of self-serving fabrications, lies, false conclusions, spectacular coincidences, and the general messiness of life. By contrast, Anabela’s version was of a geometrically neat struggle, a battle with sharp, cleanly drawn lines whose coincidences clearly resulted from the clash of opposing wills. Chance served only to disguise decisions and outcomes. It was the bottom line of an arithmetic that perfectly summed up Pizarro’s own motto: Whoever can add can divide.
“So you prefer the version that gives the credit to Chanes?” I said as I finished the oysters and watched her consume her crab claws with evident gusto.
“I prefer that you take me dancing, Negro. And I don’t have to tell you where.”
The clock had yet to strike midnight when we entered La Roca on Insurgentes Sur just as we had four years before. It had been the dawn of an unforgettable anniversary of the then sexagenarian and now septuagenarian Mexican Revolution. As always there was a gaggle of whores, goons and local characters in the doorway. Inside, a rumba band alternated sets of ballads and boleros with music from the tropics. We ordered a vodka and a whiskey and were starting to drink when the band began a set of boleros and we got up to dance. Anabela was wearing a pearl gray dress with straps that left her arms and part of her back bare while fitting snugly over her legs and hips. She was, as I’ve not said before, only a few centimeters shorter than I, and even with very low heels she matched my height. There was also the irresistibly idiosyncratic way she went about dancing, facing me straight on and embracing me with her left hand. She made full-body contact with her first steps and by instinct settled herself into me with her firm, muscular legs intertwining with mine so that we were pressed together centimeter by centimeter in the shared rhythm of an embrace. The feel of her thighs, her sex, her stomach, her breasts, her neck, her whole body blended into a single sensation. It was as if she’d melted into me from head to toe in flawlessly perfect union.
We danced two numbers and left. Still clinging to each other, we crossed to the Hotel Beverly on New York Street. Slowly, with the lights out, next to a window that overlooked part of the city and whose chill glass made us feel as if we were outdoors, we undressed and continued on the rug the prolonged fusion begun at La Roca with hands and mouths pressed together beyond thoughts or words, in a state consisting solely of bodies and murmurs.
When I woke up at dawn, a red glow suffused the roofs of the buildings, and in the distance the early morning buses rumbled along Insurgentes. Wrapped in a hotel blanket, Anabela stared out the window from one of the sofas. Her long neck let her see over its back. She looked composed and at peace in a remote, self-sufficient world of her own. She made room for me on the sofa, and I made myself comfortable next to her under the blanket.
“I’m going to live in Los Angeles,” she said. “I’m not coming back to Mexico.”
“Now you can live in peace in Mexico,” I said.
“I don’t want that kind of peace,” Anabela said. “The only thing left in Mexico that I care about is you.”
She leaned back against my chest, letting her fingernails rove mechanically, reflexively over my skin. “And if you were to move to Los Angeles?”
“Los Angeles has newspapers in Spanish.”
“Yes.”
“You could be your paper’s Los Angeles correspondent.”
“No.”
“The children would be there. They need a man in the house. Tonchis is always asking for you. And Mercedes writes you letters every week, doesn’t she?”
“Every week without fail.”
“We have a good apartment, Negro. And in the fall we’re changing to a house in the suburbs. We don’t have money problems. I have an investment adviser who gets a good return on the money from Chicontepec.”
“Are you offering to support me?”
Anabela smiled. “I’m offering you a rich, slightly spoiled widow,” she said softly.
“Who’d be leaving an indelible stain on the state of Veracruz,” I said.
“Yes.” She made herself comfortable once again, shifting her position on my chest. For a moment she said nothing, then, “Come to Los Angeles, Negro.”
“No.”
“Then are you asking me to stay in Mexico?”
“I’m not asking you to stay in Mexico.”
“Don’t you want me in Mexico?”
“I’ve wanted nothing else since the 20th of November, 1976, remember?”
“I fell asleep when you thought you’d scored, right?”
“And you snored.”
“You overdid the Chablis. If you get all your girlfriends that drunk, you must sleep with rag dolls who don’t remember a thing in the morning.”
“They all remember,” I said.
“I know. And they go looking for you in the newsroom at your paper because they want a mention in your column. A one-night stand is never enough, they’re insatiable.”
“And they all act insulted and leave.”
“If that includes me, let me remind you I just offered you my personal fortune.”
“And I’m asking you not to forget that I just declined.”
“You mean you just want to get flushed down the toilet because you’re a loser.”
“Because I’m a shit.”
“You’re not up to providing long-term service?”
“Medium or long term, no”
“Neither one,” Anabela said. The tone of her voice changed, and she curled herself back into a ball. “You don’t have it in you.”
“When are you leaving?”
“As soon as I make the arrangements.”
“What arrangements?”
“I’m getting permission to take Rojano’s coffin out of Mexico. I want it transferred to Los Angeles.”
“You want to get Rojano’s coffin out of Mexico?”
“Yes.” Anabela sat up straight. “I don’t want to leave Ro’s body here.”
“Are you serious?”
“Completely serious. I need permits from the Ministry of Health and the embassy. I already have one from the City of Los Angeles.”
“You’re going to bury Rojano in Los Angeles.”
“I already bought a plot for him.”
“So he’ll be right there for you the way Pizarro is for Little Darling?”
“Yes. Why does it upset you so? Do you think it’s strange?”
She supported herself on her elbow while arguing with me. Her mascara had run, and some of her eyelashes were crooked. Though disheveled and short on sleep, she looked radiant and inspired by her decision. From the depths of time, I felt the simple power that arose to confront me when trespassing on territory long since conquered and colonized by Rojano, the history that had bound Anabela to Rojano since her teens. Its bright and tender glow still showed through in her smile and restored the youth and vibrance remaining in the deepening hollows of her eyes. I pulled her to me, rearranged the blankets to cover her back, and put my arms around her.
“I asked if it seems strange to you,” Anabela persisted.
“No,” I told her. “With you and Rojano it seems perfectly normal.”
It took another week to make all the arrangements. I called the Health Ministry myself and smoothed the way for her with the press attaché at the embassy. Shortly before the end of May, all the paperwork was in order. On May 22, Anabela flew to Los Angeles to work out the final details for the burial. To avoid issues of preservation and any other obstacles that might crop up Rojano needed to be disinterred in Mexico, taken to the plane, shipped to Los Angeles, and re-buried the same day.
I returned to my work routine and spent a week in Tampico doing the agreed upon interviews with leaders of the oil workers’ union. One after the other, in each of the four interviews, I asked as if in passing about the causes of Pizarro’s demise. The unhesitating answer in each instance was cancer of the pancreas. With Pizarro gone, his position as head of the union fell to Loya, the mayor of Poza Rica, and Roibal was his aide now. I interviewed him in an ice cream parlor on the plaza in front of the Hotel Inglaterra in Tampico, a few meters from where Pizarro had used the metaphor of a river to explain to me his ideas about power.
“What did Lázaro Pizarro die of?” I asked Loya half way through a dish of guanábana ice cream.
“Cancer of the pancreas,” he replied mechanically and with no hesitation. Roibal sat next to him with his eye patch and a glass of milk.
“Unless you happen to know of another version,” Roibal said drily, ripping a tear in the fabric of the interview. It seemed to discomfit Loya.
“There’s talk about a settling of scores within the ranks of the oil workers,” I said, purposely trying to annoy him.
“There’s talk from where, my friend?” Loya replied haughtily. “Who says that?
“Rumors in Mexico City,” I said.
“Malicious rumors, unfounded,” Loya said.
“What more do the rumors say?” Roibal asked.
“That Quinta Bermúdez was attacked by gunmen in December of last year,” I said, “and that Pizarro died as a result of serious injuries suffered in the encounter.”
“False,” Loya said. “Pure fantasy.”
“And who could have carried out this attack?” Roibal said.
“I’m telling you it’s false,” Loya shouted. “Even talking about such a thing is offensive.”
“The motherfucker capable of overrunning Quinta Bermúdez has never been born,” Roibal said with somber pride.
“Edilberto Chanes?”
Roibal smiled. “That’s old news.”
“Lies, lies!” Loya overreacted, violently cutting off the banter for a second time. “Let’s get to the point, to reality. You’re a journalist not a storyteller. Stick to the facts, sir.”
He was a far cry from the obsequious driver who ferried us around “La Mesopotamia” in March, 1977. Brimming with self-assurance, he had more than enough energy and vigor to cool the heated exchange Roibal was spoiling for. He brooked no interference with his lecture about union gardens and cattle ranching operations, union successes, and how the union resisted management’s proclivity for handing top jobs to people from outside the oil industry. He boasted of the union’s ability to censor the governor of Veracruz and dictate the contents of a message to the President of the Republic. His bizarre and disjointed ramblings were faithfully transcribed and reproduced in the series of interviews published two weeks later.
Roibal said nothing more, but he came looking for me that night in the hotel. We took our seats, and he proceeded without further ado.
“Pay no attention to those rumors,” he said. “They’re false. Nobody attacked anybody at Quinta Bermúdez, least of all Edilberto Chanes. He caught us off guard one night in Mexico City, that’s all. Then he went around saying he’d stormed Poza Rica.”
“Loya was fuming this morning,” I said. “Did he order you to come and see me?”
Roibal nodded. I watched his good eye jump up and down in its socket.
“You’re telling me all this on his orders?”
“It’s the truth.” Roibal looked away from me.
“The truth has no need for messengers,” I said.
“I’m being disciplined,” Roibal said glumly. “He wants to humiliate me, to make me cower and bow down before him and his henchmen. Loya’s the new boss, and he’s trying to break me. That’s why I’m here.”
“How did Pizarro die?” I said.
“Cancer of the pancreas,” Roibal answered without a second’s pause, but once again he looked away. “And where did you lose your eye?”
He squirmed nervously in his chair and folded his arms as if retreating into his shell.
“On a mission,” he said, “but that’s none of your business.”
“Defending Quinta Bermúdez?”
“No.” Roibal sounded withdrawn. “I already told you. Quinta Bermúdez couldn’t be overrun, not by anybody.”
“But it could be attacked.”
“He never saw the dawn of another day,” Roibal said.
“Are you referring to Edilberto Chanes?”
“I’m referring to anyone you like,” Roibal said. He got up to leave, but, adjusting the patch over his eye, he added, “I want you to know it was a good fight. Chicontepec, I mean. Even though nobody won.”
“I’m asking you one last time.” I got to my feet and looked him straight in his good eye. “What killed Pizarro?”
“And I’m telling you for the last time…,” He smiled as if now it was his turn to mock me. “…it was his pancreas, and that’s the truth. And if Loya should ask, you tell him mission accomplished.”
Anabela returned to Mexico City on June 4 with the tickets and paperwork necessary to put Rojano’s sealed coffin on Mexicana’s noon flight to Los Angeles. At 9:00 in the morning of June 6, Anabela, Doña Lila, and I arrived at the French Cemetery with a hearse. Followed by groundskeepers, we made our way along the paths lined with willows and eucalyptus to the plot where Rojano’s mortal remains lay buried. Though the spot was at the cemetery’s edge four years ago, now it was well within the rows of graves creeping ever nearer the high outer wall that enclosed the place’s eternal occupants. By way of preparation, the marble headstone had already been removed, exposing hard, freshly turned earth. The groundskeepers started digging, and Anabela clung to Doña Lila, who was dressed in black with a hat and a spotted veil. In short order the sweating workers reached the cement slabs separating the coffin from the surrounding earth and began hammering at the mortar that had sealed the slabs. There was a pale sun overhead, and a chill breeze blew through the trees and raised small puffs of dust on the ground.
“I want you to check the headstone,” Anabela told me without loosening her grip on Doña Lila. “I want to be sure it’s Rojano.”
The headstone had been shoved aside face down. I turned it over and placed it where Anabela could see. It said Francisco Rojano Gutiérrez, Mayor of Chicontepec. Remembered by his children, Francisco and Mercedes, and his widow, Anabela Guillaumín.
“This isn’t where I remember the grave,” Anabela said. “It was nearer the wall.”
“Others came afterwards,” I said, pointing to the new rows.
“If it’s not him, he’s playing games with us,” Doña Lila chimed in to support me. “If anyone came to give me the ride this man’s getting, I’d make it a party even if there were nothing left but my bones.”
It took a lot longer to break through the slabs than to remove the earth, but the final chunk was finally tossed out. We looked down into the hole and saw the black coffin covered in dirt and weeds, engraved by the vegetation that stayed stubbornly alive in spite of slabs and headstones.
“Clean it first,” Anabela said. “I want to see the color.”
Using masons’ trowels, the groundskeepers removed the white clay and the weeds that snaked across the top of the casket like climbing plants. Little by little, its iron gray finish became visible together with its raised and totally rusted crucifix.
They cleared the remaining weeds away. Around the edges of the grave they laid out the gear normally used to lower coffins into the ground: a rectangular frame of nickel-plated iron bars attached by green strapping to a set of pulleys that would now work in reverse. The groundskeepers hooked the straps to the handles on the coffin and began to raise it. The machinery squawked and wobbled as the bands tightened, straining to hoist so much dead weight. The coffin rose a few centimeters, then dropped back into its bed.
“Something’s holding it down from underneath,” the lift operator said. First he dug around the base of the coffin with a trowel, then he took a crowbar to the weeds rooting it in place. He reattached the straps, and the machinery started squawking again. But this time the pulleys continued to crank unimpeded. With every turn they let out another groan as Rojano’s remains arose from their eternal dwelling for the second time. When the coffin reached the surface Anabela grew pale and stepped falteringly towards it, gripping Doña Lila’s arm for support.
“I want to see him.” Anabela said haltingly. She lost control her voice, and it cracked as she struggled to get the words out.
“Quiet, girl,” Doña Lila said with loving firmness. “You must neither offend God or desecrate the work of His hand.”
The groundskeepers took the coffin by its handles and carried it to the gurney on the path nearby. Anabela put a hand on the crucifix, then removed the few sods stuck to the skirting at the coffin’s base. We followed the path and one of the cemetery’s inner avenues to the waiting hearse. Once the coffin was loaded, I tipped the groundskeepers, and then we were alone with the driver biding his time behind the wheel.
I took Anabela’s arm, and we walked towards the exit where our car was parked next to the administration building. Anabela’s pulse beat unevenly as she signed the final papers, and her normally cold hands were even colder than usual. We walked to the car with Doña Lila beside us, and I opened the front door for Anabela to get in. Several meters away, the hearse idled at the entrance to the cemetery.
“I want to go with him,” Anabela said, pulling away from the car and towards the hearse.
“Doña Ana,” Doña Lila said sorrowfully, “he’s not there any more.”
“I’m going with the coffin.” Anabela corrected her coldly.
And she did. She got in the front seat next to the driver. Doña Lila and I rode in my car, making a truncated cortege en route to the airport.
“For a few minutes she brought him back to life,” Doña Lila said. “You should have felt the way she trembled.”
I saw her tremble one more time while signing the forms required for the hearse to gain special access to the airport. We spent the hour before boarding in the bar, silent or nearly silent in a pungent cloud of Doña Lila’s perfume. At one point she excused herself and left, rooting through her handbag as she walked towards the airport’s main corridor.
“You’ve got everything arranged?” I asked.
“Yes.”
She was dressed in white with black piping just as she’d been for Pizarro’s burial. Her hair was tucked beneath a cap that lengthened and enhanced her face.
“What are you going to do, Negro?”
“I need to write tomorrow’s column,” I said.
“I don’t mean that. What are you going to do, generally speaking?”
“After I do tomorrow’s column, I’ve got to do one for the day after.”
She took my hand. The bags were gone from under her eyes. She looked plain and serene. She wore no jewelry and seemed unconcerned with her appearance. Part of the effect was thanks to an absence of lipstick and only the slightest touch of eyeliner highlighting the shape of her eyes.
“I ought to apologize to you,” she said.
“There’s something good to investigate this week,” I replied. “The dope trade is on the upswing again. I got a report about it yesterday.”
“Thanks, Negro.”
“I have some letters for the children.” I took them out of my coat pocket.
“Yes,” Anabela said.
“And I think Doña Lila’s bringing something.”
What she brought was a plush doll for Mercedes and a giant puzzle that assembled into a minutely detailed representation of the Iztacíhuatl volcano for Tonchis.
“Since he likes rocks and landscapes,” Doña Lila explained, “here’s a picture of some very old ones that ought to interest him. And the little girl still loves stuffed dolls more than the things big girls lust after.”
It was nearly two when Anabela boarded after a long embrace with Doña Lila and the few seconds when she melted into me as if we were dancing.
“If it has to be a Gringo, let it be a journalist,” I said with a forlorn sense of professional loyalty.
“Thanks, Negro,” Anabela repeated. She headed down the boarding tunnel past the scanner for hand luggage, smiling, walking erect, full of athletic freshness and her seemingly eternal youthfulness.
Doña Lila wiped some tears away. We crossed the pedestrian bridge to the parking complex without speaking, then she said, “There are lots of women and men. All that’s missing are real live love affairs.”
Every day I wrote my column for the following day, and every week through the end of August I got letters from the children. Then, with my saint’s day approaching, a letter from Anabela came too. The night before the ex-reporter from El Sol had returned to Artes. She was now editor of the entertainment page for one of the capital’s major dailies, a young, even-tempered woman and a close reader of newspapers, friendly, warm-hearted, loving and inclined to domesticity. In the morning we went through the daily papers over breakfast, and I waited for her to leave before picking up the mail and getting close to Anabela again. It wasn’t a long letter though Anabela’s clear and expansive handwriting made it seem to be. Two pages were taken up with descriptions of greetings from the children and of the suburban house they’d moved into from their apartment. The paragraph about Rojano said the following:
“He’s buried in a new cemetery with lawns and trees everywhere on a hill overlooking the city of Los Angeles. I’m still alone and happy. I don’t miss corrupt journalists, but, unlike Tonchis who’s just scored his first Gringuita, I do miss some things. Mercedes is taking modern dance at the city art school. The house has a swimming pool, and you can’t imagine how calm it is. I think a lot about you and what we went through together. Sometimes I dream about it. But the nightmare always goes away in the morning. The days are so sunny. You can’t imagine the peace and quiet, the way the wind blows through the trees where Rojano is now. I go every Sunday and just sit there in the wind which, as I said, is softer than you can ever imagine.”
Despite what she said, I could imagine the wind perfectly well and Anabela too, secure and at peace on her Sunday visits to the new headstone on a hill looking down on Los Angeles, seated with her arms folded, gathering in the years spent preserving the memory of Rojano.