Adam in Eden

Chapter 15

Where do all these people come from? I look at photos of them arranged on the tabletop, and I try to picture their origins, the only clue being their mansions, brand new or recently acquired from people who were until recently rich, mansions distorted by doors better suited for a prison, colored bunting, barricaded windows, men with concealed machine guns on the rooftops, gardeners who mow the lawn while looking around, on the alert, their overalls bulging with weapons.

Where do all the weapons come from? I receive a report. In Houston, Texas alone there are fifteen-hundred gun shops. A customer can purchase more than a hundred guns in one spree by touring dozens of legitimate stores willing to sell them, no questions asked. There are also gunrunners who smuggle contraband arms from the United States to Mexico. Buying rifles, shotguns, and handguns in the land of our northern neighbors does not require a license. Most of the pistols and rifles confiscated in Mexico come from stores and gun shows in Texas and Arizona.

The possession of guns — according to the report I read this morning — is legal in the United States, and if a suspicious shipment is detained between the store and the border, the trafficker is exercising, in any case, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” established in the second amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights, predicated on the existence of “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” I wonder how that well-regulated militia is working out.

An arms dealer, when questioned, responded that he didn’t keep a record of what he had sold to someone else, and that he had sold his business. So how does he make a living now? “I live off my savings,” he said from the porch of his mansion in Houston. “When were you audited before you retired?” “Well, they’re allowed to audit you once a year, but there aren’t enough auditors to go around, so sometimes every three years, or every six. .” “What kinds of weapons did you sell?” “Guns, just guns.” “What about AK-47 rifles?” “Achy whats? Doesn’t ring a bell.” “Maybe this’ll ring a bell. We sent a plant to your store to buy twelve AK-47s, and you sold them to him. Didn’t you think that was a suspicious request?” “The customer is always right. Listen, I’m just a simple retailer.”

“I have the right to buy guns to go hunting. That’s a Constitutional right.”

“I have the right to sell guns. The Constitution. .”

“I let the authorities know when there’s a suspicious gun sale in my store. That’s my professional obligation. .”

“I don’t say anything to anybody, because one word and the drug traffickers will. .”

I receive reports about weapons confiscated in Mexico. A rifle in Acapulco was found after an attack on the offices of the Attorney General that left three secretaries dead. Two rifles confiscated on federal highways. A rifle found in Miahuatlán after an attack on army personnel at the local botanical garden.

I do the math.

Four weapons recovered by the authorities in Mexico. Four.

Thousands of guns imported by the drug cartels. Thousands.

Mansions with metal doors, colored bunting, barricaded windows, gunmen on the rooftops, armed gardeners.

“You can fit any number of things in a pair of overalls. .”

Where did they come from? Who were they before? Can they be punished by being sent back to where they came from? By jailing or interrogating their women?

As so many times before, I take the bull by the horns and send undercover Jenaro Rubalcava, an accomplished cross-dresser doing time in the underground jail of San Juan de Aragón, to Santa Catita Prison to uncover information and, with luck, to get lucky. (I calculate the times that the distinguished Mr. Rubalcava has served in exchange for a reduction in his prison sentence.) Why don’t I send a woman? Because I believe implicitly that women make up a fervent sisterhood that sticks together to defend itself from the intrusive, malevolent male, who on top of everything else, is a player if he can get away with it, and a bitch if he gives himself to another man.

The redeemed prisoner Rubalcava informs me that in Santa Catita there is an area dedicated to women drug traffickers, kidnappers, and serial killers. The Queen of Mambo is there, a busty and longhaired young woman who wears jeans, white sneakers, and a loose sweatshirt, as though to conceal her virtues. She manages Boss Big Snake’s money on a computer in her cell, even though a guard accompanies her at all times. Pumped up, she walks around the prison courtyard, where about a hundred people are heaped together, including those who come in from the outside with food and clothing for the prisoners. There is Chachacha, accused of stabbing a banker: an attractive woman, in Rubalcava’s estimation, whose low-cut blouse, combined with her tied-back hair, shows off the whiteness of her skin and distracts people from her cynical expression of satisfaction with her crime. Then there’s Major Alberta, accused of kidnapping and murdering young millionaires. There are the two “dynamiters,” accused of planting bombs willy-nilly throughout the capital. They are both cross-eyed and wear too much lipstick.

“The worst of them all, sir,” says the very diligent Don Jenaro, “is a murderer of old ladies who has senselessly killed a dozen random little old ladies she stole nothing from. She kills for the joy of killing, and she argues that her victims were decrepit, already too prone to lying in bed, and are happier dead than alive.

“The most interesting inmate is Comandante Caramelo, a fat girl whose mouth is always stuffed with candy, who heads a group of criminal women who don’t come, Mr. Gorozpe, from the lower depths of poverty. No, all of them were typists, bank employees, store clerks, nannies for rich kids, all women who were unsatisfied, not because of their poverty, but owing to the scarcity of their wealth, and wanting, Caramelo told me, to rise quickly in a society that promises everything but doesn’t specify when that promise will be fulfilled.

“‘We were in a hurry,’ Caramelo said. ‘We could have resigned ourselves to working in an office or in a pharmacy. But you know what, Counselor? What they promise us, others — a select few — already have, and they aren’t going to let it go, and the life we’re promised in ads, you know, we already know that’s pure hope, and that we won’t get any part of it, not even on the installment plan.’” Caramelo brought another piece of caramel to her mouth. She dropped the wrapper on the floor. One of the dynamiters picked it up and carried it off to the trash can.

And then, “Are you surprised, sir, that we are making our own luck?” Caramelo had asked, stunning my envoy, Don Jenaro, whose disguise had been useless.

I admit that all of these reports leave me very dissatisfied. It is as if a thousand-headed hydra had stationed itself in front of my office on the fortieth floor overlooking Bosque de Chapultepec Park, and I bravely went out to cut off one of its heads only to see that two more heads had grown in its place.

We struggle against a polymorphous monster, and the solutions that I come up with — and that I present to my associates — are inadequate, temporary, or at best would only yield long-term benefits. To legalize drugs, a little at a time, beginning with marijuana. To know that the United States will not accompany us, even in the name of individual freedom, in allowing anyone to poison himself and others. To understand that this is a global problem in a global age: cut off two hydra heads and they are replaced by four heads. .

My associates stare at me with skepticism from behind their black sunglasses. I imagine their stares anyway. Are they reproachful? Well then, they can propose something. One of them dares to speak up.

“Adam —”

“Hey now, don’t get cheeky.”

“No, not you, sir,” he continues, “Adam Góngora.”

“He’s a murderer.”

“And what else do criminals deserve, but a criminal who is more criminal than they are? With all due respect.”