Mexico City Noir

A SQUIRREL WITHOUT A TREE BY ROLO DIEZ

Centro Histórico

I was still very young and had barely experienced heartbreak when I first saw the bird with enormous wings. The wings were so great they covered the sun and threw shadows over an entire Arab city, across those churches with multicolored towers, round and pointy like a spinning top. I saw the bird in Graciela’s storybook. I see it again now, when there’s nothing left in the city, only the beating of the wings and me; it’s colder here than in Reclusorio Sur prison or Nevado de Toluca.

Black coffee, a roll, and a pastry-I’ve always had the same breakfast. Although sometimes a beer is the one and only remedy for mornings when the sun is blinding and a man regrets that last pint. But now I need my coffee, my roll, and my pastry. Maybe because it’s 3 in the morning and the last time I had a bite to eat was yesterday afternoon, or because of that cold strip between my back and my guts, or because there are only two of us on this empty street and two is a terrible number at this hour, with everything I still have to do, and do without any help or witnesses.

Let me tell you, at this hour, on these streets, it’s best if you’re from the neighborhood. Around here, God helps whoever helps himself, everybody knows what’s going on, and no one expects the head of government to actually solve any problems or for the best fighter to win in the ring. Friendly folk do not abound. Respectable people walk determined to just get home in one piece and with a few bills still on their bodies. The strong survive, that’s the law of the land.

There’s another guy on the street and he moves as if he were alone, as if it were 10 in the morning and the Squirrel didn’t exist; he ignores me and that must mean he wants to control me. I tuck my right hand into my jacket, cover the handle of the sevillana, and squeeze hard to feel it. I took this knife off an aimless gringo leaving the Bar León, up to his ears in local bourbon and without a clue where his hotel was. A gift. He’d even lost his shoes. I decided to go easy and just take the knife. A useful beauty, the best thing in the world.

The guy keeps going. It’s three blocks to my house and then the street is mine. The cold air on my chest shakes me to the core. It’s a good time to go into La Cotorra and ask for an aged tequila and a hot snack. But it’s closed. No way. It’s late.

I think about the One & Only. Graciela is the first woman with whom I’ve resorted to begging, and she’ll be the last. Like Jose Alfredo drunk on love, like an encyclopedia of boleros. I’ve shown more appreciation for her than for a box of gold Rolexes, a new car, or a whole year in Acapulco. Has anyone ever seen me behave like this with any other woman? Not a one. Our names must be written in the Book of Destiny. Celebration and quarrel always come in the wake of the bird in Graciela’s book.

Centuries ago, the One & Only was just a flower of promise and great wings grew from my back.

We lived deep in the neighborhood, my Tía Clodomira and me, in the Republic of Guatemala between Rodriguez Puebla and Vicarious Leona. She took me in after I was abandoned by my mother’s misfortune. She called me Squirrel out of love, and I knew that in her skirts I’d find the first and most exclusive hideout in which to seek refuge. Clodomira worked in a clothing store and she’d leave me playing on the patio. “Do not move from here, Squirrel.” “No, Tía.” “Wait for me.” “Yes, Tía.” Pretty soon I learned to go from patio to patio, and from the patios to the street. Scared to death, I began to wander and made my way around the block. Haven’t stopped since. I must have been about four years old then and that’s my earliest memory. Before then, I can’t picture anything. Although sometimes, on nights when the world crashes in on me, I believe I’ve glimpsed cloudy shapes and shouts that surround and beat me with an incomprehensible ferocity. Frightening things, which I neither recognize nor understand, but which haunt me, force me to turn on the light and smoke one cigarette after another until I see the sun come through my window.

I think about the One & Only and I know that girl-whom I first met when she was just a gaudy, awkward caterpillar, and whom I later witnessed as a butterfly-was whom I truly loved. I say it now because I don’t know if I’ll ever say it again. I remember when I first went to the circus, my aunt’s fiancé-a stocky guy named Reynaldo who was a coyote in Monte de Piedad-told me to keep my eye on the trapeze artist because he might fall and kill himself and it would never happen again, even if I showed up with a fistful of bills and paid a hundred times the ticket price. “Good things only come around once,” said Reynaldo, “and if we aren’t ready to dive in, we risk being left out, forever regretting.” It’s not that Reynaldo was a wise person, because if he were wise he wouldn’t be in prison, but for anybody who depends on hustling to eat, his words make sense.

At fifteen, I was making plans and holding on, barely passing my way through high school, looking to learn more and trying to keep up with Graciela from afar. We weren’t friends anymore. The One & Only despised our little gang from Guatemala, our tricks to get money, the zits that tormented me, and even my skill at beheading rats with a slingshot.

In the gang, it wasn’t a good idea to let on that you were in love; in fact, it was disastrous, because the guys had a cruel laugh reserved for anyone who developed soft feelings more appropriate to old women and fags. Like the men in bars from olden times, the gang didn’t tolerate anybody in uniform, or women. An honorable “Guatemalteco” only concerned himself with those sweet enemies when it came time to steal their panties and their hearts.

Actually, keeping the secret wasn’t that hard in the gang. It was all about taking on an attitude appropriate to a Guatemala hustler. “That chava belongs to me, one way or another. Nobody better touch her cuz she’s mine.” Still, it’s hard to love somebody who looks at you like you’ve got eight legs and can crawl up a wall. But it wasn’t always that way. A lot of time passed from the moment that little girl came to the back patio with her book in hand, to the day the nymph stopped coming, to the time that woman refused to even greet me. There were afternoons when I took to reciting romantic songs and taking her picture when I saw her lower her guard for a moment, revealing a gentle moistness about her eyes and a bloom in her cheeks. An anxious and flattered woman is an open window to anyone who knows how to look into it. I swear I felt like Juan Diego greeting the Virgin of Guadalupe. But each and every time, just when a feeling seemed to be stirring inside the One & Only, just like a chick pecks away at its shell in order to come to life, something would happen, and Graciela would again notice the marks on my skin, and she would wrinkle her nose as if something were rotting and then everything got fucked up again. Furious and desperate, the only thing I could think to do was insult her, bring her down with savage commentary to erase her sense of superiority, twist her rejection of me into fear of the streets. Later, when she was fifteen and I was eighteen, love and scorn were the same thing.

At the plazas in Loreto and La Soledad, I had money to ease things and met adventurers who didn’t faint over smallpox scars. Some became my friends. We ate sweet rolls, drank muscatel, and sometimes waited out the night to see the sun rise. The moment is so magical there in the center of the city that you’re willing to see Aztecs emerge from the ruins; you’re willing to believe the most fantastic legends. “Fuck her good and she’ll be yours forever. You don’t have any other option. Easy or hard, if you’re the first, you have a chance. What’s to lose? Don’t be such a lightweight; women like men who are determined.” They didn’t know Graciela; they were talking about other women.

I pursued Graciela and she rejected me. Like a dog begging for a caress I went after her. I pleaded with her a thousand times in a thousand ways, I robbed a car to take her for a drive, I pressured, I threatened, and, in the end, I hurt her so badly that a hundred years of regret won’t be enough.

If something has to happen, it will. The black hour came when a passing helicopter reminded me of that bird, when my unfulfilled dreams disappeared in its flight, and then there was a knock on the door to the patio and there she was-fruit for the taking in a flowered dress-precisely on a Friday when Clodomira had warned me that she’d be late. In that fatal second, I knew that we had reached a point of no return. Because… could I have done anything differently?… What else could I do, I ask, what else could I do?… Or must the Squirrel call the garbage man, give him some money, and say,“Just stuff me in your truck and toss me in the incinerator”?

What happened that afternoon was unfortunate. First, because it’s unbearable to hurt the woman you love… A crazed and empty-headed bato, a head filled only with tequila and anger and marijuana, so that you can’t think or regret or get it together to disappoint the prostitutes who hope to see you do it and finally stop acting like a fag… obsessed with finding disdain in the face of the beloved… having made the ridiculous decision to make her pay for not loving you… Add it up and none of it makes sense. It was impossible to even hope that the magic of the first time would transform her rejection into love, like what happens in stories and movies we’ve all seen and know: first, the leading lady throws a furious tantrum; then-nobody knows how this happens-passion emerges.

But passion failed to show this time-Graciela didn’t change and that was the first misfortune. Or perhaps, who knows… The second came in terrible words: “You are going to pay. You are going to die for this.” Her eyes were stone cold when she said this, staring right at me so I’d know she was serious.

Truth be told, nobody gets through life keeping promises. If you don’t believe me, just ask the president. Although Graciela is another story. If she says, “It’s gonna rain,” it’s best to take an umbrella. “You are going to die for this,” said the One & Only. I fell to my knees; sick with remorse I swore eternal love, I promised to live to take care of her, I begged. But it was like talking to a wall, like pleading with a statue.

After that, I only searched for her once. I did it because I still had some hope left, and before I gave up the fight I needed to know once and for all if the prostitutes were right. I just looked for her one more time. I saw her coming and I stepped in her path. Graciela saw me and erased all my doubts. Erased my doubts and my will to live as well.

If I didn’t suffer too much it was only because there wasn’t much time. Finding food in this city takes a whole day. Any kind of enterprise requires surveillance and work. Even robbing a gas station means forgetting about Bonnie and Clyde and studying the situation first. Secrets are revealed by going through the details. There might be money at certain times but not at others; the architecture and number of employees will determine how many men are needed to make the assault; depending on the plan, you can pass for a customer or leave in a customer’s car; you have to know the police patrols in the area, find the best route for a getaway, anticipate alternate paths of escape… myriad problems to solve and the man-hours needed to do it. That way, with days and nights turned into work, pain and love are excessive. In other words, romance and regret have a better chance in the movies; on the streets, you have to break your back.

Pretty soon I was sick of Guatemala. I got myself far away from Graciela and from the scene of the crime. I left the neighborhood, I left the city itself, I traveled the country, coast to coast and up and down. And although the newness was exciting at first, in the end it just seemed like going around the block a million times. New landscapes and different faces hide the fact that, no matter where you are, laws apply to everybody, prison bars all look the same, and cop bullets are cop bullets.

I wandered for four years. Now and then I returned to the city, I visited Clodomira on the sly and found out how things were going in the neighborhood. That’s how I learned that Graciela was now with a heavyweight from Morelos. According to the rumors, some dude tied to the Gulf cartel. And since gossip and perversion go hand in hand-they’re certainly kin-I also found out the street had me pegged. Guatemala invented what it didn’t know. Something had happened between Graciela and the Squirrel, something grave, mysterious, and truculent-everybody’s lack of imagination was so depressing that they all thought the same thing: “That cabrón Squirrel must have raped her.” The third nugget of info claimed that, to gain points with his lady, the Morelos heavyweight had put a price on my head. I couldn’t believe it. In the neighborhood, people talk because the air is free. Anybody with a mouth can join the cotorreo and if they don’t have a good story to tell, they just make stuff up. But as the love of my life, Graciela would have never accepted such savagery. I didn’t worry then and I’m even less worried now, when the winds seem to have shifted in the neighborhood. This month’s news is that the Morelos heavyweight was put on a boat and is resting comfortably in La Palma, the high-security prison. So much for him and the stories concocted in Guatemala. I don’t know why I bother with somebody I don’t even know. Must be the loneliness, which grows like pestilence at dawn.

“Your thing is melancholia,” some guy in La Cotorra dared to say to me once. “You hurt everywhere and you don’t know why. Love gone bad, fucked up.” I showed him the sevillana and the guy shut up. But tonight, dizzy and confused, trembling, I remember what he said.

Three-thirty in the morning, three more blocks to my house on this deserted street, and I’m thinking about black coffee, a roll, and a pastry. My aunt goes back and forth from the table to the stove. In the patio there’s a little girl playing with a storybook. I like to read to her and make up stories in which the bird with enormous wings flies us all over the world. Graciela and me in the clouds, looking at houses and fields from above. The little girl’s a big burden but she’ll be pretty when she grows up. The sweet, hot coffee does me good for a moment, but then there’s that ice plunging through my chest, the helicopter above me, that room in the neighborhood and the promise made, my list of creditors, and that man who got put away. As soon as I get up off the ground and this cold leaves my back and the taste of blood disappears from my mouth, I’m going to go tell Graciela I’m sorry, that I’ve always wanted her, for real, like a man, like it must be, but then I fall.

GOD IS FANATICAL, HIJA BY EDUARDO MONTEVERDE

San Fernando

Father… I accuse myself of having changed my sex.” “Is that so, hija? Me too.” The incense in San Fernando Church veiled the confessional in mist. To the side of the Epistle, an altar boy with the crusty face of a seraph, dressed in a red habit, rocked a small brazier. He was just a kid, with scrawny limbs like those street urchins who surrounded the temple.

“What do you do for a living, hija? I’m entranced by your perfume.”

“At night I’m a dancer and by day I search for lost children, though I haven’t found any yet.”

“You’re a crook,” said the priest.

“It’s not what you think. In fact, I used to work for the state police.”

“I used to be a nun. Shall we go outside for a stroll?”

“You’re not going to absolve me?”

“I’ll take care of that later. Let’s save ourselves the confiteor. I’ll confess that it’s you who came to me-I consider the admission that you’re an ex-police officer a humble act of solidarity.”

In another confession booth, incense threaded like steam in a bog around the feet of a different priest wearing torn Nikes; it snaked in under his habit and wafted toward his crotch. It was the breath of Fernando III, medieval king and canonized flagellator, whose weightless sword was displayed at the altar and hovered above his spare crown, above the devout women in their prayer shawls. The warrior wore a metal belt that cut into his flesh despite many layers of mesh. His spirit traveled from the incorrupt body in Seville to watch over his dominion in New Spain.

The penitent and the confessor strolled out together. They walked from the portico to a tainted lawn, careful not to disturb the sickly, glue-addicted children huddled about.

“Check out their stomachs, hija. Those strange cavities are ulcers, and look at that one’s sunken skull. Very few of them are worth eating. Not even a cannibal would be tempted.”

“What about the man who came over here a few days ago?”

“The guy who ate his lover? He didn’t dress his victim very well, according to Próspero, my neighbor in the confessionals, a baldhead who walks around in torn sneakers. Would you like to catch the cannibal?”

“If Madre-Excuse me. I caught one-well, I didn’t, but I was there when they caught him, Madre-Excuse me again.”

“I’m not offended by the gender confusion. We are surgical angels.” The priest covered his head a bit more with his hood, allowing only the slightest glimpse of his waxen scalp. “This church is Mexican baroque, which is kind of poignant, don’t you think? Scary, isn’t it? Look how the sky has turned purplish. It’s because of the smog; in a little while it’ll turn blue. This city always manages to get drenched in liturgical colors. If you want to find lost kids, go down to the sewers and poke around in the drains with a wire… Let’s go down to the pantheon.”

He shook his brown habit, waving away the stains of urban shame. They were greeted by an immense pink marble funerary urn in the center of a modest garden which contained the petrified remains of a fierce military man, a conservative Indian shot next to Archduke Maximilian of the Mexican Empire. They walked among the graves in the San Fernando pantheon under the city’s lecherous gray sky.

“Did you use torture when you were a cop?”

“On men, but it wasn’t what you think.”

“Torture. Don’t be afraid of the word. You were no doubt turned on by their erections when you used the cattle prod on them. Electricity is miraculous-like the tolling of San Fernando’s testicle.”

“Are you still listening to my confession?”

“I confess once again that I was waiting for you. You remind me of an old lover. Let’s see… San Fernando whipped the flesh of his soldiers with barbs. Times are changing; you have to adapt to technology. Did you get aroused?”

“I was a bit soft. My peers harassed me and I had to show I had balls, so yes, yes, I got aroused. I’d caress them after they passed out.”

“Who did you sleep with?” asked the priest.

“With Commander Pérez…” The girl practically fainted after saying this, her back to the cross, her face like a Mediterranean spring. The city’s dense air shrouded her white Gap pants and aquamarine Zara T-shirt-flea market bootlegs-in a gray aura. If she’d been naked, an infantile San Juan de Dios would have covered her breasts with his hair like sea foam, Renaissance style.

The hooded priest took her by the hand. “Look at the grave of Benito Juárez; he gave the order to shoot the soldier buried at the entrance. He was an Indian too. That’s Mexico City: Everything’s mixed. Fatality and hope are tangled in the same vine. This pantheon still smells of death. Supposedly, everything decomposes in the tropics. But some things are still here even if you don’t see them. Look at the tombstone that says Isadora Duncan-she’s here, but she’s also buried in Nice. That’s how Mexicans are: an admirer had this cenotaph made for her to put next to Juárez the Indian. This is miscegenation!” The priest’s flowing sleeve stretched as he gestured toward the cemetery. “Tell me about your erections.”

The conversation became a murmur reverberating in the crepuscular traffic. When they arrived back at the church, the priest closed the aged oak portico. They made their way down the middle aisle, past the pews now empty of their beatific penitents, whose scents still lingered. A ring of lights like sentries revealed a painting that covered one wall of the nave; hundreds of these sentries guarded a multitude of friars on their knees, gazing up with admiration at the seven martyrs of Ceuta and the seven from Morocco; they praised the Lord on a cross sprouting fir bulbs, and the nine hierarchies of the celestial court in the sky: archangels, thrones, powers, dominions, cherubs, seraphim, angels, principalities, virtues. The painting emanated shadows. A gloom grew on another wall, barely touched by four handfuls of fire coming from the cave of Bethlehem-four is a sacred Indian number. Above the cave, in the stormy sky, a cloud curled up the spiraling stream that represented the native water, water and fire-atl and tlachinolli-and an irascible San Fernando stood on the altar in a niche surrounded by chiaroscuro coils worked by Indian hands.

Night fell on the children scattered around the church and vestibule. A sad figure in a Burberry raincoat bought at the Galleria on New Bond Street in London turned his back on them. A police officer in Mexico earns enough to take a group vacation, and to finance a sex change for a favorite subordinate. This was Commander Pérez. He looked languidly at the vestibule, raised his eyes to San Fernando, King of Castile, flanked by four angels. For him, a devout Christian, San Fernando was a phantom. The police officer’s spirit had taken a different path, one with lyrics to boleros and desire for a young body whose sex he had changed, who now accosted his soul. He breathed with a deep, loving sadness.

Inside, the penitent and the confessor continued through the thick darkness of the hall of tombs. A bell rang for the dead. The altar boy with the small brazier let it toll, sighing when an airplane passed above the church.

“You know what the brains are like in those kids out there?” said the priest. “Like marine sponges with a thousand eyes. They stink of toluene or whatever it is they put in that glue. It perforates their brains. They can be marinated and boiled, then the scent goes away. Do you know what they taste like? Are they the lost ones you’re trying to find? Incidentally, you haven’t even told me your name.”

“Nausícaa,” replied the girl.

“How sophisticated. Who gave you that name?”

“Commander Pérez.”

“I would have named you Xóchitl Fernanda. It’s much more Mexican. My name is Diego Tonatiuh. Before, I was called Temeraria, reckless. Blame it on my father, an anarchist from Aragón who took refuge in this mixed-up city; he was mestiza like me. They say I killed him with a dirty look for making me become a nun.”

At that moment, the altar boy with the small brazier peeked over the pulpit and asked, “Do you want to stay the night?” He looked like a little cherub frolicking after the gentle figure of the Archangel Michael, whose lance had been stolen to skewer the devil. Neither penitent nor confessor responded.

Finally the girl spoke: “I have to go to work, Father… And I never asked you: how long has it been since you changed your sex?”

“Before the deluge, before the plagues of Egypt, before the First Sun, before the Nahui Océlotl that lasted 674 years, and before all those people were devoured by tigers. Then came four more suns, and then the last: San Fernando.”

The priest suddenly fell to the ground in ecstasy and Nausícaa thought the altar boy was speaking through him, the nasally voice of a cherub through the throat of an old monk: “Pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis mysterium, sanguinisque pretiosi… God is fanatical, hija,” he said, convulsing. “He makes me say things, see and hear what’s not real. The body is a mystery and blood is precious…”

The altar boy came down from the pulpit, helped the priest up from the tangle of his robe, and whispered something in his ear. When the priest saw Nausícaa’s astonished look, he told her to pay no mind, it was just an apparition in transit. He recovered his poise, his voice turning deep again.

“If I were to say it in Castilian, it would be something like a soul en route to… Heaven? Limbo? I can’t tell you for sure. Since we’re dealing with a street kid, I don’t even know if he’s been baptized. If I were to say it in Mexican, then it would be a teyolia disguised as an altar boy on his way to one of the four worlds of Mictlán, an inferno for elders from these parts, something akin to a spirit to us Christians. Where will it go? He’s too much of a lazy ass to be leaning on the teat tree in Chichihualco and sucking away for all of eternity. Will you let me see your tits? I don’t like to call them chichis; it’s a Mexicanism that doesn’t sound right to me-remember, I have Aragonese blood. Anyway, let’s go to the sacristy, we’ll be safe there: the soul, teyolia, or whatever you want to call it, told me there’s a man outside from whom we can only expect the worst.”

The altar boy ran off to hide in the chapel’s shadows. Nausícaa glanced his way, and the kid laughed uproariously, then quickly disappeared.

Standing before the façade, Commander Pérez raised the collar of his raincoat and exhaled a sigh of longing. He restrained himself from kicking the children in the vestibule and retraced his steps, like always. His bodyguard was there waiting for him next to the squad car and they returned to the police station.

Pérez took the day’s bribes, headed down to the dungeons. The cannibal who had been arrested a few days before near San Fernando was there in a moldy cell; a grated night-light dripped stalactites of horror. The scrawny cannibal who had devoured his lover lay trembling there on a concrete bench.

The commander’s daydream about the end of the workday, when he would go home to his wife and children and take refuge from his love for Nausícaa, was interrupted when his deputy arrived with the kitchen gloves and baseball bat.

“It smells like human flesh, like heat,” said Nausícaa.

“Don’t profane this sacristy with your lies. In this city everything filters through, whether it’s sewage or fried food, mint, epazote, thyme, marjoram, incense, or myrrh, you know what I mean? I used to wear perfume when I was a nun, after the abortions, because it made me feel less dirty; it was a pirate essence, a scent the gods could breathe. I stopped being an impure sister and became the Black Brigand. You say that it smells like human flesh. Are you suggesting-”

“No, no, Father Diego Tonatiuh. I recognize the smell from the incident with the cannibal. The case was assigned to Commander Pérez, the guy I told you about. I worked on it too. It was the neighbors who called it in. They’d been complaining for more than a year that something smelled weird in a house near where they lived downtown. We went and we found-”

“More details, hija. Carnality is so exciting.”

“Commander Pérez kicked down the door and stormed in with a submachine gun. There were about five of us, and the ones behind me kept pushing until they had the barrels of their guns you know where.”

“Up your ass.”

“That’s what they always did to me. They said I was a puto. We caught the cannibal stirring a saucepan with a wooden spoon. I don’t know exactly what was in it but it smelled like meat. One of my buddies pulled out his ranger knife and carved into a human leg. We were all dressed in black; we wore knitted caps. Somebody opened the fridge and found two women’s heads. I got dizzy from the smell of the stew-can I say stew? Commander Pérez shoved the cannibal’s head into the pan. One of the other cops pulled me into a room filled with porno magazines and raped me. I let it happen, and then the commander came in and broke the other cop’s face. He totally messed him up. There were teeth on the floor.”

“Would you eat an altar boy with cous cous à la Mexicana?”

“We caught the cannibal but he impregnated me with that stench. That’s why I use so much perfume.”

Perfumed bodies, contraband perfume, insect perfume, thought the priest (the ex-sister, the nun of nuncas, Sister Reckless of the Nuncas). It was too late now for regrets, but she certainly wasn’t going to rob a bank again just to finance a sex change. She was getting older and had little desire to be with anyone except that one man, even though they couldn’t be together anymore because a monkey wrench had been thrown in their destiny. Father Diego Tonatiuh had had a love, a great love, the only true love of his life, and the police had killed him with their wretched justice-they fried his ass with the prod. He had met his love at the convent of the Franciscan Conceptualists, where he’d practiced curettage as a nun, when the man brought his pretty girlfriend in to have an abortion.

The soul of the priest moved away from Nausícaa. He was lost in his memories, gazing upon a canvas of the Immaculate Conception, a childish virgin standing on a windy platform held up by numerous friars in fine embroidered robes; above them, the shield of San Francisco, five scars and white hairs strewn on a book. The priest recalled himself as Sister Reckless standing in a cloister of orange trees. She was rubbing orange blossoms on the hands of the man who brought the girl to get an abortion. It was love at first sight. The man was struck by the nun’s masculine poise. She of the manly presence was, in fact, a small-time bank robber, and he would soon join her in this pursuit. Mockingbirds sang in the halls, canaries twittered, potted azaleas flowered when he whispered in her ear: “Like foam floating on the mighty river, my azalea, life has swept you away in its avalanche.” She had taken a book from her habit, pointed to a painting that had been laminated with mold since the conquest: framed by flowery jungle vines, a centauress with adolescent legs and wearing huaraches climbs on a monkey; the monkey caresses the woman’s breasts with one hand, masturbates with the other. She told the man that this is how his love should be, a faithful rendition of the colonial impetus painted and imagined by Mexican Indians and Andalusian friars with a good dose of the medieval. She read: “My spirit pushes me to write about the metamorphosis of bodies into new ones. O gods! Since you have also changed, do not hesitate, inspire my efforts and take this poem from the world’s beginnings all the way to our times.” The sister had then entered the abortion room and provided the patient with a triple dose of sodium pentobarbital. There was staff at the convent to take care of these problems, and not long after this, there was Sister Reckless of the Nuncas stumbling along the Great Canal, dependent on the generosity of the police. That’s where his lover wound up.

Father Diego Tonatiuh’s mind returned to San Fernando, his breath flew from the cloister of orange trees back to the sacristy and retook the conversation with Nausícaa.

“A few days ago they caught another cannibal close to here, the one we were talking about, the fag.” His voice turned nasally again, vibrating under the hood until it seemed almost hysterical. “If you use perfume it’s because you’re a whore. Don’t make it sound like it’s because you have the saintly smell of a devout nun or because the smell of flesh bothers you. Oh, please forgive me for the whore comment. I have been contaminated by Mexican machismo. Just give me a moment to get back to my normal state.”

“Where are you taking me?” the girl asked when the priest abruptly grabbed her arm. “This stinks of human flesh. I don’t want to go. Let me go! I’m not a whore, I’m a virgin!”

“That is the true abstention, the seventh seal, the rest is macho sodomy and it’s just not worth it… although it has its charms.”

As Father Diego Tonatiuh dragged her out of the sacristy, the stench of flesh burrowed deep in Nausícaa’s heart and burned itself there. The priest noticed this and told her it was because of Father Próspero, who lived in an apartment in the building next to the parish and liked fusion cuisine-very modern for that priest with the torn sneakers. All the Mexican baroque crashed down on her: Nausícaa lived in that very same building.

The girl shot out of the church, desperately seeking an escape. She stumbled on a glass box and came face-to-face with a Christ overwhelmed by millennia of drops of blood.

“Up his ass, hija! Tickle his balls with that cattle prod!” the priest screamed hysterically. “He’s a fanatic and he’s accustomed to such passions. You can do whatever you want to him without remorse-he’s merely one more prisoner here. Scream at him, humiliate him! Nobody can hear you, not even the police. Ha! You can’t even hear yourself!” The priest’s voice echoed like metal splinters through the temple.

In that corner of Mexico City, the sun did not set or rise. It was the sky that was lowered or raised. Night fell on Nausícaa with a layer of reddish soot, like the familiar everyday sky from which people took refuge, trapped in their homes. The young woman gazed on the darkened buildings, a light here and there, the beams of a passing car. The steam from the motors that ran all day now rose from the sidewalk, a dam where the street children made their camp inside the vestibule of San Fernando. To the left and right of the Holy King, Domingo and Francisco watched these creatures ignoring the lessons of discipline. They slept sated with glue, others sweated the glue out in collective fornications. Nausícaa remembered her job. They would scold her. She moved toward a pile and looked at the kids engaging in unseemly activities.

“This is the true sexual liberation,” whispered a voice in her ear.

Instinctively, she reached for her gun, a useless reflex; she’d been unarmed since she’d changed her sex.

“I am Father Próspero. I have seen you dancing on tables. You’re never entirely naked. How did you get that privilege? When you finish your performance, they shout at you and humiliate you-do you like being humiliated?”

A street sweeper crept by.

When Nausícaa heard the word humiliation, it struck her like one of those badly pirated DVDs, and the images came to her, one after another, of her debasement at the hands of her fellow officers, the resentment they felt at her middle-class ways. Maybe they would have had more respect if she’d behaved like a whore from Veracruz and let them call her Negra. The DVD paused on an image from adolescence, when his father caught him fucking the maid’s son. He ran to the woman who’d raised him, but he was sent off to become a cop, to get the puto out of him. It didn’t work; his peers did whatever they wanted with him until Commander Pérez, his guardian angel, showed up. That night Commander Pérez paced, unable to read The Odyssey: They had consumed Nausícaa and the slaves. No sooner had they gotten rid of her veils and played, then there was Nausícaa, with her snow-white arms, singing. His protector, his guardian angel…

Her stomach began to turn, or maybe a psalm came to her, and she confessed to Próspero the incident with the servant’s son, and how he had massaged the private parts of those who had been tortured. The priest smiled, and her mouth went dry.

“What are you doing here at this hour, Father?” She spoke now in a calm, solemn tone, but there was coldness in her eyes. “Did you come to bring them something to eat?”

“No, I came to eat them.”

“Are you a sinner?” Tears bubbled from the heat of Anáhuac’s merciless night.

“I’m a goliardo, a clerical nomad,” the priest answered. “As they say: To follow gods and goddesses / will be a good sentence / because networks of love / have already captured adolescence.”

A squeak filtered through the night. Then there was more noise, more squeaks from the fornicators over to the side, from the mattresses, from under hospice blankets, from the tents, the makeshift dormitory.

“Hija, this is the fullness of freedom,” the man continued. “No hippie commune produced this. It’s better than the most insolent rap. Any pornographic mosaic from Pompeii pales before this. It can’t be compared to any Parisian watercolor of phalluses and vulvas from the nineteenth century. Your table dance is nothing next to this. These are real swingers. And look where it all takes place, in this very ass-and the city has many-just a few blocks from where liberals from Canada and Finland stroll, every one of them wanting to invent a happiness machine, and whoa! This is the kingdom of primitive Christianity, without any initiation rituals.”

He pulled a tin from his brown habit and inhaled. Nausícaa saw him blush and it dawned on her that she’d never fully glimpsed the face of the other priest, Father Diego Tonatiuh, which was always hidden under the pointed hood.

“Are you coming over for dinner, hija? We live in the same building. I prepared something. Cous cous with a guajillo chili marinade and chili morita, spiced with epazote and yerba santa, fusion cuisine.”

The altar boy with the small brazier appeared, scattering dirt and toluene around the fornicators. The neighborhood’s residents curled up to sleep, hotels cautiously opened their doors. The local dives turned down their music to an intimate proletarian hum. Unaware of having lost a war-only one, and on Mexican land-San Fernando continued on his altar carved by Indians.

Nausícaa wanted to hang herself with San Francisco’s pebbly cord until Father Próspero explained that the altar boy was the pastor of his congregation out in the streets, the one who chose the lambs whose souls would go to Chichihualco, Limbo, Tlalocan, Seville, or wherever.

Commander Pérez completed his part in the death of the queer cannibal. A hate crime, pure homophobia perpetrated by officially sanctioned killers. The guilty were predetermined. A patrol car took the commander home to a garish marble-andaluminum subdivision with swimming pools and a golf club. His wife was sleeping. He gave her a kiss. He went to his children’s bedroom, tucked them in. They’d left him their notebooks, as always, so he could check their homework. He went to his mahogany-walled study, with its diplomas from the Mossad and FBI, each framed by ninja stars. He reviewed the homework; he never let his kids down. He threw himself in an easy chair to watch Law & Order-he had the entire series on DVD-and tried in vain to read The Odyssey, his only book, which he owned in seven different editions. He had never read anything else in his life. Now an hourglass indicated it was time to deflower Nausícaa, of the snow-white arms, with his declaration of love: Who takes you as a wife is the boldest of all. No mortal, neither man nor woman, has ever come before me like this, overwhelmed me like this at mere sight. That very dawn he would tell her; that night they would leave for Cancún. He would buy a table dance and they would fuse orgasmically right there on stage. Oh Nausícaa! If only she’d already returned from the nave.

He left again for San Fernando, this time without escort.

“We are like angels; God made us, but not to marry or reproduce. Unlike the others, we were created individually-he put us in the hands of a surgeon so that each of our parts could be modeled, considered. We are neither cherubs nor seraphim; we don’t marry or reproduce. We are simultaneously impersonal and celestial, but adventurous when it comes to sex. We are expelled from paradise and, because we live in Mexico City, we make rounds with the spirits of Huitzilopochtli, a brotherhood which San Fernando curses and about which he can’t do a thing, even though his spirit comes to us from Seville. We are like the native witch doctors who have the ability to change into other beings, because God is fanatical, hija.”

Father Diego Tonatiuh was hiding in a corner behind the altar, next to the photo of the dead bank robber disappeared by the state police. The decomposed corpse had been discovered unrecognizable in a sewer’s foam. A red battery-powered lamp illuminated the photo, which was signed by Sister Reckless of the Nuncas, nicknamed La Conversa.

The priest walked through the nave to the choir, crossed himself under the cupola with the Immaculate Conception surrounded by angels with violins, lauds, and zithers. In the Expiatory Chapel, he said the Xochicuícatl: “Begin, singer. Play your flowered drum. Delight princes, eagles, and ocelots. It’s only for a brief time that we are on loan to each other.” He went to the inner door in the darkness shot through with lights, undid the bolt, and let the shutters fall on each other. He entered the confession booth and waited as he had on so many nights since he’d first seen Nausícaa in the neighborhood. On loan to each other, the phantom of the nuncas said to himself, immune to the blackness of the kettle in which his resentments were boiling over. The time we’re on loan to each other is so brief. The bank robberies had only been emotional crises, prequels to a loving eternity that had disgusted Commander Pérez when he saw the effeminate lover in a cell in that wretched police station. Father Diego Tonatiuh sucked rancor from the depths of his hatred, let slip the rest in threads of saliva that thickened the broth of his miseries.

Nausícaa entered the furnished apartment building next to San Fernando. The façade had slumped from all the quakes. The waning moon lit the four-story stairway, nahui-four, a tangle of steps, a bridge of silver and obsidian between Seville and Tenochtitlán, Paradise and Mictlán.

“This is Mexico City, officer,” said the altar boy with the brazier, who appeared on a landing. He was holding a bundle of dirty laundry smeared with the glue used by the congregation he shepherded. Father Próspero’s door was open at the end of the hall. It was an anonymous wasteland like so many other apartment buildings. It smelled of lard, yerba santa, onion, chili peppers, and thyme. The girl entered her apartment dizzy from the smell and the altar boy’s expression when he recognized her as the cop she’d once been. She cried sitting on the single bed; there was a thick Formica table, a hot plate, a piggy bank, a suitcase filled with clothes from the street market, her dancing lingerie.

She searched but didn’t find her 9 mm. On the bilious and peeling wall, there was a photo nailed with thumbtacks of Commander Pérez embracing her, back when she was a he. They were dressed in black. Neither smiled. The bathroom door was open. The tiles were soiled, the shelf and her cosmetics, the mirror and the toilet. A single naked bulb cast shadows that darkened the skin. The commander had told him that his stay here would be temporary, only while the hormone treatment took effect so that nobody would notice the changes. But he never came back. He had food delivered from Chinese restaurants. She accepted the order not to leave until a messenger brought her an envelope with the address for the table dancing. She danced Monday to Friday, heading home in a cab at the end of each show. They paid her enough. She didn’t need the extra money her colleagues made by taking clients to hotels. She was a virgin. She spent her weekends looking for company inside the bathroom. The more Nausícaa’s eyes moistened, the more the space absorbed her emotions and became filled with the emptiness that she exuded… She didn’t dare flush the toilet and empty it of the nothingness accumulating there in the bowl.

Bang! The shot rang in the nave of San Fernando as if it were from an ancient rifle instead of a Browning 9 mm. Three and a half centuries of walls cushioned the shot. The altar boy tolled for the dead in the bell tower. When Commander Pérez had come in search of Nausícaa, he’d found the door of the church slightly ajar. He’d been drawn to it. He’d pulled it open to let his corpulence through.

“God is fanatical, hija.”

This was the nasally voice Pérez heard when he’d first entered the darkness. He had removed his pistol, aimed, and the echo had bounced off the columns of the altar, flown toward the vault, fluttered in the choir.

The cop still couldn’t figure out where to point the barrel.

“God is fanatical, hija, that’s what the Creator, whatever It is, will say to your beloved when It sends him to Hell.” The voice was coming from a drain to the River Styx. Commander Pérez remembered it now. It was the same person who had claimed the bank robber’s body. It was a woman who had transformed herself into man, wearing a nun’s skirt, a black coat, and a priest’s collar-he had seemed back then like a boy in his thirties, his adolescence bizarrely extended. The commander’s obscene sense of smell had drawn him to the river, where some children led him to a dam, to the swollen body laying there in the foam. He hadn’t officially registered the body, which had begun to decompose. The nun, or whatever it was, then threatened to tell the Vatican about the theft of the gold keepsake. But the cop had nullified the threat with an offer of papers that would accredit him as a priest anywhere. In the days that followed, the corpse crumbled apart in the dirty water like pastry dough. Sister Reckless didn’t try to salvage the body, but her apparent indifference was in reality an expression of her abiding love.

“We have a deal, you demonic whore. I made you a priest. Nausícaa gave you the papers herself.”

“I haven’t forgotten. I chose the Castilian monastery at Cantalapiedra, which is a Claretian convent, though none of that mattered squat to them since you gave me a forged passport. So I returned to San Fernando a man, thank you. What I forgot was the deal itself. I agree, I broke it.”

“What do you want, you filthy nun? Do you want to send me to jail because I killed your pathetic lover?”

“My resentment is blacker than the darkness of this church.”

“Where is Nausícaa?”

“You’re looking for her in the wrong place. She’s around the corner. As always.”

“The church door was half-opened.”

“Or half-closed. Go on your way.”

The cop turned, each swell of darkness illuminated by candles forming a niche of shadows. A voice told him: “There is no greater pain than to remember happy times in misery. That’s not me, commander, but Dante, and your misfortune is not having had any happy times, and your tragedy is realizing now, in this instant, that you will never have them, nothing to remember, and that in itself will become an eternity like a shot in the head.”

In Father Próspero’s kitchen, the altar boy finished shredding the meat from the street urchin. It was dawn. The priest sliced cheeks, guts, and eyes for a cocktail, escabeche style, to go with the cous cous. Hunger had given these delicate creatures big apple cheeks. The altar boy went outside to throw the viscera in a ditch. Exhausted from all her weeping, Nausícaa sniffled quietly in her own room and sought refuge in the bathroom. The priest hummed, chose a red onion, coriander, white vinegar, salt, enough lemon juice to clear the foul odors, cleaned the jalapeños, sprinkled black pepper with his thumb and index finger, waved some aromatic herbs, and got everything ready for the marinade. The altar boy returned with the news that there was a dead body inside the temple, surrounded by police, uniformed and plainclothes. “They won’t have had breakfast yet,” said the priest with the torn sneakers, so that the boy would prepare lunch for them. First, however, he needed to tell Nausícaa to go down to Father Diego Tonatiuh’s confessional wearing a veil like María Magdalena.

Morning arrived downtown, and the children of the desert slept in the hope that the sun would wake their agonies in the open grave. The church door was wide open, but the passage to the shadows of San Fernando was blocked by yellow police tape. Nausícaa lifted it to step inside as two uniformed officers looked on indifferently at her purple table-dancing veil. She carried the guilt of the falsely devout. She crossed herself three times. Commander Pérez’s corpse lay at the other end of the nave, the open sleeves of the raincoat making him look like a spoiled angel. A group of dusty judges stood to the side of the pulpit with Saint Michael and the stolen spear.

In a confessional down the other way, a red light flashed. Stop! the priest called out to Nausícaa, raising the sleeve of his habit, a light in the midst of a storm guiding the shipwreck as the tide moaned.

“The angels on the cupola are happy,” said the shadow of the priest, gesturing toward the slipping light. Nausícaa collapsed when he removed his hood. He dragged her into the confession booth, where he sat and she knelt; he lifted her face to him. “Why are you here?”

“For my confession.” Behind the opacity of her pupils, there was a view of a tiled and sticky room upstairs at the police station, the sound of Commander Pérez’s laughter and boasts about how he’d handled the electric drill like a skilled swordsman. Nausícaa had admired the way he grabbed her head and forced her to lick the bank robber’s nobler parts. The two cops outside the booth had a mutual orgasm, then basked in the silence of their brotherhood.

“No, Nausícaa, you have already confessed everything. The rape of the maid’s son isn’t even worth a Mass. You’ve come to return the borrowed spirit whose body is no longer among us. You sent it down to the sewers, to that Great Canal that cleaves this city like an infected vein, through which runs the waste that equalizes all of the inequities of those who live here. You couldn’t take my lover, and you wanted me to lend him to you because, oh, how aroused you got when your big man fucked him up the ass! Cry now, you cheap whore-you’re the only case I know of a rapist whore. Scream, you hag!”

Father Próspero came through the sacristy wearing dark clothes, his Roman collar, and tattered shoes. The altar boy set a table in the Expiatory Chapel, incense smoke trailing his small steps through the many pews of the nave. The police surrounded the priest. His waxen face shone. A commander said something about drug trafficking while the organ on high played, Pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis mysterium, sanguinisque pretiosi, and the rest of the conversation became inaudible. The officer who was speaking had taken part, along with Commander Pérez, in the investigation of a sacristan who, years before, had been assassinated while stealing an eighteenthcentury gold talisman. The murder suspects were Próspero and Diego Tonatiuh; the police never returned the gold.

The altar boy served the vegetables. He set out chips with escabeche, cous cous tacos marinated in guajillo, and morita chili spiced with epazote and yerba santa. A detective brought cognac and Coca-Cola. The last bit of smoke from the incense slithered from the confessional.

“Only for a brief time are we on loan to each other, said the elders, back when this was a lake and the volcanoes had to always be watched. My penance will be the pain of remembering happy times during the misfortune, but you won’t even have that.” Father Diego Tonatiuh paused to catch his breath, then continued: “My loan was never complete, but during the bank robberies I had moments of happiness, even if I was only stealing for love. Your loan was never approved, and you were always unhappy. So go do your penance. You will never find the child you’re looking for. You don’t have your commander anymore, they’re going to cut you to pieces during your table dance, and you won’t have any way to make a living other than becoming a street walker. You certainly won’t be able to afford your hormones. When your beard starts coming in again, no one’s going to give a shit about you.”

Mimicry flows like beauty from Mexico City’s faucets, space and time are relative, and instead of the usual floral-and-stone façade, there’s dahlia and obsidian. In the course of time, what was yesterday a lake of water becomes asphalt today, and the past is a perpetual duplication that drowns the future. Yesterday’s omens come back, the same substance in a different shape. The city is a nagual that becomes a wall of skulls, an intelligent domotique structure: the Huitzilopochtli temple in a cathedral and Castile roses in cactus bouquets. Time is measured simultaneously with the Aztec, Julian, and Gregorian calendars and the cesium fountain atomic clock; the heart of Mexico City is made of mud and green rocks, and the God of Rain continues to cry over the whole country.

Father Próspero died from toluene inhalation. Father Diego Tonatiuh catechizes monks in the mountains of Songshan in China. The altar boy with the small brazier has grown a beard and moved east. More than five hundred years ago, Emperor Moctezuma was brought a heron with a mirror on the back of its head. In the reflection, the tlatoani saw bearded white men on red deer coming from where the sun rises. The altar boy returned mounted on a Harley, ordained a Franciscan in Cantalapiedra.

Through the west door’s empty vestibule comes a ragged bearded woman with a turbid glance, shedding dirt like those thin pigs that don’t eat anything but mud and grass. Her skin is a sallow olive. She sits on the floor, ignores the glue-addicted kids with vacant expressions, raises her eyes toward San Fernando, purses her lips with each breath, and shrugs off the tightness that causes such sorrow in her hormone-free chest. She smiles with a thin line of spit at the little winged angels that offer San Fernando to the winning king of the pagans in Úbeda, Jaén, Baeza, Cordova, Seville, defeated by the spirits of New Spain. None of the angels in the temple façade is the boy child she’d hoped to find. Behind the threshold, a different altar boy in a ragged habit sets down the small brazier; the incense drowns in the nave. The boy moves up to the tower, rings the bell, and tolls for the dead.

OF CATS AND MURDERERS BY VíCTOR LUIS GONZÁLEZ

Colonia del Valle

It’s hard to write about cats after Cortázar’s Teodoro W. Adorno; Kipling and his cat who walks by himself; Poe’s black cat; Hemingway’s, who runs in circles in the corner; Lewis Carroll’s cats. Therefore, since I’ve set out to write about cats in the next few hours of confinement, I will touch upon some facts involving my own cat: Wilson (that’s the name I imagine represented by the W. before Adorno in Julio Cortázar’s story) was yellow and big. Despite being fixed, he covered a lot of ground and would disappear for days at a time. When he returned, after he ate and drank plentifully, he’d sleep eighteen hours in one stretch. I imagined him telling me where he’d been and who he’d seen, including these four cases: Sinué, the Egyptian cat who lived with a neighboring family and had been run over at the corner of Patricio Sanz and Popocatépetl, torn in half when he tried to expand his territory. Did I remember the gray cat from the house across the street, the one with the gemstone necklace? He probably disappeared, precisely because of the necklace, after he sniffed a female and set off toward Félix Cuevas, where he then took a little jaunt down Amores Street. It was perhaps best that he not tell me what they say happened to the chunky little kitty from the corner, the one who used to like to cross Insurgentes Avenue and then Manacar theater and beyond. Good thing Wilson was fixed: no females and no territorial ambitions.

Then there was the fourth cat, the one belonging to a neighbor who was a foreigner-like me-an old and lonely American. During my stay in the snooty district called Colonia del Valle, this guy didn’t talk to any of the other neighbors and actually had some sort of problem with most of them. It was during the early ’80s and he had been there almost twenty years. He had a Mexican wife, who left him after more than a decade and a half of ill treatment, and they had two tall blond children who, because of their looks, acted untouchable and could have become telenovela actors. I began to know too much about this neighbor just before my return to the United States. Events in Mexico had conspired to destroy me in three short years, and they were about to complete the job when I filed for bankruptcy and my responsibility with my family’s businesses ended.

After Papa’s death and during my mother’s supposed terminal illness, I was forced to leave my academic life in Dallas and return to Mexico City. Alice wanted to go with me because she wanted to find out about my family’s businesses. According to our divorce agreement-which wasn’t yet final-she would get half of whatever I inherited. To be frank, we should never have gotten married. It happened because, as it turned out, Alice always believed that if she were going to marry, it should be to her best friend. Over the course of time, only our friendship survived.

As soon as we got to Mexico City and Colonia del Valle, she got the house in order, prepped rooms for both of us, discovered that most of the neighbors wanted to get to know her (as usually happens with foreigners in this country), and began to work on her Spanish. She bought Wilson from the veterinarian at the San Francisco street market. The kitten struck me as too big to be a newborn, and I am pretty sure I saw him smile after his first bottle of milk at our house. In a year, he had become the evolutionary link between the sabertoothed tiger and the domestic cat.

From the start, Alice got in the way of my having women friends, in spite of her easygoing demeanor. I told her, “I don’t understand what you’re doing here, in Mexico, with me, in this house; if you were a drunk or a drug addict it would make more sense.” Her answer was always the same: it had to do with our friendship and her interest in finding out how much she was entitled to of “man’s earthly goods,” or, in this case, woman’s. She said she’d finish dealing with my parents’ businesses and properties in Mexico and then we could each go to our own sancho. “Santo, Alice, the word is santo.” She said she’d heard that you could say sancho too. Well, yes, but that was something else entirely.

In fact, the only person on our street, and on any streets for that matter, with whom our foreign neighbor maintained friendly relations, was Alice, whether it was because she was also a gringa, or whatever. It was like she was the only person the neighborhood mad dog wouldn’t bite, something doubly strange given the antagonism between them: for example, one day, annoyed by the loud music coming from the neighbor’s house, she called him and, after identifying herself and asking him to stop his “scandalous behaviour,” she insulted him in English for several minutes. This rant-at times completely incomprehensible to me, thanks to my being from a higher social class than Alice-began with the phrase “With all due respect” and finished off with the old American favorite, “Have a nice day.” As soon as she hung up, she said, “Stupid old man,” but she wasn’t angry anymore; she was on the verge of laughter. Quickly, she added, “Better watch out, he told me he was going to break my husband’s face.”

One morning, I spied Alice through the large living room windows talking with somebody out in the park. The sun was strong and, because of her height and the light reflecting off her blond hair, it took me a moment to identify the gringo. They were chatting without the slightest trace of hostility.

“What were you talking about with the neighbor?” I asked as soon as she returned to the house.

“He’s a vulnerable old man,” she replied.

In those first days in Mexico, the process of liquidating my family’s businesses was frequently bogged down by my ignorance. I didn’t have a sense of the bigger picture, and this caused tremendous paranoia: as far as I was concerned, the partners, lawyers, and accountants were a gang of conspirators trying to rip me off. Besides, my mother-whom I stopped believing was on her death bed when I saw her playing golf after just one week in the hospital-had signed over power of attorney to me so I could do whatever I wanted, which I considered confirmation of my suspicions that, rather than dying, she was merely retiring, and was unloading everything on me. I canceled the sale of stocks, reinvested dividends, raised wages, and upped benefits as an act of revenge, just as neoliberalism arrived in Mexico with the new president, Miguel de la Madrid; I washed my hands of any possibility of profit and figured things would crash when they needed to crash. Alice just shook her head. I had given her an update on the family businesses at a less-than-ideal moment.

The night before, believing she was still away on a trip, I came home with one of the company secretaries directly after a little office party. That next morning, Alice showed up in the breakfast nook, dressed to play tennis. I was forced to introduce her, so I gave her name, and she added, “His wife.” The secretary almost spit out her coffee; immediately, she blurted, “What a big cat, and what huge fangs!” Wilson stopped rubbing himself against Alice’s thighs and moved toward his dish. The secretary asked “my wife” if that was her natural hair color. They started chatting as if they had studied fashion and makeup at the same school. As she left, the secretary said again, “What an enormous cat!” I told Alice about the party and the change of plans with the family businesses. She shook her head. I explained that the partnership would benefit from the privatization policy with which Miguel de la Madrid was ridding the nation of its excessive goods, handing them over to the domestic and foreign bourgeoisie; that the profit from the divorce would be even larger. None of it went over well with her.

“If you’re going to continue bringing your viejas…”

They aren’t actually very “old,” I explained to her.

Did I always like café-colored women?

“Alice, we say morenas-brown, if you like.”

“Well, if you’re going to keep sleeping with them, at least be sure I’m not at home.”

Later, just as I was sliding my car out of the garage, a young man started attacking the gringo. I jumped out of the car and shoved the guy before he began to kick the old man. The gringo got up and, after spitting and wiping some blood off his face with the sleeve of his shirt, growled at me to stay out of it, that it was none of my business, and then he called me an idiot. What?

A couple days later, I found Alice and the gringo having coffee and chatting amiably in our living room. I greeted her with a kiss and she said, in Spanish, “You remember him, he lives next door?”(“We say neighbor,” I whispered.) I remembered him, of course. I made eye contact with the old man for a passing second. Then I locked myself in the study. Alice soon appeared with a drink for me, took a seat on the rug next to the armchair where I was reading, and hugged my legs.

“You know,” she began, “I think that cabrón killed somebody, perhaps many people, and I don’t mean in a war. He’s like a serial killer.”

“He’s gotten away with the murder. In Spanish we say, he got away with it, Alice.” Of course, there was no need to ask why she thought this: it was female intuition. “They almost killed him the other day,” I said, and I told her what had happened.

“Ah, yes,” she responded, apparently aware of the incident,“that’s how it is with his kids.” Alfonso, the handyman on our street, had told her about worse incidents, even shootings; he’d never been hurt badly, but imagine the shock. “Did you know that Wilson fascinates him? He likes cats. He has a kitten now, he doesn’t know what kind, but she’s spotted. He actually named her Spots.” How imaginative, I thought. “He says she has a face like a whore, a made-up whore,” Alice laughed, “like in Cats. And she wears a flea collar. But when the gringo tried to pet Wilson, he clawed the guy.”

“We say scratched, Alice.”

Things changed, or went to hell, after that day. When I think of it now, it’s as if I woke up and the new situation was already there, just waiting for me to open my eyes.

I grew anxious as I headed out to the garden. There was a short ladder up against the garden wall, which I would have to climb in order to leave food and water for Spots.

A few days before, I’d woken up in the middle of the night and met her. I’d seen some branches move through the bedroom window-a rustling of leaves on the garden wall-and thought it was Wilson coming back from a night of mischief. But what emerged from the weeds instead was a spotted kitten, with a flea collar and the face of a whore; she took a few steps around the cornice when-suddenly-Wilson appeared behind her. Frightened by the sheer size of the “sabertoothed tiger,” Spots fell on her back. Wilson simply watched and smiled.

That same morning, Alfonso, the handyman, had knocked on my door and asked, on the gringo’s behalf, if I’d seen a spotted kitten in heat. It was impossible to know for sure (of course, that same dawn, I’d suspected, by virtue of the meows and shrieks outside my window), but the possibility of more than one spotted kitten wandering the neighborhood was remote: she had to be his cat. What was the plan? Alfonso shrugged his shoulders. Just imagine, I said, how difficult it will be to catch a female in that state. “If she were human, at least I’d have a chance.”

How many weeks had it been since Spots deserted her house and began subsisting on the water and croquettes I was leaving for her on top of the garden wall? Time had lost its coordinates since Alice made her final trip back to Texas, and marks on calendars and clocks meant nothing. I suppose I could calculate the months since I’d come home with company and Alice was still there, her flight canceled. This time it wasn’t a coffee-colored woman but a European, as blond and tall as Alice. They had looked each other over as I introduced them, and I’d considered it a good sign that Alice didn’t feel the need to clarify our relationship. I’d already decided to sleep with the European. “Will you excuse us?” I was on my way up the stairs when I heard about the canceled flight; she’d try to book another in the morning.

Alice went away and didn’t come back. On the phone, in Spanish and with Mexican irony, she recommended I do whatever I wanted; it was my life, after all, and she was no longer interested in my well being or whatever earthly goods she might be entitled to in the divorce.

I put the ladder up against the garden wall and took another drink for courage. I began to climb, holding a bowl of croquettes; I was stretching to place it on top of the wall when I was knocked back by a sudden weight collapsing on my neck; I scratched at the air, my back slammed down against the turf. It was better not to move for a bit. I breathed. Wilson climbed on my chest, cuddled up, and quickly fell asleep in spite of the drizzle. How many more kilos had he gained in the past week?

A court decision forced me to deal with business matters and discover that my partners had cheated me out of my share. Lazy in the comfort of her pension, my mother, in a tone of retroactive warning, said, “The idea was to sell over time, hijo.” According to her, I had my father’s tendency to think I was clever, like most gringos in Latin America. Then she issued another warning, this time in a more severe tone: “And don’t sell the house!” Although it was already mine and I had power of attorney, it would be best to claim it as an inheritance when she died.

The truth is, I’d already sold it. Twenty days before turning in the keys, I went looking for a carrier to take Wilson back to Dallas with me. (The only suitable one I could find was actually designed for rottweilers.) I boxed things up, dealt with the furniture, and packed my luggage.

One wretched Saturday afternoon, it grew cold outside and looked like it was going to rain. I wanted another drink but couldn’t find a single drop in any of my bottles. To top things off, not even the cat was home. Then I heard him when he dropped onto the roof of the shed, and by the time I got to the garden he was already coming down the trunk of the palm tree, his second stop before touching ground. I grabbed him by an eyetooth and carried him up to my room, where I let him loose and closed the door. “Stop trying to crawl under the bed, you already know you don’t fit,” I advised. So he jumped on the blankets, curled up, and pretended he was asleep. Very well. I looked for his brush and began to comb his head. I remembered that the sonic frequency of a cat’s purr is capable of destroying cancer cells.

A few nights later, much worse-after another bad calculation regarding the content of my bottles-the screams coming from Spots no longer sounded like she was in heat. She was hungry and cold. After my fall, I was no longer enthused about climbing to leave her food. She’d been on her own for the last week. When I could, I’d leave croquettes for her on the roof of the shed, but it wasn’t easy for her to get up there. Wilson invariably finished her rations.

That night, however, I heard Spots jump from the garden wall to the roof of the shed. It was a dull thud, weak in comparison to the thunder from Wilson’s heavier impact. Wilson began dozing while I went out to investigate. I ascended the ladder, and there was Spots, eating what was left of the croquettes. She saw me and immediately began flirting. She meowed and purred and rubbed her body on the roof. I went back down for a slice of ham, returned, and tossed her a small piece. She ate it quickly, so I tossed her another. Each time, I dropped the pieces of ham a little closer to me. I talked to her about the weather, I told her it was cold and that it would rain again soon, and that it’d be better to go home or allow herself to be caught. The stepladder started shaking and I could hardly maintain control as Spots munched away. I suddenly lunged and caught her by the flea collar and was able to grab the scruff of her neck; I don’t know how I managed to avoid falling with that cat. There were kicks, scratches, howls; looks that said, I will never trust a human being ever again. I wanted to snatch the phone and the neighborhood directory at the same time, without letting go of her. I ended up using Wilson’s rottweiler carrier. That’s how I should have begun.

There was a gun collection on the wall. A huge rifle with a scope. No hunting trophies. The gringo seemed proud of his little mahogany bar lined with bottles. He fixed cocktails for both of us. Instead of toasting, he merely said, “Boozing time.”

Drinking hour, I said to myself, and then, like him, I nearly downed the full cocktail in one swig.

He asked about Alice. Her? Fine. I would be going back to the United States soon. I pointed to the carrier in which I’d brought back his cat. That’s for transporting my Wilson. The gringo finished another drink. I did the same.

“I’ve never seen a bigger cat,” he said. I agreed: if he were any bigger, he’d be in some museum as the live part of a Paleolithic diorama.

Not a muscle moved on the man’s face. His gaze was intimidating. There were moments when I wanted to leave, but another drink-or perhaps my fear of simply excusing myself, grabbing Wilson’s carrier, and taking off-kept me in my seat. I had a feeling that the old man was using my visit as an excuse to start some kind of party. From the moment I arrived with Spots, I noticed an eagerness that I first thought was relief at his pet’s rescue. His offer of a drink seemed natural under the circumstances, and fortunate, given the alcohol deficiency at home.

The gringo left his place by the little bar and moved over to his turntable. He put on a record by an American band. “You like Miller?” he asked without smiling, and then took a couple of dance steps, also without smiling.

“Yes, of course I do.”

He turned up the volume and pressed some buttons, concentrating on equalizing the sound. I looked with greater focus at the wall with the gun collection. One could almost imagine the sudden appearance of a red deer or buffalo head. In their place, I noticed photographs; the light from the little bar barely reached them.

I frequently think back to what happened during those three years in Mexico, and especially that night. Imprisonment in a Texas jail provokes obsessions that wouldn’t develop in other places, I suppose, including other jails. Here, the looming presence of death row and its dead men walking make for a different atmosphere. The proximity of the execution room and the condemned bring the past to life, the one that ends here.

Up close, I could see that the photos were of the gringo when he was young: as a soldier in the Second World War; dressed in civilian clothes, next to armed companions; receiving a trophy and, below, a sign that said The Perfect Marksman; finally, standing next to a freshly shot animal. There were also photos of John F. Kennedy: with Marilyn Monroe, with Sinatra, with his brother Robert, when he was in the military. Even one in which Kennedy looks like a cadaver, he’s so thin. And one more, a picture of Kennedy next to his wife in a convertible; below it, in an arduous scribble and barely legible in the weak light: Dallas, Texas, and the date, November 1963. The gringo appeared behind me and asked if it would bother me if he repeated “American Patrol.” No, I replied, then returned to my seat. I was talking carelessly, fueled by alcohol and my host’s silence; the fact that he wasn’t saying anything made me anxious. He was one of those people who hide their emptiness in silence. I spoke about Kennedy, alluding to the photos on the wall; I noted that not even the government’s commission investigating his death had been able to prove in any credible way that there was only a lone gunman. I talked about Alice, how we’d stayed friends even after we married; about Wilson and his ability to smile. I had my hypothesis: this would be the next ability that cats developed in human society; smiling, let’s say, as an extension of purring. An evolutionary leap to become even more desired and nurtured by humans. A resource, a new survival strategy. The gringo looked on, shrugging his shoulders. When I talked to him about Kennedy, I thought he’d at least explain the photos, but he barely blinked. He seemed to get more interested when I first mentioned Alice, but faded again once it became evident I wasn’t offering any intimate details. I only remember him saying one complete sentence: “So you’re Texan, from Dallas, right?” I thought it would lead to something, but he simply kept drinking.

I went back to Dallas, our divorce was finalized, and Alice and I went back to being just friends. Once more, back to classes and routine, until Wilson disappeared for a couple of days and then somebody left his wet corpse on the porch. I was told he’d been drowned by one of the neighbors: taking that delicate delight, so American, in abusing the weak, the neighbor had allegedly submerged Wilson in his pool and amused himself by not letting him back to the surface. I wondered if Wilson had tried to smile at him along the way.

One morning, I crossed my yard over to my Texas neighbor’s pool; I found him swimming with his family. I shot him before he could come out of the water.

Alice’s jail visits usually mean news. A “horrific” earthquake had destroyed Mexico City. The first neoliberal president, Miguel de la Madrid, had initiated a period-who knew how long it would last-of more Mexican misfortunes. My mother continued to play golf. One of the gringo’s sons beat him to death, but the TV station for which he worked paid for a defense that set him free. There was no news about Spots. Wilson’s killer recovered from the shooting, was well for a while, and then had a cardiac arrest; he suffocated from a lack of oxygen in his blood. I was glad, I was very glad.

RENO BY JULIA RODRíGUEZ

Buenos Aires

I agreed to meet up on a damn Saturday with my childhood pal El Floren-that’s what we called him cuz he was from Florence, a town in Tejeringo el Chico… no, not really, I’m just messing around-and my compadre Chente, who I hadn’t seen since I baptized his kid-actually, that’s not true either-and my cousin Teobaldo, a.k.a. The Clone, his brother-in-law, a guy known as El Pirañas, and another guy I didn’t know, older than the rest of us, very big and thicklipped and scary, nicknamed San Beni, San to his buds. Our usual territory-that is, the places we lived for short periods of time-was Buenos Aires, Obrera, Tránsito, and part of that Apache zone in the city center.

You get so sick of having to scramble to make a buck that you just put on your best face and take what you can get: sweeper, bricklayer’s apprentice, spontaneous electrician, dressing up like a bullfighter to sell pins to tourists, bank security guard-well, not that, because then you have to fill out that stupid application where you have to list all your names and tell them if you have a criminal record, if you’ve had chicken pox, how long you’ve been unemployed and why, provide a letter of recommendation and explain what you’ve been doing for the last five years-so no, no, and anyway, why stand in line for that pathetic little job that no one wants to give you anyway?

Because living in Mexico City, the Capirucha, the Defe-whatever you want to call it-living here, but not in the nice neighborhoods like del Valle, Florida, San José Insurgentes, San Ángel, Polanco, the Hills, and, nowadays, Santa Fe, means being taken advantage of by everyone, including the big-cheese owner of the main telephone company, because that’s been poor people’s turf forever, and now it’s becoming the Beverly Hills of the Defe, which just fucks with my head; it’s like having a picnic in the middle of an interstate, or intentionally walking against the traffic up Calzada de Tlalpan.

We agreed to meet that ill-fated Saturday at the Poblana, a brewery and family restaurant in Doctores. Happy to see each other again and already quite drunk, we took an oath like the Musketeers and decided to stop being poor, to do whatever it took to live free.

It’s hard living in the shitty neighborhoods, with the exception of Tepito, which just needs this much to become a neighborhood of loafers absorbed into a larger city filled with more of the same. Being marginalized means being jobless: sometimes it means no water, sometimes it means no food; often it means having to hang off a lamppost just to watch a little TV, or knowing the bodies you have to step on to find a place to sleep. It’s being able to fall down drunk on the street, as the case may be, or taking a shit right there if your body demands it. It’s freezing cold and too much heat, floods, rockslides, depending on the season and the place; it’s the perpetual absence of authority, unless, of course, someone wants to fuck with us. It is, I’m telling you, total crap.

As time went by, two of us began taking our chances with the passengers on the Allende metro at the Chabacano, Portales, and Pino Suárez stations. As we got to know the territory, we got in the groove with the local sharks, and everything was love and happiness. My buddy Chente doesn’t like crowds because he starts to sweat, his throat gets tight and his vision hazy, so he doesn’t participate in this type of merchandise exchange, but that’s no prob, we all share with each other and we take care of him. He, like El Pirañas, prefers to do business at the ATMs in the nice neighborhoods. There’s good “food” there, says El Pirañas: there aren’t many people, they’re very civilized, and there’s no need to get stressed out-the clients always cooperate, meaning they put up with El Pirañas’ bites. My cousin Teobaldo is an ace when it comes to identity theft and he’s raked in good profits from that. El Floren is into auto parts and pretty much anything anybody will buy. I serve as a special assistant to everyone, depending on the work, but always with San Beni, who’s the bodyguard for the others during their operations.

At one point I had sunk so low that I was willing to do anything to bring home the bacon. Even the biggest nobody has his responsibilities, whether it’s the mamacita, the brother, the old woman (and someone else you might get cozy with on the side)… then there’s the arguments over money with the in-laws, the brothers-in-law… piles of problems, and fuck, there’s the matter with the shorties some woman brought to the crib. This is the basic minimum level of crap, though sometimes it’s a little better: the diapers, the baby bottles, the vaccinations, the schools (if the kids even get in). And the books, notebooks, pencils. And bus fare, rags to wear, quinces celebrations, weddings, funerals… and I’m exhausted. That’s why I think what happened happened.

As it was, our small business was moving along on greased rails and we began to see things differently. I found myself laughing over pretty much anything, San Beni began playing with his grandson, who at this particular moment he just wanted to throw off the balcony. Floren hooked up with the sexiest woman in his neighborhood; this actually provoked so much envy in Buenos Aires that he had to borrow a friend’s Volkswagen to avoid people seeing him when he went to visit her. San was finally able to buy a gym membership to stay in shape, and Chente’s wife took him back. What more could we ask for?

But, you know, there’s always a fly in the ointment or a bug in the rice, and Beni got pissed at some roughneck from his neighborhood who started spreading the rumor that he was a faggot-thus the focus on his biceps and triceps. I never imagined that Beni, so thick-lipped and big, could be that vindictive. With us, he’d always been a child of God: he never raised his voice, never uttered an obscenity. He’d say, “Boys, why do you have to talk like truck drivers and spit like those trashy street hustlers?” He was very decent, very courteous, he even washed his hands when he went to the bathroom. He couldn’t drink, that’s for sure, but he was good with his hands; he was like a fine embroiderer the way he could put together or take apart anything he had in his fat fingers. But whenever he got drunk, he started talking about his childhood, back when he was a good boy. You can’t imagine the kinds of horrible things that haunted him as a former daddy’s boy. The thing is, he decided to get rid of the rumormonger via the guy’s woman, with the objective of also putting a total stop to the gossip.

One wretched night he summoned us as witnesses to an abandoned auto shop in one of those neighborhoods I was talking about before. It was almost dawn. He’d managed to get the girl to come with him-she was tiny but had a pretty face; he’d found her in a bar. “I have a life-or-death message for your man,” he’d told her, and really, after that, who wouldn’t go with? Then, in that auto shop, everything got so intense and we each took turns. But later…

I don’t really want to remember what happened later; everyone did whatever. In the end, San Beni turned out to be more of a bastard than a pretty boy and we had no choice but to get rid of the mess. And there we were, stressed out but half asleep, trying to figure out how to end the story.

If it hadn’t been for my cousin The Clone-that moron made a deal with his gossipy sister-in-law, the one who sells tamales outside the Coyoacán station-I wouldn’t be here, in the RENO prison treatment center (which is nothing like the low-security CERESO), all freaked out about falling asleep next to my friends and their stench. It’s a smell, I swear on my mother, that never fails to provoke a recurrent nightmare in which my buddies are forcing me to eat painted fingertips inside Chiapas-style tamales.