The Almanac of the Dead

BOOK ONE. REIGN OF DEATH-EYE DOG MESTIZO

THE OLD MAN was that way. You could play him cards or dice, and if you beat him, he would just laugh and say you were too young to have such a bad memory. He’d claim he had won with three kings or with five threes on the dice. He would pour you more of the rotten-smelling beer he brewed out of any kind of weed or plant or cactus he could find. The old man was slow, lazy, and dangerous. He would get enough of his smelly home brew in him and then he would start bragging about his ancestors and how they had been the most illustrious and powerful. Full of beer he used to get very serious, and when I was a young child, I felt frightened. It was then he bragged the ancestors had seen “it” all coming, and one time I interrupted to ask what “it” was, and he waved his hands all around the shady spot where we were sitting and he said, “The time called Death-Eye Dog.” There was no one in the area who could talk the way the old man did.

Once the old man got rolling he would talk as if others were present and they were arguing with him, debating some point or another. So whenever he addressed the present time we live in as “Death-Eye Dog,” it seemed those invisible ones knew the time by other names, and the old man would quickly correct himself. Some knew it as “The Reign of Fire-Eye Macaw,” which was the same as saying “Death-Eye Dog” because the sun had begun to burn with a deadly light, and the heat of this burning eye looking down on all the wretched humans and plants and animals had caused the earth to speed up too — the way the heat makes turtles shiver in a last frenzy of futile effort to reach shade. The only true gods were all the days in the Long Count, and no single epoch or time of a world was vast enough or deep enough to call itself God alone. All the ancestors had understood nothing stayed fixed in the universe. Originally the sun and the stars had come from a deep blue darkness, spinning and whirling and scattering themselves in arcs above us, called the Big River or the Milky Way.

That old man had been interested in what the Europeans thought and the names they had for the planets and stars. He thought their stories accounting for the sun and the planets were interesting only because their stories of explosions and flying fragments were consistent with everything else he had seen: from their flimsy attachments to one another and their children to their abandonment of the land where they had been born. He thought about what the ancestors had called Europeans: their God had created them but soon was furious with them, throwing them out of their birthplace, driving them away. The ancestors had called Europeans “the orphan people” and had noted that as with orphans taken in by selfish or coldhearted clanspeople, few Europeans had remained whole. They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them.

Menardo had loved the stories his grandfather told him about the old man who drank stinking beer and talked about and sometimes talked with the ancestors. Menardo had loved the stories right up until the sixth grade when one of the teaching Brothers had given them a long lecture about pagan people and pagan stories. At that time the boys had started looking at the girls who did not go to school, but who were required to spend mornings working around the church, either in the kitchen or in the convent area where they washed and cleaned or in season put up the fruit and vegetables. The girls with quick hands learned sewing and embroidered heavy satin vestments for the monsignors and the bishop.

Menardo had been fat all his life. But in those days the others had picked on him and made fun of him. Pansón was the name they called him, and he did not mind it because one of the older boys had found a far worse name. For the rest of his life Menardo could hardly think of it, let alone whisper it. When he looked in the mirror to shave, it always came back to him. Flat Nose. A slang name the Indians were called. “Flat noses that dogs don’t even have.” The boy who made up the name was dark skinned himself, but he was also tall and had legs and arms of a man. When he beat up the younger boys, he always picked them up and threw them up in the air, so they were injured in the fall and not by blows from the fists or feet.

Around the time the others had called him Flat Nose and Big Belly, Menardo had made a horrible discovery. His grandfather’s nose had been much shorter and wider than his was; the people the old man called “our ancestors,” “our family,” were in fact Indians. All along Menardo had been listening to the one who was responsible for the taunts of the others. Without the family nose, Menardo might have passed for one of sangre limpia. Immediately Menardo found excuses for not going down the street where the old man lived in a small ramada in a garden. Menardo was afraid the other boys might come by and hoist themselves up on the back wall of the garden and see Menardo sitting with the old man.

Menardo’s cousin had finally come to the house one evening to tell them the old man was begging to have Menardo visit him as before. Menardo had rehearsed his lies for his mother and was able to repeat them to his cousin in flawless form: he was studying now to become an altar boy and had to spend all his free time at the rectory. Menardo almost felt sorry because the old man was the only one of all the adults who did not require anything in return, except that Menardo listen. The old man talked about other times and other worlds that existed before this present one. The old man recognized evil, whatever name you called it.

Not long after his cousin had come asking why Menardo did not visit grandpa, the old man had died in his sleep. Menardo had been relieved once they got him buried because he had studied the shapes and sizes of the noses of all his uncles and aunts and cousins; the only one with a suspicious nose was Menardo, and once the evidence the flat nose was inherited had been buried, Menardo knew exactly what to do.

He had gotten the idea out of a magazine that one of the older boys had smuggled into chapel. They had wanted the magazine because it had ads in it for women’s lipstick and perfume, and one of the ads showed a woman whirling around in a dress that showed the tops of her thighs. It was an exciting picture and the boys had nearly ruined it with their sweaty hands, smudging all the black ink on the page. But later on, when the picture was ruined and the magazine was stuffed behind the cupboard of the priest’s kitchen, Menardo had taken the magazine to the outhouse, in case he might still be able to make out the image of the woman whirling in her short dress. But the wonderful page had been torn out. What he found was a picture article on boxing and the new flyweight champion of Chiapas. The new champion was talking about his success and his hopes of meeting the flyweight champion of all Mexico, who was second in the world only to the Filipino champion. The champion had hazel eyes, just like Menardo, and his hair was light brown. But more important, his nose had a wide, flat look that the champion called his only regret. “An older, heavier opponent smashed my nose into my face,” the champion said. “But the women still like me, don’t they, Evita?” the champion said to the gorgeous, shapely blonde at his side during the interview.

UNIVERSAL INSURANCE

THE BOXING ARTICLE had given Menardo the answer he needed. He would bring it up casually. As he had later when he was courting Iliana. Menardo imagined her father was staring at his nose. Menardo had to swallow hard to keep from blurting it right out like a maniac: “It got broken in a boxing match!” Such an outburst would have finished the whole courtship right there. Iliana’s family was among the oldest in Tuxtla Gutiérrez — her great-grandfather on her mother’s side had in fact been part of the original Gutiérrez family that had settled the area. Menardo had risen quickly in the insurance business because he knew exactly what people wanted to hear.

Menardo sold “insurance of all kinds” to the whole region around Chiapas. As a salesman, Menardo got better and better; he moved up in the world, establishing his own company: Universal Insurance. He made appointments only with police chiefs, mayors, and owners of grocery stores. Of course there were many businesses and lives that could not be insured, not by any company, and not even by God himself, Menardo liked to joke over a cocktail during a follow-up visit with a new client. The concept of life insurance and insurance for buildings, livestock, and crops was new to the people outside the Federal District. Part of Menardo’s work was to explain tactfully the new world that they were living in, the new age. What was necessary so a man might sleep soundly at night was insurance against all the unknowns stalking the human race out there. Fire, Menardo likened to a feral cat, stalking at night around warehouses full of hemp or freshly ginned cotton. The glow of the cat’s eyes was seen too late to save a lifetime’s struggle and labor.

They liked it when he talked to them about hurricane winds that stampeded across the bay, to trample flat warehouses full of coffee beans or tobacco drying on racks. But there were always the older businessmen — elderly merchants who had seen their life’s savings roll away in wagons driven by thieves calling themselves “revolutionaries” and “the wave of the future.” These elder businessmen did not approve of the notion of interfering with the will of God by insuring losses. They did not like Menardo, and it took many visits and a great deal of humiliation before Menardo could get them to listen to him. He was there, he told them, because the “new world” could belong to them just as the old one had. Insurance was the new tool of the trade. What Menardo offered were special policies that insured against all losses, no matter the cause, including acts of God, mutinies, war, and revolution. The policies were extremely expensive, but guaranteed 100-percent coverage. How could they lose? How could they refuse this kind of protection?

The older businessmen inquired into the assets of Menardo’s company and found them sufficient. Still they thought he was a fool to insure against losses during revolution since anyone could see the years and the police crackdowns had not cooled off the rabble-rousers and the Bolsheviks. Menardo knew a few of them had developed a perversity due to their advancing age and to the losses they had sustained years ago. Menardo knew that a few of these bitter, strange old ladino businessmen were hoping to see Universal Insurance destroyed and Menardo wiped out. Chiapas had the misfortune of being too close to the border, which leaked rabble-rousers and thieves like a sewage pipe. Menardo’s had been the first insurance company to employ a private security force to protect clients from political unrest.

TIDAL WAVE

ILIANA’S FAMILY HAD ANNOUNCED their engagement after one of Menardo’s greatest triumphs as an insurer. A frantic telephone call had come from the owner of a shipping enterprise up the coast. An earthquake in the Pacific had sent a tidal wave in the direction of the docks and warehouses. The freighters could be taken out to sea to ride out the high water, but one warehouse was packed full with new appliances just shipped from the United States.

Menardo had had no more than two hours. He chartered a crop-dusting plane belonging to a coffee plantation he insured. He telephoned ahead for trucks, wagons, wheelbarrows — anything with wheels. He offered phenomenal wages for an hour’s work. He guaranteed anyone injured or possibly lost if the tidal wave should arrive ahead of schedule would have their family and orphans forever cared for by Seguridad Universal. When the chartered plane landed on the dirt strip behind the hospital, a doctor and a priest came running out to complain they could get no one to help with the evacuation of the hospital because everyone in the town had heard about the amazing wages being offered by Menardo. It was true. The men and big boys stood waiting anxiously glancing over their shoulders from time to time to check the ocean waves. A dump truck, a tractor pulling a flat hay trailer, a milk truck, and a number of smaller pickup trucks, taxis, and horse teams and wagons were ready and waiting. On the hill above the town, the women and children stood together, not watching the ocean but the activity at the airstrip. Menardo took command. He politely asked the doctor and the priest to step aside. Everything would be taken care of, he reassured them. While Menardo gave the orders for the crates of refrigerators and stoves to be loaded and moved to high ground, he questioned the doctor and the priest about the number of patients who were ambulatory and those who would require stretchers. Menardo could feel the power swell inside himself. He assured the doctor and the priest he would return with help.

The warehouse emptied so rapidly Menardo imagined the rising wind was pushing the crates of washing machines and deep freezers out of the building like leaves. On the grassy, green hilltop near the shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Hope, the women and children and their hastily gathered bundles were surrounded with crates of new appliances. Finally, as time began to run out, a lookout was appointed to fire a pistol from the hilltop so the crews emptying the warehouse would have time to escape. Once it was clear the contents of the warehouse would be saved, Menardo had sent ten workers, three pickups, and a dump truck to evacuate the hospital. Patients strapped on stretchers were transported to the hilltop where they, along with all the others, watched as the great wave approached with the roar of a freight train. A fierce wind rode the giant wave, tearing off hats and flapping hospital gowns. Menardo had glanced away for only a moment, to remove a speck of dust in his left eye, and when he looked again, the huge wave had toppled over itself like the stone seawalls the wave pushed ahead of itself. The crowd let out its breath in a sigh — an aahh so loud it almost sounded like a cheer. When Menardo looked again, the warehouses lay folded like squares of cloth at the foot of the hill.

The next day Menardo is famous all over Chiapas State and in the most remote villages and towns of southern Mexico. Newspapers proclaim that Universal Insurance makes good on its promises to protect clients from dangers of all kinds. Not a single new appliance has been lost, and the patients have been safely evacuated although the hospital is destroyed. The publicity from the tidal wave brings hundreds of letters and calls from prospective clients. Menardo can not allow the security of his great new enterprise to depend on the teenage boys and village farmers. Menardo sees then the necessity of a crack team of trouble-shooters. Also, a delicate matter has recently developed in a town farther south. A client reports that “agitators” have been talking to his field hands; in the night, vandals have come to destroy the coffee trees. The client, a white-haired gentleman, is a believer in the old order, and in the old ways. He pays Menardo in gold, not currency. “I am solid,” the old man says. “I wish to remain that way.”

ARMS AND MUNITIONS

MENARDO CARRIES GOLD sewn inside his underwear and socks, which he covers with another plain layer, in case of searches at the international border. In Tucson, he scans the yellow pages. He walks past gun shops, lingers near their doors, hoping to find someone he might approach about a special business deal. He wants his security men to have only the best. He wants an elite security force, one that the wealthy and the powerful will rent for special occasions — elections or funerals and even weddings — when the possibilities for violence proliferate. He prices the guns inside and settles for 9mm Lugers because many of his wealthy clients are Mexicans of German descent. He is a novice. The owners of the gun shops are all white men who wear guns and holsters in their shops. They unconsciously touch their holsters when Menardo walks in their doors. He knows they will call the police if he raises the subject. U.S. laws are strict regarding the sale of firearms to foreigners or citizens of other states. Menardo is once again self-conscious about his flat, thick nose; his skin looks darker in Tucson too.

Menardo sits back in the taxi and ignores the English words of the driver. The taxi stops at the army surplus store near the railroad tracks. Before he goes inside, Menardo checks his reflection in the plate glass. He fears his suit coat is wrinkling and spoiling his image. Menardo sees a man staring at him from the other side of the window. The man is short and slight and has a huge bundle of yellow nylon billowing in his arms. The man does not take his eyes off Menardo as he walks in the door. Menardo refuses to be stared down, but once inside, Menardo realizes he is staring at a man whose face is more than half covered with a reddish-purple birthmark. Menardo drops his eyes, and at the same time the strange little white man drops the parachute and steps over to the glass-front counter. Although the day is hot, the man is wearing tight black leather driving gloves. Menardo admires the parachute in halting English. He might find uses for those in his company. The man pulls nervously at the driving gloves and asks what the company sells. “Insurance and security,” Menardo answers, not sure he has used the correct English word for insurance. The man has a pistol strapped on his hip. He smooths the leather of his gloves compulsively; first, with the right hand, then the left. Greenlee sees Menardo staring at the pistol and smiles for the first time. The smile goes on and off like a light switch, as if the man does it only to relax his jaws. The man motions at the back of the warehouse crammed full with racks of surplus army jackets, used parachutes, and empty ammunition boxes. Menardo tries to see everything as he follows Greenlee, but every shelf and corner, every square foot of the floor, is piled with canteens, helmets, glass radio tubes, and spools of copper wire.

Menardo can hear someone hammering on hollow metal. Menardo can’t see. He removes his tinted eyeglasses, but it’s of little use. The back room of the warehouse is hot and smells like railroad ties and train diesel and crankcase oil. In the dimness he makes out the hood of a jeep. Leaning in a far corner, almost touching the fifteen-foot ceiling, are what appear to be some sort of antitank missiles. Menardo is new to all this, but he has every confidence a businessman of his brilliance and skill can arrange the purchases and delivery of certain high-quality American firearms. But just then Menardo turns to find Greenlee kneeling, pressing on a floorboard. It comes up with a pop! and Greenlee lets himself down into the hole in the floor. Menardo later wonders why he followed crazy Greenlee into the basement. Later, when Greenlee has renovated the warehouse basement, they both still laugh about that day. Menardo had followed Greenlee without hesitation. He stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder, and Greenlee flipped on the lights dramatically. For as far as Menardo could see, in the vast basement of the old warehouse, there were stacked boxes of rifles and ammunition. Later Menardo asked Greenlee why he had trusted Menardo, and Greenlee had laughed nervously, smoothed the leather of his gloves, and said he trusted no one. But with Menardo, Greenlee knew anyone stupid enough to just walk in like that and follow him into a hole in the floor could not have been any government’s agent.

Menardo had returned from Tucson with a full, satisfied feeling, not only from the big meal Greenlee had bought him at the airport before he left, but with the vision in his head of all those crates of rifles. The rifles with ammunition and delivery charges cost once again the amount of the gold coins Menardo had carried. But Greenlee had been happy to open Menardo a charge account. “This is only the beginning, my friend,” Greenlee had said, patting Menardo on the shoulder as Menardo stepped into line with other passengers bound for Mexico City and points south. It had been just the beginning because Greenlee refused to deal with the others — the hotshot colonels who bought “supplies” once or twice. There were other arms suppliers, of course; but Greenlee got the best even when “the best” was unavailable anywhere else. Even then, Menardo used to have fantasies about Iliana dying, and himself falling in love with a lovely young girl who would immediately give him the son he wanted, the son who would inherit the yearly percentages and all the rest. “All the rest” was what occupied Menardo. Selling insurance and security had been a good beginning. But it had not taken Menardo long to realize, as Greenlee hinted, the real future lay in insurance and security of a different sort.

ALEGRÍA

MENARDO HAD MADE AN APPOINTMENT with the most prestigious architectural firm in Mexico City. There, on three floors of a skyscraper, rows and rows of young engineers and architects toiled away, “designing the face of Mexico’s future,” as one of the senior partners of the firm told Menardo as they toured the premises. But when they reached the upper floor, where the offices of the senior partners and associates were located, the senior partner had led Menardo into a suite where a beautiful young woman sat working at a drafting table, her knees together and the high heels of her shoes hooked daintily on the rung of a high stool. When she turned and looked up at them, Menardo saw the lovely blue silk dress she wore was protected by a starched, white smock that gave her appearance a certain authority. She was, the senior partner told Menardo, their most prized young associate. Menardo did not remember crossing the pearl-gray carpet with the senior partner. All Menardo knew was that he was breathing the odor of many gardenias and carnations blooming together as Señorita Alegría Martinez-Soto took his thick, damp paw in her delicate, dry hand. Menardo glanced down to look at his hand in hers and saw that despite her work with pencils, rulers, and compasses, Señorita Martinez-Soto kept her fingernails long and perfectly enameled. Later Menardo had felt like a bumpkin because after the senior partner had left them alone together, Menardo had been so flustered he had accidentally stumbled over the wastebasket next to Alegría’s desk. But instead of appearing disdainful or stiff, she had laughed at the wadded balls of paper scattered over the carpet. “Little paper rabbits,” Alegría had said, pointing and then smiling broadly at Menardo. He had fallen quickly to his knees to retrieve the crumpled paper, but again she laughed and waved a hand with the long, dazzling fingernails and told him the janitors were accustomed to finding far worse. She explained when she really got an idea in earnest and began to make headway with a design, she would lose all track of time; then pencils and pencil leads and wads of torn paper would fly all over her office. “Fortunately,” Alegría said, looking deep into Menardo’s eyes, “they aren’t paying me for being neat and clean or to keep this office orderly.” Just as Menardo thought he sensed a certain boldness on the part of the young woman, she indicated the chair across the desk from hers and invited him to sit down.

The first order of business, she told him, was to get a general idea of the client’s immediate needs. Menardo had been greatly relieved that Señorita Martinez-Soto was proceeding slowly and from the very beginning. For although Menardo had boldly ventured into many business arenas in previous years and had become a self-made “millionaire,” he was quite aware that many of the intricate customs and rituals of the upper classes were still unknown to him. He had never engaged an architect before. He had simply understood this was the practice when one wished to build the castle of one’s dreams. Menardo was aware of a feeling far stronger and more urgent than simple gratitude toward this young beauty who had spared him embarrassment or discomfort. She must be one of these “modern liberated women” who did not need to resort to bitchery to get what she wanted. While she talked on and on about the “options” and “alternatives,” Menardo’s eyes darted furtively over her body, ready to dart back to her eyes whenever she looked away from the big window where she stared as she spoke. She had a fast, breathy way of talking about her ideas and goals — the interplay of structure as sculptural form with light.

“Light?” Menardo had echoed. He had narrowly escaped her eyes catching his on her breasts. Light had been the lead-in topic to their fateful discussion, enthusiastic planning, splendid rolls of blueprints, and finally, the opulent marble staircase to the second level. Menardo had learned that day to speak of “levels” rather than “floors.” Before he knew it, the time was up, and Señorita Martinez-Soto was showing him to the door. Menardo saw that all of the other offices were dark, and all but a few of the cadres of draftsmen and typists had left for the day. It was seven P.M. and Menardo had been so entranced he had forgotten his promise to call Iliana at six P.M. Now all that seemed too far in the past to matter. The lights of the capital were blinking and blazing, and without weighing the considerations, Menardo asked Señorita Martinez-Soto if she would not like to accompany him to the tearoom of his hotel for refreshment. Menardo was very self-conscious. He thought “dinner” would have been too forward, and “cocktails” or “a drink” sounded too vulgar. He had only heard gossip or read about liberated women in popular magazines. He was not sure what he should do or what he should expect. But Señorita Martinez-Soto became very cool. She explained socializing was specifically forbidden by company policy unless both husband and wife could be present. Apparently something unfortunate had happened between a client and a junior partner, but it had been long before her arrival at the firm and she did not know the details. Certainly he understood, did he not? Menardo broke into a cold sweat of embarrassment. It was the sort of mistake he tried always to avoid because he knew what separated the social classes were these intricate and confusing rules of etiquette. As she showed him out of the suite to the elevators, she had smiled and told him he should discuss with his wife the points she had raised, and she would have the firm’s receptionist telephone the following week to schedule her visit to Tuxtla Gutiérrez. It would be impossible, she reminded him, to design any structure without first surveying the building site.

Menardo could not get her out of his mind. He speculated on her background. She could not have been of high birth or from great wealth. Menardo knew the daughters of those families would never have been allowed to take up a profession. Menardo was relieved she was not too far out of his class. He was not sure, but he thought in another year or two, as the bigger arms sales were made, the millions might raise him to her level and he and she might possibly be considered social equals.

ILIANA

BACK HOME, MENARDO FELT a little ashamed at the way the spell of the big city had overcome him. Iliana was happy and excited about the plans and the design of the new house. It was her chance to get even with sisters and brothers and in-laws who had been skeptical about the marriage. But Menardo had money, and her family had lost much of its wealth over the years. Still Iliana had been reminded, every day since she was three years old, that her great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side had descended from the conquistador De Oñate.

Menardo had been cautious about mentioning Señorita Martinez-Soto. He had even let Iliana go on calling the architect “he” until it was time to dress for the party at the Governor’s Palace. Then he had said:

“Oh, by the way, it is interesting, and I know you will like her — the architect who is doing the drawings is a woman.” Iliana had been intent on discovering whether Tacho, the sullen Indian chauffeur, had remembered to pick up the dry cleaning. She knew Menardo did not like to wear the brown suit to the Governor’s Palace where the governor and the general and the ambassador would all be in military regalia. Naturally Iliana understood the importance of these details. In the months of their engagement she had done all she could to give helpful hints to Menardo so her parents and relatives would find him more acceptable. The consequence of these months of exchanging brown shoes or tan shoes for the dignity of black had made Menardo prone to fits of temper just before leaving the house for society “functions” as he called them. But Tacho never forgot anything, and almost as if he knew what the Señora was thinking, he sent the cook from the kitchen to remind the Señora the dry cleaning was hanging in the hall closet. Tacho favored the Señora because she had permitted him to keep his pet macaws in a tree behind the old garage.

Iliana brought Menardo the black suit and ruffled white shirt. She asked Menardo if the senior partner was sure this woman had the necessary capabilities. Menardo could feel himself move within, away from excitement and anticipation he could not pin down, to irritation, then fury, with Iliana and her dumb questions. Iliana had spoiled the new feeling he had been enjoying as he bathed. She was always raising worries where none should be. Iliana was insisting on an expensive automobile, a bulletproof Mercedes, because she felt they had reached “that level,” the highest of society. Iliana had only attended the nun’s school through the seventh level because her parents believed further education only confused young women. Iliana had never been confused, but she had always been uneasy. She had been born into a family set on the brink of ruin by dirty, stupid Indians who had no understanding of how much they needed their patróns to keep the world running productively. Even after Menardo had loaned large sums of money to her father and three brothers, thus establishing himself, Iliana still was gnawed by the fear that disaster was stalking all of them. Sometimes the fear surged up in her stomach causing her to have to excuse herself from her parents’ dinner table, or to have to leave the ballroom for the ladies’ lounge. Iliana had thought for a long time that a house that was slightly larger than the old family home would prove her husband to the rest of the family. Iliana did not want the design spoiled. She felt a little angry the architecture firm had put their dream house in the hands of a woman.

Iliana did not exactly argue. From their house to the Governor’s Palace she had listened as Menardo reeled off Miss Martinez-Soto’s academic honors and professional prizes. But when Menardo would look to see if that had satisfied her, Iliana would say, “I don’t know,” which prompted Menardo to launch into another description of the size of her office and its proximity to the offices of the junior associates and senior partners. The last time Iliana said “Well, I’m not so sure,” Menardo had taken his head in both hands as if to shake his brains around. All he could think of were the years they had been engaged in this ritual to prove he was worthy enough despite all the money her family had received from Menardo. Iliana shut up when she saw the violence with which he seized his own head. Menardo had never laid a hand on her, but he had often shouted at her and told her how stupid or how greedy she was.

Dinners at the Governor’s Palace were business affairs, Menardo reminded Iliana. However gay or social they might seem to her, she should be careful not to interrupt or join in conversations with him and the men, although the former ambassador’s wife often did. The governor’s wife used to remain so the former ambassador’s wife, an American woman, would not be alone with the men. The American woman did not speak or understand Spanish well, and the other women had devoted part of the evening to a discussion of the lack of refinement in certain women who slipped into places and occasions where they had no business. Iliana leaped upon the subject tonight with a special appetite because the woman architect had begun to worry her. Iliana was anxious to have the other women agree with her because Menardo seemed so determined to leave their dream house in the hands of Miss Martinez-Soto.

The judge’s wife said that she had recently read a magazine article that concluded that work outside the home caused infertility and sterility in women. The police chief’s wife cleared her throat, and the judge’s wife appeared flustered for a moment. The women had an understanding: they avoided topics and names, and even words that might in any way connect one of themselves with an upsetting incident or circumstance. Iliana had been trying for years to carry a child to term. How many times had each of them carried bouquets of gardenias and miniature roses to the hospital bed where Iliana sat clutching the bed sheet to her belly, tears streaming out of her eyes, without a sound. But Iliana took no notice of the reference to barrenness, perhaps because Menardo had stopped sleeping with her. It had been kind of the judge’s wife, really, to mention the effects of careers on women such as Miss Martinez-Soto. Iliana felt better. That other woman was no threat.

Menardo could hardly concentrate on the conversation after dinner because he was rehearsing imaginary conversations between himself and Miss Martinez-Soto. This was very unlike Menardo, who had learned it pays to listen closely to the conversations of men such as the judge and the police chief. In this district, the judge and the police chief had certain powers that rivaled those of the governor and even the former ambassador. The ambassador had retired from his post in Washington, D.C., to manage business affairs for a wealthy American with vast holdings in Guatemala and Colombia. The women informed their husbands the former ambassador’s wife had complained he traveled far more now than he ever had. The wives did not expect to know what importance, if any, might be attached to all this travel. They reported the information so their husbands would praise them. The former ambassador’s wife complained in public and sometimes even argued with him. The wives were encouraged to report gossip and incidents out of the ordinary so they would be useful to their husbands not simply as wives and the mothers of their sons, but as patriots.

VIDEO SURVEILLANCE

POWER CENTERED IN THE INVESTIGATIONS the chief of police might authorize independent of any other agency or bureau. The southern border was particularly vulnerable to secret agents and rabble-rousers, sewage that had seeped out of Guatemala to pollute “the pure springs of Mexican democracy.” The chief of police had often requested secret meetings with the governor and the judge and former ambassador to brief them on the current investigations or to ask for emergency funds, since over half of the manpower and physical resources of the State Police were committed to the “protection” of state security. The difficulty, the governor had often complained in bitter tones, was that the Federal District did not appreciate what a poor state Chiapas was, and how little money the state had. “None of them understand that we are the ones responsible for protecting our border. They don’t know the dangers we face daily.” The police chief did not like to hear the governor use the word we when clearly the governor did nothing all day but doze in his red leather desk chair and scribble his signature on the piles of papers his secretary brought him. The secretary had been a runner-up in an International Teenage Miss competition only a few years earlier, and the police chief took advantage of the governor’s conspicuous absences at their golf games to complain to the judge and to the former ambassador.

“She is as thin and flat as a young boy. She is a mere child. How can that old pig mount her without tearing her open, without ruining her insides?” The police chief was careful to wait until they had finished nine holes and had retired to the shade of their big white umbrella before he mentioned Miss Teenage Chiapas. The manager of the country club had set up a white wrought-iron table and umbrella especially for them on the far side of the ninth hole. The steep slope of the back side of the ninth hole made a perfect backstop for bullets, and it had become their habit to play nine holes, refresh themselves with a few pitchers of margaritas, and then fire a few rounds with their handguns. The police chief had ruined golf games before by allowing himself to become upset over the shocking sexual appetite of the governor. Each had an idea about what the police chief was feeling during those moments when the tequila was whispering in his ears, and he would yell and reach for his service revolver if anyone disturbed him. Menardo thought the police chief must be imagining the governor and the girl together, in the small conference room off the governor’s main office, the long, thin legs spread open and skirts pushed up high.

The judge knew the police chief had called the governor’s young secretary into his office after midnight for a confidential security check. The judge thought the police chief must be remembering how easily the white silk panties had slid down her long, thin legs as he began what he termed “a body search,” which was perhaps a bit uncomfortable, but all a part of official procedure in the line of security duty. The judge thought the chief must be remembering how the girl and governor appeared on the secret video cameras that had recently been installed in the governor’s office while he was away at a national conference in the Federal District.

The chief of police could not remember the girl’s face, much less her dark buds of breasts or her small, thin buttocks, which he had seen on the video screen. What he could not forget, what remained in his thoughts, had been something far more horrible, something that he had not expected to see but that the video camera had revealed. It was the long, thick erect organ of the governor; in low light it might be mistaken for a loaf of bread. He had of course been with the governor many times in the locker room of the country club after a shower or in the sauna room. But even standing beside the governor at the marble urinal in the Governor’s Palace in the capital had not prepared the chief for when the governor first took down his trousers and boxer shorts.

On the videotape, as the governor ran his fingertips over the girl’s breasts and belly, his organ would increase its girth but the length remained the same, and most strangely of all, the organ did not twitch or jerk or move as the governor pushed his finger in and out of the dark bush area between the girl’s legs. Even at the instant the governor knelt astraddle the former junior miss, the organ hung down with its own weight and had to be lifted and then guided to the threshold with both the governor’s hands, a maneuver that reminded the police chief of a mortar crewman loading a shell.

Even if the girl knew how to type and was past sixteen, the legal age for such carnality, the police chief could not help but think that such conduct left their administration, and the entire government party, wide open to charges of scandal the filthy communists relished. At a time when the unrest and turmoil to the south were in a ferment, the police chief felt the governor should not take these weekly golf games lightly. They needed the solidarity and brotherhood more than ever. It was not fitting for this serious business of men to play second fiddle to the flower-pink cunt that already suffered bruised petals, if security’s new color-video camera was telling the truth.

As their car pulls out of the governor’s private driveway, the former ambassador’s wife tells him that Iliana could do nothing but talk and brag about the huge new mansion she and Menardo were having built. “Oh, where?” the former ambassador asks, pretending he is interested when he had hoped for a nap on the ride home. She is a clever bitch and immediately takes offense at his languid response.

“Don’t you think that is interesting?” she demands. “Don’t you wonder how all the money goes to that monkey-face who passes himself off as a white man?” Here the former ambassador is struck by the difficulty in balancing one interest with another. Her information comes in handy now that he is working for the American company. But it is not necessary for her to know anything, and yet the former ambassador hears in her badgering tone signs she is attempting to construct possible links and plots. The former ambassador clamps a hand to his forehead and apologizes, saying he feels one of his terrible headaches coming on. That quiets her immediately because the severity of his headaches necessitates days of bed rest in total darkness with high dosages of morphine. What the former ambassador does not tell his wife is he knows exactly where Menardo is getting the money to build the big new house.

• • •

Menardo rises before daylight and nervously showers twice, once upon rising, but then again before it is time to leave for the airport because he feels oily from the humidity and his own sweat. Iliana insists on coming along to the building site with Miss Martinez-Soto. Menardo has always known Iliana would have to participate in the planning and the design. But since the senior partner had put their project in the young architect’s hands, Menardo’s previous expectations and plans have also changed. Had a senior architect done the designs and blueprints, Menardo might have felt at ease about leaving Iliana to work alone with her. Old man Portillo was a proven master architect and he would know how to sidestep graciously any of Iliana’s stupid ideas. But this young woman, though she had been a prize winner and top graduate from Madrid, might lack the experience needed to deal with the likes of Iliana, who could talk of nothing but greenhouses and conservatories and orchid-raising as her new hobby.

Everything about Iliana irritated him this morning. He wanted to bash in her rouged cheeks and eyes ringed in turquoise. She kept asking why he wanted to leave for the airport an hour earlier than necessary, when everyone knew the plane from the Federal District always ran two hours late. He ignored the questions the first two times she asked, but the third time he had slammed down his briefcase so hard that the downstairs maid and the cook scurried out the back door. Iliana stood with the expression she assumed when her feelings were hurt. She went back upstairs, and a few minutes later, when Menardo yelled for her to come, that Tacho had brought the car around, she appeared at the head of the stairs in her pink satin kimono and said she did not feel well enough to go. Menardo felt small and helpless clinging to the briefcase, which felt heavier and heavier in his hand as he stood looking up at Iliana. He did not want Iliana along on the day he hoped to spend exclusively with Miss Martinez-Soto.

Iliana was the kind who picked up the telephone and spoke with the husband or father of any woman she had suspected with Menardo. This had caused Menardo a great deal of embarrassment. Menardo believed it went back to the status of his family versus the status of hers. Had he been from origins equal or higher than hers, like other husbands he knew, Iliana would not dare make her poisonous telephone calls and send hate-filled, unsigned letters. Menardo had given her as much money than any husband of the upper class ever could have. Iliana’s own family would never have afforded an expenditure the size of which the new house was going to require. Menardo was proud his wife had large sums of cash to spend. Iliana’s own sisters and brothers remarked how much money she spent. Everyone knew how expensive Iliana’s collections were. She had begun collecting antique perfume bottles after the first miscarriage; Iliana’s deep sorrow over the loss had necessitated some diversion. Menardo had tried to dissuade Iliana, citing the costliness of these perfume bottles, but he had not fought very hard. After the antique perfume flasks had come enameled pillboxes, odd demitasse spoons, rosary beads of precious stones, pearls, and gold.

Menardo left Iliana, arranging to drive by later after the visit to the building site so Miss Martinez-Soto could meet Iliana. They would discuss color charts and features Iliana wanted in the mansion. Menardo had calculated this move to calm any worries Iliana might have had about his intentions toward Miss Martinez-Soto.

ADULTERY

TACHO ROLLED PEBBLES of different colors on the ground near the airstrip and small terminal building. Menardo sat in the front seat straining his eyes, almost blinding himself even with the dark glasses as he peered into the bright sunlight searching for signs of the flight from Mexico City. Tacho was tossing the pebbles in the old Indian game that Menardo remembered seeing his grandfather play, when Menardo was a small child and his grandfather still had enough eyesight to see the little stones. Menardo had known it was a gambler’s game, but today Tacho told him it was a fortune-telling device too. Menardo had been pretending to read the newspaper between glances at the blinding sky, but he stopped long enough to make a guttural sound expressing his impatience with Indian superstition.

“The pebbles can’t tell you any more than I already know,” Menardo said crossly. “The plane is two hours late from Mexico City, and my guest will be exhausted and half-sick by the time she arrives. She will regret she ever heard the name of Tuxtla Gutiérrez.” Tacho was kneeling beside the driver’s door, rolling the pebbles while Menardo made his dismissive remarks. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry boss,” Tacho said without raising his head. “I asked the pebbles. They say she will like it here, sir.” Menardo said nothing to this. He hated the way Indians tried to please you, telling you whatever they thought you wanted to hear so you would be tricked and believe their stupid superstitions or at least be manipulated to give them a bonus on payday. Still, Menardo had heard the cook and the downstairs maid quarreling over hot tips they had purchased from Tacho, hot tips on numbers for the lottery. Tacho had not asked them to pay in cash, which Tacho never lacked. He had required them to accompany him to the garage where he kept a hammock handy for naps and such transactions as these. The women had been fighting over the numbers he had given them. The cook had the little maid in tears. The cook maintained Tacho preferred older, bigger women and therefore had not given the maid as many winning numbers as he’d given the cook. Sometime later Menardo learned the cook had been right. Tacho had given the skinny girl only one winning number while the cook with the big fanny had won with five numbers.

Miss Martinez-Soto was escorted off the aircraft by a fair-skinned man in a captain’s hat and uniform coat. The captain was apologizing profusely, and Menardo realized Miss Martinez-Soto was wearing an airline galley smock. The captain tipped his hat to Menardo and apologized for the delay and moreover for the “terrible inconvenience” Miss Martinez-Soto had suffered and for which the airline would pay. Menardo took Miss Martinez-Soto’s hand and got a faint whiff of vomit. She seemed so much younger and far less formal outside the big city. She laughed and ran her hands down the sides of the smock.

“A man in the seat behind me stood up to go to the lavatory. Just then he got airsick. I am lucky he missed my hair. But he got my dress.” Menardo was enchanted. She was talking to him as if they had always known one another.

Alegría did not like the sullen Indian chauffeur. Negroes made better drivers. She did not like the way the Indian looked at her. He seemed to know already. She decided the Indian chauffeur must be Menardo’s way of keeping in touch with his humble origins. That ass, the senior partner Mr. Portillo, had insisted on taking her for a long lunch to discuss Menardo, their prospective client. This man was “self-made,” as Mr. Portillo put it delicately, which meant here was a man of darker skin and lower class who had managed to amass a large fortune. Alegría hated the way Portillo bit into the olives skewed to the martinis he kept slinging back. Portillo was the only one of the partners who had not tried to seduce her. Portillo drooped in his chair, suddenly giving way to the weight of the martinis.

The courses of the meal seemed to wash in and out relentlessly; Alegría played with her spoon and imagined the plates and bowls were garbage washing onto a beach. When he saw Alegría did not care for the soup, he cut short his lecture on the holy man Bartolomé de Las Casas. He turned to Menardo and the mansion Alegría would be designing. It would be her first solo commission, and he naturally wanted to give her the benefit of all the knowledge his years in the profession had accumulated. Alegría did not tell him so, but Portillo would have nothing to worry about with this commission. The Señor was head over heels for her after one look. No, there would be no offenses, no ruffled feathers. If the wife wanted Gothic vaulted ceilings in the closets, Alegría was prepared to give them to her, and to concern herself only with structural stability.

That night, Alegría had had a bitter argument with Bartolomeo. She told him she had to fly to Tuxtla Gutiérrez the following week. Bartolomeo had been angry at the length of the lunch she had had with Mr. Portillo. Bartolomeo was furious at the time her firm spent with the rich, “petting their swollen little egos!” Bartolomeo had shouted at Alegría, “And then you! You they keep there to pet the swelling trousers of the rich!” Alegría did it instinctively. When Bartolomeo got upset, she groomed her fingernails. The steady motion of the nail file was soothing. Stroking on the bright-colored nail enamel somehow distanced his words. Once when she teased him about New World being the terminology of the exploiter, Bartolomeo had slapped her across the face. Staggering back from the blow, tears blinding her, Alegría’s hand had brushed the electric coffeemaker. But instead of recoiling from the burn she had seized the handle and slammed the coffeepot into Bartolomeo’s chest, scalding him. Alegría had found that a manicure prevented such incidents.

Alegría thought the Indian chauffeur exemplified the worst characteristics possessed by the Indian. He had listened to every word Menardo or Alegría said, from the airport to the dress shop, to the moment he opened the door of the Mercedes for them in front of the Royal Hotel. He not only made eye contact with his social superiors, this Indian alternately had mocking, then knowing, eyes. Alegría hated what he had said with his eyes as she was escorted off the wretched plane by the captain. Tacho had looked right at her as if to say, “The captain wants to reach right into your panties.” As he held the car door outside the hotel, Alegría had glanced up and to her horror saw the Indian was smiling as if he knew she was going to seduce his boss later that afternoon.

MARBLE STAIRWAY

ALEGRÍA HAD BEEN IN Mexico City, quarreling with Bartolomeo over the affair she had been having with Menardo, when the shocking message had arrived. Iliana was dead. The accident could be traced back to the first afternoon Menardo ever spent with Alegría, and their visit to the building site on the edge of suburban Tuxtla where a last hilltop of jungle trees and vegetation had persisted. The light that shone down on the site had been magical. It was the most luminous and soothing sunlight Alegría had ever seen. When she commented on it, Menardo had been quick to point out the southern climes had much to offer a person who had spent most of her life farther north. It was true. She had hated the winters in Madrid. Sometimes she thought she might die before the overcast and the wet winds passed. Sometimes she had borrowed money from another student and simply fled on the train to the sun and the ocean in the South. Alegría had nodded, still looking with wonder at the wide, flat jungle leaves and the fretwork of the innumerable vines and delicate mosses, which transformed the blinding tropical light into a light which was soft but which illuminated all crevices with a glow of pearls. The quality of the light instantly became Alegría’s focus. Whatever Iliana and Menardo said they wanted — entryways, carports, closets, whirlpool baths — Alegría scrutinized to determine how these details or items might be built without interfering with the quality of the light. It had been for this special light that the fatal marble stairway had been designed. The high wall of glass in the conservatory would supply the cascades of glowing white light.

Iliana and Alegría got along surprisingly well. They had agreed on nearly every detail — from built-in appliances in the kitchen to the size of the storage closets on the second floor. Alegría won over Iliana completely when she presented the drawings for the wall of glass display cases for Iliana’s collections. Alegría made the journey from Mexico City twice each month during construction. Menardo could not reveal to Iliana and certainly not to Alegría that the cost overruns were beyond his wildest fears. It was during this time that Menardo began to notice burning sensations in his stomach, no matter what he ate for lunch. The doctor gave Menardo big bottles of liquid chalk to drink when he felt the burning. Dr. Gris asked if Menardo was under any unusual stress. Was anything going haywire at home or with the business? Dr. Gris had protruding eyes magnified many times behind thick glasses. When he asked these questions, he leaned close to Menardo’s face, smiling all the while, as if he knew everything. Menardo could smell the doctor’s sour breath, and the face seemed more frog than human. The froggy sounds their skin and bodies made in the sweat still embarrassed Menardo. Alegría was part of a different generation; the slap slap and suck suck sounds paralyzed him with embarrassment, but excited her to new heights. Menardo did not tell Dr. Gris about any of this, but the huge, bugging eyes seemed to miss no detail. At one time Menardo had been much closer to Dr. Gris. They had often golfed together with the former ambassador and the police chief. But after Menardo’s young secretary had needed the sudden confidential attention of Dr. Gris, they no longer saw each other socially. Menardo had felt betrayed. He had always given Dr. Gris a wholesale price on the night security patrol that kept the doctor’s estate secure from trespassers. The doctor’s bill had been itemized. Besides the initial test and consultation, and the “surgery,” Dr. Gris had added nearly ten thousand more for “confidentiality”—an item Menardo had assumed was part of the deal, after all the golf they’d played together. When Menardo had expressed shock at the bill, Dr. Gris had only smiled. His eyes protruded in proportion to the width of his smile. Gris told Menardo saving face in a town the size of Tuxtla Gutiérrez was expensive indeed. A little later, after Menardo had thought about it, he sent a statement to Dr. Gris indicating the price of security against burglars and trespassers had risen due to the revaluation of the peso. Dr. Gris had paid without question, and although Iliana still saw Dr. Gris, and Menardo had brought his nervous stomach to him, their golf games were no more.

Alegría and Iliana had ganged up on Menardo. Alegría saw the jungle as a distinctive feature the house should not deny. At first Iliana had wanted high walls to shut out the jungle. She had not even wanted windows facing east where the clearing gave way to thick vines trailing down from the limbs of giant jungle trees. But Alegría had worked patiently, explaining the glass and steel of the conservatory walls would be as secure as any wall, which of course was not true, but was the kind of reassurance that Iliana needed before she could move on. Alegría argued that in order for the marble stairs to create the effect of a cascade of light, a waterfall of jungle light down the polished marble, the entire east wall would have to be glass. The marble staircase branched from the midway landing up to the second-floor level where one could stand and gaze down into the masses of orchids and bromelaids Iliana collected for her conservatory. One could then turn to survey the great sala, which held four long dining tables for winter dinners and had electrical hookups in one corner for dance-band amplifiers. But as Alegría told them both in her breathless enthusiasm, no visitor would ever enter this house without immediately turning to the staircase and to the wall of glass and the lush green jungle vegetation outside the conservatory. Iliana had wanted something grand for her mansion, and the cascade of white marble stairs had been exactly what Iliana wanted. Guests would be forced to notice the conservatory, filled with her latest collecting interest, rare jungle orchids.

All the women Iliana lunched with at the club buzzed with excitement and envy. The judge’s wife wrinkled her brow slightly and said that the whole house plan and even the size of the swimming pool seemed “so very modern.” To which Iliana had smoothed the bodice of her linen dress and laughed. Of course the judge’s wife would not appreciate such a staircase. She weighed close to three hundred pounds and it would have been an ordeal for her. Certainly the judge’s wife had no use for the swimming pool — no bathing suit would fit her.

Iliana had been taught by her mother to pretend ignorance of those things that cannot be changed. She had picked up the telephone before and had made trouble for married women sleeping with Menardo. But she had “not recognized” those women and those situations over which she had no control. If Iliana had suspected anything initially, when Menardo kept flying to the Federal District to review drawings and floor plans, once she began working with Alegría, she chose to ignore her suspicions and mistrust. Alegría often took her side against Menardo. Both women were of the opinion that as long as they were going to the trouble of building a house, it should be exactly the way Iliana wanted it. When Mr. Portillo had discussed the commission with Alegría, he had reminded her such opportunities to design a private home of these dimensions came seldom to young architects. Fewer and fewer could afford such luxury.

Iliana had wanted a house the size of Maximilian and Charlotte’s palace. But with patience Alegría convinced Iliana that to have a house which was so “out of scale” would be a crime against good taste. The discussions of “scale” had not meant much to Menardo except it might save him millions of pesos. He was a little surprised at how quickly the two women had warmed up to one another after he and Alegría had sex together. Menardo had expected the love affair might affect Alegría in a negative way. Menardo certainly had no desire for Iliana, but he had recovered his old fondness for her in the heat of his passion for Alegría. It pleased Menardo to see the two of them together intently studying blueprints and to understand the various terms used by architects and builders.

Iliana began to miss the club luncheons, and when she did attend, the other wives noticed she no longer complained about the female architect. Instead, Iliana had begun to talk about scale and proportion and clever ways to conceal storage space behind wall panels. Finally, the judge’s wife, as the senior woman in the luncheon group, took Iliana aside and warned her she had been absent far too often. Actually the others were angry because Iliana was talking about things they did not understand. Iliana had not been surprised the envy of the other members of the luncheon club had manifested itself in this manner. She had rather expected it and had maybe even hoped for some little confrontation that would set her apart from them. Of course she knew that one did not let such things get too far out of hand.

Menardo spent afternoons with Alegría in her hotel room. Alegría had made it known to all that under no circumstance was she to be disturbed. The afternoons were her time to rework the design plans.

When he came to Alegría’s room, he carried a cardboard tube of blueprints. Menardo had long ago learned never to be caught without an explanation or excuse for himself.

LOVE TRYST

ALEGRÍA HAD NEVER AGAIN received him as she had the first time, the afternoon of her harrowing plane flight from Mexico City. Menardo had insisted she buy the most expensive dress that fit her, noting proudly the dress shop had few dresses in her size. The wealthy women of Tuxtla Gutiérrez were too fond of their luncheons and rich snacks at their canasta games. Actually, Alegría chose a white pantsuit of raw silk. She pretended to be shy about spending her client’s money. She was aware Iliana shopped there also and did not want to give the saleswomen of the store any extra details for their inevitable gossip. She had come only for the day, to survey the building site. Of course, she had not brought a change of clothes. The disgusting old man on the plane had vomited all over her white linen skirt and matching blazer. This was what Menardo had argued to Iliana after Alegría had returned to Mexico City, and word had reached her that Menardo had bought clothes and a hotel room for their female architect.

Menardo had given her two hours to rid herself of the filth from the plane ride. When he rang up to her room, she had recovered herself and took a businesslike tone. When she stepped out of the elevator, leather folio in hand, she looked as cool as the icy white silk. She had slipped on her big sunglasses before she stepped outside. Tacho was holding the car door. She stepped around the chauffeur, leaning as far away from him as she could. All the way to the building site she sat with a shoulder slightly turned to him, only nodding when Menardo pointed out the court building, the police station, the entrance to the country club, and the Governor’s Palace. Menardo had offered her a hand as she stepped out of the car, but she had not taken it. She walked ahead of him to survey the clearing. Menardo had lost all hope then and was about to join Tacho, who was leaning against the hood of the car, when Alegría suddenly turned and called out. Menardo had jumped, fearing a poisonous snake or a drunken Indian. But Tacho did not move, and Menardo was embarrassed to see Alegría laughing. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she said. “I was only calling you over to see this.” Menardo hurried to the place she was standing.

“Look,” she said, but when Menardo looked he saw only the ragged edge of the jungle where the bulldozers had stopped.

“What do you think?” Alegría had been pointing up into the fringe of wide, waxy leaves. Menardo looked vainly for a bird or a green tree frog or a lizard or snake. All he saw were branches, leaves, and vines in a tangle and dappled by a few shafts of sunlight. “If it’s a flower of some kind,” Menardo said, laughing nervously, “don’t expect me to see it! I leave that to the florists.”

“The light,” Alegría said with a lovely tone to her voice, as if she were in love with the light. “See?”

“Oh!” Menardo said quickly. “Yes, yes, I do!”

“There is nothing more lovely than the veiled sunlight the jungle gives. We will let this light be the theme of the entire house.”

“Yes,” Menardo said, squinting up at the tops of the jungle trees, wondering how Iliana would ever agree to have her dream home built so close to the jungle.

Alegría had grown more and more excited about the light and the ways in which the special qualities of the softly filtered sun could be enhanced by the design of the building and the placement of windows. She had talked nonstop all the way to the hotel. Menardo could only watch her breathlessly, because when Alegría was talking about her vision of what the new house could be, her face and her hands — her whole body — were vibrant. Suddenly Menardo felt sweat rolling down his sides, sliding over his ribs and soaking the top of his shorts and trousers.

In the hotel room Menardo stood in a daze as Alegría unrolled rolls of buff tracing paper and made broad sweeps with her felt pen, quickly sketching walls of glass, a central stairway in front of the glass, and a wall that partially enclosed the jungle rather than shutting it out. When she stood back and looked at him for some words, some response, Menardo felt his desire choking him. He tried to speak but the effort made his eyes water. All he could do was move his head rapidly, and the sight of him, short, stocky, eyes wide, and head nodding, was almost more than Alegría could bear.

Later Menardo would see it again and again. Alegría had turned away from him, and when she turned back, suddenly the white silk blouse had been unbuttoned so he could see her pink brassiere and her navel. He regretted he was not a polished, finished man because he knew she must be used to that sort. The two steps he took toward her he remembered were uneven. The last step he might have stumbled. He blamed Alegría’s sudden move. Just as he reached her and put his hands on her shoulders (she was as tall as he), she had stepped back, deliberately falling backward onto the hotel bed. Menardo had never experienced a seduction of this kind before. The whores had never wasted a single motion. Their moves were methodical. They left nothing to surprise. A few of the small-town girls had hoped to catch him for a husband and had made lavish displays of themselves, spreading their legs wide, hitching skirts and dresses high, slipping panties to their ankles for him. But Menardo had not been surprised; that had been the sort of behavior he had come to expect as a rising star, a man bound for wealth.

Menardo squeezed his hand down to unzip his trousers, and Alegría had moaned and pushed against him as the back of his hand pressed against the mound between her legs. She was holding him by the shoulders, pulling him down so it was difficult to get the trouser’s zipper all the way open. He felt her raise her hips high and felt her peel off her panties beneath him. At that instant, a warm, perfumed scent enveloped them, the zipper opened, but Menardo knew he would never be able to get the trousers off. He settled for an open zipper. He was barely able to push his cock inside her before he had the sensation of a runaway horse leaping from under him, leaving him, falling far far behind, then spiraling up to the explosions of light, and at last deep, soft darkness.

Alegría listened to herself. When she was of two minds about anything, she created an internal debate. She was surprised she had even considered an affair with this provincial businessman. If word ever got back to Portillo and the rest of the old men at the firm, her future in the profession would be ruined. She would immediately be fired, and she would never work again unless she went far from Mexico City. Alegría could imagine Portillo saying, “There is a fine line, a fine balance between keeping the client happy and satisfied, and absolute surrender of good taste and moral values.” Portillo had of course been referring to the problem of clients’ demands for Roman columns and Gothic vaulted ceilings. Alegría could feel the sticky wetness leaking out between her thighs and running under her buttocks soaking the bed. With each breath Menardo’s weight on her chest was suffocating her. When she tried to shift the weight, Menardo rolled off her quickly, apologizing, asking her if she was all right. Alegría wanted to laugh at Menardo’s awkwardness and his fear that he might have caused her discomfort. Instead she rolled over with her back to him and looked at the sky out the window. It was nearing sundown. The light was a rich chrome-yellow on the white walls of the hotel. Even as she was watching, a pink tint was beginning to wash into the yellow-gold. Alegría felt her chest and throat thicken, and tears began rolling down her cheeks. She was remembering what one of the Basque students had said to her in the smoky coffeehouse near the campus in Madrid. The Basque had been the only one who had really tried to persuade her. The other communists had never taken her seriously, especially not the women. But the little Basque had shaken his head at her and warned that class defined sex for your family and you. She had laughed gaily and he had said, “Someday you’ll know. You’ll feel it. How men use you. Treat you like a thing. The rich man. The powerful men. You feel how they fuck.”

HIGH RISK

THE LITTLE BASQUE had died in the riots. She had been taking final examinations in the school of architecture, so Alegría had not cried. She could not afford to be upset during examinations. The Basques had been all they had talked about at the coffeehouse. Dying for the cause. It was what he wanted, Alegría would say when the others brought it up. But now ten years later she was lying on a hotel bed in the capital city of one of the poorest states in Mexico, crying for the Basque who had been so short none of them had ever known his real name. “Shorty.” Was she crying for the Basque? The proletarian women would have said she was crying for herself, who else? Because they said she would always be looking out just for herself. Alegría wished she could tell the Basque:

“You are right. Menardo here thinks I am out of his class, and so he fumbles and apologizes.” Alegría had not had sex before with a man so anxious to please her. She had not had sex with a man who sensed so quickly her moods. She had been blunt with Menardo. She had told him she was risking not just her position at the firm but her entire career as an architect for him.

Menardo had listened to her discuss the dangers. But he did not share the anxiety or fear Alegría felt because he was so certain he could take care of her in the event anything happened. He had just concluded negotiations with an arms dealer in Tucson. If plans were successful, Menardo knew he would in a few more years be one of the wealthiest men in the south of Mexico. Menardo wanted to take her hand and lean close so he could get the full effect of her lovely hazel eyes. But Alegría had insisted they go downstairs quickly afterward. They had both carried rolls of blueprints when they entered the hotel dining room. Alegría was still discussing the ruin of her career and her life in low, calm tones lest any of the busboys or waiters sense urgency and eavesdrop. “You have nothing to worry about,” Menardo said expansively. “Believe me. Arrangements would be made.” Alegría had looked at the brown moon face and flat nose and the shining dark eyes and thought how little he knew or understood, despite the wealth he had begun to accumulate.

“I would hate doing nothing,” Alegría had warned him. “I would go crazy.” Menardo began to outline what he would do for Alegría in the unlikely event of dismissal, but she had cut him short. She had refused to discuss it further. It was upsetting her. There was no need to talk because nothing was going to happen.

For a long time, as Alegría and Iliana worked together closely on the interior designs for the house, Menardo was convinced their arrangement was safe. Of course he longed to have Alegría come down from Mexico City more often than twice a month, but the policies of her firm did not allow that even during the construction phase. Menardo obeyed Alegría’s dictates. If she felt that a visit to her hotel room was not wise, then Menardo was a gentleman and met her only in the hotel bar. Sometimes Alegría restricted him to visits only when Iliana was present. Iliana liked to dine at the country club when Alegría was in town, because then Iliana could show off in front of the women from her club. Iliana would carry a roll of blueprints to dinner with her although they never discussed the plans there. The factor of Iliana and her friends at the women’s club had fooled both Alegría and Menardo. They had been so careful to watch out for Iliana and to include her in every phase, they had forgotten the trouble might come from Iliana’s so-called friends.

The other women could tell by the way Iliana talked about the female architect that she suspected nothing between that woman and her husband. None of them thought twice about the casual encounters their husbands might have. There was no worry because, if anything, casual activity kept their husbands in line at home. What they all feared was a woman who would settle for a house, maid, and money for herself and the bastards she would bear. It became a matter of sheer economics. None of them wanted their husbands’ money spent anywhere except in their households.

Like the other wives, Iliana seldom interfered with Menardo’s affairs of the heart unless it appeared a great deal of money was pouring into the other woman. In a town the size of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, a phone call or two and the woman in question would be warned that her job, if she had one, and her family members, if they lived nearby, were all in jeopardy. There was an understanding among all the women in the club that there was no need to discuss such matters except perhaps in a discreet conversation between two or three club members. Certainly it was considered bad taste to bring up the subject of a husband’s escapades unless the wife herself raised the issue. All the rules were thrown to the side this time. The women in the club could not maintain the silence. Iliana’s behavior — her talk about the blueprints, color schemes, and then all those color photographs — had been more than the others could tolerate. They would have been forced to tolerate Iliana’s airs had she been invulnerable. But Iliana had been so caught up in her pretensions of reading blueprints that she had missed a fundamental fact: her husband was fucking the architect. The judge’s wife spent three days making discreet midmorning calls on all the members of the club, speaking in whispers about the duty and obligation they had to inform Iliana of the seriousness of her position. Iliana had her reputation to think of. After all, Menardo wasn’t simply fucking the company receptionist or the teenage mail clerk. Iliana had mentioned Alegría’s name more often than Menardo’s.

“The foolishness of it. The irony,” as the former ambassador’s wife had put it. The other women were not as irritated with “Mrs. Former Ambassador” as they usually were. The former ambassador’s wife did not say so, but she also happened to know Menardo was very busy then with a business deal that, if it went as planned, would give Iliana so much money the club women would never ever be able to cut her down to size. The former ambassador’s wife knew they had to move fast. It was this: if Iliana had not talked so much about Alegría. If Iliana had not acted as if Alegría were her best friend, the other women would not have done what they did.

Alegría had guessed what had happened the instant she saw the Indian chauffeur’s face. Workmen were finishing the interior — the plastering and painting, and final cleaning of the white marble staircase.

EXPOSED

ALEGRÍA HAD COME for the last inspection. She could not see Tacho’s eyes behind the mirror lenses of his sunglasses, but she could see his thin lips pulled up in a smile. She thought she would not be able to speak or even to breathe. Menardo asked what was wrong. He was gripping her hand and smiling and talking happily as he always did when she arrived.

“She knows,” Alegría said in a weak voice.

“What?” Menardo let her hand loose. “No! How could she? What makes you say so!”

Alegría sank her head back on the seat with her eyes closed. “Ask him,” she said, barely lifting a hand to point at Tacho. Tacho was watching them in the rearview mirror. Tacho nodded his head. Menardo felt his world had split into halves, one half flying behind him in the airliner with Alegría, the other looming ahead of him as Iliana’s old aunt stormed from the airport lobby, towing Iliana behind her as she rushed toward them. Menardo had fended off Iliana’s old aunt while Alegría rushed to catch a flight back to Mexico City.

Iliana’s aunt had already called the Portillo firm to speak with the senior partner. After the old aunt and Iliana had confronted Menardo, the old woman’s driver had taken her directly to a telephone to relay a message to the Portillo firm: “Whore arrives P.M. flight.” Old man Portillo himself had met Alegría at the airport, with the firm’s lawyer at his side. Except for the surroundings and the noise, both of which had been chosen by Portillo deliberately, the whole affair had been surprisingly civilized and quick. She had agreed to resign her position immediately, and the firm had in turn presented her with a generous severance check. Portillo and the lawyer had concluded the business before the luggage off the arriving flight had been unloaded. Old man Portillo had been pleasant because she had proven all his arguments against hiring women at any level in their firm.

Just like that, Alegría had thrown away six years of university classes and her professional career, at least in Mexico. There had been “the tight white knot,” as the student radicals called the Eurotrash oligarchy. They themselves were all grandchildren of the worst oligarchs, which gave them, they argued, a special privilege to attack those who had spawned them. How the radicals would have laughed if they could have seen her paid off and dismissed in public with people staring at the tears running down her face after Portillo and the lawyer walked away. Just like that her career as an architect was gone. Obliterated. All for Menardo, and she had not even been aroused much by his chubby hands and the short, fat prick. She could have handled Menardo as she had handled dozens of others — clients, colleagues, and senior partners. Portillo himself had “accidentally” brushed her arm and breast a time or two himself; she could have bought a little “job security” from Portillo, but she had been too proud. She didn’t know why, but the pride was gone now. Had it been because Menardo had made promises right from the start? Was it because he had kept insisting he would take care of her? She had loved her work. She did not need a man to give her money. Something inside herself had listened each time Menardo had whispered in her ear. Had she believed Menardo’s promises about a business of her own? In the same town where his wife lived? Alegría had completely lost her good sense.

Somewhere in the equation, Bartolomeo’s name appeared. Alegría had dreamed about him and awoke crying because in a dream he had boarded an airliner to leave her forever. Bartolomeo would only make jokes about the loss of her job. Bartolomeo argued Alegría’s services rightfully belonged to the poor who needed shelter, and not to the sweat hogs of capitalism. Alegría’s designs — whitewashed walls and stone breezeways above sapphire-blue water — were pure decadence, capitalist pigstys.

Her job was lost, and her career in Mexico, maybe everywhere, was ruined. Bartolomeo would die laughing. All her schooling, all her bourgeois delusions cut down to size. And now maybe she would come to be with the rest of them, the people about to deliver Mexico a great revolution.

Mexico had never seen a great revolution, only rehearsals for the greatest uprising. Here was Alegría’s big moment. Her choice. She had only to say yes to Bartolomeo and she could be part of “it.” Whatever “it” was.

HIGH COMMAND OF THE PEOPLE’S ARMY

ANGELITA LA ESCAPÍA had been at the airport for nearly twenty-four hours. She had watched the comings and goings of cars and bodyguards and overheard heated phone calls by the old maiden aunt. Menardo was memorable that day. La Escapía had noticed him the first time when he greeted the young white woman who had arrived on a flight from Mexico City. Hours after Iliana and her old aunt have been driven home, La Escapía sees the pudgy half-breed monkey return, this time wearing stiff new jungle-camouflage fatigues and black combat boots. What was the deal? Red Monkey had passed La Escapía both times, the second time so close she could smell the alcohol fumes around his face. The monkey drank tequila. Red Monkey was the code name for Menardo when they discussed him and the trading and services he had increasingly been performing for General J. The long delay at the airport was a windfall for their people. Red Monkey was about to fall into the soup.

La Escapía watched the three small planes land one after the other as delicate and quick as moths. They taxied to the hangar area where she watched Menardo greet each pilot in turn, shaking hands and nodding vigorously all the while. Marx had been right about a great many things. The history of the Americas made revolution against the European domination inevitable. But Marx had also been a European, and he and those following after him had understood the possibilities of communal consciousness only imperfectly. European communism had been spoiled, dirtied with the blood of millions. The people of the Americas had no use for European communism. That was why she and the others had voted to break with the Cubans. La Escapía strolled outside to the area shaded by hangar buildings. General J.’s jeep was parked next to the black Mercedes. The general and Red Monkey were standing in front of the three airplanes, gesturing wildly at one another and smiling. La Escapía and the others had expected the private air force for some time; after all, Menardo maintained his private security police as a service to the customers of Universal Insurance. La Escapía had been furious with intelligence reports because nothing had been found out about the link between the arms dealer in Tucson and General J.’s friends at the U.S. CIA. Yet they had collected volumes of detailed surveillance of Menardo’s sexual liaisons with the little lady architect from Mexico City. El Feo had only shrugged his shoulders at the intelligence officer. La Escapía had really been angry then. Why didn’t they admit it? They enjoyed watching the architect because she slept with comrade Bartolomeo, their Cuban friend.

La Escapía disliked the waste of valuable energy spying on their own members. Yes, she knew Bartolomeo was not strictly one of them. Bartolomeo was the liaison with Cubans and other friends of indigenous people. Bartolomeo was the funnel for financial aid wheedled away from comrades all around the world. She did not like Bartolomeo either. When the issue was the indigenous people, communists from the cities were no more enlightened than whites throughout the region. Still, Bartolomeo was weak enough for her and El Feo to manage as they wished. Accounting and receipts would be no problems. Bartolomeo was too lazy to be bothered to keep accounts.

“Yes, sir!” El Feo was saying triumphantly. “Things were what they appeared to be! Comrade Bart was fucking the architect at the same time she was fucking the enemy, Menardo.”

La Escapía kept hold of her temper. “So what?” she wanted to know. Were they implying Bartolomeo was a double agent? Did they know if the architect was also an agent? What was their proof? Only lunatics believed in guilt by association. El Feo had not disagreed or argued with La Escapía. He only smiled and nodded; La Escapía knew he was agreeing with himself and not with anything she might say, the stubborn, smelly he-goat. La Escapía could tell the direction El Feo’s thoughts were running, and she had to agree with El Feo this time. There was no revolution and there would be no revolution as long as “outsiders” like Bartolomeo were telling the people how to run their revolution.

AIR FORCE

MENARDO THANKED GOD a thousand times for the three airplanes that had been delivered that afternoon. The airport, which earlier had been the scene of such terrible humiliation, before the sunset, had become the site of another of Menardo’s milestones, his greatest triumph since he had saved ten thousand new appliances from the tidal wave. Universal Insurance now boasted its own private air force. Menardo and General J. had kept themselves spellbound for hours talking about their partnership in the insurance business. Wherever revolution, mutiny, uprising, or guerrilla war might strike, Universal Insurance would be there to offer complete protection to clients. No need to depend on poorly equipped government forces. Besides, “government forces” could not be trusted. Military officers hatched mutinies left and right, and disgruntled police might develop “blue flu” and call in sick if the price wasn’t right. Universal Insurance would provide the answer for every security need. Legislative assemblies had fallen into the hands of radicals and madmen. Urgent needs to bolster the national defense were ridiculed by communists, terrorists, and anarchists of every sort. Chief executives of the future could buy policies with Universal Insurance to indemnify themselves against violent uprising or revolution.

“With the services of Seguridad Universal, all the client does is signal us with a Code Blue. Even if we have only the sketchiest details, we go to our computerized files where we locate the client’s instructions. Code Blue from a head of state guarantees said chief of state instant and complete mobilization of Universal’s Special Security Forces.”

The three light planes would become “gunships” equipped with.50-caliber guns.

Whenever Menardo recalled the terrible scene with the weeping woman in the airport lobby, he felt as if his intestines had dropped into his underpants. But Menardo had only to catch a glimpse of the three small planes to feel reborn. The beauties were in his possession if only for a few hours, until General J.’s pilots flew them to Guatemala. Menardo almost broke into a run to reach the small, sleek planes. Greenlee had delivered one of the Piper Cherokees himself. He was standing with the other two pilots who had flown the planes from Tucson. Greenlee stopped talking and smoothed the imaginary wrinkles of his black driving gloves before he crossed the concrete apron to shake hands with Menardo.

Menardo ran his hands over the metal as if the planes were racehorses. Was Menardo pleased? Greenlee was only there to please one person: that person was the customer, Menardo. For purposes of confidentiality, Menardo had not introduced Greenlee to General J. The general’s own position was rather complicated, and he had cautioned Menardo to reveal their partnership to no one, certainly not the wives. The general reminded Menardo “women are blabbermouths.” The general had not mentioned Iliana by name, but Menardo’s heart began pounding again. He felt the familiar surge of adrenaline rush through his limbs. Menardo was afraid the general knew about the affair between himself and the woman architect. Everywhere the walls had eyes and ears. Only the other afternoon they had been discussing internal security over drinks at the ninth-hole shooting club. General J. had been drunk and loud as he had said, “No one can be trusted. A great storm is gathering on the southern horizon.” Menardo did not want anything to go wrong; he did not want a woman, not even a woman such as Alegría, to upset his partnership with the general. They would have the perfect arrangement: the general would not only perform his official military duties along Mexico’s southern border, he would oversee security operations for Universal Insurance Corporation. The general liked to say he had suffered the inadequacies and impotence of the army too long. It had been a lonely job for the general. He himself had seen Marxists in the highest levels of the Mexican government, Marxists who routinely castrated the budget requests from military commanders such as himself. Marxist conspirators in government refused the general the manpower and the modern equipment necessary to protect the southern border while Cuba was supplying Indian bandits and criminals sniper rifles with infrared scopes. All the general had for his troops were assorted carbines, some left over from the Second World War. The same subversive elements in the government sent him raw recruits — not soldiers — scrawny Indians who wore their army-issue boots dangling by laces around their necks. “Savages,” General J. was fond of calling them. They had calluses on their feet thicker than the soles of any boots. Well, now the general had his own air force at his disposal. Soon Universal Insurance would have an entire security force on continuous standby call: a private army all their own.

DISGRACE AND RUIN

HE HAD BEEN CAUGHT by Iliana before, and Menardo already knew her preferred tactic was to inflict great damage on the “other woman.” At first Menardo thought a young professional such as Alegría was beyond the reach of a sour matron in a provincial town such as Tuxtla Gutiérrez. But then he remembered Iliana’s uncle was acquainted with Mr. Portillo, and fear for Alegría swept over him. Surely the quality of her work and her high standing in her graduating class would insulate Alegría from Iliana’s hysterical allegations.

Menardo had hoped to lure the general home with him, knowing that Iliana and her old maid aunt dare not attack him in front of General J. But the general was wound up like a mechanical toy, and one of the pilots had promised to explain the intricacies of jet fighters.

Menardo thought Tacho might know something about Iliana’s terrible discovery. As they drove from the airport through the downtown district toward home, Menardo cleared his throat a number of times. Tacho glanced into the rearview mirror each time, to see if the boss had got up the nerve to ask. But each time Menardo backed down. It was unseemly to let servants know anything was amiss. Anyway, Iliana always told Menardo how she found out.

“That is the worst thing!” Iliana sobbed. “The whole club knew! They were all delighted! I trusted that woman! Filthy pig dripping your slime while she talked oh so nicely to me! Well, they have gotten back at me now for all the jealousies they’ve had! I can never hold my head up again!” But this time Iliana’s crying did not affect him. He did not feel guilty or sad or remorseful. He was numb. Iliana had greeted him at the door with the news that Miss Martinez-Soto was no longer with the Portillo firm. The club would love Iliana all the more now that they had cut her down to size. No, this time Menardo felt nothing except perhaps the urge to drive a fist smack into the middle of Iliana’s puffy, damp face. The old maid aunt was upstairs napping or he might have. He was a man of his word. Alegría had become his responsibility. Fortunately, his Universal Insurance Corporation had a limitless future ahead of it.

Alegría had been thinking about the mansion with its glass wall toward the jungle and the white marble staircase. She had taken a camera with her on the day of the confrontation, planning to photograph the complete construction so she might add the house to her portfolio and résumé. Now she was ruined. Bartolomeo would be delighted. He would make her work for the “people” now. Menardo had sent a cashier’s check and a spray of pale yellow orchids from the most expensive shop in Mexico City. The money was enough to cover her expenses. She thought she should take a vacation. But when she returned to the apartment, she could not bring herself to lift the phone book to the bed. She would follow the doctor’s orders. Call the travel agent to arrange a week in San Diego. She needed to go far away. She needed time to think. She lay down, but instead of sleeping her mind raced over the events again and again. Mexico did not need many architects, Bartolomeo was fond of saying, since the ruling class was so small and all the others were too poor to build “designer houses.” Her stomach clutched around the thought she had ruined herself. She had lost an inside position on the track to the top. She remembered as a child the horse races in Montevideo. A horse running far in the lead had inexplicably pulled up, allowing all the horses to run past. She had remembered it because it was one of the few times she had ever seen her father lose his poise. Her father had bet a large sum on the horse. He was no longer joking and talking.

Alegría’s father always bragged she would go far. Alegría decided she would not tell her parents until she had definite plans. But she also could not delay too long, since either one of her parents might telephone the firm. Her father might forgive the accusations, but he would hate to get the news from strangers. She had to call her parents, but she could not raise herself from the unmade bed and reach down for the telephone. She thought a short nap might help.

Iliana refused to speak to Menardo except to clarify logistical details concerning purchases and deliveries to the new house. Since the incident she had thrown herself into interior decoration. Menardo was relieved. It had occurred to him Iliana might insist the house be sold immediately. But Iliana had her own concerns. She had gone to great lengths to make sure that Miss Martinez-Soto would not find new employment in any of the prestigious architectural firms. This had been accomplished rather simply via the grand old family connections in Mexico City, and with the aid of the women at the club. Alegría after all, was Venezuelan, not a Mexican citizen. Iliana let the club members make strategic phone calls. If Miss Martinez-Soto attempted any legal action, Iliana and her allies made sure no law firm in Mexico City would take her case. Iliana had been afraid to stop or in any way relax her vengeance for fear she might slide into one of her depressions as she had after miscarriages. It was not possible to know for certain if Miss Martinez-Soto was ruined in Mexico, but Iliana had made every effort.

The betrayal by Menardo and Alegría did not shake Iliana’s fascination with the structure she herself had designed. The design had been Iliana’s idea. Alegría had only drawn what Iliana had told her to draw. The grand entry hall had been Iliana’s idea. The new house excited much jealousy. To settle old scores, Iliana knew it would be necessary to furnish this house more lavishly than she had planned originally. Iliana sent Tacho to the big newsstand downtown for all the French and Italian magazines on interior design. The contractor had completed the pool and the landscaping. Iliana took out the buff tracing paper without flinching. She unrolled it on the big mahogany table in the dining room. Her reply to all of them was to appear at the weekly luncheon carrying the familiar cardboard tube. The wife of the former ambassador shook her head when she reported to her husband that night. “We thought she went on while that woman was designing the house. But today we had to listen for two hours about water lilies for the swimming pool! Finally I had to say, ‘Iliana, darling, we believe you. You are spending a fortune!’ ” The former ambassador only nodded. He knew all about Menardo’s business, especially now that Seguridad Universal was available throughout the entire region.

THE FALL

THEY HAD BEEN LIVING in the house for less than five weeks. The accident took everyone by surprise. The wives of the police chief and the judge had of course known about it immediately since their husbands’ offices were involved directly. There might not have been so much excitement had Iliana not been from a founding family. And of course there was the fact the new house was in the suburbs too close to the jungle where anything or anyone might emerge. Therefore, a full inquiry and a special investigation were ordered. The maids and the cook had been unpacking dishes in the downstairs pantry. The three women said they never heard Iliana cry out, although one of the maids said she thought she remembered hearing a faint sound. Of course outside, the crew finishing the pool area had been using a cement mixer with a loud gasoline engine. By the time Menardo reached his house, the driveway was full of police vehicles. The white Pontiac ambulance from the local mortuary was parked with its tailgate down. As he rushed through the front entrance, the drama of the grand entry hall immediately struck him. The wall of glass at the far end glowed with a luminous light filtered through the jungle leaves. The light was strange. Reflected off the high polish of the brilliant-white marble stairs, the light seemed more pervasive than the summer-afternoon sun at one o’clock. Menardo had been given no details. He only knew a terrible tragedy had occurred at his home. Now under the high vaulted ceiling, a crowd of plainclothes detectives, medics, and Dr. Gris were gathered at the foot of the marble staircase. Menardo saw they had covered Iliana with a blanket off her own bed, an expensive white cashmere shawl Iliana had preferred on winter evenings. The cook and two housemaids were huddled by the kitchen entrance. The cook was crying and wringing her hands, and the maids were trying to comfort her. Menardo took one look and knew the cook was not crying over Iliana. The cook was merely afraid. Because the cook had worked for them eight years, and police investigators knew the passage of time had a way of creating certain conflicts between the wealthy and their Indian servants.

The police chief was conferring with his detectives, but sensed Menardo’s arrival by the sudden shift of the huddle near the corpse. The chief hurried across the wide hall. His big Luger in its black leather holster slapped against his fat hip. Menardo had seldom seen the police chief in uniform. He preferred civilian clothes, he said, for security reasons. Today he was in his full regalia. The black was set off by generous amounts of silver braid and silver medallions dangling from their pins on his thick chest. Iliana would have liked that, and she would have liked the effect of the big hall filled with police detectives speaking in low voices. The chief had worked himself into a good deal of emotion crossing the big hall. Like any husband, he had often daydreamed about somehow losing his wife so he could enjoy his middle years as a playboy and lover. But the sight of Iliana’s body sprawled at the bottom of the dazzling white staircase had caused the hair on the chief’s neck to stand up. For the moment, the woman architect seemed to have slipped the chief’s mind. Menardo had to look closely to see if the chief was serious or only pretending. But when Menardo realized the chief was sincere, the loss of Iliana struck him. Menardo could not think why exactly, because Iliana’s fury over his affair with Alegría had not abated as quickly as with past affairs. Menardo could not think what the loss was, but he knew it was connected with the shock the chief seemed to feel. Menardo felt as if he were onstage, and the audience was waiting for him to perform. But he could think of nothing. Fortunately, the chief and the detective took the cue. The chief strode over to the foot of the stairs. He walked up the stairs, and then as he turned dramatically, to face the group below, the chief lost his footing and slipped back flat on his ass. One of the uniformed men, a quick, thin man with dark skin and eyes, leaped forward to aid him, but the chief pushed his hand away. “She might have been pushed. Due to the location of the house, and the increase of, shall we say, ‘subversivism.’ ” Hearing this, the cook broke into sobs. “Everyone will be questioned.” The chief nodded in the direction of Tacho, who was staring at the body. Tacho stiffened and looked at Menardo. “My driver was with me at the time,” Menardo said.

“You must understand everyone — those workmen — everyone will have to be questioned,” the chief said, trying to straighten a pin on the back of one of his medals. A detective took the chief aside. “Sir,” he said, “the marble steps — something is not right. The angle is rather acute. The steps were made too close together even for a woman’s step. The foot catches the edge of the step.” The other detectives nodded silently, behind their spokesman. “Unsafe design.” They might have said anything — that they thought he had killed his wife, that terrorists crawled out of the jungle and pushed her — anything. But for them to dare criticize the design of the cascading white marble staircase was more than Menardo could tolerate.

“It could not have been the stairs! They are perfection! Look at them!” Menardo shouted.

But the questioning of the cook, maids, Tacho, and all the men plastering the swimming pool revealed nothing. Menardo was interrogated by his friend the chief himself. The questions centered on Menardo’s business dealings and business connections. The chief wanted to know more about General J. and his consultant work with the Guatemalan government. Why exactly were the two of them buying airplanes from the United States? The chief had it from reliable sources two planes would be located, at least some of the time, in Guatemala. Naturally there were concerns about national security. “After all,” the chief said, “invasions by one nation upon another are not unknown. Such a move on the part of Guatemala is not unthinkable or impossible.” Menardo found the chief’s questions alarming. He realized that his recent business expansion had excited a good deal of jealousy and suspicion. “I have had so very many troubles come down on me now,” Menardo said in a weak voice. He was worried because Alegría did not answer his longdistance calls or letters. The chief’s fleshy lips broke into a wide smile. He put his arm around Menardo in a ritual of brotherhood. “My poor friend,” the chief said.

Menardo had not been able to contact Alegría until the night after Iliana’s funeral. Alegría seemed not to understand anything he said to her on the phone. Alegría sounded drunk. She had just returned from Cancun and was exhausted from the traveling. Her flight had been late. Alegría could only echo Menardo’s words: “Accident,” “found dead,” “broken neck,” “buried today.” The shock of the news of Iliana’s death did not touch her, but instead thudded against the layer of numbness Alegría wore like a strange skin. At Cancun she had not been able to break free of the crushing waves of exhaustion and sleep. The sun flashed off the white sand and water as if the molten metals of the planet had never cooled, but had only coalesced into polished surfaces, mirrors upon mirrors. She had ordered meals in her bungalow, but found despite how ripe the fruits might appear or how fragrant the watercress or parsley, they had little flavor, as if they had been picked too soon, still green, and had been forced to ripen. She knew the waiters and help at the resort were gossiping about her. She had registered under her parents’ home address in Caracas. She knew the resort staff expected a man to arrive shortly and join her. When no man had appeared and the young woman slept away the days, the resort staff had deduced the end of a love affair.

Alegría had intended to call her parents after she had rested and thought things out. But the prospect of planning her next move caused her eyelids to feel heavy and evaporated all her strength. She had tried to fight this lethargy first with strong coffee and then with tiny white pills, but the effort had only left her nauseous. Alegría had felt time leaking away with the tides. Her father would telephone the firm asking for her. He might already know. She did not think she had the strength to hold the phone receiver. She was forced to let it all go, just like that.

The funeral had been unpleasant. Iliana’s parents were old-fashioned and were horrified Menardo had sent the body to the mortuary, which they considered barbaric and a sin. They followed Church dogmas so old most of the priests had not heard of them. Her parents had always known Iliana’s marriage to Menardo would bring her to a bad end. Only an inferior creature would have chosen to build a new house in a jungle area exposed to so many dangers. Iliana’s parents didn’t care that the local inquiry and special investigative officers had ruled the death accidental. The coroner’s officer noted that while the marble staircase was by far one of the most stunning focal points of this most modern and beautiful mansion, still the stairs themselves had been made with a peculiar design. From discussions with the workmen, investigators determined the stairs had been cut and polished in an unusual manner. The officer did not know what the desired visual effect might have been, but the practical result was the close spacing of the stairs took no account of a person’s natural stride. The police investigator noted he had spent the morning at the death scene and had even asked a maid and a gardener to walk up and down the stairs. He himself had repeated the procedure over ten times. All of them, the report noted, had experienced some difficulty, and the maid had nearly fallen, because of the slippery surface; however an adult might negotiate the steps, the foot seemed to land on the edge of an adjacent step.

It is the husband’s right to dictate all funeral arrangements. Menardo found himself relishing this last act as son-in-law and husband. Menardo had wanted to use the mortuary for many reasons. What he had argued with his inlaws was that after autopsy, only morticians had the skills to make the body once again presentable. But he also wanted to avoid the “old customs”—the open coffin in the main hall, a steady stream of visitors, mostly members of her clan, the very people who had opposed him and a few who had continued to snub him at weddings and baptisms. Iliana’s mother had fainted, but Menardo thought Iliana looked as good as could be expected after the fall. Bruises from the fall were covered under layers of powder. The only fault Menardo found had been with the eyebrows, which Iliana had always penciled with a thin line of reddish color. The mortuary had given Iliana fat, black eyebrows.

It was difficult for Menardo to remember he was a widower and officially in mourning. Of course he was sorry Iliana was dead; she had not been sick or old. She might have enjoyed many more years. But then, on the other hand, everyone had to die sometime. There were no children, and Iliana had never cared for her nieces or nephews. Her parents were elderly and in failing health, but they had all the others to fret at and complain to. She had gone suddenly and, the coroner had said, “painlessly.” Menardo wondered a little bit about that, but of course the first blow to the head or snapping of the neck or spinal column caused loss of all sensation. Menardo knew he was expected to make some show of grief for the benefit of Iliana’s family. But now that she was gone, he kept feeling a spitefulness that he was almost ashamed of. Iliana was gone and it mattered little whether he kept the in-laws anymore. As for his own family, none of them came. Menardo’s ties with them had nearly dissolved.

Menardo took a last look at Iliana, and he did not see anyone he’d ever known. He tried to remember tender moments, those days in the courtship when he had actually anticipated the evening all the day before. Menardo had the feeling he kept changing; he had become different people until little of the original person remained. Menardo could feel he was headed toward the headlines and history. The dawn of the new age Menardo had so often cited to the provincial businessmen had suddenly burst forth into the heat of the day. The high noon was approaching.

Menardo realized he had paused by the coffin somewhat longer than usual. Menardo pulled himself up straight and made a little bow to Iliana, patting her crossed hands. He had not touched the dead before and was surprised at the nothingness he felt. Not woodenness or waxiness or cold — just nothingness. Death had made her hands a mere surface; already her body was becoming an illusion. Death had flattened her out. She had no more substance than a photograph. He almost wished they did not have to bury her. He almost wanted to watch, day by day, and to check from time to time on the progress of decay.

BOOK TWO. REIGN OF FIRE-EYE MACAW TERRORIST BOMBS

PERHAPS IT WAS NOT the normal thing so soon after a wife’s death, but Menardo was succeeding brilliantly with the new business deal General J. had set up, and Alegría had finally agreed to marry him. Still, change was everywhere from that time on. Sometimes Menardo told himself these changes were his fate, and it was only with Iliana gone that his eyes had cleared enough to see. Iliana had always kept him so tightly tangled in the world of club luncheons and dinner dances Menardo had not noticed the shiftings or the rise of the river. Now there were more “incidents.” Tuxtla had always had its share of petty crime and murder among the Indians. But not a week after Iliana was buried, Menardo found himself back at the funeral home, this time for rosary of the eldest daughter of the bank president. The girl had been walking on the main street in downtown Tuxtla. A bomb had exploded in an alleyway across the street. The girl had been killed by a piece of roof tile knocked loose by the explosion. At the funeral-home chapel, Menardo tried to get a good look at the dead girl. While all the others prayed aloud softly, Menardo leaned hard against the polished wood of the front pew, clicking his rosary loudly so none would suspect he was studying the corpse, not praying. She had not been a pretty girl. She had a beak nose and black moles on her neck and cheeks. Death had changed her skin color very little. All the banker’s daughters had cultivated skin white as milk. Menardo could not determine much by looking at the dead girl. He knew he would have to touch her as he had touched Iliana. Even after the rosary was finished he stayed on his knees with head bowed, waiting for the others to leave. All he wanted was to touch the dead girl’s hand, but he did not want anyone to see. Because they would not understand it was something he needed to do in order to clarify his thinking. Menardo had even spoken to Tacho about the matter.

Tacho’s expression never changed as he listened to the boss. The black, piercing eyes in the rearview mirror studied Menardo and made him self-conscious. Menardo had inquired what the Indians did when there was a death. “The usual things like the white people do. And then…” Tacho let his voice trail off, as if the boss would not want to hear more than that. The eyes in the rearview mirror kept watch.

“No,” Menardo said, “tell me more. What I wonder about is…” But Menardo could not say it. Not even to this Indian who had no idea of propriety, of which questions might be asked and which could not. Tacho said no more, and Menardo had decided it was not worth the trouble to ask him again. Tacho was waiting outside the funeral home for him. Menardo looked around quickly to see if there were any windows Tacho might be able to peek through. Menardo checked to be sure no funeral-home employees were nearby.

Menardo’s throat was dry with excitement. He could feel a tingling down both legs, which he blamed on the hour he’d been kneeling. As he walked toward the coffin, he dropped the rosary beads into the pocket of his suit coat. He could justify what he was about to do only because it was necessary. Once he had done it, he would be free of it and would never have to concern himself again with these thoughts. This was all a result of Iliana’s death. It was not his fault. Menardo held his hand above hers, working himself up to touch the dead girl’s hand. He extended his right forefinger slowly, as if approaching a reptile which might startle. Menardo could smell his own sweat. It had the odor of fright he recognized from that morning he had rushed through the doors of the new house to find medics, police, and servants milling at the foot of the stairs.

He was not sure he was actually touching her hand, but when he pushed, the corpse’s left arm had shifted, leaving the right hand alone on her chest with a pink rosary threaded through the fingers. The movement of the left arm horrified Menardo. Everything was supposed to be in its place and remain there. It had frightened him so badly he could not remember what he had felt with his forefinger. He had not been able to distinguish her flesh from his own. What embarrassment! He would have to try to fix the left arm before any mortuary employees appeared. Menardo took a deep breath. The odor of candle wax and gardenias made him light-headed. He took the left arm by the wrist, but this time there was no mistaking it. He could see he was touching the dead girl, but the arm felt as if it were an extension of himself, a strange growth on the ends of his thumb and his fingers. He let the arm drop again, took his own right hand into his left, and squeezed each finger. There was nothing wrong with his fingers. He looked at the dead girl again. He had to hurry. His hand was shaking so badly now he could barely rearrange the rosary in the hands. He lifted the arm by the white chiffon and guided it back to its place on top of the right hand and the rosary.

Menardo could see the red glow of Tacho’s cigarette. Tacho was leaning against the side of the car staring up at the sky. It was a moonless night and clouds were scattered over the stars. Menardo was relieved Tacho would not be able to see his face clearly. He was sure his face must be the color of ashes. Menardo rolled down both windows in the backseat so he would not have to smell his own sweat. But Tacho had already picked up his scent. Tacho’s eyes stayed in the rearview mirror watching him all the way to the house. Suddenly Menardo felt an anger almost bursting his chest. Menardo was angry the bomb had killed the young girl. He was angry at the stupid fall Iliana had taken, a fall that she could as well have taken two months sooner, before she had made her poisonous phone calls to Mexico City. Menardo was angry at Alegría, paralyzed in her apartment in Mexico City, refusing to allow him to see her. Alegría insisted they observe some rules of decorum before their marriage, since Iliana had died in a freak accident. Luckily, Iliana had done the design of the steps herself. It had been Iliana who had insisted the marble be highly polished. Alegría had argued for a more subtle effect.

Menardo had to see Alegría. The operator rang and rang, but Alegría was not answering her phone. She had told Menardo she was keeping the phone unplugged because she did not wish to receive calls from her parents, who had learned of her disgrace and who called to question her more closely about her dismissal from the firm. What she had not told Menardo was that she could not bear to be in the apartment alone. The pale blue rooms were a prison. Everywhere she turned there was a reminder of the career she had dreamed of.

COMMUNISTS

ALEGRÍA KNEW BETTER than to tell Bartolomeo or any of the rest of the group about Menardo’s marriage proposal. They would have sneered. Still, it was comforting to hunch in a, corner and listen to them drone on and on about revolution. Mexico was being robbed blind. Mexico had been robbed blind. “Yes,” Alegría wanted to say, scanning the faces quickly, “and only one or two of you were not weaned on the stolen fruits of Indian land and Indian labor.”

She had been exhausted by the time the taxi dropped her at Bartolomeo’s apartment. His comrades did not seem to be at home, although anyone might have been sleeping in the piles of newspapers and dirty clothing. Alegría had quit asking who or how many because Bartolomeo delighted in the “open door” policy their group had. As many as twelve “comrades” sometimes slept in the tiny room. So there had been little privacy. The room served Bartolomeo well. The politics of the room kept intimacy at bay and had forced his family to disown him.

Alegría wished she had a shot of brandy. The comrades and roommates often came marching into the little room right in the middle of the night. Bartolomeo kept her pinned on the tangle of old blankets until she convinced him she had had an orgasm. When the roommates walked in, she always shut her eyes tight. She was grateful then not to have electricity. The candles they kept lit in the red and blue glass jars cast long shadows, and Alegría imagined the comrades saw hardly more than vague figures. This night she lay listening for the trump trump trump of the comrades’ boots while Bartolomeo labored on top of her. He could not pierce the shell of her concentration on sound. She could hear a baby crying on the floor above. She could hear a slow, metallic ticking of a cheap alarm clock down the hall, a radio, and a musician playing an Indian flute. She could hear the voice of a woman pray, “Hail, Holy Queen Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope”; she could hear the sound of retching and vomiting and the scrabble of rodents’ feet, a dull thud, a door slamming, a groan.

When Alegría awoke, she was lying alone on the pile of blankets. Their voices were low, but they were not arguing Lenin or what is to be done with the writings of Mao. Alegría detected an atmosphere of alertness, and a certain suspense. From the floor she could make out the legs of men at the table, though later she heard a woman’s voice. One voice kept saying, “Slowly, slowly now — be careful!” Then she knew. She was wide-awake in an instant. The comrades were making bombs ten feet away from her. She moved very slowly, as one might move to avoid startling a wild animal. She did not bother with bra or panties and crushed them into her purse. She was glad she was wearing a simple dress with no buttons or zippers. She listened for a lull, for one of the people crowded around the table to move, and then she got up and said, “Bartolomeo?” In the strange candlelight at the table all the faces seemed elongated. A voice said, “Who’s that?” and another said, “Just the one Bartolomeo fucks.” “He’s not here. He went to get something.” Suddenly Alegría felt how much she had hated all of them. To them Alegría would always be just another woman Bartolomeo fucked. Nothing she could do or say would ever make them trust her. Bartolomeo needed her to stir up their anger, to remind them who and what it was they hated and opposed. They would not care if Alegría agreed the system that starved and destroyed human beings for the profit of a few was a system that must fall from the sheer weight of the bodies of the dead. “Stay with your own kind!” one of the women drunk on the cheap beer had shouted at her late one night, and Alegría had shouted back, “I know my own kind! The bourgeois! You are one and the same as me!” The drunk woman had tried to fight her, but Bartolomeo had pulled Alegría away by her arm. She didn’t like the sound of what they were now doing at the table. The voice that kept urging, “Easy! Easy!” didn’t seem able to answer back when another voice demanded, “You know so much then — you do it!” Alegría wanted to laugh out loud. She had to get out of there. She had listened to their discussions enough to know that their grasp of dialectics was weak; she feared their grasp of wiring blasting caps to explosives might be even weaker. She preferred to take her chances on the street at three-thirty in the morning. Overhead the smoke, dust, and clouds had formed a luminous canopy that glowed a poisonous orange. As her eyes became accustomed to the dark, she saw the glow was bright enough to throw faint shadows on the decaying walls. The early November frost had come down from the mountain peaks. Alegría turned up the collar of her coat to cover her mouth and nose.

She returned to her blue rooms just as the sun was blazing up behind the layers of orange and pale brown. The phone was ringing as she came in, and it continued ringing until finally she lifted the receiver.

Menardo had to see her. The situation was urgent. His voice sounded desperate. “What is it?” she said. “Oh,” he said, “everything is breaking loose! Subversives are everywhere!” Menardo had to swallow hard before he said, “They bombed this week, killed a young girl.” He thought he might sob when he said, “The bank president’s daughter.” Alegría managed to calm him. They must not see each other until their engagement was announced. Wedding plans must wait until at least eight months had passed since Iliana’s death. “You know that,” Alegría reminded him. “Yes,” he said reluctantly, he knew.

Alegría had tried to make a clean break with Bartolomeo in Madrid. She had. They had. Bartolomeo had gone to Mexico City. But later her best job offer had come from Mexico City. She had been careful not to go near the university because she knew where he’d be. In the end, he had come looking for her.

Menardo met her at the Tuxtla airport with his arms full of red roses. He put them into Alegría’s arms and hugged her close. The paperwork at the civil registry had taken no time. A magistrate had read the vows, and two of his clerks had been witnesses. Menardo’s dream had been an intimate little chapel wedding, but under the circumstance, he had agreed with Alegría that a quiet civil ceremony was called for. All Menardo wanted was for her to be his wife this night of all nights when she would truly be his and he would truly be hers. Driving to the hotel afterward, Menardo had taken Alegría’s hand and had gently pressed it to the crotch of his trousers so she might feel the strength of his ardor. The organ flexed and pulsed before she had moved her hand away. Alegría felt nausea sweep over her; she had no choice. Alegría pressed against Menardo and leaned over so he could reach into her bodice to take the nipple of her left breast between his fingers. As they reached the hotel, Menardo straightened his tie and rearranged his hair. Did she want to dine? In the light of the big lobby she could see him so vividly, the large black mole right above his lip, the perspiration of his sexual excitement soaking under the arms of his white polyester sport coat. Alegría would not have been surprised to see a spot of moisture near his fly, but fortunately his sport coat had been buttoned.

No, she did not want to eat. The idea of food left her nauseous. She needed to rest. But Menardo interpreted the words “to rest” to mean she wanted sex with him. She wanted to try to explain, but saw that his ardor had already returned, and words would do no good.

Menardo had ordered the honeymoon suite filled with dozens of white roses. The champagne was iced, and he insisted she drink a glass. The champagne did settle her stomach, and she had two more glasses before Menardo could wait no longer. His penis was as short and fat as he was, and it was lost in the overhang of his belly. He insisted on kissing her all over, then licked and sucked the parts he’d kissed. The champagne and the fatigue had left her drowsy, and the kissing had irritated her more than it had aroused her. Alegría wanted to tell him just to stick it in and get it over with. But now she had to pretend she was his bride; from that night on, she would have to be his wife. She had to endure his lips on her shoulders and her arms. When he kissed her thighs and inched toward her pubis, Alegría imagined he was a giant mollusk trailing slime over her as he prepared to nose into her vagina. The urge to jerk herself away, to draw her legs to her belly and then to kick him violently was almost uncontrollable. So she had groped desperately for his penis. But the crouching position he had assumed for the licking and kissing had put the organ out of reach. Fortunately, Menardo interpreted her gesture as a great demonstration of desire, and he had lost all control and embarrassed them both with his ejaculation across the sheets.

COMRADE LA ESCAPÍA AND THE CUBAN

“COMRADE LA ESCAPÍA,” people in the villages called her, teasing, and not teasing. She didn’t care. All her life she had heard them whisper behind their hands and gossip behind her back. Call her comrade, call her anything you wanted, but she had worked her way up to the rank of colonel in the Army of Justice and Redistribution. Delegates sent by all the villages had warned that everyone would be quarreling and fighting if military rankings and military discipline were used. No one was supposed to set herself or himself above anyone else, not in the family, not in the clan, and they sure better not in the village. No, the village delegates had recommended military rank not be used except in their dealings with the outside world.

The village delegates had not recommended anyone be called comrade either. People had seen enough TV and movies to know what comrade meant. They had been taught by the missionaries to hate communism. Things had begun to shake, and La Escapía knew the uprising would be in full blossom soon enough to silence all her enemies and critics. Big things were going to start happening so fast. She and the other leaders of the People’s Army had been able to amass one of the largest and most sophisticated arsenals in the region. The Indians had managed to obtain the weaponry and supplies from at least a half dozen different groups representing more than a dozen foreign governments as well as underground groups. The Indians had even got two big checks from a famous U.S. actor. La Escapía laughed at critics. Of course the tribes took money from anyone they could get it from. They agreed only on one point: they must retake their land despite the costs. From the missionaries, La Escapía (known to the nuns as Angelita) had gone to the Cuban Marxists. She was a silent but ruthless critic of the months of “political instruction” she and the others had received at the Marxist school the Cubans ran in Mexico City. La Escapía’s favorite instructor had been a blond Cuban who had taught her how to fuck. He used to take her to his rich woman’s apartment, “his fiancée,” he called her, then Bartolomeo had dripped his juice all over the blue velvet bedcover. When La Escapía had tried to wipe off the bedcover, Bartolomeo had stopped her. He said the woman needed to be brought down a notch or two. Bartolomeo had tried to get rough with her. Not physically, because she was certain she weighed more than he did. Bartolomeo had tried to bully her. He had threatened to report La Escapía and the others for harboring nationalistic, even tribal, tendencies. But Angelita only laughed. Her laugh meant the end of the afternoon sex instructions with Bartolomeo. Let him fuck his rich-bitch architect girlfriend. La Escapía and the others would deny they had secret intentions. Whatever the rich outsiders wanted to believe was all right with the tribal people. They just wanted the means to take back their lands. That was their secret and the only “truth” tribes could agree upon. Angelita had never hesitated to admit she had fucked Bartolomeo because she had learned a great deal from him about obtaining aid from others besides Cuba. She had graduated at the top of her class at the Marxist school. Later when enemies in the villages, people related to her by clan or marriage, accused La Escapía of being a “communist,” she let them have it. Didn’t they know where Karl Marx got his notions of egalitarian communism? “From here,” La Escapía had said, “Marx stole his ideas from us, the Native Americans.”

The school classes had been conducted in the basement of a downtown building. Lectures on Marx had been all that kept the Cuban school open. Constantly the Cubans reminded La Escapía and the other Indians about the expense and trouble involved in trying to educate them. La Escapía had expected to hate everything the Cubans taught. She and the others from the villages had only agreed to attend the school because the Cuban made such classes a condition for the delivery of arms and other supplies. In the early weeks of class La Escapía had dozed off and actually snored during the classes. Then in the fourth week, the lazy Cubans had begun to read directly from Das Kapital. La Escapía had felt it. A flash! A sudden boom! This old white-man philosopher had something to say about the greed and cruelty. For La Escapía it had been the first time a white man ever made sense. For hundreds of years white men had been telling the people of the Americas to forget the past; but now the white man Marx came along and he was telling people to remember. The old-time people had believed the same thing: they must reckon with the past because within it lay seeds of the present and future. They must reckon with the past because within it lay this present moment and also the future moment.

After the lecture, La Escapía had gone to Bartolomeo’s office. She had questions about Marx. What Marx said about history and about the change that comes and that can not be stopped. Bartolomeo had stared blankly at her breasts while she talked. He was not interested in what the old Indians thought about the passage of time or about history. He was not even interested in what Marx had to say about time or history. Pushing the door shut with one foot, Bartolomeo said all he was thinking about was sucking her left nipple in his mouth. La Escapía had not bothered Bartolomeo about Marx again.

VAMPIRE CAPITALISTS

MARX WAS THE FIRST white man La Escapía had ever heard call his own people vampires and monsters. But Marx had not stopped with accusations. Marx had caught the capitalists of the British empire with bloody hands. Marx backed every assertion with evidence; coroner’s reports with gruesome stories about giant spinning machines that consumed the limbs and the lives of the small children in factories. On and on Marx went, describing the tiny corpses of children who had been worked to death — their deformed bodies shaped to fit inside factory machinery and other cramped spaces. While the others dozed, La Escapía sat up in her seat wide-awake. She could not get over the brutality and all the details Marx had included. She could never have imagined tiny children wedged inside the machinery just to make a rich man richer.

El Feo was sent by La Escapía’s elder sisters to take stock of her political views. El Feo wanted to know how she knew this man Marx wasn’t a liar like the rest of the white men. La Escapía shrugged her shoulders. She wasn’t trying to convert anyone. Tribal people had had all the experience they would ever need to judge whether Marx’s stories told the truth. The Indians had seen generations of themselves ground into bloody pulp under the steel wheels of ore cars in crumbling tunnels of gold mines. The Indians had seen for themselves the cruelty of the Europeans toward children and women. That was how La Escapía had satisfied herself Marx was reliable; his accounts had been consistent with what the people already knew.

From that point on, the words of Marx had only gotten better. The stories Marx related, the great force of his words, the bitterness and fury — they had caught hold of La Escapía’s imagination then.

La Escapía used to walk for hours around and around downtown Mexico City, in a daze at what she was seeing — at the immensity of wealth behind the towers of steel and concrete and glass, built on this empire for European princes.

In the filthy, smog-choked streets with deafening reverberations of traffic jammed solid around her, La Escapía had laughed out loud. This was the end of what the white man had to offer the Americas: poison smog in the winter and the choking clouds that swirled off sewage treatment leaching fields and filled the sky with fecal dust in early spring. Here was the place Marx had in mind as “a place of human sacrifice, a shrine where thousands passed yearly through the fire as offerings to the Moloch of avarice.” La Escapía really liked the way Marx talked about Europeans.

El Feo kept quiet but nodded vigorously at the right places. La Escapía was going to make him pay through the ears for acting as go-between for the elder sisters. The elders just wanted the land back; they didn’t want to hear about “revolution.” While he was listening to La Escapía talk about Marx and the cities of werewolves and England’s dead children, El Feo had already been formulating his report to the elder sisters. He would advise them to listen: La Escapía was on to something important.

El Feo didn’t worry about the world the way La Escapía did. The thought of retaking all tribal land made him happy; El Feo daydreamed about the days of the past — sensuous daydreams of Mother Earth who loved all her children, all living beings. Those past times were not lost. The days, months, and years were living beings who roamed the starry universe until they came around again. In the Americas the white man never referred to the past but only to the future. The white man didn’t seem to understand he had no future here because he had no past, no spirits of ancestors here.

CRIMES AGAINST HISTORY

EL FEO HAD SPENT HOURS talking with the elder sisters and the special committee. They were concerned that Angelita might already have become a communist. No, her thoughts were from her heart, aimed at helping them. She was their soldier. She was no communist. La Escapía had merely carried out her assignment at the Cuban school to the fullest extent possible. He could not possibly tell the story the way La Escapía had. Perhaps the elders should consider listening themselves. Words could not be blamed simply because stupid or evil persons slandered the words or corrupted their meaning. Commune and communal were words that described the lives of many tribes and their own people as well. The mountain villages shared the land, water, and wild game. What was grown, what was caught or raised or discovered, was divided equally and shared all around.

No, El Feo was relieved to report, La Escapía had not been brain-washed by the Cubans. In fact, she was contemptuous of their ignorance of Marx, and she had clashed with the Cubans over which version, whose version, of history they would use.

La Escapía had originally made notes because she had to locate so many of the words in a dictionary. Gradually she had learned the words, but La Escapía had kept writing in the notebook anyway because people were always liable to ask you to prove what you were saying wasn’t just a lie. The notebook had tiny marks and numbers only she could decipher, for page numbers and titles and authors of books. La Escapía had kept the notebook to back her up when Cubans wanted to argue or the “elder sisters” tried to give her trouble. She had written “Friends of the Indians” across the front cover of the notebook as a joke. Friends of the Indians! What a laugh! The clergy and the communists took credit for any good, however small, that had been done for the Indians since the arrival of Europeans. The world was full of “friends of the Indians.” The Dominican priest Father de Las Casas had been a great friend of the Indians. La Escapía had searched through their canyons of books, but she had found it: all in printed words just as Marx had said. The Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas had been a rich slave-holder with an inheritance of a plantation and Indian slaves to work it on La Isla de Hispaniola. Las Casas had gone to Cuba slave-hunting with other businessmen, although Las Casas was not present when the rebel Indian leader Hateuy was burned alive. Why hadn’t the stupid Cubans running the communist school in Mexico City talked about this part of Cuban history? Later La Escapía had pointed to this as one example of how little the Cubans knew about Cuban history. La Escapía called it further proof Cubans didn’t want indigenous people to know their history. When they denied indigenous history, they betrayed the true meaning of Marx. Not even Marx had fully understood the meaning of the spiritual and tribal communes of the Americas.

El Feo and the others had been reluctant to execute Comrade Bartolomeo without “due process” in a trial of some sort. “Kangaroo court?” someone joked at the back of the meeting hall. Because nobody had cared what they did with the Cuban white man who was no good to anyone anymore.

Bartolomeo had somehow managed to exceed all the others in his disdain for history before the Cuban revolution. Before Fidel, history did not exist for Bartolomeo. That was his crime; that’s why he died.

La Escapía had pronounced the death sentence because Bartolomeo had had no respect for the true history of Cuba or any of the Americans except for the singsong “Fidel Fidel Fidel Fidel!” Bartolomeo had died because he had betrayed the truth with half-baked ramblings he alleged were the words of Karl Marx. La Escapía was indignant. The Cuban school in Mexico City drove people away; it did not gather new comrades for the great struggle to regain all the lands of the Native American people. Angelita had read the words of Marx for herself. Marx had never forgotten the indigenous people of the Americas, or of Africa. Marx had recited the crimes of slaughter and slavery committed by the European colonials who had been sent by their capitalist slave-masters to secure the raw materials of capitalism — human flesh and blood. With the wealth of the New World, the European slave-masters and monarchs had been able to buy weapons and armies to keep down the uprisings of the landless people all across Europe.

La Escapía was not acquainted with Cubans of African or Native American descent; but the European Cubans were a race of hairdressers. Bartolomeo had kept quiet about the great Indian rebel leaders because Fidel had not been around back then. The Europeans had destroyed the great libraries of the Americans to obliterate all that had existed before the white man.

Bartolomeo had died for other crimes too, but La Escapía, El Feo, and the others had always felt proud as they remembered that mainly Bartolomeo the Cuban had lost his life because he had neglected to mention the great Cuban Indian rebel leader Hateuy.

Five hundred years of Europeans and nothing had changed. The Cubans had lied and distorted the words of Marx; worse, they had attempted to suppress the powerful warning Hateuy had sent to the people of the Americas. Hateuy had refused baptism before Europeans burned him alive because he said he did not want to go to heaven if Europeans might also be there. Cheers and shouts had come from the back of the crowd when Angelita La Escapía had finished.

The stories of the people or their “history” had always been sacred, the source of their entire existence. If the people had not retold the stories, or if the stories had somehow been lost, then the people were lost; the ancestors’ spirits were summoned by the stories. This man Marx had understood that the stories or “histories” are sacred; that within “history” reside relentless forces, powerful spirits, vengeful, relentlessly seeking justice.

No matter what you or anyone else did, Marx said, history would catch up with you; it was inevitable, it was relentless. The turning, the changing, were inevitable.

The old people had stories that said much the same, that it was only a matter of time and things European would gradually fade from the American continents. History would catch up with the white man whether the Indians did anything or not. History was the sacred text. The most complete history was the most powerful force.

Angelita La Escapía imagined Marx as a storyteller who worked feverishly to gather together a magical assembly of stories to cure the suffering and evils of the world by the retelling of the stories. Stories of depravity and cruelty were the driving force of the revolution, not the other way around, but just because the white man Marx had been a genius about some things, he and his associates had been wrong about so many other things because they were Europeans to start with, and anything, certainly any philosophy, would have been too feeble to curb the greed and sadism of centuries.

Marxism had a bleak future on American shores. Irreparable harm had been done by the immense crimes of his followers, Stalin and Mao. To the indigenous people of the Americas, no crime was worse than to allow some human beings to starve while others ate, especially not one’s own sisters and brothers. With the deaths of millions by starvation, Stalin and Mao had each committed the sin that was unforgivable.

Only locos such as the Shining Path mentioned Mao anymore. The Shining Path refused to hear about any mass starvation except what they themselves had suffered; to them, all history outside the Americas was irrelevant. The earth could be flat as far as the Sendero knew or cared. If communists had starved some millions, the bankers and Christians of the capitalist industrial world had starved many many millions more. Look all around and in every direction. Death was on the horizon. Talk to the Sendero about Stalin’s or Mao’s famines and they will simply shoot you to shut you up. Marx and Engels could not be blamed for Mao or Stalin or Sendero any more than Jesus and Muhammad could be blamed for Hitler.

El Feo had worked out the wrinkles and snags between Angelita and the elder sisters. The time was drawing near for the “beginning,” and they did not want misunderstandings or hard feelings among their people or allies. Many of the older people had been reluctant to hear about Marx because theirs had been a generation that had seen the high water of the flood of Christian missionaries, who had recited the names Marx and Engels, right after the names of Satan, Lucifer, and Beelzebub.

So Comrade Angelita did not hesitate to talk about anything the people wanted to ask. There was nothing to be nervous about. There was nothing they couldn’t talk about.

Was Comrade Angelita trying to get the village to join up with the Cubans?

How much were the Cubans paying her?

Wasn’t communism godless? Then how could history so full of spirits exist without gods?

What about her and that white man, Bartolomeo? To questions about her sexual conduct, Angelita was quick to laugh and make jokes. Sex with the Cuban was no big thing.

BULLETPROOF VEST

“JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING for you, Menardo, a little gift.” “Ah, Sonny, what is it? Size extra large? What are these? Falsies? You don’t think I’ve got a big enough chest and belly?” Menardo laughs as he holds up the bulletproof vest his friends in Tucson have sent him.

Menardo sits with the sun at his back by the pool. The gardeners are swimming on the bottom, cleaning bits of soil and stray rootlets from the water lilies. Twice daily this is done to keep the big pool crystal-clear as glass. The vest’s gift wrapping slides from his lap, but the maid catches it before it hits the blue tile decking. Sonny Blue finishes the piña colada, and another maid, older, with a face like an Olmec mummy, brings him a fresh drink. Sonny pokes a finger at the gardenia floating in the drink. He watches Menardo stand up and try on the vest.

“These pads—”

“They are called inserts.”

“These will stop a.357 magnum.”

“But they are heavy, hot to wear.”

“Yes,” Menardo said. “Still, I don’t mind. Hot and alive are better than cold and dead.”

Menardo fumbles with the bulletproof vest, then slips his white silk shirt over it. “Pues! Qué guapo!” Menardo struts up and down the length of the pool to get the effect of the vest. He glances at the big yellow and pale pink blossoms floating on the water. A gardener surfaces at his feet, but he is looking at Sonny Blue.

Sonny Blue was beginning to feel tired from the flight that had left Tucson so early. He traveled for their “friend,” Mr. B. Mr. B. rented warehouses in Tucson from Leah Blue. Mr. B. sent Sonny to Mexico to become familiar with a key supplier, Menardo. The U.S. government supports covert forces and supplies them with weapons got by trading cocaine through Tucson. Mr. B. has explained it before. Max Blue had worked for the U.S. on secret projects a time or two. Sonny found the secret war exciting.

“No, no worry my friend,” Menardo says in English. “We are shooting them to hell. We are making them a bloody pile.”

There is a woman laughing. The sound pours through the French doors of the balcony. Both men look up. “Alegría,” Menardo says, and smiles again at Sonny. “She loves beautiful, expensive things.” Sonny suddenly hates Menardo’s tone of certainty about his wife. He longs to tell Menardo what Alegría really loves, what she wants to take and take all night long. Instead Sonny Blue stands up suddenly and extends his hand. Menardo points at the piña colada Sonny has not finished. “Alegría will be furious if she misses you,” Menardo says. Sonny Blue knows he should go. Menardo works with all the factions. His number may be coming up — bulletproof vest or no vest. Sonny shakes his head.

“Next trip I’ll come for dinner.”

“Your word of honor!”

Sonny Blue lets Menardo embrace him and kiss both cheeks. “My word of honor,” Sonny says softly.

The older maid escorts him out. Her face is a mask, but in the eyes Sonny sees danger. He looks around the vast mansion, the pale marble staircase and the white and black checkerboard of marble in the entry hall. Beneath the glass dome of the conservatory, gardeners’ assistants hang like monkeys from ladders, tending orchids with cascading spikes of yellow blossoms flecked with bright red. The sky above the dome is the blue of gemstones, not sky. The glass dome is Alegría’s dome. It is her design. Sonny is impressed. Alegría had graduated from architecture school in Madrid. Menardo wasted no time in replacing the dead wife with one as young as his daughter. Sonny knows there are rumors Alegría killed the old wife.

All the thick hairs on Menardo’s stomach and chest have turned white. He will be fifty in the spring. He wants to wear the bulletproof vest to the ambassador’s party. But he can not decide if an undershirt should be worn to prevent chafing.

“I don’t want to be in the middle of dinner and have it pinch my ribs.”

“There’s no chance of that happening unless you mean pinching the layer of fat hiding your ribs.” Alegría is angry because Menardo scolded her for the new shoes and purse to match.

“Reptile, aren’t they.” He frowns. “You know how I dislike snakes.”

She laughs and he turns suddenly from the silver box containing his cuff links. She realizes then he is serious. He has never been so angry with her before. She stands motionless and stares at him like the little doe blinded in the headlights of their Mercedes the night before. She is selfish and thoughtless but she knows it. All the shoes and dresses with his money are intentional. Why else is she married to him?

Menardo turns back to the mirror and fumbles with the thin metal inserts that slip into pocket panels sewn in the front and back of the vest. The insert that belongs in the pocket over his heart does not lie flat. He had read the instructions that came in the box. The vest is the finest body armor made. The vest is sold only to the U.S. military and U.S. police forces. The instructions must be followed or the maximum protection will not be obtained.

“Is everything all right?” The sight of the vest makes Alegría uneasy. Lately there is an unidentified dread that shadows her.

“Of course. Don’t be silly.” Menardo says, taking a silk shirt from the closet. “We are going to be late.” Alegría feels the tears. She had not thought of tears, but there they are in her eyes.

The scene is a replay of her afternoon with Bartolomeo, who complains he can’t even tease her anymore.

“You will look good as a widow,” Bartolomeo had told Alegría as she was dressing. She was wearing a black silk slip.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that you look ravishing in black.”

“You know something else — tell me!” But Bartolomeo rolls over on his side and laughs. He tells her paranoia comes from guilt, but she had been frightened. Had spies seen her with Bartolomeo? Bartolomeo teases her after they make love; he calls her “the double agent.”

“On whose side?” Alegría says, though she knows it is dangerous either way.

Tears get nowhere with Bartolomeo, but fortunately Menardo is different. Menardo refuses nothing to her tears. She removes the black lizard shoes and carefully wraps them in the white tissue paper. She wipes the back of her arm across her face like a child. He is right. They are all right. About her. She’s selfish. She lives for herself. She knows this but can not stop. There is no other use for her. She knew this even while she was in school. The others at the university sneered at her drawings full of delicate lines.

“Whom are those buildings for? What meaning do they have for any of us?”

She laughed nervously and pretended to erase a smudge. “When you take power, you will want big buildings too,” she teases, but the hostility from them is always there even though she uses her key to get into the architecture building late at night to mimeograph leaflets for them. She loved making the drawings — floor plans of vast rooms, interiors flooded with light from high windows and domes, the pearly-yellow light framed on white walls. She wanted the gardens to penetrate the rooms. The only criticism of the drawings for her final project had been that they contained no human figures. The professor of the design class finds the figures of little dogs, parrots, and monkeys too whimsical. She does not tell him the human figures she draws spoil everything. They always look like police or men in dark suits, and they are always too large. She cleverly drew little dogs on the stairway. A monkey played in the orchids of the hanging garden, and she drew a scarlet macaw on a perch.

In the backseat of the Mercedes, Menardo pats Alegría’s hands absentmindedly; ahead of them are two bodyguards in a truck, and two more guards follow in a white jeep. The vest causes Menardo to hold himself straight. He moves stiffly when he turns to take a second look at an armored personnel carrier parked outside the Governor’s Palace. Mexico is almost bankrupt and the country is about to explode, that is what her mother and father write to her each week. “Come home to Caracas,” they plead.

“You are upset about something,” Alegría says to Menardo, who has a sour look on his face. He tugs at the corners of his small, neatly trimmed mustache. “It’s nothing you need to worry about, darling.”

“But it is,” Alegría answers.

At the party he watches her dance with each of the host’s four handsome sons. Alegría is the only woman dressed in black. She is the most beautiful. He had not meant to scold her about the shoes. But somehow black reptile skin is part of the nightmare he has from time to time. He struggles to remember the dream, but knows only somewhere in the dream there is scaly, black, reptilian skin. He had been startled that Alegría had found shoes and a purse identical to the reptile skin in the nightmare. She could not have known about the reptile skin because he told no one his dreams except Tacho, his driver, who came from a village near a Mayan temple ruin. In Tacho’s village they were all trained to decipher dreams. Menardo paid Tacho twice the going rate to ensure strict confidentiality. Enemies could use your dreams to destroy you, that’s what Tacho had told Menardo in the beginning. Right then Menardo knew he must double the Indian’s salary or tell Tacho nothing about his dreams.

Menardo talks to Tacho about other delicate matters. He asks Tacho who these Indians are who join up with the guerrillas in the hills. Tacho turns and flashes a big smile into the backseat of the Mercedes.

“They are the brothers of the soldiers who guard the Palace,” Tacho says, and pretends he is serious. Menardo likes a servant with a sense of humor. Sullenness upsets him. He had been relieved when Alegría had changed out of the black lizard shoes without pouting. Gardeners, servants, and the Indians had become more sullen since guerrilla forces had made regular strikes across the border. Guatemala had too many educated Indians. It was the fault of the Church. From the very beginning priests treated them like human beings.

“Nowadays you educate an Indian and he becomes a Marxist,” the former ambassador says. The governor signals for the expensive champagne. Although they have been discussing the guerrillas, and before that the upcoming elections, Menardo’s attention wanders. It is probably due to lost sleep from the nightmare. He watches Alegría dance with an investment broker from São Paulo. She smiles up into the man’s face. It occurs to Menardo he could ask Tacho if Alegría had ever been unfaithful. Indians could detect such things. The governor jokes this is the last of his French champagne, now that the socialists had spoiled everything in France. Someone jokes about the Americans with money frozen in Mexican bank accounts. It isn’t a mistake any wealthy Mexican would have made. Menardo allows the dark-skinned servant to refill his glass again. He is getting drunk, but he wants to. Alegría is dancing with the host’s youngest son. They stop. The boy gestures with both hands.

“It’s not just the Indians, really.” Someone behind him is talking about guerrillas. “A few come from the best of families.” Menardo takes a big swallow of champagne. He wants to dance with his wife. The boy sees him and bows away graciously. Alegría looks surprised. “Are you all right?” she asks.

“Can’t a man dance with his wife?” Menardo answers, laughing from the governor’s good champagne.

Alegría can feel the vest under his tuxedo. It is unyielding. He draws her closer to him, and with her eyes closed his steel-padded chest might belong to someone else. Alegría’s breasts are small, but they press the edge of the bulletproof panel into his chest. The pressure of the padded steel against his ribs is reassuring. He waltzes with his eyes closed. With champagne on the inside and the vest on the outside and his beautiful wife in his arms, Menardo forgets about the terrorist bombs and reports of new unrest. How nice it is to forget. But Alegría twists away from Menardo before the waltz has ended.

“That vest of yours is crushing me!”

“Ssh! It’s no good if you tell everyone!”

She laughs and replies, “So serious!” But she glides away to the ladies’ room downstairs. Menardo watches her until she disappears. Perhaps he was taking a risk to marry a woman so young, so full of modern attitudes. He smooths his shirt under the tuxedo jacket, feeling the padding and the steel of the vest. Iliana would never have complained about the vest. How often she had urged him to buy the bulletproof Mercedes. Before that, Iliana had worried about traffic accidents and insisted on big cars. It was good Iliana had not lived to see the world now where terrorists routinely attached bombs to cars. In his nightmare Menardo is riding in the Plymouth from years ago. He can not see who is driving. It appears to be early afternoon because the streets are empty. Here Menardo is puzzled because the empty streets of the dream frighten him. This is not a dream in which brown tarantulas swarm over his bed or blood-drinking bats attack him. Such dreams had awakened him but had not left him soaked in sweat. In the nightmare, he knows somehow the month is August. The empty streets of the nightmare are hot and bright from the sun. There are no spiders or monsters, only the empty street where Menardo is driven in the Plymouth.

Somehow the dream awakens him stiff with terror, and with the bed sheets soaked in sweat. Menardo always awakens before the car passes the Governor’s Palace. Tacho can not explain why this dream leaves him shaking and dreams about spiders, bats, or big jungle cats do not. Tacho claims this dream can not be read until the car proceeds around the plaza past the Palace. Tacho urges him to stay in the dream long enough to reach the Palace.

Alegría returns with her fur stole and beaded purse. “These shoes hurt my feet,” she says, and Menardo regrets scolding about the black lizard shoes. Other guests follow them. Outside, a three-quarter moon is dropping over the edge of the horizon. The breeze is surprisingly cool for late July. On the drive home, Alegría dozes with her hand in his hand. He leans over carefully and pulls a bottle of brandy from the backseat compartment. He suffers more often from a nervous stomach. Old age, Dr. Gris tells him, and laughs. But Menardo knows the nausea arrived that night with the nightmare.

READER OF DREAMS

TACHO SUSPECTS HE IS FORGETTING important details from this dream. Tonight Menardo understands this. Though he can not say why, the dream takes place in early August. It is just this sort of detail Tacho claims he needs in order to interpret the dream. Menardo remembered the black serpent skin. He is irritated that Tacho can’t interpret its meaning without knowing more. It is not a snake or lizard itself in the dream. Maybe it is around the corner, once you pass the Governor’s Palace. Tacho, like all the Indians, finds it easy to make jokes about the problems of others. They could care less about their own situations. No wonder they were such a poor and ignorant lot, although Tacho could at least interpret dreams — or could until the same dream came night after night. Before, when Menardo still had ordinary dreams, Tacho had told Menardo what numbers were associated with which dreams. For a share, Tacho offered to instruct the boss how to use dreams for the lottery. Tacho’s boldness in asking for 10 percent had been a little shocking. Still, for an Indian, Tacho knew a lot about percentages and odds. They had won each day he had placed a bet. Tacho was firm about the amount of money that could be placed on a number. Tacho claimed that if one got greedy and bet more than the prescribed amount, then the number would not pay. Working together they had won over 20 million pesos. Not bad, not bad. The work with the dreams had brought him closer to a servant than he had been since his childhood. His own father had always advised against it.

Tacho is slouched in the front seat. In the darkness the red ash of his cigarette stares like the eye of a ghost. Tacho has the car door open for them before Alegría reaches the driveway. Brandy on top of the champagne makes Menardo talkative. He doesn’t care if Alegría hears him ask Tacho about his dream. But tonight Tacho only grunts. Nothing more. The silence of Indians is maddening. Menardo understands why his ancestors found it necessary to kill a few. But then Tacho turns to the backseat and whispers, “Tonight stay until your car has passed the Palace.”

Alegría has gone to her own bedroom. The cigarette smoke has given her a headache, she says. Menardo postpones turning out the light. He makes a list of important phone calls for tomorrow. He wants to reassure Mr. B. that he knew nothing of General J.’s plan to resell the merchandise to an air force colonel in Honduras.

He gets up abruptly and goes over to the massive black-walnut chest where the bulletproof vest is lying. He removes the inserts and lays it tenderly into the box. The guarantee and other printed materials are scattered on the bed. Menardo plans to read himself to sleep. But just to be sure, he pours another brandy. The advertising brochure is printed on expensive, slick paper. The pages are filled with color photographs of police officers — a few in uniform — but most bare-chested. They pointed at marks left by the impact of the bullet against the vest. The bruises ranged from purplish black to scarlet and fading yellowish brown. With each photograph there was a brief description of the encounter and the weapons used. The clock by the bed shows three-thirty. Menardo has read each of the accounts in the magazine carefully. He is pleased the vest repels knife attacks as well as bullets. Menardo feels happier than he has felt in many months. Perhaps the danger was becoming a strain. But the stakes were even higher now with General J. and their new air force. Now there was Sonny Blue, who worked for Mr. B. Menardo felt drowsy from the brandy, but after the light was out, thoughts continued to dart and flit through like nighthawks. The magazine had many details concerning ballistics. The metal inserts for his vest have STOPS.357 AND 9MM printed on them in large black letters. Of course a.38 slug was no problem. Menardo was curious about the blade of a knife. According to the brochure, cheap switchblades or butcher knives would break off in the vest. Menardo imagined an attack on him by masked assailants. The first attacker would fire a.38-caliber revolver at Menardo’s chest while the second would lunge with a big knife for his belly, but the knife would skid off the steel insert. Stunned by their failure, they would stand helplessly as Menardo pulled out his 9mm automatic, and the faithful Tacho opened fire with the Uzi he kept beside him on the car seat. The scenario was exhilarating. The bodies of the two guerrillas lay crumpled on the steps behind Menardo as he strode into the club for his afternoon meal. The scene soothed him to sleep.

When he woke, Menardo heard a bird singing in the wisteria outside the window. He felt more refreshed than he had in many weeks. The vest had kept away the nightmare. Despite the brandy and the governor’s French champagne, his head was clear. He felt alert. He whistled while he bathed. He smiled at the maid who brought in his white silk suit. However, he waited until the maid left the room before he took the bulletproof vest from its box. He examined it carefully, running his finger over each seam, each nylon stitch. The knock at the bedroom door annoyed him. He pushed the vest back into the white tissue paper on top of the two inserts. But it was only Alegría.

“Still fondling your vest,” she teased. She had only come to go through her special closet where she kept her most expensive dresses. She paused to choose between a pale yellow suit of raw silk and a white linen dress. Although she was in a bubbly mood and seemed to have forgotten the incident the evening before with the lizard-skin shoes, Menardo felt a distance between them. He was glad when Alegría gave a little wave and darted out the door again. He wanted to be alone with the vest to read all of the technical information in the new owner’s manual. The vest must not be allowed to become oily or soiled and was less effective when wet. The nylon covers on the steel inserts could be washed gently by hand in a mild detergent without the steel inserts. The vest itself was guaranteed effective against knives and.22 and.38 calibers. Steel inserts were necessary for protection from larger calibers. Of course the inserts were less comfortable than the vest alone, but except for dancing with his wife, Menardo had not found the inserts to be annoying. The unyielding panels felt reassuring. He decided he would always wear the steel inserts. That way he could be certain.

Tacho had been relaxing behind the steering wheel as if he were ready to hear about the nightmare. But Menardo had slept without dreams that night as he preferred. A man of his stature and financial success should not be confiding his dreams to a servant. Without intending to raise the subject, Menardo told Tacho the problem of the dream had been solved. He told Tacho no more than that. Nothing about the vest, although the vest had done the job. No one must know he wore a bulletproof vest.

Night after night Alegría refuses sex with Menardo. Her quarrels with Bartolomeo leave her too angry for sex with her husband. “Fat red monkey” is the name the Indian guerrillas in the hills call Menardo, Bartolomeo delightedly reports. Finally Alegría agrees to sex with Menardo to avoid suspicion. She lies to Menardo and says she must go to her private bathroom for birth control. Away from him, Alegría sits on the closed lid of the toilet and stares out the window. The sky is full of stars. Alegría wonders what will become of herself six months from now. She tries to remember the names of some of the constellations. Where would she be tonight if she were not here? With whom would she be having sex right now? Sonny Blue in Tucson? Bartolomeo claimed the uprisings and strikes all over Mexico were only the beginning. In six months the war would spread from the South. The Indians talked to sacred macaws. Bartolomeo gave up. The Indians were hopeless. Bartolomeo was returning to Mexico City. He asked Alegría to accompany him. Menardo wouldn’t last long once the Indians got started. All this time the Indians had been misleading Bartolomeo and the others. The Indians couldn’t care less about international Marxism; all they wanted was to retake their land from the white man.

After a while, Menardo comes searching for her. But by that time she has decided to leave Menardo. It is perfectly clear to her that something will soon happen: “great changes” as the gypsy fortune-teller used to say, using the bundle of divining sticks to brush away black ants from the cushion he sat on. Well, Alegría understood great changes all right. She could feel them surge warmly through her veins with the blood. Sometimes she thought about the big dumb animals with their identical instincts. She had had no idea of why she was getting ready to leave Menardo. It was all in her blood, the tingle of apprehension but also anticipation. Bartolomeo says they are out of control — these mountain tribes who hate Europeans, and who believe they know communism better than Lenin or Marx. Bartolomeo predicts only trouble from these Indians; he is about to advise his supervisors to suspend all shipments of aid.

Menardo sweet-talks her through the bedroom door. He wants her very much. He tells her he will even remove the vest, an attempt on Menardo’s part to humor Alegría with a little joke. Alegría feels as if she owes sex to Menardo at least twice a month. Alegría unlocks the door, then bends over the side of the bathtub, displaying her ass, and then calls for him to come in. She has learned to prefer this position because she need not be near his face. When she thinks about leaving Menardo, she thinks about escape from this. She is just as bored with Bartolomeo. Alegría can feel herself falling in love with Sonny Blue.

GENERAL J.

“GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE!” the general says. His little grandson is playing with a woven-straw turkey with a red head and red feet. The general catches the toy just before the child drops it into the toilet. It is a cheap toy the Indians sell at the market. The maids spoil Nico, then run off and leave the general baby-sitting. None of the Indians could be trusted. The old woman who raised him had volunteered to rig an explosive to the general’s mattress. What is the world coming to when the oldest servants can not be trusted? General J.’s newly divorced daughter consoles herself with luncheon dates with her ex-husband’s friends. She is three ax-handles wide, the general teases. She hates him for the teasing.

“Gobble, gobble, gobble!” the general says, and runs the turkey across Nico’s head. He laughs at the child’s shock when he tucks the toy into the pocket of his dress uniform. The general’s daughter blames him for the disappearance of her husband, who was fat and soft and had a hind end floppier than hers.

“He ran off with another man,” the general tells her, but they both know her husband had enemies. The general had never seen a eunuch, but he had read many descriptions. The son-in-law had had the eunuch’s swinging hips and mincing steps. His fat fingers had been covered with gold rings. Still, the general could be philosophical; reading the great literature of the world had prepared him for anything that might happen. So when his only child had married a faggot, General J. had simply reread King Lear. When deserters bolted off to the mountains to lead battalions of other stinking mestizos and Indians, the general had reread Paradise Lost. One had to take the philosophical view: the sky rained down dirty-brown angels over the rugged coastal mountains. Indians were the work of the devil. The general is late for his meeting. He slips the straw turkey out of his pocket while the driver and the bodyguard talk soccer in the front seat. Each minute that ticks away reiterates his rank over the rank of the others. A true leader must consistently show those under him he is the boss. He is the man who can afford to arrive late.

“Gobble, gobble, gobble!” he says, waving the little turkey at them. They are already on the third pitcher of margaritas. He props the little turkey against an empty glass pitcher. The purpose of the meeting is to assess their position in these days of upheaval. Menardo arrives late at the country club. The others have already taken golf carts to their private pistol range. At first the golfers had complained, but rank was rank. The golfers had little to fear at the ninth hole. The pistol range merely used the back of the mound to muffle the sound. The shooters aimed past the ninth green and fairways toward the tropical forest. “If anyone gets hit, it will be us. None of these yokels in Tuxtla knows anything about swinging a golf club,” the governor jokes to the police chief. Menardo has played golf with the former ambassador, and it is true golf balls pose far more danger than stray bullets from their pistol range. Menardo pats his chest. He has had to ask Alegría to buy him shirts a half size larger. The bulk from the vest makes his old shirts too tight under the arms and across his shoulders. In the old shirts he can’t breathe right. He feels as if he is being suffocated.

He can hear them shooting. All the grass and forest trees muffle the shots. Bump! Bump! The flat, loud pop that means the chief is there. He is fanatical about his.44 magnum. He’ll match it against all the others anytime.

Someone has brought unopened gallon cans of vegetables and fruit to use for target practice. A can flies into the air awkwardly like a heavy seabird. Only full, unopened tins simulate the sounds of bullets hitting flesh and bone. Another bullet spins the can around on the ground. The police chief is always satisfied with his.44 magnum. He holds the cans away from himself so he will not soil his uniform. One drips a golden liquid. The other leaks runny red juice. Menardo can’t identify what the contents are until the chief motions for all of them to come closer to compare the sizes of the bullet holes. Menardo smells peaches and red peppers. What excites the police chief is the size of the hole the bullet leaves as it exits. The.44 leaves a hole as big as a child’s head. That morning the police chief kept turning his finger around the exit hole made by his.44. He pretended not to notice the little cuts on his fingers and the specks of blood. The purpose of the pistol range was to pass Friday afternoons and to give country club VIPs an opportunity to practice marksmanship.

Menardo understands why the golfers hate the arrangement. It sounds as if the ninth green has been ambushed. Ten, even five, years ago it would not have mattered so much. But now terrorists had invaded everywhere — even golf courses. Everything reflected the change. This vest, the.44s and.38s, the pistol range. Security matters were a change for all Europeans. They only vaguely remembered stories about the uprisings of the Indians against their ancestors in the great castle wars.

They are all wearing earplugs and are watching the police chief fire a short-barrel automatic rifle. The police chief turns from the target and sees Menardo first. “How do you like this baby!” He waves the automatic rifle above his shoulders to demonstrate its light weight. The governor is sitting on a white plastic lawn chair. They all take white lawn chairs and surround the table shaded with the white umbrella.

“The umbrella is to keep off stray golf balls,” the former ambassador jokes. They repeat the same jokes to show their solidarity. The police chief gives their stock reply: “You are here with us, so there’s no danger!” Menardo reaches to pour the big glass pitcher of margaritas. The police chief’s little joke has caused an uneasy surge in his blood. Politics had no place in their common cause, which was survival, whatever their minor political differences. Earlier that same morning more severed human heads had been found floating among the flowers of Xochimilco.

EL GRUPO GUN CLUB

THE POLICE CHIEF wants action. The general is biding his time with the guerrillas, but some of the guerrilla leaders had once been the general’s officers. The general gets emotional when he talks about the defectors. General J. rapidly confuses the rest of them with his talk about theology and Lucifer. The defectors had been trusted aides.

Things were veering out of control in their region, and the entire meeting of the shooting club would be devoted to a discussion of recent developments that might aid their “joint interests,” as General J. so delicately describes their business deals with one another.

The general suddenly finds himself in a reflective mood. He takes a deep breath and looks away from the table to the western horizon where jagged mountains lie majestically in the blue mists. He gestures to the waiters, who bow respectfully and bring iced pitchers of margaritas. Theirs is a business of the most serious nature: they govern the many; all the more reason they had to fortify, even indulge, themselves in every way.

They drained a fifth and sixth pitcher of margaritas. The governor is tipped back in his chair, snoring. The general notes that lately the old lecher can’t keep awake. The general signals his driver to bring the new chromeplated.44; he is ready for target practice. The general motions for the others to keep still, so the governor will not awaken and spoil the joke. Theirs has always been a group that appreciated practical jokes and laughter. The general wants to startle the old governor with the gunfire. Menardo keeps thinking about strokes and heart attacks as the chief pulls the trigger. Flames blaze out the end of the.44’s barrel. The explosion is deafening, and the governor leaps up from his chair and overturns the table, spilling empty pitchers and glasses. The governor clings to the former ambassador, shaking with terror. He clings to him even after the police chief has collapsed on the shooting bench in tears from the laughter. Menardo is laughing, but is not enjoying it. They had been discussing the infiltrations and the saboteurs. Of course the assassins must be everywhere. Fortunately, they have designed everything around them for maximum security. Fortunately, they did not have to worry within El Grupo, as they called their afternoon shooting club. Menardo was not sure, but he thought the police chief had looked at him a bit strangely just now as he said this. Menardo had never quite felt secure with the police chief because there was rivalry between the chief and General J. Menardo motions to Tacho for his holster and gun. He can shoot as well as the others. The police chief doesn’t shoot that well.

Menardo fired his 9mm again and again and watched a party of golfers scurry away from the ninth hole of the golf course. The rest of El Grupo had started on the fresh pitcher of margaritas and seemed not to notice how widely the bullets had missed the targets. Menardo had trouble concentrating on the target. He kept thinking about the worst that could happen if they were to begin to suspect him someday, for some reason. Of course he had nothing to hide; Menardo was completely innocent, but he knew his remarriage had angered El Grupo. Rumors about Alegriá’s political activities years ago in Spain still circulated in Tuxtla. Greenlee had told Menardo not to worry, that Mr. B. and the others at the “Company” were looking out for all of them. But Menardo was not sure the gringos understood the rift between the police and the military.

When Menardo returned to his chair at the glass-top table, the police chief was still laughing. His big belly had jerked his shirt loose from the trousers. He was quite drunk now, and his eyes were bloodshot. “That is the trouble,” the chief was saying, “none of you want to stand and fight. None of you are prepared.” Menardo touched the edge of the bulletproof vest. He wanted to tell them he was ready, he was not running away.

Menardo listens to the governor and the former ambassador as they fire at human silhouettes of black cardboard. They talk about bank accounts and real estate in Arizona and southern California. Their strategy is to invest across the border. The Mexican economy is a sinking ship. The governor is drunk on margaritas. He will embrace Mexico and love her, but his money goes to a safe place.

The police chief spins the cylinder of his.44 magnum and winks at Menardo. Each time he fires, yellow flame blazes from the barrel. Let bankers and politicians talk all they want. Let them wave their pieces of paper. The chief won’t buy that horseshit about economic conquest or economic domination. The judge shuffles a deck of cards and gestures at the others to see if they want to play.

The chief keeps talking while Menardo takes his turn at the firing line. He is too drunk to notice he missed all six shots. The governor keeps pushing wads of cash and stacks of silver to the center of the table. He makes stupid jokes about banks and foreign debt soon being eclipsed by the accumulated interest and late penalties. The police chief makes a sloppy shuffle that barely mixes the cards. The police chief leans farther in his chair so he can watch the former ambassador’s hand of cards.

The police chief draws one card, holding his first four. The greatest threat Mexico faces is rape and bondage by foreign bankers. The former ambassador does not blink. The air under the ramada sinks under the weight of the relentless afternoon heat. Menardo wipes his hand across his upper lip. Menardo has never felt such tension in a poker game before.

The police chief gulps a double shot of tequila and deliberately stalls the game. “Where would we be without bankers?” he says to no one in particular, and draws two cards. The governor snaps his cards together and drops them on the cash in the middle of the table.

“Sounds like Marxist talk to me,” the governor says, laughing, then goes to take a piss at the edge of the fairway. Menardo watches the police chief’s eyes. The eyes study the former ambassador, then the judge. Menardo is startled when the chief looks at him, and Menardo drops his eyes to the cards he’s holding. They have all dealt with foreigners. Besides, Greenlee was no banker, only Mr. B.

When the cards are no good, they throw them down in the center of the table and take another turn on the firing range. Shooting, cards, and drinking are required activities. All cardplayers had to shoot and to get drunk; all shooters had to get drunk and play cards. Tequila makes everyone jabber.

They all knew stories about local uprisings. Priests had complained fewer Indians attended Mass. Everywhere there were rumors of religious pilgrims slowly marching north. The judge and Dr. Gris argued the pilgrims were unarmed and harmless. How could anyone take seriously thousands of landless Indians who obeyed the orders of sacred macaws? In a neighboring district they had outlawed Indians from keeping the birds for purposes of fortune-telling. Menardo suddenly felt they were all looking at him. His heart was pounding. Of course they probably all knew Menardo had allowed Tacho to keep some birds in a big tree by the garage. Suddenly Menardo knew he should go. He tried to think of excuses. He settled on a promise he had made weeks ago, to take Alegría to lunch at the Royal Hotel; this month was the “anniversary” of their first love-making. He felt ashamed to use their anniversary to escape El Grupo. But he did not feel comfortable today, with all the talk of strange native religious cults and Mexico City “Reds.”

But Menardo also knew the police chief didn’t like anyone to leave during his stories. When the chief was drunk, he easily became enraged. Menardo gritted his teeth to keep the appearance of relaxation. The afternoon heat was beginning to bear down, and too many tumblers of margaritas rested uneasily in his stomach. Suddenly Menardo felt as if a drug had been injected into his veins, and he could move his head and neck only with the greatest difficulty. His legs felt like sandbags and his arms were too heavy to move. Menardo felt panic. He was sure it was a sudden medical crisis brought on by the heat and the alcohol and the loud voice of the police chief. He was certain it was something like a heart attack or a stroke, because it had come over him so suddenly. When Menardo tried to speak, he found his tongue entirely filled his mouth. None of the others seemed to notice, but by then they were all drunk. The former ambassador sat swaying back and forth in his lounge chair. Even the bulletproof vest seemed suddenly to tighten around his chest and press his ribs too close to his lungs. Menardo could not move his hand to his face to wipe away the sweat. He could not even move his eyes to the left to catch Tacho’s attention. The governor got up and started firing his.38 special.

The sound of the governor’s shots broke the paralysis, and Menardo was able to wobble to his feet. He had to go, he said. Just then he saw the manager of the country club frantically speeding across the golf course to stop El Grupo from shooting up the ninth hole. Three or four times a year it had been a custom of theirs after the sixth pitcher of margaritas, and what could the manager do? All but two of the group served on the country club’s board of directors. They had hired him. Still, when the manager came, usually that was a signal for the party to break up.

Time to go home for siestas before dinner. The governor had a date with his new sweetie. Just thinking about her made his manhood stiffen.

STRIKES, UNREST, AND UPRISING

MENARDO LET TACHO HELP HIM into the backseat. Tacho could tell that he was not feeling well, but said nothing. That was one good thing about these Indians. They didn’t say much. But then Tacho did a strange thing. Tacho drove him past the mortuary, and suddenly Menardo recognized the sensation of paralysis he had felt earlier; he realized it was the sensation of a body being embalmed. He had felt the embalming fluid course through his veins. He could feel the sweat under his arms and down his back. He could feel sweat on his balls.

Menardo was surprised and frightened at how long it took to pass the mortuary. He realized it was partially his fault because he had told Tacho to drive slowly to conserve gasoline that every day became more expensive. The mortuary is visible for a long distance because it is a two-story building in the style of a Castilian mansion. At first the red-tile roof was all Menardo could see. Then he could see the purple blossoms of vines that climbed the outer walls. The plump flowers were grotesque. They seemed to have been approaching the mortuary for the past twenty minutes, and still they were not quite even with the mortuary’s entrance gate. He tried but could not think of what the purple flowers of the vines resembled except human intestines. Menardo regretted he had gone to see the victims of the ambush. Corpses were not yet a common thing, as in lands to the south. The bodies had barely begun to swell, and there was only a faint odor when the wind stirred. Although they had each been shot at the base of the skull, all the stomachs had been slashed open. Menardo could only think of the travel brochures for the Hawaiian Islands where Alegría wanted to go. Human intestines resembled Hawaiian necklaces of flowers. The car seemed not to quite reach the mortuary, even as it moved along the road. Menardo had felt the same sensation in a dream in which he was always just approaching but never quite reaching the treasure. Sounding as indifferent as he could, Menardo asked Tacho to speed up a bit because the Señora would be waiting. This was a lie, because Alegría always played tennis on Friday afternoons. He felt the Mercedes surge forward, and the added speed broke the strange spell so at last they were past the mortuary.

Menardo had taken to sleeping in the bulletproof vest after university professors had been awakened by masked men and marched to the big fountain in front of the university library. The assassins shot the night watchman too, but he had lived long enough to describe the execution. With pistols buried in their victims’ stomachs, the assassins shouted, “Test this!” Of course the professors had all been communists, and the assassins were likely men working for the Police Chief’s special unit. Still, in times such as these one could not be too careful. So Menardo had slipped his silk pajamas over the vest. The vest no longer chafed or caused heat rash over his stomach. Without the vest, Menardo felt strangely exposed and somehow incomplete.

Alegría had made fun of Menardo in his vest. They no longer shared the same bed, and he was careful to remove the vest before he slipped into the velvet robe he always wore to her bedroom. She had joked about Menardo without his bulletproof vest.

“Aren’t you afraid the communists will shoot you right here?” Alegría said, laughing. Alegría had a cruel side, which his first wife, Iliana, had never had. “They have a small size for women you know.” Menardo wanted to please her. Sex required such effort now that Alegría had moved to her own bedroom. It was her design showcase, she said, but the next thing, she wanted to sleep there alone. Her excuse had been fear of pregnancy, but Menardo knew the vest he wore to bed was responsible. Still Menardo had no choice; without the vest, his sleep was lacerated with nightmares.

Iliana had been dead little more than a year and already the world had changed a great deal so she might not recognize newspaper headlines these days. The rebels rely almost entirely on dynamite. They hit key railroad and highway bridges. Last week terrorists had wired the staff car of a general called Fuentes with ten pounds of dynamite. The blast had blown away both legs and both balls and only left a flap of skin for a piss tube where his dick once was. Let that story get around. Later the rebels had scattered flyers with cruel cartoons of General Fuentes in a wheelchair with a comical dildo strapped on attempting to fuck a cunt labeled “Capitalism.” Menardo had been shaken by the bombings. He had met Fuentes on four occasions briefly. Strangely, they had once stood side by side at the Governor’s Palace urinal; Menardo had not been able to resist the compulsion to glance quickly to his left to see the size and the shape of Fuentes’s cock. To think General Fuentes had been unmanned by exploding steel fragments — the very organ Menardo had so recently seen in the men’s room — had left Menardo nauseous.

BLOOD MADNESS

MENARDO HAD ASKED TACHO what he thought about men cutting off the sex organs of other men and women. Menardo had conversations with Tacho he would never have dared with a white man. Tacho had watched Menardo in the rearview mirror as he answered. The blood fed life. Before anything you had the blood. The blood came first. At birth there was blood.

Blood was powerful, and therefore dangerous. Some said human beings should not see or smell fresh blood too often or they might be overtaken by frightening appetites. Usually Tacho said little, but on gruesome subjects, Tacho was like all the other Indians, even Menardo’s own grandfather, who relished stories about accidents and death. Menardo wanted to take advantage of Tacho’s mood to ask certain questions. Were there human sacrifices anymore? Not by the Indians, Tacho said, but the human sacrificers had not just been the Mexican tribes. The Europeans who came had been human sacrificers too. Human sacrificers were part of the worldwide network of Destroyers who fed off energy released by destruction. Menardo laughed out loud at Tacho. Tacho believed all that tribal mumbo jumbo Menardo’s grandfather had always talked about. Tacho looked at Menardo in the rearview mirror as if the laughter had insulted him, but Tacho continued.

Blood and its power had been misused by sorcerers. Long before Europeans ever appeared, the people had already disagreed over the blood and the killing. Those who went North refused to feed the spirits blood anymore. Those tribes and people who had migrated North fled the Destroyers who delighted in blood. Spirits were not satisfied with just any blood. The blood of peasants and the poor was too weak to nourish the spirits. The spirits must be fed with the blood of the rich and the royal. God the Father himself had accepted only Jesus as a worthy sacrifice.

Menardo thought Tacho had finished on the subject, but then Tacho had blamed all the storms with landslides and floods, all the earthquakes and erupting volcanoes, on the angry spirits of the earth fed up with the blood of the poor.

Menardo did not raise the subject again with Tacho. The talk of blood and spirits thirsting for blood made Menardo feel nauseous. Then later in the day the disgusting subject had been raised again by General J., who wanted to talk about castration over lunch. The general fancied himself a bit of a scholar.

Menardo was disturbed that both General J. and Tacho had been so anxious to talk about sex and blood; he expected it of Tacho, but not of the general, who was highly educated. Yet the longer the general had talked to Menardo, the more animated the general had become, and a flush had spread up his throat to his cheeks, and Menardo had thought he saw a suspicious bulge in the general’s trousers. The general had continued with a theory some French doctors had had: he speculated that the sight and smell of blood naturally excited human sex organs. Because bloodshed dominated the natural world, those inhibited by blood would in time have been greatly outnumbered by those who were excited by the blood. Blood was everywhere, all around humans all day long. There was always their own blood pumping constantly.

Here Menardo had interrupted the general to ask, surely the general was referring to savage tribes — Indians and Africans — and not to civilized Europeans? But the general had laughed and shaken his head, draining his glass and wiping his mustache on the back of his hand. “No, these are the ancestors of the French we are talking about. The cave people of France.” Menardo did not recall the nuns and the priests or even the high school teachers ever mentioning that the early ancestors of the French had lived in caves eating raw meat. But the general was an intellectual, and Menardo knew the Catholic Church was old-fashioned about modern science. The French doctors had further speculated that the sight and smell of blood of the castration caused the body to release chemical signals to the genitals so that in primitive times, the conquerors who had castrated their prisoners would immediately impregnate the geldings’ women. The general had asked Menardo to forgive him for going on so unabashedly as he had about the unpleasant subject. But the general was about to complete a scholarly treatise on the use of physical measures such as castration to subdue rebel, sub-versive, and other political deviants. General J.’s main thesis was that only the body remembered. The mind would blank out. Tortured nerves and veins had a memory; what the torturers did to prisoners was to make human time bombs. General J. believed the best examples of the Nazi torture work were Jews who proclaimed themselves survivors. Because their bodies had carried cruel memories for years and years, and when the Jews thought they were home free, and safe, then the time bomb went off and they committed suicide.

The general’s other theory was that man had learned the use of rape through the observation of the sexual behavior of stallions in wild herds. The soldiers of the invading armies had simply made certain all pregnant captives had been repeatedly and violently raped until bleeding commenced. Like stallions, they replaced the aborted with seed of their own.

The talk about blood had left Menardo shaken. He tensed his muscles to feel the firm outline of the vest on his belly and chest. Oddly he had never feared wounds in his back. All he had ever been was a serious businessman, a pioneer in the world of casualty insurance. Menardo had never lifted a hand against anyone except those who had in some way threatened damage to one of Universal Insurance’s clients. Even then, Menardo himself had never touched a hair on anyone; he had always left those decisions in the hands of General J., who commanded their security services. As the president of Universal Insurance, Menardo enjoyed state-of-the-art protection around the clock. Expense was of little concern. It would look bad for business if anything happened. Menardo had been thinking about a dealership for bulletproof vests. He liked the name Body Armor and knew it would sell strongly with his regular insurance clients. “We cover you for everything” was the slogan he would use.

Menardo began to make plans. It would be such a simple matter. He and Tacho would conduct a test. A simple but dramatic test of the bulletproof vest. By none other than himself. Menardo had studied the body armor brochures closely. Bullets had only left dark-purple bruises. Testimonials that accompanied the photographs again and again described the moment that vest users saw the end of the gun barrel and got ready to die. The velocity of the bullets had slammed them to the ground, but a miracle of high technology had given them a second chance. Menardo wanted to feel it, to experience it and to know the thrill, to see the moment of death and not have to pay.

SPIRIT MACAWS

TACHO HAD OBSERVED WHITE PEOPLE all his life. He had learned to follow Menardo’s moods and ignore whatever Menardo might say because Menardo was a yellow monkey who imitated real white men.

Tacho knew Iliana had warned Menardo many times about telling his dreams to an Indian. Tacho had been overjoyed the day Iliana took her fall. The marble stairs were imitations of the temple staircases the Indians had built. Tacho laughed all the more when the boss had married Alegría. Tacho had smelled Alegría, and he had correctly guessed the day Menardo’s new wife had gone back to fucking the Cuban, Bartolomeo. Tacho knows about the Cuban from his people living in the mountains.

Only Tacho and a few others knew about the macaw spirit beings that followed him, always roosting in nearby trees until they located Tacho again. The big blue-and-yellow birds had cruel beaks and claws. They followed Tacho wherever he went, and for a long time the big parrots refused to talk to him. Tacho stole cake from Menardo’s kitchen, and one of the blue-and-yellow birds had spoken to Tacho. The bird addressed Tacho as Wacah. Tacho was reluctant to hear any more and left the birds in the tree outside. Birds and animals that were too friendly toward humans might be sorcerer’s animals, not real animals. The blue-and-yellow macaws shrieked Tacho’s new name over and over from dawn to dusk:

“Wacah! Wacah! Wacah! Wacah! Big changes are coming!” For a long time after that, Tacho had hurried past the tree into the garage to avoid the two spirit macaws. But they had stayed high at the top of the tree and ignored Tacho, or Wacah. They refused to leave. The macaws kept reading off lists of orders, things that Tacho-Wacah must do. Tacho bribed the birds with candy, and then for two or three nights Tacho had beautiful dreams.

All Menardo’s dreams had contained the terror of a doomed man, and always the dreams were of ambush on the highway, dreams in which the cars and guards usually accompanying the Mercedes were suddenly gone. No matter how deadly the omens in the dreams, Tacho told Menardo there was nothing to fear; Tacho lied to Menardo every chance he got. Tacho watches the gradual changes in the yellow monkey. The change that the vest brought to the master and mistress’s bedroom is quite extensive and funny. They no longer fuck because Señor prefers to cower in his vest.

For weeks the vest keeps Menardo’s dreams simple and blissful. Then one night Menardo dreams of an asphalt highway in the moonlight where the white lines give way to a giant silver rattlesnake warming itself on the pavement. Menardo screams at Tacho, but he can’t brake. The car tires explode as they tear into the huge snake, hurling bloody chunks of reptile skin and flesh against the car windshield. Tacho says no need to worry, the giant snake is from the Bible, and it is good luck for Christians to kill serpents. But after the dream, Menardo can no longer eat red meat. He is haunted by a smear of reptilian tissue across glass. The sight of reptile scales makes Menardo’s skin crawl. Menardo proceeds with plans to experiment with the vest. If Tacho is going to assist in the test, Menardo wants him to understand a little. Menardo opens the brochure and points at a series of pictures of white men without shirts.

“Look! See?” Menardo’s fat brown forefinger slides over the white man’s left nipple. “The big dark spot! Right there!”

Tacho looked, then nodded slowly.

“A criminal shot him with a.38 special, but the vest saved him!” Menardo pats his own chest over his pajamas.

Tacho is cautious. “This very same vest?”

Menardo is suddenly impatient. “No, not this one, but one just like it. So today,” he says with a flourish, “today, my friend, we are going to perform a scientific test!” Today they are compadres. This will be their secret. Their secret alone.

Tacho is careful to take side streets to avoid the route of Menardo’s fatal dream. Although Menardo had talked excitedly about the tests and actual cases reported in the illustrated brochure, Tacho is not sure he understands.

POLICE INTERROGATORS

THE VIDEO CAMERAS and equipment had been gifts of the United States government. Their U.S. friends were concerned about the growing political unrest in Mexico. Their U.S. friends only asked to receive duplicate tapes of the interrogations. Menardo had always envied the police chief’s extensive knowledge of electronic technology. The chief had made a point of inviting them all into the conference room to review police interrogations on video. The chief said he needed their suggestions. While the others stared at the hundreds of tiny switches and lights on the panel, the chief had waved a thick instruction manual at them, saying it was so simple and easy, even an Indian could do it. Then the chief had laughed, and they had all laughed because none of them acknowledged any Indian ancestors.

The police chief needed the suggestions of El Grupo. They could not continue these interrogations with such stupid questions for the suspects. For example, Question: Do you know why you are here? Answer: No. Question: You are lying! This was to be an anti-subversive campaign. On the video monitor the young whore’s hard, upturned breasts filled the screen in freeze-frame. He watched the ten minutes of videotape over and over, listening to the questions the junior officers had asked. Of course they were asking her how many other girls were working as she was, and whom the girls were working for. Halfhearted questions. Girls such as her did not last long on the streets. Personally, the chief thought it was better for the girls when they got taken over by a pimp.

Communism was responsible for all the young girls, and yes, young boys, lining the streets downtown, and the parking lots outside tourist hotels. The chief had always felt his work was indispensable. They lived such a great distance from the Federal District. If the police chief was not constantly vigilant, the agitators from the South would stir up trouble. The police chief began writing furiously, hitting the pause switch on the videotape deck, rolling close-ups of females’ organs across the TV screen. The chief had sent his aide away before he had noticed the colors on the screen were all wrong — all yellows, greens, oranges, and browns and blues where they should have been rose-pink or bloodred. Still, the chief had been inspired by the whipping the junior officers gave the whore with the belts of their uniforms.

The police chief complained to Vico, his wife’s brother: the Argentine interfered and often interrupted interrogations. The Argentine had persuaded them to use lipstick and makeup on the genitals so they might show up better on the video screen. All the Argentine talked about was “visual impact” or “erotic value.” Making a little on the side selling the tapes — that was one thing, so long as police work was not hindered. The chief was delighted to make money from the filthy perversions of thousands hopelessly addicted to the films of torture and dismemberment. But a short time later the police chief had an idea. The videos Vico sold to the Argentine pornographic film company were only copies. With the originals, the chief’s idea was to educate the people about the consequences of political extremism. He wanted the people to see the punishment that awaited all agitators and communists. Stern messages could be interwoven in the interrogator’s questions, something perhaps like this: Interrogator: Why are you performing traitorous acts against God Almighty and the sovereign nation of Mexico? Whack! with the rubber hose across the soles of the feet.

But the Argentine cameraman did not want to be delayed while new questions were drafted for the interrogators to use. Vico was no better than the Argentine. They both only cared about a “quality product.” Vico was blunt. They didn’t use the sound track except for the prisoner’s cries or the torturer’s grunts and the sound of breaking bone. The chief canceled all interrogations and videotaping by the police until the official list of interrogation questions had been completed.

The chief purposely stayed away until his interrogation questions were completed. He prided himself on the perfection he demanded in all he undertook. But in the ten days the chief was absent, the Argentine had completely taken over. It probably was the first time the Argentine had been surrounded with such yokels. The chief despised the junior officers and their kowtowing to the Argentine. So during the ten days he had been away, they had become grinning idiots in officers’ uniforms. Whatever the Argentine told them, they did without question.

The chief looked at the report by Dr. Guzman. The Argentine had made a mess of everything. The prisoners were covered with welts, bruises, and burns. “The videos sell for more money that way,” the subordinate answered when the police chief had questioned him about the medical report.

It all gave the chief a dizzy, unbalanced feeling. Suddenly everything about the way the chief had understood his assignment, even his own life — all of it seemed to go up in steam, evaporate. None of them understood what the bruises and burns might prove to the outside agitators or international commissions.

The light-headedness came again when the first images blinked on the video monitor screen. It was far worse than anything the chief could have dreamed. The Argentine had turned the basement of police headquarters into a movie studio. They were out of uniform. Dressed in civilian clothing. The chief tried to keep his composure. By whose order had the junior officers performed interrogations out of uniform? But even before he could speak, Vico and the Argentine were at his side. A junior officer stopped the videotape. Vico whispered in the chief’s ear. Vico urged the chief to remain calm. The money involved here was considerable.

“Look at the laws of supply and demand,” Vico continued, and the chief was wondering if his brother-in-law was on some kind of dope because his talk just seemed to be getting faster and faster. For years there had been no shortage of “raw material” in Argentina. But recently there had been a drastic interruption. A change in government, so to speak. The chief nodded. Vico put his hand on the chief’s arm. They were supplying half the world. Think of it! Vico raved on and on. But somehow in stepping back from the idiot Vico, the chief had inadvertently nodded his head in the direction of the officers by the video machine. The idiots had assumed the gesture was their signal to start the video again. On the video monitor he could again see his men. He could not believe it. Things had been changed. The interrogation room had been decorated with colored paper and paper flowers as if for a party, but in the center of the room on a tinfoil “throne” sat the prisoner. The prisoner’s eyes had been taped with the silver tape the Argentine used to bundle cords on video equipment. But the chief had not been prepared for masks on their faces. The interrogators wore carnival masks — the wolf, the rat, the vampire, and the pig. In this video they wanted no trace of the police. This they had done for a special video called Carnival of Torment. How quickly they had lost sight of their true purpose. Of course, they wanted to make money, but what had been most important to the chief was the message, the warning that must be sent. The chief kept a notebook beside his bed. Every night he woke at least twice for his bladder, and while he was up, sudden ideas came to him. The videos could carry warnings to more than leftwingers and subversives. Thieves and criminals of all types, molesters of children and small animals, traitors, spies of enemy nations — all would receive warnings. This is waiting for you, the warnings would say. This is what’s waiting for anyone out there who dares violate the law.

But not this! This circus was a crime! A beast feast! This was perversion that had involved his own junior officers. The video was still rolling; now the images on the screen were silhouettes and the prisoner’s nipples and vulva were spotlighted. On the screen they thrust a cattle prod inside the vagina. The junior officers were laughing.

The chief did not feel well, but blamed the odor of his coat. The odor of cleaning solvent made the chief ill. His wife had become less attentive in recent years. She no longer looked after the household and the hired help after the children were grown. She spent all her time with the women’s club. Playing canasta and drinking gin with the governor’s wife and the others. The chief would make a note as soon as he reached his office: “warnings to loose women” would be the theme of their next interrogation session.

The Argentine cameraman talks too much after three beers. He brags about the movies he made while he was in the Argentine army. The chief did not care for the Argentine’s loud mouth always bragging. The Argentine didn’t know a hole in the dirt from the hole in his butt. The chief does not like the cameraman’s smart-ass attitude. Argentines are all like that. The bastard talks as if it is a sex movie. But first and foremost the videotape is an official record. The chief does not allow Vico or the swine Argentine to change his standard procedures for interrogations. Vico doesn’t argue, but from his next trip to Buenos Aires he returns with a suitcase full of video cassettes the buyer-distributor has sent to give them more ideas. Watching the Brazilian and Taiwanese sex shows after practice at the pistol range began around that time. The chief brought the cassettes Vico had borrowed.

He let the Argentine think they were going to let him call the shots. The chief even made a point of telling Vico how well the Argentine was working out. The chief wanted the Argentine to get sloppy and maybe become insubordinate with him or one of the staff officers once or twice — something like that. Because the arrogance of the Argentine was almost more than the chief could swallow. The Argentine was Mr. Know-it-all! The chief really enjoyed setting him up. They start out the inter-rogation with a beating. The prisoner is handcuffed with hands pulled behind him. The Argentine said he had more than enough footage of the lolling tongue and swelling, blackened face. They had already poked and jabbed with broomsticks. Such limited imaginations these Mexicans had! The Argentine did not attempt to mask his contempt for them.

Finally the Argentine had turned to the chief and said, “Do they understand words or do they just grunt?”

The Argentine had been lured to Tuxtla by Vico, who had promised him the latest in high technology and equipment. Otherwise the Argentine would have taken a job in Mexico City. The job in Mexico City had paid less, but all the actors, including the girls, were professionals. Tuxtla was the pits. Police interrogators made even torture dull and repetitive. The chief had been embarrassed when the Argentine pointed out the inadequacies of their interrogation methods. All of the big fish were taken away from them and sent to Mexico City. The little ones would tell you anything about anyone even before the sergeant and his men got past the preliminaries — stripping off prison trousers and the insertion of the copper wires up the prisoner’s ass. The copper wires were connected to a tractor battery. Prisoners would shit all over themselves trying to expel the little wires.

The Argentine cameraman was always on the police chief’s mind. He should never have gone into business with his brother-in-law, Vico. The Argentine had been Vico’s idea. Despite the business at hand, the police chief found he often lost his concentration, and he would find himself thinking about the smirk on the Argentine’s face. The chief had always been able to control personal impulses and urges because he’d seen strong men, intelligent men, ruined by their lack of self-control. Many times the chief has had to fight back the impulse to slug incompetent subordinates in their faces, but with the Argentine, the chief can no longer ignore the arrogance.

The day they get the Argentine the timing is perfect. They seize the Argentine as he walks through the door of the interrogation room. The man behind the camera wears a pig mask. The chief wears the hangman’s mask of black cloth. The Argentine pales when he hears the electric doors clang shut up and down the basement corridor. The Argentine does not struggle as they tie his arms and legs spread apart on the chair. The chief wonders if the Argentine has guessed who the movie star will be. Imagine the surprise of Vico and the others in Buenos Aires when they see this video. There was no need for the expense of a surgeon’s table or any of the other props. The chief had never needed more than the heavy, high-backed oak chair. If it was the genitals the chief wanted to get at, the chair worked best. The victim’s sitting position pushed all the guts and tallow down on the sex organs, forcing them out. The best way to geld a horse was to hobble it with its head snubbed tight against a tree or post. One slit and the testicle was visible inside the slippery, marbled-blue membrane. Men were not much different.