Chapter Eighteen #3
So it was uncharacteristic that he failed to see the article coming.
He wondered if his love for Lydia had blinded him to the inevitability of it, and that possibility caused him to feel a faint wrinkle of resentment toward her.
Even before he read it and even with the anonymous byline, Javier, who read the article with his usual equanimity, presumed the article was the work of Lydia’s husband, whose journalistic expertise in the drug trade was well-known.
Initially, he didn’t need to measure his response, because the article didn’t provoke much feeling in him.
On the contrary, Javier regarded it to be a mostly fair depiction of his life.
There were, of course, some marginal inaccuracies, one or two instances of exaggeration.
There was more righteous condemnation than Javier was prepared to accept, but that was to be expected.
Beyond those details, Javier thought, Sebastián had managed to apprehend something true about the essence of Los Jardineros in Acapulco.
And he was bewildered but unexpectedly pleased by the inclusion of his poem.
Javier presumed that Lydia had somehow given it to her husband.
Had she memorized it? (A flattering notion.) Secretly photographed it with her cell phone during a moment of lapsed judgment?
Though the poem revealed something intimate about him, it also illuminated his humanity, he thought.
He therefore portended that it might make him beloved by the people.
He neither smiled nor scowled as he folded the newspaper and set it in the sunbeam on the leather seat beside him.
Instead, he tried to anticipate the impact the article might have on his future.
He understood immediately that there would be ramifications, that his relative anonymity was a thing of the past, that his liberty had been permanently compromised.
He’d always known this would happen one day.
He hadn’t expected it to be so soon, but he would adapt.
It was, at worst, a nuisance. Perhaps it could even be fun.
He couldn’t recall another time the press had devoted so much attention to a cartel as young as Los Jardineros.
It had taken years of established work before ordinary people began to recognize the names El Chapo Guzmán or Pablo Escobar, and there were plenty of people who still loved those men for their generosity and mythos, even after their spectacular downfalls.
The only thing that truly unsettled Javier was his speculation that Lydia, his dear Lydia, had betrayed his confidence with the poem.
That betrayal he had not foreseen, and it caused a treacherous quickening in his chest. But then it occurred to him that perhaps she hadn’t been disloyal at all.
Maybe she’d provided the poem as a faithful contribution, a nod to his true self. Maybe the poem was a gift.
Lydia knew Javier as well as anyone knew him. His first response to the article was exactly as she’d predicted.
At that same moment, several miles away, just at the outskirts of the city, on a sprawling finca with glittering all-day views of the turquoise sea, Javier’s wife was also reading the article.
She was a woman who had never been beautiful, but who took care to appear as if she might once have been.
Her hair was platinum, her mascara and lipstick tastefully applied, her bosoms maintained by the architecture of expensive lingerie, her nails, gleaming and square and only a shade pinker than natural.
She hadn’t had a cigarette in almost three years, yet here she was, smoke curling from the tip of her quivering menthol.
She had a name, but she seldom heard it.
Instead, she heard Mamá or Mi Reina or Dona.
She’d reached an age where she expected each day to be the unveiling of some quiet new sorrow, and where she simultaneously believed there was nothing left in life that could truly surprise her.
As she pursed her lips to draw on the menthol, the fine lines around her mouth became grooves.
She stained the filter of her cigarette with a shimmer of gold-coral lipstick and blew the smoke out over one shoulder.
A nervous maid soundlessly approached and tipped extra coffee into her waiting cup.
There were gulls out wheeling over the dappled blue horizon.
The bougainvillea sang. But she sat, wordlessly rereading Sebastián’s article for the third time.
It troubled her. It’s unsettling to see, emboldened by the veracity of black and white, the most deeply suppressed grapplings of your own smothered conscience, printed right there in the newspaper for all the world to read.
Javier’s wife had failed to sufficiently calm herself when their daughter, Marta, called from boarding school in Barcelona later that afternoon and destroyed her with the simplicity of a single question: Mamá, is it true?
And because of her failure, in that moment, to adequately reassure her daughter, she would forever blame herself for what happened next.
Three days later, on the day before Yénifer’s quinceanera, the boarding school dean called to relay the news that Marta had been found hanging from the air-conditioning vent in her dorm room by a pair of her roommate’s knotted tights. The suicide note was addressed only to her father.
“One more death should not matter much.”