Chapter 1 #2
Moisés wore a striped shirt and too much Vaseline in his hair.
He was a gigolo who made his money conning tourists.
He’d sweep a woman off her feet with a few well-placed lines, then make off with cash or jewelry, promptly removing any real diamonds or rubies from their settings and selling them at obscure shops in La Lagunilla.
Moisés took off his sunglasses and tossed them on the table. “How are you?”
“Fine,” Ulises muttered. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “Here. Have a look,” he said, without bothering with more chatter, eager to simply seal the bargain and get the hell out of the coffee shop.
He took the camera from his shoulder bag and handed it to Moisés. Moisés turned it between his hands, examining it.
“What do you think?”
Moisés rattled off a figure. When Ulises protested, Moisés laughed. “Now, now, you know how it goes. Hot goods—”
“It’s not stolen. It’s mine.”
Moisés looked at him in confusion. “Really?”
It was true. The camera had been a gift from the widow Aguirre.
“Then why not pawn it?”
“It’s all the same, isn’t it? Why bother with pawn tickets?
Besides, I’m too busy to be haggling with those clowns,” he said, although the truth was he was trying to lie low; he didn’t want to show his face around Monte de Piedad or any of the shops his father had frequented. He felt a little paranoid.
There were scant threads that connected Ulises to Jalisco.
He’d used another name there and spun a fake background for himself.
But he hadn’t been able to collect a few letters, a couple of postcards, which in his haste he’d left behind in his apartment.
Two of those postcards tied him to an address in Iztapalapa and might offer a muddy path to his current whereabouts: he’d used his landlady there as a reference for the rooming house where he now lived when he’d been unable to secure his old room upon his return to Mexico City.
But it was unlikely anyone would be thorough or driven enough to make that connection, and the postcards were, at any rate, innocent enough in their content.
They had been mailed by his father and were simple greetings from five years back, when his old man had taken a seaside vacation to try to improve his health.
He was safe. Perhaps.
Moisés raised an eyebrow at Ulises, clearly unconvinced by his words, but he pulled several bills from his wallet and handed them to him.
“I could use a guy like you,” Moisés said. “You have the looks, and you speak English.”
French too. His father had taught him everything he knew, and that included languages.
He was particular about his son’s education, making sure he didn’t grow up to become a cheap thug from a bad neighborhood.
His father had made himself into a gentleman through force of will and smarts.
It was hard to picture his father growing up in a dismal vecindad, though that was where he’d started his life, an uncouth nobody who managed to escape his past. At least for a while.
Ulises knew where the work Moisés offered led: nowhere.
And there was something seedy about those operations, about the men who entrapped the unwary tourists.
He thought the business of lonely hearts letters was cleaner.
More dignified. If he played well, he didn’t even have to fuck his target.
In Moisés’s line of business, the fucking was necessary.
An essential component. The sneaking out of the room in the middle of the night, without making any noise, with a woman’s pearls and her change purse tucked in one’s pocket, struck him as obscene.
It was cheap. He and his father had worked the small cons, but they had never been cheap. Yet here he was, and if he didn’t tread carefully, he might wind up a beggar on the street like the one he’d bumped into that morning.
“I thought you already had boys working for you. That fellow with the curly hair, and the other one—”
“David? He’s retired.”
Doubtful. The police had likely caught him. That was the trouble with being the guy with the sticky fingers. He was the one the cops went after with their nightsticks.
“What are you going to do, then?” Moisés asked, and his expression struck Ulises as a tad mocking. Snide. As if Moisés were thinking, What makes you so much better than us?
He bade Moisés a curt goodbye and stepped out of the coffee shop. He took his time walking back to the guesthouse, pausing to look forlornly across the street at the bank where his father had once rented a safety-deposit box and kept his valuables. All of that had been sold.
Once he neared the guesthouse he quickened his steps, thinking he might be able to evade detection. No use. Near the staircase he bumped into Don Pánfilo, who smiled his yellow smile at him.
“I dropped a telegram underneath your door,” his landlord said.
“Thank you. I swear I’ll have the rent tomorrow.”
“You make sure of that. It’s a disgrace what the world has come to. Tenants always in arrears, and the price of everything keeps rising.”
“I know, sir, I know.”
By the time Ulises slipped back into his room and took off his jacket, night had fallen.
He was rereading the telegram when the lights went off.
It was another of the drills President Camacho had organized.
Apagones. As if German bombers really were going to cross the Atlantic and bother with Mexico City.
Unlikely, and yet the thought of bombed-out ruins ran through his head, and the images he tried to ignore in the newspaper lodged behind his eyelids late at night.
Hitler’s panzers advancing across Europe, turning palaces into rubble.
Corpses littering empty fields, as abundant as wildflowers.
He thought about Moisés’s job offer and grimaced. He lit a candle and lay on the bed, his right hand behind his head, staring at the ceiling while he smoked his second cigarette of the day.
Why had he been stupid? Why had he gone after the widow Aguirre? She had three sons, after all. Three fuming, thirtysomething sons who didn’t appreciate that a young man had latched on to their mother, that she’d bought him cuff links and the new camera and even a car.
If only she’d signed the papers. He’d thought she would do it.
She’d seemed interested in his business proposition; she’d been ready to hand him a sizable check as a deposit.
But then she had the audacity to ask one of her sons for advice, and that son called the other sons, and the scheme came tumbling down.
When the widow Aguirre discovered that there was no hotel development in Acapulco, she’d promptly gone into hysterics.
He couldn’t be blamed for that. He hadn’t even been in the room when it happened.
It had been her sons, badgering the poor woman, who pushed her to the edge with their questions and their recriminations.
But no matter. Afterward, there was nothing to do but to flee with only a few possessions.
He took another puff of his cigarette, let the smoke trail up from the corner of his mouth.
The drill, the darkness that blanketed his city block with the electricity turned off, depressed him.
Not that when the lights turned on his spirits would be lifted.
The lightbulbs would burst back to life, but what use was a city aglow when he couldn’t enjoy it?
When he couldn’t drink highballs at Los Cocoteros and spend the evening dancing with a beautiful woman in a sequined gown?
Yet there was that insidious, nagging fear of the bombers.
War drills gave him a chill. Industrialization would save Mexico.
That’s what the propaganda posters said.
Contribute to the war effort by being a good worker, manufacture the materials the Allies might need, ensure victory.
Radio programs dramatized the heroism of the U.S.
armed forces in Europe and Asia, assuring everyone that this would all be over quickly.
But he kept thinking about pictures of the London Blitz and imagining his neighborhood blown up, houses turned into rubble and cars smoldering on street corners.
The countryside might be safer than the capital, mightn’t it?
And even if his fears of war were exaggerated, he needed cash.
Needed a secure spot in this world. Needed something more than this endless search for scraps.
Moisés looked like shit. A few more years of hard living and Ulises would also start losing his good looks and fit physique.
He didn’t want to leave the city, despite his misgivings about it, yet he was broke, and he was tired, and he needed more certainty than the few pesos he made writing letters, the back-and-forth of lonely hearts. The real dough was available when you met the women in person.
The widow or the spinster. Which one to pick? In the end, his decision came down to money: the ticket to Puerco Ahogado, Veracruz, was cheaper.
—
He was not fond of trains, of their rhythmic rumbling and their wailing, but he was even less fond of buses, and the idea of perching himself inside a crowded tin can was more offensive than the train.
Therefore, he rode with stoicism to Puerco Ahogado and stepped off the train with a face of grim determination.
He was greeted at the station by vendors selling oranges and chirimoyas, a boy with newspapers under his arm yelling out the headlines, and stray dogs that wagged their tails and hoped for a morsel.
The air was uncomfortably moist; it clung to his skin, made him feel like he’d just gotten out of the shower.
Or else as if he were a plant in a hothouse.