Authors: Roberto Bolaño
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary Collections, #Mystery & Detective, #Mexico, #Caribbean & Latin American, #Cold Cases (Criminal Investigation), #Crime, #Literary, #Young Women, #Missing Persons, #General, #Women
At
five in the morning, when Inspector Juan de Dios
the asylum director on his answering machine. The person you're looking for,
said the director's voice, is sacraphobic. Call me and I'll explain. Late as it
was, he called her right away. The director's recorded voice answered. Martinez
here, from the Policia Judicial, said Juan de Dios Martinez, sorry to call so
early ... I got your message ... I just got in ... Tonight the Penitent . . .
Anyway, I'll call you tomorrow ... Or today, I guess . . . Good night and
thanks for the message. Then he took off his shoes and pants and fell into bed,
but he couldn't sleep. By six he was at the station. A group of patrolmen were
celebrating the birthday of a colleague and they offered him a drink, but he
said no. From the offices of the judicial police inspectors, which were empty,
he heard them singing "Happy Birthday" over and over again on the
floor above. He made a list of the officers he wanted to work with him. He
wrote a report for the
He watched two patrolmen come down the stairs with their arms around each other
and he followed them. In the hallway he saw several cops talking, in groups of
two, three, four. Every so often one group laughed loudly. A man dressed in
white, but wearing jeans, pushed a stretcher. On the stretcher, covered in a
gray plastic sheet, lay the body of Emilia Mena Mena. Nobody noticed.
Emilia Mena Mena died in June. Her body was found in the
illegal dump near Calle Yucatecos, on the way to the Hermanos Corinto brick
factory. The medical examiner's report stated that she had been raped, stabbed,
and burned, without specifying whether the stab wounds or the burns had been
the cause of death, and without specifying whether Emilia Mena Mena was already
dead when the burns were inflicted. Fires were constantly being reported in the
dump where she was found, most of them set on purpose, others flaring up by
chance, so there was some possibility the body had been charred by a random
blaze, not set alight by the murderer. The dump didn't have a formal name,
because it wasn't supposed to be there, but it had an informal name: it was
called El
During the day there wasn't a soul to be seen in El
soon to be swallowed up by the dump. At night those who had nothing or less
than nothing ventured out. In
call them
teporochos,
but a
teporocho
is a survivor, a cynic and
a humorist, compared to the human beings who swarmed alone or in pairs around
El
There weren't many of them. They spoke a slang that was hard to understand. The
police conducted a roundup the night after the body of Emilia Mena Mena was found
and all they brought in was three children hunting for cardboard in the trash.
The night residents of El
most, of picking their way through the dump. Their feeding habits and their sex
lives were a mystery. It was likely they had forgotten how to eat or fuck. Or
that food and sex were beyond their
r
each by
then, unattainable, indescribable, beyond action and expression. All, without
exception, were sick. To strip the clothes from a body in El
skin it. The population was stable: never fewer than three, never more than
twenty.
The
main
suspect
in
the
killing
of
Emilia
Mena
Mena
was
her boyfriend. When the police came looking for him at the house where
he lived with his parents and three brothers, he was already gone. According to
the family he had gotten on a bus
a
day or two before the body was
found. The father and two brothers spent a few days in a cell, but the only
coherent information that could be extracted from them was the address of the
father's brother, in Ciudad Guzman, the suspect's ostensible destination. When
the police in Ciudad Guzman were alerted, some officers made a visit to the
residence in question, equipped with the necessary warrants, but they found no
trace of the alleged boyfriend and killer. The case remained open and was soon
forgotten. Five days later, while the investigation was still unconcluded, the
janitor at
the body of another dead woman. It was on a piece of ground where the students
sometimes played soccer and baseball, a field with a view of Arizona and the
shells of the maquiladoras on the Mexican side of the border and the dirt roads
leading from the factories to the network of paved roads. Along one side,
separated from the field by a barbed-wire fence, were the school yards, and
farther off were the two three-story school buildings, where classes were
taught in big, sunny rooms. The school had opened in 1990 and the janitor had
been there since the beginning. He was the first to arrive each morning and one
of the last to leave. The morning he found the dead woman, something caught his
attention while he was picking up the master keys from the principal's office.
At first he wasn't sure what it was. By the time he came into the supply room
he realized. Buzzards. Buzzards were flying over the field next to the yard.
But he still had plenty to do, and he decided to investigate later. Shortly
afterward, the cook and the kitchen boy arrived, and he went to have coffee
with them in the kitchen. They talked for ten minutes about the usual things,
until the janitor asked if they had seen buzzards over the school when they
came in. Both of them answered that they hadn't. Then the janitor finished his
coffee and said he was going to take a walk out to the field. He was afraid he
would find
a
dead dog. If he did, he would have to come back to the
school, to
t
he room where the tools were
kept, and get a shovel and go back to the field and bury the dog deep enough so
the students wouldn't dig it up. But what he found was a woman. She was dressed
in a black shirt and black shoes and her skirt was rolled up around her waist.
She didn't have anything on underneath. That was the first thing he saw. Then he
got a look at her face and saw she hadn't died that night. One of the buzzards
landed on the fence but he shooed it off. The woman had long black hair at
least halfway down her back. Some strands were stuck together with coagulated
blood. On her stomach and between her legs there was dried blood. He crossed
himself twice and stood up slowly. When he got back to the school he told the
cook what had happened. The kitchen boy was scrubbing a pot and the janitor
spoke in a low voice, so he wouldn't hear. He called the principal from the
office, but the principal had already left home. He found a blanket and went to
cover up the dead woman. Only then did he realize a stake had been driven
straight through her. His eyes filled with tears as he returned to the school.
The cook was there, sitting in the yard, smoking a cigarette. She made a
gesture as if to ask how it had gone. The janitor responded with another
gesture, impossible to decipher, and went out to wait for the principal by the
main door. When he arrived they both went out to the field. From the yard the
cook watched as the principal lifted one side of the blanket and stared from
different angles at the scarcely visible shape on the ground. A little later
they were joined by two teachers, and, about thirty feet away, by a group of
students. At noon, two police cars, a third, unmarked car, and an ambulance
arrived, and the dead woman was taken away. Her name was never learned. The
medical examiner stated that she had been dead for several days, without specifying
how many. The stab wounds to the chest were the probable cause of death, but
the examiner couldn't rule out a fractured skull as the principal cause. The
dead woman was probably somewhere between twenty-three and twenty-five. She was
five feet seven inches tall.
The last dead woman to be discovered in June 1993 was
Margarita Lopez Santos. She had disappeared more than forty days before. The
second day she was gone, her mother filed a report at Precinct #2. Margarita
Lopez worked at K&T, a maquiladora in the El Progreso industrial park near
the
disappearance she was working the
t
hird
shift at the maquiladora, from nine at night to five in the morning. According
to her fellow workers, she had come in on time, as always, because Margarita
was more dependable and responsible than most, which meant that her
disappearance could be fixed around the time of the shift change and her walk
home. But no one saw anything then, in part because it was dark at five or
five-thirty in the morning, and there wasn't enough public lighting. Most of
the houses in the northern part of Colonia Guadalupe Victoria had no
electricity. The roads out of the industrial park, except the one leading to
the
all the waste from the park ended up in Colonia Las Rositas, where it formed a
lake of mud that bleached white in the sun. So Margarita Lopez left work at
five-thirty. That much was established. And then she set out along the dark
streets of the industrial park. Maybe she saw the pickup that parked each night
in an empty plaza next to the parking lot of the WS-Inc. maquiladora, a truck
that sold coffee and soft drinks and different kinds of sandwiches to the
workers on their way into or out of work. Most of them women. But she wasn't
hungry or she knew there was a meal waiting for her at home and she didn't
stop. She left the park and the ever more distant glow of the lights of the maquiladoras.
She crossed the
Crossing Guadalupe Victoria would take her no more than half an hour. Then she
would be in Colonia San Bartolome, where she lived. All in all, a fifty-minute
walk, more or less. But somewhere along the way something happened or something
went permanently wrong and afterward her mother was told there was a chance she
had run off with a man. She's only sixteen, said her mother, and she's a good
girl. Forty days later some children found her body near a shack in Colonia
Maytorena. Her left hand rested on some guaco leaves. Due to the state of the
body, the medical examiner was unable to determine the cause of death. One of
the policemen present at the removal of the body, however, was able to identify
the guaco plant. It's good for mosquito bites, he said, crouching down and
plucking some little green leaves, pointed and tough.
There were no deaths in July. None in August either.
Around this time the
City
La Razon
sent Sergio Gonzalez to
write a story on the Penitent. Sergio Gonzalez was thirty-five and recently
divorced, and he was looking to make money any way he could. Normally he
wouldn't have accepted the assignment, because he was an arts writer, not a
crime reporter. He wrote reviews of philosophy books that no one read, not the
books or his reviews, and sometimes he wrote about art shows or music. He had
been on staff at
La Razon
for four years and his financial situation was
acceptable, if not comfortable, until the divorce, when suddenly he was in
constant need of money. Since there was nothing else he could write for his own
section (where he sometimes used a pseudonym so readers wouldn't be able to
tell that all the articles were his), he badgered the editors of the other
sections to give him extra assignments to help boost his income. Hence the
proposal to travel to Santa Teresa and write the story of the Penitent. The
person who offered him the story was the editor of the paper's Sunday magazine,
who held Gonzalez in high regard and thought that with his offer he would kill
two birds with one stone: on the one hand, Gonzalez would make some money, and
on the other hand, he could take three or four days of vacation up north,
somewhere with good food and clean air, and forget about his wife. So in July
1993, Sergio Gonzalez flew to
perfectly.
metallic blue, lit from beneath, cheered him up instantly. The people in the
airport and later on the city streets struck him as friendly, relaxed, as if he
were in a foreign country and seeing only the good side of its inhabitants. In
Santa Teresa, which he thought of as a hardworking city with very little
unemployment, he got a room at a cheap hotel called El Oasis in the center of
town, on a street where the paving stones dated back to the time of the Reform,
and a little later he visited the offices of
El Heraldo del Norte
and
La
Voz de Sonora
and spoke at length with the reporters who were covering the
story of the Penitent. They told him how to get to the desecrated churches,
which he visited in a single day, in the company of a taxi driver who waited
for him out front. He managed to talk to two priests, at San Tadeo and Santa
Catalina, who had little new to add, although the priest at Santa Catalina
suggested he take a good look around, because in his opinion the
church-desecrator-turned-killer wasn't the worst scourge of Santa Teresa. The
police let him have a copy of the sketch of the perpetrator and he made an
appointment to talk to Juan de Dios
the inspector in charge of the case. In the afternoon he talked to the mayor,
who invited him to lunch at the restaurant next door to the city council
building, a restaurant with stone walls that strove and failed to look
colonial. But the food was very good, and the mayor and two other lower-ranking
members of the city administration made it their business to keep things lively
with gossip and dirty jokes. The next day he tried to interview the chief of
police, but it was a staff member who met with him, probably the police
department's press officer, a kid straight out of law school who handed him a
folder with all the information a reporter might need to write a story about
the Penitent. The kid's last name was Zamudio and he had nothing better to do
that night than keep Sergio Gonzalez company. They had dinner together. Then
they went to a club. Sergio Gonzalez couldn't remember having been in a club
since he was seventeen years old. He told Zamudio, who laughed. They bought
drinks for lots of girls. The girls were from Sinaloa and it was immediately
clear by their clothes that they were factory workers. Sergio Gonzalez asked
one girl he ended up with whether she liked to dance, and she said she liked it
more than anything in the world. The answer struck him as illuminating, though
he couldn't say why, and also devastatingly sad. In turn, the girl asked him
what a
chilango
from
City
reporter and he was writing a story on the Penitent. She didn't seem impressed
by the revelation. She had never read
La Razon
either, which Gonzalez
found hard to believe. At some point, Zamudio took him aside and said they
could sleep with the girls. Zamudio's face was distorted by the strobe lights
and he looked like a madman. Gonzalez shrugged.