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
The next dead woman was found
near the
turned up. The discovery fell to four ranch hands and the ranch owner's nephew.
They had been searching for runaway cattle for more than twenty hours. The five
trackers were on horseback, and when they could see that it was a dead woman,
the nephew sent one of the hands back to the ranch with orders to tell the
boss, while the rest of them stayed behind, perplexed by the bizarre position
of the body. Its head was buried in a hole. As if the killer, clearly a
lunatic, had thought it was enough to bury the head. Or as if he'd thought that
by covering the head with earth the rest of the body would be invisible. The
body was facedown with its hands pressed to its body. Both hands were missing
the index and little finger. There were stains of coagulated blood in the chest
region. The woman wore a light dress, purple, the kind that fastens in front.
She wasn't wearing stockings or shoes. In the subsequent forensic examination
it was determined that despite multiple cuts to the chest and arms, the cause
of death was strangulation, with a fracture of the hyoid bone. There were no
signs of rape. The case was assigned to Inspector Jose Marquez, who soon
identified the dead woman as America Garcia Cifuentes, twenty-three, a waitress
at Serafino's, a bar belonging to Luis Chantre, a pimp with a long police
record who was said to be a police informer. America Garcia Cifuentes shared a
house with two friends, both waitresses, who had nothing of substance to
contribute to the investigation. The only thing established beyond a doubt was
that America Garcia Cifuentes had left home at five for Serafino's, where she
worked until four in the morning, when the bar closed. She never came home,
said her friends. Inspector Jose Marquez held Luis Chantre for a few days, but
his alibi was impeccable. America Garcia Cifuentes was from the state of
Guerrero and had been living in Santa Teresa for five years, where she had come
with a brother, who was in the
States
friends, and with whom she never corresponded. For a few days, Inspector Jose
Marquez investigated some Serafino's patrons but didn't come up with anything.
Two weeks later, in May 1994,
Monica Duran Reyes was kidnapped on her way out of the
del Toro. She was twelve years old and she was a little scatterbrained but a
good student. It was her first year of secondary school. Both her mother and
father worked at Maderas de Mexico, a maquiladora that built colonial-and
rustic-style furniture that was exported to the
States
who was in school, and two older siblings, a sixteen-year-old sister who worked
at a maquiladora that made wiring, and a fifteen-year-old brother who worked
with his parents at Maderas de Mexico. Her body appeared two days after the
kidnapping, alongside the Santa Teresa-Pueblo Azul highway. She was dressed and
next to her was her schoolbag full of books and notebooks. According to the
forensic examination, she had been raped and strangled. In the subsequent
investigation, some friends said they had seen Monica get into a black car with
tinted windows, maybe a Peregrino or a MasterRoad or a Silencioso. It didn't
look as if she was taken by force. She had time to scream, but she didn't
scream. When she saw one of her friends, she even waved goodbye. She didn't
seem to be afraid.
In Colonia Lomas del Toro once
again, a month later, the body of Rebeca Fernandez de Hoyos, thirty-three, was
found. She had long dark hair down to her waist, and she had been a waitress at
El Catrin, a bar on Calle Xalapa, in nearby Colonia Ruben Dario. Previously she
had worked at the Holmes & West and Aiwo maquiladoras, where she was fired
for trying to organize a union. Rebeca Fernandez de Hoyos was from
years now. When she was eighteen, she had lived in
where she appeared on a register of prostitutes, and she had made several
unsuccessful attempts to settle in the
States
migra.
Her body was discovered by a
friend who had a key to her house and was surprised Rebeca hadn't come in to
work at El Catrin, because, as she stated later, the deceased was a responsible
woman and missed work only when she was sick. The house, according to her
friend, was the same as always, or in other words
at first glance she didn't
see anything to suggest what she was about to find. It was a small house, with
a living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. When she went into the bathroom,
she discovered her friend's body, which was sprawled on the floor as if Rebeca
had fallen and knocked herself on the head, though there was no blood. Only
when she tried to revive her, patting water on her face, did she realize that
Rebeca was dead. She called the police and the Red Cross from a public phone
and then she went back to the house, moved her friend's body to the bed, sat in
one of the two armchairs in the living room, and watched a TV show while she
waited. The Red Cross came much more quickly than the police. There were two
medics, one of them very young, twenty at most, and the other about forty-five,
who might have been his father. It was the older man who told her there was
nothing they could do. Rebeca was dead. Then he asked her where she'd found the
body and she said in the bathroom. Well, let's put her back in the bathroom,
you don't want trouble with the cops, said the man, motioning to the boy to
take the dead woman by the feet as he lifted her by the shoulders, returning
her to the original scene of death. Then the medic asked her what position she
had found her friend in: sitting on the toilet, propped against it, on the
floor, huddled in a corner? She turned off the TV and came to the door of the
bathroom and gave instructions until the two men had left Rebeca just as she'd
found her. The three of them stared from the doorway. Rebeca seemed to be
drowning in a sea of white tiles. When they were tired of the sight or felt
queasy, they sat down, she in the armchair and the medics at the table, and lit
some cigarettes that the medic took out of the back pocket of his pants. You
must be used to this, she said, somewhat incoherently. That depends, said the
medic, who didn't know whether she was talking about the cigarettes or about
hauling dead and injured people every day. The next morning the medical
examiner wrote in his report that the cause of death had been strangulation.
The dead woman had had sexual relations in the hours before her murder,
although the examiner couldn't certify whether she'd been raped or not. Probably
not, he said when a final opinion was demanded. The police tried to arrest her
lover, a man by the name of Pedro Perez Ochoa, but when they at last found
where he lived, a week later, the person in question had been gone for days.
Pedro Perez Ochoa lived at the end of Calle Sayuca, in Colonia Las Flores, in a
shack built, rather skillfully, of adobe and bits of trash, with room for a
mattress and a table, a few yards from the waste pipe of the EastWest
maquiladora, where he had worked. The
neighbors
described him as a polite and generally clean-looking man, from which it was
deduced that he had showered at Rebeca's house, at least in recent months. No
one knew where he was, so no arrest warrant was sent anywhere. At EastWest his
file had been lost, which wasn't unusual at the maquiladoras, since workers
were constantly coming and going. Inside the shack, several sports magazines
were found, as well as a biography of Flores Magon, some sweatshirts, a pair of
sandals, two pairs of shorts, and three photographs of Mexican boxers cut out
of a magazine and stuck to the wall next to the mattress, as if Perez Ochoa had
wanted to burn the faces and fighting stances of those champions onto his
retina before he went to sleep.
In July 1994 no woman died, but
a man showed up asking questions. He came on Saturdays around noon and left
late Sunday night or early Monday morning. The man was of average height and
had black hair and brown eyes and dressed like a cowboy. He began by pacing the
central plaza, as if he were taking measurements, but then he became a regular
at some clubs, especially El Pelicano and Domino's. He never asked any direct
questions. He looked Mexican, but he spoke Spanish with a gringo accent and his
vocabulary was limited. He didn't understand puns, although when people saw his
eyes they were careful not to kid him. He said his name was Harry Magana, or at
least that's how he wrote it, but he pronounced it Magana, so that when he said
it you heard Macgana, as if the self-sucking faggot was of Scottish descent.
The second time he came by Domino's he asked for somebody called Miguel or
Manuel, a young guy, in his early twenties, about so tall, built like so, a
nice kid with an honest face, but no one could or would tell him anything.
Another night he made friends with one of the bartenders, and when the
bartender left work Harry Magana was waiting for him outside, sitting in his
car. The next day the bartender couldn't come in to work, supposedly because
he'd been in an accident. When he came back to Domino's four days later with
his face covered in bruises and scabs, everyone was shocked. He was missing
three teeth, and if he lifted his shirt he revealed countless bruises in the
most outrageous colors on his back and chest. He didn't show his testicles, but
there was still a cigarette burn on the left one. Of course, he was asked what
kind of accident he'd gotten into and his answer was that on the night in
question he had been out drinking until late, with Harry Magana, as it
happened, and
that after he left the gringo and was on his way home to Calle Tres Virgenes, a
group of maybe five bastards had attacked him and beaten the shit out of him.
The next weekend Harry Magana wasn't seen at Domino's or El Pelicano. Instead,
he visited a whorehouse called Internal Affairs, on Avenida Madero-Norte, where
he spent a while drinking highballs and then settled in at a pool table and
played Demetrio Aguila, a big man, six foot three and over two hundred and
fifty pounds, with whom he got to be friendly, because the big man had lived in
Arizona and New Mexico, working as a fieldhand, by which he meant tending
livestock, and then he had come back to Mexico because he didn't want to die
far from home, he said, although later he admitted he didn't really have much family
in the usual sense, a sister who must be around sixty by now and a niece who
had never married and lived in Cananea, where he was from too, but Cananea
could start to feel small, stifling, tiny, and sometimes he needed a trip to
the big city that never sleeps, so then he hopped in his pickup without a word
to anyone, or maybe with a see-you-later to his sister, and no matter what time
it was he turned onto the Cananea-Santa Teresa highway, which was one of the
prettiest highways he had ever seen in his life, especially at night, and drove
nonstop to Santa Teresa, where he had a cozy little house on Calle Luciernaga,
in Colonia Ruben Dario, you're welcome to stay anytime, Harry, my friend, one
of the few old houses still standing after all the change and the mostly shoddy
redevelopment projects that had been carried out. Demetrio Aguila must have
been about sixty-five and he struck Harry Magana as a good person. Sometimes he
went to a room with a whore, but most of the time he preferred to drink and watch
the crowd. Harry asked if he knew a girl called Elsa Fuentes. Demetrio Aguila
wanted to know what she looked like. About so tall, said Harry Magana, raising
his hand to just over five feet. Blond dye job. Pretty. Nice tits. I know her,
said Demetrio Aguila, Elsita, that's right, nice kid. Is she here? Harry Magana
wanted to know. Demetrio Aguila said he d seen her on the dance floor a while
ago. I want you to point her out to me, Senor Demetrio, said Harry, can you do
that? Certainly, my friend. As they went up the stairs to the dance club,
Demetrio Aguila inquired whether he had some score to settle with her. Harry
Magana shook his head. Elsa Fuentes was sitting at a table with two other
whores and three clients, laughing at something one of the girls said in her
ear. Harry Magana leaned on the table with one hand, his other hand resting his
belt, behind his back. He told her to get up. The whore stopped laughing and
raised her head to get a good look at him. The clients were about to say
something, but when they saw Demetrio Aguila behind Harry they shrugged it off.
Where can we talk? Let's go to a room, he said into Elsa's ear. As they were on
their way up the stairs Harry Magana paused and told Demetrio Aguila it wasn't
necessary for him to come along. Of course not, said Demetrio Aguila, and he
started back down. In Elsa Fuentes's room everything was red: the walls, the
bedspread, the sheets, the pillow, the lamp, the lightbulbs, even half the
tiles. Through the window you could see the bustle of Madero-Norte late at
night, cars crawling by and people overflowing the sidewalks between the food
carts and juice carts and the cheap restaurants jostling for business, the
prices of their daily specials scrawled on big blackboards that were constantly
revised. When Harry Magana turned to look at Elsa, she had taken off her blouse
and bra. She does have big tits, he thought, but he didn't plan to make love to
her that night. Don't get undressed, he said. The girl sat on the bed and
crossed her legs. Do you have cigarettes? she asked. He pulled out a pack of
Marlboros and offered her one. Give me a light, said the girl in English. He
lit a match and held it out to her. Elsa Fuentes's eyes were a brown so light
they looked yellow like the desert. Stupid kid, he thought. Then he asked her
about Miguel Montes, where he was, what he was doing, the last time she'd seen
him. So you're looking for Miguel? asked the whore. Do you mind telling me why?
Harry Magana didn't answer: he undid his belt and then rolled it up in his right
hand, letting the buckle dangle like a bell. I don't have time, he said. The
last time I saw him was about a month ago, maybe two, she said. Where was he
working? Nowhere and everywhere. He wanted to get a degree, I think he was
going to night school. Where did he make the money? Odd jobs here and there,
said the girl. Don't lie to me, said Harry Magana. The girl shook her head and
blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling. Where does he live? I don't know,
he's always moving. The belt whistled through the air and left a red mark on
the whore's arm. Before she could scream, Harry Magana covered her mouth with
one hand and pushed her down on the bed. If you scream, I'll kill you, he said.
When the whore sat up again the mark on her arm was bleeding. It'll be your
face next time, said Harry Magana. Where does he live?