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
He
had a hard time finding Calle Santa Catarina, but he got there at last. Elsa
Fuentes's house had whitewashed walls and a steel door. He knocked twice. The
nearby houses were completely silent, although he had passed three women on the
street on their way to work. The three of them flocked together as soon as they
left their houses and vanished rapidly after glancing at his car. He pulled out
his knife, crouched down, and got the door open with no trouble. On the inside
of the door was an iron bar that served as a bolt and wasn't in place, by which
he guessed no one was home. He closed the door, ran the bolt, and began to
search. The rooms gave no sense of having been abandoned; instead they had an
air of decorum, with a hint of coquettishness. The walls were hung with jugs, a
guitar, bundles of medicinal herbs that gave off a pleasant scent. The bed in
Elsa Fuentes's room was unmade, but otherwise the room was impeccable. The
clothes in the closet were neatly put away, there were several photographs on a
night table (two of Elsa with Miguel Monies), the dust hadn't had time to build
up on the floor. There was plenty of food in the refrigerator. Nothing was
turned on, not even the electric candle next to the picture of a saint.
Everything seemed set to wait for Elsa Fuentes to return. He looked for signs
that Miguel Monies had been staying there but found nothing. He sat in a chair
in the living room and prepared to wail. He couldn't say exactly when he fell
asleep. By the time he woke up, it was noon and no one had tried to get in. He
went into the kitchen and looked for something to eat for breakfast He drank a
big glass of milk after checking the expiration date on the carton. Then he
look an apple from a plastic basket near the window and ate it as he searched
every corner of the house again. He didn't want to light the stove, so he
didn't make coffee. The only thing in the kitchen that
had
spoiled was the bread, which was stale. He looked for an address book, a bus
ticket, the least sign of a struggle that he might have missed. He checked the
bathroom, he looked under Elsa Fuentes's bed, he rummaged in the trash. He
opened three boxes of shoes and found only shoes. He looked under the mattress.
He lifted the three small rugs, all Oriental, coquettish in Elsa Fuentes's
particular way, and didn't find anything. Then it occurred to him to look up at
the ceiling. In the bathroom and the living room there was nothing. In the
kitchen, however, he spotted a crack. He got on a chair and dug with the knife
until plaster fell to the floor. He made the hole bigger and stuck in his hand.
He found a plastic bag with ten thousand dollars and a notebook inside. He put
the money in his pocket and began to leaf through the notebook. There were
phone numbers without name or label, seemingly set down at random. He guessed
they were clients. A few numbers were attached to names, Mama, Miguel, Lupe,
Juana, and some nicknames, possibly friends from work. Among the Mexican
telephone numbers he recognized a few
time to go. He was nervous and his body was crying out for coffee. When he
started the car he had the feeling that he was being spied on. And yet
everything was quiet, except for some boys playing soccer in the middle of the
street. He honked the horn and the boys took a long time to get out of the way.
In the rearview mirror he saw a Rand Charger appear at the other end of the
street. He coasted along and let the Rand Charger catch up. The driver and his
companion showed not the least interest in him and at the corner the Rand
Charger passed his car and left him behind. He drove downtown and stopped in
front of a fairly crowded restaurant. He ordered a plate of scrambled eggs with
ham and a cup of coffee. As he was waiting for his food he went up to the
counter and asked a boy if he could make a call. The boy, who was wearing a
white shirt and black bow tie, asked if he planned to call the
out the notebook and showed him the numbers. Okay, said the boy, you call where
you want and then I'll charge you, all right? Sure, said Harry Magana. The boy
brought over the telephone and then went to wait on other customers. First
Harry Magana called Elsa Fuentes's mother. A woman answered. He asked for Elsa.
Elsita isn't here, said the woman. But isn't this her mother? he asked. I'm her
mother, yes, but Elsita lives in Santa Teresa, said the woman. So where am I
calling then? asked Harry Magana. Excuse me? said the woman. Where do you live,
senora? In Toconilco, said the woman. And where is that, senora? asked Harry
Magana. In
senor, said the woman. But where in
woman. And where is Tepehuanes? yelled Harry Magana. Why, in
Magana as he wrote the words Toconilco and Tepehuanes and finally
paper. Before he hung up, he asked for her address. The woman gave it to him,
all garbled, but without any hesitation. I'll send you some money on your
daughter's behalf, said Harry Magana. God bless you, said the woman. No,
senora, bless your daughter, said Harry Magana. So be it, then, said the woman,
God bless my daughter, and you too. Then he motioned to the boy in the bow tie,
indicating that he hadn't finished yet, and returned to the table, where his
scrambled eggs and coffee were waiting for him. Before he made another call he
asked for a refill of coffee and with the cup in his hand he went back up to
the counter. He called Miguel Montes's number (although it might be a different
Miguel, he thought), and just as he'd feared, no one answered. Then he called
the number of the woman named Lupe and the conversation was even more chaotic
than the one he'd just had with Elsa Fuentes's mother. What he managed to get
straight was that Lupe lived in Hermosillo, she didn't want to have anything to
do with Elsa Fuentes or Santa Teresa, she had indeed known Miguel Monies but
she didn't want to have anything to do with him either (if he was still alive),
her life in Santa Teresa had been a mistake from start to finish and she didn't
plan to make the same mistake twice. Next he called two other women, the one
listed as Juana and the woman (though it might have been a man, it wasn't
clear) tagged Vaca. Both numbers, a prerecorded voice informed him, had been
disconnected. The last attempt he made almost at random. He called one of the
numbers in
A man's voice, distorted by the answering machine, asked him to leave a message
and promised to return the call. He asked for the bill. The boy with the bow
tie did some math on a paper he took out of his pocket and asked whether he had
enjoyed his meal. Very much, said Harry Magana. He took a nap at Demetrio
Aguila's, on Calle Luciernaga, and dreamed of a street in
sandstorm. We have to get the girls at the bead factory! shouted someone behind
him, but he paid no attention and remained immersed in a file, photocopied
documents that seemed to be written in
a
language not of this world. When he woke he took a cold shower and dried
himself with a big white towel, pleasing to the touch. Then he called information
and gave them Miguel Montes's number. He asked what address the number belonged
to. The woman made him wait a moment and then read the name of a street and a
number. Before he hung up he asked whose name the number was registered in.
Francisco Diaz, sir, said the operator. Night was falling fast in Santa Teresa
when Harry Magana got to Calle Portal de
Pablo
neighborhood that still retained traces of what it had once been: one- and
two-story cement and brick houses, middle-class, formerly inhabited by
government employees or young professionals. The only people to be seen on the
street now were old men and women and gangs of adolescents who went by at a run
or on bikes or in beat-up cars, always in a hurry, as if they had something
very urgent to do that night. In fact, the only one with anything urgent to do
is me, thought Harry Magana, and he sat in his car, motionless, until
everything was dark. He crossed the street without being seen. The door was
wooden and didn't seem hard to crack. He went to work with the knife and the
lock soon gave way. From the living room a long hallway led to a small yard lit
by the lights of a neighboring yard. Everything was a complete wreck. He heard
the muted sounds of a TV in another house and a grunt. He knew immediately that
he wasn't alone. It was then that Harry Magana regretted not having his gun
with him. He peered into the first bedroom. A man, short and broad backed, was
pulling a bundle out from under a bed. The bed was low and it was hard to get
the bundle out. When the man managed it at last and began to drag it into the
hallway, he turned and looked at Harry Magana without surprise. The bundle was
wrapped in plastic and Harry Magana felt choked by nausea and rage. For an
instant the two of them stood frozen. The short man was wearing a black zip-up
overall, probably the official overall of a maquiladora, and his expression was
angry and even embarassed. I always get stuck with the dirty work, it seemed to
say. With a sense of fatalism, Harry Magana imagined that he was somewhere
else, not a few minutes from downtown, at Francisco Diaz's house, which was
like being at no one's house, but in the country, in the dust and brush, at a
shack with a corral and a henhouse and a woodstove, in the Santa Teresa desert
or any other desert. He heard someone closing the front door and then steps in
the living room. A voice calling the short man. And he heard the latter reply:
I'm over here, with our friend. His rage grew. He wanted to bury his
knife in the man's heart. He lunged at him, glancing
desperately out of the corner of his eye at the two shadowy figures he had seen
in the Rand Charger, coming down the hallway.
The year 1995 began with the
discovery, on January 5, of another dead woman. This time it was a skeleton
shallowly buried in a field belonging to the Hijos de Morelos farming
cooperative. The farmworkers who dug it up didn't know it was a woman. They
assumed it was a small man. There were no clothes or anything buried with the
skeleton that might have helped to identify the remains. The cooperative
alerted the police, who showed up six hours later. In addition to taking
statements from everyone who had been present when the skeleton was found, they
asked whether any worker was missing, whether there had been fights lately,
whether there had been a change in anyone's behavior in recent days. As might
be expected, two young men had left the cooperative, like every year, for Santa
Teresa or
the time, but they were never serious. The workers' behavior varied depending
on the season, the harvest, the little livestock they had left, in sum, on the
economy, like everyone else's. The Santa Teresa medical examiner soon
established that the skeleton was a woman's. If to this one added the fact that
there were no clothes or scraps of cloth in the hole where she was buried, the
verdict was plain: it was murder. How had she been killed? It was impossible to
say now. And when? Probably about three months before, although on this last
point the medical examiner preferred not to venture any definitive conclusion,
since corpses decompose at different rates. If anyone required an exact date,
they would have to send the bones to the
public statement in which it ultimately and vaguely evaded any responsibility.
The killer might easily have been a driver headed to
have been a hitchhiker picked up in
killed in Saric, and randomly buried here.
On
January 15 the next dead woman turned up. Her name was Claudia Perez Millan.
The body was found on Calle Sahuaritos. The deceased was dressed in a black
sweater and had two cheap rings on each hand,
plus
an engagement ring. She wasn't wearing a skirt or panties, although she did
have on red imitation-leather flats. She had been raped and strangled and
wrapped in a white blanket, as if the killer had planned to move the body
elsewhere and had suddenly decided, or been obliged by circumstance, to leave
it behind a dumpster on Calle Sahuaritos. Claudia Perez Millan was thirty-one
and lived with her husband and two children on Calle Marquesas, not far from
where the body was found. When the police paid a visit to her place of
residence, no one came to the door, although crying and shouts could be heard
from inside. Equipped with the proper warrant, the police broke down the door
of the dead woman's residence, and, locked in one of the bedrooms, they found
the minors Juan Aparicio Perez and his brother Frank Aparicio Perez. In the
room were two loaves of sandwich bread and a bucket of drinking water.
Questioned in the presence of a child psychologist, the minors both admitted
that it had been their father, Juan Aparicio Regla, who had locked them in the
night before. Then they had heard noises and shouting until they fell asleep,
though they hadn't been able to tell who was shouting or where the noises came
from. The next morning the house was empty and when they heard the police they
began to scream. The suspect owned a car, which wasn't found either, leading to
the conclusion that he had fled after killing his wife. Claudia Perez Millan
worked as a waitress in a coffee shop in the center of the city. Juan Aparicio
Regla had no known occupation. Some thought he worked at a maquiladora, others
that he was a
pollero,
leading
migrants across the border into the
warrant was issued, but those in the know were sure he would never set foot in
the city again.