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 third medical examiner was
Rigoberto Frias and he was thirty-two. He was from
job abruptly and without explanation. He had been in Santa Teresa for two
years, hired on the recommendation of a former classmate of Garibay, and he
was, in the opinion of his colleagues, meticulous and skillful. He worked as a
teaching assistant at the medical school and lived alone on a quiet street in
Colonia Serafin Garabito. His apartment was small but tastefully furnished. He
had many books and almost no friends. Outside of class he hardly ever talked to
his students, and he had no social life, at least not in university circles.
Sometimes, at an order from Garibay, the three medical examiners would meet for
breakfast in the early morning hours. At that time of day, the only place open
was a twenty-four-hour American-style coffee shop, which drew people from the
area who had been up all night: orderlies and nurses at the
drivers, relatives and friends of patients, whores, students. The coffee shop
was called Runaway, and on the sidewalk next to one of the windows there was a
vent from which big gusts of steam billowed. The Runaway sign was green and
sometimes the steam was tinted green, an intense green, like a tropical forest,
and when Garibay saw it he invariably said: fuck, that's pretty. Then he would
fall silent and the three medical examiners would wait for the waitress, a
chubby, dark-skinned teenager from Aguascalientes, or at least that's where
they thought she was from, to bring them coffee and ask what they wanted for
breakfast. Young Frias hardly ever ordered anything, at most a doughnut.
Arredondo usually asked for a piece of cake with ice cream. And Garibay had a
steak, rare. a while back, Arredondo had told him it was terrible for his
joints. At your age, you shouldn't, he'd said. He no longer remembered
Garibay's answer, but it was sharp and succinct. While they were waiting for
their breakfast to come, the medical examiners sat in silence, Arredondo staring
at the back of his hands, as if searching for some tiny drop of blood, Frias
staring at the table or with his eyes fixed on Runaway's ocher ceiling, and
Garibay watching the street and the few cars that went by. Sometimes, very
rarely, two students who made extra money as lab or office assistants came
along, and then they usually talked a little more, but as a general rule they
were silent, sunk deep in what Garibay called the knowledge of a job well done.
Then each paid his bill and they slunk out like vultures, and one of them,
whoever's turn it was, walked back to the institute, and the other two went
down to the underground parking garage and parted without saying goodbye, and
shortly afterward a Renault drove out, Arredondo gripping the wheel with both
hands, and vanished into the city, and shortly after that another car drove
out, Garibay's Grand Marquis, and the streets swallowed it up like a
commonplace lament.
At
the same time of day, cops at the end of their shifts met for breakfast at
Trejo's, a long coffee shop like a coffin, with few windows. There they drank
coffee and ate huevos rancheros or eggs and bacon or scrambled eggs. And they
told jokes. Sometimes they were monographic, the jokes. And many of them were
about women. For example, one cop would say: what's the perfect woman?
Pues
she's two feet tall, big ears, flat
head, no teeth, and hideously ugly. Why?
Pues
two feet tall so she comes right up to your waist, big ears so you can
steer her, a flat head so you have a place to set your beer, no teeth so she
can't bite your dick, and hideously ugly so no bastard steals her away. Some
laughed. Others kept eating their eggs and drinking their coffee. And the
teller of the first joke continued. He asked: why don't women know how to ski?
Silence.
Pues
because it never snows
in the kitchen. Some didn't get it. Most of the cops had never skied in their
lives. Where do you ski in the middle of the desert? But some laughed. And the
joke teller said: all right, friends, what's the definition of a woman?
Silence. And the answer:
pues
a
vagina surrounded by a more or less organized bunch of cells. And then someone
laughed, an inspector, good one, Gonzalez, a bunch of cells, yes, sir. And
another joke, international this time: why is the Statue of
head for the observation deck. And another: how many parts is a woman's brain
divided into?
Pues
that depends,
valedores!
Depends on what, Gonzalez?
Depends how hard you hit her. And on a roll now: why can't women count to
seventy? Because by the time they get to sixty-nine their mouths are full. And
still going strong: what's dumber than a dumb man? (An easy one.)
Pues
a smart woman. And full throttle:
why don't men lend their cars to women?
Pues
because there's no road from the bedroom to the kitchen. And in the same
vein: what does a woman do outside the kitchen?
Pues
wait for the floor to dry. And a variation: what do you call a
neuron in a woman's brain?
Pues
a
tourist. And then the same inspector laughed again and said excellent,
Gonzalez, brilliant, neuron, yes, sir, tourist, brilliant. And Gonzalez,
tireless, went on: how do you pick the three dumbest women in the world?
Pues
at random. Get it? At random! It
makes no difference! And: how do you give a woman more freedom?
Pues
get her a bigger kitchen. And: how
do you give a woman even more freedom?
Pues
plug the iron into an extension cord. And: how long does it take a woman to
die who's been shot in the head?
Pues
seven
or eight hours, depending on how long it takes the bullet to find the brain.
Brain, yes, sir, mused the inspector. And if someone complained to Gonzalez
about all the chauvinist jokes, Gonzalez responded that God was the chauvinist,
because he made men superior. And he went on: what do you call a woman who's
lost ninety-nine percent of her IQ?
Pues
speechless.
And: what happens to a woman's brain in a spoon of coffee?
Pues
it floats. And: why do women have one more brain cell than
dogs?
Pues
so that when they're
cleaning the bathroom they don't drink the water out of the toilet. And: what's
a man doing when he throws a woman out of the window?
Pues
polluting the environment. And: how is a woman like a squash
ball?
Pues
the harder you hit her,
the faster she comes back. And: why do kitchens have windows?
Pues
so that women can see the world.
Until at last Gonzalez wore himself out and got a beer and dropped into a chair
and the rest of the policemen went back to their eggs. Then the inspector,
exhausted after a night's work, wondered to himself how much of God's truth lay
hidden in ordinary jokes. And he scratched his crotch and dropped his Smith
& Wesson Model 686, which weighed almost two and a half pounds, on the
plastic table, and it made a muffled sound like thunder in the distance when it
hit the tabletop, attracting the attention of the five or six nearest cops, who
were listening, no, who
glimpsed
his
words, the words the inspector meant to utter, as if they were wetbacks lost in
the desert and they had
glimpsed
an
oasis or a town or a pack of wild horses. God's truth, said the inspector. Who
the fuck comes up with jokes? asked the inspector. And sayings? Where the fuck
do they come from? Who's the first to
think
them up?
Who's the first to
tell
them?
And after a few seconds of silence, with his eyes closed, as if he'd
fallen asleep, the inspector half opened his left eye and said: listen to the
one-eyed man, you bastards. a woman's path lies from the kitchen to the
bedroom, with a beating along the way. Or he said: women are like laws, they were
made to be broken. And the laughter was general. a great blanket of laughter
rose over the long room, as if death were being tossed in it. Not all of the
cops laughed, of course. Some, at the farthest tables, polished off their eggs
with chile or their eggs with meat or their eggs with beans in silence or
talked among themselves, about their own business, separate from the others.
They ate, it might be said, hunched over in anguish and doubt. Hunched over in
contemplation of essential questions, which doesn't get you anywhere. Numb with
sleep: in other words with their backs turned to the laughter that invited a
different kind of sleep. Meanwhile, leaning at the ends of the bar, others
drank
without
a word, just watching the commotion, or murmuring what a load of shit, or not
murmuring a thing, simply taking a mental snapshot of the crooked cops and
inspectors.
The morning of the jokes about
women, for example, when Gonzalez and his partner, patrolman Juan Rubio, left
Trejo's, Lalo Cura was waiting for them. And when Gonzalez and his partner
tried to shake him off, Epifanio emerged from a corner and said they'd better
listen to the kid. According to Juan Rubio they'd been working the night shift
and they were tired and who was Epifanio to tell them what to do. This kind of
event was as popular among Santa Teresa cops as jokes about women. Even more
so, in fact. The two cars drove off to a secluded spot. Slowly. After all, why
hurry to a shit kicking. First Gonzalez's car, followed a few yards back by
Epifanio's. They left behind the paved streets and any buildings over three
stories high. They watched the sun rise through the windows. They put on
sunglasses. News of the event was radioed from one of the cars, and soon after
they got to the field some ten police cars showed up. The men got out of their
cars and offered each other cigarettes or laughed or kicked at stones. Those
who had flasks took swallows and made innocent remarks about the weather or
their private affairs. After half an hour all the cars drove off, leaving a
cloud of yellow dust hanging in the air behind them.
Talk
to me about your family history, said the bastards. Explain your family tree,
the assholes said. Self-sucking pieces of shit. Lalo Cura didn't get angry.
Faggot sons of bitches. Tell me about your coat of arms. That's enough now. The
kid's going to blow. Stay calm. Respect the uniform. Don't show you're scared
or back down, don't let them think they're getting to you. Some nights, in the
dim light of the tenement, when he was done with the books on criminology
(don't lose it now, man), dizzy from all the fingerprints, blood and semen
stains, principles of toxicology, investigations of thefts, breaking and
entering, footprints, how to make sketches and take photographs of the crime scene,
half asleep, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, he heard or remembered
voices talking to him about the first Exposito, the family tree dating back to
1865, the nameless orphan, fifteen years old, raped by a Belgian soldier in a
one-room adobe house outside Villaviciosa. The next day the soldier got his
throat cut and nine months later a girl was born, called Maria Exposito. The
orphan, the first one, said the voice, or several voices taking turns, died in
childbirth and the girl grew up in the same house where she was conceived,
which became the property of some peasants who took her in and treated her like
another member of the family. In 1881, when Maria Exposito was fifteen, on the
feast day of San Dimas, a drunk from another town carried her off on his horse,
singing at the top of his lungs:
Que
chingaderas son estas I Dimas le dijo
a
Gestas.
On the slope of a hill that looked like a dinosaur or a Gila monster he
raped her several times and disappeared. In 1882, Maria Exposito gave birth to
a child who was baptized Maria Exposito Exposito, said the voice, and the girl
was the wonder of the peasants of Villaviciosa. From early on she showed
herself to be clever and spirited, and although she never learned to read or
write she was known as a wise woman, learned in the ways of herbs and medicinal
salves. In 1898, after she had been away for seven days, Maria Exposito
appeared one morning in the Villaviciosa plaza, a bare space in the center of
town, with a broken arm and bruises all over her body. She would never explain
what had happened to her, nor did the old women who tended to her insist that
she tell. Nine months later a girl was born and given the name Maria Exposito,
and her mother, who never married or had more children or lived with any man, initiated
her into the secret art of healing. But the young Maria Exposito resembled her
mother only in her good nature, a quality shared by all the Maria Expositos of
Villaviciosa. Some were quiet and others liked to talk, but common to them all
was their good nature and the fortitude to endure periods of violence or
extreme poverty. But young Maria Exposito's childhood and adolescence were more
carefree than her mother's and grandmother's had been. In 1914, at sixteen, her
thoughts and actions were still those of a girl whose only tasks were to
accompany her mother once a month in search of rare herbs and to wash the
clothes, not at the public washhouse, which was too far away, but behind the
house, in an old wooden trough. That was the year Colonel Sabino Duque (who in
1915 would be shot to death for cowardice) came to town looking for brave
men—and the men of Villaviciosa were famous for being braver than anyone—to
fight for the Revolution. Several boys from the town joined up. One of them,
whom until then Maria Exposito had thought of only as an occasional playmate,
the same age as she and seemingly as naive, decided to declare his love the
night before he marched to war. For the
purpose, he chose a grain shed that no one used anymore (the people of Villaviciosa
had grown poorer and poorer), and when his declaration only made the girl laugh
he proceeded to rape her on the spot, desperately and clumsily. In the morning,
before he left, he promised he would come back and marry her, but seven months
later he died in a skirmish with the federal troops and he and his horse were
swept away by the Rio Sangre de Cristo. So he never returned to Villaviciosa,
like so many other boys who had gone away to war or found work as guns for
hire, boys who were never heard of again or who cropped up here and there in
stories that might or might not have been true. In any case, nine months later
Maria Exposito Exposito was born, and young Maria Exposito, now a mother
herself, set to work selling potions and the eggs from her own henhouse in the
neighboring towns and she didn't do badly. In 1917, there was an unusual
development in the Exposito family: Maria, after one of her trips, got pregnant
again and this time she had a boy. He was named Rafael. His eyes were green
like those of his distant Belgian great-grandfather and there was something
strange about his gaze, the same strangeness that outsiders noted in the
townspeople of Villaviciosa: they had the opaque, intense stare of killers. The
few times she was asked who the father was, Maria Exposito, who had gradually
adopted her mother's witchlike language and manner, although all she did was
sell the potions, fumbling among the little rheumatism bottles and the varicose
vein flasks, answered that his father was the devil and Rafael his spitting
image. In 1934, after a Homeric bender, the bullfighter Celestino Arraya and
his comrades from the club Los Charros de la Muerte came to Villaviciosa in the
early morning hours and took rooms at a tavern that no longer exists and that in
those days offered beds for travelers. They shouted for roast goat, which they
were served by three village girls. One of those girls was Maria Exposito.
By twelve the next day they were gone, and
three months later Maria Exposito confessed to her mother that she was going to
have a baby. Who's the father? asked her brother. The women were silent and the
boy set out to retrace his sister's steps on his own. a week later Rafael
Exposito borrowed a rifle and went walking to Santa Teresa. He had never been in
such a big place, and the paved streets, the Teatro Carlota, the movie
theaters, the city hall, and the whores who back then walked the streets of
Colonia
border and the American town of
Adobe
the city for three days and learn his way around before he did what he had come
to do. The first day he spent searching for Celestino Arraya's haunts and a
place to sleep for free. He discovered that in certain neighborhoods night was
the same as day and he told himself he simply wouldn't sleep. On the second
day, as he was walking up and down the street in Colonia
girl, with jet-black hair down to her waist, took pity on him and brought him
home with her. In a room in a boardinghouse she made him rice soup and then
they made love until night. For Rafael Exposito it was the first time. When
they parted the whore ordered him to wait for her in the room, or, if he went
out, in the cafe on the corner or on the stairs. The boy said he was in love
with her and the whore went off happily. On the third day they went to Teatro
Carlota to hear the ballads of Pajarito de la Cruz, the Dominican
trovador
who was touring
and Jose Ramirez's
rancheras,
but
what the boy liked best were the chorus girls and the magic numbers by a
Chinese conjurer from Michoacan. At sunset on the fourth day, well fed and calm
in mind and heart, Rafael Exposito said goodbye to the whore, retrieved the
rifle from where he had hidden it, and headed resolutely for the bar Los Primos
Hermanos, where he found Celestino Arraya. Seconds after he shot him he knew
without a shadow of a doubt that he had killed him and he felt avenged and
happy. He didn't shut his eyes when the bullfighter's friends emptied their
revolvers into him. He was buried in the public grave in Santa Teresa. In 1935
another Maria Exposito was born. She was shy and sweet, and so tall that even
the tallest men in town looked short next to her. From the time she was ten she
spent her days helping her mother and grandmother to sell her
great-grandmother's remedies, and going along with her great-grandmother at
dawn to gather herbs. Sometimes the peasants of Villaviciosa saw her silhouette
against the horizon, climbing up and down hills, and it struck them as
extraordinary that such a tall, long-legged girl could exist. She was the first
of her lineage, said the voice, or the voices, who learned to read and write.
At eighteen she was raped by a peddler, and in 1953 a girl was born who was called
Maria Exposito. By then there were five generations of Maria Expositos living
outside Villaviciosa, and the little house had grown, with rooms added on and a
big kitchen with a gas stove and a wood fire where the eldest prepared her
brews and medicaments. At night, when it was time for dinner, the five always
sat down together, the girl, her lanky mother, Rafael's melancholy sister,
the childlike one, and the witch, and
often they talked about saints and illnesses that they never caught, about the
weather and men, which they considered equally troublesome, and they thanked
heaven, though not too enthusiastically, said the voice, that they were only
women. In 1976, the young Maria Exposito met two students from
who said they were lost but appeared to be fleeing something and who, after a
dizzying week, she never saw again. The students lived in their car and one of
them seemed to be sick. They looked as if they were high on something and they
talked a lot and didn't eat anything, although she brought them tortillas and
beans that she snuck from home. They talked, for example, about a new
revolution, an invisible revolution that was already brewing but wouldn't hit
the streets for at least fifty years. Or five hundred. Or five thousand. The
students had been to Villaviciosa but what they wanted was to find the highway
to Ures or
Each night they made love to her, in the car or on the warm desert sand, until
one morning she came to meet them and they were gone. Three months later, when
her great-grandmother asked her about the father of the child she was
expecting, the young Maria Exposito had a strange vision: she saw herself small
and strong, she saw herself fucking two men in the middle of a salt lake, she
saw a tunnel full of potted plants and flowers. Against the wishes of the
family, who wanted to baptize the boy Rafael, Maria Exposito called him
Olegario, the patron saint of hunters and a Catalan monk in the twelfth
century, bishop of Barcelona and archbishop of Tarragona, and she also decided
that the first half of her son's last name wouldn't be Exposito, which was a
name for orphans, as the students from Mexico City had explained to her one of
the nights she spent with them, said the voice, but Cura, and that was how she
entered it in the register at the parish of San Cipriano, twenty miles from
Villaviciosa, Olegario Cura Exposito, despite the questioning to which she was
subjected by the priest and his incredulity about the identity of the alleged
father. Her great-grandmother said it was pure arrogance to put the name Cura
before Exposito, which was the name she'd always had, and a little while later
she died, when Lalo was two and walking naked in the yard, contemplating the
yellow or white houses of Villaviciosa, always shut tight. And when Lalo was
four, the other old woman, the childish one, died, and when he turned fifteen,
Rafael Exposito's sister died, said the voice or the voices. And when Pedro
Negrete came to get him to put him to work for Don Pedro Rengifo, only the
lanky Exposito and Lalo Cura's mother were still alive.