Tequila Blue (13 page)

This led to a long, tedious discussion revolving around children, the future, madness and what is or is not possible. What most impressed me was the way people can change, because neither of them was bright red anymore: they were both a sort of misty pink verging on deathly grey, which, thinking back, I should perhaps have seen as a bad sign. I eventually won out by employing a trick that works every time. When others are floundering in uncertainty, you have to seem completely sure of yourself. That makes you the person who knows what's going on, whereas their doubts show their ignorance.

“Let me give him a call, then we'll decide,” I told them. They agreed, so I got out and rang the Commander at home.

*

I adopted a tone somewhere between professional eagerness and sheer excitement:

“I've got important news on the gringo case, boss. There are some delicate matters I need to
talk to you about. I can't sort them out on my own, or discuss them on the phone.”

Nine o'clock at night. A good time to invade a house and turn into a burglar.

“Come and see me,” said the Commander.

“Let's go and talk to him, then afterwards we'll decide,” I told my companions, so they would realize there was no going back.

“Look,” I said. “It was that old bastard who had us shot at. If things go badly, we finish him off ourselves, then home to bed.” (Obviously I was planning to go into hiding, and would tell Quasimodo to do the same.) “Tomorrow we show up for work as usual, and that's that. No one will link us to an armed burglary. There are gangs holding up families in their homes every night. In fact, there's one operating right now in Copilco, and the Commander lives quite near there.

“He lives in San Angel, and that's nowhere near.” Arganaraz, as argumentative as ever.

We were soon at the house. I presented myself on the interphone, and the door opened. Two minutes later I'd got my gun out and was holding it to the head of my boss, a man apparently unable to believe what was happening to him. Quasimodo and Arganaraz looked even more surprised than him, and the one who looked most surprised of all must have been me. No chance. This must be how things look when you jump out of a plane several thousand feet in the air and go into freefall without opening the parachute, because you know it's there and because you want
to enjoy the sense of adventure and terror for as long as they last.

This purple-faced man, with matching purple furniture, was stammering as he peered down the barrel of my gun. He was trembling faced by his inferior, Carlos Hernandez, Hernandezatyour-service, someone he thought he could count on who never seemed dangerous because his job was to say “Yes, boss” in the same way that this bastard stammered “Yes, boss” whenever he talked to a superior. All of which happened in the real world but did not have to happen when reality turns into a nightmare. That man feared Carlos Hernandez because Carlos Hernandez had just ushered in chaos.

Sacred and cursed as only murderers and saints can be, Carlos Hernandez renounces normality and boredom, renounces TV and speeches, watches and calendars, rejects the idea of doing today what he did yesterday, refuses to look at the present with the eyes of the past, thumbs his nose at regulations and codes of behaviour in the DO and all the rest of the motherfucking police, forgets all his routines, casts off his lethargy, will not comb his hair or shave, tells his neighbours what he thinks of them whenever he meets them, and when meeting certain women neighbours caresses breasts and hips, laughs at the newspaper headlines, shows his collection of condoms to primary school teachers, suggests sex on the spot with young ladies selling religious tracts, believes that
anyone who doesn't lend a book is a numbskull, and anyone who doesn't give it back is even more stupid, will never again say “at your service”, much less “at your orders”. A friend only to cats and drunks, condemned men and stray dogs, whores and homosexuals, communists and human rights defenders, guerrilleros and feminists, pariahs and gunmen, smokers and liberation theologists, an admirer of Zapata and Pancho Villa, but of no one who wears a suit and tie and carries a briefcase, scornful of Sanborns, postmodernism, the President's opinions and Hollywood films, bored by men of maize and the idea of Mexico “race of bronze”, tired, overwhelmingly weary of being a policeman . . . Carlos Hernandez watches incredulously as the colours in the room swing towards blue, thinks it must be because night has fallen: all he knows is he enjoys feeling that the Commander is afraid of him.

That was all. I could kill him, and I was off my head – because you had to be crazy to force your way into his house, threaten him with a gun and demand he hand over a photo showing the Chief of Police fornicating with an iguana. And since I was lost to this world anyway, it was increasingly likely I might get it into my head to pull the trigger. I was the problem. Arganaraz – a loser who was going to betray me at the first opportunity – and Quasimodo – lost in his Archive, slave to an old debt – were simply obeying a superior will, a clearer vision, you might
say, if it weren't for that fact that I was seeing everything a very Proustian shade of turquoise at that precise moment. I decided for them. I freed them from the problem of having to think. Although perhaps they were regretting having a leader with a bullet in his skull that made him confuse lettuces with orchids and who seemed determined to lead them straight to prison or death.

I'm surrounded by people of little faith. People incapable of knowing what they want, and if by chance they do stumble on the answer, too scared to say “I want this”. I know them well, because I used to be one of them. Perhaps you need to have been shot in the back of the head and to have had your third eye opened to be able to see, I mean to really see, without pay-cheques and school fees, without nine-to-five and Christmas holidays, without all the smokescreen we've had injected into our veins, without what we are not, and are not even interested in, preventing us from remembering the only true being we have ever been: the magical shadow of what was once a child. The child who imagined the impossible and hoped to grow up to achieve it. The same being I am now, restored thanks to a hole in the head, with the eyes of a reptile that can see the world is green, someone determined to recover what all those who have fed off my flesh and my life have stripped me of: the Commander, Lourdes, Gloria, my children, the shopkeepers of this city, the banks, the teachers, my colleagues at
work, all those who were close to me and banded together to turn me into a donkey and then all lined up to jab the donkey with a cattleprod. All those who said: “Work, Carlos, bend your back, grind your bones, earn money, I expect it of you because I'm your boss, it's your duty because I'm your wife, you can't abandon us because we're your children, you have to watch over us because we're inhabitants of this city, you have to have your papers in order, you have to make your payments on the money you've borrowed, take out insurance, pay for your own funeral, don't stop and rest, Carlos, you've got to go on working.” Let's be clear about it: not even those who most cared for me or loved me, not one of them was ever capable of saying: “Have your cake and eat it, live it up, bet all your money, the world is covered in a cloud of stupidity and resignation, don't breathe it in, be yourself, set off for Abyssinia, be like the bird and the tiger, don't just die underneath your TV dinner tray, don't die either in your office or at home, and don't let the tears of women stop you, there are other women and other parties to go to, there are seas to cross, adventures to live. They've robbed you of everything, Carlos: look at your grey face, your yellow teeth, your wrinkles, your shifty eyes, take a good look at your frozen bones, how death is rising through your flogged animal's flesh, look how you're dying on your feet, Carlos Hernandez. Get on with it.”

The Commander said something. His lips moved, but I couldn't catch the words. Arganaraz and Quasimodo grabbed me from behind and took away my gun. Everything went black. It's harder to die than to live.

Bingo. Full house. Case closed. The murderers showed they had the kind of intelligence and skill that could leave all clues at a dead end. Anyone who can do that, whatever his motives or aims, is bound to create a state of affairs which for the average Mexican policeman (or the police of any other country) will be as indecipherable as classical Arabic and will end up with him collapsing in the first bar he comes across, anywhere he can drown his despair and bewilderment in tequila. Someone always appears to knock over the amateurs' chips and make crime what it should be: a game for professionals, people who, thanks to their lengthy experience, their local knowledge and the means they have at their disposal, are the only ones who can see things through to the end, even an investigation. Science, in other words. And wielding power.

Jones – sadistic pornography – money. Mr and Mrs Accountant see the opportunity and recruit Valadez to do the deed. On the night of the crime Mrs Accountant goes out with Jones. She hides her auburn hair under a blonde wig. She's done her make-up differently. “Today I want to be a new woman for you. I want you to make love to me as if
we had just met, as if you had just picked me up in the street.” That's what she says to him, or some other similar nonsense. Pornophiles like games of that sort. All men do, in fact. Which, following strict Aristotelian logic, must mean that all men are pornophiles. Mr Accountant or Valadez, or both of them, follow her to the hotel where she goes with Jones. Mrs Accountant kills him, wipes off her make-up, changes her wig for a man's. Leaving the hotel, she speaks in a gruff voice, makes her gestures and gait more masculine. She puts on an act, and convinces the hotel porter she's a transvestite. Two hundred yards from the hotel, she gets into a waiting car. An auburn-headed woman pretending to be a blonde who turns into a fair-haired man. Too much.

Quasimodo looks at me sadly, and I discover that sadness goes hand-in-hand with ugliness. The least sadness in the world must be Kim Basinger's, because she is so beautiful even when she cries. Kim-smile, Kim-glasses, Kim-tears are simply different versions of her lips, her eyes, her skin. But the sadness of an ugly person is pathetic because it's so pure. Which explains the success of Frankenstein, Quasimodo (Victor Hugo's) and all the other “good” monsters. They convince us by being both ugly and sad. Their ugliness simply becomes part of their sadness, adding to it and increasing its intensity.

“You looked so out of it, I decided to help you, Carlitos,” he tells me. “Even against your will, and knowing you wouldn't like it.”

I feel like kicking his head in. But I need him to finally resolve a case I have to close. I've got this evening and tonight to find the proof. Tomorrow, even though Jones, Victoria Ledesma, Valadez and Mr and Mrs Accountant will still have open files, they will disappear into the silent stacks of the archives, carefully classified and labelled, where they'll sleep the endless winter of those who simply appear as a record of the facts, memory and, occasionally, as a launching pad for possible future vindication.

The first thing is to get my hands on some beer. They kept me prisoner in a clinic for three days, feeding me injections and food for sick people. A white ghostly place filled with sexless nurses, as bad tempered as old maids and programmed not to give any information to their victims. I had never been in that penitentiary before, and hope never to be there again. They kept me on fruit juice and pap for three days, as if I were a baby rather than a hardened criminal.

I'm thrilled to see that Quasimodo has regained his normal rat-grey colour and that the air and sky have gone back to their usual soot and ozone. I'm even more thrilled to have left that secret clinic where I was afraid that any of the injections they gave me might send me to sleep forever. The robotic nurses who were in charge of my body – not so much as a finger touching me that suggested anything personal, much less female – aroused such a powerful nostalgia in me for the caresses of Lourdes, Gloria and Rosario that if any
of them gets wind of it, they can start choosing the colour of the noose to put around my neck right now. I was thinking the whole time that the satanic Doctor No or Mengele would look in on me and decide that the moment had come to neutralize me. I suppose I've been lucky, and I'm pleased to be breathing in three hundred parts per million of polluted air while I savour a beer that would be perfect if it had been left to chill only three minutes longer.

I explain to Quasimodo that I care about my friends, and that's the only reason why I haven't sent him to the cemetery. I know no one is perfect, and I don't think I'm in any position to go around judging my neighbour. If he ran out, abandoning me in my hour of greatest need, and if he thought that his betrayal was for my own good, so be it. I'm not one to split hairs or to call into question other people's word of honour. All I want to get clear is that I can decide for myself what suits me. It's for me to say what it is in my best interest. I've got a mouth, and when I need help I'll shout for it. Although I can't imagine myself asking to be disarmed so that my chief enemy can toss my bones into a dungeon.

Quasimodo looks so sad that even for me his ugliness becomes unbearable. And since I can't bear to see a monster cry, I continue to reassure him that we're talking among friends, and that Arganaraz is a completely different matter – laying aside the fact that it was Quasimodo who brought him along unasked – because Arganaraz is not
only not my friend but is a first-class bastard, a rogue who sells his sisters as whores, a spider who should be crushed: something I'll be happy to do as soon as I lay my eyes on his cheating face.