The Fugitive (12 page)

Once, when I found an especially greasy piece of meat on my plate, a strange association of ideas prompted me to pour a little Coca-Cola over it. Strangely enough, this actually improved the flavor. It no longer tasted unholy and foul. It was merely disgusting.

There are times when I think that if someone were to ask me to name the five worst things I had done in my life, one might be “having eaten armadillo repeatedly.” In any case, one fine day I decided I couldn't take it anymore. I sold my share of the flock.

 

One member of the group, a union officer at the telephone company, had inherited a house and some land on the volcanic hills surrounding Mexico City. We would go out there frequently to have barbecues and play soccer; between games and meals, we would talk, as usual, about politics. Every so often, I would shut out the conversation and gaze down at the megalopolis stretching out beneath us for miles and miles in every direction.

“I don't like you, I don't like you one little bit!” I would think to myself.

At certain times of the day, a giant cowl of pale-red gas loured over the city; that was our daily dose of pollution. Even ten years ago, ecologists had sounded alarm bells, warning that Mexico City was a region at extreme environmental risk. Recently I read that the pollution there caused thirty thousand deaths a year. It is believed that another four million people suffer from pollution-caused diseases. The administration of the Federal District, then as now, comes up with solutions straight out of science fiction. One such solution was to build huge fans on the surrounding mountains, to force a mass of clean air down into the city and sweep away the toxic cloud.

 

The group had no idea of how to organize a political movement around environmental issues. In fact, pollution seemed like the least of the city's problems compared with the challenges that the populace faced in simply making it through each day with a shred of dignity still intact. We all knew, for instance, that the uncontrolled development of the city had created huge clusters of population around dangerous and toxic factories and plants, but to raise that issue would mean provoking the anger of the local inhabitants and the factory workers themselves.

We were talking about that very subject, sitting on the grass in front of the house, when the Pemex (Petróleos Mexicanos) plant blew up. There was a roar, a burst of flame, and then a cloud of smoke, dense and black as pitch, billowed up over part of the city. We immediately got in our cars and started down to the city, but it was impossible to get close to the disaster area. Wild rumors were circulating about the number of dead; radio and television news reports received their marching orders from the government, who tried to minimize the scale of the disaster.

Without success. By the following day, the opposition press had already reported the truth. The blast had destroyed not only the oil facility itself, but the entire slum area that surrounded it. And as if that weren't enough, subsequent to the initial explosion, underground fuel lines exploded, demolishing rows of homes in outlying neighborhoods. It was impossible to arrive at a specific number of deaths because the government had immediately ordered a number of mass graves dug, with the justification that, otherwise, contagious diseases might spread. The official government numbers—about two thousand victims—were based exclusively on a count of the corpses that had been identified by relatives or bodies found with identification papers.

This report triggered a wave of furious indignation because it was well known that most of the inhabitants of the shanty towns were Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees, or else Indios from Chiapas and other poor sections of Mexico, and therefore
indocumentados
, or undocumented. The survivors were abandoned to shift for themselves, in an intolerable state of deprivation. On the fifth day, when we finally succeeded in making our way through the army and police cordon surrounding the site, we found people in a state of frenzied desperation.

It wasn't difficult to persuade the survivors to appoint a committee to demand government aid and reparations from Pemex. It was clear that the company was seriously at fault; it had used antiquated facilities, placing demands upon the plant that far exceeded its capacity. That, plus the total absence of safety regulations, caused the explosion. A huge protest movement immediately began to spread, and when it really began to irritate those in power, government and industry decided that it was time to put an end to the discussion once and for all.

The representatives of the communities that had been devastated by the blast were either bought off or frightened into silence. My friends did all they could to keep the committee alive, until the comrade from our group who had been most vocal and visible in public meetings was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

That's when we withdrew from the struggle, and went back to playing soccer in the meadow at the mountain house, talking about politics and looking down at the city below us.

 

During an unsuccessful attempt to organize a strike among the factory workers at a Japanese auto plant to protest the dangerous conditions there (the workers on the spray-painting line were not even given respirator masks), I met Odile.

Odile was French. She wrote and illustrated children's books. She was married to a Mexican labor organizer she had met in Paris. They had two children, a four-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl. Odile was a sweet-tempered, energetic woman. It was not easy for her to live in Mexico City, in a low-income neighborhood that was steadily collapsing under the weight of the uncontrolled urban development—it was estimated that three thousand new homes were being built every day. Still, she managed to make everything she did look easy and natural. She conveyed a sense of peace and confidence. I liked to spend time with her; often, we sat in silence. I was happy just to sit and watch her draw the fanciful characters that populated her children's stories.

One morning, Bulmaro, her husband, called me on the phone:

“Odile lost our son,” he told me.

“I'm sorry to hear that; did she have an abortion? I didn't know she was pregnant,” I replied.

“No, I'm talking about Julio. She lost him on the subway.”

“How the hell can you lose a child on the subway?” I protested.

“Get over here, we need your help,” he cut me off, hanging up without saying goodbye.

The others were already at their house when I got there. As I looked around at their somber, worried faces, I immediately understood that this was serious.

It had all happened in seconds. Odile had walked down into the subway station during rush hour, holding the little girl in her arms, the boy by the hand. They had immediately been swallowed up by the usual overwhelming throng of passengers. Odile tried to make her way onto a subway car, pushing the boy ahead of her. As soon as he stepped into the car, the crowd lurched and swayed, forcing her to let go of his hand. In that fraction of a second, the doors closed. The train pulled out of the station.

I had been in the Mexico City subway system just once. After that I stuck to the public bus system and occasionally used
peseros
, the collective taxis. That one time, I was literally forced to fight my way onto the train and off again, and I had my pocket picked to boot. It wasn't something I wanted to experience again, and I imagined that only a fourth-generation native of Mexico City would be up to the ordeal. I would never have dreamed that Odile would use the subway, much less take the children with her.

The child's disappearance had already been reported to the police and the subway authorities. Deep down, I thought that was enough; it seemed like the others, who were already organizing a full-blown search campaign, were a little over the top. We split up into teams, and each team went to a station along the train line. Bulmaro stayed at home to coordinate the operation by phone. They even reached out to a number of former
panchitos
, who were now supporters of the group, to see what they could achieve through their contacts with the criminals that infested the subway system.

Odile was nowhere to be seen. Shut in her room with her baby daughter, she was in a state of shock.

There were about ten of us in each search team. My team was assigned to the station after the one where Odile had lost the boy. We talked to hundreds of people, until the subway closed down for the night; we offered rewards. Once an hour we phoned Bulmaro, but the answer was always the same:
nada
.

I realized I had underestimated the gravity of the situation when, as I made my way around the station, I began noticing little posters with lots of different photographs. Photographs of children. In Mexico City, children went missing all the time. On the subway, in the street, from their homes—they weren't always found.

On the third day, we wallpapered the stations with photographs of little Julio. On the tenth day we stopped searching.

Spending ten days in a subway station searching for a four-year-old boy was an experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Not merely because of the desperation that gripped me every minute of those ten days, but especially because of my sense of helplessness in the face of a city so huge that it could swallow up anything, anyone, without explanation, as if they had never existed. Amidst the most absolute indifference. Even a little boy that you had seen playing until just a few hours ago.

My presence as a gringo in the subway station hardly went unobserved. I was the chosen target of profiteers, interested only in scamming a little money out of the situation. They would come up to me, acting as if they knew something, and only after I had slipped them a bank note or two would they try to palm off fanciful tales that only wasted our time.

By the time it was over, it was obvious that someone had kidnapped the boy. But who? And why? None of us really wanted to know, but the former
panchitos
put us in touch with child-traffickers (illegal adoptions, the organ trade, and snuff films). They took lots of money from us and never told us anything useful.

I saw places I had never even heard of, like the dormitories for abandoned children. Where, for a peso, they spent the night and felt a little safer. A haven till the next day, when they ventured back out into the streets, to beg, to shine shoes, or to steal. Streets where mothers prostituted their eight-, nine-, and ten-year-old daughters, for a handful of coins.

For the authorities, Julio's disappearance was just one more file to put with the countless others that already filled their filing cabinets to overflowing. For Odile and Bulmaro, it marked the end of everything. After a few months, she went back to France with her little girl. He stayed in Mexico, but he was never the same.

Political activism remained his only interest; he seemed to be unstoppable, tireless, but he scrupulously avoided any situation where there was the slightest risk of human contact. He was no longer seen at parties or dinners. The comrades told me that sooner or later he would get over it and become the same old Bulmaro. They all agreed that he had been right to stay in Mexico instead of following Odile back to France. He needed to stay with his people, they said, he shouldn't leave the group. He shouldn't abandon the cause.

I saw things differently. I was a friend of Bulmaro's and one evening, when all the others were at a birthday party, I went to his house and knocked on the door.

“Hi, Bulmaro, I've come to have a talk with you.”

“It must be a long talk if you brought a bottle of liquor.”

“Yes, that's right,” I answered, showing him the label. “This is calvados from Normandy, aged twelve years. I brought it with me from France, and I was saving it for an important occasion.”

“Then this must be an important talk you have in mind. I've never tasted this liquor, what's it like?”

“It's brandy made out of apple cider. Normandy is a beautiful place, Bulmaro, a proud, fierce land, windswept. This calvados will give you a whiff of the place.”

“Max, I'm happy you've come to see me, but if you want to talk about Odile, France, and my children, then you can just take your bottle back home with you.”

“No, Bulmaro, I'm not leaving. Even if we have to duke it out, you're still going to listen to what I have to say to you.”

“You're too big for me, Italian comrade . . . Come on in, I guess this means you're going to spoil my evening.”

We sat down, facing one another, across a little square table where I had seen the children eating dinner many times before. Between us stood the bottle, two glasses, an ashtray, and our cigarettes.

“Bulmaro, why won't you go to Paris to be with Odile?”

“Because I'm Mexican, Max. Because I am a Mexican labor organizer, and my place is here, in Mexico. If I went to France, I would be throwing away the most important thing in my life up till now.”

“Horseshit, Bulmaro, that's horseshit. If you said you were staying here because you still hoped that you could find your son, I'd understand. But that would be horseshit, too, because you know perfectly well”—I hesitated for an instant—“that you'll never find him. But don't tell me you're staying here for the cause, because I don't believe it for a second.”

He shot to his feet and grabbed the back of his chair with both hands, squeezing it powerfully.

“You're laying it down a little heavy tonight, Italian comrade. Why don't you go back to Italy? You come here, you swagger around, you call me a liar. Everyone who has known me all my life says I am doing the right thing. You're just a Johnny-come-lately, you have no right to tell me what to do.”

“Bulmaro”—and my voice expressed my sympathy and understanding—“all the others are just afraid of losing you. Can't you see? There's only a few of you left, and if you left the group might fall apart, because everyone sees their failure to find the
niño
as the worst sort of defeat. This city has screwed you once again, and nobody wants to admit it. If you chose your family instead of the group, you would throw the group into total disarray.”