Woes of the True Policeman (13 page)

“Candide is the quintessential innocent, and Pangloss is, too, more or less.”

“Pangloss is his teacher?”

“Yes. He’s a philosopher. The classic optimist. Like Candide, except that Candide is an optimist by nature and Pangloss argues rationally for optimism. He’s a moron, basically.”

“And is the novel set in Mexico?”

“No, I don’t think so. Pangloss teaches theology, metaphysics, cosmology, and nigology, and don’t ask me what that is because I don’t know.”

“Nigology. Huh,” said Jordi.

That night he looked up
nigology
in the
Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy
. He couldn’t find it. Those fucking professors, he thought angrily. The closest thing was
nigola
: (
Naut.
) Lengths of thin line strung between the shrouds of a sailing ship to make a ladder; ratline. To sail amid the rigging and the topsails! There was also
nigromancia
, or necromancy, the meaning of which Jordi knew thanks to role-playing games, and also
nigérrimo
, ma. (Del lat.
Nigerrimus.
) adj. sup. de
negro
.
Negrísimo
, very black.

Nor was it in the
Ideological Dictionary of the Spanish Language
by Julio Casares or in the
Pompeu I Fabra
.

Much later, while his parents were sleeping, he got out of bed naked, and with measured steps, as if he were on a phantom basketball court, he headed for his father’s library and searched until he found a Spanish translation of
Candide
.

He read: “It is clear,” said Pangloss, “that things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end. Observe: noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles. Legs, as anyone can plainly see, were made to be breeched, and so we have breeches. Stones were made to be shaped and to build castles with; thus My Lord has a fine castle, for the greatest Baron in the province should have the finest house; and since pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round. Consequently, those who say everything is well are uttering mere stupidities; they should say everything is for the best.”

For a while he knelt there on the rug in the library, rocking slightly back and forth with his five senses elsewhere. Have I fallen in love with you? he thought. Am I falling in love? And if I am, what can I do about it? I don’t know how to write letters. I’m doomed. Then, stricken, he whispered: fuck, Rosa, fuck, it’s so unfair, so unfair …

Around this time Jordi Carrera dreamed that he was playing for Barcelona at the Palau Sant Jordi alongside the stars of Catalan basketball. The opposing team was Real Madrid, but it wasn’t the usual Real Madrid. The only player he recognized was Sabonis, but this Sabonis was much older and slower and his hands shook when he caught the ball. The rest of the Madrid players were strangers, and not only were they strangers, even their bodies were indistinct. Their legs were legs, but at the same time there was something about them that was uncharacteristic of a pair of limbs, as if they were constantly coming in and out of focus. The same was true of their arms and faces, which never seemed to settle into a fixed expression or firm outline, though this strange phenomenon didn’t seem to bother the other Barcelona players. The Palau was full to bursting and the shouting of the spectators was so loud that for a moment Jordi thought he would pass out. Without much surprise he realized that he was playing point guard, not center. The Madrid players soon began to commit fouls and almost all of them were against him. He didn’t know the score. So focused was he on the game that he never lifted his head to glance at the electronic scoreboard. In fact, he had no idea where the scoreboard was, but he suspected that his team was winning, and this made him incredibly happy. When he noticed that he was bleeding from the nose, the brow, and the upper lip, the scene underwent a radical shift.

Now he wasn’t on the Palau court but in a dark locker room with raw cement walls and long, damp benches and a constant noise of water, as if a river were running above the changing room. He wasn’t alone. A shadowy figure was watching him from a corner. Jordi felt his bloody face and cursed the shadow in Catalan. He said
son of a bitch
in Catalan, then he said
bastard
, though the word was the same in Spanish. The shadowy figure quivered like a broken fan. Jordi told himself that he should take a shower, but the ominous presence in the corner made it an ordeal to undress. Feeling cramps in both legs, he sat down and covered his face with his hands. Incomprehensibly, he saw his father, his mother, and Amalfitano drinking whiskey in the yard one fall afternoon, happy, with no problems on the horizon. The afternoon, the sky, and the rooftops of the neighboring buildings were heartrendingly beautiful. Where is Rosa? he asked longingly, careful not to disturb the equilibrium of the scene, which he sensed was precarious. But his parents didn’t seem to hear him. He soon realized that they were in another dimension. Then the dream lifted, drifting away in a balloon or on a cloud, and below, in the streets of Barcelona, Catalan nationalists fought house to house against the Spanish army. Jordi knew the name of the army without being told: it was the King’s Army, the National Army, and it fought with commendable tenacity against him and his compatriots. But this time it wasn’t just the Castilian soldiers whose faces and limbs were blurred. The Catalan militiamen also grew hazy amid the rubble and even the cries of the wounded or the leaders ordering their men to advance or retreat took on the same quality, blurring in the air, fleeing the Catalan and Spanish languages for a kingdom where words were like electrocardiograms, where voices were like Tartar dreams.

In the last image of his dream Jordi saw himself huddled in a corner, hugging his knees as hard as he could and thinking of Rosa, Rosa, Rosa, so far away.

Celestino Arraya, whose house Rosa Amalfitano visited on the third day after her arrival in Santa Teresa, was born in Villaviciosa in 1900 and died at a cantina called Los Primos Hermanos in 1933, a few months after Hitler came to power. Little information is available about his childhood: legend has him as a brave young soldier with Pancho Villa when the reality is that he spent the Villa years hiding away on a ranch where his friend Federico Montero—an eminent politician and landowner who managed to navigate the turbulent years of the Revolution with courage and unerring instinct—bred fighting bulls. It was the Piedras Negras bullring that saw his first triumph, in 1920. After that, successful appearances followed in other border cities and towns: Ojinaga, Nogales, Matamoros, Nueva Rosita. These were some of the rings from which he emerged raised aloft, clutching tail and ears in his hands like a shipwrecked sailor frozen stiff with cold. He was extremely adept in the art of killing. His final anointing occurred at the Monterrey bullring and, in 1928, in Mexico City, where he was acclaimed in the ring and feted on public thoroughfares. He was tall and slender—cadaverous, according to some—and always sharply dressed, whether in bullfighting attire or civilian clothes. The elegance with which he moved in the ring, though, became a mannered stride in everyday life, the strut of a preening gangster. Along with Federico Montero and other friends, he belonged to a bachelor’s club, The Cowboys of Death, which was officially gastronomic and harmless, though of terrible memory. Death, the real thing, came to him at the hands of a sixteen-year-old boy who for motives that remain unknown came looking for him at the cantina Los Primos Hermanos and with his old rifle put two bullets in his head before being shot in turn by the bullfighter’s comrades. The statue that stands guard over his mausoleum was erected at the initiative of Montero and other friends, who bore the full cost themselves. The sculptor was Pablo Mesones Sarabia (1891–1942), of the Potosí school of Maestro Garabito.

The sculpture group titled
Victory of the Town of Santa Teresa over the French
, situated in the Plaza del Norte one hundred feet from the statue of General Sepúlveda, hero of the Revolution, and created by Pedro Xavier Terrades (1899–1949) and Jacinto Prado Salamanca (1901–1975), both sculptors of the Potosí school of Maestro Garabito, presented a kind of inaccuracy or basic historical error. The work in itself was nothing to sneeze at: composed of five wrought-iron figures, it possessed the characteristic élan of the Potosí school, a quality of the sublime or of transfigurement, its frenzied figures contorted, one might say, by the breath of History. The life-size group included a Santa Teresa militiaman pointing southeast toward something that the spectator might guess were the retreating enemy troops. The face of the militiaman, lips clenched and features twisted in a scowl of pain or rage, is partly obscured by a too-big bandage around his head. In his left hand he carries a musket. Behind, at his feet on the ground, lies a dead Frenchman. The Frenchman’s arms are flung wide and his hands are gnarled as if by fire. His face, nevertheless, has the thing that artists of old called the repose of death. To one side, a soldier of the irregular forces dies in the arms of a girl no older than fifteen. The gaze of the soldier—eyes of a madman, eyes of a visionary—turns to the sky, while the eyes of the girl, part Madonna and part Goya Gypsy, remain gravely and piously shut. The left hand of the dying man clutches the girl’s right hand. And yet these are not two hands together; not at all. They are two hands that reach for each other in the dark, two hands that repel each other, two hands that recognize each other and flee in despair. Finally, there is an old man, half turned to the side, his head lowered as if he’d rather not see what’s happened, his lips puckered in an expression that might be of pain, but might also signify the act of whistling (and that’s what the children who play in the square call him: the Whistler). The old man is frozen, his right hand over his heart but not quite resting on his breast, the left hanging to one side, as if rendered useless. The sculpture group was commissioned in 1940 and finished in 1945. According to some critics, it is Terrades and Prado Salamanca’s masterpiece, and the last piece on which they worked together. Be that as it may, the work’s flaw is in its title. There was never a battle against the French for the simple reason that the men against whom the town of Santa Teresa fought under José Mariño and Amador Pérez Pesqueira weren’t French but Belgian. The campaign and subsequent battle, according to the well-documented book
Benito Juárez vs. Maximilian: The Fall of Europe
, by the Mexican historian Julio V. Anaya, proceeded like this: in August 1865 a battalion of four companies of one hundred men each, made up of volunteers from the Belgian Legion and led by Colonel Maurice Libbrecht, tried to take Santa Teresa, which at that time was undefended by Republican troops. The column came first to Villaviciosa, where it encountered no resistence. After revictualing, it set out from Villaviciosa, leaving behind a garrison of twenty men. An alert was raised and in Santa Teresa preparations for the defense of the city were rapidly made under the leadership of Señor Pérez Pesqueira, mayor of the city, and Don José Mariño, wealthy local landowner and liberal with a reputation as an adventurer and eccentric, who recruited any man who could bear arms to swell the ranks of the militia. On August 28, at noon, Libbrecht’s Belgians reached the edge of town and after sending out a scouting party—which returned with the news that the city’s defenses were nonexistent and that three horsemen had been lost in a skirmish—it was decided to give the troops an hour of rest and then launch a direct assault. The battle was one of the worst disasters to befall the invading army in the northeast of Mexico. The militiamen of Santa Teresa were waiting for the Belgians in the center of the city. A few snipers on the edge of town who immediately retreated and even some flower-bedecked balconies draped with banners made from sheets, reading “Long Live the French” or “Long Live the Emperor,” were enough to cause the unsuspecting Libbrecht to fall into the trap. The battle was fierce and both sides fought without seeking or granting mercy. The Belgians made their stand in the Central Market and in the streets leading to the Plaza Mayor. The militiamen made theirs at the Town Hall and the Cathedral, as well as in the streets between the Belgian position and the fields outside of town, the ochre fields that—except for Libbrecht’s few supply troops and some shepherds who moved across foreground and background, through pastures and over hills, like figures in a Flemish painting—bore empty and as if fear-struck witness to the din and the cannon blasts that resounded in the city, an abstract entity within which there unfolded a battle of wills and agonies. By night, with the Belgians demoralized after various attempts to break the siege, José Mariño’s militiamen launched the final attack. Libbrecht fell in the onslaught and shortly afterward the Belgians surrendered. Among them was Captain Robert Lecomte, of Bruges, who would later marry the daughter of Don Marcial Hernández, in whose house he spent the rest of the war, more as a guest than as a captive. In his memoirs, published in four installments in the
Bruges Monitor
, Lecomte hints that the defeat owed to Libbrecht’s overconfidence and ignorance of Mexican idiosyncracies. His story is almost entirely consistent with that of J. V. Anaya, who draws upon it: the battle was cruel but remained within the bounds of chivalry and gallantry; most of the prisoners were taken to Piedras Negras, where the division of General Arístides Mancera was stationed; their treatment at the hands of the Mexicans was exquisite. Nor does it differ from the memories of another extraordinary witness, José Mariño, patron of the arts and man of the world, who in 1867, as the guest of General Mariano Escobedo, was present at the Battle of Querétaro and the subsequent shooting of the Emperor; in his
Memoirs
, New York, 1905, Mariño gives an extensive account of the preparations for the battle and a succinct description of the battle itself. Mariño’s book is full of so many things—battles, affairs of honor, political intrigues, romances, ties to great poets (he was a personal friend of Martí and Salvador Díaz Mirón, some of whose letters are woven into the eight-hundred-plus-page volume)—that the episode of the Battle of Santa Teresa necessarily plays a minor role, included only, one might say, in order to once again demonstrate the personal initiative and battle-tested courage of its author. Nevertheless, Mariño devotes nearly four full pages to the pursuit that was launched soon after the conclusion of the battle, a pursuit in which he played no part. Who was pursued? The troops who didn’t enter Santa Teresa and the few soldiers who managed to escape the siege. A certain Emilio Hernández (son of Don Marcial Hernández?) led the chase. First to be pursued were the men who escaped Santa Teresa; they put up little resistance. Next were the supply troops with their gear; they surrendered without a fight. Warned of the presence of “French” troops in Villaviciosa, Emilio Hernández returned prisoners and captured equipment to Santa Teresa, and with only thirty horsemen headed off to liberate Villaviciosa. He arrived in the early hours of the following day and found no “Frenchmen” or Belgians. Some villagers had left town and scattered through the neighboring fields. Others were asleep in their low, dark houses and wouldn’t rise until past noon. When they were asked, the peasants said that the soldiers had gone. Where, which way? inquired Emilio Hernández. Home, said the peasants. Though dauntless, Emilio Hernández’s men—half of them ranchers and gentlemen, the other half cowboys and hired men—grew uneasy, feeling watched, as if they were on the threshhold of something better ignored (this is made plain by José Mariño, an excellent narrator of boudoir scenes and opera finales and an amateur translator of Poe). But Emilio Hernández refused to give up and sent half of his men after the soldiers while with the others he set out to comb the town. The first group found a horse hacked to death by machete. The second found only sleeping people, children with a dazed look, and women washing clothes. As the afternoon wore on, a smell of decay crept into everything. At dusk, Emilio Hernández decided to return to Santa Teresa. The Belgians of Villaviciosa had vanished into thin air. Concludes Mariño: “the town seemed one thousand, two thousand years old, the houses like tumors blooming from the earth; it was a lost town and yet it was haloed with the invincible nimbus of mystery…”