And two months after the French landed at Veracruz, two of Maximilian’s soldiers disappeared, and because the plague city showed her occupiers such a sullen face, the French contra-guerrillero expert Dupin felt at first inclined to carry out some exemplary hangings, but then the missing were found, one in a dilapidated house on Callejón California and the other, of course, in that ruin on Avenida Nicolás Bravo. Dupin suspected that they had been decoyed by prostitutes to be strangled by robbers, but he could not explain the apple-green ovoids of polished jade in their mouths. The insurgents he hunted would never have been so obscure. Moreover, it came to light that the dead men’s valuables were in the possession of the very Mexicans who had discovered and reported them. They had pilfered the corpses, yes, but they were innocent of worse acts. Dupin contented himself with terrifying the relevant families. Then he set out on more consequential business, raiding deeper into the fever country.
By now the ledgers of the Ayuntamiento were scarcely being kept up, while newspapers remained rudimentary except in Mexico City; so how often such murders (if such they were) took place cannot be known, and perhaps the censors passed them over in any event. The wavy hunks of decaying paper, with their faint smell of mildew, the stencilled wormtracks and the dark brown letters offset in orange mirror-writing, or sometimes corroding themselves through like stencils, do present themselves most picturesquely, and nobody with any claim to aesthetic sense can be unimpressed by the way that numerously lovely wormtracks at the top of some snow-white sheet make it resemble wedding lace. But what facts can be discovered? The researcher might just as well be driving across the freeway bridge and along the petrol-perfumed double highway, which is lined with grubby white-limed trees and wanders drearily past fences and concrete walls.
In my time there lived a sad young man named Ricardo Ramírez who once loved most unfortunately in the city of Guadalajara. He happened to be a doctoral candidate in the patriotic but unremunerative department of folklore. Wishing at all hazards to avoid glimpsing his former sweetheart’s beautiful, treacherous face, he wrote his favorite aunt, who lived in Veracruz, and asked whether he could board with her awhile. Since his dissertation, in setting out to identify the “autonomous” and “universal” elements of Mexican legends, laid its snares conveniently wide, anywhere he cared to go would serve; all he required were stories, the stranger the better. Hence the bony night-wanderer who bites that lady who foolishly fell asleep with her window open, the murder-carcass whose wristbones sway toward and away from its neck-stump as it begs in the only way it can: Make me whole! the flaming ghost of the young bride whose jealous mother-in-law burned her to death once upon a time, these and other macabre jewels Ricardo strung on wires of theory, and however he arranged them, they appeared as shiny as cars in the rain. A cocky sailor of archives, prone especially to planting his standard on the most ancient islands of colonial writing (which nowadays keep shrinking evermore within the rectangular oceans of silvery conservation paper), he knew what he sought, and found exactly that, the fascicles dwindling like melting ice-shards, verso words showing through, blots spreading and darkening, so that our hero could interpolate whatever he liked. If his method lacked rigor, so much the better for Ricardo and his easygoing professors. Even before Adela broke his heart, the grotesque, lurid and erotic had faithfully distracted him from counterpart aspects of his own half-lived life. Turning pages of worm-lace, the signatures splitting apart where there once had been a binding, he quarried legends from the reign of Carolus III (whose second seal used to get affixed for a fee of twelve reales), explicated a broken stone jaguar head, collected old cabinet cards of Maximilian in uniform and visited the Temple of the Moon, which turned out to be another dark old pyramid in the center of town, with a fence around it. Had Adela remained faithful, Ricardo might have dreamed out his life in his harmless, feeble fashion, turning dust into paper so that it could become dust again. It is not for me to say that he neglected her. But so she told the taxi driver who seduced her. As might have been expected, Ricardo now collected folktales about traitorous women.
Although he could not go so far as to claim a uniquely Mexican provenance for that topic (since prior to Adela he had been jilted by a buxom exchange student from Madrid), Ricardo followed the line that the nation’s founding legend could only be the oft-told parable of La Malinche, the indigenous mistress of Cortés — because, you see, she interpreted for the conqueror with politic eloquence, embellishing his false promises and magnifying his threats, even assisting at the torture-interrogations of caciques who might have known the whereabouts of more crocodile-textured golden bracelets studded with silver flower-petaled knobs and spiral-bellied monkey figures (most such treasures, it turned out, had already been lost or melted down by the time Mexico fell); worst of all, Malinche betrayed all plots against the Spaniards, so that through her, all too many would-be liberators met destruction, while more forsook their hopes. Therefore, Ricardo hated Malinche! The records indicate that she kept house for Cortés, and bore him a son. He then married her off to a drunk. Upon meeting her Mayan relations, who had originally enslaved her, she proudly or desperately informed them that she would rather serve her husband and Cortés than anything else in the world. For that service she was rewarded about as well as any other Mexican — which Ricardo, of course, found exquisitely fitting; yes, he was bitter, although, being delicately handsome, with skin the color of creamy coffee, he might yet love and be loved again, and then why wouldn’t he think better of the world? As for Malinche, her emotions are lost to us. Once she died, her ghost became known as La Llorona, the longhaired one who weeps over her lost children. Ricardo grew polemical on this subject. (Do not blame him too much for his cruelty; his nights and days were death.) At that time Malinche had new defenders, the feminist syncretists, who argued that whatever harm she did her own kind was the fault of compulsion, that she was an instrument of progress — without her, the authorities might still be cutting people’s hearts out with obsidian knives, instead of working them to death in the silver mines — and, most importantly, that her docile or ambitious miscegenations helped found the modern Mexican race. To this, Ricardo asserted, in fiery counterparagraphs, that La Malinche was, in fact, evil to the bone, her suffering therefore justified, her very name a byword for the dirtiest whoredom. Just as certain young women in church know how to pray to good advantage, kneeling with their arms outstretched on the prie-dieu which seems to draw in their hourglass waists still narrower, so Malinche, at least in Ricardo’s opinion, made effective show of her submission, as a result of which, again in his opinion, she acquired culpability. Adela had been just that way. Whenever Ricardo took her on a holiday, she did just as he said — but then it became his fault when it rained. Eventually her whole life was his fault. Likewise, Malinche ruined Mexico. — While Ricardo was engrossed in excoriating the dead woman in such terms as gave him sadistic gratification, he received a reply from his aunt, welcoming his speedy arrival in Veracruz. Knowing somewhat of his field of inquiry, the old lady reminded him of what she was sure that he already knew, that in Veracruz could be heard any number of tales about La Llorona. So he fled to that city where almond trees come up out of the sidewalk and yellow-green coconuts cluster in the armpits of palms.