The students lived in a van parked at a bend in the road between Villaviciosa and Santa Teresa and every night María Expósito would slip out of bed to go and meet them. When her great-grandmother asked who the father was, María Expósito remembered a kind of delicious abyss and had a very clear vision: she saw herself, small but mysteriously strong, able to take three men at once. They hurl themselves on me panting like dogs, she thought, from in front and behind so that I can hardly breathe and their cocks are enormous, they’re the cocks of Mexico’s peasant revolution, but inside I’m bigger than them all and they’ll never conquer me.
By the time her son was born the Paris students had gone home and many Mexican students had stopped existing.
Against the wishes of her family, who wanted to baptize the boy Rafael, María Expósito called him Francisco, after Saint Francis of Assisi, and decided that the first half of his last name wouldn’t be Expósito, which was a name for orphans, as the students from Monterrey had informed her one night by the light of a campfire, but Monje, Francisco Monje Expósito, two different last names, and that was how she entered it in the register at the parish church despite the priest’s reluctance and his skepticism about the identity of the alleged father. Her great-grandmother said that it was pure arrogance to put the name Monje before Expósito, which was the name she’d always had, and a little while later, when Pancho was two and running naked along the sand-colored streets of Villaviciosa, she died. And when Pancho was five the other old woman, the childish one, died, and when he turned fifteen, Rafael Expósito’s sister died. And when Don Pedro Negrete came for him the only ones left were the lanky Expósito and Pancho’s mother.
3
“We saw them from the distance and right away we knew who they were and they knew we knew it and they kept coming. I mean: we knew who they were, they knew who we were, they knew that we knew who they were, we knew that they knew that we knew who they were. Everything was clear. The day had no secrets! I don’t know why, but the thing I remember best about that afternoon are the clothes. Their clothes, especially. The one who was carrying the Magnum, who was going to make sure that Don Gabriel’s wife died, was wearing a sharp white guayabera with stitching on the front. The one carrying the Uzi was in a green serge jacket, maybe two sizes too big.”
“Ay, the things you know about clothes, darling,” said the whore.
“I was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and some drill pants that Cochrane had bought for me and already taken out of my weekly pay. The pants were too big and I had to wear a belt to keep them up.”
“You’ve always been on the skinny side, sugar,” said the whore.
“All around me it was the different outfits that were moving, not the flesh-and-blood people. Everything was clear. The afternoon had no secrets! But at the same time, everything was out of whack. I saw skirts, pants, shoes, white tights and black tights, socks, handkerchiefs, jackets, ties, a whole store’s worth of clothes, I saw cowboy hats and straw hats, baseball caps and hair ribbons, and all the clothes flowed along the sidewalk, flowed through the arcade, completely removed from the reality of the pedestrians, as if the flesh they sat on repelled them. Happy people, is what I should have been thinking. I should have envied them. Wanted to be them. People with money in their pockets or not, but glad to be on their way to the movie theater or the record store or anywhere, people going to eat or drink beer, or on the way home after a walk. But what I thought was: all those clothes. All those clean, new, useless clothes.”
“You were probably thinking about the blood, darling,” said the whore.
“No, I wasn’t thinking about the bullet holes or the blood splattering everything. I was thinking about clothes, that’s all. About the motherfucking pants and shirts going back and forth.”
“Don’t you want me to go down on you, sugar?” asked the whore.
“No. Stay where you are. Don Gabriel’s wife, I didn’t see her clothes. I saw her pearl necklace. Like a solar system. And I saw everything about the couple of fat slobs who were with me: the way they looked at each other, the shiny jackets, the dark ties, the white shirts, and the shoes, how to describe them, leather shoes that weren’t old but weren’t new, either, shoes for jerk-offs and scum, shoes for losers, with creases where you can see the pathetic celebrations and fears of men who’ve sold out everything and still think they can be happy or at least hold on to some kind of happiness, some dinner every once in a while, a Sunday with the family and the kids, the poor brats stuck in the desert, the crumpled photos good for squeezing out a couple of tears, tears that stink of shit. Yes, I saw their shoes and then I saw the parade of clothes in the air and I said to myself look at the waste, look at the wealth in this city of sin.”
“Now you’re exaggerating, love,” said the whore.
“No, I’m not. It happened exactly the way I’m telling you. Don Gabriel’s wife didn’t even realize that death was on top of her. But the slobs from Tijuana and I saw it and right away we knew what we were seeing. The killers walked like movie stars. Like a weird cross between movie stars and clerks. They walked slowly, not bothering to really hide their guns and never taking their eyes off us for a second. I guess that was when my buddies decided they’d had enough. Those looks, they were thinking, beat the looks they’d been exchanging and after a second, they just spun around and went running, no, not running, trotting like draft horses, swinging past the crowds of people on the sidewalk and the arcade. They didn’t say a thing to me. And I had no time to yell assholes, cowards, faggots.”
“The worst kind of trash, darling,” said the whore.
“I stood there motionless, next to the señora, who didn’t know what was going on, why we had stopped, noticing how my white shirt and drill pants were shivering, too big, if my belt hadn’t been pulled tight they would’ve fallen down and lain there shivering on the ground. But I also had time to get a look at the killers. One of them, the one with the Magnum, walked on as if he hadn’t noticed a thing, and the other one smiled at the sight of my two buddies running off, as if to say life is funny isn’t it, as if to say running away isn’t cowardice, it just means you’re light on your feet. I noticed the one with the Magnum: he reminded me of someone from Villaviciosa. There was something sad and serious about him and he wasn’t so young anymore, or that’s how it seemed to me. Not the other one, I’m sure the other one was from the city. Then people began to back away, probably because they saw the guns or because all of a sudden they realized that there was going to be a shoot-out or because they got a look at the señora and me and thought we looked like goners.”
“I can imagine how scared you must have been, love,” said the whore.
“I wasn’t afraid. I waited until they were just fifteen feet away and when I had them there, before anyone could scream, I pulled my gun out nice and easy, no sudden movements, and took them both down. The assholes never got a shot out. The one with the Uzi died with a look of surprise on his face. Then I turned, angrily, since rage was all I felt then, and I emptied the rest of the clip at the slobs from Tijuana trotting away, but they were already too far. I think I wounded a bystander.”
“You’re a real son of a bitch, darling,” said the whore.
“They held me for five hours at the General Sepúlveda police station. Don Gabriel’s wife told the police that I was her bodyguard but they didn’t believe her. Before they put me in the patrol car I told her to call her husband and then go to some coffee shop to wait for him and not come out, and if there was a way to lock herself in the bathroom at the coffee shop, she should go ahead and do it. Then they cuffed me, put me in the patrol car, and took me to the station.”