Serpiente Oculta

The only reason he agreed to meet me, he says. is that his life was over.

Estoy muerto pero no me acuesto, was how he puts it. I am dead but I won’t lie down.

I sit on a  bench in the Bosque de Chapultepec, just outside the castle, the location texted to my phone an hour before. I wonder what he will look like, scan the faces in the crowd over the fold of my newspaper. The hot air is greasy with the smoke of the food trucks parked in a long row by the gate. Volkswagen taxis rattle down the cobbles, engines braying like geese as they tear around the corners.

And then he is sitting on the bench next to me.

He sets down a paper bag between us.

He gets up and is gone.

In the bag is a motel key. The next meeting, face to face.

I arrive early, but he is already waiting for me. He does not look as I remember, though I saw him just yesterday. For a moment I wonder if it is indeed the same man.

My doubts vanish as soon as he speaks, for the voice is the same as on the telephone. It is a soft voice, yet his precise pronunciation gives it an unnatural force, like a steel spike driven into concrete.

“Before I begin,” he says, “I must tell you something.  The stories I will give you are tales of evil, the deepest evil with no redemption in them. Your face tells me that you wonder why I wish to tell them to you. I can give only what is perhaps an unsatisfactory answer: that time will heal everything except lies. The truth is often ugly, often evil. Yet it is the truth. Do you still wish to hear it?”

His pupils so dilated that his eyes are shiny black with a thin corona of brown iris. They seem to be a cave into which I will tumble. My body shakes with an urge to flee, close the door behind me, drive to the airport and forget all of this.

Yet the eyes compel me. “Yes,” I hear myself saying. “I wish to hear it.”

From somewhere he produces a bottle of handblown glass, the bubbles trapped in its sides. He swiftly gets up and takes a pair of the motel glasses, tearing the paper covers from them and pouring them half-full of a murky amber liquid. He hands one to me, holds up his own.

“To truth,” he says with dark solemnity.

We drain the glasses and I feel the fire of the raw mescal spreading through me like ripples in a pond. He refills my glass, then sits back in the motel chair.

“I cannot tell you how I came to this profession,” he says. “It was not a decision I made all at once. My family came from central Mexico, a place so poor as to defy belief. We came north, to the border. My mother and father went to the maquilas to work fifteen, eighteen hours, six days a week. We children were left on our own. In Ciudad Juárez I went to school. I was a good student, learned English and algebra. I dreamed of going to university to become a poet like Lorca or José Martí. When I was sixteen, a man offered us fifty US dollars to drive a car across the bridge into El Paso, leave the car and walk away. I never asked what was in the cars. It was more money than my father made in a week of work.”

He sips from his glass, then drains it. He motions for me to do the same.

“Drink. We must stay even to take this journey together.”  

I drink, the room growing dim at the edges as he refills my glass. The mezcal has a smoky taste, the smell of a fire burning far away across the desert.

“The Juárez police recruited some of us. We were paid two hundred pesos a month, plus bonuses. Weekends were long parties with drugs and liquor and whores. I was eighteen. They sent me to train with the FBI, where I learned how to use weapons, to surveil, to command a squad of men. I was put in charge of the kidnapping task force. Our job was to prevent kidnapping, but what we really did was to kidnap the victims ourselves, hold them for a while, and then give them to the other unit to be killed. This took less time than guarding the victim while waiting for the ransom. Sometimes we would be told where the body was hidden and pretend to discover it. Other times, the victim would simply vanish. “

He lights a cigarette, sips from his glass. “This was back in the days when things made sense.”

He tells me that in 1997 the head of Juárez cartel was assassinated. The payments to the FBI stopped. The units were on their own.

“When I started, we bought all our drugs in El Paso. The cartel had warehouses of cocaine on the Mexico side of the border, but to slit open a kilo meant your life. After the assassination of El Jefé, there were no such rules. Men such as myself were in high demand. As I said earlier, I did not decide to become a sicario. There was never a choice. It was a new world, and I became a new man. Before, it was organized. When the chaos came, it became something else. A game, but a game such a Satan himself would devise.

“There was a man who rose in the organization, a man of bottomless cruelty, of endless evil. I will give you an example. There was a rumor that one of his lieutenants wanted to make a move, to acquire territory for himself. This lieutenant had a large family. Men were sent to this lieutenant’s house. They took his youngest, a baby girl of three months, and put her in a pot on a stove. In front of the entire family they boiled the baby alive. It took two hours for the child to die. As we left, the boss told the lieutenant that he would force the family to eat the next child he killed. Another time he rounded up the entire staff of the Juárez newspaper and hung them by their heels in a public park, slitting their throats and pulling their tongues through. These are but two examples I have seen with my own eyes.”

As he talks I can see the town square drenched with blood, recall the photos of the charred remains of judges and police officers with burned tires around their necks. I can smell the coppery blood and singed flesh, hear the wails of the bereaved.

As I sit in this anonymous motel room, I am afraid. “How many?” I hear myself asking, my voice far away.

“How many have I killed?” His tone is flat, but it seems he is smiling. “It is bad luck to count. Three hundred? Five hundred? Most were taken in the night, bound and gagged and driven to the desert. These were killed cleanly and put into holes. To their families, they simply vanished.”

“Did you ever ask why?”

He stares at me, the black eyes like holes in the night sky. “I knew why. As I know now I am telling you this. It is truth, and must be heard.” 

He fills our glasses again. I drink automatically, finish in one gulp. My stomach tightens into a fist, and the world swims around me.

“I am a dead man now,” he says, lighting another cigarette. “They have given the signal. Anyone can kill me on sight. There is no headquarters, no recourse for clemency or appeal. It is an event that will happen. I am like a coin whose fate was written the moment it was struck. One side heads, the other, tails. This coin is passed from hand to hand and wears thinner with each transaction. One time it is used to purchase medicine for saving a life; another time, for a knife that takes one. Highest of all its callings is when the coin is used to turn fate itself, tossed in the air to make a decision. Whether the decision is important or trivial is beside the point. The coin itself has no agency in the decision. It is a catalyst, causing the reaction without taking part in it.”

We sit in the motel room, the empty bottle between us.  He looks now like an old man, hunched and beaten. It is as though he’s aged several decades during our conversation. When he looks up at me, I can see his eyes are brown and bloodshot, the pupils reduced to tiny black pinpricks.

“I never knew the reason for the killings, just as I do not know the reason for my own death warrant. It has never been mine to know.  Perhaps in the end there is nothing to know.”

When I awake the next morning, he is gone. So is the bottle, the ashtray, and any trace he was ever here. My head throbs as though it was split by a hatchet, my back twisted with cramp from sleeping hours in this uncomfortable chair.

I stagger to the bathroom and kneel at the toilet, retching up the bitter dregs of the mezcal. The memory of what he told me will never leave. I have crossed the bridge into a country I never wanted even to visit, a place where such things as he told me not only exist but are commonplace.

A place where I will dwell forever.

 

With apologies to Charles Bowden, a man who will always have my utmost respect and admiration. You can read his Harper’s article here.