2666

by Roberto Bolaño

another joke, international this time: why is the Statue of Liberty a woman? Because they needed an empty head for the observation deck. And another: how many parts is a woman’s brain divided into? Pues that depends, valedores! Depends on what, González? Depends how hard you hit her. And on a roll now: why can’t women count to seventy? Because by the time they get to sixty-nine their mouths are full. And still going strong: what’s dumber than a dumb man? (An easy one.) Pues a smart woman. And full throttle: why don’t men lend their cars to women? Pues because there’s no road from the bedroom to the kitchen. And in the same vein: what does a woman do outside the kitchen? Pues wait for the floor to dry. And a variation: what do you call a neuron in a woman’s brain? Pues a tourist. And then the same inspector laughed again and said excellent, González, brilliant, neuron, yes, sir, tourist, brilliant.

González, tireless, went on: how do you pick the three dumbest women in the world? Pues at random. Get it? At random! It makes no difference! And: how do you give a woman more freedom? Pues get her a bigger kitchen. And: how do you give a woman even more freedom? Pues plug the iron into an extension cord. And: how long does it take a woman to die who’s been shot in the head? Pues seven or eight hours, depending on how long it takes the bullet to find the brain. Brain, yes, sir, mused the inspector. And if someon...

And: what’s a man doing when he throws a woman out of the window? Pues polluting the environment. And: how is a woman like a squash ball? Pues the harder you hit her, the faster she comes back. And: why do kitchens have windows? Pues so that women can see the world. Until at last González wore himself out and got a beer and dropped into a chair and the rest of the policemen went back to their eggs. Then the inspector, exhausted after a night’s work, wondered to himself how much of God’s truth lay hidden in ordinary jokes.

The truth is in what it says about men in that society

God’s truth, said the inspector. Who the fuck comes up with jokes? asked the inspector. And sayings? Where the fuck do they come from? Who’s the first to think them up? Who’s the first to tell them? And after a few seconds of silence, with his eyes closed, as if he’d fallen asleep, the inspector half opened his left eye and said: listen to the one-eyed man, you bastards. A woman’s path lies from the kitchen to the bedroom, with a beating along the way. Or he said: women are like laws, they were made to be broken. And the laughter was general. A great blanket of laughter rose over the long room, as if death were being tossed in it.

Not all of the cops laughed, of course. Some, at the farthest tables, polished off their eggs with chile or their eggs with meat or their eggs with beans in silence or talked among themselves, about their own business, separate from the others. They ate, it might be said, hunched over in anguish and doubt. Hunched over in contemplation of essential questions, which doesn’t get you anywhere. Numb with sleep: in other words with their backs turned to the laughter that invited a different kind of sleep. Meanwhile, leaning at the ends of the bar, others drank without a word, just watching the commotion, or murmuring what a load of shit, or not murmuring a thing, simply taking a mental snapshot of the crooked cops and inspectors.

Complicit

The next day the soldier got his throat cut and nine months later a girl was born, called María Expósito.

Maria #1

In 1881, when María Expósito was fifteen, on the feast day of San Dimas, a drunk from another town carried her off on his horse, singing at the top of his lungs: Qué chingaderas son estas / Dimas le dijo a Gestas.

In 1882, María Expósito gave birth to a child who was baptized María Expósito Expósito, said the voice, and the girl was the wonder of the peasants of Villaviciosa.

Maria #2

In 1898, after she had been away for seven days, María Expósito appeared one morning in the Villaviciosa plaza, a bare space in the center of town, with a broken arm and bruises all over her body. She would never explain what had happened to her, nor did the old women who tended to her insist that she tell. Nine months later a girl was born and given the name María Expósito, and her mother, who never married or had more children or lived with any man, initiated her into the secret art of healing.

Maria #3

the young María Expósito resembled her mother only in her good nature, a quality shared by all the María Expósitos of Villaviciosa.

In any case, nine months later María Expósito Expósito was born, and young María Expósito, now a mother herself, set to work selling potions and the eggs from her own henhouse in the neighboring towns and she didn’t do badly.

Maria #4

In 1917, there was an unusual development in the Expósito family: María, after one of her trips, got pregnant again and this time she had a boy. He was named Rafael. His eyes were green like those of his distant Belgian great-grandfather and there was something strange about his gaze, the same strangeness that outsiders noted in the townspeople of Villaviciosa: they had the opaque, intense stare of killers.

In 1934, after a Homeric bender, the bullfighter Celestino Arraya and his comrades from the club Los Charros de la Muerte came to Villaviciosa in the early morning hours and took rooms at a tavern that no longer exists and that in those days offered beds for travelers. They shouted for roast goat, which they were served by three village girls. One of those girls was María Expósito. By twelve the next day they were gone, and three months later María Expósito confessed to her mother that she was going to have a baby.

Maria #5

She was the first of her lineage, said the voice, or the voices, who learned to read and write. At eighteen she was raped by a peddler, and in 1953 a girl was born who was called María Expósito. By then there were five generations of María Expósitos living outside Villaviciosa, and the little house had grown, with rooms added on and a big kitchen with a gas stove and a wood fire where the eldest prepared her brews and medicaments.

Maria #6

Against the wishes of the family, who wanted to baptize the boy Rafael, María Expósito called him Olegario, the patron saint of hunters and a Catalan monk in the twelfth century, bishop of Barcelona and archbishop of Tarragona, and she also decided that the first half of her son’s last name wouldn’t be Expósito, which was a name for orphans, as the students from Mexico City had explained to her one of the nights she spent with them, said the voice, but Cura, and that was how she entered it in the register at the parish of San Cipriano, twenty miles from Villaviciosa, Olegario Cura Expósito, despite the questioning to which she was subjected by the priest and his incredulity about the identity of the alleged father.

Living in this desert, thought Lalo Cura as the car, with Epifanio at the wheel, left the field behind, is like living at sea. The border between Sonora and Arizona is a chain of haunted or enchanted islands. The cities and towns are boats. The desert is an endless sea. This is a good place for fish, especially deep-sea fish, not men.

As they were leaving the locker room, the inspector told him he shouldn’t try to find a logical explanation for the crimes. It’s fucked up, that’s the only explanation, said Márquez.

Sergio asked her if people were afraid. The mothers are, said the woman. Some fathers, too. But not people in general, I don’t think.

Yolanda Palacio, was a woman of about thirty, fair-skinned and brown haired, formal in manner, although her formality betrayed glimpses of a yearning for happiness, a yearning for good times. But what are good times? Sergio González asked himself. Maybe they’re what separate certain people from the rest of us, who live in a state of perpetual sadness. The will to live, the will to fight, as his father used to say, but fight what? The inevitable? Fight who? And what for? More time, certain knowledge, the glimpse of something essential? As if there were anything essential in this shitty country, he thought, anything essential on this whole self-sucking motherfucker of a planet.

Sergio González glimpsed the desert moon, a fragment, a helicoidal slice, rising above the roofs.

how do you know these killings are the Santa Teresa killings? asked Sergio. Because they’re such a burden, said Florita. And because they come one after the other. Urged to explain herself better, she said that an ordinary murder (although there was no such thing as an ordinary murder) almost always ended with a liquid image, a lake or a well that after being disturbed grew calm again, whereas serial killings, like the killings in the border city, projected a heavy image, metallic or mineral, a smoldering image, say, that burned curtains, dancing, but the more curtains it burned the darker it grew in the bedroom or the living room or the shed or the barn where the killings took place.

Asked about the means of transportation he had used to get his unwitting wife out past the fifteen-mile marker on the Casas Negras highway or to dispose of the body there, supposing he had killed her elsewhere, which was a matter Pacheco refused to discuss despite the harshness of the interrogation, he stated that a friend had loaned him his car, an ‘87 Coyote, yellow with red flames on the sides, but the police were unable to find this friend or failed to search for him as diligently as the case warranted.

At the end of July, the Santa Teresa authorities, in collaboration with Sonora state officials, invited the investigator Albert Kessler to the city. When the news was made public some reporters, especially from Mexico City, asked the mayor, José Refugio de las Heras, if the hiring of the former FBI agent was a tacit acknowledgment that the Mexican police had failed. De las Heras replied that it wasn’t, not at all, that Mr. Kessler was coming to Santa Teresa to give a fifteen-hour professional training course to a select group of students chosen from among Sonora’s best officers and that Santa Teresa had been picked as the site for this course—over Hermosillo, for example—for its status as an industrial powerhouse as well as its sad record of serial killings, a blight previously unheard-of or almost unheard-of in Mexico, that they, the country’s top officials, wanted to halt in time, and what better way to eliminate a blight than by forming a police corps with expertise in the matter?

Who’s bringing in Albert Kessler? asked the reporters. Who’s going to pay for Mr. Kessler’s services? And how much? The city of Santa Teresa, the state of Sonora? Where will the money come from for Mr. Kessler’s fees? From the University of Santa Teresa, from the illicit funds of the state police? Will private sources be part of it? Is there some benefactor behind the visit of the eminent American investigator? And why now, why bring in a serial killer expert precisely now and not sooner? And also, aren’t there any Mexican criminologists capable of collaborating with the police? Professor Silverio García Correa, for example, isn’t he good enough? Wasn’t he the best psychologist of his year at UNAM? Didn’t he get a master’s in criminology from NYU and another master’s from Stanford? Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to hire Professor García Correa? Wouldn’t it have been more patriotic to entrust a Mexican affair to a Mexican, rather than an American?

Chuy Pimentel kept taking pictures. They show the lawyer, who seems about to shed a few tears. Of rage. The reporters have the gaze of reptiles: they watch Haas, who stares at the gray walls as if his lines are written on the crumbling cement.

According to her friends, María Estela had or had had a boyfriend, called El Chino. No one knew his real name, but they did know where he worked. Juan de Dios went to look for him at a hardware store in Colonia Serafin Garabito. He asked for El Chino and they told him they didn’t know anyone by that name. He described El Chino as he had been described by María Estela’s friends, but the response was the same: no one who answered to that name or fit that description had ever worked there, at the counter or in the back. He sent out his informants and for a few days he did nothing but search. But it was like looking for a phantom.

Being a criminologist in this country is like being a cryptographer at the North Pole. It’s like being a child in a cell block of pedophiles. It’s like being a beggar in the country of the deaf. It’s like being a condom in the realm of the Amazons, said Professor García Correa. If you’re mistreated, you get used to it. If you’re snubbed, you get used to it. If your life savings vanish, the money you were putting aside for retirement, you get used to it. If your son swindles you, you get used to it. If you have to keep working when by law you should be doing whatever you please, you get used to it. If on top of that your salary is cut, you get used to it. If you have to work for crooked lawyers and corrupt detectives to supplement your pay, you get used to it.

he took a breath, as if he were about to tell a long story, and Chuy Pimentel chose that moment to take a picture of him. In it, because of the light and the angle, Haas looks much thinner, his neck long like a turkey’s, though not just any turkey but a singing turkey or a turkey about to break into song, not just sing, but break into song, a piercing song, a grating song, a song of shattered glass, but of glass bearing a strong resemblance to crystal, that is, to purity, to self-abnegation, to a total lack of deceitfulness.

As they walked away, Epifanio asked Lalo Cura what he thought. About the dead woman? asked Lalo. No, the crime scene, said Epifanio, lighting a cigarette. There is no crime scene, said Lalo. It’s been deliberately wiped clean. Epifanio started the car. Not deliberately, he said, stupidly, but it doesn’t matter. It’s been wiped clean.

Sometimes she invited me to visit and I loved to go, although my parents and grandparents weren’t eager for me to spend time with girls like Kelly, not because of her, of course, but because of her parents, for fear her architect father would in some way take advantage of his daughter’s friendship to gain access to what my family considered sacrosanct, the iron circle of our private life, which had resisted the onslaughts of revolution and repression that came after the Cristero uprising and the marginalization when the remnants of Porfirism—in fact, the remnants of Mexican Iturbidism—were roasted over a slow fire.

In my family’s view, I can tell you, real Mexicans were few and far between. Three hundred families in the whole country. Fifteen hundred or two thousand people. The rest were embittered Indians or resentful whites or violent people come from who knows where to destroy Mexico. Thieves, most of them. Upstarts. Fortune hunters. People without scruples.

The truth is, Kelly liked my house, I’d say she liked it better than her own, and ultimately it makes sense that she should have, and it says a great deal about the clarity of her taste, even as a girl. Or stubbornness, which might be the more fitting word. In this country we’ve always confused clarity with stubbornness, don’t you think? We think we’re clear-sighted when in fact we’re stubborn. In that sense, Kelly was very Mexican. She was stubborn, obstinate.

On his way back to the hotel, in one of the city council’s official cars, Kessler thought how nice and hospitable these people really were, just as he had believed Mexicans to be. That night, tired, he dreamed of a crater and a man pacing around it. That man is probably me, he said to himself in the dream, but it didn’t strike him as important and the image was lost.

I could write a treatise on the secret sources of Mexican sentimentalism. What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes and the eyes of others, we Mexicans. And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?

At eight-thirty, as he was glancing over the crime reports, two policemen came to get him. The policemen were utterly submissive in manner. They were like two whores allowed for the first time to dress their pimp, but Kessler didn’t notice.

The dead woman’s name was Angélica Ochoa and, as he was told by the policemen who were cordoning off the street, it looked more like a settling of scores than a sex crime. Shortly before the crime was committed, two cops saw a couple arguing heatedly on the sidewalk, next to the club El Vaquero, but they didn’t want to intervene, thinking it was a normal lovers’ spat. Angélica Ochoa had been shot through the left temple, the bullet exiting her right ear. A second bullet had pierced her cheek and exited the right side of her neck. There was a third bullet in her right knee. A fourth in her left thigh. And a fifth and last bullet in her right thigh. The sequence of shots, thought Juan de Dios Martínez, was probably fifth to first, the coup de grâce delivered to the left temple. At the moment the shots were fired, where were the policemen who had seen the couple fighting? When they were questioned, they couldn’t give a coherent explanation.

Angélica Ochoa was his wife, and it seems La Venada had heard she was planning to leave him. Most likely, thought Juan de Dios sitting behind the wheel of his car, parked on a dark corner, the murder hadn’t been premeditated. At first La Venada probably just wanted to hurt or scare or warn her, thus the bullet in the right thigh, then, upon seeing Angélica’s expression of pain or surprise, he felt not only rage but amusement, the darkest expression of humor, which manifested itself in a desire for symmetry, and then he shot her in the left thigh. After that he lost control. The floodgates were open. Juan de Dios rested his head on the steering wheel and tried to cry but couldn’t. The attempts of the police to find La Venada were in vain. He had disappeared.

there’s lots of coke around here and all the filth that comes with it, and then Kessler looked out again at the landscape, fragmented or in the constant process of fragmentation, like a puzzle repeatedly assembled and disassembled,

they turned down a wider street, just as desolate, where even the brush was covered with a thick layer of dust, as if an atomic bomb had dropped nearby and no one had noticed, except the victims, thought Kessler, but they didn’t count because they’d lost their minds or were dead, even though they still walked and stared, their eyes and stares straight out of a Western, the stares of Indians or bad guys, of course, in other words lunatics, people living in another dimension, their gazes no longer able to touch us, we’re aware of them but they don’t touch us, they don’t adhere to our skin, they shoot straight through us, thought Kessler as he moved to roll down the window. No, don’t open it, said one of the inspectors. Why not? The smell, it smells like death. It stinks. Ten minutes later they reached the dump.

There are people who think our names are our destiny. I don’t believe that. But if they are, when Kelly chose that name she somehow took the first step into invisibility, into a nightmare. Do you think our names are our destiny? No, said Sergio, but then I wouldn’t. Why not? asked the congresswoman with a sigh, without curiosity. I have an ordinary name, said Sergio, fixing his gaze on his hostess’s dark glasses. For a moment, the congresswoman put her hands to her head, as if she had a migraine. Do you want me to tell you something? All names are ordinary, they’re all vulgar. Whether your name is Kelly or Luz María, it makes no difference in the end. All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we’re afraid to teach them.

The Sonora state attorney general, the assistant attorney general, the inspectors, said that the problem might be, perhaps was, could conceivably be, you might say, a problem of the city police, headed by Don Pedro Negrete, twin brother of the university rector. And Kessler asked who Pedro Negrete was, whether he had been introduced to him, and the two energetic young officers who had escorted him everywhere and whose English wasn’t bad, said no, in fact Mr. Kessler and Don Pedro hadn’t crossed paths, and Kessler asked them to describe him, since maybe he’d seen him the first day, at the airport, and the inspectors gave a brief description of the police chief, not very enthusiastically, a poor sketch, as if after having mentioned Pedro Negrete they regretted having done so. And the sketch didn’t suggest anything to Kessler. It remained mute. Crafted of hollow words.

When the reporters left the Santa Teresa penitentiary, the lawyer laid her head on the table and began to sob very softly, so unobtrusively that she didn’t seem like a white woman. Indian women cried like that. Some mestizas. But not white women and certainly not college-educated white women. When she felt Haas’s hand on her shoulder, his touch not a caress or even friendly, maybe just a token gesture, the few tears she’d let fall on the tabletop (a table that smelled of disinfectant and, strangely, of cordite) dried and she lifted her head and gazed at the pale face of her defendant, her beloved, her friend, a haughty and at the same time relaxed face (how could anyone be haughty and relaxed at the same time?), observing her with scientific rigor, not from that prison room but from the sulphurous vapors of another planet.

From the scavengers’ combined descriptions a police sketch was made of the suspected killer and police stations around the country were alerted. But the case went nowhere. María Elena’s ex-husband and boyfriend simply disappeared and were never heard of again.

But Kelly was like that, friends were sacred and she would always stand up for a friend. For example, when I joined the PRI there was a slight domestic upheaval, to call it something. Some reporters who had known me for years stopped talking to me. Others, the worst, still talked, but mostly behind my back.

As you’re well aware, this is a macho country full of faggots. The history of Mexico wouldn’t make sense otherwise.

The others, as you know, said I had joined the party out of self-interest. Of course I joined out of self-interest. But there are all kinds of self-interest and I was tired of preaching in a vacuum. I wanted power, that I won’t deny. I wanted free rein to change some things in this country. I won’t deny that either. I wanted to improve public health and the public schools and do my bit to prepare Mexic...

it wasn’t long before I realized my mistake. You think that from the inside you might change some things for the better. First you work from the outside, then you think that if you were inside the real possibilities for change would be greater. You think that inside, at least, you’ll have more freedom to act. Not true. There are things that can’t be changed from outside or inside. But here comes the funniest part. The really unbelievable part of the story (the sad story of Mexico or Latin America, it makes no difference). The part you can’t believe. When you make mistakes from inside, the mistakes stop mattering. Mistakes stop being mistakes. Making a mistake, butting your head against the wall, becomes a political virtue, a political tactic, gives you political presence, gets you media attention. At the moment of truth—which is every moment, or...

I went from being well-known to being famous. I was an attractive woman, I didn’t mince words, the dinosaurs of the PRI laughed at my jabs, the sharks of the PRI considered me one of their own, the Left wing of the party unanimously cheered my brazenness. I wasn’t aware of...

That night, around eleven, my friend called and the first thing he asked was whether it was a secure line. Bad sign, bad news, I thought instantly. In any case, I turned ice-cold again. I said the line was utterly secure. Then my friend told me that the name I’d given him (he was careful not to speak it) belonged to a banker who, according to his sources, laundered money for the Santa Teresa cartel, which was like saying the Sonora cartel. All right, I said. Then he said that this banker, in fact, owned not one ranch outside the city but several, although according to his sources there hadn’t been a party at any of them on the days my friend was in the area. In other words, there was no public party, he said, with society photos and that kind of thing. Do you understand what I mean? Yes, I said.

Then he said that to his knowledge, and this had been confirmed by his sources, the banker in question had good relations with the party. How good? I asked. Exemplary, he whispered. To what degree? I pressed. They go deep, very deep, said my friend. Then we said good night and I sat there thinking. Deep meant reaching far back in time, very far back, in other words millions of years back, in other words to the dinosaurs.