“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Following you,” he said simply.
“Why?”
“Habit. You were under surveillance.”
“By you?”
“Me and my teammates.”
So she’d been right. She had seen him before the confrontation at Emilio’s house. Up close she was able to place him: he’d been at the diner. He’d cocked his head a little, smiled at her while he lit a cigarette. Now she remembered.
“You played a song,” she said and then she frowned. “Am I under surveillance again?”
“No. That’s all over. Plus, it would be pretty dumb for me to talk to you if that was the case.”
“Why are you talking to me?”
“I’m curious about you. And I told myself I would. Talk to you, that is. After it was all over.”
It was odd how she wasn’t nervous, sitting there, talking to a killer. Because the young man was a killer and God knew what else. Maybe she was tired. She felt old, as if life had drained out of her body, and her soul was as numb as her cold hands.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I was a Hawk. I’m not anything in particular now.”
“I meant what’s your name.”
“Oh. That. I suppose it’s Ermenegildo,” he said.
“Suppose?”
“Yeah. I could tell you. Over coffee. It’s kind of cold in this bus.”
“I’m headed home.”
“I know.”
She looked ahead. The bus was slowly rolling down the avenue. The man took out a cigarette and offered one to her. She shook her head. He lit his cigarette, took two puffs.
“There’s a café over there,” he said, pointing at the street corner coming up ahead. “It’s nice. Or you want to hit that joint of yours with the jukebox?”
“I’m going home.”
“You scared of me?”
She didn’t reply. He smoked his cigarette and leaned forward, resting his forearms on the seat in front of him. “I saw your record collection in your apartment. It’s impressive.”
“You were in my apartment.”
“Told you: surveillance.”
She pictured him and his buddies going through her drawers, sitting in her atelier and sliding their hands over her books, her records. Her meaningless, dull life laid bare to strangers.
“Anyway, I was wondering why you’ve got the Prysock cover, not the Bennett.”
“That is what you want to know? That is why you followed me onto this bus?” she said, her voice suddenly tinted with anger.
He turned his head and looked at her. His hair was shaggy and wet with rain, water droplets sliding down his neck, and his eyes were twin black abysses. They were painted with ink, like the eyes of a comic book character.
“I don’t know what I want, don’t know who I am,” he said, and the smoke curled up from his mouth. “I don’t know anything. But I can’t stand being alone right now.”
She thought of the jungle, as she’d seen it in those cheap romance stories she liked to read. The quality of that jungle sky came back to her. That’s what his eyes were like: the night on the printed page. Blacker than the night outside the bus, the real and tangible night awaiting them here—because in the city there were lights from buildings and cars. But the night in the comic books was smeared on the page and did not allow any light. Even the moon did not provide illumination: it was a circle, the size of a coin. The absence of ink but not the presence of light.
The moon did not glow.
“I’m getting off at the next stop and I’m going back to that café,” he said. He sounded tired too. Like her.
She clutched her bag and pressed her lips together. The bus neared the curb, and the young man climbed off it. The semaphore light was red. She saw him, with his cigarette in his mouth, standing on the sidewalk for a moment, before the light changed and the bus stuttered forward.
He was mad. That was clear. Who else but a madman would come looking for her like this? Who would look for her at all?
Crazy killer, crazy man standing back there, in the rain, walking back to his café. Maite thought of the safety of her apartment, of the parakeet in its cage and her collection of stolen trinkets. She thought of playing “Strangers in the Night” and sinking into the shadows of her living room and dancing alone, dancing on her own, as usual. As she should.
At the next stoplight she jumped off the bus. The rain fell slow and steady, making music of its own. She stood in the middle of the sidewalk with her umbrella in one hand and her grocery bag in the other, looking down the street in the direction of the café.
She wondered what would happen if she started walking there, if she did not head immediately home.
She wondered what kind of story started like this.
She saw a figure in the distance, hazy, and he waved at her. Maite held her breath.
Afterword
THE TELEGRAM THAT opens this book is a real message sent by the CIA. One Thursday in 1971, a shock group funded and organized by the Mexican government attacked a group of students marching through a large avenue in Mexico City. The Hawks (Los Halcones) had been trained by Mexican authorities with support of the CIA in an effort to squelch communism in Mexico and suppress dissent. Hundreds of protesters were injured or killed during what became known as El Halconazo or the Corpus Christi Massacre. President Luis Echeverría and local authorities, including Mexico City’s regent, Alfonso Martínez Domínguez, denied the existence of the Hawks or shifted the blame.
As a result of this attack, simmering guerilla action in Mexico increased, as incensed students decided that one could not reason with the authorities. Meanwhile, the Hawks were disbanded. However, repressive action against activists and guerilla fighters did not cease. Through a group known as the Brigada Blanca, the government abducted, tortured, incarcerated, and murdered Mexican citizens during the decade of the 1970s. This was known as the Dirty War (Guerra Sucia).
Music debates had been heating up in Mexico for years. In upper-class neighborhoods, government approved “singing cafes” could play the music the government sanctioned, harmless covers of American songs. But by the late sixties, most of these venues had closed down. The government claimed they fomented rebellion and anti-nationalist values. A few months after the Halconazo, the Festival de Rock y Ruedas de Avándaro took place. It was called the “Mexican Woodstock.” Subsequently, President Echeverría outlawed rock concerts, and the government demanded that records played on the radio be free of content that offended morality. In response, young people of the lower classes organized clandestine reunions called “funky pits,” but the rock scene suffered greatly.