Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition (21 page)

He looks confused, but driving a cab is a decent job and it won’t do to offend foreign passengers by questioning their orders. The car leaves the patch of downtown hotels and enters the real Mexico City. It is colorful and, at first, relatively prosperous. As we drive in the direction of 
El Paraíso
, however, the income of the residents drops precipitously, as do the quality of the road and the state of the buildings. Finally my driver can’t stay quiet any longer.

“Are you quite sure this is the direction you wish to go sir? The D.F.—Mexico City, I mean—is confusing, even for those of us who grew up here. Perhaps you intended… ”

He begins to construct excuses so that I can change my destination without losing face.

“This is just fine, we’re going the right way,” I tell him, looking out at a woman in the street who is fetching water from a rain barrel. After filling her pot she closes the barrel’s lid and padlocks it. I turn back to the driver. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Emilio sir,” he says, evidently hesitant to add his last name in case I intend to complain to his boss.

“Emilio, I’m going to the 
El Paraíso
, you understand?”

He doesn’t nod or say ‘yes,’ but from the widening of his eyes in the rearview mirror I can tell he understands perfectly well.

“Now, I wouldn’t ask you to drive me all the way there. I know it’s not safe. I know you don’t want to go there, and I know you don’t want to have to tell your boss that you dropped off some foolish gringo in there, am I right?”

“I would rather not sir, no.”

“Fine. What I’d like you to do is to take me about another two kilometers. From there I’ll walk. The only thing I want from you after that is directions, okay? Can you do that?”

“Of course,” he says. He still looks apprehensive, but somewhat relieved, as though he doesn’t have to worry about himself any more but can’t help wondering what’s going to happen to me.

For a while we drive in silence. Emilio watches the odometer the whole way. Eventually he draws to a careful stop.

“This is two kilometers sir.”

We’re surrounded by a neighborhood of closely-packed, low-rise apartments, most with rickety balconies. Clothes flap on innumerable clotheslines, and children play games of tag. There are chickens, some in pens and some loose, and below the balconies raggedy stray dogs dig in the dirt and play-fight with one another.

I tell Emilio the address I’m looking for, which Machiko gave me this morning. I suppose it’s well known, because on hearing it go he loses all civility and all worry about his job. He leaps from the cab and pulls my door open.

“Out senõr. Get out of my cab now.”

I climb out. The odor of the neighborhood is upon me immediately: animal dung, sweat, vegetables cooking, sewage, wood smoke, laundry.

“I only want directions.”

“I know nothing about such a place,” he says, crossing himself.

“So why are you crossing yourself? If you know nothing about it, it might be a monastery, or an orphanage.”

“You know it isn’t.”

“Yes, and so do you. Now all I want is directions.”

“No senõr. I will not. If you belong in such a place you will find it yourself. You don’t belong in my cab, that is the truth.”

With that he slams my door, gets back in, slams his own door behind him, and disappears in a cloud of dust and exhaust. As soon as the cab leaves, the local children surround me, begging in Spanish for money. One of the older girls, still a teenager, tries to nuzzle up against me. I gently move her to arm’s length and hold her there. I drop a handful of change in the dirt to divert the other children, then lead the girl by the arm to a spot a few meters down the road. She misunderstands me and begins leading me toward one of the buildings, but I stop her.

“No, no sex.”

She looks confused. Maybe it’s just that she was certain I wanted sex. What else has any gringo ever wanted from her? Or maybe, given where she lives, she’s never heard a machine translation before. The combination of my natural voice, speaking in English, with the mechanical overlay of Spanish, sounds strange even to my ears, and I’m used to it.

“What do you want?”

Her voice in the original Spanish is melodious, but suspicious. The English translation in my ear is flat and emotionless, but functional. I’ve used the kaikki for translation enough times and in enough languages that I’m used to listening to both voices at once and can get a fairly accurate impression, not only of the words being spoken, but of the speaker’s intonation and mood. It’s a habit I formed early so it’s hard to avoid doing it, even when I want to, as I often did in Tijuana. There—I know from my dreams and my piecemeal memories—I would have done anything to avoid hearing the emotional content of what people were saying: cursing, begging, imploring, despairing. I shake my head to clear it of the memory. Taking out a ten-peso bill, I show it to her.

“I need you to lead me to an address. I’ll give you ten pesos now, fifty more when we get there.”

Sixty pesos is no doubt more than she’s ever had at one time before, several months’ earnings at least, even though it’s only about twenty dollars at today’s exchange rates. I again recite the address Machiko gave me. I feel like shit because the moment I’ve said it the girl turns pale, but I’m holding out the ten peso note and there are fifty pesos more on the line. It will convince her, against her better judgment, to take me where I want to go. I loathe using her poverty against her this way, but it’s the only way to get the job done. After a moment she gives an abrupt nod and snatches the bill from my hand. She turns and begins walking and I trot to catch up with her.

As we walk, the neighborhood around us seems to deteriorate before my eyes. I thought it looked poor and run down where we started, but what do I know? I’m from Cali, and things are measured differently here. Poverty has a deeper, harsher bottom than it does in L.A. The clothes on the people, children and adult alike, become more ragged. Their faces look prematurely old and empty of emotion. The smell gets worse and the sun ripens it. The heat is so intense it threatens to press me into the earth and bury me there.

In one area three adjacent buildings have partially collapsed in an earthquake and run together into a pile of brick, mortar, snapped wood beams, and bits of paper. It looks like a mudslide. Parts of the buildings remain standing and, amazingly, people live there. I can see them moving around, hear them talking and shouting. In some places they’ve hung blankets from clotheslines, or nailed them over the open spaces, to protect their privacy where the earthquake sucked away walls, leaving the interior rooms visible to the outside world. I can’t imagine how they keep their children from falling off the edges where the floors abruptly disappear. Maybe children do fall sometimes, I don’t know.

Mexico City has occasional earthquakes and in that way it resembles L.A. Los Angeles lies on top of five fault lines. Each one is named after a neighborhood, some of which are gone now: the Hollywood, the Santa Monica, the Newport-Inglewood, the MacArthur Park, and the Echo Park. I’ve seen buildings demolished like these are, people killed, cars crushed, stores burst open, their goods strewn into the street like the pulp of fruit that’s been stepped on. But in L.A. there’s money to rebuild and there’s the political will to restore what’s been destroyed. Maybe in some parts of Mexico City those things exist, but they aren’t in evidence here. From the weathering on the partially fallen buildings I can see that they have been sitting, skewed and partially gutted, for a few years at least.

As we move further into the slum, the music changes, too. When I got out of the cab I immediately noticed the racket of numerous stereos. The music came from shops, from homes, from cars. At that point the music was largely Latin pop: bouncy dance songs and smooth love ballads. Here, though, the music is aggressive, assaultive. Latin beats still form the foundation, but on top of that angry, crunching guitars spit and crackle while singers chant bitterly. Most of the lyrics are in Spanish, but some are Nahuatl, the ancient Aztec language that many people use even now. Still others use dialects that I can’t identify and that the kaikki can’t process. Sometimes the traditional rhythms are slowed to a crawl, the guitars are replaced with forlorn synthesizers, and the lyrics are sung quietly, desperately, creating tunes that are gothic and macabre.

A new feature that appears as we move deeper into 
El Paraíso
 is the soap-box preacher. I notice one, then another, and then suddenly they seem to be everywhere, screaming, hollering, bellowing, pronouncing, intoning, and every single one of them sweating like crazy. The babble of voices is too much for the kaikki to keep up with, though I can catch words and phrases here and there with the directional mic as I direct my gaze at one street-corner savior and then another. Some wave Bibles. Others have only tracts, or no written material at all, but invoke the names of ancient Aztec or Maya gods, describing their powers and their roles according to each religion or cult. There is Cihuacaotyl, the Aztec god whose howl signals the beginning of war; Kisin, the Mayan god of earthquakes and death; and Yum Kaax, the Mayan god of maize and bounty. The preachers—if that is the right word—spread their messages, using these symbols to threaten doom, promise food, seek converts. Some hold up texts I can’t identify, likely from cults that have flourished here as the poverty intensified over the centuries. One book’s cover shows a woman riding a ray of light. A poster portrays three old men arm in arm, staring out at me like fates. A leather-bound volume has nothing on its cover but a gold-embossed bull.

There are also stalls where women sell potions. Most likely such things are sold in the nicer neighborhoods as well, but indoors, in shops. Here the people’s mythology invades the streets. There are multi-colored bottles filled with colored liquid and stuffed with amulets and magical herbs, all intended to ward off the evil eye, attract a mate, get revenge, make money, or fulfill any of a thousand other dreams. I can understand why Suarez has located his cult here. Aside from growing up here, he has a natural population from which to draw converts. Like the poor anywhere they are made superstitious by their desperation, open to anything that might improve their lives or solve their problems.

As though the thought of Suarez has brought me closer to him, I realize that we're approaching our destination. The symbol of the 
Suerte
 is a red hand print, symbolizing the bloody mark left by the murderer who steals the luck of his victim. I notice one on a wall, then on a doorway, then several on the scarred hull of a wheel-less, abandoned car. Soon they are everywhere, sometimes random, sometimes arranged in patterns. I know from my research that the rules concerning their display are very strict: you do not make the mark unless you have committed the murder it stands for. Every handprint I see—and as we walk further there are hundreds upon hundreds of them, forests of them—represents a human being slaughtered for the sake of the killer’s own good fortune.

The girl leads me across a street and we pass through a no man’s land where an earthquake has completely leveled the buildings for a hundred meters or so. On the other side of this gap my guide comes to a stop. She looks back at me, points forward, then opens her hand. There’s no need to resort to a translation, obviously we’ve arrived. I hand her a fifty peso note then, as an afterthought, give her another. She looks at me and I see a bouquet of expressions cross her features: shock, gratitude, envy, cunning. She’s surprised by the bonus, she loves the money I’ve given her, she hates me for the ease with which I can hand it out, and she would like to get closer to that roll of fifty peso notes in my pocket. She takes my hand and squeezes it gently.

“If you come back this way... ” she says, forcing herself to be inviting. I can almost hear her thinking. 
Maybe if I see him again I can get him in bed, maybe the
 
fifties will keep coming, maybe he will even want a girlfriend
. I let her hand go.

“Maybe,” I say, intending no such thing but not able to bring myself to crush her hopes. She’s street-smart, though, and she knows a lie when she hears one. Angry, she spits at my feet and stamps back toward home.

I turn and look back at the other side of the open space cleared by the quake. There the will and the resources to rebuild 
do
 exist. Every building has been repaired, resurfaced, repainted. Perhaps it’s a mistake to say ‘every building,’ as there don’t seem to be individual buildings. Each house or apartment building has been joined to the next by a network of walls, bridges, and struts that have turned several blocks of real estate into a single, walled complex: a palace, a fortress, and a church all in one. Here there are no red hands—that's for the outside world. Here there is simply a grand, quiet, imposing structure. At first it seems to be unpopulated, until I realize that I’m being watched by sentries on several rooftops.

A moment later a door opens in a wall nearby and a figure emerges, a man with shoulder-length dark hair, dressed in jeans and a white, gauzy shirt. He approaches me purposefully, confidently, and as he gets closer I realize to my surprise that it’s Suarez. I had expected that some underling would take me to the great leader, like a foreign emissary being led to a king, but here is the man himself.

He has an angular, sculpted face—more indigenous than European—a bright smile, and cheerful brown eyes. When he’s within steps of me I realize he isn’t going to stop and suddenly he’s embracing me warmly. It lasts only a moment, then he holds me at arm’s length, like a father regarding a son he hasn’t seen in a long time.

“Gat Burroughs, welcome. Welcome to my home, to the home of the 
Suerte
. You are a guest here and our hospitality is yours. I’m Vicente, as you must have guessed.”

“Your English is very good,” I say, removing the headpiece and stowing it back in my pocket. Machiko hadn’t told me Suarez spoke English—maybe she assumed I knew.

“I’ve had a long time to learn it,” he says, then laughs. It’s not a madman’s laugh, just a laugh. If anything it’s a little understated. This is a man who knows he has nothing to prove. He can afford to be good humored. I notice that he’s not tall, only about five foot seven or eight, but he doesn’t have to be. His presence is commanding enough without height.