The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (30 page)

The Morales Vargas apartment consisted of probably two low-ceilinged bedrooms that we didn’t see but where, in the manner typical of the
vecindades
, beds were likely to be shared by children and even adults at night, just off the small living room, with an adjacent tiny kitchen. Inside the apartment, Karen’s mother, Ana María Vargas, was seated on the living room couch along with a few of her grandchildren and a Chihuahua. Ruth Marines, the mother of Rafael Rojas Marines, was sitting in an armchair next to the couch. A teenage girl sat at a small table absorbed in her laptop. Pablo and I sat on low plastic stools like the one the girl was sitting on, and Juan stood leaning in a corner. Bureaus and cabinets filled with religious statues and other souvenir-like objects crowded the room, which had the playroom clutter of a home where numerous small children reside, though there were actually few toys to be seen. A large television sat atop one cabinet. Family photographs and religious images covered the walls. One of the photographs, inside the largest frame, was of a handsome young man in a
fútbol
shirt, his name, Cesar Adrian Morales Vargas, in calligraphic lettering in the poster matting alongside the photo, with “5 Julio 1984–19 Agosto 2011” and some phrases such as “rest in peace . . . forever in our hearts,” though I don’t recall the exact words. Karen’s mother was a diminutive, pretty fortysomething woman, in a sweatshirt and jeans. Ruth Marines, in a dark dress, was taller and more heavyset, with a good-natured face that also suggested a strong character. Both had the classic Mexican features: prominent cheekbones, full lips, vivid dark eyes, and seemingly ageless brown skin. The mood in the room was warm and friendly. It didn’t feel like sitting down with two mothers who were facing the possible death of two children in the most horrific of circumstances. Mexican politeness, I thought, a nearly obliging levity, and also, maybe, the way mothers know they need to be when there are small children in the room. We talked about the Chihuahua, who was named Pecas and belonged to Karen’s younger sister Jéssica, the eighteen-year-old sitting at the computer. Karen’s Chihuahua, Chiquis, was Pecas’s mother, but as Karen was not there to take care of her, Chiquis had been sent to stay with in-laws. Karen and Alan Omar had three children.

Ana María, Karen’s mother, owned a little sidewalk stand outside the
vecindad
where she sold candies, popsicles, and
chicharrones.
That was now providing the family with what they had to live on. Karen had worked selling lingerie and bikinis from a stand out on the
eje
. Karen and her mother had an especially close bond. Pablo told me that Ana María did not hide even from her other children that Karen was her favorite. The last time Ana María saw Karen was at one in the morning on the Sunday of the
levantón
. She’d just packed away her candy stand, and was carrying out trash, and Karen came down the stairs and helped her. Alan Omar and their friend Monse—Monserrat Loza, also one of the disappeared—waited out on the sidewalk. Karen was wearing beige slacks and matching beige heels, and a loose black blouse embroidered in front with rhinestones. She was carrying a black bag with a golden chain strap—Jéssica piped up from the corner to add that the bag was studded. Karen had ironed her black hair even straighter than it already was but hadn’t put in a flip curl over her forehead, as she usually did when she went out for the night.

Alan Omar worked at a stand that repaired cell phones. Though married to Karen, he lived with his mother, María Victoria Barranco, in a neighboring apartment in the
vecindad
. The two families were tight-knit, sharing the duties of raising the three children
.
Alan Omar’s father was a merchant seaman from Ecuador who’d turned up in Tepito one day and stayed; now he was gravely ill. A fair-haired, light-skinned little boy, one of the children on the couch in the living room, had inherited the Ecuadoran’s features. Alan Omar was a devoted fan of América, the
fútbol
team that on Sunday night, May 26, would play Cruz Azul for the Mexican League championship. Alan Omar had planned to watch at home, and had asked his mother, before going out for the night with his wife and Monse, to have his favorite snacks ready. That Sunday afternoon, María Victoria prepared his platter of snacks for the championship match. The match, which América would win, was to begin at eight. As the hours went by and Alan Omar didn’t appear, she grew uneasy. Then she, along with the other families in Tepito, received Toñín’s terrible message.

Rafael Rojas Marines, thirty-three, sold sunglasses from a stand in front of the Tepito church. In 2004, he’d gone to prison for six years for robbery. He lived with his mother in Tepito. Ruth Marines sat up in her chair and spoke, with a slight smile that seemed both a little chagrined and resigned, about that Saturday night when she’d last seen her son. She knew he was headed out to an
antro,
as nightspots are called, and tried to talk him out of it. “You’re going out to fight,” she said. “Those places are full of trouble and you get crazy when you drink.” But Rafael had been in a bad motorcycle accident six months before, and surgeons had put metal plates and screws into his shattered arm and shoulder. “Don’t worry, Jefa,” he told her, “I’m going to behave, I couldn’t fight now even if I wanted to.” Later Marines would tell another interviewer, “When I saw my son leave, I felt something really bad, and I wanted to call him back so that he wouldn’t go out.” Only two days before his abduction,
Rafael had finally had the money to pay a dentist to implant false teeth to replace the three he’d lost in the accident.

“My son Cesar Adrian never set foot in prison,” said Ana María, referring to the young man in the memorial photograph on the wall. “He never gave me any trouble.
Era un chavo tranquilo
,
an easygoing boy.” He was a devotee of San Judas Tadeo, who is the “wholesome” saint, in comparison with La Santa Muerte. But two summers before, on August 19, 2011, Cesar Adrian had gotten into a fight out on the street not far from home. Another youth went to fetch his brother, and quickly it was three against one. Ana María, at her candy stand, heard the volley of gunshots. Cesar Adrian had received nine bullets yet managed to come running down the sidewalk to his mother. “Don’t worry,” he told her, “I’m going to get out of this, I can do it, I can. Don’t cry Mamá, I’m going to get out of this.” There was no ambulance at hand, so
“
luego luego,
” she flagged a taxi and rushed him to the nearest hospital, but he did not survive his wounds. Three months later, police arrested one of the youths who’d killed her son. The other two, though everyone knew who they were, remained at large. “And the one who was arrested,” said Ana María, “wasn’t even the one who’d fired the most shots.”

Now Jéssica stood up from the computer in which she’d been quietly engrossed throughout our conversation. She was entrancingly pretty, fresh-faced, cheerful. In the United States, I thought, she might be a classic cheerleader type, the kind of girl who always looks as if she must smell of soap and laundry detergent, her shimmering hair newly shampooed. A swath of brown belly showed in the space between her pressed T-shirt and spotless pale tight jeans. “He was shot nine times,” she said animatedly. “Four in the chest, and four, no three, in the back, and one in his
pompas,
” his butt. “That’s eight,” said her mother. “Twice in his
pompas,
” Jéssica added quickly.

“They left five children in the street,” said Ana María, referring to her slain son’s children. Two were now living with her, three with other families. Ana María has eleven grandchildren in all. “I was in really bad shape,” she said. Two of her son’s killers were free, but she was afraid to press charges, fearing for the lives of her other children. A psychologist provided by the city finally convinced her, and an arrest warrant was issued for the two, but nothing happened. “They’re still walking around these streets.”

Another teenager came into the living room. If possible, Brian was even more beautiful than his sister Jéssica. His features resembled hers and his long dark hair was just as lustrous. He was muscular and lithe, covered with tattoos and piercings, but shared his sister’s air of pulchritude, even if his T-shirt, “Rebel Fondue” printed on it, and fatigue pants were fashionably ripped. (I remembered Barbara Patterson in
The Savage Detective
s ranting about her boyfriend, that all he does is take showers, “because if nothing else Rafael is clean, like practically all fucking Mexicans,” an anthropological observation that, in my experience, is right on the mark.) Just that morning Brian had been let go from criminal detention, where he’d been held for three days for robbery. From the apartment his mother had heard screams down in the street and, heart in mouth, had run outside and seen the police taking her son away. A lady, Brian calmly explained, had accused him of stealing a cell phone and two hundred pesos, equivalent to about seventeen dollars, which he said he hadn’t done. The police wanted to charge him with aggravated robbery and
pandillarismo
, gang violence. But the woman hadn’t turned up to formally press charges, and so he’d been released.

The conversation turned to another photograph on the wall, of a young woman whose softly sensual face, with large almond eyes, was the most beautiful in the room. Pablo had mentioned to me before how struck he was by the beauty of many of the women he saw while walking around in Tepito. He’d been coming to Tepito several times a week, meeting with families, preparing a piece for
El País
that would include photographs and short profiles of each of the missing twelve, to be published a few days before or on June 26, which would mark a month since the
levantón
.
¹⁴
The woman in the photograph was named Nayali, and she’d been the only child of Ana-María’s sister-in-law, and a cousin of Jéssica and Brian. She’d been killed, seven years before, in Tepito, at age twenty, by a stray bullet.

It was as if the young dead on the walls had joined us. It was as if they—along with the missing, Karen, Alan Omar, and Rafael; and the certifiably living, mothers, brothers, a sister, orphaned grandchildren; Pablo and me—were conversing in this crowded
vecindad
living room. “Don’t cry, Mamá”—as if the photograph on the wall had spoken those words in sync with his mother. We were in the
Pedro Páramo
world of the murmuring, whispering, talkative dead. But this wasn’t Rulfo’s austere ghost poetry, just as bustling, dangerous Tepito hardly resembles abandoned, desolate Comala. This was more like Aura’s
Pedro Páramo,
I thought. She’d had an idea for a novel in which she was going to reinvent
Pedro Páramo
as a modern reality show. In Rulfo’s novel, Juan Preciado comes to Comala to look for his father, Pedro Páramo, not yet understanding that everyone he meets in Comala is dead, and that if he’s come there, it’s because he’s dead too. Aura had an obsession with her absent father and in her novel the protagonist’s search for her father was to be the subject of a reality television show set in contemporary Mexico. For her novel to be a credible reimagining of
Pedro Páramo
, she would have needed to make the dead be also alive, and vice versa, and, it being set in contemporary Mexico, maybe Aura would have found voices for those who, in the manner of the “disappeared,” seem to exist in no definable condition. Maybe her novel, I thought, would have had some resemblance to the conversation—by turns antic, melancholy, disconcerting, even humorous—we were having in this living room in Tepito.

Now thirty-four-year-old Gabriela Téllez, also kidnapped from Heavens, and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Danae Téllez, “joined” the conversation in that room. In the morning Pablo, by phone, had arranged to meet with Danae in Tepito later that afternoon. But since morning she’d stopped answering her cell phone. Sometimes it rang and she didn’t pick up, and sometimes it was turned off. Pablo was desperate to meet with Danae for his piece of individual portraits of the twelve missing, because he’d now spoken to and collected photographs from members of every family except Gabriela’s, and he was running out of time. Danae was Gabriela’s only relative who could really tell him about her. They’d been inseparable. Night after night, mother and daughter had gone out to the
antros
, the bars and clubs, together. They were regulars at After Heavens. Danae had escaped being kidnapped along with her mother because that Saturday night, after going first to Bar Cristal, they’d returned to their Tepito apartment when Danae had felt tired, or unwell. Long past midnight, when friends had phoned Gabriela telling her to come to Heavens, Danae had begged off, saying she wanted to sleep, and her mother had gone alone. Gabriela worked at a computer store in the center, and that was how she’d maintained her household, which included Danae, two other much younger children, and an elderly mother in poor health who’d recently had a knee operation. Ana María and Jéssica knew the Téllezes. Danae wasn’t in school, they told us, and had never worked a day in her life. Her mother had always doted on and spoiled Danae, they said. Now she would have to somehow support her younger siblings and grandmother. Danae was described as flighty and immature; she behaved as if she were even younger than Jéssica. She didn’t seem to have grasped the reality of what had occurred, or of her new situation. That was also the impression Pablo had taken from his few brief conversations with her, when the families came out of meetings with the chief prosecutor, or held a vigil or stopped traffic. “A typical teenager,” he’d told me. Danae was lively and scrappy-seeming, he’d said, quick to laugh, and extremely pretty.