THE CHIEF
He came out of jail hating him for everything, what he’d done to his father, what he’d done to him. El Güero picked him up at the exit of the Black Palace and he climbed into the red Thunderbird, so give your heart in sweet surrender, hey baby, where there’s music and fun there’s your Güerito. He told Bernabé that the Chief would be waiting in his house in Pedregal anytime the kid wanted to stop by and see him. The Chief was sorry Bernabé had been locked up ten days in Lecumberri. But a lot worse had happened to the Chief. Bernabé hadn’t known, he hadn’t read the newspapers or anything. Well, a real storm broke loose against the Chief, they said he was an agent provocateur and they threatened to send him as governor to Yucatan, which was roughly like being a ditchdigger on the moon, but he says he’ll get even with his political enemies and he needs you. He said you were the best man in the brigade. You may have stiffed poor old Burro but the Chief says he understands that you’re hotheaded and it’s okay with him. Bernabé started sobbing like a baby, it all seemed so lousy, and El Güero didn’t know what to do except stop the cassette music out of respect and Bernabé asked him to drop him on the road to Azcapotzalco near the Spanish Panteon but El Güero was worried about him and followed in the car as Bernabé walked along the dusty sidewalks where flower vendors were fashioning huge funeral wreaths of gardenias and stonecutters were chiseling tombstones, names, dates, the beginning and end of every man and woman, and where had they been, Bernabé kept asking himself, remembering the book burned by orders of Licenciado Carreón. El Güero decided to be patient and was waiting for him when an hour later he walked through the wrought-iron cemetery gate, that’s the second time you’ve come through an iron gate today, kid, he joked, better watch your step. Bernabé, still hating the Chief, entered the house in Pedregal, but the minute he saw that nearsighted janitor’s face he felt sorry for the man clinging to an oversized tumbler of whiskey as though it were a life belt. It made him sad to remember him on all fours stark naked his balls freezing trying to win his wife’s cruel teasing game. Hell, didn’t Mirabella have the right, after all, to go to finishing school rather than live in a tin-and-cardboard shack in some lost city? He walked into the house in Pedregal, he saw the Chief cut down to size and felt sorry for him, but now felt sure of himself, nothing bad could happen to him here, no one would abandon him here, the Chief wouldn’t make him bust his ass cleaning windshields because the Chief had no intention of taking justice to the state of Guerrero, he wasn’t about to die of hunger just to feel pure as the Host, the Chief wasn’t a fuckup like his Chief, his Chief Mariano Carreón his Chief Andrés Aparicio, oh Father, do not forsake me. The Licenciado told El Güero to serve the kid his whiskey, he’d been brave and never mind, politics is nothing more than a lot of patience, it’s like religion that way, and before you knew it the moment would arrive to get even with the men who were plotting against him and trying to exile him to Yucatan. He wanted Bernabé, who’d been with him in the hour of combat, to be with him in the hour of revenge. They’d change the name of the brigade, it had become too notorious, one day it would reappear bleached clean, bleached by the sun of revenge against the crypto-Communists who’d infiltrated the government, only six years, thank God for the one-term presidency, then those Reds would be out in the street and they’d see, they’d swing back in like a pendulum because they knew how to wait a long long long time like the stone idols in the museum, right? there’s no one can stop us. He said to Bernabé, his arm around his neck, that there was no destiny that couldn’t be overturned by contempt and he told El Güero that he didn’t want to see any of them, not him, not the kid Bernabé, not any of the young toughs in the house while his daughter Mirabella was there, she’d be returning the next day from Canada. They went to the training camp and El Güero gave Bernabé a pistol so he could defend himself and told him not to worry, the Chief was right, there was no way to stop them once they got rolling, look at that rock, how it keeps rolling, shit, said El Güero with a shrewd and malicious expression Bernabé hadn’t seen before, they could even slip out of the Chief’s hands if they wanted, didn’t he know everything there was to know? how to set things up, how to go to a barrio and round up the young kids, begin with slingshots if they had to, then chains, then ice picks like the one you killed the Burro with, Bernabé. It was so easy it was a laugh, all you had to do was create a kind of unseen but shared terror, we’re terrified of always living under someone’s protection, they’re terrified of living without it. Choose, kid. But Bernabé didn’t answer, he’d stopped listening. He was remembering his visit to the cemetery that morning, the Sundays he’d spent making love with Martincita in the crypt of a wealthy family, remembering a ragged old man urinating behind a cypress, bald, smiling like an idiot, smiling ceaselessly, who with his fly open walked away beneath that Azcapotzalco noonday sun hot as a great yellow chili pepper. Bernabé felt a surge of shame. But don’t let it return. A vague memory, a kind of unknowing would be enough for this new Bernabé. He went to see his mother when he had a new suit and a Mustang, secondhand but all his, and he told her that next year he’d have a sunny clean house for her in a respectable neighborhood. She tried to talk to him as she had when he was a boy, My little sweetheart, you’re such a good boy, my little doll, you’re not a ruffian like the others, she tried to say what she’d once said about his father, I never dreamed you were dead, but to Bernabé his mother’s words now were neither tender nor demanding, they merely meant the opposite of what they said. On the other hand, he was grateful that she gave him his father’s most handsome suspenders, the red ones with the gilded clasps that had been the pride of Andrés Aparicio.