Through the rest of that summer he was frequently drunk, as much to blunt his memory as to ease his chronic pains. He kept to the heart of the city, which had been little damaged by the war and where the fashionable neighborhoods of the privileged flanked the Plaza de la Constitución, the vast central square and center of the federal government. This main plaza was more commonly called the zócalo—and the term had come to refer to any town’s main square that contained a cathedral and municipal building.
He got money for liquor by stealing from church poor boxes, by robbing drunks on the late-night streets. He wrested bottles from weaker men. He occasionally encountered a bartender or patron who took his branded face for a badge of honor and stood him a few drinks. He fed at the alley doors of restaurants where a man might be meted leftovers when the dinner trade was done, or in whose garbage cans he might find something still edible, but on some days he ate nothing. A friendly vendor of old clothing provided him with a shirt and pants and a woolen poncho to replace his tattered uniform. He somehow obtained a sombrero. From a distance he looked like one more dispossessed peón at large on the capital’s teeming streets. He slept in the parks. When the weather was inclement he took shelter in pulquerías, the most squalid of drinking places but where a man could sleep undisturbed in a corner among a litter of other homeless drunks. He spent his days ambling about the central city. He washed at public fountains. He sat on park benches and observed without curiosity the city’s passing spectacle. He had lost all interest in the doings of the world and ignored even discarded newspapers and broadsheets except as insulation against cold nights. He one day saw a former Patricio comrade on the street, wearing a spanking new Mexican army uniform, and ducked into the crowd before the soldier caught sight of him.
His was a solitary existence and by now he could conceive of no other. But the streets were especially dangerous for a man alone. The capital was rife with rateros and brutos—thieves and roving gangs of young thugs—and the city’s police force of the time was small and poorly trained. People of the better classes did not venture outside after dark except in groups and with hired bodyguards. The first time he was set upon was in the darkness of a park where he slept in the shrubbery, and he lost a front tooth and was robbed of his shoes. The episode clarified to him the severity of his handicaps and how dim-witted he was to be weaponless. From a marketplace meat stall he stole a boning knife and honed its curved seven-inch blade sharper still on the stone rim of a fountain. Two nights later when a trio of thugs swooped on him he slashed the throat of one and wounded both of the others before they scrabbled away in a cursing retreat. He stripped the sandals from the one he killed, took the few centavos in his pocket. In the months that followed he killed at least three more assailants and bloodied a number of others in driving them off. He gained a daunting reputation among the local street gangs. El Yanqui Feo, they called him, and most of them eventually let him be. But he remained a challenge to young street toughs wanting to make a name for themselves, and his clothes were rarely free of recent blood stains.
So did his days pass. Each the same as the one before. Each tomorrow his vague and only future. Every dawn’s waking one more astonishment. He was twenty years old and felt decrepit.
In the last days of September came a cold and chronic rain. He got sick, grew weak and dizzy, went about in a sweating chill. His body felt peculiar, as though its flesh was barely clinging to its bones. One morning he was nearly run over as he crossed a street, staggering back as the mule team clopped by. It was a municipal wagon with a load of corpses loosely covered with a tarp. He clearly saw the face of one at the bottom of the pile—eyes open and teeth bared in a grimace that might have passed for a maniacal grin. The face, Samuel Thomas was certain, winked at him.
On a raw dank night, walking in a small plaza of bright shops and restaurants a few blocks north of the zócalo, he was seized by a sudden sensation of being weightless and then the earth tipped under him and he fell unconscious on the sidewalk. But even in the better parts of town the prostrate forms of insensate drunks were a common sight, and passersby on their way to supper or the theater stepped around him with no more interest than if he had been a hole in the ground. The common sentiment about bodies on the central streets was that they would either revive and move on or be picked up in the morning by the collection wagons.
He came to awareness under a sky of iron gray. A young woman was crouched beside him, studying him with curiosity. She wore an apron and held a broom and had a white crescent scar at the outer corner of one eye. She asked if he were wounded. He said he didn’t think so. His voice sounded to him like a stranger’s. He tried to get up but fell back and nearly passed out again. She put the back of her hand to his cheek and then a palm to his forehead, then said she would be right back.
In her absence he was unsure whether she had been real or imagined. But then she returned, accompanied by a grayhaired man with a black eye patch. They helped him to stand and steered him a short way down the sidewalk and into a small café cast in soft yellow light and infused with the aromas of coffee and sausage and cinnamon. There were tables covered with white cloth and a small bar with a few stools. Samuel Thomas was unsure if he in fact apologized for his stink or if he only thought he did. Then nearly took the girl and old man down with him as he fell in a swoon.
He awoke on a cot in a dimly lighted storeroom. The sole window was small and high and the daylight in it was as gray as he’d last seen it. An oil lamp with its wick set low burned on a small table beside the cot. The air pungent with peppery odors. The walls were hung with cookware, the ceiling with strings of dried sausages and chiles, the shelves held condiments, sacks of sugar and salt and maize and wheat flour. There were casks of beer and cases of bottled wine. In a corner of the room, a rat lay with its neck under the sprung bail of the trap, its eyes like little pink balloons and the cheese white in its mouth. Samuel was under a blanket and wearing a night shirt. He only vaguely recalled someone undressing him, washing him with a warm cloth, holding a glass to his lips. A wonderful liquor of a kind he had never tasted before.
He’d been awake but a few minutes when the door opened slightly and the girl looked in and saw his open eyes, and smiled. She went away and a few minutes later came back with a tray of food and set it on the little bedside table. She said he had slept around the clock. He guessed her to be a few years older than himself.
She put a cool palm to his forehead and smiled. Your fever is nearly gone, she said in the clearly enunciated Spanish of those educated in the capital.
She leaned down to take a look into the chamber pot under the bed. She said that she had at first feared he had eaten something spoiled or drunk bad water, but had since decided he was not poisoned, only malnourished. A few days of rest and proper feeding, she told him, and he should be fine.