He had waited ten minutes when a yellow taxi broke away from the orderly line of one-peso cabs and worked its way to the curb, honking. Diego stopped it and got into the rear seat. He was the only passenger. The driver tried to catch Diego’s eye in the rear-view mirror; he smiled, but Diego had no desire to converse with a taxi driver.
When they reached the Hotel Reforma, a girl dressed in white, a nurse, stopped the cab. She carried cellophane-wrapped syringes, vials, and ampules. Diego slid to the far side of the seat to make room for her. He felt as if he were coming down with something, and wished he could ask the nurse for a shot of penicillin.
Just before the traffic circle at El Caballito in front of the Ambassadeurs Restaurant, two nuns calmly entered the taxi. Diego knew they were nuns by the hair tightly drawn back into a bun, the absence of makeup, their black dresses, the rosaries and scapulars. They chose to get in the front with the driver. He treated them like old friends, as if he saw them every day. “Hel-lo, Sisters, how’s it going today?”
The taxi was held up by a long red light. A nondescript man had run to the cab and attempted to get in after the nuns, but the driver shook his finger “no,” and drove off against the red light.
He managed to slow for an instant beside the newspaper stand at the corner of Reforma and Bucareli to avoid a violation. The warning light flashed on, but at the moment the taxi started to move, a student ran toward them with his arms crossed across his chest, running lightly in his tennis shoes in spite of the load of books he was carrying; a girl emerged from behind the newsstand and followed him. They got in the back, and the nurse had to squeeze close to Diego, but she didn’t look at him or speak to him. Diego ignored her.
The driver left the mandatory taxi lane and drove with more than usual speed in the direction of San Juan de Letrán. Once again, with difficulty, as he had in front of the University Club, the driver worked his way back into the line of one-peso cabs. On the corner of Juárez and San Juan de Letrán, in front of Nieto Regalos, stood a fat woman in a cotton dress; she had a basket over one arm. She signaled the taxi; the driver stopped as the light changed from yellow to red.
The woman thrust her nose into the taxi and asked them to let her in, all the taxis were full, she’d be late to market, her chicks were about to roast in the heat, be good to her. “No, señora,” replied the driver. “Can’t you see I’m full?” As he crossed the intersection, Juárez narrowed to become Madero. The woman with the basket was left behind, shaking her fist, her voice drowned out by the mounting roar of traffic.
“Why didn’t you let her get in?” asked Diego, immersed in the silence of his fellow passengers.
“I’m sorry, señor,” the driver replied, unperturbed, “but I’m running full, and if I picked her up, the cops would put the bite on me. They’re just waiting for the chance.”
Diego exchanged glances with the nurse, the student, the student’s curly-haired girl, and the two nuns, who had turned around to look at him. Incomprehension and coldness alternated in their distant, hostile eyes.
“Stop! Stop, I tell you!” shouted Diego, without conviction. They were all staring at him as if they’d never seen him before; they were all counting on the absence of memory, as if there were some time warp between Diego and the rest of humanity, like bad sync between an image and a voice on a movie screen.
Now the driver caught Diego’s eye in the rear-view mirror and winked. An indecent, offensive wink that implied a complicity that had never been sought or agreed upon.
“All right,” said Diego, exhausted. “Stop. Let me out here.”
“Five pesos, please.”
Diego handed the wrinkled bills to the driver and got out in front of the Hotel Majestic, almost on the corner of the Plaza de la Constitución.
He walked faster. He crossed the Plaza and presented his card to the Palace guard, beside the elevator. He was told to go to the Salón del Perdón, where the meeting was to be held.
Many people were milling around the great brocade-and-walnut Salón dominated by the historic painting consecrating the nobility of soul of the rebel Nicolás Bravo. At a distance, Diego saw a myopic Leopoldo Bernstein using his handkerchief to wipe the sauce splattered on his glasses from his breakfast eggs. He replaced the glasses, saw Diego, and smiled amiably. In one corner of the Salón, he saw the Director General in violet eyeglasses, visibly suffering in the bright daylight, the flashes of the press photographers and television lights; beside him, Mauricio Rossetti, staring straight at Diego and whispering into the Director General’s ear. There was a moment of heightened whispering, followed by an impressive silence.
The President of the Republic entered the Salón. He advanced among the guests, greeting them affably, probably making jokes, pressing certain arms, avoiding others, effusively offering his hand to some, coldly to others, recognizing one man, ignoring the next, illuminated in the steady, biting light of the reflectors, intermittently divested of shadows by the flashes. Recognizing. Ignoring.
He was approaching.
Diego prepared his smile, his hand, adjusted the knot of his necktie. He sneezed. He removed his handkerchief and discreetly blew his nose.
Bernstein observed him from across the room, smiling ironically.
Rossetti was making his way through the crowd toward Diego.
The Director General waved his hand in the direction of the door.
The President was within a few steps of Diego Velázquez.
EPILOGUE
The official maps outline a large rectangle extending from the drilling platforms of Chac 1 and Kukulkán 1 in the Gulf of Mexico to the beds of Sitio Grande in the spurs of the Chiapas Sierras, and from the port of Coatzacoalcos to the mouth of the Usumacinta River.
The maps of memory describe the arch of a coast of luxuriant loneliness, the first seen by the Spanish Conquistadors. Tabasco, Veracruz, Campeche. A lime-colored sea, so green that at times it resembled a great plain, redolent of its riches of porgy, corbina, and shrimp, tangled with seaweed linking the calm waves that sink into the sands of beaches of moribund palm trees: a red, vegetal cemetery; and then a slow ascent through lands red as a tennis court and green as a billiard table, along lazy rivers thickened with floating hyacinths, toward the mists of the native sierra, the seat of the secret world of the Tzotziles: Chiapas, a lance of fire in a crown of smoke.
It is the land of the Malinche. Hernán Cortés received her from the hands of the caciques of Tabasco, along with four diadems and a lizard of gold. She was a gift, but a gift that spoke. Her Indian name was Malintzin. The stars baptized her, because she was born under an evil sign, Ce Malianalli, oracle of misfortune, rebellion, dissension, spilled blood, and impatience.
The parents of the doomed child, princes of their land, were fearful, and secretly they delivered her to the tribe of Xicalango. By coincidence, that same night another baby died, the daughter of slaves of Malintzin’s parents. The princes told that this dead baby was their daughter and they buried her with the honors befitting her noble rank. The doomed child, as if her masters divined the dark augury of her birth, was passed from people to people as part of tributes, until she was offered to the Teúl, the white-skinned, blond-bearded god the Indians confused with the benevolent God Quetzalcóatl, the Plumed Serpent, who had one day fled from the horror of Mexico, promising to return another day by sea, from the east, with happiness on his wings and vengeance on his scales.