This is mine, he thought, as he headed along the broad veranda to the house edge. There was another veranda there, one on the other side as well, and to the rear of the house was a porch and a brief yard that ended beyond the remnants of a ruined chicken coop where the foothills began. He’d never owned a thing, beyond his tools and clothing and a few books. He had new clothes now, fine western boots, twill pants and a tooled cotton shirt, and he’d worn his new fedora and a cotton sports jacket, after he’d had a trim and otherwise prepared himself, when he’d gone to the government records office in Tampico.
He paused at the house edge and looked off to the side, a few yards of once-cultivated land there, but a strip of barren ground now covered by the house shadow, and he too was in shadow, cool under the veranda’s eaves, and beyond the shadow strip and still in the sun was a rusted metal fence, freestanding, ten yards or more to either side of a gate. The fence may once have gone around the entire place, but he couldn’t be sure of that. Maybe it was just a formal entrance, since beyond the gate was where the path began, meandering away through scrub, to where it broadened and became the narrow dirt road, which disappeared in the near distance at a turning, the mouth of which was like another gate, a canopy formed by tall, gnarled bushes into which wild bougainvillea had wound its tendrils. The mouth was bloody in the sun, startling in its green branches and red blossoms, the only place of strident color, no matter where his eyes rested.
They’d put him in a waiting room with others. He had the deed and some documentation, his driver’s license and the creased and often folded birth certificate he’d managed to carry along through the years. The others were businessmen, and they wore suits, and he sat away from them and near a window and could see down into the square, the stone fountain at its center, and across on the other side a row of public buildings that pressed against the old church. The square was empty, but as he watched it began to fill as siesta ended, people crossing with purpose, entering the mouths of invisible shopping streets at the corners, carrying fabric and paper bags, in sun hats of no use now as afternoon shadows covered them. Then he heard his name, and someone came for him and took him into another room and sat him down on a bench at the room’s side, where he waited again.
The room was large and full of rows of desks, computers and typewriters upon them, and people sat at the desks and rose from time to time and went to search in the file cabinets that lined the walls, and while he waited he thought of Peter in his coma and of the deed in his pocket and of Strickland and the note and money he’d left for him. Had he left the deed too, purposely, in that hiding place behind the books? Strickland knew his documents, had studied them, though some had moved through quickly, bought and sold again in a matter of weeks only, and he might have missed Carlos’s name in his perusal. It was the history that held value, the official seal of Obregón, and not the ownership or legal responsibilities that the deeds and contracts, the letters and the other documents, noted. Still, Strickland was a careful reader of his possessions, and he might have seen his name there and not mentioned it, though that would have been a strange violation of their relationship. The nature of our being together in that year, Carlos thought. He couldn’t get it to add up, recognizing that he never would, and he turned from it, slipping in the mild exhaustion caused by his travel, and was thinking then of the city beyond the room’s walls, nothing he really remembered. He’d been too young for that, or too desirous of forgetting it, and yet there’d been a familiarity to the streets and shops, at least something in the attitude of the people he’d passed by and engaged with, a certain reserve that was comfortable. Even on the rickety bus trip down from Reynosa, peasants and merchants, two dogs, chickens in wire cages, boxes of fruits and vegetables, a special corazón. Then a woman came and asked for his papers, and she and a few others gathered at a desk, their heads close together, and in a while she took his papers into another room, then came back with copies and the originals and asked him to return again the next afternoon.
That night, after he had bathed and rested, he walked the streets of the city, finding nothing that was familiar, but for the language he’d not spoken fluently since childhood and the postures and gestures of the older inhabitants, the few he found among the tourists. He sat on the bank of the Panuco. He entered a few shops, but he had nothing to buy. He ate his dinner, an ancient taste of tamales, at a stand on a busy street. He entered and sat for a while in the dark church. Then, on the way back to his hotel, he passed into a side street and came upon the lights above the door at the Lluvia del Oro and went in and crossed the dark crowded room and sat at the bar and ordered tequila. There were women in the place, prostitutes, but none approached him. They were there for the tourists and they thought him a local Mexican. He liked that, and only had to turn his head away when the eyes of a man fell on him, another kind of prostitute, in loose linen slacks and a shirt opened almost to the navel, whose lids had been darkened slightly with makeup.
The next afternoon he was back at the office again, this time ushered immediately into a room where a middle-aged man sat in his suit behind a large wooden desk. His hair was greased back in an older fashion, and Carlos could see the glint of wax in his thin mustache. The man rose from his chair and nodded, then pursed his lips, pointing to the chair across the desk, and Carlos sat down and the man settled into the leather of his own chair and swiveled slightly, glancing out the window to the side of the room. Carlos could see the copies of the deed and his documents and some other papers on the desk pad, the man’s fingers at the edge of them, a diamond ring in gold setting and carefully pared nails.
“English or Spanish?” the man asked, then sighed when Carlos answered, and tapped his fingers on the papers.
“This could have been so difficult,” he said.
“¿Por qué?” Carlos said, and the man smiled.
“Porque the Revolution. Muchos presidentes, generals, bandits, et cetera.”
“¿Pero?” Carlos said.
“Pero for this one, this Joaquín Sánchez.”
He lifted up a sheet of thin paper, and Carlos could see the formal handwriting through it and the impression of the seal under the signature.
“This letter, and these other documents he filed, perfectly executed. And your deed holds the impression of Obregón, who may well have been a pendejo, but the president of the country then, nevertheless.”
“Who is this Sánchez?”
“I don’t know nothing about that,” the man said. “Why he might have been involved in this. This is ancient material. I had to search it out. Lucky for you there was another one here. I didn’t have to look for it this time.”
“What do you mean, another?”
“I mean just that. Another person with a claim. Lucky for you it was a bad one, no damn good at all.”