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Fiction

The Way to Juarez

By Rafael Pérez Gay
Translated from Spanish by Catherine Mansfield

The doctor didn’t try to hide from me the storm my father was passing through:

“It’s called delirium. Hallucinations, amnesia, psychic disorder. It could also be a case of dementia caused by psychotic depression. We need to do a serum electrolytes test and an unenhanced cranial tomography.”

The neurologist wanted to look inside the theater of my father’s brain, to become a spectator of that absurd drama, as if there might be a new Ionesco trapped inside my father’s mind. I never liked Eugene Ionesco. In his stories dead bodies grow inside a room and men turn into rhinoceroses; as far as he was concerned, dreams are more lucid than our waking thoughts. In the world of that madman who triumphed with his delirium, dream stories unveiled dramatic forms. Seen from this point of view, at night when we dream, or in our delirium when we go mad, every one of us is a surrealist; we are all Breton, Picasso, Dalí. Along the road of madness, Ionesco was a recognized master of the theater of the absurd; but actually his dialogues are heavier than a grand piano. To understand him you have to carry around a whole dictionary of literary terms: avant-garde, postwar trauma, the loneliness of Man, language crisis, alienation, and some hidden eroticism thrown in for good measure. Anyway, let’s move on to my father.

My dad’s ideas were not so different from Ionesco’s. Carried away by his hallucinations, he plotted fantastical stories from the shadows of his room. The creatures of his mind shut away in the basement of his cerebral functions were clamoring to enter the house of his consciousness. In the end the doors gave way and the strange thoughts brought his inner reason crashing to the ground. Of course, the mind is an unsolved mystery and as for life, it’s a dream.  My father chose an international intrigue to help him plunge into a dark labyrinth. He assembled the central theme of Mexican public life from his own private world.

I tried to follow his plot. That was how I found out that for some time now he had been working as an undercover spy, using coded messages to report on the activity of two or three drug lords in the Juarez Cartel, a criminal organization which had fallen on hard times since the death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, El Señor de los Cielos, or the Lord of the Skies. On one mission my father found himself entangled in a string of lies and was finally betrayed in Madrid. Federal agents bought with dirty money forced him right to the edge of the abyss. The charge was extremely serious: according to the traitors, my father planned to bring a shipment of drugs into Spain. He was arrested at Barajas airport, accused of collaborating with Colombian drug lords. Since he was working undercover as a federal officer, the national authorities didn’t recognize him as a secret agent and accused him of being a member of the cartel that had tried to introduce 1,500 kilograms of pure cocaine into Spanish territory.

“1,500 kilos,” I repeated the figure with feigned amazement.

“You know nothing about organized crime,” he reproached me, angrily.

While he described his ongoing drama, I tried several times to bring him back to this side of reality. My father just looked at me with distrust. He broke off in the middle of his story to say:

“Tell me the truth. What’s your role in this treacherous game?”

“Nothing,” I answered, cast down by his phantoms.

“Do you trust your brother?” he asked me, in a hushed voice.

“Yes.”

“I would look into it if I were you. There are too many loose ends.” He put his finger to his lips, calling for silence.

He became desperate when he told me that my mother had been arrested as a suspected money launderer. He tried to make sense of his experience and force order on chance events: in the end he revealed that two spies dressed as nurses had caught him in a trap. He pointed one of them out to me from his bed. This whole creation came from inside my father’s brain, that galaxy which fits in one hand and which neurologists have described as a self-sufficient universe. This aleph is formed by billions of interconnected neurons and is capable of both creating and deleting its own energy and information. It functions with the same intensity in wakefulness as in sleep—when there are no intrusions from the outside world—and also in madness, that powerful dynamite for the conscious mind.

Mom tried to follow my father through the fantasies he invented with the furious uncertainty of a desperate creator. She gave up at some point during the Spanish intrigue and declared:

“Your father is wandering among us, but he’s no longer here.”

She was talking about a ghost, a presence which has come to carry out some unfinished business in the world of the living. As on other occasions my mother was right. Dad was in many places at once, but he wasn’t there with us.

“Tell your mother whether or not I was at Chanona airport last night,” he said, calling on me to give evidence.

“Chanona is a long way off,” I replied, following the false trail of this nonexistent airport. “Were you there?”

“Yes. An impressively modern airport,” he lied with all the conviction of madness.

In the mornings the nurses came and went, looking after the old people. The movement upset my father and he called me to his room to ask about this domestic activity which to him seemed like a battle that takes no prisoners.

“What’s happening here?”

“Nothing,” I told him. “The nurses are making the beds, emptying the toilets, making breakfast.”

“This is an African chaos,” he insisted, describing the hustle and bustle around him. Disorientated, he added: “Last night I fell asleep in Puebla. Two days ago I woke up in a seat at the Plaza cinema and last week in a strange apartment in the Condesa buildings. I went mad,” he told me, and started to cry. “I don’t want to stay another minute in this life. It’s a department of hell.” It sounded like a call for closure, but to this day nobody can ask destiny to fix the date and time of their own death, unless with a bullet through the brain.

My father was right. The cloak of madness on the shoulders of old age makes existence a living hell. It adds a tragic touch of darkness to a dead-end alley.

“Let’s talk to the doctor,” I tried to comfort him. “You’re getting out of this maze.”

I didn’t know what I was saying. The results of the serum electrolytes test revealed no alteration in the level of sodium, potassium, magnesium or calcium, abnormal levels of which are the usual cause of delirious thoughts. The tomography revealed a brain free of tumors or hematoma. The neurologist attributed my father’s mental disorder to a psychotic depression which had originated many months before in a well of sadness. If I understood correctly, the origin of delirium is unknown. It can be sparked off by a heart condition, an attack of bronchitis or an episode of pain which plunges the sufferer into an endless dream. Tucked within the folds of each delirium wait fleeting moments of happiness and sorrow, pure fantasy and the red-hot iron of reality, a sweet memory or an unbearable nightmare. This was the dream prison that my father had entered to serve the sentence of his ninety years of age.

The doctor drew on a battery of chemicals to save him from the shadows: Risperdal, Rivotril, Remeron. This antidepressant, antipsychotic, and anxiolytic front defeated the assault of anxiety but sunk him into a cloud of lethargy. The sedatives returned my dad’s delirium to the inner world of dreams, but reduced his waking life to just a few hours.

“He will sleep more now,” the doctor warned us, “but he’ll be calm. Without anxiety as his enemy he’ll suffer less, and maybe we can bring him back.”

Whenever he woke from the chemical lethargy caused by the medicine, my father shooed away imaginary cats and confused the windows with doors. In one of his waking moments he told me:

“I don’t understand. This morning I was at the plaza de toros in Mexico City.”

“Did you want to fight a bull?” I tried a reckless joke.

“No. I want to celebrate my ninetieth birthday there.”

“With fifty thousand guests?” I pointed out the size of the bullring.

“Yes,” he replied with conviction. “Do you think we could fill it?”

“I think it would be difficult. We don’t have that many friends,” I answered, and for a moment instead of the flame of madness I thought I saw the clear water of humor in his eyes.

“If we charge an entrance fee we could do a pretty good trade” he said, instantly making me his business partner.

There are some character traits which never leave us, not even on our deathbeds. Unbridled vanity and the obsessive hunt for fortune were my father’s second skin, even in madness and old age. Life plays games of chance with us: in the days of the criminal drama that culminated in my father’s arrest in Spain, I was invited to visit Ciudad Juarez.

 

I went for the money. I didn’t want to go to Juarez, but in the end I agreed. I could fill a notebook with the number of times I’ve accepted offers I wanted to turn down. They offered to pay me to sit at a table and spout off about culture and drug trafficking alongside two journalists who no doubt knew everything about the drug world that I didn’t. The shadow of bankruptcy was hovering over me, which was why I agreed to take on this and other undesirable commitments. Whenever there are children, old people, or invalids in the house, money will never stretch far enough. I ended up working twice as hard and earning half as much. I missed deadlines handing in texts on subjects I cared nothing about. We always do the opposite of what we once wanted. I knew nothing about drug trafficking that hadn’t been lifted from the eight columns of a newspaper or a television report. I made a living telling extraordinary stories collected from the press.

If they don’t want to die of hunger or fade into obscurity, writers these days have to parrot away at every literary forum and head to television studios and radio booths. Of course, this financial motivation doesn’t fully explain the sheer quantity of loudmouths in the public eye who dominate the world of arts. Maybe it’s because nobody is afraid of exhibitionism. Anyone will happily take their place in front of a camera or microphone and talk like a river flowing nowhere in particular. Fame is a corrosive poison.

I packed a bag and left for the airport. During the flight I read in El País that Spain had become the gateway for Colombian cocaine arriving in Europe and the money laundering center for drug cartels, who set up fly-by-night businesses to clean up their earnings. The global drug trade generated 322 billion dollars annually, almost two thirds of which came from cocaine. The central photograph on the front page showed the deck of The Oceania in Vigo, where police had seized 1,500 kilograms of cocaine. The leaders of the operation had been arrested, a Colombian and a Mexican, two of the international police’s most wanted drug traffickers. The Mexican had been trying out new alliances after the collapse of the Juarez Cartel’s empire. The copy of the newspaper in my hands was printed several days after the delirious drama which had seen my father arrested at Barajas airport. I thought to myself that the dreams of madmen come true every day somewhere in the world; we are all the realization of a delirious dream taking place on the other side of the planet. When the pilot announced that we were landing at Ciudad Juarez Airport, I remembered Chesterton’s phrase: a madman is anything but a man who has lost his reason.

Juarez is the  mouth of Hell. On entering, the desert sun reveals the dazzling glare of a midget town stretching across northern Chihuahua on the border with the United States. For many years, this village won first prize in a macabre lottery: organized crime, lawlessness, police corruption, unpunished violence. The hotel we were put up in was part of an American chain. It was horrific. They laughed in my face when I asked the way to the town center. There are no central streets in Juarez, as if the funnel of the frontier had sucked them all toward the American dream on the other side of the border.

Under clouds scattered by hot summer winds, the Franklin Mountains lie across the border that separates the two countries. This small mountain range houses a strategic military kingdom for the United States: Fort Bliss. Here, in the desert landscape of this mountainous labyrinth of caves, US marines trained to invade Iraq. North American soldiers break out of this prison of discipline to get high and let go in Mexican brothels.

The closest thing to a town center is an old train station where Francisco Villa once got trigger happy and murdered innocent people during some military episode or other. There’s nothing unusual about that; Villa and his men were always killing innocent people. Instead, I was pointed toward a street full of bars, also called Juarez, on the way to the oldest bridge across the border. Everything in this town is named after that hero of independence from Oaxaca and everything taints his name with the antithesis of Juarist values. Juarez’s nightmare has come true in Juarez.

I walked under the desert sun among images of the end of the world: poverty, drugs, prostitution. Wherever I looked on the street I saw ruined houses. I later found out that these were crack houses, dens of drugs and prostitution where heroin is the common currency. The state government razed them to the ground. After they had closed them time and time again and arrested the owners, the houses were taken over once more by the mafia and heroin addicts. The only solution found by the municipal government to put an end to these centers of madness and delinquency was to destroy them. Sometimes the only remedy is to add rubble to rubble.

I went into the Kentucky, a shadowy bar where the wail of northern redova music could be heard in the background, singing a tale of drug trafficking. That high noon of relentless sunshine had brought together uncomplicated American soldiers out for a good time, men who had crossed half the country looking for work at the assembly plants, and young people dressed in washed-out denim who embroidered the skin of their faces with rings, pins, and knives. In the sordid shadows of the bar I asked myself: Is this where Mexico begins or ends?

My cellphone rang. The nurse handed the phone to my father:

“Did you hear what happened last night?” He sounded agitated, as if someone had just told him a secret.

“No,” I answered, waiting for his story.

“They arrested one of the chiefs of the Gulf Cartel. Any moment now it will all come to light. You have to come and get me, go to the embassy if you have to.”

“Take it easy. I’ll come and get you,” I lied.

I told the nurse to give him two more drops of Risperdal to reduce his anxiety. I didn’t tell my father about the trip to Juarez because I didn’t want to add delirium to his delirium. However, in the Kentucky bar the message sounded not only real but urgent: any moment now it will all come to light. The shadows of the bar were filled with an air of imminent attack.

Every street corner in Juarez harbors the story of a murder. Everybody bears a story like a strange medal of merit: tales of crimes that went unpunished, women thrown out into the desert, and the pathological brutality of the soldiers of the drug war. I happened to hear from a taxi driver the brief and unfortunate love story of El Chiquilín, a minor drug baron who operated under the rule of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Lord of the Skies, and his brother Vicente. El Chiquilín had both the glory and misfortune of falling into the trap of love with a young beauty, who he took away with him one day as if robbing an object from a house. He was happy with her for a while, until she in turn fell into the trap of passion with a subordinate, who responded so feverishly and so fully that their guilty love soon came crashing out into the light for everyone to see. “At last the secret is out, wrote Auden,” I thought as I listened to the taxi driver’s story.

The stabs of disloyalty leave mortal wounds. El Chiquilín resented his friend’s betrayal more than that of his young wife. The man was under his protection; it was El Chiquilín himself who had made him somebody in his small kingdom on the streets of Juarez. El Chiquilín took no notice of the woman and said to his former friend: “I’ll give you three hours to do whatever you want and then I’m going to start looking until I find you and kill you.” He gave him three last hours of freedom and then went looking from brothel to brothel, bar to bar, house to house until he found him and killed him with his bare hands. The man was left lying in the darkness, from where he had once been picked up and made somebody in the light of that street kingdom. Meanwhile, El Chiquilín had cut down the number of payments he had to make in exchange for selling his merchandise to the brother of the Lord of the Skies, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, heir apparent to the empire where El Chiquilín had his kingdom. The heir missed his money and sent some men to ask after El Chiquilín, who had spent months lost in drugs and debauchery since the execution of his friend and the loss of his love. When they found him, he didn’t understand what they were saying and never really understood why they were killing him on the corner of one of the streets lined with ruined buildings that had once been his kingdom. As for the woman, she was never heard of again.

The taxi left me at the hotel entrance. I went up to my room and scribbled down as much as I could remember of the story so that I could read it out the next day as an opener to my public presentation for which I would be paid good money. At the end of this introduction full of forbidden love and mortal laws I added a line that was not my own: Así pasa la Gloria del mundo: sin Gloria, ni pena, ni mundo. Thus passes the glory of the world: without glory, without sorrow, without a world. Sleep overpowered me as I was trying to remember the author’s name. Stretched out on the bed, I lost myself in a tangle of meaningless images, with one phrase echoing inside me: any moment now it will all come to light.

 

“Rumbo a Juárez” © Rafael Pérez Gay. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2012 by Catherine Mansfield. All rights reserved.

English Spanish (Original)

The doctor didn’t try to hide from me the storm my father was passing through:

“It’s called delirium. Hallucinations, amnesia, psychic disorder. It could also be a case of dementia caused by psychotic depression. We need to do a serum electrolytes test and an unenhanced cranial tomography.”

The neurologist wanted to look inside the theater of my father’s brain, to become a spectator of that absurd drama, as if there might be a new Ionesco trapped inside my father’s mind. I never liked Eugene Ionesco. In his stories dead bodies grow inside a room and men turn into rhinoceroses; as far as he was concerned, dreams are more lucid than our waking thoughts. In the world of that madman who triumphed with his delirium, dream stories unveiled dramatic forms. Seen from this point of view, at night when we dream, or in our delirium when we go mad, every one of us is a surrealist; we are all Breton, Picasso, Dalí. Along the road of madness, Ionesco was a recognized master of the theater of the absurd; but actually his dialogues are heavier than a grand piano. To understand him you have to carry around a whole dictionary of literary terms: avant-garde, postwar trauma, the loneliness of Man, language crisis, alienation, and some hidden eroticism thrown in for good measure. Anyway, let’s move on to my father.

My dad’s ideas were not so different from Ionesco’s. Carried away by his hallucinations, he plotted fantastical stories from the shadows of his room. The creatures of his mind shut away in the basement of his cerebral functions were clamoring to enter the house of his consciousness. In the end the doors gave way and the strange thoughts brought his inner reason crashing to the ground. Of course, the mind is an unsolved mystery and as for life, it’s a dream.  My father chose an international intrigue to help him plunge into a dark labyrinth. He assembled the central theme of Mexican public life from his own private world.

I tried to follow his plot. That was how I found out that for some time now he had been working as an undercover spy, using coded messages to report on the activity of two or three drug lords in the Juarez Cartel, a criminal organization which had fallen on hard times since the death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, El Señor de los Cielos, or the Lord of the Skies. On one mission my father found himself entangled in a string of lies and was finally betrayed in Madrid. Federal agents bought with dirty money forced him right to the edge of the abyss. The charge was extremely serious: according to the traitors, my father planned to bring a shipment of drugs into Spain. He was arrested at Barajas airport, accused of collaborating with Colombian drug lords. Since he was working undercover as a federal officer, the national authorities didn’t recognize him as a secret agent and accused him of being a member of the cartel that had tried to introduce 1,500 kilograms of pure cocaine into Spanish territory.

“1,500 kilos,” I repeated the figure with feigned amazement.

“You know nothing about organized crime,” he reproached me, angrily.

While he described his ongoing drama, I tried several times to bring him back to this side of reality. My father just looked at me with distrust. He broke off in the middle of his story to say:

“Tell me the truth. What’s your role in this treacherous game?”

“Nothing,” I answered, cast down by his phantoms.

“Do you trust your brother?” he asked me, in a hushed voice.

“Yes.”

“I would look into it if I were you. There are too many loose ends.” He put his finger to his lips, calling for silence.

He became desperate when he told me that my mother had been arrested as a suspected money launderer. He tried to make sense of his experience and force order on chance events: in the end he revealed that two spies dressed as nurses had caught him in a trap. He pointed one of them out to me from his bed. This whole creation came from inside my father’s brain, that galaxy which fits in one hand and which neurologists have described as a self-sufficient universe. This aleph is formed by billions of interconnected neurons and is capable of both creating and deleting its own energy and information. It functions with the same intensity in wakefulness as in sleep—when there are no intrusions from the outside world—and also in madness, that powerful dynamite for the conscious mind.

Mom tried to follow my father through the fantasies he invented with the furious uncertainty of a desperate creator. She gave up at some point during the Spanish intrigue and declared:

“Your father is wandering among us, but he’s no longer here.”

She was talking about a ghost, a presence which has come to carry out some unfinished business in the world of the living. As on other occasions my mother was right. Dad was in many places at once, but he wasn’t there with us.

“Tell your mother whether or not I was at Chanona airport last night,” he said, calling on me to give evidence.

“Chanona is a long way off,” I replied, following the false trail of this nonexistent airport. “Were you there?”

“Yes. An impressively modern airport,” he lied with all the conviction of madness.

In the mornings the nurses came and went, looking after the old people. The movement upset my father and he called me to his room to ask about this domestic activity which to him seemed like a battle that takes no prisoners.

“What’s happening here?”

“Nothing,” I told him. “The nurses are making the beds, emptying the toilets, making breakfast.”

“This is an African chaos,” he insisted, describing the hustle and bustle around him. Disorientated, he added: “Last night I fell asleep in Puebla. Two days ago I woke up in a seat at the Plaza cinema and last week in a strange apartment in the Condesa buildings. I went mad,” he told me, and started to cry. “I don’t want to stay another minute in this life. It’s a department of hell.” It sounded like a call for closure, but to this day nobody can ask destiny to fix the date and time of their own death, unless with a bullet through the brain.

My father was right. The cloak of madness on the shoulders of old age makes existence a living hell. It adds a tragic touch of darkness to a dead-end alley.

“Let’s talk to the doctor,” I tried to comfort him. “You’re getting out of this maze.”

I didn’t know what I was saying. The results of the serum electrolytes test revealed no alteration in the level of sodium, potassium, magnesium or calcium, abnormal levels of which are the usual cause of delirious thoughts. The tomography revealed a brain free of tumors or hematoma. The neurologist attributed my father’s mental disorder to a psychotic depression which had originated many months before in a well of sadness. If I understood correctly, the origin of delirium is unknown. It can be sparked off by a heart condition, an attack of bronchitis or an episode of pain which plunges the sufferer into an endless dream. Tucked within the folds of each delirium wait fleeting moments of happiness and sorrow, pure fantasy and the red-hot iron of reality, a sweet memory or an unbearable nightmare. This was the dream prison that my father had entered to serve the sentence of his ninety years of age.

The doctor drew on a battery of chemicals to save him from the shadows: Risperdal, Rivotril, Remeron. This antidepressant, antipsychotic, and anxiolytic front defeated the assault of anxiety but sunk him into a cloud of lethargy. The sedatives returned my dad’s delirium to the inner world of dreams, but reduced his waking life to just a few hours.

“He will sleep more now,” the doctor warned us, “but he’ll be calm. Without anxiety as his enemy he’ll suffer less, and maybe we can bring him back.”

Whenever he woke from the chemical lethargy caused by the medicine, my father shooed away imaginary cats and confused the windows with doors. In one of his waking moments he told me:

“I don’t understand. This morning I was at the plaza de toros in Mexico City.”

“Did you want to fight a bull?” I tried a reckless joke.

“No. I want to celebrate my ninetieth birthday there.”

“With fifty thousand guests?” I pointed out the size of the bullring.

“Yes,” he replied with conviction. “Do you think we could fill it?”

“I think it would be difficult. We don’t have that many friends,” I answered, and for a moment instead of the flame of madness I thought I saw the clear water of humor in his eyes.

“If we charge an entrance fee we could do a pretty good trade” he said, instantly making me his business partner.

There are some character traits which never leave us, not even on our deathbeds. Unbridled vanity and the obsessive hunt for fortune were my father’s second skin, even in madness and old age. Life plays games of chance with us: in the days of the criminal drama that culminated in my father’s arrest in Spain, I was invited to visit Ciudad Juarez.

 

I went for the money. I didn’t want to go to Juarez, but in the end I agreed. I could fill a notebook with the number of times I’ve accepted offers I wanted to turn down. They offered to pay me to sit at a table and spout off about culture and drug trafficking alongside two journalists who no doubt knew everything about the drug world that I didn’t. The shadow of bankruptcy was hovering over me, which was why I agreed to take on this and other undesirable commitments. Whenever there are children, old people, or invalids in the house, money will never stretch far enough. I ended up working twice as hard and earning half as much. I missed deadlines handing in texts on subjects I cared nothing about. We always do the opposite of what we once wanted. I knew nothing about drug trafficking that hadn’t been lifted from the eight columns of a newspaper or a television report. I made a living telling extraordinary stories collected from the press.

If they don’t want to die of hunger or fade into obscurity, writers these days have to parrot away at every literary forum and head to television studios and radio booths. Of course, this financial motivation doesn’t fully explain the sheer quantity of loudmouths in the public eye who dominate the world of arts. Maybe it’s because nobody is afraid of exhibitionism. Anyone will happily take their place in front of a camera or microphone and talk like a river flowing nowhere in particular. Fame is a corrosive poison.

I packed a bag and left for the airport. During the flight I read in El País that Spain had become the gateway for Colombian cocaine arriving in Europe and the money laundering center for drug cartels, who set up fly-by-night businesses to clean up their earnings. The global drug trade generated 322 billion dollars annually, almost two thirds of which came from cocaine. The central photograph on the front page showed the deck of The Oceania in Vigo, where police had seized 1,500 kilograms of cocaine. The leaders of the operation had been arrested, a Colombian and a Mexican, two of the international police’s most wanted drug traffickers. The Mexican had been trying out new alliances after the collapse of the Juarez Cartel’s empire. The copy of the newspaper in my hands was printed several days after the delirious drama which had seen my father arrested at Barajas airport. I thought to myself that the dreams of madmen come true every day somewhere in the world; we are all the realization of a delirious dream taking place on the other side of the planet. When the pilot announced that we were landing at Ciudad Juarez Airport, I remembered Chesterton’s phrase: a madman is anything but a man who has lost his reason.

Juarez is the  mouth of Hell. On entering, the desert sun reveals the dazzling glare of a midget town stretching across northern Chihuahua on the border with the United States. For many years, this village won first prize in a macabre lottery: organized crime, lawlessness, police corruption, unpunished violence. The hotel we were put up in was part of an American chain. It was horrific. They laughed in my face when I asked the way to the town center. There are no central streets in Juarez, as if the funnel of the frontier had sucked them all toward the American dream on the other side of the border.

Under clouds scattered by hot summer winds, the Franklin Mountains lie across the border that separates the two countries. This small mountain range houses a strategic military kingdom for the United States: Fort Bliss. Here, in the desert landscape of this mountainous labyrinth of caves, US marines trained to invade Iraq. North American soldiers break out of this prison of discipline to get high and let go in Mexican brothels.

The closest thing to a town center is an old train station where Francisco Villa once got trigger happy and murdered innocent people during some military episode or other. There’s nothing unusual about that; Villa and his men were always killing innocent people. Instead, I was pointed toward a street full of bars, also called Juarez, on the way to the oldest bridge across the border. Everything in this town is named after that hero of independence from Oaxaca and everything taints his name with the antithesis of Juarist values. Juarez’s nightmare has come true in Juarez.

I walked under the desert sun among images of the end of the world: poverty, drugs, prostitution. Wherever I looked on the street I saw ruined houses. I later found out that these were crack houses, dens of drugs and prostitution where heroin is the common currency. The state government razed them to the ground. After they had closed them time and time again and arrested the owners, the houses were taken over once more by the mafia and heroin addicts. The only solution found by the municipal government to put an end to these centers of madness and delinquency was to destroy them. Sometimes the only remedy is to add rubble to rubble.

I went into the Kentucky, a shadowy bar where the wail of northern redova music could be heard in the background, singing a tale of drug trafficking. That high noon of relentless sunshine had brought together uncomplicated American soldiers out for a good time, men who had crossed half the country looking for work at the assembly plants, and young people dressed in washed-out denim who embroidered the skin of their faces with rings, pins, and knives. In the sordid shadows of the bar I asked myself: Is this where Mexico begins or ends?

My cellphone rang. The nurse handed the phone to my father:

“Did you hear what happened last night?” He sounded agitated, as if someone had just told him a secret.

“No,” I answered, waiting for his story.

“They arrested one of the chiefs of the Gulf Cartel. Any moment now it will all come to light. You have to come and get me, go to the embassy if you have to.”

“Take it easy. I’ll come and get you,” I lied.

I told the nurse to give him two more drops of Risperdal to reduce his anxiety. I didn’t tell my father about the trip to Juarez because I didn’t want to add delirium to his delirium. However, in the Kentucky bar the message sounded not only real but urgent: any moment now it will all come to light. The shadows of the bar were filled with an air of imminent attack.

Every street corner in Juarez harbors the story of a murder. Everybody bears a story like a strange medal of merit: tales of crimes that went unpunished, women thrown out into the desert, and the pathological brutality of the soldiers of the drug war. I happened to hear from a taxi driver the brief and unfortunate love story of El Chiquilín, a minor drug baron who operated under the rule of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Lord of the Skies, and his brother Vicente. El Chiquilín had both the glory and misfortune of falling into the trap of love with a young beauty, who he took away with him one day as if robbing an object from a house. He was happy with her for a while, until she in turn fell into the trap of passion with a subordinate, who responded so feverishly and so fully that their guilty love soon came crashing out into the light for everyone to see. “At last the secret is out, wrote Auden,” I thought as I listened to the taxi driver’s story.

The stabs of disloyalty leave mortal wounds. El Chiquilín resented his friend’s betrayal more than that of his young wife. The man was under his protection; it was El Chiquilín himself who had made him somebody in his small kingdom on the streets of Juarez. El Chiquilín took no notice of the woman and said to his former friend: “I’ll give you three hours to do whatever you want and then I’m going to start looking until I find you and kill you.” He gave him three last hours of freedom and then went looking from brothel to brothel, bar to bar, house to house until he found him and killed him with his bare hands. The man was left lying in the darkness, from where he had once been picked up and made somebody in the light of that street kingdom. Meanwhile, El Chiquilín had cut down the number of payments he had to make in exchange for selling his merchandise to the brother of the Lord of the Skies, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, heir apparent to the empire where El Chiquilín had his kingdom. The heir missed his money and sent some men to ask after El Chiquilín, who had spent months lost in drugs and debauchery since the execution of his friend and the loss of his love. When they found him, he didn’t understand what they were saying and never really understood why they were killing him on the corner of one of the streets lined with ruined buildings that had once been his kingdom. As for the woman, she was never heard of again.

The taxi left me at the hotel entrance. I went up to my room and scribbled down as much as I could remember of the story so that I could read it out the next day as an opener to my public presentation for which I would be paid good money. At the end of this introduction full of forbidden love and mortal laws I added a line that was not my own: Así pasa la Gloria del mundo: sin Gloria, ni pena, ni mundo. Thus passes the glory of the world: without glory, without sorrow, without a world. Sleep overpowered me as I was trying to remember the author’s name. Stretched out on the bed, I lost myself in a tangle of meaningless images, with one phrase echoing inside me: any moment now it will all come to light.

 

“Rumbo a Juárez” © Rafael Pérez Gay. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2012 by Catherine Mansfield. All rights reserved.

Rumbo a Juárez

EL MEDICO NO ME OCULTÓ la tempestad por la que cruzaba mi padre:

Se llama delirium: alucinaciones, amnesias, desorden psíquico. Podría tratarse también de una demencia causada por una depresión sicótica. Ordene una prueba de electrolitos séricos y una tomografía simple de cráneo.

El neurólogo quería ver el teatro del cerebro de mi padre, volverse el espectador de esa intriga absurda como si la mente de papá encerrara un nuevo Ionesco. Nunca me gustó Eugéne Ionesco. En sus historias los cadáveres crecen en una habitación y los hombres se convierten en rinocerontes; para él los sueños eran pensamientos más lúcidos que los producidos en la vigilia. Para ese loco que triunfó con sus delirios, las historias oníricas develaban formas dramáticas. Vistas así las cosas, durante la noche, cuando soñamos, o en el delirio, cuando enloquecemos, todos somos surrealistas, somos Breton, Picasso, Dalí. Por el camino de la locura, Ionesco fue reconocido como un maestro del teatro del absurdo, pero la verdad es que sus diálogos pesan como un piano. Para comprenderlo  hay que cargar con un diccionario de términos literarios: vanguardia, absurdo, traumatismo de la posguerra, soledad del hombre, crisis del idioma, alienación, erotismo oculto de las sillas. En fin, pasemos a ver a mi padre.

Los pensamientos de papá no eran muy diferentes a los de Ionesco. Tomado por las alucinaciones tramaba en la sombra de su cuarto historias fantásticas. Las criaturas de su mente confinadas a los sótanos de las funciones cerebrales clamaban por entrar en la casa de la conciencia. Al final las puertas cedieron y los pensamientos raros arrasaron  los interiores de la razón. Cierto, la mente es un misterio aún no resuelto y la vida, sueño. Mi padre eligió una intriga internacional para adentrarse en un laberinto oscuro. Recogió del aire privado el  asunto central de la vida pública mexicana.

Intenté seguirlo en su trama. Así me enteré de que desde tiempo atrás él era un espía encubierto que informaba en código de las acciones de dos o tres capos del Cártel de Juárez, una organización delictiva venida a menos desde que murió Amado Carrillo Fuentes, El Señor de los Cielos. En una misión lo enredaron con las cuerdas de la mentira y fue traicionado en Madrid. Agentes federales comprados con dinero sucio lo llevaron al borde del abismo. La acusación era gravísima; según los traidores, mi padre quiso introducir un cargamento de droga a España. Lo detuvieron en el aeropuerto de Barajas acusándolo de complicidad con jefes colombianos del narco. Puesto que funcionaba como un federal encubierto, las autoridades nacionales no lo reconocieron como agente secreto y lo acusaron de ser uno de los operadores del cártel que intentó introducir mil quinientos kilogramos de cocaína pura al territorio español.

Mil quinientos kilos repetí la cifra con asombro fingido.

No sabes nada del crimen organizado me reprochó colérico.

Mientras me contaba el drama de su presente, en varias ocasiones intenté ubicarlo de este lado de la realidad, pero mi padre me miraba desconfiado. Interrumpió su relato y me dijo:

Dime la verdad: ¿qué tienes que ver en todo este juego de traiciones?

Nada le respondí abatido por sus fantasmas.

¿Confías en tu hermano? me preguntó en voz baja.

Sí.

Yo en tu lugar lo investigaría. Hay demasiados cabos sueltos se cruzó la boca con el dedo índice pidiendo silencio.

Lo arrasó la desesperación cuando me informó que mi madre había sido detenida como sospechosa del grave delito de lavado de dinero. Procuraba darle sentido a su experiencia y orden a lo fortuito; al final, me reveló que dos espías disfrazadas de enfermeras le tendieron una trampa. Me señaló desde su cama a una de ellas. Toda esta creación provenía del cerebro de mi padre, esa galaxia que cabe en una mano y los neurólogos han definido como un universo autosuficiente. Ese aleph está formado por billones de neuronas interconectadas y es capaz de crear y cancelar su propia energía e información, funciona con la misma intensidad en la vigilia que en el sueño, cuando no hay entradas del mundo exterior, y también en la locura, esa voraz dinamitera de la conciencia.

Mamá intentó seguirlo a través de las fantasías que mi padre creaba con la furia y el desconcierto de un creador desesperado. Mi madre lo abandonó en algún punto de la intriga española y declaró:

Tu padre deambula entre nosotros, pero ya no está aquí.

Hablaba de un fantasma, una presencia que ha venido a cobrar su última cuenta pendiente en el mundo de los vivos. Como otras veces mi madre tenía razón, mi papá estaba en muchos lugares al mismo tiempo, pero no entre nosotros:

Dile a tu madre si anoche estuve o no en el aeropuerto de Chanona me llamaba a testificar.

Chanona queda muy lejos seguí la corriente falsa de ese puerto aéreo inexistente. ¿Ahí estuviste?

Sí. Un aeropuerto moderno como pocos  mintió con la verdad de la locura.

Durante las mañanas las enfermeras entraban y salían atendiendo a los viejos. A mi padre lo alteraba el movimiento y me llamaba a su cuarto para preguntarme por la vida doméstica que a él le parecía una guerra sin cuartel:

¿Qué pasa?

Nada le contaba: las enfermeras arreglan la camas, vacían los excusados, preparan el desayuno.

Esto es un desorden africano afirmaba describiendo el ajetreo y agregaba desorientado: Anoche dormí en Puebla, hace dos días amanecí en una butaca del cine Plaza, la semana pasada en un departamento desconocido de los edificios Condesa. Me volví loco me dijo y empezó a llorar. No quiero estar un minuto más en esta vida, esto es una sucursal del infierno sonaba como una orden de clausura, pero hasta ahora nadie puede mandarle al destino el día y la hora de su propia muerte como no sea dándose un tiro en la sien.

Mi padre tenía razón, el manto de la locura sobre las sombras de la  vejez vuelve infernal a la existencia, le añade un toque trágico de oscuridad en un callejón sin salida.

Vamos a consultar al médico quise reconfortarlo. Vas a salir del laberinto.

No supe lo que decía. Los resultados de los electrolitos séricos no revelaron alteración alguna en el sodio, el potasio, el magnesio o el calcio, sustancias que fuera de rango suelen ser la causa de los pensamientos delirantes. La tomografía reveló un cerebro limpio de tumoraciones o hematomas. El neurólogo atribuyó el desorden mental a una depresión sicótica cuyo origen situó muchos meses atrás en un pozo de tristeza. Si entendí bien, el origen del delirio no se conoce, lo detona una afección cardiaca, una bronquitis o un episodio de dolor que hunde a quien lo padece en un sueño eterno.  Entre los pliegues de cada desvarío espera la dicha fugaz y la infelicidad, la fantasía y el hierro candente de lo real, la memoria dulce o la pesadilla insoportable. En esa prisión onírica entró mi padre a cumplir la condena de los noventa años de su edad.

El médico recurrió a una batería química para rescatarlo de la penumbra: Risperdal, Rivotril, Remeron. El frente antidepresivo, antisicótico y ansiólitico venció el acoso de la angustia, pero lo hundió en una nube de letargo. Los sedantes devolvieron los delirios al interior de los sueños, pero redujeron la vigilia de  mi papá a unas cuantas horas.

Dormirá más nos advirtió el médico, pero estará tranquilo, sin el enemigo de la ansiedad sufrirá menos y quizás podamos traerlo de regreso. 

Cuando despertaba de los sopores químicos provocados por las medicinas, mi padre espantaba con la mano gatos imaginarios y confundía las ventanas con las puertas. En uno de sus despertares me dijo:

No entiendo. Esta mañana aparecí en la Plaza de Toros México.

¿Querías torear? solté el chiste imprudente.

No, ahí quiero celebrar mis noventa años.

¿Cincuenta mil invitados? le dije el cupo de la plaza.

Sí me respondió convencido. ¿Podremos llenarla?

Me parece difícil. No tenemos tantos amigos respondí y creí ver en su mirada no la llama de la locura sino el agua clara del humor.

Si cobramos la entrada sería un negocio redondo en un momento me hizo socio de la empresa. 

Hay rasgos de carácter que nunca nos abandonarán, ni en el lecho de muerte. La vanidad desaforada y la búsqueda obsesiva de la fortuna, segunda piel de mi padre, aun en la vejez y la locura. La vida juega a los dados con nosotros: en los días de la trama delictiva que culminó con su arresto en España, me invitaron a Ciudad Juárez.

 

FUI POR DINERO. No quería viajar a Juárez, pero al final acepté. Si cuento las veces que he admitido propuestas a las que quise negarme llenaría un cuaderno. Me ofrecieron un pago por sentarme en una mesa a perorar sobre cultura y narcotráfico acompañando a dos periodistas que ciertamente sabían del mundo narco todo lo que yo ignoraba. Me rondaba el fantasma de la quiebra, por eso tomé ése y otros compromisos indeseables. Cuando en la casa hay niños, ancianos o enfermos, no hay dinero que alcance. Terminé trabajando el doble y ganando la mitad. Entregué textos a destiempo sobre asuntos que no me interesaban. Siempre hacemos lo  contrario de lo que una vez quisimos. De narcotráfico yo no sabía nada que no se desprendiera de las ocho columnas de un periódico o de un reportaje televisivo. Me defendí contando historias extraordinarias recogidas de la prensa.

Si no quieren morir de hambre y desaparecer, en nuestros días los escritores tienen que hablar como pericos en todos los foros, asistir al estudio de televisión y a la cabina radiofónica. Sé que esta razón financiera no es suficiente argumento para explicar la cantidad de fanfarrones que pueblan el territorio de nuestras letras y el espacio público. Quizás  esto se deba a que nadie teme al exhibicionismo, cualquiera toma un lugar ante la cámara o el micrófono a hablar como un río que corre hacia ninguna parte. La celebridad es un veneno corrosivo.

Hice una maleta y salí al aeropuerto. Durante el vuelo leí en el periódico El País que España era la puerta de entrada de la cocaína colombiana a Europa y el centro del blanqueo de los cárteles que utilizaban empresas fugaces para lavar sus ganancias. El negocio global de la droga movía 322 mil millones de dólares, casi dos tercios provenían de la cocaína. La fotografía central de primera plana reproducía la imagen de la cubierta del barco Oceanía, en Vigo, donde la policía había incautado mil 500 kilogramos de cocaína. Fueron capturados los jefes de la misión, un colombiano y un mexicano, dos de los narcos más buscados por la policía internacional. El mexicano probaba alianzas después del imperio derruido del Cártel de Juárez. La edición del diario que tenía en las manos se imprimió muchos días después de la delirante trama en que mi padre fue detenido en el aeropuerto de Barajas. Pensé que los sueños de los locos se cumplen todos los días en algún lugar del mundo, nosotros mismos somos la realización de un delirio soñado en el otro lado del planeta. Cuando el piloto anunció que aterrizaríamos en el aeropuerto de Ciudad Juárez recordé la sentencia de Chesterton: un loco es todo menos un hombre que ha perdido la razón.

Juárez es una boca del infierno. En la entrada, el sol desértico muestra los brillos deslumbrantes de una ciudad enana extendida en el norte de Chihuahua y la frontera con Estados Unidos. Desde hace muchos años, ese pueblo ganó el premio mayor de una lotería macabra: crimen organizado, ilegalidad, corrupción policiaca, violencia sin castigo. Nos hospedaron en el hotel de una gran cadena estadunidense. Horrendo. Se rieron de mí cuando pregunté por el centro de la ciudad. No hay calles centrales en Juárez, como si el embudo de la frontera las hubiera abducido hacia el sueño americano del otro lado de la línea fronteriza.

Bajo las nubes que dispersan los vientos calientes del verano, la montaña Franklin estriba la separación de la frontera. En ese ramal corto de montañas funciona un reino militar estratégico para Estados Unidos: Fort Bliss. En la geografía desértica de ese laberinto montañoso de cuevas entrenaron los marines para invadir a Irak. Desde esa cárcel de la disciplina atraviesan los soldados norteamericanos para drogarse y desfogarse en los burdeles mexicanos.     

Lo más parecido al Zócalo es una vieja estación de ferrocarril donde Francisco Villa tiró bala y asesinó inocentes en algún episodio revolucionario; nada raro, Villa y su estado mayor siempre mataron inocentes. Me dieron en cambio las señales de una calle de bares, llamada precisamente Juárez, establecidos en el camino que conduce al puente fronterizo más antiguo. Todo lleva en esa ciudad el nombre del prócer oaxaqueño y todo tiñe con su nombre la antípoda juarista. La pesadilla de Juárez se ha cumplido en Juárez.       

Caminé bajo el sol del desierto entre imágenes del fin del mundo: pobreza, droga, prostitución. A uno y otro lado de la calle vi edificios derruidos. Más tarde supe que se trataba de picaderos, antros de droga y prostitución en los que la heroína es la moneda corriente. El gobierno del estado los destruyó con la piqueta. Después de cerrarlos una y otra vez, de arrestar a los dueños, las casas eran tomadas de nuevo por la mafia y los heroinómanos. La única solución  a la mano que encontró el municipio para acabar con esos centros de locura y delincuencia fue la destrucción. Algunas veces, el único remedio consiste en agregar escombro a los escombros.

Entré al Kentucky, una cantina en penumbras en la que sonaba al fondo el lamento de la redova norteña cantando una leyenda del narcotráfico. Concurrieron ese mediodía de sol a rajatabla soldados norteamericanos francos y de juerga, hombres que recorrieron la mitad del país para encontrar trabajo en las maquiladoras, jóvenes vestidos con mezclillas deslavadas que bordaron la piel de su rostro con anillos, alfileres y navajas. En la sombra sórdida del bar me pregunté: ¿aquí empieza o termina México? 

Sonó mi celular. La enfermera le dio el auricular a mi padre:

¿Supiste lo que pasó anoche? se oía agitado, como si le hubieran revelado un secreto.

No le respondí esperando su historia.

Arrestaron a uno de los jefes del cártel del Golfo. Todo se sabrá de un momento a otro. Tienes que venir por mí, si es necesario recurre a la embajada.

Descansa. Iré por ti le mentí.

Le dije a la enfermera que le diera dos gotas más de Risperdal para disminuir la angustia. No le conté  a mi padre del viaje a Juárez, no quise agregar delirio a su delirio, pero oído en el bar Kentucky, el mensaje parecía no sólo real sino urgente: de un momento a otro todo se sabría. Un aire de inminencia y acoso dominaba las sombras del bar.

Las calles de Juárez guardan en cada esquina la historia de un asesinato. Todos llevan como extraña medalla al mérito un relato de crímenes impunes, mujeres tiradas en el desierto, y la saña patológica de los soldados del narco. A mí me tocó oír de los labios de un taxista la breve historia de amor desdichado de El Chiquilín, un capo menor de la droga que operaba bajo la férula de Amado Carrillo Fuentes, El Señor de los Cielos, y de su hermano Vicente. El Chiquilín tuvo la gloria y la desgracia de caer en la trampa del amor con una joven belleza a quien se llevó un día como se roba un objeto de una casa. Con ella fue feliz hasta que al cabo de un tiempo ella pisó la trampa de la pasión con un subordinado, quien le correspondió de tan febril y mutua manera que sus amores culpables salieron como torrente a la luz y se hizo evidente para todos. At last the secret is out, escribió Auden, pensé mientras oía el cuento del taxista.

Las puñaladas de la deslealtad son mortales. El Chiquilín resintió más la traición de su amigo que la de su joven mujer. Era su protegido, nadie sino el mismo Chiquilín lo había hecho alguien en su pequeño reino de las calles de Juárez. El Chiquilín se saltó a la mujer y dijo al amigo: “Te voy a dar tres horas para que hagas lo que quieras y luego voy a empezar a buscarte hasta que te encuentre y te mate”. Le dio las últimas tres horas de vida libre y luego lo buscó burdel por burdel, cantina por cantina, casa por casa hasta que lo encontró y lo mató con sus propias manos. Quedó tirado en la oscuridad, de donde un día lo recogió para que fuera alguien en la luz de su reino callejero. Mientras tanto, El Chiquilín había mermado algunas de las entregas del dinero que debía hacer por la venta de sus mercancías al hermano del Señor de los Cielos, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, heredero del imperio donde El Chiquilín tenía su reino. El heredero echó de menos el dinero y mandó preguntar por El Chiquilín que llevaba tres meses perdido en la droga y el desarreglo absoluto como consecuencia de la ejecución del amigo y la pérdida del amor. Cuando lo encontraron, no entendió de qué le hablaban, ni supo bien a bien por qué lo mataban en una de las esquinas de las calles de edificios derruidos que habían sido su reino. De la mujer no volvió a saberse nada.

El taxi me dejó en la entrada del hotel. Subí a mi cuarto y transcribí el episodio como me lo permitió la memoria para leerlo al día siguiente como umbral a mi exposición en la mesa pública por la que cobraría dinero fresco. Al final de ese portal de amores prohibidos y leyes mortales escribí una línea que no era mía: Así pasa la gloria del mundo: sin gloria, ni pena, ni mundo. Me venció el sueño mientras intentaba recordar al autor. Me perdí en un embrollo de imágenes sin sentido, tirado en la cama, con una frase interior:

De un momento a otro, todo se sabrá.

Fragmento de la novela Nos acompañan los muertos. Planeta. 2009.

 

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