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On December 19, on some land
near Colonia Kino, a few miles from the Gavilanes del Norte farming
cooperative, the remains of a woman were found in a plastic bag. According to
the police statement, she was another victim of the Bisontes gang. According to
the medical examiners, the victim was between fifteen and sixteen years old,
five foot two or five foot three, and it had been approximately a year since
she'd been killed.

In the bag were a pair of cheap
navy blue pants, like the kind women wore to work at the maquiladoras, a shirt,
and a black plastic belt with a big plastic buckle, of the decorative variety.
The case was handled by Inspector Marcos Arana, recently transferred from
Hermosillo
, where he was attached to the narcotics squad,
but on the first day Inspector Angel Fernandez and Inspector Juan de Dios
Martinez
showed up at the
scene. The latter, when told to leave the case to Arana because they wanted to
break him in, took a stroll around the area until he came to the gates of the
Gavilanes del Norte farming cooperative. The main house still had its roof and
windows, but the other buildings looked as if they'd been flattened by a
hurricane. For a while, Juan de Dios wandered around the ghost farm, to see if
he could at least find a farmworker or a child or a dog, if nothing else, but
even the dogs were gone.

What is it I want you to do?
asked the congresswoman. I want you to write about this, keep writing about
this. I've read your articles. They're good, but too often you pull your
punches. I want you to strike hard, strike human flesh, unassailable flesh, not
shadows. I want you to go to Santa Teresa and sniff around. I want you to sink
in your teeth. At first I didn't know much about Santa Teresa. I had some
general ideas, like anybody, but I think it was after my fourth visit that I
began to understand the city and the desert. Now I can't get them out of my
head. I know everybody's names, or almost everybody's. I know of some illicit
activities. But I can't go to the Mexican police. At the attorney general's
office they would think I was crazy. And I can't hand over my information to
the gringo police. Out of patriotism, ultimately, because no matter whom it
disturbs (myself first of all), I'm a Mexican. And also a Mexican
congresswoman. We'll fight it out among ourselves, as always, or we'll go down
together. There are people I don't want to hurt, but I know I'll hurt them. I
accept it, because times are changing and the PRI has to change too. So all I
have left is the press. Maybe because of my years as a reporter, I've kept my
faith in some of you. Also, the system may be full of flaws, but at least we
have freedom of expression, which is something the PRI has almost always
respected. I said
almost
always, don't look so incredulous, said the
congresswoman. Here people publish what they want with no trouble. Anyway, we
aren't going to argue about this, are we? You published a so-called political
novel in which all you do is toss around unfounded accusations, and nothing happened
to you, did it? You weren't censored or taken to court. It was my first novel,
said Sergio, and it's very bad. Did you read it? I read it, said the
congresswoman, I've read everything you've written. It's very bad, said Sergio,
and then he said: books aren't censored or read here, but the press is another
story. Newspapers are read. At least the headlines. And after a silence: what
happened to Loya? Loya died, said the congresswoman. No, he wasn't killed and
he didn't disappear. He just died. He had cancer and no one knew it. He was a
private man. Now someone else runs his agency, maybe it doesn't even exist
anymore, maybe it's a corporate consulting firm now. I have no idea. Before he
died, Loya gave me all his files on Kelly. What he couldn't turn over he
destroyed. I sensed something was wrong, but he wouldn't tell me anything. He
went off to the
United States
,
to a clinic in
Seattle
,
where he held out for three months and then he died. He was a strange man. I
visited him only once, he lived alone in an apartment in Colonia Napoles. From
the outside it was an ordinary middle-class place, but inside it was something
else, I don't know how to describe it, like a mirror image of Loya or a
self-portrait, but an unfinished self-portrait. He had lots of records and art
books. The doors were armored. He had a photograph of an older woman in a gold
frame, a melodramatic touch. The kitchen was completely redone and it was big
and full of professional kitchen gadgets. When he found out he didn't have long
to live he called me from
Seattle
and in his own way he said goodbye. I remember I asked whether he was afraid. I
don't know why I asked him that. He answered with another question. He asked
whether I was afraid. No, I'm not afraid, I said. Then neither am I, he said.
Now I want you to use everything that Loya and I gathered between us and stir
up the hive. Naturally, you won't be alone. I'll be with you always, though you
can't see me, helping you every step of the way.

The last case of 1997 was
fairly similar to the second to last, except that the bag containing the body
wasn't found on the western edge of the city but on the eastern edge, by the
dirt road that runs along the border and then forks and vanishes when it
reaches the first mountains and steep passes. The victim, according to the
medical examiners, had been dead for a long time. She was about eighteen, five
foot two and a half or three. She was naked, but a pair of good-quality leather
high heels were found in the bag, which led the police to think she might be a
whore. Some white thong panties were also found. Both this case and the
previous case were closed after three days of generally halfhearted
investigations. The Christmas holidays in Santa Teresa were celebrated in the
usual fashion. There were
posadas,
pinatas were smashed, tequila and
beer were drunk. Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing.
Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter
that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept
residents and strangers from getting lost.

5. THE PART
ABOUT ARCHIMBOLDI

His mother was blind in one
eye. She had blond hair and was blind in one eye. Her good eye was sky blue and
placid, which made her seem slow but sweet natured, truly good. His father was
lame. He had lost his leg in the war and spent a month in a military hospital
near Düren, thinking he was done for and watching as the patients who could
move (he couldn't!) stole cigarettes from the others. When they tried to steal
his cigarettes, though, he grabbed the thief by the neck, a freckled boy with
broad cheekbones and broad hips, and said: halt! a soldier's tobacco is sacred!
Then the freckled boy went away and night fell and he had the sense that
someone was watching him.

In the next bed there was a
mummy. He had black eyes like two deep wells.

"Do you want a
smoke?" the man with one leg asked.

The mummy didn't answer.

"It's good to have a
smoke," said the man with one leg, and he lit a cigarette and tried to
find the mummy's mouth among the bandages.

The mummy shuddered. Maybe he
doesn't smoke, thought the man, and he took the cigarette away. The moon
illuminated the end of the cigarette, which was stained with a kind of white
mold. Then he put it back between the mummy's lips, saying: smoke, smoke,
forget all about it. The mummy's eyes remained fixed on him, maybe, he thought,
it's a comrade from the battalion and he's recognized me. But why doesn't he
say anything? Maybe he can't talk, he thought. Suddenly, smoke began to filter
out between the bandages. He's boiling, he thought, boiling, boiling.

Smoke came out of the mummy's
ears, his throat, his forehead, his eyes, which remained fixed on the man with
one leg, until the man plucked the cigarette from the mummy's lips and blew,
and kept blowing for a while on the mummy's bandaged head until the smoke had
disappeared. Then he stubbed the cigarette out on the floor and fell asleep.

When he woke, the mummy was no
longer there. Where's the mummy? he asked. He died this morning, said someone
from a different bed. Then he lit a cigarette and settled down to wait for
breakfast. When he was released he went stumping toward the city of
Düren
. There he boarded a
train that brought him to another city.

In this city he waited twenty-four
hours in the station, eating army soup. The man distributing the soup was a
one-legged sergeant like himself. They talked for a while, as the sergeant
ladled soup into the soldiers' tin plates and he ate, sitting on a nearby
wooden bench like a carpenter's. According to the sergeant, everything was
about to change. The war was coming to an end and a new era was about to begin.
He answered, as he ate, that nothing would ever change. Not even the two of
them had changed, and each had lost a leg.

Whenever he spoke, the sergeant
laughed. If the sergeant said white, he said black. If the sergeant said day,
he said night. And the sergeant laughed at his answers and asked whether the
soup needed salt, whether it was very bland. Then the man got tired of waiting
for a train that seemed as if it would never come, and he set off again on
foot.

He roamed the countryside for
three weeks, eating stale bread and stealing fruit and chickens from farmyards.
During his wanderings,
Germany
surrendered. When he was told, he said: good. One afternoon he came to his town
and knocked at the door of his house. His mother came to the door and upon
seeing him in such a state she didn't recognize him. Then everyone hugged him
and fed him. He asked if the girl who was blind in one eye had married. They
said no. That night he went to see her, without changing clothes or washing,
despite his mother's pleas that he at least shave. When the girl saw him
standing at the door to her house, she recognized him instantly. The one-legged
man saw her too, looking out the window, and he raised a hand in a formal
salute, even a stiff salute, though it could also have been interpreted as a
way of saying such is life. From that moment on he told whoever would listen
that in his town everyone was blind and the one-eyed girl was a queen.

In 1920 Hans Reiter was born.
He seemed less like a child than like a strand of seaweed. Canetti, and Borges,
too, I think—two very different men—said that just as the sea was the symbol or
mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited. Hans
Reiter defied this rule from the moment he was born. He didn't like the earth,
much less forests. He didn't like the sea either, or what ordinary mortals call
the sea, which is really only the surface of the sea, waves kicked up by the
wind that have gradually become the metaphor for defeat and madness. What he
liked was the seabed, that other earth, with its plains that weren't plains and
valleys that weren't valleys and cliffs that weren't cliffs.

When his one-eyed mother bathed
him in a washtub, the child Hans Reiter always slipped from her soapy hands and
sank to the bottom, with his eyes open, and if her hands hadn't lifted him back
up to the surface he would have stayed there, contemplating the black wood and
the black water where little particles of his own filth floated, tiny bits of
skin that traveled like submarines toward an inlet the size of an eye, a calm,
dark cove, although there was no calm, and all that existed was movement, which
is the mask of many things, calm among them.

Once, his one-legged father,
who sometimes watched as his one-eyed mother bathed him, told her not to lift
him out, to see what he would do. From the bottom of the washtub Hans Reiter's
blue eyes gazed up at his mother's blue eye, and then he turned on his side and
remained very still, watching the fragments of his body drift away in all
directions, like space probes launched at random across the universe. When he
ran out of breath he stopped watching the tiny particles as they were lost in
the distance and set out after them. He turned red and understood that he was
passing through a region very like hell. But he didn't open his mouth or make
the slightest attempt to come up, although his head was only four inches below
the surface and the seas of oxygen. Finally his mother's arms lifted him out
and he began to cry. His father, wrapped in an old military cloak, looked down
at the floor and spat into the center of the hearth.

At three Hans Reiter was taller
than all the other three-year-olds in his town. He was also taller than any
four-year-old, and not all the five-year-olds were taller than he was. At first
he was unsteady on his feet and the town doctor said it was because of his
height and advised that he be given more milk to strengthen his bones. But the
doctor was wrong. Hans Reiter was unsteady on his feet because he moved across
the surface of the earth like a novice diver along the seafloor. He actually
lived and ate and slept and played at the bottom of the sea. Milk wasn't a
problem. His mother kept three cows and hens and the boy was given plenty to
eat.

His one-legged father sometimes
watched him walking in the fields and wondered whether anyone in his family had
ever been so tall. The brother of a great-great-grandfather or
great-grandfather, it was said, had served under
Frederick
the Great in a regiment composed
only of men over five foot ten or six feet. This select regiment or battalion
had suffered many losses, because the soldiers were such easy targets.