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The El Chile dump made less of an
impression on Kessler than the neighborhoods he drove through—always in a
police car escorted by another police car—where the snatchings most often took
place. Colonia Kino, La Vistosa, Remedios Mayor, and La Preciada to the
southeast, Colonia Las Flores, Colonia Plata, Alamos, Lomas del Toro to the
west, the neighborhoods near the industrial parks and along both sides of
Avenida Ruben Dario and Avenida Carranza like a double spinal cord, and Colonia
San Bartolome, Guadalupe Victoria, Ciudad Nueva, Colonia Las Rositas to the
northeast. Walking the streets in broad daylight, he told the press, is
frightening. I mean: frightening for a man like me. The reporters, none of whom
lived in those neighborhoods, nodded. The officers, however, hid smiles. They
thought Kessler sounded naive. He sounded like a gringo. A good gringo, of
course, because bad gringos sounded different, spoke differently. For a woman,
said Kessler, it's dangerous to be out at night. Reckless. Most of the streets,
except for the main thoroughfares with bus routes, are poorly lit or not lit at
all. The police keep out of some neighborhoods, he told the mayor, who squirmed
in his seat as if he'd been bitten by a snake and assumed an expression of
infinite regret and infinite comprehension. The
Sonora
state attorney general, the assistant
attorney general, the inspectors, said that the problem might be, perhaps was,
could conceivably be, you might say, a problem of the city police, headed by
Don Pedro Negrete, twin brother of the university rector. And Kessler asked who
Pedro Negrete was, whether he had been introduced to him, and the two energetic
young officers who had escorted him everywhere and whose English wasn't bad,
said no, in fact Mr. Kessler and Don Pedro hadn't crossed paths, and Kessler
asked them to describe him, since maybe he'd seen him the first day, at the
airport, and the inspectors gave a brief description of the police chief, not
very enthusiastically, a poor sketch, as if after having mentioned Pedro Negrete
they regretted having done so. And the sketch didn't suggest anything to
Kessler. It remained mute. Grafted of hollow words. A tough guy, the real
thing, said the energetic young inspectors. A former member of the judicial
police. He must look like his brother, the rector, mused Kessler. But the
inspectors laughed and offered him a last shot of
bacanora
and said no,
he shouldn't get that idea, Don Pedro didn't look anything like Don Pablo,
nothing at all like him, the rector was a tall, thin man, practically skin and
bones, whereas Don Pedro was on the short side, broad shouldered but short, and
carrying a few extra pounds because he liked to eat well and didn't turn up his
nose at either
nortena
food or American hamburgers. And then Kessler
wondered whether he should talk to the man. Whether he should visit him. And he
also wondered why the police chief hadn't come to visit him, when after all he
was the guest. So he wrote down the name in his notebook. Pedro Negrete, former
judicial,
municipal police chief, highly regarded, didn't come to
welcome me. And then he turned to other matters. He busied himself studying the
killings one by one. He busied himself drinking shots of
bacanora,
Christ
it was good. He busied himself preparing his two lectures to be given at the
university. And one afternoon he went out the back way, as he'd done the day he
arrived, and took a taxi to the crafts market, which some called the Indian
market and others the
norteno
market, to buy a souvenir for his wife.
And just like the first time, unknown to him, an unmarked police car followed
the whole way.

When the reporters left the
Santa Teresa penitentiary, the lawyer laid her head on the table and began to
sob very softly, so unobtrusively that she didn't seem like a white woman. Indian
women cried like that. Some mestizas. But not white women and certainly not
college-educated white women. When she felt Haas's hand on her shoulder, his
touch not a caress or even friendly, maybe just a token gesture, the few tears
she'd let fall on the tabletop (a table that smelled of disinfectant and,
strangely, of cordite) dried and she lifted her head and gazed at the pale face
of her defendant, her beloved, her friend, a haughty and at the same time
relaxed face (how could anyone be haughty and relaxed at the same time?),
observing her with scientific rigor, not from that prison room but from the
sulphurous vapors of another planet.

On November 25, the body of
Maria Elena Torres, thirty-two, was found in her house on Calle Sucre in
Colonia Ruben Dario. Two days earlier, on November 23, there had been a march
of women across Santa Teresa, from the university to city hall, protesting the
killings of women and the climate of impunity. The march was organized by the
WSDP, along with several NGOs, plus the PRD and some student groups. According
to the authorities, no more than five thousand people took part. According to
the organizers, there had been more than sixty thousand people marching the
streets of Santa Teresa. Maria Elena Torres was among them. Two days later she
was knifed in her own home, stabbed through the neck so that she bled to death.
Maria Elena Torres lived alone, since she and her husband had separated not
long before. She had no children. According to the neighbors she had fought with
her husband that week. When the police showed up at the boardinghouse where her
husband lived, he had already fled. The case was assigned to Inspector Luis
Villasenor, recently arrived from
Hermosillo
,
who after a week of interrogations came to the conclusion that the killer
wasn't the fugitive husband but Maria Elena's boyfriend, Augusto or Tito
Escobar, whom the victim had been seeing for a month. This Escobar lived in
Colonia La Vistosa and had no known occupation. When they went to look for him,
he was gone. Three men were found in the house. Upon interrogation, they
declared that they had seen Escobar come home one night with bloodstains on his
shirt. Inspector Villasenor had to say that he'd never interrogated three
worse-smelling individuals. Shit, he said, was like their second skin. The
three men worked picking through the trash at El
Chile
, the illegal dump. Not only
was there no shower where they lived, but no running water either. How the
fuck, Inspector Villa-senor asked himself, had Escobar managed to become Maria
Elena's lover? At the end of the interrogation, Villasenor took the three men
out to the courtyard and gave them a beating with a length of hose. Then he
made them undress, threw them some soap, and sprayed them down for fifteen
minutes. Later, as he was throwing up, it occurred to him that there was a
logical connection between the two acts. As if one led to the other. The
beating with the piece of green hose. The water gushing from the black hose.
Thinking this made him feel better. From the scavengers' combined descriptions
a police sketch was made of the suspected killer and police stations around the
country were alerted. But the case went nowhere. Maria Elena's ex-husband and
boyfriend simply disappeared and were never heard of again.

Of course, one day the work dried up.
Dealers and galleries come and go. Mexican painters don't. Mexican painters are
always what they are, like mariachis, say, but dealers fly off one day to the
Cayman Islands
, and galleries close or cut their employees'
salaries. Something like that had to happen to Kelly. Afterward she turned to
managing fashion shows. The first few months she did well. Fashion is like art
but easier. Clothes are cheaper, no one has any illusions when she buys a
dress, and at first she did well, she had experience and friends, people
trusted her taste even if they didn't trust her, her shows were a success. But
she was bad at managing herself and her money, and always, for as long as I can
remember, she was strapped for cash. Sometimes the way she lived drove me crazy
and we had huge fights. Several times I introduced her to men, single or more
often divorced, who would have married her and financed her lifestyle, but in
that regard Kelly was irreproachably independent. By this I don't mean she was
a saint. There was nothing saintly about her. I know of men (because those same
men told me so with tears in their eyes) she took for everything she could get.
But never under legal cover. If they gave her what she asked for it was because
she, Kelly Rivera Parker, had asked for it, not because they felt an obligation
to their wife or the mother of their children (by this point in her life Kelly
had decided she would never have children) or their official lover. There was
something in her nature that rejected any notion of romantic commitment, even
if her perpetual lack of commitment left her in a precarious position, a
position that Kelly, meanwhile, never attributed to her own actions but to
unforeseen twists of fate. She lived, like Oscar Wilde, above her means. The
most incredible thing of all was that this never made her bitter. Well, once or
twice it did, once or twice I saw her furious, raging, but these attacks would
be over in minutes. Another of her good points, one of mine, too, was loyalty
to her friends. Well, this might not be exactly a good point. But Kelly was
like that, friends were sacred and she would always stand up for a friend. For
example, when I joined the PRI there was a slight domestic upheaval, to call it
something. Some reporters who had known me for years stopped talking to me.
Others, the worst, still talked, but mostly behind my back. As you're well
aware, this is a macho country full of faggots. The history of
Mexico
wouldn't
make sense otherwise. But Kelly was always on my side, never asked me to
explain, never reproached me for a thing. The others, as you know, said I had
joined the party out of self-interest. Of course I joined out of self-interest.
But there are all kinds of self-interest and I was tired of preaching in a
vacuum. I wanted power, that I won't deny. I wanted free rein to change some
things in this country. I won't deny that either. I wanted to improve public
health and the public schools and do my bit to prepare
Mexico
to enter
the twenty-first century. If that's self-interest, so be it. Of course, I
didn't achieve much. I brought more hopes than hardheadedness to it, I'm sure,
and it wasn't long before I realized my mistake. You think that from the inside
you might change some things for the better. First you work from the outside,
then you think that if you were inside the real possibilities for change would
be greater. You think that inside, at least, you'll have more freedom to act.
Not true. There are things that can't be changed from outside or inside. But
here comes the funniest part. The really unbelievable part of the story (the
sad story of
Mexico
or
Latin America
, it makes no difference). The part you
can't
believe.
When you make mistakes from inside, the mistakes stop
mattering. Mistakes stop being mistakes. Making a mistake, butting your head
against the wall, becomes a political virtue, a political tactic, gives you
political
presence,
gets you media attention. At the moment of truth—
which is every moment, or at least every moment from eight a.m. to five p.m.—it
makes just as much sense to be present and to err as to hunker down and wait.
You can do nothing, you can fuck things up—it doesn't matter, so long as you're
there. Where? Why, there, the place to be. And that was how I went from being
well-known to being famous. I was an attractive woman, I didn't mince words,
the dinosaurs of the PRI laughed at my jabs, the sharks of the PRI considered
me one of their own, the Left wing of the party unanimously cheered my
brazenness. I wasn't aware of the half of it. The truth is like a strung-out
pimp. Wouldn't you agree?

Albert Kessler's first lecture
at the
University
of
Santa Teresa
was a
popular success like few in memory. If you didn't count the two talks given in
the same place years ago, by a PRI candidate for president, or another by a
president-elect, never before had the fifteen-hundred-seat university hall been
completely filled. According to the most conservative estimates, the number of
people who came to listen to Kessler far exceeded three thousand. It was a
social occasion, because everybody who was anybody in Santa Teresa wanted to
meet Kessler, shake the distinguished visitor's hand, or at least see him from
up close, and it was also a political occasion, because even the most stubborn
opposition groups seemed to relax or assume a more diplomatic and less
antagonistic stance than they had adopted thus far, and even the feminists and
the groups of relatives of disappeared women and girls settled down to wait for
the scientific miracle, the miracle of the human mind set in motion by that
modern-day Sherlock Holmes.

The story of Haas's
denunciation of the Uribes came out in the six papers that had sent their
correspondents to the Santa Teresa penitentiary. Before publication, five of
the reporters called the police for comment, and the police, like the big
national papers, expressly denied there was any credibility to the account. The
reporters also called the Uribe residence and talked to family members who said
that Antonio and Daniel were traveling or didn't live in
Mexico
anymore or had moved to
Mexico City
, where they were studying at one
of the universities there. The reporter from
El Independiente de Phoenix,
Mary-Sue
Bravo, even managed to get the address of Daniel Uribe's father and tried to
interview him, but all her attempts were in vain. Joaquin Uribe always had
something to do or wasn't in Santa Teresa or had just stepped out. While
Mary-Sue Bravo was in Santa Teresa, she happened to run into the reporter from
La
Raza de Green Valley,
who was the only reporter to cover Haas's press
conference who hadn't called the police for their official response, thus
risking a lawsuit from the Uribe family and the Sonora state agencies handling
the case. Mary-Sue Bravo spotted him through the window of a cheap restaurant
in Colonia Madero where the reporter from
La Raza
was eating. He wasn't
alone. Sitting with him was a brawny man who Mary-Sue thought looked like a
policeman. At first she shrugged it off and kept walking, but a few yards farther
on she had a presentiment and turned back. She found the reporter from
La
Raza
alone, polishing off some
chilaquiles.
They said hello and she
asked if she could sit down. The reporter from
La Raza
said of course.
Mary-Sue ordered a Diet Coke and for a while they talked about Haas and the
slippery Uribe family. Then the reporter from
La Raza
paid the bill and
left, leaving Mary-Sue alone in a restaurant full of men who, like the
reporter, looked like farmworkers and wetbacks.