Velvet Was the Night Read online

  “No idea,” the Antelope said. “Maybe one of those students, maybe—”

  “We gotta drive him to the doctor.”

  “Fuck no,” El Güero said, shaking his head. “You know the rules: we wait until one of the cars swings by and then we load him into that. No driving him ourselves. We still have work to do. There’s a cameraman from NBC hiding in a taco shop, and we’ve got to grab that prick.”

  El Gazpacho was gurgling like a baby, spitting more blood. Elvis tried to prop him up and glared at his teammates. “Fuck that, help me get him to the car.”

  “The car’s too far. Wait for an ambulance or one of the vans to swing by.”

  Yeah, yeah. But the problem was Elvis didn’t see no ambulance or no van swinging by right then and everyone was busy as fuck. It could take nothing for El Gazpacho to be rolled into a vehicle, or it could take a while.

  “Motherfucker, it’ll be five minutes, and then you can go figure out what’s up with the cameraman.”

  El Güero and the Antelope didn’t look very convinced, and Elvis couldn’t hold poor Gazpacho forever and he couldn’t carry him nowhere. He wasn’t that strong; he was quick and wily and could kick and punch courtesy of the personal defense lessons El Mago had given them. The strong one, that was El Güero, a fucking Samson who could probably lift an elephant in his arms.

  “El Mago ain’t going to be happy if his right-hand man bites the dust,” Elvis said, and at last that seemed to rattle the Antelope enough, because the Antelope was deadly afraid of El Mago, and El Güero was a subservient snake when El Mago was around, sliding on his belly for crumbs, so some preservation instinct must have activated inside his dull brain.

  “Let’s get him to the car,” El Güero said, and he lifted El Gazpacho, who was no small man, as though he were a baby, and they ran the few blocks necessary to reach the alleyway to find that someone had torched their car.

  “Who the fuck!” yelled Elvis, and he spun around, furious. He couldn’t believe it! Those little fuckers! It must have been one of the protesters who’d singled out the vehicle due to its lack of plates.

  “Well, your plan’s fucked now,” El Güero told him, and the sadistic motherfucker looked a bit giddy. Elvis didn’t know if it was because things weren’t going well for Elvis or because he hated El Gazpacho.

  Elvis looked around at the lonely alleyway strewn with garbage. The smoke made his eyes water, and the scent of gunpowder clogged his nostrils. He pointed to the other end of the alleyway.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “I’m heading back. We got work to do,” El Güero said, and he was putting El Gazpacho down. Just dumping him down on the ground like a sack of flour, leaving him there atop a damn pile of rotten lettuce. “We gotta get that cameraman.”

  “Don’t you fucking dare, you son of a bitch,” Elvis said. “El Mago, he’ll have your balls if you don’t help us.”

  “Up your ass. He’ll be pissed we were a bunch of pussies and didn’t finish the job. If you want to play nurse, do it alone.”

  That was that. El Güero was walking away. The Antelope didn’t seem to have made up his mind about what to do. Elvis couldn’t believe this crap. He wasn’t no softie, but you didn’t leave one of your teammates to bleed out in a stinking alleyway like that. It wasn’t right. And this was El Gazpacho! Elvis would rather have a foot amputated than leave El Gazpacho behind.

  “Come on, help me here. What? You lost your dick?” Elvis asked the Antelope.

  “What the fuck’s my dick—”

  “Only a limp, dickless shit would be standing there rubbing his hands. Grab him by the shoulders.”

  The Antelope grunted and complained, but he obeyed. The three of them made it to the end of the alleyway and down the street. There was a blue Datsun parked there, and Elvis shattered the glass of the passenger’s window with a bottle he found on the ground. He slid into the car.

  “What you gonna do?” the Antelope asked.

  “What’s it look like?” Elvis replied as he frantically looked inside his backpack until he fished out the screwdriver. Handy thing, that. It was an old habit of his to carry it from back in the day when he’d been a juvenile delinquent. The cops would give you a massive beating if they found you carrying a knife and then arrest you for having a concealed weapon, but a screwdriver was no knife. The other thing he liked to carry were two little pieces of metal that he used to pick locks when he didn’t have his full kit.

  “You can’t hotwire it like that,” the Antelope said, but the Antelope liked to complain about everything.

  Elvis jammed the screwdriver in place, but it wouldn’t go. He bit his lip, trying to calm the fuck down. You can’t pick a lock if you’re shivering; same with starting a car. Gladius.

  “Man, can’t you hurry it?”

  Gladius, gladius, gladius. Finally! He got the motor running and motioned for the Antelope to get in the car. The Antelope started protesting.

  “The mission still needs to be completed, and what about El Güero and the others and that cameraman from the American network?” he asked, sounding a little breathless.

  “Jump in,” Elvis ordered. He couldn’t afford to have a panicked operative, and he kept his voice level.

  “We can’t take off.”

  “He’s gonna bleed to death if you don’t press against his wound,” Elvis continued in that same level tone he’d learned from El Mago. “You gotta get in the car and press hard.”

  The Antelope relented and pushed El Gazpacho into the car and climbed in next to him. Elvis took off his denim jacket and handed it to the Antelope. “Use that.”

  “I think he’s gonna die anyway,” the Antelope said, but he did press the jacket against El Gazpacho’s chest as instructed.

  Elvis’s hands were slick with El Gazpacho’s blood as he took the steering wheel. The gunshots had started again.

  2

  THE STREET SMELLED of fritangas and oil, a far cry from the scent of frangipani and roses and island paradises, which she’d tried to conjure the previous evening, spraying cheap perfume around her apartment and playing “Strangers in the Night.” The conjuring had failed. Instead, she hadn’t slept well and had a headache.

  Maite attempted to pick up the pace. The alarm clock hadn’t gone off, and she was going to be late, but she had to stop at the newsstand. Would Jorge Luis’s surgery go according to plan? The question had gnawed at her mind for days now.

  She was hoping there would be no one ahead of her, but two men were standing in line. Maite bit her lips and clutched her purse. The papers were all talking about the confrontation that had taken place on Thursday. “The president is willing to listen to everyone,” declared Excélsior. She hardly paid attention to the headlines. Sure, she’d heard chatter about the student demonstration, but politics seemed terribly dull.

  Love, frail as gossamer, stitched together from a thousand songs and a thousand comic books, made of the dialogue spoken in films and the posters designed by ad agencies: love was what she lived for.

  The young man ahead of her was buying cigarettes and chatting with the owner of the newspaper stand. Maite stood on her tiptoes desperately trying to signal to the newspaper stand owner, hoping he might send the man on his way. Finally, after another five minutes, it was her turn.

  “Do you have the latest Secret Romance?” she asked.

  “It hasn’t come in yet,” the newspaper stand man said. “There’s some kind of problem over at the printer. But I’ve got Lágrimas y Risas.”

  Maite frowned. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Lágrimas y Risas. She had loved the adventures of the Gypsy girl Yesenia, the exotic world of Geisha, and the suffering of the humble maid María Isabel. Most of all, she had been taken by the evil ways of Rubí, the antiheroine who was desired by all men, a seductive, dangerous devourer of hearts. But the current story at L
ágrimas y Risas hadn’t caught her fancy. This stand didn’t carry Susy: Secretos del Corazón, and frankly she was addicted to Secret Romance. The drawings were top-notch, and the writing was excellent. She wouldn’t even consider one of the Western comic books dangling from clothespins or the raunchy ones that featured naked women.

  In the end, Maite ended up deciding against buying an issue of Cosmopolitan for the romance story in the back and purchased a bag of Japanese peanuts and indulged herself in the latest Lágrimas y Risas, which was cheaper than glossy magazines. She was supposed to be saving money, anyway. She had to pay the mechanic. A year before she had bought a car. Her mother warned her against such an expensive purchase, but Maite stubbornly plunked down the money for a secondhand Caprice.

  It was a huge mistake. It broke down after the first two months, then she was in a collision, and now it was back with the mechanic. Mechanic! Armed robbers, that’s what those men were. They took advantage of an unmarried woman and charged more than they would have if they’d been dealing with a man, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  A man. That’s why she was fearing Friday. It was Maite’s birthday. She would be turning thirty. Thirty was the age of an old maid, the point of no return, and her mother would no doubt remind her about that, insisting that she knew some young man or another who would be perfect for Maite and couldn’t she be less picky? Maite’s sister would agree with her mother, and the whole evening would be ruined.

  To make things worse, Friday was also the day she contributed to the savings pool. It was company policy. Well, not really. But Laura, who was the most senior of the secretaries, maintained a monthly office pool which everyone had to contribute to so that at the end of the year they received a lump sum. The one time Maite had declined to participate in the “voluntary” office pool, Laura had been incensed. The next time, she tendered the money.

  It was a racket. Laura said the savings pool helped people keep their money safe, so the greedy banks couldn’t get their claws on it and they didn’t have to pay the fees on an account, but Maite was certain Laura dipped into the pool during the year. Besides, if they’d had a real savings account, that would generate interest, wouldn’t it? But no. They had to have this ridiculous cushion of money sitting in someone else’s lap, and if Maite dared to ask for her share early in the year Laura would have a fit.

  Friday and that silly racket, and then her birthday to top it off.

  Maite could already picture the cake and the pink icing spelling out in big letters “Maite, Happy Birthday.” She didn’t want to be reminded about her age. Earlier that month, she’d found a gray hair. She couldn’t be graying yet. She couldn’t possibly be thirty. She didn’t know where her twenties had gone. She could not recall what she’d done in that time. Maite couldn’t name a single worthy accomplishment.

  Maite rolled the comic book up and tucked it in her purse, walking at a faster clip. Rather than waiting for the elevator, she braved the four flights of stairs up to Garza Abogados S.C. She was ten minutes late; thank goodness most of the lawyers hadn’t streamed in yet. When she was a young girl, just out of secretarial school, Maite had thought working for lawyers would be exciting. Perhaps she would meet an interesting, handsome client. They would elope. But there was nothing exciting about her line of work. Maite didn’t even have a window that opened and the plants she brought to liven up her desk kept dying.

  Around ten a.m. the woman with the coffee trolley and sweet breads rolled in, but Maite remembered that she was supposed to be on a budget and shook her head. Then Diana came up to her desk to tell her that the boss was in a mood.

  “How come?” Maite asked. Her desk was far from the green door with the name “Licenciado Fernando Garza” emblazoned on it. Instead she worked for Archibaldo Costa, who was a distracted, bald man. The other secretaries said the reason Archibaldo remained on the payroll was that he had been old man Garza’s best friend, and Maite could believe that. His spelling was atrocious, his writing was worse, and Maite did the real bulk of redacting acts and certificates.

  “The Corpus thing with those students. He was railing about professional agitators, about commies.”

  “He thinks it was communists?” replied Yolanda, who sat at the desk next to Maite’s.

  “Sure. He says they’re trying to make President Echeverría look bad.”

  “I heard it was some sort of foreign plot. Russians.”

  “Same thing, isn’t it? Reds are reds.”

  “It’s refried Tlatelolco.”

  More secretaries joined the conversation, expounding on what they’d read in Novedades and El Sol de México, with a couple of them questioning the accuracy of those newspapers, saying they’d read El Heraldo de México and a journalist from that paper said thugs had beat him up. This comment earned them an angry “pinko” from another secretary. Maite didn’t know who was right, only that people were talking about Hawks and conspiracies and it was all a little bit much. She had been running errands for Costa the previous Friday and hadn’t gone into the office, so she had missed the chatter about what happened Thursday afternoon in San Cosme. She hadn’t paid much attention to the news over the weekend and had assumed it would have all blown over by Monday morning and she needn’t bother disentangling the politics at play. Maybe she ought to have bought the paper that morning, if it was going to become something everyone was discussing. Maite never knew what was important and what wasn’t. But then, before she could ask for more information, Fernando Garza himself walked by, and the women returned to their seats.

  “Hey, girlie, get me a pair of socks during your lunch hour, will you?” he told her as he headed toward the elevator.

  Maite frowned. They’d had an office boy who did such chores, but he’d left for a better job, and the lawyers hadn’t seen fit to find a replacement. Now most of the errands he’d performed fell onto Maite or Yolanda.

  Maite tried to tell herself it was better if she didn’t really have much time for lunch, because that way she wouldn’t be tempted to spend her money at a decent restaurant, but the fact that she had to waste half an hour of her lunchtime standing in line and paying for a pair of socks irritated her.

  “It’s because his feet are smelly,” Diana told her when they were leaving the office. “He could put on talcum powder, but he forgets at least once a week. Whenever he takes off his shoes, the stench is unbearable. I’ve got to tell you, old man Garza would never have taken off his shoes in the office.”

  It had been six months since Fernando Garza’s father had retired, and Diana was still talking about how the old man would have never done this thing or another. She obviously missed the wrinkled bastard. Maite didn’t think she’d miss Archibaldo if he retired. Not that she wanted him to leave. She’d spent five years at Garza precisely because she wasn’t built to withstand change.

  Maite didn’t like her job, but she refused to look for something else. Her office, not far from the Chinese clock at Bucareli, wasn’t the finest one in the city by far, but the pay was steady, and she had learned to gauge the temperament of the workers there and comply with the expectations of the bosses. A few times a year, especially during the rainy season, she would grow restless, and instead of solving her daily crossword puzzle, she surveyed the help wanted ads in the paper and circled a few of them with a red pen, but she never phoned. What was the point? Before Garza she’d worked for another lawyer, and it was much of the same.

  “What do you think, should we get together this Friday to celebrate your birthday?” Diana asked.

  “Don’t remind me about that,” Maite said. “I’m supposed to visit my mother, and my sister will probably make an appearance.”

  “Go to see her, and then we can have dinner. My sister is serving ate con queso for dessert.”

  “I don’t know,” Maite said, shrugging.

  Diana was three years older than Maite, more out
going, less nervous. She knitted on the bus and lived with her two older sisters, mother, and grandmother in a cavernous casona that was damp and dark. The women all looked like each other, one a little more weathered than the next. Diana’s grandmother had no teeth and spent her days napping in the living room under two blankets. Maite knew that in a few years Diana would sit in that chair, that her face would be the withered face of the grandmother, her hands hidden under the heavy blankets.

  Maite imagined herself older, as old as her friend’s grandmother. She wasn’t beautiful, not even pretty, and the thought of her meager charms disappearing filled her with dread. Maite’s mother had probably been right all along, about marriage. About Gaspar. But he’d been so dull, and Maite had still been filled with hope, with expectations, and despite her mother’s nagging she wanted more than a man who didn’t inspire the least bit of sentiment in her.

  Most of her acquaintances had married and had children by now. They didn’t have much spare time to spend with her anymore and a simple arrangement to go to the movies became a monumental task because they had to find someone to take care of their babies. Diana, however, was a stalwart presence there. Diana was the one person she truly liked at Garza.

  She wondered what she’d do if Diana also abandoned her, if she married and stopped working at the office, and once again she felt miserable and old.

  She should have married Gaspar. She would have if it hadn’t been for Cristóbal.

  Cristóbal. Cristóbalito. Her first love. Her one love.

  As the most junior of the secretaries at a newly inaugurated law firm, Maite’s duties had been simple: sorting letters, opening correspondence, and addressing envelopes, among other tasks. It was only her second job. Before that she’d worked at a department store, but she’d quit that to attend secretarial school in the hope of bettering herself. The secretarial classes had lasted for a year, during which she learned some typing and a little about the world.

  That spring of 1961, Maite was nineteen, and when a young man smiled at her in the elevator she blushed. It turned out they sometimes boarded the elevator around the same time in the morning, and Maite began to time her arrival so it always coincided with his. After a few of these coincidences he introduced himself: he said he was Cristóbal, but she could call him Cristóbalito. He was an accountant working on the floor above hers.