Death in Veracruz Read Free

conversation about schools and the consolations of provincial life. Around eleven, using the wail of a child upstairs as an excuse, I attempted my getaway. By then I estimated that festivities would be well under way in Mocambo where the city government was throwing a party for the press.
    â€œDon’t leave,” Anabela begged as she headed for the stairs and the source of the wailing. “At least wait till I come down.”
    â€œThat’s right, brother. Wait for her to come down,” Rojano reiterated as if reading from a script.
    Once Anabela had disappeared up the stairs, he reminded me, “I’ve still got something to show you.”
    As he spoke, he regarded me intensely with a stare held over from another time, then he made a nervous exit througha door in the back of the house. His demeanor confirmed my suspicion that his newfound respectability and stability were pure show, the appropriate backdrop for a proposal of whose nature I was, for the moment, unaware.
    I went back to the ice bucket for a fourth whiskey and waited.
    He returned from the back of the house with a package under his arm but would not let me see it in the sala. Instead, he took me into a small room, a combination pantry and office that we entered through the garage. Inside was a desk, a pair of dusty file cabinets, an empty bookcase, and several crates of mangos and oranges stacked in one corner. An enlarged photo of Anabela sat on the desk. It showed her running towards the camera with her hair blown back from her forehead by the wind and her thighs clearly defined under a black skirt with a blur of forest in the background.
    He pushed the photo aside and lay the package, a bulky manila envelope marked
remittances,
on the desk.
    â€œI’ve been working on this for two years,” he said.
    He undid the red string between the seals on the flap and the body of the envelope, then took out what looked like a leather saddlebag. It was, to be more exact, a square leather letter file with a rigid center panel and four flexible dividers that closed like an accordion over the documents between them. On each divider there was an engraving: a pasture; a factory smokestack; an oil well; and the head of an Olmec statue next to an Indian woman with long braids. Each divider bore the caption
Destroy to create
in large rustic lettering with the motto
Whoever can add can divide
in smaller letters below. Each image was framed by a border composed of intertwined pseudo-Aztec figures.
    Rojano opened the leather dividers exposing three file folders, each wrapped in different-colored onion paper.Nervously and with painstaking care—he’d begun to sweat—he opened the first packet.
    It contained a set of photos of semi-nude cadavers still fresh and bleeding from wounds to their skulls and bodies as they lay on stone slabs in what had to have been a smalltown morgue. Eight photos of eight bodies, among them a child of about ten, his lips pulled back by rigor mortis to expose his teeth, his small eyelids half shut. The caption in crude white lettering beneath the photos read:
Municipality of Papantla, Veracruz, July 14, 1974.
Also in the packet was a photocopy of the death certificate issued by the office of the public prosecutor, a file of some twenty pages, and the plat of a parcel of rural property with the surveyor’s seals and notations in the margins.
    Rojano pushed the letter file and crepe paper to one side of the desk and slapped the photos down one by one in two rows of four as if dealing a deck of cards.
    â€œThere they are,” he said without looking up. His demeanor spoke volumes about hours wasted poring over this macabre game of solitaire. “What do you think?”
    â€œWhat do you want me to think?”
    â€œDon’t you see something strange about them?”
    â€œThat you’re collecting them so meticulously.”
    â€œI’m serious, brother. Does the date mean anything to