Mexico City Noir Read Free

reveal a surprising city: one that has more movie theaters than Paris, more abortions than London, more universities than New York. Where nighttime has become sparse, desolate, the kingdom of only a few. Where violence rules, corners us, silences us into a kind of autism. Shuts us in our bedrooms with the TV on, creates that terrible circle of solitude where no one can depend on anyone but themselves.
    XII
    The writers in this volume aren’t afraid of trying to exorcise the demons. Though using very different narrative styles, what they have in common is that they speak to, and about, a city they love. They understand that the only way to stop the violence and abuse that surrounds us is to talk about it. They are all professional writers but they are also professional survivors of life in Mexico City. Almost all of them, of us, take refuge in humor, a very dark humor, acidic, which allows us enough distance to laugh at Lucifer.
    Another shared element in the stories that follow is an interest in experimentation, in crossing narrative planes, points of view. The neodetective story born in Mexico is not only a social literature but also one with an appetite for moving outside the traditional boundaries of genre.
    Mexico City Noir may not be sponsored by the city’s department of tourism, but if anyone, from anywhere on earth, were to ask whether the writers recommend visiting Mexico City, the response would be both firm and passionate: “Yes, of course.”
    Because this is the best city on the planet, in spite of itself.
    Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Mexico City
October 2009

PART I
    A BOVE THE L AW

    I’M NOBODY
    BY E DUARDO A NTONIO P ARRA
    Narvarte
    F eet moving: a step, another, then one more. Eyes stare at the squares that make up the sidewalk. Stubborn hands grip the supermarket cart carrying all his things: a poncho, a plate and a pewter spoon, two shabby blankets, a plastic cup, a sun-bleached photo of a woman and a boy, a sweater, a paper bag filled with butts and three cigarettes, barely worn sneakers, a bottle with traces of liquor, several pieces of cardboard, and two empty boxes. His life: what remains of it. He pushes. He moves forward, barely registering the faces passing in the opposite direction. I don’t look. I never pay attention. I haven’t seen a thing, chief, I swear. Around here, I don’t even look at the houses or buildings, just the street signs to know where I’m going. He walks on, not listening to the roar of the engines, or the screams of the horns around the public square, or the voices, or the screeching of tires. I’m nobody. No. I didn’t hear anything. I never hear anything. He was a skinny thing, you know. He doesn’t notice the food vendors, even though they arouse something in him, at the bottom of his belly. He goes on, not feeling the rain, the heat, or the cold. He just keeps moving, measuring the sidewalk through the cart’s wire grid, swerving the wheels to avoid the curbs and holes. Like he does every day, all day long.
    Yes, he walks without hearing, without seeing. Always the same. Until the arrival of one of the gray-uniformed security guards from the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation, who opens the door to the parking lot before settling behind the tollbooth window. If it’s the old man with the white mustache on the day shift, he pokes him in the chest with the stick hanging off his waist. But if it’s the fat red-faced guy, he kicks him in the ribs—but softly, without any intention of hurting him.
    “C’mon, Vikingo, it’s dawn already. Get a move on.”
    And, still between dreams, he asks himself who that Vikingo they’re referring to could be, until, in the midst of a stomachache, cramps, and his own mind’s fogginess, a distant image comes to him of a dim red mane and an unkempt beard, which he remembers seeing in a mirror or reflected on some window. I am Vikingo. But not before—he didn’t have a beard before. But yes: Vikingo. Nobody. And so