Paco Taibo II - Mexico City Noir

It takes approximately three days for a corpse’s skin to decompose. It fills up with toxic gases that cause sores on the outside, then the skin succumbs, cracks, and the gases are freed. If the corpse is exposed to the sun, it takes less than ten days for everything to collapse, for the flesh to rot and the scent to spread among the living. In the end, only the skeleton remains, and perhaps remnants of the liver, the toughest organ in the human body, the one that most resists decomposition. An irony if the death has been brought on by cirrhosis.

I don’t have cirrhosis, nor do I have a body. I am matter floating here on this rooftop where I continue to stare at the barrel of a gun that some guy is pointing at me. To the west, there’s the vast, dark stain that is Chapultepec Forest, to the south there’s the eternal track of my doubts, to the north the shadow of a blonde who’s moving away, to the other north another blonde and another goodbye, until I bring my gaze back to the stain on the west, and again I find the barrel of the gun.

A few days ago: Tell me that you will not leave me , a voice whispers in my ear, and I hear the whisper as if it were a siren beckoning Ulysses’ ship. And Ulysses-me-I stay firm at the rudder, tied with cords, trying to cross the sea without paying attention to her song. The siren approaches, embraces me, tries to take the rudder and direct me toward an island, but I maintain control and the ship continues its course. Suddenly I notice the ship has ceased to be, it’s not even a simple plank sailing in the blue of the ocean; the boat is a bed, the sea is a room, and at my side there is a woman who whispers in my ear, and where the horizon should be, a door appears instead, and it’s kicked to pieces by a guy who bursts in with a gun in his hand which he aims right at my forehead.

The siren disappears.

There is no sea in this life.

A flight scene must have its limits. It’s impossible to just keep running around the world, there must be boundaries so that certain characters can admit exhaustion.

I am the guy who holds the weapon in his right hand. There’s a man in front of me looking to escape, but I stop him and tell him that if he makes any strange movements, I’ll have to shoot. My finger touches the gun’s trigger and then, totally, completely, I absolutely forget the reason for my aggression.

I don’t want to shoot anymore. I don’t want this gun in my hand.

A bullet traverses three hundred and twenty meters per second, the equivalent of the speed of a lie, the speed of a bloodthirsty and clumsy and cruel love.

A.45 caliber bullet destroys approximately twenty centimeters of my heart’s flesh and leaves an exit wound equivalent to three absences, four goodbyes.

If the emptiness is not empty, if there is no ravine or precipice, if it is only the damn distance of four stories down to the ground, is there any possibility of survival?

Movement.

Stop!

There’s a blonde who looked up my name and info and asked to meet me here. The signs are clear: this is an affair. And I, who am not at all stupid, had been certain that a blonde could only be bedded every two centuries.

This was my century.

The guy with the gun shows up midcentury.

The blonde disappears as the century comes to an end.

Anachrony.

When fleeing, it’s important not to leave behind the people you love.

A dark tunnel. The same way you come into life, the same way you leave.

Can a tomb be considered a dark tunnel? Is a vagina a dark tunnel?

Is a penis a dark tunnel?

Jean Valjean carrying Mario through the barreling darkness…

The Count of Monte Cristo fleeing through the dark…

A stethoscope bringing a sign of life is a dark conduit…

Big bang, the damn dark barrel, the fucking quarks are all black holes…

Blondes are not good companions for adventures.

Guns are better companions for adventures.

Brunettes are not good companions for adventures either.

The day has not been good.

More than seventy years old, the lady paces the apartment and a cat follows; she watches it with distrust. Perhaps the cat is just anxious, it almost always gets this way when it rains, maybe because of that thing about how cats don’t like water, but this is a strange cat, it almost never goes outside so it shouldn’t be afraid of the rain; in fact, the lady has never seen the cat outside the house. What’s the cat’s name? The cat has a peculiar name, her husband says it and the cat jumps into his lap, but for a while now she’s been forgetting things, because of that damn disease whose name she would say but it’s obvious she’s also forgotten that, like with so many other things in this world, and she thinks that at this point in her life it may be better to forget things, to loosen the ballast, like a balloon that needs to stay light to withstand-what do they call that?-yes, the last reverses of life. God, if only she knew what a reverse meant, a reverse was a stitch she once learned in her youth which she used when sewing and embroidering and all those things that make a woman more of a woman, manual tasks such as ironing and cooking in order to keep a man happy enough so he’ll maintain the household; so now what can a reverse in life possibly mean? How it is possible that life has a reverse, and if it has a reverse then it must have a forward, but she has never experienced a forward. Life has only been difficult, as she certainly knows. They came to that room in the neighborhood forty years before, just for a while, but the years piled up and a while became always and they’ve lived there ever since, and they had children, of course, three of them, two boys and a girl, all stillborn. That’s why they didn’t want to try a fourth time-why bring the dead into this world when supposedly this is the world of life? No, no children, it was imperative to accept the loneliness and the cats her husband brought to the house, many of which left, tired of the lack of food and the smell of poverty and grease all over the place. Only that one cat stayed with them and lived there, hiding under the furniture, but that night the cat seemed nervous, perhaps because of the rain. She could smell the scent of humidity, her muscles sensed it would rain that night, she was positive. The best thing to do would be to close the window to make sure the armchair in the living room didn’t get wet. She took a step, watched the cat arch its back, and pushed the curtains to close the shutters-and that’s when she saw a man hurrying up the stairs. That struck her as odd; perhaps it was somebody on the way to the roof to collect his laundry before it got wet on the line, but no-in that neighborhood, the men never went up on the roof, much less to gather laundry. She knew she was right when she saw another guy go up after the first one, with the same haste and a pistol in his hand. There was a scream but she does not remember, doesn’t remember the words, knows that there were words but she can’t differentiate between a scream and an insult; if someone says tree , she thinks mud ; if they say scissors , she relates it to a day of rest, so she’d rather close the window and wait for the rain to end and for her husband to come home and for the loneliness to settle and the cat-that animal called silence or therapy -to stop meowing so maybe she can hear herself better, to see if she can recall a better memory…

The barrel of a gun is not just a simple hole, it moves in an undulating way; perhaps the guy who’s holding the weapon is trembling. Just the same, it could be something other than a pistol, perhaps a knife of some sort, but if it’s a knife then it ought to be shinier; maybe a knife is easier to avoid. I cling to this possibility, that at least the sharp edge doesn’t have the speed of a bullet. Or does it? Has anybody ever measured the speed of a blade? In any case, what’s more dangerous, a blade or a bullet? Obviously, it all depends on the placement of the wound. If the knife damages the femoral vein… Do blades shine? I look for the sparkle in the dark but there’s nothing there, then everything is a penumbra, and there is no knife, only a gun.