The boy had worked all morning at the garbage dump on the outskirts of the small Mexican town of San Martin. It was midday, mid-June; the sun beat down harshly. He paused to wipe the grimy sweat from his brow with the red bandana knotted round his neck.
‘Pass me the water bottle,’ his mother, Graciela López, said. ‘I’m thirsty, son.’
‘Sí, mamá,’ Maximiliano said. Twelve years old, he worked alongside the widowed Graciela and his four-year-old brother, Pepe, sorting through the giant heaps of foul-smelling garbage for what could be resold or recycled. The López family and the other Mexicans working on the site were known as ‘pepenadores’, which means ‘scavengers’, or ‘waste pickers’. They lived in a row of huts made of flattened tin cans, sheets of plywood, and cardboard cartons.
Gasto-intestinal and respiratory problems were common amongst the pepenadores. The drainage was poor at the site and the pump water wasn’t potable. They bought their drinking water in five-gallon plastic containers from a delivery man. But if you asked them why they stayed, some would say they liked the work, others that it was better than no work at all, or they would tell you they’d never known anything different; but most would finally take you aside and quietly admit they never earned enough to be able to quit and find a healthier job, much as they might want to.
‘That’s a little better,’ Graciela said after she’d drunk from the bottle. Maximiliano tried to give his mother an encouraging smile. He found it hard, though. She’d been tossing and turning on her mattress throughout the night, vomiting in a basin, sweating heavily with a fever. Often now her stomach became bloated and her back ached constantly. She became nauseous and wouldn’t eat, and was slower at her work. Maximiliano wished he could help her. He wished she could see a doctor. He thought about their long journey and wondered, not for the first time, whether it had been worth it.
The López family had left their mountain village five years ago when there was no longer any labouring work available for Graciela’s husband, Juan, a landless campesino. They trekked most of the fifty kilometres on foot; Maximiliano remembered being carried part of the way on his father’s back. They remained at the dump because Juan, a Zapotecan Indian, could find no other employment when they reached the town, and their money had almost all been spent. Juan built their hut but died of a jaundiced liver only a year after Pepe’s birth.
After Juan’s death, every day was much the same for the family. Up at dawn, Graciela would heat beans and tortillas for herself and the children. As the sun rose they, with the other pepenadores, would start scrambling through the vast stinking piles of garbage deposited by dump trucks from San Martin and nearby towns, picking it over before it was bull-dozed into fiery pits. They had to be wary of the black rats and slavering wild dogs that were as much scavengers as they themselves were. Overhead, buzzards circled. The pepenadores gathered in canvas sacks plastic bottles, glass, aluminium cans, dolls, toys, anything solid that could prove useful. Maximiliano was good at sorting out the metals and dragging heavy objects like lamp-stands, car radiators, and bicycle wheels from the heaps. He scraped the rust off old metal, scraping for hours until his knuckles bled, while Graciela filled the sacks with what they’d found and Pepe crouched beside them both, chuckling happily.
‘I’m so tired today, son,’ Graciela said suddenly, ‘and I’m not feeling well again.’
‘Sit down, mamá,’ Maximiliano said. ‘Sit down and rest.’
‘There’s no time to rest.’
But she sat down anyway. Pepe, clinging to Graciela’s patched jeans, his nose running, smiled up at her.
‘Agua?’ he said. ‘Agua, mamá?’
Graciela managed a grin and handed the infant the water bottle.
‘There you are, Pepito. Leave some for me, won’t you.’
She wiped his nose, ruffled his hair, and searched for nits in it as the little boy drank eagerly. Maximiliano liked it when his mother smiled. But she didn’t smile very often now. He could remember when she was a lot prettier, too. When she used to braid her hair and wear a beautiful floral dress on her Sundays off, instead of jeans and blouses. He’d noticed she and some of the other women seemed to get old very quickly, much quicker than the men. They toiled the hardest, trying not to miss even a day so the site boss, Poncho Galvan, wouldn’t dock their pay. Graciela earned forty pesos, about three dollars, for her twelve hours of work, but lately had begun to miss days because of her sickness, and had started to borrow money from Poncho to buy their food.
‘Let’s get to work again,’ she said, getting up. ‘Poncho is watching us.’
Maximiliano looked round. Not far off, Poncho Galvan was indeed watching them. A corpulent, brutal-looking man in his fifties, with a low brow, short neck, and florid face. He always dressed in black overalls and heavy boots, and settled with his fists any arguments men had with him. A sindicalista, a trade unionist from the state capital who once visited the pepenadores to talk to them about their work conditions, had ended up in hospital and never returned to the site.
‘No, mamá,’ said Maximiliano, eyeing Poncho. ‘You are not well, you should rest some more. I’ll work faster myself to make up for it.’
‘If I rest any more, Poncho will fire me. Don’t you realize that?’
‘I wouldn’t let him, mamá.’
‘How could you stop him, you silly muchacho?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Maximiliano. He wished he did know.
‘And where would we go if we didn’t work here?’
‘Nowhere, I suppose.’
At times like this, how he wished his father were still alive! He had been a kind man, he remembered. Kind but weak. He drank too much cane liquor but never harmed them physically, unlike the fathers of some of the other families who sometimes thrashed their wives and children mercilessly. Maximiliano had cried when his father died, and cried again when they buried him in the ‘fosa común’, the grave site at the very bottom of the town’s cemetery, opposite the dump, where people whose families couldn’t afford full burial costs were interred in a common grave, along with indigentes, as they were called — persons, that is, of unknown identity, or who were completely impoverished. His father had no headstone to honour him, only a small name plaque on which Graciela laid flowers on the Day of the Dead when she could afford to buy them.
Maximiliano tickled Pepe under his armpit.
‘Max! Max!’ Pepe chuckled. Maximiliano tickled him again. ‘Max! Max!’
Maximiliano was fond of his little brother. He loved his gurgling laughter, his smiling eyes, the way he always toddled beside him, hand in hand, exploring the site with him when they weren’t working. But there was little time for this now their mother was ill; their life had become an endless struggle. Maximiliano and Graciela, like all the others, had to give what they collected to Poncho, who would then sell it at high prices to the owners of a massive recycling plant in the state capital. Poncho lived on the site too, but in his own comfortable brick house built for him by the company; he also had another smaller house built nearby where he’d installed a couple of single women from amongst the pepenadores to service the truck drivers or any other men who wanted a woman for an hour or two, or overnight, and were willing to pay for it.
‘Mamá, here comes Poncho!’ Maximiliano murmured.
Graciela looked up. The overseer was ambling nonchalantly towards them. When he reached them, he paused, hands on his hips. He took a cigarette from his overalls, lit it, and took several casual puffs before finally speaking.
‘What is the problem now, Doña Graciela?’
‘I am still unwell, patrón. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’
‘Have you been to see a doctor?’
‘I would rather spend the money on food for my boys.’
This was so, but Graciela was also suspicious of doctors; they seemed to deliver only bad news to people. All she knew was the pain she suffered, from whatever caused it.
‘You should think about yourself first,’ said Poncho. ‘The boys are young and strong.’
Poncho had a sly look that day on his unshaven face. He had had his eyes on Graciela ever since Juan’s death, and Maximiliano was uncomfortably aware of this now, and wished she didn’t have to borrow money from him. He disliked the man; he hated the insolent, knowing stares he gave his mother, and the way he bellowed at the workers if he thought they were slacking. He disliked him almost as much as he hated the smell of the dump, the all-pervading stench from the rank blend of noxious liquids leaching through the rotting vegetables, household cleansers, oils, battery acids, dead animals, and black, sticky ashes from the fires that blazed day and night, fuelled by the methane gas the organic waste produced. It was a sickly, sour stench that mingled with other toxic fumes like the unpleasant hydrogen sulphide; it clung to the skins of the pepenadores and their clothing until after a while it could never be kept permanently out of their hair and bodies no matter how hard the men and women scrubbed themselves.
‘Listen, I have advanced you almost five hundred pesos,’ Poncho said. ‘That is a lot of money.’
‘ You have been very kind. I will work it off,’ Graciela replied.
‘That would take a long time.’
‘Well, that’s true.’
Poncho scratched his chin thoughtfully. Lowering his voice so the boy couldn’t hear, but Maximiliano heard anyway, he whispered: ‘There could be an easier way, Doña Graciela.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come and see me tonight and I will tell you.’
‘Qué va!’ Graciela had a pretty good idea what a visit to Poncho would mean. She rejected him with a proud toss of her head.
‘Think it over,’ Poncho insisted. ‘I will take you to the doctor, too.’
‘No,’ she answered him firmly. ‘No, Poncho.’
I am nothing to speak of, she thought, nothing but a penniless pepenador’s widow, but I still have my children and my pride and my memory of a good husband and I will pray tonight to the Virgin of Guadalupe that I will not listen to Poncho’s sly words.
‘I will wait up for you,’ Poncho said. He reached out and chucked Graciela under the chin. He tickled her gently. She pushed his hand away.
‘No.’
Poncho laughed. ‘I will wait,’ he repeated. ‘Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?’
As he left, he patted Maximiliano’s head. The boy pulled away. Poncho’s breath and his hands always stank.
Graciela remained silent with her thoughts and wouldn’t speak to Maximiliano about what had taken place. She would take the remainder of the day off, though. It was no commitment to Poncho. She sat down, took Pepe on her knees and began caressing him, jiggling him to make him laugh. All at once there were tears of happiness on her face as she smothered him with kisses.
Maximiliano took his mother’s hand; but she seemed not to notice him. Perhaps she loves Pepe more than me, he thought, and he wondered if she knew how much he loved her. He had tried to tell her, but lately those sort of feelings had begun to be supplanted by something else, a simmering rage burning deep inside him. He had felt only sadness when his father died, but became angry when he’d seen Poncho beat the sindicalista, and whenever he thought about how poor his mother and all the other pepenadores were, and how they had to go without so much. Would his life have to be the same?
No, he knew that wasn’t what he wanted. There must be some other way. He knew he would never go to a school now; his mother needed him so much, especially since she was so ill. He would try again to tell her what was in his heart, and how glad he was that she had sent Poncho away.
‘Mamá?’ he said.
‘What is it, Maximiliano?’
‘Te amo.’
‘Do you, boy?’ she answered distractedly.
‘Sí, mucho; and mamá — ’
‘Gracias, Maximiliano. I’m going back to rest for a while. You finish off here.’
‘Sí, mamá.’
Graciela returned to their shack, Pepe toddling along beside her. She thought about her children, her plight — and Poncho. She pondered deeply. Perhaps, she reasoned, there would be no dishonour if Poncho were sincere; and perhaps she should accept his help about a doctor.
Meanwhile, Maximiliano packed up what they had gathered. A certain distance had arisen between his mother and himself now. He’d seen it start when she first became ill, when he noticed traces of despair on her face when she thought he wasn’t watching, and even a kind of fear he’d never seen before.
When he finished filling the sacks he dragged them one at a time to the shed at the loading bay where they were checked by Poncho and the metals were weighed. Some of the big brawny truck drivers stood around smoking cigarettes, laughing, telling jokes, drinking beer, eating thick bread rolls of ham and cheese, chilies and tomatoes, while others tuned the engines of their huge diesel trucks. These men were different from the pepenadores, Maximiliano thought. They came and went, they had a freedom that he didn’t. They knew of other places: Guadalajara, Chihuahua, Vera Cruz. One of them talked about a lake in Mexico City called Xochimilco where people hired boats which they poled through floating gardens, full of flowers, and they had picnics in these boats and drank tequila and sang songs and played guitars.
When Maximiliano got back to the shack he knew his mother had decided something important, because for long minutes she was silent. The two boys ate rice with some stewed pork skins while Graciela hardly touched hers. Pepe was fretting. When night fell, she slipped a shawl over her head and said: ‘You look after Pepe, Maximiliano. I’m going up to see Poncho for a while.’
‘Sí, mamá.’
He watched her slip away into the darkness. He saw Poncho open the door of his house, and his mother illuminated by the light from inside. When she went in, Maximiliano sat on a stool outside the shack cradling Pepe in his arms, singing him the children’s song about elephants swinging in a spider’s web. After a while, Pepe began to doze. By the time the song was finished and ten elephants were in the web, Pepe was fast asleep. Maximiliano carried him back in and laid him down on the mattress the two shared. He wished his mother were there with Pepe and himself. It was the first night they’d never been together and it was the same for the next two weeks. Graciela would return in the mornings to take care of Pepe. She would calmly cook their breakfasts, and she no longer sorted garbage. But she had changed now, Maximiliano could see, as he searched her face for answers to the questions he couldn’t put into words.
‘Why are you looking at me like that, Maximiliano?’
‘I don’t know, mamá.’
‘Poncho is looking after me. I don’t have to work in the dump now.’
But there was a nervousness about her, and the hope she tried to project to her son was strained. There was a heavy, tight feeling in Maximiliano’s heart, and the growing anger was stirring. As the days passed, he noticed people whispering about his mother behind her back and exchanging knowing glances. One night, she came home from Poncho’s house crying. They had been arguing, she said. Her face was bruised.
‘Did he hit you, mamá?’
‘Maximiliano, I have to talk to you about something.’ Poncho had finished taking his pleasure with her; she would try to explain this to the boy. But Maximiliano already guessed; he also knew Poncho hadn’t kept his promise about the doctor.
‘I will kill him.’
‘You will not kill him. That won’t help. Listen, son, Poncho says I have to work with Liliana and Paula to pay my debts and buy our food. I can’t do anything else but that, I haven’t the strength.’
The boy hated Poncho now. He understood clearly how his mother had been used. He knew what the plump Liliana and the scrawny other woman, Paula of the heavily painted face, did, because other boys had told him. They told him the men paid Poncho for their time with the women, and said women like that were called putas — whores.
It was soon no secret at the dump what Graciela was doing. She became as brazen as the other two women. Sometimes she took Pepe with her to the brothel and Liliana and Paula helped care for him; at other times Maximiliano looked after Pepe himself. There was no longer any trace of pride on Graciela’s face, Maximiliano noticed. Worse, she seemed to grin strangely at people when they passed by, and sometimes even wink grossly.
Maximiliano felt that he himself was changing, too. He’d begun to lose his temper with his friends. One day one of the older boys from another family said to Maximiliano: ‘Hey, kid, how much does your mother charge?’ and Maximiliano fell upon his taunter and beat him so badly the boy began to cry, and fled. The fight surprised and disturbed Maximiliano because it made him a little frightened of something fearful and untamed inside himself, like a dragon lurking there secretly, always ready to spring from its lair.
Then, late one afternoon, it happened. It was Maximiliano’s turn to look after Pepe, so he collected the boy from the brothel and took him home to the shack. Maximiliano was tired out that day. He laid himself down on the mattress with Pepe cuddled close, and soon they were both asleep. It was a sound, deep sleep. He always slept well with his little brother beside him. Suddenly, he awoke with a start. He felt around. Where was Pepe? He was no longer there. He got up. The boy wasn’t in the shack. He ran outside.
‘Pepe! Pepe!’ he called. The boy was nowhere in sight. He couldn’t have wandered far, Maximiliano thought. He asked people if they’d seen the boy. No one had. Perhaps his mother had come back for Pepe, he hoped. He ran to the brothel. Two men were laughing inside. Graciela, half-dressed, came to the door.
‘No, he’s not here!’ Graciela shouted. ‘Why aren’t you looking after him?’
‘I was, mamá. I fell asleep…’
‘You stupid boy, Maximiliano! You careless fool!’
When they couldn’t find Pepe, a general search of the site was organized by Graciela and Poncho. Most of the pepenadores stopped work and joined in; but it was a chorus of barking by a pack of dogs that led them to the end of their quest. Pepe had toddled up to the rim of a smouldering pit, had apparently become asphyxiated by the smoke and the unburnt gases, and fallen unconscious into the flames. The dogs were savaging his charred body.
‘Perdóname, mamá,’ Maximiliano wept as the pepenadores drove off the dogs and dragged Pepe clear.
‘You stupid fool, Maximiliano. You tonto!’
‘Mamá, I...’
‘I curse you, Maximiliano! I’ll never forgive you!’ Graciela raged.
Pepe was buried the next day in the fosa común. Paula and Liliana came to the interment, but no one else attended apart from Graciela, Maximiliano, and the gravedigger. Poncho told Graciela he was far too busy to come, but he would pay for the flowers, advanced, of course, against her earnings. The next day she went back to work at the brothel as if nothing had happened; but her eyes were vacant, and she seemed to walk with difficulty. She no longer spoke to Maximiliano, nor much to anyone else thereafter. One night, a week later, Maximiliano crept unseen onto the back of one of the trucks pulling out of the depot. I must never cry again, he told himself. Never.
Ten years later on a quiet Sunday morning, an inconspicuous grey limousine which possessed, however, a highly tuned, super-charged motor, pulled up in a side-road near the dump. There were two men in the car. The middle-aged driver, whose name was Torres but was nicknamed ‘El Toro’, had a pock-marked face, the build of a heavy-weight boxer, and wore dark glasses. His companion, much younger, was tall and lean. A good-looking man, he moved easily, almost laconically. He wore dark glasses also, his charcoal suit was of a fashionable cut, and the fingers of his right hand displayed three gold rings. The largest ring had a skull engraved on it. Both men carried revolvers in concealed shoulder holsters.
‘Why the hell are we stopping here?’ said Torres.
‘That’s my business.’
‘We’re still two hours from the city. You’d better be careful.’
‘We’ll leave by the old road. We won’t take the autopista. I can show you the way, I know this place well.’
‘Don’t forget we’re going to be busy today. We’ve got our orders.’
‘Don’t tell me my job, Torres. You just drive the damn car.’
‘Sí, Max,’ Torres said, backing off.
‘And see that you wait here for me.’
‘Of course Max. You know you can always count on me, hombre.’
‘See that you do.’
Max got out, turned the corner, and paused before he entered the dump. Jesus Christ, the place hadn’t changed at all, he mused. Some of these plants had been modernised in other towns throughout the republic, but not here. The stench was the same, the old buildings were the same, even the pepenadores, who stared at him curiously as he entered, looked as they always had: shabby and work weary, their children skinny and malnourished. And always those damned buzzards circling overhead.
He hadn’t believed he would ever return. His life had changed rapidly after he left that day, hidden on the back of the truck. Ending up in one of the state capitals, too young to find a job, he’d joined a street gang of adolescents. With them, he learned how to fight like a demon and to use knives and guns. He’d found an outlet that satisfied his burning fury. He soon became a leader, distributed drugs for one of the cartels in the barrios, and eventually joined the cartel itself, steadily moving up the ranks as an enforcer and gunman — a pistolero. But lately, memories of his mother and his childhood kept returning, unbidden, to him. He’d begun to contemplate his life’s direction, its validity, and to wonder what sort of a man he really was, or ought to be. This made him uneasy; and even if he drowned himself in tequila or in a woman’s arms or took cocaine, it didn’t push his negligence with Pepe and his mother’s vituperative reaction back into the shadowy recesses of his mind where he’d repressed them.
He started up the path from the entrance and soon found Graciela’s old shack. An ancient, gnarled man he didn’t know was sitting outside the door picking the small stones and twigs out of a bag of beans. He looked startled at the sight of Max, thinking him an official of some sort.
‘Buenos días, viejo,’ Max said. ‘You can relax. I used to live here once.’
‘Verdad?’ said the old man in amazement.
‘Yes. Where is Graciela López, viejo?’
‘Oh, she died about nine years ago, hombre. Very ill, I believe. Buried over at the fosa común beside her husband. They used to say Señora López was a bit —’
He tapped his forehead.
‘All right, that’s enough,’ said Max. ‘What about Poncho?’
‘Well, he’s still here. Getting rich off our backs, the bastard.’
‘Gracias, viejo,’ Max said. He pulled a one-thousand peso note from the thick roll in his wallet and handed it to the old man, who could hardly believe his good fortune; he muttered his astonished thanks.
Max strode up to Poncho’s door. When he knocked, it was opened by Poncho himself.
‘Buenos días,’ Poncho said. ‘What do you want, señor?’
‘I want you, Poncho.’
Max jerked out his revolver with its long silencer and thrust it under the overseer’s bulging double chin.
‘Get down on the floor.’
Poncho trembled; a river of sweat flowed from his forehead.
‘I’ve got money,’ he said.
Max shoved him over with his free hand, tripping him with his foot. ‘I don’t want your money, Poncho.’ Poncho lay on the floor, trembling. Max pushed the gun behind his ear. ‘Do you remember me? Do you remember my mother? You tricked her, didn’t you?’
‘Por favor, hombre… Who are you?’
‘Graciela’s son. ’
Poncho twisted his head so he could see Max clearly.
‘I remember you now. You ran away, didn’t you?’ Poncho’s mind was racing. He’d heard in a cantina some mention of Maximiliano López’s name; hadn’t he become a feared pistolero for one of the northern cartels? Yes, Bustamonte the local police Comandante, a friend of his, had told him that one night. ‘Dios mio, help me,’ Poncho prayed silently. He felt a trickle of warm urine dampen his underwear.
‘Don’t hurt me, Max,’ he said.
‘I’m not going to hurt you, I’m going to kill you.’
Max cocked the gun. It will be so easy, this one, he thought. Easier than some of the others, because I hate this man. His finger tightened on the trigger’s first pressure. Poncho began to whimper.
Then Max paused. He thought back over his life. How he’d made more money than he’d ever dreamed of through the vocation that tapped into his rage; but he had never learned to read and write, never even learned to love. If he killed Poncho, he knew he would just keep on killing; and for the first time, he realized clearly that this wasn’t what he wanted. It was time to stop, to search out something else, to think of the future. Perhaps if he spared Poncho, he could begin to redeem himself somehow. His father had been a gentle man, he remembered. He would do it for his sake as well as his own, and for Graciela too, and in memory of Pepe. It didn’t matter whether or not Graciela had forgiven him, because he had forgiven her. He even forgave now the pathetic fat man sprawled quivering with terror on the floor in front of him.
‘It’s your lucky day, Poncho,’ he said. He left the house unhurriedly, without looking back. One of the women who worked in the brothel was hanging out her washing. She whistled at him flirtatiously as he passed by.
Torres tooted the car horn impatiently when he spotted Max approaching.
‘Listen, Torres,’ Max said. ‘I’m going to the cemetery. I’ll only be a minute or so.’
That was all he would need. Enough time for a prayer and a farewell to his parents and Pepe. Afterwards, he would give ‘El Toro’ the slip when they got to the city, before the big job. That would be the end of it, and the beginning of something else.
‘All right,’ Torres said. ‘I’ll wait.’
Torres did so, but a few minutes later, because his legs felt cramped after the day’s long drive, he got out of the car. He strolled up to the corner, smoking a cigarette, then suddenly glimpsed in the distance three black patrol cars approaching cautiously along the main road. Torres wasn’t to know that Poncho, having recovered from his shock, had alerted Bustamonte with a panic-stricken phone call; but he knew a trap when he saw one.
‘Damn you, Max,’ he muttered. He walked casually as he could back to the car, paused for little more than a moment, then drove off down the side-road. It was Max’s own fault, he convinced himself, stepping on the accelerator; he had broken the rules and wasted time; he was his own betrayer. When Max came out of the cemetery the police opened fire with their shotguns without a warning. They didn’t know, although it would have made no difference, that Max no longer had his weapon on him; he had hurled it deep into one of the blazing garbage pits because that was where it belonged.
As he lay in the street, bleeding his last, he felt somehow the motion of a gently rocking boat and he knew, then, where he was. Yes, he was at that lake with the floating gardens, Xochimilco, in Mexico City, and in the boat with him were his mother and his father and little Pepe. His father was strumming a guitar…
Bustamonte and his officers surrounded Maximiliano’s body and went through his pockets. Bustamonte pulled out the wad of notes from the blood-stained wallet. Poncho, who had come running out of the dump when he heard the shots, stared greedily at the money.
‘There’s mucho dinero here, Poncho,’ Bustamonte said. ‘Thousands of pesos, hombre; and dollars, too.’
Poncho nodded eagerly; he knew what Bustamonte was thinking.
‘Without all this money, his gold rings, and his identification,’ said the Comandante, ‘what is he, Poncho?’
‘An indigente, Comandante.’
‘That’s right, Poncho. An indigente.’ He peeled off a handful of the 1000-peso notes.
‘This is for you, the rest for me and my men.’ He winked. ‘That’s the end of the matter. There’s plenty of room in the fosa común for the likes of him. These pistoleros cause nothing but trouble these days, don’t they?’
‘That is so true, Comandante,’ said Poncho. ‘Whatever is the country coming to?’