Woes of the True Policeman

Edelmira was almost certainly killed on Sunday, between noon and midnight. Alejandra, meanwhile, was held for longer: she was probably killed on Thursday or Friday, twenty-four hours before some children found her body near the assembly plant.

13

Gumaro guided Pancho’s first steps on the Santa Teresa police force. When they ran into each other at the station in the morning, he would say: come with me, let your buddies pick up the slack, I want to talk to you. And Pancho would drop whatever he was doing and go with him. Gumaro was nondescript in appearance, neither very tall nor very big, and he had a small head, like a lizard. It was hard to guess his age and he might have been older than everyone thought. To some people, he came across as none too impressive, too small and thin to be a policeman, but if they looked him in the eyes they could tell that he was no ordinary man.

Very late one night, at the bar La Estela, Pancho watched him closely for a while and discovered that he hardly ever blinked. He reported this to Gumaro and asked why he did things differently from ordinary mortals. Gumaro answered that when he closed his eyes it gave him a terrible pain in the head.

“So how do you sleep?” asked Pancho.

“I fall asleep with my eyes open and once I’m asleep I close them.”

He had no fixed address. He could be found at any of the Santa Teresa police stations and he never seemed to be busy, not even when he was performing his duties as Don Pedro Negrete’s driver. Everyone owed him favors, favors of all kinds, but he only took orders from Don Pedro.

He told Pancho that he was going to teach him how to be a policeman. It’s the best job in the world, said Gumaro, the only one in which you’re truly free or you know for a fact — without the shadow of a doubt — that you aren’t. Either way, it’s like living in a house of raw flesh, he said. Other times he said that there should be no police force, the army was enough.

He liked to talk. He especially liked to carry on one-sided conversations. He also liked to make jokes that only he laughed at. He didn’t have a wife or children. He felt sorry for children and avoided them, and women left him cold. Once a bartender who didn’t know him asked why he didn’t find himself a wife. Gumaro was surrounded by on-duty and off-duty officers and all of them fell silent, waiting to hear his reply, but he didn’t say anything, just kept drinking his Tecate as if nothing had happened, and ten minutes later the bartender came over again and said he was sorry.

“Sorry for what, pal,” asked Gumaro.

“For being rude, Sergeant,” said the bartender.

“You aren’t rude,” said Gumaro, “you’re a jackass, or just an ass.”

And that was it. He didn’t hold grudges and he didn’t have a temper.

Sometimes he stopped by the place where a crime had been committed. When he arrived everyone stood aside, even the judge or the medical examiner, with whom he was on first-name terms. Without saying a word, absorbed in his own thoughts, his hands buried in his pockets, he cast an eye over the victim, the victim’s effects, and what some policemen call the scene of the crime, and then he left as silently as he’d come and never returned.

No one knew where he lived. Some said that it was in Don Pedro Negrete’s basement, while others claimed that he didn’t have a place to call home and that he did sometimes sleep in the cells, empty or not, at the General Sepúlveda police station. Pancho was one of the few who knew from the start (in an extraordinary show of confidence on Gumaro’s part) that in fact he sometimes slept in Don Pedro’s basement, in a little room that had been fixed up especially for him, and sometimes in the cells at the station, but most nights, or days, he slept at a guesthouse in Colonia El Milagro, five blocks from Pancho’s apartment. The owner was a woman in her early fifties with a lawyer son who worked in Monterrey. She treated Gumaro like one of the family. Her husband was a policeman who had been killed in the line of duty. Her name was Felicidad Pérez and she was always asking Gumaro for little favors that he never granted.

Many times Pancho followed him from bar to bar until dawn.

Gumaro drank a lot, but he almost never showed the effects of alcohol. When he got drunk he would pull his chair over to the window and scrutinize the sky, saying:

“My brain needs air.”

This meant that he was elsewhere. Then he would start to talk about vampires.

“How many Dracula movies have you seen?” he asked Pancho.

“None, Gumaro.”

“Then you don’t know much about vampires,” said Gumaro.

Other times he talked about desert towns or villages or hamlets that only communicated among themselves, with no regard for borders or language. Towns that were one or two thousand years old and where scarcely fifty or one hundred people lived.

“What towns are those, Gumaro?” Pancho asked.