street kids would throw rocks at them without mercy. He now began to suspect that Simenon’s novels, while pleasant and entertaining, could not make him a detective in the world south of the Rio Grande. The poet was wrong. A Maigret was incapable of taming the bursting, capacious reality of Latin America. It would be like telling Bienvenido Granda to sing Franz Schubert’s
Lieder
in the bars of Managua or Tegucigalpa instead of boleros, or making Celia Cruz imitate María Callas at a jam session on Eighth Street. The tangled files of the Mexican Medical Association alone would pose an insurmountable, maddening challenge to the structured brains of Holmes, Maigret, and Marlowe, accustomed as they were to scrupulously perusing organized files in the silent amplitude of rooms in prestigious institutions, ensconced in stately buildings with parquet floors, chandeliers, and sumptuous drapes.
He took a crocodile taxi toward the Excelsior. At least he’d get to have dinner with Mónica Salvat. Hopefully, he’d find an experienced journalist and functional filing system at the newspaper, he thought as he passed Chapultepec Forest, nineteenth-century façades, and the scaffolding of buildings under construction. Mexico City teemed. It seemed to be dying and being born at the same time, as though it lamented the loss of tranquility and ancient edifices, and yet celebrated modernity, longed for it. Street vendors filled the central streets, where people in modern dress walked, as did women in indigenous clothing and men in jeans and hats, like extras from a LuisAguilar film. From where he sat, behind the Chrysler’s window, the city seemed to break apart into scenes both modern and traditional, as contradictory as disparate fragments. He speculated that Bracamonte could well be strolling with his miraculous concoctions through that motley Mexico City throng, although he could also be walking around Havana with his chest covered in revolutionary medals. Or perhaps he lived on a beach with turquoise water in Quintana Roo, in a cabin sheltered by the shade of many trees, like the cabin of which he and Ángela had dreamed when they were still in love. The truth was, Bracamonte could be wandering anywhere and at the same time nowhere. He might even be dead, he thought as the taxi turned around Zócalo, with its giant Mexican flag.
15
Á ngel Bracamonte, oncologist?” Luis Cervantes asked with a frown.
The reporter had thick ears and lips, and rosy cheeks and nose, like a rubber doll. That is, a sixty-year-old doll that typed in an office with stained walls, dirty windows, and faded curtains.
“In the forties. Mexico City. He was researching the medicinal properties of plants in Chiapas. He must have been well-known,” Cayetano Brulé added, to jog his memory.
“Mexican?”
“A semi-Mexican Cuban.”
Cervantes ran his hands over his typewriter. He looked uncertain. Despite his prodigious memory, he remembered no one with that name. Not all doctors were celebrities in Mexico, as they could be elsewhere, Cayetano thought. In Mexico there were even some who lived precariously close to impoverished Zócalo, especially those who, loyal to their Hippocratic oath, devoted themselves to serving the poor in marginalized neighborhoods, ministering to patients who might never have felt the cold pressure of a stethoscope on their chest.
“And you’ll have to forgive me,” Cervantes said, “but I doubt this person was a doctor if he specialized in medicinal plants. It soundsmore like the work of shamans or witch doctors than a gentleman who’d invested years at the university. Are you sure he was a doctor?”
In fact, he had not considered this possibility. He had turned certain things over many times in his mind, and considered the options, but had not imagined that the poet could have mistaken an herbalist for a doctor thirty years ago. But why not? When he couldn’t even remember Ángel Bracamonte’s second last name. Of
Lieder
in the bars of Managua or Tegucigalpa instead of boleros, or making Celia Cruz imitate María Callas at a jam session on Eighth Street. The tangled files of the Mexican Medical Association alone would pose an insurmountable, maddening challenge to the structured brains of Holmes, Maigret, and Marlowe, accustomed as they were to scrupulously perusing organized files in the silent amplitude of rooms in prestigious institutions, ensconced in stately buildings with parquet floors, chandeliers, and sumptuous drapes.
He took a crocodile taxi toward the Excelsior. At least he’d get to have dinner with Mónica Salvat. Hopefully, he’d find an experienced journalist and functional filing system at the newspaper, he thought as he passed Chapultepec Forest, nineteenth-century façades, and the scaffolding of buildings under construction. Mexico City teemed. It seemed to be dying and being born at the same time, as though it lamented the loss of tranquility and ancient edifices, and yet celebrated modernity, longed for it. Street vendors filled the central streets, where people in modern dress walked, as did women in indigenous clothing and men in jeans and hats, like extras from a LuisAguilar film. From where he sat, behind the Chrysler’s window, the city seemed to break apart into scenes both modern and traditional, as contradictory as disparate fragments. He speculated that Bracamonte could well be strolling with his miraculous concoctions through that motley Mexico City throng, although he could also be walking around Havana with his chest covered in revolutionary medals. Or perhaps he lived on a beach with turquoise water in Quintana Roo, in a cabin sheltered by the shade of many trees, like the cabin of which he and Ángela had dreamed when they were still in love. The truth was, Bracamonte could be wandering anywhere and at the same time nowhere. He might even be dead, he thought as the taxi turned around Zócalo, with its giant Mexican flag.
15
Á ngel Bracamonte, oncologist?” Luis Cervantes asked with a frown.
The reporter had thick ears and lips, and rosy cheeks and nose, like a rubber doll. That is, a sixty-year-old doll that typed in an office with stained walls, dirty windows, and faded curtains.
“In the forties. Mexico City. He was researching the medicinal properties of plants in Chiapas. He must have been well-known,” Cayetano Brulé added, to jog his memory.
“Mexican?”
“A semi-Mexican Cuban.”
Cervantes ran his hands over his typewriter. He looked uncertain. Despite his prodigious memory, he remembered no one with that name. Not all doctors were celebrities in Mexico, as they could be elsewhere, Cayetano thought. In Mexico there were even some who lived precariously close to impoverished Zócalo, especially those who, loyal to their Hippocratic oath, devoted themselves to serving the poor in marginalized neighborhoods, ministering to patients who might never have felt the cold pressure of a stethoscope on their chest.
“And you’ll have to forgive me,” Cervantes said, “but I doubt this person was a doctor if he specialized in medicinal plants. It soundsmore like the work of shamans or witch doctors than a gentleman who’d invested years at the university. Are you sure he was a doctor?”
In fact, he had not considered this possibility. He had turned certain things over many times in his mind, and considered the options, but had not imagined that the poet could have mistaken an herbalist for a doctor thirty years ago. But why not? When he couldn’t even remember Ángel Bracamonte’s second last name. Of
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