Mexico Read online

  I went to the main meat fridge in the kitchen, and I started to pull out things that I thought El Chapo might like. El Chapo was a short bull. He was an animal. He was dark and earthy. He snorted when he spoke. Beef, alone, wouldn’t be enough to get his attention. I needed something darker. I thought of some wild boar I had in the fridge, some elk or venison. The boar meat might be close, but the elk and venison were too delicate. If I could have found a slab of water buffalo, that would have been about right. I ate a piece of cured water buffalo meat once, in a restaurant in Sri Lanka, and it tasted as black as the thick skin on the animal.

  And then I realized, only one thing would make El Chapo absolutely happy. Human flesh. I knew human flesh would do it. But I couldn’t give him what he wanted unless I could cut that flesh off of myself, to save the life of me and the other patrons outside, waiting to see if they would make it to another day.

  I found a block of Wagyu beef and took it out of the fridge. I sliced it in thin delicate shavings and then piled the shavings up on six different plates, for El Chapo and some of his henchmen. The first ingredient would be the beef. The second would be human blood. I took one of the sharp knives off the wall of cutting utensils and cut my thumb. I squeezed drops of blood onto the beef, letting the crimson color sink into its thin wafers. The plates looked colorful and there were only two ingredients. I made the plate for El Chapo bigger than the rest, to fit his big ego. I was about to tell the waiters to bring the dishes out, but then I stopped, for a second, and tasted the meat. The ingredients were wrong. The dish was close but not quite right. There was a bitterness, a tough saltiness to my blood that wasn’t quite perfect, as if the totality of my experiences in life came out in the flavor of the blood, and I realized normal blood wouldn’t be enough.

  El Chapo had eaten everything. He had eaten, I guessed, in the finest restaurants of Vegas and in London, Tokyo, and Paris. His empire was global. I knew he was a billionaire. This dish had to be unlike anything he had ever eaten in any of those fine restaurants. But normal blood wouldn’t do. I thought of the baby piglets, lambs, and veal that were the staples of every great restaurant in Europe. It was precisely the tenderness and innocence of those animals, the very thing that made vegetarians cringe at such dishes, which made meat-eaters relish such food. Like old people rubbing on creams to remove their wrinkles, the restaurant patron craves baby carrots, the youngest peas, and other new-grown shoots and lettuces to pass across their tongue before they are chewed and ingested. The desire of someone like El Chapo—who had devoured young women like his wife, and who dressed like a teenage hip-hop star—to avoid his true age, was strong. He needed to dominate all the people around him, like a dirty old man who preys on young girls. So I knew, suddenly, that I needed the blood of a kid.

  I went out the door and into the main dining room. There were a dozen of El Chapo’s guards there, watching the patrons eat. Most of the diners’ plates were empty, and they were waiting for El Chapo to finish his meal so they could go. When I came into the dining room, I heard a few gasps from some of the clients and saw an older woman start to cry. I had no idea how bloody my apron looked. I saw a young girl with two long pigtails running down the back of her hand-knit blue sweater. Her mother was holding her tight by her side, telling her, gently, not to be worried. I came up to the mother, well done up with makeup, who looked like she went to the spa once a week. I had to convince her to give up her daughter.

  “My son’s name is Jimmy,” I said. “He looks about the age of your daughter. Please trust me if I tell you I need your daughter to come into the kitchen for a second.”

  “Why?” the mother asked. She looked tortured, like she was in the middle of a bank robbery and I’d just become one of the bank robbers.

  “There will be time to explain later,” I said, in as calm a voice as I could manage. I tried to be commanding. A command would be the only way to get the mother to relinquish her daughter. I said in a soft, but firm and commanding, voice, “I need your daughter to come back to the kitchen with me.”

  “Only if I come, too,” the mother said.

  So I told her all right, she could come, too. The guards of El Chapo told me to hurry up. “What are you doing wasting time?” the head guard, with the diamond in his ear, said. “Get in the kitchen and give The Boss his meal. He’s hungry. He’s been waiting for you.”

  I went back into the kitchen with the daughter and her mother. I stood in front of the plates of Wagyu beef growing moister and plumper as it absorbed the blood.

  I put my thumb up to the face of the mother, where I had the slice from the knife I had made before. The wound was pink and the blood was sticky. “You see this?” I said to the mother. “I need to do the same to your daughter.”

  She looked at me like I was a crazy terrorist. She tried to pull the knife out of my hand. I had a choice: Give in, let the girl go, admit that I might be crazy, a Dr. Frankenstein in the kitchen, admit that the whole thing was an overreaction on my part. But I have learned, in life, that you have to go with your gut. I didn’t think, I just took action. I put my hand up against the mother’s mouth and made her stay quiet. I grabbed one of the dish towels and stuck it into her mouth. Her eyes pleaded with me not to do anything to her daughter. I picked up the knife again, I pulled up the hand of the child and cut her thumb, deeper than I would have liked in the heat of the moment, and blood came pulsing out. I lifted her high into the air, with her pigtails flailing behind as she cried out for her mother, who was trying to yell, and I squeezed the blood of her hand onto El Chapo’s plate.

  The waiters looked at me like I was insane, but the rule in a fine restaurant is to never question what the head chef demands. They brought the food out to El Chapo, and I made sure they brought the plate with the young girl’s blood specifically to him.

  I followed out a few minutes later, and I could see El Chapo licking his thumb, picking up the plate to get more of the sauce on his lips and into his mouth.

  “There are only two ingredients in the dish,” I told El Chapo.

  “What is it? It’s fucking good. It’s fucking delicious,” he told me. “The others agree. I’ve eaten all over the world, and I’ve never eaten anything this tasty.”

  “It’s Wagyu beef with human blood,” I told him. “The blood is mine.” I held up my thumb to prove I wasn’t lying. There was the cut, irritated and sticky with drying blood. I didn’t mention the girl. If El Chapo knew, he might develop a fetish for young blood. He might look for her in the main dining room and take her away. He might rape her. There was no telling what kind of habits he could develop. I’ve read, from survivors of airplane crashes, that once the taste of human flesh is tried, once the taboo is broken, it’s hard to go back.

  “Son of a bitch,” El Chapo said. “You think I’m an animal. Some kind of cannibal.” He spat on the table with venom, like a rattlesnake. I couldn’t tell if he was going to pull out a gun and shoot me, or not.

  “I don’t think anything,” I said submissively.

  “You people in the ‘normal world,’ you know nothing about who I really am,” El Chapo said. “A cannibal! Nothing could be more ridiculous.” He picked up his plate and held it in front of his face, looking into a mirror. He threw the plate against the wall and the white china, with blood, broke into pieces.

  “But I never lie,” he said. “Even if someone attempts to trick me. I’m the most honest person you’ll find in all of Mexico. Come here!” I approached, as commanded. He took my thumb and squeezed my wound until I cried out, hoping my finger wouldn’t burst. New blood came forth from the thumb. “You should be happy just to keep your life,” El Chapo said, looking me straight in the eyes, letting me know he could kill me every bit as easily as he’d tossed the plate. “But I challenged you, and you gave me something with two ingredients, and it’s the best thing I have ever tasted.”

  He ordered one of his guards to bring me my tip. He pulled out a couple thick piles of hundred-dollar bills from a brown bri
efcase, and left the money on the table. He put my thumb on the money, until some of the blood seeped into the face of Ben Franklin on the bills. “Now you are guilty of entering the world of blood, too,” he said.

  He stood up quickly and walked into the main dining room. The girl was back with her mother, sitting at their table, the mother still in tears. I prayed El Chapo wouldn’t discover she’d been involved with the meal. I hoped he wouldn’t see the girl’s thumb was just like mine.

  El Chapo looked around the room and saw the girl, next to her crying mother. He stood in the middle of the patrons. “What’s wrong, little girl?” he said to all the customers. He walked up to the girl. “Didn’t you like your meal? Please finish eating, everyone. I hope you’ve seen the great El Chapo isn’t such a bastard after all. Please enjoy your meal. It’s compliments of me and my associates.” He waved his hands wide in appreciation to his guards and bowed to them.

  The mother held her daughter, hiding the girl’s face from the “great” El Chapo, and he left with his hands raised in the air like a boxer accepting applause after winning another fight, though the room was silent. The guards returned everyone’s purses and cell phones, and then disappeared.

  —

  Two months after El Chapo came into my restaurant, I went with Jimmy to the Museum of Anthropology in Polanco, not far from where I work. The museum is enormous, with a courtyard where Jimmy can run around, so I like to take him there when I can. At the far end of the museum, like a magnet drawing all the visitors forward, are the rooms with the remains of the Aztec empire—high stone temples covered in alabaster, which had reached up to the broad sky at the center of the ancient city of Tenochtitlan in the middle of what is today Mexico City. The halls with Aztec art are filled with clay statues, and one is of a god that looks like a robot, square with big round eyes. This is Tlaloc, the god of rain and thunder. He controlled the water, necessary for the corn to grow. The Aztecs prayed to dozens of gods, and at the top of their pyramids they sacrificed thousands of people to keep the gods satisfied.

  Jimmy ran ahead of me in the Aztec galleries, past stone knives with small eyes made of turquoise that the Aztecs used to cut out the hearts of the sacrificed people. Young victims were always considered the most worthwhile for placating the gods. They had more potential energy for the rest of their lives stored within, so they were believed to be the most valuable offerings.

  For two weeks, I hadn’t been sleeping well. I didn’t know what to do with the money El Chapo had left me as my tip. I kept thinking about what he’d said to me, that now I was guilty, too. My wife had told me I should be practical and use the money to keep building up the restaurant, or to put it into the college fund for Jimmy. She told me I would be turning bad money into good, taking it from the drug dealers and making it into something positive. She told me I should be proud I’d saved everyone in the restaurant that day. But whenever I looked at the money, and thought about the possessed way I’d lifted the girl to put her blood on the beef to give to El Chapo, I wasn’t so sure I was a hero. It wasn’t just that I’d tortured her mother and cut the girl’s finger; I was playing with black chef magic, thinking I could outsmart El Chapo. What if he’d reacted differently to my dish? What if he’d reacted in anger and killed me, or more people? I was just as guilty of giving in to my ego, of thinking I could control him, as El Chapo thought he could control the world.

  “Come over here,” I told Jimmy. He was lost, wandering among the Aztec gods, and I had to call him a couple more times before he complied. I’d told his mother I wanted to go with Jimmy alone to the museum. Jimmy and I came to a stone pyramid altar, twenty feet high, which used to sit on top of one of the pyramids of Tenochtitlan. From my backpack, filled with snacks and a juice bottle for Jimmy, I pulled out a big envelope with the twenty thousand dollars El Chapo had given me. The envelope was new, but you could still see, faintly, the blood on some of the bills within. “Take this envelope up to the top of the pyramid,” I told Jimmy. “Put it on the round stone.” I told him to go to the place where the Aztecs used to leave the sacrificed hearts. I looked around to make sure there were no guards coming. “Keep going! Put it up there,” I said to Jimmy. He placed the envelope just where I told him, on the stone altar. He made a face at me. He told me he didn’t want to come down. “It’s fun up here,” he said. I could hear the guard coming. I told Jimmy to hurry. I told him we had to go home.

  THE GOD OF COMMON NAMES

  This is a Romeo and Juliet story. But it’s set in Mexico, where I live and work as a teacher.

  One day, about a month ago, this black SUV pulls up in front of the private New Hampshire School where I teach in San Jerónimo. The New Hampshire School is one of those precious schools where rich Mexicans send their kids to give them an exclusively foreign-feeling education. English is spoken in half of the classes. The students take ski trips to Vail, in Colorado, over Christmas break with the other students. They dream of getting into places like Harvard and Yale, but most end up at places like Bucknell University or, if they’re less brilliant, the University of Miami, Florida.

  Three blocks up the street from the school, there’s a fantastic bakery where you can get croissants stuffed with walnut paste and a dog-grooming store where they import weight-loss dog food for breeds like yellow Labs. There’s a wine store with two-hundred-dollar bottles of imported French wine and an electrolysis beauty salon that keeps humming with one laser plucking after another. I’m told permanent Brazilian waxes there are the thing.

  Black SUVs aren’t all that uncommon at our school. The kids come with their drivers and bodyguards, who bring them in the morning. But what made this SUV unusual is that it showed up in the middle of the day, when the kids had already eaten lunch and were all in their classes. The other thing that made the SUV unusual was that no kid came out of it. I could see the Cadillac come into the parking lot. I was teaching my usual tenth-grade class in American History and Culture. We had just done a unit on American outlaws like Jesse James and the Chicago gangsters of the ’20s, and the kids were into that.

  Two of my students, who almost never pay attention, had perked up during the unit. One was José Cachez Jiménez and the other was Sandra Fernández de Guanajuato. I make up a seating chart at the beginning of each semester, where I place the students randomly in new desks. I do this to avoid having cliques form, and I do it because one of the big social differences between American students and Mexican students is how everything in Mexico revolves around the group. American students, of course, like to hang out together, but they tend to break off in groups of two or three after school. But in Mexico it’s all about big groups of eight or so buddies or female pals. They do everything together. They play soccer together, go to the movies together, have parties together, and then work together or swap business deals together as they get older.

  In any case, Sandra and José ended up randomly in my class sitting next to one another, in the back. There’s some strange law about teaching that even when you seat students randomly, the ones in the back tend not to pay too much attention. I would hear them tittering, a few weeks into the class, when my back was turned to the students, while I was writing on the board. I’d see Sandra and José casting glances back and forth, even while taking exams.

  Sandra’s face is long and thin; she wears her hair with a lot of wavy curls that she’s spent hours combing so they cascade one below the other in bountiful thick semicircles, frozen perfectly with lots of hairspray. If Frank Gehry were a hairstylist instead of an architect, this would be his kind of head of hair. She wears red lipstick that she regularly freshens. Excessive makeup is illegal in the school, but the definition of what’s excessive is different in Mexico. Unless you have false eyelashes, you’re OK in the New Hampshire School. Outside of school, I saw Sandra in an upscale mall, once, with tight jeans with sequins stitched on the back pockets, in the shape of crosses—but coquettish, round crosses that let you know she’s religious and she believes in God but
if some boy wants to come along and find his way into her pants, that would be OK.

  In class, the students all have to wear uniforms with green and blue plaid skirts for the girls and blue blazers with the New Hampshire crest for the boys.

  José is the kind of guy who likes to have his blazer always unbuttoned. He sneaks in a soccer shirt when he can, under the blazer, of the national soccer team or of one of his favorite teams in Italy.

  I never turn the kids in for clothing violations, because I figure the whole pretension that the kids are future Ivy Leaguers is ridiculous. And besides, they’re kids. All I’m interested in is that they learn to read a bit better, that they start to understand just a little of the wide history out there that most of them are oblivious to, and that they consider the possibility there’s more than only one right answer. If they can get away from the idea that history is a right or wrong answer, with only dates to memorize, then I feel I’ve done my part.

  The man who came out of the SUV was wearing a white cowboy hat. He was tan in a way upper-class Mexicans around Mexico City don’t like to get, meaning his skin was rough and leathery. He had on a crisp, Western-style shirt with fake cowboy stitching on the pockets, and he was wearing a pair of mirrored aviator glasses. Needless to say, this isn’t the typical kind of parent that comes to pick up their kids at the New Hampshire School. Two men in black suits, with white shirts and pink ties, who looked like private security guards, trailed behind the man with the cowboy hat as he came into the school.

  For another couple minutes, I forgot about the man I’d just seen in the parking lot. I continued with the latest course section about American Prohibition and the women’s suffragist movement, how women finally fought to get their full right to vote.

  Then a knock came at the door to the classroom. I turned away from the blackboard, where I was writing, and went to the door. There was the guy with the white cowboy hat. I looked through the glass window of the door, and for a second I had the certain feeling I should leave the man outside and call security. But I also had the feeling I was going to be in deep trouble if I didn’t open the door. So I did. Or, more like, after we made eye contact the man with the hat let himself in.