All these barrios look alike. They’re the precipices hanging over the hopes for one’s well-being. The fear they inspire in me doesn’t minimize my morbid curiosity. For years, it has been the only stimulant that I’ve had to return home to as I lock myself inside and read. That’s how I learned to live with myself. Alexander Avenue crosses 138th. The corners are occupied by a Catholic church, the police station with the subway entrance next to it, a housing complex tower, and a somber brick building with fire escapes zigzagging down its facade. An Irish bar has survived on the ground floor. I doubt that the dingy cardboard and neon four-leaf clovers hanging in the window and from the walls inside have brought anyone luck. They’re the nationalistic fetish of a ruddy-faced bartender who supplies bilingual sots with beer and bourbon. The church takes in the Latinos, mainly Mexicans, as well as the few black folk who are not evangelicals, Seventh-Day Adventists, or Muslim. The devoutness of Mexicans is so intense there’s even a mural of the dark-skinned Virgin in the back patio of the church; every twelfth of December, a pilgrimage starts there and ends at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan in order to sing a birthday praise to the Virgin of Guadalupe: the greatest and most passionate patroness known on the East Coast for workers and their daily grind in kitchens, factories, and warehouses.
The cult of blood also shares those same corners.
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Leo died only because he was a sick, old man who no longer cared about danger. He dragged his feet without taking his gaze off from the crack of survival that grew wider and wider beneath him. His supermarket cart rolled against the sidewalk, spilling tin cans, blankets, and winter clothing. He didn’t need three gunshots to the rib cage, but no one thinks about that when pulling the trigger. The gaunt body of that bum probably gave up after the first shot. On that evening he was the target of an unknown suspect who, according to an eyewitness, had been slowly cruising around Willis Avenue and 138th, one of the crew members aboard a Ford sedan.
I reached the bloody bulk, avoiding the silent statues gathered there and staring at the scene in disbelief. The moment he was shot, I was at the corner store buying beer and cigarettes, and chatting with the grocer about the Saturday boxing matches shown on a Spanish-language TV station. We had changed the topic of discussion when he mentioned how a crime had been solved by a detective with a Dominican background and who was the son of one of the grocer’s friends, who had saved all of his earnings to buy a house on one of the beaches in his country.
The dry and quick bursts reminded me of the sound made when smashing an inflated paper bag. Then there were some hysterical shrieks drowned out by squealing tires. The music coming from nearby apartment windows slowly filled the stillness that followed the shooting. The grocer and I stayed quiet while looking at each other in shock, and then, without saying good-bye, I walked outside, ignoring the warnings. I went along guided by the pedestrians who passed me, running in the direction of the cadaver as if they were spurred along by a stampede, nearly knocking down the police officers who were exiting the station to investigate. As always when there’s a death in the street, the carrion eaters arrived before the ones trying to prevent things like that.
After a few minutes, the street filled up with gawkers, and shouts were heard as if the people had woken up from a heavy sleep while something interesting was occurring. The local drunk, the sickly woman panhandling outside the stores, the thug, the scaredy-cat, the pimp, the cholo, and the trickster surrounded the cadaver while making comparisons with other local tragedies. They pushed each other, pointed, even laughed. We wanted life to provide something novel to talk about.
I felt an emptiness in my stomach as if I were fasting. I saw a body stretched out on the asphalt. I couldn’t understand if the face looked waxen because of life or death. On the corner, the police were sharing their report with some other patrolmen in front of the station, the very same ones who had just taken control of the tumult with choreographed coldness and efficiency.
“As far as I can see, we’ll never find out who did this,” a passerby experienced with the law of the jungle pronounced.
“Well, what are you doing here then?” one of the cops retorted, defending himself from the implied critique.
For me, this confirmed how simple it was for one to meddle in the affairs of another person without that person being able to stop it. I asked a few questions, and I stood near the police officers and the experts to hear their comments, and I was a few inches from a dead man without having to be dead in order to do so. All of that without needing to flash any credentials. On similar occasions, fear shook my resolve as a “newspaper reporter.” (In Mexico, I carried a press card that was never useful, not even for passing the security desk at the newspaper that issued the identification. Invariably, the vigilantes would call the editor to make sure I was the person I claimed to be. In the photo, I was ten years younger, undergoing the dynamic process of deformation by way of sleepless nights and drunken binges.) But this time I was finally able to stay at the scene of the crime without anyone bugging me. I had the luxury of exchanging my suspicions about the neighborhood’s peculiarities with people who had lived their whole lives there. Almost all of my intelligence was untrue and based on commonalities to win over the trust of the other gossipers, all handpicked by me, and who were asking why someone would want to kill Leo the Homeless Man.
The police officers continued with their investigation, while the local residents took advantage of warning each other. I had seen, as if through a one-way mirror, the way they protected themselves from informers, a camera exposing this neighborhood in pain and always under suspicion. I had heard an unforgettable noise: a high-powered gun in action. A miserable man had died due to flimsy motives in the same spot where I would regularly pass while on my way to get a haircut, buy vegetables at the market run by the Chinese, purchase alcohol, or eat tacos on Cypress Hill, known as a spot where drug dealers met. No one knew the victim or the assassin. To make things simple, one was Leo the Homeless Man, and the other was a twisted homie. That’s what everyone said. A daily affair, and one wouldn’t have to wait too long before someone else within the gears of crime would oil the clockwork of death.
As far as I was concerned, the case was closed. I was a partial witness to one of the frequent crimes in that part of the Bronx. Nothing mattered. From thereon, the homicide would become part of the statistical charts and tabula rasas onto which the barrio’s personality was imprinted. Moreover, I doubted that the assassination would earn a spot on some corner of the New York Post. A black homeless man had died by the hands of an assassin well versed in the ever-increasing drive-by-shooting. He could have died from drugs, hypothermia, or cirrhosis. No one would claim the body; none of this interested anyone, apart from those long minutes in which the bloodied and deformed body, as if going through a rapid mummification, lay there waiting for the ambulance to come and take it away.
For me, death was like a frightening warning about that neighborhood immune to worry.
Leo had wandered around that area for many years, picking through trash or begging for blackened and gooey bananas from the store that the Caribbeans ran. His behavior was like that of other bums in other places: lost in his own thoughts and solitary. I would watch him often, and I failed at finding anything about his past or any details that would differentiate him from others like him. I never saw him eat, drink, or sleep. I never saw him stare at anyone or at anything in particular. While the paramedics rolled him into the ambulance and the police told everyone to keep on moving, I returned to the small talk that made daily life almost tolerable. Besieged by terror, racial strife, and obvious poverty, the apathetic crowd dispersed, each person jealously holding on to any clue that would make the cat-and-mouse game easier.
I returned to the store for my Colt 45 and I had no qualms about providing a detailed news report to the grocers. We made some guesses and jokes about the word on the street, and before I left the store, I had already forgotten about the touchy criticism made about Mexican boxers. My role as an informer was taken