Woes of the True Policeman

would come back and marry her, but seven months later he died in a skirmish with federal troops and he and his horse were swept away by the Río Sangre de Cristo, also known as Hell River because it ran brownish-black. Though María Expósito waited for him, he never returned to Villaviciosa, like so many other boys from the town who went off to war or found work as guns for hire, boys who were never heard of again or who cropped up here and there in stories that might or might not have been true.
    And nine months after his departure María Expósito Expósito was born and young María Expósito, suddenly a mother herself, set to work selling her mother’s potions and the eggs from her own henhouse in the neighboring towns, and she did fairly well.
    In 1917, there was an unusual development in the Expósito family: María got pregnant again and this time she had a boy.
    His name was Rafael and he grew up amid the tumult of the new Mexico. His eyes were green like those of his distant Belgian great-grandfather and his gaze had the same strangeness about it that outsiders noted in the gaze of the townspeople of Villaviciosa: it was opaque and intense, the stare of a killer. The identity of his father was never revealed. He might have been a revolutionary soldier, or a federal soldier, since they, too, were seen around town at the time, or he might have been some random local who preferred to remain in prudent anonymity. On the rare occasions when she was asked about the boy’s father, María Expósito, who had gradually adopted her mother’s witchlike language and manner (though all she did was sell the medicinal brews, fumbling among the little rheumatism flasks and the drafts for the curing of melancholy), answered that his father was the devil and Rafael his spitting image, and despite what one might imagine, the inhabitants of Villaviciosa weren’t ruffled in the slightest by this reply, since all the local boys, some more than others and some less, might have been the sons of Pedro Botero.
    In 1933, during a Homeric bender, the bullfighter Celestino Arraya and his comrades from the club The Cowboys of Death arrived early one morning in Villaviciosa, the bullfighter’s hometown, and took rooms at the Valle Hebrón bar, which at the time was also an inn, and shouted for roast goat, which they were served by three village girls. One of those girls was María Expósito. They left the next morning at eleven and four months later María Expósito confessed to her mother that she was going to have a baby. Who’s the father? asked her brother. The women were silent and the boy set out to retrace his sister’s steps on his own. A week later Rafael Expósito borrowed a rifle and set off on foot for Santa Teresa.
    He had never been in such a big place and he was so struck by the bustle of the streets, the Teatro Carlota, and the whores that he decided to spend three days in the city before carrying out his mission. The first day he spent searching for Celestino Arraya’s haunts and a place to sleep for free. He discovered that in certain neighborhoods night was the same as day, and he pledged simply not to sleep. On the second day, as he walked up and down the main street of the red-light district, a short, shapely Yucatecan girl with jet-black hair down to her waist and the look of a woman to be reckoned with took pity on him and brought him home with her. There, in a hotel room, she made him rice soup and then they spent the rest of the day in bed.
    It was the first time for Rafael Expósito. When they parted the whore ordered him to wait for her in the room or, if he wanted to go out, at the entrance to the hotel. The boy said he was in love with her and the whore went off happily, laughing to herself. On the third day she brought him to the Teatro Carlota to hear the ballads of the Dominican troubador Pajarito de la Cruz and the rancheras of José Ramírez, but what the boy liked best were the chorus girls and the magic numbers by Professor Chen Kao, a Chinese conjurer from Michoacán.
    At dusk on the fourth day, well fed and at peace with himself, Rafael Expósito said goodbye to the whore, retrieved the rifle from the vacant lot where he’d hidden it, and headed resolutely to the bar Los Primos Hermanos, where he found Celestino Arraya. Seconds after he shot him he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he had killed him and he felt avenged and happy. He didn’t shut his eyes when the bullfighter’s friends