Woes of the True Policeman

emptied their revolvers into him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in Santa Teresa.
    In 1933 another María Expósito was born. She was shy and sweet and so tall that even the tallest men in town looked short next to her. From the time she was eight she spent her days helping her mother and grandmother to sell her great-grandmother’s remedies and going along with her grandmother at dawn to gather herbs. Sometimes the peasants of Villaviciosa saw her silhouette against the horizon and it struck them as extraordinary that such a tall, long-legged girl could exist.
    She was the first in her family to learn to read and write. At the age of seventeen she was raped by a peddler and in 1950 a girl was born whom they called María Expósito. By then there were five generations of María Expósitos living together outside Villaviciosa, and the little farmhouse had grown, with rooms added on any old way around the big kitchen with the hearth where the eldest prepared her brews and medicaments. At night, when it was time for dinner, the five always sat down together, the girl, her lanky mother, Rafael’s melancholy sister, the childlike one, and the witch, and often they talked about saints and illnesses, about money, about the weather, and about men, whom they considered a scourge, and they thanked heaven that they were only women.
    In 1968, while the students of Paris were taking to the streets, the young María Expósito, still a virgin, was seduced by three students from Monterrey who were preparing, or so they said, for a revolution of the peasantry, and whom after one thrilling week she never saw again.
    The students lived in a van parked at a bend in the road between Villaviciosa and Santa Teresa and every night María Expósito would slip out of bed to go and meet them. When her great-grandmother asked who the father was, María Expósito remembered a kind of delicious abyss and had a very clear vision: she saw herself, small but mysteriously strong, able to take three men at once. They hurl themselves on me panting like dogs, she thought, from in front and behind so that I can hardly breathe and their cocks are enormous, they’re the cocks of Mexico’s peasant revolution, but inside I’m bigger than them all and they’ll never conquer me.
    By the time her son was born the Paris students had gone home and many Mexican students had stopped existing.
    Against the wishes of her family, who wanted to baptize the boy Rafael, María Expósito called him Francisco, after Saint Francis of Assisi, and decided that the first half of his last name wouldn’t be Expósito, which was a name for orphans, as the students from Monterrey had informed her one night by the light of a campfire, but Monje, Francisco Monje Expósito, two different last names, and that was how she entered it in the register at the parish church despite the priest’s reluctance and his skepticism about the identity of the alleged father. Her great-grandmother said that it was pure arrogance to put the name Monje before Expósito, which was the name she’d always had, and a little while later, when Pancho was two and running naked along the sand-colored streets of Villaviciosa, she died. And when Pancho was five the other old woman, the childish one, died, and when he turned fifteen, Rafael Expósito’s sister died. And when Don Pedro Negrete came for him the only ones left were the lanky Expósito and Pancho’s mother.

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    “We saw them from the distance and right away we knew who they were and they knew we knew it and they kept coming. I mean: we knew who they were, they knew who we were, they knew that we knew who they were, we knew that they knew that we knew who they were. Everything was clear. The day had no secrets! I don’t know why, but the thing I remember best about that afternoon are the clothes. Their clothes, especially. The one who was carrying the Magnum, who was going to make sure that Don Gabriel’s wife died, was wearing a sharp white guayabera with stitching on the front. The one carrying the Uzi was in a green serge jacket, maybe two sizes too big.”
    “ Ay , the things you know about clothes, darling,” said the whore.
    “I was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and some drill pants that Cochrane had bought for me and already taken out of my weekly pay. The pants were too big and I had to wear a belt to keep them up.”
    “You’ve always been on the skinny side, sugar,” said the whore.
    “All around me it was the