Woes of the True Policeman

his degree and a scholarship to study philosophy in the capital. Pedro, meanwhile, furnished sufficient proof of his courage as a police officer and a man, but most of all of his exquisite nose and tactful handling of the people who mattered. Quietly he rose through the ranks of the Santa Teresa police department. His superiors respected him and his subordinates half loved and half feared him. It was around this time that all kinds of gossip about him began to spread. It was said that he had slit the throat of a whore in her hotel room, that he had killed a leader of the railroad union (though the train didn’t pass through Santa Teresa), that for the benefit of a local rancher he had engineered the disappearance of five seasonal workers clamoring for what they were owed. But nothing could ever be proved.
    Pablo completed his philosophy degree with a thesis titled Heidegger and Mexican Thought , which some fellow students and professors judged to be in the great critical tradition and that was actually tossed off in twenty-five days, plagiarized from all kinds of sources, by the Michoacán poet Orestes Gullón, who three years later would die of cirrhosis of the liver. Gullón, reporter for El Nacional , author of slanderous palindromes and acrostics, as well as poems occasionally published in a few Mexico City journals and provincial newspapers, was Pablo Negrete’s one friend during his profitable and happy time in the capital; serious-minded and polite, he knew how to avoid making enemies, but his only real friend was Gullón. With the latter he spent time at Café La Habana, on Calle Bucareli, and at the bar La Encrucijada, on Bucareli at Victoria, and at some dubious dance halls on Avenida Guerrero.
    The northerner and his friend from Michoacán were an odd couple. Gullón was a talker, cultivated and self-centered. Pablo Negrete was reserved, not too busy grooming his ego—though he did put a lot of care into his attire—and his knowledge of the Greek classics left much to be desired. He was interested in German philosophy. Gullón professed an Olympic disdain for it: he said that the only decent German philosopher was Lichtenberg, who was less a philosopher than the ultimate jokester and clown. He liked Montaigne and Pascal. And he could recite from memory bits of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Zeno of Elea, to the delight of Pablo, who grew fonder and fonder of him as time went by.
    Unlike his brother, Pedro Negrete had many friends. Being a policeman made it easier. A policeman, he discovered without being taught, could be friends with anyone he wanted. The cultivation of friendship, an art previously foreign to him, became his favorite pastime. As a boy, friendship had struck him as mysterious, sometimes risky, even reckless. When he was older he understood that friendship—the essence of friendship—resided in the guts, not the brain or the heart. Everything boiled down to the play of mutual interests and a way of touching people (touching them physically, hugging them, slapping them on the back) with confidence. And it was precisely in the police force where this art was most vigorously practiced.
    In 1958, at the age of twenty-eight, he was named detective. Shortly afterward Pablo returned to Santa Teresa and obtained a post at the university. They had no money but they had wiles and they continued to rise in their careers. In 1977 Pedro Negrete was promoted to police chief of Santa Teresa. In 1982, after his predecessor became embroiled in a scandal, Peblo Negrete took the rector’s chair.
    Shortly after meeting Amalfitano—seven hours later, in fact—Pablo called Pedro. The call was prompted by a premonition. This is how it happened: that afternoon, the new philosophy professor had stopped by his office to introduce himself, and that night, in the quiet of his library, with a whiskey and the third tome of Guillermo Molina’s History of Mexico within easy reach, the rector found himself thinking again about the professor. His name was Óscar Amalfitano, he was Chilean, he had previously worked in Europe. And then he had the vision. He wasn’t drunk or especially tired, so it was a real vision. (Or I’m going crazy, he thought, but immediately rejected the idea.) In his vision, Amalfitano was riding one of the horses of the Apocalypse through the streets of Santa Teresa. He was naked, his white hair was wild and bloody, and he was shouting in terror or joy, it wasn’t