The Girl with the Little Red Flower
Mexico City station was big. Its platform pillars were painted by red brushstrokes that shone in the midday sun. There was a ticket booth and almost three restaurants (the third being a pitiful sort of deli). And soot handed Pablo Caesar worked in the rail yard, checking the coupling on the freight trains. His back hurt, (he was fifty seven) but he went about his work whistling and, one day, whilst whistling, he found a dead girl.
Her white dress billowed westward, and with its embroidery and its black soot blotches, looked as if it belonged to a Dalmatian. Strapped to her back were paper-mache wings, cracked and broken to pieces. Her foot was twisted upwards and a bone stuck out of her right arm. A little red flower flapped and leapt from her nymphet (alas, I am not Nabokov) hand, spiralling away in the wind. Pablo didn’t know what to do, so did what any Mexican man would do and called a priest.
The priest, bearded, but young, tottered across the stones – blackened from day after day of passing freight trains. Pablo stood by a freight car, waiting, wringing his little rail worker hat in his black Mexican hands. The priest smiled, ‘Dear Pablo, whatever is the matter?’ Pablo led him to the girl. A second and with his hand on his mouth and crossing himself the priest did say onto Pablo Caesar, something something angels and the smile was gone and then the priest was gone with it.
Pablo found the priest with his hands on his knees, white spittle hanging from his lips. The priest said something else about angels and put one hand on the freight car. Shaking his head, he stood up and straightened his robes. He knew exactly what to do.
The phone booth swallowed two indiscriminate coins and gave a comforting gurgle. Operator, operator dial it back, operator put me through. The phone was answered by the constable, a portly man who’d been working behind the same desk in the same room for twelve years. ‘I’ll do the best I can,’ he said and looked through the shutters. Rain. After the rain stops, he thought, I’ll help, after the rain stops. ‘I will be there once my subordinates return,’ he said. A hiccup of static and the line: dead.
The constable sighed and returned to work (reports mainly: a petty piece of thievery, two counts of arson). He signed, a simple, smudged D, on the last document and checked the window again. Rain still. It dawned on him – the pitter patters, the storm clouds, the endless trudge of wet policemen – the rain was never going to stop. He sighed – he was a great one for sighing.
He left at twelve, wrapped in his cape, arriving prickled in dark wet freckles. He met the drenched priest by the phone booth. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said and the priest pointed at the dead girl. The constable nodded and smiled and said, ‘it’s alright to be afraid,’ patting the priest on the back. He gave Pablo a cup of watery coffee. ‘This must be hard for you,’ he said. Pablo said nothing. ‘Okay,’ the constable said, clapping his hands together, ‘I’ll take it from here.’
He came up to the girl, and after doing some measurements and checking the girl’s pockets, he told his usual joke, “Well! She’s dead alright!” and his two sub-ordinates laughed (fake) laughter.
And then there were several hollow minutes. The clouds parted, the priest gave a prayer, Pablo ate a sandwich (Tuna, cress) and, after three more cups of dirty coffee in a Mexican café, where the windows were almost opaque and the waitress was too big to fit between the tables, the constable decided that the girl needed an identity.
A series of phone call, missing persons checked and rechecked, misnomers (most notably: one false woman, dressed in her Sunday best, ‘No this is not my daughter, sorry.’ ’Thank you very much Madame,’ the subordinates said, all smiles) and, finally, the mother, dazed, arrived at the tracks, still wearing her hospital gown. She was sick. Every so often, a tiny Mexican man with a hospital uniform tried to stop her march. She came up to Pablo and said, “Well, where is she? Is it my Maria?” and Pablo, who’d yet to drink his coffee, simply pointed. She screamed and dashed the tiny Mexican aside.
‘Maria! Oh, Maria!’ she said and collapsed by the tracks, with her hair in her hands and tears in two mascara tracts across her cheeks. She screamed some, obscure, unword-like things. The constable came out of the café, quite Sherlockian, with his cape billowing in the wind and a pocket watch in his hand. He said: ‘Madame. Is this your daughter?’
She screamed unintelligible thises and thats in reply and collapsed and held the white dress in her hand and wept into it like a rag and shook all over and dragged the dress from her eyes to her lips and back again. The constable said: ‘Madame. Could you answer some questions?’
She said something to Maria.
‘What did she last say to you?’
More unintelligible nothings.
‘Please Madame.’
She shook her wet face. ‘She came to see me. She’d already made the wings. And (Sobs) she told me how she (a choke) become (splutter) an angel (another) and save me.’ Then the mother sat up and looked at Maria. She shook her head and wept into her hands.
‘I am sure she is with the angels now,’ the constable said.
She stood up, slipped on the tracks; teeter tottered, balanced, and lunged, all arms and legs, at the constable. A subordinate emerged and grappled her. She struggled, crushed up and crying, red in the face. He offered shush, shush, shushes and there theres and calm downs, but she bit his ear and the pair waltzed, jabbering like a mad man, towards the constable. Left step, right step, two step, dance step. She got close enough and spat in his face. The second subordinate flourished a blue polka dot handkerchief and wiped the spittle from the constable’s moustache.
‘There is no need-‘ the constable said.
‘Can’t you see I’m sick,’ she said from somewhere amongst the pair; the waltz going this way, that way. And step, and step, and step.
‘I’m just-doing-my job,’ the constable said, between the cleansing pats of the handkerchief.
‘Can’t you see, I’m dying and nothing matters anymore,’ and she collapsed (the waltz ended) and cried upon his boots.
From far away, the priest and Pablo observed (coldly) the mother, pestered by blankets and tissues, as she wept. ‘It kind of hurts,’ the priest said, as the mother and her girl were packaged into an ambulance.
‘What does?’ Pablo said, watching the ambulance nee-nar nee-nar into the distance.
(The constable and his two subordinate dallied in the dust clouds. ‘Why didn’t you move the body?’ subordinate A said. ‘What?’ the constable said, emerging from a shattered daydream. ‘Why didn’t you move the body?’ ‘Oh, forensics, my boy, forensics,’ the constable said, ‘besides, what were we supposed to do, drag her like a stretcher?’ ‘We could have at least cleaned her,’ subordinate B said. ‘Now, that’s quite enough of that,’ the constable said, ‘you’re my subordinates.)
‘All this death and no point to any of it.’
‘Well,’ Pablo said, splatting coffee across the railway tracks and pulling on his gloves, ‘it affects us all differently.’
‘Or some not at all,’ the priest said.
‘Yes,’ Pablo said, looking at the coupling of a nearby freight. (He felt the strangest temptation to whistle – sweet, tuneful notes – to tell the world it was going to be alright) ‘Or some not at all.’