—

You smell a slum before you see it.

Keller had a professor in college who said that civilization was a matter of plumbing. That basically, the infrastructure for moving clean water in and filthy water out is what allowed people to congregate in large populations in permanent dwellings and create cities and cultures. Otherwise, people had to be nomads to literally escape their own shit.

No such infrastructure exists in La Polvorilla, the worst slum in Iztapalapa. The smell of stagnant water is the least of it, the stench of urine and shit—dog, donkey, goat, chicken, and human—is an assault on the senses. The dirt streets are basically running sewers of shit and agua de tamarindo—“tamarind water,” so called because of its brown color.

The lack of piped-in clean water demands a daily chore that only ensures that the women, at least, live in poverty. They wait for hours a day for the trucks to arrive, and on some days trucks don’t make it at all because they’ve been hijacked in other Iztapalapa neighborhoods before they can get there.

Most of the “houses” are hovels—shacks and shanties with plywood walls and cardboard “roofs.” Packs of feral dogs come out of the park at night looking for food. Most of the time it’s garbage or a careless chicken, but the dogs have been known to carry away children.

The barrio is mostly famous for its dope, pickpockets, and prostitutes, and for an annual passion play that draws tens of thousands. I guess, Keller thinks, people will always show up to see someone put on a cross.

The streets are busy now.

Small-time drug dealers, hookers, gangs of kids. They watch Keller warily—he’s not from here, doesn’t belong here, only ventured into La Polvorilla to find a woman, buy heroin or coke.

Or maybe he’s a cop.

Keller walks down a street, ignores the imprecations of the working girls and the kids selling mota, along the endless rows of shanties with tin roofs or old billboards serving the function of roofs.

He stops at a shack that has an old Coca-Cola sign for a door and pushes his way in.

The one room has a bare mattress and a single cane chair rescued from a garbage dump. A hot plate is wired to an old power strip—that and the single bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling are connected to an illegal source in the street.

She’s that rare creature, an old jaladora.

A crack whore.

Most of them don’t live this long, Keller thinks, although it’s hard to determine a crack addict’s age. In their twenties they look like they’re forty, in their thirties they look sixty, in their forties—if they live that long—they take on the indeterminate look of the very old. The wizened chin, the missing teeth, the vacant stare, which now looks at him blankly.

“Ester?” Keller asks. He’s heard stories about her. Now it’s taken him days to track her down.

Ester pats the mattress—an invitation. She offers him a half-and-half, an around-the-world, a hand job when she senses he isn’t responding to the more expensive choices.

“Ester,” Keller says, “you’ve been telling a story. About the policemen. About when you were young, and you were so pretty?”

“I was pretty.”

“I bet you were,” Keller says. “You’re pretty now. Would you tell me the story?”

“Un diabolito,” she says, demanding a cigarette laced with crack.

“After you tell the story,” Keller says.

Ester sighs.

—

She was pretty then and not a whore.

Long black hair, dark eyes, long lashes.

(There is a rose, Keller thinks listening to her, in La Polvorilla.)

Fifteen and a virgin when the policeman found her. Walking down the street with her cousin toward the butcher to buy goat meat for her mother because it was her little brother’s first communion and they were going to have a special dinner. She was in her white dress, her legs brown, her ankles dirty from the dust of the street.

“Ven aquí, chola,” he called from the car.

“I’m not a chola,” Ester called back and kept walking. So many of the girls in La Polvorilla were in the gangs, but it wasn’t for her to give her love and her body to some boy that would be dead soon.

“They will give you a disease or a baby,” her mother warned. “Hook you on drugs, turn you out in the street.”

Her mother would know, Ester thought, not unkindly.

This had been her mother’s life.

It wouldn’t be hers.

She was pretty and she knew it. She saw how boys looked at her, how men looked at her, she looked at herself in the dirty broken mirror in the shack that was her home when everyone else was asleep. She looked at her breasts and her stomach and her face and knew that men wanted her. One night when she was looking, she saw her older brother pretending to be asleep looking at her, and knew he wanted her, too.

Living in La Polvorilla, she had heard of such things.

Ester was a virgin but not a silly girl—she knew all about sex, had lain on her mattress and heard her mother with the men she brought home. Heard her mother’s moans and the men’s grunts and the whispered words. She had touched herself and known that pleasure, she had talked with girls who had done it, traded jokes and jibes with boys, but she knew she didn’t want a boy but a man.

“Where are you going, little mamacita?” the policeman asked, driving the car slowly beside her.

She knew he was a policeman because only policemen drove cars like that in La Polvorilla.

“To get some goat,” she said, and she and her cousin laughed, because “goat” in Spanish is the same as “cuckold.”

The policeman laughed, too, and that’s when she began to like him.

“From that thief, the butcher over there?” he asked.

“He’s no thief.”

“All butchers are thieves,” he said. “You’d better let me come with you so he doesn’t cheat you.”

“You do what you want,” Ester said, because a pretty girl can say things like that to men and get away with them.

“You want a ride?” he asked.

“In a cop car?” Ester answered. “What would the neighbors think?”

“ ‘Lucky girl’!”

“I don’t think so,” Ester said. “They’d think I was in trouble or I was telling tales.”

“What tales could you tell?”

“You’d be surprised.”

By this time they were across the street from the butcher’s. The policeman got out of the car and his partner took the wheel and parked it. He came in and stood there while Ester asked for two pounds of cabra. When the butcher put the meat on the scale the policeman said, “And keep your thumb off it, ’mano.”

The butcher, Señor Padilla, whom Ester had known all her life, frowned but said nothing until he told Ester the price.

“Wrap it up and give her my price,” the policeman said.

Señor Padilla frowned but again said nothing, wrapped the meat in brown paper, and handed it to Ester. Confused, she started to hand him the money her mother gave her, but Señor Padilla shook his head and wouldn’t take it.

The policeman stepped up to the counter. “Once a week, every Friday, you give her my price. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“Chido.”

Outside on the street, the policeman asked, “Aren’t you going to say thank you?”

“Thank you.”

“Is that all?”

“What do you want?”

“Un besito.”

A little kiss.

She pecked him on the cheek.

The partner in the car laughed and then honked the horn. “We have work to do, lover boy!”

“What’s your name?” the policeman asked.

“Ester.”

“Aren’t you going to ask mine?”

“If you want me to,” she said. “What is it?”

“They call me Chido,” he said, “because I say ‘cool’ a lot. Enjoy your dinner. I hope I see you again, Ester.”

Walking away, her cousin said, “Ester, he has to be thirty!”

Ester knew.

She went home and they had their party. When Ester gave her mother the money back and she asked why Padillo didn’t charge her, Ester said it was a present for Ernesto’s communion. Her mother looked at her funny but didn’t ask any more. When Ester touched herself that night, she thought of Chido.