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with any kind of feeling.
    The poet turned his head and was greeted by an unexpected
sight: a long line of cars moved slowly in his direction. At the
head of the line were six Fords with about a hundred men
marching on foot behind them, followed in turn by some three
hundred cars and trucks. Picket signs waved in the air: "Ban the
time card!" "No more police assaults!"
    As the protesters drew level with him, the poet made up his
mind and jumped onto the running board of one of the passing
trucks.
    "Got room for a fellow traveler?"
    "Make yourself at home," said the driver, sealing their pact
of solidarity with a nod.
    The poet tried to decide whether to go along with the march
or finish one of the verses he was working on for the engineer.
But the rhymes in his head took over for him and he floated in
that cottony paradise all the way until the caravan of cars and
trucks turned into the Zocalo, horns blaring raucously.
    Most of the demonstrators left their vehicles parked in the
wide avenue and the poet got down from the truck and started
off toward his appointment with the engineer. Then from the
balconies of City Hall someone started firing on the demonstra tion. Panic seized the crowd of drivers spread across the plaza,
and the demonstrators ran for cover, some toward the National
Palace, others toward the shops that fronted the square.

    The next day, after conferring with the poet, Pioquinto
Manterola would write in El Democrata: "Nobody could have
guessed what was about to happen. The tragedy spread its bloody
wings over demonstrators and spectators alike."
    The drivers counterattacked, hurling stones at the windows
of City Hall. Firemen tried to disperse the crowd with water
hoses. Then came the charges of the mounted police, which the
drivers met head-on in their vehicles. A pair of gendarmes rolled
on the ground beside their dying horses. The sirens of the Red
Cross and the White Cross added to the confusion. A certain
Captain Villasenor, whom the poet recognized from earlier days
in Ciudad Juarez, was swept away by a crowd of taxi drivers
charging through the arched doorways of City Hall.
    A cab driver lay bleeding from a bullet wound. The poet,
hidden under a delivery truck, watched the parade of feet,
wheels and hoofs passing before his bulging eyes. Stones flew
through the air. The streetcars stopped their circuit around the
plaza. Finally the city employees who had started the riot by
firing on the demonstrators abandoned the balconies under the
hail of stones.
    The poet took advantage of a brief pause in the battle to
scramble out from under the truck where he was hiding. He
made his way out of the Zocalo hanging onto the back of a
White Cross ambulance.
    The next day he read in Manterola's account how the battle
between the drivers, city workers, firemen, and police had ended
with five dead and more than twenty wounded.
    "And you were there?" the mining engineer asked incredulously a couple of hours later.
    The poet only raised his eyebrows, not knowing what to
say. It was as if he'd been there and he hadn't. "This goddam town," he thought, not knowing who to blame for the echo of
the bullets that still buzzed in his ears.

     

THE MAN HELD OUT THE PHOTO without letting go.
The reporter and the policeman tugged on either end of the small
picture for several seconds.
    "Much obliged, Captain," said Pioquinto Manterola, finally
pulling it from the policeman's grasp with a sudden jerk.
    "Wait a minute."
    "Sir?"
    "You know something I don't?" asked the municipal police
captain, a thin glassy-eyed fellow groping with his thumbs for the
pockets of a nonexistent vest.
    "No. I just wanted to get a look at this picture for inspiration
in another story I'm working on."
    The reporter walked out the door, stepping nimbly over a
drunk whose questionable judgment had led him to take his siesta
on the stationhouse steps. There was no doubt about it, the woman
was the same. And