Colonia Universidad is easy to find because half of it has just burned to the ground and the remains are still smoking. Blackened oil drums, charcoal that had defined shacks the day before, naked bed springs and a few bicycle frames twisted into Salvador Dali forms. Margarita Espinada is easy to find, too. She wears a camera around her neck, and black jeans, boots, and a blue work shirt. The jeans are dirty, the shirt stained dark under the arms and down the back. Her black hair is short. The other women around her are wearing dresses and have long hair, and scarves on their heads. At a quick glance you might mistake her for a man.

They’re all watching you before the car even stops. When you stride toward them, the women all back up, spread apart, move away. Margarita stands her ground. She raises her camera and takes your picture, as though in an act of defiance. From a distance she looks to be about twenty, but up close you can see the lines around the eyes and mouth. More like early thirties. Lean. There’s a thin scar across the bridge of her nose and one cheek. If she remembers you from the Chicken Man’s, there’s no sign of it in her eyes. She turns, points. You follow, leaning around the nearest shack to see.

There’s a man dangling from some power lines down the hill, turning slowly like a charred piñata. "He was tryin’ to run a line from that transformer to his house. He wasn’t very good at it."

You look away, and in the silence hand her the photo. She looks at it, at her name on the back, then wipes it down her thigh, wipes her name away. "You want a drink, Deputy?" There’s the tiniest suggestion of amusement in the question.

"I’m not really a deputy, you know. It’s just a nickname."

"Hey, at least they don’t call you pendejo."

"I don’t know that they don’t."

She laughs, and for a moment that resolute, defiant face becomes just beautiful.

The shack she takes you to is barely outside the fire line. The frame is held together by nails driven through bottle caps. The walls are cut up shipping cartons for Three Musketeers candy bars. No floor, only dirt. There’s an old, rust-stained mattress and a couple of beat-up suitcases. She comes up with a bottle of tequila from God knows where, apologizes for the lack of ice and glasses. Then she takes a long swig from the mouth of the bottle. Her eyes are watering as she passes it to you. You smell her then, the odor of a woman mixed in with the smoke smell, sweat and flesh and dirt. You almost want to ask her why she does this, lives this way, but you haven’t any right. Instead you say his name as a question.

She lays down the photo. "Gabriel Perea is real, he exists. He’s what they call an assembler, on a production line. The maquila is about twenty miles from here. The story of him grows as it travels. All around."

You recite the version you got from the firemen earlier: great prophet, seer who will lead them into the kingdom of Heaven.

"Pura guasa," is her answer. Pure foolishness--exactly what your friend Baum said.

"But the picture. He is seeing the Virgin?"

She shrugs. "Yes, I know. From your eyes--how could I take the picture and not say it’s true?" She pushes her thumb against the image, covering the face. "This says it’s real. Not true. I know that he tells everyone what the Virgin wants them to know."

"And what’s that?"

"To be patient. To wait. To endure their hardships. To remember that they will all find Grace in Heaven more beautiful than anything they can imagine."

"That wouldn’t take much of a heaven. Has anyone else seen her?"

"No one in the factory now."

"But someone else?"

Again, she shrugs. "Maybe. There are stories. Someone saw her in a bathroom. In a mirror. There are always stories once it starts. People who don’t want to be left out, who need to hear from her. That can be a lot of people.

"In Colonia El Mirador, a Sacred Heart shrine begins to bleed. It’s a cheap little cardboard picture, and they say it bleeds, so I go and take its picture."

"Does it? Does it bleed?"

"I look in the picture I take, at how this piece of cardboard is nailed up, and I think, ah, the nailhead has rusted and the rust has run down the picture. That’s all. But I don’t say so."

"So you lied to them, the people who made the claims about it?"

She snatches back the bottle. Her nostrils are flared in defiance, anger; but she laughs at your judgment, dismissing it. "I take the picture and it says what is what. If you don’t see, then what good is there in telling you how to see?"

The anger, contained, burns off her like radiation. You flip open your Minox and take her picture. She stares at you in the aftermath of the flash, as if in disbelief.

Breaking the tension, you ask, "Is he crazy?"

She squats down in the dirt, her back pressed against the far wall, takes off the camera and sets it on the mattress. "Listen, I got a job in a factory because I heard there was a dangerous man there. A Zapatista brother, someone of the Reality. He had workers stirred up.

"And I thought, I want to be there when they have him killed. I want to document it. The bosses there will pay workers to turn in their co-workers. Pay them more money than they can earn in a month, so it’s for sure someone will turn him in. But this Perea, he sought out those people and he convinced them not to do this. He offered hope. ‘The Dream we can all dream, so that when we awaken it will remain with us.’ That’s what he promised. When I learned that, then I knew I had to photograph him. And his murder."

"Except the Virgin showed up."

She grins. "I hadn’t even gotten my first exciting twenty dollar paycheck. The rumor circulated that he was going to confront the managers. Everyone was breathing this air of excitement. And I have my camera, I’m ready. Only all of a sudden, right on the factory floor, Gabriel Perea has a vision. He points and he cries, "Oh, Mother of God! See her? Can you see her? Can you hear her, good people?" Of course we can’t. No one can. They try, they look all around, but you know they don’t see. He has to tell it. She says, ‘Wait.’ She says, ‘There will be a sign.’ She’ll come again and talk to us."

"Did she? Did she come back?"

"About once every week. She came in and spoke to him when he was working. People started crowding around him, waiting for the moment. It’s always when he doesn’t expect. Pretty soon there are people clustering outside the factory and following Gabriel Perea home. The managers in their glass booths just watch and watch."

"They didn’t try to stop it?"

"No. And no one got into trouble for leaving their position, or for trespassing. Trying to see him. To hear his message. And I begin to think, these men are at least afraid of God. There is something greater and more powerful than these Norte Americanos."

"Yet you don’t believe it?"

In answer, she gets up and takes the larger suitcase and throws it open on the mattress. Inside are photos, some in sleeves, some loose, some in folders. You see a color shot of a mural of a Mayan head surrounded by temples, photos of women like those you scared off outside, one of a man lying peacefully sleeping on a mattress in a shack like this one. She glances at it and says, "He’s dead. His heater malfunctioned and carbon monoxide killed him. Or maybe he did it on purpose."

She pulls out a manila folder and opens it. There’s a picture of an assembly line--a dozen women in hairnets and surgical gowns and rubber gloves, seated along an assembly line.

"What’s this place make?"

"Motion controller systems." You stare at a photo sticking out from the pack, of Gabriel Perea head-on, preaching, in that twisted martial arts pose of his. This time she has crouched behind equipment to get the shot, but in the background you can see the managers all gathered. Most of them are grainy shadows, but the three faces that are visible are clearly not frightened of what’s happening here.

"They look almost bored."

She nods.

"You think he’s a fake. Comes in posing as an agitator, a Zapatista, to catch workers who’d be inclined to organize, and then catches them in a big net supplied by the Virgin Mary, who promises them a wonderful afterlife provided they grind themselves down like good little girls and boys in this one."

She glances at you oddly, then says, "Maybe they don’t call you names, Deputy."

You meet her eyes, smile, thinking that you’d be willing to fall in love with this other photographer; but the idea fades almost as fast as it arrives. She lives with nothing and takes all the risks while you have everything and take no risks at all. Her dreams are all of her people and death. Yours are of awards and recognition.

She offers you the bottle again and you drink and wheeze and wonder why it is you can’t have both dreams. Why yours seems petty and cheap. You don’t believe in the Virgin, either. The two of you should be able to support each other. Ignoring the delusions of a few people over their rusting shrine is a far cry from ignoring this kind of scam.

She agrees to get you an interview with Gabriel Perea. It will take some days. He is a very reluctant holy man, more shy than the Tarahumara.

"Come back in three days." To this colonia, to this shack, to wait for her. All right, you think, that’s good. It gives you time to get information.

You give her five film canisters and she kisses you on the cheek for it. You can feel her lips all the way home....

--from Isaac Asimov's Magazine, May 2002 edition

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{Read the complete story in Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories}

All images and text © 2002, Gregory Frost

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