Rosa came over, her usual day to clean, and halfway through the day she stopped for a bit and asked if I’d heard about the poor señor whose mutilated body they had found the other day up by the donut shop. I said yes, indeed I’d read about it online and that people had been talking about it. How horrible, how horrible; she said her sister, who lives right there, walked out her  front door early that morning and practically tripped over this bloody body which also had been castrated and left there nude, in the rain. Her sister thought he’d been dumped there maybe around 7:30, just as she normally goes to the panadería to get bread and start her morning errands. She said now her sister can’t sleep because every time she closes her eyes, she sees the same awful sight again and again.

“And the worst”, Rosa added, “is that at 7:30 all the little kids have to walk up that hill to get to school and a bunch of them saw it before the police got there, and those kids are now completely frightened and upset by what they saw, and their parents are at a loss as to what to tell them about what it all means.” She said by the time her sister got back from her errands that morning, the police, ambulances, all that, were there and that they were taking the body to the Forensic Institute in Ocotlan.

Thus far, no one has identified this poor guy, no one has claimed responsibility, and as he wasn’t from our town, no one is certain whether it was cartel-related or he just got sideways with someone over a woman or some other score being settled, who knows. She said the worst is that the fallout from something like this is that everyone who sees it right there in the street is in some small way traumatized and damaged for life. Not unlike my adventure with the carjacking, come to think of it. Of course she’s right and she asked me “why would someone do that to another human being, kill them that way?” I didn’t really have an answer for her but we talked about it for awhile longer, till she noticed it was starting to rain, and she gathered her things and ran out the door to get to the bus stop before the weather got any worse.

Guanajuato