Emilio Garibay

Emilio Garibay, the oldest of Santa Teresa’s three medical examiners, is a large, asthmatic physician whose professional life is defined by an unending caseload. Born into a local landowning family enriched by selling desert plots to maquiladoras, he did not substantially pursue that business: he teaches at the medical school and examines the dead. His work makes him a recurring figure in a city where women’s killings are counted, investigated, and translated into forensic records, even as those records cannot resolve every uncertainty.

Identity and professional life

Garibay was born in Santa Teresa, and the narrative suggests that he is likely to spend his life there. His family belonged to the upper-middle class and had made money selling desert land to factories established near the border during the 1980s. Garibay himself sold little, if any, of that land. Instead, he became a professor at the medical school and a medical examiner, occupations that leave him too busy to turn seriously to business.

His workload is inseparable from the city’s violence. The account notes that he unfortunately never lacks work as a medical examiner. The word “unfortunately” carries the weight of a profession sustained by an emergency: each examination is a necessary task, but the accumulation of cases signals that the killings have become part of the city’s daily institutional life. His position gives him direct responsibility for examining bodies, while teaching keeps him connected to the medical school and its students.

Work, illness, and routine

Garibay’s asthma is a practical presence in his working life. He sometimes suffers an attack while performing an autopsy and ignores it. If his assistant, Doña Isabel, is nearby, she retrieves his inhaler from the jacket hanging on the coat rack. Garibay opens his mouth and lets her administer a puff, a small act of dependence folded into a routine otherwise governed by his own persistence. When alone, he simply carries on without using the inhaler.

His work does not end with the examination room. In the early morning, he sometimes meets the other two medical examiners for breakfast at Runaway, a twenty-four-hour American-style coffee shop frequented by people who have been awake through the night. The coffee shop’s green sign and the steam venting beside its window catch his attention: when the vapor takes on an intense green tint, he remarks on its beauty, then falls silent. The brief response to the sign is a rare, specific interruption in a scene otherwise shaped by fatigue and professional routine.

At breakfast, the three examiners are usually quiet. Garibay watches the street while Juan Arredondo studies his hands and Rigoberto Frias looks at the table or ceiling. They wait, eat, pay, and part without ceremony. Whoever has the turn walks back to the Institute of Forensic Anatomy; the others head to the underground garage. Garibay drives away in a Grand Marquis, and the streets absorb the car into the city. The recurring meal does not offer the examiners a release from their work so much as a subdued pause before they return to it.

Belief, reading, and character

Garibay is an atheist, and the narrative links that conviction to an unusual intellectual withdrawal: despite having collected a substantial library, he has not read a book in years. The shelves contain specialist works along with philosophy, Mexican history, and a few novels, but possession has not become use. He sometimes wonders whether his lack of reading follows from his atheism, imagining that not reading may be its highest expression—or at least the form of atheism he recognizes in himself. His private question is whether someone who does not believe in God can believe in a book.

That contradiction sharpens the portrait without resolving it. Garibay is a medical-school professor and a specialist surrounded by professional knowledge, yet his personal relation to books has lapsed into skepticism. His practical commitment to examining the dead coexists with a refusal to seek meaning in reading. The narrative presents this not as a diagnosis or a conversion story, but as a thought he turns over privately while continuing to work.

Forensic work and its limits

The medical examiner’s role is shown through the specific procedures and findings attached to the murdered women. In the January 1993 case of thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana, the body passes through police examination and photography before reaching the city hospital morgue for an autopsy. The examiner records strangulation as the cause of death and documents evidence of severe assault. The report establishes concrete facts about the killing, but the surrounding investigation begins with a more basic gap: the police chief and the officers in the station do not know who the victim is.

A later discovery makes the limits of forensic certainty explicit. When scavenger children find a badly decomposed body in the El Chile dump, the remains are sent to the Institute of Forensic Anatomy. The victim is estimated to have been between fifteen and twenty, and the examiners cannot determine the cause of death. Dental evidence eventually identifies her as Irene Gonzalez Resendiz, a sixteen-year-old who had disappeared from Guanajuato. The identification answers who she was, but the cause of death remains unknown. These cases distinguish what examination can establish from what it cannot: a cause may be recorded while a person remains unidentified, or identity recovered while the circumstances of death remain unresolved.

The morgue within Santa Teresa

Garibay’s work belongs to a wider institutional landscape. The city’s maquiladoras and expanding neighborhoods generate the setting in which bodies are found, while police, hospitals, and forensic offices divide the work of discovery, documentation, and identification. In one case, a factory executive hands money to a policeman after a murdered woman is found at a dump beside maquiladora waste; the medical examination later records that the victim was pregnant and had been strangled and raped. The contrast between a payment tucked into a uniform pocket and the subsequent clinical findings shows how official procedure and compromised policing occupy the same chain of events.

The novel also places the examiners’ quiet breakfasts beside police breakfasts at Trejo’s, where officers tell misogynistic jokes over their food. Garibay is not shown participating in that conversation, and the distinction matters: the text does not attribute those jokes to him. Instead, it sets the professional silence of the examiners beside a police culture that makes women the objects of ridicule. Within that contrast, Garibay’s function is neither to solve the city’s violence nor to stand outside it. He is part of the labor through which its victims become documented cases, and his recurring presence makes the cost of that labor visible in the endlessness of the work.