The Uncomfortable Dead (21 page)

Authority:
Why were you carrying a satellite telephone?

Morales who is not Morales (hereinafter to be referred to as Non-Morales):
To speak directly from Montes Azules with my contacts in the United States and Europe.

Authority:
Why did you need to speak to those contacts?

Non-Morales:
To give them status reports on the Montes Azules deal.

Authority:
What deal?

Non-Morales:
To get them to privatize the lands in order to sell them. First we had to evict the indigenous communities living there. The plan was to stir up trouble to justify a military occupation of the entire region and clear it of all people. Our plan, and don’t you believe I’m in on this alone, was first to plant drugs so as to have a pretext on which to send in the Army, but that fell through because you don’t allow drugs. Then the idea was to set forest fires, but that fell through because of the Forest Protection Law. The next plan was to provoke a confrontation among Indians. We had already contacted some Lacandones, the people from SOCAMA, and a few from the official ARIC. We were going to give them paramilitary training, like we did in the north of Chiapas in Los Altos, and then set them against the Zapatistas, but that one got fucked as well because you decided to relocate the communities and you eliminated the pretext. So that screwed our last plan and we had to come up with another. That’s what I was doing when you got me.

Authority:
Why do you say you’re not alone in this?

Non-Morales:
Because there’s a lot of very rich and powerful people in the deal. Their representatives met with Fox the other day, right there in the Lacandona forest. That was the reason he and his wife visited. The statement about promoting ecotourism is a lie. They went there because powerful men are pressing him to privatize everything so they can buy it up and do their business. Zedillo and Carabias were there. The satellite telephone was precisely to contact a guy who’s very close to Fox and who was with him on his tour of Europe. I stayed back here to check out what we were going to do with the lands, and to see about some “pets” they wanted in the Spanish Court, but now they’re in for a long wait.

Authority:
Why are you carrying all this money?

Non-Morales:
To pay for the transportation of the animals to Spain and to pay off the Indians to get them to support us in the privatization scheme. Besides, you have to throw money around with officials: small, medium, and big, as well as municipal, state, and federal.

Authority:
Who was going to be in charge of training the paramilitary?

Non-Morales:
The weapons and the training were going to be put up by the Federal Army, but the ideas—the vetting and the ideological training—were going to be supplied by El Yunque.

Authority:
What is El Yunque?

Non-Morales:
It is a secret rightwing organization, extremely rightwing, involved in both the PAN and the Fox administration. But they’re also present in other political parties. The members include political figures, businessmen, and bishops. They have spent years following the teachings of their predecessors, Salinas and Zedillo. The plan is to sell everything they can and become rich. They don’t care about anything else, not the country, not religion, not the people, even if they say they do.

Authority:
Do you belong to El Yunque?

Non-Morales:
No. They contacted me because I worked with the paramilitary in the north of Chiapas, and with the people from Paz y Justicia. And also in Los Altos with the Cardenistas and Máscara Roja. And in other places with Los Puñales, Los Chinchulines, Los Albores de Chiapas, Los Aguilares, MIRA, and SOCAMA. And in Montes Azules, it was me who was organizing the PRD people in Zinacantán. El Yunque believes that the Zapatistas are the main obstacle in the way of their plans. It is ready to do anything, even go to war, to eliminate you guys. And now, with the Bush victory in the United States, well, they’re ready for anything. The rich gringos want to buy up the whole world, and the politicians here are willing to sell them this part called Mexico. El Yunque is one of the sellers, but there are other groups inside the political parties. Anyone who can, no matter if he’s PAN, PRI, or PRD, is going to sell.

Authority:
Are the bad governments aware of the things you are saying?

Non-Morales:
Of course they are. They’re the ones organizing the whole thing. I’m just a hired hand.

[Note: The second hearing was suspended because a messenger arrived from the General Staff with news that they had traced the satellite telephone and discovered that the number was registered to the Vamos Mexico Foundation, headed by Mrs. Marta Sahagún de Fox, the wife of President Fox.]

Third preliminary public hearing with Non-Morales

The accused was asked if he had anything else to declare, and the Non-Morales said that he did and started off on a rambling speech switching from one thing to another and moving from insults to crying, and we could hardly understand what he was trying to say because half the time he would be screaming and the other half speaking so softly that only he could hear himself. From what little could be understood, he mentioned the deceased Pável González, a student at the National University (UNAM) who had been killed, and then explained that the question of the deceased Pável González had been a warning from El Yunque to the authorities who were trying to uncover their activities in the university and other places, and the message was that there was going to be war. That the Digna Ochoa thing had also been a warning. That El Yunque, the far right, uses the same tactic as the gringo administrations—preventive war, which is to kill people before asking who they are or what they want. That successive administrations have to pretend that things change even when they never change, and if not, then it happens all over again. That he, Non-Morales, is just another number and that even if we screw him over, there will be others, perhaps worse than him. That we should please forgive him and he will never do it again. That he wants to go home to his mother. That we should all go home and fuck our mothers. That he hopes no one gets killed. That we should forgive him. That he’s afraid, very afraid. Then the Non-Morales went in his pants—that is, he shit and pissed in his pants—and didn’t even tell anyone, but just did it and stood there and the session had to be suspended because of the stench. He smelled real bad, so we had to suspend so that the Non-Morales could get cleaned up a little, and then he came back and said that was all he had to say.

THE PRELIMINARY PUBLIC HEARINGS WITH THE NON-MORALES ARE ADJOURNED.

Signatures of the accused prisoner and the comrades of the Honor and Justice Commissions of the different autonomous Zapatista rebel municipalities.

Sentence

The Honor and Justice Commissions of all the autonomous Zapatista municipalities organized under the five Good Governance Boards have met to sentence the Morales who is not Morales.

At 16:40 hours (4:40 p.m.) of the 9th day of February of 2005, the Honor and Justice Commissions of the autonomous municipalities, having presided over the first, second, and third preliminary public hearings with the individual known as Morales, who is accused of selling out the national sovereignty—that is, the country—and planning the deaths of Mexican Indians, and it having been proven that he did participate in the commission of these crimes, the authorities do decree:

1. That the person known as Morales, who is not Morales and has many different names, is hereby sentenced to ten years of community service in the projects of the Good Governance Boards in different Zapatista communities to atone for this great evil crime against humanity.

2. That there will be no parole until he has served his sentence.

3. There being no other matter to be discussed, the sentencing is concluded at 17:00 hours (5:00 p.m.) of the same day and date.

Signature of the accused prisoner, now the condemned prisoner. Signature of the authorities of the Honor and Justice Commissions of the autonomous municipalities.

The Telephone Call

Excerpt of a transcription of a telephone conference call originating in Washington and extending to Rome, Madrid, London, Moscow, and Mexico, intercepted on February 10 by the Echelon spy satellite system and erased from the record on the order of Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State of the United States of America:

“They caught Morales in Chiapas.”

“Have him released.”

“Can’t do that. He was caught by the Zapatistas and we have no control over their justice system.”

“Fuck! He’s going to spill everything and the Zapatistas will make it public. Something has to be done. Where do they have him?”

“He was tried and found guilty in the Montes Azules affair and the matter of the paramilitary. He was sentenced to community work among the indigenous peoples. We can assume that they seized everything he had with him. The IDs are no problem because we can say the Zapatistas invented them, but his computer had names that can sink the whole thing.”

“He has to be located and terminated.”

“Yes, we kill him and blame the Zapatistas.”

“Bad idea. No one is going to believe us. If the Zapatistas didn’t kill General Absalón Castellanos Domínguez, who was as bad or worse, they won’t kill Morales.”

“Right! But there are other options.”

“Does anyone know where they have him?”

“No, but we can find out.”

“Do that, then send someone who can give him something that will make him seriously ill. But it has to be fast, because the Zapatistas won’t hesitate to make everything public.”

“I’m going to send López, who has been there for some time undercover as a journalist; he’s just like Morales, capable of killing his own mother.”

“Okay! But remember, if something goes wrong, yours will be the first head to roll.”

This Is As Far As I Go

So that’s how things went with this case, or thing, when I went into Mexico City, the Monster, to find the Bad and the Evil, and how I got to work with Belascoarán, and the people I met, and what I did over there and here in Chiapas, Mexico.

A while back I sent a letter to Belascoarán telling him that the aforementioned Morales was not Morales and everything else that happened in this case, or thing, regarding the Bad and the Evil. I didn’t tell him anything about Magdalena and I might not even tell you, cause it’s like I said at the beginning of this story, there are wounds that don’t heal even if you talk them out, and it’s even the contrary—they just get to bleeding worse than ever when you dress them in words. As soon as I get through with you here, I’m going to take some flowers to Magdalena’s grave. NOBODY will be coming along with me. Oh, by the way, on her headstone I had them carve,
Here lies the heart of NOBODY.

Okay, so I’ll be leaving now. This is as far as I go. I still have to go ready the mule, but first I want to thank you a whole lot for having taken the time to stop and give us a look, even for a little while. I already did my part. We still have to find out how things went for Belascoarán over in the Monster, which is Mexico City. But I gotta tell you to be ready for anything, cause we Zapatistas are like that: Just when you think we’re through, we come up with another thing, or case, depends. So that’s what our struggle is like; what’s missing is always missing.

And you know what? Well, it so happens that El Sup’s not here cause he went to talk to Moy and Tacho, so I’m here all by myself, and that’s how come I have to do the honors of wrapping up our participation in this story about the uncomfortable dead and all those things, or cases, depends. So I’m going to sign:

From the mountains of Southeastern Mexico,
Elías Contreras, Investigation Commission
       of the Zapatista National Liberation Army
February 2005

CHAPTER 12

AND I LIVE IN THE PAST

I
t was the strangest daybreak Héctor had ever seen. He knew because he had followed the process delicately, with almost mathematical precision. First there was the invisible presence of the sun, affecting the shape of the darkness. Then came the gray streaks on the horizon, leading to the unveiling of strangely purple clouds … Then, suddenly, there was light.
Smog can do some marvelous things,
the detective told himself. He went down to the place where he often had breakfast to try and wake the waiters out of their stupor. They usually set the morning tables while they were still asleep, and Héctor knew it would take them awhile to serve him some fresh orange juice—fresh out of the refrigerator, because the actual squeezing had taken place about a month and a half earlier in a concentrate plant in Miami.

When Monteverde came out his front door, Héctor was waiting for him.

“Where’s the dog?”

“Well, I can’t very well take him to the office. The dog stays home.”

“Do you know Barney? Barney, the purple dinosaur?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“I think I know who’s been calling us,” Héctor said, lighting a cigarette. “Jesús María Alvarado had a son, Ángel Alvarado Alvarado, and they tell me he works as a voice-over artist on television:
The Flintstones
and a purple dinosaur—”

“The
Flintstones
isn’t on TV anymore.”

“Well, that kind of thing … Do you know him?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

When he got back to his office, Héctor discovered that his office mates had left on work missions. Two notes bore witness:
Went to fix a lady’s plumbing. Gilberto
and
Went to La Merced to buy materials
—
Naugahyde and damask. Carlos.
This, of course, meant that along with being a detective, he now had to fill in as receptionist.

For the umpteenth time, he dialed the number they had given him for Ángel Alvarado and listened to the endless rings. No one home. Did this Alvarado actually exist?

He turned to his notes on Juárez’s ministers and opened the Yellow Pages. Before trying to cross-reference any of the names with a furniture shop, he called upon the simplest method of logic: Ruiz, Ramírez, and Guzmán were extremely common names. If your name was any one of those, no one would say you have the same name as one of Juárez’s ministers, they’d say it was the same as about a million other Joe Schmoes in the book. Furthermore, it had to be a well-known minister, not just any old appointment; it had to be something that sounded like a street or like one of those statues on Paseo de la Reforma. It probably wasn’t Melchor Ocampo: too well known and there was a major street with his name. No, he was just a reference point and would not be described as “one of Juárez’s ministers.” Prieto? Zarco? Santos Degollado? Lerdo de Tejada? It wouldn’t be González Ortega, not unless he used his compound last name.

The telephone book is like what the Bible represents for fundamentalists in Kansas or what tarot cards represent for freeloaders. If you know the questions, you can find all the answers right there in that immense volume of yellow pages. So there were three
Prieto
furniture shops, one
Lerdo
used-furniture salesman, a
Zarco
home-appliance store, and one
Degollado
furniture depot. Six to start with. He jotted down the addresses and celebrated the first step in his desk research with a soda.

Héctor dialed the number for Deep Throat once again and finally got signs of life at the other end of the line.

“Is that Mr. Alvarado?”

“He hasn’t come in yet, but he’ll be here around 12. He’s got a voice-over session.”

“I beg your pardon, but where is here?”

“You have called the studios, the Gama Studios. We’re in the Roma district, number 108 Puebla Street, very close to the Insurgentes metro station.”

Barney the purple dinosaur looked more like a hairy-chested, overweight, forty-something Mexican who didn’t care much for shaving. When he finished dubbing a very coquettish voice onto one of the three little pigs, they handed him a note from Héctor, who was watching him through the glass partition in the control cabin. The note on the back of one of Héctor’s business cards read very simply,
Jesús María Alvarado wants to see you.

“Good day,” Alvarado said a little timidly, holding out his hand formally, a very hairy and homely hand it was. His voice was unmistakable. They had taken seats on one of the benches in a little park across from the studios, and Alvarado-Barney took out a package of old bread to feed the pigeons. Héctor opened a pack of filtered Delicados and proceeded to blow smoke at the animals as they came to eat the bread.

“You must be one of the people who received the calls.”

Héctor nodded and returned to his Alec Guinness face. He was going to let this guy tell his story with no pressure.

“It was the only idea that I could think of.”

Héctor smiled. He liked this Alvarado character. “It wasn’t a bad idea,” he said.

“Do you really think so? It’s just that talking into a microphone is what I do. What else could I do, shoot the bastard? No, right? Go to the police? No way! What would I tell them?
Hey, listen,
I
ran into a prick on the street and I’m sure he’s the one who killed my father thirty years ago. He’s a certain Morales whose name is not Morales. Oh, by the way, he’s a policeman too, like you, or was, or maybe you worked under him, or maybe not.
No, right?”

“So why were you calling Monteverde?”

“Who’s Monteverde?”

“The one who was a friend of your father in ’68, the one with a dog named Tobías, the one who got me into this.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. He was just one of the people I called. I found one of my father’s address books and decided to call them all. Most of his friends from the ’60s were no longer at those old numbers; some had died, others had moved away from Mexico City. I left messages for many of them, the answering-machine messages.”

“So why did you call me?”

“Who are
you?”

“Héctor Belascoarán.”

“The detective?”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, that was funny. I was calling this one guy and leaving the message on his machine, when suddenly he picked up and yelled, ‘Stop breaking my balls, buddy! You should call a detective named Belascoarán. I ran into that guy in the National Archives and he was looking for a picture of you.’”

“So?”

“Well…”

“And what about Morales?”

“That bastard?”

“Exactly.”

“A week ago, I was walking down the Lázaro Cárdenas Central Axis, along a street called San Juan de Letrán, looking to buy some of those pirate videos that go for fifteen pesos and work great, and also to have some chocolate and donuts, and out of nowhere, fuck if I don’t see this guy! Just from looking at him I got a bad feeling, a kind of chill. Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Some I do, some I don’t,” Belascoarán said, not meaning to be enigmatic or anything, just trying to establish the difference between Hollywood and the Holocaust.

“Then I took a good look at him, and there was no doubt about it. It was Morales. It was the man I remember from Lecumberri. The same one who once gave me his yo-yo collection, all friendly like, the prick. The same one who killed my father. And my whole body started shaking, but I calmed down and watched him enter the Latinoamericana Tower and get in the elevator. That was about where I ran out of steam, but I did see that the elevator stopped on 7, 17, and 41.”

“And then?”

“I went home and didn’t say a word to my daughter. And I spent the whole night awake with cold sweats. In the morning, I took my father’s address book and started making phone calls.”

“What about the story you tell about how Morales set up a metal barricade on one of the roads to rob coffee from the farmers?”

“Well, that’s one they told me.”

“And all that stuff about a secret amnesty in this country and how Morales benefited from it?”

“Well, isn’t it the truth? Isn’t it the pure fucking truth? Aren’t the murderers all free and in good health?”

Héctor nodded. “What about the shot in the back of the head?”

“I was seven years old and my father had just gotten out of jail. He was lying in bed reading the
The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara.
I’ll never forget that, and I still have the book, the Siglo XXI edition, the binding all broken, but I still have it. He got a telephone call, then put on his shoes and left the house. My grandmother always said that it was Morales who called him … And he never came back. They found him in the Tlatelolco gardens, sitting on a bench with a bullet in the back of his head.”

Alvarado-Barney’s last words were, “Can I keep calling you?”

Héctor was about to answer with an emphatic
no,
but the guy had such a sad expression on his face that he found himself nodding instead. He remained in the park awhile tying up loose ends. None of the furniture places on his list had offices in the Latinoamericana Tower. Well, the guy could have been there on an errand. When Héctor ran out of cigarettes, he realized that he hadn’t asked Barney about bin Laden.

He went to look for the taxi he had taken from the failed mugger, almost certain that someone else must have stolen it, but no, there it was, all rusty and powerful.

Winding his way through traffic that was getting heavier as the morning wore on, he visited the addresses on his list. The Prieto furniture places belonged to three brothers, all very young, who had inherited them from their father two years earlier. The used-furniture dealer called Lerdo, in the Doctores district, was actually a Lebanese immigrant who had bought the business from the original Lerdo in the ’50s. On one leg of his trip, Héctor’s vehicle was hailed by a couple of young newlyweds who wanted a ride to the Toluca terminal. When he refused to charge them, they attributed it to young love and good luck, and Héctor didn’t really want to set them straight by telling them that it was a pirate taxi stolen from a mugger, and that he, Héctor, was not a professional driver.

It was getting close to lunchtime. Héctor could tell because his sense of smell was growing sharper and sharper. Ever since he had lost his eye, he could smell things better and at a greater distance. He let the smells guide him and wound up in a Michoacán taco stand that sold meat skewers; it was over in the Escandón district, near the area where he would later look for the Degollado warehouse.

One hour and thirteen
campeche
tacos later, Héctor Belascoarán pulled over on Prosperidad Street, a surprising name in a district that had wallowed in decadence ever since the Revolution seized the estate from Mr. Escandón.

The entrance to the warehouse was a large metal door secured on the outside with a padlock. Héctor knocked three times without really expecting a reply.

A young boy stopped his soccer practice long enough to tell Héctor, “Sometimes he doesn’t hear; the man is half deaf. You can go around the back,” he added, pointing to the alley beside the neighboring tenement.

When he got around to the back, Héctor found a courtyard full of rubble and a second door, one that didn’t even rate a lock, just some twisted wires. He knocked again, and based on the wisdom that he had never known of any cats actually killed by curiosity, he untwisted the wires and walked in.

When the door closed behind him, Héctor found himself in absolute darkness. In the absence of windows or skylights, he couldn’t even guess at the size of the place. Obviously, he had not brought a flashlight with him, so he used his tiny Bic as a sort of proletarian Statue of Liberty to blaze a trail of light in the darkness. He bumped into something he guessed might be a crate and moved off to try and find a wall. When he finally located one, he made his way along it to where he thought another door would be. He found a light switch by pure chance, as it was much lower than it should have been. When he turned on the light—a few old mercury vapor lamps—they revealed a phantasmagoric cemetery of old furniture distributed around the space by category and type: here the metal-frame kitchen tables, over there the archaic console record players, along with a phalanx of about fifty refrigerators that had probably been new thirty years earlier, and all sorts of chairs: dining room chairs, garden chairs, rustic chairs, and a dozen bar stools. In one corner of the warehouse, which must have been close to fifty meters long by another fifty meters wide, there were open crates full of toys.

Once upon a time, in a curiously philosophical aside, a historian friend had told him that it was important to distinguish between antiques and old junk. At the time, Héctor thought it was foolishness, but what he saw here was something different; this wasn’t just old furniture, these were the mortal remains of the Mexican middle class that had only made it halfway, the glorious middle class of the ’60s that was crushed in the ’80s and dead and gone in the new millennium. Or was it? Who knows …

In another corner of the old warehouse, a single desk bore witness to what might have once been an office. He found a piece of pipe to break into the drawers, but he didn’t have to use it; the drawer was open … open and empty. There were no lists, no records, not even a filthy old inventory. There was merely a single box of old business cards with two telephone numbers and addresses—one for the Escandón warehouse, which is where he was, and another for an office on the forty-first floor of the Latinoamericana Tower—both in the name
of Juvencio Degollado, Manager.

For many years, the Latinoamericana Tower had been the center of Mexico City. The Zócalo was the ceremonial center, the symbolic center, but the place to have an unforgettable tryst was at the foot of the Latinoamericana, on the corner of Madero and San Juan de Letrán. There, in the shadow of the tallest building in Mexico, people intending to commit suicide would congregate, so much so that they wound up fencing in the scenic observation deck. But the place was also frequented by young couples visiting the sky bar, from where you could see almost to the edge of the known world. By now, however, the Latinoamericana Tower was no longer the tallest building in the biggest city in the world. And some people were saying that it was not even the biggest city in the world anymore, that Tokyo and Buenos Aires were bigger In any case, with all the pollution there were precious few days when you could see anything at all from the observation deck. And in the final rat-shit analysis, just to finish fucking it completely, Mexico City had lost its center … there was no center at all—what had been the center was now a collection of neighborhoods whose inhabitants didn’t know their neighbors and rarely even went outside to contemplate the dangerous splendor of the urban world.