The Uncomfortable Dead (9 page)

“Easy! Let’s go up to the reading room. There’s a guy there doing research on 1968 and Lucumberri.”

They approached a man with Coke-bottle glasses practically hidden behind a stack of boxes, documents, and folios.

“My friend Belascoarán needs to know something about the prisoners of 1968.”

The super-nearsighted researcher looked up with a smile as Héctor spoke.

“Jesús María Alvarado and Fuang Chu Martínez shared a cell here in ’68. I need to know if there was anyone else in that cell. Was there another temporary occupant?”

“Crujía?”

“The C,”
Fritz said without hesitation.

The researcher brushed away a shock of hair that was threatening to block his vision and began searching through what appeared to be his own notes. He soon found a list that he traced from top to bottom with an index finger.

“Alvarado Estrada, Jesús María; Chu Martínez, Fuang.”

“What about the third man?”

“There was none. According to the prison records, there was never anyone else. You see, the lists show the changes, the newcomers. And when there were temporary inmates, they appear in brackets … And this is the official list of prisoners for the year 1968, the one the prison director had on his desk.”

“Is there anyone at all on the list by the name of Morales … just Morales?” Belascoarán asked anxiously, as the man’s fingers ran down the whole list again in alphabetical order.

“No Morales was ever imprisoned because of the 1968 movement,” the efficient nearsighted researcher averred.

Héctor drummed on the table, eliciting a scorching glare from another researcher.

“Show him the pictures,” Fritz suggested.

“What pictures?” Belascoarán demanded.

“These,” and about a dozen photographs appeared out of the magic folders.

Héctor studied them intently. They were the prisoners of ’68; he recognized Pepe Revueltas and the most famous ones: Cabeza de Vaca, Salvador Martínez, and Luis González de Alba. They were standing in a chaotic pose in front of a fountain.

“There are three of them I haven’t been able to identify, but I know who all the others are,” the researcher said, not without a hint of pride, as he pulled out a pencil trace of the photograph with a number in each of the silhouettes corresponding to a list of names.

“Which one is Jesús María Alvarado?”

“This one,” said the researcher with complete certainty, pointing to a powerfully built young man with a strong mustache and curly hair.

“And the guy beside him is Fuang Chu, right?”

“Yeah, that one was easy.”

“How about this other one?” Héctor asked, pointing an index finger. “He’s probably one of the three you haven’t identified.”

“How did you know?”

“My friend here is a detective,” Fritz explained proudly, as all three of them studied the blurry half-profile of a very skinny young man with a sharp nose and glasses, no more than twenty-five years old. Just an ordinary young man.

Hours later, back in Belascoarán’s office, his friend Cristina Adler told him that there were no males with Morales as a paternal last name in the public-service directory of the first level of the federal government; there was, however, a female Morales who worked with Creel in the Ministry of the Interior baking animal crackers for the minister’s official presents.

Héctor went out into the streets to see if the cold of the night would focus his intelligence. The foggier this Morales got, the more real he seemed to be. He flagged down the first taxi that passed his office and gave the driver the address for the Pachuca supermarket in La Condesa. He wanted to buy himself a half-pound of Spanish
chorizo de cantimpalo
and some provolone for dinner.

Fifteen minutes later, the driver pulled into one of the many dead-end streets around Mazatlán Avenue, stopped the car in a dark spot, and twisted around, brandishing a large kitchen knife. Héctor, who had been trying to imagine Morales thirty years older, just gawked.

“Give me all your cash and credit cards … That’s today, asshole!” commanded the driver-turned-mugger.

“Just look at this bad eye I have here, young man,” Héctor said, pointing to his patch. As the surprised ex—taxi driver shifted his focus to the patch, still waving the knife about two inches from his face, Héctor slapped the weapon hand aside and whipped out his .45 from his shoulder holster, sticking it between the man’s eyes as he pulled back the hammer.

“Hey, what’s up, amigo?”

“What’s up is you’re going to die, moron. Now, real slowly, drop the fucking knife, because in about a second I’m going to blow your brains out.”

The guy dropped the knife, but Héctor had a hard time not firing because adrenalin is a bitch once it gets going. Like so many Mexicans, he was thoroughly fed up with the gratuitous violence that made it almost impossible for a guy to simply finish an honest day’s work and come home to some
chorizo
and provolone for dinner.

“Whose taxi is this? Is it yours or did you steal it?”

“It belongs to my cousin, he lends it to me.”

The thief had the look of a wild animal. His eyes kept darting from the muzzle of the .45 to his own weapon lying on the floor, yet his face was not one of defeat, but of rage.

“So now your cousin is fucked too for lending you his cab to pull this kind of shit.”

Héctor hit him in the middle of the face with the gun, but you see, when they do that in the movies, the guy goes out like a light, nice and easy, but here the driver began screaming as if
he
were the victim, and bleeding out of his head like a stuck pig, so Héctor had to hand him a couple more whacks before he finally went still. Then he dragged him by the feet out of the cab and tied him to a tree with a chain and padlock he found in the trunk for securing the spare tire from thieves. He was inclined to believe that it was a real taxi, and that it was lent and not stolen, because the rear license plate was covered with mud.

Héctor decided to take the taxi. You know what they say about thieves who steal from thieves… His hand was bleeding from a cut extending from under his pinky all the way to his wrist. It wasn’t deep but it bled like hell. Furthermore, his shirt was drenched with blood from the assailant-driver’s head. He drove the taxi to a nearby drugstore and had the pharmacist patch him up in the back of the store.

“That’s an ugly cut there; how’d you get it?”

“My mother did it by accident when she was cooking,” Héctor said. He loved innocent lies.

He drove the cab all the way back to the neighborhood and, taking advantage of the darkness on Mexicali Street, decided to abandon it in obscure anonymity. He checked the papers in the glove compartment, half wishing the owner’s name would be Morales, but it wasn’t. Unfortunately, the title was registered in the name of one Casimiro Alegre, who had nothing to do with Morales Motors or Morales Used Cars or anything of the sort. His dinner had been nicely screwed. He wasn’t about to go to the supermarket at this time of night covered with blood to buy
chorizo
and provolone. He left the car with the door ajar and the keys in one of the folds of the front seat cover. If someone stole it, that would be too bad. Thieves who steal from thieves who steal from thieves …

Walking up to his doorway, he found Monteverde and the limping dog there waiting for him.

“What happened to your hand?”

“I cut myself on a chain saw trying to save a kid from drowning,” he lied nonchalantly, though the dog seemed to look at him askance.

The street was filled with people having fun. The restaurants on all four corners were jammed, the car watchers happy as hell, and the bikers, an Aztec version of
Born to Lose,
were behaving themselves and sucking on lemon-strawberry popsicles in front of a mini-mart.

Monteverde wondered if he should ask about Héctor’s state of health, or make some stupid comment about how dangerous the streets are, but since Héctor didn’t seem to care much either way, he decided to let the whole thing slide.

“I got another message from Alvarado. In your office they told me I could find you here, so seeing as how we’re neighbors …”

“Come on up; let’s hear what he has to say,” Héctor replied. “I have an old turkey pot pie for your dog.”

“Tobías loves pot pies.”

The answering machine began its tale:

This
is installment number twenty-seven of the history of modern Mexico, supplied free of charge by Jesús María Alvarado. It starts with the victory in the last election when the outgoing
PRI
administration and the incoming PAN administration signed a pact. It was a very odd pact because it was never put in writing. This secret pact had to do with an amnesty.
If you let me govern, everything in the past will be forgiven,
said the pact that was never written. Nothing had to be spelled out. Everything was said with winks, grunts, suggestions, allusions, uncertain certainties. If any of them had sworn to anything specific, the whole understanding would have collapsed; if there’s one thing those bastards know for sure, it’s that a sworn oath is always a lie, even if you swear to Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Mexican National Soccer Selection. But a pact was a pact. A few days later, the ex-president of the republic turned up on the board of directors of two major corporations, Proctor & Gamble and one of the gringo railroad companies, as a full member, leather armchair rights and all. Curiously enough, both companies had received sizable benefits from his administration: bargain-basement railroads, cheap, tax-free real estate.

The amnesty was in place. The fact that the incoming president did not say a word, did not even seem to notice that his predecessor had acquired stock options juicy enough to buy him a seat on those illustrious boards, confirmed that the fix was on. The executor of the whole thing may have been Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda, who had said on a number of occasions that there would be no change of government without an amnesty. But that was just one deal. The last thirty years have witnessed a great many dirty deals, many suspicious overnight fortunes, many murders, many unexplained affinities, a whole lot of shit that had to be swept under the doormat.

But sometimes the pressures are just too much and a pact develops cracks. Could it be that poor old Morales was going to be left holding the stick? Naah, who could even imagine that … !!! To be continued
—

Then silence followed by a busy signal.

When Monteverde and his dog left, Héctor tried to replace the provolone and
chorizo de cantimpalo
with an omelet of smoked oysters from Japan, and as he cooked he listened to Mahler.

He was beginning to like this dead guy. He had a certain historical perspective that living people never have—that and a strange sense of humor.

The telephone rang at the crack of dawn. In the dim rays of early day, the interior of his room was barely lit. As he moved toward the door, he stumbled into a twenty-four-pack of Cokes wrapped in plastic. With half his big toe jammed in the twenty-four-pack, Héctor hobbled on one leg, the bad one, cursing ridiculously as he made it over to the table by the chair of his dreams, just when the answering machine cut on.

Listen up, old buddy, this is Jesús María Alvarado.
[Coughing spell] I
know that Monteverde and his dog put you on the case. What are you going to do? Prove that I’m dead? Then what? In the meantime, let me give you a present.
Do
you know where Juancho is?
Do
you know who has him?
Do
you know where the taco vendor bin Laden from Juárez City is? Morales has him. If you need more data … Juancho, carrying his briefcase stuffed with hundreds, decided that he liked that fucky-fucky stuff and the taco stands, and he immediately thought of Mexico City, where there’s a shitload of both. Great, but
—

Belascoarán smiled at the machine that was now playing a busy signal. The thought of picking up the receiver had never even crossed his mind. Rules were rules. So one was looking for him while the other left him messages. That was the game and that was how it had to be played. How had this person gotten his telephone number?

It was true enough that there were many taco vendors in Mexico City, but the part about easy sex, well, that was just a malicious rumor, a delusion of grandeur generated in the recesses of the nether regions of the biggest city in the world. It’s us goddamn
chilangos
who are always going around bragging. And to judge from these latest developments, the mythical, metaphysical, and probably metaphorical Juancho-bin Laden, the taco vendor, the nonexistent Osama, the evil genius, had completely swallowed the story spread around by the defective natives that in Mexico City there’s a whole lot of fucking going on.

CHAPTER 7

AND PANCHO VILLA WAS NOT A WITNESS

T
hey can’t come to me with that crock of shit that globalization is modernity.” The Russian wasn’t angry, that was just the way he talked. And without stopping his talking, he went on making tortillas. “What the hell modernity are they talking about? Go ahead, you tell me. That’s old as the hills. They been trying to globalize us for bout 500 years. First the fuckin Spanish, then the fuckin gringos, then the fuckin French. And now they’re all gettin together to gang up on us … even the fuckin Japanese.”

The Russian is a Purépecha Indian, so go figure why he turned out tall and blond. I mean real blond, not peroxide blond. He’s originally from Michoacán, but he has a “saved tortilla” stand in Guadalajara, over by the Cathedral, and its name is The Pearl of the West. Anyone who wants to understand that thing about saved tortillas would have to go the stand and check it out with the owner. The Russian works in an apron that says
Lifeguard
and he has a poster of Pamela Anderson from
Baywatch
and a large sign that says,
Our tortillas are not drowned. We save them in time. Say NO to fast food,
and further down there’s another sign: This
stand is true through and through and we don’t accept propaganda for America or any other religion.
Other than being blond, the Russian is called the Russian because in ’68 he went to the Olympic Village in Mexico City to find the sports delegation from the U.S.S.R. to rally their support for the political prisoners of the student movement. They sent him packing, and he started shouting that they were all fucking CIA agents and that he, the Russian, was more Soviet than any of them, because he, the Russian, had sold tacos to Leon Trotsky in Coyoacán. The Russian spent three days in Lecumberri for “lack of Olympic spirit and brotherhood among nations,” the judge said. They sent him up because he was a pain in the ass, and they released him for the same reason. They couldn’t deal with him. During those days in prison, the Russian met the Chinaman Fuang Chu during a political argument. The Russian might be very Russian, but he’s a Maoist, and the Chinaman might be very Chinese, but he’s a Trotskyite.

They spent two days and nights arguing about the essence of the Mexican Revolution—one might be very Russian and the other very Chinese, but they were both very Mexican. They wound up the best of friends thanks to Adolfo Gilly, a tenant in Lecumberri since 1966, who intervened with a presentation that later became part of his book,
The Interrupted Revolution.
The Russian got released because he had beaten up one of the guards. It had taken another six guards to get him under control. Lecumberri did not have all that many guards, so it was easier to turn him loose than keep him. The Russian and the Chinaman met again at the National Democratic Convention held in August of 1994 in Zapatista territory. On that occasion, after the downpour, they argued again. The Russian insisted that the Zapatistas were Maoists and the Chinaman insisted that they were Trotskyites. On the night of August 10, 1994, they talked to Insurgent Major Moses and Comandante Tacho and they both became official Zapatista supporters. They’ve worked together in different Zapatista initiatives and they both live in Guadalajara, Jalisco, in the western part of the Mexican Republic.

At this point in time, the Russian has before him Elías Contreras, Investigation Commission of the EZLN. Elías is not talking; he’s just eating his tortilla.

“Them fuckin gringos, they stole half our country in a war and then they persecuted Pancho Villa but couldn’t catch him, and now they’re tryin to steal the other half of the country with their fuckin transgenic hamburgers and hot dogs and radioactive waste.”

The Russian went on preparing tortillas and Elías eating his.

“Then the fuckin French deposed Don Juarito Juárez, who had really big
cojones,
not like this little prick who has his photo taken with Don Juarito’s picture behind him. But Don Juarito went into the resistance and he fucked the fuckin frogs. Then came the fuckin Japanese with their goddamn peanuts and their
takechi
and
koyi
and all their sweet food.”

A bite by Elías into his tortilla.

“Nothing doin, my friend. What did you say your name was on this mission? … Well, okay, Elías, Elías Contreras. El Sup probably gave you that last name. I used to know a guy called Contreras back in 1969, a bastard who cheated at dominos. He carried a marker and made spots on the tiles, and it was a mess because then you’d get two or three rounds and no wins.”

Another bite out of Elías’s tortilla.

“No, the Chinaman went to Mexico City. I think a relative of his died, I don’t rightly know. Goddamn Chinese. First they screw us with their Bruce Lee movies, then with their strange food, and now with their tools, which break at the first squeeze.”

Next-to-last bite out of Elías’s tortilla.

“So if you want to wait, be my guest. The Chechen will be coming in a while because she’s going to take these tortillas to the those Altermundista kids they’ve got in prison. They want to break them and castrate them and bring them into El Yunque, but with these tortillas I’m sending them, full of vitamins and minerals and hydrocarbons and all, they’ll be able to resist and nobody’11 be able to break them. Here comes the Chechen … So what’s happening, my beautiful Chechen? Mr. Elías here is looking for that goddamn Chinaman, cause he’s got a message from El Sup. I already told him the Chinaman isn’t around.”

The girl the Russian called “the Chechen” to Elías: “Don’t you believe this goddamn Purépecha Indian Russian, my name is Azucena. He calls me the Chechen because he’s trying to start something with me and he figures it’ll be easier with a bit of geographic determinism, but he hasn’t got a chance. The Chinaman just returned from the capital and I’m off to see him right now. If you like, I can give you a lift.”

The tortilla finished disappearing into Elías’s mouth, the napkin no more than a piece of greasy nostalgia.

The Russian to Elías: “The thing is, this Chechen wants to get it on with an intellectual, and I keep telling her that I AM … but that I’m an organic intellectual and not a transgenic one.”

The Russian to Azucena: “Don’t go getting lost again in the Glorieta de Minerva … and don’t eat the tortillas … and don’t give any to that goddamn Chinaman!”

The Russian to Elías: “And if you run into El Sup, tell him to quit screwing around with his stories and his novel and just plain tell us outright how it all ends.”

Azucena, with her bag of saved tortillas, and Elías Contreras got lost in the Glorieta de Minerva.

“Watch your hands!” the Chechen said, irritated about being lost. Elías sneaked a peek at his hands and wiped them on his pants. It took them an hour to find their way out. They parked two blocks away from La Mutualista. “Just in case we’re being followed,” Azucena said. “I’ll go in first,” she added.

Elías waited in the car. A while later Azucena returned. “He’s there. He’ll be waiting for you at the lockers,” she said. Elías didn’t know what
lockers
were. Azucena explained. “They’re like gray steel boxes with locks on them. There’s a mess of them in several rows. That’s where the Chinaman will be.”

They said goodbye and Elías entered the public baths. Sitting on one of the benches facing the
gray steel boxes with locks
was Fuang Chu.

The Chinese man said hello and asked how everyone was doing. Elías said okay, that he was on an Investigation Commission, and handed over the envelope. Fuang Chu opened it up, checked the documents, and noticed a picture.

“So you guys are looking for this Morales too? Sounds like an epidemic. In Mexico City, I ran into a guy calling himself a detective who was also looking for him. I got a fax from some comrade who’s already dead. I met a guy named Morales when I was in prison. A real prick, he was. But he didn’t look like the one in the picture. I’ll write this all down for you.”

While Fuang Chu wrote, Elías strolled down the aisles of lockers as if he were looking for something. On one of the lockers, behind an old poster announcing an event in honor of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán at the International Book Fair, there was a little piece of paper stuck on the metal. Elías read it and lit a cigarette, then returned to where Fuang Chu had finished writing.

The Chinese man gave Elías the papers and the picture, shook his hand in farewell, and said, “You give my best to Moy. And if you run into El Sup, tell him to quit screwing around with his stories and novel and just plain tell us outright how it all ends.”

A Hacker in the American Union

Paris, Texas, U.S.A., December 2004. Natalia Reyes Colás, 100% Ñahñu Indian, wetbacked it over to the other side in 1944 when the Second World War was still going on. At the age of twenty, she married some meatball who she soon sent packing because he beat her. She recently turned seventy-five and has been an Internet junkie and ham operator for the last fifteen years. With a lot of reading and practice she became a skillful and respected web hacker, signing herself
NatKingCole.
Cruising the ether very late one night, she broke into a satellite electronic surveillance system known as Echelon, one she had been following for years.
NatKingCole
downloaded and decoded a message. Running it over in her mind, she thought:
Damn Zapatistas, they just won’t keep still. Let’s give them a little hand and screw the hawks
and
the doves!
She keyed in her own encoded message and attached a little present. A few more strokes and the Echelon transmission was amended. At the Medina Annex earth station, they received a nonsense message:
Over in the fountain/the spout was in the middle/the stream first got real big/and then it got real little.
The disconcerted operator ran the tape over and over again. The virus that would come to be known as Bitter Pozol slowly infiltrated the operating system and spread throughout the entire Echelon network. It took the experts three weeks to sweep the system clean of the complete works of Francisco Gabilondo Soler, alias Cri-Cri, whose ideological persuasion was not on file with the Central Intelligence Agency. To correct the “accident,” Bush had to reorganize his intelligence services, and the State Department issued a press release accusing Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden of cybernetic terrorism.

NatKingCole,
better known to the former migrant workers of Tlaxcala as Doña Natalia, turned off her computer, caressed her cat Eulalia, and said, “Well, what do you think? Have we earned some warm milk and cookies?”

“Meow,” Eulalia answered.

“Me too,” said Natalia Reyes Colís, neo-Zapatista of Paris, Texas, U.S.A., as she opened her refrigerator door.

La Magdalena

Sometimes even God makes mistakes. The other day, I was roaming around the Monument to the Revolution—that is, I was exploring the terrain, cause you gotta know which way to run when the thing (or the
case)
gets nasty. So I had spent some time in a little park called San Fernando, which is right there by the cemetery. And I stayed awhile facing the statue of General Vicente Guerrero, the one where they have the motto of the Zapatista National Liberation Army:
Live for your country or die for freedom.

Then it got a little late and I walked off down the street called Puente de Alvarado, and right there the police got me—that is, the
Judiciales.
They asked who am I and what am I doing and said that I should fork over what I had and a lot of other strange things, cause those
Judiciales
talk real strange. So they were trying to push me into the police car, and then a girl comes over with a really, really short skirt and a tiny blouse—that is, she was practically naked even though it was cold. Then she talked to
the Judiciales
and they sort of let me go. And then she came over to where I was and we talked and she said her name was Magdalena and she asked where I was from cause I talked real different and, seeing as how she must be a good person cause she shooed the
Judiciales
away, I told her I was from Chiapas, so she asked me if I was one of those Zapatistas and I said I didn’t know what Zapatistas are, and she said I must be one cause real Zapatistas don’t go around saying they’re Zapatistas. So then she told me she had been in the Zapatista National Liberation Front, the FZLN, but she hardly didn’t have time to go to meetings and all, and then she started to explain how she wasn’t a she, but a he, and there I was not understanding much, and she picks up her skirt and I see plain as day that there was something under her bloomers making a big bump. So I asked how it was that she was a he but dressed like a she, and he/she explained that she’s really a woman but got born in the body of a man. And then she said that since there was no clients around that we could go up to her room, and when we were there he/she told me the whole story about how she needed to save money to have the operation to make her a woman’s body and that’s why she was street-walking, and I said I walked a lot of streets and she explained how street-walking was a kind of job to save money, and then she fell asleep. So I made myself as comfortable as I could in a corner with my jacket and a blanket Magdalena loaned me. But I didn’t hardly sleep at all cause I got to thinking how God makes mistakes, cause Magdalena, who is a woman, got put in the body of a man.