“Well, if God knows it, why shouldn’t the world?” answered Héctor, who hadn’t guaranteed anything for a long time.
“Are you a believer?” the progressive asked, a bit taken aback.
“There’s a friend of mine says he quit being Catholic for two reasons: one, because he thought that with so many poor people the Vatican treasures were a kick in humanity’s balls; and two, because they don’t let you smoke in church. And I imagine that goes for all religions. And I agree—the very idea of God annoys the shit out of me,” Héctor wound up very seriously.
Taking advantage of the moment of silence, Héctor checked out the progressive official and found that, as opposed to what Carlos had said, the guy had no tie, although he did have a stain on his yellow shirt, a shaggy beard, and the glasses of the terminally short-sighted. He was tall, very tall, and when he got excited he shook his head sideways in a perpetual no. He looked like an honest man, the kind his mother used to call “a good person,” referring always to workers, plumbers, milkmen, gardeners, and lottery hawkers. If memory didn’t fail him, his mother had never said that any bourgeois, grand or petit, was “a good person.” She must have had her reasons.
“There’s a dead guy talking to me,” the man said, breaking in on Héctor’s mental evaluation of him and his past.
Héctor opted for silence. Just a couple of months before, he had gone to a video club and rented a series created by Alec Guinness based on a novel by le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, produced by the BBC, and for six continuous hours he had watched in fascination as Smiley-Guinness used the most effective interrogation technique in the world: putting on a stupid face (if the guy weren’t British, Héctor would say he was the biggest jerk he’d ever seen) and staring at people languidly, not too interested, like he was doing them a favor, and people would just talk and talk to him, and once in a while, a long while, he would drop a question, as if not really caring much, just to make conversation.
And the method worked.
“For about a week now I’ve been hearing messages on my answering machine from a buddy of mine, only this buddy died in 1969. He was murdered. And now he’s talking to me, leaving me messages. He tells me stories. But I don’t rightly know what it is he wants from me. And I think he’s calling when he knows I’m not home so he can just leave a recording. Maybe it’s a joke, but if it is, it’s a hell of a joke.”
Héctor kept up his Alec Guinness face.
“My name’s Héctor,” the man said.
“So’s mine,” Belascoarán replied, kind of apologizing.
“Héctor Monteverde.”
“How about the dead guy?”
“His name’s Jesús María Alvarado, and he was really something.”
Héctor went back into silent mode.
“So, how much do you charge?”
“Not much,” Belascoarán said.
That appeared to quiet the man down … the dog too.
“Here’s the tape. You can listen to the whole thing in five minutes. You decide and we’ll talk later.”
“I don’t have an answering machine in this office. If you can lend the tape to me, tomorrow we can—”
“No! Not tomorrow. In a while. Take my address,” Monteverde said, handing over a piece of paper. “And here are some notes I prepared about how I met the dead man. I’ll be at home … I don’t sleep.”
“I don’t either,” Héctor said.
And he watched as same-name Monteverde stood up and left the office, followed by his limping dog.
“That’s one hell of a story!” said Carlos Vargas with a mouthful of tacks, shaking his hammer over the pink easy chair.
“The phrase that comes to mind is the one about reality getting extremely strange,” Belascoarán answered.
Hours later, sitting at home, Héctor listened to the voice of the dead man coming from the tape.
“Hello. I am Jesús María Alvarado. I’ll call you back, buddy.”
The voice did not sound familiar; it was gravelly and didn’t reveal any anxiety, urgency … nothing. Just a toneless voice offering a name. It was not cavernous or put through special effects; it wasn’t intended to sound like a voice from the grave. What’s a voice from the grave supposed to sound like? This talking to dead people …
Yet Jesús María Alvarado was indeed dead, although not in 1969 like the progressive official Monteverde said, but in ’71. So it was prehistoric, thirty-four years ago. He had been murdered as he left prison. A bullet in the back of the head for the first political prisoner to be freed after the 1968 movement. Execution-style … and no official explanations.
Monteverde and Alvarado had met at a school where they both taught literature. They were just nodding acquaintances. A couple of coffees together, a couple of faculty meetings. The 1968 assemblies, the founding of the coalition of teachers in support of the student movement. Monteverde was a little absent-minded, lovesick, a bit timid … the son of an undertaker who had made his fortune on the luxury of death, something that Héctor Monteverde (according to his meticulously drafted notes) thought was not only immoral, but thoroughly shameful and reprehensible in the year of the movement. World literature was the antidote to the funeral parlors. Alvarado was the child of peasants who had come to literature through some incomprehensible conception of patriotism, and by the sheer force of rote repetition of “Suave Patria” and the memorization of verses by Díaz Mirón, Gutiérrez Nájera, and Sor Juana, for recitation to the town people. Forever poverty stricken, he couldn’t even afford to have his clothes washed at the end of each month, his tab at the corner store was overflowing, and he was filled with anger.
Apparently, during those magical and terrible years, Héctor Monteverde had followed the life of Alvarado from a distance, up until the man was murdered.
Héctor figured that he had to think the matter through calmly; he put aside the answering machine and the peach juice he had been drinking, and climbed back up to the roof with a packet of letters he had found in his mailbox. With infinite patience he set out to make paper airplanes and place them in a row along the parapet around the roof. Down on the street, the new day’s noise was just getting started in Condesa, the bikers, the teenagers having fun.
There was the slightest of breezes, and every once in a while it managed to blow one of the paper planes off the parapet, sending it into marvelous acrobatics before crashing to the ground. But very rarely did one succeed in floating away on the updraft. When the planes were all gone, he returned to his room. He had left all the lights on, the best antidote to loneliness, turning the damn house into a Christmas tree. He rewound the answering-machine tape. What he heard was what he had heard, and the voice said again, “Hello. I am Jesús María Alvarado. I’ll call you back, buddy.”
Another Jesús María Alvarado, the son of Jesús María Alvarado, the ghost of Jesús María Alvarado, an alter ego of Jesús María Alvarado with the same name, some table-dancer trying to attract attention, the police trying to drive Monteverde nuts for reasons known only to themselves, he summarized.
The second call was even better:
Listen, man, this is Jesús María Alvarado. I hope you’ve got a long tape, cause I have to tell you what happened to me. It’s a really rat-shit story, crazy. There I was in Juárez, in a bar, and since all the tables were taken I just stood around drinking my beer and watching the goddamn TV. The noise was a pisser and I couldn’t hear a thing, but there was bin Laden, with his stony expression, in one of those communiqués he keeps sending out over the TV. This guy’s a real pain in my balls, so I wasn’t listening much, but then a couple of guys behind me started hollering something like, “Das Juancho, das freekin Juancho!” So I turn around to see what was up with this freekin Juancho and there were these two half-drunk muscle-bound studs going on with their mantra: “Das goddam Juancho, Juancho!” pointing at the TV. I flipped around to make sure I wasn’t the one who was nuts, as usual, but it was still bin Laden, all elegant with a field rifle in
his hand and the rag around his head and that dopey face of his. So I flipped around again to talk to the Juancho fan club. “What’s with this fuckin Juancho?” I says, and them, half slurring because of the booze, they tell me that there on the TV was none other than their buddy Juancho, and just lookit how the prick had done himself up. And I kinda found out that Juancho ran with these guys, he had been a taco vendor in Juárez and got tired of his crappy life about three years ago and wetbacked it over to open a butcher shop in Burbank, California. Me, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the whole thing, so I turn to the TV again and, sure enough, the sonovabitch was still there, so I went to ask the two drunks what else they knew about Juancho, and were they sure it was him, and when had he grown that shitty beard, but the guys had disappeared, gone, nada. I searched the bar and the sidewalk and all, but there was no sign of them. And I says to myself, Now ain’t that a pisser. Bin Laden’s alter ego is a taco vendor from Juárez. But then I started getting it all together and I says, Alvarado, what do you know about Burbank? And the thing is, I do know something about Burbank. It’s the skin-flick capital of the United States, a shit town near Los Angeles, triple-X companies and motels … Fuck, fuck, film, film, long live savage capitalism! And I put two and two together, and I ask myself, like, what if it was the Bushes who’ve been making the bin Laden communiqués, those messages from hell, in a porno studio in Burbank, California, where they even have all the desert you might want? What if they concocted the whole thing? What if it’s all a dream factory starring a Mexican taco vendor by the name of Juancho? But to tell the truth, even I couldn’t believe that crock, and I kept telling myself, You can’t be serious … But it does make a cool story, doesn’t it?”
Héctor turned off the machine. He went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and splashed cold water on his face. Like a lot of people who live alone, he was in the habit of talking to his mirror persona, but now he couldn’t think of anything to tell himself. He thought it over again and broke out into roaring laughter. Kafka swimming in his briefs in Xochimilco. Bin Laden played by Juancho in Burbank. And, of course, when he wasn’t doing communiqués, like Alvarado said, Juancho spent his free time fucking on film and getting paid for it. A free version of A Thousand and One Nights, as told in a taco emporium in Juárez: crazy but funny, the dumbest prick on the border.
The third tape started as always—“This is Jesús María Alvarado”—like he was trying over and over again to establish that he had come back from the valley of the shadow of death. After the name, there was a pause and a cryptic comment, “Maybe I shouldn’t have come back,” and then a long silence and a click that put an end to the call.
There was a fourth call that started off with the usual, “This is Jesús María Alvarado,” then without a word of explanation went into some verses:
Where I will only be
a memory of a stone buried under briar
over which the wind flees its sleepless night.
And that was all. The poem sounded familiar, but Héctor couldn’t remember where or when he had heard it.
The progressive Monteverde lived in the Roma Sur neighborhood about twelve blocks from his home, so Héctor decided to take a walk, strolling along the promenade on Alfonso Reyes Avenue, which was better when it was Juanacatlán and lined with unionized whores or those hoping to join. He stopped at one of the taco joints to have a couple of cheese arracheras with lots of green salsa, then went on his way, smiling to strangers, every once in a while saying good evening just to see how the well-mannered Mexicans of the capital would recover their basic manners and reply.
The character seemed to live alone. Alone except for the dog with the splint, which, just as Belascoarán passed through the doorway, came over and licked his hand, either to identify him or simply to express solidarity between two cripples. There was no sign of children in the house, no pictures, but the walls were covered with reproductions of paintings of mountains and volcanoes, from a Velasco to Alt’s Paricutin, and rather attractive photographs of Everest in the style of National Geographic.
Monteverde was wearing the same chocolate-stained shirt from a few hours earlier. Héctor asked to use the bathroom, which was pristine, spotless. In his free time, Monteverde must be a detergent and Windex freak. A touch of incongruent humor among such hygienic fundamentalism moved him: On one of the walls there was a poster that read, Constipation Promotes Reading. Héctor decided he had to get one of those for his own home. The idea wasn’t new and he wasn’t constipated, but it was another good excuse to read in the john.
The floor in the hallway was filled with books for lack of bookshelves. Monteverde had arranged them on their sides so that all you had to do was bend over slightly to pick one up. Héctor recognized many of his own favorites: Remarque, Fast, Haefs, Ross Thomas, Neruda, Hemingway, Cortázar. They were all there.
“So tell me it ain’t strange, man.”
He didn’t answer, but he figured he would have to give the Alec Guinness method a rest. It was time for questions. He dropped into a rat-gray rocker, and before Monteverde could do likewise, he blurted out, “Did you recognize the voice?”
“No, but you can’t tell. It’s been so many years.”
“Were you guys friends? Friends enough that if he were alive he would—”
“I went to his funeral. He’s dead. I saw him lying there dead in his coffin, with a patch that you could see sticking out from the back of his head where they had shot him,” Monteverde interrupted.
“Were you good friends?”
“Just friends. He was always raring to go about everything. I was more timid. But there we were, in the movement, teaching literature in the preps, and we had a sort of a girlfriend, him first, then me, and we only ate street food, the cheapest we could find.”
The bit about teaching literature in the preps reminded Belascoarán of the poem, which he began to recite:
Where I will only be
a memory of a stone buried under briar
over which the wind flees its sleepless night.
“Where forgetfulness may dwell/in the vast dawnless gardens/ where I will be …” Monteverde added.
“Of course, the Cernuda poem, I thought it sounded familiar, but I couldn’t…” Belascoarán paused, slapping his hands together to applaud his own memory.
“A marvelous poem,” Monteverde said, and resumed:
Where sorrow and fortune will be only words,
a native sky and land enveloping a memory;
where I will finally be free without even knowing it,
dissolved in a mist, an absence,
an absence soft as the flesh of a child.
“There, far away; where forgetfulness may dwell,” they finished in unison.
Now that was a real poem, one of those that grabs you by the nuts and squeezes softly until the pain becomes an idea. That was one hell of a poet, the old Spaniard exiled in Mexico. Héctor lit a cigarette; he used the moment to organize his ideas, while the dog, who must have been nervous about secondhand smoke, limped to a safe distance.
“That one scared me more than the other messages; it was Jesús María’s favorite poem—he would recite it for his students every so often. I wound up doing the same because of him.”
Héctor lit up another with the butt of the prior; the dog didn’t protest.
“Why would Alvarado, Alvarado’s ghost, or someone trying to pass himself off as Alvarado, be sending you these messages? Who are you, Monteverde? What do you do for a living?”
“I work for the government in Mexico City. I’m a special investigator for the Department of Oversight. It’s kind of a delicate job, particularly these days, that’s why I freaked. Otherwise I would have laughed it off. You can’t imagine, recently things have become very murky …”
“What are you working on now?”
“I’m sorry, that’s confidential, and furthermore it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the dead guy’s calls. I sound like some half-ba
ked Charlie Chan,” Monteverde concluded with a smile, “don’t I? But the fact is, it’s delicate, what with all the goddamn corruption they had during the PRI administrations and the shit those bastards left us.”
“And are you corrupt? Forgive me for asking, but since we don’t actually know each other …”
Monteverde squeezed out a sad smile. “You can only buy what’s up for sale. Me? I’m made of steel, friend, stainless steel, incorruptible, a bit of a jerk and very far to the left. I don’t insult our dead.”
The sad expression was becoming something else and there were a few sparks in his eyes. Even the dog seemed to respond and lifted his head.
“So, are you for sale?” he asked the detective.
“My friend, I don’t want to wake up one of these days with my mouth full of ants. Me, I bend but I don’t go down,” Belascoarán answered, tapping his knee where he had a steel spike implanted that set off every metal detector in every airport around the world. “Who have you told about this?”
“Only Tobías,” Monteverde said, pointing to the dog.
“And the bin Laden story, do you believe that?”
“No. But it’s a hell of a story. I’m just sorry I didn’t come up with it myself.”
Belascoarán returned to the Alec Guinness routine, but it didn’t work. Monteverde was off thinking about something far, far away.
“How about you, when did you become an insomniac?” the detective finally asked.
“When we lost the elections in ’88, the day the system crashed, the election fraud. For some reason I got the idea in my head that during the night they were going to come and kill us all … How about you?”
“It was a few months ago. One night the woman who sometimes comes over to sleep with me didn’t show up, but I waited all night for her, and now I don’t sleep,” the detective answered, a little embarrassed. His own explanation couldn’t stand up to Monteverde’s; his insomnia paled in comparison to the historic insomnia of the literature-teacher-turned-progressive-official. “Who gave you my number? Who suggested that you contact me?”
The Uncomfortable Dead Page 3