The Uncomfortable Dead

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “You must be breaking my balls,” the Chinese man said, drawing the words from deep inside his soul.

  CHAPTER 5

  SOME PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

  There are live ones and dead ones. The dead ones are better than the live ones.

  That’s what El Sup told me when he was giving me instructions before going into the Monster. He was explaining about the drops, the citizens’ drops—cause there’s also mountain drops, which is when we do it with medicine, food, weapons, ammo, equipment, books. That’s when you don’t want to go carrying everything around all at once, so you hide them in different places according to the plan. Mountain drops are very tricky and you have to go around checking them cause the rain or the coons can maybe get into them, spoil them, that is. But it’s not the same in the city. They have rain in the city and some say they even have coons, but it’s not the same cause in the city the drops are used for leaving and picking up messages. So in the city they have live drops and dead drops, and the dead drops are when there’s nobody to take or give the message, and what you do is you leave the message for somebody to pick up and you don’t have to have a meeting between the one who drops and the one who picks up. So a dead drop is where there’s no people, just places and things, and the live drop is where you have a real person who receives messages or gives them or both. You call it a live drop cause there’s a real live person that receives things and holds onto them awhile and then delivers them to another person when that person gives the right password.

  Thing is, El Sup went on explaining about how the dead drops were better. And I say he’s right.

  That was before I went into the Monster, Mexico City. It was real difficult. Getting around in the Monster, that is. The pesero, the microbus, that is, kept taking me around and around cause I was gawking at everything stead of looking where I was going, and sometimes I even went around three times cause of staring at a big old street called an avenue cause it was so big and all, what with cars going every which way, and a body can’t be diddling around cause you can get deceased out there. Well, in my case I’m already deceased, but maybe the cars didn’t know that, so I waited till there was a clearing and then ran like hell to the other side.

  In the metro, well, that’s different cause the metro runs under the streets and there’s no cars … yet. As I was saying, I was already in Mexico City, the Monster. I think it was El Sup who said that the ground grows upward, but I think that’s because he hadn’t walked around there, since the simple truth is that the ground grows down. What I mean is, on the ground there’s only cars—well, cars and a shitload of antennas with buildings growing out of their feet.

  The Monster has big houses and small ones, tall ones and little bitty ones, fat and skinny, rich and poor. Like people, but without hearts. In the Monster, the most important thing is the houses and the cars, so people get sent underground, to the metro. If people stay up there in car country, well, the cars kind of like get very pissed and try to gore them, like bulls would.

  In the city, they don’t really know how to speak the language, cause they don’t even know the difference between a mare and a stallion; they just call everything a horse. Then there’s cool. When city people don’t know how to explain how they feel or when they’re angry or when they’re happy or anything like that, they just say cool. Like the other day, I was on a pesero, which is a microbus, and there was a couple of youngsters looking really in love and all, and the youngster boy asks the youngster girl if she really loves him and she says cool, but you could tell in her eyes that what she meant was you matter a lot to me. And then they kissed and all. But on a different day, the driver all of a sudden had to stomp on the brakes and this little old guy went flying into this big guy who caught him, and the old guy says I’m so sorry, and the big guy says that’s cool, which you could tell in his manner meant it don’t matter none. So I figger cool means a whole lot of things and city folk don’t have to learn a lot of words after they learn cool. Maybe that’s why they have their heads all mixed up like me, Elías Contreras, Investigation Commission, Zapatista National Liberation Army.

  Well, like I was saying, the people who get around walking, or how city folk say, by going pedestrian—the cars seem to want to run into those pedestrians. So if you don’t have a car, you really have to be quick so’s they won’t make you deceased, so you can take the pesero, or just go straight down and take the underground way, which is the metro. So when I got off the second time around from the pesero and I was on the street again, I figgered I had to get down there and take that metro. Now, the metro is like a lot of cars tied together with a kind of chain, and the one pulls the others. When the metro finally arrives, the people outside all bunch together real tight and the people inside all bunch the same and some want to get in and others want to get out. The one who pushes the most wins. In the beginning, I thought this was the way city folk did their exercises and I got into the spirit of things, urging them on with, “A people united can never be defeated,” but I finally decided it wasn’t that, and that they were just like that, pushy, I mean, at least the pedestrian ones, cause the ones in the cars are all different. They just cruise around all the time and holler blow it out your ass at each other, or asshole, like they was really pissed, but they’re not, that’s just what they do, blow it out their asses, I guess. The other day, I asked Andrés and Marta what there was more of, cars or people. They said people. So I got to thinking why cars were more important than people, cause you could see plain as day that the city was made for cars and for antennas, but it sure ain’t made for people. So since they don’t all fit together—cars, people, and antennas—they had to dig a hole under the city, that is, under the ground. And down there you have a lot of people. There’s men and women and children and old people, and they even have policemen. They have people of all kinds and sizes same as up top. But what they don’t have down there is rich people.

  One day I went and took the metro to a station called … called … Gimme a second here so’s I can check the map … Got it, it’s called Azcapotzalco. After I got there, I went to catch another pesero that took a long time, and I finally got to a place that looks like a paddock but ain’t one. What they had there is a thing called a circus, and I went to see where it was that the giraffes lived. As it turns out, those giraffes are a lot like cows, meaning they have horns and all, but their heads are way up on the end of a real long neck that looks like somebody stretched them too much when they were being born, or maybe they just want to see real far and they stretch their necks far as they can, or maybe they just want to look like the houses in the city. So you might say that giraffes are like cows, but with antennas.

  Okay, now, back to the point, cause I didn’t really want to see no giraffes, what I had to do was see a comrade who was going to be seeing the giraffes at exactly 7 p.m. and who was going to have blue hair—the comrade, not the giraffes. The guy was a youngster, and you know youngsters don’t really mind much if they don’t get where they have to be on time, but he finally got there. In the Monster, you know, youngster boys and girls sometimes like to dye their hair different colors. Sometimes they dye it red or yellow or green or lots of colors, and sometimes blue. So the youngster who came late had blue hair. I went right up to him, but not too close cause you never can tell if he ain’t the one. Then I says real soft without looking at him, “The giraffes walk like they’re rock ‘n’ roll dancing.” And the young man answers without looking at me, “Giraffes united can never be defeated.” So I could tell he was the one, and he left his bread bag by the fence and walked away without another word.

  Guess you’d like to know how I knew I was sposed to go find the youngster with the blue hair, right? Thing is that the clues, that is, the instructions, came coded in the communiqués about the Broken Pocket, in the greeting to Don Manolo Vázquez Montalbán, and in the communiqué about the giraffes. El Sup had already told me that the communiqués would let me know where I was sposed to pick up or drop messag
es. Sometimes they would be live drops and other times they would be dead drops. So with the codes I could tell when and where I was going to get a message. I guess I’ll let you figger out how the codes went. That last one was easy. The difficult ones were in the communiqué about the video you must read. I had to go to this real uppity place called Santa Fe that’s real fancy and look behind a latrine, I mean behind the toilet, in a place that sells tamales.

  There was a message there from El Sup and I found out I had to pick up another message from El Sup on the 8th and deliver my report on the 15th at that same drop, meaning the latrine in the tamale place. Then there was the time with the communiqué about the speed of dreams, when I had to go to the Oceania metro station and find a shoe shop with a number 69 on the door and they gave me a pair of shoes that didn’t really fit too good on my left foot, but I looked inside and saw that there was a piece of paper with a message and that’s why I couldn’t get my foot in, so I read the message. With the Miguel Enríquez communiqué, I wound up right in the middle of the Monster, on a street called República de Chile, looking for a sign that said For Sale, and I stuck my report behind it for somebody else to pick up, so this was one of those good dead drops.

  All in all I had a real hard time in the beginning, but then later I began to understand city ways and I kinda liked it. El Sup had told me that if you want to know the Monster, you have to walk it. Walk through it, he told me, and you’ll see that the city is built on the people who can save it. So that’s what I did, I walked all around that city. And I went everywhere, and everywhere I went I ran into people like us Zapatistas, which means people who are screwed, which means people willing to fight, which means people who don’t give up.

  Okay, like I was saying, the youngster with the blue hair left a bread bag by the gate where the giraffes are, at the circus called Circo Unión. Then I moved in close and grabbed the bread bag that didn’t have no bread, but instead a message from El Sup addressed to me and saying only, Find Mamá Piedra.

  The Barcelona—La Realidad—Monster Axis

  Stay alert, keep moving, trust no one.

  That was the general recommendation I gave Elías before he left. With that, I was repeating what Che Guevara said in his book Revolutionary War Passages; it was also what each one of us was told when we had to move alone. I spoke to him about Mexico City too, or rather, what I remembered about the capital. And I’m not talking about the generous and caring city that welcomed us for the Indigenous Pride Demonstration. No, I spoke to him about the city I left more than twenty years ago, when I came to the mountains. Though according to what I heard later, that city has nothing to do with the one there now.

  Elías’s visit had been in the works since Pepe Carvalho brought me some papers written personally by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. The papers came with a brief note from his son:

  Subcomandante,

  When looking through my father’s papers shortly after his death, I found these notes which I imagine might make some sense to you.

  My regards,

  Daniel

  One of the papers contained a sort of diagram, all interconnected with arrows, lines, circles, and squares, that read as follows:

  •BARCELONA. Hotel Princesa Sofía. Plaza Pio XII, No. 4, Financial Center, Diagonal Avenue; María Cristina metro station. Morales.

  •DIPLOMATIC POUCH MEXICO-MADRID-MEXICO. Check flights 1994-2000. Morales.

  •DISAPPEARED—DIRTY WAR. Morales. The White Brigade.

  •ACTEAL. General Renán Castillo. Morales.

  •MONTES AZULES. Morales.

  • ZEDILLO-CARABIAS-TELLO. Morales.

  •BIODIVERSITY—TRANSNATIONALS. Morales. Checks. Accessories?

  • EL YUNQUE. Morales. Reactivation of the paramilitary.

  •MURO. Re-edited?

  Another piece of paper contained a series of questions:

  1. What was Morales doing in the suite at the Princesa Sofía? Was he staying there alone? What was he doing in the Financial Center? He went in at 21:00 and left at 22:00. What about the María Cristina metro station? He entered at 22:30 and left at 23:00. The hotel.

  2. What was Morales up to with those continuous trips between Mexico and Madrid? Never twice in a row on the same airline. No apparent pattern.

  3. What was Morales’s role in the Dirty War in Mexico? White Brigade? What about Acteal?

  4. What was Morales doing with the Montes Azules materials he carted around in his briefcase?

  5. Why was Morales at that dinner with former president Ernesto Zedillo, Julia Carabias, and Carlos Tello Díaz?

  6. Who or what was the final destination of the briefcases full of euros that Morales carried from the Financial Center to the María Cristina metro station in Barcelona?

  7. What was Morales’s specific role in the new structure of EL YUNQUE in Mexico?

  The third document wasn’t really a document, just a napkin with the following:

  Barcelona exhausted. Answers … in Mexico? In Chiapas? A Barcelona—La Realidad—Mexico City axis?

  Was Manuel Vázquez Montalbán making an investigation or a puzzle? Whatever the case, we had to investigate the pieces. I went to talk to the committee. We thought it over for a while and decided to send Elías into the Monster. After Elías left, I sent other commissions out to gather information on the Montes Azules and I asked Deep Throat to send me anything he had on the current antics of Zedillo and Carabias. I wrote a letter to Alvaro Delgado, a journalist with Proceso magazine and an expert researcher on El Yunque and its reactivation under the Fox administration, begging him for information on that ultrarightist group. I wrote one other letter, addressed to the Good Governance Board of Los Altos, asking them to contact the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center to gather information on the Acteal massacre. As I was compiling information, Elías would be learning how to get around in Mexico City.

  When I deduced from Elías’s reports that he was ready, I instructed him to find Doña Rosario Ibarra de Piedra. She would know where to find Belascoarán, and perhaps she and the ladies of Eureka might also know something about this Morales and his role in the Dirty War.

  A Little Card

  Me, I knew right off that Mamá Piedra was the one we call Doña Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, who works with a group of ladies we call the Doñas, and they’re organized to locate men and women who were disappeared by the bad government of the PRI, and the other bad governments, which are the PAN and the PRD, cause they just clam up and never admit where they disappeared those people, that is, fighters for justice for the poor, which means that they were on the side of the people who are screwed, which is all of us. The group is called Eureka, which means that they get real happy when they find a disappeared person and reappear them, and then they have a party that they call Eureka.

  So I found Doña Rosario. It took awhile cause she wasn’t in the Monster. She was in Monterrey. So when she turned up, I went to see her at her little house.

  She got real happy when she saw me and she kept hugging me and calling me my son and all, and she kept hitting me, but not like she was mad; it was just the way she was, cause she’s from the north and that’s kind of how northerners behave. And she asked me about El Sup and how he was and if he was sick and about the cold up there, which is where I am now, because up there for the city people means right here for us, and out here is up there for the city folk. You can see why people keep saying that I got my head a little mixed up.

  So the thing is, I couldn’t hardly say nothing, what with all the hugging and questions from Mamá Piedra, as we called her. When she finally got through with her hugging and things, she asked me if I was hungry and I said I was, a bit, and while she was cooking cuche with mole, or something like that, I explained to her just what it was that I was doing in the Monster and that I was on an Investigation Commission. When I mentioned this Morales, she sorta got real still and quiet, like she was thinking. Then she said the food was ready and we ate and it was real delicious,
the cuche with mole, and really hot and spicy.

  When we were having our coffee, Doña Piedra said that the simple truth was she couldn’t remember no Morales, but that she was going to ask the other Doñas and visit the museum home of Dr. Margil, which is also in Monterrey. I said that would be good. And then I asked her if she didn’t know where abouts I could find a guy called Belascoarán who did the same kind of work I do, only he does it in the city, and El Sup told me she might know about this man and might even know where he lives or where he works. She took another sip of her coffee and answered me.

  “He works downtown somewhere. He’s got an office on Bucareli Street. I’ll get you the exact address right now.”

  And she began searching in a stack of papers on her table and mumbling something about a little card, and I know I have it here somewhere, so where the heck did I put it … and it took awhile, but she finally found it and gave it to me, that is, she gave me this little card that said:

  Héctor Belascoarán Shayne

  Independent Detective

  Donato Guerra, near the corner of Bucareli

  Mexico, D.F.

  Fragments of the Conversation between El Sup and the One They Call Deep Throat (intercepted by an EP-3 spy plane and transmitted to one of the SIGNIT satellites of the Echelon Network and relayed to the Regional Security Operations Center at Medina Annex, U.S.A., coordinates 98°W, 29°N, NAVSECGRU and AIA, under code name “morai”):

  “Zedillo and Carabias have business interests in Montes Azules. The NGO run by Carabias is just a front for poaching animal species, which they distribute all over the world through an international black market. Their trade in macaws, tapirs, monkeys, and other animals I can’t remember right now is just the first step. They’re paving the way for the entry of giant corporations that are going after the wood, the uranium, and the water. Water is going to be as important in this century as oil was in the past. I’m talking about money, a great deal of money. The Fox administration knows all about it, but they’re not saying anything. Morales is a kind of sales agent and wandering bag man … Well, that’s what he’s doing now—in the past, he did a lot of other things.”