The Uncomfortable Dead

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “What about Tello?”

  “A pissant climber; that’s his whole life. I imagine you already know this, but the book he is alleged to have written about the Zapatista uprising was actually written by the intelligence services of the Federal Army on direct orders from Zedillo. They had asked Pérez Gay, I don’t know if it was Rafael or José María, but he refused on ethical grounds. Then Aguilar Camín recommended one of the courtesans, Carlos Tello Díaz. This Morales individual gathered some facts and invented the rest to weave stories about the guerrilla organizations he had fought against or infiltrated in the ’60s. It seems Morales was under the orders of Nazar Haro, but he also had his own initiatives. When Nazar and Salomón Tanús tortured prisoners, it was Morales who recorded what the victims said, true or false. He wrote his reports in duplicate. One he turned in, and the other he kept. When Nazar fell out of grace with his superiors, Morales vanished, but with a copy, his own copy, of the secret and unedited files of the Federal Department of Security. The real files, not the ones that were released publicly. Morales vanished for a while and just turned up recently. I’m no expert in the Dirty War, but I can tell you that the people who were in it then are still active now; they were sort of recycled. The government of change is really the government of recycled evil. Where it used to say PRI, it now says PAN. Bottom line: Morales wrote, Tello signed. That appears to be the extent of the relations between those two. Zedillo was so pleased with the book that he brought Tello into his inner circle. While Juan Ramón de la Fuente adopted Nilda Patricia, Zedillo started a, shall we say intimate, relationship with Julia Carabias. Tello’s previous tourist trips into the Lacandona rain forest coincided with the appearances of Zedillo and Carabias in the region. In their evening get-togethers, Tello Díaz shared more than just dinner with those two. Tello might appear to be something like a bridge between Zedillo-Carabias and the people behind the Nexos and Letras Libres magazines, but it seems he wasn’t. I think he’s just playing the gofer for Zedillo, who’s got the same sense of humor he displayed during his administration. I don’t think Krauze or Aguilar Camín would invest a cent in Tello, not because they have anything against making a buck, but because they see Tello as no more than a disposable napkin—although Tello might turn out to be the theoretician behind the ecological-Disneyland transformation of the Lacandona rain forest. There you have it: pillaging of natural wealth behind the façade of ecological protection, and all of that with intellectual backing … the perfect deal.”

  “Could it be that this Morales had something to do with Acteal?”

  “I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “Did you find out anything about El Yunque?”

  “That information is still in the inner sanctum. I haven’t been able to get any of that.”

  “Does Morales have any contacts with the Fox cabinet?”

  “Looks like it, but I’m not certain. If he does, they are so insulated that it’s difficult to pin them down. There was one meeting where his name was mentioned; everyone looked at Creel and the subject was quickly changed. I think the one who mentioned him was Martín Huerta. You might be interested to know that this Morales has a permanent pass into the American embassy. According to my information, he’s been seen dining with Ambassador Tony Garza in a very exclusive restaurant.”

  “Do you have a picture of this Morales?”

  “No, just general descriptions. Between fifty and sixty years old, about my size. Supposedly he looks like a prosperous banker. He likes to dress well and he enjoys fine cuisine.”

  “Okay. I think I’ve got enough. Did you have any difficulty getting here?”

  “No, none. I thought I should come and tell you personally because I didn’t like the idea of sending this in writing. What I can tell you is to take care of yourselves. They’re practically hysterical with the coming elections.”

  “The gringos?”

  “No, the gringos don’t worry about these things because whoever wins will be eating out of their hands anyway. I’m talking about the domestic turds, what you call the political class. There’s a lot of money up for grabs. It will be lucrative for anyone who can get his hands in the privatization of the power companies and the oil. Since it’s obvious that this won’t happen during the current administration, the smart money is betting on the next one. They’re going to throw so much shit at each other … They’re attacking López Obrador, but not because they’re afraid of him or because he’s a populist or anything like that. In his four years in office, all he’s done is suck up to his superiors. They’re after his ass because he’s in the lead for the top prize. Today he’s the target; tomorrow it’ll be whoever takes the lead. López is getting hit in waves: First they throw the PGR at him, then Interior, then the Supreme Court of Justice, and then all of them together. Cabinet meetings are not used to plan policy, but to check the polls and plan the next strike. When the dust settles, Martita will be the only one left standing. In the PRI, they’re pounding each other with everything, but the press doesn’t notice it because of all the other scandals. Carlos was responsible for the Enrique Salinas thing. It’s a clear message to Raúl and it says, Shut up. In the PRD, they’re trying to figure out if it’s better to sell López Obrador down the river or to get on the bandwagon. In the auction, Cuauhtémoc is the highest bidder for Numero Uno’s head. In the end, only the worst will survive: Martita for the PAN, Madrazo for the PRI, and Cárdenas for the PRD.”

  “I asked you for information, not for a political analysis.”

  “Yes, I know, but these pricks are turning the country into a syphilitic old whore. Begging the old whore’s pardon, but it really gets me mad. Listen. Tell the comrades in the committee to get me out of there. Being a prick might be contagious.”

  “Wasn’t it you who used to say that some birds can cross a swamp without getting soiled?”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t a swamp, it’s a goddamn sewer, and it’s about to blow up. We’re going to be swimming in shit.”

  “Come on now, you’re sounding like the European Union.”

  “Hey, don’t even joke about that. You know what side I’m on.”

  “So don’t sweat it. What’s missing is missing …”

  Another Card

  To tell the truth, I was kinda jealous of that Belascoarán and his card, so I went on down to the print shop in Santo Domingo, down there by the Zócalo, and I had me some of them cards printed up that say … that say … Gimme a minute, I got one here in my backpack. Yeah, here it is, take a look:

  Elías Contreras

  Investigation Commission, EZLN

  Mountains of S.E. Mexico, near Guatemala

  Chiapas, Mexico

  Now my problem is that I have to get some more cards made up for Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Chol, and Tojolabal. That’ll be the next time I go into the Monster. Okay, so I couldn’t just go and find that Belascoarán feller, cause first I had to figger out whether or not I was even sposed to find him yet. So I wrote my report and I sent it to El Sup asking if I should go talk to Belascoarán and all, or if I should wait. Then I got the answer:

  Do not find the soda man yet. Wait for some papers I will be sending you. When you have them, then go find him. Do not meet with him at any of his regular places. Meet someplace you already checked out before. Make sure he hasn’t got a tail on him. If he’s clean, make contact. From there on, it’s up to you. If you think he’s okay, then give him the papers and tell him we want to work together. If it looks to you like something’s not right, then just tell him I send my regards and that’s that. It’s up to you to judge. Report when it’s done. That’s all. Regards.

  From the mountains of Southeast Mexico,

  Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos

  December 2004

  CHAPTER 6

  ONCE YOU’VE GIVEN UP YOUR SOUL …

  Héctor Belascoarán Shayne was in love with a ghost woman. A woman who had disappeared. This was nothing new to him. Not that he kept falling in love w
ith ghosts, but that women with whom he had been in love, on and off, for more or less long periods of time, would suddenly disappear.

  According to the mysterious agenda of the girl with the ponytail, who wasn’t a girl anymore and who hadn’t worn a ponytail in the longest time and instead had a lock covering one eye (Veronica Lake—style), a few marvelous and elegant white hairs, a doctoral degree in philosophy, and the ability to kick back tequila caballitos… well, according to her own weird perspective, she was nowhere. And she hadn’t even taken the trouble to say goodbye, which she never did anyway. She had simply vanished. She failed to turn up for work, the university was on break, she didn’t answer her telephone, even the answering machine had gone deaf and dumb, and the door to her apartment was becoming a wasteland of junk mail, electricity bills, bank statements, and issues of La Jornada and Proceso.

  Sometimes Héctor would accept these disappearances as a kind of mandatory recess from a relationship that couldn’t quite be defined: intermittent but regular lovers? Unstable couple with sidereal escapes? Maori-style marriage? The lovers from A Man and a Woman, but twenty-five years later? A de facto couple with an ex post facto pacto?

  But this time she should not have disappeared like that, because without knowing it she had left Héctor sad, depressed, feeling like he had been gypped by a pirate pesero… and a little bit older than usual. When had he fallen so crazy in love with this woman that he was ready to slit his wrists for her? This was the source of his sudden anxieties, those absolutely adolescent pangs that pursued him, those cinematographic appearances of her face when he was shaving, eating tacos, or listening to Mahler.

  Mahler? What the hell did this ex girl with the former ponytail have to do with that marvelous bedeviled Jew of the dawn of the twentieth century? He had discovered Mahler many years after the girl with the ponytail. She was there before. And what linked the girl and the composer was not the adagietto of the 5th Symphony (it was months later that he found out an adagietto is just a wilting adagio that never perks up, and that an adagio is a piece played slowly), the one that most people remember in connection with the movie Death in Venice based on the work by Thomas Mann and much improved by Visconti. That rise and fall of passions cresting and crashing like waves in the sea, and there isn’t a sonovabitch alive who can recover them. No, it was not that Mahler that he associated with the ponytailed girl and her appearances and disappearances. Curiously enough, it was instead this tremendous piece of music he had discovered when the Mexico City Symphony had asked him to help recover a truckload of instruments. One afternoon, when they were halfway through their rehearsal, in the middle of that empty theater populated solely by a handful of musicians and a universe of sound, Héctor had caught himself drenched in tears because of music that was seizing and overwhelming him. That was why he ended up spending more time in the rehearsals than in the actual investigation. It was Mahler’s 8th. It was a paean to the greatness of humanity that Héctor interpreted on a very personal level amid the miseries of Mexico City. It was this Mahler that he associated with the girl. And let no one ask Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, the solitary detective in the craziest and most upside-down city on the planet, why. Let no one ask, because he would not be able to answer.

  So, with a feminine and Mahlerian yearning, he sat on the side of the bed, the one he had not made in a fortnight and needed a change of linen, and played Mahler’s 8th on his stereo, instructing the machine to play it ad nauseam. And while it was playing, he reviewed his conversation with Fuang Chu Martínez and chain-smoked till the room was a cloud of haze.

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

  Héctor did not feel obliged to explain why he was working as a detective in Mexico City, so he stared right back at this Chinaman who was refusing to take him seriously. Showdown: Chinese man against one-eyed man.

  It was the latter who won, perhaps because all of his energy was concentrated into a single eye.

  “Why are you asking about Jesús María Alvarado?”

  “Because the person who hired me has been receiving voice messages from him on his answering machine.”

  The Chinese guy took another long look at Héctor before answering. “Alvarado is dead. I wasn’t at his funeral because I was in prison, but he’s dead. He died in ’71, a shitload of years ago … So you say you’re an independent cop? Which department of the Ministry of the Interior?”

  Belascoarán lit a cigarette. You were still allowed to smoke in funeral parlors. For some strange reason, they had been spared from the wave of anti-tobacco Puritanism rolling down from the United Stated and sweeping across middle-class Mexico.

  How could he explain the last thirty years to Fuang Chu Martínez? How could he explain his tortuous relations with the authorities? He decided to follow the method of using his scars as signposts, the way of the scar, his Cheyenne friends called it.

  “You see this eye I’m missing? It was blown out by a former member of the Judicial Police … now deceased. You know why I got one leg longer than the other? From a shotgun blast fired by the same people who organized the halcones. I spent seven months and three days in a prison cell in Tabasco for proving an election fraud was committed by the PRI some years ago. I was beaten by a mob led by a priest in Tlaxcala who was trying to exorcize the Pokémons, and it was me who gathered the evidence to put Luisreta, the banker, in prison.”

  “You’ve got my attention,” the Chinese man said.

  “I’m a decent sort, some say. But about Alvarado—the only thing I know is that you two were cellmates after ’68.”

  “So why would anyone want to know more?”

  Héctor handed him a copy of the five messages the dead man had left on Monteverde’s machine.

  “Shit! How about that Alvarado? Sonovabitch coming back from the dead!” Fuang Chu said with a smile out of the silent movies, only half of his face moving.

  “Do you know who killed him?”

  “I’ll be damned. Sending messages from the beyond—that was some character, Alvarado was,” the Chinaman answered, avoiding an answer, “and he brought Morales with him.”

  “What do you know about Morales?” Héctor snapped, swearing to himself that it would be the last question he was going to ask Fuang Chu. He would just let him say what he felt like saying.

  “Me, I got this,” Fuang Chu said, pulling a wrinkled piece of thermal fax paper from his pocket.

  Héctor took the paper and read aloud:

  He’s not a dog, but he bites;

  He’s not Speedy Gonzales, but in pictures he’s a blur;

  He’s not an ostrich, but he has quills;

  He’s not poison, but he kills;

  Like me, he returns from the dead.

  Who is it?

  Your old cellmate,

  Jesús María Alvarado

  It’s a shitty riddle, Héctor thought, but even so he added it to the other materials, without Fuang Chu trying to stop him.

  “Do you have an answering machine?”

  “No,” the Chinaman said, “I’m premodern: no TV, no gas …”

  “That’s why he sent a fax.”

  “But he didn’t send it to me, he sent it to the public baths where I work, in Guadalajara.”

  Héctor conjured up Alec Guinness again and prayed to le Carré for it to work. It did. The Chinese man took a long breath and began his story.

  “You know how traitors develop? People don’t rot overnight. They don’t go to bed one night as guerrilla fighters and wake up agents of the Ministry of the Interior. They just grow weak. They betray out of exhaustion, out of boredom, out of inertia. It’s as if they take so much abuse that the flesh they’re made of begins to get flaccid and mushy; as if the spaces in their muscle tissue get clogged with tiny particles of shit and the remnants of old tumors. And the entire process requires ongoing justification, a growing mountain of self-pity, a dense cloud of self-deception.

 
; “Do you know what Morales did on his twenty-fifth birthday? He turned his ex-wife in to the political police and she wound up getting tortured in the cellars of their facilities facing the Monument to the Revolution. Can you imagine what Morales did to justify that treason? He said he was saving her from certain death. Do you know what Morales dreamed about? He dreamed about his ex-wife walking barefoot on the sands of a beach in Veracruz. In the meantime, she was being raped three times and getting half her teeth kicked in.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because in a two-by-three-meter cell with two other prisoners, we can hear each other’s dreams, even without words. Not even our fucking dreams are private. Because Alvarado had big cojones, and since we’d heard all about Morales and knew he was a traitor, a plant put there to see what they could get out of us, Alvarado decided the piece of shit didn’t exist and never even acknowledged his presence. And me, since I’m Chinese, I went into the most Oriental of all silences and convinced myself as well that Morales did not exist. There we were, three of us in a cell acting as if we were only two. If Morales spoke, we wouldn’t answer; if he handed us a spoon, we let it drop; if we bumped into him, we didn’t apologize, we just walked through him.”

  Héctor had kept silent, but Fuang Chu was getting lost in the past.

  “Was Morales his real name?”

  “Go figure. That was the name he brought with him and that’s the one we know.”

  “Did he have a first name or only Morales?”

  “Morales, only Morales. He left a lot sooner than Alvarado, and a whole lot sooner than me. I got out three months after Jesús María.”

  “Do you believe that Morales killed Jesús María Alvarado?”

  “I do! Don’t ask me why, but I do. Jesús left prison anxious to rebuild the network he had set up when they arrested him near the end of ’68, and he was ready for anything. He said that the time for words was over; that demonstrations only served to provide the Army with target practice. He was very ready to act. Five days after he got out, they killed him. A bullet in the back of his head.”