The Uncomfortable Dead

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “How do you tie that to Morales?”

  “I can’t. I just know it! I remember the look on his face.”

  Héctor thought that over. It was as good an argument as any.

  “I went off to Guadalajara, but it was a long time before I stopped checking the shadows and walking with my back to the wall—just to keep from making it too easy for them.”

  “Did you ever see or hear of Morales again?”

  “Never! But when the fax arrived, I remembered something I think I read in a Henry Miller book about how once you’ve given up your soul, the rest follows with absolute certainty.”

  It was a good picture of Morales …

  “And if Alvarado is back for vengeance, he has every right to it, and so do we, and I hope he fucks him,” the Chinaman said, turning back into the funeral parlor and putting an end to the conversation.

  Héctor had vague recollections of Henry Miller. The Tropics were anything but tropical; they were women’s underwear in the air, flying ejaculations, and the puritanical capacity for astonishment of a nineteen-year-old engineering student, the spawn of a Mexican middle class capable of producing an Irish folk singer and a Basque sailor exiled in Mexico City. When had the dead man met Morales … or Henry Miller? Why drag him out of the past? Héctor didn’t think that people like Henry Miller, or the Marquis de Sade for that matter, were subversive at all … just whoring pains in the ass. But in the deepest recesses of his heart, there where he never discussed literature with anyone for fear that his own loves and hates might be deemed sinful, politically incorrect, or simply unconventional, Héctor probably thought that Henry Miller was just some gringo who must have one of his balls much bigger than the other. And yet, the part about giving up your soul was familiar. Amazingly familiar for an atheist who didn’t believe in souls, except as in heels and soles. Images from the narratives of Henry Miller began to overlap with those he conjured of the ordeal suffered by Morales’s ex-wife, and it made him sick. He gave an involuntary gesture of disgust and felt a chill run up his spine. With that chill fresh in his mind, he fell asleep huddled in a corner of his bed, as if he wanted to leave room for the ghosts and the dead.

  Fritz walked a few yards ahead of Héctor and crossed into what used to be cellblock 7, using his authorization to take a look, just a little peek, at each cell. There was nothing to see. Boxes and papers. All traces had disappeared. The historical archives had devoured the historical memory, the simple memory.

  “Is there any way to dig up the prison records of 1968?” Héctor asked.

  “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.”

  H
éctor 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

  They 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 wit
h 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.