The Uncomfortable Dead

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Gilberto Gómez Letras, Plumber

  Carlos Vargas, Upholsterer

  Javier Villareal, Engineer Whatever

  So I stuck my ear against the door. I heard somebody singing that old one about A bed of stones to lie on/a stony mattress to feel/If ever some woman loves me/she’ll have to love me for real, and then he screwed it up on the ay, ay, ay part. So I knocked on the door And I left this message for Belascoarán, I left it with a feller called Carlos Vargas who tears the stuffing out of chairs all day. Okay, so I put the message and my card in this envelope and it said, I’ll meet you at Villa’s tomb. On the Epiphany. At 23:00 hours, Southeastern Combat Front time. So that’s what I did, cause at the Monument to the Revolution there’s always a shitload of people walking around with their families and eating garnachas and all them fried things city people like so much and I already tried them and, yeah, they’re tasty enough. Then, what with so many people milling around and eating garnachas and all, nobody was going to notice just this single one-eyed gimp. So on January 6, I bought the newspaper called La Jornada and I saw that there was no communiqué, and that’s when I went looking for Andrés and Marta to see if they knew something about it, and that’s when I started to get a little bit really worried, cause if no communiqué came out, then I wouldn’t know where to go for the papers that I was sposed to take to this Belascoarán, and that would mean I would be really screwing up if I got to see him without the papers. But then Andrés and Marta got to pecking on this computer thing they got, and at about 4 in the afternoon, Fox time, he says that in Germany they already received the communiqué. So I asked where that Germany was and Marta showed me on a map, and I saw how Germany was really far away. And then I got to thinking whether El Sup had gone to Germany. But Andrés and Marta explained that the communiqué gets sent out from the Zapatista Information Center and it goes to the whole world, and they probably already have it in La Jornada, but it wouldn’t get published until the next day. Well, right there I thought I was in deep shit, but then Andrés and Marta got to pecking again on that computer thing, and all at once they said, “We got it.” And then they did a little more pecking and it got printed, the communiqué did. So I got a whole lot happier cause I had the communiqué, but I still had to go about figgering where I had to pick up the papers. My job then was to read the communiqué very carefully, cause it was in there that El Sup would tell me where to go to find a message.

  I read through the communiqué word by word and I understood that I had to go to the UNAM library (that was over at the university, right in the Monster) and I had to find a book by a lady named Foppa and then the exact place where the poem is, and that’s where the message from El Sup was going to be. Then I took a metro to get to that university campus real quick, the UC they call it. But the thing is, the metro doesn’t take me right where I want to go, it just leaves me on the edge of that campus, and that’s when I wound up walking a stretch. Now, even though it was 6 p.m., Fox time, there was young guys and young girls all over the place with books and knapsacks, and I figgered that this campus must be a real happy place.

  So I finally got to a building they call “Philosophy and Letters,” where there’s lots of people milling around and guys selling CD movies real cheap. But that wasn’t where the library was, according to this young girl with very dark skin who was asking about a movie called Alice in the Subway or something like that, and they didn’t have it, the movie, but the dark-skinned girl did manage to tell me where the library was, which was right nearby, and I went in and asked if they had books by Alaide Foppa and they told me how they had one called Poetry. And so I looked in there and found a poem called “Misfortune” that’s a little long and all, about a lady who’s really in love and her husband dies and she’s all sad cause she loved him so much.

  So that poem starts and when I got, I found the part that El Sup put in the communiqué about the deceased Digna and Pável, and right there on that page there was a little key and a note that only said, North Bus Depot. So I could tell that I had to go to that there place and pick up the papers I needed for my job as Investigation Commission. And I took off real fast cause it was already 7 in the evening, Fox time, that is, 20:00 hours Southeastern Combat Front time. By that time, I was a little bit worried cause there was only three hours before I had to see the Belascoarán feller, so I took the metro again with a bunch of people and I got to the North Bus Depot about 21:30 Southeastern Combat Front time, which was 8:30 Fox time. Well, soon’s I got there I started wondering exactly where I was sposed to start looking for the papers, and just then I remembered those steel boxes over where the Chinaman works and I figgered that the little key must be to open one of them. Well, I finally found them but I noticed that there was a lot and that they was all the same, so I thought, how am I gonna find the right one, cause if I start looking over them too much they’re going to think I’m fixing to rob something, so I sat on one of those benches and started rereading the communiqué all over again, and that’s when I noticed that the first poem had seven lines to it. I figgered I just had to find the box with the seven on it, and I found it and opened it, and sure enough, there was a envelope all bunched up cause it had so much stuff in it.

  Well, that’s when I got really glad and rushed to the metro station called Hidalgo to go meet Belascoarán, and what do you know, I did make it on time for the meeting with him. So by the end of it all, I asked myself, was that a piece of cake or what?

  A Hat

  I got myself a hat, but not one of those sombreros we use up in our part of the country. Nope, this was a city hat, one where the visor is soft all the way around and it’s made out of real nice material, warm like. El Sup it was who gave it to me, and he told me his daddy had given it to him a bunch of years ago, when he was still city folk—I mean, when El Sup was city folk. It’s going to come in handy, El Sup said, and sure enough it did, cause it’s cold in the Monster. So me and El Sup’s hat went to the Monument to the Revolution. There was a lot of people, families, that is, all in the fair and having their pictures taken with the three Magi Kings and all. With so much noise and hubbub going on, I followed Belascoarán awhile till he stopped to light a cigarette in front of that hoity-toity hotel called the Meliá. Now, I could tell right off he was checking his back to see if he had a tail on him, but I knew he didn’t.

  So this Belascoarán gets stuck in the crowd that was all balled up in front of the ISSSTE house, and I decided to cut around and wait for him in front of Pancho Villa’s tomb. When he got there, I looked straight into his bum eye and said, “That Pancho Villa had real cojones, that’s why they deceased him,” and I lit one of my cigarettes, the ones we call Scorpions.

  Then he took out one of his own and I could see it was one of those called Delicados, and he lit it and said, “It wasn’t his cojones got him killed; they killed him because he sided with those who get screwed.”

  Then we hung around awhile, just smoking and looking at each other. I figgered this Belascoarán was on the up and up, so I give him my card saying, Elías Contreras, Investigation Commission.

  He stuck out his hand and gave me his card saying, Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, Independent Detective.

  Then he started going on about how the deceased Pancho Villa wasn’t really buried where they said he was, but that the aforementioned … that’s when I found out that aforementioned is the word you say when you already mentioned somebody and you don’t want to have to come back and say the name all over again, so in this case (or thing), the person is Pancho Villa, so when I say the aforementioned, what I’m saying is actually Pancho Villa, but not all the time, it depends on when you use it—in any case, it’s all mixed up, but since it’s a new word I learned, I’m using it all I can, but not too much cause I already have my head all mixed up anyway. So he went on about how the aforementioned—that is, Pancho Villa—wasn’t in that tomb, cause there was this lady where he was sposed to be and he was someplace else, least that was what Belascoarán was saying.

  A
fter a while of talking, I said, “I’m out looking for the Bad and the Evil, so there you have it, now you tell me if you want in,” and gave him the pack of papers El Sup sent me.

  Then Belascoarán looked at the papers real quick and flicked his cigarette and said real clear, “I’m in.”

  I was glad about that, cause he coulda said he didn’t want in and then I woulda made the whole trip to the Monster for nothing. We decided to meet again the next day, after he looked at the papers real slow like, so we could agree how we was going to work in coordination, which means together, the both of us, him and me, then we said goodbye, but before leaving, he asked me if I needed anything, and I said, “Yeah, I do. I don’t know where I can get some pozol here in the Monster—in Mexico City, I mean—and I also need to find a grape flavor soda called Chaparritas El Naranjo.”

  “Let me check it out,” he said, “and I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

  So we left and the noise went on. Back in Magdalena’s room I wrote a small report to El Sup, and a couple days later he answered:

  Copy meeting with soda man. See him again to coordinate investigation. Over here everything normal. We’re having some laughs with the crap Fox said on his visit over here. In case you haven’t heard about it in the news, he’s repeating the same nonsense we heard from Hernán Cortéz, Agustín de Iturbide, Antonio López de Santa Anna, Maximilian of Hapsburg, the gringos Polk, Taylor, Pershing, and Eisenhower, and Porfirio Díaz, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Salinas de Gortari, and Ernesto Zedillo: He said that we were long gone. Later, when I finish laughing, I’ll send you some more information I received. Regards and Happy New Year.

  From the mountains of Southeast Mexico,

  Insurgente Subcomandante Marcos

  January 2005

  CHAPTER 8

  A NIGHT WITH MORALES

  Three things would stick in Héctor Belascoarán Shayne’s mind from his encounter with the Zapatista investigator, Elías Contreras: the super pandemonium of the monument to a lost revolution, now populated by hawkers and vendors; the expression on envoy Elías Contreras’s face when he began to talk about the comparative virtues of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata; and the “Morales file” sent to him by the Zapatistas. All three things took root in his soul.

  The Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City was born like some monstrosity to the greater glory of the Porfirio Díaz administration; the Revolution of 1910 left it half-built, and that’s the way it stayed until the mid-’30s, when it was recycled as a grandiloquent mausoleum for the obsolete armed struggle. Somewhere under its columns lie the remains of Venustiano Carranza, Plutarco Elías Calles, Lázaro Cárdenas, and, allegedly, Pancho Villa: personalities who often fought on opposing sides and lay in the same plot thanks only to the pragmatic magic employed by the PRI to turn history into consumable material and a legitimizer of its own power.

  They’ve somehow forgotten that Villa fought against Carranza, that Calles participated in the assassination of both, and that Cárdenas ordered the expulsion of Calles from Mexico. Regardless, there they are, all together. The people of Mexico City are convinced it’s because of these uncomfortable graves that the city is afflicted by so many killer earthquakes.

  At this time of year, the monument was crawling with carousels, taco vendors, bolita bookies, metal-horse races, handicraft hawkers, and hundreds of Magi Kings, complete with stalls and photographers, representing the only monarchy Mexican believers in the republic will allow. The night was alive with music—cumbias, crap from the north, and the chuca-chuca of the crumbiest tropics—played at hundreds of decibels and seasoned by the aroma of candied apples and cotton candy.

  The center of the monument had not been overrun by the revelers of the Epiphany, and under the shadows Belascoarán made his way toward the person with the gray hat at the foot of the Pancho Villa Mausoleum with whom he was supposed to, curiously enough, identify himself by means of a business card.

  “Did you know that Pancho Villa is not buried where they say he is?” Belascoarán asked, pointing to the ultra-official tomb.

  “So who did they put in place of the aforementioned?” Elías Contreras asked.

  “Well, it’s somewhat complicated, but funny. You see, in November of 1976, President Echeverría decided to stick another feather in his cap and ordered that the remains of Villa be taken from Parral and brought for burial with military honors under this corner of the monument. But somebody had already rifled through Villa’s tomb in 1926 to steal the head, which never turned up, and one of the widows—”

  “You mean he had more’n one?”

  “Officially, three. In reality, about twenty-five. So one of the widows, wanting to prevent the further disappearance of pieces of the general, took the rest of him out of the tomb and moved them about 120 meters further down in Parral Cemetery. Then, as luck would have it, this widow, who was making trips to the United States for cancer treatment, died, and the locals figured they might as well bury her in Villa’s old grave. That’s why, when they opened the grave in ’76, under the direct supervision of an anthropologist, somebody told the Army that the deceased had the head and pelvic curve of a woman. The soldiers in charge told him to fuck off, cause they had a mission to fulfill and nobody gave a rat’s ass if he had a head, and the woman’s pelvis be damned. So in an open caisson, escorted by cadets of the Military Academy in full dress formals, they brought the lady and buried her with high military honors, and every year the honors are repeated, complete with bugles and trumpets. Most people figure she deserves it for going and dying in Parral.”

  “How bout Villa?”

  “No! Villa gave them the slip … once again.”

  The amazing character with the antediluvian hat perched on his stiff hair just stood and stared at Belascoarán.

  “You probably believe that Emiliano Zapata had bigger balls than Pancho Villa, right?” Belascoarán said, trying to break the ice with the Zapatista comrade.

  Elías Contreras not only thought it, he knew it, and he couldn’t imagine how anyone with half a brain could even doubt it. So he just stared at Belascoarán, asking himself what kind of nauyaca had bitten him and liquefied his brain.

  He had to keep this fellow from saying that Villa was better than Zapata, or else the whole relationship would go to pot, cause El Sup had told him that if this Belascoarán was even a little bit chickenshit, he should forget about him. So he just handed him the envelope.

  Héctor took the package and read the capital block letters on the cover: MORALES. There were several folders, a number of files on a certain Morales. The surprise almost bowled Belascoarán over. He didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Next, the bin Laden—Juancho thing would be real as well. Could the Zapatistas be after Morales too?

  “Do you believe in coincidence?”

  “That’s the only thing I don’t believe in.”

  “Do you believe in chance?”

  “Only when there ain’t none.”

  The Zapatista Elías Contreras then said very seriously, “I’m looking for the Bad and the Evil. Now you decide if you come in on this or what.”

  “Of course I’m in,” said Belascoarán, without giving it a second thought.

  Now, Héctor Belascoarán Shayne did not believe in plots; he had experienced too many to wind up believing in them. He was a Mexican, subject to the Mexican definition of paranoid: a guy who believes that he’s being followed by a couple of guys who are following him. But he didn’t have a simplistic attitude either. His brother, Carlos, the family’s eternal militant, used to say that Héctor, the existential Martian, was one of those guys who paradoxically believe that the social being is the vehicle of the social conscience, that Ali Baba ran around with the forty thieves so much that he became one and joined the PRI. Héctor believed that if you were a chair for too long you’d ultimately enjoy having somebody’s ass on you all the time. But he did not believe in the innate evil of politicians; he believed that if you become one for too long you end up tur
ning into a prick, and that having power too long creates an obsession with power, and when your political power is over you’re left with money, which is another kind of power, and that’s why there are so many open drawers to stick your hand into, so many abuses; and to keep the country the way they wanted it, Mexico’s leaders in recent years had established a kind of supreme law of the land (one that was never made public and was kept in the supreme closet of the supreme leader), which dictated things like: The only principle of survival is the principle of authority. When your principles are in the gutter, the best thing to be is a rat. The Revolution will do us justice. Finders keepers, losers weepers. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. The law of the budget is to take your fill; if you don’t steal it, someone else will. Héctor was convinced that in earlier times Mexico had been essentially unfair, ruled by abuse of power, arbitrariness, and violence against the underprivileged; and more recently by mediocrity, phony religiosity, spite, and bad taste.

  But when he glanced over the Morales file, he thought his mouth would never close again, and his cigarette almost burned his fingers. This was too much; this was the Ken and Barbie album of power abuse. It justified the very idea that the system had bribed the devil.

  The package contained the documents of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, a mysterious photograph, a typed page entitled The Earthquake Deal, the White Brigade’s black book, a few communiqués from Zapatista headquarters, an excerpt of a conversation between a certain Marcos and somebody known as Deep Throat, and a short note from the subcomandante:

  Greetings to you from all of us here, and from me personally. A few weeks ago we received a collection of notes by a writer named Manuel Vázquez Montalbán that his son found among his papers after his death, and which contained very interesting information about a character he calls “Morales.” We do not know the outcome of the investigation in Barcelona that produced these notes. We do not know whether they were notes for a future novel, or if they are something much more alarming, or both. Since they look like some sort of detective puzzle, it occurred to me that you might be interested in helping us figure it out. I don’t think I need to warn you that if this character exists, he is extremely dangerous. If you agree to collaborate in the investigation, Comrade Elías will be your permanent liaison with us. If you do not, we urge you to be extremely discreet.