“Why would one of them want to talk to me?”
“Those of us who are working on the history of the Dirty War keep receiving notes, real siren songs: Could we spare some time? Could we talk some things over? Now that it’s all coming out, they want to talk, but without talking. They want to tell their part of the affair, they want to invent their own stories. They spent all that time in the shadows; they never appeared in the photos; they never got any medals. They believe it was the others who sent them up the creek; it was the others who gave the orders. If there’s anything they hate worse than the leftists, it’s the presidents whose orders they followed. They’re all schizos and psychopaths who want to be somebody else and they all have different stories to tell.”
“Of course,” Héctor said, “nobody wants to be the Wicked Witch of the West. So, are you going to accept the conditions set by one of these creeps?”
“For now, I need to. If later you find that you have to send him up, we’ll talk. He’ll be waiting for you in half an hour at La Habana Café. It’s twenty meters from your office. He’s about sixty years old and he’ll be carrying a copy of the Constitution so you can recognize him.”
“The Constitution? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“That’s what he said.”
For years, La Habana Café was a kind of no-man’s land. Back in the ’60s, the journalists of the Communist Party could coexist there with officials of the nearby Ministry of the Interior, and if you listened carefully you might get the impression that these were people who actually knew something. Then the waitresses grew old, or their coffee got too cold, or it just tasted different. In any case, Héctor never liked coffee, and these days, if you listened carefully you might hear strains of narco-ranchera music, or, if you cared to look closely, you might glimpse some retired narco-rancheros. Nostalgia didn’t quite mend the imperfections.
The man sitting there alone with a copy of the Political Constitution of the United States of Mexico looked to Belascoarán like something out of a boring Disney fairy tale remake (like where the Wicked Witch of the West is actually a deep-cover good guy). This character didn’t really have a face. He was something like what people call elderly, with the nondescript features they love to have on polls or in commercials for the National Lottery. He had a medium-dark complexion with an ordinary white-streaked mustache, black hair that wasn’t too black, and a rat-gray suit. The only thing that stood out on this gentleman was his tie, a brilliant garnet red that matched the garnet ring on his left ring finger … the right was for shooting and it wouldn’t do to interfere with his trigger finger.
Héctor tried to hide his limp, as he always did when meeting the enemy. He tried to take on a fierce look in his eye, the good one, and he hoped the patch would make it even fiercer. He sat down across from the guy and waited.
Suddenly, the character just started in: “There was a war. There was a bunch of sleaze-bag assholes who thought they were the granddaddies of Che Guevara and went around shooting Mexican Army soldiers in the back of the head. What were we supposed to do, just let them?”
No, they didn’t just let them. They persecuted them and their families; they murdered them, they tortured them, and they killed their children; they raped their women before their eyes; they hid the bodies … and they lied to the mothers of the disappeared.
Héctor had known a few of them: the torturers and the tortured. He had heard stories that had kept him awake for months. And worse, he heard about all these things ten years after they happened. Because he had been living on Mars; he had been too busy being a happy little engineer while it was all happening.
“What is it with them? Don’t they understand that we are the law?”
Héctor did understand, of course, but what he did not understand was this scumbag’s use of the third-person they, the them, the we, and the you.
“You can’t let them give you their bullshit stories now. We all know that if they’d won, they would’ve lined us up in front of a firing squad against the gates of Chapultepec and shot us. Up against the wall, just like in Cuba when Fidel took over.”
“Did you know Jesús María Alvarado?”
“I heard about him, but I never met him,” Mr. Anonymous said, fiddling with his ring.
“Did you ever meet a certain Morales?”
“A dumb jerk. He was one of them … but he punked out. We never trusted the little prick … and we were right not to. The asshole ended up stealing things. He stole from us, no less.” The guy tried to produce a sly smile, but it didn’t work. “Just imagine, he stole some papers from us to try and cover his ass, but he didn’t have the balls—he never even attempted to pull off his faggoty little blackmail.”
“When did he quit your team?”
“He wasn’t in my team.”
“You talk about them and us; who are you talking about when you say us?”
Anonymous let that one go and took a long sip from his coffee.
“When did you see him last?”
“Back around ’83. I don’t know if they gave him a job in the provinces. Maybe he just pulled a disappearing act, you know, Going for cigarettes, back in a second … and punked out again … Once a punk, always a punk.”
“You know anything about his private life? A wife? A day job? An address? Any friends?”
“He was a loner. What do you expect? He had fucked over his wife and friends. For a job, he sold furniture.” Anon let out an inappropriate little chuckle. “Yeah, he sold old furniture … and he lived in the Santa María district. But what makes this dumb Morales prick so interesting to you?”
Now it was Héctor’s turn to clam up. He signaled to a passing waitress to bring him one of the sodas she had on her tray. He and Anonymous just looked at each other.
“Morales wasn’t his name; it was just a cover. What was his real name? Do you know it?”
“I know everything,” Mr. Anon said, smiling.
Héctor did not return the smile. He lit a cigarette.
“His name was Juvencio. I remember because it was the stupidest name in the whole fucking world. And I can’t remember his last name right now, but I’ll give you a lead, a pisser of a lead. One time somebody told him that his last name was the same as one of Juárez’s ministers.”
“Which Juárez?”
“Now you’re going to tell me you leftists don’t know who Juárez was … Don Benito, asshole.”
“Oh, that one.”
Conjuring up the specter of the liberal president Benito Juárez must have triggered some gut reaction in Anonymous, because he started off again without any further prompting.
“You know what? Instead of busting our balls with all those papers they keep digging up, what they should do is build us a monument, a fucking monument on the Alameda, one with—”
Suddenly he just stopped. He didn’t even finish his sentence. He got up from his chair and … the conversation was over. He reached his hand out to the detective. Héctor ignored it and picked up the tab for the soda and coffee. He wasn’t going to let this trash pay for his soda.
“It’s paid,” Anonymous said, as he walked slowly toward the door.
With a little bit of luck, the terrible midday traffic on Bucareli Street would be a vehicle of divine justice and some microbus would run him over. But there is no God in heaven, because Anonymous moved in his tired shuffle right into the traffic, simply sidestepping the cars and ignoring the honks from the ones he forced to brake.
Héctor had a couple of threads to follow, but first he had to get rid of the rotten aftertaste from the interview with Anonymous, so he left La Habana Café and took a taxi to Chapultepec.
A chill breeze was sweeping the terraces of Chapultepec Castle. When the sun doesn’t come out in the morning in Mexico City, it’s a bad omen. The locals, who are like lizards but won’t admit it, start to get nervous and all the talk shifts to polar air masses and other things that may happen in Gothenburg or in Siberia, but never around here.
As the group moved away, Héctor stayed awhile, pacing around Juárez’s carriage. He remembered a book he had read about how this carriage carried the itinerant republic, with the French armies chasing it, over a distance of 4,000 kilometers. A carriage holding the authority of the republic protected by a guard of barefoot soldiers because the president did not have the money to pay for their boots, or even his own salary. From Mexico City, Juárez headed to a place called Paso del Norte in the vicinity of Chihuahua, which is now understandably known as Juárez City. As long as the carriage kept rolling on sovereign territory, the republic was alive. It was a beautiful story.
Héctor approached the carriage slowly, watching for some lapse in the guard’s attention that would allow him to touch one of the wheels, then stretched his arm over the red protection cord. The wheel was shiny, as if a great many hands had rubbed it over the years.
He decided to eat at home. He went by the Michoacán market to pick up some chistorras to have with his Teacher’s, along with some avocados, potatoes, tomatoes, and fruit from the greengrocer. He thought about it for a moment and decided to buy a Chinese melon, a little beat up but perfectly ripe.
As he walked through his door, he noticed the light on his answering machine blinking. He took his time, put the potatoes on to boil, sliced the tomatoes so they could breathe, sprinkled salt on the slices, and only then opened a Coke and took his position in the easy chair of destiny. He pushed the button.
Don Héctor, this is Jesús María Alvarado. The idea just popped into my head. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I said to myself, Why not call the detective? It reminds me of the joke about the guy who goes to the doctor one Saturday and tells the doctor that he’s very worried because he has three balls. The doctor gives him a thorough scrotum examination and comes to the conclusion that there is no problem, and he tells the man that he has nothing to worry about because he only has two balls. Then the man says that he wasn’t really worried. It was just that being Saturday and all, he didn’t have anything better to do, so he decided to drop by and have the doctor fondle his balls.
Well, that’s it. That, and to let you know that years ago I went after Morales, but he found me first and stuck a gun to the back of my neck and killed me, and that—
The voice cut off; his anwering-machine tape only recorded short messages.
Once he had cleaned the melon stains off his shirt, Héctor called Fritz and took a walk to La Torre de Lulio, a used bookstore a few blocks from his home on Nuevo León Street, and he got a deal on the fifteen-volume complete works, letters, speeches, notes, and essays of Benito Juárez. Finding the books was no problem, haggling the price down was no problem, but lugging the three plastic grocery bags back home almost killed him. Then, as if he had returned to his worst days as a college student, he began skimming through every single one of the horrible orange volumes from top to bottom, trying to find the names of all of Juárez’s ministers. It was dark outside when he finally abandoned his quest, absolutely certain that he had overlooked something, that there must have been some change of minister here or there in one of the cabinets.
He dialed the number of Alvarado’s son, the line that no one ever answered, and listened to the standard number of rings.
Suddenly he remembered something, a poem he had jotted down. Whose was it? Where had he stashed it? In a book! Which book? What was he reading when he had copied the poem? He was reading Robin Hood. He searched the bookcases along the hall till he found the tattered Thor edition that was shedding its yellow binding. He shook the book and the piece of paper glided to the floor.
The poem by the forgotten author read:
If I disappear from the present
And
Live in the past
It is certain
That one day I will be
Real
The two little girls raced around his easy chair. They must have thought that a house without furniture was really cool, because they cavorted happily through the hallways and frolicked into the living room, almost crashing into the chair as they sped around it. These well-mannered children had taken off their shoes and left them in a tidy bundle next to the door.
“What do you need my nieces for? I hope you realize what it took. You just call and ask me to bring them, and here they are, but their mother was something else. You can’t just go around saying, Lend me your daughters and I’ll bring then right back as soon as I see this detective,” Fritz said.
“Listen to this, girls, I want you to hear something.”
They must have been around six, no more than seven, but very disciplined, so they slammed on their brakes and turned all their attention to the nice man with one eye.
“I want you to close your eyes and listen to a voice, then tell me who it belongs to.”
The girls nodded and closed their eyes. Belascoarán pushed PLAY on the answering machine.
“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 …”
“It’s Barney, it’s Barney, and he said a bad word, he said rat-shitl” one of the girls screamed, as the other one smirked and opened her eyes wide.
CHAPTER 11
THE TIME OF NOBODY
The trick is to get them to look the other way.
That’s what the city comrade told me, the one called Alakazam cause he’s a magician, which means he does magic. The thing is, I had to go say goodbye cause I already had to come back here. So we were there eating some of those tacos they call de suadero. Well, we weren’t eating, he was eating, cause the other day I ate one of those tacos and spent the next day in the latrine, which is the outhouse. So this Alakazam was explaining how he does his magic, those things he makes appear and disappear and where he reads people’s minds and all, and I wasn’t understanding very much, but what he said was that you had to get people to look at one hand and then do the switch with the other. So I asked if it was like politicians do when they get people to busy themselves with some tomfoolery while on the other side they’re doing their underhanded stuff. And Alakazam said that it was something like that, except that he was a magician who entertained people and politicians were pricks who fucked people; that’s what he said, now. And then Alakazam began to explain that, like, for example, there are two agendas, and I asked what was an agenda, and he said … Hold on a minute, I got it right here … it’s just that my pad is about as mixed up as my head … Here it is, right after perspective, it says that an agenda is a kind of pad where you jot down what you intend to do, and how, and when, and who you intend to do it with, and it also means the program for the day and what’s more important and all that. So he was explaining that there’s two agendas, the agenda of the powerful and the agenda of the screwed. So for them it’s the agenda of the powerful that’s the most important, cause they want to keep getting more powerful and richer. On the other hand, the agenda of the screwed is what’s most important for us, which is the fight for liberation. And then Alakazam explained that the powerful—that is, the rich and the bad government leaders—are trying to convince everyone that their agenda, the agenda of the powerful, is the only good one for everybody, even for the screwed. So they are constantly telling us about the concerns of the powerful and convincing us that it’s all that’s important and it’s what we have to be concerned about. So you see, they have us looking one way while they’re stealing everything and selling the country down the river, and our natural resources, like our water, oil, electric power, and even our people. And when we finall
y see what’s going on, then it’ll be too late, cause there won’t be anything left when we get through looking the other way. And the worse thing is not that we’re looking off where there’s nothing to see, no sir, the worse thing is that they get us to think that their concerns, the concerns of the rich, are our concerns, and we take them like our own. So then, according to modern politics, Alakazam says, Democracy is for the majority, the screwed, to be all concerned over the well-being of the minority, the powerful. And the other thing is for all of us that are screwed to look the other way while they steal our lands, our jobs, our memories, our dignity. And on top of it all, the powerful want us to applaud them and give them our votes. And that’s when Alakazam said how there’s black magic, which is the one you do with demons, and there’s white magic, which is the one that Alakazam and other magicians do, and then there’s dirty magic, which is the one politicians do.
So Alakazam told me all this before we said goodbye. I had already said goodbye to all the other city friends before that. Well, not exactly all of them, cause the fact is, I didn’t come back alone. See, I brought Magdalena back with me, cause she, or he, said they both wanted to get to see the Zapatista territories and at the same time help me find the Bad and the Evil. So I explained that what they gave me for the trip didn’t amount to enough for the both of us, and then he/she said that it didn’t matter none cause there was the money she had saved for the operation. So I got to thinking that it was a good thing for Magdalena to come along and see the struggle of the Zapatista communities for herself. So here we are: We did part of the trip with the Muciño feller and the rest by bus.
Elías’s Return Trip
My name doesn’t matter now, but they call me Muciño. Yeah, like the soccer player. But that Muciño was known as El Centavo Muciño and I think he played for Cruz Azul. Besides, I don’t play soccer at all; I’m a cop. Yes, I am, with the Federal Preventive Police. No, don’t get excited, there’s good and there’s bad everywhere, you know. There’s even good and bad in the police, although I think that if we put it to a vote, we good ones would lose by a landslide. In any case, I was able to take Elías part of the way. I took him from Mexico City to Puebla, and I would have taken him all the way to Chiapas, except that I had to turn in the patrol car. It would have been good to see the comrades, but I was only able to go as far as Puebla. No, he was not alone. He had a lady with him, or not exactly a lady, but a person dressed like a lady. Elías said her name was Magdalena. Well, what happened was that I ran into Elías, who had come into Mexico City to see the doctor and was now returning, so I offered to give him a lift, even if it was only part of the way. Truth is, I wanted to chat with him. Elías is a very fine person and even if he does talk very funny, he’s a great listener and he always comes up with good advice. The Zapatistas? Well, I had heard about them during the uprising. I was just a kid then. Later there was the March of the Indigenous Peoples in 2001, and since I was assigned to protect the Zapatista delegation, I got to hear the speeches by the comandantes in all the rallies. After that, a group of comrades in the police started talking a little about everything and we saw how what they propose is a good thing—the Zapatistas, I mean. No, we don’t do anything, we just read the things they say and talk about it amongst ourselves. Yes, I did go to Chiapas once, to one of the Good Governance Board meetings. No, I didn’t go as a spy. I went in civilian clothes, but I told the people at the door that I was a policeman. Yes, they did welcome me, and the board members explained all the things they were doing. That was when I met Elías. No, he doesn’t belong to the Good Governance Board and he’s not one of the authorities. No, he was there because he had been sent on an errand. I was waiting for a car to take me back to the city and we got to talking. I understood everything he said and I liked what he had to say. Yeah, you know, some of the communiqués sent by El Sup are very complicated and I don’t always understand what he’s saying, because he uses very cultural words. Elías, now, he talks so we can understand him, a lot like us. When we parted company, I told him that if he ever got to Mexico City and there was anything I could do for him, he should look me up, and what do you know, the day came and he did. No, he hardly talked along the way, but he listened with a lot of attention. Me? Well, I told him about what happened in San Juan Ixtayopan, in Tláhuac. Yes, when they lynched two comrades from the police force and left a third one half dead. Yes, it was in all the papers. Well, so he would tell El Sup about it. Who knows, he might even write a communiqué about it. You see, what happened is not what they say happened. What you got is that there were these people from a TV channel and they were doing one of those things they call a reality show or something like that.
The Uncomfortable Dead Page 18