The Uncomfortable Dead (22 page)

The office had a little sign to one side of the entrance:
Degollado Furniture.
There was no lock on the door, so Héctor just turned the knob. There was a single room with a desk at the end on a dirty green rug, and Morales, sitting on an executive chair with a very high back, his hands on the curiously bare desktop, just staring at him.

“You’re the one who’s been following me. I knew it.”

“No. I’m a friend of the one who’s been following you.”

Héctor looked around for another chair to sit on, but there was nothing. Just a refrigerator, an old umbrella stand, and two horrendous Velasco reproductions—his
Valley of Mexico
and a landscape from the Porfirio Díaz period—hanging on the wall.

Morales wore very thick glasses and his nearsighted gaze followed Belascoarán’s eye as it explored the room.

“Piece of shit of an office, isn’t it?”

Héctor nodded.

“Years ago, the elegant thing was to have an office in the Latinoamericana Tower. There were the big-time lawyers, the money lenders, the dentists who made gold fillings, agents for German machinery companies.”

“That was a long time ago,” Héctor said, resting on his good leg. He could walk for hours on end, but standing around really hurt a lot. In about half an hour, the pain in his lower back would be murder.

“Would you like a soda?” Morales asked, pointing to the broken-down 5’10” Westinghouse. Héctor opened the refrigerator and found it almost empty. There was a single Coke and half a dozen Sol beers.

“I never left. I stuck it out in this stinking city. And every once in a while, someone would stop and stare at me, kind of recognizing me, but nothing would happen. They were all afraid, so they turned around and went the other way. Sometimes it was me who chickened out; I’d rush into the nearest metro station and spend the next hour with my ass dripping sweat, looking over my shoulder”

Morales was wearing a blue suit that needed cleaning and a red tie on a light blue shirt. He had no one to iron for him and he had never learned to do it himself. Héctor opened the soda with the end of a stapler he found on top of the refrigerator and took a long swig. It tasted awful. Was Morales trying to poison him? He spit it out on the table. Morales, shocked by Héctor’s behavior, jumped back and reached into a drawer. He would have brought out his old gun if Belascoarán had not whipped around and stomped the drawer shut, crushing his hand. Over the din of Morales’s unintelligible obscenities, Héctor couldn’t help feeling a little proud of the ballet step that had swept him to the drawer in time to kick it shut with his bad leg. Not bad for a one-eyed gimp. Though now he was going to have a sore back for the rest of the day. He pulled out his own gun and showed it to this character, who was trying simultaneously to dry his soda-spattered shirt and rub life back into his mangled hand.

“What did you put in the Coca-Cola?” Héctor figured it was about a dozen Valiums. Morales didn’t look like the arsenic type. Maybe a hundred grams of rat poison. Did they still sell that shit?

“What the holy fucking hell do you think I put in it?”

“It tasted like shit,” Héctor said, a bit apologetic for the commotion he had started.

“It must have been stale.”

Héctor motioned toward the huge window in the corner of the room. Now that was a great window. And forty stories down, there was the city. Morales moved over to the window and Belascoarán, wasting no time, flopped into his chair. Not bad at all.

“You are Morales,” Héctor said into open space, not even acknowledging the man holding a hand attached to a wrist that was rapidly turning purple. He took Morales’s pistol from the drawer and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “You killed Jesús María Alvarado.”

“No way. I was just tailing him. I swear by Our Lady of Guadalupe. I was merely the finger-man. It was Ramírez who killed him.”

“No! You were there and you killed him!”

“I swear I didn’t. I was there, and I fingered him, but I wasn’t even carrying a gun that day. I said,
Look, there’s Alvarado,
and that’s all. I fingered him, but fingers don’t kill. I didn’t even know they were out to kill him.”

“You were a torturer in the ’70s.”

“Is that what they told you? Is that what those pricks said?”

“You ratted out your own wife, and because of you they almost killed her.”

“We had already separated. We were no longer together and she was suing me over some paintings and jewelry belonging to her grandmother, which she claimed I stole from her.”

“You were in the White Brigade.”

“Yeah, I was into that, but I wasn’t giving the orders. The orders were coming from the real pricks. Whenever an operation got interesting, they’d send me out for sodas.”

Morales began to sob. He pulled off his glasses and threw them on the floor. Then he wept two huge tears.

“I’m just a poor jerk. I’m nothing. Do you know how I made a little money? The shittiest way you can imagine: by stealing refrigerators and stoves from the homes of the people we kidnapped and later disappeared. It was easy; we were going to kill them anyway. What the fuck would you want a stove for if you were going to be tortured for three months, and if you didn’t die from the torture you were going to spend years in the cooler? What? Was I supposed to leave them for the supers? Or the landlords? Because none of those people ever dared return to a house we had
taken.
There was a smell of death in them. They were
burned.
So here I am, selling ranges and fucking Formica dining room tables and easy chairs with cigarette burns on the arms. That’s how I made money. But not much.”

He was a poor slob, a minor scumbag. Héctor had no doubt that in the torture sessions, he was the pinch hitter, or that he stole records, or that every once in a while he did pull the trigger or push the dagger, or pour the bottle of Tehuacán water up a prisoner’s nose to suffocate him, or that he occasionally kicked a naked and bleeding detainee lying on a floor.

What was he supposed to do with this character? Who was he supposed to turn him over to? In Mexico?

“Let’s go down to the street,” Héctor blurted out.

The hallway was empty. Héctor pointed to the stairs: forty-one floors. Not a bad punishment at all—punishment for his bad leg.

“So where are you taking me?” Morales asked with half a smile. “Where are we going?”

“You are going to fuck your mother!” Belascoarán barked, with all the rage evoked by the memory of a certain Jesús María Alvarado—whom he had never met, but whose ghost kept talking to him on the phone—as he stuck his foot in front of Morales’s, clipping him with his shoulder and watching the man tumble head over heels, down and down, probably all forty-one stories of the Latinoamericana Tower, right out into San Juan de Letrán, also known as Lázaro Cárdenas, and known to some as the Central Axis. Down to the very end. Down into the bowels of hell.

THE END

EPILOGUE

O
n his way home, Héctor Belascoarán thought he saw two or three Moraleses. One of them was getting out of a car in front of a hotel on Reforma Avenue. He tried to get rid of this paranoid syndrome, to shake it loose like you do with a bad thought accompanied by chills, but he only managed to make it worse.

He walked by a woman who was crying silently, without a fuss, and trying to cover her face with a bluish Kleenex.

He talked about soccer with a lottery vendor.

He ran across a couple of peasants who were lost and guided them to the bus stop by the Chapultepec metro station. The man was carrying a saxophone and the woman a bag of stale bread.

The city had a peaceful ambience today, but Héctor was unable to tune in to that peace. Moraleses kept turning up in the most unlikely places: in the middle of the stolen kiss of two adolescents parting at the trolley stop, in the doorway of a jewelry shop that was closing its curtains …

Was he going crazy? Or was he more lucid and sharper than ever? Was he living with ghosts from the past because he was lonelier than a dog?

The thought of the dog reminded him that he had to call Monteverde and tell him the end of the story. He also had to bring the dog a present. Tobías had liked the
chorizo.
A pound
of Toluca
sausage? The poor dog would die, but what a way to go! He decided that old Tobías could get along fine on half a pound
of Toluca
sausage; that would leave the other half a pound for his own breakfast, with a few scrambled eggs.

He took off his shoes and nudged them into the middle of the room, tapping them with his big toe. The room was as empty as always. He had never been able to buy furniture, nor had he ever even thought about it. He had his rug, and in the corner of the room a floor lamp, his easy chair where he went to think, and the telephone perched beside it on top of his collection of Mexico City telephone books, past and present.

He went to the refrigerator to get himself a drink and found an unopened three-liter bottle of Lulu’s Red Currant Soda. What a windfall! When had he bought it? When had he gotten the idea of having a feast of red currant soda, cigarettes, and Mahler? Out on the street, the teenage yuppies had invaded the neighborhood to dine in the local restaurants. They made big noises, little noises, laughing noises, brake-screeching noises, and horn-blowing noises. He wondered what Elías Contreras might be doing at that moment over in Chiapas. Over there, everything was probably a lot clearer, the air more transparent, enemies more defined, things simpler, traps more evident, potholes easier to evade. He poked his head out the window and gazed over the rooftops, over many, many streets, in the direction of the invisible Ajusco, toward the pale lights of Chapultepec Castle, beyond the jungle of television antennas.

The thought occurred to him to send Elías Contreras a telegram, but if he sent something like,
My Morales, fucked,
it would get censored.

Suddenly his telephone rang. Héctor stared at it with mistrust. It was one of those old telephones with the cradle on a slim neck, the kind you could hold between your ring finger and your middle finger without being double-jointed. He’d inherited it from somebody who had stashed it away when they changed over to the ugly modern ones. He let it ring a few more times. Finally, the answering machine kicked in.

Belascoarán, this is Jesús María Alvarado. Well, what do you know? If you were intending to catch Morales and snatch Juancho from him, you’re too late. He already sold Juancho to the gringos, who took him back to Burbank. Juancho would have been very well-off if he had stayed here in Mexico; he could have kept on making commercials for Gansitos Marinela on Channel 2:
Osama bin Laden says that the best chocolate-covered tarts are …
I’m just telling you so that the next time you see that guy reading a communiqué on
CNN,
you can check out the mark under his right eye. It’s a little scar, and the thing is…

Héctor let the voice ramble on until the minute and a half of recording time was up. Then he moved over to the telephone, picked up the receiver, and dialed a number at random. A pre-recorded voice picked up, speaking for International Financial Investors:

All our representatives are currently busy with other customers and will take your call in the order it was received. If you want to leave a message, press 1; if you need personal attention, press 2; if you want to be transferred to our main menu, press
3—

Héctor pressed 1.

“Listen, this is Jesús María Alvarado, and I’m calling to let you know that if you have a certain Morales on your staff, be very careful because the guy is a delinquent, an expert in fiscal frauds designed to screw the overwhelming majority of the people for the sake of a minority. Well, that’s more or less what you do already, but he does it illegally. Bottom line: Morales is bad news.”

He hung up feeling immensely satisfied, like a kid with a new ball, like a teenager who’s discovered his father’s secret
Playboy
collection. He picked up the receiver again and dialed another number at random.

“You have reached the home of Susana Quirós,”
a youthful voice said.
“If you wish to send a fax, start now; if you wish to leave a message, wait for the beep
…”

“Listen, this is Jesús María Alvarado and I’ve called to tell you…” began Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, independent detective.

THE [SECOND] END

Mexico City
Late winter, 2005

AN INTERVIEW WITH PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II

BY
J
UAN
F
ELIPE
H
ERRERA

August 2009. Interview translated by Cristián Flores García.

W
ord velocity, rebel story, and a kaleidoscopic scene. This is what hit me as I interviewed Paco Ignacio Taibo II through a tangled-up recording machine in Riverside, California, connected to Spain. A few questions about the novel became life questions—how do we
speak of
and
write about
and
act for
liberation? Since 1970, as a poet, I have been concerned with the lives of Indigenous America, within and beyond national demarcations.
The Uncomfortable Dead
compresses, for me, four decades of investigation, creation, and spoken word performance—that is, translating the experience of the oppressed, and empowering language (in partnership) to this end, presenting such acts in realms of unpredictable change. In my case, I have addressed these issues as a Chicano from Mexico in El Norte. With Taibo and Subcomandante Marcos, most exhilarating is noticing that here the rebel voices catapult from the “south” toward to El Norte, from Mexico to the U.S. A circle is galvanized and begins a new journey with the twenty-first-century reader. ¡Bravo, Paco! ¡Bravissimo, Marcos!

Juan Felipe Herrera:
How did this unique collaboration with Subcomandante Marcos begin?

Paco Ignacio Taibo II:
A man I had never seen before visited me at my house one day and said, “I bring a letter from Subcomandante Marcos.” And I replied, “Well, give it to me.” He sat in front of me while I read the letter. In it, Marcos asked if I was interested in writing a novel by four hands with him. It was an old project that he had conceived with Manolo Vázquez Montalbán, to be worked out by six hands. However, Manolo had just died that year and he had been the one who was supposed to explain the story to me. Now it was all left up in the air and Marcos wanted to know if I was interested. In case I said yes, there was a second letter. So then I started to think. Counted to ten, and when I got to nine I said, “Let’s do it.” The timing was somewhat complicated for me because I was at about the halfway point in the writing process of my biography of Pancho Villa, but the idea was very attractive, you see. So then we get to the second letter, in which there was a proposal for Chapter One and not much more than that, without a clear idea, really, of where the novel was going and what Marcos wanted. So I told him, “All right, we need some connections. First, we need to change the title,” which I didn’t like. Then I said, “Also, we’re going to write a novel, not a political essay.”

JFH:
So it all started with the concept of an essay?

PIT:
No, no, no, no. But I said this in my reply to his letter, you see. I was suggesting a change of title. The idea was to start publishing the novel as soon as possible in a newspaper, in weekly installments. And there were also some other topics that we had to discuss and agree upon. Marcos proposed that the proceeds from this book go to an NGO within Zapatista territory. And I told him, “Yes, but it has to be an NGO independent from the Zapatistas, right?” So as to make it clear that we were giving our money to an organization of neutral humanitarian character. So we were good, we agreed, and from that very moment the madness began and we started working the following day. I then talked to the editor at the Mexican daily newspaper
La Jornada.
The editor there said, “All right, let’s go. Let’s do it.” The idea was
for La Jornada
to publish the full book one chapter at a time. And then I wrote Chapter Two and a race against time started, because I had to send Marcos the chapter and he had to read it before moving on. He had to return Chapter Three, which I would have to read to be able to write Chapter Four, then return it and so on. We only had a cushion of nine days between each chapter.

JFH:
Nine days?

PIT:
Yes. And our communication mechanisms were like those in Chinese spy novels, you see. I remember that in one of the chapters—I think it was number five—Marcos was slow with his writing because it turned out to be longer than he expected. I was getting very anxious. So I sent him a message through our complicated messaging system. I stated my concern: where is Chapter Five so that I can write Chapter Six? I then received a cryptic message:
The ass has left La Realidad but it’s raining.
So I said, “What’s this?” I thought, Is it a coded message? What the fuck is this? But no, it was literal. It was raining and the donkey carrying the chapter had left La Realidad to head as quickly as possible to a place where the chapter could be sent back to me.

We never kept in touch while writing the book; no direct, personal contact. Instead, we used this weird communication web. And so in keeping with our understanding, he had to develop his character in the first three chapters. We had agreed that I would use Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, a character in nine of my published novels, so I didn’t really need to develop my protagonist. I could then concentrate on building the plot in the first three chapters.

JFH:
And he could then come in and interweave his character?

PIT:
And he could then weave his character into the plot, yes. That way the famous Elías, Marcos’s protagonist, would become part of the plot. Within that frame, we worked together along the twelve weeks that the experiment lasted.

JFH:
Twelve weeks?

PIT:
Yes, twelve weeks. Very entertaining. Some very strange incidents occurred, like one day I was at the Guadalajara International Book Fair and all of a sudden someone next to me handed me a cell phone and said, “It’s for you, Paco.” I took the phone and heard a voice saying, “Listen, in Chapter Three, should such and such happen?” It was hilarious. So I replied, “Okay, all right, that sounds good.” I returned the cell phone to the owner and the fellow disappeared.

JFH:
What’s your perspective on the political situation in Chiapas?

PIT:
The problems there continue to be unresolved. The government has not carried out the agreements of San Andrés, you see, and the fundamental demand for the autonomy of indigenous communities has not been dealt with. And there are continuous provocations. The Zapatistas alternate between periods of mass mobilization and public debate and periods of silence. I suppose they are in a period of silence right now, but I can only suppose because my life takes place in Mexico City, which is a jungle of it own, though it’s a jungle of TV antennas.

JFH:
Why choose to tie the story to the political and social upheaval of 1968? I know it was a great historic moment, but why not another great moment?

PIT:
Because it is the moment in which the transformation of the Mexican society really begins, and at the same time the rotten tracks are revealed, the rotten tracks embedded in the system in a latent but clear way. It is also the time when a new political police organization that acts with total impunity is built.

JFH:
That situation continues and you two vent it all out. It still remains basically untold.

PIT:
What happened in ’68 has been told. What happened here … our intent was to create a continuity and tell how there were some dead people who were uncomfortable because their stories from the past were still beating strong in the present.

JFH:
I was thinking about the two protagonists in the novel, Héctor and Elías. What would Héctor ask you if he were here?

PIT:
Héctor ask me? No, no, my friend. That is why I write the novel, so that Héctor doesn’t ask me questions.

JFH:
In the book, you touch on the concept of borders and territories.

PIT:
My intent in the beginning of the novel—in the chapters that I was writing—was to create a counterpoint to the world of the Zapatista rebellion and to give the reader an overall impression of Mexican globalization, starting from the complexities of Mexico City. That, to me, is an important issue to make clear in the novel.

JFH:
And where do the official documents that appear in the novel come from? It is also a book about documents.

PIT:
Yes, it is—it’s about documents both real and fabricated.

JFH:
But which ones are real and which ones are fabricated?

PIT:
The reader decides.

JFH:
And there are satellite transmissions …

PIT:
The reader must decide.

JFH:
I enjoyed it very much. Personally, as a poet, this book threw me off; it allowed me to fly over these new territories, which became new inspirations to continue writing. And you touch on the concept of multiple worlds.

PIT:
Well, it’s not a new theme for me; I have touched on themes such as this many times in my novels. I have tried to show the complexity of Mexico City, the city that has more universities than New York, more abortions than London, and more movie houses than Paris.

JFH:
Do you feel that Mexico exists here in the United States?

PIT:
One of the many Mexicos can be found in the United States. I’ve discovered it in unusual places. Like, for example, on the corner of 46th Street and 6th Avenue in New York City, I ran into twenty-five Poblanos standing there one day. And so I asked them, “What the fuck are you all doing here, my friends?” And they told me, “Well, it’s because … we were just here …” talking gibberish and acting foolish. And then I figured it out—they were there on that corner to flirt and pick up the Korean girls getting off work. So I think very soon there will be a Mexican-Korean community in New York.

JFH:
Let’s discuss one of the more mysterious entities in the novel, El Yunque.

PIT:
There has been plenty of discussion about El Yunque. It’s a subject that was covered heavily in the Mexican media—the emergence of a secret extreme right wing inside the Mexican right wing. In the novel, it’s a lateral theme, not a central one; the darker characters are deeply linked to the repressive system of the state over the last thirty years.

JFH:
How was the novel received when it was first published in Mexico?

PIT:
When it was serialized in
La Jornada,
their server collapsed. It was published in both their print and online editions, and because of the high demand, their website crashed.

JFH:
The voices in your work, they really come alive …

PIT:
Well, thank you very much. You are very kind. Some stories must be told. Within all these stories, there are some very dark historic episodes that are usually hidden from society. Only in a novel can one speak about them in depth. Journalistic reports stay on the surface, so the novel is the only outlet that can, diagonally, profoundly penetrate the truth of any society. That is why we use the novel as an instrument.

THE PUNCH CARD AND THE HOURGLASS

An Interview with Subcomondante Marcos
by Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Pombo

This interview was first published in
Revista Cambio,
Bogotá, Colombia, March 26, 2001.

Gabriel García Márquez:
Seven years after the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) declared that one day it would enter Mexico City in triumph, you are in the capital and the Zócalo is completely full. What did you feel when you climbed the dais and saw that spectacle?

Subcomandante Marcos:
In keeping with the Zapatista tradition of anticlimax, the worst place to see a demonstration in the Zócalo is from the platform. The sun was fierce, there was a lot of smog, we all had a headache, and got very worried as we counted the people passing out in front of us. I commented to my comrade, Commander Tacho, that we should get on with it, or by the time we began to speak no one would be left in the square. We couldn’t see all the way across it. The distance we had to keep from the crowd for security reasons was also an emotional one, and we didn’t find out what had happened in the Zócalo until we read the newspaper reports and saw the photos the next day. But yes, in our view and in the assessment of others, we do think that the meeting was the culmination of a phase, that our words on that day were appropriate and our message the right one, that we disconcerted those who expected us to seize the Palace or call for general insurrection. But also those who thought that we would be merely poetic or lyrical. I think an effective balance was struck and that, one way or another, on March 11 the EZLN could be heard speaking in the Zócalo, not so much about 2001, but about something that is yet to be completed: a conviction that the definitive defeat of racism will be turned into a state policy, an educational policy, into a feeling shared by the whole of Mexican society. As if this has already been settled, yet it still remains a short way off. As we soldiers say, the battle has been won, but a few skirmishes still remain to be fought. Finally, I believe that the meeting in the Zócalo made it clear that it had been the right decision to put our weapons aside, that it was not our arms which brought us into dialogue with society, that the gamble on a peaceful mobilization was sensible and fruitful. The Mexican state has still to understand this, the government in particular.

GGM:
You’ve used the expression “as we soldiers say.” To a Colombian, accustomed to the way our guerrillas talk, your language doesn’t sound very soldierly. How military is your movement, and how would you describe the war in which you have been fighting?

SM:
We were formed in an army, the EZLN. It has a military structure. Subcomandante Marcos is the military chief of an army. But our army is very different from others, because its proposal is to cease being an army. A soldier is an absurd person who has to resort to arms in order to convince others, and in that sense the movement has no future if its future is military. If the EZLN perpetuates itself as an armed military structure, it is headed for failure. Failure as an alternative set of ideas, an alternative attitude to the world. The worst that could happen to it, apart from that, would be to come to power and install itself there as a revolutionary army. For us it would be a failure. What would be a success for the politico-military organizations of the ’60s or ’70s which emerged with the national liberation movements would be a fiasco for us. We have seen that such victories proved in the end to be failures, or defeats, hidden behind the mask of success. That what always remained unresolved was the role of people, of civil society, in what became ultimately a dispute between two hegemonies. There is an oppressor power which decides on behalf of society from above, and a group of visionaries which decides to lead the country on the correct path and ousts the other group from power, seizes power, and then also decides on behalf of society. For us that is a struggle between hegemonies, in which the winners are good and the losers bad, but for the rest of society things don’t basically change. The EZLN has reached a point where it has been overtaken by Zapatismo. The “E” in the acronym has shrunk, its hands have been tied, so that for us it is no handicap to mobilize unarmed, but rather in a certain sense a relief. The gun-belt weighs less than before and the military paraphernalia an armed group necessarily wears when it enters dialogue with people also feels less heavy. You cannot reconstruct the world or society, nor rebuild national states now in ruins, on the basis of a quarrel over who will impose their hegemony on society. The world in general, and Mexican society in particular, is composed of different kinds of people, and the relations between them have to be founded on respect and tolerance, things which appear in none of the discourses of the politico-military organizations of the ’60s and ’70s. Reality, as always, presented a bill to the armed national liberation movements of those days, and the cost of settling it has been very high.