The Uncomfortable Dead (3 page)

The third tape started as always—“This
is Jesús María Alvarado”
—like he was trying over and over again to establish that he had come back from the valley of the shadow of death. After the name, there was a pause and a cryptic comment,
“Maybe
I
shouldn’t have come back,”
and then a long silence and a click that put an end to the call.

There was a fourth call that started off with the usual, “This
is Jesús María Alvarado,”
then without a word of explanation went into some verses:

Where
I
will only be
a memory of a stone buried under briar
over which the wind flees its sleepless night.

And that was all. The poem sounded familiar, but Héctor couldn’t remember where or when he had heard it.

The progressive Monteverde lived in the Roma Sur neighborhood about twelve blocks from his home, so Héctor decided to take a walk, strolling along the promenade on Alfonso Reyes Avenue, which was better when it was Juanacatlán and lined with unionized whores or those hoping to join. He stopped at one of the taco joints to have a couple of cheese
arracheras
with lots of green salsa, then went on his way, smiling to strangers, every once in a while saying good evening just to see how the well-mannered Mexicans of the capital would recover their basic manners and reply.

The character seemed to live alone. Alone except for the dog with the splint, which, just as Belascoarán passed through the doorway, came over and licked his hand, either to identify him or simply to express solidarity between two cripples. There was no sign of children in the house, no pictures, but the walls were covered with reproductions of paintings of mountains and volcanoes, from a Velasco to Alt’s
Paricutin,
and rather attractive photographs of Everest in the style
of National Geographic.

Monteverde was wearing the same chocolate-stained shirt from a few hours earlier. Héctor asked to use the bathroom, which was pristine, spotless. In his free time, Monteverde must be a detergent and Windex freak. A touch of incongruent humor among such hygienic fundamentalism moved him: On one of the walls there was a poster that read,
Constipation Promotes Reading.
Héctor decided he had to get one of those for his own home. The idea wasn’t new and he wasn’t constipated, but it was another good excuse to read in the john.

The floor in the hallway was filled with books for lack of bookshelves. Monteverde had arranged them on their sides so that all you had to do was bend over slightly to pick one up. Héctor recognized many of his own favorites: Remarque, Fast, Haefs, Ross Thomas, Neruda, Hemingway, Cortázar. They were all there.

“So tell me it ain’t strange, man.”

He didn’t answer, but he figured he would have to give the Alec Guinness method a rest. It was time for questions. He dropped into a rat-gray rocker, and before Monteverde could do likewise, he blurted out, “Did you recognize the voice?”

“No, but you can’t tell. It’s been so many years.”

“Were you guys friends? Friends enough that if he were alive he would—”

“I went to his funeral. He’s dead. I saw him lying there dead in his coffin, with a patch that you could see sticking out from the back of his head where they had shot him,” Monteverde interrupted.

“Were you good friends?”

“Just friends. He was always raring to go about everything. I was more timid. But there we were, in the movement, teaching literature in the preps, and we had a sort of a girlfriend, him first, then me, and we only ate street food, the cheapest we could find.”

The bit about teaching literature in the preps reminded Belascoarán of the poem, which he began to recite:

Where
I
will only be
a memory of a stone buried under briar
over which the wind flees its sleepless night.

“Where forgetfulness may dwell/in the vast dawnless gardens/ where
I
will be …”
Monteverde added.

“Of course, the Cernuda poem, I thought it sounded familiar, but I couldn’t…” Belascoarán paused, slapping his hands together to applaud his own memory.

“A marvelous poem,” Monteverde said, and resumed:

Where sorrow and fortune will be only words,
a native sky and land enveloping a memory;
where
I
will finally be free without even knowing it,
dissolved in a mist, an absence,
an absence soft as the flesh of a child.

“There, far away; where forgetfulness may dwell,”
they finished in unison.

Now
that
was a real poem, one of those that grabs you by the nuts and squeezes softly until the pain becomes an idea. That was one hell of a poet, the old Spaniard exiled in Mexico. Héctor lit a cigarette; he used the moment to organize his ideas, while the dog, who must have been nervous about secondhand smoke, limped to a safe distance.

“That one scared me more than the other messages; it was Jesús María’s favorite poem—he would recite it for his students every so often. I wound up doing the same because of him.”

Héctor lit up another with the butt of the prior; the dog didn’t protest.

“Why would Alvarado, Alvarado’s ghost, or someone trying to pass himself off as Alvarado, be sending you these messages? Who are you, Monteverde? What do you do for a living?”

“I work for the government in Mexico City. I’m a special investigator for the Department of Oversight. It’s kind of a delicate job, particularly these days, that’s why I freaked. Otherwise I would have laughed it off. You can’t imagine, recently things have become very murky …”

“What are you working on now?”

“I’m sorry, that’s confidential, and furthermore it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the dead guy’s calls. I sound like some half-baked Charlie Chan,” Monteverde concluded with a smile, “don’t I? But the fact is, it’s delicate, what with all the goddamn corruption they had during the PRI administrations and the shit those bastards left us.”

“And are
you
corrupt? Forgive me for asking, but since we don’t actually know each other …”

Monteverde squeezed out a sad smile. “You can only buy what’s up for sale. Me? I’m made of steel, friend, stainless steel, incorruptible, a bit of a jerk and very far to the left. I don’t insult our dead.”

The sad expression was becoming something else and there were a few sparks in his eyes. Even the dog seemed to respond and lifted his head.

“So, are
you
for sale?” he asked the detective.

“My friend, I don’t want to wake up one of these days with my mouth full of ants. Me, I bend but I don’t go down,” Belascoarán answered, tapping his knee where he had a steel spike implanted that set off every metal detector in every airport around the world. “Who have you told about this?”

“Only Tobías,” Monteverde said, pointing to the dog.

“And the bin Laden story, do you believe that?”

“No. But it’s a hell of a story. I’m just sorry I didn’t come up with it myself.”

Belascoarán returned to the Alec Guinness routine, but it didn’t work. Monteverde was off thinking about something far, far away.

“How about you, when did you become an insomniac?” the detective finally asked.

“When we lost the elections in ’88, the day the system crashed, the election fraud. For some reason I got the idea in my head that during the night they were going to come and kill us all … How about you?”

“It was a few months ago. One night the woman who sometimes comes over to sleep with me didn’t show up, but I waited all night for her, and now I don’t sleep,” the detective answered, a little embarrassed. His own explanation couldn’t stand up to Monteverde’s; his insomnia paled in comparison to the historic insomnia of the literature-teacher-turned-progressive-official. “Who gave you my number? Who suggested that you contact me?”

“We have a common acquaintance working in the office of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas; his name’s Mario Marrufo Larrea. I told him I had some really weird things going on and he said you specialized in weird things.”

“Well, I ain’t the only one in Mexico.”

And they celebrated by downing a couple of Cokes, Belascoarán’s with no ice.

It’s already becoming a cliché, this notion of being tied to the city by an umbilical cord, trapped in a love-hate relationship. The sleepless Belascoarán was looking out his window on the neon night and reviewing his own words. He was feeling like the last of the Mohicans. He averred, confirmed: There is no hatred. Just an immense, infinite sensation of love for this ever-changing city that he lives in and that lives in him, that he dreams of and that dreams of him. A determination to love that goes beyond all the rage, possession, and sex, and dissolves into tenderness. It must be the demonstrations, the golden hue of the light at the Zócalo, the book stands, the meat tacos, the currents of deep solidarity, the friends at the gas station across the way who always say hello when he passes. It might be that marvelous winter moon. It might be.

Héctor sat in a rocker to smoke. He spent the night smoking and listening to the sounds of the street. For no apparent reason, the image of Héctor Monteverde’s limping dog came to mind. It was dawn when he fell asleep.

CHAPTER 3

WHICH IS A LITTLE LONG

…
cause all of a sudden it tells about the Broken Calendar Club; it explains how Elías solved the case of the woodpecker; it addresses the dangers of ignoring customs and mores; it warns that the dead have no company; and it relates how Elías traveled and arrived in Mexico City, with all the marvelous adventures that befell him, besides reflecting on the Bad and the Evil.

I
’m not the murderer— A
match burned, lighting up a cigarette and the face surrounding it: haircut like a skinhead, face with shining eyes, silver rings, unshaven cheeks.
I think I should explain this right now to avoid confusion.

Neither am I the butler. I suppose I should say this right at the beginning, because, you know, in mystery stories the murderer is the butler … or the other way around. I’ve never been a housekeeper, but I have been a goalkeeper, and I sometimes played that position in the soccer games at the local government in La Garrucha. In the beginning I didn’t know what was going on, but every Sunday, after praying at church, there was a big noise among the children and a lot of talking in Tzeltal among the adults. I only understood the part about “Zapatista campamenteros,” and then everyone went out on the playing field. Though it’s not really a playing field. From Monday through Friday it’s the paddock, but on Sundays it’s the soccer field. As if they knew it was Sunday, the cows would move to the neighboring field, leaving us a minefield of cow shit. Then some people from the town would come carrying pews from the church and benches from the school and improvise the grandstands. The field we used is on the side of a hill so one goal is higher than the other, which is an obvious advantage for the team that plays on the high side. However, in the second half they change goals and everything evens out. Or so they say. Then the teams are organized; a town person, always someone in authority, is referee. I was saying that sometimes I was a goalkeeper for the “campamenteros” team, as the town people say, or the “campamentistas team,” as we say. Basically, men and women from different parts of the world were in a peace camp—we joined together in a soccer team and we played against the Zapatista towns. When I played we almost always lost. But don’t you believe that it was because the Zapatistas were so good, no. It was a breakdown in communication. We used to shout at each other (cause the team was always mixed, men and women) in French, Euskera, Italian, English, German, Turkish, Danish, Swedish, and Aymara. Nobody understood nothing and, like they say around here, it was an unholy mess and the ball always went where it shouldn’t.

In that soccer thing I learned what those Zapatistas call “the resistance.” At least I think I did. What happened was that in one of the games our side had two huge Danes, about six-foot-six and terribly good at soccer. Their height, plus their extra-long strides, left the Zapatistas far behind, cause they’re smaller and have shorter legs. Within the first few minutes it was obvious that our patent superiority would soon be reflected on the scoreboard. And fact of the matter is, after about ten minutes we were ahead two to zero. It was then that it happened. I saw it because I was the goalkeeper and because, furthermore, around here I learned to pay a lot of attention to things beyond the obvious. There was no indication from anyone, no meeting, no conversations, signals, or looks among the Zapatistas. And yet I think they had a way of communicating, because after our second score all the Zapatistas moved back to defend their goal. They left the whole field to our huge Danes, who were happily rushing back and forth. But with all those people on the Zapatista side, the field became a mudhole. The ball would stick, like in cement, and you needed several internationalist kicks to even make it roll.

They’re going to stall,
I thought,
so they don’t get stomped,
and I sat back to watch the game, which was on the far side the whole time. A few minutes went by and then what happened, happened. Our team, which was doing all the running around, began to show signs of fatigue. In the second half it was evident that we were getting bogged down. Our Danish stars were gasping for air, stopping to breathe every two or three steps. And then—again without any overt signal—
wham,
the whole Zapatista team hit me. They scored seven goals in twenty minutes and the spectators went wild, cause you know they were all rooting for the local team. The game ended seven to two, and half of our team took an hour to recover and three weeks before they could walk right.

So I been a goalkeeper but I’m not the doorkeeper and I’m not the murderer. As you probably guessed, I’m a campamentista, and I’m from another country. I’ve been in peace camps in five autonomous municipalities, even before they were called
caracoles,
and in a few other communities that suffered militarization or paramilitarization. You might be asking me what exactly a foreign campamentista is doing in this mystery novel. Actually, that’s what I keep asking myself, I can’t really help you out with that. While we check out what’s going on, I can tell you a bit about myself. Maybe that way we can, together, figure out what the hell I’m doing in this book.

The Broken Calendar Club

I’m a Filipino and my name is Juli@ and my last name is Isileko. Somebody once told me that Isileko means
secret
in Euskera. I’m a mechanic and I work in an auto repair shop in Barcelona. I write my name with an @: Juli@. I write it that way because …. Do I really have to say I’m gay? Okay, yes, I’m gay, homosexual, queer, fruit, queen, faggot, or however it is you call us in your own world. But actually, I don’t think I should mention it because then they associate
homosexual
with
criminal.
So. Maybe we should leave out sexual preference altogether and stick with the fact that I’m from the Philippines, that I have a Basque name, that I’m a mechanic in Barcelona, Spain, and amateur goalkeeper in Chiapas, Mexico … And in my home town they call me Julio.

For more information, I got a skinhead haircut and a few tattoos. On my back, between my shoulder blades, I have a notice tattooed in gothic letters that says, THIS SIDE BACK, and one on my chest that says, THIS SIDE FORWARD. That’s just in case they cut me up in pieces. I have another one somewhat below my belly button that says, HANDLE WITH CARE, with an arrow pointing to my dick. I have another on my butt saying,
NO
RETURNS. I’m also a ringer, which means I have piercings and I wear earrings, but not too many: one on my left eyebrow, two in my right ear, three in my left ear, one in my nose, one each on my nipples, and … that’s it.

I came to Zapatista country because I got tired of reading communiqués. Yes, I began to get interested in the Zapatista movement because I read about it in a book by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. It’s not as if I was personally acquainted with the author, it’s just that once I was working on a car and I found this book in the backseat. After reading it, I asked one of my buddies in the shop if he knew anything about the Zapatistas in Chiapas. He said he didn’t, but that there was this café near his house where some young guys used to get together, some of the ringers like me, to try to raise support for those Zapatistas. So I went; I got some books and some website addresses where I could find the communiqués, and I read all of them, until I finally came over to Chiapas. I got tired of reading because I could tell that they were only fragments of a bigger story, as if they only gave me a few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and hid others, the most important ones. Yes, I got angry at El Sup without actually knowing him. I began to ask myself why they mentioned certain things and not others. What right did that guy in the ski mask have to only show me some things and hide the rest? I had to go over there, I thought.

So I quit going to the professional soccer matches—Barcelona wasn’t doing so hot, anyway. That’s how I got a few dollars together. So I came over. I was right and I was wrong. I learned that the Zapatista messages do tell certain things and hide others—the biggest, the most terrible, the most marvelous. I learned that they are not trying to fool people, but rather to invite them …

Just a moment. Give me a second here …

Okay, I’ve just been informed that I’m not in this novel, so it’s probably just an unfortunate mistake that the newspaper or the publishing house will have to sort out, or so I’m told. Since its likely that this is going to take awhile, I’ll use the time to tell you about some people I met at La Realidad Peace Camp, and about how I met Elías.

Another flame lights another cigarette.

Want one? You don’t smoke? In this novel everybody smokes. Belascoarán smokes, Elías smokes, I smoke, El Sup, well, what can I tell you? They should attach a fire extinguisher to each copy and announce on the cover:
Tobacco may be harmful to your health,
or,
Smoking during pregnancy may increase the risk of premature delivery and low birth weight,
or any of those things they write on the cigarette packages that nobody reads. That way, even if the book doesn’t win a literary award, at least it will get one from the
Society of Active Nonsmokers,
if there is any such society.

So then. In the camps I’ve met people from many countries, although not many from Mexico. Some stay only a short time and others stay for years. Of course, there are those that come and go, like that Juanita Dot Com who comes from I don’t know what country or even if his name is what he says it is, the only certain thing being that he has a website. Every time that guy comes, he brings a stack of magazines and newspapers and leaves carrying no more than a smile. So what I’m saying is that although we’re from different countries with different languages and most of us differ on our take on Zapataism, all of us campamentistas develop close, more or less stable bonds of camaraderie. In fact, I had a close fraternal relationship with three campamentistas. Together we founded what we called the Broken Calendar Club, which might have been a good name for a mystery novel or a secret esoteric society, or for a group of unemployed
Playboy
bunnies, but it was a group of people who called ourselves this for reasons I will now explain.

The Broken Calendar Club includes a German woman who worked for a pizza joint delivering food on a motorcycle to raise the money to make the trip over here. I don’t think it’s necessary to mention that she’s a lesbian, for the same reason I gave earlier, but what I
can
tell you is that her name is Danna May and her last name is Bí Mát, which is a Vietnamese name that means
clandestine.
Danna May plays defense on our soccer team and she came to Zapatista lands on something like a honeymoon with her friend, a woman with a doctorate in mathematics, who is not here right now because she went back to Berlin to raise more money to prolong their stay here in Chiapas. In town they call Danna May “May.”

There’s also a French woman, a school teacher from Toulouse, whose name is Juin Hélène and whose last name is Protuzakonitost, which means
outlaw
in Serbo-Croatian. Juin Hélène loves jazz; she says her life is like a piece by Miles Davis, and she came, she says, to learn about this autonomy thing, because on her return to France she intends to get together with her pupils and start an autonomous rebel municipality and name it after Charlie Parker. Juin’s job on our team is to be a deterrent, because of her precise kicks—not at the ball, but at the other team’s ankles. In town she’s known as Blondie or Frenchie.

Our fourth element is an Italian, a cook by trade, whose name is Vittorio Francesco Augusto Luiggi and whose last name’s Nidalote, which in Albanian means
forbidden.
He’s a firm believer in extraterrestrials, and according to what he told us one night in the forests of Chiapas, there are good extraterrestrials and bad extraterrestrials. The bad ones already landed a long time ago in Washington, London, Rome, Madrid, Moscow, and Mexico, and they took over everything and started the fast-food craze. The good ones, well, the good ones haven’t arrived yet, but if there’s any place where they are going to land, it will be on Zapatista soil. And they won’t be coming to conquer us or teach us their high technology, but how to defeat the bad ones. Vittorio Francesco Augusto Luiggi figures that the good extraterrestrials are going to need a cook, and that’s why he’s here. Vittorio Francesco Augusto Luiggi plays left end on our team because he says you have to be consistent with your political positions, even in sports. In town they call him Panchito, something for which he, and all of us, are thankful.

So that’s it. We’re what you might call an
original
group, and if we Zapatify our names you get: May Clandestine, June Outlaw, July Secret, and August Forbidden. So we have perfect names for characters in a porn novel, or a spy novel, or a porn-spy novel, but not a mystery novel. And even if we add the April from the first chapter, the calendar is still incomplete, broken.

Don’t pay me too much mind now. Maybe El Sup put us in the novel like a random sampling of people—because the Zapatistas, you know, maintain that the world is not unique, that there are multiple worlds, and that’s why they’re sticking the book with a gay Filipino mechanic, a German pizza-delivering bike dyke, a jazz-loving French teacher, and an Italian cook who believes in extraterrestrials. So it’s not just men and women, and it’s possible that later on we might even get a few more odd characters.

Although, actually, I think the Italian cook is only in the book because in mystery novels the detective usually winds up having culinary adventures. The other day, for example, I found Vittorio Francesco Augusto Luiggi (August Forbidden in our broken calendar) trying out a recipe that he said El Sup had given him. It was called Marcos’s Special and he did it up just the way they told him: mince and fry one ration of beef; add a small can of Mexican salsa and cheese; mix thoroughly and serve hot.

When August Forbidden finished his concoction, I told him, “It looks like dog barf.”

Then he tasted it himself and added, “It tastes the same as it looks.”