The Uncomfortable Dead (10 page)

The next day we had some coffee, but almost at noon cause Magdalena didn’t get up. And I started talking about the Zapatista struggle and about how we’re organized in the resistance towns, and she was real happy listening. But I didn’t say I was on an Investigation Commission or nothing, and she didn’t ask what I was doing in the Monster, that is, Mexico City. And I looked at her and thought she was a good woman, cause she was discreet and didn’t go around asking what a body was doing. And she said that if I had to, I could stay in her room however long I needed. So then I thanked her and I went out and bought her a bouquet of red roses and gave them to her, and I said that as soon as we win the war we were going to set up a hospital to put right everything that God got wrong. Well, right there she started crying, maybe cause nobody ever gave her flowers, and she went on crying for a while. And later she went out to do her street-walking and I went out to find that there place Belascoarán works at.

Fragments of a Letter from Álvaro Delgado
(reporter for the Mexican magazine
Proceso), Addressed to Sup Marcos, Late 2004:

There is definitely a connection between El Yunque in Mexico and at least one fascist organization in Spain known as
Ciudad Católica. This
organization remains loyal to the Franco program and is a hardline detractor of democracy.

The founder of El Yunque, Ramón Plata Moreno (assassinated in 1979, allegedly due to the work of an inside informer), venerated José Antonio Primo de Rivera, leader of the Spanish phalanx. Aside from Spain, El Yunque maintains relations with ultrarightist organizations in France, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. Everything about El Yunque smells of the obscurantism of the Middle Ages and the persecution of ideas.

The Fox cabinet is packed with Yunque members. For example, Emilio Goicochea Luna (alias Jenofonte), private secretary to Fox (and national leader of the Boy Scouts); Guillermo Velasco Arzac, ideologue for Fox and Marta Sahagún; Ramón Muñoz Gutiérrez (alias Julio Vértiz), head of the President’s Office for Government Renovation, and along with Marta Sahagún, the real power behind the throne; Enrique Aranda Pedrosa, director of Notimex; Martín Huerta, federal secretary of Public Security; Alfredo Ling Altamirano (alias Daniel Austin), Institute of Access to Information; Luis Pazos, general director of Banobras and notorious for having misdirected federal funds to Jorge Serrano Limón’s Provida, a “pro-life” group.

And the PAN is not far behind: Luis Felipe Bravo Mena (national president), Jorge Adame (senator), Manuel Espino Barrientos (general secretary), and Juan Romero Hicks (alias Agustín de Iturbide, present governor of Guanajuato), among others.

It is not only
MURO
(University Movement for Renovation Orientation) that serves as a front for El Yunque. There are also organizations such as the Nationalist Integration Vanguard (VIN), Anticommunist University Front
(FUA),
Christian Movement Yes, National Council of Students (CNE), Comprehensive Human Development and Citizens Action
(DHIAC),
National Civic Women’s Association (ANCIFEM), National Pro-life Committee, Testimony and Hope Movement, Mexican Human Rights Commission, National Morality Alliance, In Favor of the Best, Citizens Coordination, Iberian-American Unifying Guard (GUIA)
—
just to mention a few. Father Maciel’s Legionnaires of Christ appeared at almost the same time, so there’s probably some connection.

Although the right, like the left, is not a single, indivisible monolith (there are differences and even confrontations), the ultraright has real power in Mexico and is working to infiltrate every aspect of society
—
social, political, and cultural.

I don’t know if there is any Morales in their structure, but the one thing you can be certain of is that El Yunque, also known as the Army of God, has a paramilitary structure and their indoctrination meetings are run with military discipline. One of their branches is called Crusaders of Christ the King. El Yunque has done everything possible to get close to the Army, though I don’t have any data linking them to the organization of paramilitary groups.

I’m sending you my book,
The Army of God: New Revelations on the Extreme Right in Mexico,
published by Plaza y Janes. In it you will find thoroughly chilling facts.

Piece of Cake

You cannot live
with a death inside
you have to choose:
hurl it far away
like rotten fruit
or be infected
and die.

That was how the deceased Digna Ochoa and the deceased Pável González began their communiqué. It was part of a poem by a lady who defended all of us screwed people, and her name was Alaide Foppa. The poem was called “Misfortune” and I knew that the communiqué was going to be released on January 6. Cause the thing is, one day I ran into this comrade Alakazam, who’s a magician—that is, he makes things appear and disappear and he knows what people are thinking. So this Alakazam gave me the message that I should go find the Chinaman, over where I already knew, and he gave me some papers so I’d show them to the Chinaman and he should tell me what he thought about them—that is, the Chinaman should tell me his thinking on it. So then I left for Guadalajara, but I didn’t go directly to where I knew the Chinaman was. No sir! I went first to find the Russian. So there I was, eating tortillas with the Russian, when this woman from Guadalajara comes up, I mean the female comrade named Azucena, the one who took me to see the Chinaman. Then I talked to the Chinaman and I showed him the papers and a picture El Sup sent me with Alakazam. And when the Chinaman was busy writing his thinking, I took a walk around to find something that had to do with Don Manolo—that is, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán—and I found a poster with his name on it, Don Manolo’s, I mean. So I felt around behind it and I found this piece of paper that said,
The thing by the deceased appears on the epiphany; when you get the papers, go see the soda man.
Now it was clear that on January 6 I was sposed to find the papers for the investigation that we were gonna do with the Belascoarán feller, although at that time I didn’t rightly know if he was gonna come in on it or if he was gonna shrivel up like a flower that can’t take the heat. So when I got back from Guadalajara, I went looking for his workplace—his office, I mean—over where that little card said, the one I got from Mamá Piedra, Doña Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, that is. I already had some kind of idea what this Belascoarán was like, cause the Chinaman told me about him, so I went to that street called Donato Guerra and I played the dummy awhile to check if Belascoarán was being watched and to see if he even showed up. It was real late when this feller went into one of the buildings, all loaded down with Coca-Cola bottles. Now I knew right away it was Belascoarán, cause he only had one eye, and besides that, he had a leg that didn’t work too good either. But I stood around awhile cause I says to myself, what if there’s a few one-eyed gimps on Donato Guerra Street, near the corner of Bucareli, over in the Monster. Finally, I figgered there was only one of them and that it had to be that Belascoarán, cause he had one eye and a limp and that’s the way the Chinaman said he was. Besides that, he was loaded with Cokes and that musta been why El Sup called him
the soda man.
So let me tell you that this Belascoarán was about as old as me—as old as me, that is, before I was deceased, which means that he must be around fifty years old going on sixty. Then I got to thinking how what with being crippled in the eye and in the leg, he was real easy to peg. And then I thought that I had to see him in someplace with a lot of people, cause with so many people maybe he wouldn’t stand out so much. So I figger he sleeps there—in the office, I mean—cause I left there real late and he never came out.

Then the next day I was on him at the crack of dawn, and I had to wait till about noon before he came out so’s I could slip into the building. Inside, I climbed the stairs looking to find the workplace and ran across a door with a sign that said:

Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, Detective
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.