The Uncomfortable Dead (11 page)

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.

After 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

T
hree 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 turning 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.

Best regards from the mountains of Southeast Mexico, Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos

Of all the possible times and places to study the materials, he had chosen his office in the middle of the night, perhaps because if he was going to spread them all out, he would need his own desk, the one belonging to the Rooster Villarreal, Gómez Letras’s plumbing table, and the broken chairs awaiting plastic surgery from Carlos Vargas. He tried to place them in some kind of order and complement them with his own findings, to see if he could get the whole hodgepodge into perspective;
perspective,
that grand lady whose favor it would seem he had lost.

Toward the end of 1968, a former guerrilla fighter of about twenty-five years of age betrayed his comrades and his wife and became an ally? informant? agent? for the Mexican government’s Secret Service (according to the talking corpse). This man shared a cell with Jesús María Alvarado and Fuang Chu Martínez (according to the Chinese man).

He went by the name of Morales, but there was no trace of him in the prison records, just a picture of a very skinny young man with a pointy nose and the glasses of the terminally nearsighted. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

This individual murdered Jesús María Alvarado when he, Alvarado, was freed from prison in 1971 (according to the Chinese man.)

In later years, he joined (may have joined) the White Brigade (according to the Vázquez Montalbán papers) in the period known as the Dirty War. The notebook entitled
The Black Book of the White Brigade
contained eight pages of an anonymous text run off an ancient mimeograph machine and bound with a pale blue cover. It was an overwhelming catalogue of horrors connected to that police-military organization that arose in 1974 during the presidency of Luis Echeverría. A cross-ministerial organization involving the Army and the Ministry of the Interior and dedicated to the eradication of the incipient urban guerrilla, whatever the means, whatever the cost. They did everything, above and beyond all legality: kidnapping, murder, torture. It was headed by a certain Nazar Haro. A tiny account in the booklet, telling of some of the operations of the White Brigade, seemed to attest to the presence of Morales in it. It was underlined in red pencil and said, Among
the torturers were Morales, agent Urteaga, and a “minder” by the name of Canseco,
and that was all.

Deep Throat’s papers made another mention: When the brigade tortured someone,

that Morales was one of those taking notes (…) When Nazar fell from the grace of his bosses, Morales disappeared, but he took with him an uncensored copy of the records of the Federal Department of Security
—
the real records, not the ones they released publicly.

Belascoarán jotted down 1983 as the probable date when Morales dropped out of sight. That date was more or less clear. Then came a brief gap. After that, you could insert the data from the mimeographed sheet, which appeared to be a fragment of the transcript of a recording, which read:

—
what Gustavo Arce told me, who was a member of one of the brigades organized by the anthropology students to stop the pricks, because after the earthquake they were trying to take advantage of the cracked walls and sinkholes, particularly in the center, to pull down the homes and evict the people so they could build whatever they fucking well pleased. Then the grenadiers would come with eviction notices, supposedly for the people’s protection, right? And the brigades of students from the school of anthropology would mark the buildings with notices saying,
Building catalogued as a national monument,
right? Then nobody could tear it down without the authorization of the Anthropology Institute. So, together with the community, they would stop them. It was a real bitch … a few pricks speculating with the misfortune of the people, and the one coordinating the operation with the police and the building owners was a certain Morales, Señor Morales. Gustavo, who had a few altercations with him, a few shouting matches actually, says he was a toad, a freaking cynic about fifty years old who had a limp and wore rings with red stones on his pinky and ring finger of his left hand. Later, I got curious about that Morales person, because he didn’t work for the Mexico City government. When everything had quieted down, he was no longer seen in the historic city center. I asked about him and no one could tell me anything, but he ran squads for the Ministry of Public Works of the Mexico City government, and bossed around officers of the grenadiers like he was their damn father. When I tried to write about this, he was no longer around, but Laura, the one from the Union of Earthquake Victims, remembered him and told me he had a mustache and white hair on his temples. Not a lot, but…

So Morales could be placed in Mexico City in 1985 at the time of the earthquake that registered 8.1 on the Richter scale … except that this Morales was “about fifty years old” and the White Brigade Morales mentioned by Alvarado would not be more than thirty-five to thirty-eight. Could it be the same time-worn Morales? Maybe. People were usually rotten at guessing ages. Just ask María Félix: She celebrated her fiftieth birthday three times and people either didn’t notice or didn’t care enough to notice.