The Uncomfortable Dead (2 page)

So I got myself on the road and headed back to Entre Cerros. After a cup of coffee at cousin Eulogia’s, I made myself as comfortable as I could on the grain bin to get some sleep. It turns out I didn’t get much sleep, what with the drumming of the rain and the worrying about finding María. Now, when I don’t sleep I get to thinking too much. Mara always scolds me for thinking too much, and I tell her there’s no way to stop, that that’s how they made me. So I went on thinking about what if María ain’t deceased, what if she wasn’t disappeared, what if she disappeared herself, and where could she have got to, and if she disappeared herself it musta been cause she didn’t want to be appeared, so then she musta gone where nobody could appear her.

In the morning it was still raining, so I borrowed a nylon poncho from cousin Humberto. I left him the loaded mule and went to the local government at La Realidad.

Soon as I got there, I asked to talk to the head of the Good Governance Board. They took me first to the Vigilance Commission. Míster and Brusli were there. I told them I was on the Investigation Commission and that I needed to talk to the Good Governance Board. Then they sent me in. I asked the Board if they had information about the women’s collectives in the towns. They handed me some lists. It took awhile, and I couldn’t find anything I wanted in the lists, so I gave them back.

“So what is it you’re looking for?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered, cause it was the pure and simple truth. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but if I found it, I’d know.

“Looks like you’re all mixed up,” the Board guys said.

“That’s about right,” I said.

“So you couldn’t find what you were looking for?” they went on asking.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Well, that list has all the women’s collectives,” one of the Board guys told me.

“Yeah, all of them except a brand new one that’s just getting started,” another one added.

“Oh yeah, that one, but it’s in a new region and it barely hasn’t even started up yet. They don’t even have an autonomous municipality, but the women are organizing their collective,” the first one said.

“That’s the way it is,” the only female Board member said, “the women are the first to get organized, and if the fight is taking too long it’s because of the men; their minds are too narrow.” None of the men said anything.

I got the feeling that I was about to find what I didn’t know I was looking for, so I asked, “Where is that collective that’s just getting started?”

“It’s over in the Ceiba region, in the town of Tres Cruces, along the Comitán road,” the woman said.

Brusli loaned me his mare and I set out for Tres Cruces. Along the way it grew dark and the mare kept getting spooked at every shadow, so I put her up in a town along the way, but seeing as how the second day was running out, I walked it—fact of the matter is, I think I practically ran the rest of the way.

I got to Tres Cruces when the moon was halfway across the sky. I went to see the local headman and introduced myself. He went off for a while, I imagine to radio in and see if I was who I said I was, cause he came back real happy and even invited me to dinner. We had coffee and
guineo
bananas. When we got through I asked him how the work was going and he said it was fine, that the collective sometimes lost a bit of push, but that with a little political talking-to they perked right up again.

“The one that’s getting along just fine is the women’s collective, and it’s that April who’s providing the spark,” the headman said.

“Who’s this guy April?” I asked.

“Not a guy, but a gal,” he answered.

I took another sip of coffee and waited on him. Soon the headman continued.

“April’s a woman who came in about three weeks ago, said she was Women’s Commission. We put her up at Doña Lucha’s, seeing as how she’s alone after Aram went deceased. So that’s where the April woman is living and I think she’s got a good head on her, cause the other women in town really like her. Every week she comes in for the political work and stuff, and I think they already asked to have their collective registered with the Good Governance Board.

So I said goodbye to the headman and told him I was going to spend the night over at the church. Making believe it was just out of curiosity, I asked him where that Doña Lucha lived. He said it was on the outskirts of town facing the hill. So I left him, but instead of going to the church, I went right on. There was only one shack on the side of town by the hill, so I figgered that must be Doña Lucha’s place. I stood around awhile waiting, but not for long. The door opened up and the first thing I saw was a shadow that by the light of the moon became a woman.

“Good evening to you, María,” I said, stepping out from behind the water trough.

She sorta froze up a second, but then she bent over, picked up a rock, and looked me in the eye.

“Who says my name’s María? My name’s April.”

I just stood there not saying a word, and thinking how any other woman would’ve gotten spooked and would’ve screamed or run away or both. This here one was ready to face down a stranger, though. A woman like that don’t shut up when things aren’t right. She don’t stay with a man who treats her bad, either.

I kept my eyes glued to the hand with the rock and talked to her real slow: “My name is Elías; I’m Investigation Commission and I’m looking to find out what happened to a woman called María who disappeared from the town of Entre Cerros, and the thing is, her husband is real worried.”

Still holding onto the rock, she asked, “Am I supposed to know this town Entre Cerros or this María or her husband Genaro—”

Right there I butted in, “Now, I didn’t say her husband’s name was Genaro.”

Well, I’m imagining she went pale, but I could barely make out her face so it was hard to tell if she actually changed color or not. Then, after a long silence, she picked up a stick with her free hand and said real slow, “Nobody’s taking me where I don’t want to go.”

“Not my job to take anybody anywhere, ma’am, not by hook and not by crook. I’m just investigating.” I turned around to take my leave but had hardly moved when I heard her voice.

“You like to come in and have something to eat? Doña Lucha made tamales.”

After dinner, as María-April or maybe April-María told me her story, Doña Lucha offered me …

Some Coffee

“El Sup is right there waiting on you,” said the insurgent combatant standing guard outside the command post, and sure enough, there was El Sup by the hitching post, smoking his pipe. He gimme a hug, offered me some coffee, and we sat down on a log. Lieutenant Colonel José was there as well. I told them the whole story. Cause the thing is, this María, who is actually April, her husband, who’s called Genaro, mistreated her a lot, didn’t let her participate, and was very jealous. And when Genaro, her husband, found out that they were going to name her to the Board of the Women’s Collective, well, he even beat her. Then she took it up with the town assembly but they couldn’t come to any decision, and things went on the way they were. Now, her children are all grown and all and don’t really depend on her, and the Revolutionary Law on Women says she has the right to progress. And with every word she said, Doña Lucha kept nodding her head like saying she agreed, and she kept clenching her fists like she was real mad. And so April, who is María, got tired of being treated like a dog, but before disappearing herself she left a good stack of firewood for Genaro so he would never think she left cause she was lazy. She said that she had disappeared herself cause she couldn’t take it no more. That the Revolutionary Law on Women says that she has a right to choose the man she wants to have—or if she wants to have one at all. That she left for Tres Cruces because she had already met Doña Lucha at a women’s meeting and she knew she would back her up. That she knew it was wrong to have lied about being Women’s Commission and all, but that’s the only thing she could think of to get them to let her into town. That she changed her name and called herself April cause that was the month of women who fight. Now, I didn’t mention that the month of women who fight is not April, but March, cause they were pretty mad right there and it might be better for somebody else to explain later on when they were a bit more settled down. And that April accepted that she should be punished for lying about being Women’s Commission, but that she was not going back to be mistreated again, that she was a Zapatista and she was acting like one.

El Sup and the lieutenant colonel listened in silence, El Sup only refilling and lighting his pipe now and again.

When I finished reporting, he said, “Well, that’s a surprise. I met that Genaro
compa
once at a meeting of headmen and he spoke very well, he sounded very Zapatista.”

And I said, “Hey, Sup, you ever heard of anyone who couldn’t be a Zapatista for a little while?” El Sup moved his head like he was doing some thinking.

“So, how long does it take to become a Zapatista?” he asked as he was helping me saddle up the mule.

“Sometimes it takes more than 500 years,” I said and hurried up to get going, cause my town is actually a ways off.

And the sun was hurrying along like there was something it was …

Missing

The sky bit off chunks of the darkness billowing among the treetops. Distracted by a flying cloud, El Sup chewed on his cold pipe stem.

“There’s still a whole lot missing on the question of women,” the lieutenant colonel said.

“Yeah,
missing,”
said El Sup, putting the case documents into a thick folder that read,
Elías: Investigation Commission.

Someone, very far away, received a sealed envelope on which the sender had written:

From the mountains of Southeast Mexico,
Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos
November 2004

CHAPTER 2

LEAVING AN IMPRINT

W
ere there more antennas or fewer? There were many more, he told himself. Many more television antennas. Many more than when? More than before, of course. And he let that
before
just linger. With every passing day, there were more
befores
in his conversations and in the thoughts that flitted through his mind; he was turning into a pre-retirement adult. But the fact was, he had that antenna thing nailed right. There were a whole lot more antennas than before, and they were part of the jungle canopy. The jungle of television antennas of Mexico City. The jungle of antennas and lampposts and buttresses that wove in with the trees, stretched over the rooftops, hung off lines, climbed up broomsticks: glorious, arrogant. The jungle of Mexico City, along with its mountains, the polluted Ajusco hills.

The afternoon was fading away; Belascoarán lit his final cigarette and gave himself the seven minutes it would last before leaving his perch. Over the last few months, he had begun to prefer seeing Mexico City from above. From the highest roofs and bridges he could find. It was less harmful that way, more like a city, just a single solid thing as far as the eye could see. He liked it and still likes it.

When he was about five and a half minutes into his cigarette, his office mate, Carlos Vargas the upholsterer, came whistling through the metal door that led to the roof. He was whistling that old Glen Miller piece that had become so famous at sweet-sixteen parties in Mexico City during the ’60s. He was whistling in tune and with a great deal of precision to boot.

“You know, boss, I’ve got half a notion that these disappearances of yours up here on the roof might mean you’ve begun smoking grass on the sly. You’ve gone pothead, you’re getting high and flying low.”

“You’re wrong and I’m going to show you,” Belascoarán said, offering him the chewed-up butt of his filtered Delicado.

Carlos shook his head. “There’s a progressive official looking for you.”

“And what is a
progressive
official?”

“Same as the others, only they’re not on the take, and this one’s got a chocolate stain on his tie and a crippled dog.”

Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, independent detective, accustomed to absurd enigmas because he lived in the most marvelously absurd city in the world, climbed down the seven stories asking himself what the hell a “crippled dog” might mean in upholsterer’s crypto-language, only to find out that “crippled dog” meant a goddamn dog with a splint on one of its front legs, a timid face, and ears hanging to the ground. The animal was resting serene and sad at the feet of this progressive official. Carlos paid them no mind and was already back in his own corner of the office stuffing a pink-velvet easy chair.

Belascoarán dropped into his seat and the wheels carried him elegantly, until he hit the wall. He stared at the progressive official and raised his eyebrows, or rather his eyebrow—ever since he had lost one of his eyes, he found it difficult to move the other eyebrow.

“Are you a leftist?” the official asked, and God only knows why, but Belascoarán did not find that icebreaker at all strange in these times when the nuns of the Inquisition were flying back on their broomsticks, conjured up by the administration of one Mr. Fox, who wasn’t foxy at all.

He took a deep breath. “My brother says I’m a leftist, but a natural one, which means unawares,” Héctor said, smiling. “And that means I’m a leftist but I never read Marx when I was sixteen and I never went to demonstrations to speak of and I don’t have a poster of Che Guevara in my house. So, well, yes, I’m a leftist.”

The explanation appeared to satisfy the official. “Can you guarantee that this conversation will remain confidential?”

“Well, if God knows it, why shouldn’t the world?” answered Héctor, who hadn’t guaranteed anything for a long time.

“Are you a believer?” the progressive asked, a bit taken aback.

“There’s a friend of mine says he quit being Catholic for two reasons: one, because he thought that with so many poor people the Vatican treasures were a kick in humanity’s balls; and two, because they don’t let you smoke in church. And I imagine that goes for all religions. And I agree—the very idea of God annoys the shit out of me,” Héctor wound up very seriously.

Taking advantage of the moment of silence, Héctor checked out the progressive official and found that, as opposed to what Carlos had said, the guy had no tie, although he did have a stain on his yellow shirt, a shaggy beard, and the glasses of the terminally short-sighted. He was tall, very tall, and when he got excited he shook his head sideways in a perpetual no. He looked like an honest man, the kind his mother used to call “a good person,” referring always to workers, plumbers, milkmen, gardeners, and lottery hawkers. If memory didn’t fail him, his mother had never said that any bourgeois, grand or petit, was “a good person.” She must have had her reasons.

“There’s a dead guy talking to me,” the man said, breaking in on Héctor’s mental evaluation of him and his past.

Héctor opted for silence. Just a couple of months before, he had gone to a video club and rented a series created by Alec Guinness based on a novel by le Carré,
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,
produced by the BBC, and for six continuous hours he had watched in fascination as Smiley-Guinness used the most effective interrogation technique in the world: putting on a stupid face (if the guy weren’t British, Héctor would say he was the biggest jerk he’d ever seen) and staring at people languidly, not too interested, like he was doing them a favor, and people would just talk and talk to him, and once in a while, a
long
while, he would drop a question, as if not really caring much, just to make conversation.

And the method worked.

“For about a week now I’ve been hearing messages on my answering machine from a buddy of mine, only this buddy died in 1969. He was murdered. And now he’s talking to me, leaving me messages. He tells me stories. But I don’t rightly know what it is he wants from me. And I think he’s calling when he knows I’m not home so he can just leave a recording. Maybe it’s a joke, but if it is, it’s a hell of a joke.”

Héctor kept up his Alec Guinness face.

“My name’s Héctor,” the man said.

“So’s mine,” Belascoarán replied, kind of apologizing.

“Héctor Monteverde.”

“How about the dead guy?”

“His name’s Jesús María Alvarado, and he was really something.”

Héctor went back into silent mode.

“So, how much do you charge?”

“Not much,” Belascoarán said.

That appeared to quiet the man down … the dog too.

“Here’s the tape. You can listen to the whole thing in five minutes. You decide and we’ll talk later.”

“I don’t have an answering machine in this office. If you can lend the tape to me, tomorrow we can—”

“No! Not tomorrow. In a while. Take my address,” Monteverde said, handing over a piece of paper. “And here are some notes I prepared about how I met the dead man. I’ll be at home … I don’t sleep.”

“I don’t either,” Héctor said.

And he watched as same-name Monteverde stood up and left the office, followed by his limping dog.

“That’s one hell of a story!” said Carlos Vargas with a mouthful of tacks, shaking his hammer over the pink easy chair.

“The phrase that comes to mind is the one about reality getting extremely strange,” Belascoarán answered.

Hours later, sitting at home, Héctor listened to the voice of the dead man coming from the tape.

“Hello.
I
am Jesús María Alvarado. I’ll call you back, buddy.”

The voice did not sound familiar; it was gravelly and didn’t reveal any anxiety, urgency … nothing. Just a toneless voice offering a name. It was not cavernous or put through special effects; it wasn’t intended to sound like a voice from the grave. What’s a voice from the grave supposed to sound like? This talking to dead people …

Yet Jesús María Alvarado was indeed dead, although not in 1969 like the progressive official Monteverde said, but in ’71. So it was prehistoric, thirty-four years ago. He had been murdered as he left prison. A bullet in the back of the head for the first political prisoner to be freed after the 1968 movement. Execution-style … and no official explanations.

Monteverde and Alvarado had met at a school where they both taught literature. They were just nodding acquaintances. A couple of coffees together, a couple of faculty meetings. The 1968 assemblies, the founding of the coalition of teachers in support of the student movement. Monteverde was a little absent-minded, lovesick, a bit timid … the son of an undertaker who had made his fortune on the luxury of death, something that Héctor Monteverde (according to his meticulously drafted notes) thought was not only immoral, but thoroughly shameful and reprehensible in the year of the movement. World literature was the antidote to the funeral parlors. Alvarado was the child of peasants who had come to literature through some incomprehensible conception of patriotism, and by the sheer force of rote repetition of “Suave Patria” and the memorization of verses by Díaz Mirón, Gutiérrez Nájera, and Sor Juana, for recitation to the town people. Forever poverty stricken, he couldn’t even afford to have his clothes washed at the end of each month, his tab at the corner store was overflowing, and he was filled with anger.

Apparently, during those magical and terrible years, Héctor Monteverde had followed the life of Alvarado from a distance, up until the man was murdered.

Héctor figured that he had to think the matter through calmly; he put aside the answering machine and the peach juice he had been drinking, and climbed back up to the roof with a packet of letters he had found in his mailbox. With infinite patience he set out to make paper airplanes and place them in a row along the parapet around the roof. Down on the street, the new day’s noise was just getting started in Condesa, the bikers, the teenagers having fun.

There was the slightest of breezes, and every once in a while it managed to blow one of the paper planes off the parapet, sending it into marvelous acrobatics before crashing to the ground. But very rarely did one succeed in floating away on the updraft. When the planes were all gone, he returned to his room. He had left all the lights on, the best antidote to loneliness, turning the damn house into a Christmas tree. He rewound the answering-machine tape. What he heard was what he had heard, and the voice said again,
“Hello.
I
am Jesús María Alvarado. I’ll call you back, buddy.”

Another Jesús María Alvarado, the son of Jesús María Alvarado, the ghost of Jesús María Alvarado, an alter ego of Jesús María Alvarado with the same name, some table-dancer trying to attract attention, the police trying to drive Monteverde nuts for reasons known only to themselves, he summarized.

The second call was even better:

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
I
just stood around drinking my beer and watching the goddamn TV. The noise was a pisser and
I
couldn’t hear a thing, but there was bin Laden, with his stony expression, in one of those communiqués he keeps sending out over the TV. This guy’s a real pain in my balls, so
I
wasn’t listening much, but then a couple of guys behind me started hollering something like, “Das Juancho, das freekin Juancho!” So
I
turn around to see what was up with this freekin Juancho and there were these two half-drunk muscle-bound studs going on with their mantra: “Das goddam Juancho, Juancho!” pointing at the TV.
I
flipped around to make sure
I
wasn’t the one who was nuts, as usual, but it was still bin Laden, all elegant with a field rifle in his hand and the rag around his head and that dopey face of his. So
I
flipped around again to talk to the Juancho fan club. “What’s with this fuckin Juancho?”
I
says, and them, half slurring because of the booze, they tell me that there on the TV was none other than their buddy Juancho, and just lookit how the prick had done himself up. And
I
kinda found out that Juancho ran with these guys, he had been a taco vendor in Juárez and got tired of his crappy life about three years ago and wetbacked it over to open a butcher shop in Burbank, California. Me,
I
couldn’t make heads or tails of the whole thing, so
I
turn to the TV again and, sure enough, the sonovabitch was still there, so
I
went to ask the two drunks what else they knew about Juancho, and were they sure it was him, and when had he grown that shitty beard, but the guys had disappeared, gone,
nada. I
searched the bar and the sidewalk and all, but there was no sign of them. And
I
says to myself,
Now ain’t that a pisser. Bin Laden’s alter ego is a taco vendor from Juárez.
But then
I
started getting it all together and I says,
Alvarado, what do you know about Burbank?
And the thing is,
I
do know something about Burbank. It’s the skin-flick capital of the United States, a shit town near Los Angeles, triple-X companies and motels … Fuck, fuck, film, film, long live savage capitalism! And
I
put two and two together, and
I
ask myself, like, what if it was the Bushes who’ve been making the bin Laden communiqués, those messages from hell, in a porno studio in Burbank, California, where they even have all the desert you might want? What if they concocted the whole thing? What if it’s all a dream factory starring a Mexican taco vendor by the name of Juancho? But to tell the truth, even
I
couldn’t believe that crock, and
I
kept telling myself,
You can’t be serious …
But it does make a cool story, doesn’t it?”

Héctor turned off the machine. He went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and splashed cold water on his face. Like a lot of people who live alone, he was in the habit of talking to his mirror persona, but now he couldn’t think of anything to tell himself. He thought it over again and broke out into roaring laughter. Kafka swimming in his briefs in Xochimilco. Bin Laden played by Juancho in Burbank. And, of course, when he wasn’t doing communiqués, like Alvarado said, Juancho spent his free time fucking on film and getting paid for it. A free version of A
Thousand and One Nights,
as told in a taco emporium in Juárez: crazy but funny, the dumbest prick on the border.