The Uncomfortable Dead (8 page)

Was Manuel Vázquez Montalbán making an investigation or a puzzle? Whatever the case, we had to investigate the pieces. I went to talk to the committee. We thought it over for a while and decided to send Elías into the Monster. After Elías left, I sent other commissions out to gather information on the Montes Azules and I asked Deep Throat to send me anything he had on the current antics of Zedillo and Carabias. I wrote a letter to Alvaro Delgado, a journalist with
Proceso
magazine and an expert researcher on El Yunque and its reactivation under the Fox administration, begging him for information on that ultrarightist group. I wrote one other letter, addressed to the Good Governance Board of Los Altos, asking them to contact the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center to gather information on the Acteal massacre. As I was compiling information, Elías would be learning how to get around in Mexico City.

When I deduced from Elías’s reports that he was ready, I instructed him to find Doña Rosario Ibarra de Piedra. She would know where to find Belascoarán, and perhaps she and the ladies of Eureka might also know something about this Morales and his role in the Dirty War.

A Little Card

Me, I knew right off that Mamá Piedra was the one we call Doña Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, who works with a group of ladies we call the Doñas, and they’re organized to locate men and women who were disappeared by the bad government of the PRI, and the other bad governments, which are the PAN and the PRD, cause they just clam up and never admit where they disappeared those people, that is, fighters for justice for the poor, which means that they were on the side of the people who are screwed, which is all of us. The group is called Eureka, which means that they get real happy when they find a disappeared person and reappear them, and then they have a party that they call Eureka.

So I found Doña Rosario. It took awhile cause she wasn’t in the Monster. She was in Monterrey. So when she turned up, I went to see her at her little house.

She got real happy when she saw me and she kept hugging me and calling me
my son
and all, and she kept hitting me, but not like she was mad; it was just the way she was, cause she’s from the north and that’s kind of how northerners behave. And she asked me about El Sup and how he was and if he was sick and about the cold up there, which is where I am now, because
up there
for the city people means
right here
for us, and
out here
is
up there
for the city folk. You can see why people keep saying that I got my head a little mixed up.

So the thing is, I couldn’t hardly say nothing, what with all the hugging and questions from Mamá Piedra, as we called her. When she finally got through with her hugging and things, she asked me if I was hungry and I said I was, a bit, and while she was cooking
cuche
with
mole,
or something like that, I explained to her just what it was that I was doing in the Monster and that I was on an Investigation Commission. When I mentioned this Morales, she sorta got real still and quiet, like she was thinking. Then she said the food was ready and we ate and it was real delicious, the
cuche
with
mole,
and really hot and spicy.

When we were having our coffee, Doña Piedra said that the simple truth was she couldn’t remember no Morales, but that she was going to ask the other Doñas and visit the museum home of Dr. Margil, which is also in Monterrey. I said that would be good. And then I asked her if she didn’t know where abouts I could find a guy called Belascoarán who did the same kind of work I do, only he does it in the city, and El Sup told me she might know about this man and might even know where he lives or where he works. She took another sip of her coffee and answered me.

“He works downtown somewhere. He’s got an office on Bucareli Street. I’ll get you the exact address right now.”

And she began searching in a stack of papers on her table and mumbling something about a little card, and I
know
I
have it here somewhere, so where the heck did
I
put it …
and it took awhile, but she finally found it and gave it to me, that is, she gave me this little card that said:

Héctor Belascoarán Shayne
Independent Detective
Donato Guerra, near the corner of Bucareli
Mexico,
D.F.

Fragments of the Conversation between El Sup and the One They Call Deep Throat
(intercepted by an
EP-3
spy plane and transmitted to one of the
SIGNIT
satellites of the Echelon Network and relayed to the Regional Security Operations Center at Medina Annex,
U.S.A.,
coordinates 98°W, 29°N,
NAVSECGRU
and AIA, under code name “morai”):

“Zedillo and Carabias have business interests in Montes Azules. The NGO run by Carabias is just a front for poaching animal species, which they distribute all over the world through an international black market. Their trade in macaws, tapirs, monkeys, and other animals I can’t remember right now is just the first step. They’re paving the way for the entry of giant corporations that are going after the wood, the uranium, and the water. Water is going to be as important in this century as oil was in the past. I’m talking about money, a great deal of money. The Fox administration knows all about it, but they’re not saying anything. Morales is a kind of sales agent and wandering bag man … Well, that’s what he’s doing now—in the past, he did a lot of other things.”

“What about Tello?”

“A pissant climber; that’s his whole life. I imagine you already know this, but the book he is alleged to have written about the Zapatista uprising was actually written by the intelligence services of the Federal Army on direct orders from Zedillo. They had asked Pérez Gay, I don’t know if it was Rafael or José María, but he refused on ethical grounds. Then Aguilar Camín recommended one of the courtesans, Carlos Tello Díaz. This Morales individual gathered some facts and invented the rest to weave stories about the guerrilla organizations he had fought against or infiltrated in the ’60s. It seems Morales was under the orders of Nazar Haro, but he also had his own initiatives. When Nazar and Salomón Tanús tortured prisoners, it was Morales who recorded what the victims said, true or false. He wrote his reports in duplicate. One he turned in, and the other he kept. When Nazar fell out of grace with his superiors, Morales vanished, but with a copy, his own copy, of the secret and unedited files of the Federal Department of Security. The real files, not the ones that were released publicly. Morales vanished for a while and just turned up recently. I’m no expert in the Dirty War, but I can tell you that the people who were in it then are still active now; they were sort of recycled. The government of change is really the government of recycled evil. Where it used to say PRI, it now says PAN. Bottom line: Morales wrote, Tello signed. That appears to be the extent of the relations between those two. Zedillo was so pleased with the book that he brought Tello into his inner circle. While Juan Ramón de la Fuente adopted Nilda Patricia, Zedillo started a, shall we say
intimate,
relationship with Julia Carabias. Tello’s previous tourist trips into the Lacandona rain forest coincided with the appearances of Zedillo and Carabias in the region. In their evening get-togethers, Tello Díaz shared more than just dinner with those two. Tello might appear to be something like a bridge between Zedillo-Carabias and the people behind the
Nexos
and
Letras Libres
magazines, but it seems he wasn’t. I think he’s just playing the gofer for Zedillo, who’s got the same sense of humor he displayed during his administration. I don’t think Krauze or Aguilar Camín would invest a cent in Tello, not because they have anything against making a buck, but because they see Tello as no more than a disposable napkin—although Tello might turn out to be the theoretician behind the ecological-Disneyland transformation of the Lacandona rain forest. There you have it: pillaging of natural wealth behind the façade of ecological protection, and all of that with intellectual backing … the perfect deal.”

“Could it be that this Morales had something to do with Acteal?”

“I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Did you find out anything about El Yunque?”

“That information is still in the inner sanctum. I haven’t been able to get any of that.”

“Does Morales have any contacts with the Fox cabinet?”

“Looks like it, but I’m not certain. If he does, they are so insulated that it’s difficult to pin them down. There was one meeting where his name was mentioned; everyone looked at Creel and the subject was quickly changed. I think the one who mentioned him was Martín Huerta. You might be interested to know that this Morales has a permanent pass into the American embassy. According to my information, he’s been seen dining with Ambassador Tony Garza in a very exclusive restaurant.”

“Do you have a picture of this Morales?”

“No, just general descriptions. Between fifty and sixty years old, about my size. Supposedly he looks like a prosperous banker. He likes to dress well and he enjoys fine cuisine.”

“Okay. I think I’ve got enough. Did you have any difficulty getting here?”

“No, none. I thought I should come and tell you personally because I didn’t like the idea of sending this in writing. What I can tell you is to take care of yourselves. They’re practically hysterical with the coming elections.”

“The gringos?”

“No, the gringos don’t worry about these things because whoever wins will be eating out of their hands anyway. I’m talking about the domestic turds, what you call the
political class.
There’s a lot of money up for grabs. It will be lucrative for anyone who can get his hands in the privatization of the power companies and the oil. Since it’s obvious that this won’t happen during the current administration, the smart money is betting on the next one. They’re going to throw so much shit at each other … They’re attacking López Obrador, but not because they’re afraid of him or because he’s a populist or anything like that. In his four years in office, all he’s done is suck up to his superiors. They’re after his ass because he’s in the lead for the top prize. Today he’s the target; tomorrow it’ll be whoever takes the lead. López is getting hit in waves: First they throw the PGR at him, then Interior, then the Supreme Court of Justice, and then all of them together. Cabinet meetings are not used to plan policy, but to check the polls and plan the next strike. When the dust settles, Martita will be the only one left standing. In the PRI, they’re pounding each other with everything, but the press doesn’t notice it because of all the other scandals. Carlos was responsible for the Enrique Salinas thing. It’s a clear message to Raúl and it says,
Shut up.
In the PRD, they’re trying to figure out if it’s better to sell López Obrador down the river or to get on the bandwagon. In the auction, Cuauhtémoc is the highest bidder for
Numero Uno’s
head. In the end, only the worst will survive: Martita for the PAN, Madrazo for the PRI, and Cárdenas for the PRD.”

“I asked you for information, not for a political analysis.”

“Yes, I know, but these pricks are turning the country into a syphilitic old whore. Begging the old whore’s pardon, but it really gets me mad. Listen. Tell the comrades in the committee to get me out of there. Being a prick might be contagious.”

“Wasn’t it you who used to say that some birds can cross a swamp without getting soiled?”

“Yeah, but this isn’t a swamp, it’s a goddamn sewer, and it’s about to blow up. We’re going to be swimming in shit.”

“Come on now, you’re sounding like the European Union.”

“Hey, don’t even joke about that. You know what side I’m on.”

“So don’t sweat it. What’s missing is missing …”

Another Card

To tell the truth, I was kinda jealous of that Belascoarán and his card, so I went on down to the print shop in Santo Domingo, down there by the Zócalo, and I had me some of them cards printed up that say … that say … Gimme a minute, I got one here in my backpack. Yeah, here it is, take a look:

Elías Contreras
Investigation Commission, EZLN
Mountains of S.E. Mexico, near Guatemala
Chiapas, Mexico

Now my problem is that I have to get some more cards made up for Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Chol, and Tojolabal. That’ll be the next time I go into the Monster. Okay, so I couldn’t just go and find that Belascoarán feller, cause first I had to figger out whether or not I was even sposed to find him yet. So I wrote my report and I sent it to El Sup asking if I should go talk to Belascoarán and all, or if I should wait. Then I got the answer:

Do
not find the soda man yet. Wait for some papers I will be sending you. When you have them, then go find him.
Do
not meet with him at any of his regular places. Meet someplace you already checked out before. Make sure he hasn’t got a tail on him. If he’s clean, make contact. From there on, it’s up to you. If you think he’s okay, then give him the papers and tell him we want to work together. If it looks to you like something’s not right, then just tell him I send my regards and that’s that. It’s up to you to judge. Report when it’s done. That’s all. Regards.

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

CHAPTER 6

ONCE YOU’VE GIVEN UP YOUR SOUL …

H
éctor Belascoarán Shayne was in love with a ghost woman. A woman who had disappeared. This was nothing new to him. Not that he kept falling in love with ghosts, but that women with whom he had been in love, on and off, for more or less long periods of time, would suddenly disappear.

According to the mysterious agenda of the girl with the ponytail, who wasn’t a girl anymore and who hadn’t worn a ponytail in the longest time and instead had a lock covering one eye (Veronica Lake—style), a few marvelous and elegant white hairs, a doctoral degree in philosophy, and the ability to kick back tequila
caballitos
… well, according to her own weird perspective, she was nowhere. And she hadn’t even taken the trouble to say goodbye, which she never did anyway. She had simply vanished. She failed to turn up for work, the university was on break, she didn’t answer her telephone, even the answering machine had gone deaf and dumb, and the door to her apartment was becoming a wasteland of junk mail, electricity bills, bank statements, and issues of La
Jornada
and
Proceso.

Sometimes Héctor would accept these disappearances as a kind of mandatory recess from a relationship that couldn’t quite be defined: intermittent but regular lovers? Unstable couple with sidereal escapes? Maori-style marriage? The lovers from A
Man and a Woman,
but twenty-five years later? A
de facto
couple with an
ex post facto
pacto?

But this time she should not have disappeared like that, because without knowing it she had left Héctor sad, depressed, feeling like he had been gypped by a pirate
pesero
… and a little bit older than usual. When had he fallen so crazy in love with this woman that he was ready to slit his wrists for her? This was the source of his sudden anxieties, those absolutely adolescent pangs that pursued him, those cinematographic appearances of her face when he was shaving, eating tacos, or listening to Mahler.

Mahler? What the hell did this ex girl with the former ponytail have to do with that marvelous bedeviled Jew of the dawn of the twentieth century? He had discovered Mahler many years
after
the girl with the ponytail. She was there before. And what linked the girl and the composer was not the adagietto of the
5th Symphony
(it was months later that he found out an adagietto is just a wilting adagio that never perks up, and that an adagio is a piece played slowly), the one that most people remember in connection with the movie
Death in Venice
based on the work by Thomas Mann and much improved by Visconti. That rise and fall of passions cresting and crashing like waves in the sea, and there isn’t a sonovabitch alive who can recover them. No, it was not
that
Mahler that he associated with the ponytailed girl and her appearances and disappearances. Curiously enough, it was instead this tremendous piece of music he had discovered when the Mexico City Symphony had asked him to help recover a truckload of instruments. One afternoon, when they were halfway through their rehearsal, in the middle of that empty theater populated solely by a handful of musicians and a universe of sound, Héctor had caught himself drenched in tears because of music that was seizing and overwhelming him. That was why he ended up spending more time in the rehearsals than in the actual investigation. It was Mahler’s
8th.
It was a paean to the greatness of humanity that Héctor interpreted on a very personal level amid the miseries of Mexico City. It was
this
Mahler that he associated with the girl. And let no one ask Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, the solitary detective in the craziest and most upside-down city on the planet, why. Let no one ask, because he would not be able to answer.

So, with a feminine and Mahlerian yearning, he sat on the side of the bed, the one he had not made in a fortnight and needed a change of linen, and played Mahler’s
8th
on his stereo, instructing the machine to play it
ad nauseam.
And while it was playing, he reviewed his conversation with Fuang Chu Martínez and chain-smoked till the room was a cloud of haze.

“You have got to be breaking my balls,” the Chinese man said, drawing the words from deep inside his soul.

Héctor did not feel obliged to explain why he was working as a detective in Mexico City, so he stared right back at this Chinaman who was refusing to take him seriously. Showdown: Chinese man against one-eyed man.

It was the latter who won, perhaps because all of his energy was concentrated into a single eye.

“Why are you asking about Jesús María Alvarado?”

“Because the person who hired me has been receiving voice messages from him on his answering machine.”

The Chinese guy took another long look at Héctor before answering. “Alvarado is dead. I wasn’t at his funeral because I was in prison, but he’s dead. He died in ’71, a shitload of years ago … So you say you’re an independent cop? Which department of the Ministry of the Interior?”

Belascoarán lit a cigarette. You were still allowed to smoke in funeral parlors. For some strange reason, they had been spared from the wave of anti-tobacco Puritanism rolling down from the United Stated and sweeping across middle-class Mexico.

How could he explain the last thirty years to Fuang Chu Martínez? How could he explain his tortuous relations with the authorities? He decided to follow the method of using his scars as signposts,
the way of the scar,
his Cheyenne friends called it.

“You see this eye I’m missing? It was blown out by a former member of the Judicial Police … now deceased. You know why I got one leg longer than the other? From a shotgun blast fired by the same people who organized the
halcones.
I spent seven months and three days in a prison cell in Tabasco for proving an election fraud was committed by the PRI some years ago. I was beaten by a mob led by a priest in Tlaxcala who was trying to exorcize the Pokémons, and it was me who gathered the evidence to put Luisreta, the banker, in prison.”

“You’ve got my attention,” the Chinese man said.

“I’m a decent sort, some say. But about Alvarado—the only thing I know is that you two were cellmates after ’68.”

“So why would anyone want to know more?”

Héctor handed him a copy of the five messages the dead man had left on Monteverde’s machine.

“Shit! How about that Alvarado? Sonovabitch coming back from the dead!” Fuang Chu said with a smile out of the silent movies, only half of his face moving.

“Do you know who killed him?”

“I’ll be damned. Sending messages from the beyond—that was some character, Alvarado was,” the Chinaman answered, avoiding an answer, “and he brought Morales with him.”

“What do you know about Morales?” Héctor snapped, swearing to himself that it would be the last question he was going to ask Fuang Chu. He would just let him say what he felt like saying.

“Me, I got this,” Fuang Chu said, pulling a wrinkled piece of thermal fax paper from his pocket.

Héctor took the paper and read aloud:

He’s
not a dog, but he bites;
He’s not Speedy Gonzales, but in pictures he’s a blur;
He’s not an ostrich, but he has quills;
He’s not poison, but he kills;
Like me, he returns from the dead.
Who is it?

Your old cellmate,
Jesús María Alvarado

It’s a shitty riddle, Héctor thought, but even so he added it to the other materials, without Fuang Chu trying to stop him.

“Do you have an answering machine?”

“No,” the Chinaman said, “I’m premodern: no TV, no gas …”

“That’s why he sent a fax.”

“But he didn’t send it to me, he sent it to the public baths where I work, in Guadalajara.”

Héctor conjured up Alec Guinness again and prayed to le Carré for it to work. It did. The Chinese man took a long breath and began his story.

“You know how traitors develop? People don’t rot overnight. They don’t go to bed one night as guerrilla fighters and wake up agents of the Ministry of the Interior. They just grow weak. They betray out of exhaustion, out of boredom, out of inertia. It’s as if they take so much abuse that the flesh they’re made of begins to get flaccid and mushy; as if the spaces in their muscle tissue get clogged with tiny particles of shit and the remnants of old tumors. And the entire process requires ongoing justification, a growing mountain of self-pity, a dense cloud of self-deception.

“Do you know what Morales did on his twenty-fifth birthday? He turned his ex-wife in to the political police and she wound up getting tortured in the cellars of their facilities facing the Monument to the Revolution. Can you imagine what Morales did to justify that treason? He said he was saving her from certain death. Do you know what Morales dreamed about? He dreamed about his ex-wife walking barefoot on the sands of a beach in Veracruz. In the meantime, she was being raped three times and getting half her teeth kicked in.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because in a two-by-three-meter cell with two other prisoners, we can hear each other’s dreams, even without words. Not even our fucking dreams are private. Because Alvarado had big
cojones,
and since we’d heard all about Morales and knew he was a traitor, a plant put there to see what they could get out of us, Alvarado decided the piece of shit didn’t exist and never even acknowledged his presence. And me, since I’m Chinese, I went into the most Oriental of all silences and convinced myself as well that Morales did not exist. There we were, three of us in a cell acting as if we were only two. If Morales spoke, we wouldn’t answer; if he handed us a spoon, we let it drop; if we bumped into him, we didn’t apologize, we just walked through him.”

Héctor had kept silent, but Fuang Chu was getting lost in the past.

“Was Morales his real name?”

“Go figure. That was the name he brought with him and that’s the one we know.”

“Did he have a first name or only Morales?”

“Morales, only Morales. He left a lot sooner than Alvarado, and a whole lot sooner than me. I got out three months
after
Jesús María.”

“Do you believe that Morales killed Jesús María Alvarado?”

“I do! Don’t ask me why, but I do. Jesús left prison anxious to rebuild the network he had set up when they arrested him near the end of ’68, and he was ready for anything. He said that the time for words was over; that demonstrations only served to provide the Army with target practice. He was very ready to act. Five days after he got out, they killed him. A bullet in the back of his head.”

“How do you tie that to Morales?”

“I can’t. I just know it! I remember the look on his face.”

Héctor thought that over. It was as good an argument as any.

“I went off to Guadalajara, but it was a long time before I stopped checking the shadows and walking with my back to the wall—just to keep from making it too easy for them.”

“Did you ever see or hear of Morales again?”

“Never! But when the fax arrived, I remembered something I think I read in a Henry Miller book about how once you’ve given up your soul, the rest follows with absolute certainty.”

It was a good picture of Morales …

“And if Alvarado is back for vengeance, he has every right to it, and so do we, and I hope he fucks him,” the Chinaman said, turning back into the funeral parlor and putting an end to the conversation.

Héctor had vague recollections of Henry Miller. The
Tropics
were anything but tropical; they were women’s underwear in the air, flying ejaculations, and the puritanical capacity for astonishment of a nineteen-year-old engineering student, the spawn of a Mexican middle class capable of producing an Irish folk singer and a Basque sailor exiled in Mexico City. When had the dead man met Morales … or Henry Miller? Why drag him out of the past? Héctor didn’t think that people like Henry Miller, or the Marquis de Sade for that matter, were subversive at all … just whoring pains in the ass. But in the deepest recesses of his heart, there where he never discussed literature with anyone for fear that his own loves and hates might be deemed sinful, politically incorrect, or simply unconventional, Héctor probably thought that Henry Miller was just some gringo who must have one of his balls much bigger than the other. And yet, the part about giving up your soul was familiar. Amazingly familiar for an atheist who didn’t believe in souls, except as in
heels and soles.
Images from the narratives of Henry Miller began to overlap with those he conjured of the ordeal suffered by Morales’s ex-wife, and it made him sick. He gave an involuntary gesture of disgust and felt a chill run up his spine. With that chill fresh in his mind, he fell asleep huddled in a corner of his bed, as if he wanted to leave room for the ghosts and the dead.

Fritz walked a few yards ahead of Héctor and crossed into what used to be cellblock 7, using his authorization to take a look, just a little peek, at each cell. There was nothing to see. Boxes and papers. All traces had disappeared. The historical archives had devoured the historical memory, the simple memory.

“Is there any way to dig up the prison records of 1968?” Héctor asked.