The Uncomfortable Dead by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Subcomandante Marcos Read Free Book Online

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