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

autonomy thing, because on her return to France she intends to get together with her pupils and start an autonomous rebel municipality and name it after Charlie Parker. Juin’s job on our team is to be a deterrent, because of her precise kicks—not at the ball, but at the other team’s ankles. In town she’s known as Blondie or Frenchie.
    Our fourth element is an Italian, a cook by trade, whose name is Vittorio Francesco Augusto Luiggi and whose last name’s Nidalote, which in Albanian means forbidden. He’s a firm believer in extraterrestrials, and according to what he told us one night in the forests of Chiapas, there are good extraterrestrials and bad extraterrestrials. The bad ones already landed a long time ago in Washington, London, Rome, Madrid, Moscow, and Mexico, and they took over everything and started the fast-food craze. The good ones, well, the good ones haven’t arrived yet, but if there’s any place where they are going to land, it will be on Zapatista soil. And they won’t be coming to conquer us or teach us their high technology, but how to defeat the bad ones. Vittorio Francesco Augusto Luiggi figures that the good extraterrestrials are going to need a cook, and that’s why he’s here. Vittorio Francesco Augusto Luiggi plays left end on our team because he says you have to be consistent with your political positions, even in sports. In town they call him Panchito, something for which he, and all of us, are thankful.
    So that’s it. We’re what you might call an original group, and if we Zapatify our names you get: May Clandestine, June Outlaw, July Secret, and August Forbidden. So we have perfect names for characters in a porn novel, or a spy novel, or a porn-spy novel, but not a mystery novel. And even if we add the April from the first chapter, the calendar is still incomplete, broken.
    Don’t pay me too much mind now. Maybe El Sup put us in the novel like a random sampling of people—because the Zapatistas, you know, maintain that the world is not unique, that there are multiple worlds, and that’s why they’re sticking the book with a gay Filipino mechanic, a German pizza-delivering bike dyke, a jazz-loving French teacher, and an Italian cook who believes in extraterrestrials. So it’s not just men and women, and it’s possible that later on we might even get a few more odd characters.
    Although, actually, I think the Italian cook is only in the book because in mystery novels the detective usually winds up having culinary adventures. The other day, for example, I found Vittorio Francesco Augusto Luiggi (August Forbidden in our broken calendar) trying out a recipe that he said El Sup had given him. It was called Marcos’s Special and he did it up just the way they told him: mince and fry one ration of beef; add a small can of Mexican salsa and cheese; mix thoroughly and serve hot.
    When August Forbidden finished his concoction, I told him, “It looks like dog barf.”
    Then he tasted it himself and added, “It tastes the same as it looks.”
    But August is one of those people who believes the Zapatistas are never wrong, so he claimed the problem was that the salsa brand he used was Herdez and “El Sup actually told me it had to be La Costeña.”
    In any case, begging the pardon of Pepe Carvalho and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, the fare in this novel is not going to be all that good. And now that I have discussed eating, give me a second so I can go to the john.
    Elías and the Case of the Woodpecker
    A dummy, because aside from being a woodpecker, the bird was a dummy, like you’re gonna see from what I’m gonna tell you.
    Okay, the thing is, they sent me on an Investigation Commission to the Morelia caracol (you remember that’s what they call the autonomous municipalities) in the Tzots Choj region, and the thing, or rather the case, was a man who had been deceased by some guys who said they weren’t the ones who deceased him. The Good Governance Board from those parts had sent