The Uncomfortable Dead: A Novel of Four Hands

Four Hands Good

Resurrection is a very Mexican act. In a city and country where you lose 95% of the time, resurrection is the way to come back, to find justice, to find light at the end of the tunnel. – Taibo, quoted in "Héctor's Body," Frontera Dreams

As one has come to expect with Taibo's Héctor Belascoarán Shayne series, the novel incorporates an array of bizarre tangents and political ruminations that situate the plot amongst the quotidian mystery of how Mexico provides for its people in the era of globalization. Just as the authors' share of the novel's proceeds goes to the Mexico-U.S. Solidarity Network, contemporary Mexican politics stands front and center in the narrative, and the dead continue to make history long after passing through the grave. The Mexico City-based detective Shayne, after dying and coming back to life in previous novels, now partners up with a dead investigator named Elías, who is sent by Marcos (or "El Sup") from the mountains of Southeast Mexico to Mexico City (or "the Monster") in order to, among other things, investigate a series of messages left on an answering machine by someone who died over thirty years ago. It may not initially seem plausible that the dead continue to make history, but they do, they do.

The novel has great fun with metanarrative commentary about (and by) Marcos, who is everywhere and nowhere as a character, as he lets the manifold voices of his comrades speculate about his motivations and beliefs: "Campamentistas...should criticize El Sup for not being or doing what they think he should be and do, they should plan how they're going to export Zapataism to their own countries...but they should definitely not enter into metaphysical considerations. Neither should they wetback their way...into mystery novels, especially those that are written by four hands, twenty fingers, two heads, many worlds." And yet these considerations seem exactly what Marcos and Taibo want to encourage: what does it mean to be Mexican? What does it means to exist on the margins of the machinations of global capitalism? To find another way to survive this life, we must turn to the dead, the ghosts, and the wetbacks.

Otherwise put, the material struggle for social justice always has a metaphysical component to it, and that struggle requires grappling with Evil in all of its forms. It also means dealing with the absurdities of existence head on: "Shayne was Mexican, so absurdity was his daily bread. He was Mexican and had only one eye, so he could see only half of what other people saw, but more clearly. In recent years he had been living on the edge, on the borders between strange territories skirting incoherence, irrationality, and extravagance; this, along with tragedy, cowardice, collective insult, impunity, fear, and ridicule." The detective, like the Zapatistas, inhabits the strange borderlands of the Mexican national imaginary, and this is precisely why he represents the people.

Seeing many worlds with one eye may not sound like a viable political platform, but too often Mexican and world history have turned its many eyes to seeing but one world. As Elías is told by city comrade Alakazam: "And when we finally see what's going on, then it'll be too late, cause there won't be anything left when we get through looking the other way. And the worse thing is not that we're looking off where there's nothing to see, no sir, the worst thing is that they get us to think that their concerns, the concerns of the rich, are our concerns, and we take them like our own." The Uncomfortable Dead looks Mexico straight in the eye, and it is through this lens that we see the plight of the whole world.

None of the hands in this narrative seem particularly nostalgic for the '60s (Taibo, of the "Generation of 68," has published a short memoir about that era's student movement), but they remain acutely aware of how history haunts the present. Add to this an elusive, evil man named Morales, the possibility that Osama bin Laden may be a former taco vendor named Juancho whose proclamations are taped in a Burbank studio and that the dead voice on the answering machine may also be that of the Mexican Barney, and it becomes abundantly clear that the uncomfortable dead have a lot of loose ends to tie up by the last page. Whether they do or not, however, is beside the point. Taibo's plots and pacing have always taken a back seat to revealing the many contours of today's absurd world. Though Shayne laments the state of his home city, he is still in love with it. Like Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles, Mexico City is both character and addressee, both polluted metropolis and aging lover, "whose inhabitants didn't know their neighbors and rarely even went outside to contemplate the dangerous splendor of the urban world." But neither Shayne nor Taibo will give up on that dangerous splendor, and neither should we.

Marcos' narrators illustrate the differing worldviews encoded urban and rural languages. He is a talented, multivocal storyteller, harnessing the work of García Lorca, Cervantes, Leonard Peltier, Angela Y. Davis, Pablo Neruda, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, among others, in his fight against what chapter nine repeatedly calls "the Bad and the Evil." In addition to Elías, there are appearances from "The Russian" and "The Chinaman" (neither is from Asia), a clandestine paramilitary group called NOBODY, and a sympathetic transvestite named Magdalena. As nervy characters are wont to do, they assert the right to exist despite their apparent incongruity, "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."

The nation that claims these people as its own will survive the era of globalization. But there are better ways to exist; as The Uncomfortable Dead shows, the most important mystery of all is how we may best die, how we may best survive.

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