Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Translated by Gregory Nipper - Calling All Heroes: A Manual for Taking Power

I ask that readers unfamiliar with adventure novels fl ip to the final pages and read Appendix One. For readers with no knowledge of the Mexico of 1969, I suggest going to the final pages and reading Appendix Two.

Insecure readers (those who think that if they dont read the footnotes they will miss something important) are invited to skip to the final pages and read Appendices One and Two.

The rest can go ahead.

Thank you,

For example, on Insurgentes Bridge, on the side where that insipid mercury light doesnt disturb the night; over Avenida Divisin del Norte, where the darkness is broken by the constant line of automobile headlights (and there, ten meters below, is the viaduct), like an urban river with all its roar. You toss the butt and watch it fall, secretly hoping it will bounce off the roof of a car (you miss). In a way, with the butt went the seven minutes it took to smoke the ciga rette, and now you feel like climbing up on the guard wall and pissing on the automobiles. Below, a moving van raises curtains of water as it bursts through the puddles. Its rain ing again...

For example, in the doorway of the Teatro Roble at the end of the last show. They were featuring The Battle of Algiers , of course, and the crowd came down the stairs as if anxious not to return to itself, not to leave in stunned silence but to erupt in the Apache war cries of the Algerians overfl owing the Casbah.

For example, in the faculty mimeograph room, surrounded by the two machines that Eligio Caldern (nicknamed The Tricolor) and Adriana had fi ne-tuned like Swiss watches to produce an average of two thousand leaflets an hour. In the midst of that fascinating noise, celebrating each new spot of ink on your hands, forehead, nose...

For example, in San Juan de Letrn at six in the evening, when the light in the city changes, contemplating a long row of lead soldiers in a shop window and fondling the two hundred pesos you had in your pocket to buy books in the old Zaplana Bookstore: Howard Fast in Ediciones Siglo XX paperbacks for seventeen and a half pesos, and Dos Passos novels, and Fuks Notes From the Gallows , on sale for seven pesos, and you go in to buy it all, to see it all, to...

But you are on a gurney that runs along the corridors, as the skillful hand of an audacious driver of gurneys guides you along the racetrack of the white hallways. The guy ought to notice how a spot of blood is spreading on the sheet that covers you. According to the rhetoric of hospital scenes, it is obligatory to find a beautiful woman at the door to the operating room, hiding her tears (but not so well that they cant be seen); but there is no door to the operating room, only the spreading spot of blood and the hand that slips from the gurney and falls to the floor, the knuckles bounc ing and dragging across the green tiles. The orderly wonders whether to stop and/or to push the gurney forcefully, his eyes fixed, captivated by the red spot that spreads on the white sheet.

You think, There are spiders, huge spiders climbing over my hands, a shitload of them. And you feel like if you dont moisten your arms with ice water, theyll rot, theyll fall off. Could they be termites instead, or piranhas?

Theyre piranhas, the kind that when you stick in your arm you pull out bloody bones... But it is a game, a gaming board with the feet acting as markers, moving around the colored squares.

And the loneliness, all of it. All the damned spiders and all the assholes in the world. I am tired. I am not going to

be able to read anything this way because Im too dizzy. The trapeze is moving. A nurse says something while she tears your blue, blood stained shirt from your body.

Long live Mexico, children of La Chingada , you whis per when they move you from the gurney to the operating table, to the bewilderment of a young doctor.

A flash of consciousness hits you. You open your eyes and say,

They bare their teeth at me...

Mexico City, December 1970

My dear Nstor:

You asked me to tell in three pages the story of your

run-in with the whorekiller last year. As I am accustomed

to your wild ideas, here goes:

The version that I have is very exact (gathered from vari

ous sources), but it doesnt go further than the most super

ficial details. Exact, but irritating.

It seems you left the newspaper offi ce at 5:30.

To drink a cup of coffee, the editor-in-chief said.

Ive got it, you said after hanging up the phone, accord

ing to the sports writers.

He ran out. But that doesnt mean anything; hes always

running out, the offi ce boy said.

You had a tape recorder slung over one shoulder. From the right shoulder, and it was swinging so much I thought hed bust it, said Serafn Nava of the entertain ment section, who passed you in the swinging door of the editorial office.

From the left shoulder. And now whos going to give

me back the tape recorder? Not that its so important, you

see, but it was an Uher and belongs to the newspaper, and

everything here is inventoried, and so on, the administra tive clerk said.

Do you have a tape, dummy? I said to him, because sometimes a person forgets; and he replied, Ive got a pair, but I didnt understand him, Serafn Nava said.

It seems you left on foot. Theres no proof one way or another.

Here a question arises: Who called you?

I had been following your articles. I was buying El Universal to see what the fuck you were trying to do in a world as alien to your own as the scandal sheet. And there you went, quick and speedy, driven by the same intense passion as always, hot on the trail of the whorekiller. He hadnt killed many, only three, but you had linked the murders together (all of them in fleabag hotels, all of them with a switchblade, all of them in the afternoon), and you had given him the name of the prostitute murderer in public and whorekiller, one word, when talking about him with friends.