‘I don’t mind skulls and bones,’ said Marie. ‘There’s nothing even vaguely human to them. I’m not scared of skulls and bones. They’re like something insectile. If a child was raised and didn’t know he had a skeleton in him, he wouldn’t think anything of bones, would he? That’s how it is with me. Everything human has been scraped off these. There’s nothing familiar left to be horrible. In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize. This isn’t changed. They’re still skeletons, like they always were. The part that changed is gone, and so there’s nothing to show for it. Isn’t that interesting?’
Joseph nodded.
She was quite brave now.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘let’s see the mummies.’
‘Here, señora,’ said the caretaker.
He took them far down the hall away from the stack of bones and when Joseph paid him a peso he unlocked the forbidden crystal doors and opened them wide and they looked into an even longer, dimly lighted hall in which stood the people.
They waited inside the door in a long line under the arch-roofed ceiling, fifty-five of them against one wall, on the left, fifty-five of them against the right wall, and five of them way down at the very end.
‘Mister Interlocutor!’ said Joseph, briskly.
They resembled nothing more than those preliminary erections of a sculptor, the wire frame, the first tendons of clay, the muscles, and a thin lacquer of skin. They were unfinished, all one hundred and fifteen of them.
They were parchment-colored and the skin was stretched as if to dry, from bone to bone. The bodies were intact, only the watery humors had evaporated from them.
‘The climate,’ said the caretaker. ‘It preserves them. Very dry.’
‘How long have they been here?’ asked Joseph.
‘Some one year, some five, señor, some ten, some seventy.’
There was an embarrassment of horror. You started with the first man on your right, hooked and wired upright against the wall, and he was not good to look upon, and you went on to the woman next to him who was unbelievable and then to a man who was horrendous and then to a woman who was very sorry she was dead and in such a place as this.
‘What are they doing here?’ asked Joseph.
‘Their relatives did not pay the rent upon their graves.’
‘Is there a rent?’
‘Sí, señor. Twenty pesos a year. Or, if they desire the permanent interment, one hundred seventy pesos. But our people, they are very poor, as you must know, and one hundred seventy pesos is as much as many of them make in two years. So they carry their dead here and place them into the earth for one year, and the twenty pesos are paid, with fine intentions of paying each year and each year, but each year and each year after the first year they have a burro to buy or a new mouth to feed, or maybe three new mouths, and the dead, after all, are not hungry, and the dead, after all, can pull no plows; or there is a new wife or there is a roof in need of mending, and the dead, remember, can be in no beds with a man, and the dead, you understand, can keep no rain off one, and so it is that the dead are not paid up upon their rent.’
‘Then what happens? Are you listening. Marie?’ asked Joseph.
Marie counted the bodies. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. ‘What?’ she said, quietly.
‘Are you listening?’
‘I think so. What? Oh, yes! I’m listening.’
Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.
‘Well, then,’ said the little man. ‘I call a trabajador and with his delicate shovel at the end of the first year he does dig and dig and dig down. How deep do you think we dig, señor?’
‘Six feet. That’s the usual depth.’
‘Ah, no, ah, no. There, señor, you would be wrong. Knowing that after the first year the rent is liable not to be paid, we bury the poorest two feet down. It is less work, you understand? Of course, we must judge by the family who own a body. Some of them we bury sometimes three, sometimes four feet deep, sometimes five, sometimes six, depending on how rich the family is, depending on what the chances are we won’t have to dig him from out his place a year later. And, let me tell you, señor, when we bury a man the whole six feet deep we are very certain of his staying. We have never dug up a six-foot-buried one yet, that is the accuracy with which we know the money of the people.’
Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. Marie’s lips moved with a small whisper.
‘And the bodies which are dug up are placed down here against the wall, with other compañeros.’
‘Do the relatives know the bodies are here?’
‘Sí.’ The small man pointed. ‘This one, vea ustéd? It is new. It has been here but one year. His madre y padre know him to be here. But have they money? Ah, no.’
‘Isn’t that rather gruesome for his parents?’
The little man was earnest. ‘They never think of it,’ he said.
‘Did you hear that, Marie?’
‘What?’ Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four. ‘Yes. They never think of it.’
‘What if the rent is paid again, after a lapse?’ inquired Joseph.
‘In that time,’ said the caretaker, ‘the bodies are reburied for as many years as are paid.’
‘Sounds like blackmail,’ said Joseph.
The little man shrugged, hands in pockets. ‘We must live.’
‘You are certain no one can pay the one hundred seventy pesos all at once,’ said Joseph. ‘So in this way you get them for twenty pesos a year, year after year, for maybe thirty years. If they don’t pay, you threaten to stand mamacita or little niño in the catacomb.’
‘We must live,’ said the little man.
Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three.
Marie counted in the center of the long corridor, the standing dead on all sides of her.
They were screaming.
They looked as if they had leaped, snapped upright in their graves, clutched hands over their shriveled bosoms and screamed, jaws wide, tongues out, nostrils flared.
And been frozen that way.
All of them had open mouths. Theirs was a perpetual screaming. They were dead and they knew it. In every raw fiber and evaporated organ they knew it.
She stood listening to them scream.
They say dogs hear sounds humans never hear, sounds so many decibels higher than normal hearing that they seem nonexistent.
The corridor swarmed with screams. Screams poured from terror-yawned lips and dry tongues, screams you couldn’t hear because they were so high.
Joseph walked up to one standing body.
‘Say “ah,”’ he said.
Sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, counted Marie, among the screams.
‘Here is an interesting one,’ said the proprietor.
They saw a woman with arms flung to her head, mouth wide, teeth intact, whose hair was wildly flourished, long and shimmery on her head. Her eyes were small pale white-blue eggs in her skull.
‘Sometimes, this happens. This woman, she is a cataleptic. One day she falls down upon the earth, but is really not dead, for, deep in her, the little drum of her heart beats and beats, so dim one cannot hear. So she was buried in the graveyard in a fine inexpensive box…’
‘Didn’t you know she was cataleptic?’
‘Her sisters knew. But this time they thought her at last dead. And funerals are hasty things in this warm town.’
‘She was buried a few hours after her “death”?’
‘Sí, the same. All of this, as you see her here, we would never have known, if a year later her sisters, having other things to buy, had not refused the rent on her burial. So we dug very quietly down and loosed the box and took it up and opened the top of her box and laid it aside and looked in upon her—’
Marie stared.
This woman had wakened under the earth. She had torn, shrieked, clubbed at the box-lid with fists, died of suffocation, in this attitude, hands flung over her gaping face, horror-ey
ed, hair wild.
‘Be pleased, señor, to find that difference between her hands and these other ones,’ said the caretaker. ‘Their peaceful fingers at their hips, quiet as little roses. Hers? Ah, hers! are jumped up, very wildly, as if to pound the lid free!’
‘Couldn’t rigor mortis do that?’
‘Believe me, señor, rigor mortis pounds upon no lids. Rigor mortis screams not like this, nor twists nor wrestles to rip free nails, señor, or prise boards loose hunting for air, señor. All these others are open of mouth, sí, because they were not injected with the fluids of embalming, but theirs is a simple screaming of muscles, señor. This señorita, here, hers is the muerte horrible.’
Marie walked, scuffling her shoes, turning first this way, then that. Naked bodies. Long ago the clothes had whispered away. The fat women’s breasts were lumps of yeasty dough left in the dust. The men’s loins were indrawn, withered orchids.
‘Mr Grimace and Mr Gape,’ said Joseph.
He pointed his camera at two men who seemed in conversation, mouths in mid-sentence, hands gesticulant and stiffened over some long-dissolved gossip.
Joseph clicked the shutter, rolled the film, focused the camera on another body, clicked the shutter, rolled the film, walked on to another.
Eighty-one, eighty-two, eighty-three. Jaws down, tongues out like jeering children, eyes pale brown-irised in upclenched sockets. Hairs, waxed and prickled by sunlight, each sharp as quills embedded on the lips, the cheeks, the eyelids, the brows. Little beards on chins and bosoms and loins. Flesh like drumheads and manuscripts and crisp bread dough. The women, huge ill-shaped tallow things, death-melted. The insane hair of them, like nests made and unmade and remade. Teeth, each single, each fine, each perfect, in jaw. Eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight. A rushing of Marie’s eyes. Down the corridor, flicking. Counting, rushing, never stopping. On! Quick! Ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three! Here was a man, his stomach open, like a tree hollow where you dropped your child love letters when you were eleven! Her eyes entered the hole in the space under his ribs. She peeked in. He looked like an Erector set inside. The spine, the pelvic plates. The rest was tendon, parchment, bone, eye, beardy jaw, ear, stupefied nostril. And this ragged eaten cicatrix in his navel into which a pudding might be spooned. Ninety-seven, ninetyeight! Names, places, dates, things!
‘This woman died in childbirth!’
Like a little hungry doll, the prematurely born child was wired, dangling, to her wrist.
‘This was a soldier. His uniform still half on him—’
Marie’s eyes slammed the furthest wall after a back-forth, back-forth swinging from horror to horror, from skull to skull, beating from rib to rib, staring with hypnotic fascination at paralyzed, loveless, fleshless loins, at men made into women by evaporation, at women made into dugged swine. The fearful ricochet of vision, growing, growing, taking impetus from swollen breast to raving mouth, wall to wall, wall to wall, again, again, like a ball hurled in a game, caught in the incredible teeth, spat in a scream across the corridor to be caught in claws, lodged between thin teats, the whole standing chorus invisibly chanting the game on, on, the wild game of sight recoiling, rebounding, reshuttling on down the inconceivable procession, through a montage of erected horrors that ended finally and for all time when vision crashed against the corridor ending with one last scream from all present!
Marie turned and shot her vision far down to where the spiral steps walked up into sunlight. How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike. They stood like the naked pipes of a vast derelict calliope, their mouths cut into frantic vents. And now the great hand of mania descended upon all keys at once, and the long calliope screamed upon one hundred-throated, unending scream.
Click went the camera and Joseph rolled the film. Click went the camera and Joseph rolled the film.
Moreno, Morelos, Cantine, Gómez, Gutiérrez, Villanousul, Ureta, Licón, Navarro, Iturbi, Jorge, Filomena, Nena, Manuel, José, Tomás, Ramona. This man walked and this man sang and this man had three wives; and this man died of this, and that of that, and the third from another thing, and the fourth was shot, and the fifth was stabbed and the sixth fell straight down dead: and the seventh drank deep and died dead, and the eighth died in love, and the ninth fell from his horse, and the tenth coughed blood, and the eleventh stopped his heart, and the twelfth used to laugh much, and the thirteenth was a dancing one, and the fourteenth was most beautiful of all, the fifteenth had ten children and the sixteenth is one of those children as is the seventeeth; and the eighteenth was Tomás and did well with his guitar; the next three cut maize in their fields, had three lovers each; the twenty-second was never loved; the twenty-third sold tortillas, patting and shaping them each at the curb before the Opera House with her little charcoal stove; and the twenty-fourth beat his wife and now she walks proudly in the town and is merry with new men and here he stands bewildered by this unfair thing, and the twenty-fifth drank several quarts of river with his lungs and was pulled forth in a net, and the twenty-sixth was a great thinker and his brain now sleeps like a burnt plum in his skull.
‘I’d like a color shot of each, and his or her name and how he or she died,’ said Joseph. ‘It would be an amazing, an ironical book to publish. The more you think, the more it grows on you. Their life histories and then a picture of each of them standing here.’
He tapped each chest, softly. They gave off hollow sounds, like someone rapping on a door.
Marie pushed her way through screams that hung net-wise across her path. She walked evenly, in the corridor center, not slow, but not too fast, toward the spiral stair, not looking to either side. Click went the camera behind her.
‘You have room down here for more?’ said Joseph.
‘Sí, señor. Many more.’
‘Wouldn’t want to be next in line, next on your waiting list.’
‘Ah, no, señor, one would not wish to be next.’
‘How are chances of buying one of these?’
‘Oh, no, no, señor. Oh, no, no. Oh, no, señor.’
‘I’ll pay you fifty pesos.’
‘Oh, no, señor, no, no, señor.’
In the market, the remainder of candy skulls from the Death Fiesta were sold from flimsy little tables. Women hung with black rebozos sat quietly, now and then speaking one word to each other, the sweet sugar skeletons, the saccharine corpses and white candy skulls at their elbows. Each skull had a name on top in gold candy curlicue: José or Carmen or Ramón or Tena or Guillermo or Rosa. They sold cheap. The Death Festival was gone. Joseph paid a peso and got two candy skulls.
Marie stood in the narrow street. She saw the candy skulls and Joseph and the dark ladies who put the skulls in a bag.
‘Not really,’ said Marie.
‘Why not?’ said Joseph.
‘Not after just now,’ she said.
‘In the catacombs?’
She nodded.
He said. ‘But these are good.’
‘They look poisonous.’
‘Just because they’re skull-shaped?’
‘No. The sugar itself looks raw, how do you know what kind of people made them, they might have the colic.’
‘My dear Marie, all people in Mexico have colic,’ he said.
‘You can eat them both,’ she said.
‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ he said, peeking into the bag.
They walked along a street that was held between high buildings in which were yellow window frames and blue iron grilles and the smell of tamales came from them and the sound of lost fountains splashing on hidden tiles and little birds clustering and peeping in bamboo cages and someone playing Chopin on a piano.
‘Chopin, here,’ said Joseph. ‘How strange and swell.’ He looked up. ‘I like that bridge. Hold this.’ He handed her the candy bag while he clicked a picture of a red bridge spanning two white buildings with a man walking on it, a red serape on his shoulder. ‘Fine,’ said Joseph.
Marie w
alked looking at Joseph, looking away from him and then back at him, her lips moving but not speaking, her eyes fluttering, a little neck muscle under her chin like a wire, a little nerve in her brow ticking. She passed the candy bag from one hand to the other. She stepped up a curb, leaned back somehow, gestured, said something to restore balance, and dropped the bag.
‘For Christ’s sake.’ Joseph snatched up the bag. ‘Look what you’ve done! Clumsy!’
‘I should have broken my ankle,’ she said, ‘I suppose.’
‘These were the best skulls; both of them smashed; I wanted to save them for friends up home.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, vaguely.
‘For God’s sake, oh, damn it to hell!’ He scowled into the bag. ‘I might not find any more good as these. Oh, I don’t know. I give up!’
The wind blew and they were alone in the street, he staring down into the shattered debris in the bag, she with the street shadows all around her, sun on the other side of the street, nobody about, and the world far away, the two of them alone, two thousand miles from anywhere, on a street in a false town which was nothing and around which was nothing but blank desert and circling hawks. On top the State Opera House, a block down, the golden Greek statues stood sun-bright and high, and in a beer place a shouting phonograph cried ay! marimba…corazón…and all kinds of alien words which the wind stirred away.
Joseph twisted the bag shut, stuck it furiously in his pocket.
They walked back to the two-thirty lunch at the hotel.
He sat at the table with Marie, sipping albóndiga soup from his moving spoon, silently. Twice she commented cheerfully upon the wall murals and he looked at her steadily and sipped. The bag of cracked skulls lay on the table…
‘Señora…’
The soup plates were cleared by a brown hand. A large plate of enchiladas was set down.
Marie looked at the plate.
There were sixteen enchiladas.
She put her fork and knife out to take one and stopped. She put her fork and knife down at each side of her plate. She glanced at the walls and then at her husband and then at the sixteen enchiladas.
Sixteen. One by one. A long row of them, crowded together.