Through the Grey, page 22
“Nope, just have a name and a date of death.”
“Yeah, right. We’ll go to the Registrar of Deaths.” He said it with such relish I had to stifle a giggle. “We have to move it, though, ’cause they’ll close early. Dia de Muertos is a major holiday. It’s like your Christmas, only with dead guys. The market’s crazy-full with old ladies like Tia Mercedes and all their kids doing the shopping for the ofrendas and all that. And tourists. And you want to get inside before the ghosts of the violently dead return.” He gave me a sly glance from the corner of his eye to see if I’d bite, but I didn’t.
“Then we’d better get going,” was all I said.
We continued down the street to the market with the ghost dog tagging at our heels and the gold threads that dragged from Mickey’s fingertips spinning out through the crowds of spirits that thronged the streets already crowded with the living. He seemed unaware of the vibrant threads spooling from his hands. I wished I knew what that shiny energy strand was all about, but I’d have to wait and see.
We threaded our way through the periphery of the market crowd and cut across the corner of the zocalo—partially “opened” by the ruthless removal of towering trees, the memories of which still threw phantom shade over the raised, central “kiosk” where the state band played on Tuesdays, according to a notice nearby.
I could see the memory of the original plaza like a projection over the new design, with huge, thick-trunked trees and Victorian iron benches set along the narrower, shadier paths, and the not-so-long-ago stench of tear gas floating on the warm breeze and an echo of screams. Shadows of the dead protesters glimmered over the memory of blood on the stones in front of the old government building. I could hear the shouts and the shots mingled with the scent of flowers and fresh, spiced bread from the market nearby. The combination made me queasy. No one in their right mind would want to linger there that night.
We turned from the market, the shops, and the cafes that lined the sunbaked zocalo and headed down to the government offices a few blocks away. We entered the usual bureaucratic maze of once-grand rooms chopped into offices and cubicles with flimsy, movable walls, repulsively out of place in the building that predated World War I.
The man behind the registrar’s desk, however, fit in perfectly. He had a small mustache with waxed points and wore his shirt collar buttoned up tight under his conservative tie.
“Hi,” I started, hoping I could manage to make myself understood in English. “I need to locate a grave.”
The clerk’s nostrils pinched in annoyance and he shook his head. “No habla Ingles, Señora.”
I cast a glance at Mickey, who was leaning against a wall again. He shot me back a snotty look. This was going to be fun.
“Mickey, would you translate for me?” I asked.
With a sigh, the teenager heaved himself upright and ambled to the desk.
He made a gesture at the clerk, who gave him a look nearly as disdainful as the one Mickey had given me.
“La gringa está buscando un sepulcro,” he said.
“La gringa.” Well at least I wasn’t “puta” this time.
The clerk heaved a shrug and spat back something that I imagined was “Yeah, aren’t they all?”
There was a bit more wiseass chit-chat before I put a restraining hand on Mickey’s arm.
“Mickey. Just translate. Commentary isn’t required.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right.” Then he gave me a blank look.
“What?” I asked, feeling the ghost dog brush past me to lie down on the floor near the door. I didn’t look down, just stared at Mickey.
“So…? What am I supposed to translate?”
I closed my eyes for a moment and breathed, then said, “Ask him if there’s a form I need to fill out and what it will cost for him to find the information right now.”
Mickey made with the rolling eyes again and looked back to the clerk who was glaring at us, even though there was no one else waiting in his cubbyhole. Mickey seemed to be repeating my request, but this time in a slightly singsong, high-pitched voice.
The man frowned a him. “Forma? Para qué?”
“He says ‘A form for what?’”
“Yeah…I figured that part out, Mickey. I need to know if there is a form I am required to fill out in order to find out where a certain person is buried here in Oaxaca. If so, I need that form and I wish to know what fee I have to pay to get that information immediately—while I stand here and wait. Now, can you be that specific with him, Mickey?”
He huffed and turned back to the clerk, parroting my request in his mocking voice.
The clerk was annoyed by it too, but he grunted an affirmative and handed over a form and said something about pesos.
“He says it’ll cost a hundred dollars to do it right now.”
“No, he didn’t Mickey. He said ‘cinco cientos pesos.’ That’s about fifty bucks. My Spanish sucks, not my math.”
“Yeah, right.” And the eye roll. I was getting too familiar with the routine already.
I filled in the form as best I could with Mickey’s non-help and fished a thousand pesos from my wallet. I put it down with the form, saying “Apesadumbrado,” and jerking my head toward Mickey. Even as bad as it is, I can manage a few important words in Spanish: please, thank you, beer, toilet, keys, and sorry.
A smile almost cracked the man’s wooden face as he accepted the form and the overpayment, with an amused snort. “Momentito,” he said, taking the form away behind a screen.
I sat down on one of his two cracked green vinyl-covered chairs to wait.
“He only goes back to the computer,” Mickey groused. “He just wants to make it look important.”
I shot him a quelling glance, but said nothing.
The phantom dog got up to chase a phantom cat around the room. I ignored their antics and so did almost everyone else, except a skeletal clerk who tried to give the dog one of his finger bones to dissuade it from barking. The dog wasn’t having anything to do with the clerk’s finger and backed away, bristling, leaving the ghost cat free to dash out of the room to the relative safety of the hall.
The flesh-and-blood clerk, who looked nothing like his bony predecessor, returned with a sheet of paper. “Hmph,” he coughed, then launched into a rattling discourse aimed somewhere in between me and Mickey as if he couldn’t decide which of us he was supposed to talk to—Mickey the brat or the illiterate gringa.
Finally the clerk let out an impressively heavy sigh, shrugged, and shoved the paper forward for one of us to take. “Buenos dias,” he added, turning his back and stomping off to his sanctum in the back.
Mickey grabbed the sheet and held it out to me after a second’s perusal. “You’re fucked. There are three graves for your guy.”
“Three? Not for the same date.”
“Yeah. Look.”
I took the page and looked it over. And there were three gravesites given for Hector Purecete, all with the same death date in 1996. “That’s gotta be wrong—it’s not a common name, is it?”
“No.”
“Great,” I muttered. “I guess I’ll have to go look at all of them and see what shakes loose.”
I stood up and walked out of the government offices with Mickey and the dog trailing me.
We’d started back across the zocalo, passing closer to the site of the teachers’ fatal protest than I liked, when Mickey finally decided to talk again.
“What do you want to find this guy’s grave for anyway?” Mickey asked. “Some kind of creepy ritual or something?”
My turn to sigh. “No. I told you before, I just need to find it and leave something on it. On November First.”
“Yeah, right.”
I stopped, burning in the high altitude sun and the hot Grey energy of the massacre. “Mickey, is it just for me, or do you always have a bad attitude?”
He turned his head and muttered under his breath, starting to walk on. I snatched his arm and dragged him back to me, through a red blotch of remembered blood and pain. He flinched a little and tried to wrench himself out of my grip, spitting nasty Spanish words.
“Damn that’s a lot of endearing little nicknames you have for me. How ’bout we make this easier on both of us. You can just call me the G.P.—”
“Huh? The what?”
“The gringa puta. And I’ll just call you brat-boy. It’ll be so much easier, don’t you think?”
He glowered at me and pulled against my hold. I let him go and sighed.
“Mickey, look: I appreciate the offer of help, but your attitude is just not flying with me. You can straighten up and stop acting like a punk, or I can do without you. What’s it going to be?” My ghostly dog-companion circled around us, growling as if to keep something unpleasant at bay.
Mickey seemed to consider my statement seriously, sidling into the sun and away from the crying red energy of the teachers’ deaths. “OK…GP. We’ll have to get to the panteons soon. It’ll be a lot busier tomorrow. And you really don’t want to be out tonight.”
“You’re serious about that ghosts of the violent dead thing?”
He nodded. “You Norte Americanos think el Dia de Muertos is just a funny tradition—not real—but we don’t. Not up here. This is the ghost country. We’re not afraid of death—not like you. We live with it.”
“You might be surprised.”
He ignored me. “But we don’t do foolish things like stand where people were murdered on their Day to return from Mictlan. That’s just fucking stupid.”
I nodded. “All right. Let’s get someplace better then. Like the panteon—a panteon is a cemetery, right?”
“Yeah. It’s actually pretty safe right now. But we should get the car. Those three aren’t close to each other.”
I was surprised at his change of attitude. He was still kind of surly, but at least he seemed to be helping me instead of making more work. We walked back to the house and Mickey borrowed his aunt’s car—a dusty silver Chevrolet Chevy, which amused me.
I took the passenger seat and held the door open for a moment. The ghost dog stopped at the car’s doorsill and sat on the ground, looking pathetic and thumping its stumpy tail, but wouldn’t step up into the car.
Mickey looked at me. “Something wrong?”
“No…no I’m fine.” I closed the door and the dog vanished from view. We drove away without any sign of the phantom canine until we got out at the first panteon on the list.
The first stop was the municipal cemetery of San Miguel. We drove around a small carnival that was setting up in a courtyard in front and walked across drifts of flowers and greenery that had escaped from the bundles carried by a stream of people entering the panteon ahead of us. The dog trotted up, materializing out of the road dust and Grey mist to rub against my legs and bump its head against me impatiently until we walked through the cemetery gates. The dog ran ahead, into the crowd of animate skeletons and live humans who filled the graveyard.
Everyone was busy, the living and the dead, and I paused to stare. “There are a lot of…people here.” I said.
“Yeah. The graves have to be cleaned and decorated, the family ofrendas made, and the cooking has to be done before Todos Santos on November First. It’s a Sunday this year, so they gotta be done today and tomorrow or the Church might be offended. Most of these guys won’t bring their feasts until after sundown on Sunday.”
I glanced at him with a curious frown. “Feasts? In a graveyard?”
He snorted something that was almost a laugh. His tone still left a bit to be desired, however. “Yeah. I keep trying to tell you: it’s like a party. El Dia de Muertos is a cycle of life thing. We have all this stuff at home—the ofrendas and stuff—but we come to the panteon in the evening to party with the family ghosts. We know death, but we don’t worship it or freak out about it. It’s just…part of life. We aren’t afraid of the old bony woman. Just look at the skeletons,” Mickey added, pointing at a pair of children waving paper skeleton puppets at each other in an elaborate pantomime punctuated with much chattering and laughing.
The puppets had jointed legs and arms controlled with strings the children pulled with their fingers while clutching the sticks to which the paper skeletons were mounted. One was a musician with a guitar and a top hat, while the other was a girl singer with a fur stole and long skirt. The kids pranced ahead with their puppets. The ghosts of several other children tagged behind, giggling, as the impromptu cabaret act headed for the family plot. The group was herded along by an aging man carrying an elaborate iron-work cross under his arm and followed by a cold boil of silver and red energy—the imminence of those who died by violence, perhaps.
“Those guys are gonna clean the graves of their family and put that new cross up,” Mickey lectured me. He was almost spitting. “They’re not sad—they’re happy. They work hard today. They remember the dead. ’Cause they know we’re all gonna die. That’s the big deal you Norte Americanos don’t get. You can’t ‘cheat’ death. You just have to know it’s there and remember. We all got a skeleton inside us.”
The skeletons. As I looked around the panteon, I saw few ghosts of the type I was most familiar with—the memory manifestations of the dead. Nearly all the ghosts in this cemetery were skeletal with only the barest hint of faces or flesh, a few were purely bones while a smaller handful had the shape of the living people they had once been. These were the only ghosts I saw that seemed distressed or confused, wandering among the raised graves as if desperate to find something they’d misplaced, blind to the throngs of living and dead around them.
I got it: the manifestations of the Grey depended upon the minds of those who shaped it. Here, where skeletons were the symbol of the dead, embraced, even beloved in all their bony glory as just another part of the cycle of life, most of the spirits of the dead looked like skeletons. In the US where death was the end of life, most ghosts manifested with the memory-shape of their formerly-living bodies. But they could have been anything, like the discorporate entities I’d met once or twice, manifesting as changing shapes, or inconclusive features on a mutable column of fog, or the roiling anger of the slaughtered.
The ghost dog trotted back from its peregrinations through the crowd and sat at my feet, tongue lolling, looking happy for the first time since it had appeared. I almost reached to pat its head before I remembered that most people don’t see ghosts. Even as comfortable with death as the Oaxaquinos were, I doubted they would understand my stooping to pet a spectral hound. Mickey would probably think I was crazy and say so. I didn’t believe he’d suddenly decided to respect me; he just didn’t want me to kick his ass. But he wasn’t above a few more needling comments.
I cleared my throat. “Where do you think we’ll find the grave? This a big place.”
“Caretaker will have a list of the plots and tombs.” He was pretty savvy about graveyards, but I supposed that wasn’t unusual here.
We pushed through the crowds to a large stone building with colonnades filled with niches on one side and open to a large courtyard on the other. The patio of the mausoleum was full of people walking or crawling on the paving stones to lay out pictures in mounds of colored sand: cavorting skeletons, Virgins of Guadalupe; flowers and crosses and skulls. Mickey called these “sand carpets.” We found one of the caretakers assisting a sand painter, laying out a border of small bricks to keep the moist, colored sand from dribbling into the walkways. We picked our way closer, careful not to disturb the developing sand carpets. Mickey called out to the caretaker as we got near.
The woman looked up from her bricks and said something I couldn’t follow. The caretaker was darker-skinned and had a more pronounced nose and cheek bones than Mickey—probably related to some local Indian group. Mickey replied in a language I knew wasn’t Spanish. The kneeling woman stood and began to talk very fast. Mickey pointed to the paper we’d gotten from the Registrar of Births and Deaths. The woman frowned and pointed off across the cemetery, making motions with her hands to indicate turns. Mickey nodded and seemed to be thanking her, then turned and tugged me back into the mausoleum’s colonnade.
“She says it’s out in the edge, near the back fence, but she thinks this is wrong. The grave’s been around a long time. You sure 1996 is right?” he added with a touch of sneering doubt at my brain power.
“Yup.”
Mickey shrugged so hard his eyes rolled. “All right. Let’s go look at it.”
We set out through the graveyard, trailed by the dog. Distracting myself from Mickey’s volatility, I tried to imagine the scruffy mongrel as a skeleton. I didn’t succeed, to my relief.
We found the grave under a pile of people who were busily scrubbing the headstone and stone fence clean of dirt with stiff-bristled brushes. As we watched the inscription came clear: Hector Purecete, died 1888. Not even close.
Mickey grunted and shot me a smug look. Oh yeah…that showed me, all right.
He started to turn back, but before he could move away I waved to the oldest woman in the grave-cleaning group. She peered up at me and I tried to ask her if she knew of Maria-Luz’s Hector Purecete, but her English was non-existent. Groaning in disgust, Mickey stepped in.
After a rapid exchange, he held her off with a gesture and glanced back at me, his face creased with curiosity. “This is Señora Acoa. She says this is the only Hector Purecete she knows about. But she says a man came asking the same question a few years back. Señora Acoa couldn’t help him, either. She says Hector, here, was a soldier. Sounds like a real pendajo. She’s his, like, great, great, great niece. She doesn’t live here anymore and is going back to Coyocan tomorrow, but she figured they should come and clean up Hector’s grave every year. She didn’t even know where he was buried until that guy showed up.”
“Does she remember the man’s name?” I asked, looking at the elderly woman who stood by her ancestor’s grave.
Mickey translated for me and this time he was dead serious.
The elderly Señora Acoa replied in a streak of words I couldn’t begin to follow, her voice wavering. Then she swayed, putting her hand to her chest. The energy around her shut down to a thin, white line that grew more and more translucent, then began to shift and rise away from her as a messy skein of gold and white light.
