The graveyard lay glistening, all whiteness, all marble snow, all sparkle and glitter of harsh gravel like an eternal fall of hail, crunched under their feet as Filomena and Filepe took their shadows with them, ink-black and constant from the unclouded moon. They glanced over their shoulders in apprehension, but no one cried Halt! They had seen the gravedigger drift, made footless by shadow, down the hill, in answer to a night summons. Now: “Quick, Filepe, the lock!” Together they inserted a long metal rod between padlock hasps and wooden doors which lay flat to the dry earth. Together they seized and pulled. The wood split. The padlock hasps sprang loose. Together they raised the huge doors and flung them back, rattling. Together they peered down into the darkest, most silent night of all. Below, the catacomb waited.
Filomena straightened her shoulders and took a breath.
“Now.”
And put her foot upon the first step.
In the adobe of Filomena Díaz, her children slept sprawled here or there in the cool night room, comforting each other with the sound of their warm breathing.
Suddenly their eyes sprang wide.
Footsteps, slow and halting, scraped the cobbles outside. The door shot open. For an instant the silhouettes of three people loomed in the white evening sky beyond the door. One child sat up and struck a match.
“No!” Filomena snatched out with one hand to claw the light. The match fell away. She gasped. The door slammed. The room was solid black. To this blackness Filomena said at last:
“Light no candles. Your father has come home.”
The thudding, the insistent knocking and pounding shook the door at midnight.
Filomena opened the door.
The gravedigger almost screamed in her face. “There you are! Thief! Robber!”
Behind him stood Ricardo, looking very rumpled and very tired and very old. “Cousin, permit us, I am sorry. Our friend here—”
“I am the friend of no one,” cried the gravedigger. “A lock has been broken and a body stolen. To know the identity of the body is to know the thief. I could only bring you here. Arrest her.”
“One small moment, please.” Ricardo took the man’s hand from his arm and turned, bowing gravely to his cousin. “May we enter?”
“There, there!” The gravedigger leaped in, gazed wildly about and pointed to a far wall. “You see?”
But Ricardo would look only at this woman. Very gently he asked her, “Filomena?”
Filomena’s face was the face of one who has gone through a long tunnel of night and has come to the other end at last, where lives a shadow of coming day. Her eyes were prepared. Her mouth knew what to do. All the terror was gone now. What remained was as light as the great length of autumn chaff she had carried down the hill with her good son. Nothing more could happen to her ever in her life; this you knew from how she held her body as she said, “We have no mummy here.”
“I believe you, cousin, but”—Ricardo cleared his throat uneasily and raised his eyes—“what stands there against the wall?”
“To celebrate the festival of the day of the dead ones”—Filomena did not turn to look where he was looking—“I have taken paper and flour and wire and clay and made of it a life-size toy which looks like the mummies.”
“Have you indeed done this?” asked Ricardo, impressed.
“No, no!” The gravedigger almost danced in exasperation.
“With your permission.” Ricardo advanced to confront the figure which stood against the wall. He raised his flashlight. “So,” he said. “And so.”
Filomena looked only out the open door into the late moonlight. “The plan I have for this mummy which I have made with my own hands is good.”
“What plan, what?” the gravedigger demanded, turning.
“We will have money to eat with. Would you deny my children this?”
But Ricardo was not listening. Near the far wall, he tilted his head this way and that and rubbed his chin, squinting at the tall shape which enwrapped its own shadow, which kept its own silence, leaning against the adobe.
“A toy,” mused Ricardo. “The largest death toy I have ever seen. I have seen man-sized skeletons in windows, and man-sized coffins made of cardboard and filled with candy skulls, yes. But this! I stand in awe, Filomena.”
“Awe?” said the grave-digger, his voice rising to a shriek. “This is no toy, this is—”
“Do you swear, Filomena?” said Ricardo, not looking at him. He reached out and tapped a few times on the rust-colored chest of the figure. It made the sound of a lonely drum. “Do you swear this is papier-mâché?”
“By the Virgin, I swear.”
“Well, then.” Ricardo shrugged, snorted, laughed. “It is simple. If you swear by the Virgin, what more need be said? No court action is necessary. Besides, it might take weeks or months to prove or disprove this is or is not a thing of flour paste and old newspapers colored with brown earth.”
“Weeks, months, prove, disprove!” The gravedigger turned in a circle as if to challenge the sanity of the universe held tight and impossible in these four walls. “This ‘toy’ is my property, mine!”
“The ‘toy,’” said Filomena serenely, gazing out at the hills, “if it is a toy, and made by me, must surely belong to me. And even,” she went on, quietly communing with the new reserve of peace in her body, “even if it is not a toy, and it is indeed Juan Díaz come home, why, then, does not Juan Díaz belong first to God?”
“How can one argue that?” wondered Ricardo.
The gravedigger was willing to try. But before he had stuttered forth a half-dozen words, Filomena said, “And after God, in God’s eyes, and at God’s altar and in God’s church, on one of God’s holiest days, did not Juan Díaz say that he would be mine throughout his days?”
“Throughout his days—ah, ha, there you are!” said the grave-digger. “But his days are over, and now he is mine!”
“So,” said Filomena, “God’s property first, and then Filomena Díaz’ property, that is if this toy is not a toy and is Juan Díaz, and anyway, landlord of the dead, you evicted your tenant, you so much as said you did not want him, if you love him so dearly and want him, will you pay the new rent and tenant him again?”
But so smothered by rage was the landlord of silence that it gave Ricardo time to step in. “Grave keeper, I see many months and many lawyers, and many points, fine points, to argue this way and that, which include real estate, toy manufactories, God, Filomena, one Juan Díaz wherever he is, hungry children, the conscience of a digger of graves, and so much complication that death’s business will suffer. Under the circumstances are you prepared for these long years in and out of court?”
“I am prepared—” said the gravedigger, and paused.
“My good man,” said Ricardo, “the other night you gave me some small bit of advice, which I now return to you. I do not tell you how to control your dead. You, now, do not say how I control the living. Your jurisdiction ends at the tombyard gate. Beyond stand my citizens, silent or otherwise. So …”
Ricardo thumped the upright figure a last time on its hollow chest. It gave forth the sound of a beating heart, a single strong and vibrant thump which made the gravedigger jerk.
“I pronounce this officially fake, a toy, no mummy at all. We waste time here. Come along, citizen gravedigger. Back to your proper land! Good night, Filomena’s children, Filomena, good cousin.”
“What about it, what about him?” said the gravedigger, motionless, pointing.
“Why do you worry?” asked Ricardo. “It goes nowhere. It stays, if you should wish to pursue the law. Do you see it running? You do not. Good night. Good night.”
The door slammed. They were gone before Filomena could put out her hand to thank anyone.
She moved in the dark to place a candle at the foot of the tall corn-husk-dry silence. This was a shrine now, she thought, yes. She lit the candle.
“Do not fear, children,” she murmured. “To sleep now. To sleep.” And Filepe lay down
and the others lay back, and at last Filomena herself lay with a single thin blanket over her on the woven mat by the light of the single candle, and her thoughts before she moved into sleep were long thoughts of the many days that made up tomorrow. In the morning, she thought, the tourist cars will sound on the road, and Filepe will move among them, telling them of this place. And there will be a painted sign outside this door: MUSEUM—30 CENTAVOS. And the tourists will come in, because the graveyard is on the hill, but we are first, we are here in the valley, and close at hand and easy to find. And one day soon with these tourists’ money we shall mend the roof, and buy great sacks of fresh corn flour, and some tangerines, yes, for the children. And perhaps one day we will all travel to Mexico City, to the very big schools because of what has happened on this night.
For Juan Díaz is truly home, she thought. He is here, he waits for those who would come to see him. And at his feet I will place a bowl into which the tourists will place more money that Juan Díaz himself tried so hard to earn in all his life.
Juan. She raised her eyes. The breathing of the children was hearth-warm about her. Juan, do you see? Do you know? Do you truly understand? Do you forgive, Juan, do you forgive?
The candle flame flickered.
She closed her eyes. Behind her lids she saw the smile of Juan Díaz, and whether it was the smile that death had carved upon his lips, or whether it was a new smile she had given him or imagined for him, she could not say. Enough that she felt him standing tall and alone and on guard, watching over them and proud through the rest of the night.
A dog barked far away in a nameless town.
Only the gravedigger, wide awake in his tombyard, heard.
To the Chicago Abyss
Under a pale April sky in a faint wind that blew out of a memory of winter, the old man shuffled into the almost empty park at noon. His slow feet were bandaged with nicotine-stained swathes, his hair was wild, long and gray as was his beard which enclosed a mouth which seemed always atremble with revelation.
Now he gazed back as if he had lost so many things he could not begin to guess there in the tumbled ruin, the toothless skyline of the city. Finding nothing, he shuffled on until he found a bench where sat a woman alone. Examining her, he nodded and sat to the far end of the bench and did not look at her again.
He remained, eyes shut, mouth working, for three minutes, head moving as if his nose were printing a single word on the air. Once it was written, he opened his mouth to pronounce it in a clear, fine voice:
“Coffee.”
The woman gasped and stiffened.
The old man’s gnarled fingers tumbled in pantomime on his unseen lap.
“Twist the key! Bright-red, yellow-letter can! Compressed air. Hisss! Vacuum pack. Ssst! Like a snake!”
The woman snapped her head about as if slapped, to stare in dreadful fascination at the old man’s moving tongue.
“The scent, the odor, the smell. Rich, dark, wondrous Brazilian beans, fresh-ground!”
Leaping up, reeling as if gun-shot, the woman tottered.
The old man flicked his eyes wide. “No! I—”
But she was running, gone.
The old man sighed and walked on through the park until he reached a bench where sat a young man completely involved with wrapping dried grass in a small square of thin tissue paper. His thin fingers shaped the grass tenderly, in an almost holy ritual, trembling as he rolled the tube, put it to his mouth and, hypnotically, lit it. He leaned back, squinting deliciously, communing with the strange rank air in his mouth and lungs.
The old man watched the smoke blow away on the noon wind and said, “Chesterfields.”
The young man gripped his knees tight.
“Raleighs,” said the old man. “Lucky Strikes.”
The young man stared at him.
“Kent. Kool. Marlboro,” said the old man, not looking at him. “Those were the names. White, red, amber packs, grass green, sky blue, pure gold, with the red slick small ribbon that ran around the top that you pulled to zip away the crinkly cellophane, and the blue government tax stamp—”
“Shut up,” said the young man.
“Buy them in drugstores, fountains, subways—”
“Shut up!”
“Gently,” said the old man. “It’s just, that smoke of yours made me think—”
“Don’t think!” The young man jerked so violently his homemade cigarette fell in chaff to his lap. “Now look what you made me do!”
“I’m sorry. It was such a nice friendly day.”
“I’m no friend!”
“We’re all friends now, or why live?”
“Friends?” the young man snorted, aimlessly plucking at the shredded grass and paper. “Maybe there were ‘friends’ back in 1970, but now …”
“1970. You must have been a baby then. They still had Butter-fingers then in bright-yellow wrappers. Baby Ruths. Clark Bars in orange paper. Milky Ways—swallow a universe of stars, comets, meteors. Nice.”
“It was never nice.” The young man stood suddenly. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I remember limes, and lemons, that’s what’s wrong with me. Do you remember oranges?”
“Damn right. Oranges, hell. You calling me a liar? You want me to feel bad? You nuts? Don’t you know the law? You know I could turn you in, you?”
“I know, I know,” said the old man, shrugging. “The weather fooled me. It made me want to compare—”
“Compare rumors, that’s what they’d say, the police, the special cops, they’d say it, rumors, you trouble making bastard, you.”
He seized the old man’s lapels, which ripped so he had to grab another handful, yelling down into his face. “Why don’t I just blast the living Jesus out of you? I ain’t hurt no one in so long, I …”
He shoved the old man. Which gave him the idea to pummel, and when he pummeled he began to punch, and punching made it easy to strike, and soon he rained blows upon the old man, who stood like one caught in thunder and down-poured storm, using only his fingers to ward off blows that fleshed his cheeks, shoulders, his brow, his chin, as the young man shrieked cigarettes, moaned candies, yelled smokes, cried sweets until the old man fell to be kick-rolled and shivering. The young man stopped and began to cry. At the sound, the old man, cuddled, clenched into his pain, took his fingers away from his broken mouth and opened his eyes to gaze with astonishment at his assailant. The young man wept.
“Please …” begged the old man.
The young man wept louder, tears falling from his eyes.
“Don’t cry,” said the old man. “We won’t be hungry forever. We’ll rebuild the cities. Listen, I didn’t mean for you to cry, only to think, Where are we going, what are we doing, what’ve we done? You weren’t hitting me. You meant to hit something else, but I was handy. Look, I’m sitting up. I’m okay.”
The young man stopped crying and blinked down at the old man, who forced a bloody smile.
“You … you can’t go around,” said the young man, “making people unhappy. I’ll find someone to fix you!”
“Wait!” The old man struggled to his knees. “No!”
But the young man ran wildly off out of the park, yelling.
Crouched alone, the old man felt his bones, found one of his teeth lying red amongst the strewn gravel, handled it sadly.
“Fool,” said a voice.
The old man glanced over and up.
A lean man of some forty years stood leaning against a tree nearby, a look of pale weariness and curiosity on his long face.
“Fool,” he said again.
The old man gasped. “You were there, all the time, and did nothing?”
“What, fight one fool to save another? No.” The stranger helped him up and brushed him off. “I do my fighting where it pays. Come on. You’re going home with me.”
The old man gasped again. “Why?”
“That boy’ll be back with the police any second. I don’t want you stolen away, you’re a ver
y precious commodity. I’ve heard of you, looked for you for days now. Good grief, and when I find you you’re up to your famous tricks. What did you say to the boy made him mad?”
“I said about oranges and lemons, candy, cigarettes. I was just getting ready to recollect in detail wind-up toys, briar pipes and back scratchers, when he dropped the sky on me.”
“I almost don’t blame him. Half of me wants to hit you itself. Come on, double time. There’s a siren, quick!”
And they went swiftly, another way, out of the park.
He drank the homemade wine because it was easiest. The food must wait until his hunger overcame the pain in his broken mouth. He sipped, nodding.
“Good, many thanks, good.”
The stranger who had walked him swiftly out of the park sat across from him at the flimsy dining-room table as the stranger’s wife placed broken and mended plates on the worn cloth.
“The beating,” said the husband at last. “How did it happen?”
At this the wife almost dropped a plate.
“Relax,” said the husband. “No one followed us. Go ahead, old man, tell us, why do you behave like a saint panting after martyrdom? You’re famous, you know. Everyone’s heard about you. Many would like to meet you. Myself, first, I want to know what makes you tick. Well?”
But the old man was only entranced with the vegetables on the chipped plate before him. Twenty-six, no, twenty-eight peas! He counted the impossible sum! He bent to the incredible vegetables like a man praying over his quietest beads. Twenty-eight glorious green peas, plus a few graphs of half-raw spaghetti announcing that today business was fair. But under the line of pasta, the cracked line of the plate showed where business for years now was more than terrible. The old man hovered counting above the food like a great and inexplicable buzzard crazily fallen and roosting in this cold apartment, watched by his Samaritan hosts until at last he said, “These twenty-eight peas remind me of a film I saw as a child. A comedian—do you know the word?—a funny man met a lunatic in a midnight house in this film and …”