They had dinner at a simple restaurant across the street from the hotel, a narrow place with wall booths, a juke-box, and undersized paper napkins in dispensers on the table. Afterwards they walked through the quiet streets that were lighted by round, yellowish street lamps. Theodore felt an inexplicable well-being and happiness, the openness of spirit that often came when he was pleased with a piece of work, but which now seemed to be caused by the town itself. He carried, folded into three napkins, the chicken from two of his three enchilados suizos to give to Leo.
Theodore did not think of the steamer rug until he started to get into bed. They had washed in cool water, and their teeth were chattering.
“I’ve got to ask them for another blanket, Ramón.”
But of course there was no telephone in the room, and he was in his pajamas. Theodore would have almost, but not quite, gone downstairs in his dressing-gown to his car, which was in the hotel garage, but—He looked at Ramón and laughed.
Ramón did not laugh. Perhaps his headache had begun to obsess his thoughts, or perhaps he wanted him to leave the room so that he could say his prayers in privacy.
Theodore put his suit on over his pajamas. There was no light proper in the wide hallway, but a good deal of light came from people’s open doors. Glancing with impersonal curiosity at the open or half-open doors, he saw people lying in bed, people undressing, yawning, scratching, a man in pyjamas tuning a guitar. Another man in slippers and dressing-gown was walking slowly, by himself, in the second-floor hallway. Downstairs, the desk was again deserted. Theodore asked one of the boys seated on a bench in the lobby if he might have another blanket.
“Ah, no, señor. The blankets are locked up, and the señor with the keys has gone home.”
“I see. Thank you.” He went on to the closed door of the garage at the back of the lobby. A padlock dangled from a chain. “Can you open this?” he said to the boys.
The key had to be searched for in cubby-holes behind the desk’s counter. At last it was found, the door opened, a light switch found and turned on, and by climbing along someone’s front bumper Theodore reached the boot of his car and got his blanket. His car was wedged with hardly an inch to spare on any side.
“I don’t want that grey car moved by anybody but me, do you understand?” Theodore said to the boys. “If it has to be moved, call me, whatever the hour is.”
“Sí señor.”
He had the keys and the brakes were set, but he had seen cars lifted or bumped out of the way if the owner were not to be found. Again he climbed the three flights, each with its stratum of humanity preparing for bed, and at the third floor turned left and walked towards his room.
Ramón was standing by the window looking out—though the window faced on nothing.
“The blanket, Ramón!” Theodore said, spreading it over the bed. He would have proposed that they read the newspapers or look at the books he had brought, but the single dim light in the bed lamp precluded two people reading at the same time. Theodore got up his courage and put his hand on Ramón’s shoulder. “Come to bed. You’ll catch a cold standing there. We’re seven thousand feet high, you know.” And when Ramón turned with a look of willingness, he added: “And take this stupid pill.” This time Theodore had the pill ready in his hand.
“No, thank you, Teo, I have no headache.”
“I know from the way you look. You’ll go to bed and not sleep a wink! What’re you trying to prove, Ramón?”
A silence fell. Ramón brushed his teeth in the bathroom. He came out, very quietly in his flattened grey house slippers, and lay down on the bed outside the bedclothes, with his hands behind his head. He seemed to be inviting a cold, or at least adding deliberately to his physical discomfort.
“Go on, say what you are thinking, Teo,” Ramón said.
Theodore was thinking of many things, but it was difficult for him to find words gentle enough to express himself. “I was thinking about a conversation we once had about religion as—organized pretending. Do you remember, Ramón?”
“I don’t remember,” Ramón said indifferently.
Theodore closed his hands in the pockets of his dressing-gown and shivered. “It was one evening when you and I walked around the Zócalo and then went up to the Hotel Majestic roof—for a drink and coffee.” But Ramón gave no sign of remembering. “This indifference towards your physical welfare—Whom are you pleasing? Yourself or God? You must choose to live or not to live, not do something between the two, Ramón.”
“I think that is my business.”
“Of course it is. But—I was reminded of our conversation about religion and its aspects of organized pretence. You saw what I meant that night. You agreed, although I wasn’t trying to convince you of anything.”
“Ah, I remember. We were talking about rituals. There’s such a thing as believing in them, Teo. You may not. I do.”
“Believing in their value. I do, too. I don’t believe in their intrinsic value, and you didn’t either that night.”
“But that was years ago. Two years, at least.”
Theodore saw his eventual defeat staring at him, but he went on: “We talked about generally practiced pretence, ritual, whatever you want to call it. The ritual of fasting after Carnaval may have a value, yes, but no value per se. It’s symbolic. Your body is not symbolic, however. Its tangible, if only for a short time. Take for instance—”
“Therefore God’s a pretence, too?”
Theodore hesitated. “I’m talking about the rituals surrounding Him. Rituals become baseless beliefs, and they can lead to mental unbalance.”
Ramón made no comment.
“I was reading recently about some South Sea Island people who consider paranoia a normal state of mind and encourage it among themselves. Paranoia isn’t accepted in our society, and anybody with it gets into trouble one way or another. It’s not socially approved. But in this South Sea Island colony, people not displaying paranoia are considered abnormal and even ostracized. Wives can’t exchange bowls of soup, because they’re supposed to suspect it’s poisoned. Nobody questions the rationality, you see, because everybody’s been brought up the same way.” Theodore paused, trembling from head to foot in the chill.
“Well, what’re you getting at, Teo?” Ramón asked, propping himself on one elbow.
“That we live under equally absurd rituals that nobody—or very few people dare to criticize for fear of offending the majority of people.”
“But you dare.”
“Certainly, I dare. If I feel like it.” Theodore lighted a cigarette and moved his fingers over the flame of his lighter for a few moments to warm them. In the room next to theirs, a man and woman were arguing bitterly as to who was responsible for leaving a thermos full of hot coffee at the last hotel they had been in. “You may be surprised at what I started out to say, Ramón. That is that a certain pretension or ritual can be very strengthening to the personality or the character—”
“Always looking for the benefits!”
“—assuming it doesn’t go against society, as a belief in the Christian God certainly doesn’t go against ours. It doesn’t even have to be a religious ritual or pretence, though. Any pretence can give one hope and fortitude, but one should first accept the fact it’s a pretence, Ramón. One can still go on pretending if one chooses to.”
“You speak always as if people can choose!”
“Yes, they can.”
“But they can’t if they believe, Teo. That’s just part of your Existentialist vocabulary. Choice—decision—and it’s harder for you to make a simple decision than for anybody I know!”
Theodore smiled, because Ramón did not know how difficult and absurd had been his efforts to decide to be a friend to Ramón, and to decide this, irrevocably, and with a positive yes, when he still admitted the possibility that Ramón could
be Lelia’s murderer. “I was only saying, Ramón, that certain details of every religion are baseless, and people know it consciously or unconsciously, yet they cling to them because they realize how much benefit they derive from them or think they do.”
“Benefits again.”
“All right! Or because they’re afraid not to cling to them, which I think is a bit worse! Or out of habit. Practically as bad.”
Ramón scowled. “I think you have no respect for anything, Teo.”
Theodore had an odd twinge of fear. He stood up a little taller. “That’s neither here nor there. Is it? You’re always annoyed when I use the word ‘choice’. I know there can’t be any choice once you’ve taken the plunge—into a religion, I mean. Maybe there’s no choice even at the beginning. You fall into it the way people fall in love. Then you can put your intellect into mothballs, at least in that department. But is it sinful to recognize that the details of self-mortification, sacrifice, and rituals are organized, socially approved pretences?” He gestured and the pill went flying from his cold fingers and hit a wall. Leo jumped down from his bed in Theodore’s suitcase to investigate. Theodore sighed. All this talk to get a fellow to take a little pill for his own good!
Ramón had got up. “It amuses me, Teo, how you can always find the most painless way to hitch yourself to something somebody’s already made for you and suffered to make. You take what you want and discard the rest.”
“I’m not hitching myself to anything.”
Ramón walked stiffly towards the foot of the bed. “And only what you care to believe is the truth.”
“Oh—” Theodore suddenly wanted to sit down, but there was no place except the bed. “Truth’s all things to all men—like Existentialism, you’d say. It doesn’t exist, that’s why we keep looking for it. If you admitted the organized pretence in your religion, truthfully, you would be standing there in pain now with a headache that’s of no interest to God or anyone else but yourself. You wouldn’t be farther away from God or from pleasing Him, either.”
“No, and I wouldn’t be feeling anything, I suppose,” Ramón said, sitting down on the bed. “What would you offer me instead, Teo? Nothingness? Is that what you have?”
“In my own way, I believe in God, Ramón, but, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know whether I believe or pretend to believe. Maybe I’ll never know and what does it really matter? It’s a person’s actions that count and not the rituals. There are other fields—hope, for instance. I think I pretend there, too, but it’s a beneficial pretence. I hope for something unattainable and I love it just because it’s unattainable. How blissful that moment when one decides to hope!” Theodore said and drew on his cigarette. “Yes, decides,” he repeated, because Ramón was smiling. “I think that’s what’s meant by revelation, and it’s not an illustration, either. On the contrary, nothing’ll stick closer to you than what you’ve decided to believe in. Sometimes all the doctors in the world can’t prize you away from it. Revelation is the realization that one can be happy after all, if one only decides to be happy. The truth for Christians is ‘Christ is risen. He died for my sins. Therefore I shall have eternal life and a reason and a right to be happy. I can be a part of this truth.’ Those disjointed statements are gathered together and labeled—‘truth’. But it’s nothing but a time-hallowed attitude, which can as well lead to good as to bad.”
Ramón let his head fall back on his pillow. “You prove only your own point, that everybody has his own truth.”
Theodore carried his cigarette, which was burning his fingers, into the bathroom and dropped it into the toilet. The toilet had no seat, and inside the bowl, high above the bit of water in it, was written: GLORIA. When he came back into the bedroom, Leo was licking his paw placidly, and it occurred to Theodore that he might have eaten the pill.
“To be absolutely honest myself, Teo,” Ramón said, “I don’t know what the truth is, either.”
It was perhaps the most hopeful thing he had heard Ramón say since Lelia’s death. He got another pill from the box and poured a glass of water from the carafe on the bed table. “I’ll turn out the light if you don’t want to read, Ramón.”
“All right, Teo.”
Theodore could feel Ramón’s awakeness in the dark. Ramón did not stir at all. Theodore at last fell asleep, and awakened at the gentle movement of the bed as Ramón very carefully eased himself from it. Ramón began to walk slowly up and down, touching the left side of his head occasionally, yet not gripping it, not even whispering the curses that he sometimes muttered during his headaches. Ramón described the pain as being like an iron hook caught in his brain, a piece of foreign matter, a simile that always reminded Theodore of the metal bar itself that had struck him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Want a guide, mister? You American? I speak English!”
“I got a car. You want to ride? Tour of the town! Twenty-five pesos! There is my car, señor!”
“No, we want to walk, thank you,” Theodore said in English. They were on the sidewalk in front of the great bullet-scarred Alhóndiga de Granaditas, the objective of Hidalgo’s attack in the Revolution, the scene of Pipila’s heroic sacrifice, and the most famous building of the town.
They moved on, still dogged by two or three of the self-appointed town guides. Ramón stopped to look back at the doorway, and up at the ornamented corner, perhaps the corner where Hidalgo’s head had hung for months, rotting in the sun, as a warning to all those who would revolt against the Spanish.
“You want to see the Panteon, señores?” asked an adolescent voice at Theodore’s elbow. “I can take you. Mummies—”
“No, thank you,” Theodore said, taking out his car keys. They were going to the Panteon at last.
The boys stood in a silent semicircle, momentarily taken aback by the car. “Many streets up there, señor!” “One-way streets! You need a guide!” “Bad roads for a car, señor. My car is only twenty pesos. I take you around the whole town.”
At Ramón’s instructions, Theodore took a west-bound, climbing street, zigzagged through the section of one-way streets near the beautiful Street of the Priests with its windowless pink-tan walls and windowless bridge like something out of medieval Europe, and climbed finally to a straighter, west-bound road. The town dropped behind them and a fresh, sunny wind blew through the windows. Theodore was in no mood to see the mummies, but he knew he would never be in a mood to see them, and since he had to see them during this sojourn in Guanajuato, this morning seemed as good a time as any. But the world was full of bright sunlight and green, living things. He could see the tops of trees moving miles away and he could have spent the day looking at all of it.
“There it is,” said Ramón, bending low to see, because the Panteon was yet higher, on a hill to their right.
Theodore saw a very long wall, whose height he could not judge, set on a small plateau. The road took them by winds and turns inexorably towards it. On the wall was written the inscription that was on the walls of the cemetery where Lelia lay:
HUMBLE THYSELF! HERE ETERNITY BEGINS
AND HERE WORLDLY GRANDEUR IS DUST!
He drove on to a small area, indicated to him by a watchman at the gates, which on two sides dropped sheer for what looked like hundreds of feet. A boy of about sixteen ran up to the window and asked if Theodore wanted him to park for him. Theodore thanked him and said no.
“Last month a car went over the edge. I am very used to American cars,” the boy said in English.
There was not room to turn around, but the boy made circular gestures with an air of authority as if this was exactly what he wanted Theodore to do—try to turn around and go over the edge. Theodore put the car into a parallel position with another car, his front bumper to the cemetery wall. On the way out, he would simply have to back to a place on the road where he could turn.
They walked through th
e gates and a field of graves and tombs spread before them, surrounded by the wall, that was nearly three times the height of a man and as thick as a coffin was long. The walls, every square yard of them, contained vaults and were marked off in squares, each with a name and date. The ground was yellowish and bone-dry, as Theodore remembered the ground of Lelia’s cemetery, as if the feet of thousands of mourners had obliterated every blade of grass. Yet the faded pastel lavenders of the tombstones’ shadows, the pale green traces of moisture in the walls and the instant-coffee and jelly jars of real and artificial flowers, fresh and wilted and dead, made it look like a picture by Seurat and relieved much of its gloom for Theodore. He wandered to an empty vault and looked in. It was lined with ordinary house bricks. A casket had evidently been removed, because on the ground, leaning against the wall, was a square of stone that had fronted the catacomb: Maria Josefina Barrera 1888–1937. R.E.P.
“They rent out the vaults,” Ramón said, “and if the relatives do not pay the rent, they take the body out.”
Theodore nodded. He had read it somewhere before. Some of the bodies had become the famous mummies, and some must be simply thrown away somewhere, he thought, like litter.
“The mummies are this way,” Ramón said, pointing to the back wall.
Theodore followed him. Near the back wall Theodore saw a square hole in a slab of cement pavement. A wooden cover lay beside it.
Ramón stopped beside the hole and motioned for Theodore to precede him down. There were faint purple shadows under Ramón’s eyes, more subtle than the purple of the tombstones.
A spiral iron stairway led down from the hole. Theodore took a last look around. Two women in black bent over a grave far to his left. A young man was walking through the gate. Theodore looked down at his feet and descended. He had thought the steps would lead to a small chamber like a dungeon, and when he reached the bottom and saw dimly lighted corridors on either side he had a sensation of having been tricked, a flash of recollection perhaps due to some description of Ramón’s that he had heard long ago. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimmer light, he saw with a shock that the mummies were right beside him on his left, lining the walls of the left corridor shoulder to shoulder all the way to the end, where more stood. Some were dressed or partially dressed, but most were quite naked.