A Game for the Living

  Ramón turned to look at a little grey-suited man who was coming down the stairway.

  “You want to see the mummies?” the little man asked, unnecessarily.

  “Sí,” Ramón replied.

  The little man turned on a brighter light and stepped into the doorway of the corridor and stood sideways, thereby impeding their passage slightly.

  Theodore went in, and then Ramón. More footsteps were coming down the spiral stairs, ringing faintly in the cement tunnel. Theodore watched Ramón’s face for a moment, saw that he looked tense but calm, then turned his eyes to the mummies, not that he wanted to, but because he knew Ramón would notice whether he gave them proper attention. Their skins were of a pale yellow color, like dried leather. Nearly all had dried, stiffened black hair on their heads and in the pubic region. Women’s breasts hung down like collapsed bags. Theodore took shallow breaths. There was an airlessness about the place, a faint sourness—he did not know what it was, but he sensed the absence of anything breathable by the living.

  The little caretaker stood with sightless-looking eyes and a small smile, absurd in his limp business suit and hat, perhaps about to launch into his lecture, unless he was too tired today. Theodore hoped he was too tired.

  A young boy came into the corridor with a casual air, one of the boys who had lingered around them at the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, Theodore thought, and he rather expected the boy to start his own improvised commentary on the mummies. Theodore walked slowly towards the end of the corridor, pausing a moment to look into the open eyeless lids of a man whose jaw was dropped as if he were snoring, revealing a few teeth. The penis was missing, Theodore noticed, but then he saw it, a dried string-like thing unrecognizable except by its location.

  “The figure in the black suit is that of a French doctor,” the caretaker said, pointing to one of the few clothed mummies. “Notice the fine state of preservation.” He gestured to the horrible, nearly bald head which had suddenly taken on a European color and structure to Theodore, and touched the now ludicrous fine lace of the man’s shirt front carelessly, as if the dead man no longer commanded respect. “The extreme dryness of the Guanajuato climate preserves the bodies,” he droned.

  Ramón looked fixedly at the French doctor’s face, at his stiffly hanging hands. Theodore wondered what he was trying to see or feel by peering at something which the mind had left.

  Theodore turned and was face to face with the young boy, who smiled a little and stepped aside. The boy had dark hair on his upper lip, which Theodore, at that moment, found disgusting.

  The caretaker called their attention to the bloated collapsed figure of a woman who had died apparently as the result of an unsuccessful Cesarean section—he pointed wordlessly at the slit in her side and at the tiny, mummified infant which hung from her wrist by a wire around its neck. The infant was crouched up in a fetal position and resembled a big-headed monkey. Theodore looked away in revulsion and met Ramón’s accusing eyes. Theodore shrugged involuntarily and gave a bitter little smile. Enough ugliness was enough! What was the purpose of it? If Ramón had ever been articulate about the purpose of coming here—Theodore noticed that the boy was watching both of them.

  “. . . and this woman—the wife of a mayor of Guanajuato,” the caretaker was murmuring, though nobody seemed to be listening to him.

  Theodore made his way slowly towards the door, still flanked by the mummies, that were so close he could have stretched out both arms and touched them. He did not like the prowling boy, who had the lively eyes of a pickpocket or worse, and who seemed to be looking at him and Ramón quite as much as he looked at the mummies. No doubt he would tell the caretaker that he had sent the two men here, and claim part of the caretaker’s tip.

  “And this. This woman was buried alive,” said the caretaker. “An epileptic.”

  Theodore glanced and his attention was captured. It was a rather tall, dark-haired mummy on the left near the door. Her mouth was open and twisted, as if she were screaming. Her claw-like hands were drawn up near her left shoulder, the fingers pulling against one another in a familiar gesture of despair. Even the empty sockets of her eyes were stretched open.

  “. . . buried during an attack,” the caretaker said with a sigh.

  When, Theodore wondered. Perhaps two hundred years ago, when epileptics were considered insane? He did not care to ask. The woman’s long black hair seemed to writhe in agony, too. Theodore imagined her sucking the last air of the tomb into her lungs, straining with her last strength to break the cover with her bent knees, and then straining her fingers against one another as death froze her in a pantomime of the futile struggle.

  “That is impressive, is it not?” Ramón asked in a low voice.

  Theodore nodded. The boy watched them in a front corner of the corridor, with a pleased expression.

  A light had been turned on in the opposite corridor, which was much shorter. Theodore saw a stack of human bones about fifteen feet high, neatly piled in the manner of wood faggots, resting on two or three rows of skulls, each of which faced outward, grinning and ornamental. After the mummies, these seemed unreal, not death-like, but like a comic relief. Theodore looked in his wallet and, having no singles, gave the man a five-peso note.

  Ramón climbed the stairs, Theodore followed him, and then came the boy. The sunlight fell warmly and deliciously on Theodore’s face. He looked up at the sun until its glare drove his eyes away.

  “Buenos dias,” said the boy, smiling at Theodore. “Were you able to find a satisfactory hotel?”

  “Si,” Theodore said curtly.

  “They are all filled,” the boy continued in badly pronounced English.

  “We have found a place.”

  “Where?”

  “A place,” Theodore said, walking on with Ramón.

  “If you are eenterested in something like the Orozco, I think I can get you some rooms there,” the boy said, walking along with them.

  The Orozco was Theodore’s favorite hotel, but they were booked up for the next several days. “Gracias,” Theodore said.

  “But I could get you a room.”

  “Gracias, no.” Theodore walked on with Ramón to the car, and the boy loitered outside the cemetery’s gates.

  Theodore backed the car and used the gates as an area to turn around in. Going down the hill, they passed the boy walking in the direction of the town.

  They had, that morning, installed themselves in a pension hardly more comfortable than the Hotel La Palma, but at least with more charm. All its rooms were on the ground floor around a patio in which a fountain ran and parrots swung in metal rings or climbed among blossoming bougainvilleas. It cost forty pesos a day apiece, including meals. Four blocks from the pension, Ramón asked Theodore to let him out, and said he would walk the rest of the way to the pension and meet him there in less than half an hour. Theodore stopped the car. He noticed that a church was near-by in the same street. Ramón got out, and Theodore drove on to the pension and parked the car in a little blind alley at one side which served as a garage. Then he walked back slowly to the church with an idea of looking at its interior, but when he reached its modest doorway, which had a piece of brown leather, cracked and worn sleek, hanging three-quarters of the way down to its threshold, he felt he would be intruding on Ramón if he went in, even if Ramón did not see him.

  Theodore crossed the street and sat down at one of two sidewalk tables of a tiny bar which served soft drinks and beer. He ordered a beer. What was Ramón praying for, he wondered. What was he confessing? He prayed for his soul, of course. What else would one pray for, if one believed in an eternal soul, after looking at eighty or a hundred horrible corpses? One would think, surely this isn’t all that’s going to happen after I die, death can’t be just this. And for many people, he thought, the mummies would be excellent propaganda for the existence of an after-li
fe practically tantamount to proof! It reminded him of a statement made by an American scientist which he had written down in the back of his diary, simply because of its absurdity. It went something like: “Can this be all? Is our planet doomed to burn out in ten or twelve billion years and the universe to be nothing more than a huge cemetery with no further potentiality of life?” Well, what if it was destined to be nothing more than a huge cemetery? The arrogance of most men’s minds—and this one had been a scientist—appalled Theodore. “Life,” they said with reverence, and yet they saw it only in anthropoid form, or at best as life as they knew it. If the earth became a hunk of metal, or disintegrated and vanished in particles too small for scientists’ eyes or even their microscopes to find, wasn’t there some beauty in that, beauty in the idea, if nothing else? It seemed quite as beautiful as three billion sweating or freezing human beings creeping around on a globe.

  He took out his fountain drawing pen and began to sketch the front of the church on a blank back page of a book he carried. The old red stone columns, on either side of the door, spiraled up like twisted lava. The pointed arch of the shadowed doorway looked like a human mouth, wide open in a cry of tragic agony. The picture under his pen took on a personal quality, a special individuality, like a human face, and Theodore suddenly saw the door as Ramón, screaming at a deaf and non-existent God a cry that might have been as silent as the door.

  He put his pen away and his mind slowly focused on the physical again, on the fact that Ramón had been in the church at least fifteen minutes, that there was a two-peso tab under his nearly empty bottle of Carta Blanca, that he was very hungry, and that he could not by the effort of imagining make himself a Catholic for half an hour or even one minute.

  Ramón came out of the church and stood for a moment with one hand on the leather door flap, as if he did not want to turn loose of it, or did not know in which direction to go. Theodore raised his arm and called “Ramón!” He took some money from his wallet, waited for change, and left a peso tip. Ramón had crossed the street. He nodded to Theodore in greeting, and they began to walk towards the pension in silence. After a block, Ramón said:

  “You were not impressed by the mummies?”

  “Of course I was.”

  “I think you’ll find that they’ll work a change in you.” Ramón walked with his head up, a little cheered as always after he had been inside a church.

  Theodore pondered this for a moment. “Have they changed you?”

  “Yes. Not today. I’ve seen them before. They are reminders,” Ramón went on, looking straight in front of him. “Reminders of the unimportance of the body.”

  “Yes. After one is dead.”

  “And of the shortness of death and the eternity of life.”

  “Eternity of life?” Theodore asked in surprise, then realized this was exactly what he had expected.

  “Did I say that?” Ramón asked, smiling. “No, I meant the opposite. Unless, of course, one chooses to call this death and the other life, as some do.”

  “And you? Do you?”

  Ramón frowned, though his smile lingered. “Maybe I do. Sometimes this life seems only like a waiting for something. Do you know what I mean, Teo?” he asked in a cheerful voice, glancing at Theodore.

  “Yes,” Theodore said dubiously. To anticipate ‘life’ as an eternity in hell—what kind of perverted joy was that? Or was he possibly hoping for purgatory or something better? Theodore decided to say nothing more on the subject, lest he disturb, by a clumsy question or a statement, the precarious chess game that Ramón was playing with himself in his mind. Ramón began to talk about the beauty of the town.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Theodore made another effort by telephone that afternoon to get a room at the Orozco. The manager blamed the crowdedness of the city on “the end of Carnaval.” He chose to speak to Theodore in English. Theodore’s name was on their list, however, and perhaps in five days, perhaps less, there should be a room. Theodore then telephoned Sauzas’s office in Mexico, and gave the name ‘Los Papagayos’, the pension at which he and Ramón were staying. Sauzas was not in.

  At a little before five, Theodore returned from a walk that had taken him up to the Hotel Santa Cecilia, where he had made a panoramic water-colour of the town. He thumb-tacked it over his bed, a burst of red and grey in the room of muted and faded colors. His room was identical with Ramón’s next-door. Each had a thin double bed with a flimsy but ornate bedstead, a straight chair, a tall brown wardrobe which had lost the same right-hand door, each had a chamber-pot of pink and white under the bed, and each a small metal crucifix over a table on which stood a water pitcher in a basin, beside a glass carafe of drinking water with an inverted glass on top of it. In the patio the parrots chattered and gave an occasional squawk, as if the five or six of them played a card game that caused them all to talk in sequence. Buckets filled slowly at the fountain with trickling sounds that rose in pitch, ended, and began again. Mops and rags slapped constantly on the blue-and-white tiles, which were impeccably clean, as if the family of father and mother and two daughters and two sons who operated the pension had lost their minds on the subject of scrubbing the patio.

  “Concha, have you seen the mop?”

  “The what?”

  “The mop!”

  “No-o.”

  Slop! Water dashed over the stones and hissed to silence.

  A boy laughed long and lazily and with relish, making Theodore smile as he heard him. There was a happy atmosphere in the pension, and Theodore had nothing to complain about, not even the simple food, but he wished for Ramón’s sake that the room were prettier to look at and that the toilet was not on the patio, too, behind a wooden door, because he did not want Ramón to be reminded of his apartment in Mexico.

  The inevitable conversation went on:

  “Juan, you didn’t see the mop?”

  “No-o. Ask Dolores.”

  Trickle, trickle . . .

  Theodore lay on his bed, lulled by the voices, which the patio’s four walls amplified and emptied of meaning, so they became as hollow as symbols.

  “No-o, Maria,” came a girl’s voice. “You mean the mop with the long handle?”

  “Ai,” said the girl in calm despair.

  “Look in the kitchen, Maria!”

  “Awr-r-rk!” A parrot expressed horror at some move in the game.

  And Theodore thought of the strange moment that morning when he had felt a physical attraction—perhaps for only ten seconds, but very strongly—for the girl who had shown Ramón and him their rooms. She was barely eighteen, he thought, a little plump, modest and docile and without artifice, and there could have been no other reason for his attraction except that she was female, and he could not remember ever having been attracted to such a simple kind of girl before in his life. It had been the first time since Lelia’s death that such an emotion had stirred in him—and actually the same stirring might have happened if Lelia had still been alive, so transitory and purposeless it was—yet this morning there had been the feeling that if he had touched this girl, his desire would have evaporated, because of Lelia. And so it might have, but it would not always be so. And the real source of the depression that had followed his attraction was the knowledge that he would go on in a state of being physically alive, that there would be another woman some day, or women, and that he did not even want her, or them.

  He would write something about it in his diary, he thought, and while he was thinking of how best to say it in English, he fell asleep. He had a dream that Lelia was sitting at the long table in her apartment, which had been transported to the blue-and-white patio of the pension. She wore a bright purple-and-yellow rebozo, or stole, which he had just made her a present of, and she was pleased and in a good humor. They were waiting for someone, and they listened for a knock at the door, but all they heard were the parrots
’ squawks, which made Lelia smile. Then Lelia said that at last he was getting somewhere, wasn’t he? “What do you mean?” he asked. “You are about to find out who is responsible for all this,” Lelia said with laughing dark eyes, “but it doesn’t matter in the least, Teo, not to me. It’s just a silly game—a game for the living.” She looked at her door, hearing something he did not; and then Ramón opened the door suddenly and came in, in high spirits, with his arms full of rum bottles piled high as his chin, and the bottles rested on a bed of red carnations. Theodore asked him why he had not brought white, and Ramón looked bewildered, and asked him to repeat the question. . . .

  Theodore heard a knock at his door, and sat up with the dream in his head. “Ramón?” he asked.

  “No, señor,” said a girl’s high-pitched voice. “A señor outside would like to speak with you.”

  Theodore stood up. “One minute,” he called, smoothing his hair with one hand. He opened the door, and looking past the girl he saw a young man standing in the sunlight on the sidewalk just outside the pension’s gate. Theodore had a sudden feeling of having seen him before, a feeling that he knew him—and then he realized that it was the boy with the incipient moustache who had been with them in the corridor of mummies.

  “Buenas tardes,” said the young man as Theodore approached him. “Señor Schiebelhut?”

  “Sí,” Theodore said.

  “There are two rooms available for you at the Hotel Orozco.” He gave a small, jerky bow.

  “I called them just two hours ago. There weren’t—”

  “I have just found out,” the boy interrupted in his twanging, adolescent voice. “They are not available today, but tomorrow morning sure.”