Body of Truth (41 page)

Finally the kid drove away leaving Haydon standing on the dusty curb of 5a avenida, facing the front of the Cementerio General. Across on the other side, the high walls of the cemetery were already providing a lengthening shade from the westward falling sun. The cemetery entrance was an architectural bastardization of Greek and Roman styles, having a tall Roman arch flanked by neo-classical pilasters and crowned with a staid Greek pediment. This romantic amalgam was bordered on either side for fifteen or twenty meters by the tall windows of the administrative offices. Beneath the windows was a wainscoting of dark paint. Along this wall groups of Indian women in their brilliant native
costumbres
sat at the base of the wall, their darkened and weathered faces peering out from behind mounds of fresh flowers, cerise azaleas, crimson and fleecy carnations, bloody and coral roses, snowy lilies and creamy gardenias, saffron marigolds and gold lantana, pink-bordered frangipani with peach centers, a rainbow of hibiscus, and the ivory and theatrical floripondio. A wealth of color offered by girls and women on the brink of starvation, flowers for the memory of the only people on earth who were more disadvantaged than themselves, the dead.

Haydon crossed the wide dusty street and entered the deep shadows of the long portico that soon opened into the cemetery grounds. The main avenue stretched out ahead of him, flanked by massive cypresses and cedars, their trunks painted white to form a bright colonnade beneath a dark canopy of green, and at the far end of the avenue, in front of a hazy sky, the cupola of a rich man’s crypt. To either side other lanes branched off the main one, all of them lined with trees, mostly palms that reached nearly to the clouds before they burst into sprays of green fronds.

The main, more carefully tended, avenues and calles of the cemetery, the ones nearest the graceful arched entry, were dedicated in death, as in life, to the everlasting dwellings of rich men’s bodies. Here the self-centered and arrogant wealthy ignored priestly wisdom and made every effort to bridge the gulf that separated what they had been in life from what they had become in eternity. Block after block of lavish mausoleums and tombs and crypts and vaults lined the shady lanes and avenues. Here was a mammoth mausoleum of stone that seemed to be an architectural blending of an Egyptian and Mayan pyramid, its doors of massive sheets of copper engraved with the images of an Egyptian king and queen surrounded by hieroglyphs and overspread with the embracing wings of a vulture. There was a miniature Tudor house of stone and wood, a miniature mosque with minarets, a miniature cathedral, a miniature Greek temple, many as large as actual houses. There were lesser crypts, too, of cottage size, and a vast array of motifs and styles—Swiss chalets, A-frames and dachas, modern and geometrically daring designs of glass and tile, bungalows, clumsy knockoffs of architectural themes reminiscent of every conceivable trendy modern design, kitsch run amok. All of these, odd little houses of the dead, many of them deteriorating as any house would if neglected. It was an altogether peculiar demonstration of how truly awkward the living felt in their inevitable confrontation with death.

And then there were the poor, the legions and legions of dead who claimed only the small space their bodies displaced. For these there were rows upon rows of low cement rectangular crypts, complexes ten meters high, a city block long, and of a depth that would allow two bodies to be laid end to end, one pushed in from one side of the crypt and another from the opposite side of the building. These crypts were nothing more than coffin-sized cubicles stacked one upon the other, ten high. As each body was shoved into its space, a cement plate was fitted into the opening and plastered over. Sometimes the family paid extra to have the dead’s name scratched into the cement plate, sometimes they couldn’t afford it and painted it themselves. Sometimes they didn’t. In any case, after several rainy seasons alternating with scorching
veranos
, the names were gone. But on the front of each plate, almost without exception, a little device of some sort was provided as a receptacle for flowers, and the long flat façade of these crypts was forever decorated with flowers, fresh and wilting and dead, and in all hues, bright and fading and dead. The plaster cracked and flaked off the fronts of the crypts, and some who treasured the maintenance of such things would repair them, while others who were too poor or too tired to maintain what housed only dusty bones and memories, did not. The broad sidewalks in front of the crypts were cracked and intruded with sacrilegious grasses, and the dead who were poor on earth rested in their plain, narrow eternities, quiet and unobjecting, while the dead who were rich on earth did the same, in a more lavish silence.

CHAPTER 40

A
ccording to his watch, Haydon was a little over two hours early for the meeting at five-thirty. He did not directly follow the route described in Lena’s message, but rather walked to the first calle and turned into it in the opposite direction from the meeting site. The Cementerio General was, he recalled, the oldest burial ground in the city, and its narrow lanes were lined with old cypresses and stone pines and palms and cedars and
amates
and even wispy pepper trees. This lane was flanked by majestic palms, their high crowns a lush dark green against the hazy, glaucous sky. Large crypts faced each other from either side of the lane, structures of fine stones with statues in the romantic tradition portraying the deceased in the proud glory of his earthly form, or idealized personifications of his virtues.

Haydon followed this shady, shallow slope until he came to a cross lane which he took to his right, west, in the general direction of his ultimate destination. Here he saw the sides of crypts, allées of cypresses and pines, little paths behind the mausoleums where small sheds in which the caretakers kept their tools were tucked away out of sight.

Occasionally he would see an old man moving through the cypresses, carrying a hoe or machete or pruning saw, sometimes two old men together, in sweaty shirts and ragged straw hats. They moved amid the rippling shadows of the tombs almost as if they themselves already had joined that other world, walking silently, always just out of shouting distance, now there, now gone, apparitions, the true dwellers of the necropolis.

Before he reached the next calle, he heard the faint piping trill of what sounded like a panpipe. He turned his head to hear it better, though he needn’t have, for he and the music were approaching the same intersection. And then he realized it wasn’t pipes at all, at least not the kind he imagined. What he heard was an incongruous mixture of melody and place and instrument. He stopped just short of the intersection, one row of tombs back from the black hearse that, covered in a film of summer dust, crept into the crossroads beneath the ancient cypresses and palms. An obese driver, seemingly wedged behind the wheel of the hearse, stared straight ahead, one arm hanging out the window, his job requiring no more concentration than was necessary for swatting flies.

The hearse entered into the intersection with its back door opened wide to reveal the casket inside. Close behind followed a loose rabble of a crowd, silent Guatemalans, all of them dressed in black, the women shawled and veiled despite the afternoon heat, the men in ill-fitting and dusty suits, their dingy, tieless shirts buttoned at the collar. They tramped along stoically in a swaying rhythmic shuffle, their dusty shoes—and bare feet—kicking up little puffs of powder, which, because the afternoon was as still as a held breath, rose no higher than their knees before it settled back to the earth only to be raised again by the people behind. These self-absorbed mourners, these new and unaccustomed city dwellers so recently from the countryside where their ancestors had buried their dead for thousands of years, had forfeited the keening of their forefathers to a tape recording, broadcast over a loudspeaker mounted behind the driver. The dirge was “Home on the Range,” interpreted by the shrill up-and-down notes of a calliope’s dolorous piping. This odd, melodious requiem rose up through the boughs of the cypresses and drifted out over the crypts with a morose gaiety, riding the dusty sunlight as it stole obliquely through the palms and struck the sides of the tombs as a post-meridian glow in the first moments of its softening.

Haydon stood transfixed as the grievers moved by through the rippling shadows, unwilling to move until the last mourner was well past and the notes of the calliope were fading among the tombs farther down the sloping lane. They were gone.

He was now parallel to the main avenue, monitoring his own progress as he reached each new lane. Just before he came to the end of the avenue where he had been instructed to turn right, he walked back toward the colonnade of white-trunked cypresses and crossed over to the other side into a warren of crypts, long alleys of flat-faced sepulchers on the one side, dead and dying flowers draped upon their chipped façades like the hanging gardens of Babylon in an age of drought and famine, and on the other side, lichen-covered stone vaults, rows and rows of them as far as he could see.

He turned back to his left, trying to stay within fifty meters of the narrow angling lane that diverged from the main avenue and headed down a shallow slope into an ever-poorer neighborhood of crypts. Here the walls of warehoused dead became the rule of burial, with sections of crypts interspersed. Gradually the lane he was following inched out onto a promontory, the cypress and eucalyptus trees crowding out the graves until across the lane the cemetery fell off into the vast ravines of the Rio La Barranca. The lane itself became a rutted dirt road, the graves only on one side of it, and on the other, cypresses, and then the land fell away into the Gehenna of squatters’ shacks and slums, their smoke and stench wafting up toward the cemetery on the late afternoon breeze.

Haydon came to the end of the road and to the end of the cemetery. A last cluster of tombs clung to the promontory, along with a mixture of cypresses and palms and eucalyptus, but on all sides the ravines dropped away into a smoky world of smoldering garbage, watched over, always, by the floating black cruciforms of
zopilotes
hanging in the opal sky.

A burble of conversation rose and died, sending a chill over his flesh before he reminded himself that no one he needed to fear would carry on a conversation at all. He moved away from the road toward the voices, heard the chink of tools, and walked between the crypts into a narrow corridor to the back side of the charnel houses. There on the edge of the ravines, behind a crypt on the margin of the cliff, an elderly woman and a girl who must have been sixteen or so were sitting on the edge of a hole they were digging, a glass jug of water between them as they rested. As Haydon rounded the corner of the crypt, they both looked at him as if he were a ghost, their sweaty faces frozen in his direction. Their hole was a ragged thing, crudely dug, and, as Haydon instantly realized as he looked at their startled faces, an illegal grave. They were probably from the terraces of shacks below in the ravines. Someone had died and needed burying, and they needed only a small piece of earth.

They looked at each other. The girl’s eyes were as large as they could get and still remain in her head, and Haydon thought that if she hadn’t been sitting with her legs dangling in the hole she would have bolted over the cliff. But the old woman regarded Haydon with benign resignation, the expression of a woman who had lived so long and seen so much that being kicked out of a grave in her closing years would not have surprised her.

“
No tenga pena
,” Haydon said. Don’t worry about it. Reaching into his pocket, he took out his pack of cigarettes as he walked over to the two women. He took one out and lighted it, and squatting down near them, held out the pack to the old woman. “Go ahead,” he said. “Keep them.”

Surprised, the girl didn’t know what to do, but the old woman snatched the cigarettes from Haydon’s extended hand and immediately shook one out for each of them, grasping the pack in her crooked and filthy fingers. She was too old to question opportunity.

Haydon looked into the hole they had scrabbled in the rocky soil. “Who died?” he asked.

“A child,” the old woman said. “She likes this view. She likes the
zopilotes
,” she said, raising the gnarled hand with the cigarette and, pointing her middle finger to the sky, scribing circles in the air where the vultures wheeled in the distance.

“Did you find this spot yourself?” Haydon asked the girl, but she would not look at him. She only smoked and stared into the hole.

“Yes, herself,” the old woman answered for her. “The poor girl is deaf,” she explained. “We were going to dig only at night, to avoid the caretakers.” She shrugged. “But it was taking too long; the child is smelling. So”—she looked at the hole in which their legs were hanging—“we finish it today. Tonight, we bring the child up in the dark.”

Haydon nodded. Sweat was dripping from the girl’s nose, her head was bowed, still avoiding Haydon’s eyes.

“Is she a friend?” Haydon asked.

The old woman grinned. “No, no.” She put an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “She is my granddaughter,” she said proudly.

Haydon tried to return the old woman’s smile, but he felt the muscles around his mouth resist. Still he did smile, and the old woman saw that he understood her pride.

“You know the Roosevelt Hospital?” Haydon asked.

“I know where it is, yes.”

Still squatting, Haydon took out his pen and a piece of paper from his wallet and wrote down the name of Dr. Bindo Salviati. He reached out and gave it to the old woman. “Take the girl there and have the doctor look at her ears. Maybe he can help.”

The old woman took the piece of paper and nodded. She couldn’t read, and she didn’t have money for doctors, but she was being polite. Haydon told her the name and had the old woman repeat it. Then he reached into his wallet again and took out some money.

“This will cover the cost of your taxi to and from the hospital, and it will cover the cost of the doctor’s examination. Dr. Salviati is a friend. He’ll know what to do for her if anything can be done. Do you understand?”