Making an Exit

by Sarah Murray

  * * *

  To my knowledge, Fa’s remains did not—unlike those of the medieval saints—work any miracles. Or perhaps they did. For standing on the spot where The Hut once sat is a smart new building where my mother now lives.

  Our scheme was hatched soon after Fa died. Sam didn’t want to stay alone in the family home, Summerfields. Meanwhile, Kate, her husband Ian, and their two small boys, Dylan and Gus, were bursting out of their tiny one-bedroom apartment in London. Unable to find anything else affordable in the city, they were considering moving to the suburbs. The perfect solution seemed for them to take the house in Dorset. We’d build a new self-contained apartment next door for Sam. Everyone loved the idea. Fa would, I’m sure, have been thrilled.

  Then Melvyn Sparks turned up. A successful local businessman, Melvyn started his career as a young architect, working closely with Fa on local development projects and farm buildings. Today, Melvyn has a string of companies, from real estate development firms to private jets and golf courses. Dividing his time between houses in Britain and villas in Spain, he’s now more often in boardrooms than on building sites.

  Astonishingly, Melvyn announced he’d like to oversee our tiny four-hundred-square-foot project, and recommended his best contractors for the job. One day, when work was well underway, he stopped by to inspect the progress. Over a coffee in our kitchen, I thanked him for his help. “Ah well,” said Melvyn, pausing and glancing at the ceiling. “I know he’s up there watching me.”

  To make way for the construction, however, The Hut had to go. It was a sad thought. It had been Fa’s special place and, of course, his temporary reliquary. Then Sam’s younger brother, Anthony (who accompanied her to Fa’s cremation), said he’d like to have it in his yard. Enterprising and energetic, Anthony is astonishingly good at building and fixing things. So when he said he could dismantle and reconstruct The Hut, we believed him.

  Anthony drove down to Dorset with a trailer. In a single day, he took The Hut apart, loaded it piece by piece onto his trailer, and drove it back to his house that evening (“I did get some funny looks from other drivers on the motorway,” he told me cheerily).

  Soon after, he sent me photographs of The Hut in its new home, a couple of hours away. It looks exactly as it did in Dorset, except a different set of trees clusters around it. It’s got the same irregular shape (Fa had it extended on one side), the same slightly concave roof with its weathered gray asphalt surface. The same faded door still has lichen spreading around the bottom and a padlock securing it shut. I can imagine Fa inside, working on his scrapbooks in the company of the plastic model planes and the Egyptian brick. Of course, The Hut would have never been rebuilt without Anthony’s talents. But I can’t help thinking that its new lease of life constitutes a miracle—well a small one, anyway.

  9

  Hello Again

  ON AN ALTAR IN OAXACA

  I’m looking at a picture of Fa. It’s one I took some years ago. In his favorite hat, with his trusty walking stick in hand and a red scarf at his neck, he’s standing on a narrow country lane lined with trees stripped bare for winter. I know that lane—it runs alongside the bluebell wood, not far from the hill where we scattered his ashes. I’m fond of this particular photograph. It reminds me of how much Fa loved the West Dorset landscape. He was never happier than when he was trudging through muddy fields, stick in hand.

  The photograph is not framed. In fact, it’s a photocopy of the original but the paper is just about stiff enough to allow me to prop it up for viewing. I’ve taken a few moments to decide where to put this picture of him. Next to the tiny plaster figurine of a skeleton sitting at a sewing machine? Or perhaps beside the model of a skeletal sheep wearing a sombrero? Another option would be in front of the large corpse-shaped loaf of bread with a plastic saint’s head baked in right where the face should be.

  I spend a little longer thinking about it before I finally settle on an appropriate slot. My father is now standing in front of a female skeleton doll in a black-and-turquoise lacy flamenco dress. Below him is a life-sized sugar skull covered in different kinds of dried berries and another one decorated in colored tinfoil with green metallic discs in its eyes. I’ve left a handful of Werther’s Originals on the shelf for him. They were his favorite sweets (he always kept a few in his coat pocket). He got me on to them, too, so while I was originally going to leave the whole packet, I’ve saved a few for myself.

  At this point, anyone not familiar with Mexico’s Day of the Dead festival is thinking I’m either hallucinating or having some kind of voodoo-inspired nightmare. Fear not. I’m in Oaxaca, where this annual celebration is just days away and skeletons are appearing in homes, shops, restaurants, and public buildings. The Hotel Azucenas, where I’m staying, has a Day of the Dead altar just inside the entrance to its courtyard. And a couple of weeks ahead of my arrival, the hotel e-mailed me this message:

  Dear Guests Visiting Oaxaca & Hotel Azucenas during the Day of the Dead, as you may know most homes and many businesses in Oaxaca (and Mexico) make beautiful altars of flowers, fruit and offerings for the dead during these days. You are invited to bring your own photos of family and friends who have died, if you would like to include them in our altar. And we (the living & the dead) look forward to seeing you in Oaxaca.

  At the time I received this note, I didn’t know a whole lot about the traditions of Dia de los Muertos, but now here I am looking at my father on a Mexican altar for the defuntos (departed), along with a dozen or so pictures of the relatives of other hotel guests and a black-and-white image of two tabby cats. I very much like seeing him there, and I’ve already taken several photos of the altar to show Sam and the rest of the family. Fa would no doubt have thought me rather silly. But he would have smiled indulgently all the same.

  The Hotel Azucenas’s ofrenda, or altarpiece, is typical of the Day of the Dead shrines erected in homes, commercial establishments, and public offices. This one’s a riot of color. It’s covered with pink-and-purple plastic tablecloths in bold floral designs while above, also in pink and purple, are draped papel picado, or “perforated paper”—delicate paper cutouts depicting dancing skeletons that remind me a little of the festive bone swags in Sedlec Ossuary.

  In a couple of tall vases on either side of the altar are bunches of orange marigolds (known here as flor de muerto, and which since pre-Columbian times have symbolized death), combined with a few burgundy-red amaranths, a flower known, appropriately enough, as Love Lies Bleeding. Leafy branches with oranges dangling from them create a glorious arch over the whole thing.

  As well as photographs of the defuntos, the altar’s tiered shelves display an assortment of skeleton effigies and sugar skulls (calaveras). Copal incense made from pine will guide the dead toward their home. There’s food and drink, too—a glass of water placed in a prominent position (the dead are always thirsty), some tortillas, a few cupcakes, and the loaf of bread with the saint’s head embedded in it. On one shelf is a bottle of Noche Buena, a popular Mexican beer. A packet of Marlboro cigarettes, a dish of peanuts, a bowl of plums, and a few pomegranates are also dotted around.

  It’s important to leave a generous supply of food and other offerings on the altar, including the favorite treats of the deceased relatives. For this is the time when the dead return to earth to visit their relatives, and they’re hungry when they get there.

  * * *

  Oaxaca is one of Mexico’s most beautiful colonial towns. It sits in the southern part of the country at the convergence of the Sierra Madre Oriental and the Sierra Madre del Sur ranges. The province was a thank-you gift to Hernán Cortés from the Spanish crown for his conquest of New Spain. In 1521, Cortés arrived to claim his prize and proceeded to build a dazzling showcase city, with everything a smart new metropolis should have—an elegant grid plan, grand classical buildings, and magnificent Catholic cathedrals. The most spectacular, Santo Domingo, has a pair of stylish domes in black-and-blue checked tiles. Just inside its main entrance, a gild
ed ceiling depicts Saint Dominic’s family tree.

  On my first morning in Oaxaca, I wake to a flawless day. The air is crisp, the sky is clear blue, and, walking down the hill from the hotel, the sun on my shoulders feels like a blessing after the gray clouds I left behind in New York. I’m heading toward the Mercado Abastos, an immense covered market on the edge of town just the other side of the railway tracks. That’s where I’m hoping to find all the flowers, skeleton effigies, and candy skulls sold at this time of year.

  Plunging down the first entrance I see, I feel I’ve died and gone to heaven. There’s something intoxicating about the profusion of goods on display at these kinds of markets. Cheap soaps, washing-powder sachets, and lipsticks are piled precariously on small tables. Thousands of shoes and leather sandals hang in ranks on plastic feet cut off at the ankles (a display method I’ve always found a little disturbing).

  In the fresh produce section, plump cactus leaves and exotic vegetables I’m unable to name are piled high in a Thanksgiving-style salutation of abundance. Pyramids of fruit defy gravity (or are somehow glued together), while in the meat section, a row of headless plucked chickens lie on a table with their spindly legs sticking out at different angles like a lineup of poorly disciplined cancan dancers.

  Sounds drift in and out. Porters clear a path for their loads using high-pitched whistles. Manic mariachi tunes give way to the strains of a soppy love ballad that’s part of the soundtrack coming from a DVD stall. Next to it, a competitor is screening a cheap horror movie. As I walk past, a woman howls in anguish as she rips off her own jaw, assisted by some rather unconvincing special effects and lots of fake blood.

  Invading my nostrils is a pungent cocktail of odors—copal incense smoke, the heady scent of marigolds, the rich cocoa aroma of mole paste, and, cutting through it all, the citric sharpness of oranges and limes. I long to buy everything but know I’ll never get it in the suitcase.

  Then I stumble across what I’m looking for—great piles of loaves like the one on the altar at the Hotel Azucenas. These are pan de muertos (bread for the dead). Table after table is loaded with them, and embedded in the surface of each loaf are little heads of Jesus, the Virgin, and various saints, all with colorful haloes in pink, red, yellow, blue, purple, and even lime green. Across from the bread, one woman is selling heart-shaped buns with a dark red paste spread over them. I’m just guessing, but do these by chance represent bleeding hearts?

  Moving deeper into the market, I find a stall selling strings of tinsel with tiny plastic skulls threaded through it. It’s the start of the skeleton section. And what, you might think, could be weirder than going shopping for skulls and skeletons? Yet the merchandise feels festive rather than morbid. Everything is endowed with a playful humor. There are plastic skeletons wearing sombreros, skeleton dolls (like the one on the hotel altar next to Fa’s photograph), skeleton earrings with tiny dangly arms and legs, candy skulls in all sizes, and miniature wooden caskets with little skeletons inside. In my favorite version, you pull a string at one end, causing the cadaver to sit bolt upright.

  Meanwhile, small dioramas, or nichos, feature groups of skeletons installed behind glass in painted boxes, with brides and grooms in wedding outfits, families sitting around dinner tables, and mariachi musicians ready to strike up a tune. Miniature skeletons—dozens of tiny plaster figures glued to wooden bases—are keeping busy. There’s the skeleton dog groomer, the skeleton footballer, the skeleton singer dressed as Elvis, the skeleton at a computer, the artist skeleton painting at an easel, the skeleton dentist with her skeletal patient, and (perhaps most paradoxically) the skeleton midwife assisting at the birth of a skeleton baby, which pokes out between the legs of its skeleton mother.

  La Calavera Catrina turns up everywhere. She’s the Lady of the Dead. Her image first appeared in the nineteenth-century works of José Guadalupe Posada, the Mexican printmaker, and today you find her on cheap plastic shopping bags, in papel picado cutouts, and in life-size effigies decorating lobbies and shop windows around town.

  La Catrina is also available as a ceramic statuette. In this more elaborate and expensive form, she cuts a macabre figure—tall, willowy, and flamboyantly attired in a long low-cut gown revealing her rib cage. With a broad-brimmed hat covering her hairless skull, she often appears cigarette in hand, a bejeweled clutch bag on her bony arm, and a feather boa around her fleshless shoulders—a cadaverous Auntie Mame. In some ways, she’s nothing but a burlesque bit of fun and fantasy. But, with her toothy grin and black, empty eye sockets, she’s also menacing.

  * * *

  Mexicans were not the first to use scary skeletons to commemorate the dead. Nearly six hundred years ago, in the cemetery of the Parisian monastery of Les Saints Innocents, a mural was decorated with images rather like those stuck up in Mexican shop windows and on the shelves’ ofrendas.

  The mural, completed in 1425, has since disappeared, but its images survive in a set of woodcuts made by printer Guy Marchant in 1485 showing dozens of dancing dead figures, each accompanying a living person. With grinning skulls, they prance around with courtly movements as they entice the living—kings, popes, clerks, and laborers—to join them in a ghoulish caper toward the grave. The final image is of a dead king, whose flesh is being consumed by worms.

  Images of the Danse Macabre, as it was known, became popular in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As well as the dancing dead, other macabre themes started to creep into art, architecture, and literature. One tale, The Three Living and the Three Dead, told of the encounter of a duke, a prince, and a count with three ecclesiastical corpses, who urge the aristocrats to repent their sins, for their status and riches will be of no use when they’re dead. The story appears in paintings and prints of the time, with the corpses often depicted in a grisly state of decomposition, accompanied by variations on the ominous message: “What we are, you will be.”

  The use of personifications of death at this moment in history makes perfect sense—actual death was never far away. The Black Death is thought to have arrived in Europe in 1347, when a ship full of rats bearing diseased fleas dropped its anchor in the Sicilian port of Messina. Soon, a pandemic—the bubonic plague—was ripping across Europe at an astonishing pace. This, and a subsequent series of plagues, wiped out nearly two-thirds of Europe’s population. It decimated whole towns.

  And it was a brutal way to go. Perishing from the plague took only a few days, but it was an awful experience, accompanied by fever, agonizing pain, and black swellings the size of apples in the armpits and groin, from which oozed blood. These were followed by the appearance of blotches and boils. And the simultaneous presence of two varieties of the plague—one affecting the bloodstream and spread by contact with infected individuals, the other attacking the lungs and spread by respiratory infection—proved devastating. The death rate skyrocketed.

  The only way to accommodate so many corpses was to dig mass graves. There was no time for funerals. The dead were buried without vigils, prayers, or even last rites (eventually, to assuage people’s fears of dying without remission of their sins, the church permitted laymen to administer extreme unction).

  “The stench of their putrefying bodies carried the tidings,” wrote fourteenth-century Florentine author Giovanni Boccaccio, “and what with their corpses and the corpses of others who died on every hand the whole place was a sepulchre.” The mortality rate was such that, as Boccaccio put it, “a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat.”

  For the citizens of medieval Europe, such a rapid spread of disease was horrifying. Medicine was in its infancy, and doctors knew almost nothing about the source of the contagion. Some ascribed it to far-off earthquakes, others to swarms of locusts. Ancient Greek and Roman medical literature contained no clues. In a vain attempt to find someone to blame, angry mobs massacred hundreds of Jews across Europe.

  With people around them dropping like flies from an unexplainable disease, artists and poets looked for ways of turnin
g death into something tangible. Grinning skulls and skeletal dancers turned mortality into a figure that was threatening but also rather comical. Grief and consolation are absent from the manuscripts, sculptures, and paintings of the time. Art expressed either shock at the brevity of earthly life or the hope of salvation. We can only imagine the very human feelings that lay between.

  The potency of the macabre retained its currency, appearing a century later in strange, disturbing tomb carvings. Instead of depicting knights in armor or bishops in ecclesiastical robes, some sculptors started to carve their patrons’ marble effigies as skeletons, or as naked, decomposing corpses.

  Cadaver tombs (or transi tombs, as they’re also known) show the bodies of those they memorialize in various states of decay. One tomb, now in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, represents John Baret, a wealthy English clothier who died in 1467, as an emaciated corpse, with his rib cage and femurs exposed and his bones protruding through his sunken skin. In other tombs, worms penetrate the limbs and frogs eat into the flesh of their occupants.

  In some instances, sculptors created “before and after” versions. In the Fitzalan Chapel at Arundel Castle, West Sussex, a rare “double-decker” tomb sits above the body of John, the seventh earl of Arundel, who died in 1453. On the top section is his effigy in a suit of armor; below is a withered cadaver, the ominous sign of things to come. (Curiously, the shriveled marble corpse doesn’t depict his actual cause of death—gangrene arising from a cannonball wound sustained in battle. Victorian archaeologists confirmed this after partially excavating the grave, finding a body with a leg missing.)

  In another double-decker tomb in a Dutch church in Vianen, the lower section shows the unfortunate Reynout van Brederode, a noble who died in 1556, as a skeleton crawling with infestations of creatures resembling eels or worms. Beneath a grandiose classical wooden canopy, his body is in a grotesque state of decay. Inside the chest cavity his internal organs can be seen, while his legs are part flesh, part bone.