Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09

by The Small Assassin (v2. 1)

  He walked downstairs, opened his medical bag on the chair, took something out of it and held it in his hands.

  Something rustled down the hall. Something very small and very quiet. Jeffers turned rapidly.

  I had to operate to bring you into this world, he thought. Now I guess I can operate to take you out of it. . . .

  He took half-a-dozen slow, sure steps forward into the hall. He raised his hand into the sunlight.

  “See, baby! Something bright—something pretty!”

  A scalpel.

  THE NEXT IN LINE

  It was a little caricature of a town square. In it were the following fresh ingredients: a candy-box of a bandstand where men stood on Thursday and Sunday nights exploding music; fine, green-patinated bronze-copper benches all scrolled and flourished; fine blue and pink tiled walks—blue as women’s newly lacquered eyes, pink as women’s hidden wonders; and fine French-clipped trees in the shapes of exact hatboxes. The whole, from your hotel window, had the fresh ingratiation and unbelievable fantasy one might expect of a French villa in the nineties. But no, this was Mexico! and this a plaza in a small colonial Mexican town, with a fine State Opera House (in which movies were shown for two pesos admission: Rasputin and the Empress, The Big House, Madame Curie, Love Affair, Mama Loves Papa).

  Joseph came out on the sun-heated balcony in the morning and knelt by the grille, pointing his little box Brownie. Behind him, in the bath, the water was running and Marie’s voice came out:

  “What’re you doing?”

  He muttered “—a picture.” She asked again. He clicked the shutter, stood up, wound the spool inside, squinting, and said, “Took a picture of the town square. God, didn’t those men shout last night? I didn’t sleep until two-thirty. We would have to arrive when the local Rotary’s having its whingding.”

  “What’re our plans for today?” she asked.

  “We’re going to see the mummies,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. There was a long silence.

  He came in, set the camera down, and lit himself a cigarette.

  “I’ll go up and see them alone,” he said, “if you’d rather.”

  “No,” she said, not very loud. “I’ll go along. But I wish we could forget the whole thing. It’s such a lovely little town.”

  “Look here!” he cried, catching a movement from the corner of his eyes. He hurried to the balcony, stood there, his cigarette smoking and forgotten in his fingers. “Come quick, Marie!”

  “I’m drying myself,” she said.

  “Please, hurry,” he said, fascinated, looking down into the street.

  There was movement behind him, and then the odor of soap and water-rinsed flesh, wet towel, fresh cologne; Marie was at his elbow. “Stay right there,” she cautioned him, “so I can look without exposing myself. I’m stark. What is it?”

  “Look!” he cried.

  A procession traveled along the street. One man led it, with a package on his head. Behind him came women in black rebozos, chewing away the peels of oranges and spitting them on the cobbles; little children at their elbows, men ahead of them. Some ate sugar cane, gnawing away at the outer bark until it split down and they pulled it off in great hunks to get at the succulent pulp, and the juicy sinews on which to suck. In all, there were fifty people.

  “Joe,” said Marie behind him, holding his arm.

  It was no ordinary package the first man in the procession carried on his head, balanced delicately as a chicken-plume. It was covered with silver satin and silver fringe and silver rosettes. And he held it gently with one brown hand, the other hand swinging free.

  This was a funeral and the little package was a coffin.

  Joseph glanced at his wife.

  She was the color of fine, fresh milk. The pink color of the bath was gone. Her heart had sucked it all down to some hidden vacuum in her. She held fast to the french doorway and watched the traveling people go, watched them eat fruit, heard them talk gentle, laugh gently. She forgot she was naked.

  He said, “Some little girl or boy gone to a happier place.”

  “Where are they taking—her?”

  She did not think it unusual, her choice of the feminine pronoun. Already she had identified herself with that tiny fragment parceled like an unripe variety of fruit. Now, in this moment, she was being carried up the hill within compressing darkness, a stone in a peach, silent and terrified, the touch of the father against the coffin material outside; gentle and noiseless and firm inside.

  “To the graveyard, naturally; that’s where they’re taking her,” he said, the cigarette making a filter of smoke across his casual face.

  “Not the graveyard?”

  “There’s only one cemetery in these towns, you know that. They usually hurry it. That little girl had probably been dead only a few hours.”

  “A few hours—”

  She turned away, quite ridiculous, quite naked, with only the towel supported by her limp, untrying hands. She walked toward the bed. “A few hours ago she was alive, and now—”

  He went on, “Now they’re hurrying her up the hill. The climate isn’t kind to the dead. It’s hot, there’s no embalming. They have to finish it quickly.”

  “But to that graveyard, that horrible place,” she said, with a voice from a dream.

  “Oh, the mummies,” he said. “Don’t let that bother you.”

  She sat on the bed, again and again stroking the towel laid across her lap. Her eyes were blind as the brown paps of her breasts. She did not see him or the room. She knew that if he snapped his fingers or coughed, she wouldn’t even look up.

  “They were eating fruit at her funeral, and laughing,” she said.

  “It’s a long climb to the cemetery.”

  She shuddered, a convulsive motion, like a fish trying to free itself from a deep-swallowed hook. She lay back and he looked at her as one examines a poor sculpture; all criticism, all quiet and easy and uncaring. She wondered idly just how much his hands had had to do with the broadening and flattening and changement of her body. Certainly this was not the body he’d started with. It was past saving now. Like clay which the sculptor has carelessly impregnated with water, it was impossible to shape again. In order to shape clay you warm it with your hands, evaporate the moisture with heat. But there was no more of that fine summer weather between them. There was no warmth to bake away the aging moisture that collected and made pendant now her breasts and body. When the heat is gone, it is marvelous and unsettling to see how quickly a vessel stores self-destroying water in its cells.

  “I don’t feel well,” she said. She lay there, thinking it over. “I don’t feel well,” she said again, when he made no response. After another minute or two she lifted herself. “Let’s not stay here another night, Joe.”

  “But it’s a wonderful town.”

  “Yes, but we’ve seen everything.” She got up. She knew what came next. Gayness, blitheness, encouragement, everything quite false and hopeful. “We could go on to Patzcuaro. Make it in no time. You won’t have to pack, I’ll do it all myself, darling! We can get a room at the Don Posada there. They say it’s a beautiful little town—”

  “This,” he remarked, “is a beautiful little town.”

  “Bougainvillea climb all over the buildings—” she said.

  “These—” he pointed to some flowers at the window”—are bougainvillea.”

  “—and we’d fish, you like fishing,” she said in bright haste. “And I’d fish, too, I’d learn, yes, I would, I’ve always wanted to learn! And they say the Tarascan Indians there are almost Mongoloid in feature, and don’t speak much Spanish, and from there we could go to Paracutin, that’s near Uruapan, and they have some of the finest lacquered boxes there, oh, it’ll be fun, Joe. I’ll pack. You just take it easy, and—”

  “Marie.”

  He stopped her with one word as she ran to the bathroom door.

  “Yes?”

  “I thought you said you didn’t feel well?”
<
br />   “I didn’t. I don’t. But, thinking of all those swell places—”

  “We haven’t seen one-tenth of this town,” he explained logically. “There’s that statue of Morelos on the hill, I want a shot of that, and some of that French architecture up the street . . . we’ve traveled three hundred miles and we’ve been here one day and now want to rush off somewhere else. I’ve already paid the rent for another night. . . .”

  “You can get it back,” she said.

  “Why do you want to run away?” he said, looking at her with an attentive simplicity. “Don’t you like the town?”

  “I simply adore it,” she said, her cheeks white, smiling. “It’s so green and pretty.”

  “Well, then,” he said. “Another day. You’ll love it. That’s settled.”

  She started to speak.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  She closed the bathroom door. Behind it she rattled open a medicine box. Water rushed into a tumbler. She was taking something for her stomach.

  He came to the bathroom door.

  “Marie, the mummies don’t bother you, do they?”

  “Unh-unh,” she said.

  “Was it the funeral, then?”

  “Unh.”

  “Because, if you were really afraid, I’d pack in a moment, you know that, darling.”

  He waited.

  “No, I’m not afraid,” she said.

  “Good girl,” he said.

  The graveyard was enclosed by a thick adobe wall, and at its four corners small stone angels tilted out on stony wings, their grimy heads capped with bird droppings, their hands gifted with amulets of the same substance, their faces unquestionably freckled.

  In the warm smooth flow of sunlight which was like a depthless, tideless river, Joseph and Marie climbed up the hill, their shadows slanting blue behind them. Helping one another, they made the cemetery gate, swung back the Spanish blue iron grille and entered.

  It was several mornings after the celebratory fiesta of El Dia de Muerte, the Day of the Dead, and ribbons and ravels of tissue and sparkle-tape still clung like insane hair to the raised stones, to the hand-carved, love-polished crucifixes, and to the above-ground tombs which resembled marble jewelcases. There were statues frozen in angelic postures over gravel mounds, and intricately carved stones tall as men with angels spilling all down their rims, and tombs as big and ridiculous as beds put out to dry in the sun after some nocturnal accident. And within the four walls of the yard, inserted into the square mouths and slots, were coffins, walled in, plated in by marble plates and plaster, upon which names were struck and upon which hung tin pictures, cheap peso portraits of the inserted dead. Thumb-tacked to the different pictures were trinkets they’d loved in life, silver charms, silver arms, legs, bodies, silver cups, silver dogs, silver church medallions, bits of red crape and blue ribbon. On some places were painted slats of tin showing the dead rising to heaven in oil-tinted angels’ arms.

  Looking at the graves again, they saw the remnants of the death fiesta. The little tablets of tallow splashed over the stones by the lighted festive candles, the wilted orchid blossoms lying like crushed red-purple tarantulas against the milky stones, some of them looking horridly sexual, limp and withered. There were loop-frames of cactus leaves, bamboo, reeds, and wild, dead morning-glories. There were circles of gardenias and sprigs of bougainvillea, desiccated. The entire floor of the yard seemed a ballroom after a wild dancing, from which the participants have fled; the tables askew, confetti, candles, ribbons and deep dreams left behind.

  They stood, Marie and Joseph, in the warm silent yard, among the stones, between the walls. Far over in one corner a little man with high cheekbones, the milk color of the Spanish infiltration, thick glasses, a black coat, a gray hat and gray, impressed pants and neatly laced shoes, moved about among the stones, supervising something or other that another man in overalls was doing to a grave with a shovel. The little man with glasses carried a thrice folded newspaper under his left arm and had his hands in his pockets.

  “Buenos diaz, senora y senor!” he said, when he finally noticed Joseph and Marie and came to see them.

  “Is this the place of las mommias?” asked Joseph. “They do exist, do they not?”

  “Si, the mummies,” said the man. “They exist and are here. In the catacombs.”

  “For favor,” said Joseph. “Yo quiero veo las mommias, si?”

  “Si, senor.”

  “Me Espanol es mucho estupido, es muy malo,” apologized Joseph.

  “No, no, senor. You speak well! This way, please.”

  He led between the flowered stones to a tomb near the wall shadows. It was a large flat tomb, flush with the gravel, with a thin kindling door flat on it, padlocked. It was unlocked and the wooden door flung back rattling to one side. Revealed with a round hole the circled interior of which contained steps which screwed into the earth.

  Before Joseph could move, his wife had set her foot on the first step. “Here,” he said. “Me first.”

  “No. That’s all right,” she said, and went down and around in a darkening spiral until the earth vanished her. She moved carefully, for the steps were hardly enough to contain a child’s feet. It got dark and she heard the caretaker stepping after her, at her ears, and then it got light again. They stepped out into a long whitewashed hall twenty feet under the earth, dimly lit by a few small gothic windows high in the arched ceiling. The hall was fifty yards long, ending on the left in a double door in which were set tall crystal panes and a sign forbidding entrance. On the right end of the hall was a large stack of white rods and round white stones.

  “The soldiers who fought for Father Morelos,” said the caretaker.

  They walked to the vast pile. They were neatly put in place, bone on bone, like firewood, and on top was a mound of a thousand dry skulls.

  “I don’t mind skulls and bones,” said Marie. “There’s nothing even vaguely human to them. I’m not scared of skulls and bones. They’re like something insectile. If a child was raised and didn’t know he had a skeleton in him, he wouldn’t think anything of bones, would he? That’s how it is with me. Everything human has been scraped off these. There’s nothing familiar left to be horrible. In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize. This isn’t changed. They’re still skeletons, like they always were. The part that changed is gone, and so there’s nothing to show for it. Isn’t that interesting?”

  Joseph nodded.

  She was quite brave now.

  “Well,” she said, “let’s see the mummies.”

  “Here, senora,” said the caretaker.

  He took them far down the hall away from the stack of bones and when Joseph paid him a peso he unlocked the forbidden crystal doors and opened them wide and they looked into an even longer, dimly lighted hall in which stood the people.

  They waited inside the door in a long line under the archroofed ceiling, fifty-five of them against one wall, on the left, fifty-five of them against the right wall, and five of them way down at the very end.

  “Mister Interlocutor!” said Joseph, briskly.

  They resembled nothing more than those preliminary erections of a sculptor, the wire frame, the first tendons of clay, the muscles, and a thin lacquer of skin. They were unfinished, all one hundred and fifteen of them.

  They were parchment-colored and the skin was stretched as if to dry, from bone to bone. The bodies were intact, only the watery humors had evaporated from them.

  “The climate,” said the caretaker. “It preserves them. Very dry.”

  “How long have they been here?” asked Joseph.

  “Some one year, some five, senor, some ten, some seventy.”

  There was an embarrassment of horror. You started with the first man on your right, hooked and wired upright against the wall, and he was not good to look upon, and you went on to the woman next to him who was unbelievable and then to a man who was horrendous and then to a woman
who was very sorry she was dead and in such a place as this.

  “What are they doing here?” said Joseph.

  “Their relatives did not pay the rent upon their graves.”

  “Is there a rent?”

  “Si, senor. Twenty pesos a year. Or, if they desire the permanent interment, one hundred seventy pesos. But our people, they are very poor, as you must know, and one hundred seventy pesos is as much as many of them make in two years. So they carry their dead here and place them into the earth for one year, and the twenty pesos are paid, with fine intentions of paying each year and each year, but each year and each year after the first year they have a burro to buy or a new mouth to feed, or maybe three new mouths, and the dead, after all, are not hungry, and the dead, after all, can pull no ploughs; or there is a new wife or there is a roof in need of mending, and the dead, remember, can be in no beds with a man, and the dead, you understand, can keep no rain off one, and so it is that the dead are not paid up upon their rent.”

  “Then what happens? Are you listening, Marie?” said Joseph.

  Marie counted the bodies. One, two three, four, five, six, seven, eight, “What?” she said, quietly.

  “Are you listening?”

  “I think so. What? Oh, yes! I’m listening.”

  Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.

  “Well, then,” said the little man. “I call a trabajando and with his delicate shovel at the end of the first year he does dig and dig and dig down. How deep do you think we dig, senor? ”

  “Six feet. That’s the usual depth.”

  “Ah, no, ah, no. There, senor, you would be wrong. Knowing that after the first year the rent is liable not to be paid, we bury the poorest two feet down. It is less work, you understand? of course, we must judge by the family who owns a body. Some of them we bury sometimes three, sometimes four feet deep, sometimes five, sometimes six, depending on how rich the family is, depending on what the chances are we won’t have to dig him from out his place a year later. And, let me tell you, senor, when we bury a man the whole six feet deep we are very certain of his staying. We have never dug up a six-foot-buried one yet, that is the accuracy with which we know the money of the people.”