by Lili Wright
Down in the valley, a firecracker exploded. A sunflower of purple and gold blossomed, then trailed off in spermlike fizzles, some new kind of failure.
“They never stop with the damn cohetes. What time is it?” Anna checked her watch. Three a.m. She called out over the wall. “God is sleeping, people.”
Constance raised a hand. “God was a collector. God was the first collector.”
Anna whipped around. “What?”
Constance really did look crazy. Her pale eyes were remote and watery. Her painted toes curled into filthy terry-cloth mules. Her robe hung open and her nightgown dipped dangerously to one side. She gripped her weapon like an aging Amazon.
“The animals. The plants. The desert. We are his collection. This was his chapel.” Constance swung her arm at the wrecked lawn, the crushed flowers, the oily puddles and embers, the hoses and fallen timbers, the charred chapel, a half-melted monster.
“And look what we’ve done with it,” Anna said, assessing the apocalyptic vision.
Constance smiled darkly. “It’s more fun to collect things than care for them. But I wouldn’t worry too much about the mess.”
The firefighters had the blaze under control. Salvador was on the phone again. Soledad was calming the dogs.
“You’re right, we shouldn’t worry,” Anna agreed, her mood as black as her dress. “The Mexicans will clean it up.”
—
Not long after, the police questioned Anna. She botched her grammar, but they didn’t seem to care. The verb “shoot” was disparar, which always sounded like “disappear,” which was the point of shooting something, or someone, after all, to make them disappear. Exhausted from inept conjugations and pantomime, Anna withdrew to a bench overlooking the pool, keeping an eye on Holly. Thomas had disappeared, but Anna was going to make damn sure the evidence did not. Her father joined her. He made a face at the skeleton and whistled.
“He’s a real freak. Dressing the dead up like dolls. To think, all those afternoons, Daniel Ramsey sat on that patio, chattering away. You know, I found my notes. Those Grasshopper masks, the Centurion, I’d bought them because—”
“Lorenzo Gonzáles told you to.”
“How did you know?”
“Thomas made them. Gonzáles peddled them. Gonzáles probably tipped off the Met himself. He sells you junk, humiliates you, then offers to bring you back from the dead. Daniel Ramsey will buy Montezuma’s death mask. You or Reyes. Only, his plan backfired: the death mask was real.”
Her father pressed his temples. “Folk art used to be so innocent, but money ruined it. I ruined it. Thomas ruined it. Your mother always said I had an addictive personality.”
“You do—”
“I prefer to call it ‘passion.’ But I had no business chasing masks when I hadn’t taken care of the small decent thing.”
“The ashes?”
“The ashes. You. Me. The house. Your mother would have been horrified by my drinking.” He held up a hand to stop Anna from piling on. “I’ve been dry for six shaky days. Give me some credit, please. My head is killing me.” He looked around, his righteousness collapsing. “You know, I’ve always pictured your mother resting under a tree.”
Anna nodded. “A pine tree would be good.”
The city lights pulsed beneath them. The cathedral glowed. Anna felt her mother was close. I was seeing things through her eyes, as she had seen them. She had given me her eyes to see. Rose’s spirit had never left this proud, magical country, where the frogs yakked and the stars sighed, where tigers danced and the dead lingered, where each night the white lilies closed their petals against the dark. Pobre México, tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos. Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States. An old joke. Really, of course, it was the reverse.
Though she finally had the death mask, Anna didn’t feel victorious. Here at the pool, as the Mendez children ran in circles, astounded at their luck to be out of bed, as the firefighters conferred, Anna watched the floating skeleton, keeping vigil. She felt the weight of objects, her obligation to the dead, to the past. We destroy so many things with our touching, starting with the things we love most.
Something shifted in the pool. The skeleton’s foot dropped below the surface. Then a shin, then a knee. Holly was sinking. Weighed down by the legs, the pelvis hovered, then submerged, followed by the rib cage, until all that remained was the skull, two sockets, deep and black as life’s unanswerable questions. Anna took her father’s hand. He whispered something in her ear. She watched. She listened. For once, the dogs were silent.
twenty SANTA MUERTE
No one ever asks me how I do what I do. My genius is another miracle people think they deserve. Like the miracle of a newborn child. Or the miracle of ocean tides. When people die, I put their bodies back together, sew them up, patch their wounds, paint them, polish them, pump their veins full of life until they are themselves again, dead but on their way to the village. That’s all a saint can do. If I have time, I pack them a lunch.
I am an aesthetician, a seamstress, a coroner. I am the Frida Kahlo of the underworld. Coco Chanel with a golden sewing machine. I do more heavy lifting than the Virgin Mary, her royal chasteness, her hands idle and white. Once, I was a beautiful woman. Men got on their knees for me. They begged to slip their hands under my satin dress, snap my black garter, bury their faces in my breasts. I opened their presents, parakeets in tin cages, oleander soap, saffron.
Now there is nothing but the work.
I begin with the eyes. The embroidery is taxing and can’t be rushed. It takes hundreds of silk stitches—brown, blue, emerald, overlapping—to make eyes that endure for eternity. They let you speak without saying a word. You could say “I love you” and you could say “Screw you” and you could say “Pass the bolillos and butter.”
With a warm sponge, I wash limbs, scrub skin until it gleams like marble. At first, I dreaded the heavy ones, all that fat to work around, but I have become a person of greater sympathy, softening as I age. The children make quick work. So beautiful, so small.
After I drain the blood, I fill the body with an elixir of mint leaves and pomegranate, sprigs of basil, lemon juice, cinnamon, a dash of ouzo. The flesh regains its color, its heat and sensation. My hand pump keeps a steady pace. Each limb I massage in turn. I allow myself the occasional break. Smoke a cigarette. Why not? I am already dead.
The final touches—nails, lips, tongue. I sprinkle the hair with marigold oil and henna until it shines. The feet are often disastrous. I have seen toenails as gray and brittle as shale, and every kind of fungus. If it’s bad enough, I pour myself a drink. I can work well high. I am the Pancho Villa of Purgatory. I am the Edith Piaf of Paradise. Some people do not recognize themselves. They say, “This isn’t me at all. You have confused me with another.” But death cannot remedy what life has spoiled. Each day, you make the face you live and die with. A saint is not a magician.
Go and live now. Use yourself up.
I’ll be here waiting. The handmaiden of humanity. The auntie of the afterlife. The bitch of the great beyond. I will darn your eyes and scrub your teeth and water your mouth and hem your belly and perfume your earlobes with lilac.
Don’t thank me. No one does. I am just a skeleton paying for her sins.
twenty-one THE HOUSEKEEPER
Soledad found Hugo back at the cottage, shaking under a blanket, murmuring nonsense about an eighth omen, a burning temple, a fallen empire.
“Don’t worry, my love,” she whispered. “Tonight, we go.”
She made a beeline to the Malones’ pink house, ran up to her mistress’s bedroom. She opened her jewelry box, lifting the gold to judge its heft. In Constance’s underwear drawer, under push-up bras and silk slips, lay a stash of dollars bundled with a rubber band. Soledad had asked the Virgin Mary about the morality of stealing from the wife of the man who had sho
t her husband, and the Virgin told her to take enough to pay for medical bills, back wages, and a new dress. In the bottom drawer, she discovered pesos and a gun, and collected those, too, holding the gun at arm’s length like a dead mouse. She raced back to the cottage and said good-bye to her kitchen, the curtains, the honeysuckle breeze.
At dawn, she and Hugo began the long journey north on a second-class bus. They nibbled pork sandwiches and shared a bag of Sabritas. They held hands.
They arrived in Real de Catorce late in the day. The two-and-a-half-kilometer tunnel into the city was closed to cars because of a festival, so they entered in a horse-drawn carriage, clutching their bags in the half-light. Every minute, a carriage approached from the other direction. The shadowed faces of passengers whisked past them, stirring up the manure-laced breeze. Nauseated, Soledad nibbled salty crackers.
When they emerged, the city lay wide and open and bright. The air was thin at 2,750 meters and they panted up the hill, past vendors selling mementos of San Francisco de Asís. In the Templo de la Purísima Concepción, they prayed. It was the first time they had been to church together since their wedding. Soledad thanked the Virgin and asked for forgiveness. (Perhaps she had taken sufficient money to buy several dresses.) When she finished praying, Hugo’s head was still bowed. Soledad wished she could read his mind—What does he believe? Whom does he love?—but it was enough to have him at her side.
He is mine now.
I no longer have any need to learn English. I have always hated English. It is not a musical language. Maybe I will learn Italian instead.
twenty-two ANNA
An odd group gathered on the morning after the fire. Anna, her father, Salvador, the looter, and Chelo clustered around a patio table at the Puesta del Sol. The looter looked like he’d slept in his clothes. Chelo’s hand rested on her belly, protecting her baby from the next threat, though the patio was peaceful, bathed in sunshine, smelling like butter. Already the idea of a man in a tiger’s mask seemed like a dream, a pesadilla, not quite credible, replaced by the much more palpable threat of the fire, which Anna could still smell on her fingertips and taste in her throat. She had barely slept, thoughts churning about this meeting, how to make everything come out right.
Salvador was sketching in a notebook, his face wan and depleted. Only Daniel Ramsey seemed bright-eyed, sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup, nibbling a mint toothpick, tap-tapping a tourist map on the table’s edge, like he had places to go. Anna had two masks in her pack: the death mask of Montezuma and a fake fashioned by Emilio Luna’s brother. The looter would fall for a lie. The truth would be harder to sell.
“Thanks for coming,” Anna said. “I thought we should talk about what to do now.” She gave the genuine death mask to her father. “You can confirm the mask for us?”
Her father’s face softened as he ran his fingers over its bumpy surface. The looter snapped to his feet, lit a smoke, began pacing.
“An amazing piece of history,” Daniel Ramsey marveled. “Stunning workmanship, a true piece of art, and then when you consider its role in history . . .” He dropped his head, suddenly shy. “But as I told Anna last night, I don’t want it.”
The looter stopped cold. Salvador did a double take. Anna had been just as stunned when her father had told her. At first, she’d been angry. Was he too proud to accept her gift? Was he collecting something new? Medieval sheet music? Fertility dolls?
“I don’t want anything.” Daniel had used these same words the night before. “Collecting made me happy once, but it doesn’t anymore. For years, I was chasing something that was already gone. I wanted my wife back and—”
He looked away, shrugged. “Maybe, in a strange way, I was looking for myself. This is me. This is what I love. Anyway”—he gave the mask a brisk salute—“the mask is precious, priceless, but it isn’t mine. Even if I bought it.”
He handed it back to Anna.
“Then it’s settled,” the looter said. “I’ll take it to Marisol.”
“Mari?” Anna twisted her shoulders. “Actually, I’ve been thinking . . . this might sound crazy . . . but maybe we should just put the mask back.”
The looter glared. “In the chapel?”
“No,” Anna said. “In the ground.”
The looter cinched down his cap. Chelo read his body language. Understood trouble. “And why would we do that?” he said. “We had an agreement.”
“Right, we did, but I don’t need the mask anymore, and you could give Mari this other one.” She handed him the reproduction. “It’s the copy we had made. Frankly, it just doesn’t feel right, stealing from the dead. Mari wouldn’t approve of grave robbing. Bad karma. Mala onda.”
Chelo flinched. She understood those two words.
“Mala onda,” the looter scoffed. “Speak for yourself. Good things are happening to me. Don’t you want the money?”
Anna stared at the door of her shitty hotel room. She was becoming rather fond of it. The ceiling fan, despite appearances, had not fallen, and she’d been messing around with the old typewriter.
“Not this way,” she said. “Some other way, maybe.”
The looter kicked a chair, stubborn, sullen. Anna imagined that different versions of this same thing had happened to Christopher Maddox before. He’d failed a test of courage or character, disappointing those he’d most hoped to impress. She remembered how he’d looked in Tepito. Crazy eyes. Pistol jerking. That addict was still inside him, a skeleton from his past.
Anna said softly, “You could bring Mari some other wonderful thing.” She repeated herself in Spanish.
Chelo whispered. The looter shook his head. Before it was settled, Chelo piped up in Spanish. “He could give Mari my needlepoint. He helped make it.”
The looter gazed at her with wonder. “You should see this thing. It started out just a bunch of holes, but she’s colored in the whole Virgin Mary.”
Chelo looked worried. “¿No te gusta?” The two of them bowed their heads, conferring, this time loud enough for Anna to hear.
“Of course I like it. But I couldn’t ask you.”
“You didn’t ask. I offered.”
“We could sell the mask. Buy a house for the baby. That’s a lot of money to—”
“Not that way.”
The looter swore, kicked the bricks, outvoted by the women he’d come to trust. “All right, then. Back it goes.”
Anna lowered her shoulders. “You think you can find the cave?”
“You would hope. I spent two days down there.”
“You’d have to seal it up somehow.”
The looter perked up. “I could set an explosive and send a bunch of rock flying down. No one would ever find it.”
Salvador winced. “How about a shovel?”
“That would work, too.”
No one said anything. The mask had brought them together, but now nothing bound them, like a cast after its final performance. The looter, in particular, seemed reluctant to part. He put his arm awkwardly around Chelo. “I’m going to be a father.”
“¿Sabes si es un niño o una niña?” Anna asked Chelo.
“I think it’s a boy.” The girl looked happy, proud.
—
When Anna presented the fake mask to Lorenzo Gonzáles, the dealer didn’t even bother to pull out his magnifying glass. He was short with her. No pompous lectures about antiquities or the role of the collector. “It’s a cheap reproduction.” He pushed the mask back at her. “I have no use for it.”
Anna did her best to look shocked. “With all your connections, I’m sure you could find the right buyer.”
Gonzáles leaned in, curious now. “And who is the right buyer for such a mask?”
“A collector with discriminating taste and unlimited funds. Someone who lost a precious mask and urgently wants it back for an upcoming show. In fact, if such a mask app
eared in a rival’s show, the dealer might be blamed for having, well, screwed things up.”
Anna smiled sweetly.
Lorenzo Gonzáles gave her a look of pure hatred. He reached into a strongbox.
Anna couldn’t resist one final jab. “I understand you’ve done a great job renovating your bathroom. Perhaps you’d give me a tour.”
Gonzáles stiffened. “Tell me how much this treasure costs.”
“It’s very expensive,” Anna said, cheerily. “But I’m sure you could resell it for a handsome profit.”
“Yes, I suppose I could.”
“You’ve heard the line ‘Art is what you can get away with’?”
The fat man brightened ever so slightly. “That’s good. Who said it?”
“Another man who loved masks,” Anna said. “Andy Warhol.”
—
Anna fed a sheet of paper into the manual typewriter. She typed without thinking. She did not check her facts.
I’ve worn a mask most of my life. Most people do. As a little girl, I covered my face with my hands, figuring if I couldn’t see my father, he couldn’t see me. When this didn’t work, I hid behind Halloween masks: clowns and witches and Ronald McDonald. Years later, when I went to Mexico, I understood just how far a mask can take you. In the dusty streets, villagers turned themselves into jaguars, hyenas, the devil himself. For years, I thought wearing a mask was a way to start over, become someone new. Now I know better. A mask doesn’t change who you are; it lets you be the person you’ve always been, the person you paper over out of habit or timidity or fear. Some people—people like me—have to try on a lot of faces before they find one that fits.
She ripped out the sheet and placed it in a folder. There. A start. Salvador was right: she didn’t hate masks, though she would never collect them. Instead, she would write a book, part history, part memoir. She would interview carvers—with Salvador’s help, yes, she did need a guide, or better, a partner—and weave their tales together with the story of her own family: her parents’ collection, the accident, the hunt for the death mask.