A Game for the Living (19 page)

Theodore hesitated. “I'm talking about the rituals surrounding Him. Rituals become baseless beliefs, and they can lead to mental unbalance.”

Ramón made no comment.

“I was reading recently about some South Sea Island people who consider paranoia a normal state of mind and encourage it among themselves. Paranoia isn't accepted in our society, and anybody with it gets into trouble one way or another. It's not socially approved. But in this South Sea Island colony, people not displaying paranoia are considered abnormal and even ostracized. Wives can't exchange bowls of soup, because they're supposed to suspect it's poisoned. Nobody questions the rationality, you see, because everybody's been brought up the same way.” Theodore paused, trembling from head to foot in the chill.

“Well, what're you getting at, Teo?” Ramón asked, propping himself on one elbow.

“That we live under equally absurd rituals that nobody—or very few people dare to criticize for fear of offending the majority of people.”

“But you dare.”

“Certainly, I dare. If I feel like it.” Theodore lighted a cigarette and moved his fingers over the flame of his lighter for a few moments to warm them. In the room next to theirs, a man and woman were arguing bitterly as to who was responsible for leaving a thermos full of hot coffee at the last hotel they had been in. “You may be surprised at what I started out to say, Ramón. That is that a certain pretension or ritual can be very strengthening to the personality or the character—”

“Always looking for the benefits!”

“—assuming it doesn't go against society, as a belief in the Christian God certainly doesn't go against ours. It doesn't even have to be a religious ritual or pretence, though. Any pretence can give one hope and fortitude, but one should first accept the fact it's a pretence, Ramón. One can still go on pretending if one chooses to.”

“You speak always as if people can choose!”

“Yes, they can.”

“But they can't if they believe, Teo. That's just part of your Existentialist vocabulary. Choice—decision—and it's harder for you to make a simple decision than for anybody I know!”

Theodore smiled, because Ramón did not know how difficult and absurd had been his efforts to decide to be a friend to Ramón, and to decide this, irrevocably, and with a positive yes, when he still admitted the possibility that Ramón could be Lelia's murderer. “I was only saying, Ramón, that certain details of every religion are baseless, and people know it consciously or unconsciously, yet they cling to them because they realize how much benefit they derive from them or think they do.”

“Benefits again.”

“All right! Or because they're afraid not to cling to them, which I think is a bit worse! Or out of habit.
Practically
as bad.”

Ramón scowled. “I think you have no respect for anything, Teo.”

Theodore had an odd twinge of fear. He stood up a little taller. “That's neither here nor there. Is it? You're always annoyed when I use the word ‘choice'. I know there can't be any choice once you've taken
the plunge—into a religion, I mean. Maybe there's no choice even at the beginning. You fall into it the way people fall in love. Then you
can put your intellect into mothballs, at least in that department. But is it sinful to recognize that the details of self-mortification, sacrifice, and rituals are organized, socially approved pretences?” He gestured and the pill went flying from his cold fingers and hit a wall. Leo jumped down from his bed in Theodore's suitcase to investigate. Theodore sighed. All this talk to get a fellow to take a little pill for his own good!

Ramón had got up. “It amuses me, Teo, how you can always find the most painless way to hitch yourself to something somebody's already made for you and suffered to make. You take what you want and discard the rest.”

“I'm not hitching myself to anything.”

Ramón walked stiffly towards the foot of the bed. “And only what you care to believe is the truth.”

“Oh—” Theodore suddenly wanted to sit down, but there was no place except the bed. “Truth's all things to all men—like Existentialism, you'd say. It doesn't exist, that's why we keep looking for it. If you admitted the organized pretence in your religion, truthfully, you would be standing there in pain now with a headache that's of no interest to God or anyone else but yourself. You wouldn't be farther away from God or from pleasing Him, either.”

“No, and I wouldn't be feeling anything, I suppose,” Ramón said, sitting down on the bed. “What would you offer me instead, Teo? Nothingness? Is that what you have?”

“In my own way, I believe in God, Ramón, but, to be perfectly honest, I don't know whether I believe or pretend to believe. Maybe I'll never know and what does it really matter? It's a person's actions that count and not the rituals. There are other fields—hope, for instance. I think I pretend there, too, but it's a beneficial pretence. I hope for something unattainable and I love it just because it's unattainable. How blissful that moment when one decides to hope!” Theodore said and drew on his cigarette. “Yes, decides,” he repeated, because Ramón was smiling. “I think that's what's meant by revelation, and it's not an illustration, either. On the contrary, nothing'll stick closer to you than what you've decided to believe in. Sometimes all the doctors in the world can't prize you away from it. Revelation is the realization that one can be happy after all, if one only decides to be happy. The truth for Christians is ‘Christ is risen. He died for my sins. Therefore I shall have eternal life and a reason and a right to be happy. I can be a part of this truth.' Those disjointed statements are gathered together and labeled—‘truth'. But it's nothing but a time-hallowed attitude, which can as well lead to good as to bad.”

Ramón let his head fall back on his pillow. “You prove only your own point, that everybody has his own truth.”

Theodore carried his cigarette, which was burning his fingers, into the bathroom and dropped it into the toilet. The toilet had no seat, and inside the bowl, high above the bit of water in it, was written:
GLORIA
. When he came back into the bedroom, Leo was licking his paw placidly, and it occurred to Theodore that he might have eaten the pill.

“To be absolutely honest myself, Teo,” Ramón said, “I don't know what the truth is, either.”

It was perhaps the most hopeful thing he had heard Ramón say since Lelia's death. He got another pill from the box and poured a glass of water from the carafe on the bed table. “I'll turn out the light if you don't want to read, Ramón.”

“All right, Teo.”

Theodore could feel Ramón's awakeness in the dark. Ramón did not stir at all. Theodore at last fell asleep, and awakened at the gentle movement of the bed as Ramón very carefully eased himself from it. Ramón began to walk slowly up and down, touching the left side of his head occasionally, yet not gripping it, not even whispering the curses that he sometimes muttered during his headaches. Ramón described the pain as being like an iron hook caught in his brain, a piece of foreign matter, a simile that always reminded Theodore of the metal bar itself that had struck him.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Want a guide, mister? You American? I speak English!”

“I got a car. You want to ride? Tour of the town! Twenty-five pesos! There is my car, señor!”

“No, we want to walk, thank you,” Theodore said in English. They were on the sidewalk in front of the great bullet-scarred Alhóndiga de Granaditas, the objective of Hidalgo's attack in the Revolution, the scene of Pipila's heroic sacrifice, and the most famous building of the town.

They moved on, still dogged by two or three of the self-appointed town guides. Ramón stopped to look back at the doorway, and up at the ornamented corner, perhaps the corner where Hidalgo's head had hung for months, rotting in the sun, as a warning to all those who would revolt against the Spanish.

“You want to see the Panteon, señores?” asked an adolescent voice at Theodore's elbow. “I can take you. Mummies—”

“No, thank you,” Theodore said, taking out his car keys. They were going to the Panteon at last.

The boys stood in a silent semicircle, momentarily taken aback by the car. “Many streets up there, señor!” “One-way streets! You need a guide!” “Bad roads for a car, señor. My car is only twenty pesos. I take you around the whole town.”

At Ramón's instructions, Theodore took a west-bound, climbing street, zigzagged through the section of one-way streets near the beautiful Street of the Priests with its windowless pink-tan walls and windowless bridge like something out of medieval Europe, and climbed finally to a straighter, west-bound road. The town dropped behind them and a fresh, sunny wind blew through the windows. Theodore was in no mood to see the mummies, but he knew he would never be in a mood to see them, and since he had to see them during this sojourn in Guanajuato, this morning seemed as good a time as any. But the world was full of bright sunlight and green, living things. He could see the tops of trees moving miles away and he could have spent the day looking at all of it.

“There it is,” said Ramón, bending low to see, because the Panteon was yet higher, on a hill to their right.

Theodore saw a very long wall, whose height he could not judge, set on a small plateau. The road took them by winds and turns inexorably towards it. On the wall was written the inscription that was on the walls of the cemetery where Lelia lay:

HUMBLE THYSELF
!
HERE ETERNITY BEGINS

AND HERE WORLDLY GRANDEUR IS DUST
!

He drove on to a small area, indicated to him by a watchman at the gates, which on two sides dropped sheer for what looked like hundreds of feet. A boy of about sixteen ran up to the window and asked if Theodore wanted him to park for him. Theodore thanked him and said no.

“Last month a car went over the edge. I am very used to American cars,” the boy said in English.

There was not room to turn around, but the boy made circular gestures with an air of authority as if this was exactly what he wanted Theodore to do—try to turn around and go over the edge. Theodore put the car into a parallel position with another car, his front bumper to the cemetery wall. On the way out, he would simply have to back to a place on the road where he could turn.

They walked through the gates and a field of graves and tombs spread before them, surrounded by the wall, that was nearly three times the height of a man and as thick as a coffin was long. The walls, every square yard of them, contained vaults and were marked off in squares, each with a name and date. The ground was yellowish and bone-dry, as Theodore remembered the ground of Lelia's cemetery, as if the feet of thousands of mourners had obliterated every blade of grass. Yet the faded pastel lavenders of the tombstones' shadows, the pale green traces of moisture in the walls and the instant-coffee and jelly jars of real and artificial flowers, fresh and wilted and dead, made it look like a picture by Seurat and relieved much of its gloom for Theodore. He wandered to an empty vault and looked in. It was lined with ordinary house bricks. A casket had evidently been removed, because on the ground, leaning against the wall, was a square of stone that had fronted the catacomb: Maria Josefina Barrera 1888–1937. R.E.P.

“They rent out the vaults,” Ramón said, “and if the relatives do not pay the rent, they take the body out.”

Theodore nodded. He had read it somewhere before. Some of the bodies had become the famous mummies, and some must be simply thrown away somewhere, he thought, like litter.

“The mummies are this way,” Ramón said, pointing to the back wall.

Theodore followed him. Near the back wall Theodore saw a square hole in a slab of cement pavement. A wooden cover lay beside it.

Ramón stopped beside the hole and motioned for Theodore to precede him down. There were faint purple shadows under Ramón's eyes, more subtle than the purple of the tombstones.

A spiral iron stairway led down from the hole. Theodore took a last look around. Two women in black bent over a grave far to his left. A young man was walking through the gate. Theodore looked down at his feet and descended. He had thought the steps would lead to a small chamber like a dungeon, and when he reached the bottom and saw dimly lighted corridors on either side he had a sensation of having been tricked, a flash of recollection perhaps due to some description of Ramón's that he had heard long ago. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimmer light, he saw with a shock that the mummies were right beside him on his left, lining the walls of the left corridor shoulder to shoulder all the way to the end, where more stood. Some were dressed or partially dressed, but most were quite naked.

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-life 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.