El Dia de Muerte, Ray Bradbury

El Dia de Muerte

Morning.

The little boy, Raimundo, ran across the Avenida Madero. He ran through the early smell of incense from many churches and in the smell of charcoal from ten thousand breakfast cookings. He moved in the thoughts of death.

For Mexico City was cool with death thoughts in the morning. There were shadows of churches and always women in black, in mourning black, and the smoke from the church candles and charcoal braziers made a smell of sweet death in his nostrils as he ran. And he did not think it strange, for all thoughts were death thoughts on this day.

This was El Dia de Muerte, the Day of Death.

On this day in all the far places of the country, the women sat by little wooden slat stands and from these sold the white sugar skulls and candy corpses to be chewed and swallowed. In all of the churches services would be said, and in graveyards tonight candles would be illumined, much wine drunk, and many high man-soprano songs cried forth.

Raimundo ran with a sense of the entire universe in him; all the things his Tio Jorge had told him, all the things he had himself seen in his years. On this day events would be happening in such far places as Guanajuato and Lake Patzcuaro.

Here in the great bull ring of Mexico City even now the trabajandos were raking and smoothing the sands, tickets were selling and the bulls were nervously eliminating themselves, their eyes swiveling, fixing, in their hidden stalls waiting for death.

In the graveyard at Guanajuato the great iron gates were swinging wide to let the turistas step down the spiral cool staircase into the deep earth, there to walk in the dry echoing catacombs and gaze upon mummies rigid as toys, stood against the wall. One hundred and ten mummies stiffly wired to the stones, faces horror-mouthed and shrivel-eyed; bodies that rustled if you touched them.

At Lake Patzcuaro, on the island of Javitzio, the great fishing seines flew down in butterfly swoops to gather silvering fish. The island, with Father Morelos’ huge stone statue on top of it, had already begun the tequila drinking that started the celebratory Dia de Muerte.

In Levares, a small town, a truck ran over a dog and did not stop to come back and see.

Christ himself was in each church, with blood upon him, and agony in him.

And Raimundo ran in the November light across the Avenida Madero.

Ah, the sweet terrors! In the windows, the sugar skulls with names on their snowy brows: JOSE, CARLOTTA, RAMONA, LUISA. All the names on chocolate death’s-heads and frosted bones.

The sky was glazed blue pottery over him and the grass flamed green as he ran past the glorietas. In his hand he held very tightly fifty centavos, much money for much sweets, for surely he must purchase legs, sockets and ribs to chew. The day of eating of Death. They would show Death, ah, yes, they would! He and madrecita mia, and his brothers, aye, and his sisters!

In his mind he saw a skull with candy lettering: RAIMUNDO. I shall eat my own skull, he thought. And in this way cheat Death who always drips at the window in the rain or squeaks in that hinge of the old door or hangs in our urine like a little pale cloud. Cheat Death who is rolled into tamales by the sick tamale maker, Death wrapped in a fine corn-tortilla shroud.

In his mind, Raimundo heard his old Tio Jorge talking all this. His ancient, adobe-faced uncle who gestured his fingers to each small word and said, “Death is in your nostrils like clock-spring hairs, Death grows in your stomach like a child. Death shines on your eyelids like a lacquer.”

From a rickety stand an old woman with a sour mouth and tiny beards in her ears sold shingles on which miniature funerals were conducted. There was a little cardboard coffin and a crepe-paper priest with an infinitesimal Bible, and crepe-paper altar boys with small nuts for heads, and there were attendants holding holy flags, and a candy-white corpse with tiny black eyes inside the tiny coffin, and on the altar behind the coffin was a movie star’s picture.

These little shingle funerals could be taken home, where you threw away the movie star’s picture and pasted in a photograph of your own dead in its place on the altar. So you had a small funeral of your loved one over again.

Raimundo put out a twenty-centavo piece. “One,” he said and he bought a shingle with a funeral on it.

Tio Jorge said, “Life is a wanting of things, Raimundito. You must always be wanting things in life. You will want frijoles, you will want water, you will desire women, you will desire sleep; most especially sleep.

You will want a burro, you will want a new roof on your house, you will want fine shoes from the glass windows of the zapatera and, again, you will want sleep. You will want rain, you will want jungle fruits, you will want good meat; you will, once more, desire sleep.

You will seek a horse, you will seek children, you will seek the jewels in the great shining store on the avenida and, ah, yes, remember? You will lastly seek sleep. Remember, Raimundo, you will want things. Life is this wanting.

You will want things until you no longer want them, and then it is time to be wanting only sleep and sleep. There is a time for all of us, when sleep is the great and the beautiful thing. And when nothing is wanted but only sleep then it is one thinks of the Day of the Dead and the happy sleeping ones. Remember, Raimundo?”

“Si, Tio Jorge.”

“What do you want, Raimundor?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do all men want, Raimundo?”

“What?”

“What is there to want, Raimundo?”

“Maybe I know. Ah, but I don’t know, I don’t!”

“I know what you want, Raimundo.”

“What?”

“I know what all men in this land want; there is much of it and it is wanted far over and above all other wantings and it is worshiped and wanted, for it is rest and a peacefulness of limb and body ……

Raimundo entered the store and picked up a sugar skull with his name frosted upon it.

“You hold it in your hand, Raimundo,” whispered Tio Jorge. “Even at your age you hold it delicately and nibble, swallow it into your blood. In your hands, Raimundo, look!”

The sugar skull.

“In the street I see a dog. I drive my car. Do I pause? Do I unpress my foot from the pedal? No! More speed! Boom! So! The dog is happier, is he not? Out of this world, forever gone?”

Raimundo paid money and proudly inserted his dirty fingers within the sugar skull, giving it a brain of five wriggling parts.

He walked from the store and looked upon the wide, sun-filled boulevard with the cars rushing and roaring through it He squinted his eyes and …

The barreras were full. In la sombra and el sot, in shadow or in sun, the great round seats of the bull ring were filled to the sky. The band exploded in brass! The gates flung wide! The matadors, the banderilleros, the picadors, all of them came walking or riding across the fresh, smooth sand in the warm sunlight. The band crashed and banged and the crowd stirred and stirred and murmured and cried aloud.

The music finished with a cymbal.

Behind the barrera walls the men in the tight glittery costumes adjusted their birettas upon their greasy black hairdos and felt of their capes and swords and talked, and a man
bent over the wall above with a camera to whirr and click at them.

The band whammed proudly again. A door burst open, the first black giant of a bull rushed out, loins jolting, little Buttery ribbons tacked to his neck. The bull!

Raimundo ran forward, lightly, lightly, on the Avenida Madero. Lightly, lightly he ran between the fast black huge bull cars. One gigantic car roared and homed at him. Lightly, lightly ran Raimundito.

The banderillero ran forward lightly, lightly, like a blue feather blown over the dimpled bull-ring sands, the bull a black cliff rising. The banderillero stood now, poised, and stamped his foot. The banderillas are raised, ah!

So! Softly, softly ran the blue ballet slippers in the quiet sand and the bull ran and the banderillero rose softly in an arc upon the air and the two poles struck down and the bull slammed to a halt, grunting-shrieking as the pikes bit deep in his withers. Now the banderillero, the source of this pain, was gone. The crowd roared!

The Guanajuato cemetery gates swung open.

Raimundo stood frozen and quiet and the car bore down upon him. All of the land smelled of ancient death and dust and everywhere things ran toward death or were in death.

The turistas filled into the cemetery of Guanajuato. A huge wooden door was opened and they walked down the twisting steps into the catacombs where the one hundred and ten dead shrunken people stood horrible against the walls.

The jutting teeth of them, the wide eyes staring into spaces of nothing. The naked bodies of women like so many wire frames with clay clinging all askew to them. “We stand them in the catacombs because their relatives cannot afford the rent on their graves,” whispered the little caretaker.

Below the cemetery hill, a juggling act, a man balancing something on his head, a crowd following past the coffin, carpenter’s shop, to the music of the carpenter, nails fringing his mouth, bent to beat