Balanced delicately upon his proud dark head the juggler carries a silvery satin-skinned box, which he touches lightly now and again to give it balance. He walks with solemn dignity, his bare feet gliding over the cobbles, behind him the women in black rebozos toothing tangerines. And in the box, hidden away, safe and unseen, is the small child body of his daughter, newly dead.
The procession passes the open coffin shops and the banging of nails and sawing of boards is heard through the land. In the catacomb, the standing dead await the procession.
Raimundo held his body so, like a torero, to make a veronica, for the great hurtling car to pass and the crowd to cry “Ole!” He smiled wildly.
The black car rose over and blotted light from his eyes as it touched him. Blackness ran through him. It was night…
In the churchyard on the island of Janitzio, under the great dark statue of Father Morelos, it is blackness, it is midnight. You hear the high voices of men grown shrill on wine, men with voices like women, but not soft women, no, high, ban and drunken women, quick, savage and melancholy women. On the dark lake little fires glow on Indian boats coming from the mainland, bringing tourists from Mexico City to see the ceremony of Dia de Muerte, sliding across the black foggy lake, all bundled and wrapped against the cold.
Sunlight.
Christ moved.
From the crucifix he took down a hand, lifted it, suddenly waved it.
The hot sun shone in golden explosions from the high church tower in Guadalajara, and in blasts from the high, swaying crucifix. In the street below, if Christ looked down with mellow warm eyes, and he did so now in this moment, he saw two thousand upturned faces: the spectators like so many melons scattered about the market, so many hands raised to shield the uptilted and curious eyes.
A little wind blew and the tower cross sighed very gently and pressed forward under it.
Christ waved his hand. Those in the market below waved back. A small shout trickled through the crowd. Traffic did not move in the street. It was eleven of a hot green Sunday morning. You could smell the fresh clipped grass from the plaza, and the incense from the church door.
Christ took his other hand down also and waved it and suddenly jerked away from the cross and hung by his feet, face down, a small silver medallion jingling in his face, suspended from about his dark neck.
“Ole! Ole!” cried one small boy far below, pointing up at him and then at himself. “You see him, you see? That is Gomez, my brotherly! Gomez who is my brotherly!”
And the small boy walked through the crowd with a hat, collecting money.
Movement. Raimundo, in the street, covered his eyes and screamed. Darkness again.
The tourists from the boats moved in the dream of the island of Janitzio at midnight. In the dim street the great nets hung like fog from the lake and rivers of today’s silver minnows lay glittering in cascades upon the slopes. Moonlight struck them like a cymbal striking. Another cymbal; they gave off a silent reverberation.
In the crumbling church at the top of the rough hill is a Christ much drilled by termites, but the blood still congeals, thickly from his artistic wounds and it will be years before the agony is insect-eaten from his suffering mask.
Outside the church, a woman with Tarascan blood lifting and falling in her throat sits fluttering ripped morning-glories through the flames of six candies. The flowers, passing through the flames like moths, give off a gentle sexual odor. Already the moving tourists come and stand about her, looking down, wanting to ask, but not asking, what she is doing, seated there upon her husband’s grave.
In the church, like resin from a great beautiful tree, the limbs of Christ, themselves hewn from beautiful limbs of imported trees, give off a sweet sacred resin in little raining droplets that hang but never fall, blood that gives a garment for his nakedness.
“Ole!” roares the crowd.
Bright sunlight again. A pressure on Raimundo’s flung body. The car, the daylight, the pain!
The picador jousted his horse forward, the horse with thick mattresses tied to it, and kicked the bull in the shoulder with his boot and at the same time penetrated that shoulder with the long stick and the nail on the end of it. The picador withdrew. Music played. The matador moved slowly forward.
The bull stood with one foot forward in the center of the sun-held ring, his organs nervous. The eyes were dull glazed hypnotic eyes of fear-hate. He kept eliminating nervously, nervously, until he was streaked and foul with a nervous casting out. The greenish matter pulsed from his buttocks and the blood pulsed from his gored shoulder, and the six banderillas bindled and clattered on his spine.
The matador took time to rearrange his red cloth over his blade, just so carefully, while the crowd and the pulsing bull waited.
The bull can see nothing, know nothing. The bull desires not to see of this or that. The world is pain and shadows and light and weariness. The bull stands only to be dispatched. It will welcome an end to confusion, to the racing shapes, the traitorous capes, the lying flourishes and false fronts.
The bull plants out its feet in feeble stances and remains in one position, slowly moving its head back and forth, eyes glazed, the excrement stiff unfelt rivuleting from its flanks, the blood tiredly pumping from the neck. Somewhere off in the glazed distance a man holds out a bright sword. The bull does not move. The sword, held by the smiling man, now cuts three short gashes down the nose of the empty-eyed bull. So!
The crowd shouts.
The bull takes the cutting and does not even flinch. Blood flushes from the snuffling, cut nostrils.
The matador stamps his foot.
The bull runs with feeble obedience toward the enemy. The sword pierces his neck. The bull falls, thuds, kicks, is silent.
“Ole!” shouts the crowd. The band blows out a fanfarria finale!
Raimundo felt the car hit. There were swift intervals of light and darkness.
In the Janitzio churchyard two hundred candles burned atop two hundred rocky graves, men sang, tourists watched fog poured up from the lake.
In Guanajuato, sunlight! Striking down through a slot the catacomb, sunlight showed the brown eyes of a woman mouth wide in rictus, cross-armed. Tourists touched and thumped her like a drum.
“Ole!” The matador circled the ring, his small black biretta in his fingers, high. It rained. Centavo pieces, purses, shoes, hats. The matador stood in this rain with his biretta raised for an umbrella!
A man ran up with a cut-off ear of the slain bull. The matador held it up to the crowd. Everywhere he walked the crowd threw up their hats and money. But thumbs jerked down and though the shouts were glad they were not so glad that he kept the cut-off ear. Thumbs went down. Without a look behind him, shrugging, the matador gave the ear cracking toss.
The bloody ear lay on the sand, while the crowd, glad that he had thrown it away, because he was not that good, cheered. The bucklers came out, chained the slumped bull to a team of high-stamping horses, who whistled fearful sirens in their nostrils at the hot blood odor an bolted like white explosions across the arena when released yanking, bounding the dead slumped bull behind, leaving harrowing of the horns in sand and amulets of blood.
Raimundo felt the sugar skull jolt from his fingers. The funeral on the wooden slat was torn from his other wide flung hand.
Bang! The bull hit, rebounded from the barrera wall as the horses vanished, jangling, screaming, in the tunnel.
A man ran to the barrera of Senior Villalta, poking upward the banderillas, their sharp prongs choked with bull blood and flesh. “Gracias!” Villalta threw down a peso and took the banderillas proudly, the little orange and blue crepe papers fluttering, to hand about like musical instruments to his wife, to cigar-smoking friends.
Christ moved.
The crowd looked up at the swaying cross on the cathedral.
Christ balanced on two hands, logs up in the sky!
The small boy ran through the crowd. “You see my brother? Pay! My brother! Pay!”
Christ now hung by one hand on the swaying cross. Below him was the city of Guadalajara, very sweet and very quiet with Sunday. I will make much money today, he thought.
The cross jolted. His hand slipped. The crowd screamed.
Christ fell.
Christ dies each hour. You see him in carven postures in ten thousand agonized places, eyes lifted to high dusty heavens of ten thousand small churches, and always there is much blood, ah, much blood.
“See!” said Senior Villalta. “See!” He wagged the banderillas in the face of his friends, red and wet.
With children chasing, snatching at him, laughing, the matador circles the ring again to the ever-increasing shower of hats, running and not stopping.
And now the tourist boats cross the dawn-pale lake of Patzcuaro, leaving Janitzio behind, the candles snuffed, the graveyard deserted, the torn flowers strewn and shriveling. The boats pull up and the tourists step out in the new light, and in the hotel on the mainland shore a great silver urn waits, bubbling with fresh coffee; a little whisper of steam, like the last part of the fog from the lake, goes up into the warm air of the hotel dining room, and there is a good sound of chattered plates and tining forks and low converse, and a gentle lidding of eyes and a
