The coffee smell is as rich as the skin of a Tarascan.
In Guanajuato the gates close, the rigid nightmares are turned from. The spiral stair is taken up in hot November light. A dog barks. A wind stirs the dead morning-glories on the pastry-cake monuments. The big door whams down on the catacomb opening. The withered people are hidden.
The band hoots out its last triumphant hooting and the barreras are empty. Outside, the people walk away between ranks of phlegm-eyed beggars who sing high, high songs, and the blood spoor of the last bull is raked and wiped and raked and wiped by the men with the rakes down in the wide shadowed ring. In the shower, the matador is slapped upon his wet buttocks by a man who has won money because of him this day.
Raimundo fell, Christ fell, in glaring light. A bull rushed, a car rushed, opening a great vault of blackness in the air which slammed, thundered shut and said nothing but sleep. Raimundo touched the earth, Christ touched the earth, but did not know.
The cardboard funeral was shattered to bits. The sugar skull broke in the far gutter in three dozen fragments of blind snow.
The boy, the Christ, lay quiet.
The night bull went away to give other people darkness to teach other people sleep.
Ah, said the crowd.
RAIMUNDO, said the bits of the sugar skull strewn on the earth.
People ran to surround the silence. They looked at the sleep. And the sugar skull with the letters R and A and I and M and U and N and D and O was snatched up and eaten by children who fought over the name.
1957
The end
