And they took him away to the dry earth which was like the greatest mouth of all which held him a long time, draining the bright moisture of his life, drying him like ancient manuscript paper, until he was a mummy as light as chaff, an autumn harvest ready for the wind.
From that time until this, the thought had come and come again to Filomena, how will I feed my lost children, with Juan burning to brown crepe in a silver-tinseled box, how lengthen my children’s bones and push forth their teeth in smiles and color their cheeks?
The children screamed again outside, in happy pursuit of Filepe.
Filomena looked to the distant hill, up which bright tourists’ cars hummed bearing many people from the United States. Even now they paid a peso each to that dark man with the spade so that they might step down throught his catacombs among the standing dead, to see what the sun-dry earth and the hot wind did to all bodies in this town.
Filomena watched the tourist cars, and Juan’s voice whispered, “Filomena.” And again: “This I cry out. In death I will work . . .I will not be poor . . . Filomena . . .” His voice ghosted away. And she swayed and was almost ill, for an idea had come into her mind which was new and terrible and made her heart pound. “Filepe!” she cried suddenly.
And Filepe escaped the jeering children and shut the door on the hot white day and said, “Yes, Mamacita?”
“Sit, niño, we must talk, in the name of the saints, we must!”
She felt her face grow old because the soul grew old behind it, and she said, very slowly, with difficulty, “Tonight we must go in secret to the catacomb.”
“Shall we take a knife”—Filepe smiled wildly—“and kill the dark man?”
“No, no, Filepe, listen. . . .”
And he heard the words that she spoke.
And the hours passed and it was a night of churches. It was night of bells, and singing. Far off in the air of the valley you could hear voices chanting the evening Mass, you could see children walking with lit candles, in a solemn file, ’way over there on the side of the dark hill, and the huge bronze bells were tilting up and showering out their thunderous crashes and bangs that made the dogs spin, dance and bark on the empty roads.
The graveyard lay glistening, all whiteness, all marble snow, all sparkle and glitter of harsh gravel like an eternal fall of hail, crunched under their feet as Filomena and Filepe took their shadows with them, ink-black and constant from the unclouded moon. They glanced over their shoulders in apprehension, but one cried Halt! They had seen the gravedigger drift, made footless by shadow, down the hill, in answer to a night summons.
Now: “Quick, Filepe, the lock!” Together they inserted a long metal rod between padlock hasps and wooden doors which lay flat to the dry earth. Together they seized and pulled. The wood split. The padlock hasps sprang loose. Together they raised the huge doors and flung them back, rattling. Together they peered down into the darkest, most silent night of all. Below, the catacomb waited.
Filomena straightened her shoulders and took a breath.
“Now.”
And put her foot upon the first step.
In the adobe of Filomena Díaz, her children slept sprawled here or there in the cool night room, comforting each other with the sound of their warm breathing.
Suddenly their eyes sprang wide.
Footsteps, slow and halting, scraped the cobbles outside. The door shot open. For an instant the silhouettes of three people loomed in the white evening sky beyond the door. One child sat up and struck a match.
“No!” Filomena snatched out with one hand to claw the light. The match fell away. She gasped. The door slammed. The room was solid black. To this blackness Filomena said at last:
“Light no candles. Your father has come home.”
The thudding, the insistent knocking and pounding shook the door at midnight.
Filomena opened the door.
The gravedigger almost screamed in her face. “There you are! Thief! Robber!”
Behind him stood Ricardo, looking very rumpled and very tired and very old. “Cousin, permit us, I am sorry. Our friend here—”
“I am the friend of no one,” cried the gravedigger. “A lock has been broken and a body stolen. To know the identity of the body is to know the thief. I could only bring you here. Arrest her.”
“One small moment, please.” Ricardo took the man’s hand from his arm and turned, bowing gravely to his cousin. “May we enter?”
“There, there!” The gravedigger leaped in, gazed wildly about and pointed to a far wall. “You see?”
But Ricardo would look only at this woman. Very gently he asked her, “Filomena?”
Filomena’s face was the face of one who has gone through a long tunnel of night and has come to the other end at last, where lives a shadow of coming day. Her eyes were prepared. Her mouth knew what to do.
All the terror was gone now. What remained was as light as the great length of autumn chaff she had carried down the hill with her good son. Nothing more could happen to her ever in her life; this you knew from how she held her body as she said, “We have no mummy here.”
“I believe you, cousin, but”—Ricardo cleared his throat uneasily and raised his eyes—“what stands there against the wall?”
“To celebrate the festival of the day of the dead ones”—Filomena did not turn to look where he was looking—“I have taken paper and flour and wire and clay and made of it a life-size toy which looks like the mummies.”
“Have you indeed done this?” asked Ricardo, impressed.
“No, no!” The gravedigger almost danced in exasperation.
“With your permission.” Ricardo advanced to confront the figure which stood against the wall. He raised his flashlight. “So,” he said. “And so.”
Filomena looked only out the open door into the late moonlight. “The plan I have for this mummy which I have made with my own hands is good.”
“What plan, what?” the gravedigger demanded, turning.
“We will have money to eat with. Would you deny my children this?”
But Ricardo was not listening. Near the far wall, he tilted his head this way and that and rubbed his chin, squinting at the tall shape which enwrapped its own shadow, which kept its own silence, leaning against the adobe.
“A toy,” mused Ricardo. “The largest death toy I have ever seen. I have seen man-size skeletons in windows, and man-size coffins made of cardboard and filled with candy skulls, yes. But this! I stand in awe, Filomena.”
“Awe?” said the gravedigger, his voice rising to a shriek. “This is no toy, this is—”
“Do you swear, Filomena?” said Ricardo, not looking at him. He reached out and tapped a few times on the rust-colored chest of the figure. It made the sound of a lonely drum. “Do you swear this is papier-mâché?”
“By the Virgin, I swear.”
“Well, then.” Ricardo shrugged, snorted, laughed. “It is simple. If you swear by the Virgin, what more need be said? No court action is necessary. Besides, it might take weeks or months to prove or disprove this is or is not a thing of flour paste and old newspapers colored with brown earth.”
“Weeks, months, prove, disprove!” The gravedigger turned in a circle as if to challenge the sanity of the universe held tight and impossible in these four walls. “This ‘toy’ is my property, mine!”
“The ‘toy,’” said Filomena serenely, gazing out at the hills, “if it is a toy, and made by me, must surely belong to me. And even,” she went on, quietly communing with the new reserve of peace in her body, “even if it is not a toy, and it is indeed Juan Díaz come home, why, then, does not Juan Díaz belong first to God?”
“How can one argue that?” wondered Ricardo.
The gravedigger was willing to try. But before he had stuttered forth a half-dozen words, Filomena said, “And after God, in God’s eyes, and at God’s altar and in God’s church, on one of God’s holiest days, did not Juan Díaz say that he would be mine throughout his days?”
“Throughout his days—ah, ha, there you are!” said the gravedigger. “But his days are over, and now he is mine!”
“So,” said Filomena, “God’s property first, and then Filomena Díaz’ property, that is if this toy is not a toy and is Juan Díaz, and anyway, landlord of the dead, you evicted your tenant, you so much as said you did not want him, if you love him so dearly and want him, will you pay the new rent and tenant him again?”
But so smothered by rage was the landlord of silence that it gave Ricardo time to step in.
“Grave keeper, I see many months and many lawyers, and many points, fine points, to argue this way and that, which include real estate, toy manufactories, God, Filomena, one Juan Díaz wherever he is, hungry children, the conscience of a digger of graves, and so much complication that death’s business will suffer. Under the circumstances are you prepared for these long years in and out of court?”
“I am prepared—” said the gravedigger, and paused.
“My good man,” said Ricardo, “the other night you gave me some small bit of advice, which I now return to you. I do not tell you how to control your dead. You, now, do not say how I control the living. Your jurisdiction ends at the tombyard gate. Beyond stand my citizens, silent or otherwise. So . . .”
Ricardo thumped the upright figure a last time on its hollow chest. It
