Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (14 page)

 
          
 
"How long, Hanks, since we last saw
water?"

 
          
 
"Twenty years. Captain."

           
 
"No, yesterday morning."

 
          
 
Coming back through the door, his heart
pounded. The wall barometer clouded over, flickered with a faint lightning that
played along the rims of his eyelids.

 
          
 
"No coffee, Hanks. Just—a cup of clear
water."

 
          
 
Hanks went away and came back.

 
          
 
"Hanks? Promise. Bury me where she
is."

 
          
 
"But, Captain, she's—" Hanks
stopped. He nodded. "Where she is. Yes, sir."

 
          
 
"Good. Now give me the cup."

 
          
 
The water was fresh. It came from the islands
beneath the earth. It tasted of sleep.

 
          
 
"One cup. She was right, Hanks, you know.
Not to touch land, ever again. She was right. But I brought her one cup of
water from the land, and the land was in water that touched her lips. One cup.
Oh, if only ... !"

 
          
 
He shifted it in his rusted hands. A typhoon
swarmed from nowhere, filling the cup. It was a black storm raging in a small
place.

 
          
 
He raised the cup and drank the typhoon.

 
          
 
"Hanks!" someone cried.

 
          
 
But not he. The typhoon, storming, had gone,
and he with it.

 
          
 
The cup fell empty to the floor.

 
          
 
It was a mild morning. The air was sweet and
the wind steady. Hanks had worked half the night digging and half the morning
filling. Now the work was done. The town minister helped, and then stood back
as Hanks jigsawed the final square of sod into place. Piece after piece, he
fitted neatly and tamped and joined. And on each piece, as Hanks had made
certain, was the golden, the full rich ripe-grained wheat, as high as a
ten-year-old boy.

 
          
 
Hanks bent and put the last piece to rest.

 
          
 
"No marker?" asked the minister.

 
          
 
"Oh, no, sir, and never will be
one."

 
          
 
The minister started to protest, when Hanks
took his arm, and walked him up the hill a way, then turned and pointed back.

 
          
 
They stood a long moment. The minister nodded
at last, smiled quietly and said, "I see. I understand."

 
          
 
For there was just the ocean of wheat going on
and on forever, vast tides of it blowing in the wind, moving east and ever east
beyond, and not a line or seam or ripple to show where the old man sank from
sight. "It was a sea burial," said the minister. "It was,"
said Hanks. "As I promised. It was, indeed." Then they turned and
walked off along the hilly shore, saying nothing again until they reached and
entered the creaking house.

 
          
 
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 Janitzio,
the great fishing seines flew down in butterfly swoops to gather silverine
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 Lenares, 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, luisaI
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 coflBn 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 coflan 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 zapateria, 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 stores
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, Raimundo?"

 
          
 
"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.

 
          
 
"Ah!"

 
          
 
"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! Bom! 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
sol, 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
fluttery 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 filed 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 the
coffin like a drum. 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 rehozos 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, hard 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 El
Dia de Muerte, sliding across the dark 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.