"Look!" he cried.
A procession traveled along the street. One man led it, with a package on his head. Behind him came women in black rebozos, chewing away the peels of oranges and spitting them on the cobbles; little children at then- elbows, men ahead of them. Some ate sugar cane, gnawing away at the outer bark until it split down and they pulled it off in great hunks to get at the succulent pulp, and the juicy sinews on which to suck. In all, there were fifty people.
"Joe," said Marie behind him, holding his arm.
It was no ordinary package the first man in the procession carried on his head, balanced delicately as a chicken-plume. It was covered with silver satin and silver fringe and silver rosettes. And he held it gently with one brown hand, the other hand swinging free.
This was a funeral and the little package was a coffin.
Joseph glanced at his wife.
She was the color of fine, fresh milk. The pink color of the bath was gone. Her heart had sucked it all down to some hidden vacuum in her. She held fast to the french doorway and watched the traveling people go, watched them eat fruit, heard them talk gently, laugh gently. She forgot she was naked.
He said, "Some little girl or boy gone to a happier place."
"Where are they taking-her?"
She did not think it unusual, her choice of the feminine pronoun. Already she had identified herself with that tiny fragment parceled like an unripe variety of fruit. Now, in this moment, she was being carried up the hill within com-pressing darkness, a stone in a peach, silent and terrified, the touch of the father against the coffin material outside; gentle and noiseless and firm inside.
"To the graveyard, naturally; that's where they're taking her," he said, the cigarette making a filter of smoke across his casual face.
"Not the graveyard?"
"There's only one cemetery in these towns, you know that. They usually hurry it. That little girl had probably been dead only a few hours."
"A few hours--"
She turned away, quite ridiculous, quite naked, with only the towel supported by her limp, untrying hands. She walked toward the bed. "A few hours ago she was alive, and now--"
He went on, "Now they're hurrying her up the hill. The climate isn't kind to the dead. It's hot, there's no embalming. They have to finish it quickly."
"But to that graveyard, that horrible place," she said, with a voice from a dream.
"Oh, the mummies," he said. "Don't let that bother you."
