"Marie."
He stopped her with one word as she ran to the bathroom door.
"Yes?"
"I thought you said you didn't feel well?"
"I didn't. I don't. But, thinking of all those swell places-"
"We haven't seen one-tenth of this town," he explained logically. "There's that statue of Morelos on the hill, I want a shot of that, and some of that French architecture up the street … we've traveled three hundred miles and we've been here one day and now want to rush off somewhere else. I've already paid the rent for another night…."
"You can get it back," she said.
"Why do you want to run away?" he said, looking at her with an attentive simplicity. "Don't you like the town?"
"I simply adore it," she said, her cheeks white, smiling. "It's so green and pretty."
"Well, then," he said. "Another day. You'll love it. That's settled."
She started to speak.
"Yes?" he asked.
"Nothing."
She closed the bathroom door. Behind it she rattled open a medicine box. Water rushed into a tumbler. She was taking something for her stomach.
He came to the bathroom door. "Marie, the mummies don't bother you, do they?"
"Unh-unh," she said.
"Was it the funeral, then?"
"Unh."
"Because, if you were really afraid, I'd pack in a moment, you know that, darling."
He waited.
"No, I'm not afraid," she said.
"Good girl," he said.
The graveyard was enclosed by a thick adobe wall, and at its four corners small stone angels tilted out on stony wings, their grimy beads capped with bird droppings, their hands gifted with amulets of the same substance, their faces unquestionably freckled.
In the warm smooth flow of sunlight which was like a depthless, tideless river, Joseph and Marie climbed up the hill, their shadows slanting blue behind them. Helping one another, they made the cemetery gate, swung back the Spanish blue iron grille and entered.
It was several mornings after the celebratory fiesta of El Dia de Muerte, the Day of the Dead, and ribbons and ravels of tissue and sparkle-tape still clung like insane hair to the raised stones, to the hand-carved, love-polished crucifixes, and to the above-ground tombs which resembled marble jewel-cases. There were statues frozen in angelic postures over gravel mounds, and intricately carved stones tall as men with angels spilling all down their rims, and tombs as big and ridiculous as beds put out to dry in the sun after some nocturnal accident. And within the four walls of the yard, inserted into square mouths and slots, were coffins, walled in, plated in by marble plates and plaster, upon which names were struck and upon which hung tin pictures, cheap peso portraits of the inserted dead. Thumb-tacked to the different pictures were trinkets they'd loved in life, silver charms, silver arms, legs, bodies, silver cups, silver dogs, silver church medallions, bits of red crape and blue ribbon. On some places were painted slats of tin showing the dead rising to heaven in oil-tinted angels' arms.
