“Where is your sweater?” asked Angela, in a Spanish coated with the residue of her native dialect. Oaxaca, in November, is sliced with a musky mesquite breeze and a bitter nighttime cold.
“I don’t have one,” I respond.
Translation: Silly American woman believes that Mexico is warm all year, all places, all of the time.
Humps of dirt piled fresh; tiny wooden crosses, crooked and nameless, croon over stones sacredly placed, squared in, and lit to the edges with candles and marigolds. Tapetes, elaborate and colorful sand paintings, shroud gritty blank graves and surround imperial stone obelisks: it is Dia de Los Muertos.
The Day Of the Dead.
Royal purples and sacred gold, line the paths that twist you through and around grave sites. Yet, they are not paths so much as empty strips, sometimes and hopefully lit by candles, often crisscrossed with random graves dug long before a path was ever needed. Step up and over, don’t be shy!
El Panteon (the cemetery) is full of musicians and enormous papier-mâché puppets, wearing traditional dress, driven by people half their size. Ponche (apple cider) brews, while mourners leave offerings of cigarettes, beers, cokes and the most beautiful tapetes you will ever see. Sand paintings have been drizzled, patiently, possibly for days, to construct colorful scenes of dancing skeletons (with mescal or tequila in hand) or the face of the deceased.
I am a visitor, a voyeur; an uncomfortable but excited trespasser of ancient tradition.
Stumbling over a fresh grave and nearly onto the lap of a man in his early forties, I am struck by the elaborate, tiny, space that he and his family hover over. They are drinking beers, placing the last of the marigolds, and strumming a baby guitar. Her grave is entirely surrounded by family, quite obviously a new loss. “Is this for your child?” I ask, in my broken Spanish.
“Si, Claro, she was only four,” he tells me. I’ve righted myself and am now standing on the humped up edge of one plot, peering into the elevated tomb of his daughter.
In my awkward inquisitiveness, I begin to praise the work they have done on the detailed tapete: the flowers, the…I gently wave my hand over… “Todo…es bonita…” Everything, I say, everything is so beautiful; my eyebrows gently scrunched in a somewhat forced compassion, appearing to be near tears myself.
Out of the dark, a sudden, Screeching Laughter:
“Waaaaaa Hahhaa HAHhahahah!!!!!!! HEEHEeEeeeehhh!!!!” squeals an off-white softball sized mechanical skull. Dramatically dropping and cackling, catching me in their trap.
The family is roaring in laughter! They set me up, with their motion-detecting skull, their entire evening of cheap entertainment; provided by unsuspecting, sweater-less, gringa tourists.
“How dare they!” I think, “Death is Serious!!” But, as the gentle eyes of the father coax me into a soft smile, and he gives me a subtle knock on the shoulder, I am taught my first lesson about death in Mexico:
Sometimes, we can play with it.
