Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

Ghost Whisper to My Lover

175 I think, querido, that none of us really knows how to grieve. It’s such a mystery of an emotion that we trip over ourselves trying to get through this feeling of our bodies collapsing internally. But we have to fall apart in order to piece ourselves together again. Is it any wonder we love ceremonies , or flickering lights through our unknowing and the unknown. When our former neighbor the hunchback died (his name was Tony, but my grandfather insisted on calling him “El Jorobado” so the rest of us called him that as well) the announcement was made at dinner one warm afternoon as the grape harvest was coming to a close. Tony and his wife lived a few doors down from us when we all lived on top of each other in Thermal, and their apartment was a favorite stop for us during Halloween because Tony was extremely generous with candy. He would step out on his front porch, dressed in a brown leather jacket with a row of fringes coming down from his shoulders to his wrists and across his hump. A matching hat with a tassel made him look elegant, even graceful . The news of his death came with a plea from his widow for contributions for the cost of the funeral. The conversation then turned to the expense of El Jorobado’s burial plot. Cemeteries were a waste of money and land, my grandfather reasoned , because after a few years, the graves became neglected, their locations forgotten, so that in the end the plot too became a ghost. He presented his evidence: his own parents’ graves, his two daughters’ graves, all 6 Ghost Whisper to My Lover four lost in Zacapu’s panteón. “Might as well toss the flowers to the wind,” he said, “rather than waste your time looking for the headstones.” My grandmother withdrew into daydream at the mention of the two daughters she lost in infancy. My grandfather kept on until he made his resolve. “If any one of us should die,” he announced to those of us gathered around the dining table. “The rest of us aren’t throwing money away on any burial. Cremation and a simple sign of the cross over the ashes is the cheapest answer.” “Yes, of course,” my father added, always willing to add a touch of humor to a somber moment. “And if possible, we should get some permit that will let us drag the corpse out to the middle of the street to burn it. The only expense there is a sack and a gallon of gasoline.” In either case, my grandmother decided that we should remember El Jorobado for el Día de Muertos that November 2nd by lighting a red votive candle we bought from the Mexican foods section at Alpha Beta. The wax wasn’t really red, but the glass was. The side of the glass had a sticker of la Virgen de Guadalupe with a bar code attached at the bottom, and it looked as if la Virgen were looking down curiously at the stripes. For the first few years after we immigrated our family didn’t celebrate el Día de Muertos because we didn’t have any relatives buried in U.S. soil, and neither did we have a close relative recently deceased. Most of our dead were our ancestors in Michoacán, in the brightly colored cemeteries where we cleaned the graves on the first day of November, and where we shared a meal with the spirits the following day. The mood on these occasions was usually festive, just another excuse to throw a party, sucking on sugar skeletons and munching on pan de muerto—a plump bread with a button of a skull attached on the side, and a caricature of a skeleton body drawn on the top with sugar. But November 1982 marked the first days of the dead after the death of my mother just two months before. One of my younger cousins pointed out that maybe we should do something to mark the occasion. I was surprised at how easily my uncle complied. He was the cynic in the family, known for his quick temper, his irreverent humor, and his foul language. 176 zacapu days and nights of the dead 177 GhostWhispertoMyLover There were six of us gathered in the living room: my father, my brother and I, my...