They came at the start of my shift and we talked out on the ambulance dock and they told me what I already knew. I had some time, at my own risk they said, but they were putting up barricades to warn others away. They’d be shutting down the electricity, sporadically, for a few days, then permanently at the first of the week, and someone would come for the bottled gas before then, and I’d better set about removing the things I wanted to save immediately. Then there was a call from the insurance company, voiding the policy and the personal one too if I didn’t get out of the house.
Arthur drove me up to the Manor early the next day and I had a talk with the doctor, the youngest of the four owners, who sat in his chair in the office in his white smock and glasses, his arms folded across his chest, and looked to the side of my face and down at the scatter of papers on the desk’s surface as he spoke. He said I couldn’t stay there, and anyway they’d be closing the place down before long and I wouldn’t even have the job then. That’s when I came to the necessary decision and asked for the two weeks’ vacation I had coming and asked Arthur to go for the candles and bottled water, the canned goods and wood for the stove, and the shells I ordered from the hunting shop in Orleans. Now he comes only in daylight, and I don’t let him linger, and in the evenings I hold up my mother’s dresses against my body and my father’s shirts and pants before packing them, and I look at stained photographs and pathetic souvenirs, and I think of the old men at the Manor growing restless in the recent weeks and the one left on the ward without clothing for travel and how the pumping of his diseased heart may be the only pulse left in the life of that place before long, and I recognize now that whenever I dressed myself it was for going out, a perversely undying habit dragging me always into useless memory.
I have a manual treadmill in my parents’ bedroom, and I’ve wedged it with pieces of wood to make it level again, and when I walk it and close my eyes and imagine I’m walking in the world in safety, I think of my mother and my last days out in the world on the streets of Tampico, and I think of a time before that too and of my father and the stories he told me about his life in old Mexico and the lives of various spirits and ghosts when I was a small child. Not one of the stories was about fishing, and I think I knew my father had been no fisherman and that we had a secret together, but I was too young then to imagine anything beyond that.
My father was a hard and secretive man, but he came alive in his stories, and I was his perfect admiring audience. One of his stories had the flavor of something told many times before and within it were the lives of calaveras and children. He told it through pictures of skeletons in a book I can’t find in the house anymore, though I have been searching in candlelight and down in the wind in the basement for it. And late in the night of my searching the lights came on and I was faced with the vulnerability of my foundation, sight of the tilting out of the seaside wall and the numerous fissures that had opened in it, some large enough for a man or a woman to slip through, and I was in that familiar panic. Then the lights blinked off again and I turned and tugged at the rope and climbed up the slope of the dirt floor to the banister and the stairs. It was dawn when I reached the window, and raining lightly, and I saw a figure on the beach below, under dark and moving clouds, and below the window was no ground now, but only the cliff face and the morning sun on the alluvial escarpment and the cement stairway down in the sand. I saw the figure climbing the steps, collar raised against wind and rain, before I stepped away and went to check the weapons and the barricades, then brewed a pot of tea on the camp stove and sat in the kitchen in my sweats and sneakers and waited for the last clouds to pass and waited for the sun to reach the room.
In the dances of skeletons, the parodies lie in activities and the broad, yet subtle, exaggerations these figures in their bones bring to them. Risen up from the dead well after their moldering, calaveras partake of the same world that got them there. But in the common anonymity of their figures, clothed always in uniforms — even a house dress is that — thrust this world into example and instance, and thus celebration, of both the menial and significant, rendering the poses of both ludicrous through gesture and tableau. Women are men, and children are only smaller versions of women and men, and only by virtue of action in tasks or bending to pantomime in mute conversation are the bones expressive, though a jaw might creak up a fraction at the corners, the subtle hint of a thought that provokes a particular grin that never comes. And this is the art of the dead come alive, and within it the recognition that everything is a story.
And in these stories all calaveras have their parts, from the politician vomiting words out over the crowd, to the culpable businessman at his elbow and the henchman at the platform’s edge. And each in the crowd too is an actor, in gesture of agreement or of disgust, varieties of pantomime, and the raising of weapons in the bony hands of the military at the periphery. And yet among them, on rare occasion, in the figure of a foot soldier, a carpenter, provocative virgin to the side of a gathering of virgins, one finds the empty skull gaze, the figure in ambiguous gesture beyond the story, head tilted in longing toward the might have been. These are the traveling calaveras, and whether they are few or many is not certain, for one may see the same one seen before without knowing it because of the traveling, that search for a proper circumstance in which the dance can be mindlessly entered, which is never found, because the skeleton is the free essence beyond longing or nostalgia, and these are the aberrant calaveras, dragging the memory of the flesh and desire with them.
Two children, a boy and a girl who were farm children. They passed through a dark wood on their way home, and at a bend in the trail in the wood they came upon a fallen oak tree and a calavera sitting on the trunk among branches, and they were not hesitant because they were children and had no fear of death. The calavera wore the uniform of his last engagement, the vestments of a bishop who had sold the votes of his diocese for money. His grinning skull face stared out from the folds of his robes, his head cocked arrogantly to the side in remembered gesture, but there was a certain look of longing in his teeth and hollow eyes that the children noticed immediately as they climbed among the branches to sit beside him. Are you lost? they asked. He said he was, but he was grinning, and they were not sure of the meaning of his answer. They could see his bare clavicles where his garment opened at the neck, and they thought he must be cold wearing only his bones under his clothing, and they reached up to raise the hood of his cloak over his head, and it fell down to cover most of his face, guarding against any clear view of it. They helped him to climb free of the branches, and then they walked beside him, holding the bones of his fingers, as they led him home.
It was a farmer’s home, one room with a large wooden table and a stove and sink and a stone fireplace. There was a double bed in a corner and pallets on the floor, and the mother fell back at the sight of the bishop in the doorway, flustered and honored, and led him to the table and put food and drink before him that he could not eat. He said he just needed a little rest, and she placed a chair near a window, and the calavera sat in it, and the children gathered on the floor at his feet. And once he’d answered the few halting questions the mother put to him, she went about her business of cleaning and cooking, and he sat still in the chair in his spectral garments, watching her.