Memorias Muertas

For a long time I thought it was a canon. The explosions seemed to come from everywhere at once, unlike gunshots that let you feel their direction of origin in your belly. The noise bounced off the mountains and a puff of smoke held high overhead. It isn’t until the old man lights one off next to me, and the sound makes me almost deaf but leaves just enough so I can hear the second blast a few moments later that I understand these are fireworks.

I watch as he reloads. He holds a small newspaper bomb up to the sky and against his breast to bless it. There is a cringle of paper as he wraps another layer around it and slips it into the metal cylinder. I suppose it is like a small canon. He moves the cylinder around on the dirt, finding solid ground and searches his pockets for matches. When he bends the fuse down a woman nearby stops wailing and walks away, just behind a concrete grave. The man stoops to light the wick then takes several swift steps back. It explodes. Little pieces of charred newspaper hang in the air like black snowflakes and fall to the ground. And the man moves on, to honor another ancestor.

Each mausoleum is painted in bright colors and patterns and adorned with wreaths of plastic flowers, bouquets of lilies and marigolds and gaudy garlands. Offerings of thin burning candles and scraps of food and juice frame the names of loved ones. Families eat ice cream bars and smoke cigarettes and sit and talk. Several marimba bands move from one group to the next, playing the favorite songs of dead relatives competing to make themselves heard by the living and the dead. Libations of alcohol and water and coconut juice pour upon concrete.

In other towns, people fly spectacular kites that represent dreams or messages to the gods, to the ancestors. The tails carry evil thoughts back to the earth while the pure ones remain in the sky. I remember that ala means both wing and soul and almost understand.

I have no altar, no family here. I buy a garland of paper flowers to give as gifts to the women I love when I come home. A drunken man tries to interrogate me when I place one over the gated entrance to the cemetery. I watch the others mourn and think of my own ancestors-- the ones I’ve known, the stories I’ve heard, and the ones that are lost, except in me and my brothers. Invisible hands that shaped our minds, bodies, hearts. But my soul belongs to me alone. I move on and feel the eyes of angels.