The Antidote (21 page)

This more intimate relationship with mortality was not always so unusual. Such traditions date at least to ancient Rome. There, according to legend, generals who had been victorious in battle
would instruct a slave to follow behind as they paraded through the streets; the slave's task was to keep repeating, for the general's benefit, a warning against hubris:
memento mori,
‘remember you shall die'. Much later, in Christian Europe,
memento mori
became a staple of the visual arts: symbols of death appeared frequently in still-life paintings, sometimes including skulls intended to represent those of the artists' patrons. Public clocks featured automata representing death, and sometimes the Latin slogan
‘Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat'
as a reminder of the effect of the passing minutes: ‘Every [hour] wounds, and the last one kills.' The specific motivation for contemplating mortality differed from era to era, and culture to culture. In the ancient world, it had much to do with remembering to savour life as if it were a delicious meal, as Lauren Tillinghast had advised; for later Christians, it was often more a case of remembering to behave well in anticipation of the final judgment.

I'd been especially intrigued to hear about one contemporary example of death-awareness in Mexican daily life. Santa Muerte was the name of a new religion (according to its followers) or a Satanic cult (in the eyes of the Catholic Church) which worshipped death itself - the figure known as La Santa Muerte, or Saint Death. The movement had sprung up several decades ago in the toughest neighbourhoods of Mexico City, among prostitutes and drug dealers and the very poor - people for whom both the Mexican government and the Catholic Church had failed to provide. Instead, they prayed to Santa Muerte for protection from death, for a gentle death, or sometimes for death to their enemies. Now, as a result of immigration, Santa Muerte had spread to parts of the United States; it was also said that some of Mexico's most powerful businessmen and politicians kept secret death-shrines at home. And although many of the followers of Saint Death
were law-abiding Mexicans - they had marched in the streets to protest the government's attempts to characterise the movement as nothing but a band of criminals - it was nonetheless true that it had become the religion of choice of the
narcotraficantes,
the ruthless drug-smuggling gangs of Mexico's north. At the movement's main shrine in the
barrio
of Tepito in Mexico City - where a life-sized model of a skeleton, laden with jewellery, stood in a glass case on a side-street - some of the country's most violent men came to leave offerings of dollar bills, cigarettes, and marijuana. Whatever other significance the movement had, being a follower of Santa Muerte seemed to entail devoting oneself to an especially extreme form of
memento mori
- to organising one's life around the omnipresence of death. ‘In a world of facts,' writes Paz, ‘death is merely one more fact. But since it is such a disagreeable fact, contrary to all our concepts and to the very meaning of our lives, the philosophy of progress … pretends to make it disappear, like a magician palming a coin.' In Mexico, Santa Muerte was where you turned if the circumstances of your life made this sleightof-hand impossible - if the constant fear of violent death removed the option of ignoring your mortality.

I did visit Tepito during my time in Mexico, a few days before the Day of the Dead itself, though it didn't prove the most successful of assignments. I had been warned not to get there by hailing a taxi from the street, because of the risk of kidnapping; as a reporter, I have no real thirst for danger, and arguably I shouldn't have gone at all. ‘Foreigners for obvious reasons
never
go to Tepito!', someone advised, in an internet forum that I probably shouldn't have consulted. ‘Only idiots and the ignorant visit Tepito,' warned someone else. A few days earlier, an armed gang had gunned down six people on a street corner there, in the
middle of the day. In the newspapers, it was reported that the police had written off whole sections of it as too dangerous to bother trying to patrol. A filmmaker based in Mexico City, who'd made a documentary about Tepito, declined to accompany me there, citing safety concerns. And a restaurateur in a smarter part of the city had cheerily passed along what she claimed was a well-known saying: in Tepito, even the rats carried guns. My walk into Tepito was therefore, if nothing else, a pretty good exercise in
memento mori
for myself.

I set off from the heart of the city in the middle of the morning, through shopping streets and Mexico City's business district, then along bigger highways lined with scrappy, busy markets, until the streets grew narrower and the buildings smaller again, and I found myself in Tepito. The core of the neighbourhood was another cacophonous market - Tepito is notorious as a centre for the sale of counterfeit and stolen goods - but in my search for the Santa Muerte shrine I soon left the main roads and plunged into the deserted backstreets, where rats scuttled from towering piles of rubbish. I hurried past darkened doorways, growing nervous.

In the event, the scene at the shrine itself was festive. Around twenty people were waiting in an orderly line to pay their respects to the skeleton, which was resplendent in purple and orange necklaces and a lace shawl. Some carried their own, smaller statuettes, or bottles of spirits to leave as a gift; one or two blew cigar or cigarette smoke over the skeleton when they came to the front of the line, in what I later learned was a rite of spiritual cleansing. The devotees chatted and laughed - men and women, elderly women and muscular young men, some with newborn babies and toddlers in tow.

Having been unable to persuade a translator to come with me to the
barrio,
I was forced to rely on my terrible Spanish to start a
conversation with a woman carrying a foot-high Death statue under her arm. Several other people in the line turned to stare.

She didn't want to talk. The atmosphere in my immediate vicinity quickly turned less festive. I was intruding. Besides, it was quite possible that some of those around me wouldn't want to talk to any reporter, or any stranger: people came to Santa Muerte, according to the Mexican essayist Homero Aridjis, ‘to ask her “protect me tonight because I am going to kidnap or assault somebody”'. It was a struggle to imagine a life in which death played quite so central a role. Then again, the great truth that was underlined by the scene at the shrine - where the generations mingled as they waited in line - was that death was a subject in which everyone had an inescapable interest.

As a pale, skinny Englishman, though, I was prominently out of place. And a muscular man in a black sleeveless vest, who seemed to be standing guard over the shrine, appeared to have noticed this. He glared at me. There was as much amusement as menace in his glare, since it was embarrassingly plain that I posed him no physical threat. Still, he tilted his head in such a way as to indicate the direction in which he believed I should now proceed: away from the shrine and back to the main street.

It was shortly after this that I made the decision to leave Tepito.

I had better luck on the Day of the Dead itself. (Celebrations begin on the last day of October, but the festival reaches its peak on 2 November.) Through a friend of a colleague, I'd made contact with a local retired taxi-driver named Francisco, who spoke decent English and had a sideline as a ‘fixer' for journalists visiting Mexico City. At dusk, he pulled up outside my hotel in a severely battered grey van. ‘It's a very safe car,' he said, beaming, though I hadn't asked, then added, ‘My other car was in an accident - and now my brother cannot use his leg!' I didn't pursue the subject.
Francisco, as he'd explained to me on the phone a few days earlier, knew his way round the tiny settlements in the countryside outside the capital where the Day of the Dead was still
auténtico -
not commercialised or touristic but haunting and pure, and where villagers spent the entire night conducting vigils in local cemeteries, communing with the corpses of their relatives. It wasn't really in my interests to start quibbling about road safety.

In Mexico City, the official municipal celebrations were reaching their peak. The historical central square, the Zócalo, was packed with families strolling among carts selling bone-shaped bread and sugar skulls. People - adults and children - were everywhere dressed as death: boys as hollow-eyed vampires in stiff starched collars, women as ‘La Catrina', the iconic Mexican image of death as a woman in a broad-brimmed hat. On many corners, there were altars to the dead, bedecked with papier mâché skulls. Such traditions stretched back centuries, but they had been integrated into the life of a busy, modern city. In the offices of banks and insurance companies downtown, I'd been told, desks were often turned into altars. It was commonplace for colleagues to write comic poetry to each other, predicting the manner in which they might die.

But Francisco and I were headed away from the bustling squares, onto wide, chaotic highways - dodging stray dogs and suicidally piloted minibuses - and then, as night fell, on empty, unlit country lanes. ‘You know,' Francisco said, after we had passed another dimly illumined roadside statue of death, looming from the blackness, ‘when I was a child, on this day, we would go from house to house, to make a joke about how each person was going to die. So if someone smokes too much, you brought him cigarettes, to make a joke about how he was going to die from too much smoking.' He smiled at the memory. ‘Or if there
was someone who lived in that house had died from too much smoking, then you could bring cigarettes as a gift to remember him.'

‘Didn't people get offended?'

‘Offended?'

‘You know. Insulted.'

‘No, why?' He turned to look at me. ‘I think that this is only in Mexico, though.'

He was largely right about that. Elsewhere in the Catholic world, 2 November is All Souls' Day, designated since the eighth century as an occasion for mournful remembrance of the dead. But when the
conquistadors
reached Mexico, in the fifteenth century, they encountered celebrations of death among the Mayan and Aztec populations far more elaborate than their own: the Aztecs honoured their ‘lady of the dead', Mictecacihuatl, with a twomonth festival of bonfires, dance and feasting. The colonists were determined to replace all this with something more sombre, and more Christian. The Day of the Dead - with its strange mixture of Christianity and pre-Christian religions, mourning and humour - is a testament to the incompleteness of their victory.

There were cultures that took
memento mori
to even greater extremes. The sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne was fond of praising the ancient Egyptians - ‘who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room, to serve as a memento to their guests'. (A writer's working space, Montaigne also believed, ought to have a good view of the cemetery; it tended to sharpen one's thinking.) And in the
Satipatthana Sutta,
one of the formative texts of Buddhism, the Buddha urges his monks to travel to charnel grounds in order to seek out - as objects upon which to meditate - one of the following:

… a corpse, one or two days old, swollen up, blue-black in colour, full of corruption; a corpse eaten by crows; a framework of bones, flesh hanging from it, bespattered with blood, held together by the sinews; bones, scattered in all directions, bleached and resembling shells; bones heaped together, after the lapse of years, weathered and crumbled to dust …

‘Corpse practice', as it was known, was intended to lead the meditating monk to the realisation that - as the Buddha is supposed to have phrased it - ‘This body of mine also has this nature, has this density, cannot escape it.'

Francisco and I drove on. Eventually, after a diversion to a tiny town to eat pork
chilaquiles
from a roadside stall, and to watch a procession of churchgoers bearing framed photographs of dead relatives, we arrived at his intended destination: the village of San Gregorio Atlapulco. It was chilly, and almost midnight. At first, all I could see was an orange glow in the black sky; then, rounding a bend in the road, we came suddenly upon its source. The village cemetery was covered in hundreds of candles, and blanketed everywhere in marigold petals, sending a soft orange light into the sky.

Francisco parked the van, and we walked into the cemetery. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to what I was seeing. Many of the gravestones were only rough concrete slabs, or stubby pieces of wood, but almost none were unattended. Next to each, sitting in folding chairs, or cross-legged on the ground, were groups of two, three, or four people, sometimes more, holding murmured conversations and drinking tequila from paper cups. In one corner, a mariachi band in full costume strolled from grave to grave, serenading every headstone in turn. I stopped a woman who was carrying armfuls of rugs and chairs towards a nearby
headstone, and asked what she was doing. ‘Oh, it's my mother,' she said brightly, gesturing at the grave. ‘We come every year.'

It would be entirely wrong to give the impression that the Day of the Dead - or Mexico's approach to
memento mori
in general, for that matter - represented any kind of shortcut around the inescapable and scarring realities of grief. The participants in the cemetery vigils were not, by and large, those still reeling from the impact of having recently been bereaved. The idea, in any case, was not to adopt a rictus grin in the face of death. That approach is surely the ‘cult of optimism at its worst': it doesn't work, and even if it did, it wouldn't be an appropriate response to loss. The Day of the Dead is not an effort to remake something horrifying as something unproblematic; it is, precisely, a rejection of such binary categories. What was happening in the cemetery was
memento mori
at its most powerful - a ritual that neither repressed thoughts of death, nor sought, in the manner of an American or British Hallowe'en, to render it saccharine and harmless. It was about letting death seep back into life.