The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (26 page)

One of the things I am thinking about today is how different this summer has been from the last one. A year ago I’d wanted some sort of epiphany from the Mass, anything that I might just pull from within myself during an hour of concentration and maybe even prayer to help me understand the persistence of grief and how to honorably break its grip on me. Now here I am just a couple of weeks short of the first anniversary of my relationship with Jovi. I tell myself that I want nothing for myself at tonight’s Mass, only a space for intense reflection, and to do what feels right. But anniversaries, of this sort anyway, are not like other days. The wound is tender today. Nostalgia, sadness. In the morning I spent about an hour reading Aura’s book. This year, unlike last year and the four years before it, I don’t observe my private and hellish stations of the cross, thinking that at this hour you were in that horrible rural hospital, at this hour we were in the air ambulance, etc. I feel myself drawing back from horror and trauma. I will not take the day off, I have work to do, I need to finish writing this part about Tepito and the summer of 2013.

But last night, in bed beside Jovi, I woke at about three in the morning, flooded with anxiety, thinking about what Aura was going through at that same hour six years ago, in the emergency ward, in that unspeakably terrifying and heartrending void that I can never reach, alone as she faced her death, only hours away. During that long night and morning when the hospital staff wouldn’t let me into the emergency ward to see her. When I could be of no help, when I would never be able to be of any help to her ever again, when my love could not have been more futile.

What is it like, what has it been like, for the Tepito families, as they ponder the fates of their missing? What are they going through, when they wake at three in the morning?

That same Saturday, after we’d met with Doña María Teresa Ramos in her
tianguis
, there seemed to be no one else for Pablo and me to speak to; the families hadn’t yet returned from México State. But it turned out that it was the day of the monthly Mass for La Santa Muerte: St. Death or Holy Death. In the DF’s working-class barrios and in many other parts of the republic, La Santa Muerte, a gowned skeleton, often wearing a princess’s tiara, usually carrying a scythe and globe, has become a figure of popular devotion nearly as iconic as the Virgin of Guadalupe, and in some communities may even have overtaken the Virgin. In the DF there are numerous Santa Muerte shrines, including one in nearby Colonia Morelos tended by a “priest” who is also a dentist, but the most important one is in Tepito. The monthly Mass draws thousands of worshippers. A few of the merchant police offered to walk us over there, and to get us inside so that we could speak to Doña Queta, the famously formidable “priestess” who presides over the shrine and the Mass. Pablo had interviewed her before, and he thought that if anyone had a feeling for the pulse of Tepito, it was Doña Queta. She is one of the most well-known and respected personages in the barrio. Surely she’d heard something or had some insight into the Heavens case. The faithful confided in her, confessed to her, and sought her blessing every day.

The Santa Muerte shrine is on the outskirts of Tepito, on Calle Alfarería, away from the market, on the other side of Avenida del Trabajo, in an area of dilapidated streets that seem relatively quiet and are mostly lined with
vecindades.
If these blocks look somewhat bombed, that’s partly because the 1985 earthquake hit the neighborhood hard, inflicting damage everywhere, and many collapsed buildings were never rebuilt or replaced. The vacant lots and ghost buildings are not necessarily uninhabited—through some paneless windows you spot laundry hanging in the blackness inside, or cartons piled high. I kept thinking, during the first visit and then even more so on subsequent ones, that the sky from Tepito, looming over the urbanscape’s low uneven contours—concrete rooftops, peeling paint and whitewash, rusted corrugated metal sheets, empty gaps—looks different than it does from other neighborhoods. The sky seems to crouch over the neighborhood as if worried for it, helplessly gazing down from on high, but also hoisting its skirts up away from it. Or else, I thought another day, it’s like a Paul Bowles sky, which makes Tepito feel like an ancient walled city in the desert, and accentuates its busy, tense, and ominous insularity.

That Saturday, Calle Alfarería was packed for blocks on end with devotees of the Santa Muerte cult. Over loudspeakers, we could hear Doña Queta’s intense, somewhat harsh and relentless voice pronouncing prayers or a sermon. The scent of marijuana pervaded the air. On a strip of trampled grass and dirt along the edge of the avenue, vendors were selling all manner of Santa Muerte figurines, statues, images, amulets, and other merchandise, but some were also selling small busts of Jesús Malverde, the outlaw patron folk saint of the narcos, especially in northern Mexico. As San Judas Tadeo, at the center of another phenomenally popular Mexico City cult, is the patron saint of lost and desperate causes, and also is believed by some, mainly by prostitutes I suppose, to especially protect prostitutes, the Santa Muerte is considered the protector of thieves, and is generally associated by those outside the cult with criminality. La Santa Muerte apparently has centuries-old cultural roots that some researchers trace to sixteenth-century Chiapas and Guatemala, but the contemporary version of the cult, much metamorphosed, didn’t become known in Mexico City until around 2000, and then burgeoned. The death saint’s current mystique, the root of its popularity, seems to have spread from the country’s penitentiaries. A former girlfriend, Verónica, back in the 1990s, used to photograph the Islas Marías federal prison and its inmates, spending weeks at a time on the legendary prison island, and I remember her telling me about La Santa Muerte, and how only one prisoner at a time was allowed to have the gowned skeleton tattooed on his back, and how another prisoner might try to murder that one to seize the honor for himself. When Claudio Lomnitz, in
Death and the Idea of Mexico,
quotes a follower of the Santa Muerte who says, “She’s miraculous, but she is also very jealous . . . because you can only believe in her. . . . And if you don’t, she takes you with her,” I remember how furious Verónica was with me when she discovered that I’d slid a tiny prayer card with an image of the Santa Muerte into my wallet next to one of San Simón, another folk saint-divinity attractive to criminals, and to many others too, from Guatemala, with divine ancient Maya roots. I only had the cards because I liked them, but she insisted La Santa Muerte would harm me if her image had to share my wallet with San Simón, and she made me throw the card away.

Now Santa Muerte images, and tattoos, are all over the place in Mexico, especially among the more marginalized groups in the city and country. Daniel Hernández, in
Down and Delirious in Mexico City,
reported that a taxi driver told him, “The local narco capos bring their automatic assault weapons to Doña Queta’s on Halloween so that the tools of their trade can be blessed by Death.” Pablo said that when he was reporting his piece on the cult for
El País
, some heavy-looking men, in mobster suits, carrying walkie-talkies, had turned
up while he was interviewing Doña Queta, and that their presence had clearly embarrassed her. Raúl was accompanying Pablo and told him they were Federales, PGR federal police, often the same as crime capos anyway. Claudio Lomnitz describes a Mexico City “brotherhood of policemen and criminals that has the cult of La Santa Muerte at its core.” Lomnitz situates the cult as prospering in a spiritual space left vacant in Mexico by the receding of the “sanctity of the state,” and by implication the sanctity and authority of traditional Catholicism too. He writes that while the “cult seems to have begun on the fringes of the state—among the criminal element and the police—[it] has only recently begun to work its way into the mainstream,” attracting law-abiding followers and those who, like many Tepiteños, live in circumstances where the line between illegality and lawfulness is commonly blurred. La Santa Muerte now has millions of followers in Mexico, but this has less to do with whatever association with criminality the saint may have and everything to do with what any criminal has in common with every other person, and that is that someday he or she will die. So here, again, was the Mexican idea of a skeleton, of Death, as an equalizer between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, and criminal and law-abiding. “We believe in you because you are just,” goes a prayer at the dentist’s shrine. “You don’t discriminate. You take the poor and the rich.” Mexico’s Catholic hierarchy condemns the Santa Muerte cult as paganism, and in parts of Mexico authorities have had Santa Muerte shrines destroyed, and the faithful have marched to defend their “freedom of religion.” In the DF, in 2009, as Hernández reports, they marched right up to the doors of the Metropolitan Cathedral on the Zócalo. But La Santa Muerte really works more like pure Catholicism, if far from doctrinally pure—in Catholicism, praying to the saints, “God’s most gracious advocates,” is another way of praying to God. That’s what one of the merchant policemen was explaining to me as we walked over there. “It’s not the worship of death itself,” he said. The faithful, he said, pray for the intercession of La Santa Muerte with God as they might similarly pray to the Virgin or to any saint. But La Santa Muerte is especially powerful because she shares with God the knowledge of when death will call us. Our destiny is death, but we still have lives to endure. La Santa Muerte knows how much time we have left and can ask God, who also knows, for help on our behalf. It seemed easy enough to understand when explained that way.

But I was far more curious about what Doña Queta might have to say about the Heavens case and the missing Tepito young people than I was about La Santa Muerte. Many years spent in Central America had long ago used up whatever fascination I’d once had with folk religions. We went around to the back of the shrine, where the merchant association police passed us off to a teenager who was waiting for us and who led us through the packed, jostling crowd to a beefy, smooth-faced young man who turned out to be Doña Queta’s son. Most of the faithful carried their own framed portraits or statuettes of La Santa Muerte, many of these inside backpacks slung backward over their chests, draped skulls poking out the tops. Some hauled along life-size or even larger figures of La Santa Muerte, made of lacquered papier-mâché; one that I saw was winged like a giant bat. People pulled figures or portraits of La Santa Muerte from their bags while others crouched in front and blew marijuana on these images—a rite, I suppose, that I saw repeated several times. We were taken into a roped-off area alongside the altar, at the front of the
vecindad
where Doña Queta lives. She was finishing her sermon, I caught very little of it. Inside its windowed altar, the life-size Santa Muerte stood in her radiant blue gown, a matching satiny
chal
draped over her head, which is a human skull, with hollow eyes and a grin of yellow teeth, wearing a shoulder-length brown wig. Her long, brown-boned fingers were also those of a human skeleton. Doña Queta regularly and dotingly changes La Santa’s color-coordinated vestments and adornments. Perched near the feet of the saint was a chocolate-skinned baby mannequin, dressed like a little king, a Santería figure—Doña Queta is a devotee of that Afro-Cuban folk religion too. There were all kinds of other stuff in and around the altar, including banks of fresh flowers and a platter of red lollipops. People had formed an extremely long, winding line for their chance to visit one-on-one with La Santa Muerte. Doña Queta was helping to direct traffic, letting people through the little gate, shouting, “One at a time . . . wait your turn . . . don’t push.” Her coarse black hair is splotched white, as if by a paintbrush, just over her forehead, and she has a handsome brown face, with a strong jaw and sharply winged brows over heavy-lidded, intense black eyes. Pablo said later that she seemed in an especially testy mood. A tall blond man standing in our area was a Danish anthropologist, and while Pablo spoke to him, I went to the front, as close to the altar as I could get. Then a mariachi band began playing right behind me and for the next hour or so I was trapped there. Not only their clothing, hairstyles, and worn facial features but also something in their anxious, passionate expressions suggested that most of these worshippers were poor. Though most were clearly urban working people, they reminded me of Maya peasant worshippers in Guatemalan highland villages for whom the religious statues inside a church are not just representations of this or that saint but literally divine and powerful in themselves. They approached Doña Queta, the grand holy lady, with nervous docility, and then went forward to beseechingly stand, bow, and pray before the holy skeleton, holding out their own Santa Muerte figures and images, kissing their fingers and pressing them to the glass unless Doña Queta sharply told them not to. Some took photographs. The priestess hurried them along, because there were still hundreds of people waiting their turn. Those who wanted to leave a lighted candle or a gift—a bouquet of roses or a fistful of lollipops—had to carry their offerings into the small room off to the side. Some of the young men were clearly drunk or on drugs or both. Some of the women looked like prostitutes, the very poor ones who line the streets outside the Merced market. I saw countless Santa Muerte tattoos. One inebriated youth, bedraggled but muscular, who was being unruly in line, approached Doña Queta. I was surprised by how attentive she was as he spoke to her, and then she seemed to speak sternly but kindly to him—she knows his mother, I thought to myself—before prayerfully blessing him, her hand over his forehead. He stumbled forward to the altar, and then stayed too long and became agitated again when he was told to move on, though he finally did. I watched Doña Queta speak with and bless several of the faithful as she had done with the inebriated youth. All of the people I watched approach the altar were there to ask for something that they believed or hoped Holy Death could deliver to them from God: protection, health, money, love, an end to loneliness or to misery, success in one endeavor or another. And who is to say that asking in this way, concentrating on what you want, summoning what you believe to be some greater power to strengthen your own endurance or will, might not be of help? Why do humans pray? And does it much matter who or what you pray to? Just reciting or reading a poem can be a prayer, I knew from my own experience. Poetry is faith, devotion, and desire too; sometimes it’s a spiritual humbling, sometimes an uplifting. After Aura died a friend, Sharon, brought me an inscribed copy of Joan Didion’s
The Year of Magical Thinking
. Didion’s advice to me, in a separate note, was to “read lots of poetry,” and I did.