Trash (16 page)

José Angelico used me when his son died. I was sad to see him again with news that his daughter had died also. It meant he had no one in the world now.

He was a thin, lean, gentle man who always spoke quietly. I knew that he was a houseboy for a rich man, but that was all I knew. He found me early in the morning, and he looked as if he hadn’t slept for a long, long time. He gave me just a morning to make the stone, which is unusual, but he said he had run out of money for the funeral home, and the coffin had to be moved that day. It would be a simple ceremony, he said, because there were no relatives.

I offered him all my sympathies, and he paid me two hundred as a deposit, and I set to work.

Pia Dante Angelico: seeds to harvest, my child
were the words he chose.
It is accomplished
.

I did not chisel it myself. My son is ten years old, and is a fine cutter now. He used to rough out and I would finish. Now, he finishes, and he’s developing his own style of turning letters – small flourishes that add elegance to elegant words. He completed the stone in four hours, and we set it by for pick-up.

How was I to know it was lies? He looked to me so meek and so mild – there wasn’t a lie in his face. He took the stone and paid me from a small leather bag. He had the coffin behind him, carried by two young men – street sweepers, they looked like. No priest. I went along and saw the coffin placed inside, and we said prayers for the child. I sealed it and fixed our little stone. All I could see was the worry and grief, like he was a man worn down to nothing. There wasn’t a lie in his face.

When I read about him dying in a police station, I just thought,
Poor man
. I read the story to my son, and we said a prayer for him also.

Raphael, Gardo and Jun-Jun (Rat):

The Day of the Dead is about the biggest festival of the year out here – bigger even than Christmas and Easter together. It’s when ten million candles get lit, and the ghosts come up and walk around arm in arm, and everyone goes to see their departed ones, who stand up out of the ground and say hello.

That was why the traffic soon got slow, and before too long we were in a long jam – at last the taxi dropped us on the road that led off to the cemetery, and we walked in the smell of flowers.

There were crowds pushing everywhere.

People walked with kids and babies in their arms, whole big families, and some of the men had tables on their heads and chairs in stacks, on trolleys; they had cases of beer, great big bottles of water, and the ice carriers were dragging
great slabs of ice, shouting for a way through. Little stoves, bags of food, and people dressed up as best they could, as if for a carnival – little girls in new dresses and the boys in ties, even though it was a hot morning. This is the day when your family is together again. You set up house by the grave, and sit and chat and eat and drink right on to midnight. By the time it gets to evening, the whole cemetery is glittering with the candles – and that’s when they say you need an extra chair, and an extra glass. That’s when you can turn round, and dead Grandma’s right beside you, old bones in whatever you buried her, smiling away with a hundred stories to tell. That’s when the kid you lost is playing around at your feet again, and if you had some quarrel with a brother who died, you can talk it through and settle it. Father Juilliard told Rat all about the resurrection one time, and I guess it’s this that he was talking about.

Rat says: I’ve never seen it, of course, but then I have no family here.

I do believe in ghosts, though, and on Sampalo island, where I’m from, people say they come out of the sea sometimes, if a boat goes down. They come into the village, sad as sad, and cry by your door all night. What do I know, though? I’d seen nothing like this.

Around us, the flower shacks got thicker and were overflowing with flowers till the scent lifted you off your feet. There were stores with sweet little Bible verses, plastic
statues, plaques and postcards. The lottery sellers were everywhere, carrying wads of tickets and shouting. After all that, we came to the candle stalls – so many candles, thick and thin, tiny as your finger or too big to carry. Back from them there were food stalls, doing good business – and the three of us stopped and ate some fish, because we were hungry again and hadn’t had breakfast.

Raphael: I cleaned the blood off my arms, and Gardo said it was time for a plan. Opening up the Bible, we sat eating and reading, and nobody bothered us, because who’s going to get upset about even street kids, if they’re reading the Bible on All Souls’ Day? There was that breeze again, getting stronger still with all that flower smell, and we could feel the freak typhoon coming in on us again, ripping at the tents. It was going to be hard keeping the candles lit, so there were lots of people buying little jars for that reason.

I said, ‘
Where we lay
,’ and I scratched my head. ‘I guess he’s buried here. Does that make sense?’

‘He won’t be buried anywhere,’ I said (this is Gardo). ‘If the police killed him, he’s going to be burned up by now and in the trash. Also, he must have wrote all that before he died.’

That was true and we all agreed. But we also thought,
What if his wife’s buried here?
If that was the case, then
Where we lay
could mean the family grave. And that was what we decided to look for.

*   *   *

Rat now: I felt bad then, because that meant reading was needed. I couldn’t read, and that meant I’d be no use. There was nothing for it, though, so we finished our fish and started, and I carried the papers and the book and followed on.

Like I said, it’s the biggest graveyard in the city. Once through the gates, there were walkways spreading off to left and right, stretching for miles. We were soon lost in graves, trees and monuments. There were bushes and shrubs, and as we walked, great big angels would suddenly appear at you out of the leaves. Peaceful-looking Madonnas looking into the distance, and weepy little Jesuses on tiny little crosses, and then big-brother Jesuses stretched out, with eyes up to heaven. I had never been watched over by so many saints and I nearly got split up from the boys looking at them.

The tables were going up and picnics were opening. The parties were starting, and soon Raph and Gardo knew they’d never find one name in all these millions.

‘We can ask,’ said Raphael. ‘There’s an office with lists of names … is that a big risk?’

‘Everything is,’ said Gardo, looking around, still looking mean. ‘Everything has been.’

That was when I said I would do it. I said, ‘I can pretend Mrs Angelico did me a good turn and that I’ve come to say hi.’

So Gardo counted me back a bit of my money – he’d
become the money-man after the deal with Marco. ‘Get her some flowers,’ he said. ‘That’ll make it real.’

That’s what I did, and it took three hours or more. There was a big queue of people, and I kept getting shoved back. When I got a guard to see me, he said he needed twenty to check the record – which was a lie, but I gave it to him. Then he went off and took ages, answering all sorts of other questions from people, so I just sat with my flowers, hoping he wouldn’t forget me altogether. It was late afternoon when I got my slip of paper, and Gardo thought I’d been off drinking.

‘B twenty-four/eight,’ I said to Raph. ‘He says, “Top of the slope and look for a pink angel.” ’