Do not read this. El delito acusa.

2 November, Dead People’s Day

Leandro is at the cemetery to put flowers on his dead people: his mother and father, grandmothers, a baby son that died when it was one minute old, and his brother who died last year. Leandro said it’s wrong to say you don’t have a family. Even if they are dead, you still have them. That isn’t nice to think about, ghost people standing in rows outside the windows, waiting to get acquainted.

Leandro, wife, and dead people are having their party at the graveyard behind the rock beach on the other side. Tamales in banana leaves, atole, and pollo pipian. Leandro said those are the only foods that could attract his brother away from a lady. He meant Lady of the Dead, who is called Mictec-something—Leandro couldn’t spell it. He can’t read. He didn’t cook the tamales this time. At his house, the wife is Captain of Tortillas, and the sergentes are his nieces. When he leaves here, he goes home to a mud thatch house and women who cook for him. Maybe he sits in a chair and complains about us. No one comes to take off his boots. None to take off.

All the maids went off also for Día de los Muertos, and Mother had to warm the caldo for lunch herself. She complained about Mexican servants running off for every excuse. In Washington, D.C., who ever heard of the kitchen help having to go throw marigolds on a grave? She says the indios have so many gods they have an excuse to stilt out of work every day of the year. These Mexican girls. But Mother is one herself. A good thing to remind her, if you want a slap on the kisser.

This morning she said, I am no mestizo, mister, and don’t you forget it. Don Enrique is proud of no indios mixed up in his blood, Pure Spanish only, so now Mother is proud of that too. But she has nothing to celebrate, because of no Indian gods. Not even the God of Pure Spaniards, she doesn’t like him either. She said chingado when she burned her hand after the maids went to their party. Pinche, malinche. Mother is a museum of bad words.

Don Enrique brought back the accounts books from a shop in Veracruz so we can keep track of the truth around here. He told Mother, Desconfía de tu mejor amigo como de tu peor enemigo. Trust your loved ones as you trust your worst enemy. Write. Everything. Down. He slapped the little books on her dressing table, making her jump and the sleeves of her dressing gown tremble. He calls them Truth Books.

Here is the truth. One booklet was pinched by the household thief. Mother was finished with it anyway. She started, but then Cruz took over the job of writing down which days Mother pays them. Otherwise Mother says she paid but really didn’t, because she was juiced. Don Enrique told Cruz to keep tabs whilst he is away in the Huasteca. He says money runs out of this house like blood from a wound.

7 November

Seventy-two seconds, longest time ever. If Mother could hold her breath that long she could be divorced. But that time does not really count, it is on land only. On a bed cercado de tierra, locked by land. Kneeling by the pillow with a pinched nose, holding the watch up to the candle to see the seconds. It’s harder to go that long in the water, because of cold. One way is to breathe a lot first, very fast, then take in one large breath and hold it. Leandro says in the name of God don’t try that when you’re diving, it’s a good way to faint and drown. Leandro used to dive for lobster and sponge for his living, before he was a cooking boy.

That is some slide down the stairs, from a soldier’s life out there diving to a galopino. Cookie! That’s as dangerous as sucking on a nurse’s tit! It was a very rude thing to say this morning to Leandro, who isn’t allowed to be angry. He came back from the Day of the Dead with his hair tied in a special way, the horse-tail in back wound with henequen string. Probably his wife did that.

Leandro said his brother who made the diving goggle was drowned last year whilst diving for sponge. He was thirteen, younger than you and already supporting his mother. Leandro said that without looking up, hitting the knife hard against the board, chopping onions.

Natividad came in then with the tomatoes and epazote from market, so there was no chance to say No lo supe. Usually there is something terrible you don’t know.

Or for Leandro to say, You don’t know anything.

From the exciting life of diving, his brother got to be dead. That is the truth about soldiering, in case you want to know something, Leandro said. Cooking won’t kill you.

This morning low tide was early. The village boys collecting oysters came into the cove and said this beach belonged to them. They screamed Vete rubio, go away blond boy, scramble away like a crab over the coral rocks. The path by the lagoon makes a dark tunnel through mangrove trees to the other side of the point. The beach over there is only a thin strip of rocks, and disappears when the tide comes up. This morning the tide was lowest ever. Knobs of the reef cropped out of the water, like heads of sea animals watching. That side is too rocky for boats. No one goes there. No oyster boys to scream at a rubio who is not rubio, with hair as Mexican black as Mother’s. When they look, do they see anything at all?

Floating on the sea is like flying: looking down on the city of fishes, watching them do their shopping. Flying away como el pez volador. Like a flying fish. The bottom falls, and in deep water you can soar, slipping away from the crowded coral-head shallows to the quiet dark blue. Shadows of hunters move along the bottom.

At the back of the cove on that side, a rock ledge rises up from the water. You can see that cliff from the ferry. It has long white stripes of guano, banners marking the roost holes where seabirds think they are hiding. At the base of that cliff, something lay under the water that can’t be seen from a boat. A dark something, or really a dark nothing, a great deep hole in the rock. It was a cave, big enough to dive down and crawl into. Or feel around the edges and go a little way inside. It was very deep. A water-path tunneling into the rock, like the path through the mangroves.

An unexpected visit from Mr. Produce the Cash. Mother was in a mood when he left. His fancy shoes must have pinched her also. She started a spat with Don Enrique.

24 November

Today the cave was gone. Saturday last, it was there. Searching the whole rock face below the cliff did not turn it up. Then the tide came higher and waves crashed too hard to keep looking. How could a tunnel open in the rock, then close again? The tide must have been much higher today, and put it too far below the surface to find. Leandro says the tides are complicated and the rocks on that side are dangerous, to stay over here in the shallow reef. He wasn’t pleased to hear about the cave. He already knew about it, it is called something already, la lacuna. So, not a true discovery.

Laguna? The lagoon?

No, lacuna. He said it means a different thing from lagoon. Not a cave exactly but an opening, like a mouth, that swallows things. He opened his mouth to show. It goes into the belly of the world. He says Isla Pixol is full of them. In ancient times God made the rocks melt and flow like water.

It wasn’t God, it was volcanoes. Don Enrique has a book on them.

Leandro said some of the holes are so deep they go to the center of the earth and you’ll see the devil at the bottom. But some only go through the island to the other side.

How can you know which is which?

It doesn’t matter, because either one can drown a boy who thinks he knows more than God because he reads books. Leandro was very angry. He said stay away from that place, or God will show you who made those holes.

25 December

The village wakes up in a hurry, whilst the sun seems to struggle with the job as Mother does. Last night was the party for Christmas Eve. Today she will sleep until noon, then wake up with one hand across her forehead, the frilled elbows of her dressing gown shuddering. Her voice like a Browning machine rifle sending the house girls running for her headache powders. And everyone else out of the house.

On the road walking to the village for Christmas mass, a lot of people passed by, nuggets of family in brown shells. A man leading his pregnant wife on a burro, like Joseph and Mary. Three long-legged girls in dresses straddling one gray mare, their legs hanging down like a giant insect. A peevish rooster that ought to have been in a better mood, because look here my friend: at the roadside butcher stand, all your comrades hang upside-down ready for roasting. Sausages also were slung over the line like stockings, and a whole white pig skin just hanging, as if the pig went off and left his overcoat. His wife the sow was alive, tied to a papaya tree in the yard with her piglets rooting all round. They could be free to run away, but don’t, because of their mother chained on the spot.

The little church in the village has no bell, only copal-tree incense floating out the open windows to mix with the fish-rot smell of ocean. Leandro was there with his family, resting one hand on each of his children’s heads, like grapefruits. Later at the fiesta he didn’t ever say Feliz Navidad or Hello friend I come to your house every day. He only clapped together his small son’s hands for the piñata strung from the fig tree. There were firecrackers for the holy babe snapping blue smoke in the road, and amongst all the nut-brown families, one invisible boy.

1 January 1930: First day of the year and decade.

Every cabeza in the house is full of headache powders. Shattered glasses in twinkling pools on the terraza. No word is heard from the turkey that chased children from the yard all December. He greets the New Year from the kitchen, a carcass of bones attended by his audience of flies.

A fine day to go out looking for a tunnel to another world. Perhaps to meet the devil. Mother called out Callete malinche dios mio don’t slam the door! Not even the usual warning about sharks, let them have boy-flesh if they want. Clear sky, empty beach, and the water like a cool pair of hands, begging. Even the reef fishes didn’t speak today.

The lacuna was there again, a dark mouth in the rock. This time the opening was deeper below the surface, but it was still possible to dive down and feel between the lips of rock into a gullet that broadened in darkness. It was the last day of the world then, time to swim inside, thinking of Leandro’s dead brother. Stroking through cold water, counting the pounding heartbeats: thirty, forty, forty-five, one half of ninety. Waiting that long before turning around, feeling the way back toward the entrance, swimming with aching lungs back to the light.

Sun and air. Breathing. Alive, after all. The hand of the watch returned to the top for one more year of life, stolen back.

5 January

Tomorrow is Feast of the Kings. Only here it will be the Feast of Don Enrique’s Sisters and Mother, who came over on the ferry. Leandro has to cook for them all. Cruz and the others went to their villages for the fiesta, but Mother is determined to have a feast for the guests, with or without servants. She pretends she and Don Enrique are married, and the señora is to be called abuela. The so-called grandmother in her chic frock lights a cigarette, crosses her legs, blows smoke out the window.

Mother wants green and red chalupas, and scrambled egg torta with sugar. Leandro would like to be with his family. He’s put out with Mother for making him stay, so he made fun of the señora. A scandal. But he knows he won’t be caught. The capitan and his sergente have a conspiracy.

The rosca de reyes is hardest to make: the cake called Ring of the Kings, using white-flour dough, the same as for Baby’s Crupper tortillas. A blob of dough fit for a king, rolled out on the table, as long and fat as a sea slug. Como pene. Poking it and laughing: Como bato. Leandro is normally much more pious.

Weiner! Jaker!

Pachango!

Thing! Thing of the King!

Leandro had tears in his eyes and said Mother would kill us. He crossed himself and prayed for both souls. He made the cake into a ring by putting the thing-of-the-king in a circle and pressing the ends together. The token goes inside, a small clay baby Jesus that looks like a pig. Leandro said really it’s not even Jesus, it’s the boy-god Pilzintecutli. He dies when the days grow dark in December, then rises again on February 2, which is Candlemas. The ancients were concerned with light and darkness. We are in the dark days now, he said. Whoever finds the token in the cake will have good luck, when the light returns.

All the rest of the year, the clay token sits in a jar in the cabinet waiting to go into this cake. Leandro took the little pig Jesus out of the jar and kissed it before putting it in the rosca. Round jellied fruits go on top, but he put a square piece where the token was inside, his secret way of marking it. Reach for that one, he said, when the dish of cake is passed around.

Is it still lucky if you cheat, instead of getting the token by chance?

Mi’jo, Leandro said. Your mother can’t even remember the day she gave you birth. If an orphan boy is going to have any luck, he will have to make it himself.

What kind of orphan has two living parents? You said everyone has family even if they are ghosts. Or forget your cumpleaños.

Leandro took the orphan’s cheeks in his hands and kissed him on the mouth, and then spanked his crupper like a child, not a boy as tall as a man. A boy with terrible thoughts of kissing a man as a man. Leandro meant nothing by it. A beso for a child.

Leandro went home after the feast. All servants have fled, leaving kitchen scraps, bad moods, and dust. What is the use of good luck in an empty house?

2 February, Candlemas

Leandro was gone nineteen days, now back. He has to make a hundred tamales for Candlemas, without his sergente. It’s better to hide in the amate tree all day reading, a book won’t run off to its family any time it wants. Leandro can’t even read. Let him make tamales all day.

Today begins a year of perfect luck protected by Pilzintecutli, the clay-pig Jesus.

13 February

Today the lacuna appeared, a little below the surface. It’s near the center of the cliff below a knob where a hummock of grass grows out. It should be easy to find again but best to look early, with sun just up and the tide low. Inside the tunnel it was very cold and dark again. But a blue light showed up faintly like a fogged window, farther back. It must be the other end, no devil back there but a place to come up on the other side, a passage. But too far to swim, and too frightening.

One day Pilzintecutli will say, Go ahead lucky boy. Vete, rubio, swim toward that light. Go find the other side of the world where you belong.

The strangest thing. Mother believes in magic. She went back to the village of the giant stone head. After sending Natividad away with the carriage, she said, “This time we both go.” She took off her shoes again to cross the footbridge, then followed a path through the forest right around the edge of a lake. Yellow-winged jacanas flapped up from the water and an alligator rested at the edge, covered with waterweed up to its bulging eyes. Then back into the jungle, under giant trees. We were going to see a brujo, she said finally, because someone has put a bad eye on us both, and that’s why she can’t get another baby. Probably it was Don Enrique’s mother.

The brujo’s bamboo hut stood in a clearing, inside a circle of stones. It might have been made a thousand years ago. The door was a curtain of snail shells strung together that made a wooden tinkling sound when his hand pulled it aside. Inside was an altar covered with little clay figures, and branches with leaves standing in jars, and cockleshells of burning copal gum, the same incense as in the church. He said to take off our shirts, which Mother did immediately, down to her silk underthings. The brujo didn’t look at her, his eyes went to the roof of the hut and he began to sing, so he truly was a brujo, not just a man.

He seemed as old as a person could be, and still living. His chant was quiet and fast, Echate, echate. He walked all around Mother first, swatting her body gently with a branch of leaves dipped in a jar of leaf-water, shaking drops of it on her hair, breasts, and belly, then everything else, son included. Then he blew smoke over her, from the cockleshell of burning gum. With his knotted old hands he held up a figure cut from thin paper, a small catlike man-shaped thing, and burned it in the flame of a candle. Some of the carved figures on his altar looked like a man’s thing, his organ. Stone pachangos.

When he finished Mother paid him in coins. She didn’t speak until after crossing the bridge back to the village. The square was deserted, except for the great stone head. Natividad hadn’t come back. “Enrique can’t be told about this,” she said. “You know that, of course.”

“Does he want you to get a baby?”

She straightened her dress and pulled at the back of her stocking. “Well. It would change things, wouldn’t it?”

Leandro’s baby girl died in January after Feast of the Kings, and no one here knew. Cruz told Mother today. He was gone three weeks, not because he was angry with his sergente, but to bury a child. The two small grapefruit heads in church: only one now. Cruz had a fight with Mother because what Don Enrique pays is not enough for feeding a chicken. She said Leandro’s wife couldn’t get her milk, and the baby died.

How can he go home to a family with nothing to eat, then come to this house to make one hundred tamales? He behaves as if he had no dead children. The real Leandro never comes here. He only pretends.

9 March

Today the lacuna is gone. Directly below the knob in the cliff, nothing. If it is there, then buried below too much ocean. The grass hummock on the cliff face is very low to the water now. Or rather, the sea is higher.

Don Enrique is away in the Huasteca, and Mother has taken up kitchen knives. She waved one around this morning. Not to chop onions but to show she means business about keeping her secrets. Not just the brujo, but also Mr. P. T. Cash. So, no mention here about another surprising visit from him, while the master was away. Anyway Mother is too lazy to lift up a mattress and find this little book.

13 March

The lacuna came back. In the afternoon the rock opened its mouth and swallowed the boy down its gullet. But it was hard to swim, the water was rushing out. It was the same as before, lungs bursting, turning back too soon. Leandro’s brother whispering, Come live with me here, but a brain hungry for oxygen loses courage and wants air.

Tomorrow will be the day.

Last Will and Testament

Let it be known. If HWS drowns in the cave, he leaves nothing
to anyone. His earthly possessions are stolen things: pocket
watch. This book. One year of good luck.
He leaves his body for the fishes to eat.
He leaves Leandro to wonder where he has gone.
He leaves Mother and Mr. Produce the Cash to enjoy the company
of the devil.
Dios habla por el que calla.

14 March

The cave has bones inside. Bones of humans! Things on the other side.

This is how it feels when you are nearly drowned: the brain pounds like a pulse in red and black. The salt water burns your eyes, and you nearly go blind following the light until you come to the air, breathing.

At the end of the tunnel the cave opens up to light, a small saltwater pool in the jungle. Almost perfectly round, as big across as this bedchamber, with sky straight up, dappled and bright through the branches. Amate trees stood in a circle around the water hole like curious men, gaping because a boy from another world had suddenly arrived in their pool. The pombo trees squatted for a close look, with their knobbly wooden knees poking up out of the water. A tiger heron stood one-legged on a rock, cocking an unfriendly eye at the intruder. San Juan Pescadero the kingfisher zipped back and forth between two perches, crying, “Kill him kill him kill him!”

Piles of stone blocks lay in a jumble around the edges of the pool, a broken-down something made of coral rock. Vines scrambled all over the ruin, their roots curling down through it like fingers in sand. It was a temple or something else very ancient.

The light through the trees was shadowy at midday, but the water was clear. Belly-dragged up on a flat stone, sitting at the edge looking back in, it was plain to see the bottom of the cave dropped down to make a sort of room down there, huge and deep. Stones were piled like a sand castle underwater, with bits of shining things mixed into the pile. Maybe yellow leaves, or gold coins. It was like coming up inside a storybook. An ancient temple in the forest, and a pirate’s treasure below. The treasure was mostly shells and broken pottery covered with sea moss, mostly too deep to dive down and reach.

It took hours to explore everything. Some of the broken blocks of the ruin had designs carved on them, a script of lines and circles or perhaps the portraits of gods. One looked like a skeleton, its arms flung open, the skull smiling wide. A water snake slipped off a rock and made a sliding S shape across the top of the water. The jungle vines were tangled like fishing nets. It was the type of forest with a watery floor, and no good way to walk out of there. And no good way to swim back out of that cave, either. No way back from this story, it seemed. Nothing left to do but slide like a turtle into the pool, sink down, and sit on slime-covered rocks and the treasure of ancient times.

That is where the bones were! Leg bones, wedged in the rocks. It made for such a shock, it was hard to breathe after seeing them. Floating in the pool was also not very easy because now the tide pulled downward, dropping lower and sucking against the stones around the edge of the hole, hissing a song of drowning: ahogarse, ahogarse. The ocean pulled hard, dragging a coward explorer back from the secret place, sucking him out through the tunnel and spitting him into the open sea.

Out there again gasping, it was plain that the tide had turned and gone out. Now it was extremely low. Coral knobs poked out like heads. A great round moon hung on the eastern horizon, just coming out of the sea, white as an oyster.

Then it seemed the bones and temple could not have been real, and this cave would vanish again. Only the moon was real, as big and whole as breathing.

A book in Don Enrique’s library says the pagans of old built their castles on this island. Not as tall as the great pyramids of the Azteca, but small stepped temples with platforms for sacrifice. They carved pictures of their gods, which were many in number. The book said the same things Leandro says, that the ancients watched light and signs to tell them when to plant corn, when to get married. But it also told more terrible things: they made sacrifices by throwing gold and sometimes girls (alive) into water holes in the forest. The cave must be that kind of hole, a cenote. Because of the bones.

The book was written by a priest, not very good, but interesting at some parts. Hernán Cortés sent an expeditionary force to destroy the pagan city here and build the cathedral in town. If the ruin in the jungle is really part of that ancient city, then for certain the cenote has gold and treasure in its depths, along with the bones of unlucky girls. Leandro might know something about it, but can’t be asked. There is no trusting his allegiance, he might tell Mother. So he will never know about going inside the lacuna.

24 March

First, the cave wasn’t there today. Or so it seemed. But really it was, nearly two meters down from the surface, buried by tide, with a strong current flowing out of it.

The last time, it was morning when the current inside the cave pulled inward toward the jungle-hole. During the hours of exploring the tide must have turned, so at evening it was easy to swim out. The moon was just rising then. The tides are the cause. The time to go in is just before the tide turns. Otherwise, more bones on that pile.

25 March

The tide was wrong completely, the current flowed out of the cave all day. On the day of the full moon, everything was right.

Don Enrique says a full moon pulls up the highest tides of the month, at midday and midnight. And it pulls them down to their lowest ebb when it is rising or setting. So says a man in a frock coat and breeches who, if he tried to row a boat, would fall out instantly and drown. But Leandro said the same thing about the moon and high tide, so it might be true.

How can you know if the moon is going toward full, or disappearing?

This evening the moon was half, and Leandro said it’s dying away. You can tell because it’s shaped like the letter C, not curved forward like D. He says when the moon is D like Dios, it is growing to fill God’s sky. When dying away it is C, like Cristo on the cross. So, no good tides again for many days.

12 April

Today was the full moon, perfect tide, and the bad luck of slicing the end of a finger with the kitchen knife. Blood everywhere, even in the masa, turning it pink. It had to be thrown out. Oh no, let’s serve it to Don Enrique and Mother! A clayuda of her son’s blood, like the Azteca sacrifices to their gods.

Leandro said, Pray God forgives you for such talk. Get busy and make more masa.

Tonight the moon rose, the beach was quiet, and no one swam into the lacuna. The three Musketeers would have done it, diving in with scabbards in their teeth, not bandages on their fingers. But they were three, all for one and one for all.

Tonight a shadow passed across the moon. Don Enrique says an eclipse. But Leandro says it is El Dios and El Cristo putting their heads together, crying over everything that happens down here.

2 May

Birthday of Santa Rita de Casia. Mother needed cigarettes, but there wasn’t any market today because of the fiesta. All the women went to the procession in long ruffled skirts, their hair braided with ribbons and flowers. Boys carrying beeswax candles as tall as men. The old woman who sells nopal in the market was at the front, dressed like a wrinkled bride. Her old groom shuffled beside, holding her arm.

Leandro says they couldn’t have this fiesta last year because of the Silence against the church. But that Santa Rita de Casia is not really a saint, but a woman-god. Nothing is ever what they say, and no one holy one hundred percent.

12 May

Perfect tide today. Into the cave and back out. The water pushed, all the way in, to touch those bones again. Tomorrow the tide should be almost perfect again. But only a few more days this month, to look for the treasure hidden from Hernán Cortés.

13 May

Mother says tonight. In just a few hours we leave on the ferry. It isn’t possible just to go away from here, but she said, Oh yes it is. Leave everything.

Tell no one, she said: Don Enrique will be furious. Not even Cruz can know, don’t pack anything from your room yet because she would notice. Wait till it’s almost time. Take only what fits in one rucksack. Two books, only. Not those huaraches, don’t be ridiculous, your good shoes.

She said: Bueno. Very fine. If you want to stay here, stay. On this stupid island so far from everything, you have to yell three times before even Jesus Cristo can hear you. I will happily go without you, and light a candle for you in the Catedral Nacional when I get there. Because when Enrique finds out, he’ll kill you instead of me.

Mr. Produce the Cash is meeting us on the mainland.

You will not say one word to Leandro. Not one word, mister.

Dear Leandro, here is the note you won’t read because you can’t read. The pocket watch is in the jar in the cabinet, with the clay Pilzintecutli. It’s a gift to find next year when you have to make the rosca with no sergente to help mix the flour. The watch is gold, maybe you can take it to monte de piedad and get money for your family. Or keep it to remind you of the pest who is gone.