Trash - Andy Mulligan [51]
Then, an amazing thing.
Gardo did something so smart I think Rat kissed him, but he says he didn’t! Cool as anything, he held up the money we had left to a slow-moving taxi cab. I think the driver was so stunned he just pulled over, and we piled in before he could smell us. A few minutes later we were off again, on the South Superhighway, and he had twice the fare in his hand and he was smiling too.
‘Where you going?’ he kept saying. ‘Where you going?’
‘Naravo Cemetery,’ we said.
Where else would we go? The square on the map.
And on this particular day, you know – another funny thing – probably half the city was heading that way too – we were just running with the flow. The Day of the Dead, and the Naravo’s the biggest graveyard in our city: everyone goes there, rich and poor alike. So we got down low in our seats, and soon our happy driver was up the ramp and driving fast, overtaking buses and trucks. He put his radio on, and we sang.
We wound down the windows and we sang louder as the sun came up higher, right in our eyes. OK, it wasn’t over, not at all. But we were alive another day, and that was worth singing for!
7
My name is Frederico Gonz, and I make grave memorials.
One small detail from me, for Father Juilliard. You ask, sir, so I will tell you.
I met José Angelico the way I meet many of my customers. I have a workshop on the cemetery road, just past the coffin makers. I specialize in the small, simple stone. I am very aware that my clients have next to nothing, and renting the grave has often taken most of their money. So I modify and modify and get down to the very lowest cost. The dead, however, must have that stone: the reminder, the eternal reminder, that this man, this woman, this child – existed.
On some of the graves the name is marked in paint, or even pen, and everyone knows how sad that is. Make something out of stone, I say, and no one touches the grave. The poor are not buried, you see. There is not enough ground here any more, so in the Naravo they build upwards. The graves of the poor are concrete boxes, each just big enough for the coffin. They go up and up – in some parts twenty boxes high. A funeral here is to slide the coffin in and watch the sealing of the compartment. Part of my service is that I cement the stone that I’ve made into place, and thus seal the chamber.
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