No Place to Bury the Dead

I came to Mezquite searching for Visitación Salazar, the woman who would bury my children and teach me to bury those of others. I walked to the ends of the earth, or where I believed my own world had come to its end. I found her one May morning beside a stack of burial chambers. She wore red leggings and work boots, and a colorful scarf was tied around her head. A halo of wasps wheeled about her. She resembled a dark-skinned Madonna astray in a dump.

On that arid parcel of land, Visitación Salazar was the only living soul. Her dark lips framed white, square teeth. She was a beautiful Black woman, shapely and willful. Her arms, strong from cleaning the graves, gleamed in the sun. It was as though she were made of oil and jet instead of flesh and blood.

Sand had muted the light, and wind needled in our ears, a moan that seemed to rise through fissures in the ground. That breeze was a warning, a dense, strange dust storm, like madness or pain. The end of the world was a mountain of dust, formed from the bones we had left behind on our journey here.

At the entrance was a sign daubed with thick brushstrokes: THE THIRD COUNTRY. It was an unofficial cemetery, home to the dead that Visitación Salazar buried in exchange for goodwill alone, sometimes not even that. Almost all who had been laid to rest had only the date of their burial on the slab. Their meager tombstones were engraved with scribbles made in fresh concrete: the rough scrawl of those who would never rest in peace.

Visitación didn’t even turn to look at us. She was on the phone. The device was in her left hand; in her other were plastic flowers, which she planted into the recently churned mortar.

“Yes, honey, I can hear you!”

“Are you sure she’s going to talk to us?” Salveiro murmured. I nodded.

“I can hear you, mamita!” she continued, “I was saying there are no more vaults. Ayyyyy! You’re breaking uuuuup!” she cried, tragicomic.

“Will she ever get off the phone . . . ?”

“Hush, Salveiro.”

“Tell the man to wait!” she cried, finally addressing us. “The dead are patient! The dead are in no hurry whatsoever!”

Another gust of wind seared our skin. The land surrounding Mezquite was a skillet piled high in thistles and laments. It was a place where there was no need to drop to one’s knees to do penance. The penance that had brought us here was enough.

That was how it was in The Third Country, a border within another border, where the eastern and western mountain ranges met, as did the living and the dead, good and evil, reality and myth.

The plague and the rains arrived together, as bad omens do. The cicadas fell quiet, and a tumor of dust materialized in the sky until it started leaking drops of brown water. In contrast to the calamities we had suffered before, this one shattered our memories and desires.

The plague attacked memory, disorienting it first, then eroding it. It spread quickly, and the older the person, the worse they were afflicted. The elderly fell like flies, their bodies unable to withstand the assaults of the first fever. In the beginning, it was said to be contracted from water, then there was talk of birds, but nobody could explain the amnesia epidemic that transformed us all into specters and filled the sky with vultures. It made us inept, swaddled us in fear and oblivion. We wandered aimlessly, lost in a world of ice and fever.

Men went out into the street to wait. For what? I never found out.

We women did whatever we could to keep despair at bay: We gathered food, opened and closed windows, climbed up to the rooftops, swept the patios. We gave birth heaving and shouting like those madwomen whom no one offers even a sip of water. Life concentrated in us, in what we, until then, had been capable of holding on to, or pushing out.

My husband got infected too, but it took me some time to realize. I misattributed the first symptoms to his temperament. Salveiro was a man of few words. He was reserved and felt little curiosity beyond his own affairs. When I met him, he worked at his family’s garage, loosening nuts with a lug wrench, or lying alongside a hydraulic jack to fix some malfunction in the innards of a run-down truck. I often passed by the dark premises but never paid too much attention to what happened inside. One day I went in because I needed engine grease for the locks at home: a pot of 3-in-One, something to lubricate the latches, but Salveiro offered to come take a look.

“It’s not the latches. It’s the timber. It’s being eaten away by termites, that’s why the doors won’t close, see?” He showed me a small mound of fine wood particles.

He came back the same week to inspect the roof and the rest of the house. He surveyed the house in its entirety. Checking whether a beam was a breeding ground for gnats, whether the table legs hadn’t been finished properly or the table itself had been ineptly sawn. He went from one end to the other, a tool in hand. He sanded this and hammered that. Everything he set his eyes on stopped creaking or rasping, as if he could repair things by sight alone.

“And who is this, Angustias?”

“The tire fitter’s son, Papá. He offered to fix the window sashes and frames.”

After each visit, we offered him a beer to thank him for his trouble. He took a seat beneath the tamarind tree and didn’t mind being quizzed.

“Why don’t you leave the garage and do this instead? You have a knack for it,” said my father, but Salveiro took a swig without answering. “Angustias has a hairdressing license. You could try taking a course. If you had a certificate in carpentry, you could run your own workshop.”

“I just opened a beauty salon,” I said, drawing attention to myself. “It’s two blocks from here. Come for a haircut, and I’ll tell you about course prerequisites?”

He showed up the next day. He was wearing clean trousers and a freshly ironed shirt. The sleek skin of his face, smelling of aftershave, contrasted with his grease-and oil-smeared arms. After massaging shampoo and lotion into his scalp, I steered him toward a chair, settled a cape over him, and used my best scissors to trim his locks. The damp tufts collected on his shoulders.

In the end, Salveiro didn’t take the course, but he kept showing up three times a week to deliver one thing or repair another.

“Angustias, he looks like a tree trunk, but if you like him . . . ,” my father murmured in my ear before smiling for the only photo we took of ourselves in the doorway of the courthouse where Salveiro and I were married.

My husband was a good man. He was gifted in bed. He knew how to touch me with the same patience he showed whenever he manipulated wood. He said little, but I didn’t mind. And that was the problem: I never imagined that his silence had something to do with the lethargy already sweeping the streets, with the cloud of weariness that was burying the city alive.

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From No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo. Used with permission of the publisher, HarperVia. Copyright © 2024.