The Toltec Art of Life and Death

“The funeral of Sara’s son, Memín.”

“And the other? Where is he now?”

“Miguel is there, in this peculiar memory, standing at his mother’s side.”

Lala looked through the crowd until she spotted him, an eleven-year-old standing close to his mother and looking up at her face as she sobbed savagely. As other relatives moved in to console her, she turned from her son to fall into the arms of her husband. Losing sight of his parents in the crush of people, Miguel edged carefully away, studying the scene from the shade of the elm tree, where his older brothers had gathered in troubled silence.

“This is bad,” said his grandfather from his post beside Sarita. “No one is attending to the boys. Yes, they are almost grown, except for Miguel, but this is a heartbreak for them, too. How is it that we neglect the innocent, the uninitiated, in our selfish wish to grieve?”

“Oh, they are initiated,” the redhead responded, anxiously rubbing Sarita’s wrist. “They have already memorized the script to this piece of human theater. They will survive, of course, by donning their costumes and shouting their well-rehearsed lines to the balcony, just like everyone else. To tell the truth, this is what makes me enthusiastic about humankind. Mindful drama.”

Don Leonardo looked at her, astonished. “Mindful?”

“Just look,” she said. “You are a great one for looking.”

The two of them turned to watch the assembly of mourners. Everyone was now crowded around the grave site in a tight circle—men, women, small children, and bewildered teenagers. Sara, the grieving mother, was at the center. A priest could be heard speaking, but he was barely visible within the throng. Then, after a few moments, even his words were lost, for a wailing rose from the group that was both chilling and disquieting, a sound that obliterated every other sound. Rising from the initial soft moan of one woman’s grief, there came a chorus of moans that grew and grew until it felt like a torrent of sorrow, the hymn of a thousand bereaved mothers. Beneath its refrain thrummed the resonant murmur of men, comforting and consoling. The noise swept skyward, up and around in random circles, until it finally reached a crescendo and plummeted to Earth. Up and down it went—swirling, spiraling, plummeting. In the midst of its fury, the priest shouted out, inviting the bereaved to offer parting gifts to the deceased—flowers, notes, rosaries. As the mourners began performing their ritual farewells, the sorrowful background voices began to falter. Wailing settled into whimpering. Finally, the cacophony faded to scratchy silence, like a musical masterpiece lost in the final grooves of an old phonograph record. The funeral was over, and the crowd scattered onto the grassy hillside in separate little bunches, each one advancing toward a waiting car.

Throughout this remarkable scene, little Miguel stood by the elm tree where he had earlier gone to join his brothers. After the brothers had joined the group at the gravesite, Miguel remained by himself, watching and listening. Don Leonardo kept his attention on the boy; he followed the whimsical patterns and images that moved through the youngster’s mind. The child was seeing the drama—the great skirmish of emotion that was playing out in front of him—without submitting to the spell of it. As Leonardo dreamed with the boy, he began to relax and to remember, his mouth curling into a sly smile that flitted across his face and found refuge in his knowing eyes.

The death of my older brother was a devastating event for me and for the whole family. He was nineteen years old, and already a husband and a father. Of course, he was still a child to most of the adults around him, and certainly in the eyes of his mother. His death came by surprise, as it does when it touches the very young. Then again, young men seem to woo death like zealous lovers. Memín drove fast, and with reckless pleasure. At nineteen, young men are gods; we are immortal, because we say so. Never mind those who worry over us and who would give their lives for us. And yet, at nineteen Memín was the head of his own family. His young bride was pregnant with their second child. He had already accumulated heavy responsibilities, even as he careened headlong into manhood. Before he could reach it, however, he was killed at the wheel of his speeding car. His little family was with him, and thankfully they survived. In that sense, he lived on through his children, but the brave and blazing light that was Memín went out forever.

By the time I myself was nineteen, I also was too arrogant to listen, and too full of life to respect the nearness of death. In those heedless years, I drank too much, partied too much, and eventually pushed fate against a concrete wall in my merry insolence. I would have courted danger to the point of death, like my oldest brother, had something not prevented me. But something did, and I lived to grow a little wiser. I lived to achieve the promise of wisdom that life makes to every child.

Such wisdom was an integral part of me when I was very young and hadn’t yet lost it in the deep hormone drifts of adolescence. At eleven years old, I was still thoughtful. I may even have been wise. I had my dreams, and I had my heroes. Like my other brothers, I saw Memín as an action hero. Certainly, he was always in action; he was always moving, running, speeding, laughing. He chased schemes, goals, girls, and we assumed that nothing could stop him from catching all of them. Wasn’t he faster than time? Wasn’t he quicker than destiny, and stronger than doubt? Wasn’t he the coolest guy we knew? It took a long time after his death to realize that Memín—brother and action figure—would no longer be playing among us.

Strangely, his most lasting gift to me—the youngest brother who played such a small part in his life—was his funeral. My childish thoughts moved toward a kind of wisdom that day. Standing among my relatives, I felt as if I had two families: one was caught up in a scene from one of Mamá’s telenovelas, in which each character, played by actors with varying talents, wreaked havoc in his own life and the lives of others. My other family communicated through impressions, feelings, and encouragements. This second family might not have existed at all, or they might have been right there, living with me. They might have been my mother, my father, and my brothers, talking to me beneath the noise of their randomly spoken words.

There might have also been a third family with me that day—I could have been sensing a lingering trace of my ancestors. The old ones were gone but not gone, and all of them were wiser than I. Whatever that connection was, I felt I had company that morning when we buried Memín. The mystifying presence of the old ones stayed with me throughout the day, even as we left the cemetery and went home . . . and the family’s bitter tears turned inexplicably to laughter.

That’s right. As if someone had changed the channel on our tiny black-and-white television, the mood of the group lightened miraculously when the front door opened and women poured into the house to lay out platters of food. Suddenly I was watching a different kind of spectacle. In this one, the women gossiped, the children played, and after a few beers, the men took turns telling hilarious stories about my dead brother.

I saw how people put on arbitrary faces and took them off—on cue, and following each other’s lead. Racked with grief in one instant, they needed just a little encouragement to remove the grief masks and start again with a joke and a smile. They kept up with each other, mirroring responses back and forth, eyebrows twisting and lips moving to the words someone else was speaking. Oh, there was food on the tables, and everyone ate well that afternoon, but I saw for the first time how nobody missed a bite from life’s emotional buffet.

And it wasn’t all good. With every bite of biscochito, they took two doses of poison—feasting on scandal, sharing disapproval, spreading rumors. A kind woman would say unkind things about someone else, inexplicably. A grown man would seem pleasantly congenial one moment and fighting mad the next, for no other reason but that a particular word had been uttered. A word, a phrase, a look, a shrug—what more did they need? I’d been learning how to act this way for years, without realizing that I had become a master at it. It was already easy for me, at eleven years old. It was automatic, but when I watched everyone else that day, I felt the wrenching shock that comes with sudden awareness.

Emotions seemed to be feeding something I couldn’t see. They ran unchecked through each human body, causing sickness and frenzy—but for what reason? There was nothing about sadness, anger, or joy that was wrong. I remembered a time in my childhood when emotions ran through me like river sprites—they touched me, changed me, and then vanished without leaving a scar. These people, though, were scarred in ways I couldn’t see, and the pain was still being felt. It seemed odd for someone to submit to sorrow simply because the occasion called for it. And a bit later, were they all being jovial simply because it was three o’clock? Would they be terrified by evening, and disappointed by bedtime? There didn’t seem to be any rationale for their emotional drama—except that someone, or something, was feeding on the power of it.

In time, an idea came to me. As I listened, and as I watched, I could see that normal emotions turned intense, even vicious, as people were drawn into one story or another. It might be something they were hearing, or saying, or thinking, but the story ruled each of them, and changed them, turning them into hunters, hungry for a certain kind of blood. Sensing, feeling humans were being transformed into creatures who devoured human feeling.

I began to play with random emotions, feeling them at my fingertips, as people moved around the little house that day. Without speaking to anyone, I practiced shifting moods and attentions. Sitting on the floor, I steered the subtle flow of emotional energies here and there, getting a sense for how it was done. People laughed, then they cried a little. They comforted each other, and then fell silent. The current would stop, start, then move faster. It would correct itself, making a new pattern, and the moods would shift again. No one noticed the little boy with eyes closed, seeing something that couldn’t be seen, as his fingers gently touched the air around him and his expression remained curious but serene.

Look at him. Do you see what he’s doing?” asked Sarita, who was sitting on one of the high-backed chairs in the home she’d shared with her husband and children long ago. It was interesting to find her elderly self there, in her usual seat at the head of the table, staring at bowls of salsa and platters of chicken. Sipping a cup of herbal tea, she felt she might recover her strength again.

This kind of scene, where dozens of relatives filled the house and spilled onto the porch and into the street, was as familiar as old shoes. She still loved nothing better than to hold family gatherings at her home—to cook, to eat, and to exchange stories. She could hear José Luis laughing out on the porch, and she felt deeply comforted. These had been wonderful years for the two of them, when the older girls were married and raising their own families, and when the first grandchildren were born. Life in this tiny place had seemed perfect, at least before the accident. After that, it had seemed less safe and less certain.

“I do see what the boy is doing,” said don Leonardo, “but I can’t see why he’s doing it.” He went back to picking galletas off the dessert tray.

“Of course you can,” she said, pointing at the boy, who was still sitting on the living room carpet. “You and I do it all the time. He’s watching life flow around the room in ribbons and streams.”

“He’s not normal; that I can say. Maybe before, but not now.”

“It was far from a normal day.”

Sarita looked around, moved at the sight of so many dear family members. There were nieces and nephews, children and grandchildren—most of them old now, many of them departed. She was one of only a few left of her generation, those who remembered the old times, and yet she had to admit it was hard to recognize many of the people in this room. Had she changed as much as they?

There was an old man sitting on the divan at the far end of the room, a plate balanced on his lap. He was dressed elaborately in a traditional Mexican outfit of flared black pants and a cropped jacket, both studded in silver conchas. Beneath the jacket he wore a ruffled blouse, once white perhaps, but now faded to a musty yellow. A large sombrero lay next to him on the couch, grimy with age, its tassels knotted and stained. The old man’s skin looked like sun-baked buffalo hide, but his eyes were bright and full of mischief.

“Is that—?” she began, and then stopped herself. “Could that be don Eziquio?”

Don Leonardo gave her a look made of fresh innocence and headed toward the tub of cold beer that awaited him on the porch. Muttering to herself, Sarita rose from the table and moved across the room with slow deliberation, still unsure of her balance. She approached the leathered old man and stood over him as he wolfed down his food and hummed quietly to himself with pleasure.

“Grandfather,” she said abruptly. “Why are you here?”

The rugged face looked up at her in surprise, beaming a smile of recognition. “Sara! How very old you’ve become!” he exclaimed, swallowing a mouthful of beans. “I’m honored to be answering the call of my much-bewildered son. He is in need of my advice and expertise, as it happens.”

“My father called you? Do you know why?”

“A matter of death and life, I was told,” he explained cheerily, ripping the last meaty morsel from a chicken bone. “And he promised there would be women.”

“It is a matter of death . . . and life,” Sarita said softly. “We find ourselves at the funeral, so long ago, of my sweet boy, Memín. But our purpose here is to save my youngest son, whom you may not remember.”

“Of course I remember!” he said, patting his lips with a stained napkin. “Miguel Angel! It is for that reason I feel confident there will be women.” He peered through the crowd of people. “Which one is he?”

“He is there, on the floor. At this time, he would have just turned eleven.”

“Eleven? Is that all? Ah,” he said with dismay, hardly looking at the boy. “Then we will have to wait a year or so for willing girls and rhapsodic pleasures. Well, that’s no problem; I’ve got time.” He went back to his plate of chicken and beans, looking up briefly when a woman walked by—a gorgeous woman with red hair and eyes as deep and blue as the cenotes of his homeland. He looked at her once, then twice, wondering where he had seen her before. No, he had never seen her—and yet somehow they had met. Yes, they had met.

Sarita left him where he was, unsure how his presence would improve the journey. Well, an ancestor was an ancestor, so she wouldn’t complain. She’d had enough of this particular memory, in any case. She wanted to be done with it. This sad day, which had been a horrible experience for her then, was somehow made more horrible by its recapitulation. She began working her way to the kitchen, in search of the redheaded woman. They needed to talk. They had a small amount of time available to them, and an even smaller shopping bag.

In her haste, Sarita failed to see Lala milling through the crowd, considering her next move and circling the child who sat on the floor by himself. The redhead had already noticed the old woman, and although she was relieved to see her in good health again, she was tired of Sarita’s bothersome questions, so she made herself invisible among the relatives and neighbors who jammed the front room. She liked it here. She liked it when people came together to smoke and talk and spread the virus. Any virus was transformational. Any virus could change the way an organism worked, but this kind of virus changed the human dream. It was a word-borne virus, a virus that inflamed thought and started a fever in the human body. It was knowledge, something that her world would not exist without. She smiled, comforted to know that she lived in that world—a world built out of syllables, sounds, and the strong mortar of belief.

Her world looked the same, felt the same as the physical universe, although some called it a reflection. Her symbol was also a tree, like the Tree of Life—great and lovely and deeply rooted. The roots of life stretched into the infinite and its branches breathed eternal light; but her roots drank from the spring of human storytelling, and her branches bore its fruit. There was no thought, no reality without her, she mused. Without her, there were only beasts in the field.

She could sense the living Miguel in the room, although she could not see him. He wasn’t here, where the little boy sat, teaching himself to trace the forces of human feeling. Miguel was near, however, watching and waiting for the right moment to show himself. If he was here, he would be watching this boy, she thought. He would be remembering, and helpfully packing that memory into his mother’s shopping bag. He didn’t wish to return to the world he’d left, she knew, but he would. He would, because Sarita insisted. He would, because a wise apprentice will honor the teacher, if not the mother.

Lala lay down beside the eleven-year-old that Miguel once had been and looked into his face. Ah . . . that face! And the eyes, hiding a blazing light somewhere in their darkness. These were the eyes of the man he would someday be, the man she had never truly learned to resist.

“Do you know how much I have wanted you?” she whispered to the boy. “Can you see the past and the future of us, my love? Can you see how we will dance together, through a thousand more generations?”

The boy’s expression didn’t change. His black eyes were focused on things that no other person in the room had noticed. None, that is, but her. Lala sighed, laid her head back on the rug, and closed her eyes. She was recalling the first time she had come to him . . . not just in visions and thoughts, but in the fullness of a woman’s body and a woman’s intellect. She had waited until he was bored, tired of the same tasteless food. She had waited until he was ready for the kind of knowledge that stirred men into a frenzy. It was only then that she had taken him by the hand and led him back into the ancient dream of the Toltec people.

Like everyone, Lala had been shocked when Miguel left his medical practice and the safety of his books. She worried when he returned to Sarita—who was a sorceress, however she wished to call herself—asking to learn her skills. During those years as an apprentice to Sarita, he had become intuitive, and unafraid of his own power. He was slipping out of her control. Lala wanted him to understand how human beings are connected by words, only words, and to recognize the supreme authority of ideas over human actions. She felt compelled to help him elevate storytelling to its greatest genius, and that was what she did.

Ah . . . Lala knew now where this journey would take them next, and she smiled in satisfaction. She must collect the old woman so they could start up again—so they could witness the moment when Miguel first met the woman who had inspired his storytelling. He had been afraid at their meeting, having recognized her from his sleeping dreams. He wished more than anything to run away from her that day, but he stayed. He stayed, and he fell in love. Yes, that’s where they would go next.

She opened her eyes, and when she did, she saw the boy staring directly at her.

“I’ve never danced with a girl before, but I will soon, I think.” He looked around the room and then his eyes drifted back to her. He assessed her, his face flushed with feeling.