Confesiones a un Árbol: The Black Man and La María

THE BLACK MAN AND LA MARÍA

Sketch (approximate) of the Old Cemetery in the

El Progreso neighborhood of Chimbote, June 1970

“Step back, so you don’t catch a bad air,” my father said; my brother Fernando and I took a couple of steps back. Then, he removed the fragments of the coffin lid that had survived both time and the earthquake. Inside the box, we saw La María’s skull-less skeleton, wrapped in the habit of the Virgin of the Gate. She had died at twenty-one, in the full splendor of her life.

How did this unusual story begin? It started early one June morning in 1970. My father had gone out for supplies, and on his way back, he decided to "cut through" the Old Cemetery in the El Progreso neighborhood. With every step, he observed the wreckage the tremor had brought upon the place. The earth had not only shaken; it had split open and healed poorly. It had shifted and displaced itself. In its apocalyptic movement, it had spat out rickety coffins, skeletons, and bones into the open air. The historic graveyard, in other words, was a cemetery of scattered bones. And the dogs were having a field day in the middle of June.

Chimbote, in those days, was in a state of catastrophe following the earthquake of May 31, 1970. For reasons of public health, heavy machinery was being prepared to level the destroyed cemetery. While crossing it, my father noticed two skulls: one lay on the ground, isolated from the rest of the skeletal remains, with the unmistakable characteristics of an elderly male. The other lay near a dilapidated coffin containing the rest of the bones; it had belonged to a woman. My father thought of the inexorable fate awaiting them once the caterpillars and bulldozers fulfilled their task of flattening and leveling everything.

A few hours later, when my father reappeared at his grocery store, his face looked exalted and restless. There was a good reason for it: inside the bag he held in his hands were the two skulls he had seen at the cemetery. They were El Negro and La María.

My father told us what he had seen at the graveyard. He explained the final fate hanging over the remains. He told us he wanted to return with two helpers to bring back the woman’s entire skeleton. “But what for, Alejandro?” my mother asked. “Look, Elsa, one day when I have the money, I’ll have the skeleton assembled, and my eight children will be able to study anatomy,” he replied. And so it was that my brother Fernando, then eleven years old, and I, at nine, ended up accompanying him to La María’s grave.

The cemetery was located eight minutes from my house. It had begun operating at the dawn of the twentieth century. Half a century later, the El Progreso neighborhood rose up nearby. Over the years, it became the very heart of the neighborhood. It was always called El Panteón, but when the current Divino Maestro cemetery opened in 1956, it became known as the Old Cemetery.

Since 1966, the Public Benefit Society of Chimbote had tried to close, demolish, and eradicate it, but only a minority of the bereaved moved their deceased to the new cemetery. Thus, the announced closure remained in a state of limbo until May 31, 1970, when the earthquake destroyed it and settled the matter of its demolition once and for all.

After the eight-minute walk back to the Panteón, my father located La María’s coffin. It was a dark burial box. Rickety but whole, though the lid—as mentioned at the start of this story—was broken and incomplete. The coffin lay twisted on the sandy ground, tilted at a diagonal from its original position.The coffin lay twisted on the sandy ground, tilted at a diagonal from its original position. The foot end was semi-buried, while the opposite end rested on the sandy surface. My father collected the bones one by one, placing them carefully into various bags. Then, in silence, we began the walk back to San Isidro, our neighborhood.

Once home, the entire family proceeded to wash and boil the bones. My mother prepared wood fires in the corral, and atop bricks, she set the large metal tins where the water was to boil. This task took several hours. Every minute passed in a state of tension—more lighthearted than dramatic, like walking a razor’s edge—where fear made our skin crawl, yet was balanced by the presence of the family and shared jokes. Above, in the sky, the sun bestowed a clear and mild afternoon.

My father had no scientific pretensions, only pure intuition, when he decreed that the larger skull had belonged to an old man. It was sturdier, wider, and darker than the refined skull of La María, and it had few teeth—all in poor condition, much like the jawbones where the teeth are housed. Everything about it suggested age over youth. From the very first day, we christened him “El Negro.”

La María’s bones were complete. Not a single tooth was missing, and they were all in good condition. Rightly or wrongly, the afternoon we washed the bones, my father gave birth to a legend that would eventually become truth for us: La María had been not only young, but beautiful. From then on and forever, she became another member of the family.

From the moment El Negro and La María arrived at my house, a string of inexplicable events occurred. For instance, one fine day in 1972, in our store, my father was having a few beers with his nephews, Lázaro Quevedo Díaz and Franciles Silva Cachay. During the conversation, the latter complained about thieves who broke into homes to steal things. “That doesn’t happen here; the skulls watch over us,” my father said. Franciles then asked to borrow one of them, and my father agreed. That day, my cousin left happy for his home, carrying El Negro in a bag.

Seventy-two hours later, Franciles was back. His hair was standing on end, and he said that for three consecutive nights his family hadn't been able to sleep because of strange noises, and that for no reason at all, his bed would move. Many years later, his daughter Estela recounted that on the day her father returned El Negro to us, he was called by name twice along the way; he looked back and saw no one. Yet, she also noted that it hadn’t all been bad during those seventy-two hours; her little daughter Mónica, only a year and a half old at the time, had played to her heart's content and pulled all sorts of pranks on good old El Negro.

A year earlier, in 1971, there occurred what my family calls “The Story of the Steel Drums.” We had a couple of steel drums in our corral left over from a masonry project. On several occasions in the dead of night, my parents heard the drums rolling over and over, from the back of the corral toward the alleyway that led to Aviación Avenue. My father would get up to check, but he found everything in its place. My older brother Roger did the same and couldn't see anything abnormal either. The rolling drums dismayed my family, and for a few months, they were the subject of tremulous conversations. Until one day, a friend of my father, who was said to know the twists and turns of souls in torment, came to visit. The first thing he asked was: “Alejandro, where are the bones located?”

When the bones first arrived at our house, after washing them, my father separated the two skulls and placed La María’s remains into two fisherman’s mesh bags—except for the smallest bones, which were kept in a small cardboard box. The bags were placed atop the woven reed roof of my parents' bedroom, near a small gap for the light. My father figured that the sunny Chimbote weather of those days would finish drying and disinfecting them. The skulls and the cardboard box were then tucked onto the middle shelf of a green counter in our grocery store

“Alejandro, La María wants her body whole,” the friend declared after being filled in. He added: “Her soul wanders in torment; she will not rest in peace as long as her body is divided.” Following this advice, my father brought La María’s bones down from the roof and, on that middle shelf of the green counter, reunited them with her head, the tiny bones from the box, and El Negro’s skull. And La María never, ever haunted us again.

From then on, a special relationship was established between her and us. She acquired the status of protector and benefactor of the family. My father was a non-practicing Catholic with deep social convictions and a blunt, categorical way of speaking. He liked to say he only believed in Christ, in Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, and in his María. My mother, for her part, has been and is a fervent Catholic; armored in her faith, she did not falter before economic hardships and managed to raise her eight children. La María was an additional source from which she drew strength and where she placed her prayers. And she always kept the flame of a missionary candle burning before her.

The middle shelf of the green counter, mentioned earlier, was a compartment or platform where my mother kept a blanket and a pillow. She would work all through the night at her Singer sewing machine; then, at times during the day, she would rest inside the counter while customers came to buy things. She didn’t sleep in the arms of Morpheus, but in the arms of La María. I also rested in this spot, especially when there were beer drinkers in the shop, as I enjoyed listening to their grown-up conversations. The shelf was narrow but sufficient. Respectfully, I would nudge the skulls a little to make room for my own body… and, in truth, one rested very well there.

Meanwhile, on the grounds of the old Panteón—following its destruction by the 1970 earthquake and subsequent demolition by the authorities—in 1974, the then-mayor of the Provincial Council of Santa, Mrs. Carmela Oviedo de Sarmiento, built and inaugurated a large sports complex: six sports courts enclosed by a high steel mesh. It was one of the largest and most beautiful public works in Chimbote at the time, but, unfortunately, it did not last long.

Toward the second half of the seventies, La María’s bones had begun a rapid process of deterioration; a whitish powder accumulated in the bags that held them. Some time before, my father had discarded the initial idea of hiring a specialist to assemble the complete skeleton, as it was too costly. The erosion of the bones continued inexorably, to the point that my father had to make the decision to let them go. The skull, however, remained in good condition and continued to provide protection to our home.

But it wasn’t only La María’s bones that were deteriorating with time. The green counter that sheltered them shared the same fate. By then, the store had already closed, and the counter was being mercilessly eaten by woodworms. In 1977, I needed to build a door for the alleyway of my house. Lacking the money for such projects, I ended up dismantling the counter to use its salvageable materials. With their altar gone and without a new stable place, El Negro and La María began a pilgrimage through different parts of the house. My father said to me: “You’ve undressed two saints to dress another.”

As for La María, her pilgrimage lasted a little over fifteen years, while for El Negro it was only four. In 1981, the latter moved to Florencia de Mora, Trujillo. That year, Mrs. Amelia Gonzales Ávalos—my sister Nelly’s mother-in-law—told my father during one of her visits to Chimbote how dangerous her neighborhood was due to thieves who had already broken into her home more than once. My father, repeating the offer he had made to my cousin Franciles in 1972, offered El Negro to Mrs. Amelia nine years later. The good lady did not hesitate for a second and took him to her home. Word that reached us over time indicated that he fulfilled his role to the fullest and kept the house free of thieves.

The final chapter of El Negro’s story, for us, arrived in 1999. One of Mrs. Amelia’s granddaughters, named Yordana, was in the fifth grade at the María Madre school in the Mampuesto neighborhood of Florencia de Mora. That year, a science fair was organized for the students. Yordana took him to school to support her project on the anatomy of the human body and, in the end, she left him there. At this point, my family lost track of good old El Negro for good.

The sports complex built over the Old Cemetery in 1974 did not have a long life. Six years into its operation, it began to be invaded by street vendors who, little by little, destroyed its wire fencing and took possession of the sports courts. After a few years, they took complete control not only of the sports area but also of several surrounding streets. By 2009, this part of the El Progreso neighborhood had become one of the largest informal open-air markets in the entire national territory.

La María’s pilgrimage in my house lasted until 1995. After wandering from room to room, my father finally found a permanent place for her. It turns out that the home where we grew up changed in 1992. My older siblings had been forming their own families but lacked a proper place to live. So, my father decided to divide the house among his eight children, granting us an advance on our inheritance so that each of us could build our own apartment. Progressively, brick, cement, and iron replaced the eucalyptus poles and woven reed mats. The new house included a spacious common patio-corridor, twelve meters long by two and a half meters wide.

At the same time, my father grew full of years; he had left his usual work and dedicated himself full-time to the passion of his life: gardening. He especially loved cacti. He no longer had the same space as in the old house, but he made do with the new patio, turning it into the most beautiful part of the home. He placed planters everywhere and hung many others in the most unexpected spots, to the point that not even a single pin... or cactus needle, could fit.

Since my father devoted most of his hours to this space, he arranged on a shelf the few personal belongings he had decided to keep at this stage of his life: a small hand mirror, a safety razor, a pumice stone for his feet, his gardening tools, and also something very special: La María, thus concluding her pilgrimage within the house.

By 1999, I was living in London, England. I had married Terry, a woman of American origin. In February of that year, my only daughter, Dorothy, was born; and in December, I took them both to Peru to meet the family. My wife was moved to see my father; before her stood a 76-year-old ascetic who had renounced almost all the material goods of life. Terry explained her feeling to me this way: “Your dad has worked his whole life, and all he has are his clothes, his slippers, his planters, and his María.”

Years pass, and time flies for my father. By 2007, I was no longer living in Europe, but in the United States. In April of that year, my mother called me and said: “If you want to say goodbye to your father, you have to come flying.” I arrived in Chimbote with Terry and Dorothy, and I had the honor of seeing him depart. The moments that followed were hard and filled with confusion too. After the first 24 hours, I noticed that one member of the family had not been informed of the passing.

I then headed to the patio of the planters. Once there, I walked toward the shelf. Standing before La María, I looked at her and said: “María, the man who in 1970 rescued you from the caterpillar tracks of the tractors has left this world.

Life goes on. And so does this story. Now, let us take one final look at the site of the old graveyard that in 1974 was turned into a sports complex, only to be subsequently invaded by street vendors.

In 2009, Victoria Espinoza García, then mayor of the Provincial Council of Santa, made national headlines regarding this land. On Sunday, October 18, a massive police operation evicted five thousand street vendors from the former sports complex and adjacent streets, relocating them to an esplanade in Chimbote’s Dos de Mayo neighborhood.

The eventful history of the lands of the old Panteón seems to have concluded with a happy ending: once again, on this very surface, a modern sports complex for the community at large was built, and inaugurated on June 27, 2010.

As I finish this story, I do not know if it is an indulgence to ask La María to grant me a miracle. Could it be possible for this tale to reach one of her relatives? The details I have are few, but they might be enough.

On that sunny day in June 1970, in the destroyed Panteón of Chimbote, beside her rickety coffin was a wooden cross barely standing in the sand; its inscription read: “María V. Mercado 1940-1961.” One final note: my father never doubted that she had been beautiful, very beautiful.

New Hampshire, USA

May 2015