The moment the music ended I saw that we had been under a spell, and whatever screen that had protected us had been lifted, and everything was bad. A contamination swept through the theater like animal agitation at the premonition of storm or slaughter, and a sense that something had gone terribly wrong but no one knew what it was. The applause subsided and the musicians left the stage. We began to rise from our seats and gather in the aisles, speaking in low tones as we filed out for intermission. Phones that had rung throughout the concert were silent. It felt like any sudden disturbance in the sheen of procedure might spark a riot.
A hand caught my elbow, my husband Joel’s. He had been seated a row behind me, and now his face was blank and he spoke into my ear, let’s get out of here. Our procession shuffled into the foyer, where we fanned out around a crystal chandelier encircled by stone columns that rose three stories above us to a milky, stained-glass dome. A woman wearing black lace practically collapsed against a column and beat wind against her face with her program. Hadn’t we all felt it? There had just been a crime or a violation of some kind. Something about that music had been noxious to my spirit. While it was playing, whatever was harmonious and symmetrical in life had convulsed grotesquely out of alignment.
Joel took my arm and steered us through the crowd toward the theater café. He ordered glasses of white wine frosted with moisture, and we sat in the shade under an umbrella on the terrace overlooking Plaza de la Liberación. Across the plaza stood the cathedral. People milled around in the June heat and sat at the edge of the fountain shaded by tabachin trees. Children climbed on the terrace to beg for money. Someone dressed in an orange Garfield costume was distributing leaflets. Municipal Police stationed at the corner in camouflage-painted trucks angled their massive, mounted guns into the square at forty-five degrees and patterns of light and shadow crazed the scene with a narcotic unreality.
What was that? Joel said. His face contorted with dislike and I could tell he had something to say. It was one of the reasons I loved him. I have no idea, I said. The concert had been my idea. To buy tickets we’d had to queue at the kiosk ten minutes before the start time. In line were not just the usual distinguished heads but younger, well-dressed patrons, and everyone was sweating. Our tickets totaled four-hundred pesos, about twenty dollars. Who let concert tickets be so cheap? It felt like stealing. That whole time, Joel said, I was having these apocalyptic visions of chaos and disorder and nuclear wasteland. I felt like I was going insane. I swear to god I was about to get up and leave.
I opened the program. The piece was called The Colors of the Heavenly City, composed by Messiaen in 1963. Joel and I weren’t musicians or connoisseurs by any description. Tastes may be acquired, but this aversion wasn’t about class. How could I describe it? It was like death. It was just sounds. There was no sense to it, no evident pattern or structure. The more I strained for a shape the more horrifically random it seemed. In my mind lingered an image of the musicians in black formalwear, arrayed cultishly before the conductor like insects in thrall to a light.
I’m not offended, Joel said, like I wasted my money. I’m weirdly upset.
It’s what destruction is, I ventured. Music was supposed to have a shape. The shape was meant to tell you some truths about life, how it goes up and down and has harmony sometimes and discord and terrible things and beauty. Wasn’t that the point? Because only death was formless. I was a painter, so I could tell myself that I knew something about acts of creation and destruction. I was prone to seeing reality that way: a series of veils obscured increasingly more mysterious aspects of the world, and an artist’s job was to describe their textures and peel them back. I was primed for metaphors and monitoring death’s garments for sudden flutters, exposing unseen realms and all the illusions of the material world. I don’t think I’m alone in seeing things like this.
But it wasn’t just random noise, that’s what’s disturbing, Joel said. A bunch of untrained doofuses in sweatpants blowing horns would have been better.
A chime signaled the end of intermission. Let’s not go back in, Joel said. He paid for the wine. I tucked the program in my bag and we stepped from the terrace into the plaza.
But now I was beginning to imagine death everywhere, and a cartoon reaper tangled me in its robes as I tried to run. Was I a happy person? Did I have the defenses, the talismans, the whatever staves it off—bright colors, gratitude, the laughter of babies, a flush bank account? Death was children eating ice cream in the plaza plastic water bottles in the garbage, and opiates invisibly changing hands and fallen blossoms crushed underfoot. Death was an afternoon concert, death was many things. Now that I was watching for it I would be chased down shadeless streets without possibility of concealment or escape. I would feint and juke and argue, and fling bits of life at it, and try to push it back.
After the concert we walked home and I picked a few limes from the trees lining the streets to make margaritas. The fruits were small and hard and deep green and did not produce much juice, but I was still charmed by the gesture of public generosity.
In second marriages, you’re not inebriated by novelty. Joel and I could go places and actually enjoy ourselves. We had rented a house in the grandly dilapidated older part of the city, where the buildings were so close together they shared walls. Joel spoke fluent Spanish with our host, an architect who had met our taxi the morning we arrived and gave us a package of local honey candy. The architect said the house was a classic design and had belonged to his grandparents. He’d hung paintings and his grandmother’s crewelwork embroidery, updated the kitchen and brought in tall new windows and large sculptural pieces. The courtyard was filled with potted cacti, beds of wandering jew and an orchid-studded frangipani tree. I strolled around the house noticing the details, and all of it meant something to me. I could trust people who made things beautiful.
Joel and I took our margaritas into the shaded courtyard to cool down. From a nearby rooftop a bird clicked and whistled. It sounded like a grackle.
How crazy was that music, Joel said, like POW torture music.
I brought up the bird, whose song was also random but pleasing to hear. Joel said that was different, that was natural; this was insane. We were still stuck on it, trying to get to the bottom of the bad feeling. I wanted to forget about death for a while and just enjoy ourselves. Joel had more to say: once in his twenties, he had a strange death-like experience on DMT.
It was like going down to the engine room, he said. Where I saw the structure of the reality that I occupy. That separation from ego wasn’t immediate. The creatures, I don’t even know how to describe them. They were reptilian and mechanical, metallically serpentine. I’d close my eyes and everything was moving in a lively mass, like a swarm of eels. Think of a suit of armor, where everything is jointed. It makes me understand why Satan is called serpentine. There was something weird about that place, something very base level. Not human. I didn’t remember anything about my personal life in those moments. That part of me was gone. When it was ending, it felt like about a billion years had passed. Time wasn’t real anymore. When was the last time you weren’t conscious of the passage of time? Imagine being in that state for thousands of years. The self is gone, and you’re just a rock, tossing in the ocean.
The dogs next door started barking. Not go fetch barking—hungry barking, so savage I could picture them devouring their own jaws and teeth in a furious frenzy. Then, abruptly, silence.
The experience was completely non-verbal, Joel continued. But over time, it was tainted by repeated retelling. Describing any memory, you’re moving further and further from the actual experience and accruing more and more verbal recollections. The verbalization, it would seem natural, eventually becomes the memory. Every memory has a half-life, it gradually decays. And words hasten that. And yet they extend it. I think that’s why we made speech.
I thought of my friend Dani, who’d always held a curious power over me. I told Joel a childhood memory of idly repeating her name, Dani Dani Dani Dani, like a spell, until it was the strangest thing I had ever heard and it no longer meant anything at all. With no other weapon I destroyed my friend. It was such a potent trick that it scared me a little. I had discovered a trapdoor to a crime, a way to dematerialize and denature her with just a word. Through that hatch I found a primal layer of reality, oblivion right below the surface. What a slime things became if you tried to master them. Death death death. Nicole, Nicole—Enough. Here I was, alive.
A cowbell sounded beyond the walls of the courtyard, faintly then louder.
Oh, shit, Joel said.
The architect had told us about the bell and the trash collection. He’d warned us against flushing any paper; the city water treatment system couldn’t handle it. We were supposed to listen for the hand-rung bell and bring our household trash to the curb for a little truck to haul away. Ours was overflowing with toilet paper and eggshells and citrus rinds, and I’d noticed a few black flies circling.
It can wait, I said.
Then a strange feeling overtook me, and I previewed myself emptying the trash. I foresaw each gesture, bending down to remove the full plastic sack from the bin, carefully tying it off, walking it outside. Each action so clear in my imagination, playing in a loop. How many hundreds of times had I emptied the trash? How many hundreds of times more were to come? What was this gridlock with death, this mordant certainty that only inevitable things happen?
I’ll get it, Joel volunteered. The grackle had winged over to our tree and shuffled noisily along a branch, fixing me with its beady white eye.
Joel went inside. I’d gotten stuck, was all. This was just a pattern, this push-pull with death. A side-effect of my artistic sensibilities, Joel would hint when I’d had a tough day. My object permanence problem, he called it. I have a talent for what’s right in front of my face, but if something bad happens it’s bad permanently. The last thing I felt is the biggest thing I’ve ever felt, he’d joke. Unflattering, but true: when the walls close in I have no faith in what I’ve learned. But the only form of death I really knew was regenerative—from an empty husk springs something new. But there I went again, giving death a shape and an aim when it was just absence and erasure. The elderly were much braver getting out of bed in the morning than I had to be. Dying was final. Dying was about the body breaking down, and bodies in distress were not abstractions. And I was not dying. Not strictly speaking. I was only thirty-nine. I still had decades, barring catastrophe. Death death death. I would have to levee some livelier defenses against it.
How had Dani escaped all this? Dani grew up on a dairy farm, she was probably more used to seeing death. She seemed almost to invite chaos into her life and was the better artist for it. For me, painting was about beauty. In a painting I could exclude anything I did not want to see. Beauty was a universal balm. But Dani’s paintings always made me question how I saw everything.
I owed this trip to her, actually, she’d arranged the whole thing. Dani was always trying to drum up opportunities for me. She was doing very well herself, showing paintings in Paris and Tokyo and profiled standing beside her canvases in fashion spreads. She had recently sold a painting through an art consultant to an orchestra conductor in Paris. It so happened that this man was here to conduct the concert Joel and I had just left. Dani had gotten the consultant to show him my work and arrange a sale, and hinted I would be in the city and interested in meeting him.
All of this highlighted the widening gap in our professional success. But I was grateful. At Yale, Dani had always managed to outdo me gracefully. After graduating we moved to New York and worked for our professor for a number of years, and shared a studio space and a gallery in Brooklyn. Dani eventually had two girls, married their father, and moved to France. Meanwhile, my ten-year marriage to my college boyfriend ended, and then I met Joel and we settled near his parents in South Hadley, Massachusetts. I’d never told Dani about my childhood memory, my evil spell. These days Dani and I visited each other once or twice a year and spoke regularly. I had a very fine life.
The bell was ringing right outside our front door. Joel passed through the courtyard with a full bag, then returned and sat down beside me to examine the crumpled concert program he’d discarded and retrieved. Look, he said. The same performance was scheduled the day after next. Let’s skip the first half and go in after intermission, he said, and I agreed.
The next day we planned a walking tour. We ate breakfast at a street taqueria and strolled along a broad palmy avenue given over entirely to bridal and formal boutiques with gowns of every color floating in the windows. Heading toward the city center we crossed the parade route, now cleared of the weekend’s festivities. On the morning of our arrival, the celebration had trapped us in our taxi with our luggage for an extra hour in labyrinthine, bumper-to-bumper traffic. Immobile, Joel and I cursed the city planners and watched people spilling down sidewalks and streets. Revelers walked arm-in-arm in elaborate or minimal clothing, bedecked in glitzy rainbows and waving rainbow flags. Our driver had been heroic. Joel tipped him several times the cost of the trip.
After breakfast we went to a beautiful sprawling building, now a museum, that had once been a hospice for orphans and the infirm. We saw cathedral-sized paintings by a famous Mexican muralist. In the central dome was El Hombre de Fuego, a flaming, ascendant figure surrounded by burning, tortured forms. The guide book our host had lent us described the paintings as representing Mexican traditions of transformation through suffering, martyrdom and rebirth. It said the artist’s primary subject was the tragedy of revolution and empire. He saw history as cyclical and violent, and he distrusted all utopian visions.
Next, we went to see the artist’s murals at the Government Palace. Wandering through porticos and stone archways, we seemed to be trailing a pretty teenage girl wearing a silver tiara and a glittery, off-shoulder mint green gown. A quinceañera, Joel said. She was accompanied by a photographer and two assistants whose jobs seemed to be selecting backdrops, checking lighting and caddying equipment. The entourage was attracting looks from other visitors and the whole production had a whiff of an American wedding, something sentimental and embarrassing. Check out that scepter, Joel said. Mixed messages of sovereignty and infantilized womanhood seemed muddled with time and society. I looked at the skin on my arm, far from fifteen, sparkling in the sun with a finely-grained texture like granite.
Visible from the central plaza, the palace’s main feature was a bifurcated staircase with a wide central flight that split into two, leading to the upper floor. The atrium walls above the massive stairwell were flooded with natural light, illuminating teeming, red and black murals. In the facing panel an apocalyptic figure dressed as a priest wielded a flaming sword over a tripart scene of fiery war: crosses burned with hammers and sickles and swastikas; heaped figures with blank, skeletal faces screamed in agony and fled destruction, clerics and conquistadors swung machetes. Joel said he was amazed the government seemed to have no qualms about representing itself with such violent cautionary tales. We walked around the balustraded mezzanine to take it in. At the foot of the stairs we had to step around the quinceañera who was seated beneath the mural and gazing demurely into the camera, her dress foaming over the stone like a scoop of ice cream.
Out on the street again, we went into a shop that sold touristy skull merchandise, t-shirts and wall-to-wall shelves of wood and terra cotta painted skulls. Joel picked out a black shirt with a rhinestone skull and the words tener azúcar and held it up to me. Here, babe, this’ll get you kidnapped, he said. Gee, thanks. I’m sure they could fetch a higher ransom, I said, thinking of the quinceañera. Nah, they don’t care, he said good-naturedly.
En route home we came to a cementerio público. On the map it seemed impossibly large. We estimated it covered an area of twenty or twenty-five city blocks. It was mid-afternoon by then, and scorching hot. When in Mexico, Joel said. Inside the walls was a bleached, shadeless city of classical architecture in miniature, bristling with palms and narrow spears of cypress. There was no one else but a caretaker irrigating water through a hose from a central fountain. We passed the fancy private mausoleums near the entrance and wandered toward the far edges, where weeds grew between the tombstones and the crypts crumbled with neglect. We began seeing many broken tablets and uncovered graves, some quite deep, with room for three stacked caskets. None of the pits were fenced off or marked for caution. Why were so many empty? We speculated families had stopped paying for the plots and the caskets were removed. Where did they go? One of the open graves was so deep it was hard to see the bottom. We guessed it could have held nine or ten coffins from a single family. Joel stepped back from the edge and groaned. I have a friend, he said, who holds himself over high bridges. I don’t blame him, it’s really uncomfortable. It goes right underneath your lungs and into your stomach. Did they lift the caskets out with a crane? I wondered. I kept picturing that scene, the living’s debt to the earth unpaid and one by one the earth disgorging the dead.
I was dusty and thirsty and ready to leave. Across the street from the cemetery was an enormous flower market. Workers trimmed and bundled stalks, delivery trucks arrived and motored away. I liked the rough, deft way they handled the delicate flowers. We nosed around the selection of marigolds, chrysanthemums, lilies, roses, gerbera daisies and carnations in white plastic buckets. I thought of the old dead Victorian language of flower significations, where a particular flower communicated some quality or message. Joel began talking to a seller and with my poor comprehension I made out that Día de las Madres and Muertos were their biggest days of the year. A bible verse from childhood drifted through my mind as if printed on a little scroll of curled paper—let the dead bury the dead—which I had never understood, but which now seemed like an injunction to be alive, and do alive things. I bought a bunch of slender blue irises for the table. At home I went online and looked up the floriography of irises. The word was associated with the Greek goddess Iris, messenger between gods and mortals, and came from the Greek word for rainbow.