Unasked Questions
Russ López
A La Catrina sighting today wouldn’t be that rare, given how Day of the Dead imagery has become ubiquitous. With her elegant clothes and euphoric grinning skull, she has become a symbol of Mexican culture, and you find her macabre face on tee shirts, murals, and burrito joint menus year-round. But back when I was six, she was only spotted in early November when she shepherded the dead to and from the world of the living on El Día de los Muertos. Thus, encountering her at a family picnic in May was pretty special. La Catrina, it turned out, was my dad’s cousin.
We were staying with relatives in Los Angeles on the way back from a couple of weeks in Mexico visiting other family. As usual, this called for a party, so there were a couple dozen people enjoying the warmth of a late spring day in the backyard of my great aunt’s house.
Unlike the other women at the party who wore unremarkable clothes, La Catrina showed up wearing a hat with multicolored paper roses, an elegant black outfit with a billowing skirt, and high heels that kept sinking into the grass. “I have a party to go to later,” she told my mother. Even if she hadn’t been in fancy clothes, La Catrina would have been easy to recognize. She was so skinny and pale I mistook her forearms for bones while her face had no more flesh on it than an old-style skull. She was obviously related to us, she looked like my father if that slim man had lost fifty pounds. No one was frightened by her presence. Actually, no one but me saw that she was La Catrina. They all thought she was just Cynthia Nuñez. Alberto and Belinda’s daughter. But I saw through her thin disguise; she was the skeletal Catrina in the flesh.
To my surprise, La Catrina was quite sociable. I would have thought the gatekeeper of the underworld would maintain a dignity that kept people at arm’s length. But she was friendly to all, hugging each woman and kissing every man. When she embraced me, her body felt like it was all bone. She wasn’t cold, but I felt like I had squeezed death herself after I put my arms around her slight waist, and I will forever associate the smell of her perfume, a mixture featuring rosewater, with mortality. None of that mattered because La Catrina was kind, helping me when I spilled some taco filling on my shirt. “Here’s a napkin, mijo,” she said with that netherworld grin that skulls possess.
There was much I wanted to ask her about the dead, but my family would have been mortified by my bad manners if I did. I had never met my abuela, she had died when my father was a little boy, and I would have done anything to have La Catrina bring her up to meet me on the Day of the Dead. My neighbor’s dog had been hit by a car, and I wanted to ask La Catrina to bring me news of that cute little guy to ease my neighbor’s grief. There were other questions. Was the underworld just another far off place like Spain, New York, or Paris? Were the dead happy and did they get good cable down there? Did La Catrina like her job? Did it pay well?
I saw La Catrina a dozen times over the next few years, each time looking as if she was in the middle of a parade of the dead. But despite my curiosity, I never asked my questions because that was not the way people behaved in my family. We respect privacy, we do not talk of things that might embarrass. Nor did La Catrina ever confide in me. She would sing, dance, flirt, and gossip, but never betray the secrets of the dead. My father boasted that Cynthia Nuñez had gone through three husbands and a dozen lovers; my mother said with a scowl that she was a loose woman. Then and now I thought she was exotically attractive, perhaps something to look forward to regarding death. Eventually I lost track of her. I hear she passed away a few years ago, and now dwells peacefully with the others who lay in the land beyond our hearts.
There are countless things I never asked my father; it seems like every day I find another question for him so that there is a heap of them on the floor next to the teetering pile of unread books in the corner of my living room. He has been gone for over a decade, and though I desperately search for him every Día de los Muertos, he has never graced us with an appearance. That is not surprising, he probably is too humble to think anyone among the living is aching to see him.
Part of my grief comes from not knowing the details of his life. There was so much about him that remains a mystery because he was a quiet man. He loved me, there is no question about that, and he delighted in everything I did, but that didn’t mean we shared confidences. Though we communicated in two languages, I never could understand him.
He had been a farmworker growing up, moving with the seasons from the Mexican border to Oregon. A couple of years before I was born, he found a steady job in a warehouse where he met my mother, but I didn’t know a thing about his youth beyond a few hints he dropped. “I worked in the beet fields here,” he casually mentioned when we passed through San Luis Obispo on one of our many road trips. “Your uncle and I used to flirt with the women who weighed the apricots we picked, hoping we’d make a few extra cents,” he told me out of the blue as we shopped for produce at the supermarket.
I once asked for details, but he just said, “I worked hard so you don’t have to,” before turning to the baseball game on the radio. I could tell he did not want to talk about those days. I never questioned him again.
It’s too late to ask my father why he broke up with my mother. I remember their many arguments, which never seemed to be based on anything real. I can still see my mother in tears and that angry look on my father’s face when they fought. My mom would never explain the divorce. “Go ask your father,” she’d say with a hurt tone in her voice. “Let him tell you why I told him to leave.” But of course, I never really wanted to know the details of their relationship. Now I wonder if there had been something in his nature that led to the divorce, and though my own marriage is sound, I worry that I might make the same mistakes he did. But it is too late to get him to explain his marriage to me.
I don’t know much about my grandmother’s death except from what I could glean from a few stray family rumors and the death certificate that I obtained through a public records request. She had been in the middle of a difficult pregnancy, expecting twins, when she collapsed. My grandfather rushed her to a hospital twenty miles away, but there was nothing the doctors could do. High blood pressure led to kidney failure and her dying two weeks later. Though I am relieved she had received medical care during those last days of her life, I find the totality of her death impossible to put my arms around. My poor father, who was just a little boy at the time, must have been devastated. I still feel pangs of loss whenever I see an abuela hold a crying child in her lap, wipe a kid’s dirty face with a tissue she fished out of her pocket, or hold a toddler’s hand to cross a street. I never had those typical grandmother experiences; worse, my poor father didn’t even have his mother. I should have asked him how he felt, maybe share my grief with his, but I lacked the courage to do so and now it is too late.
I wish I could say that as I grow older, I have learned the lessons of my hesitations and now ask questions of everyone. But I remain reluctant to pry and as my hair grays, I find myself with more unanswered questions. Mentally, they accumulate like pebbles in a bag hanging from my back, and slowly, they are making me bend under their weight. Sometimes I worry that I have answers that others might want, but I never know what to say and volunteering random facts or observations would just make people think I was weird. So I sit back and wait for the questions that never come.
Russ López is the author of six nonfiction books including The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond. He is the editor of LatineLit, an online magazine that publishes fiction by and about Latinx people, and his work has appeared in The Fictional Café, Somos en escrito, Northeast Atlantic, Discretionary Love, Night Picnic, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and elsewhere. López has also written numerous academic articles, book reviews, and works in other formats. Originally from California with degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and Boston University, Russ lives in Boston and Provincetown.