DR. LEROY...

In the fallow months of the year, passings are commemorated throughout Mexico. Guanajuato, city of masques and reveries, fictions and fantasmas - a place Edgar Allen Poe might have dreamed up - celebrates death all year long at the mummy museum, a short walk up from the city center. Some find visiting these desiccated relics a ghoulish experience; others take them in with necrophilic glee. A mineral peculiarity of the soil in the cemetery nearby confers the dubious fate of physical immortality on local corpses whose descendants haven’t kept up payment on grave plots. The ravaged specimen of Dr. Leroy from France, stiff dungarees forever sagging at his hips, never fails to leave me bemused. The frontier physician died in 1865, and with no one around to pay his fees, he was resurrected as a mummy in 1970. Does it console the good doctor somehow to know that his Chinese cook is there beside him, a mummy too? 

…from Mexican Days (Random House)

COMING TOMORROW, SUNDAY: CHAPTERS 19 AND 20 OF VALPARAÍSO.