MUMMIES

In the fallow months of the year, passings are commemorated throughout Mexico. Guanajuato, city of masks and reveries, fictions and fantasmas - a place Edgar Allan Poe might have dreamed up - celebrates death all year long at the mummy museum, a short walk 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, oval mouth set in a permanent howl, never fails to leave me bemused. This 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?

The mummies, long a favorite Mexican postcard to send home, tease Mexico's rich relationship to the subject of death. This comfort with la muerte, the affection lavished on skeletons and skulls, the attitude of warm sentiment and humor, the blending of morbidity and wit, northerners often find alarming. If mummy-viewing is a chance to consider mortality in general, it is also an opportunity to note the peculiar persistence of certain body elements. That fingernails appear to grow after death is a well-known fact; but the endurance of pubic hair in skin shrunk over a century's time to the appearance of a saddlebag comes as a surprise, unless you happen to be a gravedigger.

Once I visited the museum while it was in the process of overhaul, the mummies awaiting transfer to the newly built glass sarcophagi where they presently reside. Unwilling to lose revenue, they'd left the museum open, the mummies simply propped up against the walls, and I could reach out and touch the remains of Dr. Leroy. Stroking his crusty hip with my fingers, I remember thinking that we are all, in the end, leather.

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