Larry Molina Barber
I dig the grave in a light rain. It’s a small hole for Paco. Elsewhere in the world, people I love have suffered losses that brought down the sky. Here, in the central highlands of Mexico, I bury my cat. He was Paco. His namesake is my grandfather, who eloped from Guatemala to New York with his bride, Amalia, in 1916. We sprinkle Paco with chicken-flavor treats and I quickly cover him with dirt and tamp it down. “Me moriré en Paris con aguacero,” writes César Vallejo of life and suffering. “I will die in Paris with a drenching rain.” My salty drops tumble from an atmospheric river, the Congo, the Amazon, the Orinoco of tears.
Paco’s grave in the garden is perhaps 15 feet from the base of our abuela jacaranda, grandmother tree. She was a sapling when Paco and Amalia fled on a United Fruit steamship, and she has grown and spread those many years. Her green crown shades our garden, terrace, and roof, the gardens and rooftops of the houses on either side, and a section of El Nigromante elementary schoolyard behind us.
Digging, I thought how our cat, placed in the earth between abuela’s deep roots and her branches, will at some time be absorbed by her, his still flesh disassembled by the action of moving things: water and bacteria, fungi and worms and insects. Paco, remade as essential molecules, moving up abuela’s thick bole and dividing in two, then quickly again into her five climbing trunks, articulating and balancing, stretching and elaborating her body out to her tips. Paco will be there.
Some months from now, after abuela’s feathery leaves die and trickle down, her bare branches will become spectacular—for Easter, say the Catholics, to honor Christ’s rising, our abuela will express herself in royal purple. Throughout San Miguel, generations of jacarandas will bloom, flowers will fall in their millions, to be replaced by more purple in the trees to fall again, showering what’s below for weeks. When this happens, abuela will cover the fieldstones of our garden. Bees will dip among the fallen blossoms. I will walk to his grave and feel Paco is here in this purple carpet, beloved.