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We woke at six. The cold usually woke me even before that; somewhere just before dawn my two layers of clothing and one thin quilt would stop holding back the wind that blew through the improvised cloth walls, and my shivering would rouse me to the eerie predawn light.
After waking came coffee. We would walk down to the kitchen just underneath the shelter, and the women--the Mayor’s wife, the preacher’s wife, and the Deaconess--would have coffee for us, strong and flavored with cinnamon. It was coffee meant to be drunk black, perfect for waking up a sleepy bunch of gringos to face the day ahead.
When the last cup was empty, around seven o’clock, we walked to the worksite. It wasn’t far from the house; just past Zapateria Jenny and down the footpath. The air was cold and thin in the mornings, and it stung the back of my throat. Sometimes I’d look down the hill toward the city and see the haze of winter pollution hanging in the dried lakebed, around the tops of the buildings of the biggest city in the world. It made the landscape almost surreal, rounding the edges and plunging bits of it into smudgy obscurity like the Otherworld seen through the veil. Sometimes I longed to be down there, in that fog, down where the lights and the action were, where every corner turned might be a new adventure. Other times I’d think of the time I accidentally stepped into chicken guts behind a restaurant, or of the shame I felt when I ran out of money to buy dolls from the poor children outside the great golden cathedral, and I’d cling to the separateness that was the mountain, the travel-group, and my position as observer.
The high bald head of a volcano hung over our worksite. It was barren and remote as a moon, and the changing light on its face told me when morning was slipping away. The other travelers spent their work-time talking and praying that morning; having recovered from the effects of the altitude, I was more interested in moving aside the rocks looking for scorpions or baby lizards. Maybe I would even find some insect I’d never seen before. As I hauled wheelbarrow-loads of rocks away from the place for the foundation, I looked eagerly for anything special among the detritus. Soon, I started finding it.
The first piece of him that came up from the earth was a rib. It was a light, airy thing, small enough that I knew it had to belong to a baby. The marrow was long gone, leaving it hollow as a bird’s bone. It was broken and covered in dust, and it was the first piece of human remains I had ever handled. There’s a strange reverence that comes over you in that moment, no matter how prepared you think you are, no matter how many times you’ve pictured yourself standing inside carefully-measured squares and dusting with paintbrushes. I stood and let myself feel it before beginning to catalogue the bones and set them in their proper place historically and culturally.
Pieces of him, of this baby, came up all that morning. First there were ribs. Then a bit of pelvis. A vertebra, as small and perfectly-formed as a charm for a necklace, came along with skull fragments. And then it was lunchtime, and we walked back to the kitchen for quesadillas and enchilada.
The pale sunlight fell on my dust-covered hands as I ate; I watched it and saw how thin my own skin was, how light the bones beneath the surface.
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