The Book of Resting Places

by Thomas Mira y Lopez

Yet, for all that, SRI couldn’t determine who was who. “The county hired us to clear the site,” John shrugged, “and so that’s what we did.” For expediency’s sake, they sacrificed steps such as DNA testing that otherwise would have been taken. Although Tucson’s Catholic diocese kept records of the buried, it didn’t record who was buried where, so only a few remains could be identified. These rare successes depended on the right confluence of events—two skeletons with bullet wounds in their chests were only identified when a slog through Tucson’s 1870s crime headlines turned up an obituary for a shopkeeper and his wife shot to death in the armed robbery of their store.

  The most telling material was found in what else the excavation exposed: centuries-old trash; a prehistoric pit house with a streetlight’s foundation running through the middle of it; a dog’s skeleton buried underneath a house’s foundation. Privies and outhouses proved especially rich. John and his team dug shafts twenty feet deep and at the bottom, they would chance upon a perfectly preserved newspaper or a grocery receipt reading pigs, bacon grease, flour.

  “It was like arranging a tapestry,” John said.

  This seemed a funny way to describe the process. Comparing the layers of a city to an intricate weave of textiles meant to create a larger, complex representation of a scene is fairly intuitive, and it makes sense to juxtapose the skill and care needed to excavate so rich an archaeological site as National with the artistic craft and precision necessary to fashion a tapestry. But what’s most interesting is that a tapestry is primarily ornamental: it’s a wall hanging, a furniture covering, something to look at. Does the same then hold true for National? A cemetery memorializes and archaeology studies the dead, but while both honor their subject, they value it in often-contradictory forms. The question of how to properly handle the dead—who, despite all those who claim to speak for them, stay silent in the matter—remains unanswerable.

  When SRI excavated the cemetery, they consulted with both the Tohono O’odham Nation and Los Descendientes, the heritage groups that claimed cultural affinity with the cemetery’s inhabitants. Los Descendientes approved of the plan for exhumation—they wanted to know everything they possibly could about their ancestors and considered the current burial state unsuitable; any information was of value to them, and members would often visit John Hall at the site, asking him about what had been found. The Tohono O’odham Nation resisted that idea and didn’t want the burial site disturbed at all: what happened at National Cemetery, to them, was sacrilege.

  Once the excavation was complete, the problem still remained of what to do with the bodies. From May 2009 till June 2010, Pima County exhumed, transported, and reburied individual remains. Civilians went to All Faiths Cemetery, military to Fort Huachuca, and the thirty-six Native American remains to the Tohono O’odham Nation. Each cemetery held its own rededication ceremony. More than two thousand people attended the military reburial on Armed Forces Day. Governor Jan Brewer gave a speech; Gabby Giffords, district congresswoman at the time, rode her motorcycle there.

  The designated name for this process was “repatriation,” a sending back to “one’s own country.” The term raises the question: what constitutes one’s country, and who decides those borders? The exhumation was spun so that the bodies were now returning to their “true home,” as if the same thing hadn’t been said about those early Tucsonans when they were buried in their first final resting place. Add to this the irony that these remains were upended by a courthouse—a structure that, at least in the great state of Arizona and its SB-1070 laws, symbolizes a legal system used to unfairly target and deny the citizenship of many descendants of those remains—and repatriation starts to take on a more ominous ring. If the exhumation at National Cemetery reclaimed a sense of culture and heritage, it also asserted possession of the land. Just as I claimed a long-lost ancestor, Pima County claimed to honor a forgotten cultural lineage to access a desired site.

  When my tour with Ben had ended, I handed him the hard hat and vest and made my way down Stone Avenue. I disappeared once again into the emptiness of the street and the slow, comfortable rhythm of traffic. When I reached the L-shaped alleyway he had pointed out, I ducked into it. The whole expanse lay in front of me: the pit that would become a parking garage, the seven stories of glass and steel, and the city beyond that, dropping and lengthening until it reached the Catalina Mountains, distant but sharply etched. From the site, a hammer knocked a calm and repeated ring. The same lanky man emerged from behind a dirt mound carrying the same two buckets. Contrails shoelaced across the sky. The freight train would pass behind Toole in a minute.

  I turned around to face the building. It was the squat brown office of the school superintendent. In the alleyway, a line of violet spray paint ran around the building’s perimeter, perforated like a cut-here diagram. Someone had spray-painted SRI Excavation on the outside of this line and then several arrows pointing in the direction of the courthouse. Here was the border, the dividing line between repatriation and remains.

  By 1900, fourteen middle-class residences were built on the spot where I stood. Unlike National’s occupants, those who lived there have names: George Whomes, dentist, and his wife, Adah; John Brown, a rancher, and his wife, Dolores; George Cheyney, the postmaster, and his wife, Anne. While National Cemetery represented one of the most diverse cemeteries ever exhumed in the U.S., there were now only three non-Anglo-American residents on that land. They were Nicolasa Antonio, the Native American servant of George and Anne Cheyney; Matilda Sturis, the Mexican servant of George and Adah Whomes; and Clara Antonio, whom the records sometimes state as Mexican, sometimes as Native American, but always the servant of Phillip and Elizabeth Brennan.

  Before John Brown died in 1914, he had a fear much the same as my own about the sitio: that the paving of Stone Avenue would destroy the beloved mulberry trees he had planted in back of his house. Old John Brown made no mention of what his own house might have paved, or what the mulberry trees might themselves have uprooted.

  We don’t know this for certain, but I’m willing to bet that when it came to his mulberry trees, John Brown wasn’t thinking of Dora Scribner Miller, a woman who arrived in Tucson in 1885 at the age of six and who, when asked by the Tucson Citizen in 1953 if she remembered National Cemetery, delivered an account in opposition to every other newspaper’s negative report: “Why, that place was an old cemetery when we first came to Tucson. It was one of the first things we saw when we got off the train—lots of mesquite and catclaw with little paths through the trees to the graves. There were always candles burning, and day or night you could see someone there saying a rosary.”

  I cannot move past this when it comes to National Cemetery’s exhumation: that we can match the names and locations of the people above, but not those who lived below. The cemetery Dora Scribner Miller remembered ended up a forgotten space—not obverse and reverse, not a city of the dead and a city of the living, but just one more strata of history in the underground cross section, another archaeological feature alongside the utility lines and gas mains and water pipes and cement foundations, the overburden you dig through to get to what you really want. I had hoped a cemetery would prove more special, that it could carry ghosts. But a grave may very well prove less illuminating than a privy and the newspaper used to wipe someone’s nineteenth-century ass.

  What bothered me about National is what ultimately bothers me about all cemeteries. I arrive at each one hoping to find permanence, only to discover that within their promise of preservation lies the hint that they allow us to forget. I hate saying goodbye. But this isn’t so much the pain of parting as it is the fear of forgetting. To deal with grief, to survive what would otherwise be too sharp-edged, we must allow a dullness to take root. By staking memory to a place, we absolve ourselves of its full weight; the bookmark replaces the finger that might have been kept on the page. I try my best to remember—I walk down Alameda Street on a warm November night with a skull painted on
my face and my father’s photo in hand; I daydream about the table at Meridiana where I am once again fifteen years old and, in between the calamari and the salmone al affumicato, my father orders me a glass of red wine. Still I know there remains an eagerness for oblivion within the memorials I create, a desire to wash over everything like the mountains in the distance. A city buries its dead just so it can keep on living. Whether exhumed or not, a grave doesn’t maintain what’s been lost so much as it concedes the ghost is never really coming back.

  The Path to the Saints

  In 2008, microbiologists discovered two new species of bacteria growing within the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome. This discovery thrilled the admittedly narrow set of biologists, since the bacteria’s existence contained useful keys on how to better preserve the underground networks. Yet the bacteria also ate away at the catacomb walls, staining the volcanic rock white, causing minerals to dry out until they became a fine powder, an efflorescence like granulated flour or ground bone. Their presence created a dilemma. What is to be done when the only thing left alive in a place also destroys it?

  I lived in the north of Rome in the fall of 2006. Tourist maps cut off this part of the city, the neighborhood outside the ancient walls where the Romans buried their dead. I was studying abroad for a semester in college and so “lived” is probably the wrong word. A friend once said you only lived in a place if you received mail there, and I did not. Instead, I rolled my suitcase into a small, windowless bedroom for a homestay with Paolo, an architect in his late thirties. Paolo lived by himself in an apartment his mother owned on a street named after Vivaldi. He rented the extra room to students. I was one of a dozen or so Americans that had stayed with him over the years, though he did not speak much English, and I, despite having wanted to go to Rome for three years, knew no Italian.

  Paolo, by his own account, was a melancholy guy. He listened to Tom Waits and Fabrizio de André at night and, since architectural work was slim in the Italian economy, drafted freelance designs at his desk. He owned a computer from the 1990s that he never turned on. He had curly, pipe-cleaner hair swept back from his forehead, giving the impression he might bald someday. He looked like the villain of some movie I couldn’t remember. I was very nervous to meet him, and the first thing I did was to explain, with demonstrative hand gestures, that I did not like George W. Bush.

  Paolo was disciplined. He trained for half-marathons in the park and timed his pasta with a stopwatch. He allowed himself a baby can of Coke with dinner each night. Mio vizio, he’d say, pointing to the can. We ate together at his kitchen table while watching histrionic Italian game shows where contestants had to choose between the unknown contents of large wooden boxes and follow sets of seemingly arbitrary, inconsequential rules. “I hate this show,” Paolo would say. Then he’d go on to explain its rules to me.

  Shortly after I moved in with Paolo, my father became unexpectedly sick and began dying, hospitalized first in Rio de Janeiro and then New York City. I did a lot of walking around those months, beating the same path between school and Paolo’s apartment, waiting for bad news via expensive cell phone calls. I watched old women walk around my neighborhood and grew furious at them for their health. I’d wander down to Villa Borghese, where I’d stare at the Bernini sculptures alongside the other tourists: dutiful Aeneas with Anchises on his back, carrying his aged father out of Troy. I stopped buying into the system that many buy into: that bad things aren’t supposed to happen to you because you haven’t agreed to this narrative. I’d circle the highways that ringed the city, lost in the middle of the night until the metros opened in the morning. I’d walk back to Paolo’s house, sleep an hour, then wake up and walk to my elementary Italian class.

  In short, I had very little mooring me to real life except for my host. He asked how I was doing. He’d make me speak in Italian and then let me switch back to English when I got tired. He’d moon his eyes out to let me know he understood what I was trying to say. When I did the same, he laughed and called me Mr. Bean, the Rowan Atkinson character from another stupid show we both had watched. He’d share his little can of Coke with me. Afterward, when I fell asleep at 9 p.m., he’d wake me up so we could get gelato. Somehow we understood each other—as if language were only a river whose rocks and mud we had to wade our way through.

  Paolo’s house stood a fifteen-minute walk from the Catacombs of Priscilla. Wealthy patrons in Ancient Rome built these catacombs beneath their property in exchange for sainthood. Priscilla, my neighborhood benefactress and the wife of a Roman politician, donated her land in the late second century ce.

  Roman catacombs were originally designed like a fishbone, a central spine with galleries jackknifing off on either side like ribs. As burials increased, their structures grew more complicated until, by the fifth century, with its maze of honeycombs and orthogonals, a map of the catacombs would have looked like the molecule you memorize for an organic chemistry test. Fossores, the catacomb diggers, had to ensure their tunnels corresponded with property lines overhead. When they reached their outer limits, the fossores simply dug down. Priscilla descends some three stories deep and is thirteen kilometers long; if you stretched it out, you could walk to the Colosseum and back and still not have exhausted its paths.

  As the catacombs grew, it became more difficult to determine who was buried where. To ease navigation, fossores left itinera ad sanctos—paths to the saints—in the tunnels, skylights that guided visitors down corridors until they reached a martyr’s tomb. Families left small markers by graves, statues or trinkets of little value. They carved epitaphs as well, brief messages imploring visitors not to disturb the body, like the no radio sign taped to a parked car: “He lived thirty years. In peace.” “Aeternae memoriae.” “Not a seventh part of what once existed.”

  I spoke to my father twice while I was in Rome. Paralyzed on his right side, he was no longer capable of forming real speech. Only a breath and then a syllable: a “T—” that could not become Tom. On the other end, when I spoke, I wanted to shout out loud like the game show host Paolo and I watched every night, eager to window dress the Italian I was learning. I wanted to parade the words, the short, staccato, twinned syllables. Ho dimenticato tutto mi Italiano. “I’ve forgotten all my Italian.” Sono stanco! “I am tired!” Or the words when wanting to leave a crowded bus: Scusi, scusi, permesso! “Excuse me, excuse me, I have to get out of here!”

  We visited the Catacombs of Priscilla on class trips. The tour guides showed us the mosaic on the ceilings of women leading the Eucharist, smudged over so that the women appeared as men. God forbid the historical record reveal female priests. On the walls, there was a censored Medusa’s head, her Gorgon curls whited out, the snaky ends now a mess of ringletted hair, your garden-variety, photoshopped saint. All over the catacombs lay the evidence that people reconstituted bodies to better suit a message.

  I stood at the back on these trips, bored and waiting for the tour to be over. I traced the electric cabling that ran along the tops of the tunnels. I thought how I should probably leave Rome and move back home with my father. I wondered why I did not. The tour guides told us about the walls, the soft volcanic tufa the Romans initially believed bees nested within, walls that now were filled with tombs, loculi stacked three or four high like bunk beds. I thought of the rehab ahead, of how my father’s body and mind would be permanently changed. I thought of all he would lose. I realized I did not want to go back because my father would not be my father anymore and, when I knew this, I told myself he’d be better off dead. I was tired, I said, and so was he and it was okay to give up. The tour guides told us that when it grew too hot in the summer, Priscilla would bring her family down into the catacombs to eat their meals. I thought how if you thinned out Paolo’s face, gave him a darker head of hair, and cast him in dim-enough light, you could say: there goes my father.

  Paolo and I ran in the park together. We visited architectural museums and drank Birra Moretti with hi
s friends. We hung our laundry from the clothesline out the window. Ours was an easy domesticity. He cooked and I did the dishes. He taught me how to make a good tomato sauce (a pinch of sugar to offset the seeds’ bitterness), to sauté couscous directly in the pan with chicken and olive oil and red wine vinegar. He weighed his pasta in grams and tossed it into the frying pan for a minute to mix with the sauce. He showed me if you cooked Bolognese in conchiglie, the meat would hide in the shell to form an ad hoc dumpling. He told me not to eat so fast when he saw me scarf it all down.

  If I counted the hours, I might find I spent more time with Paolo in four months than with my father in the previous four years. My father worked long hours—in the lab from nine in the morning to nine at night—and I had a lock on my door at the age when I would use it. Then came college. At some point, I don’t really know where the time went. One day there was a man and the next a scratch on the wall lamenting this was not a seventh part of what once existed.

  One night, Paolo and I ran into each other as we both entered his building. We rode the elevator, one of those small old European things with folding doors and a metal grate that shuts so fast it might take off your foot. We stood almost touching but did not speak. As the elevator cranked itself up, the moment was outside enough of our usual contexts that it made us strangers. Suddenly Paolo became someone I didn’t know at all, someone I didn’t understand. We had been speaking the wrong words all along. I had a moment of B-movie paranoia and thought, ridiculously, how he could pull a knife out from his jacket and stab me in the chest. He really did look like the villain from a movie I had seen long ago.

  I was wrong, of course. Still, I’ve never felt that way about someone I know. He had become a symbol, and that consequently meant he was wide open for interpretation.

  Other nights, I’d come home to find Paolo eating potato chips and drinking his little can of Coke at the kitchen table. His blueprints and drafts lay untouched on his desk. “That’s your dinner?” I asked him the first night I found him this way. “Yes, usually,” he said. When you live alone, he said, you let yourself eat like that, you let yourself go.