When We Were Ghouls Read online

Could the dunes really have been covered in pottery shards and random bones, human bones, femurs, ulnas, and clavicles? Why would bones and pottery just be scattered about? I’ve always assumed the story we tell, when we dug up the grave, has elaborations. It’s how my family tells a story. We are Southerners from birth, after all. But I’m starting to fear what is true, what is fact. Who is the family who traipses through a place like this? With an eight-year-old in tow? Maybe I’ve just imagined it. My own elaborations.

  But even the omniscient Wikipedia refutes my imagination and insists what I’ve seen was true. I type in “Ancon” and find this description of the indigenous history:

  In Ancon the ridges of gravel and sandy soil were littered with skulls, bones, and remnants of tattered handwoven cloth.

  Wikipedia might fudge the truth, but it isn’t a mind reader.

  Then I read, “Beneath the surface, grave robbers found mummified bodies with all the accompanying grave goods in shallow graves.”

  Grave robbers. Naw, I don’t want to use this label. I have a good family. Not the kind who would decimate remains for their own sake. Greedy and selfish? All my family members might be a little weird, a bit too fascinated with the dark side, but they aren’t body snatchers. Nor corpse thieves. Grave robbers? Looters, maybe. I’ll stick to looters.

  My mom’s email response about the name of the locale arrives a couple of hours later. She’s asked my dad:

  We’re both trying to get our brains around it, but so far . . . I think it had three syllables. It’s rattling around in my head. If I think of it, I’ll email you back.

  Since I am pretty sure Ancon sounds right, and my googling has unearthed another word that sounds familiar, I pick up the phone and call my folks, anxious to know what they can fill in, what I can’t retrieve from my memory. When my mom answers, I don’t say hello. I ask, “Was it Chancay? It doesn’t sound familiar to me, but it looks right.”

  My mother replies, “Chancay? I don’t know.” Then another phone in the house picks up on her end. “Jaime, is that you? Was it Chancay?”

  “That’s the culture,” my father says. “Chancay were the people. It was their gravesite.”

  “Do you remember the body?” I ask first. I want to know about that National Geographic fellow I watched unwound. I don’t want to prompt my dad too much, but I want to see if his memory matches mine, if it matches the National Geographic video. “Was it wrapped in the fabric that we have on the wall?”

  “Tela,” my dad corrects me and feeds me the Spanish word for “fabric.” Their house is filled with telas. Framed pieces of ancient cloth line one wall in my folks’ house. Intricate geometric designs on camelid wool the color of dried blood, in small woven pieces, about the size of a license plate, hang on another wall. These are surrounded by the oil paintings of Texas Hill Country bluebonnets my dad has created since retirement.

  “Tela,” my dad repeats. “Yes, the body was in that position, that knees-up-to-the-chin—what’s that called?” He’s eighty-four, and his memory is disappearing for the things said over and over like “fetal position,” although he can remember the Spanish word for cloth and the name of the culture that thrived north of Lima from 1000 to 1475 AD before the Inca conquest. He has always been the family member who recalls all details. Some of us even say he has a photographic memory. When his memory goes, so will the story archives. This is why I want him to confirm my memory of the embalmed body.

  He has become frustrated that he can’t remember the word. Then he recalls the right phrase, and we are off to the rest of the story.

  “All the bodies were buried in the fetal position. Embalmed and wrapped in the cloth.” Yes, just as the National Geographic websites concur. “The ground below their bodies would be stained where the fluids had leaked out. And the cloth stuck to their skin. Like taffy. Remember how the skin was like taffy the way it clung to the bones?” I can hear his smile as he describes it.

  His memories can be overlaid with mine without too much slippage. To me, this makes them facts. I’ve seen a ghost—the body we dug up. It is true we dug up a grave. It is true that my family members are grave robbers. My nerve endings push themselves to the surface, make me want to slough off my own skin. I want to find a new body. I don’t know where I belong. The body in the grave, the body we dug up, is now more recognizable than my family.

  “We didn’t find a body, did we?” my mother says. “There was no body.”

  “Sure, there was a body,” I reply. As much as I don’t want there to be a body, as much as the realization that my family were grave robbers has me wanting to seek cover, to find a new place to hide, her denial of the truth unearths more in me. It’s ludicrous she doesn’t remember a body. Now I am certain the body was exactly the way I remember it.

  “The body was all wrapped up on that shelf. The shelf built into the wall,” my father says.

  “I don’t remember a body,” my mother says. “We were even more ghoulish, if we dug up a body.”

  Did she really not know? Her contradiction confounds me. Didn’t we always say, when we dug up the grave? What’s the main ingredient in a grave, if not a body?

  “I don’t remember the shelf.” I evade my mother.

  This is my memory of what happened graveside next:

  The skeleton in the ground looked just like all the other skeletons my father had taken me to see at the Peruvian museums. With the body unwrapped, the diggers almost danced around it. I didn’t see what there was to make all the hoopla about. All squatty and balled up, like the skeleton was afraid of being beaten.

  “Look how long his hair is,” Mrs. Riley said. The long black hair of the dead man had grown down around his pelvic bone. He could have sat on it in the school bus, as I could my own hair. But his hair was black and matted, caked with dried mud in places.

  “The hair and fingernails keep growing after they die,” my dad said. He always knew those kinds of things.

  I craned my neck around the diggers who had gathered around the body now and tried to catch sight of the dead man’s fingers. His hands curled in under his chin, so I couldn’t see whether his nails were long like his hair. One of the diggers reached down and grabbed a handful of the black tresses and lifted the skull, separating it from the rest of the skeleton. Then, like a lasso, he twirled the long ponytail of black hair and the wide-eyed skull over his head a few times before tossing it out of the grave they had dug.

  Mrs. Riley and my mom screamed, as the skull sank in the sand. I followed suit with a scream, until my dad laughed, then I laughed too. I don’t recall being terrified like a normal eight-year-old might have been. This corpse was more of a specimen to me after all we had seen since moving first to Africa and then to Peru. A museum artifact, or it could have been.

  Now I scramble to the edge to see what’s inside.

  “Jaime, you tell them to put that right back where they got it.” My mom’s jawbones manacled together as they did when she told me to stop doing whatever I was doing that was getting on her nerves. I watched closely, because in those days I wanted her never to be unhappy. Her elbows splayed out from her hips, her face shrunk inward. I wanted to stand by her, but, well, a grave breached between us.

  My dad shouted in English, “Hey, go get that. We want it.” He pointed to where the skull had landed. When the diggers turned around and saw my dad point, one quickly scrambled out of the grave hole and ran for the skull.

  “Mart, of course there was a body,” my father argues with my mom while I’m on the phone.

  “We didn’t have any respect for the dead. None. We were ghouls.” She lets her own memory flit from one thought, one belief, one ideal to the next. Whatever suits her. Or does she? My own memories seem to decide on their own when to show up, so maybe hers do too. I listen to her deny the pile of bones we unearthed, but I also fixate on the word “ghouls.” Something about me likes the idea of having a family made up of looters, grave robbers, and ghouls. The Munsters incarnate. When I was young
, I knew my mom was every bit as beautiful as Lily Munster, my dad as goofy as Herman. It’s funny, at first. Then maybe not so funny.

  “I didn’t know what we were doing,” she repeats. “I had no idea.” Her denial is vexing. Denial, the finest form of forgetfulness. She will insist she had no part in it until we agree with her. It’s what she does. She wants it to go away. I would normally give in to her. Want her to see how loyal I am. But this story I cannot give away. Especially now that these memories are coming back to me like white horses pushing me under. I need to know all the facts. I need to start at the beginning, know how we got here. How we got there.

  I ask how they knew where to go, and my mother replies, “Someone told us about it at the dinner party the night before.”

  “And they had said it was a burial site, so what did you think we were doing?” my father queries her.

  They had a lot of dinner parties.

  This is what I remember:

  I stood on the toilet lid, leaning over the sink, trying not to block my mom’s reflection as I gazed at my own in the corner of the mirror. My cheeks were pudgy. So I looked at my mom’s face instead. She was prettier. She sprayed her frosted, blonde hair into a flip on the ends. The ladies at the beauty parlor did a much better job, but she tried to repeat what they did the next day, her hair always a little flatter, even though she slept on a pink, satin pillowcase. Sometimes she even wore a Shirley MacLaine wig. Short shag style, all the rage right then.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked me.

  “You,” I admitted. “How much longer till the party?”

  “Ten minutes. You can come down and say hello, but just until dinner.” She took a sip of the drink that had been sitting in the metal cup holder where dangling toothbrushes surrounded it. It was a Salty Dog. She liked the bitter grapefruit taste. She licked her lips and left a coral lip print on the glass rim.

  “Will the Nelsons be here?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “It’s not that group. It’s the Rileys and some Peruvian and embassy friends.”

  “You’re pretty,” I told her. She took my face between her manicured fingers and kissed my forehead. Then she walked out of the bathroom, drink in hand. I looked in the mirror to check out the lip print on my forehead that matched the one on the rim of her glass. Throughout the evening, the ladies who came for the party would plant more lipstick kisses on my face. I wouldn’t wipe them off. Instead, like a stamp collector, I gathered them in their different shades and imprints.

  Later after the dinner party, where I stayed the whole night because my mother didn’t notice, and my dad didn’t tell, I stood on the toilet seat again as she brushed her teeth. I stared in the mirror at her. She’d been crying. She cried at parties.

  “Americans are show-offs, aren’t they?” I said.

  “Pretty much,” she said, “for the most part.”

  “I don’t want to be American,” I said.

  “Not much you can do about it,” she said. And she spit into the sink.

  The next morning we packed the car to go on an excursion. It’s what we did every weekend, went for a drive, a picnic, anything that got us out of the house, no matter where or what country we lived in. We drove in the Buick, the Land Rover, or the Toyota to out-of-the-way places. This weekend it was up carretera Panamericana Norte, the Panamerican Highway, to a location outside Lima their friends had talked about at the party last night. The Rileys were going with us, and my mom thought Mrs. Riley would pack a better picnic basket than she could. This was probably true, but I told her that whatever she packed would be better.

  “When we first arrived, we had to drive over the two split logs. Remember that?” My father still tromps down cemetery lane.

  I don’t remember that detail at all. “Sounds scary,” I say.

  “No, no, they had a sense of humor. The Rileys’ car wouldn’t go over the logs, but ours would so we all piled in our car and drove over. Then we came around a corner and had to stop because there was a big mound of dirt. On top of the mound was a mummified skeleton propped up announcing the entrance to the cemetery.” He laughs, he likes this part. We both do. Our dark senses of humor are complementary.

  I should be writing this down, I think, but I don’t, not yet, because I want to just listen and ask questions, to sift through the silt of memory and find mine, and see what matches, what doesn’t, what might fit together, like a skeleton.

  “There wasn’t a body in the grave,” my mom says again. “We never found a body. I would remember.” I again have the vision of her yelling at the diggers to retrieve the skull they flung out of the grave.

  “Sure we did,” my father says. “Remember, I kept the skull for years. A prince, he had that silver band around his forehead.”

  I hadn’t remembered the silver band until he mentions it on the phone call. But now I recall how that was the determining factor that the body we had unearthed was valuable, was a person worthy of respect. Or, I guess, respect during his lifetime. A crown—silver, or maybe it was tin—meant royalty. To us.

  “Oh gads, that’s right,” my mom says. “We kept that skull in the pantry.” Her memories come in lightning bolts, like mine.

  “No, that was Marty’s skull,” I say. “He found it and kept it to make a lamp. It sat in our pantry until it didn’t.”

  “Marty wasn’t there,” my dad says.

  My mind comes to a jolting halt, as though while shoveling sand I’ve hit titanium, and the blow jars me. Marty is the beginning of my tale. He was always the part I knew was true. Why is my brother in my memory so clearly? I know I heard his voice over the sand dune. Why can I still see how he held up that skull and showed me the jawbone? Why do I remember him, if he wasn’t there?

  “But I remember him there,” I say to my parents, expecting them to come around to my perspective.

  I remember his traipsing over the sand dune just like the memory of the mummy I so distinctly recognized, and which my father confirmed. No, I don’t want this memory of Marty to go away, to not be true. I need him to be there, otherwise I would have been alone. I would have been hiding on the other side of that dune with the scattered bones all alone. Who would have come over the dune to find me? I make the decision I will keep this memory. A truth exists inside that memory that I am not ready to relinquish. A ghost I saw that I will keep to myself.

  “We were ghouls,” my mom announces. We have been leaving her out of the conversation, and she wants us to pay attention. “I know it’s hard to believe that I didn’t know, but I didn’t—but if I had, I wouldn’t have—I couldn’t believe we were doing that. Digging up a grave. If I had known—”

  I can’t stand her faux denial anymore. “What?” I ask her. “If you knew, you wouldn’t have taken all the pottery home and used it to decorate the house?” My tone is sharp, too sharp. She will excoriate me for this, but I’ve lost patience and want to stop her repudiation. I can picture her living room where the pieces of fabric are framed behind museum-quality glass, the pottery is filled with dried cattails and lines the hallway to the bedrooms, and the Nigerian mahogany hand-carved chest is stuffed with silks from Asia that she bought to sew dresses and pantsuits, but that still lie folded, unstitched, fabrics never used. Carved ivory tusks sit on ebony pedestals on the chest next to the giant thorn carvings.

  “We were ghouls,” she repeats, a sting in her voice. “Hideous people.”

  Hideous. She does not refer just to herself. She refers to the past. And to the present. I will pay for disagreeing, she warns. She refers to all of us. We are all hideous. None of us innocent.

  I carry on with my quest. My quest for what lies between innocence and guilt.

  “Didn’t you have to bribe the movers to get all the stuff out of the country?” I ask my dad.

  This is how I remember the story:

  A bribe was given to the moving company so we wouldn’t be reported to the Peruvian government for stealing national artifacts.

  “I
took the tela and the pots to the British Embassy the next week,” my mom says, “and asked whether we shouldn’t have this stuff, but the woman there, the muckety-muck, what was she?”

  “British Embassy liaison,” Dad fills in.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” my mom replies, “and she said, ‘Good gosh no, the Peruvian government has warehouses of that stuff. They don’t want it.’”

  In my inquiry, I had come across a Washington Post article detailing the court case of an inheritance, of a man selling Peruvian artifacts, of jail time served. “Portions of coastal Peru are so rich in ancient gravesites dug up by robbers that ‘from an airplane, it looks like the area has been bombed,’ the consul general said.” “Humanity,” the article argues, is who owns these antiquities, not individuals.

  Humanity. Hideous. Who are we?

  I repeat my question: “But didn’t you have to bribe the movers?”

  “Naw, I just gave them that skull and told them it was theirs if they packed the pieces really well so nothing broke. I didn’t want any of it to break.”

  “We were ghouls. We had no respect. If had known—.” My mother won’t quit pleading her innocence. Won’t quit declaring our guilt.

  What I didn’t know when I squatted at the graveside, but found out later, was that the hair and nails don’t keep growing. It’s the decomposition of the layers of flesh and the plumpness of skin deflating that make the nails and hair look like they have grown. It’s all a matter of perspective.

  Years ago I heard a Radiolab podcast about memory. Hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich interviewed scientists, and these are snippets of what I learned: Memories are not stored in filing cabinets or hard drives in our brain. Memory is a bridge over a chasm. It’s a physical thing made of proteins. A cellular construction. Re-creating the memory, the act of remembering, is an act of creation. It’s an act of imagination. What you’re remembering is the memory reinterpreted in the light of today. Each time you remember it’s a brand-new memory. Every time you remember, you rewrite it. The more you remember it, the less accurate it becomes. All you have is the most recent recollection. The more often you tell the memory, the more it becomes about you, and the less it becomes about what actually happened.