My family lives in Mexicali, right across the border,
the California-Mexico border.
And my brother and my father used
to tell me about this crazy mortician that
lived right down the street.
This crazy mortician, apparently, every month
he would throw this elaborate party, more- in this parlor.
And everybody was invited.
It was sort of his way to celebrate life.
I mean, how does one celebrate life?
Somebody who deals with death so often and in so many ways,
and somebody who takes care of his neighbors,
you know, in many different ways as well.
And I never attended any these parties,
but my brother did, and so did my father.
And they would tell me this guy was crazy, very crazy.
But what's so ironic about this was when the mortician died
and his son took over, took over his position,
and the mortician was taken care of in his own parlor.
And I always wondered, you know, what sort
of secrets this mortician kept.
And I'm sure there are probably hundreds.
And now I'll share with you four of the mortician's secrets.
First secret, the most righteous part of the body
is the armpit with its delicate growth of hair.
The armpit has withheld more gossip.
It has kept quiet more than our privates,
complacent in a corner that when exposed we choose to ignore.
That's how it became so respected.
It took advantage of our faces turned sideways,
our embarrassed looks, and then imitated that humility.
Second secret, mouths always spit out their final sentences.
Until then, the jaws remained locked as if
biting down on that last word, the location of the car keys,
a cry for help.
The name of the face the dying recognized
and thought they could pronounce before closing shut.
The dead sometimes do this purposely and attempt
at grasping the world they feared to leave behind
and holding on to a memento which
could comfort them when pressed slightly against the tongue.
Sometimes it is accidental that the word is there at all,
having been abandoned or compressed
within the throat at the moment of death.
Either way, the mouth eventually lets go.
The word, turned solid as the marble or a broken tooth,
surrenders to the quietest of hours.
The word squeezes through the lips
and reclaims its ascension back to sound.
When it bounces off the chin, a bead of sweat
melting on the griddle.
A blue kiss coming up for air.
Third secret, a woman's ash tastes different from a man's.
Remember how as children we shook the sawdust of old church
floorboards with our weight.
While on our knees, we reached down to draw obscene figures,
then licked our fingers clean.
A man's ash will remind us of the days
we mixed those pictures with the host of catechism days,
when we spread the orange coating of bricks
to affect the bloody tongue during silent prayer.
A man's ash tastes of old pinole, of common dust,
bedroom dust, sucked in excitedly
within the fury of sheets.
But a woman's ash is not as easily compared.
I can't explain it with anything I've tasted
but certainly with elements I never dared to touch.
Taking her ash was like discovering
the outlines of a woman's fingers
in the glove, of the head beneath the hair.
It was finally knowing the taste of sugarcane pulp
a woman discreetly spits inside her napkin.
It was digging out the thin crust of dirt between her toes
and around the curve of her heel.
It is something not quite forbidden or inaccessible.
It is the flavor of what could have been,
and which I savor even more because it wasn't.
Fourth secret, before the bodies leave the parlor,
I dress them in my coat.
Not my black mortician's coat with its heavy scent of lily
stems and tarnish, but my blue one, the one I
haven't worn myself.
It's not a body in my coat that excites me
but rather that of my fleshed-out coat
inside a coffin.
Its collar and shoulders pushed out against the lining,
as if with the weight of the coat's deep color
and not of the corpse.
In my coat, the body vanishes.
The face becomes an afterimage.
The gold buttons show through the crossed hands.
I'm persuading my burial coat to be selfish,
to want its own space, to keep itself company.
I'm reaching it.
I'm teaching it to be its own body.
And like the body, insists on reshaping
the edges of the coat on its own and on demanding
to twist and bend all objects in the parlor toward itself.
Already the lapel rejects flowers whose
petals don't fade into blue.
When I die, I will dress my death in that coat
and allow my absence to become the main attraction.
Thank you.
Muchas gracias.
[APPLAUSE]