Guanajuato’s cemetery, like the Acropolis of Athens, is found at the top of a hill. Below lies a beautiful panorama of the city, tinged with a strange charm at night.
In this place of eternal rest, as we can refer to it, the phenomenon called mummification occurs in many bodies interred there.
Whether because of the altitude or because of mineral salts in the earth that preserve them, the fact is that from time to time, mummies are dug up from the burials or collected from the niches and drawers built into the walls surroundng the cemetery that have no contact with the earth. The mummies are placed in the gallery of the subterranean crypt made for exhibiting them to the public.
That throng of cadavers with their eternal grimace of death expresses what death is, serving us so that we may reflect about the vanity of life, the pride of human beings and the ephemeral reign of beauty.
Each specter lying there, claimed by no one, holds a story, but none so interesting and dramatic as the one I am going to tell.
One of these mummies, still bearing its tragic, gloomy grimace, has its legend , told me many years ago by an old gravedigger on a peaceful autumn afternoon while we sat together on a grave.
In the mid-nineteenth century, a childless couple lived in Mineral de Santa Ana. The woman named Carmen, fortunate in her beauty and appeal, was surrounded by admirers who constantly wooed her. She was married to a mature man named Pedro, an experienced miner, a contractor who hired a squad of prospectors whose work brought him large quantities of money that he spent on satisfying the whims and desires of his beautiful young wife.
Pressed by the group of love-struck young men, finally Carmen yielded to one of them, delivering herself to him with the caution that women put into play when they give in to the temptation that degenerates into adultery.
Pedro didn’t know anything about it until one day when he arrived home from work, he unexpectedly came upon the most repugnant scene of his life, his wife in a man’s arms in his own bed.
That outrage awakened anger for his stained honor as well as the instinct of the wild beast within him. He wanted to murder the pair, but controlled himself. He came near the bed and first shifted his wife. She woke up and, fully aware of the danger, fell to her knees to beg that he forgive her. The intruder remained where he was, petrified with fright but not knowing what to say.
Pedro felt the impulse to stab his wife, but again controlled himself. Immediately, with the hilt, he struck a strong blow to the head of the man who had shamed his house and stained his honor. The man fell unconscious to the floor, face down with blood spurting from his head.
Without losing time, Pedro tied the man’s feet and hands and, carrying him on his shoulders, left the house, telling Carmen to follow him.
They took a path uphill where there was a very deep, abandoned mine. At this time, the wounded man was conscious and begged that he be pardoned for the offense he committed, promising never to do it again and telling Pedro that he would go away somewhere far from the town.
“This very moment, you will go farther than you think so that you will not do it again,” Don Pedro said to him and lowering the man from his shoulders, threw him into the mine. The man, on feeling himself fall into the depths, launched a horrifying howl that resounded in the night and was heard afterward when his body hit the bottom.
Carmen turned pale and trembled as she watched the tragedy.
When they returned home, Pedro told her: “You witnessed what happened and have to keep quiet about it. My great affection for you is what saved you from accompanying him on that journey where I sent him. But if you deceive me again, I swear by El Santo Niño de los Atribulados that I don’t know what I will do to you.”
His wife promised Pedro that she would be faithful and good. Of course in Mineral de Santa Ana people noticed the disappearance of Vicente Villafaña, a young man with a pleasing appearance, much given to amorous adventures and to street duels, a relentless seducer of married women and a nightmare to jealous husbands.
None of the inquiries came up with anything clear. When the family members lost all hope of seeing him, they lived with the belief that he had fled with a woman to Guanajuato, or perhaps, keeping in mind his quarrelsome nature, that he had been conscripted into the army to enlarge its ranks.
Some months later, Pedro and Carmen moved to the San Roque neighborhood in the city of Guanajuato. There they lived in a large house with the comforts appropriate to a mining contractor of Pedro’s class who earned enough money to satisfy his wife’s needs and desires.
On leaving the Santa Ana mine, he had even better luck at Mineral de Rayas where he arranged for a lot that produced great profits because of a vein of gold discovered there..
Time passed slowly and Pedro was growing old. Meanwhile Carmen retained her youthfulness and beauty and suitors continue wooing her.
One day Don Pedro—let us call him that now because he had made so much money and was elderly—received an anonymous letter saying that his wife Carmen was making him look foolish with a young man who apparently was very poor because she was providing him with money to pay his college fees and giving him money for anything he needed. The young man was to be seen in her house the nights Don Pedro worked at the mine, and to prove what the letter writer was saying, Don Pedro should spy on them.
Don Pedro behaved with caution when he heard this sweeping revelation, but he started thinking about the way to surprise his wife in her infidelity. Probably the anonymous writer denouncing his wife was a suitor unsuccessful in receiving her favors, seeking revenge in this way.
Don Pedro told a next-door neighbor in San Roque all that he knew about his wife, begging him to keep quiet because he wanted to find out the truth. To do that he had to ask permission to go though the neighbor’s house to surprise her. The neighbor promised to say nothing, offering other kinds of help besides. Then Don Pedro pretended to take a trip to Mexico City, telling Carmen to stay home taking care of the house so she would not have to suffer the discomfort and danger that a long trip like his would entail, as in the times in which this all took place, the stagecoach traveled highways infested with bandits and robbers.
Don Pedro took the stagecoach that left Guanajuato at 4:30 in the morning, promising he would be back before two weeks were up. As Carmen said goodbye to her husband, she pretended to be sad but in truth she was happy that she would be able to enjoy herself with her new lover.
When the stagecoach stopped in Silao, Don Pedro got out of the vehicle with the pretext that he had urgent business there so that he was willing to lose what he had paid for the rest of the fare to Mexico.
That afternoon, he returned to Guanajuato, walking by deserted paths and expecting to arrive by midnight.
The neighbor, who was expecting him, was waiting with the door ajar. As soon as he entered the house, Don Pedro he put his plan into action. He climbed to the roof, then with his neighbor’s help, went down a rope to his own house.
As soon as he went into the bedroom, he knew that the anonymous note was true. When he shone a light, he saw his wife asleep with a man. Horrified, the two woke up, understanding that they were facing their last hour alive. Don Pedro approached them and with anger showing on his face hurled himself on the man who had defamed his honor and stabbed him to death. Expecting to die the same way, Carmen fell to her knees, pleading with him to spare her.
Don Pedro, braking his initial impulse to use the weapon in his hand, said, “You promised me to be faithful and good and you have broken your word. Now I cannot forgive this offence.”
Then he immediately locked her in the room where she had sinned. With the aid of his neighbor, Don Pedro spent the night in his storeroom digging the hole that would serve as a grave. The next day he ordered a casket made with two vents but without any adornment. It was ready that night and he personally carried it to his house.
After midnight, he lifted his wife from the bed and used force to put her into the casket where he had already placed the corpse of the man who had dishonored him. Then, once the lid of the casket was nailed down, he tied it up with rope.
Carmen, aware of what was happening, cried out in desperation until she lost her voice. Don Pedro then lowered the casket to the bottom of the grave and began to cover it with earth. When the dawn of the new day lit up the east, the man had finished his work. In the place where his beautiful Carmen lay buried beside her lover, not one trace remaining that could betray him. The paving bricks were once again in the same place, and he, overwhelmed by fatigue and the double tragedy, was like a dead person himself, lying on the floor that served as his wife’s tomb, feeling in his own body all the desperation that came before the frightful agony she must have suffered before dying in such a horrible way with a corpse for company.
Don Pedro had moments of repentance for what he had done and even felt the impulse to dig into the grave to rescue the body, but his wounded dignity stopped him from doing it. His act was already irreversible because by then his Carmen was already a cadaver after suffering her long, agonizing suffocation.
At noon, Don Pedro, went out to the street and started to drink in the first bar he saw. From there, he went to the church and gave money to the priest to say masses for his dead wife who, he said, had met her death far away.
That night he went to see his neighbor and delivered the papers giving him title to the house. He also gave him a box full of gold coins and asked him to keep quiet about all he had witnessed. That same night Don Pedro disappeared from Guanajuato, never to be seen again by anyone in the city.
Much later, in the year 1903, two women who lived by washing clothes and doing ironing, occupied the house in San Roque, which had a gloomy appearance after so many years without occupants. Some of the neighbors knew that the house had belonged to a very rich miner who disappeared one night leaving a buried treasure.
Those two women started to hear noises at night. Sometimes they heard heartrending moans coming from a room that was always closed. One night in the darkness, shadows of a woman and a man called out to them.
Because people kept insisting that there were coins in the house, one day the women made up their minds and with the help of two neighbors began to dig in the room where they had heard sounds.
The soil was loose and this encouraged them to keep on. About four feet down, they came to the casket and when they took off the cover, they saw the most moving and horrible sight imaginable. Inside the casket, they found the remains of two dead people: a man’s skeleton and a woman’s body mummified in a desperate position. Her mouth still displayed a terrified grimace, her dried-out eyes were outside their orbits, her arms still showed her effort to force the cover open – all gave the impression that she had been buried alive. And she was nothing less than the mummy I had just seen, whose macabre expression betrayed the secret of her frightful agony and death.
When the gravedigger finished telling me the story, night had already fallen. The wind was moaning through the branches of the acacias and the cypress trees as if it were the murmur of an infinite, eternal prayer issuing from all the graves.
Text taken from the book Leyendas Guanajuatenses, secunda parte de Relatos y Sucedidos de Guanajuato, 1957. Translation by Rochelle Cashdan.