viragette

I’m back. I met many beautiful people, saw new places. There were cloud bursts, one-hundred-year-old photographs, older churches and academic departments full of reasonably-adjusted people. Which of these was more shocking - I don’t know. I returned to Seattle, stumbled home from the airport at 3:00 AM, got up at 7 the next morning, packed everything I own into an 8′ X 6′ X 7′ crate, corresponded with a hiring committee, spent 12 hours with my Little sister, and then had an aneurysm and died. I had left instructions that I should be dug up later so that I can finish cleaning our 3-room home before tomorrow morning, when we no longer live there.

For now, a travel story that is not my own, but is better than any of mine, will have to suffice. During my recent travels, I went to visit my family. My aunt and uncle have a place in Mexico where they like to vacation once a year, or so. My aunt told me this story about their last visit.

There is a mansion on the hill behind the town where they vacation. They had always wondered about it. With the help of a friend who retired to Mexico, they travelled up the hill and bribed the caretaker in order to view the mansion. It is a frightening place, and the local people are superstitious about it. No one goes there, and the people of the town were shocked to hear that they had visited once they returned. The caretaker himself absolutely refused to accompany them into the cellars. The home, which is huge, is now deserted, and only the caretaker lives there, along with many resident mangy dogs. It is constructed primarily of marble, which was imported from Italy and dragged up the hill - probably by the people of the town below. It has been thoroughly looted, and the only things that remain are either painted on the walls, or are too heavy to carry away.

This home was built and inhabited by the Chief of the Mexican Police - by reputation very corrupt - around the 1950s. He was eventually forced from power by Mexico’s elite, after years of extortion and murder. It is rumored that a tunnel runs from the mansion, beneath the mountain, directly to the beach below - so that bodies could be disposed of. The number of people who were murdered by, or on the orders of this man is believed to number over 1000.

The mansion is built along the lines of a Roman Villa, with marble columns and large open-air living spaces. On the walls, huge frescos depict the Chief of Police. He is shown in armor, astride a horse, trampling tiny people. Or holding the world in the palm of his hand. Or as the devil, with horns. All of the murals are disturbing, and some are both disturbing and sexually explicit. The front gates, fashioned out of wrought iron, are 30 feet tall and built into them are cages in which lions were housed. A lions den is to the side of the gates, inside the estate. The pictures my aunt and uncle brought back show huge, open-air, marble terraces - across which skinny ragged dogs wander - and the gates with their wrought iron lion cages.

Now that is some dark humor.