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house of the Rosario family who kept the pulque saloon, an altar had been built, like a small stage, a glorious gallimaufry of gauze, lights, candles, colored cloth and paper, gilt, silvering, angels, crucifixes, images, and Mexican flags. Even Coco, the idiot cow-tender, usually in a state of agricultural grime, was cleanly washed and dressed and wore a brand-new sombrero in his hands. Fireworks sounded, grew nearer. So did a curious medley of musics. Sky rockets hissed and wooshed and shot sizzling upwards and exploded with bangs and bursts of stars, and the procession rounded a corner and came into sight.
    All the religious confraternities in town, it seemed, were there, members and banners and huge burning tapers, as well as many from out of town. The women for the most part dressed in white, those who were not in white were all in black, mantillas or rebozas covering their heads … except, curiously enough, the women members of the lay religious orders. Their dress was something in between uniform and habit: all bareheaded, as though to emphasize that they were
lay
people and in no way contravening the secular law against the wearing of clerical costume in public. Men, though outnumbered, were numerous, clutching their sombreros; children were present in profusion, and all walked slowly and gravely with their eyes cast down, voices raised in something half-chant and half-hymn. Group after group, band after band, banner after banner…. Jacob thought, as he did again and again, how, for an ostentatiously secular republic, Mexico managed to be so very and so constantly and so demonstrably religious.
    The marchers proceeded on with measured pace, the voices paused, the music was suddenly heard again … and a very odd music it was, too: the repetition of a single bar over and over again, of a kind of music which had certainly never come out of Spain — odd, archaic, impressive, stirring, baffling. The musicians came into sight: three Indian men, one with a flute, one with an odd sort of drum, and one with something vaguely resembling an ocarina —
    But before he could fully take this in, from down the street, a rather sad and shabby and tiny “orchestra” in run-down uniforms with run-down instruments of the conventional sort, burst into an off-key version of a tune he recognized (after a moment) from having heard it in the United States, to wit, “Good Night, Sweet Jesus” — and the native players fell silent. And on this note of bathos and anachronism, the spectators fell to their knees and the catafalque, borne on the shoulders of a dozen young men, approached and passed by.
    It distantly resembled a sort of truncated four-poster bed, with frame and canopy of dark and carven wood, with sides of glass. Jacob strained, Sarah strained, Macauley strained, to see what was inside. Again the resemblance to a bed … someone was lying down, covered with a profusion of (so it seemed) embroidered, richly embroidered, bedclothes, drawn up to his chin. The face was dark, very dark, scantily bearded, in total repose, on its head what seemed to be a skullcap or headdress of equally rich fabrication. They thought they could see the hands, too, but the procession did not halt. The catafalque seemed to float by in a sea of sighs and candleflame; the rockets hissed and wooshed; the near-19th-century orchestra reached the end of its piece; once again the tootling and the beating of the weird and totally non-European, yet tantalizingly evocative melody motif, over and over again….
    There was a silence. Those who had knelt now rose to their feet. The beautiful and elaborate designs and patterns of flowers had been churned into chaos by the passing feet. Señora Mariana smiled as she noted this. Sarah asked, somewhat disappointed, “Is it all over?”
    “¿
Es terminado?”
— Macauley
.
    “Sí, ya es terminado, Señores.”
— Señora Mariana
.
    “Well, it’s all over, folks. I’ll be getting home. I suppose