Mexico, 1965

NONE OF THE SUBJECTS of this Elliott Erwitt photo is related to me, although a couple could be. For instance, the man and woman central to the image could very well be my parents. The casual wave of the woman's hand in stating an absolute truth might easily be my mother's as it withers away a strong conviction held by my father about whatever it is he points to.

The pair is standing in a gallery of desiccated bodies in Guanajuato, Mexico, where my parents once stood, too, with my brother and me. They were about this age when my father quit his job and they cleaned out their savings, hauled us from school, and we began our South-of-the-Border adventure.

I never understood all the reasons for our trip. I remember hearing it was a lifelong dream of my mother's, but I don't know why my father was interested. Until his recent retirement and discovery of online stock trading, my father had way too many Great-Depression scars to comfortably pick up and leave for a foreign country with no financial plan to speak of.

On the spring evening in 1965 preceding our departure, the house was a panic of last-minute preparations. Friends of my parents would drop in to offer assistance, but as was usual in our house their visits degenerated into a lot of talk and cigarette smoke and their presence did little to push forward the process of packing. One of their more resourceful friends, Hugh, made himself useful whipping up some popcorn and martinis and turning on the television, so while the rest of the house flitted about with preparations for our future, Hugh and I settled in to watch an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

The evening's tale was set in a small Mexican pueblo, where a poor family schemed to retrieve the mummified remains of their Papa who'd been cruelly disinterred after the rent on his tomb fell into arrears.

The dead man's widow and son attempt to get his body back from the drunken and demented cemetery keeper, first using reason and innocent pleading and then, when those methods fail, by acting the pranksters so the caretaker mistakes the son's ventriloquism for the voice of God emanating from the mummy's leather lips. My recollection of the story's end is hazy, but the caretaker either sees the error of his grave-digging ways or he dies, and the lovely widow and adorable son get a new living room lampshade they call Papi, making their poverty just a little easier to accept.

This was all great entertainment for Hugh, who had a healthy pitcher of Tanqueray under his belt. I, however, was convinced that I was going to die on this Mexico journey and my mummified body would be dug up and used by a madman to display macramé in a cemetery gift shop. My parents were merely annoyed at Hugh for leaving me sleepless and screaming the night before they were to begin a multi-thousand mile road trip. They finally calmed my tears enough to get a modicum of sleep, but only after lying to me, telling me it was only a fiction, as with all television the figment of an imaginative Hollywood psychopath and having no basis in reality. Understanding that things like this did not actually occur in real life allowed me to sleep most nights until, a few weeks later, we arrived in Guanajuato.

It turns out people who write for television are not nearly so imaginative as desperate-for-rest parents of eight-year-olds might lead one to believe. In fact, the Hitchcock writer in this case added nothing of his own in describing what turned out to be the Guanajuato way of life. Situated in rugged terrain about 200 miles northwest of Mexico City, Guanajuato is perhaps most famous for the fact that its climate and soil tend to mummify its cemetery's residents. Add to that a land shortage that requires constant disinterment to make room for new dead, and horrific Hitchcockian teleplays practically write themselves.

The morning after our arrival we drove straight to the cemetery and, following the guidebook's instructions, paid the more-sane-and-sober-than-I-expected caretaker a peso to let us into the museum. He did so by opening a creaky hatch in the ground to reveal a spiral iron staircase leading to a subterranean hallway. Turning left brought us to the display in the photo; in the other direction lay a dark passage with a dirt floor down which we walked until it became too dark to see anything at all. Being unfamiliar with the ways of Mexican museum display, we assumed that if there was something of interest farther down it would be labeled and lit, so we turned around and resurfaced in the cemetery. There, vendors were hawking mangoes and grilled corn and little skeleton dolls and postcards of the mummies. For these cards, a photographer had dressed the bodies up in tuxedos and gowns and arranged them in various poses so the cards he sold looked like displays for a child's doll store, save for the fact that all these "dolls" had gaping black eye sockets, slack, silent-screaming jaws with gray, leathery skin, and gnarled tufts of filthy old hair. Some of the postcards showed the entire length of the museum's hallway from the mummy display to end of the tunnel into which we had ventured, so we could now see where we had been headed: At the end of the darkened passage are the vestiges of former Guanajuateños whose remains didn't merit exhibition. Display-quality mummies are found only every several years, and the rest of those evicted end up in the dark tunnel in a massive mountain of skin, hair and bones. Looking at these postcards, it became obvious that had my family proceeded just a step or two farther, we would have instigated our own burial under the museum's entire collection of unpresentable inventory–possibly giving some unimaginative Hollywood hack all he would need to sell his first teleplay to Hitchcock.

So what were Erwitt's couple discussing in their photo? Were they my parents, maybe they'd have been marveling at Mexico's lenient child abuse laws that didn't include psychological torture among their criminal definitions. Or perhaps, inspired by all the shriveled figures about them, they were considering the withered state of their own troubled relationship and discussing their impending separation. The possibilities are endless. I do know that with the passage of time, the hysterical fears that gruesome death can strike in an eight-year old subside and my memories now are mostly of a pleasurable and unusual childhood. Perceptions and fear may have changed over time for the couple in the photo, too. They certainly have for my parents, now divorced, who these days consider decidedly more mortifying than eternity in a Guanajuato museum display the possibility of running into each other unexpectedly at the mall.