and rising beside pools of metallic green water leaching through the dump and into a black river coursing into the bowels of the city.
I back away from the edge and follow Calavera along a sepulcher wall facing out over the precipice.
“He’s here, I know he’s here,” Calavera mutters to himself. “He should be here.” Again he halts and stands for some time facing the wall, closely inspecting each plaque. A name, a simple prayer, a life reduced to a hyphen. This one is faded by the elements. This one is favored with a flowering succulent. This one is carved in flowing font. A few plots have been bricked up and plastered over. One remains open, a blank blackness occupied by a vulture, head cocked, inspecting us with a single beady eye.
FIGURE 11. Tenements for the dead, Guatemala City General Cemetery.
“I must have it wrong,” Calavera says. “Let’s go to the next one.” The path ahead ends abruptly where the cliff has crumbled away into the ravine. We backtrack and turn down another corridor, surprising an adolescent couple necking, the boy pressed up against the girl against the wall. She giggles. The boy looks up, then nuzzles in closer. They cling to each other, ignoring my awkward greeting. Vultures perch atop the walls on either side like sentries, wings rustling and talons scraping against the plaster.
For the next hour, as the sun sinks in the west, we wander like that, crisscrossing the northwest section of the cemetery, vainly searching for Giovanni’s plot among the tens of thousands interred and innumerable missing. After a while, Calavera stops pointing out people he knows and trudges along in silence.
Finally, we stand side by side above the path leading to the old meeting place at the furthest corner of the cemetery.
“It’s confusing here,” I say. “And it’s been . . . well, it’s been a long time.”
Calavera just shakes his head.
“I’m sure your sister wouldn’t have let anything, uh, happen.”
“No.”
I fiddle with the recorder and jot a few words in my journal: “Forgotten? Discarded? Dead or not?”
Calavera pauses, and then, suddenly resolute, turns to head down the path to the old meeting place. “Let’s go, Anthony. Let’s see what’s down there now.”
A flock of vultures has gathered around a corpse of one of their own stretched out like a patient etherized upon a table beside a pillaged grave. They flap away lugubriously as we approach, dispersing among the scattered trash and headstones worn indecipherable in the undergrowth. Calavera pokes around, looking for his name and others he and his old compatriots graffitied long ago. I walk the perimeter and stop suddenly before a ruined mausoleum.
“Oh shit,” I say, and call out to Calavera. “Look here.”
Calavera joins me. The mausoleum wall has been graffitied in black spray paint. An M and an S, a 13, and a cartoon crown and skyscrapers. A date is scrawled beneath: 21 May 2012. That is two days ago.
We both turn to look out from the plateau toward the footpath leading back to Calavera’s neighborhood. After a few moments, I say in a low voice, “Perhaps we should be leaving.”
Calavera’s gaze lingers on the graffiti. “Yeah, OK.” He shakes his head. “What a shitty tag. I tell you, kids these days don’t know shit.”
As Calavera walks with me away from the meeting place at the edge of the cemetery, one more memory rises up unbidden. It was the last time he saw his brother. Giovanni was driving a Honda civic with tinted windows on the outskirts of Xela. The air coming through the windows was hot and dry. Casper—already ramflero of Salvatrucha Locos de Northside—sat in the front passenger seat. Giovanni had invited him against Sandra’s wishes. Sandra was in the back with her infant daughter suckling at her breast, sitting next to Calavera. Calavera watched the baby breastfeed while pretending to look out the window: her lips straining at the nipple, her eyelids squeezed shut as if the light flitting through the car were blinding. Sandra was listening distractedly to Giovanni and Casper talking, when Casper suddenly turned around and fixed Calavera with a grin.
“One more to feed the nation, huh,” he said, turning back to Giovanni.
Giovanni looked over sharply at Casper. “What did you say?”
“I said, one more little vato to make the mara strong.”
Giovanni jerked the car to the side of the road and skidded to a stop in the gravel. “Listen, dickhead,” he said in a quiet, charged voice, “my brother will never join the gang. I do not want this life for him. He is better than this. Do you understand?”
“Calm down, brother. I was just . . .”
“I said, do you fucking understand?”
“Yeah yeah, of course. Don’t worry man. I was just joking around. Why don’t you smoke your joint and chill out, hey?”
Still glaring at Casper, Giovanni shoved the car into gear and pealed out onto the road. Sandra and Calavera exchanged a startled look, both too afraid to speak. Casper stared stolidly out the window at warehouses of sheet metal, unpainted, boxy things where men covered in grease moved like ants among the carcasses of dead tractors, semis, and other machines strewn about the gravel lot.
FIGURE 12. Mara Salvatrucha graffiti on gravestone, Guatemala City General Cemetery.
As they drove, Calavera watched his brother’s face in the rearview mirror, the tattoo tears etched at his right eye, the gothic script down his neck. In those days he was always angry about one thing or another, stuff he never discussed with Calavera, or with any of his family, if what Sandra said was true. As Calavera watched, Giovanni looked up into the mirror and for an instant they were caught in each other’s reflected gaze. What Calavera saw there he was never able to name: an infinite sadness, a secret window into his brother that he’d never seen before and never would again. Perhaps it was all the hopes and fears that would break Giovanni to pieces if he let them loose. Calavera wanted to wrap his arms around his brother’s neck and cry. Then Giovanni turned his eyes back to the road. For a long while, no one spoke.
CHAPTER 2
Emissaries of the Violent Peace
Like the decomposing landscape where the Guatemala City cemetery meets the city dump, mara history makes for treacherous terrain. Telling the story of the maras’ rise means reckoning with the breathtaking mortality rates among gang-involved youth. Death’s specter materializes in the symbols with which maras and mareros mark their bodies and neighborhoods. Take, for example, the tres puntos (three points) tattoo, once a trademark of Southern California Latino gangs. Composed of three dots in the shape of an ellipsis or an equilateral triangle, it is usually tattooed on the back of the hand or at the corner of an eye.1 For some it references the Holy Trinity. For others it is a trifecta of sex, mourning, and death. Among the maras of Central America, the tres puntos has taken on another meaning as well. It is said to stand for the only three certainties in la vida loca: the hospital, the prison, and the cemetery. Over the years, as violent death has steadily become more certain than survival, the cemetery has come
