The driver left me by a wax museum just in front of the basilica and told me how to find Calvario from there. It was a small street whose crooked and untamed trees seemed much older than the buildings behind them. In the middle of it stood a two-domed church and next to this lay a line of small shops, including a clinic and an old gate that led to the Hogar de Ancianos Santa María de Guadalupe. By it, the trees met in the middle of the road, covering it completely with shade. There was a nevería on the corner with bright ice-cream cones painted on its walls. Between the church and the hogar, meanwhile, lay the shop that corresponded to the address that the boys had written down for me. Its window was filled with votive candles, little plastic dolls of the Virgin in glittering capes, and what looked like sugar skulls. The shop had just opened and a middle-aged woman was turning on the lights inside her cavern of Catholic hope and kitsch. When I opened the door, a bell rang from deep inside the cavern of the shop. The woman looked up and I could tell that I was not in the usual run of her customers. I was suddenly sure that Dolores had been there just before me, and I decided to just ask the owner up front if that was the case.
“There was no American here,” she said defiantly.
“The person who was just here—where did they go?”
“Everyone who comes here goes to the basilica afterward.”
I began to notice that there were small figurines of the Virgin with scythes, female reapers that were unusual. Weren’t they the figures that Dolores had described as belonging to the Santa Muerte? Little shiny statues stood in rows, skeletons in silver and gold cowls and dresses holding scythes. Some were all white, some black. A few, slightly larger, were scarlet and green and the scythes had gold blades. Around them were blue and black candles and others that were banded in seven colors. The botánica section, the woman explained. A collection of folk medicine and magical amulets and spell-casting perfumes. The blue candles indicated wisdom; the black ones protected against black magic. Gold was for increasing prosperity.
I showed her a photograph of Donald and she shook her head. And then it occurred to me that I had forgotten to bring one of Dolores.
“Was it a woman?”
The denial was less emphatic.
So I had my answer, and I had suddenly realized something.
“When did she leave? Was it less than ten minutes ago?”
And against her better judgment she blinked while denying it.
The glass shook as I closed the door behind me. I walked away as quickly as I could toward the basilica. Around the plaza, filled with both rubble and pilgrims, I sat there in the sun breathing in the thin air with difficulty. Dolores was almost certainly there among the crowds. I entered the church, which rose like a metal bedouin tent from the edge of the plaza opposite its sixteenth-century companion. Above the altar hung the veil in which the Indian saint Juan Diego had once gathered roses, itself imprinted with a mysterious image of the Virgin.
Under it, in an automated ritual, a conveyor belt whisked the faithful under the relic to be blessed by it. Outside, loudspeakers boomed over from the markets nearby. It washed over an army of beggars and neatly groomed peddlers of Virgin memorabilia. And I moved through this crowd, sifting slowly through the cripples and the blind until—just as I turned away from the great metal tent—I saw her making her way toward the basilica.
Dolores was dressed in black with a dark-green head scarf over her hair, low heels, and a white bag slung over her shoulder. Unaware of me or anyone around her, she walked slowly into the church and I followed her at a safe distance until she got onto the conveyor belt and was dragged slowly under the veil.
She got up at the other end and went back into the nave and knelt among the wretched of the earth before crossing herself, turning, and then going back outside into the sunshine. She walked around to the bautisterio, near which stood an entrance to what I thought was a large park but which I soon saw was actually a cemetery. The cemetery of Tepeyac. It was crowded, but she went into the park, along a wide path filled with hundreds of people. Soon I was following her among the ponderous stone angels and the Père Lachaise–style family tombs and camposantos. She made her way to a grave somewhat removed from the crowds until I was only a few tombstones away from her.
At that moment a tiny, oblong cloud unconnected to any others had appeared at the outer rim of the sun and was about to dim it. It shone like liquid silver and then, as it moved, the light decreased and her eyes moved upward and met mine. But there was no recognition. Exactly then a young man appeared as if out of nowhere, stepping up to her with the confidence of the familiar, and put his arm around her.