The next day, as Julian and his brother prepared the goat, Gia and I decided to do a day trip to Guanajuato — an old colonial city of narrow streets and vertiginous staircases nestled in a valley about three hours away by car. The city’s main tourist attraction was the Mummy Museum. It was a beautiful day, and we were a bit reluctant to spend too much time indoors, but everyone kept telling us we had to go, so we trekked up the winding hillside road to the museum. When we got to the top of the hill we found a nondescript, single-storey beige building surrounded by tour buses. We waited in a long queue for the better part of an hour before entering.

It turned out the “mummies” on display were corpses exhumed from the adjacent cemetery of individuals whose families had been unable to pay a burial tax introduced in the 1870s. About one in ten of the corpses had been found preserved, all of them from above-ground crypts — likely due to the arid climate, which would have rapidly dried them out after burial. Inside the museum, the mummies were displayed in vitrines with virtually no information panels. Some of them were from as recent as the 1960s, which meant some of their descendants, probably many, were still alive. This seemed unfathomable to me. As Gia and I walked through the dimly lit hallways decorated with fake cobwebs and mirrors with holographic ghouls lingering in them, I had the distinct impression I was in a haunted house. There was nothing museological about any of it.

Local folklore maintained the mummies were people who had been accidentally buried alive; having succumbed to an agonizing death of asphyxiation, their bodies transformed into mummies as a lasting testament to their suffering. Apparently there was some truth to this. Because of a local cholera epidemic from 1829 to 1851, many bodies were buried as soon as possible to limit the spread of infection; however, it is thought that in some cases the dying were buried alive by accident. Which would explain the horrifying expressions on some of their faces.

One face in particular lingered with me. It was the mummy of a mother. I’m not sure how I could tell she was a mother, but somehow I knew this beyond a doubt. She was a woman of about fifty. Her mouth was wide open as if she were screaming. Her eye sockets appeared to be screaming too. Her arms were crossed in front of her as if holding her body or perhaps attempting to press up against a coffin with the backsides of her arms. Her breasts looked like two wasp’s nests. I held her hollow, haunted gaze until my eyes filled with tears and I looked away.

“She’ll win every staring contest,” Gia murmured.