By the time Gia and I stumbled back out into white, hot daylight, I was furious. It was all so absolutely obscene. But what, exactly, was obscene? The museum’s refusal to treat death as a hallowed and sanctified thing? The unrestrained showcase of horror? Wasn’t death a horror? Wasn’t this the hard truth? Was this place making a show of death any more than Aliens or Titanic had? Did it feel obscene that these bodies had once contained real people? They were, of course, no longer people. They were now things no different than a rock or a vase or a car tire, and yet I was shaken to the very core with the feeling that I had just witnessed some profound violation. Looking around us, it occurred to me for the first time that the crowds flowing out of the museum’s exit were mostly Mexican tourists, parents with their children who had travelled to Guanajuato from elsewhere in the country. They spoke animatedly. Inside the dark halls the children had pointed at the bodies and run ahead, calling back and waving one another over. There was nothing precious or reverential in how they moved about the space or spoke of the bodies. They were unashamed and unabashed to be scared, repulsed, and fascinated by the dead. They were unashamed and unabashed to be alive. To rejoice in the fact that they were not, at least yet, those bodies. I realized, standing there, that what I had felt shaken was my own WASP relationship with death as something respectfully, if rarely, spoken about and certainly never gawked at.

As we made our way back down the hill towards the bustling central thoroughfares, we turned off down a shady side street to escape the afternoon sun and soon found ourselves navigating a vertiginous labyrinth of intersecting staircases trafficked mostly by stray dogs. The narrow, stepped passageways were steep and filled with blind corners, every landing leading off in a new direction at a ninety-degree angle. We knew the general direction we had to head was down, but every corner we rounded seemed to lead to more staircases in an Escher-like nightmare. The staircases were lined with locked doors, gates guarded by barking dogs, and dark cubbyhole shops separated from the street by wooden countertops. Most of the shops had small television sets showing the same soccer game, but somehow all seemed unoccupied.