The Secrets in Guatemala s Bones
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| A grave site at a former military installation in El Quiché, Guatemala. Credit Antonio Bolfo for The New York Times |
This
year, Peccerelli’s work has become the center of an unprecedented legal
case. On June 7, a judge ruled that eight of Guatemala’s top former
military leaders will stand trial for massacres, torture and
disappearances they ordered or helped orchestrate at a military base in
the city of Cobán between 1981 and 1987. (Prosecutors also hope to bring
charges against other military officials in the case, including a
sitting congressman and eight fugitives, some of whom may be in the
United States.) Unlike most war trials in Guatemala, the accused are not
foot soldiers but high-ranking officials — more than have ever been
prosecuted at one time. “There has never been anything like this in
Guatemala,” says Jo-Marie Burt, professor of political science at George
Mason University and a transitional-justice expert.
The
bulk of the evidence comes from exhumations Peccerelli and his group,
the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, known as F.A.F.G.,
undertook at the former military base, where they uncovered 84 graves
and 565 bodies. As Snow often told Peccerelli, bones make excellent
witnesses. “Although they speak softly,” Snow said, “they never lie, and
they never forget.”
Fredy Peccerelli’s family fled
Guatemala in 1980, when Peccerelli was 9, as the civil war between the
military and leftist guerrillas raged. Around that time, paramilitary
death squads with names like Eye for an Eye and White Hand crisscrossed
Guatemala City in unmarked white vans and jeeps, snatching people off
street corners, from their workplaces, from their houses in the middle
of the night. Bodies were often left mutilated along the roadside or
strung up from trees. The military targeted leftist organizers, Catholic
priests and nuns, teachers, university students, trade unionists and
the indigenous Maya — anyone deemed affiliated with the left.
In
August of that year, Peccerelli’s father received a death threat by
mail. Perhaps the military focused on Fredy Sr., who was president of
Guatemala’s Weight Lifting Federation, because he had traveled to the
Communist U.S.S.R., as a delegate for the Olympics team. Or maybe it was
because six years earlier he was a law student at San Carlos
University, which was at the forefront of community organizing and
opposition to the military. Fredy Sr. wasn’t especially political, but
it didn’t take much for the military to threaten or “disappear” people.
Young
Fredy immediately moved with his siblings and parents into the house of
his great-grandmother. After Fredy Sr. flew to New York City to look
for an apartment, another letter arrived, this one addressed to his
wife, María: “We know Fredy has left,” María remembers reading. “The day
he sets foot in Guatemala, he is dead.” By Thanksgiving, the entire
family had moved to the Bronx.
Fredy
Jr., a round-faced, cautious boy, struggled to speak English. He longed
for his grandparents and missed playing marbles in the dirt streets.
His parents were no less homesick. The Peccerellis struggled to keep up
with the news in Guatemala. The press was censored; phone service was
lousy, and even when it improved, Guatemalans were cautious about what
they said. The military’s orejas, ears, were everywhere.
By
the time he was in high school in Brooklyn, Peccerelli barely thought
about Guatemala. He’d become a Yankees fanatic, a baseball player, a
competitive swimmer. But then, during his junior year at Brooklyn
College, in a cross-cultural-studies course, he read “I, Rigoberta
Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala.” Menchú is a Mayan activist and
Nobel Peace Prize winner whose father was murdered while occupying a
building in protest of military occupation in 1980; her mother was
tortured, raped and killed. Like most middle-class children from
Guatemala, Peccerelli had known little about the Maya, who tend to live
in the remote Highlands and have suffered centuries of discrimination.
But Menchú’s descriptions of Maya culture and the atrocities they
suffered made Peccerelli want to go back to learn more. “I had these
naïve dreams about becoming the Mesoamerican Indiana Jones,” he told me
in one of our many conversations over the last 18 months.
That
naïveté, though, bumped hard against the reality of Guatemala when he
returned to begin his career in forensic anthropology. His first
exhumation was deep in the tropical Ixcán region. Five men and five
women, all in their 20s, traveled 12 hours by truck across rocky dirt
roads that chewed up tires, another two hours on foot and about half an
hour wading in chest-high water across the Xalbal River. Then they
finally hiked for three hours through the forest to the village of
Cuarto Pueblo. Of the group — whose members came from Germany, Brazil,
the United States and Guatemala — Peccerelli was the least experienced.
He had majored in anthropology and taken a class in osteology, as well
as the three-week class in forensics. But otherwise he had the training
of a Brooklyn Boy Scout. He carried a backpack with 50 pounds of gear,
including his rubber water shoes. He wore new Patagonia khakis and $200
hiking books. “It was as if George from ‘Seinfeld’ had landed in Cuarto
Pueblo,” he told me. “I hit the floor running and fell on my face.” He
was also a source of constant amusement at the local river, where some
15 children would surround him as he bathed, touching his face, poking
his arms. “They had never seen anyone that fat,” Peccerelli says.
A
Guatemalan legal rights organization had asked the group to find the
dead and interview survivors of a massacre in Cuarto Pueblo on March 14,
1982. It was the same month that Efraín Ríos Montt, an army general,
seized power in Guatemala and unleashed what would become the dirty
war’s most brutal scorched-earth campaign, in which, for the next year
and a half, tens of thousands of civilians were killed.
On
the morning of the Cuarto Pueblo murders, about 400 soldiers surrounded
the market, the health clinic, the school. It was a Sunday, and the
soldiers blocked parishioners from leaving the church, then set the
building on fire. Survivors told Peccerelli that soldiers macheted men
and women who tried to flee and captured and gang-raped others. They
pointed to a concrete pillar against which the military smashed babies.
Finally, after ordering local men to dig ditches, the soldiers threw in
wood and bodies and doused them with gasoline. The entire village — and
some 350 bodies — burned for days. That first night, a survivor
reported, the air was full of “smoke and the smell of burnt flesh.”
Listening
to the families relive these horrors devastated Peccerelli. At night he
slept in a tent just a few feet from the pillar and dreamed of pools of
blood. He also suffered through dengue fever, malaria, giardia. Still,
he said, “I’d never met people who had managed to survive and still
maintain their humanity by welcoming us and trusting us.” He didn’t know
how long he’d stay in Guatemala, just that he wanted to understand more
about the war and its victims.
At
the end of two months, the team took 40 coffee sacks full of teeth and
bone fragments back to the Guatemala City lab for forensic analysis. The
anthropologists couldn’t determine how many people were killed, let
alone their identities. “We could only prove that it happened,”
Peccerelli says. “And that the remains were human.” A year later, they
returned the remains to Cuarto Pueblo, where families held a mass
funeral, placing 12 coffins of charred bones inside a sky blue concrete
tomb.
In
the next few years, Peccerelli and the team got a clearer sense of how
many massacres like Cuarto Pueblo had taken place — and how much work
lay ahead. A 1999 United Nations-commissioned report estimated that at
least 200,000 people were killed or “disappeared,” the vast majority of
them Maya. The military and related paramilitary groups were responsible
for 93 percent of the human rights abuses, including “acts of
genocide.” The report also pointed to the role of the United States: The
C.I.A. staged a coup in 1954 to overthrow President Jacobo Árbenz of
Guatemala after his land-reform policies ran afoul of the powerful
American-owned United Fruit Company. The United States then installed
the first in a long line of military dictators and, on and off for the
next four decades, provided regimes with money, weapons, intelligence
support and counterinsurgency training. When the war finally ended in
1996, the military had committed 626 massacres against the Maya. Cuarto
Pueblo was just a microcosm of the slaughter.
The former Cobán military
base sits six hours north of Guatemala City, in the Highlands region.
Today it is known as Creompaz, and the United Nations trains
peacekeepers there. At the metal front gate, soldiers stand with rifles
on their shoulders. A narrow road leads over a bridge and up a hill to
the low-slung, whitewashed main building. From roughly the 1970s through
the 1990s, the military ran intelligence operations — and for at least
some of that time, prison and torture facilities, prosecutors say — from
the complex.
Archaeologists
had long been prohibited from excavating on most military bases. The
military rejected any talk of exhumations and refused to turn over
meaningful documents from the war. Then in 2000, an organization called
Famdegua, dedicated to finding the war’s missing, interviewed two
witnesses (now in a witness-protection program) who saw civilians taken
to the Cobán base. Local authorities initially wouldn’t approve the
group’s request to find the bodies, but more than a decade later, in
2012, a judge granted a search warrant, and exhumations began.
By
then, Peccerelli had gone from stumbling through his first exhumation
to, five years later, heading a 44-person organization. His fluency in
English meant Peccerelli could interact easily with American forensics
experts and international funders. But also, like Snow, who became
Peccerelli’s close friend and mentor and often flew to Guatemala to
advise and work with the team, he combined ambitious ideas with an
outsider’s fearlessness.
For
years, the team had focused on “closed context” cases, massacres that
took place in villages where witnesses could help identify bodies
through dental work, childhood fractures, a distinctive piece of
clothing. But without a DNA lab, identifying most of the 40,000 forcibly
disappeared, like those found on military bases, was near impossible.
How could the anthropologists link bones disintegrating in the ground
for 30 years to Maya families, many of them illiterate, reluctant to
trust outsiders and scattered in isolated mountains? After a decade
spent planning a lab, training a staff and verifying results,
Peccerelli’s lab produced its first genetic matches in 2010 — two years
before the exhumations at Cobán began.
From
February 2012, when the archaeologists first arrived at the base, until
December 2013, they worked seven days a week, uncovering more brutality
than they’d ever seen in one place. One grave held 64 men and boys,
pressed helter-skelter into a still life of death: skulls face down,
broken into pieces; a tangle of pants and legs akimbo, some with thick
ropes encircling their ankles. Just yards away, in another grave, lay 41
women with 22 children under the age of 4. The work was delicate:
Skulls can fracture. The earth shifts. Move the dirt too roughly, and it
swallows bones into its folds and mixes them with other bodies. An
errant stroke can brush away a remnant of a blindfold, a piece of rope, a
cranium fragment with a bullet hole, the bullet itself: the criminal
evidence needed to prosecute a murder.
The
archaeologists boxed every set of remains and drove them to F.A.F.G.’s
anthropology lab in Guatemala City, where an assistant would drill a
small sample from the femur. That sample would then be sent to
F.A.F.G.’s white nine-room DNA lab, which is protected by bulletproof
doors and two armed guards out front. It could take months before one
sample yielded results. A technician ground each bone to a flourlike
powder, then added enzymes and other chemicals to extract and isolate
strands of DNA. Next, a machine created thousands of copies of the DNA
segments, and a technician ran them through a genetic analyzer. Finally,
the copies were compared with DNA samples in the lab’s database — there
are now 13,000 — each one given by a person searching for someone who
was missing.
The
rest of the bones remained in the main anthropology lab, in a modest
two-story house in a residential neighborhood. There, some 2,400 boxes
the size of minifridges are stacked three, four and five tall. They line
the entire second floor and parts of the lab. Each one is marked with
the location where the bones were discovered — Estrella Polar, Santa
Avelina, San Juan Cotzal, Cobán — and an individual case number.
On
the day I visited, two assistant anthropologists cleaned bones with
toothbrushes and water. Near them, a skull sat on a plastic lunch tray,
with an army green blindfold tied around its eye sockets. Another tray
held more than 50 fragments of a cranium, shattered like glass. In the
back half of the room, dozens of skeletons had been carefully
reconstructed, bone by bone, and lay atop 30 plastic folding tables
covered in blue cloth. Few of the bodies have all their 206 bones and 32
teeth. Finger and toe bones disintegrate; bones commingle and decompose
on top of one another. The goal, always, is for the anthropologists to
uncover a story. How old was the person when he or she died? (One of the
pelvic bones doesn’t completely fuse until between ages 20 and 23;
clavicles as late as 25. And all bones start to show signs of
deterioration by the early 30s.) Was the person male or female? (Men
have thicker, heavier skulls; women have wider pelvises.) What was the
cause of death: a bullet? (An X-ray may reveal a bullet and possibly
entrance wounds.) An ax to the throat? (The cuts may reach back to the
vertebrae.) A machete against the skull? (Certain fractures indicate
blunt-force trauma.)
On
one table lay the remains of a victim from Cobán. He had been
discovered in Grave 63 with 25 other men and women — all the bodies
blindfolded or with their hands bound. On another table was a teenage
boy. Next to him, the reconstructed bones of a young child, or what
remained: parts of a skull about the size of a fist, most of the
vertebrae, one leg bone and a smattering of ribs, each no bigger than a
twig.
Guatemala City is one
of the most dangerous cities in the world, ravaged by drug and gang
violence, much of it a direct consequence of the dirty war and its
aftermath. Under the 1996 peace accord that ended the conflict, neither
the military nor the guerrillas were held accountable for war crimes.
Instead many of the commanders, police officers, detectives and death
squads simply traded one type of power for another, becoming ringleaders
in money laundering, human smuggling and extortion, along with the drug
trade that has devastated Guatemala. Stop at a red light in Guatemala
City and men, doubled up on motorcycles, may wield a gun and demand your
cellphone, your wallet, your life. In some areas, lynchings by
vigilantes replace formal policing. For the cost of a few pounds of
coffee, you can buy a hit man’s services — and most likely get away with
the murder. About 70 percent of murders in Guatemala City go
unpunished, according to 2012 figures.
For
decades, lawyers, judges, journalists and human rights workers who have
tried to uncover Guatemala’s shrouded past have faced intimidation and,
not so infrequently, kidnapping, torture and murder. The death threats
began for Peccerelli and his staff in 2001, when a fellow anthropologist
at another organization received a letter listing 11 targets, including
Peccerelli and several others at F.A.F.G. “For 10 years we have known
who you are and let you be,” the letter said. “Now it is time to settle
accounts.” A couple of times in the field, locals — presumably military
sympathizers or former collaborators — have intimidated F.A.F.G.
archaeologists, throwing rocks at them and wielding machetes and
canisters of gasoline, threatening to burn them alive. In 2006, the
Inter-American Court of Human Rights required the Guatemalan government
to protect Peccerelli and his colleagues. He has a bulletproof S.U.V.
and bodyguards around the clock. They accompanied his children to school
and to friends’ houses until two years ago, when Peccerelli sent his
then 17-year-old daughter to college and his 16-year-old son to boarding
school in the United States.
Not
surprisingly, intimidation escalates during war trials in Guatemala.
When Ríos Montt was prosecuted in 2013 for genocide against the Maya
Ixil, the first time a former head of state faced such charges in his
own country’s court, Peccerelli and his staff were among the dozens of
witnesses and experts to testify. The conservative elite and former
military officers wrote op-eds in newspapers denouncing the trial.
Anonymous opponents of the trial also distributed a six-page circular
titled, “The Faces of Infamy,” which featured photos of Peccerelli,
Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, who prosecuted the case, and others,
labeling them “traitors.” Though Ríos Montt was found guilty, the
verdict was overturned 10 days later in a split decision by the
constitutional court. A retrial began this spring.
In
February, just weeks after Attorney General Thelma Aldana announced
arrests in the Cobán case, Peccerelli told me: “I knew it would rain on
me. In Guatemala, you find the truth, then you kill the messenger.” We
were on a train riding from New York City to Washington. Peccerelli had
come to the United States to talk to supporters about opening an
American office, in order to raise money and also connect with
Guatemalans here who still have missing family members. With the
impending trial, the trip had instead turned into strategy sessions with
lawyers and heads of nonprofits about how to best protect F.A.F.G.’s
staff and the case’s evidence.
In
newspapers and on social media, right-wing organizations with ties to
former members of the military have denounced Peccerelli as a fake
scientist and “the son of a guerrilla.” One military advocate, whose
father was a commander at Cobán and who himself was kidnapped by
guerrillas during the war, has filed a lawsuit against Peccerelli and
his colleagues, accusing them of obstructing justice, taking bribes and
abusing authority.
Several
months ago, someone in the prosecutor’s office leaked F.A.F.G. an email
warning that former military members were reportedly looking for hit
men to kill someone in the prosecutor’s office and at the organization.
Peccerelli has since told his staff to vary their work hours and their
routes home and remove any personal information from their cellphones.
His fiancée, Jessika Osorio (Peccerelli and the mother of his children
separated years ago), who is also the head of F.A.F.G.’s investigation
team, now refuses to leave the house without Peccerelli’s bodyguard. And
even Peccerelli, typically unflappable, seems worn down. “It’s changed
me,” he said recently. “I love exhuming; I love telling families we
found their loved ones. But the justice part has meant a lot of painful
things.”
These
tactics are intended not only to intimidate but also to divert time and
money from his work. As it is, Peccerelli has been forced to cut his
staff in recent years to 63 from 150; funding has dropped to $1.9
million this year from a peak of $3.5 million in 2013, when U.S.A.I.D.
was among F.A.F.G.’s supporters. The Netherlands, the biggest F.A.F.G.
funder, shut its embassy in Guatemala a couple of years ago for
budgetary reasons and took its financial backing with it. Although the
United States’ State Department provides some money, many Guatemala
experts believe the United States needs to do more. “Hundreds of
millions of dollars in U.S. aid flowed to Guatemala’s military over
decades,” notes Kate Doyle, director of the Guatemalan Documentation
Project at the National Security Archive. “The least the United States
could do today is underwrite F.A.F.G.’s efforts to repair some of that
damage for the victims.”
In
the past decade, though, the country has moved, in its slow and halting
way, toward judicial progress. The last two attorneys general have
aggressively prosecuted war crimes and corruption, aided by a 2006 deal
between the United Nations and the Guatemalan government that created
the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, funded in
part by the United States, to help repair the broken judicial system.
Last spring, tens of thousands of Guatemalans began turning out for
protests, demanding the resignation and prosecution of then President
Otto Pérez Molina, yet another war commander, for his involvement in a
major fraud scheme and to denounce other corrupt government officials.
(Pérez Molina stepped down and has been indicted.) For a country that
has long been defined by terror, Doyle says, it’s been “the first steps
toward a real Guatemalan Spring.”
Nevertheless,
Guatemala’s right wing retains fierce power. And some observers worry
that because of the stakes in the Cobán case, threats against F.A.F.G.
will intensify. Over the years, weary of the intimidation, a handful of
lawyers, judges and human rights workers have fled Guatemala. Peccerelli
has continued to hang on. “This is a guy who came of age in the U.S.
and had every opportunity to do whatever he wanted,” Jo-Marie Burt, the
transitional-justice expert, says. “He could have gotten up and left any
time.”
I
asked Peccerelli recently if he considered returning to the United
States. “I contemplate leaving here every day,” he told me. “But I’m not
throwing away 21 years of work. Not many people were lucky enough to
get on a plane and leave during the war. This is me paying back. I want
to be here to tell the story.”
In the early months
of the Cobán exhumation in 2012, Delfina Xol traveled by bus for two
hours from her village, Campur, in the Alta Verapaz region of the
Highlands, to Cobán, with her sister-in-law and one of her daughters.
Delfina had heard radio ads that aired in the two most prominent
indigenous languages of the area, Poqomchi’ and Q’eqchi’, announcing
that F.A.F.G. was stationed at a nearby Catholic church, taking DNA
samples and interviewing anyone with missing family members in the
region.
It
had been more than two decades since her husband, Roberto, disappeared
from the village where he grew up and where he and Delfina fell in love
as teenagers. They had four children together, and Delfina was pregnant
with their fifth when he vanished. Roberto owned a small store; he
helped build a local school. He was outgoing, an affectionate dad who
loved taking his kids to the river and playing soccer with friends.
On
July 13, 1988, Roberto Xol awoke at 5 a.m., skipped breakfast and
dressed in the clothes his 11-year-old daughter, Filomena, had picked
out, as she often did: jeans, a Coca-Cola T-shirt, a pressed button-up
shirt. He was walking toward the bus stop to get supplies for his store
when a man wearing sunglasses and driving a white car stopped him in the
street. The car, a witness later said, looked like a jeep. Darkened
windows, no license plate. The driver motioned to Roberto: Get in.
That
afternoon, his younger children ran back and forth to the bus stop
waiting for their father to return, while Filomena tended to the store.
By nightfall, Delfina feared the worst: She knew what had happened to
men in her town. Roberto’s cousin had disappeared, as had at least 40
others in the community.
‘Not many people were lucky enough to get on a plane and leave during the war. This is me paying back.’
When
he didn’t come home after a couple of days, Delfina gathered her
children and traveled by bus to the military base in Cobán. Had he been
arrested? Forced into service? A soldier at the front entrance gave her
no information, just a warning: “Don’t return here again, or you will
die here.” She went to morgues, jails, hospitals. Without his income,
the family — once well-off by local standards — soon lost everything.
Delfina had to sell the store, the house and Roberto’s construction
tools, one by one. She cut corn and picked coffee beans, but it wasn’t
enough. She couldn’t afford the books and uniforms required for her
children to attend school. They begged on the street. For weeks at a
time, the family lived on tortillas.
Over
the years, Delfina hoped that somehow Roberto would return. She never
remarried. She dreamed about him often. Perhaps he was living as a
refugee in Mexico, like some who escaped Guatemala’s civil war. Or he
had amnesia and would recover soon. Rumors had circulated in the
Highlands about a large house where the military imprisoned the
disappeared.
At
the Cobán church, an investigator asked Delfina if Roberto had
distinguishing marks that might help identify him — dental work, bone
fractures. Next, he took swabs from inside the cheeks of one of
Roberto’s daughters and his sister, and sent them off to the DNA lab.
A
year later, two F.A.F.G. investigators, Freddy Muñoz and Diane Manuela
Xiloj Cuin, arrived in Campur with news for the family. The lab, they
said, had a potential match. But they would need samples from the other
daughters before they could confirm it. Months went by; the lab had an
enormous backlog of cases. Then, one day in July 2014, Muñoz and Xiloj
Cuin told the family they were returning to Campur with more
information. Filomena walked three hours from her village, which is
inaccessible by car and has no cellphone service, to join her mother and
her sisters. As they gathered in the youngest daughter’s living room,
Xiloj Cuin explained how the DNA process works. Muñoz then told them
F.A.F.G. had been able to match the daughters’ DNA to a skeleton found
in Grave 45, known as case No. 1433-XLV-1, one of the more than 560
bodies exhumed at Cobán.
Delfina
and all her daughters were weeping by then. Roberto hadn’t run off to
start a new family. He hadn’t moved to Mexico. Instead, he was kidnapped
by the military, possibly tortured. He was murdered and dumped into a
hole in the ground on a base just 30 miles away. And he lay there, alone
in the cold earth, for more than 20 years.
Four months later, Peccerelli
headed from Guatemala City to Campur for Roberto Xol’s funeral. As dawn
broke on the drive into the Highlands, the air smelled of dew and wood
smoke from open-fire cooking. Mist clung to the mountains. For several
hours, the road wound past one-story houses of adobe, concrete or wood,
many with tin roofs, no plumbing, no electricity. Pickup trucks stuffed
with men, women, children — a Highlands version of public transportation
— shared the narrow dirt roads with women walking to markets and men
and young boys descending from the mountains, hunched because of the
stacks of wood on their backs, almost as big as their thin bodies.
By
the time Peccerelli arrived in Campur, Freddy Muñoz was there, carrying
a large cardboard box from his truck. The box was labeled 1433-XLV-1.
“They are bringing my grandfather!” a few of Roberto’s 14 grandchildren
shouted. “Grandfather is coming!”
A
hundred or so people filled the mud yard, and another 75 pushed into
Roberto’s second-eldest daughter’s two-room concrete house, no bigger
than 400 square feet, which she shares with her three children and
Delfina. Smoke and the smell of incense filled the room. A bucket of
water rested below the coffin to call spirits. On the right side of the
coffin sat a bowl wrapped in a Mayan textile. On the other side lay a
new toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, a comb — the things Roberto would need
on his journey in the next world.
At
the head of the coffin, Delfina and her four daughters huddled
together, all of them under five feet tall, with black hair pulled into
buns or ponytails, dressed in skirts and huipiles, or Mayan
women’s shirts, embroidered with flowers. One of Roberto’s daughters,
Mayra Arely, was 4 when her father disappeared. She had to drop out of
school by age 10; at 14 she married, and until recently, she had a job
cleaning houses. Only the baby of the family, Norma, now 27, a mother
and a teacher — with whom Delfina was pregnant when her husband
disappeared — finished school, because of the generosity of relatives.
As
Peccerelli opened the coffin, Muñoz took out a white button-down shirt
and black slacks the family bought for Roberto. Then, standing at either
end of the coffin, Peccerelli and Muñoz worked quietly and quickly,
pulling bones out of lunch-bag-size paper bags to reconstruct his body.
Muñoz slid femurs and pelvic bones into the pants and lay Roberto’s foot
bones below, while Peccerelli lined up the vertebrae inside the shirt.
Next, he reconstructed Roberto’s rib cage and his arms before placing
his hand bones on the outsides of Roberto’s pants pockets. Peccerelli
sweated from the heat beaming off the tin roof and the crush of people
around the coffin. His eyes watered from the smoke of the incense. If he
put a few rib bones out of order, no one would ever know. But it
mattered to him. This was often the moment during funerals when
Peccerelli felt emotional, but he swore never to cry in front of
families. After all the exhuming and forensic analysis, there was
finally this: a family’s goodbye for someone missing for so long, and a
set of bones that had become, once again, human.
Having
set all the bones just right, Peccerelli gently placed the skull
against a white satin pillow in the coffin; no sign remained of
Roberto’s broad cheekbones. No hint of his charcoal eyes or the handsome
face that was said to break women’s hearts. The only things that
reminded Delfina of her husband were the two gold crowns on his teeth,
the remnants of a long-ago bar fight.
Before
Peccerelli closed the coffin, there was one last thing to do. From a
plastic bag on a table in front of the coffin, Muñoz pulled out a pair
of pants, a Coca-Cola shirt, a striped button-up shirt and a pair of
shoes — the clothes Roberto was wearing the day he disappeared, now
encrusted with the dirt of more than two decades. Mayra Arely recognized
them immediately: the last outfit her sister chose for their dad, the
outfit her sister had described in detail for years. She crouched down
in front of the clothes, her face buried in the remnants of her father.
“Papa, Papa,” she cried as the room fell quiet, “you’re back, you’re
back.” Moments later, Filomena was there, weeping, too. And Delfina, her
head bowed, gripping a black shawl around her shoulders.
After
a few minutes, Muñoz picked up the clothes and laid them inside the
coffin. Then, together, he and Peccerelli closed the lid.
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