Chapter Text
Devout Catholics visit the Vatican, Muslims Mecca, Jews the Wailing Wall, and fans of Ernesto de la Cruz have their own site of pilgrimage: the tiny Oaxaca town of Santa Cecilia. This was where de la Cruz first learnt his craft, playing for pesos in the town square, and though later in his career he sometimes tried to draw a veil over his humble beginnings, this is also where he chose to be laid to rest. This is my second visit to Santa Cecilia; my first was two years ago, on Dia de los Muertos, when the ground around de la Cruz's monumental tomb was almost paved with candles and marigolds. Ernesto de la Cruz is Santa Cecilia's greatest son, and her people all but worship at his altar.
Except, of course, for the one I'm here to see today, who believes de la Cruz murdered his great-grandfather.
“Great-great-grandfather,” Miguel Rivera corrects me. He counts back briskly on his fingers. “Me, my papa Enrique, Abuelita Elena-” The lady in question, supervising the meeting from the head of the table, smiles widely at me. “-and then Mama Coco, and then Papa Héctor.” Miguel is confident, articulate and smiling. Sitting at the kitchen table in his family's home, with a bundle of paper scraps, three printed sheets and one framed photograph spread out in front of him, he looks like a general overseeing an army. His feet do not quite touch the floor.
Miguel didn’t mention--before he appeared on the other side of the gate of his family’s compound, and I found out for myself--that he is only thirteen. Archival research is a strange hobby for a boy of that age, and one you'd hardly think Miguel Rivera had the time for. At the weekends, and two nights a week after school, he learns to make shoes in his family's workshop (Rivera Family Shoemakers, founded 1921 and going from strength to strength.) When he has free time, he spends it strumming his guitar in the street outside his house, but free time is hard to come by with a new baby sister of barely six weeks. Little Socorro Rivera is howling upstairs as I arrive. “Sorry, sorry!” Miguel calls, laughing, slamming doors and shutters to keep out the noise. “That's my little sister. I think she's going to be a singer. Don't you?” That last comment is aimed, with a cheeky smile, at his Abuelita Elena.
"Don't push your luck, Miguel!" Abuelita Elena scowls. “I caught Abel looking at an accordion last week. An accordion!” For a moment I expect her stern expression to crack--surely that was some kind of joke--but Miguel dutifully covers his smile with a hand as he hops up into his chair.
It's an odd moment, but neither of them are in a hurry to explain. Instead Miguel grabs the framed photograph, leans across the table and offers it to me. It’s a family portrait. A beautiful woman with a grave expression sits with a goggle-eyed baby on her lap. Her husband stands at her shoulder, dressed in white, holding a guitar.
“Here. This is Mama Imelda, holding my Mama Coco, and this-” He taps the glass over the husband. “-is Héctor. Papa Héctor, I mean.”
Miguel Rivera has officially got my attention.
I don't want to be dishonest. When I was asked to write this article, I mostly agreed for the chance to revisit Santa Cecilia on expenses. Any Ernesto fan knows there’s no shortage of wild stories about his youth, and it’s not even the first time he’s been accused of murder on what turned out to be flimsy or fabricated evidence. Miguel Rivera is going to have to work hard to rattle me, but this photograph, at least, is worth the trip.
One of the minor mysteries in the history of Ernesto de la Cruz's early years is the Sepulveda Sketch, a postcard-sized drawing of Ernesto on his first tour, which shows him sitting with another musician and two matched glasses of tequila. The interesting thing about it is that they seemed to have swapped guitars for the occasion; the unknown man is holding Ernesto's signature gold-toothed guitar, while the one Ernesto cradles is decorated with gold swirls. Miguel’s Papa Héctor—lean, long-nosed, smiling shyly—is without a doubt the second man in the Sepulveda Sketch. What is more interesting, though, is that in the framed photograph Miguel has just given me, he is still holding the gold-toothed guitar.
His head has also been torn off and taped back into place, which is not an indignity ever visited on the Sepulveda.
I tap my finger against the glass, over the tear. “What happened here?”
“Mama Imelda got angry and ripped his head off,” Miguel says.
The story starts just over a hundred years ago, in 1917. That was the year Miguel's great-great-grandmother Mama Imelda, a wealthy, beautiful, educated young lady, married a penniless orphaned musician named Héctor Rivera.
“And he had big ears,” Abuelita Elena interjects.
“I think she must have loved him,” Miguel says. “It's the only explanation.”
A year later, their daughter was born; Miguel's Mama Coco, the first Socorro Rivera. When she was three years old, in the spring of 1921, Héctor left.
Miguel and Abuelita Elena are both silent for a moment.
"He wanted to play his music for the world," Miguel explains, with a bright and almost-pleading smile.
Abuelita Elena isn't so kind. "He left his wife and child and went chasing after his dreams like an idiot!"
With Héctor gone, Imelda Rivera and her three-year-old daughter were left to fend for themselves. It was lucky for the Rivera family that Mama Imelda was not a woman to wallow in despair. Her parents had cut her off when she married her penniless orphaned big-eared musician, but she set herself to learning a trade and she learned fast. A year after Héctor left Santa Cecilia, she was running Rivera Family Shoemakers from the front room of her house with the help of her twin brothers.
In that time, though, Héctor had disappeared. The last letter arrived in early August. After that, the Rivera family never heard from him again. And at some point, within a year of Héctor’s departure in the spring, Imelda ripped his face out of the family portrait and banned all music from her home. Not an instrument or a scrap of sheet music passed her door. Nobody was permitted to so much as whistle. Any passing strummer who set up within earshot of her home would be chased away by a well-aimed boot or her dog, Conejito.
“A mariachi band walked past her house once,” Abuelita Elena says admiringly. “Once.”
“There were warning signs at each end of the street. With a picture of a boot on,” Miguel says.
Imelda Rivera was clearly not a woman to do anything by halves. "She was scared someone else would leave the family to play music," Miguel explains.
Abuelita Elena nods seriously. “It was better not to risk it.”
I'm reminded sharply of the lectures about drug use I sat through in high school. If you ever touch a marijuana you will instantly die. Humming leads step by inexorable step to abandoning your family and being obliterated from the ofrenda. It sounds utterly mad to me, and I say so.
"People outside the family don't understand," Abuelita Elena sniffs.
The Rivera family's taboo on music, though, has survived for four generations and almost a hundred years, and as Miguel chatters on, it becomes very clear that it hasn't gone away. It has merely been relaxed. Miguel is in fact a musician on probation; the time spent polishing shoes in the workshop with his family is a trade for the time in the street—never in Santa Cecilia’s famous plaza, that den of mariachis--with his guitar.
It was Mama Coco herself who, at ninety-nine years of age, finally negotiated an easing-up of the embargo, though she wasn't quite aware she was doing it. Mama Coco was afflicted badly with dementia in the last years of her life. Her daughter objects when I say that she 'suffered' from the disease; they made sure she was comfortable and happy. It is an undeniable fact, however, that she used to ask miserably when her Papa was coming home. That was what prompted Miguel to break the taboo; he grabbed the guitar he'd learned to play secretly, hidden in the attic, and played a song for her. The song was 'Remember Me'.
I fold my arms and settle back in my chair. "Ernesto's greatest hit."
"Debatably," Miguel says, and smiles. I think, naively, that maybe he prefers Un Poco Loco.
"So why did you choose a song by Ernesto de la Cruz?" I ask. "Considering that you're meeting me to accuse him of murder."
"Well, I didn't know about that when I did it," Miguel says, eyes wide. “I used to be, like, Ernesto’s biggest fan. I learned to play by watching his videos. Frame by frame.” He sticks his tongue out of the side of his mouth, assumes an expression of fierce concentration and plucks the strings on an imaginary guitar. “Like that!”
“He had a shrine,” Abuelita Elena says, with an undercurrent of simmering wrath.
Miguel pulls a face. “Don’t tell everyone, Abuelita! It’s embarrassing.”
I’m getting a little antsy, waiting for Miguel to bring out the documentation. “You've told me an interesting story, Miguel, and I think it’s a shame you’ve been disillusioned about Ernesto. I came to hear your theory about a murder, though.”
“I’m getting to it!” Miguel protests, and glares at me. “Do you read the last page of all your books first?”
“You’ve got all those papers there and you’re not letting me look at them! It’s very suspicious,” I say.
Miguel grins, and finally digs into the hoard. The first offering is a photocopy of the church record for Mama Coco’s baptism. Godfather: Ernesto de la Cruz. My eyebrows go up involuntarily, and I grab my pen and make a note of the date of the baptism.
“So, this certainly proves they were friends for a long time.” And the date of Héctor’s departure, in the spring of 1921, does coincide with the best estimates for the start of Ernesto’s first tour. With the Sepulveda Sketch, it seems safe to conclude that they travelled together. “And the murder?”
“Like ninety percent of people get murdered by someone they know. That’s just statistics,” Miguel says.
“No, ninety percent of murdered people are murdered by somebody they know,” I say. “That or the crime rate in Santa Cecilia is much worse than I’d have expected.” I tap the end of my pen against the notebook, and hurriedly stop myself in case that’s too musical for Abuelita Elena. “Honestly, Miguel, I’d be delighted if I found a thing like that in my family. Standing as godfather to someone’s child is a long way from killing them, isn’t it?”
“I know! That’s why I was so shocked when I found out,” Miguel agrees brightly. “But you’re jumping ahead again! See, after I played for Mama Coco, she showed me some things she’d kept hidden.” Mama Coco’s reaction to the music must have been favourable, I’ve gathered, or the ban wouldn’t have been relaxed. “Papa Héctor’s head, to start with, but as well as that-” He lifts the bundle of torn paper from the table and carefully hands it to me, rather than simply pushing it over. The edges are frayed. “-she gave me these.”
He watches anxiously, hands clenched, as I separate the delicate pages.
Torn scraps of paper, a few postcards. They are all letters, all in the same hand, and every sheet covered with writing, doodles, lyrics and even sheet music in wobbly staves. Some are addressed something like ‘To my darling, the light of my life, and the other smaller light of my life’, other simply ‘Querida Coco’. They’re dated between April and July 1921.
As soon as I realise what I’ve been handed, I push back my chair, go to the sink, and carefully wash my hands. Abuelita Elena and Miguel watch me, frowning.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m cleaning my hands. I don’t want to damage them.”
Miguel bites his lip and looks at Abuelita Elena. “Should we have been doing that?”
Abuelita Elena folds her arms. “My hands are clean.”
“It’s not dirt. The natural oils on your hands aren’t good for the paper,” I explain. “Though… oh my God, you’re shoemakers. You handle leather and use wax and polishes and things? And then touch the documents?”
Miguel looks guilty. Abuelita Elena sets her jaw. “We wash when we come out of the workshop. We’re not savages.” Her gaze ticks away from me slightly. “Somebody might have spilt tabasco on July 6th.”
“It didn’t cover any of the words,” Miguel says defensively.
Oh my God.
I dry my hands carefully and return to the table. Miguel and Abuelita Elena are now looking at the letters like they’re a live grenade and might explode into dust at any moment.
Héctor Rivera’s letters offer news from the road—Ernesto and I were in this town or another, we played here and here and met these people and slept in such a place. Which is to say, a personal, almost day-by-day record of Ernesto’s first tour. There are lyrics, and heavily-annotated guitar chords. I’m dizzyingly aware that several people would kill for what has just been dropped unexpectedly into my hands.
“Would you mind if I came back tomorrow, to make a transcription?”
“Tomorrow?” Miguel looks at Abuelita Elena.
“I’ve handled documents this old before. I promise I’ll treat them as if they were my own.”
“And the more people read them, the better,” Miguel says, with a sharp smile.
Abuelita Elena says grudgingly that it’s all right so long as someone sits with me while I work, presumably so that I can’t stuff the letters into my bag and run away. To be fair, it’d be worth it.
“You ought to keep these in a safe,” I inform them both. “A well-hidden one.” As I look through the letters, though, a suspicion dawns on me that the dates and places and even the lyrics are not their sole significance.
The Songbook—the small, worn notebook found among Ernesto’s possessions after his untimely death, containing the lyrics and sheet music for the songs written between August 1919 and July 1921—is the most treasured artefact of de la Cruziana; twenty-five thousand visitors a month file reverently past it at the Ernesto de la Cruz Museum. It is an unfortunate fact, however, that the script in the Songbook does not match the extant examples of Ernesto’s handwriting. There are many potential explanations for this: handwriting does change with age, and it’s even possible that Ernesto purposefully developed the elegant, flamboyant hand he used in later life. I’ve always personally subscribed to the latter theory, and I’m no graphanalyst. But to my untrained eye, the handwriting of Héctor Rivera’s letters very closely resembles the handwriting in the Songbook.
Miguel and Abuelita Elena aren’t the only ones, now, looking at the bundle of letters like it might explode. I sit back and take a few deep breaths.
“According to the letters, Papa Héctor was the one who really wrote Remember Me,” Miguel informs me, cheerfully, as if he knows what I’m thinking but isn’t sure I’m freaking out enough. “For Mama Coco. It’s all in the letters. They sang it together at the same time every night no matter how far apart they were.”
“That’s in the letters?”
Abuelita Elena nods. “We’ve heard them all.”
“We sat around the table and read them to Mama Coco,” Miguel says. “Look, this is Papa Héctor’s last letter, July 26th-” With the ease of practice, he snags it out of the nearly-identical pile. “He’s really soppy.” His nose wrinkles. “I loooove you and I die every morning I don’t wake up beside you—yuck!—and Coco’s face is so pretty, kiss her pretty face for me.” He rolls his eyes. I’m not sure how Miguel survived that first reading. Miguel shakes his head and presses on. “But he doesn’t sound like he wants to run away and leave them, does he?”
“No,” I admit, but with a wariness learned from several ex-boyfriends.
“I thought so too!” Miguel says. “And I went on the Internet-” He mimes typing. “-and it turns out someone’s taken pictures of aaaallll the civil records from, like, all time, and put them on a website! So you can put names in and they find you all the records that match the name. I think it was the Mormons that did it. Which was weird of them, but it was really helpful, because I found this!” He doles out the next printout and watches eagerly for my reaction.
It’s a death certificate. Héctor Rivera, originally of Santa Cecilia, died on July 29th in San Antonio de Padua in Tamaulipas, from food poisoning. He was twenty-one years old and had no family.
“That’s very unfortunate. And Imelda never found out?”
Abuelita Elena shakes her head. Miguel stares at me, like he’s waiting for me to catch on. I examine the document again.
“When it says food poisoning, it doesn’t literally mean someone poisoned his food. He could have just eaten a bad chorizo.”
Miguel kicks the leg of his chair impatiently and keeps staring.
“Ah. No family.”
Miguel nods energetically.
“He hadn’t separated from Ernesto on the 26th, and he was exactly where they had planned to be three days later. And Ernesto knew Héctor had a wife and child. So, you think it’s suspicious that the death certificate lists him as having no family.”
More nodding. “Yes!”
I purse my lips and glance at Abuelita Elena. “It could be an error. These things happen. Or they could simply mean no family in that town. A wife and child in Oaxaca aren’t relevant to their records.”
Miguel screws up his face and grudgingly admits “Maybe.”
“It’s bad luck that news of his death didn’t get back to Imelda, if he was still with Ernesto when he passed away, but the postal service wasn’t all that reliable in the 1920s. And since Ernesto never visited Santa Cecilia again, he may not even have realised she didn’t get the news.” I lean on my elbows. “What made you go looking for a death certificate, though, Miguel?”
“I guess I’m a pessimist,” Miguel says, deploying his dimple. “Or…” He frowns. “An optimist?” He shrugs and looks at Abuelita Elena.
“You’re an optimist,” she tells him.
Miguel flings his hands out. “There you go! I’m an incurable optimist.” He hurries on. “Papa Héctor and Ernesto were pretty broke, all the time, so I figured Héctor must have been buried in a, you know, a pauper’s grave. But I thought it would make Mama Coco happy if we could have brought him home. Back to Santa Cecilia. The most important thing is that Mama Coco’s happy, right, Abuelita?”
I’m concerned that Miguel is in imminent danger of a shoe to the head.
“So I wrote to the priest at the local church and asked if he could tell me where Papa Héctor was buried. He didn’t know-” Miguel pulls a face. “-but he said the priest in 1921, who was called, um, Antonio Calderon y Mejia, kept a diary. Which had been sent to the archdiocesan archives, innnn….” He draws the word out. “…. Monterrey.” He drops his jaw and raises his eyebrows. “And that isn’t on the Internet. Someone has to go look at the real thing.”
The Rivera family home doesn’t have an Internet connection; Miguel has been using the computer at his local library. I’m worried that his first foray online may have already ruined him for everyday life.
“He was not going to Monterrey,” Abuelita Elena says. “Eight hundred miles! Two days just to get there, on the road, or you take a plane and they make you give them your firstborn—he said we could put him in a box marked frágil and send him by post and he’d be very quiet-” She turns on Miguel. “As if you’ve ever been quiet in your life!”
“I was learning the guitar in the attic for three years and you didn’t know! That’s pretty quiet,” Miguel says.
A brief struggle follows between Miguel, Abuelita Elena and her left sandal.
“Excuse me,” I say, “but how did you get the information from Monterrey, then?”
Abuelita Elena looks smug. “I did it! I called the man in charge of the archives and asked him if he would like a nice new pair of shoes.”
“… really?”
“Of course really!” She waves a hand. “We make very good shoes!”
“All right. I never heard of anyone bribing an archivist with shoes before, that’s all.”
“It probably took less than an hour to make the copies and mail them. A pair of Rivera shoes is the best pay he’ll ever get for an hour’s work,” Abuelita Elena says.
“So he did find something?”
Miguel hands over the last photocopied sheet.
The heading, in block capitals, is easy to decipher. The rest of it, in dense spiky handwriting, takes some work.
31ST JULY. BURIED HECTOR RIVERA OF SANTA CECILIA OAXACA, GRAVE 127.
Buried young vagabond musician today - age of 21 – succumbed to contaminated food and died in arms of friend and fellow musician travelling with him. Not alone by the grace of God. Friend name of Ernesto de la Cruz age of 25. Asked who sold the food but he could not tell me. Some family in Oaxaca. De la Cruz will deliver news and effects to them. A guitar, a wedding ring—poor substitutes for a living man. It is better to die and be with Christ than to live but this is difficult for those left behind to accept. Have marked grave with cross initialled HR in case body is sent for. De la Cruz sang touching song had not heard before at graveside-‘remember me though I have to say goodbye’. In his place I would have wept but I understand this is a point of honour in the musical life. ‘The show must go on’. May God have mercy on his soul.
I sit back and think. It’s obviously a very sad story. I try to think of it as if I were a detective, which is a little annoying; I might just have been handed a priceless resource on Ernesto de la Cruz’s early life, and I have to approach it like I’m putting the poor man on trial.
“So the points of concern are that Ernesto couldn’t say where Héctor got the bad food, and he didn’t cry at the funeral.” I interlace my fingers. “Is that what makes you suspect it was murder? Because that’s not cast-iron evidence.”
“No,” Miguel says, “it’s because—wait, really?” He squints at me. “You don’t think it’s weird he didn’t cry?”
“A lot of people don’t cry at funerals, and Ernesto was an experienced performer already by that point. So… no, not too surprising.”
“Not too surprising.” Miguel brandishes an accusing finger at me. “He’s alone, eight hundred miles from home, standing at the graveside of a dear friend who died in his arms two days before at twenty-one years old.” Abuelita Elena leans slowly into my field of vision. “He’s singing the lullaby his friend wrote for his three-year-old daughter, who’ll never see her papa alive again. His wife won’t even have got his last letter yet-”
“She’s crying,” Abuelita Elena says.
Miguel leans across the table and inspects me. “It’s true! See?” He points at me triumphantly. “You’re tearing up just thinking about it.”
“I’m a weeper, all right?” I wipe the ball of my palm across my eyes. “It doesn’t hold up, though, Miguel. Ernesto had nerves of steel. He was the consummate professional; everyone he worked with said so. He’s never known to have cried in public in his life.”
“Oh, I know! That’s not why I think he’s a murderer,” Miguel says easily. “I just needed this to prove he was at the funeral. He knew Papa Héctor was dead. Which is important, because of what’s in the last letter.”
“The last-” I shuffled through the papers until I found July 26 again.
“No, that’s Papa Héctor’s last letter,” Miguel says, and squares his shoulders. His expression turns grave. “There’s another one.”
Tension settles over the room. Miguel is a born performer, clearly, and he’s been stringing me along since I walked in. Still, now, I feel like we’ve finally reached the climax of the story.
Miguel looks at Abuelita Elena. She silently produces a folded letter, on thin white paper, and holds it out to me.
“There’s writing on both sides,” Miguel says, and clasps his hands together so tight his knuckles go pale.
The upper side is in handwriting so neat and legible it almost looks printed.
Querido Ernesto,
Héctor hasn’t written in more than two months. What’s happened? Is he sick? Is he hurt?
If he’s ignoring me to teach me a lesson, tell him to go to hell! How am I supposed to write to him when I only know where he is the week after he’s left?
If you receive this, please please write back at once. I’m losing my
Con todo mi afecto
Imelda
That I’m losing my is scored out so deeply the pen has almost torn through the paper, but Imelda’s textbook hand is still easy to read.
“A neighbour had a letter from a relative in Mexico City, to say that a singer from Santa Cecilia was filling up a club there,” Abuelita Elena explains. “She realised it was Ernesto and wrote to him.”
I take a deep breath and let it out, steadying my nerves, and turn the sheet over. Ernesto’s florid handwriting is instantly recognisable.
October 17th 1921 -
Querida Imelda, I cannot express how shocked, shocked I was to receive your letter. I simply cannot believe Héctor has not written to you. But—to my everlasting regret, as I would so dearly love to tell you where Héctor is—I cannot. I simply do not know.
We argued badly around the end of August, shortly after we came back to Mexico City. He thought that I wasn’t giving him enough credit for his songs and stealing the glory that—he said—ought to be his. I swear to you, Imelda, that was never my intention! I tried to reason with him, but he was like a madman. He seized his guitar and suitcase and stormed out of the inn, and he nevered returned. I am forced to believe—though it almost kills me to think it—that he considers our friendship over. All our years of camaraderie, simply gone, blown away like leaves in the wind. I would never have dreamt the lust for adoration could change a man so.
I cannot think what would drive him to neglect you and Socorro like this, unless… it is only that on a few occasions he drank far more than he should have, and complained to me about your treatment of him, Imelda. I am sorry to say it, but you deserve to know everything. He felt you weren’t supporting him, that you didn’t have faith in his music. I can only think that’s why he hasn’t written—though I would never have thought he would turn away from you like that! In the first weeks we travelled together he never so much as flirted with another woman. He loves you and little Socorro, I am certain of it. Perhaps he is sulking now, but he would never want to leave you forever.
I am still playing his music, though I know it will only infuriate him if he knows. If he wants me to stop he will have to come back and tell me so.
Please tell me if you hear from him. He was my dearest friend—he still is, there shall forever be a place in my heart marked Héctor Rivera—and I am afraid for him.
With all my heart
Ernesto de la Cruz
P.S. I have enclosed a signed photograph for dear Socorro.
I read it through again, just to be sure, and then set it down. I look at Miguel. I point at the letter. “This is a complete lie.”
It’s not eloquent. Under the circumstances, producing a grammatical sentence seems like achievement enough.
“Yeah,” Miguel says, nodding slowly.
“How did you get hold of this? Was it included with your Mama Coco’s letters?”
Miguel nods again.
“So… you read this letter before you went looking for Héctor’s death certificate. Miguel.” I spread my hands out wide. “Why did you look?”
“I thought, okay, so he argued with Ernesto, but even Ernesto said it was weird he wasn’t writing to Mama Imelda,” Miguel says. “And Ernesto knew him so well! Ernesto was his dearest friend.”
“But you looked first in Tamaulipas, at the end of July?”
“No. First I looked in Mexico City at the end of August,” Miguel says. “It’s really easy to get murdered in Mexico City! Abuelita says so.”
Abuelita Elena nods.
“And then when I didn’t find anything I looked everywhere. And when I found the death record in the wrong place, for the wrong date, it seemed really suspicious, you know?”
Abuelita Elena chimes in. “When we read the letter from Ernesto the first time, we all thought Mama Coco’s papa was a-” She makes a disgusted noise. “But Miguel’s guitar playing made Mama Coco happy and we thought, so long as he is only doing it in the house where we can supervise-” She pulls a face. “-maybe it isn’t so bad. Maybe he will get it out of his system. And we put the letters and the picture away and ignored them. But Miguel went to the library and did his-” The typing gesture again. “-and comes back and says no, Mama Coco’s father died in July. So how did he argue with Ernesto in August?”
Miguel cracks a smile. “Rosa—my cousin—said maybe Ernesto was carrying the corpse around and talking to it like in a horror film.” He puts on a deep voice. “Héctor, I am trying to keep our friendship alive and all you do is decompose at me!”
“Keeping a corpse in Mexico City? In August? Rosa watches too much television,” Abuelita Elena says. “So then we decided it was worth writing to Monterrey and finding out about the burial. And when we found out Ernesto lied-” She jabs her finger at me with every sentence. “I went to Mama’s room. I took her letters and her picture. I stuck her useless papa’s head back on myself. And just in time, too!”
Mama Coco passed away—peacefully, in her sleep—only six days later.
“We told her we were going to bring his body back to Santa Cecilia,” Miguel says. “It would have been nice if we could have done it sooner. You know, before. But I think she was happy to know we would try, and-” He shrugs, with a flourish. “-they’re together again now, hopefully!”
“How do you feel about Héctor now?” I ask Abuelita Elena.
She makes a disdainful noise. “He was a stupid man. He should never have left in the first place. But...” She wrinkled her upper lip. “He would have come home if he had the chance. Mama Imelda might never have forgiven him, of course.”
“If she would never have forgiven him she wouldn’t have kept his head,” Miguel says.
“So do you agree with Miguel’s theory? That Ernesto murdered Héctor to take credit for his songs?”
Abuelita Elena’s voice rises. “That man was a lying-” Her eyes slide sideways to Miguel. “-evil man, who slandered Miguel’s no-good dirty rotten guitar-playing great-great-grandfather. If he poisoned him, smothered him with a pillow, h-ch-ch-ch-” She waves a hand dismissively. “Why does it matter? Ernesto as good as murdered Héctor when he lied about him to his family!” She folds her arms and sits back in her chair.
“What do you think?” Miguel asks me nervously.
I blink several times and inspect the letter again.
I know the chemicals used to artificially age ink and paper, but I don’t know enough about shoemaking to know if Miguel would have easy access to them. The fact that it is on one sheet of paper may be suspicious. Old blank paper can be carefully extracted from old books, but rarely in large quantities. The edges of the sheet are all equally worn, though, with nothing to suggest one has been sewn or cut or protected in the spine of a book. The handwriting is smooth and fluent, with none of the stops and starts that mark a hesitant forgery.
I rub my arms with my palms. I’ve been a fan of Ernesto all my life. It was handed down through the generations. Some of my earliest memories are sitting in my grandmother’s lap as her vinyl records scratched on the turntable. I feel like I know him as if he were a family friend; melodramatic but charming, careless but always, essentially, good-natured. These documents feel like an attack on my own childhood.
“Senora Acosta?”
Miguel has tried to downplay it, but even looking for a death certificate, after reading Ernesto’s letter, speaks of sheer desperation. “You have a lot riding on your great-great-grandfather’s reputation, don’t you, Miguel?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah. I want to play music.” He shrugs. “And the ban wouldn’t have been relaxed if it hadn’t turned out to be-” He glances at Abuelita Elena, picks his words carefully and holds two fingers about half an inch apart. “-a little misguided in the first place? But if I’d found out a really bad thing about him, that would have worked too! Like if he went to prison.” He spreads his hands out wide and puts on a coaxing voice. “‘Okay, so Papa Héctor abandoned the family, but Papa Héctor was a bad man. I would never set fire to a nun like that! I love nuns! So everything is fine, right?’”
I certainly don’t think that would work. I lay the last letter aside. “Miguel, I hope you’ll take this as a compliment: I think you’re committed enough to attempt forgery.”
“What,” says Abuelita Elena.
Miguel scrunches his face up. “Well, thanks, I guess?”
“My grandson is no liar!” says Abuelita Elena, followed by a brief pause while everyone remembers that ‘secretly learning guitar in the attic’ thing. “Well, not a liar that would lie in newspapers!”
“It’s a compliment, I promise. A forgery on this scale would take a lot of time and effort and attention to detail. Not many thirteen-year-olds would even try,” I say. “Who else did you contact about this, Miguel?” We’re a small publication, not even specialising in music history, and as much as my editor will hate to read this, there are other magazines better-equipped to handle this story.
“Well, I wrote to Remembrance [: the Official Ernesto de la Cruz Fan Magazine] and a couple of other places, but they didn’t write back. Or they threatened to sue me for libel,” Miguel says.
“It was pretty optimistic to try Remembrance. You’re attacking their idol, after all.”
“Miguel doesn’t have the artistic ability to forge documents,” Abuelita Elena argues. “I remember, when he was nine-”
Miguel’s eyes go wide. “Abuelita. No.”
“-he came home from school crying one day. We said, what’s wrong, mijo? And he says-”
“Abuelita, stop!”
“-the teacher put my drawing on the wall! So we say, but that’s good, muchachito? And he says-”
Miguel covers his head with both hands, and Abuelita Elena flings her hands out as she arrives at the punchline.
“-but she hung it upside-down!”
Miguel peers at me balefully between his fingers. I try very hard not to smile.
The fact, though, is this: Miguel is taking an excellent shot at it, yes, but destroying Ernesto’s reputation isn’t his goal. He wants to rehabilitate his great-great-grandfather and lift his family’s taboo on music. The only people he needs to convince are the seven adults in the Rivera family, and all of them live in this house. Abuelita Elena is unquestionably in charge, and she’s convinced. Goal accomplished. So why take the risk of throwing forged documents in front of the juggernaut that is the Ernesto fandom?
The last letter isn’t even the document that Miguel needs. That would be the death certificate and the report of the burial. The originals of both are held in secure archives, safe from any potential tampering. No alteration there would survive even a cursory inspection.
The letters are the only part that could have been forged with any hope of success, but from the backstory I’ve been given, that would require the connivance of the entire family. Could the musical vendetta possibly stretch that far? And if it did, why would Miguel cooperate? Miguel might have snuck the last letter into the stack before revealing them to the rest of the family, but again, why? If he had gained access to the letters before the rest of the family, and he had genuinely found this last letter from Ernesto de la Cruz, the sensible option would have been to tear it into little pieces and eat it.
I don’t want to believe that these documents are genuine, but I am very much afraid that they are. “This does still fall short of proof that Ernesto murdered your great-great-grandfather.”
It’s a pretty flimsy defence. Miguel raises his eyebrows at me, unimpressed. Well, it’s true; you don’t have to cause a death to conceal it. Murderer is off the table, but that’s not much consolation when liar, thief and traitor are still available.
“You need to submit the letters for forensic examination. Of the document, and the handwriting. Ideally, with people who’ve worked on de la Cruz material in the past.”
Miguel nods, without a flicker of alarm. “Okay. That's sensible, I guess. Do you know anyone?”
The Letters are carefully parcelled up the next day, after transcription and photographing, and dispatched by courier for investigation. It was simple to verify the accuracy of the photocopied documents—the death certificate, the baptismal record and the priest’s report of the burial—and the archivist at Monterrey reports that his new shoes are the best he’s ever worn. A conclusion on the authenticity of the Rivera Letters will have to wait another two or three months, from the time this article is published.
Miguel isn’t worried. “Well,” he says, with a smile that shows off his dimple, “I already know they’re real.”
Notes from the Rivera Letters, following transcription and photographing:
Xolo:
In the third letter, April 19, Héctor writes: ‘We stayed two days in Orizaba and your godpapa Ernesto made a new friend! A wild xolo dog. It was because of his giant hat, Coco, remember his giant hat? It matches his giant head. The dog got into the shade of it and wouldn’t leave. It followed him – or his hat - just like a lovesick girl. I told him it was a bad omen and coming to take him to the afterlife so he thumped me. The dog followed us to the train station as well, and watched sadly as the train carried Ernesto’s hat into the far distance. The romance would never have lasted though. Ernesto would have left it for a chihuahua.’ Xolo is entered into the songbook April 23.
Un Poco Loco:
The refrain ‘ay, mi amor’ appears repeatedly, running the full gamut between teasing and grovelling abasement (April 15, May 12 and 30, June 14 and 22, July 6). In the second letter, April 15, Héctor writes: ‘If I say the sky is blue you argue with me.’ In the fifth letter, May 1, Héctor writes: ‘I have a hole in the sole of my left boot I can put my little finger through. What should I do, shoemaker? Besides [imitating Imelda’s handwriting] smack myself in the head with it of course - I can work that part out for myself.’ Un Poco Loco is entered into the Songbook dated May 18. In the eighth letter, May 21, Héctor writes: ‘I’ve written a song for my favourite tyrant - that’s your mama, darling, before she gets jealous. I’ll wait to show it to you both until I’m home so she can object in person.’
Viento Tintado:
In the seventh letter, May 12, Héctor writes: ‘Will you write me a letter? I know I won’t get it, of course. I don’t know if you’re even reading these or if you’re burning them to save on kindling or giving them to Coco to draw on. (If you are, hello my darling! Papa loves you!) Write to me, tear it up and throw it into the wind. It can’t be less reliable than the post is and then whenever I feel the cold wind brush the back of my neck I will think yes, Imelda is thinking of me!’ Viento Tintado is entered into the Songbook on May 28, though altered extensively later. The first verse is copied out in an early form in the ninth letter, May 30, addressed to Coco.
The World Es Mi Familia:
In the sixth letter, May 8: ‘The further we travel the harder it is to understand the accents and I bet it’s just as hard for them to understand us. Luckily I have a guitar and a big smile. Music is the universal language!’ In the eighth letter, May 21: ‘Ernesto teases me for writing too often and spending all my money on paper. We are musicians, he says, the world is our familia! Yes Ernesto but there is familia and there is familia. Ernesto pretended to be sad until I promised that he is familia, he’s practically my brother. Luckily he hasn’t heard your definition of brother, mi amor, [imitating Imelda’s handwriting] an infuriating person you can’t kill.’ The World Es Mi Familia is entered into the Songbook dated June 1. The tenth letter, June 7, reports: ‘Have written new introduction song, and heard people in the street singing it the morning after first performance! It would have been nice if they weren’t singing so loudly but that’s my own fault for getting too friendly with the tequila.’
Remember Me:
The full lyrics and music to ‘Remember Me’ appear untitled in the third letter, April 19, addressed to Coco. This is apparently to help ‘Coco’s mama’ join in with what Héctor refers to as ‘the Rivera Family Patented Long-Distance Musical Fiesta!’ The lyrics and sheet music are subsequently entered in the Songbook, dated June 12; notably, they are entered in a finished state, with no evidence of the alterations and edits made to other songs. In the eleventh letter, June 14, Héctor states ‘Ernesto has been pestering me and pestering me for weeks to ‘immortalise’ Coco’s lullaby in my music book and I finally gave in. He says he thinks it should be happier and more lively and I say Ernesto, I don’t think it’s a very happy song. He says it’s a good song to play at the end of a show but I don’t want to and I wrote it so I win. There are all the songs in the world for everybody else. Coco can keep this one for herself.’