On Monday afternoon, one of the maestras took a group of us to the local cemetery. I absolutely adore seeing cemeteries abroad and how other cultures deal with death. The cemetery in Xela dates from the 1600s, and is huge. It takes up a good 5% of the old city.
Inside there are tombs bigger than some of the smaller houses in Xela, housing ex-presidents, politicos, and other important Chivos. These tend to be ornate marble affairs with carved cherubs and angels. Unfortunately the cemetery is home to a lot of gangsters and grave robbers, so I did not see a single statue with a head. The smallest graves are little niches in a wall that you can rent for about a dollar a month. If you default on your debt, they take your bones and bury them somewhere else. There are thousands of them on the walls surrounding the cemetery, each one forming a single square in bizarre macabre checkerboard.
My favorite part is always the pauper’s cemetery, where the headstones are creatively constructed out of whatever was around at the time. Iron gates and furniture, random found rocks, or someone else’s headstone reused. It’s by far the brightest, which is saying something, since the popular colors for eternity here are bubblegum pink, sea foam green and canary yellow.
The cemetery very old and Xela's history is very colorful, so it lends itself to all sorts of ghost stories about the cholera and war victims. My favorite was the story of a gypsy girl, Vanuscha, who died in 1927. Supposedly she fell in love with a Spaniard, but his mother didn’t approve, and so she sent him back to Spain. Vanuscha supposedly died of a broken heart of a broken heart at seventeen. As a result, the local jovenes often write their requests for love on her tomb. These are particularly sweet, since their spelling and grammar are generally atrocious. But by far and away my favorite was ¨Vanuscha, please make Juan stop spitting on me.¨
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