The Stranger on the Ofrenda

“Who’s this one?”

Renata held the photograph up to the kitchen light. It had come out of the Florsheim shoebox with all the others, the dead of the family in their frames and out of them, wedding portraits, a baby in a christening gown who had died before Renata’s mother was born, Bisabuela Cata squinting in front of the church at Teotitlán. But this one she didn’t know. A man of about sixty in a white guayabera, sitting on a wooden chair against a wall painted blue, smiling with all his teeth.

Nobody in Renata’s family smiled in photographs. It was practically a rule. Her grandfather, Abuelo Fausto, had been photographed maybe a hundred times in his life and in every single one he looked like he’d been told the price of something.

Tío Memo took it from her and turned it over. Nothing written on the back. “Ah, that’s Chencho,” he said. “From Ejutla. Your abuelo’s cousin. He owed everybody money.”

“There’s no Chencho,” said Renata’s mother, from the sink.

“There’s always a Chencho.” Memo gave it back and went out to the patio to smoke.

Abuela Chela was at the table cutting papel picado into squares that didn’t need cutting. She didn’t look up. “Leave him,” she said. “Put him on the bottom step, on the end.”

“But who is he?”

“Every family has one.” She snipped. “Put a little plate in front of him. Not too much. Don’t make a fuss.”

* * *

They built the altar on the twenty-eighth, the way they did every year, against the long wall of the front room where the television usually was. Three levels made out of fruit crates and a sheet. The top for the saints and the Virgin, the middle for the photos, the bottom for the food and the water and the things the dead had liked. Cempasúchil everywhere, the orange so strong in the small room it was almost a sound. Copal in the clay burner, which made Renata’s eyes run. Two big pan de muerto with little dough faces from the bakery on Calle Mina, sugar cane, tejocotes, mandarins, a glass of water for the thirsty ones after the long walk, salt so they wouldn’t spoil on the way.

Abuelo Fausto had the best place, middle level, middle, because he was the newest. Two years. His photo was the one from his credential for the transit police, grey hat, grey face, no smile. In front of him Renata’s mother put a small glass of mezcal, a pack of Delicados with one cigarette pulled out a little, the way he liked it ready, and a bowl of the black mole he’d eaten every Sunday of his life even though it gave him heartburn.

The stranger went on the bottom, on the end, half behind a pot of flowers. Renata put a piece of bread in front of him and a small cup of chocolate. It felt rude to give him less than the others. She didn’t know why it should matter.

* * *

On the twenty-ninth the bread in front of the stranger had a bite out of it.

A real bite, the half-moon of a mouth. Renata stood in front of the altar in her school uniform with her backpack on one shoulder and looked at it for long enough that she nearly missed the bus.

“Rats,” Tío Memo said at dinner. He lived with them since his divorce, in the room that had been Abuelo’s. “This whole street has rats. The tlacuaches come down from the hill too.”

“Rats don’t bite like that.”

“Then it was Chencho.” He grinned at her. “He’s hungry. He’s been dead a long time.”

Abuela Chela put down her spoon. “Memo.”

“What? It’s a joke.”

“Don’t make jokes in front of him.”

Nobody asked her who she meant.

* * *

On the thirtieth Renata woke at five and couldn’t get back to sleep. She went into the front room in her socks. The street outside was still dark, a dog going somewhere with a lot of purpose. The candles had burned down to stubs in their glass. The room smelled of flowers that had started, just slightly, to rot.

She knelt at the bottom step and looked at the stranger.

He was closer.

She wanted it to be her imagination, and she did that thing of looking away and looking back, and it wasn’t. In the photo he was nearer the camera than he had been. Not a lot. But two days ago she could see the whole wooden chair and the blue wall behind him and the edge of a window. Now the chair was cut off at the bottom of the frame and the window was gone. His face was bigger. His smile was the same.

She took the photo in both hands and turned it to the candle. It was just a photograph. Old paper, gone soft at the corners. She put it back exactly where it had been, and she moved the pot of flowers so it covered him a bit more, and then she felt guilty and moved it back.

The chocolate in his cup was gone. Not spilled. Drunk. There was a brown line round the inside of the cup at the bottom.

* * *

“Abuela. Who is he?”

They were alone in the kitchen. Abuela Chela was making tamales, her hands in the masa up to the wrist. She took a long time to answer, long enough that Renata thought she’d pretend not to have heard, which she did sometimes now.

“When I was a girl in Teotitlán,” Abuela said, “my mamá’s altar had one. An old lady with a rebozo. Nobody knew her. My mamá fed her every year.” She slapped masa onto a leaf. “My mother-in-law had one. A boy in a sailor suit. The Ruiz family across the street have a soldier. Every family has one, mija.”

“But where do they come from?”

“From families that don’t feed them.” Abuela folded the leaf. “Somebody forgets. A grandson moves to Los Angeles. A name stops being said. They get hungry and they walk, and they go where there’s a plate. So you feed them a little and they’re happy and they go back on the second, and next year, maybe, they come again.” She looked at Renata for the first time. “You don’t fight them. And you don’t feed them too much.”

Renata thought about the bread she’d chosen, the biggest piece. The full cup of chocolate.

“What happens if you feed them too much?”

Abuela didn’t answer that. She said the tamales needed more salt, which they didn’t.

* * *

On the thirty-first his hand was in the photo.

It hadn’t been before. Now there was a hand at the bottom edge of the frame, resting on his knee, and the knee was close, and the face was close, the smile filling the top half of the picture. The thumb of the hand was holding a brim. A grey felt brim.

Renata went straight to the middle level. Abuelo’s photo was where it always was, the transit police credential, grey hat, grey face.

The hat in the stranger’s hand was the same colour. That was all. Plenty of men had grey hats.

That night the family went to the panteón with flowers and candles and a thermos of coffee, like everybody did, and sat on the low wall by Abuelo’s grave till past midnight while the mariachis worked their way through the rows and charged two hundred pesos a song. Tío Memo paid for “Amor Eterno” and cried, which he did every year. Renata’s mother held Abuela’s hand. Renata watched the cemetery full of people talking to the dead, eating with the dead, telling them the news, and thought for the first time about the graves where nobody was sitting. There were a lot of them. Dark rectangles between the lit-up ones. She hadn’t noticed before how many.

When they got home at two in the morning the mezcal in front of Abuelo’s photo was gone.

The cigarette was gone from the packet.

The mole was untouched. The plate in front of the stranger was licked clean.

* * *

On the second of November Renata’s mother screamed.

It was a short scream, a surprised one, more like a word. Renata ran into the front room in her pyjamas and found her mother standing at the altar with a hand over her mouth, and Tío Memo behind her with his shirt half buttoned, and Abuela in her chair by the window with a rosary, very still.

The middle of the middle level was empty. A rectangle in the dust where the frame had stood.

“Who moved Papá?” her mother said. “Memo. Who moved him?”

“Nobody touched it. I was asleep.”

“Well, he didn’t walk off.”

Renata looked down, at the bottom step, on the end. The stranger’s frame was gone too.

No. Not gone. It was in her mother’s hand. She’d picked it up without thinking, the way you pick up a thing that’s out of place, and was holding it against her chest, and Renata saw the frame was not the cheap pressed metal one the stranger had been in. It was the dark wooden one with the carved corners. Abuelo’s frame. The one Tío Memo had bought at the Benito Juárez market the week of the funeral.

And inside it, sitting so close now that his face filled almost all of it, the grey hat on his head at last, was the smiling man.

Her mother turned the frame round and looked at it. Renata watched her face. She watched it go from confused to puzzled, and then from puzzled to something softer, and it was the softening that frightened her more than anything else that week.

“Ay,” her mother said. “Look at him.”

“Mamá. That’s not him.”

“Who put him down there on the floor?” Her mother was already climbing the crate steps, setting the frame back on the middle level, in the middle, in the rectangle in the dust. “On the floor, with the flowers in his face. Memo, did you do this?”

Tío Memo had come to stand beside her. He looked at the photograph for a long time. Renata saw him frown and saw the frown go.

“He always hated that police photo,” he said slowly. “Didn’t he. He hated it. I’d forgotten we had this one.”

“Tío. He never smiled. He never smiled in a single picture in his life.”

“Ah, he smiled.” Memo wiped his eyes with his thumb. “With us he smiled. You were too little.”

She wasn’t too little. She’d been thirteen. She remembered him. She remembered him perfectly well. She remembered the way he cleared his throat before he said anything, the heartburn after Sunday mole, the whistle through his teeth when the América lost, the grey hat on the hook by the door.

She tried to see his face.

She saw the hat. Under the hat she saw the smile.

“Abuela,” she said, and turned round.

Abuela Chela was looking at the altar. Her rosary had stopped in her fingers. Her mouth moved, and Renata knew, with a feeling like stepping off a kerb she hadn’t seen, that her grandmother was the only other person in the room who still knew. It was in her eyes. Fifty-one years married to a man who looked at a camera like it had overcharged him.

Then Abuela got up out of her chair, slowly, with a hand on the windowsill, and went to the kitchen, and came back with a plate. Black mole, still warm. A piece of bread. She set it on the middle level in front of the smiling man, and she touched the glass of the frame with two fingers, the way she used to touch her husband’s cheek when he was being stubborn.

“Ya, viejo,” she said. “Eat.”

* * *

That night Renata waited till everyone was asleep. She took a plate from the kitchen, and the last tamal, and a cup of chocolate, and a candle, and she went out of the front door into the street in her socks.

She didn’t know where he’d go. She thought: wherever there’s a plate. Some house with a long front room and a sheet over fruit crates. Some family who would find a man in a grey hat at the bottom of their box of photographs and not know who he was and put him on the end, half behind the flowers, and give him a little. Not too much.

She set it all on the kerb by the gate and lit the candle and sat down beside it on the cold step.

She wanted to say his name out loud, so it would still be said by somebody. She opened her mouth to say it.

It took her a long moment to find it.