IGNACIO

I remember 1929 better than any other year, and of that year, I remember the twenty-third of August better than any other day. It was day number two-hundred and thirty-five, a Friday. Of that day, I remember standing on the corner of Isabel La Católica, watching cars zoom by and people threaded past.

I stood there as time unspooled in frozen fragments, in jagged, electric movements. A silent symphony only those of us who are truly lost can understand. I do not know how many hours bled away, only that my present, my past, and my future eventually collided, dissolving my entire existence into a rubble of memories and forget-me-nots. It sounds surreal, I know. But there I remained, in the year nineteen-hundred and twenty-nine, on day two-hundred and thirty-five, surrounded by the ghouls of Mexico City who rushed through the heat as if they still possessed a soul.

And nobody looked at me. Nobody stopped to talk to me. Nobody cared.

I don't think anyone has ever cared. No—that's unfair to my mother. She cared, in the way a wolf cares for a cub it barely knows how to keep alive—fractured, abandoned, but real. At least she cared.

My darling Catrina cared, too. She often called out to me. Truth is, I've heard her voice since I was a child. Perhaps since I was in my mother's womb. The saccharine nature of her timbre has always felt familiar to me—it is why I heeded its call so often, though I always stopped inches away from the doors of Mictlan, where a choir of the forsaken awaited new recruits. Whilst it may sound odd, her cry was loudest on the threshold of the weekend. Perhaps that is why my mind keeps such a meticulous ledger of Fridays.

To those of us who count days, Fridays are a wonderful phenomenon to observe. They are the only days when the ghouls of the city briefly remember how to be human. On a Friday, children run a little faster, men laugh a fraction louder, and women smile a smidgen wider. It is as though the weight of the week has finally slipped from their shoulders, and the weekend's intoxicating elixir is in full flow, liberating them from the shackles of routine.

On that particular Friday, everything felt different. The light seemed to reach out to me, its golden tentacles kissing my skin while a chorus of brass horns and shifting gears snarled through the concrete jungle. It was a symphony of the insane. What would our forebears have thought if they had seen what this had turned into? And yet—the city felt alive. I could feel everyone around me. Their vibrations. Their excitement. Their thirst for life. Because they were alive.

Or at least, I felt like the living dead.

There I stood, marooned. And nobody looked at me. Nobody stopped to talk to me. Nobody cared. I was nothing but an invisible spectator to a thousand colliding vanities. The streets were dense with them—the grumpy, the frantic, the briefly ecstatic, the profoundly anxious—each soul locked inside the airtight cage of its own egocentricity. They moved through each other like ghosts, entirely consumed by the small, frantic dramas of their own making.

'Ignacio,' she whispered.

The voice arrived not through the air, but from the marrow of my bones, just as it had on so many other occasions. She had brushed against me before, of course. First, during the fever of 1918 when her white fingers had stroked my hair while the rest of the city choked on its own lungs. Then, there was that time on Calle Tacuba, when the runaway carriage missed my skull by a fraction of an inch. And most recently, the hot, sudden summer of 1927, when a federal soldier’s stray bullet shattered the brickwork a hair's breadth from my temple, showering my eyes in plaster dust while the boy next to me collapsed without a sound. I had always managed to ignore her wails then.

But not today.

And that is why this Friday remains scorched into my memory.

Before I continue, I must ask you a question. I wonder if you close your eyes, could you tell me what your favourite fruit is? Consider it carefully. Strawberries? Peaches? Guava? Think of the pristine freshness of it, the heavy sweetness, and that overpowering, almost violent satisfaction you feel when its juices explode against your palate. Think of the unequivocal surrender of your taste buds as they soften, begging your throat for just one more drop. Consider the sheer indulgence of that momentary high. That exquisite, suffocating rush is precisely what I experience every single time she calls my name.

She is an entity of infinite titles. In the markets they whisper of Catrina; in the slums near the canals they weep for La Llorona; the cults in the hidden chapels kneel before La Niña Blanca. I once met a decadent poet in a café on Madero named Francisco Fernández Armando de la Vega Martínez, who drank himself into an early grave trying to rhyme her perfections. He simply called her Death. And on day two-hundred and thirty-five, I called her my saviour.

I turned to look at her. I wish I could say it was against my better judgment, but that would be a convenient lie. The truth was far simpler: I was tired.

There she stood beside me on the pavement. The blistering midday sun seemed to break against her porcelain skin, radiating outward in a pale, marble glow that defied the heat. Her eyes were an impossible, pale blue. In the chaotic swirl of the avenue, she remained as monumental and unshakeable as a lighthouse anchoring a dark, stormy sea, waiting with infinite patience to guide me home.

'Catrina,' I whispered.

The heavy, suffocating aroma of strawberries rushed up my nostrils as the syllables left my lips. My knees buckled beneath me. Inside my chest, animal terror and ecstatic surrender brawled like two opposing factions—the frantic urge to survive tearing against the intoxicating desire to finally let go. But beneath the chaos of my pulse, a profound calmness took root.

'Niña Blanca, hermana de mi alma, que recibes a todos los seres vivos sin distinción: cuando llegue mi hora, llévame suavemente en tus brazos, libre de dolor y de temor, hacia la luz eterna. Amén.'

'You look ready, Ignacio,' she said.

I wanted to respond but found conjuring words impossible. It is no lie what they say about your life flashing before your very eyes. Every second imprinted itself into my mind—every happy memory, every moment of love. The sadness, the hurt, the desperation: those, she had already wiped away. And so I smiled as I remembered everyone whom I had loved.

She stood beside me. We stood together, watching cars zoom by and people thread past. Some beaming, some not. Some solemn, some not. Some full of love, some not.

I looked back at her, letting the weight of my centuries drop to the pavement.

'I am ready because I am tired,' I replied.

'Fatigue is a dangerous foe. You are not the only soul it has guided to Mictlan.'

'Will I be loved?' I asked.

Catrina smiled, just as one of those peculiar, apple-green buses swished past the curb, close enough for its exhaust to warm my shins. And in that split second, the determination I thought I had lost rushed back into my veins.

I saw a young girl, no older than twelve, standing just a few feet away. She wasn't looking at the traffic, or the shops, or the ghouls. Her wide, innocent eyes were fixed entirely on the empty space beside me on the pavement, the sudden panic in her face raw and palpable.

Catrina turned her head toward the child.

'It is a strange tragedy,' Death murmured, her blue eyes locking onto her new subject. 'To live in a world of billions, yet wake as you slept… alone. To walk in a city of millions, yet stand as you were born… alone.'

'Yes,' I replied, stepping off the safety of the curb. 'And loneliness is tiresome.'

At this, she reached out and touched my wrist. Her fingers were shockingly warm, like the sunlit brick of Mictlan.

'Fear not, Ignacio,' she said, her smile turning infinitely tender. 'Be alone no more.'

The suffocating aroma of strawberries exploded in my mouth, blinding my senses. I walked willingly into the centre of the roaring cobblestones, turning my head one last time to watch her. She wasn't looking at me anymore.

As the iron brakes began to screech, Lady Death simply smiled, adjusted her dress, and began to walk after the girl.

Then came the screams. The roar of that apple-green bus, labelled Zócalo.

Followed by a beautiful, permanent nothingness.

Yes, I remember 1929 better than any other year, and of that year, I remember the twenty-third of August better than any other day. It was day number two-hundred and thirty-five.

It was the day I died.