By 1872, Father Gaetano Barbati made it his mission to arrange, stack, sort, and catalogue the bones stuffed into the Fontanelle Cemetery. Volunteers from the city came to help, and, like good Catholics, prayed for the anonymous dead as they piled skulls along one wall, femurs along another. The problem was, the skull prayers did not stop there.
Spontaneously, a cult of devotion sprung up around the unnamed skulls. Locals would come to Fontanelle to visit their pezzentelle, or “poor little ones.” They would “adopt” certain skulls, cleaning them, building them shrines, bringing them offerings, and asking for favors. The skulls were given new names, revealed to their owners in dreams.
The Catholic Church was not pleased. They even closed the cemetery in 1969, with the Archbishop of Naples decreeing that the Cult of the Dead was “arbitrary” and “superstitious.” According to the Church, you could pray for souls trapped in Purgatory (like these anonymous dead), but the anonymous dead had no special, supernatural powers to grant the living favors. The living begged to differ.
Scholar Elizabeth Harper pointed out that the Cult of the Dead was strongest and “most noticeable during times of strife: specifically among women affected by disease, natural disaster, or war.” The most important factor was that these women “lack access to power and resources within the Catholic Church.” (This idea was echoed by Andres Bedoya, the artist 6,500 miles away in La Paz, who described the ?atitas as potent to those women “whose connection with the beyond wasn’t being properly managed by the Catholic Church.”)
Vigilant though the Church may have been since reopening the Fontanelle Cemetery in 2010, the Cult of the Dead has not disappeared. Amidst a sea of white bone, dashes of color burst out. Neon plastic rosaries, red glass candles, fresh gold coins, prayer cards, plastic Jesuses, and even lottery tickets are scattered throughout the ruins. A new generation of the Cult of the Dead has found their most powerful pezzentelle.
BY 11 A.M. the Fiesta de las ?atitas was packed. The rows of graves were lined with blessed ?atitas, now accepting offerings of coca leaves and flower petals. Police patrolled the cemetery’s entrance gates, checking bags for alcohol (booze-related violence has led to the creation of new ?atitas). In the absence of alcohol, the skulls had to indulge in other vices. Lit cigarettes burned down to tar-stained teeth.
“Do you suppose they enjoy the smoking?” I asked Paul.
“Well, obviously they enjoy it,” he said dismissively, before disappearing into the crowd, wearing his coyote hat.
One woman danced with her ?atita to the raucous sounds of a live accordion, guitar, and wooden drum, thrusting this skull into the air and shaking her hips. This was the skull’s day, his celebration.
A man sat with the skull of his father. At one point his father had been buried right here in the General Cemetery. This forced me to wonder: if his father had been interred, how had his son gotten the skull back, the skull who now wore wire-rim eyeglasses and seven flower crowns piled high on his head?
When I walked through the cemetery there were empty graves surrounded by smashed glass and hunks of concrete. Attached to the front of the tombs were yellowed pieces of paper with notices that read some version of “FINAL WARNING: Mausoleum, 4th of January. To the relatives of the late: (Insert name here) . . .”
What followed was a message stating that the families had not paid the rental fees for keeping Dad’s body in the mausoleum. As a result, he was getting evicted. Perhaps he would go into a communal grave. Or perhaps he would return to his family, now skeletonized, to become a ?atita.
As I crouched, examining a mummified ?atita, with its lip curled up in a distinct Elvis Presley sneer, a woman my age sidled up to me. In near-perfect English she said, “So, you’re from the other side of the pond, you must be like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ ”
Her name was Moira, and she came every year to the Fiesta with her friend, who kept two ?atitas in his home. His first ?atita, the most powerful, came to him in a dream. In the dream she informed him she would be waiting for him in the countryside. He went and found her, and named her Diony. Then came Juanito. People come to his home all year round to visit them.
“My sister lost her cat,” Moira said. “She’s single, so this cat is like her baby. For four days the cat doesn’t come back.”
Her sister went to consult Diony the ?atita, asking for help finding the beloved feline. In a dream, Diony revealed that the cat was in the back of an abandoned car, with plants growing inside.
“Up the hill behind where my sister lives, there is a hollowed-out car that has been there for fifteen years. And there’s the stupid cat, trapped in a hole in the back of the car!
“This was a week ago,” Moira explained, “and to be safe, my sister also asked Diony to scare the cat, to make sure it wouldn’t run away again. Now it won’t even go beyond the border of the yard, like it’s being yanked back by a leash.”
I wondered if Moira believed that the power of the skull had really found this cat. She thought for a moment. “It’s the faith people have when they ask. That’s what matters.”
Moira thought longer and then added, grinning, “I can’t tell you if it was a coincidence or not. Either way, we found the cat!”
Any answered prayer can be viewed as a coincidence or not. I wasn’t in La Paz to determine whether the ?atitas had true magical powers. I was more interested in women like Do?a Ely and Do?a Ana, and the hundreds of other people at the Fiesta, who were using their comfort with death to seize direct access to the divine from the hands of the male leaders of the Catholic Church. As Paul bluntly put it, the skulls are “technology for disadvantaged people.” No problem—whether love, family, or school—is too small for a ?atita, and no person is left behind.
CALIFORNIA
JOSHUA TREE
Sometimes you visit corpses all around the world and realize that the corpses dearest to your heart are right in your own backyard. When I returned to Los Angeles, my funeral home awaited—along with my long-suffering funeral director, Amber, who facilitated cremations and comforted distraught families while I was off requesting help with mutual funds from a Bolivian skull.
Undertaking LA had an un-embalmed, natural burial scheduled for Mrs. Shepard. Inspired by what I had seen on my travels, I returned to work with a new sense of purpose. In my mind, the grieving family would prepare the body with love, wrapping the dead woman in a handmade shroud lined with peacock feathers and palm fronds. We’d lead a procession to the grave at dawn, carrying candles and scattering flower petals, chanting as we went.