In our neighborhood narrow paths between buildings turn into little streets sometimes, callejones, that lead past houses tucked behind the houses on the named streets. Leobardo lived in a shack made of perpendicular bamboo sticks with spaces between them on a tiny callejon. I think he probably shared it with other people. Often, he sat outside his sister’s house or his mother’s house on the main street. He might once have been handsome. By his early fifties, he was washed up. He was usually drunk: a quiet drunk, gentle, friendly. Sometimes he had a little girl on his knee: a grandchild we imagined.
The first time I said more than adios to him was maybe three or four years ago. I was driving home and just about to turn onto the road into the colonia. He was standing on the grass at its edge of the carretera, over his prostrate burro who seemed to have just died. His arms hung limp at his sides. Tears were running down his face. I pulled over and got out. Leobardo talked through his tears: the burro, whom he loved, had fallen down. He had managed to drag her up on her feet just to have her fall again. And then she didn’t get up any more. I don’t know what to do, Leobardo said. I said I don’t either. We decided to find someone who did.
I brought him up to Vero´s drugstore. Vero wasn’t there, but her mother, a lean energetic woman was. She took Leobardo to a large animal vet who lived in the colonia. I left. I was too sad to be helpful. I don’t know why, but I get overwhelmed by suffering and dead animals to the point of not functioning very well. Anyway, the next time we went past his house, we stopped, and Leobardo said someone had come to take the burro away. Some time later I saw him walking along with a younger burro. We stopped to chat and he told me someone had given it to him. For awhile, he tended to the burro, but then it was gone. I don't know what happened to it. So Leobardo resorted to a wheelbarrow to lug piles of long grass for other people’s animals.
One April or May day I came across him pushing the wheelbarrow up the street and looking as if he were in great pain. He was sweating heavily, gasping for breath, stopping every few steps. I offered to help. Leopardo said he doubted I could manage it. I'm strong I said. It didn’t occur to me that a wheelbarrow of grass would be particularly heavy but I could barely move it. Leobardo laughed wearily. I refused to give in, being me, and made it about ten feet before yielding it back to him. I walked beside him as he trudged. We didn't talk. He didn't have the strength. He was getting sick from his drinking.
Maybe a year and a half ago, Leobardo actually managed to stop drinking. His eyes looked clear, he sat straight and we even met him walking outside the Colonia, lugging loads again. He stayed sober for quite awhile, but all those years of alcohol had worked hard on him. And once so once more we found him sitting outside his sister’s house more and more often. His belly was swelling. I stopped to talk one day and asked what was wrong. He told me his belly was filled with water. He had no energy and everything hurt. He’d been to the doctor in Teocelo who’d given him a prescription for Lasix, a diuretic, but he could no longer afford it. So we started buying a generic for him. Again he improved. A lot, in fact. He was up and about, smiling, doing chores, hanging out with friends. Then one day he wasn’t fine. He’d gotten drunk, passed out so cold his sister couldn’t rouse him for several days. He stayed drunk. His sister and I talked and his sister said there was no point anymore in getting the medicine. He was killing himself.
He lived many months more than we thought he could. But last week there were rocks blocking a section of the street and a tarp covering the section outside Leobardo’s family compound. Our neighbor Vicente told us Leonardo had died peacefully in his sleep.
The family was holding a veleria. We went in the evening bringing a bag of dried beans and a bag of sugar. We sat for awhile with the family in Leobardo’s mother’s living room and talked as we ate the beans and rice and limonada they brought to us. The body had already been taken to the cemetery in Xico, the Panteón, less than a day after he died. (In Mexico, burial must occur within 24 hours of death.) The family had cleared all the furniture from the front room and rented plastic chairs which lined the walls. A shrine with La Virgen de Guadalupe adorned with many candles filled a corner. Shadows flickered throughout the room in the candlelight. It was very peaceful. In these settings I find myself soothed by – who knows what? It felt as if Leobardo had been released from his suffering, had been forgiven and embraced.