One Hundred Days of Caskets and Partings

Throughout more than three months of national quarantine we made an effort to avoid death: we shut the doors to our homes, we protected our faces with masks on the streets, we looked after the most critically ill. Over that period of time, however, Peru suffered from 40 thousand deaths by Covid-19—almost as many as those left by the war against Shining Path. These are some of the stories of the families and funeral workers that had to face those farewells.

«El modo más cómodo de conocer una ciudad es averiguar cómo se trabaja en ella, cómo se ama y cómo se muere». Albert Camus, La peste

 

THE FUNERAL HOME

Something that Clarisa Huamanñahui misses about her job before the virus put the city in mourning was being able to speak to the dead. It’s a habit she’s had for the past six years, when she began to dress and apply cosmetics to the corpses that arrived at the funeral home. “How would you like me to do your makeup, my queen?,” “You’re going to look so handsome,” “You’re so gorgeous, beautiful!,” “Help me out so we can finish quickly, yes, papito?” That’s how she’d speak to them, she says, in order to stifle her nerves. A specialist in the cosmetic preparation of bodies has to act with surgical precision—in Quechua, Huamanñahui means “hawk’s eye”—and her hand can’t start shaking when she’s applying blush to those pale cheeks, shaving beards, plucking eyebrows, and flexing arms stiff from rigor mortis in order to dress them in a suit and tie.

“They don’t feel anything anymore, but I’m a faithful believer and I think they’re somewhere looking down at what one is doing with their bodies,” says Huamanñahui, 42, with her warm drawl from the Abancay Sierra. She used to leave them all nice and changed in the viewing chapel, but now that’s impossible.

From the beginning of the state of emergency over one hundred days ago, she hasn’t touched the face of a corpse again. Nowadays she spends her days carrying coffins that can’t be opened.

Huamanñahui—thick eyeglasses, dark overalls, N95 mask, light-blue gloves—has been outside the Edgardo Rebagliati National Hospital, one of the largest in the country, for an hour.  She might be one of the few women who during this time—such as this cold June morning near the end of the quarantine—have been collecting the dead from Covid-19 all over Lima: the second city with most deaths in the world (over 23,000) in the past four months, more than Mexico City and barely fewer than New York, according to the Financial Times’ realistic estimate.

With her colleague from Corporación Funeraria Aranzábal, she waits right next to a black van with a wreath of flowers on the roof, the open back door allowing a glimpse of a white, empty coffin. She has to pick up the body of an Air Force officer, a victim of the virus. But they're not the only ones there. On the same stretch of the street, a series of vans from other funeral homes—there are around 280 formal ones in Lima—have been waiting in line since daybreak for one of the 180 people that on average die every day from Covid-19 in Peru.

Huamanñahui laughs when she remembers the times she'd pass by a funeral home and cross herself thinking "how awful" it must be to earn a living like that. One day in 2014, when she had just arrived in Lima, she took the place of the nanny that worked for the owner of the funeral home. After that, she worked cleaning up the shop and dealing with customers. She got so involved in the business that one year she was asked to dress the corpse of an old woman that had died from a heart attack. She'll never forget the coldness of that livid skin, she says: "It's not a normal cold; it's an indescribable cold, creepy"—a dead body cools down until it reaches room temperature, almost 30 degrees less that the living. All in all, her boss congratulated her: the family had marveled at how peaceful the grandmother's face looked. "You see?", he told her. "This job is like any other."

When the emergency began in mid-March, Huamanñahui decided to leave her job temporarily in order to keep quarantine in her home in San Juan de Lurigancho. She couldn't work: in those days, the government was ordering that all dead from Covid-19 should be incinerated without a wake, in order to avoid contagion. Finally, in late April, when the health directive also allowed burials, her boss suggested she return.

No more making up dead people up or preparing vigils. She would only need a safety coverall and the strength of her arms to carry a hermetic bag with the dead person inside, put them in the cheapest coffin (pressed wood, without ornaments), cover it with transparent plastic, spray it with disinfectant, take it in the hearse to the private graveyard, and that's it. Funeral ceremonies in the days of the virus had to be very sober, prompt, and therefore cheaper. If before the pandemic Funeraria Aranzábal did up to five funerary services a month and charged between 5 thousand ($1,375) and 20,000 soles ($5,500), not including the cost of burial or cremation, now 2,500 soles ($680) would be enough to deliver the deceased into earth or fire. In the midst of massive layoffs, where almost half of Lima's middle-income inhabitants and 75% of the poorest have lost their jobs, for most families it would be impossible to pay thousands of soles for a post-mortem ritual.

Huamanñahui's pay would nevertheless be good. During the 107 days of national quarantine, Funeraria Aranzábal collected 1,300 dead people from houses or hospitals in Lima, half of them victims of Covid-19 (confirmed and suspected cases combined). For every dead person, Huamanñahui receives a "risk bonus" of 150 soles ($40). Before the emergency she earned around 3,000 soles ($825) a month (minimum salary plus sales commissions). Today she receives nearly twice that quantity: more than 5,000 ($1375). Never, she says, has she earned as much as she does now.

Huamanñahui doesn't recall how many bodies she has collected exactly—"Over one hundred, I've lost count"—but she does remember the first one she took out from a hospital. With vigils forbidden, per the family's request they parked the hearse a few metres from the house in a neighbourhood in the south of Lima. That way they were able to bid farewell and cry a few minutes in front of the sealed coffin, before allowing it to continue on its way to the crematorium.

From that day, Huamanñahui has been taking care of services that are scheduled immediately, even at dawn, and goes in to get the corpses from the refrigerated containers set up in the hospitals.  Sometimes her coworkers joke around with her—they doubt that a slight woman, with small hands and 1.56 metres tall—can carry coffins that weigh over 50 kilos, because "dead weight always weighs more". She proves them wrong.

"If I were laid off today, I'd look for another funeral home," says Huamanñahui, before going into the hospital to pick up the first corpse of the day and taking it to the cemetery. "It's a very peaceful job, which I like... Well, not at the moment I'm doing it, because then I feel remorse. I have five children. I would never forgive myself if I caught it."

After everything she has seen, and even if she knows that corpses don’t transmit the virus, she is still surprised by how "that bug" makes her think of her own mortality. Of what she can control and what she can't. Especially if you live in Peru, where some 3,500 positive new cases are detected every day, on average. This is something that is warning public health experts today of a possible new outbreak. And it distresses Huamanñahui when she sees so many people on the streets from her hearse. She doesn't have the cynical, hardened gaze that one would expect from someone living every day with death.

That's why from the beginning of quarantine she decided to stay alone in a room on the third floor of the funeral home. She visits her children every Saturday, takes them food provisions, spends the day at home (without removing her mask). She then returns at night on the usual bus that leaves her at a corner of Avenida Arenales, where she works. And she'll keep on doing that, she told me the last time we saw each other, as long as she doesn't switch jobs for something less risky. Or until there's a vaccine. Whichever comes first.

THE CEMETERY

“Diablo Fuerte”—literally, "strong devil"—isn't precisely the name of the enemy of God, but an ultra-quick-drying mixture of lime, cement and gypsum that gravedigger Carlos Prado uses to seal gravestones once he's pushed the coffin into the very back of the niche. Climbing onto the fork lift’s platform, he whitens the concrete cover with brushstrokes of gypsum diluted with water, and in seconds he writes a woman's names in black paint, the date in which she was born, the date she died, a R.I.P and a cross.

Since the pandemic reached the country, Prado—39 years old, tall, black, shaved head—only paints crosses for those that died from the virus. The one this June morning is number 203 on his list.

El Ángel General Cemetery, in El Agustino, has kept the bones and dust of some 600,000 human beings for over more than half a century. It is the last funeral space to integrate all social classes in Lima until the eighties. Over its 29 hectares, magnates such as Luis Banchero Rossi, artists such as Chabuca Granda, intellectuals such as Augusto Salazar Bondy, and politicians like Juan Velasco Alvarado lie in exquisite marble tombs or family mausoleums; and on the other side, along an interior avenue flanked by palm trees, there are 660 vertical pavilions named after saints, in whose heights a few turkey buzzards are usually perching.

There, in those rows of whitened niches, with minuscule mosquitoes flying around their hallways, lie the dead that are not famous. The people's dead.

This is where Carlos Prado has been a shoeshiner, car washer, and graveyard helper since he was a child, always in a cemetery bustling with people: food sellers, musicians singing boleros for a few soles, families spending the day with their dead, drinking beer, cleaning the niche, decorating it with flowers, crying, laughing, living. Even when security and order improved with the new administration of the Lima Welfare Society, on a weekend El Ángel could welcome up to 45,000 people—enough public to fill up the National Stadium. And it was like that until one day the virus hit the city, confined us to our homes and forced the cemetery to close its doors to visitors.

This year no one could leave flowers for Mother's Day or Father's Day. Masses and vigils are forbidden, who knows until when. Only funeral hearses with two or three plastic-covered coffins  go in every day, all the way to the pavilions of San Amadeus I, San Ananías I and San Afrodisio I, the last two acquired by the Ministry of Health to exclusively bury those deceased from Covid-19. Like the Presbítero Maestro—the old museum-cemetery located across from El Ángel—it has pavilions devoted to victims of the malaria epidemic that ravaged Lima in the late nineteenth century; the administration named these new spaces "the pavilions of the twenty-first century pandemic."

During quarantine, Carlos Prado and his four gravedigging colleagues—who earn up to 1,700 soles a month ($465), depending on their seniority—buried 251 dead from the virus in those quarters. Of that total, 218 were burials covered by the Integral System for Health (SIS)—through the Regional Health Directions (Diris) of the North and Centre—for low-income families.

Before the pandemic, when someone insured by the SIS passed away, their family would receive one thousand soles ($275) as reimbursement for funeral expenses. Today, in the context of the emergency, if the family decides to bury or cremate their deceased (be they insured or not), the SIS absorbs the cost (around 3,000 soles or $825) of collecting the corpse and transporting it to the cemetery, as well as the coffin and the crematory oven or temporary niche service, where they remain for up to 10 years. In El Ángel, a niche like that costs between 2,200 ($600) and 4,800 soles ($1320), depending on how high it is from the floor. "It's like apartments," Daniel Cáceda, the assistant manager of business and cooperation for Lima Welfare Society explained to me. "The higher up, the cheaper it is." That way, until quarantine ended, the SIS financed in Lima and Callao the burial costs for 4,254 dead from Covid-19 (confirmed and suspected cases): 70% of them were incinerated and the remaining 30% buried. This group includes the dead that are receiving their blessing from a priest this morning in the San Ananías I pavilion.

The families, standing two meters apart, record the moment on their cell phones; they make videocalls with those that were unable to go in with them. A cloud of mosquitoes flies among us. They alight on face coverings, on ears, on our hair, on our clothes and on the white cassock of Father Reyber Guerrero Pintado, chaplain of El Ángel, who right now shoos them away with the red-covered New Testament he’s holding in his hand.

Since the emergency began, Father Guerrero—35 years old, from the province of Piura, dark glasses, member of the Order of Mary, Mother of Apostles—was confined in his rented room a few streets from here. But he decided to return to work when burials were allowed, and he heard of people who died from the virus that were buried "without anyone praying for their souls."

"It was necessary as a matter of humanity," Daniel Cáceda, the director of the cemetery, had explained to me. "We're the bureaucracy of pain in the face of loss, and we must give peace to people and let their deceased depart peacefully." Both the public servant and the priest recognized that in a country where 7 out of 10 Peruvians identify as Catholic, complying with the responsory—that final prayer for the dead—was a matter of urgency. Just as Father Guerrero is doing now, as he sprinkles holy water on the niches from a virgin-shaped bottle.

Gospel of John. Chapter 11. The Story of Lazarus, raised by Jesus from the dead.

"I am the resurrection and the life...," the Father recites, and in his seven-minute express sermon he seems to avoid that word that is so final: for him, the dead haven't simply died, but rather they have "passed on to a better life," they "now rest in peace" or "have been called by our Creator." Despite the fact that he himself fears that his mother, who lives in Piura, may get infected, Father Guerrero is convinced that these phrases provide comfort, even though there is barely any for some these days. The helplessness of grief and the sting of one doubt that we will never fully know how to solve carry more weight—could I have done something more for them to survive?

That's something that Eleuterio Pérez, who hails from Comas, has thought about. He lost one brother one day to the virus; two days later he lost another one; and two weeks later he lost his mother, Maria, 67, whom he has just buried this morning in niche 14E after waiting in vain for a bed at the Dos de Mayo Hospital. Should he have insisted more in order to get her looked after? Something similar happened to Ivonne Sandoval, from San Martín de Porres, who just buried her father Reynaldo, 60, who died asphyxiated in his own bed by pneumonia. He now rests in niche 15F. Would it have been different had she given the down payment that the clinic demanded? For Ivonne, only the comfort remains of having held her father's hand until the very end.

"I feel bad about having thrown out his mattress, his blankets, out of fear for the virus, and for avoiding memories so that Mother won't suffer," Ivonne told me after the priest's responsory. "I would have preferred for him to be cremated, to have his ashes, share feasts with him, Christmas, but mother didn't feel the same way. She says the dead should be left with the dead."

* **

Near noon, when the families have left already, gravedigger Willy Loyola can finally free himself from his industrial face covering. Loyola is a 55-year-old from the province of Trujillo. He has a prominent nose and trips over his words as he speaks. He’s the most veteran member at the cemetery—36 years in the profession—and has buried more people than he can remember. The dead from the El Frontón prison massacre in the eighties. The dead from the cholera epidemic in the nineties. The dead from the fire of Mesa Redonda in 2001. And the first person to die from Covid-19 to be buried here, on April 25—a man that died in the hospital of Collique—in a white coffin. Loyola remembers that day well because of one detail.

"No one came to bid farewell to that man," Loyola remembers as he removes his rubber boots in the storeroom where he keeps his tools. "Dying like that, alone, is so screwed up."

The image of that white coffin without relatives or a priest made him sad. Especially when days later he himself would lose his older sister to the virus. She, at a hospital in Trujillo. And he, here, so far away.

"That was when that fear I was feeling took over my body," explains Loyola, who lives with his wife and two daughters. "I didn't want to come to the cemetery anymore, and I fully entrusted myself to the Virgin of La Puerta in Otuzco. Each morning I entrust myself to her, because one has to keep on working.”

Loyola apologizes and slips his face covering back on. He has to leave to find his plastic container with food. His coworkers are waiting for him next to a pavilion of niches, under the shade of some trees. There’s Juan Manuel Quito, known as Colita or "tail" because of his curious hairdo; his brother Fausto and Raúl Zarataco, also gravediggers in their fifties. There aren't mosquitos or turkey vultures lurking around here. There are shrubs, a few flowers. A cumbia is playing on a battery-operated radio. While they lunch on chicken stew on Styrofoam plates, freed from their plastic suits, they tell me about one of their colleagues that died from the virus. An employee from the area of statistics who recorded the burials. He died at home, 60 years old. They buried him. It's the only loss, they say. For now.

Colita: At least we've come out negative on the tests they've given us. That's why we put on double masks, goggles, gloves...

Fausto: Like the uniform of an alien.

Colita: But it isn't because of the dead person, for the virus dies after just a few hours in the deceased. It's because of the family, who don't understand and begin to cry and get too close, others get upset and even threaten you...

Fausto: Just in April, in the midst of the quarantine, around 40 thugs broke into the cemetery with a box. They wanted to bury their leader, and what can you do when they come up like that, they say, "Open up, motherfucker," they pull out their gun, and what do you do? You simply let them in...

Colita: They climbed onto the forklift like spiders. They started shooting into the air and when I was spreading the Diablo Fuerte on the gravestone; one of them said to me: "Cover it nicely, or you're dead."

Fausto: The first few days I didn't want to come, I’m serious. The scariest part is the virus.

Colita: It's just that before this, you'd forget to put your gloves on and you'd grab the dead person just like that, you'd cover your hands with a plastic bag and then you'd buy your soft drink and eat your chicken without even washing them.

Fausto: Now we rub alcohol on them and wash with Bolívar soap, and when we leave work we bathe until we're nice and clean.

Zarataco: The worst is the psychological aspect; Covid is traumatic.

Colita: That's why we work two weeks in Covid and two weeks with the normal dead; it's more relaxed. Being there for more than a month, in the same place, is complicated. We just recently buried 13 dead from Covid in one day.

Zarataco: Even when you’re watching television you freak out a bit. Everything is Covid Covid Covid, that's all there is. The press is full of that stuff. It gives you a headache.

Colita: I used to get upset when relatives cried. It would really move me and I'd step aside, just standing there quietly...

Zarataco: When the children cry it's upsetting. It's a purer feeling, but adults will say, "Mother, I'll come visit you every day," but then they forget and they don't come anymore. Sometimes you become a bit stronger in the face of pain.

Colita: That's why I finish up my job and I start planting roses here and there; I kill some time and forget about all that stuff.

That afternoon, as he devoured his chicken stew, Colita got up from the bucket where he was sitting to show me his garden: a piece of moist land with some twenty green stalks. In a few months they'll become roses he will offer to the families that visit El Ángel when all of this is over. Since he lives alone in a rented room a few streets from the cemetery, he spends his afternoons here so he won't miss his wife too much. She lives in Barranca, a village to the north, and he doesn't know when he’ll be able to return there.

"There have to be plants, flowers, in order for the cemetery to look pretty," Colita told me. "If there's nothing, what does it look like? A lifeless place, don’t you think?”

THE HILL

On the highest part of this hill, surrounded by fog, Luis Vásquez has been digging a grave since five in the morning. Half his body is inside a pit that's two metres long, 80 centimetres wide and 1.40 deep—enough, he says, for a coffin to fit without problems. He splits an enormous rock by hitting it with a sledgehammer and chisel, and then he leverages it with a crowbar.

"Making space for the departed requires technique," says the 40-year-old gravedigger, who is not wearing a mask or a spacesuit as he dries the sweat off his dirt-covered face. "With this one, it will be nearly 50 Covid pits I have dug on my own."

The cemetery is called Mártires del 19 de Julio and is also known as Belaúnde, and it's as big as seventy football fields placed together. Seen from above, the squatter settlement of Carmen Alto, in Comas, with its small football pitches, motorcycle taxis, businesses, minibuses and houses built on the hillsides blends in with hundreds of graves and niches that have accumulated here since the sixties, when entire families arrived from the Andes to the capital and founded districts that today make up what is known as Conos.

They arrived here in search of a place to live—but also a place to die. They formed neighbourhoods and also clandestine burial grounds, for they couldn't afford the costs of the Lima Welfare Society's cemeteries (such as El Ángel, near the Historic Centre) or the private graveyards (which appeared later, in the nineties). Then, one evening, a neighbour looked for a lot on the outskirts of their quarters that looked easy to clean up, without too many rocks; he dug a pit and buried his relative's coffin. He left a mark to remember him by: a pile of stones, a gravestone, a cross. Perhaps he prayed. Then another family did the same, and another one, and the graves and niches began to multiply without plans or order, until they touched the land where the recently-arrived neighbours were building more and more houses.

Half a century later, from the hilltop it's hard to distinguish where the city of the dead ends and the city of the living begins.

Especially because during the pandemic, burial spaces in the lower part of the cemetery have been used up. Data from Diris North indicate that Comas is the district in its jurisdiction that registered the most deaths by Covid-19—around 290—until the end of the quarantine. And according to data from Essalud (Peru’s social security program), after Carabayllo it's the district that registers the greatest percentage of active cases in all of Lima.

That's why Luis Vásquez, the son of a gravedigger named Juan de Dios, the founder of this cemetery, isn’t surprised that there are only spaces for the newly dead up here, really high up, where he’s digging a grave right now. All the crosses that surround us, he says, are people dead from the virus.

"It's scary, brother, but if there's work, you're not going to let it go to waste, are you?" says Vásquez, without pausing for a moment from breaking stone. "The good thing is that I'm alone here. Contamination is in the markets, in buses, among the living. The cemetery is safer, believe it or not.”

Before the emergency, Vásquez would dig four or five graves a month. Now, he digs one a day and charges 130 soles ($35) for that. The occupants of these pits, he says, are mostly older people. An employee from the municipality, which administers the cemetery, will later tell me that out of 20 daily burials, seven are confirmed cases of Covid-19, according to their death certificates. But Vásquez says he can tell if they are because of a particular detail: those coffins arrive wrapped up in plastic.

A while later, near nine o'clock, the first one of the day would arrive.

Immediately, a few young men, wearing black safety coveralls and industrial respirators, went out to receive it. Seven relatives—the maximum allowed—entered through the cemetery's blue facade, accompanied by a public servant from the municipality and some reporters from a TV channel. A few dogs came up behind them, barking continuously. The camera took the images we've seen so many times over the past days: of the relatives with masks, face protectors, and weepy eyes. Of the gravediggers carrying the plastic-wrapped coffin on their shoulders. Of the public servant reporting the mayor's "great efforts" in managing the pandemic.

And at the top of the hill, a man kept on digging a grave.

"Peru is a mountain crowned by a cemetery," Manuel Gonzáles Prada wrote over a century ago.

It could be a headline from today—or an epitaph—on this side of the world.

* * *

In the days of the virus, death sometimes begins much sooner than we start getting sick. It all begins with a decision that is apparently harmless, without a memorable event.

Let’s take a look at this man, for example: Carlos Enrique Bravo, 55 years old, a neighbour in Comas. He weathers the quarantine for two months alongside his wife and son without working. Until one day he must take inventory: his savings from his shoe business are running out. The Universal Family Bonus—those 760 soles ($210) so advertised by the government—never arrived. And there's a house, and bread, and electricity, and water to be paid. Then, one day in June, in the middle of the state of emergency, he gets up early, eats breakfast, slips on a cloth mask and decides to risk it: he goes out on the streets to offer his wares. He brings some money back home, but a few days later he begins to feel sick. He coughs. He breathes with difficulty. A fever knocks him down on his mattress. His wife takes him to a hospital that is over capacity, where other men like him are waiting for a bed. We all know how this story ends.

A week later, in front of a plastic-covered coffin, a white-haired man with a black cassock and prominent belly says of this man who was his friend:

Big Quique,
you left first,
at some point in life we’ll meet again, surely.
To keep on joking, talking. We’ll be here to support Carlitos; he won't be alone.
Big Quique, come now, brother,
any moment now I will follow,
wait for me.
You know, save me a seat.

A boy leaves some white flowers on the coffin before it is placed in the niche in the high part of the cemetery. The gravedigger fits the gravestone, seals it with cement, and embosses the deceased's information with a stick.

There is no priest or anyone to direct the responsory, but everyone, friends and relatives, lowers their head for a minute, as if in prayer.

Julia Penadillo, the widow, would later tell me that she tested positive for Covid-19 but managed to recover at home. What really worried her was not having enough money to bury her husband's body. For a person without a job or savings, the expense was impossible: paying 400 soles ($110) to the municipality for the right to burial + 1,500 soles ($410) to the funeral home that picks up the corpse and takes it to the cemetery in a coffin + 1,500 soles ($410) for building the simplest niche. In this area of Lima, burying someone that died from Covid-19 costs a family almost four minimum wages.

The widow says that the Integral Health Insurance to which her husband was affiliated hasn't yet reimbursed her for the burial expenses that, supposedly, the neediest families should receive. They told her she would have to wait until the quarantine was over.

"But I couldn't wait," she said. "Thank God all his friends collected the money. I feel at peace; at least I know where his body is."

Penadillo tells how in her land, the Huánuco Sierra, when someone dies, family and friends eat, drink, and play music in the name of the deceased. It's something her husband would have liked, she says. Perhaps that custom of preserving and honouring the corpse of a person arises from reminiscences of pre-Hispanic sanctity, rather than from Catholic rituals. In Memoria y muerte en el antiguo Perú [Memory and Death in Ancient Perú], archaeologist Peter Kaulicke explains that this tradition is reflected in the closeness our ancestors had with the mallqui, the mummy, which participated in celebrations: the deceased aren’t abandoned, and instead one should act as if they were present, because their souls never die.

Before the pandemic, in this cemetery in Comas, entire families would spend the day and eat the favourite dishes of their departed and drink beer and play music that they enjoyed in life. Today, because of the health directive, these gatherings are forbidden. The funeral for Julia Penadillo’s husband barely lasted 20 minutes.

And just like that one, on the day I visited the cemetery there were four burials at the same time. The gravediggers would arrive at an empty pit or niche, leave the coffin there and immediately climb into an old pickup truck to go down to the cemetery entrance to receive another dead person. These are around 15 men organized into the Association of Independent Workers of the Cemetery of Carmen (Atica). Although the younger ones are the ones that do the jobs, the founders, the older ones, are still active: they negotiate the contracts with the relatives.

That's how I met a gravedigger named Inocente Prudencio, 78, who is not following quarantine because "one has to eat, and also I get bored at home." And Horacio Mallanga, 66, who has 11 children and four decades digging up pits that have left scars on his hands. And Segundo Benítez, 71, rebaptized by the younger gravediggers as "Uncle Covid", because he belongs to the "at-risk population." Since they're associates, they all have a space reserved for them in this cemetery. For now they hang on to the serenity of being safe: personnel from the Ministry of Health gave them rapid tests and their results were negative. They've only lost—until now—three of their colleagues to the virus.

One of them was Manuel Puse Maco, another founder of the cemetery, better known as Comba. A roguish, foul-mouthed northerner with a head as large and square as a sledgehammer, he drove all the way to Chiclayo when the quarantine began to take an infected relative. Comba was 68 and diabetic. A month later he was seriously ill at home, plugged into an oxygen tank. One day they took him for an emergency visit to the hospital in Collique.

"But when he arrived he was a corpse," says Victor, the second of his children. "Death doesn't warn when it will come knocking next."

According to the association's guidelines, the son of a gravedigger becomes an associate immediately after the father dies. That's why Víctor has inherited the blue vest, the cell phone, the old red car and the clients of the deceased. Now he works with three of his eleven siblings. He does the contracts, they carry out the jobs.

"Everyone wanted to be buried by Mr. Comba," gravedigger Luis Vásquez told me. "There were even relatives that he'd help when they didn't have enough to dig the pit."

Vásquez explains that right when the emergency began, the family of a girl murdered by her partner arrived at the cemetery. The body had been at the morgue for several days. The family didn't have enough to pay for someone to bury her. So her relatives found a sector on the hill that was clear, where they could dig the pit by themselves. Vásquez was moved by this, and he and his gravedigging colleagues lent them a hoe, a pick, rope, and gave them a wooden cross. Just as old Comba used to do, his neighbour and one of his teachers.

"Sometimes you give, and God rewards you," Vásquez told me. "Not everything in this life is money."

That's why today, Comba's niche is never without yellow madonna lilies right next to his photograph. Or grapes and peaches—his favorite fruits—and a bottle of Cristal beer, left there by people who knew him and loved him.

* **

In his book The Undertaking, poet and funeral director Thomas Lynch says that after any calamity, we need the bodies of the dead back in order to "let them go again—on our terms, at our pace, to say you may not leave without permission, forgiveness, our respects—to say we want our chance to say good-bye."

And that's what the Yauli Bendezú family needed to do now. The tomb that a gravedigger dug earlier at the top of this hill had to be occupied.

They stand a few metres away from the men wearing their black safety coveralls and lowering the plastic-wrapped coffin: one of them is inside the pit; the other one holds the box from above with a rope as it is lowered into the ground.

There goes the man who in life was César Yauli, beef merchant, dead at 77 from the virus. His niece Jocelyn Villegas says that at the Cayetano Heredia Hospital in San Martín de Porres they were offered the possibility of cremating or burying the body. But the family didn’t accept. They were terrified that the reports they had seen on television could be true: one family was demanding the body of a man that had died from Covid-19 and the hospital had misplaced.

"We had to sign a paper stating that we’d take charge of our uncle. We wanted to see him, say goodbye to him as he deserved."

Although, says Jocelyn, they themselves have to trust that the body in the coffin they are now burying is really that of their relative. The Covid-19 coffins, as we know, must not be opened.

They had been told that the responsories in this cemetery were usually given by a Venezuelan missionary known as Padre Chamo. But since he didn't come today, they let Oswaldo Marcelo—tall and skinny and with a pointy nose, who earns a living at other people’s burials—pick away at his wood guitar and play a somewhat out-of-tune version of "I Have A Friend."

The gravediggers toss the last shovelfuls of earth on the coffin.

"Let's see, brothers, let's cheer really loudly, ok?", says the singer, and repeats a name three times. "César Yauli Bendezú!"

"Present!"

The singer requests an applause for the deceased. Then he asks for some coins. The relatives give him a few and the singer climbs down the hill rapidly to play at another burial. The  nephews and nieces and siblings of the deceased stay to fix up the tomb. They stick a white cross in the earth. The leave a wreath of red flowers, golden heart-shaped balloons and some candles, and they surround the grave with stones so that no one steps on it absent-mindedly, and so that they themselves won’t forget the place where their uncle has been laid to rest. In a time defined by daily death tallies and cold statistics, the Yauli Bendezús do what we've been doing for millennia, more or less: taking care of our dead with enough care and honour, as a sign that their lives deserved to be lived and remembered.

As they are doing now:

"My uncle was afraid we'd abandon him at that hospital."
"He had no children. That’s what we were to him."
"His nickname, I remember—they called him Uncle Lolo."
"He liked the number seven; he always bet at the casino and he'd say seven."
"He got drunk at my niece's wedding. He was dancing all night long."
"He always remembered everyone's birthday."
"Even people that couldn't stand him said goodbye on Facebook."
"That's right. When you die, that's when everyone likes you."

That afternoon, near the end of the quarantine, the Yauli Bendezús remained a while longer next to the altar of flowers and stones telling each other stories about Uncle Lolo, until the sky began to darken. Then they went down the slope, holding onto each other’s arms so they wouldn't slip on the graves. And thus the hill, the crosses, and the dust that was lifted every step of the way—invading everything, even the air we breathe—were all left behind.