Emilio charged me double and called it hazard pay. The hazard, he said, was staying.
We left the dock at Cuemanco an hour before sunset, the trajinera pushing through water the color of weak tea. Xochimilco's canals braid out south of Mexico City in a green maze of chinampas — floating gardens the Aztecs built, still farmed, still poled through by men like Emilio who have done it since they were boys. He stood at the stern with his long pole and did not talk for the first twenty minutes, which I respected. Men who work water learn early that silence is a tool.
Other trajineras passed us going the other way, stacked with marigolds — mountains of cempasúchil, orange as a warning light. The city was preparing. By the weekend every doorway in Coyoacán would wear its arch of flowers, every family would set its ofrenda, and the cemeteries would fill with candles and the living, sitting up all night with the dead like old friends who don't need to talk. I love Mexico in this week. The rest of the year the world pretends death is a rumor. Here, for seven days, it's a guest.
A boy on a passing boat tried to sell me a marigold garland. Emilio waved him off before I could answer, which was just as well — I photograph offerings, I don't wear them. The boy shouted something cheerful and rude, and Emilio shouted back, and for a moment the canal was just a canal: water, flowers, men yelling.
Past the last chinampa the traffic thinned. Every trajinera we met was coming the other way — farmers, flower sellers, a wedding party singing off a floating raft of marigolds — and every one of them, as they passed, looked once at Emilio, once at the bend ahead of us, and stopped singing until we were past. Nobody waved. On the whole bright canal, we were the only boat going toward the trees.
Then the trees changed.
They started as shapes — lumps in the branches, wrong the way a face is wrong in a dream. Then the boat rounded a bend and the sun dropped behind the reeds and I saw them properly: dolls. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. Hung from every branch by their necks, their wrists, one ankle. Nailed through the palms to trunks. Their plastic skin blistered white by decades of sun. Their hair — those rooted nylon wigs — grown into green-black mats of moss. Most had no eyes. The ones that did watched the water.
I shot the treeline the way the light wanted: wide, slow, letting the dusk do the art direction. f/8, 1/60, the sun bleeding out behind the reeds and turning every hanging shape into a votive. "Beautiful," I said out loud, because it was, and because saying so felt like a small defiance. You can be afraid of a place and still give it its due. That's the job.
"The island," Emilio said, like that explained it.
I lifted my camera before I thought about it. Nikon FM2, thirty-five millimeter, loaded that morning with Tri-X 400. I shoot film on islands like this because the island deserves grain.
"Photos are fine," Emilio said. "Take nothing."
"I don't steal from the dead," I said. "I just photograph them."
He didn't laugh. "Stay on the paths. Don't go past the shrine after dark. And if you hear crying from the canal — don't go to it."
"What cries from the canal?"
He poled. The water made its soft arithmetic against the hull.
"A girl," he said finally. "She's been crying since before I was born."