One day, Alma decides she has had enough with the fame game, the big career and its ups and downs. She comes to a lovely conclusion: It is time to return to the homeland she fled, and she will take all the drafts of her unfinished or unpublished books and lay them to rest there, giving each a proper burial. She buys a plot of land and begins to build a graveyard.
The locals become a fantastic choir of curious, suspicious, baffled neighbors: One rumor has it that “the place will be a resort, which would provide employment for maids, gardeners, waiters, cooks, watchmen”; another imagines “a grand house, complete with a swimming pool, a tennis court, a mini putting green.” Still another posits, “A baseball academy would be a dream come true for the tigueritos roaming the streets. Keep them out of trouble.” But when they realize Alma is building a graveyard, the outburst is comedic: a cemetery! Fear of zombies immediately clashes with the fear of homeless people defecating in mausoleums — and what kinds of jobs, by the way, are there in a boneyard? They have more reckoning to do when they realize Alma intends to put her stories in the ground, literally.
Word goes out that the great author has returned, and the locals flock to her like butterflies, everyone eager to share. A festival of storytelling breaks out in the tropics. Are the neighbors hoping to bury their own or are they giving life to tales untold? No matter. Rumors and gossip, histories and familial dramas swirl around Alma. “A little bird told me. Había una vez. Cuentan los viejos. Some scandal on the news, who is sleeping with whom, what fulano has done or said to fulana, a juicy chisme, a hot rumor. …” Amid the chatter, Alma’s own stories, the ones she has come home to bury, somehow find their place.
Soon Alma is meeting with architects, and more characters join in the cumbia of story — the dueling Perla and Filomena, who have not spoken for 30 years but keep each other’s phone numbers just in case. It is a shadowy feud, of course: “Way back, Filomena destroyed Perla’s peace of mind. The story has been buried so deep, it should have rotted into oblivion. But like Lazarus in la Biblia, it keeps coming back to life.”
Indeed. Here comes the fabulous Bienvenida (it means “Welcome”), with her tragic history that Alma cannot resist. She was once, you see, the wife of the dictator, Trujillo, a loyal and devoted first lady who is cast aside when she is unable to produce an heir. Eventually, El Jefe falls for the charms of another woman — “jealous and possessive, with a will equal to his own” — and Bienvenida’s “death knell comes when this mistress gives birth to a son.”
