Life Embitters (9 page)

“Sr Ferrer,” I asked, “what’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?”

“I find these heavy downpours depressing, do you know?” he wheezed, and visibly wilted.

One of the more musical Swiss citizens in the boarding house, Oswald Stein – a tall, robust, blond lad, with enormous feet, worthy of an Alpine shepherd – caught typhoid and died two weeks after the infection was diagnosed.

“This is a terrible
black
mark for the house,” Sra Paradís told her lodgers, “a huge disaster … We didn’t have time to do a thing, not even to take him to a hospital or clinic; in fact, we didn’t have the slightest inkling … We turned a blind eye, to tell the truth, and now the headaches will all land on my plate! Boarding houses are places to live, not to die!”

We lodgers looked at her as if to say: “Senyora, what on earth could we do?”

The very second the doctor walked out of the door, after he’d signed the death certificate, a small, fair, nervy young man walked in; bumptious and bespectacled, he was dressed like a commercial traveler and looked the meticulous sort. He was a funeral parlor employee and carried a large catalogue under his arm. As he walked in, he glanced round the house, no doubt assessing in advance the establishment’s economic potential.

Sra Paradís and the deceased’s Swiss friends spoke to the funeral parlor employee in the dining room. Sr Verdaguer was present during the visit, hovering in the doorway, wrapped in his purple dressing-gown and wearing his checkered slippers. A deep silence had descended over the boarding house.

“Are these gentlemen family?” the employee asked Sra Paradís, pointing at the Swiss men.

“No, sir. They are friends. The deceased had no family. He was a foreigner.”

“Very good! Here is what my firm can modestly offer you in terms of a funeral,” stated the employee, placing the open catalogue on the table.

And he began to turn over pages illustrated with a large array of photos.

Pride of place in the first pages was given to the large, first-class, extra special
de luxe
mortuary carriage – known as the stove hearse – with a large bell jar surrounding the casket, a monumental cart with Solomonic columns that supported the canopy and swayed in the air, complete with the symbolic appendages necessary to accompany such artifact: horses shrouded in black cloth down to their hoofs, coachmen, flunkeys, and footmen. It was grandiose, solemn, splendid; it seemed the genuine item, with the horses’ plumes, the jet-black metal adornments encrusted with tinny gilt, the coachman wearing a wig tied with a bow on the nape of his neck and a three-cornered hat, like an Imperial
maréschal
. The long team of horses occupied a double spread and seemed worthy of Versailles.

“It may not be ne-cess-ary to take such ex-cess-ive trou-ble …” said Pickel, a friend of Stein’s, his Germanic drawl emphasizing each syllable.

And he gestured to the parlor’s rep to quickly turn the pages, before adding: “That would be so expensive, we’d be sad for the rest of our lives.”

Sra Paradís was of the opinion that this shaft of Swiss wit was in flagrant bad taste. She glanced at the man from the funeral parlor as if to say: “Ignore them, they’re only foreigners …”

“I should point out,” said the parlor’s rep as he turned the pages in his meticulous manner, “I should point out that the number of priests present at the funeral depends on the class of hearse that you select …”

“I am very grateful to you, sir …” responded Pickel, nodding deferentially.

As the pages turned, one observed a gradual decrease in funeral pomp and circumstance: the hearses diminished in style and status, reduced in size, the columns shrank, and the horses even appeared smaller and scabbier. The group was still undecided. Sra Paradís suddenly asked Pickel: “Why don’t we consult the family in Switzerland?”

“Senyora,” replied Pickel, bowing his head again, with the hint of a smile, “I do not think Stein had any family.”

After various silent, anguished lulls they agreed the funeral should be a good fourth grade.

“Absolutely fine! That’s settled then …!” said the rep shutting the catalogue with a thud. “That’s all fixed then … You should know that a decent fourth grade funeral is like a humble third. It’s the most common, our standard job. You’ll be pleased with …”

Don Natali, who seemed more dead than alive as he witnessed that scene – at the time he often said that any reference to death gave him the shivers – accompanied the funeral parlor employee to the door. Two or three lodgers stood silently in the small, dingy hallway that was almost entirely occupied by a voluminous umbrella stand: they seemed to be expecting some news. Before he left, the employee surveyed the scene one last time and said, with a self-congratulatory nod of the head: “Just what I’d thought … it was clear from the start …”

Don Natali shut the door carefully, on tip-toe, making no noise at all. Sr Riera then came over to me – one of those apparently expecting some news – and whispered mysteriously in my ear: “What can that gentleman have meant when he said: ‘Just what I’d thought …’?”

“God knows! It must be a phrase from a Kabalistic ritual to do with the funeral parlor, you know?”

“Ah, right!” said Riera, heading up the passage.

That same afternoon – a fresh, verdantly luminous, beautiful May afternoon, its crystalline air soaked in the scent of spring – Sra Paradís, Pickel and the other Swiss squabbled dreadfully. Our landlady suggested that Stein should be fitted out in his best suit, because that was the custom in our country. The Swiss replied that the custom, where he came from, was to wrap the deceased in a sheet – a simple shroud.

“But what do you people know about any of this,” snarled our landlady, “You’ve never been in this situation. I have! I am a widow!”

But the Swiss held their ground, and that appalled Sra Paradís and the whole boarding house in general.

“It’s disgusting!” she exclaimed in the passage. “Taking him to the cemetery wrapped in a sheet! That may be what’s done there, but everything has its limits! It’s obscene!”

And, after an anxious pause, she added: “And to think that this is a
family
boarding house!”

Later in the afternoon and at night a deep, unusual silence again descended on the house. The cook – a lady from Almatret on the Aragonese border – stopped singing
I so love my lovely crooks
, that was the hit song of the day. Almost all the lodgers ate supper elsewhere. Only Ferrer, Riera, and I appeared at the dining table. The Maggi, fried hakes, and horrible leathery steaks also put in an appearance.

“What’s become of Sr Verdaguer?” I asked Donya Esperança.

“Don Natali has had to stay in bed because he’s got goose bumps and was shivering with cold. He’ll need an infusion and aspirin.”

That unusual supper was consumed in total silence. Sra Paradís broke it for a moment to say that if it hadn’t been for the furor that the Swiss had caused with their blasted shroud, she’d have given us green beans.

“So? Shall we go out for coffee?” asked Riera, as he gave the finishing touches to the little rabbit he made daily with his napkin.

“Thanks, Sr Riera!” I replied. “But my exams are on top of me, you know?”

“You mean you can cram, as you put it,
even
on a day like this?” asked a very shocked, surprised Riera.

“What do you expect? Forensic Practices come before life and death … don’t you see?”

Everybody returned to the boarding house in the early hours: one after another, furtively. From my bedroom in the passage I realized that the presence of that wretched man had filled everyone with panic. They placed the key in the door gingerly. They removed their shoes in the hallway and tiptoed down the long passage. Once inside their bedrooms they locked their doors. In the early hours I didn’t hear the usual spate of coughing, or anyone snoring. In fact, everyone spent the night with eyes wide open. The house seemed dead. A terrible, unreal, grotesque fear filled every mind, though it was genuine enough.

There was considerable movement in the morning. Everyone got up early. And much to my amazement, everyone scarpered. Everyone took flight. The boarding house was deserted. By eight o’clock, Sr Verdaguer, Murillo in tow, was already in the Plaça de Catalunya, gazing tenderly at the pigeons.

The time for the funeral was set for three
P.M.
At a quarter to, the bell on the stairs showed signs of life, and the bearers from the Alms House appeared in the open doorway. There were four of them, dressed in black with patent leather top hats. We lodgers, in our glad rags, gathered in the
hall that only just accommodated us – subdued, silent, and ready for the funeral – markedly limp and low-profile.

The man who seemed to be in charge of the bearers removed his hat, rehearsed the classic gesture of flinging both sides of his cloak over his shoulders in succession, and then wiped the sweat from his brow with a huge plaid handkerchief. It can be hot in Barcelona, in the month of May. What’s more, the stairs had tired them out … His subordinates extinguished their cheroots with their fingertips and put the remnants under their hatbands. There was a long pause, the time they needed to adapt to the poor light in the hall. Then, when he saw the lady of the house – Sra Paradís – was present, the head bearer spoke to her quietly, in a natural, totally sympathetic tone that was, nevertheless, compatible with mechanical, administrative procedures when he uttered the time-hallowed phrase: “Senyora, where is the individual concerned at rest?”

The individual concerned lay at rest at the end of the passage, between two pale candles with yellowish flames that were flickering feebly.

They struggled to carry the casket downstairs, because the deceased was tall and heavy. The bearers sweated like carters. Their features contorted on the stair bends, as they tensed their muscles in dramatic, baroque fashion. When they had deposited the box on the black table in the lobby, the clergy sang prayers of absolution. Then they lifted the casket on to the dais in the carriage and tied it down with the usual straps. People stood on the balconies of neighboring houses to observe the spectacle. Passersby removed their caps or hats as they walked by, turned their heads and looked. The minute the candles in the corridor were snuffed out, Sra Paradís felt a sense of release and glanced down at the funeral cortège through a crack she had opened in the shutter.

We smoked as we walked slowly behind the hearse, the bearers and the
Swiss – the main mourners – until we reached the parish church. The cortège looked like a strange, picturesque cyst on the hustle and bustle and usual traffic.

After singing the absolutions we lodgers walked to the front and shook the hands of the Swiss. We were our normal selves: nothing was out of the ordinary and every second seemed like business as usual. In the meantime, a down-at-heel carriage rolled up that parked behind the funeral hearse. It was an aged, covered charabanc for eight – one of those carriages that once took large families to the station when they were going to or from their summer holidays. We lodgers climbed in. Sr Riera acted as master of ceremonies and slotted us in as best he could. Sra Paradís had put Riera in charge of everything related to the funeral and associated paperwork.

“Naturally!” said Sr Ferrer, feeling upstaged. “He was a tobacconist, so he knows all about the mysteries of red tape!”

When Sr Verdaguer heard that jokey comment he guffawed and cheerfully rubbed his hands together.

When the carriage door was about to shut, Sr Ferrer had second thoughts and, on the pretext that sedentary people felt queasy traveling inside moving vehicles, he climbed on to the seat with the driver.

The hearse moved off over the cobbles at a quick trot. Straight-backed on the small rear platform, the bearers shored up the boney frame of the hearse’s curtained dome, took the cheroots from their hatbands and lit up. The charabanc set off and the skinny pony, not wishing to be outdone, also trotted off at a lively pace. We proceeded along a sunny Gran Via full of fresh spring air. Near Carrer d’Urgell – or Borrell – from inside our juddering, ramshackle vehicle I thought I heard a hurdy-gurdy strike up.

Sr Riera walked up and down the covered gallery that ran along the rear wing of the cemetery offices. A line of cypress trees and the lofty branches of a weeping willow were a hazy blur behind the dusty, polished panes, in the violent glare of the light that seemed intent on breaking the gelatinous wall of glass. A profound silence reigned in the gallery punctuated only by a typewriter slowly tapping away – like a partridge pecking in its cage.

Sr Riera tired of waiting and went over to a half-open office door. A tattered, flowery cloth screen stood in the center of the high-ceilinged, bare-walled room. A dense cloud of tobacco smoke rose slowly up from behind one side of the screen.

A clerk’s sitting there with a pile of cigar butts behind a pile of red tape …
, thought Sr Riera. And in recognition of the accuracy of his deductions he smiled sourly, displaying his dirty, chipped teeth. But his insight didn’t lead him to act in any way. After hesitating for a moment, he put his hat back on and returned to the gallery.

He walked up and down for a while and eventually met up with the bearer and workman who had been looking for him.

The bearer was a man in his forties, plump, ruddy, greasy-skinned, wearing a large overcoat with big rusty buttons and a top hat inlaid with leather patches that tilted slightly over his forehead. The overcoat struggled to contain his mischievous potbelly. The baggy bottoms of his yellowish corduroy trousers spilled over his huge, dented shoes. The workman was gray, middle-aged, and putty-faced; small lumps of dried lime dotted his skin, pants, and rope sandals.

When he saw the bearer was carrying a handful of papers, Sr Riera walked quickly over.

“All ready?” he asked, smiling politely.

The man in the top hat stood and stared at him solemnly, clenching his
cheroot between his teeth. He then glanced at the papers and said: “Are you number 12,057?”

“Honestly, I couldn’t say …”

“A mustachioed corpse with a tiepin …”