28
We reached town when the mist had come down: it wasn’t a drizzly mid-winter mist, the pissy sort, as people sometimes say, but a soft, pleasant streaky mist, like strips of cotton wool, that settled over the winding river. The trap went straight to the house, on the outskirts. A group of women were chatting in front of the entrance. When the trap pulled up, two neighbours came to the rear door, and before we climbed down, they informed us, misery written all over their faces: “He’s not here, they…”
“They took him away a few minutes ago. They’re in the cemetery.”
Bernat pulled the reins and turned the colt towards the opposite direction from which we’d come. Grandmother took a handkerchief from her pocket and held it over her eyes so we wouldn’t see her crying. Ció gripped her arm, saying: “It’s happened, although we were afraid it would, weren’t we? Perhaps it’s the best that could have happened… Don’t cry, Mother, we’ve got to be strong.”
Then Ció took my arm, caressed me for a second and said: “Be brave!”
I felt guilty because I shed not a tear. I couldn’t cry. It seemed I’d forgotten how to. Rather than sorrow, I felt embarrassed, embarrassed because of the looks and comments I’d have to suffer. Deep down I wondered whether it would lead to a violent change in my own life.
We made our way up a dirt track in the upper part of town. We left the houses behind and the tops of the cypress trees behind a whitewashed wall beckoned us to the cemetery.
We alighted by the wrought-iron gate and Bernat helped Grandmother as far as the path leading to the chapel, where Ció and I took her, one each side, and he retraced his steps to tie up the colt.
The sandy path, between two rows of white cedars, sliced through a grassy field, with mounds of freshly dug earth and wooden crosses that bore rudimentary inscriptions, like homework written in a rush. A wall of niches signalled the end of the cemetery, with a chapel in the middle where people were milling outside. The second they saw us, the public stepped respectfully aside to let us through. A priest and two well-dressed men seemed to be arguing, some way away from the niches. When they saw us, they shut up and bowed their heads as if to acknowledge us.
Grandmother couldn’t stand any longer and we sat her on the back bench in the chapel. It was a small space, six or seven benches, a grey-stone altar, a wooden Christ on the cross hanging from the ceiling, four candles, and nothing else.
The wooden coffin was set in front of the altar, near the front benches, on the ground and all alone. The box was made from cheap wooden planks, and the heads of the nails stuck out for all to see like flies crushed around the rim and huge cracks showed how hurriedly it had been made.
Cracks, I thought, feeling increasingly guilty, I couldn’t stop my flow of thoughts, why does it need those cracks if the dead don’t breathe. I also thought about the time when Mr. Manubens, the owner of Can Tupí, had once told us, to illustrate the lack of feeling of anarchists — and, he had added, of godless people in general — about when an officer of their stripe had given the order for a hole to be left in the side of his coffin, when he was buried, because doctors were sometimes as silly as gravediggers and buried people who looked to be dead but weren’t, they might have had a fit — an illness that was new to me — and would awake from apparent death a few days later. That was how Mr. Manubens began, but even more incredibly the man had ordained his coffin should be positioned feet first in the niche with his head pointing outwards because he wanted to hear the chatter of people strolling through the cemetery, be they ghosts or the living; he wanted to have as good a time after dying as he’d enjoyed alive. And worse still, added Mr. Manubens, his face reddening with indignation, he insisted that, if people brought flowers for his tomb, they should turn the flowers towards the wall with the stalks pointing at the general public, because those offerings were for him, not for them; the general public could go to hell.
It was pure madness for my brain to be thinking such things at a unique moment like that! Perhaps I was the only one thinking such untimely thoughts, which showed what a mixed up-lad I was.
The men were separated from the women, and Grandmother sat on the front bench next to Aunt Enriqueta and other women I didn’t know. They all wore black and mourning shawls, or un cèfiro, as it’s called in Catalan, over their heads. Ció insisted on sitting me next to my mother. Her face was waxen white, her eyes swollen and her cheeks bluish, but she didn’t shed a single tear. Mother, I suspected, was like me, and didn’t feel like weeping, or perhaps she’d used up all her tears. She stooped over to kiss my cheek and took my hand and placed it on her skirt. I noted she was wearing a dress that wasn’t hers, strictly mourning attire, that was longer than the ones she usually wore, hers were never so far beneath the knee, and its sleeves and collar sagged loosely. Aunt Ció sat next to Aunt Enriqueta.
The priest walked down the central aisle, flanked by two sacristans, all wearing white surplices, the priest’s over his soutane and the men’s over their everyday jackets. The priest also wore a purple stole around his neck, like a scarf, with two strips hanging down on each side. They stopped in front of the altar opposite the coffin. One of the sacristans brought the priest a sprinkler from some hidden corner.
Before the ceremony started, a man came over — one I recognized as being from the neighbourhood — and told me I should change pew, that it was my duty to head the mourners on the men’s side. I looked at my mother, who nodded, so I switched pews.
The man responsible for my move sat beside me, on the front male pew that had been empty to that point. The few men there were sat in the back rows and had left the front two free. Bernat sat right at the back, accompanying my grandmother.
“I’m the chief mourner,” said the man from the locality, leaning towards me, “we didn’t have time to print any cards. We’ll give them out next Sunday, if they let us have a funeral service.”
I gathered that it hadn’t been straightforward. The priest took the sprinkler by the handle, began reciting lines of Latin and started to shower the sides of the box with holy water. Once he’d done that, he indicated we should stand, and recited the paternoster. He walked over to my mother and gave her his hand, then turned round, put one hand on my head while he blessed me with his other and walked out without more ado. The two sacristans summoned the burial men, two scowling, unshaven, ill-dressed men, and between the four of them they lifted the coffin up and carried it outside.
Mother and I followed the box, and the rest of those present lined up behind us. I was shocked to see neither Grandmother nor Bernat sitting on the last bench. The niche was at the bottom of the wall where we had previously seen the priest arguing with two men. Only seven or eight people accompanied us that far. The others stood in the entrance to the cemetery or departed.
The chief mourner seemed like a master of ceremonies who wanted to take charge of everything, even the way the box was lifted up to its niche on a ladder. Before it was lifted, they placed it on trestles, and two men stepped up — that I thought were my mother’s brothers, members of that large family of hers, most of who I’d only seen once or twice in my life, at my other grandparents’ house, and they asked: “Can we take a look at him before…?”
I was surprised by my mother’s firm tone. She replied curtly: “No. If you’d wanted to see him, you should have done so when he was in hospital or prison.”
And she turned round to me, pushed me in the direction of a fat, smartly dressed, buxom woman I immediately recognized, and said: “Say hello to Mrs. Dolores. It’s thanks to her that we’ve been able to bury your father. She lent us the niche. If it hadn’t been for her, they’d have buried him in the ground like a dog.”