The polemic about death singular or deaths plural, which was started by the spirit hovering over the water in the aquarium and by the apprentice philosopher, would have ended either in comedy or in farce had the article by the economist not appeared. Although, as he himself acknowledged, actuarial calculus was not his speciality, he considered himself sufficiently knowledgeable about the subject to go public and to ask just how, in about twenty years’ time, give or take a year, the country thought it would be able to pay the millions of people who would find themselves on permanent disability pensions and would continue like that for all eternity and would, implacably, be joined by further millions, now regardless of whether you used an arithmetic or a geometric progression, disaster was assured, it would mean chaos, disorder, state bankruptcy, a case of sauve qui peut, except that no one would be saved. Confronted by this terrifying vision, the metaphysicians had no option but to button their lip, the church had no option but to return to their weary telling of beads and to waiting for the end of time, which, according to their eschatological visions, would resolve everything once and for all. In fact, going back to the economist’s worrying arguments, the calculations were very easy to make, if a certain proportion of the active population are paying their national insurance, and a certain proportion of the inactive population are retired, either for reasons of old age or disability, and therefore drawing on the active population for their pensions, and the active population is constantly on the decrease with respect to the inactive population, and the inactive population is constantly on the increase, it’s hard to understand why no one saw at once that the disappearance of death, apparently the peak, the pinnacle, the supreme happiness, was not, after all, a good thing. The philosophers and other abstractionists had first to get lost in the forest of their own lucubrations about the almost and the zero, which is the plebeian way of saying being and nothingness, before common sense could arrive prosaically, with pen and paper in hand, to demonstrate by a + b + c that there were certain far more urgent matters to consider. As was foreseeable, knowing as one does the darker side of human nature, when the economist’s alarming article was published, the attitude of the healthy section of the population towards the terminally dying began to change for the worse. Up until then, even though everyone was agreed that the old and the sick caused considerable upsets and problems, it was nevertheless felt that treating them with respect was one of the essential duties of any civilised society, and consequently, although it did occasionally take some effort, the care they needed was never denied to them and, in a few rare cases, this care was even sweetened with a spoonful of compassion and love before the light was turned out. It’s also true, as we well know, that there were a few cruel families who allowed themselves to be carried away by their own incurable inhumanity and went so far as to employ the services of the maphia to get rid of the miserable human remains that lay dying interminably between sheets drenched in sweat and stained by natural excretions, but they deserve our disapprobation, as does the family described in the oft-told tale of the wooden bowl, although, fortunately, as you will see, they were saved at the last moment from the final execration thanks to the kind heart of a child of eight. It is a tale quickly told, and we will leave it here for the illumination of new generations who do not know it, in the hope that they do not mock it for being ingenuous or sentimental. Listen, then, to this moral lesson. Once upon a time, in the ancient land of fables, there was a family consisting of a father, a mother, a grandfather who was the father’s father, and the aforementioned child of eight, a little boy. Now the grandfather was very old and because of that his hands shook and when he was at table he sometimes dropped his food, to the great irritation of his son and his daughter-in-law, who were always telling him to eat more carefully, but the poor old man, however hard he tried, could not stop his shaking, which only got worse when they told him off, and so he was always staining the tablecloth or dropping food on the floor, not to mention on the napkin they tied around his neck and which they had to change three times a day, at lunch, dinner and supper. This was how things stood, with no hope of improvement, when the son decided to put a stop to the unpleasant situation. He arrived home with a wooden bowl and said to his father, From now on, you’ll eat here, sitting on the doorstep, because that’s easier to clean, and your daughter-in-law won’t have to deal with all those dirty tablecloths and napkins. And so it was. Lunch, dinner and supper, the old man sat alone on the doorstep, raising the food to his mouth as best he could, losing half on the way, while part of the other half dribbled onto his chin, with very little actually making it down what common folk would call his gullet. The grandson seemed entirely unmoved by the cruel treatment being meted out to his grandfather, he would look at him, then look at his mother and father, and continue to eat as if it were none of his business. Then one afternoon, when the father came home from work, he saw his son carving a piece of wood and assumed he was making himself a toy, as was normal in those distant days. The following day, however, he realised that the boy wasn’t making a toy car, or at least if he was, he couldn’t see where the wheels would go, and so he asked, What are you making. The boy pretended he hadn’t heard and continued whittling away at the wood with the point of his knife, this happened in the days when parents were less fearful and wouldn’t immediately snatch from their children’s hands such a useful tool for making toys. Didn’t you hear me, I asked what you’re making with that piece of wood, the father asked again, and his son, without glancing up from what he was doing, replied, I’m making a bowl for when you’re old and your hands shake and you’re sent to sit on the front step to eat your meals, like you did with grandpa. These words had a magical effect. The scales fell from the father’s eyes, he saw the truth and its light, and went at once to ask his own father’s forgiveness, and when supper-time arrived, he helped him sit down in the chair, fed him with a spoon and gently wiped his chin, because he could still do that, and his dear father could not. History fails to recount what happened afterwards, but we know for certain that the boy’s carving was interrupted and the piece of wood is still there. No one wanted to throw it away, perhaps because they didn’t want the lesson to be forgotten or because they thought that someone might one day decide to finish the job, which was all too possible when one bears in mind the enormous capacity for survival of the aforesaid darker side of human nature. As someone once said, Everything that can happen will happen, it’s only a matter of time, and if we don’t get to see it while we’re around, it will be because we didn’t live long enough. Anyway, just so that we’re not accused of painting everything with colours drawn only from the left-hand side of the palette, some believe that an adaptation of this gentle story for television, some newspaper having first rescued it from the dusty shelves of the collective memory and brushed off the cobwebs, might help to restore to the shattered consciences of families the cult or cultivation of the incorporeal values of spirituality once nurtured by society, before the base materialism that currently prevails took possession of wills we imagined to be strong, but which were, in fact, the very image of a dreadful and incurable moral weakness. Let us not, however, give up hope. We are convinced that the moment the boy appears on the screen, half the country’s population will race off in search of a handerkchief to dry their tears and the other half, being perhaps of a more stoical temperament, will allow the tears to roll down their face in silence, the better to show that remorse for some evil done or condoned is not necessarily an empty word. Let us hope we are still in time to save the grandparents.