Sales of newspapers, we hardly need say, shot up, even more so than when it seemed that death was a thing of the past. Obviously a lot of people had already heard on television about the cataclysm that had befallen them, many even had dead relatives at home awaiting the doctor’s arrival, along with a flag weeping on the balcony outside, but it’s easy to understand that there is a difference between the nervous image of the director-general talking last night on the small screen and these convulsive, agitated pages, emblazoned with exclamatory, apocalyptic headlines that can be folded up and put in one’s pocket and carried off to be re-read at leisure in one’s home and of which we are pleased to present a few of the more striking examples here, After Paradise, Hell, Death Leads The Dance, Immortal But Not For Long, Once More Condemned To Die, Checkmate, Prior Warning From Now On, No Appeal And No Hope, A Letter On Violet Paper, Sixty-Two Thousand Deaths In Less Than A Second, Death Strikes At Midnight, No Escape From Destiny, Out Of the Dream And Into the Nightmare, Return To Normal, What Did We Do To Deserve This, etcetera, etcetera. All the newspapers, without exception, reprinted death’s letter on the front page, but one of them, to make it easier to read, reproduced the text in a box and in a fourteen-point font, corrected the punctuation and syntax, adjusted the tenses of the verbs, added capitals where necessary, including on the final signature, which was changed from death to Death, an alteration unappreciable by the ear, but which, that same day, would provoke an indignant protest from the writer of the missive herself, again using the same violet-coloured paper. According to the authorised opinion of a grammarian consulted by the newspaper, death had simply failed to master even the first rudiments of the art of writing. And then, he said, there’s the calligraphy, which is strangely irregular, it’s as if it combined all the known ways, both possible and aberrant, of forming the letters of the latin alphabet, as if each had been written by a different person, but that could be forgiven, one could even consider it a minor defect given the chaotic syntax, the absence of full stops, the complete lack of very necessary parentheses, the obsessive elimination of paragraphs, the random use of commas and, most unforgivable sin of all, the intentional and almost diabolical abolition of the capital letter, which, can you imagine, is even omitted from the actual signature of the letter and replaced by a lower-case d. It was a disgrace, an insult, the grammarian went on, asking, If death, who has had the priceless privilege of seeing the great literary geniuses of the past, writes like this, what of our children if they choose to imitate such a philological monstrosity, on the excuse that, considering how long death has been around, she should know everything there is to know about all branches of knowledge. And the grammarian concluded, The syntactical blunders that fill this appalling letter would lead me to think that this was some huge, clumsy confidence trick were it not for grim reality and the painful evidence that the terrible threat has come to pass. As we mentioned, on the afternoon of that same day, a letter from death reached the newspaper, demanding, in the most energetic terms, that the original spelling of her name be restored, Dear sir, she wrote, I am not Death, but death, Death is something of which you could never even conceive, and please note, mister grammarian, that I did not conclude that phrase with a preposition, you human beings only know the small everyday death that is me, the death which, even in the very worst disasters, is incapable of preventing life from continuing, one day you will find out about Death with a capital D, and at that moment, in the unlikely event that she gives you time to do so, you will understand the real difference between the relative and the absolute, between full and empty, between still alive and no longer alive, and when I say real difference, I am referring to something that mere words will never be able to express, relative, absolute, full, empty, still alive and no longer alive, because, sir, in case you don’t know it, words move, they change from one day to the next, they are as unstable as shadows, are themselves shadows, which both are and have ceased to be, soap bubbles, shells in which one can barely hear a whisper, mere tree stumps, I give you this information gratis and for free, meanwhile, concern yourself with explaining to your readers the whys and wherefores of life and death, and now, returning to the original purpose of this letter, written, as was the one read out on television, by my own hand, I ask you to fulfill the provisions contained in the press regulations which demand that any error, omission or mistake be rectified on the same page and in the same font-size, and if this letter is not published in full, sir, you run the risk of receiving tomorrow morning, with immediate effect, the prior warning that I was reserving for you in a few years’ time, although, so as not to ruin the rest of your life, I won’t say exactly how many, yours faithfully, death. Accompanied by fulsome apologies from the editor, the letter appeared punctually the next day and in duplicate too, that is, reproduced in manuscript form as well as boxed and in the same fourteen-point font. Only when the newspaper was distributed did the editor dare to emerge from the bunker in which he had been hidden away from the moment he had read that threatening letter. And he was so frightened that he even refused to publish the graphological study delivered to him personally by an important expert. I got myself in quite enough of a mess just by printing death’s signature with an upper case d, so take your analysis to some other newspaper, let’s share out the misfortune and from now on leave things to god, anything to avoid getting another fright like that. The graphologist went to another newspaper, then another and another, and only at the fourth try, when he was already losing hope, did he find someone prepared to accept the fruits of the many hours of labyrinthine work he had put in, toiling day and night over his magnifying glass. The substantial and juicy report began by noting that the interpretation of writing had originally been one of the branches of physiognomy, the others being, for the information of those not au fait with this exact science, mime, gesture, pantomime and phonognomy, after which he brought in the major authorities on this complex subject, each in his or her own time and place, for example, camillo baldi, johann caspar lavater, édouard auguste patrice hocquart, adolf henze, jean-hippolyte michon, william thierry preyer, cesare lombroso, jules crépieux-jamin, rudolf pophal, ludwig klages, wilhelm helmuth müller, alice enskat, robert heiss, thanks to whom graphology had been restructured as a psychological tool, demonstrating the ambivalence of graphological details and the need to express these as a whole, and then, having set out the essential historical facts of the matter, our graphologist launched into an exhaustive definition of the principal characteristics being studied, namely, size, pressure, spacing, margins, angles, punctuation, the length of upward and downward strokes, or, in other words, the intensity, shape, slant, direction and fluidity of graphic signs, and finally, having made it clear that the aim of his study was not to make a clinical diagnosis, or a character analysis, or an examination of professional aptitude, the specialist focussed his attention on the evident links with the criminological world which the writing revealed at every step, Nevertheless, he wrote in grim, frustrated tones, I find myself faced by a contradiction which I can see no way of resolving, and for which I very much doubt there is any possible resolution, and this is the fact that while it is true that all the vectors of this methodical and meticulous graphological analysis point to the authoress of the letter being what people call a serial killer, another equally irrefutable truth finally imposed itself upon me, one that to some extent demolishes that earlier thesis, which is this, that the person who wrote the letter is dead. And so it was, and death herself could not but confirm this, You’re quite right, sir, she said when she read this display of erudition. What no one could understand was this, if she was dead and nothing but bones, how then could she kill? More to the point, how could she write letters? These are mysteries that will never be explained.