This episode in the street, only possible in a small place where everyone knows everyone else, speaks volumes about the inconvenience of the communication system instituted by death for the termination of the temporary contract which we call life or existence. It could be seen as a display of sadistic cruelty, like so many others we see every day, but death has no need to be cruel, taking people’s lives is more than enough. She simply hadn’t thought it through. And now, absorbed as she must be in reorganising her support services after a long hiatus of more than seven months, she has neither eyes nor ears for the cries of despair and anguish uttered by the men and women who, one by one, are being warned of their imminent death, feelings of despair and anguish which, in some cases, are having precisely the opposite effect to the one she had foreseen, because the people condemned to disappear are not sorting out their affairs, they are not writing wills, they are not paying back taxes, and as for saying their farewells to family and close friends, they are leaving that to the last minute, which, of course, is not enough even for the most melancholy of farewells. Ill-informed about the true nature of death, whose other name is fate, the newspapers have outdone themselves in furious attacks on her, calling her pitiless, cruel, tyrannical, wicked, bloodthirsty, disloyal and treacherous, a vampire, the empress of evil, a dracula in skirts, the enemy of humankind, a murderess and, again, a serial killer, and there was even one weekly magazine, of the humorous kind, which, squeezing every ounce of sarcasm out of its copywriters, managed to come up with the term daughter-of-a-bitch. Fortunately, in some newspapers, good sense continues to reign. One of the most respected papers in the kingdom, the doyen of the national press, published a wise editorial in which it called for a frank and open dialogue with death, holding nothing back, with hand on heart and in a spirit of fraternity, always assuming, of course, that they could find out where she lived, her cave, her lair, her headquarters. Another paper suggested that the police authorities should investigate stationer’s shops and paper manufacturers, because human users of violet-coloured envelopes, if ever there were any, and they would always have been very few, would be sure to have changed their epistolary tastes in view of recent events, and it would thus be as easy as pie to catch the macabre customer when she turned up to refresh her supplies. Another newspaper, a bitter rival of the latter, was quick to describe this idea as both crass and stupid, because only an arrant fool could think that death, who, as everyone knew, was a skeleton draped in a sheet, would set out, bony heels clattering along the pavement, to mail her letters. Not wishing to lag behind the press, the television advised the interior minister to have policemen guard post boxes and pillar boxes, apparently forgetting that the first letter addressed to the director-general of television had appeared in his office when the door was double-locked and no window-panes broken. Floor, walls and ceilings revealed not a crack, not even one tiny enough to slip a razor-blade through. Perhaps it really was possible to persuade death to show more compassion towards the poor unfortunates condemned to die, but to do that, they would have to find her and no one knew how or where.
It was then that a forensic scientist, well informed about everything that related, directly or indirectly, to his profession, had the idea of inviting over a celebrated foreign expert in the reconstruction of faces from skulls, this expert, basing himself on representations of death in old paintings and engravings, especially those showing her bare cranium, would try to replace any missing flesh, restore the eyes to their sockets, add, in just proportions, hair, eyelashes and eyebrows, as well as appropriate touches of colour to the cheeks, until before him appeared a perfect, finished head of which a thousand photographic copies would then be made so that the same number of investigators could carry it in their wallets to compare with the many women they would see. The trouble was that, when the foreign expert had concluded his work, only someone with a very untrained eye would have said that the three chosen skulls were identical, and this obliged the investigators to work with not just one photograph, but three, which would obviously hinder the death-hunt, as the operation had, rather ambitiously, been called. Only one thing had been proved beyond doubt, and about which even the most rudimentary iconography, the most complicated nomenclature, and the most abstruse symbolism had all been correct. Death, in her features, attributes and characteristics, was unmistakably a woman. As you will doubtless remember, the eminent graphologist who studied death’s first letter had clearly reached the same conclusion when he referred to the writer of the letter as its authoress, but that might have been pure habit, given that, with the exception of a very few languages, which, for some unknown reason, opt for the masculine or the neuter, death has always been a person of the female gender. Now we have given this information before, but, lest you forget, it would be as well to insist on the fact that the three faces, all of them female and all of them young, did differ from each other in certain ways, despite the clear similarities that everyone saw in them. The existence of three different deaths, for example, working in shifts, was simply not credible, so two of them would have to be excluded, although, just to complicate matters still further, it might well be that the skeletal model of the real and true death did not correspond to any of the three who had been selected. It was, as the saying goes, a question of firing a shot in the dark and hoping that benevolent chance had time to place the target in the bullet’s path.
The investigation began, as it had to, in the archives of the official identification service in which were gathered photographs of all the country’s inhabitants, both indigenous and foreign, classified and ordered according to certain basic characteristics, the dolichocephalic to one side, the brachycephalic to the other. The results were disappointing. At first, of course, since, as we said before, the models chosen for the facial reconstruction had been taken from old engravings and paintings, no one really hoped to find the humanised image of death in these modern identification systems, instituted just over a century ago, but, on the other hand, bearing in mind that death has always existed and since there seems no reason to suppose that she would have needed to change her face over the ages, and not forgetting that it must be difficult for her to carry out her work properly and safe from suspicion while living in clandestinity, it is therefore perfectly logical to accept the hypothesis that she might have put herself down in the civil registry under a false name, for as we know all too well, nothing is impossible for death. Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact is that, despite asking for help from those gifted in information technology and data exchange, the investigators found not a single photograph of any identifiable woman who looked anything like the three virtual images of death. As had already been foreseen, there was, then, no alternative but to return to the classic investigatory methods, to the policemanly craft of piecing together snippets of information and sending forth those one thousand agents so that, by going from house to house, from shop to shop, from office to office, from factory to factory, from restaurant to restaurant, from bar to bar, and even visiting those places reserved for the onerous exercise of sex, they could inspect all the women in the land, excluding adolescents and those of mature or advanced years, because the three photographs they had in their pocket made it quite clear that death, if ever she were found, would be a woman of about thirty-six and very beautiful indeed. According to the model they had been given, any of them could have been death, although none of them was. After enormous effort, after trudging miles and miles along streets, roads and paths, after going up flights of stairs which, placed end to end, would have carried them up to the skies, the agents managed to identify two of these women, who only differed from the existing photographs in the archives because they had benefitted from cosmetic surgery, which, by an astonishing coincidence, by a strange happenstance, had emphasised the similarities of their faces to the reconstructed faces of the models. However, a meticulous examination of their respective biographies ruled out, with no margin for error, any possibility that they had once dedicated themselves, even in their spare time, to the deadly activities of death, either professionally or as mere amateurs. As for the third woman, identified only from family albums, she had died the previous year. By a simple process of elimination, someone who had been the victim of death could not also be death. And needless to say, while the investigations were going on, and they lasted some weeks, the violet-coloured envelopes continued to arrive at the homes of their addressees. It was clear that death would not budge from her agreement with humanity.