It was as if they had opened their eyes and seen them for the first time. That was Whatshisname, this was Youknowwho, and that was so-and-so’s father who had left such-and-such widowed, the wife of that one who had died so young… And their name was the magical and infallible key that made them desist; they heard it and left, their impulse checked; it wasn’t necessary to shout at them — they heard their names no matter what; they seemed to be attuned to the sound that belonged to them. Even more so: they seemed to have been listening for it the whole time, and wondering why nobody had spoken it.
Very soon, they were descending the staircase, followed by those who were shouting their names (it wasn’t necessary but they did it anyway), repeating them just in case, even though once was enough. And outside, the party guests, now emboldened, spread out in all directions, looking for more living dead — who weren’t hard to find — so they could confront them decisively, recognize them, and name them. News spread fast. The Pringlesians came out from under their beds, and now they were the ones hunting, without sticks or stones or rifles, armed only with their knowledge of the old families and their losses.
Some may have been amazed by the infallibility of the method. But only if they hadn’t taken into account that family names were the language of the town, and that the inhabitants spoke it from the minute they learned to talk. It was as if they had been preparing for this moment their entire lives. Or it might be amazing, or seem implausible, that they would get them right each and every time. Some had been dead for a hundred years — little more than clumps of dust stuck together somehow or other. But this could be explained: family names had become so interconnected over the years that the entire population was related by blood; apparently, the dead accepted any last name that belonged to any branch of their family tree.
From the streets, where a short while before the silence had been interrupted only by shrieks of horror and snorts from the hereafter, there arose a chorus of names that reached the heavens. Everybody was shouting them through the streets, out doors and windows, from balconies, out of cars, and from bicycles. The dead marched away in silence, retracing the steps they had taken earlier. They converged on the Plaza, and from there formed one compact mass down the transverse streets that led to the road to the Cemetery.
The retreat was like that of the tide. They were taking with them all the endorphins of the town, and the following morning the Pringlesians would have to produce more, from zero. They no longer pursued them, except out of curiosity, nor did they shout their names, except for one or another that had been forgotten, the name of a family that had died out, a name some old man had to dig out of the depth of his memory and say out loud as an extra precaution. Moreover, it didn’t take any effort and they didn’t even have to dig very deep in their memories. Their everyday conversations were full of names, the town was made up of names, and that night, names had saved the town.
A few people followed them out of curiosity, but the majority preferred to watch the procession from their rooftops; those with the best views were the owners of the only three tall buildings in town, and their neighbors who’d invited themselves over. They saw a dark mass, swarming but orderly, flowing back toward the edge of town. The only incident worth noting took place when the crowd of living dead passed the Chalet de la Virgen. At that moment, the five Virgins who lived there appeared at the door, one behind the other. Nobody could explain how they had acquired the ability to move, perhaps through some kind of religious miracle; and not only that: they had also acquired light, an intense golden radiation that made them glow, and made them visible from far away. They separated from one another and joined the rear of the great march, like shepherds herding their flock. And they herded it to the end, in other words, to the Cemetery, and they entered after the last dead, and though nobody saw this, they probably made certain that everybody went back into his own and not his neighbor’s tomb.
That’s how it all ended. Except for those who were standing on the rooftops of the tallest buildings, where they could see everything, even beyond the Cemetery, all the way to the perimeter of roads that surrounded the town. On the MacAdam ellipse of highway that surrounded Pringles, unreal under the white light of the moon, two cars, driving in opposite directions, looked like toys from that far away. One was going at full speed “as if it were racing”; the other went very slowly, like a tortoise, so slowly that if some small feature in the landscape wasn’t used as a point of reference, you would think it was standing still. Those who saw the two cars took it as a sign that life carried on, and that the following day the families of Pringles would again take up their habit of going out for a spin, thereby taking up the task, difficult and easy at the same time, of recapturing their lost happiness.
III
The following morning I woke up depressed, even before I realized that I was depressed. Then I remembered that it was Sunday, the most difficult day for me to endure. Sunday depression is classic, and how could it not be for someone without a job, without a family, and without prospects.
I stayed in bed for a while. It wasn’t even late; it was early; I wouldn’t be spared a single drop from the overflowing cup of afflictions. I remembered the old Catalan saying about the three things you can do in bed: “Pray to God, fantasize about your future prosperity, and scratch your butt.” I was never any good at fantasizing, so I didn’t have even that source of comfort; any compensatory flights of imagination were always downed by a well-aimed shot of reason as soon as they took off. I had fully incorporated the prosaic reasonableness of my fellow townsfolk, but in a way that was useless for conducting business. In solitary contemplation I managed only to amass self-recriminations for my failures, reliving them, and making myself even more depressed. There did exist, however, the possibility that my situation was simply a matter of bad luck. In other words, it might depend on chance. If this were the case, the bad luck could vanish the same way it came, and I didn’t need to consider myself a failure. Maybe I was just going through a losing streak, and once it passed, things would turn around for me. The famous “seven years”… I preferred not to count up my years of misfortune, since I suspected there were more than seven. I didn’t remember breaking any mirrors, but maybe I had without realizing it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because that’s just a crass superstition. When people say that breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck, a fiction is created and chaos is geometrified; luck varies, and in the course of a year (why am I saying a year? a day, an hour) there can be many turns of the dial from good to bad and vice versa. It’s true that sometimes there are losing streaks, longer or shorter, and even if this supposed streak of seven years is very long, almost excessively long, it remains within the limits of the possible. During that interval, the magical power of a broken mirror holds all variations in suspense — luck ceases to be luck and everything turns out badly. But once those seven years are over, luck has no reason to necessarily become good luck; it becomes just plain luck — changeable, voluble, good and bad. And subject to streaks. And immediately after the term is over, there can come — why not? — a streak of bad luck, which can last a month, a year, five years, fifty-five years. In the end the solution was not to either trust luck or not.
Finally, I got up and got dressed. I would have liked to go out, to see how people were recovering from the night’s ordeal, but in the end I didn’t. My mother had gotten up before me, and as soon as she saw me cross the threshold of my bedroom, she asked me if the food had “agreed” with me. Had it “agreed” with me? Yes. Or: not yes or no. It hadn’t “agreed” with me or not. I’d eaten it and forgotten about it. I didn’t say anything, but she didn’t care, because she had asked me that only so she could tell me that it had disagreed with her, that she was nauseated and disgusted. What was that he fed us? What was it called? Had I liked it? She’d eaten it so as not to be rude, and now she was regretting it. She’d had to drink some boldo tea as soon as she got up, and her stomach was still upset.