“Sr Ferrer,” I asked, “what’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?”
“I find these heavy downpours depressing, do you know?” he wheezed, and visibly wilted.
One of the more musical Swiss citizens in the boarding house, Oswald Stein — a tall, robust, blond lad, with enormous feet, worthy of an Alpine shepherd — caught typhoid and died two weeks after the infection was diagnosed.
“This is a terrible black mark for the house,” Sra Paradís told her lodgers, “a huge disaster … We didn’t have time to do a thing, not even to take him to a hospital or clinic; in fact, we didn’t have the slightest inkling … We turned a blind eye, to tell the truth, and now the headaches will all land on my plate! Boarding houses are places to live, not to die!”
We lodgers looked at her as if to say: “Senyora, what on earth could we do?”
The very second the doctor walked out of the door, after he’d signed the death certificate, a small, fair, nervy young man walked in; bumptious and bespectacled, he was dressed like a commercial traveler and looked the meticulous sort. He was a funeral parlor employee and carried a large catalogue under his arm. As he walked in, he glanced round the house, no doubt assessing in advance the establishment’s economic potential.
Sra Paradís and the deceased’s Swiss friends spoke to the funeral parlor employee in the dining room. Sr Verdaguer was present during the visit, hovering in the doorway, wrapped in his purple dressing-gown and wearing his checkered slippers. A deep silence had descended over the boarding house.
“Are these gentlemen family?” the employee asked Sra Paradís, pointing at the Swiss men.
“No, sir. They are friends. The deceased had no family. He was a foreigner.”
“Very good! Here is what my firm can modestly offer you in terms of a funeral,” stated the employee, placing the open catalogue on the table.
And he began to turn over pages illustrated with a large array of photos.
Pride of place in the first pages was given to the large, first-class, extra special de luxe mortuary carriage — known as the stove hearse — with a large bell jar surrounding the casket, a monumental cart with Solomonic columns that supported the canopy and swayed in the air, complete with the symbolic appendages necessary to accompany such artifact: horses shrouded in black cloth down to their hoofs, coachmen, flunkeys, and footmen. It was grandiose, solemn, splendid; it seemed the genuine item, with the horses’ plumes, the jet-black metal adornments encrusted with tinny gilt, the coachman wearing a wig tied with a bow on the nape of his neck and a three-cornered hat, like an Imperial maréschal. The long team of horses occupied a double spread and seemed worthy of Versailles.
“It may not be ne-cess-ary to take such ex-cess-ive trou-ble …” said Pickel, a friend of Stein’s, his Germanic drawl emphasizing each syllable.
And he gestured to the parlor’s rep to quickly turn the pages, before adding: “That would be so expensive, we’d be sad for the rest of our lives.”
Sra Paradís was of the opinion that this shaft of Swiss wit was in flagrant bad taste. She glanced at the man from the funeral parlor as if to say: “Ignore them, they’re only foreigners …”
“I should point out,” said the parlor’s rep as he turned the pages in his meticulous manner, “I should point out that the number of priests present at the funeral depends on the class of hearse that you select …”
“I am very grateful to you, sir …” responded Pickel, nodding deferentially.
As the pages turned, one observed a gradual decrease in funeral pomp and circumstance: the hearses diminished in style and status, reduced in size, the columns shrank, and the horses even appeared smaller and scabbier. The group was still undecided. Sra Paradís suddenly asked Pickeclass="underline" “Why don’t we consult the family in Switzerland?”
“Senyora,” replied Pickel, bowing his head again, with the hint of a smile, “I do not think Stein had any family.”
After various silent, anguished lulls they agreed the funeral should be a good fourth grade.
“Absolutely fine! That’s settled then …!” said the rep shutting the catalogue with a thud. “That’s all fixed then … You should know that a decent fourth grade funeral is like a humble third. It’s the most common, our standard job. You’ll be pleased with …”
Don Natali, who seemed more dead than alive as he witnessed that scene — at the time he often said that any reference to death gave him the shivers — accompanied the funeral parlor employee to the door. Two or three lodgers stood silently in the small, dingy hallway that was almost entirely occupied by a voluminous umbrella stand: they seemed to be expecting some news. Before he left, the employee surveyed the scene one last time and said, with a self-congratulatory nod of the head: “Just what I’d thought … it was clear from the start …”
Don Natali shut the door carefully, on tip-toe, making no noise at all. Sr Riera then came over to me — one of those apparently expecting some news — and whispered mysteriously in my ear: “What can that gentleman have meant when he said: ‘Just what I’d thought …’?”
“God knows! It must be a phrase from a Kabalistic ritual to do with the funeral parlor, you know?”
“Ah, right!” said Riera, heading up the passage.
That same afternoon — a fresh, verdantly luminous, beautiful May afternoon, its crystalline air soaked in the scent of spring — Sra Paradís, Pickel and the other Swiss squabbled dreadfully. Our landlady suggested that Stein should be fitted out in his best suit, because that was the custom in our country. The Swiss replied that the custom, where he came from, was to wrap the deceased in a sheet — a simple shroud.
“But what do you people know about any of this,” snarled our landlady, “You’ve never been in this situation. I have! I am a widow!”
But the Swiss held their ground, and that appalled Sra Paradís and the whole boarding house in general.
“It’s disgusting!” she exclaimed in the passage. “Taking him to the cemetery wrapped in a sheet! That may be what’s done there, but everything has its limits! It’s obscene!”
And, after an anxious pause, she added: “And to think that this is a family boarding house!”
Later in the afternoon and at night a deep, unusual silence again descended on the house. The cook — a lady from Almatret on the Aragonese border — stopped singing I so love my lovely crooks, that was the hit song of the day. Almost all the lodgers ate supper elsewhere. Only Ferrer, Riera, and I appeared at the dining table. The Maggi, fried hakes, and horrible leathery steaks also put in an appearance.
“What’s become of Sr Verdaguer?” I asked Donya Esperança.
“Don Natali has had to stay in bed because he’s got goose bumps and was shivering with cold. He’ll need an infusion and aspirin.”
That unusual supper was consumed in total silence. Sra Paradís broke it for a moment to say that if it hadn’t been for the furor that the Swiss had caused with their blasted shroud, she’d have given us green beans.
“So? Shall we go out for coffee?” asked Riera, as he gave the finishing touches to the little rabbit he made daily with his napkin.
“Thanks, Sr Riera!” I replied. “But my exams are on top of me, you know?”
“You mean you can cram, as you put it, even on a day like this?” asked a very shocked, surprised Riera.
“What do you expect? Forensic Practices come before life and death … don’t you see?”