Everybody returned to the boarding house in the early hours: one after another, furtively. From my bedroom in the passage I realized that the presence of that wretched man had filled everyone with panic. They placed the key in the door gingerly. They removed their shoes in the hallway and tiptoed down the long passage. Once inside their bedrooms they locked their doors. In the early hours I didn’t hear the usual spate of coughing, or anyone snoring. In fact, everyone spent the night with eyes wide open. The house seemed dead. A terrible, unreal, grotesque fear filled every mind, though it was genuine enough.
There was considerable movement in the morning. Everyone got up early. And much to my amazement, everyone scarpered. Everyone took flight. The boarding house was deserted. By eight o’clock, Sr Verdaguer, Murillo in tow, was already in the Plaça de Catalunya, gazing tenderly at the pigeons.
The time for the funeral was set for three P.M. At a quarter to, the bell on the stairs showed signs of life, and the bearers from the Alms House appeared in the open doorway. There were four of them, dressed in black with patent leather top hats. We lodgers, in our glad rags, gathered in the hall that only just accommodated us — subdued, silent, and ready for the funeral — markedly limp and low-profile.
The man who seemed to be in charge of the bearers removed his hat, rehearsed the classic gesture of flinging both sides of his cloak over his shoulders in succession, and then wiped the sweat from his brow with a huge plaid handkerchief. It can be hot in Barcelona, in the month of May. What’s more, the stairs had tired them out … His subordinates extinguished their cheroots with their fingertips and put the remnants under their hatbands. There was a long pause, the time they needed to adapt to the poor light in the hall. Then, when he saw the lady of the house — Sra Paradís — was present, the head bearer spoke to her quietly, in a natural, totally sympathetic tone that was, nevertheless, compatible with mechanical, administrative procedures when he uttered the time-hallowed phrase: “Senyora, where is the individual concerned at rest?”
The individual concerned lay at rest at the end of the passage, between two pale candles with yellowish flames that were flickering feebly.
They struggled to carry the casket downstairs, because the deceased was tall and heavy. The bearers sweated like carters. Their features contorted on the stair bends, as they tensed their muscles in dramatic, baroque fashion. When they had deposited the box on the black table in the lobby, the clergy sang prayers of absolution. Then they lifted the casket on to the dais in the carriage and tied it down with the usual straps. People stood on the balconies of neighboring houses to observe the spectacle. Passersby removed their caps or hats as they walked by, turned their heads and looked. The minute the candles in the corridor were snuffed out, Sra Paradís felt a sense of release and glanced down at the funeral cortège through a crack she had opened in the shutter.
We smoked as we walked slowly behind the hearse, the bearers and the Swiss — the main mourners — until we reached the parish church. The cortège looked like a strange, picturesque cyst on the hustle and bustle and usual traffic.
After singing the absolutions we lodgers walked to the front and shook the hands of the Swiss. We were our normal selves: nothing was out of the ordinary and every second seemed like business as usual. In the meantime, a down-at-heel carriage rolled up that parked behind the funeral hearse. It was an aged, covered charabanc for eight — one of those carriages that once took large families to the station when they were going to or from their summer holidays. We lodgers climbed in. Sr Riera acted as master of ceremonies and slotted us in as best he could. Sra Paradís had put Riera in charge of everything related to the funeral and associated paperwork.
“Naturally!” said Sr Ferrer, feeling upstaged. “He was a tobacconist, so he knows all about the mysteries of red tape!”
When Sr Verdaguer heard that jokey comment he guffawed and cheerfully rubbed his hands together.
When the carriage door was about to shut, Sr Ferrer had second thoughts and, on the pretext that sedentary people felt queasy traveling inside moving vehicles, he climbed on to the seat with the driver.
The hearse moved off over the cobbles at a quick trot. Straight-backed on the small rear platform, the bearers shored up the boney frame of the hearse’s curtained dome, took the cheroots from their hatbands and lit up. The charabanc set off and the skinny pony, not wishing to be outdone, also trotted off at a lively pace. We proceeded along a sunny Gran Via full of fresh spring air. Near Carrer d’Urgell — or Borrell — from inside our juddering, ramshackle vehicle I thought I heard a hurdy-gurdy strike up.
Sr Riera walked up and down the covered gallery that ran along the rear wing of the cemetery offices. A line of cypress trees and the lofty branches of a weeping willow were a hazy blur behind the dusty, polished panes, in the violent glare of the light that seemed intent on breaking the gelatinous wall of glass. A profound silence reigned in the gallery punctuated only by a typewriter slowly tapping away — like a partridge pecking in its cage.
Sr Riera tired of waiting and went over to a half-open office door. A tattered, flowery cloth screen stood in the center of the high-ceilinged, bare-walled room. A dense cloud of tobacco smoke rose slowly up from behind one side of the screen.
A clerk’s sitting there with a pile of cigar butts behind a pile of red tape …, thought Sr Riera. And in recognition of the accuracy of his deductions he smiled sourly, displaying his dirty, chipped teeth. But his insight didn’t lead him to act in any way. After hesitating for a moment, he put his hat back on and returned to the gallery.
He walked up and down for a while and eventually met up with the bearer and workman who had been looking for him.
The bearer was a man in his forties, plump, ruddy, greasy-skinned, wearing a large overcoat with big rusty buttons and a top hat inlaid with leather patches that tilted slightly over his forehead. The overcoat struggled to contain his mischievous potbelly. The baggy bottoms of his yellowish corduroy trousers spilled over his huge, dented shoes. The workman was gray, middle-aged, and putty-faced; small lumps of dried lime dotted his skin, pants, and rope sandals.
When he saw the bearer was carrying a handful of papers, Sr Riera walked quickly over.
“All ready?” he asked, smiling politely.
The man in the top hat stood and stared at him solemnly, clenching his cheroot between his teeth. He then glanced at the papers and said: “Are you number 12,057?”
“Honestly, I couldn’t say …”
“A mustachioed corpse with a tiepin …”
“No, definitely not.”
“Then it must be the other fellow … number 59. Stein …” he continued, looking at the papers.
“Exactly. That’s our man.”
“Here’s the paperwork.”
“So, it’s all ready … is it? Is it going to be all right?” gabbled Riera, speaking purely mechanically, a hint of anxiety in his eyes as he took the papers the bearer offered him.
Small smiles brightened the deadpan faces of the funeral professionals, as is the custom with professionals when they are asked something obvious relating to tasks they perform daily. However, after his smile had faded, the workman broke the silence, and piped up in a flat, rather deferential voice: “We had a brand-new niche ready, because they said the deceased was a foreigner. But then we got a last-minute special request, and had to make use of another cavity … Nevertheless, it’s turned out all right in the end.”
But Riera was no longer listening. He’d folded the papers and stuffed them in a pocket. He’d started walking. But he’d barely taken a dozen steps when a gross, loud, and violent swear word stopped him in his tracks and made him look round.