He contemplated this spectacle: the bearer was gripping his top hat tight and his face was a picture of wild, indignant fury. His cheroot quivered between his lips. Moreover, he had lifted his right leg and was about to kick the top of the earth ferociously.
Riera understood at once. He silently retraced his steps and gave the men the tip he’d carelessly forgotten to slip into their palms. The bearer, whose expression had slipped from annoyance to compliance the instant he doffed his hat, took the money and bowed obsequiously. The feel of money brought a bright smile to his face and, meanwhile, on the sly, he gradually lowered his leg. The workman was less obvious and watched the whole scene whistling the sparrow song, a song workmen liked to sing, apparently oblivious and aloof, as if he couldn’t care less.
Riera reached the stairs, sprinted down the steps, and walked along the ground-floor passage before coming out on to the esplanade at the entrance to the cemetery.
On the left of the esplanade a wooden bench was positioned between two round clumps of lordly box. Those of us who’d accompanied the deceased to his last resting-place stood in a circle around the bench, taciturn, subdued, heads bowed. Only Sr Verdaguer had broken rank and was pacing up and down by the wrought-iron entrance gates.
Our vehicle was parked outside, lined up with other carriages. The setting sun brought a tinge of purple to their small windows. Our charabanc’s door was wide open, and the twilight spring breeze gently swelled and deflated the flimsy white curtains: the vehicle seemed to be breathing. The horse, shaggy in its nether parts, stood rather lopsided on the flat ground, an empty bag of straw around its neck, and stood so still it looked like a stuffed animal.
To the right of the esplanade a group in mourning attire buzzed with a vague, constrained patter that seemed to heighten the deep tranquility reigning in that place. From afar, in the background, we could hear the city’s dull hum.
Sr Riera came over to the bench clutching the papers. He greeted us with that familiar, wry chuckle. With his large, compacted eyebrows, strikingly boney frame, prominent cheeks, beady, deep-set eyes, fleshy lips, large nose, and big, mineral head, Riera dealt with the deceased’s paperwork, as if he were a being who’d just arrived from a remote planet.
When he joined the group, he asked us what we were thinking of doing. Sr Verdaguer also came over. But nobody said a word: everybody stood still and silent. The other group of mourners looked at us, intrigued. A funeral in which no one wore mourning attire was frankly peculiar. As we were in our party clothes, they could have taken us for a gang of people who had decided to visit the cemetery for the pleasure of a stroll. Given the silence and general indecision, Sr Riera didn’t persist. He took off his hat and wiped a handkerchief over his forehead.
A long time went by … We were astonished to find such deep peace, such soothing tranquility on this earth. We breathed in the quiet calm of that afternoon. Finally, Sr Ferrer who was wedged between the Swiss Pickel and Bramson on the bench, leaned his hands on their shoulders, and easing himself up, whispered: “Death, my dear friends, raises problems that are difficult to resolve, that are very complex …”
Up on his feet now, he brushed away specks of ash from a pleat in his waistcoat, took out his cigarette case and invited us to a smoke. Bramson accepted a cigarette. Bramson was a red-cheeked Helvetian colossus, with a large oval-shaped belly and a stolid, drowsily bovine manner. He lit a cigarette with his sausage-like fingers and then produced a green velvet lined case, where he kept a huge, whimsical amber cigarette holder inlaid with mahogany. It was an infamous and impressive holder that weighed next to nothing even though its back displayed an intricate Alpine pastoral scene in the eighteenth-century style. The scene included an exquisitely carved shepherdess and lamb — the work of Saint-Gall. Sr Bramson puffed on his stupendous work of art and immediately remarked, twisting his head and shutting his left eye that the smoke was irritating: “Well, what now? I assume everything is ready and organized.”
“Yes. I’ve got the papers …” said Sr Riera.
“Sr Riera, I hope they didn’t get the wrong corpse …” muttered Ferrer.
“So that’s us, you know?” interjected a rather muted Sr Verdaguer. “By the Virgin Mary! We are so puny! Here today and gone tomorrow …”
And he added in Castilian, with a Lleida accent: “Our time may soon be up!”
Evening was falling and the occasional damp gust blew in from the sea. A yellowish brushstroke of sun striped the plain of Llobregat that kept settling and evaporating in a green sugary haze. The mountains to the west stood out starkly against the gray pearl sky.
Its sails billowing, a schooner sailed between the pincers of the harbor entrance, infused with straw-colored light. The sea was white, becalmed, and lathery. On the southern horizon, streaks of purple floated between sky and sea. A filthy black steamship was slowly leaving port, spewing a trail of smoke that seemed out of a child’s drawing. In the far distance, one could hear hammers hitting vessels’ iron plating, as if they were echoing memories. The vague noise seemed to float in the air.
We all seemed deeply engrossed, as if unconsciously bewitched by the gently soothing quiet of early evening.
“Where’s the coachman?” Sr Ferrer asked all of a sudden.
“He must be with the others …”
“Sr Verdaguer, please be so good as to summon the coachman,” said Sr Riera. “In the meantime, if you are all agreed, we could start to climb in … Sr Tomeu, in you go, if you don’t mind!
We climbed in, one by one. We raised the windows. Sr Bramson was still drawing on his monumental, Helvetian cigarette holder. The coachman rushed up like someone who is late. He untied the horse, tidied away the sack, and jumped up on to the driving seat. He grabbed the reins and, before setting off, poked his head through the front window.
“Tell me where, senyors …” he asked in a rather tipsy voice.
“Home!” shouted Riera, reasserting himself as leader.
The charabanc rolled slowly off.
There were eight places and we were nine. The only solution was to be seated by size: the four biggest on one side and the five thinnest on the other. At the last moment, Sr Ferrer declared that if he had to choose between the perils of catching a cold traveling in the open or being sick inside the carriage, he was decidedly in favor of the second option. Ferrer was a gentleman notoriously sensitive to subtle shades. This ensured we were tightly packed.
The bench with the biggest accommodated Bramson, Pickel, Don Manuel Ferrer and a Majorcan who lived on private income, spent the springtime in Barcelona, and whom we called Sr Tomeu. Sr Tomeu was finicky, stiff, and quite miserly, judging by what he owed the landlady. In any case, he was a gentleman who never poked his nose in, always said yes to everyone, and seemed to specialize in clichés and colorful commonplaces worthy of a conservative provincial snob. Helvetian Pickel was a large, stout young man, who wore spectacles with extremely thick lenses and sometimes sank into recalcitrant silence for long periods as if he didn’t care a fig about anything around him. Then, out of the blue, most unexpectedly, he would come out with a scintillating phrase, or make a barbed comment that shocked everyone.
I sat on the other bench with Don Natali Verdaguer, Sr Riera and a dapper old man who had only been lodging with us for a mere four or five days, one Don Martí Dalmau, and a young pharmaceutical student from Tarragona by the name of Boada. Don Martí Dalmau was a smartly dressed, respectable gentleman; slightly hunchbacked, his skin was so ivory white it seemed bled dry; his skull and features were cold and flat and his impressive teeth, gold-capped. He wore a magnificent blue suit with piping and patent leather shoes. Apparently he had come to the boarding house on the recommendation of Sr Verdaguer, but then gossip suggested he had known Sra Paradís for years.