Along with various images of funeral rites, derived from the anthropological reading that, over the years, has formed or deformed my ideas about the end of human life, cruder, sillier, more absurd pictures came to mind, influenced perhaps by sensationalist news reports or macabre films and stories. I saw a pyre made of Severina’s books on a mountaintop, against a dawn or dusk sky, and the old man’s body twisting and crackling as corpses do when they are purified by fire.
Her eyes were wide open when I turned to her. She pressed her body against mine and asked: “What are we going to do?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m afraid,” she said again.
“So am I. But we can’t let too much time go by.”
She nodded emphatically. I got out of bed and began to get dressed. As I put on my shirt, the shadow of my arms, projected by the bedside lamp onto her body and the sheets, reminded me of a bird, and I tried to suppress the thought that it might be a bird of ill omen.
When I was dressed, I sat on the edge of the bed and laid my arm across her; she turned over and looked into my eyes.
“He doesn’t have papers, you know, nor do I. What’s going to happen now?”
“Papers?”
“Proof of identity.”
“You don’t have passports?”
She smiled.
“Yes. We have various passports. They’re all fake.”
“Are you serious?”
She made me move my arm so that she could sit up.
“I never thought all this would happen here, in this country.” She looked at the window, and I guessed that she was thinking of some distant place, in Umbria perhaps, where she had said she spent her childhood. “I didn’t think he’d die. . I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
She covered her face with her hands, and her body began to shake as she broke down, crying quietly but abundantly. I tried to hug her again. She wouldn’t let me.
I stood up and left the room. I shut the door behind me and went to sit on the divan, where I had wept for the deaths of my mother and my father. I don’t know how many minutes passed before she came out of the bedroom. She was no longer naked and her tears had stopped, but her eyes were bloodshot and the pallor of her face alarmed me. She crossed the living room and dropped down beside me.
“There’s something I still haven’t told you,” she said.
Ahmed had visited her grandfather the day before he had the stroke; that is, the day the old man had come to the bookstore.
“He wanted us to pay him. But we couldn’t, of course,” said Severina.
Her weary expression, the tone of her voice, the way she half-closed her eyes: all this helped me to guess what was coming, at least in part.
“He proposed that we get married. A Moroccan-style wedding, a Muslim wedding, can you imagine? Me, converting to Islam?”
She forced herself to laugh.
“Did he fall in love with you?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Of course he did.” I thought: In a way, I’ve succeeded where Ahmed failed. Luck was on my side.
“He and my grandfather talked in private,” Severina continued. “I don’t know what they said, but I guess Ahmed threatened him.”
I remembered her grandfather’s words: “We have been accused of all sorts of crimes. .”
“Possibly. And maybe Ahmed’s visit brought on your grandfather’s stroke.”
She covered her face with her hands and started crying again.
“We have to think about the body, my love, the corpse.”
It was the first time I had addressed her in that way, but she didn’t seem surprised.
“Yes,” she said. “But you still don’t understand: we’re pariahs. We can’t go to an embassy with those passports. They’ll realize.”
“Do you want me to talk to a lawyer?”
“No, don’t, please. I hate lawyers.”
“I wonder,” I said, thinking aloud, “how bodies get to La Verbena.”
“La Verbena?”
“The cemetery where they take the John Does, the unidentified bodies. But. . don’t cry, please. I’m sorry. .”
She stopped, but only for a moment.
When she finished crying she had made up her mind. She wiped her eyes and cheeks with the back of her hand. She swallowed. She tossed her hair back. She looked at me.
“What time is it?” she asked.
It was nine.
“Good,” she said. “What say we go for a spin, the three of us?”
“The three of us?”
“Have you got a shovel? We’re going to bury him, I don’t know where, though. Have you got any ideas?”
I thought for a moment.
“Maybe.”
“Where?”
“In a forest, beyond Pinula.” I looked out east to the peaks of the mountains that were visible on the far horizon from the windows of my apartment. “It’s a really remote spot. No one goes there. They opened up a track a few years ago, but it’s never used. I think we could get in there now, because it hasn’t rained for a while. When the rain begins, it’ll be impassable until the end of the wet season.”
“Have you got a shovel?”
“Yes. I’ve got a shovel.”
Everyone knows that it’s much harder to carry a dead body than a living one; but until you actually do it yourself, you don’t realize that the difficulty is as much psychological as physical. What you’re shifting is a container that once held life, the conscious life we share, which isn’t ours to keep. Nevertheless, conveying the corpse from the apartment to the car wasn’t as hard as it might have been. It was late and we were lucky: no one saw us going into the elevator or coming out, or getting into the car. We left the city behind and climbed toward Don Justo, in the mountains. We turned off toward Pinula. We came to a police checkpoint, but they didn’t stop us.
“We’re in luck.”
“So it seems.”
“What was that?”
“Gas. Dead bodies go on releasing gas,” she said.
We left the village behind, passed Hacienda Nueva and El Cortijo, the golf club and the riding club. We took the dirt road that leads to Mataquescuintla.
“Is this the right way?” she asked when I stopped at a gate.
“Yes.”
I got out to open it. Pulling away, I felt the tires skidding on the mud for a few seconds before they got traction, and the car swerved slightly. The rank smell of the mud came in with the breeze.
The track had become even narrower; now it was just two deep ruts with the jungle rising up on either side, dark and somewhat threatening, and the tall weeds scratching shrilly at the underside of the car. Soon we began to climb a steep slope. The climatic conditions changed abruptly. There was a cold wet gust of air and we were enveloped by a mass of thick fog, which the car’s headlights could not penetrate.
“Let’s stop here, shall we?” she said.
“We’re almost there.”
After two or three hairpin bends we reached the top of the ridge. The fog cleared. Far off in the distance we could see the lights of a village at the foot of the mountains, and much, much farther away, twinkling among the trees — some of which were slender-trunked and tall, while others were stocky, with twisted, ghostly branches, burdened with creepers — the nebula of the city’s lights.