He was used to hearing the bells toll for the dead and watching funerals from the bank office, but this time, alone behind the desk, as the church door swallowed up the swarm of people, he had the impression that the bells tolled louder than ever, twice as loud, four, eight times louder, because there were two boys dead and Jaume had left him alone in the office. They came through the glass with such intensity. They rang so loud. Why such immodesty? Did they have to tell everyone that the boys had finally reached the moment of knowing everything, of seeing everything, of understanding their own existence completely? Did it have to be shouted from the rooftops? We spend our lives in retreat, only at the bottom of the well can we know if life was worth living or not, or, to put it better even though it’s the same thing: only then can we know whether we can know if life was worth living. But we can’t communicate that knowledge. Why toll the bells? To remind him that, when the moment comes, his death will also serve to torment others?
He searched for Mr. Cals amid the crowd in the square. He tried to figure out who Lluís could be. He looked for his coworker’s wife and children. He recognized clients. The host of Radio Vidreres must have been there as well, because only music was heard on that bandwidth.
Once everyone was inside the church, the first hearse was able to enter the square, backing up to the doors. Two funeral home employees dressed like businessmen unloaded the first coffin. They went up the steps and put it on a metal platform with wheels. The empty car moved aside, and the second car entered the square.
Inside the church they waited for the dead with the same expectation they would have for a bride and groom. Which brother was in which box? Did they have little plaques with their names, or was that not necessary? We live fighting against randomness: there has to be a protocol. Would it be the older brother who entered the church first — first to arrive, first to leave? The same employees carried out the same task. Afterward, the second car left the church door and parked beside the other one, in the middle of the square.
He switched off the radio. He wanted some excuse to call home. He let the feeling pass through him, the way he let mornings in the office pass. He didn’t want to turn himself into a bell tower. It was sunny, no one was left on the street, the kiosk and the bakery were shuttered. He thought of the priest, the poor guy, having to serve as a hinge, having to speak when there’s nothing to say. He thought of that little man he watched go in and out of the church each day, thought of his self-censure, of his self-control, of a priest’s forced cerebral mutilation, of his sacrifice for his parish, his loyalty to lies and ritual. Unless he was a con man and lived off others’ weakness.
Most people hadn’t gone to the wake, but some of them, the closest relatives, had. They had seen the boys displayed in their two coffins, humiliated like stuffed animals in the double zoo of their death: caged by rigor mortis and caged by the glass-topped coffins. Or perhaps it was their victory, their revenge, and it is the dead that watch over us.
And then he heard an engine approaching the square, a truck, it had to be from somewhere else, on that day, and it was already strange that it was squeezing its way down such narrow streets. He approached the door to watch it pass. It was carrying a load of hay bales. Bales of hay in January. You saw them going back and forth in June and July, after the harvest, or in the months following, but never at this time of year. . They were the old style of bales, rectangular and small; someone must have ordered them for the animals they kept, they must be coming from Llagostera or Cassà, the truck driver was confused, he was looking for someone to ask what was going on, where were the owners of the house where he was scheduled to drop them off, why had he found it locked. .
When he saw that he’d reached the church square, the driver put the truck in neutral in the middle of the street and got out of the cab. He was a tall man, about thirty years old, with short hair and a Van Dyke beard, and the strong body of a young hauler. He had bits of straw stuck in his blue sweater. Ernest half hid behind a column, and the truck driver looked toward the closed bakery and kiosk not understanding a thing. He checked his watch and then walked slowly over to the community social club. The door was open. He found the place empty except for Cindy, the South American girl who worked behind the bar. She must have explained to him what was going on, must have told him he should park and have a coffee while the funeral finished, because after a second the truck driver left the club, got into the cab, and parked down the street.
They died so young they took the whole town’s life with them, the trucker must have thought. He hadn’t parked in Vidreres, he’d parked in the Vidreres cemetery, with niches like houses; a cemetery with a kiosk, a bakery, and a bank; a cemetery with streets, with a church; a cemetery with a cemetery; with a club and a parking lot filled with empty cars. That’s what the afterlife must be like: solitude and walls.
Meanwhile, the priest spoke, and no one took their eyes off the two coffins, placed perpendicular to the altar at Christ’s feet. And while the entire town of Vidreres, locked up tight in the church, struggled not to imagine the dead brothers’ bodies, their faces, while they all tried to shrug off their curiosity, tried not to want to know what clothes the poor saps were wearing, nor who’d had to decide on the shirts the boys would wear to their own funeral and pull them out of the closet. . Who had chosen the pants, the socks, the shoes, which weren’t their usual Sunday morning shoes but imposter shoes, an attempt to fool them, to pretend that perhaps they could warm their feet, as it should be in a tolerable world where parents died before their children. . The pretense dignified the shoes, made them useful in their attempt to console, because useless objects are monstrous; he was sick of seeing it at the bank, money rotting in the vaults and creating bad blood between relatives. . But, at the moment of truth, the shoes made the cadavers more contemptible, because death won the match, infecting the clothes and the coffins, infecting the church and all of Vidreres with its ugliness. Not even the consolation trick worked. When he got home each day, the first thing Ernest wanted to do was loosen the laces and take off his shoes. . and those shoes would last longer than the feet they were on. Meanwhile, in the church, no one wanted to know who had pulled them out of the closet, whether it was their mother, their aunt, or their father, all three of whom were sitting in the front row with their backs to everyone and facing the coffins, contaminated; no one wanted to imagine the expression on the face that handed over the boys’ changes of clothes, in a bag, to the man at the funeral home, a last package for the brothers, sent to hell. . They had given the boys’ clothes — not new, not bought for the occasion, but already worn, already lived in, to a stranger, a man they’d never seen before, and that stranger put on some gloves and stuffed cotton into the boys’ noses and ears and then, with another stranger, stood the dead boys up, first one then the other, to dress them, and the boys stood like plastic dolls, and those strangers at the funeral home were now standing as well, behind the last bench, with their gazes on everyone’s backs, supervising the ceremony, waiting to take the coffins away again, because the coffins were theirs, they would always be, a dead man owns nothing. . Those strangers would be the last ones to have seen and touched the brothers’ bodies. And while some inside the church tried to respect the memory of the dead. . how does one respect a memory? How can you think about a dead man without mucking him up? How can you separate him from the living? While at the church they tried not to curse the brothers for what they represented: death before its time, the most absolute, double death, because an unexpected death is a death that doubles back on itself, that kills hope and longing, that doesn’t leave time for making plans or for renouncing making plans, it is a death that doesn’t let death live, doesn’t let it make a will, or project anything for what’s left of life; it kills the future like any death but also kills all possible expectations and therefore kills the past, a retroactive death, a death that shoots at itself from the future, that overtakes death, that passes it, the death of death itself, a death that commits suicide. . While the adults rummaged through memories to make an inventory of what remained of the two boys — what images, which smiles, what residue they had left behind — they found some surprises, because, now that they were dead, the last time they saw the two brothers became the last time they would ever see the two brothers, and the memory grew laden with nostalgia for what they now knew had been about to happen the last time they saw them. And the smiling faces of the brothers, who couldn’t imagine what awaited them. And the last words they said now meant different things, and therefore required a different answer from those who knew the future, a rectification from the prophets. . And while they relived those last moments, they remembered how they themselves were at the brothers’ ages, what they were doing at the ages the brothers would remain, and they compared the two, and then they calculated what they would have missed out on if they had died young like them, and they tried not to cheat and decide whether living beyond their youth had been worth the effort, and finding that it had, they decided that against the brothers, and it was like spitting on them. . and while some looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes, searching for how to behave, how to find the right tone — not too affected or too cold over the abandonment, over the novelty of it — they found it was impossible to avoid hypocrisy, and they gave thanks for the conventions, the ritual, the priest who didn’t allow them to start shouting or dancing or to burn down the church. . While they did that, at the bank Ernest thought that even though those boys were from Vidreres and their fathers, mother, grandparents, and an endless line of ancestors were from Vidreres, given the way things had turned out, those two boys were the least from Vidreres of anyone on the planet right now, less than the last grain of sand in the depths of the sea. And while inside the church the more emotional people cried, the hearses waited outside, parked in the middle of the square, breaking the law. Keys hung serenely from car locks, the policemen were at mass, and the truck driver had a coffee at the bar with Cindy in the large, empty club with its high ceiling, marble tables, and the television talking to itself; meanwhile, in the Santander Bank branch, standing behind the glass, Ernest focused on the strands of hay that had fallen off the bales on the truck. They were at the foot of the wheels and on the sidewalk, hollow strands of straw, and a slight gust of wind dragged them up and down, from one corner of the square to the other, and when the sun hit them they sparkled, splattered, gilded the whirling air with ephemeral cornucopias.