Felipe Alfau - Chromos

When the procession has disappeared, people behold the house and the closed windows and the door with a black bow like the negative of a child who has taken his first communion.

Then they all feel unimportant, as unimportant as spectators always feel, and their admiration for the family of the deceased knows no limits.

The house begins to drip serious, pompous people with black gloves and each one knows more than the other and they all distribute among the childish audience the sweetmeats of that which they have seen and that which they have not seen.

And people grow curious and they grow jealous of their neighbor’s sorrow and their curiosity and jealousy creep up the walls which defend the pride of the mourners.

Someone says something about the purifying intensity of sorrow and envy creeps faster and it creeps higher and lands on the windowsills, even on the roof, like vultures assaulting a house of death.

The family sits around in a circle with strange dramatic poses, like dethroned kings of a tragedy in a parody of their own sadness, of their own truth. They all sit around a dummy that lies in state.

If they look at one another, their eyes meet in the center and, fearing to discover what they disguise, they descend upon the coffin which tapers like a gloomy street seen in perspective, leading the dead away.

And there lies the cadaver, the pride of the mourners, upon a funeral pile and more proud than all. A fallen emperor among servile kings, who says: “My throne is higher than the others’. I am emptier than you all.”

And there is a cast smile upon his features that deepens as death digs in. For death does not kill with one blow. It kills first when it sets the face and casts its veil of pallor, then when it freezes, and then when it rots.

And the cadaver smiles and his smile is superior, almost despotic, because he knows what he arouses:

That the more cynical his gesture, the more interest he awakens; the colder he grows, the more he holds and the more rotten he is, the more he attracts.

Such is the pride of the mourners.

The family comments on the past and memory, the last enemy of the dead, pursues him back to infancy without giving him quarter.

Oh, memory! Scourge of death!

Oh, pride of the mourners! Oh, most outrageous iniquity hurled at a defenseless corpse!

Four days Fernando lay in state and all the time the family roamed about him. In those four days everyone aged. Death is contagious and through proximity with it, they all died a little. Before death had entered that house of disgrace, there was sadness; later, there was morbidity, increasing every day that death spent in their company.

Trini sat constantly in the same position. Her eyes sparkled with two still tears. They seemed to be the same tears that she had borne when Albarran and Rojelia had arrived. They were old, aged tears, tears crystallized like diamonds by the action of time and pain. Lolita moved around her father saying something no one could understand and then went back and perched herself on the corner chair, like a little cat.

Albarran had taken care of all the expenses for the funeral and had even gone beyond his means to secure a decent burial. When the moment came to dress Fernando and place him in the coffin, Rojelia went to a closet and looked for his clothes but could find none.

“Mother, where are his clothes?”

“He didn’t have any.”

Rojelia spoke to her husband and both left hurriedly. They went to a ready-made clothes establishment. A clerk came to meet them.

“In what can I serve you?”

“We want a black suit.”

“Step this way, please.” He took them where the suits were kept: “What size, please? Is it for you, sir?”

“No, it is not for me. My dear, do you know the size?”

“Sir, perhaps it would be better if the person came, so we could fit him.”

“But he cannot come. Can’t you understand? He cannot come.”

The clerk looked at them both and then understood. Rojelia gave him an approximate size and as the man walked away, said: “How horribly sad this is! Who would have thought that you would be the one to pay for his funeral, his coffin, even his suit, after the way all the family treated you?”

When they had placed Fernando in the coffin and before closing the lid, all except Trini grouped about it. Then the men also arrived to close the coffin and carry it away and they seemed to be in a hurry. For a moment it was tumultuous.

Trini stood at the door as a person turned to stone. She saw them all upon him and her thoughts rushed to her youth and she remembered the scene in that village of South America when they were first married. She heard and saw the vultures again, screeching, demanding the rotten flesh, and she remembered when he had tried to drive them away. And now he could not defend himself. The scene emerged and burst upon her like a thunderbolt that nailed her to the frame of the door:

“Stand away!” She gasped: “Please — leave him in peace!”

Then she approached the coffin and said: “Forgive me, Fernando. I loved you well.”

Lolita came next and said in a childish voice: “Forgive me, Father, for all the things you never knew.” And she went to her chair and was shaking.

They had already closed the coffin hastily and Enrique stood there looking at the blank top. Sorrow had spread a certain dignity upon his cadaverous countenance. A tremendous sob shook him from head to foot and resounded all over the empty house: “Forgive me!”

The men took the coffin and threw it over their shoulders. Trini was standing at the door: “Stop. Don’t carry him away!” And she collapsed like a log. The men stepped over her and went on. The horses waited impatiently outside, shaking the tuft of black feathers on their heads.

Rojelia hid her face in her husband’s chest. When the coffin passed through the street in front, something made her look up. She grew tense and then hurled herself against the window. Her arms went out between the bars reaching out in silent appeal.

She stood there motionless and for a moment it seemed that time was arrested and all the light in the world concentrated in her red hair, in her white arms.

When someone dies, he is buried. It is the best thing that can be done. But no matter how bright the day may be, it is always somber for those who loved him. Through their tired eyes, they see the indifferent happiness of others like a sunny day from a dark dungeon.

They will bury him as one hides a treasure in the night, as a plant is sown in an orchard. What else is a cemetery in the restful fragrance of its peace?

He will descend the frondose hill where birds nest in the spring and everything will be silenced a moment, even as it has been silenced wherever he has passed, strange, wrapped in somber elegance, like an unknown artist of weird conceptions.

No one will look at the coffin, suspiciously fearing that it may be empty or that it may not conceal a real corpse, because if the dead one is all there is in it, the coffin is really empty and they all know that in this world of strange ideologies, dead people are only dummies of cardboard.

The procession will advance, the song of birds now crowding his ears, the heavy scent of funeral wreaths and flowers filling his nostrils, the luxurious green carpet of grass underneath. He will pass by facing the clouds and the blue sky, jostling majestically, and enter the great vegetation of the cemetery, its warmth, its coolness, with regiments of trees marching by, their crowns sweeping overhead, and then a halt while they rise, higher and higher as he sinks within a circle of mournful faces emerging over the ascending grassy rim, and their sad chanting voices; everything growing upward and away, pushed by the brown moist walls all around. Then all blotted out by an avalanche of dirt.