The End

by Fernanda Torres

  “I don’t hate your father,” said Irene. She was about to say she didn’t feel anything for him, but thought it sounded worse than what she was being accused of. Hatred. Irene hated it when her daughter blackmailed her like she was now, forcing her to go downtown in that heat to see, of all things, one last time, the mistake. That was how she referred to him: “the mistake.” Irene really didn’t want to play the good mother right now. She didn’t want to go. She had buried him years earlier, when they divorced, but she decided it was best to go through the motions of loss. At ten thirty she stepped out of a taxi on Avenida Mem de Sá, in front of the morgue.

  The smell of rot emanated from the building. The putrid air was even worse inside. The smell stung her nostrils, working its way into her nasal passages, even when she tried not to breathe through her nose. Couldn’t he have chosen a cooler day? Irene went to reception, took a number, and sat on a plastic chair to wait. The cracked seat nipped her thigh, obliging her to watch where she put her leg. The minutes that followed were interminable. Sorrow hung on the faces of those who, like her, were waiting their turn. She thought about getting a drink of water, but when she saw a cockroach dart across an electrical socket and hide in the drinking fountain, decided to go thirsty. She read the notices on the bulletin board, the messages of faith, and took down the phone numbers of two funeral directors, as Rita might need them. Lost in limbo, she was startled by a shriek coming from the corridor. An obese woman appeared, carried by two staff dressed in white. Washed over by waves of horror, she howled like a beast. The entourage crossed the waiting room and delivered the poor woman in all her delirium to a group of family members, who took her outside. The staff returned to their slow work and Irene shared their apathy. She was relieved that she was there for someone who meant so little to her. The howls from outside made her compare herself to the fat woman. The fact that she was suffering less than anyone else there was reassuring. She felt that she had one up on everyone else, a petty sentiment that was only excusable because of the strangeness of the situation. One hundred and seventeen, someone called. It was her number.

  She went to the counter and from there a young man in a grubby white coat led her to the elevator. They rode up in silence, avoiding eye contact, and got out on the third floor. A long gallery of closed doors extended as far as the eye could see. Irene followed her guide to the second-to-last door on the right and waited while he fumbled with a key ring until he found the right one. They walked in. The air conditioning was better in there, but the stench was worse. The cold light flickered on the wall of squares, and, only then, watching the medical examiner go through the routine of comparing the tag number with the one on the protocol, did Irene realize what was about to happen. In one of those drawers was the phantom, her phantom.

  The examiner was the one who was indifferent, not her. In this government building, Irene discovered, in dismay, moments before setting eyes on the frozen body of her ex, that she had been lying every time she played down his importance in her life. Álvaro still made her stomach churn. Her nausea had nothing to do with the funk of the place; it was the specter of unresolved regrets. She felt like throwing up.

  Standing in front of the second square in the corner across from the door, the examiner motioned for her to come closer. His gloved hands pulled out the narrow metal drawer. On it lay the mistake. She hadn’t seen him in years. The light slowly revealed his nose, which looked even more hooked, and his sagging cheeks. His double chin and bald head created a halo of stiff skin around his face. His features were a flint-gray color. The drawer came all the way out, allowing her to see his wizened shoulders, his thin arms, the eternal pot belly, and his white body hair. She didn’t want to look at the rest. His nakedness made her uncomfortable. She stood there in thought, studying the contrast of his buttocks against the aluminum drawer. How small he was. There was blood on him, but it wasn’t that, his age, or even signs of the accident that intrigued Irene. Álvaro didn’t look like himself at all. His arched mouth had joined at the corners with the creases that ran down on either side of his nose, giving him a villainous look he’d never had in life. The comical passivity of times past had given way to a scowl. He had always been miserable, but not bitter. Had he become a bad man? The dead never look like the living, she thought. Álvaro was born old, but not evil, she concluded.

  When had she seen him for the last time? At their daughter’s wedding? Célia’s funeral? Neto’s? She couldn’t remember. Her conscious efforts to remove him from memory had worked. The question ushered in a second: When was the last time she had been with him? In bed with him. Snatches of their fifteen long years together came racing back, involuntarily. The separate bedrooms, his unease, his conspicuous bald patch, his anger, his paunch, his tiredness, his inertia and impotence. The only image she had intentionally preserved was of the two of them naked, wrapped in the sheets of a mountain guesthouse, where they had gone to spend the weekend in the early days of what would later become a tragedy. No affection had survived their marriage.

  “Álvaro doesn’t like women,” she said, lying on the cushions on the dark wooden floor of a mansion on Rua Visconde de Caravelas. “He should have become a priest.” Why did she stay locked away in a loveless marriage, treated like a second-class citizen by her adolescent daughter, while all her friends were getting divorced and moving on? Why was she still with him? The girl? The asthmatic dog? The maid’s end-of-year bonus? She wanted to live, fuck, love, and she didn’t even know if she had enough time left to learn to do it all. Couples who had much more going for them were coming to an end. Ciro and Ruth. “Álvaro’s a zero, a nobody, a nothing—why should I suffer over a nothing?”

  Vera was harsh. She waited for Irene to finish her laundry list of complaints, then, as the session drew to a close, said they had come to an impasse. She didn’t believe they could make progress on their own. It wasn’t just Irene. The same was true in all her work as a therapist. Vera was convinced that group analysis was the only way to free Irene from the straightjacket of rationality that imprisoned her. She was completely within her rights not to accept it; however, if she preferred to continue with conventional treatment, she would have to find another professional to help her. Irene listened, offended. The affected way Vera had said “straightjacket of rationality” should have made her leave, but, at the age of forty, she was too young, too stupid, too lost, and too desperate to say no. She said yes to group therapy.

  Her thoughts had wandered without her noticing. Why remember that afternoon? She had agreed to serve as a guinea pig in an experimental school of psychoanalysis, so popular back then but whose techniques, now obsolete, were like antiquated plastic surgery procedures, a breeding ground for neurotic aberrations among the generations that had served as its fodder. Irene didn’t like to reopen old wounds. Even dead, she thought, Álvaro brought back bad memories.

  She was objective.

  She signed the form stating that the body of the scowling individual before her was that of Álvaro Pereira Gomes Soares, resident of Copacabana, eighty-five years of age, white, old, and miserable. Signed by his ex-wife—mother of his only daughter, Rita da Costa Soares—Irene Azevedo da Costa. A long time ago, to her delight, separation and then divorce had expunged the Soares from her name.

  When she set foot outside, the asphalt was scorching hot. One o’clock in the afternoon. The whole ordeal had lasted three and a half hours. She wanted to go home, bathe, and throw her clothes and shoes in the incinerator. She considered her moral duty to her offspring fulfilled. There was no way in hell she was going to the funeral. She had the right to return to the paradise of her solitude.

  Despite her vow, Irene attended Álvaro’s farewell. Rita insisted, sobbing through the telephone line. She complained again about her lack of siblings. Siblings, thought Irene, one doesn’t make the same mistake twice.

  She had just scrubbed off the crud from the morgue with a long shower. The idea of getting dressed and facing the sauna outside all
over again, the decrepitude of the cemetery, the cockroaches… I’m an old woman—has the girl no compassion? Grow up! Bury your father without the self-pity. He was over eighty! I don’t pity anyone, much less her. She’s still young, she can do whatever she wants with her life. I’m not going to throw away another dress, another pair of shoes. I’m not going to track cemetery dust into the apartment. I’m seventy-three, missy! I’m the one who should be blackmailing you!

  But she didn’t say anything. She arranged to meet Rita at two thirty at São João Batista Cemetery. The procession would leave at four. She begrudgingly chose an old skirt, a black blouse that didn’t suit her, and a pair of too-tight sandals. At least she had cleaned out her wardrobe, she thought. On the sidewalk, she hailed the first taxi she saw. It was an old Chevrolet Corsa with loose gears, no air conditioning, and an exasperating funk of air freshener and construction worker’s armpit. She wanted to make up an excuse to get out, but she felt sorry for the driver. She told him to drive on. Even as she breathed through her mouth, the bitter perfume found its way to her olfactory glands through her taste buds. She wasn’t having a good day.

  Chapel Ten. She climbed the stairs and went inside. There was no one there. She thought she was mistaken and did an about-face, then decided to take a look at the deceased. She got close enough to the bier to see Álvaro’s scowl. It was him, the bald head, the double chin, the curved mouth, all his. She avoided looking at him again. She took a seat at one of the chairs arranged in rows, their backs to the wall. Irene counted the seconds separating her from the shower she was going to take when she got home.

  No one had sent flowers, she noticed. Just a crown of white lilies with the words: “In loving memory, Rita, Cézar, Marcelo and Felipe.” Who had fixed Álvaro up? She should have brought a magazine. No, it wouldn’t look good. Where’s Rita? Why don’t you say something, Álvaro? Irene laughed at the thought. Then she fell silent.

  Out of the quiet came the memory of the day she had helped her husband wrap up his old Monteiro Lobato collection to give Rita for her seventh birthday. His boyish expression, anticipating his daughter’s delight, reliving his own childhood through her. Irene’s eyes welled up. He was a good father, she thought, and was moved. She felt respect for and even missed the man lying motionless in front of her. She was struck by her widowhood. She was a widow. A widow, she repeated. Something she had desired so often back when they were married, that he would disappear once and for all, was now a fact and absolutely no good to her. On the contrary, she missed something and didn’t know what.

  A humble, respectful older man opened the door. He greeted her from a distance and went to pay his respects to the deceased. He stood leaning against the wooden coffin for several minutes, praying. When he was done, he made the sign of the cross and turned to the room. The lack of a quorum made him uncomfortable. He needed to share the moment with someone, but the only mourner present didn’t look like she was in the mood to chat. Ignoring her reserve, he took the chair beside Irene’s. She shuddered and pretended not to notice.

  “What a shame…” muttered the man.

  “Yeah, what a shame,” replied Irene.

  “Here one minute, gone the next, but God knows what he’s doing.”

  No. It wasn’t possible that, to make matters worse, she’d have to listen to a bunch of platitudes from someone she’d never seen before. Better to interrupt him.

  “Were you a friend of Álvaro’s?”

  “I was the one who came to his aid. I’ve been the building doorman for more than fifteen years. Time flies. You get used to seeing someone every day, then suddenly… That’s why I live every second as if it were the last, you never know what tomorrow will bring, life is a match that you light and you never know when it’s going to go out.”

  Irene thought about calling for help. Clichés made her skin crawl.

  “The only way is forward. There’s no turning back the clock. It’s God’s will.”

  The doorman was a Gatling gun of readymade phrases. Suddenly he stopped. He must be worn out, thought Irene, and was thankful. He lifted his head and looked at the coffin.

  “I lost my wife a month ago. She… She…”

  His voice caught in his throat. He tried again, but couldn’t go on. Irene watched the pantomime of pain, the tears that came and went, the spasms and gasps, the erratic gestures.

  “It isn’t right, it isn’t right,” he repeated, shaking, and collapsed into convulsive sobs. “I prayed to God…”

  Irene placed a hand on the widower’s shoulder so as not to do nothing. She glanced anxiously at the door. Where’s Rita? Rita! I found someone to mourn your father with you!

  “What about you?” asked the man.

  “I’m the mother of his daughter.”

  “Ah…”

  He recomposed himself in the face of her objectivity.

  “We hadn’t seen each other for many years. It’s more for her that I’m here.”

  The doorman realized that his commotion had been a waste of energy and apologized for bothering her. Irene told him not to worry and the conversation came to an abrupt end. They sat there quietly, staring into space. The no-nonsense manner of Álvaro’s ex-wife helped jolt him to his senses. He didn’t cry again, even when the coffin was lowered into the grave.

  Rita arrived almost an hour after the doorman. Her mourning had morphed into a nightmare of stamps, signatures, and copies of documents. A problem with the paperwork meant the funeral had to be put off until the end of the day. It was to be the last one.

  “They almost had to make it tomorrow,” explained Rita, mopping up her sweat.

  Irene reined in her desperation at having to stay there another hour. If Álvaro had had friends or relatives, she could have snuck away. If her daughter’s useless husband had left the boys with his mother and come to help, she wouldn’t be stuck in that purgatory.

  “Isn’t anyone else coming?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so, I don’t know,” said Rita. “His friends are all dead, he only went out to go to the doctor, but doctors don’t attend funerals, it’s against their principles.”

  Rita thanked the doorman for coming and he acted out the accident in detail, from start to finish, indignant that it had taken so long for help to come. Without a pause, he described the neighbor’s distress.

  “She has heart problems, she’s in a state of shock,” he said. “Her son’s taken her to stay with him and put the apartment on the market. The dogs are still there. It’s just tragic.”

  “I know,” said Rita.

  Irene listened, bored. She felt sleepy. When the sun hides behind that building, she promised herself, I’m leaving.

  There were still a good few inches of blue left in the sky, so Irene turned back to listen to the endless conversation between Rita and the windbag. The light coming through the window had caused her pupils to dilate and it took a few moments for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dimly lit interior. The ceiling went black. She felt dizzy and leaned back in the chair. She rested her head against the wall, stayed calm, and waited for her vision to return. Rita and the doorman had left the room. As a natural reflex, she checked to see if the bier was still there. It was. But the corpse was sitting up, with its hands on either side of the coffin, which made it look like a fishing boat. Álvaro was grinning at her.

  “I’m so glad you came, Irene,” he said sweetly. Her glottis tightened with panic; she wanted to scream but couldn’t. Her hands stiffened and she struggled to open her mouth. She called for help. Then she awoke with a start.

  “Mom! Are you okay?”

  It took Irene a while to focus. When she came to her senses, she remembered to look at the body. The tip of his nose, the only piece of flesh visible from where she was, assured her that Álvaro was still lying down.

  “What time is it?”

  “Four thirty. I’m tired, I need to go.”

  “It won’t be long now,” insisted Rita.

  Irene went out t
o the corridor to get a drink of water, took a sip, then remembered the cockroach in the drinking fountain at the morgue and decided she wasn’t thirsty. She didn’t want to go to the bathroom either and avoided touching anything. Even the air disgusted her. She returned to the wake.

  She was standing in front of the door when someone kicked it open. It was the chaplain, dressed in character, holding a bible and looking tense. He paused and shouted, “Who’s next?”

  Rita, Irene and the doorman turned around in surprise. Not satisfied, the chaplain repeated the question, “Who’s next?”

  They stood staring, open-mouthed, as the cleric uttered his ominous words.

  “Who called this clown? Rita, was it you?”

  Irene looked the chaplain in the face, exasperated. If nature was fair, she’d be next.

  Padre Graça rose before dawn. He prayed, bathed, ate only a little, as always, and prepared a small valise with liturgical objects. São João Batista Cemetery awaited him. For twenty-four years he had fulfilled the task of taking God’s word to families who had lost their loved ones. In the beginning, he had seen meaning in being a chaplain, but not anymore. He wished he could be transferred to a small community where people were still religious. Urbanites were hostile; they no longer believed in eternal peace. His enthusiasm as a seminarian had given way to a sterile isolation, with no way out. He dreamed of celebrating weddings, baptisms, anything but that. Too much contact with death had made him insensitive. He was no longer suited to the job. He had requested a transfer months earlier, but his superiors didn’t appear to be in any hurry to find a replacement. Padre Graça waited in resignation. For this reason, he was overwhelmed at the prospect of a sequence of funerals on what promised to be a long, hot day. Had he lost his faith?

  No one seeing him enter the building in Botafogo would have suspected the battle being waged in the silence of his soul. The idea of abandoning the cassock seduced him, especially at night, like an insistent demon. He had always dismissed the thought, but, more recently, he’d spend hours tossing and turning, unable to push away the treacherous desire. He would be a teacher, a nurse, a bank clerk, and would answer to God himself, without having to impose Him on anyone. He was tired of the crusade against the friendly fire of the evangelicals and the enemy fire of atheists. The battle was lost.