The Death of Jesus

by J. M. Coetzee

  Sister Luisa is asked to sign a declaration accepting responsibility for funerary arrangements. Prudently she refuses to do so before she has consulted her superior, Dr Fabricante.

  When he, Simón, arrives in the afternoon, he is confronted with the same printed sign: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. He tries the handle, but the door is locked. He inquires at the information desk: Where is my son? The woman at the desk pretends not to know. He must have been moved: that is all she is prepared to say.

  He returns to the room, kicks at the door until the lock breaks. The bed is empty, the room is deserted, there is a smell of disinfectant in the air.

  ‘He is not here,’ says Dmitri’s voice behind him. ‘And on top of that you will have to pay for the damage to the door.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Do you want to see? I will show you.’

  Down a flight of steps Dmitri leads him, to the basement, then down a corridor cluttered with carton boxes and castoff equipment. From the ring of keys at his belt he selects one and unlocks a door marked N-5. David is lying naked on a padded table, the kind of table used for ironing laundry, with at his head the string of festive lights flashing alternately red and blue, and at his feet a bunch of lilies. The emaciated limbs, with their swollen joints, look less grotesque in death than in life.

  ‘I brought the lights along,’ says Dmitri. ‘It seemed appropriate. The flowers come from the orphanage.’

  It is as if the air is being sucked from his lungs. It is a show, he thinks, but he can feel the panic behind the thinking. If I go along with the show, he thinks, if I pretend it is real, then it will come to an end and David will sit up and smile, and all will be as it was before. But above all, he thinks, Inés must not hear of this, Inés must be protected, otherwise she will be destroyed, destroyed!

  ‘Take the lights away,’ he says.

  Dmitri does not stir.

  ‘How did it happen?’ he says. There is no air in the room, he can barely hear his own voice.

  ‘He is departed, as you can see,’ says Dmitri. ‘The organs of the body could not hold out any longer, poor child. But in a deeper sense he is not departed. In a deeper sense he is still with us. That is what I believe. I am sure you feel the same way.’

  ‘Do not try to tell me about my child,’ he whispers.

  ‘Not your child, Simón. He belonged to all of us.’

  ‘Go away. Leave me with him.’

  ‘I cannot do that, Simón. I have to lock up. That is the rule. But take your time. Say your goodbyes. I will wait.’

  He forces himself to look at the corpse: at the wasted limbs, whose extremities are already turning blue, at the slack, empty hands, at the shrivelled, never-used sex, at the face closed as if in concentration. He touches the cheek, unnaturally cold. He presses his lips to the forehead. After which, without knowing how or why, he finds himself on his hands and knees on the floor.

  Let it all come to an end, he thinks. Let me wake and let it be at an end. Or let me not wake, ever.

  ‘Take your time,’ says Dmitri. ‘It is difficult, I know.’

  From the lobby he telephones Modas Modernas. Inocencia answers. His voice is not his own, he has to struggle to make himself heard. ‘Simón here,’ he says. ‘Tell Inés to come to the hospital. Tell her to come at once. Say I will meet her in the parking lot.’

  From his face, from his bearing, Inés sees in a flash what has happened. ‘No!’ she cries. ‘No, no, no! Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Be calm, Inés. Be strong. Give me your arm. Let us face this together.’

  Dmitri is lounging in the corridor, keeping an eye out for them. ‘So sorry,’ he murmurs. Inés refuses to acknowledge him. ‘Follow me,’ says Dmitri, and marches briskly ahead.

  The coloured lights have not been removed. Inés sweeps them to the floor, and the lilies too: there is a pop as one of the bulbs bursts. She tries to lift the dead child in her arms; his head lolls to one side.

  ‘I will be waiting outside,’ says Dmitri. ‘I will let you two do your grieving in peace.’

  ‘How did it happen?’ says Inés. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘They kept it from me. They kept it from both of us. Believe me, I telephoned as soon as I found out.’

  ‘So he was all alone?’ says Inés. She releases the crumpled body onto the table, presses the feet together, folds the limp hands. ‘He was all alone? Where were you?’

  Where was he? He cannot bear to think. At the moment when the child gave up the ghost, was he absent, inattentive, deep in sleep?

  ‘I asked to speak to Dr Ribeiro, but it turns out he is not available,’ he says. ‘No one is available. They do not want to face us. They are in hiding, waiting for us to go away.’

  Coming up out of the basement, he glimpses the retreating figure of señora Devito. Spurred on by anger he sprints after her. ‘Señora!’ he calls. ‘May I speak to you?’

  She appears not to hear. Only when he grips her by the arm does she turn toward him, frowning. ‘Yes? What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know whether you are aware, señora, but my son passed away this morning. His mother and I were not with him at the end. He died all alone. Why were we not there, you may ask? Because we were not called.’

  ‘Yes? It is not my responsibility to call in the family members.’

  ‘No, it is not your responsibility. Nothing is your responsibility. Your friend Dmitri locks the poor child away from us but that is not your responsibility either. Yet you took him out into the cold, the other night, for the sake of an astronomy lesson, of all things. Why? Why did you feel it your responsibility to teach a sick child the stupid names of the stars?’

  ‘Calm yourself, señor! David did not die because of a touch of night air. You and your wife, on the other hand, removed him by force from our care, against his will and against all advice. Who do you think is to blame for what followed?’

  ‘Against his will? David wanted desperately to get out of your clutches and come home.’

  ‘Sit down, señor. Listen to me. It is time for you to hear the truth, unpleasant though it may be. I knew David. I was his teacher and his friend. He trusted me. We spent hours together while he poured out his heart to me. David was a deeply conflicted child. He did not want to go back to what you call his home. On the contrary, he wanted to work himself free of you and your wife. He complained that you in particular were stifling him, that you would not let him grow up to be the person he wanted to be. If he did not say so to your face, it was because he was reluctant to hurt you. Should we be surprised if all this inner conflict began to manifest itself at a physical level? No. In its pain and contortion his body was giving expression to the dilemma he confronted, a dilemma he found literally unbearable.’

  ‘What nonsense! You were never David’s friend! He put up with your lessons only because he was trapped in bed, unable to get away. As for your diagnosis of his illness, it is simply laughable.’

  ‘It is not just my diagnosis. At my recommendation, David had a number of sessions with a psychiatric specialist, and would have had more if his condition had not deteriorated. That specialist supports my reading of David to the hilt. As for astronomy, it is my job to keep the intellectual interests of our children alive. David and I often exchanged ideas about the stars and the comets and so forth.’

  ‘Exchanged ideas! You pooh-poohed his stories about the stars. You called them extravagantes. You told him the stars have nothing to do with numbers, they are simply lumps of rock floating in space. What kind of teacher are you to destroy a child’s illusions like that?’

  ‘Stars are indeed lumps of rock, señor. Numbers, in contrast, are a human invention. Numbers have nothing to do with stars. Nothing. We created the numbers out of thin air so that we could use them when we calculate weights and measures. But all of that is beside the point. David told me his stories and I told him mine. His stories, which he had evidently been fed in the music academy, struck me as abstract and bloodless. Th
e stories I told him were better suited to the childish imagination.

  ‘Señor Simón, you have been through a testing time. I can see you are upset. I am upset too. The death of a child is a terrible thing. Let us take up this conversation again when we are more in control of our feelings.’

  ‘No, on the contrary, señora, let us complete this conversation now, while our feelings are out of our control. David knew he was dying. He found solace in the belief that after death he would be translated into the heavens among the stars. Why disillusion him? Why tell him his faith was extravagant? Do you not believe in a life to come?’

  ‘I do. I do. But the life to come will be here on earth, not among the dead stars. We will die, all of us, and disintegrate, and become the material for a new generation to rise up from. There will be a life after this one, but I, the one I call I, will not be here to live it. Nor will you. Nor will David. Now please let me go.’

  CHAPTER 20

  THERE IS the matter of the body, of what the hospital calls los restos físicos, the physical remains. The orphanage of Las Manos is recorded as David’s place of residence and the director of the orphanage as his guardian, therefore it is up to Dr Fabricante to decide how the remains are to be disposed of. Until such time as Dr Fabricante communicates his decision, the remains are in the care of the hospital and will be stored in a refrigerated space to which members of the public will not have access. So he learns from the woman at the desk.

  ‘I am familiar with what you call a refrigerated space,’ he tells her. ‘It is in fact a room in the basement. I have been there myself, I was let in by one of the orderlies. Señora, I am not just a member of the public. For the past four years my wife and I have taken care of David. We have fed him and clothed him and seen to his welfare. We have loved and cherished him. All we ask is to spend tonight watching over him. Please! It is not a lot to ask. Do you want the poor child to spend the first night of his death alone? No! The thought is unbearable.’

  The woman at the desk—he does not know her name—is of the same age as he. They have got on well in the past. He does not envy her her job, coping with distraught parents, holding the official line. He is not proud of himself, making his appeal to her.

  ‘Please,’ he says. ‘We will be invisible.’

  ‘I will discuss it with my superior,’ she says. ‘He should not have let you in, Dmitri, if it was Dmitri who did it. He could get into trouble.’

  ‘I don’t want anyone to get into trouble. What I am asking for is perfectly reasonable. You have children, I am sure. You would not do it to a child of your own—let the poor thing spend the night alone.’

  Behind him in the queue is a young woman with a baby on her hip. He turns to her. ‘Would you do it, señora? No, of course you would not.’

  The young mother looks away in embarrassment. He is being shameless, he knows it, but this is not an ordinary day.

  ‘I will speak to my superior,’ repeats the woman at the desk. He was under the impression that she liked him, but perhaps he was mistaken. There is nothing friendly in her aspect. She wants him to go away: that is all she cares about.

  ‘When will you speak to your superior?’

  ‘When I have a chance. When I have attended to these people.’

  He comes back an hour later, taking his place at the end of the queue.

  ‘What is the decision?’ he asks, when his turn comes. ‘About David.’

  ‘I am sorry, but it cannot be allowed. There are reasons, which I cannot go into, but they concern the cause of death. Let me simply say, there are rules we have to follow.’

  ‘What do you mean, the cause of death?’

  ‘The cause of death is undecided. Until the cause of death is decided, there are rules we have to follow.’

  ‘And there are no exceptions to these rules, even for a little boy on the worst day of his life?’

  ‘This is a hospital, señor. What has happened happens here every day, and we grieve for it, but your boy is not an exception.’

  In the confusion of David’s last days, Bolívar has been left to himself in Inés’s apartment, neglected and only irregularly fed. When he and Inés return from the hospital that evening, he is gone.

  Since the door was not locked, their first surmise is that Bolívar had been howling and a neighbour, irritated by the noise, had let him out. He makes a tour of the neighbourhood but fails to find him. Suspecting that the dog may be trying to find his way back to David, he borrows Inés’s car and drives back to the hospital. But no one there has seen him.

  First thing in the morning he telephones Las Manos and speaks to Fabricante’s secretary. ‘If by any chance a large dog appears at the orphanage, will you let me know?’ he says.

  ‘I am not a dog-lover,’ says the secretary.

  ‘I am not asking you to love the dog, merely to report his presence,’ he says. ‘Surely you can do that.’

  Inés is full of reproaches. ‘If you had kept the door locked this would never have happened,’ she says. ‘This on top of everything.’

  ‘If it is the last thing I do, I will find him and bring him back,’ he promises.

  I will bring him back. It does not escape him that he failed to bring back the boy.

  On the little printing machine at the depot he prints a handbill in five hundred copies: LOST. LARGE DOG, TAWNY COLORATION, WITH LEATHER COLLAR AND MEDALLION READING BOLÍVAR. REWARD FOR HIS RETURN. He distributes the handbill not only across his sector of the city but across the sectors covered by the other bicycle messengers as well; he pastes it on telegraph poles. All day he is busy; all day he keeps at bay the hole that has opened up in the texture of being.

  Soon the telephone starts ringing. There have been sightings of a large dog of tawny coloration all over the city; whether the dog in question wears a medallion with the name Bolívar on it no one can say, since the dog has been either too swift to capture or too menacing to approach.

  He writes down the name and address of each caller. By the end of the day he has thirty names and no idea of what to do next. If all the callers are telling the truth, it can only follow that Bolívar has manifested himself in widely separate quarters of the city at virtually the same time. The alternative is that some of the calls have been hoaxes, or else that there are several large, tawny dogs on the loose. Whatever the case, he has no better idea of where to find Bolívar, the real Bolívar.

  ‘Bolívar is an intelligent animal,’ he tells Inés. ‘If he wants to find his way back to us, he will find his way back.’

  ‘What if he is injured?’ she replies. ‘What if he has been hit by a car? What if he is dead?’

  ‘I will go to the Asistencia first thing tomorrow morning and get a list of veterinarians. I will visit each of them and leave a copy of my advertisement. One way or another, I will get Bolívar back for you.’

  ‘You said the same about David,’ says Inés.

  ‘Inés, if I could have taken his place I would have. Without a moment’s hesitation.’

  ‘We should have brought him to Novilla, hospital facilities are much better there. But Dr Ribeiro kept making promises, and we kept believing him. I blame myself, I really do.’

  ‘Blame me, Inés, blame me! I was the one who believed in the promises. I was the gullible one, not you.’

  He would say more in the same vein, but then hears how much like Dmitri he sounds, and is ashamed of himself and shuts up. Blame me, punish me! How contemptible! What he needs is a sharp slap in the face. Grow up, Simón! Be a man!

  The next day brings a further half-dozen sightings of Bolívar—the real Bolívar or a spectral Bolívar, who knows?—after which there is silence. Inés returns to the routines of Modas Modernas, he resumes his bicycle round. Sometimes, of an evening, Inés will invite him for a meal; but for the most part they spend their time apart, hurt, grieving.

  His round of the veterinary clinics brings one success. At Clínica Jull a nurse leads him into the yard where the animals are housed. ‘Is
that the dog you are after?’ she asks, pointing to a cage in which a huge dog of tawny coloration stalks up and down. ‘He does not have a name-tag, but he may have had one and lost it.’

  The dog is not Bolívar. He is years younger. But he has Bolívar’s eyes and Bolívar’s air of quiet menace too.

  ‘No, it is not Bolívar,’ he says. ‘What is his story?’

  ‘A man brought him in last week. Said his name is Pablo. His wife gave birth recently and was afraid Pablo might molest the baby while her back was turned. Dogs get jealous, as I am sure you know. He tried to give him away, but no one in their circle wanted him.’

  He stands before Pablo whom no one wants, inspecting him. For a moment the yellow eyes pass over him, and a shiver runs down his spine. Then the eyes slide off and the gaze goes blank again.

  ‘What does the future hold for Pablo?’ he asks.

  ‘We do not like to put an animal down if it is healthy. So we will hold him as long as we can. But you cannot keep a handsome fellow like that locked up indefinitely. It is too cruel.’ She gives him an interrogatory look. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know what I think. Is death ever better than life, even life locked up in a cage? Maybe we should ask Pablo for his thoughts.’

  ‘I meant: What do you think about taking him, giving him a home?’

  What does he think? He thinks Inés will be outraged. Today you bring home a stray dog, tomorrow you will bring home a stray child.

  ‘I will see what my wife says,’ he says. ‘If she is agreeable, I will come back. But I fear she will not agree. She is very attached to our Bolívar. She still hopes he will return. If he ever does return, and finds a stranger sleeping in his bed, he will kill him. As simple as that. Kill or be killed. But let us see. Maybe I am wrong. Goodbye, and thank you. Goodbye, Pablo.’