by Toni Sala
Every death told her: you are dead and that’s why you must live. You have to live because you’re dead. If you weren’t dead, it wouldn’t make sense for you to live. But you are dead, and therefore you have to live life and not live death. If you were alive, you’d have to live death. That’s why you’re dead: live life. But Iona still remained in denial, waiting for the arrival of authentic death.
“You go with your sister tonight and I’ll take my brother, okay?”
“Why don’t you lend him your car and we’ll take mine?”
“Because his is in the shop, he crashed it last night. He drove it into a ravine. He drives like a psycho, and I don’t trust him with my things, you know how he is, all he ever thinks about is girls. Look what he did to his car, and you want me to lend him mine, one he’s never driven before, so he can kill himself? You want him to drive my car off a cliff? What am I gonna drive then? Yours?”
Poor Xavi. They should have lent it to him. He wouldn’t have done worse than his brother.
The morning after that conversation, her mother was weeping in Iona’s room, waiting for her daughter to get dressed. It had been more than ten years since Iona had been naked in front of her mother, but she didn’t ask her to leave and just swallowed her embarrassment. She was thinking about how provisional denial is; the wave of reality was heading toward her, underground. Soon, the only thing she’d be able to do would be to flee. Until one day she’d wake up and find that it had all been fake. But that might take some time. Her life from now on had to be parenthetical, until the wave of reality flooded the dream of Jaume’s death and it turned out that he was alive.
“What should I wear?”
“Wear whatever you were planning to. You don’t have to go anywhere. Llúcia asked me not to take you there. They won’t open the viewing room until this afternoon.”
She pulled off her shirt and presented her body to her mother as if returning a recyclable. The last person who saw her naked was Jaume.
Would her mother have taken off her clothes in front of her? Iona’s mother couldn’t think that much. She was too sad, she was sobbing, crying; she was surprised by her daughter’s impassivity, but Iona couldn’t cry with her, she had to think, she had to feed her brain because leaving it alone would be like leaving a hungry baby alone with a plate of poison.
She saw a drop of blood on the sheets. She felt wetness on her inner thigh. Her period had come early to eliminate any doubt. Her body didn’t want to deny it. Animals accepted, they went straight to sadness, like her mother. She remembered how sad the dogs had been, their eyes damp and their ears lowered, when Grandpa Enric died, when the other dogs died. The knots were coming loose, the blood dripped down, there was nothing you could do, you didn’t even feel it coming. It was the protest, the wave of reality. As a person she could deny it, as an animal she couldn’t.
That intensity ate away at her. The blood had written on the sheet: HE LEAVES NO ORPHANS. Her mother stopped mid-sob and hugged the pillow. “Thank God.” Her daughter, menstruating, naked, twenty-one years old, her reproductive system at its peak . . . In college they were studying mammal morphology, animal reproduction and obstetrics, she would find herself one day acting as a midwife to dogs and cats. If everything went as it should, she would help birth foals, calves, and piglets, she would interfere in the privacy of entering life, and then she would intervene in the exit, sometimes of the same animal, because it wasn’t unusual for a veterinarian to find herself having to put down an animal she had helped to bring into the world. She would inseminate and she would sterilize. Come here, boy; that’s it, now, go on ahead.
But her period had come early, and that would help her in her denial. She wouldn’t have to make the decision of whether to have the child or not. Because, with Jaume dead, would she have more reasons to have it, or less? A dead father gave more reasons than a living father to continue the pregnancy. A dead father couldn’t talk, so everything had to continue its course. But how could she have done that—have his child—to Jaume? And to which Jaume, if continuing the pregnancy would mean accepting his death? That was also a crack in the denial: who would want a child after revealing life’s uncertainty and absurdity with his own death? Really, who would want that world for his child? Would Xavi and Jaume’s parents have had children if they’d known they would end up driving into a tree at twenty and twenty-two years old?
Or at thirty? Or forty? At fifty? Sixty, seventy, eighty? How many would you like, ma’am? Well, if I can’t live a hundred years, there’s no point. Well, I’ll settle for twenty-five. What luck, not to have to think about that. No, thirty or so’s enough for me, because I know we’re part of a chain and are here to perpetuate the species . . . And what if you don’t have kids? What if you can’t or you die too soon, like Jaume? Here we can only guarantee you a link to the dead, ma’am.
And what if it wasn’t her period? What if it was an early miscarriage? A miscarriage before fertilization, a period coming early to impede a birth, nature rushing to expel the part that came from him, the part he had wasted, and replace it as fast as possible, to give someone else a chance, a better role model for Iona’s child. Nature wasn’t rushing. Nature was immediate.
Jaume hadn’t even been buried, and he’d already lost all his rights. Nature went against itself by bringing you into the world, but when it came back for you it regained its place on the throne. She had gotten naked in front of her mother and, at some point, she would do it in front of another boy. She would let another boy undress her, even if just to reclaim her own body, while she waited for Jaume, so she could give it back to him. Death—that death that wasn’t—simplified things. All her doubts about Jaume, all the ambiguities constructed in the four or five years they’d been dating, all the inaccuracies, were gone with his death, as if down the drain. Everything that was unresolved, everything that still had to be discussed.
She covered her thigh with her panties and quickly grabbed some clean ones. She pulled up the top sheet, crumpled it, placed it over the stain, and left the room. She went into the bathroom, washed, and put in a tampon. When she came back to the bedroom, her mother had laid out her clothes on the mattress. She had stripped the sheets off the bed; they were in a pile on the floor. Beside her mother was Mireia, her younger sister.
“I have to get dressed,” said Iona.
Her breasts were still showing, her breasts which were Jaume’s and his children’s, because they’d wanted to have children. They had talked about it, picked names, names that were now lethal . . . Her forsaken breasts were now, once again, her’s. Not even that. They were shrinking. They were regressing to a barren girl’s. My god. Her pubis shaved the way Jaume liked it. How could her mother welcome the part of him that her daughter embodied?
She wanted to tell her sister that everything was okay; as the older one she had to take the lead and guide her little sister, but she couldn’t. She hugged her to console her. Her sister was crying for her, but Iona had to bear the denial of Jaume’s death alone, and she felt it scattering, she couldn’t hold on to the denial; it was slipping through her fingers; it was bringing her other deaths to life, four grandparents, three dogs, so vivid that if the well had been open, she would have asked Mireia to accompany her to see the woman at the bottom, swimming in her clothes, peaceful, trusting, waiting for them to throw her a rope. That woman was Jaume’s death. It wasn’t going to be easy to settle into living in a false reality. She resisted at the border of fantasy, entering that country had too high a price—insanity—but holding out on the border. . . it wasn’t just that her own body was denying the denial. The denial expanded inside her, a new pregnancy that drove out Jaume’s, and countered reality, resituated it, corrected it to underscore the incongruities. Who talked about menstruation? She searched for the cherry tree from the window. It was too sunny for a winter day. No, nothing about menstruation. The cherry tree that festered. The dogs’ blood traveled up through its roots, swelling the cherries, dripping off the leaves
, trickling down the branches and trunk to the ground and there, in the day’s white and intense light, like a frozen flash of lightning, it seemed like the shadow of the fruit tree but wasn’t; it was a red shadow, a puddle, the ground was wet. The other cherry tree was also bleeding, and the peach trees had matured so suddenly that the peaches hadn’t had time to fall; they had rotted on the branches, and their bone-colored pits hung among the leaves. Late January and that sun. It couldn’t be. The pomegranates and figs, filled with seeds, erupted; the apple tree lost its leaves, and its branches curved, loaded down with red apples. The garden covered the tubers’ rapes, the pregnant watermelons burst, across the sky came a flock of seagulls from the dump in Solius.
The two sisters and their parents didn’t have lunch; they watched television without speaking all afternoon and evening. Then their father said he was going out for a walk through the fields and left. The funeral was the next afternoon. The silence of Can Bou covered the other silences. The televisions’ volumes were low, fewer people walked down the streets of town, kids didn’t cry. The air had frozen over the plain. Even the weekenders from Barcelona, driving through the fields of Vidreres in search of the freeway, slowed their pace.
“I’m very tired,” said Mireia, as the evening drew to a close. “I just want to go to sleep.”
“Wait a minute, until your father gets back, and then go on to bed,” said her mother. “You don’t have to come to the wake.”
“I don’t think I’ll go to the burial either,” said Mireia.
Iona felt she should say something, as if she were in charge of protocol and invitations, as if she had the right to excuse her sister from attending. What was the point of her little sister being there? But Jaume and Xavi were dead, and it seemed that, in turn, the two sisters should have to go to the funeral, like an offering to the God who had taken the two brothers and not them. Iona would go as if it were nothing; she would fly over the funeral just as she was flying over this first evening with Jaume dead. The more immediate realities—the furniture in the house, the smells, the words—had intensified, as if to help her hide from what was going on.
“Maybe it’s better if you don’t come, Mireia,” said Iona. “It won’t do you any good, not you and not them.”
“I’m really sorry, I’m so tired, emotionally. I just don’t have the heart, and it’s better I say it now. I don’t want to worry all night about having to tell you tomorrow. But it seems rude not to go. Wouldn’t they have wanted the whole town to see them off? Wouldn’t they have come to our funeral, if it had been us?”
“What they would have wanted was to not have the accident. Would you want a funeral full of people?”
“I don’t know, Iona.”
“Forgive me, Iona,” interjected their mother. “Today’s not a day for arguing, but the funeral isn’t for them; no one expects it to help or to be meaningful to them in any way. The funeral is for those of us left behind, to be there for their parents and to be there for you, to share in the pain.”
“Pain can’t be shared,” said Iona. “And if it could, what would you want, to pass it off on someone else?”
“No, I’d want others to pass it on to me.”
“I don’t want to pass my pain on to anyone. It’s better if Mireia doesn’t come.”
“And what about Jaume’s parents?” said Mireia.
“They’ll understand that you’re grieving so much you can’t go. They won’t mind at all. What do we know about their suffering? I don’t want a funeral. I want to disappear for everyone in the same moment that everyone disappears for me. I don’t want to leave annoying reminders as if I were coming back. I don’t even want to leave good memories, no kids, nothing. It’s pathetic.”
“I’m so sorry. Now I see . . .” said Mireia, “that I’ve been giving it too much importance. It’s just a ritual.”
“It’s a lie, at the worst moment. It’s not for the dead; it’s for the living, out of fear. The burial isn’t to see them off; it’s for those who are left behind, like Mom said. To be there for me. To make it clear to me.”
“To be there for you and for the four of us, to be together in a difficult moment,” said Mireia. “It would be selfish of me not to go.”
“So, me not wanting a funeral for myself, is that selfish too?”
“The last thing we want to separate from is people. If you forgo a funeral, that means that you’re absolutely positive that everything ends in this world.”
“Maybe I just don’t want to cling to it desperately. Maybe because I trust that everything doesn’t end here.”
“But we even bury our animals.”
“For the sake of hygiene,” said Iona. “No one asks the clinic for their dead animals back. Even here in Vidreres, people call the vet to get rid of a dead dog. I’d rather you didn’t come. It’s using the dead. We’ll parade Xavi and Jaume around, carry them to the church, and have them blessed to make ourselves feel better. There are fifty thousand better places to take them, Mireia. You think Jaume spent much time thinking about God? You think that was on his mind? And what right do we have. . . But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it does make sense to take them to the church. To show that they’re nothing now, and we can do whatever we want with them. To make it clear who’s in charge. It’s not important, I don’t want you to come if you’re tired; in fact, I wish you wouldn’t. In fact, I wish you’d decided not to come because you have a party to go to, or something else, something that has nothing to do with Jaume and Xavi.”
“Iona . . .” said their mother.
“I’ll go,” said Mireia. “I changed my mind.”
“Mireia, if you don’t want to use them to make yourself feel better, if you want to waive that right, then everyone should understand.”
“Your father would be very upset.”
“I’m gonna go,” said Iona, “but for me it’ll be just as if I didn’t. I’ll be watching it through a pane of glass.”
“There is no glass,” said her mother.
Her father came in. He had heard the conversation from the entryway. He sat down and said, “Mireia, you will go to the service like everyone else. I went by the funeral home. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Iona thought about Xavi and Jaume’s parents, killed by the accident’s shock waves. They’d rather forget about her. She would too. She planned to avoid them. As a future daughter-in-law she was dead too. She didn’t want to be a zombie daughter-in-law who said “hi” to her zombie in-laws every time she ran into them. Everyone saw them as completely devastated—the way they must see her—but that didn’t mean the boys’ parents weren’t denying the accident. Otherwise, how could they have a wake for them? How could they even breathe? The body is perfidious, but it was also that everyone else was now looking at them through a black filter. But for Jaume and Xavi’s parents their two sons weren’t dead. They just hadn’t heard from them in several hours, they were late coming home, that happened a lot when they went out. And the funeral home and the figures in the coffins? A joke in poor taste. There’s plenty of malice in the world.
The living dead lined up at Santa Maria church, slow, pallid, dressed in black, praying. Weeping, mute, secretly violent zombies, making a murmur of moans and sighs between the bare stone walls, sitting on the uncomfortable planks of the pews, coming to pieces, flesh falling, avoiding looking at each other in their embarrassment, and because if they moved, they might lose a leg or an arm, and their heads could roll off their necks and onto the floor. They sat and listened in silence to the mass and would stick it out for all the rest of it, too. They watched the two pale wooden coffins pass between the pews, one with Jaume in it and the other with Xavi, and Iona had the feeling that she was the only living person at the funeral; that only she retained, preserved, and maintained life.
Iona saw Nil Dalmau leaving the church. She had dodged her zombies-in-law, half hiding around a corner, waiting for her parents and her sister to finish what she, because of her privilege
as the zombie widow, could shirk. That was when she saw him. It seemed that he was looking for her in the crowd, and was surprised to find her staring at him. She smiled. He was the least strange zombie at the party. The one closest to the world of the living. Everyone should’ve had to dress as monstrously as him that day—come to the party in costume like clowns to the circus. It had been a while since she’d seen him around town. He hung out with other people, from outside Vidreres, and she’d never seen him with Jaume or Xavi.
She knew him from school, where he was a few grades ahead of her. Later, they’d sent him to private school in Girona. Every once in a long while she’d hear something about what he was up to. She knew he was studying fine arts in Barcelona, or maybe he’d already finished his degree. He was dressed in black from head to toe, he was the blackest of them all, black tie. Outside, he put on a black hat. He wore his hair in two ponytails like an Indian, and had an incipient beard with no moustache. But what turned people’s heads, first curious and then repulsed, was his left ear. The lobe looked like the handle of a pitcher. He wore a metal ring inside a large open hole in the earlobe, which was dilated like a tire made of flesh.
If that meant something, Iona wasn’t in on it. In the final years of her degree they were studying tropical veterinary science. Recently, iguanas and dragons, snakes, salamanders, chameleons, spiders, and scorpions had become more and more popular; people were tired of the usual four-legged friends. The fad was creatures that were like living fossils, autistic and prelapsarian pets, an incomprehensible world, but, just like those in the know could interpret their friends’ terrariums and knew the significance of a certain ophidian, lepidosauria, or amphibian, every eccentric piece of clothing that boy wore must mean . . . what? What did it mean? Everything he’d added over the years to separate himself from the already somewhat strange little kid she’d known? And the blue tattoo of a star on the back of his hand? And the longer fingernails on his pinkies?