The music has receded, or else remains outside.
Without waiting for instructions, the workers run the torch around the edges of the metal box, which cede tranquilly, arcing apart.
The mourner leans over to look as deep inside as he can, to take in whatever detail or expression can still reach him.
But his curiosity is overrun by the irresistible impulse to bow his forehead over his progenitor.
Does he bow before a beloved being or before the immutability of death? Or before the beyond that in a certain way has come so close?
It’s me, he tells himself. I am there. My father is my copy.
He reacts: I was my father’s copy. He is more distinct than I because he is preserved at thirty-three years old.
He tells himself to wait before drawing conclusions, because, for now, they are muddled: He is what I will be. Just as I will be. How is it he keeps his hair so black, that death doesn’t whiten it, his natural color doesn’t recede, even as life has receded from him? And then: So well combed, with that natural wave caught by the painter in the portrait we had hanging at home.
And yet it seems there is something missing from that intact head. The eyes? No, the stare! He has lost his stare. It’s not that his fallen eyelids cover it. It’s that death has pulled from the upper left corner and dislodged the force of that absent gaze.
But this pulling is someone tugging at his jacket, with care and respect, to wake him or bring him to order.
He holds himself firm with a question, like a person returned from elsewhere:
“Yes…?”
“We need to get to it.”
“Just another moment.”
He still doesn’t have the proof, the secret ulterior motive of this undertaking.
Nose pressed again to the pane of glass, he scrutinizes the forehead. Terse and serene, without signs of decay. The mouth, neither cracked nor deformed into a rictus. It must have been in his chest then, he thinks, level with the heart, perhaps.
The workers finish opening the metal cover, just as with a can of preserves. The solder bows and flakes, they strip it from the edges in their dogskin gloves, and for the first time in thirty years, it has contact with the air: this body, which his son recollects as lively, dynamic, handsome; this body, which managed to achieve immobility. Managed…? Achieved…? Was it something he did himself? Today, as the operation goes forward, as they disrobe him, his son may find out. Because it’s nothing more than an execution, starting with cutting off the head. With a handsaw that sinks in at the Adam’s apple, or where it was, because his neck is now smooth, and no blood will spurt from it, no moan will emerge, save perhaps from the bereaved himself.
The head removed, so dry it didn’t tear, they carefully place it aside, and the eyes led astray by the violence of death contemplate what remains of his former body.
Knives and saws enter the corpse, with destructive exuberance and a striving for neatness. But where the bones, in their shell of hard skin turned to leather, oppose the exemplary sacrifice, the axe goes in bluntly, and now, fruit of rage, as the profession’s ruthlessness bares its claws, they let loose, giving rise to what the witness hadn’t yet known: the sound, the roar of battle, of hatchet blows against bone, the stiff metal blade as it grazes the marble, raising sparks and other sounds of a different timbre, a dreadful symphony performed by the very composers, still unaccompanied by theater music.
There must be something irresistible here, because even with his back turned to this place which ought to have a door, but doesn’t, he can sense someone’s ingress, and afraid it is her, he turns and sees his sister, her fists over her mouth to suppress something: is it nausea or screams?
He steps in front of her and leads her away.
He stays with her outside, blaming himself for relaxing his vigilance…She responds with a simple litany:
“That noise…that noise…”
Her brother understands: the noise of the saw cutting through the bones.
“Was it Papa?”
“You didn’t see him?”
“I tried, but your back hid him.”
“Better.”
“Why better? He was my father, too, wasn’t he?” She sobs. “And I never saw him, or if I did, I was so little I don’t remember. Even now, I don’t recall the last time…Can I, now?”
To keep from telling her nothing’s left but pieces, he responds despotically:
“No.”
They have stayed outside. He embraces the orphan, as if she were still a girl, with a late or retrospective intimation of their childhood and their need for sanctuary. Amid this rapport or communion of souls comes a slackening, or a pause for distraction. His gaze wanders. Far off, he notices a swarm of mourners for the unknown dead, with offerings of flowers, advancing along the alleys between the crosses and angels, and closer, he sees, amid the monuments to the deceased, crowning a pedestal some two meters in height, the bust of an older woman, her hair in a bun: she is the mother of the sculptor Domínguez, her image preserved for the ages by her artist son. He draws a comparison between this sculpted work of lasting material on its marble pedestal and the head of his father, severed by a saw and set on a wooden stool, which may fall and roll around like a ball or simply shatter its cranial bones, which must be as fragile as those of the tiny birds.
Looking over his sister’s shoulder, he suspects these observations, and the digressions following them, have only been possible because the noise of the sawing has ceased. Maybe he only notices this because the workmen emerge, with the refuse in hand, toward where?
Boards, rags; their boots transported in hand. A short trip, toward some pits he hadn’t noticed, over there, a kind of common grave. Where, moments later, another of the workers will carry what’s left of the desiccated flesh and the shapeless bits of bone. They are scattered there, and he looks to watch them vanish, until a gravedigger, maybe an underling, starts to shovel the dirt for their second interment. The definitive one, perhaps, because there, in that hole, the bones will intermingle and identity will come to an end. Goodbye, Papa. They didn’t give him time to see if there was a wound in his chest, they pulled off the elegant suit and stylish shirt while he was away, consoling the man’s daughter.
They invite him to pay homage:
“Do you want to come?”
The larger bones and head remain, with a certain order, in the hut from which the diaspora of all that had composed a unified human being proceeded.
He asks himself whether the same will now occur with the body of his mother, who is still a living memory, because she died only moths ago, while his father was fossilized, a bundle of parchment, nothing more.
No, it will not occur.
They explain to him what he knew well enough, though it had slipped his mind:
That he cannot buy or even rent a niche for his mother in the gallery of reinforced concrete, where the coffins and their contents are less prone to rot and crumble away, because spaces are scarce, and at present, there is not a single one available. (A lack of final dwellings, or overpopulation among the deceased.) That, as he is the rightful owner, in perpetuity, of his father’s niche, it is possible to pair the two bodies, even if they are sealed, and since two coffins won’t fit, they will employ what is known as reduction. They will reduce, in other words, the volume of one of the bodies, so that both will fit in a single coffin. Hence the dismemberment and fragmenting of the bones.
Consequently, the mother’s body will be preserved intact.
Not the coffin, which they will have to open, why?
“To put in his bones and head?”
“That won’t be necessary, we’ve prepared another one for him.”
He notices it, though it has been in his sight the whole time: an oblong casket, like the ones for deceased children.
An assistant knocks on it with his knuckles, to show him it is solid, quality wood.
They carefully deposit the femurs and a few ribs, and a strip of black cloth
from the suit, as a symbol, perhaps. Everything fits without difficulty until they lay the head inside, and they try the lid, which won’t close. They press down, as you do with a suitcase overstuffed with clothes.
He fears – and then perceives – a crackling, like the grinding of bones.
“Don’t, please! I’ll buy a bigger coffin.”
“It can’t be done, we have to finish now. Regulations…Anyhow, a bigger one won’t fit in the niche.”
He agrees, but dissuades them from pressing down on the cranium, because he can’t bear, whether on his way out or in the days and nights to follow, that macabre music, which seems to rise up from the soul.
They find a solution: they will avoid sealing the box completely. The lid will remain in place, but they won’t screw it down, it will stay loose, balanced and tottering over the peak of the cranium.
They ready an old wagon, with wooden rails a palm in height, barely big enough for anything, but sufficient for the two coffins: the larger one, which is now the mother’s, and the tiny one that serves to hold the father’s bones. The whole scene seems a parody of a family in mourning for a mother boxed up with her child.
The shafts are lying on the ground. Presumably they’ll fit them to one of the donkeys he saw in the corral behind the shack. But no. With great strength and determination, a worker lifts them up and sets off walking forward, not pulling, with the load behind him. Since this, apparently, is the ordinary course of things, the man simply asks:
“Where to now?”
“To the niche.”
“To the niche…?” and he stretches out his arm, pointing to the eight or ten rows, one above the other, of inset tombs, overflowing with a haunting succession of bouquets of flowers and green branches. His gesture must be an eloquent testament to his stupefaction, for the worker reacts, albeit with scorn:
“Don’t you get it? We have to take them over. Isn’t that what you wanted? If not, why’d we bother doing the work?”
Those who carried out the reduction stand around, their silence and their faces showing their agreement with their spokesman. The man understands what he has to do: hand out tips and follow the wagon.
He doubts it is sturdy enough for the journey, but it’s already on its way, guided forward vigorously by the worker, and he takes the arm of his sister, who is half-lost, half-horrified. He won’t let her think, he drags her onward.
They pass through a narrow sort of alley, flanked by trees that lose their leaves at that time of year. The cold – not the sun, because the first light of day, which was golden, has decayed into a gray insinuation of rain – hangs down like invisible icicles from the bluish branches, while a fire strikes up inside the man and makes him sweat. Pity for his sister and himself: humiliation, shame.
The group has begun to attract the stares of the people decorating the many graves on each side of the path that runs through the very center of the cemetery.
He is ashamed to let the worker make the effort alone, he waves him away from one of the shafts and takes it in his hands.
He asks if it wouldn’t be easier to change the cart’s direction and pull on the shafts. It seems more reasonable, but the worker doesn’t agree, and tells him, maybe disdainfully, he’d do better to make sure the lid of the small coffin doesn’t slide off.
And as the cobblestone pavement is highly uneven, the load begins to shift, and a few meters on, the lid does fall down and the head is left uncovered. A child shouts, with wonderment and fright:
“Mama, a dead man’s coming out of the box!”
He rushes to cover it.
The turmoil passes, and afraid the same could occur again, he walks beside the cart with one hand covering the unstable lid.
Once he’s calmer, he becomes aware of other details: of himself, in his dark suit, with one hand over the coffin, as if a terrible, captive animal might leap out. The porter in his nurse’s smock, inexplicable for those ignorant of the preliminaries. His sister, with her elegant layer of furs, which conceal her agony and dread, shattered and austere in her commitment to take part in that shabby cortege…The cart that creaks and creaks again, its groaning sound growing in their ears, which is not an illusion, because it draws the attention of those formerly lost in their respects for the dead, who look with a curiosity that he takes as insolence and disrespect.
He looks away from the rest, decides their gazes will no longer pierce him, there’s a long stretch ahead, and he devotes his attention to not letting the lid slide away to reveal the badly hidden horror, though it shouldn’t matter one bit.
In this way, he is left alone, shrunken or gathered in himself, wounded in the flesh that has suddenly become no less sensitive than his soul, and in his ears, which dread and attend every squeak from the decrepit, dilapidated cart.
Everything is sad, and the music returns, and the music is sad, too.
Borne up or led by a line of melody formed of tribulation or nostalgia and a pounding rhythm like that of waves, coming together, rising up in a breaker, and then receding. Or one that reaches out to you, not managing to touch, and withdraws, coming forward and falling back, over and over, over and over.
There is no love for the wounded, no tenderness in reach of the humiliated; it seems to come, but it doesn’t touch you, grief mounts upon grief. God, what merciless music! And with that insidiously dissonant creaking, obstinately ruining any harmony, black as it may be in this music which, so far as he can see, neither disturbs his sister in her subdued anguish nor exasperates the weary worker.
“Done.”
He has to repeat it: done. They have arrived.
He moves toward a part of the galleries that he recognizes easily from his constant visits to his father’s tomb, and now, because empty, it is easier to locate, like a deep hollow, a pure, dark, uncovered chasm.
The cart and the carter fall quiet, the latter gasping. The music has left the man’s ears and mind. He fears the discordant squealing has only withdrawn, and will later return, even when he’s no longer there.
A pair of workers charged with cleaning the galleries and a long suffering gravedigger come to help. The four of them unload the caskets, and for a moment, to catch their breath, they lay them on the pavement with the rectangular mosaics, alternating black and white.
Now they will enter the hollow that will afford them perpetual rest. Another slab of marble will seal it, with both of their names, and the immobile stone will remain between him and his parents. The end. A chord sounded and broke off. Did you hear it, sister? She doesn’t even hear the question, he didn’t utter it, he was talking to himself, my God!
Perhaps the exclamation, perhaps the solemnity of the coffins that have stopped their rattling as they lie there on the mosaic, perhaps the expectation of what will take place just afterward, visible on the faces of the assistants and the occasional kindly lady who is leaving a few chrysanthemums for her mother, make him turn, illicitly, to his recollections of the seminary. Shielded by his dark monastic clothing – though given away, without noticing, by his ordinary necktie – he utters, like a murmur, in Latin, the viaticum. Transported, and heartened by the solemnity he has produced in those around him, he says, out loud, in a language they all understand, the Salve Regina, and, without pausing, begins an Our Father, and all present accompany him. It is presumed, as he is the son, that no one will hurry ahead of him, and he will finish with devotion and strength: Amen. In the meanwhile, a thought has crept into his mind, intertwined with tortured sentiments, which prevent his uttering this formula: I am a parricide. Today, I have laid the weapon in the hand of the man who has cut off my father’s head.
His sister, wretched, has quivered through the ceremony and her wretched body falls to the ground. Soundlessly and without ostentation.
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Nest in the Bones Page 23