Reading a piece of news from Middlesboro, Kentucky, I remembered the beautiful parable of the slave who fled to Samarra because he met Death in the market and she made a gesture the slave interpreted as threatening. A few hours later the slave’s owner, who seemed to be a personal friend of Death, met with her and asked, “Why did you make a threatening gesture this morning when you saw my slave?” And Death answered, “It was not a threatening gesture but rather one of surprise. I was startled to see him there, since he had an appointment with me this evening in Samarra.”
That parable is, in a way, the diametrical opposite of something that happened two days ago in Middlesboro, Kentucky, to a man who that morning had an appointment with Death, and, for reasons that have not yet been possible to establish, it was Death, and not the man, who failed to arrive for the appointment. Because James Longworth, a sixty-nine-year-old mountain man, got up earlier than ever that morning, took a bath, and prepared as if for a trip. Then he lay down in his bed, closed his eyes, and said all the prayers he knew, while outside, pressed up against the window, more than two hundred people waited for the invisible boat to arrive that would take him away forever.
The expectation had begun three years ago, one morning when the hillbilly spoke of his dreams at breakfast time and said that in one of them Death had appeared and promised to come for him at 8:20 a.m. on June 28, 1952. The announcement spread through the local population and then around the district and then all over the state of Kentucky. Sooner or later all citizens had to die. But the mortality of James Longworth was from that day on different from that of his neighbors, because he was now a mortal man who could have done anything, even subsist on a diet of mercuric chloride, sure that Death’s word of honor, so gravely pledged, would not be taken back after such precise and peremptory notification. Since that day, James Longworth, more than anything else, was known in the streets and the district of Middlesboro and in the state of Kentucky simply as “the man who is going to die.”
So when they woke up, two days ago, all the inhabitants of the district remembered that it was June 28 and that in two hours Death would come to keep her appointment with James Longworth. What should have been a morning of mourning was in a way a bit of a holiday, when the curious citizens planned to show up late for work in order to walk a stretch and attend a man’s death. In reality, it’s not likely that people would have thought that James Longworth’s death should be different from any other. But even so, something was at stake in it that we mortals have been interested in checking since the beginning of the world: the fidelity of Death’s word of honor. And men, women, and children went to check, while James Longworth waved goodbye to them from his bed as if he were doing so from the boarding step of that invisible vehicle that, three years earlier, had allowed him to know one of the innumerable millions of stops on its endless itinerary.
Suddenly, with their hearts in their throats, the spectators established that it was exactly twenty minutes past eight and Death had not yet arrived. There was a sort of haughty desolation, a dashed hope in the two hundred heads pressing against the window. But the minute elapsed. And the next one elapsed, and nothing happened. Then James Longworth sat up disconcertedly in his bed, and said, “I’ll be disappointed if I don’t die soon.” And it’s possible that by now, the two hundred people who got up early and walked a long way and were then gasping in the luminous morning of this sweltering summer are in the town square calling for Death. Not to be dragged away by her, but to lynch her.
July 1, 1952, El Heraldo, Barranquilla