You can well imagine, sir, the sad spirits in which we found ourselves. Lord Grenley retreated to his cabin, while I and the chaplain kept vigil over the body. Evening was coming on. A thick mist covered the sea. A mournful wind was blowing. We were, all of us, deeply moved. Even old sailors who had suffered shipwreck in the Indian Ocean and rounded Cape Horn, even they had tears in their eyes.
‘Poor child,’ they said.
For those rough and simple natures, that pale, beautiful woman dressed in white was a young lady, a virgin, a child! One of them fashioned a wreath from dry seaweed and reverently placed it on her bosom – a bouquet of sea flowers.
I considered travelling on with Carmen’s body to Spain, but the captain said that with four or five more days sailing ahead of us we could not expect the body to remain uncorrupted for that length of time. We resolved, therefore, to give her a sea burial later that night. And so the chaplain and I stayed with the body throughout the evening, recalling her beauty and her great misfortune.
Night fell, and darkness concealed the waters. The chaplain went below. I remained alone. A lamp suspended from a rope lit up the body. I uncovered Carmen’s face and stroked her cropped hair. Her beauty was set in angelic immobility as if death had restored her virtue. The lovely curve of her breast was still visible beneath the flag that covered her. Never had the life force produced such grace! I gazed at her for a long time, absorbed in contemplation. Tears fell from my eyes. In the solitude of my thoughts, I said to myself:
‘Poor creature! You are going to the very deepest of graves, to the shifting vault of the sea. A fever of love consumed you in life, an eternal storm will trouble you in death! Like the sea, you were beautiful, proud, boisterous. Like the sea, you had your troubles, your hidden calms, your caves, your nameless monsters, your religious heights, your grubby foam. Your mind was filled with tender ideas as pure and bright as the fishermen’s sails filling the sea; with burdensome, modern ambitions, as fast and incisive as the paddlewheels of a boat; with the brute exigencies of temperament, as dumb and triumphant as a battleship. You were wrecked on the reef of a love grown cold, just as the sea breaks on the dark, unfeeling rocks. Your passion was your tyrant, just as the wind is the sea’s tyrant. Go, poor girl, and rest in peace amidst the dark green seaweed! Yours is a sorry fate. Who ever felt, loved, trembled, blushed, desired as much as you, who ever conquered as many hearts? How many tears you provoked! How many pulses you set racing! How many desires flocked to you like pigeons! How many now forgotten voices called to you! How many promises did you break! How much puffed-up pride did you puncture! And now, after that life of action and wilfulness, after being such a focus of energy, you will be thrown into the sea once a cabin boy has attached a couple of weights to your feet and head! And then there will be nothing but the roar of the wind and the foaming waves.
‘What use was your existence, what use the blood, will, nerves and thoughts dredged up from the very essence of your being! What ideas, what memories, what feelings of pity did you leave behind you? Were you ever more than just a beautiful body, desired and photographed? During your lifetime, you were one of those impassive natural beauties that man uses and discards, like a camellia or a peacock’s feather. You were an adornment, not a person. Just as you never had a fixed place in life, so, in death, you will have no fixed tomb. Farewell, then, for ever, O sweet ephemeral one. It is your fate to be dispersed among the waters!
‘That is why you are here alone! Where are those who loved you? Where are those you loved? Here you are, in your white dressing gown and chequered shawl, lying on the deck of a boat, a lone woman among men – as in life! There are no flowers here to place on your breast, no lace with which to frame your dead face. You die among sails and rigging, in the company of illiterate sailors who have just drunk their ration of rum. There is not even a Catholic priest to speak to you of the angels, those sweet companions of your youth. No kinsman to draw the winding sheet over your face! No responses will be chanted around your coffin. You will not cause brides to ponder as they see your funeral cortège go by, for the tarry hands of old sailors will hurl you into the sea!
‘Does it really matter, my friend? Your life has reached its logical conclusion. You lived a rebel and die one too. You lived outside narrow human conventions, and you die in the freedom of nature.
‘You will not find your bed surrounded by grasping relatives, uncaring servants, priests who yawn as they administer the last rites in a dark, stuffy room reeking of medicines. You die beneath the sublime sky, rocked by the waves, surrounded by the salt sea, exposed to the elements, and mourned by old Lascar sailors!
‘You will not be clothed in old silks or wear an ancient funeral wreath, your body will not be adorned with fake gold braid; you will depart this life in your white gown, like a joyful bride dressed for your nuptials!
‘They will not nail you into a narrow coffin, nor bind you up like a bale; you will be in contact with living things; the tears of the sea will run through your hair; you will be able to touch the seaweed. The sun’s rays, like an old lover, will be able to seek you out, and the lid of your casket will be the infinite blue sky.
‘At your funeral, you will hear no chants in bad Latin, no clanging bells, no shrill choirboy voices, nor the inane comments of mourners or the grating sound as the sexton shovels the earth into your grave. No, wearing the British flag as a shroud, you will be launched out into your watery grave in a military silence, to the ceaseless plain chant of wind and water.
‘You will not be forever crushed beneath six feet of earth, feeling the mouths of roots grazing on your breast and a host of worms invading your body as if it were a vanquished citadel. No, your death will be a perpetual journey. You will live in transparent grottos, you will guard mysterious treasures, visit glowing coral cities, fall in love with the charmed body of some fair prince, once a Norman pirate! You will be dispersed into the elements, an eternal ghost, soul of the sea!
‘No townspeople will come and sit on your tomb, sacristans will not cross themselves as they pass by nor chickens cluck and peck above you; instead, over your blue tomb the wind will wander like a melancholy old man visiting his dead.
‘Your epitaph will not be composed by a hired poet skilled in elegies and approved by the City Council. Your epitaph will be the ineffable light from the stars that will intersect to form the letters of your name on your grave…’
A sailor tapped me on the shoulder.
‘Sir, it’s eleven o’clock,’ he said.
I sprang to my feet, and recalling the vain chimera, the sad thoughts, that had formed inside my head, I said to myself:
‘Oh, dear, I forgot about the sharks.’
It was eleven o’clock at night. There were no stars. Everyone had gathered on deck. Lamps had been attached to the rigging and torches had been lit.
Two seamen lifted up Carmen’s body. The chaplain blessed it. The British flag was tied about the body with a rope. The cabin boys brought two heavy weights. They bound one to her feet and attached the other to her neck. Her small black silk boots protruded touchingly from beneath the hem of her gown and the flag in which she was wrapped. The flames of the torches cast vague, flickering reflections on the waves. In the silence, I could hear the crackling of the resin as they burned.
Finally, the ship’s bell began to toll as the seamen raised the body to the height of the ship’s rail.
A grave, melancholy, infinitely sad chant began. The chaplain was praying with his hands resting on the corpse. Then, taking a step back, he said:
‘In aeternum sit!’
To which everyone responded: ‘Amen!’
The wind was moaning around the ship. Lord Grenley stepped forward and in a clear voice said:
‘This day, on board the British vessel The Romantic, the death occurred of Carmen Puebla, a Spanish citizen. For the eternal protection of her mortal remains, since she is being buried on British territory, her shroud was the British flag. In pace.’
‘Amen,’ came the response.
‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,’ said the chaplain, ‘blessèd be the tomb in which she lies and may these waters be as holy ground for her.’
‘Amen.’
‘Into the sea!’ commanded Lord Grenley.
The two crewmen held the corpse over the water; we all moved closer and formed a semicircle with our torches. When the corpse was thrown into the water, it made a single lugubrious splash and vanished, covered by the foaming waves.
The torches were sadly, silently extinguished, and the yacht moved off. Leaning on the rail, I kept my eyes fixed on the vague spot where the body had disappeared. There lay Carmen’s dead body. A feeling of profound regret filled my heart. I remembered her dancing on the deck of the Ceylon and laughing over dinner in the Clarence Hotel. That was all over. Never more! Never more!
The wind grew colder.
‘East wind,’ called the sailor on night-watch.
‘It’s coming from Malta,’ I thought to myself.
And my last tears fell into the sea.