When She died after long weeks of death throes and morphine, of hope, of sad news forcefully denied, the Barrio Norte closed its doors and windows, imposing silence on the joy it celebrates with champagne. The most intelligent among them ventured: “What do you want me to say. To me, and I’m not usually wrong, this feels like the beginning of the end.”
All the many things, poor millionaires, She had made them swallow. And the sad part was that She had been infinitely more beautiful than those fat ladies, their wives, who still smelled of manure, as an Argentinean once said. Now also they could swallow the polite smiles with which they had greeted the orders and humiliations. Because everyone felt, with no proof besides the speeches delivered in the Plaza Mayor, that She was, in this incredible reality, more dangerous than the shady political and economic oscillations of Him, the commanding commander, He who commanded us all.
When She finally died, killing off hopes and desires, it was the end of July, a time of year filled with cruelties, cold, wind, downpours. From skies blackened with clouds and night fell a slow, implacable rain, in needles that threatened to last forever. They ignored coats and human skin only to soak bones and marrows without delay.
The humidity increased the sour smell of the threadbare garments of makeshift mourning: almost motionless, wordless, because only one person was to blame for their misfortune and he could not be named even though he was the master of the cold, the rain, the wind, and the misfortune.
According to the tale, so often closer to the truth than History written and published with a capital H, five doctors surrounded the bed of the dying woman. And all five agreed that science had its limitations.
Downstairs there was another man, impatient, pacing, on the telephone answering questions from generous or friendly journalists, perhaps also a doctor, though this doesn’t matter in the least.
He was Catalan, a well-known professional embalmer summoned by Him a month ago to prevent the sick woman’s body from undergoing the fate of all flesh.
And there was a silent but dogged struggle among the five men upstairs and the one man below. Because if this one believed to a point of distraction only in the Virgin of Montserrat, those upstairs were divided among the Virgins of Luján, La Rioja, las Siete Llagas, and between the Virgins of San Telmo and Socorro. But they agreed on the basics, on the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. And they believed in the Sunday belches of priests.
In order to carry out his agreement with Him, the Catalan embalmer needed to give the corpse its first injection half an hour before it was declared as such. The unyielding believers upstairs wholly opposed the embalming, even though said Catalan had shared generous and indisputable evidence of his talent. I remember the photo in a brochure of a child who died at twelve years old sitting peacefully in a chair dressed in an impeccable sailor suit. They displayed the mummy every time he would have had a birthday – he was scornful, time didn’t exist, his cheeks were still rosy and his glass eyes shone with malice – and, inexorably, on the anniversaries of his death. Twice a year he held the place of honor, and the relatives who remained – time did exist – sat around him drinking tea with cake and maybe a shot of anisette.
They opposed the first and indispensable injection. Because the Holy Faith that united them distributed souls so they would listen forever to the music of angels who would never change their musical staff – or maybe their confused little heads had memorized them – or so they would relish tortures never conceived of by terrestrial policemen.
So, when those liters of morphine stopped breathing, they looked at each other and nodded and looked at their watches. It was precisely 20:00. One lit a cigarette, others yielded their exhaustion to chairs.
Now they were waiting for decomposition to commence, for a green fly, in spite of the season, to land on Her open lips. Because the Holy Church ordered them to breathe in cadaverine, the almost immediate stench, and imagine the exhausting task of seven generations of worms. All this in keeping with God’s wishes, which they respected and feared. The minutes pass quickly when a qualified man safeguards his faith.
Emilio, the most obedient one to the unquestionable manifestations of the deity, said:
“Hey, turn up the heat.”
Later, they decided to go downstairs to deliver the news, sad and expected.
He was eating dinner and nodded. He then expressed gratitude for the services rendered and asked that their honorariums be paid. Then He pointed randomly at one of the men in uniform and ordered the radio stations, priority given to His own, to be instructed to report the news.
The Catalan doctor climbed the stairs two at a time, carrying his small suitcase. He prepared the injection and was dismayed when he felt how cold the corpse was.
The doors remained shut, and the crowd began to squabble and shift. The police stopped offering little cups of cold coffee and immediately there appeared vendors of chorizo, pastries, hot drinks, peanuts, dried fruit, chocolates. Few made any money because the first contingent began to arrive at nine at night from the neighborhoods unknown to the inhabitants of the Great City, from the slums, from shacks made of tin, automobile crates, caves, from the earth itself, now mud. They soiled the silent and uninhibited city, lit candles in any concavity the walls along the avenue offered, on the marble statues on the way up to the locked gates. The rain and the wind respected some of the flames; others not. People hung up cards and clippings from magazines and newspapers that unfaithfully reproduced the extraordinary beauty of the dead woman, now gone forever.
At ten in the morning they were allowed to proceed, two meters every half hour, allowed to pass through the doors of the ministry in groups of five, pushed and beaten; the blows preferred by the military were knees to the ovaries, a blessed cure for hysteria.
At noon word spread from block to block, along meters and meters of the slow-moving line: “Her forehead is green. They’re closing so they can paint Her.”
And this was the most accepted rumor because, although untrue, it was perfectly apt for the thousands and thousands of necrophiliacs, muttering and grief-stricken.