Death with Interruptions (7 page)

Angered by the continual invasion of their territories by commandos of gravediggers, either employed by the maphia or there of their own volition, coming from that aberrant land where no one died, and after various futile diplomatic protests, the governments of the three neighboring countries decided, in a concerted action, to bring out their troops and protect their frontiers, with strict orders to shoot after the third warning. It's worth mentioning that the deaths of a few maphiosi shot down at almost point-blank range after crossing the line of separation, something we usually refer to as an occupational hazard, were immediately used as an excuse for the organization, in the name of personal safety and operational risks, to increase the prices on its list of services offered. Having mentioned this interesting little sidelight on the workings of the maphia's administration, let us move on to what really matters. Once again, using a tactically impeccable maneuver to circumvent the ditherings of the government and the doubts of the armed forces' high commands, the sergeants seized the initiative and became, in everyone's eyes, the promoters, and consequently also the heroes, of the popular protest movement that marched forth to demand, en masse, in squares, avenues and streets, the immediate return of the troops to the battle front. Indifferent to and untouched by the terrible problems faced by the country on this side of the border, struggling, as it was, with its quadruple crisis, demographic, social, political and economic, the countries on the other side had finally dropped their mask and revealed to the light of day their true face, that of harsh conquistadors and implacable imperialists. In shops and homes, on the radio, on the television and in the newspapers, what one heard and read was, They're jealous of us, they're envious of the fact that no one here dies, that's why they want to invade and occupy our territory so that they won't have to die either. After two days, marching flat out and with flags flying, singing patriotic songs like the "Marseillaise," "
Ça
Ira," "Maria da Fonte," the "Hino da Carta," "Nao Verás País Nenhum," "The Red Flag," the "Portuguesa," "God Save the King," "The Internationale," "Deutschland über Alles," the "Chant des Marais," and the "Stars and Stripes," the soldiers returned to the posts they had left, and there, armed to the teeth, waited staunchly for imminent attack and for glory. There was neither. Neither glory nor attack. There were few conquests and even less empire-building, for the aforementioned neighboring countries simply wanted to stop this new species of forced migrant being buried there without due authorization, and it wouldn't be so bad if all they did was bury them, but they brought them there to be killed, murdered, eliminated, finished off, since it was at the precise, fateful moment when they crossed the frontier, feet first so that the head would be aware of what was happening to the rest of the body, that the poor unfortunates passed away, uttered their last sigh. The two valiant camps faced each other, but the rivers will not run red with blood this time either. This had nothing to do with the men on this side of the border, for they knew they wouldn't die even if a burst of machine-gun fire cut them in two. Although, out of perfectly legitimate scientific curiosity, we should ask ourselves how the two halves could survive in cases where the stomach was left on one side and the intestines on the other. Whatever the truth of the matter, only a complete madman would have considered firing the first shot. And, thank god, it never was fired. Indeed, the only consequence of a few soldiers from the other side deciding to desert to the el dorado where no one dies was that they were sent straight back where they came from and where a court martial awaited them. This fact is entirely irrelevant to the narrative of the complicated story we've been telling and we will not speak of it again, but neither did we want merely to relegate it to the darkness of the inkwell. The court martial will probably decide a priori not to take account in their deliberations of the ingenuous desire for eternal life that has always inhabited the human heart, What would happen if we all lived forever, where would it end, the prosecution will ask, resorting to the lowest of rhetorical blows, and the defense, needless to say, won't have wit enough to come up with a fitting answer, for they have no idea where it will end either. Let us only hope that they do not shoot the poor devils. Then it really could be said that they went out for wool and came home shorn.

Let's change the subject. When we mentioned the suspicions harbored by the sergeants, and by their allies among certain second lieutenants and captains, about the maphia's direct involvement in the transportation of the dying to the border, we said that these suspicions were strengthened by certain subsequent events. The moment has come to reveal what those were and how they came about. Taking as their example the family of smallholders who began the whole process, what the maphia has been doing is simply crossing the border, burying the dead, and charging a small fortune for the service. With the difference that they paid no attention to the beauty of the site and never bothered to note down in their log-book any orographic or topographic reference points that might, in future, help tearful family members, repenting of their evil deeds, to find the grave again and beg forgiveness of the dead. One doesn't require a strategically acute mind to understand that the armies ranged along the other side of the three frontiers had begun to constitute a serious obstacle to funerary practices which had, up until then, taken place unobstructed. The maphia would not be what it is had it failed to find a solution to the problem. It really is a shame, if you will allow us a brief aside, that the brilliant intellects leading these criminal organizations should have departed from the strait and narrow path of respect for the law and disobeyed the wise biblical precept that urges us to earn our daily bread by the sweat of our brow, but facts are facts, and while repeating adamastor's sad words, ah, but my heart is sick to tell the tale, we will set down here the distressing news of the trick deployed by the maphia to get round a difficulty which was, to all appearances, insoluble. Before doing so, however, it might be as well to explain that the word sick, placed by the epic poet in the mouth of the unhappy giant adamastor, meant, in that context, profoundly sad, sorrowful, grief stricken, but for some years now, ordinary people have thought, and quite rightly too, that they could make use of that excellent word to express feelings of disgust, repugnance, loathing, which, as anyone will recognize, have nothing to do with the feelings described above. One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do. Obviously, the trick wasn't as simple as making sausages, stuff 'em, tie 'em up and stick 'em in the smoke-room, the matter took time, it required emissaries with false moustaches and hats with the brim low over their eyes, telegrams in code, conversations down secret phone lines, on red telephones, midnight meetings at crossroads, notes left under stones, all of which elements we had noted in the earlier negotiations, when, so to speak, they were playing at dice with the lives of the vigilantes. Nor must one think that these transactions were, as in the earlier case, purely bilateral. As well as the maphia in this country where no one dies, the maphias in the neighboring countries also took part in these talks, for that was the only way to protect both the independence of each criminal organization within the national framework in which it worked and the independence of their respective governments. It would be completely unacceptable, absolutely reprehensible for the maphia in one of those countries to negotiate directly with the administration of another. Things, however, did not reach that point, having been prevented from doing so up until now, as if by a last vestige of modesty, by the sacrosanct principle of national sovereignty, a principle as important to maphias as it is to governments, and while this is perfectly understandable in the latter, you might have your doubts when it came to criminal associations, until you remembered with what jealous brutality they defended their territories from the hegemonic ambitions of their professional colleagues. Coordinating all this, bringing together the general and the particular, balancing the interests of some with the interests of others, was not an easy task, which explains why, for two long, boring weeks of waiting, the soldiers had passed the time insulting each other over the loudspeakers, although always taking care not to overstep the mark, not to be too rude, in case the offense should go to the head of some particularly prickly lieutenant-colonel and then all hell would break loose. The biggest contributing factor in complicating and delaying the negotiations was the fact that none of the maphias in the other countries had teams of biddable vigilantes, and they therefore lacked the irresistible means of putting pressure on the government that had produced such excellent results here. Although this darker side of the negotiations has never been revealed, except in the form of the inevitable rumors, there are good reasons for thinking that the middle-ranking commanders of the armies in the neighboring countries, with the indulgent approval of their superior officers, had allowed themselves to be persuaded, god alone knows at what price, by the arguments of the local maphia spokesmen, to close their eyes to the unavoidable comings and goings, advances and retreats, in which the solution to the problem consisted. A child could have come up with the idea, but to put it into practice, he would, having reached what we call the age of reason, have had to go and knock on the door of the maphia's recruiting section and say, My vocation has brought me here, do with me as you will.

Lovers of concision, laconicism and economy of language will doubtless be asking, if the idea is such a simple one, why did we need all this waffle to arrive, at last, at the critical point. The answer is equally simple, and we will give it using a current and very trendy term, that will, we hope, make up for the archaisms with which, in the likely opinion of some, we have spattered this account as if with mold, and that term is context. Now everyone knows what we mean by context, but there could have been doubts had we rather dully used that dreadful archaism background, which is, moreover, not entirely faithful to the truth, given that the context gives not only the background, but all the innumerable other grounds that exist between the subject observed and the line of the horizon. It would be better then if we called it a framework. Yes, a framework, and now that we finally have it well and truly framed, the moment has come to reveal the nature of the trick that the maphia thought up to avoid any chance of a conflict that might prejudice their interests. As we have said, a child could have come up with the idea. It was this, to take the sufferer across the frontier, and, once he or she had died, to bring him or her back to be buried in the maternal bosom of his country of origin. A perfect checkmate in the most rigorous, exact and precise meaning of the word. As we have seen, the problem was resolved without discredit to any of the parties, and the four armies, who now had no reason to remain at the frontier on a war footing, could withdraw peacefully, since the maphia proposed simply to enter and then leave again, for, as we have said before, the dying expired the moment they were transported to the other side, and now there will be no need for them to linger even for a minute, merely the time it takes to die, and that, which has always been the briefest of moments, just a sigh, that's all, so you can imagine how it would be in this case, a candle that suddenly burns itself out without anyone even having to blow. Not even the gentlest of euthanasias could be as easy or as sweet. The most interesting aspect of the new situation is that the justice system of the country in which people do not die finds itself without any legal basis on which to take action against the buriers, always supposing they really wanted to, and not just because of the gentlemen's agreement that the government was forced to make with the maphia. It can't accuse them of homicide because, technically speaking, no homicide takes place, and also because the reprehensible act, and if anyone can find a better way of describing it, then please do, takes place abroad, and they can't even accuse them of burying the dead, since that is the natural fate of the dead, and they should be grateful that there is someone prepared to take on a task which, however you look at it, is a painful one, both from the physical and the psychological viewpoint. They could, at most, allege that no doctor was present to record the death, that the burial did not fulfill the regulations set down for a correct interment and that, as if such a thing were quite unheard of, the grave is not only unmarked, but will certainly be lost from view once the first heavy rains come and the plants push up, tender and joyful, through the fertile soil. Having considered all the difficulties, and concerned that it might be plunged into the swamp of appeals in which, the maphia's clever lawyers, inveterate intriguers, would mercilessly drown them, the law decided to wait patiently to see how things turned out. This was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most prudent attitude to take. The country is in an unparalleled state of unrest, the powers-that-be are confused, authority undermined, moral values are rapidly being turned on their head, and a loss of any sense of civic respect is sweeping all sectors of society, probably even god has no idea where he's taking us. There is a rumor that the maphia is negotiating another gentlemen's agreement with the funeral industry in the hope of rationalizing their efforts and spreading the workload, which means, in ordinary, everyday language, that they will supply the dead, and the undertakers will contribute the means and the technical expertise for burying them. It is also said that the maphia's proposal was welcomed with open arms by the undertakers, weary of wasting their millennia of knowledge, their experience, their know-how, and their choirs of professional mourners, on arranging funerals for dogs, cats and canaries, as well as the occasional cockatoo, a catatonic tortoise, a tame squirrel and a pet lizard whose owner used to carry it around on his shoulder. We have never sunk so low, they said. Now the future looked bright and cheerful, hopes bloomed like flowerbeds, indeed, one might even say, at the risk of the obvious paradox, that the funeral industry was reborn. And all thanks to the good offices and inexhaustible money vaults of the maphia. It provided subsidies to businesses in the capital and in other cities round the country for them to set up new branches, and the maphia was, of course, duly recompensed, in localities near the frontiers, it made arrangements for a doctor to be present when the dead person was brought back across the border and someone was required to declare them dead, and agreements were reached with local councils that the burials in the maphia's charge should have absolute priority, regardless of the hour of day or night when it chose to carry these out. Naturally, all of this cost a lot of money, but now that the extras and the supplementary services accounted for most of the bill, the business continued to be profitable. Then, without warning, the tap from which had flowed a constant, generous supply of the terminally dying was turned off. It seemed that families, suffering an attack of conscience, had passed the word from one to the other that they were no longer going to send their loved ones far away to die, that if, in the figurative sense, we had eaten of their flesh, then now we would have to gnaw on their bones as well, that we are not here just for the good times, when our loved ones had strength and health intact, we are here, too, for the bad times and the worst, when they have become little more than a stinking rag that there is no point in washing. The undertakers went from euphoria to despair, were thrown back into ruin and the humiliation of burying canaries and cats, dogs and the rest of the menagerie, the turtle, the cockatoo, the squirrel, but not the lizard because that had been the only one that let its owner carry it about on his shoulder. The maphia remained calm, kept their nerve, and immediately set out to investigate what was going on. It was quite simple. The families told them, although not always in so many words, that acting in secret had been one thing, with their loved ones carried off at dead of night, and when there was no way the neighbors could know if they were still lying racked on their bed of pain or had simply evaporated. It was easy to lie, to say sadly, Still here, poor thing, when you met your next-door neighbor on the landing and she asked, So how's grandpa these days. Now everything would be different, there would be a death certificate, there would be plaques in the cemeteries engraved with names and surnames, in a matter of hours the whole envious, slanderous neighborhood would know that grandpa had died in the only way he could die, which meant, quite simply, that his own cruel, ungrateful family had dispatched him to the frontier. It makes us feel ashamed, they confessed. The maphia listened and listened and said they would think about it. This took no more than twenty-four hours. Following the example of the old gentleman on page thirty-three, the dead had wanted to die and their deaths would, therefore, be recorded on death certificates as suicides. The tap was turned on again.