forgive Jaume, even return the favor and invite him to the party of his own lowliness, continuing the exchange of small, everyday evils as if nothing had happened. After all, they were people of transactions—they knew how to play with prices and stock values. It was precisely because they understood each other that his repugnance was so strong. Jaume could have gotten violent, he could have scuttled all the things on the desk onto the floor, picked up the letter opener and threatened him, asked him who he thought he was. But he just said, “I’m going to the funeral.”
And he went to the closet, resolutely and silently. It was worse than physical violence; it was as if he shouted: You think you’ve taught me some big lesson, but I’m the one going to the funeral, not you. Me, I’m from here. You don’t have even the slightest idea of what’s going on. You’re an outsider. I’m from here and so are my parents and my wife and my children. So just shut up. You think you have the simplicity of those dead boys in your favor. Well, here’s something else that’s simple: I am in mourning, I will go to the funeral, I will share in the town’s grief, I will be with them, I will cry with them. I’m dying to cry with them. Just wait, you’ll see what a big crowd there’ll be. We won’t all fit into the church. Look at the square. The whole high school is there. The soccer team. The parade association. Those boys’ friends. You see the young people? You see the old fogeys? We’ll all be there. We’ll flood the church with tears. And the church isn’t more than two hundred meters from this office. I’ll have to wipe my feet before I come back in. I will be there and you will be here, doing numbers and thinking about your daughters. Go to hell. You stay here to watch over the office in case some other outsider like you comes in. I’ll be there, listening to the mass with the others. I’ll hear the wails of their parents and friends, the sobs echoing against the church walls as they have for a thousand years, me and everyone else will be buried there among the dead, it will be a physical thing and not one of your jokes, I will be there with my people and you here adding up numbers, waiting, and contemplating. That’s the truth and not your moralizing. Save your morality for the day your daughters are killed. Then we’ll see if you still feel like giving lessons.
He was used to hearing the bells toll for the dead and watching funerals from the bank office, but this time, alone behind the desk, as the church door swallowed up the swarm of people, he had the impression that the bells tolled louder than ever, twice as loud, four, eight times louder, because there were two boys dead and Jaume had left him alone in the office. They came through the glass with such intensity. They rang so loud. Why such immodesty? Did they have to tell everyone that the boys had finally reached the moment of knowing everything, of seeing everything, of understanding their own existence completely? Did it have to be shouted from the rooftops? We spend our lives in retreat, only at the bottom of the well can we know if life was worth living or not, or, to put it better even though it’s the same thing: only then can we know whether we can know if life was worth living. But we can’t communicate that knowledge. Why toll the bells? To remind him that, when the moment comes, his death will also serve to torment others?
He searched for Mr. Cals amid the crowd in the square. He tried to figure out who Lluís could be. He looked for his coworker’s wife and children. He recognized clients. The host of Radio Vidreres must have been there as well, because only music was heard on that bandwidth.
Once everyone was inside the church, the first hearse was able to enter the square, backing up to the doors. Two funeral home employees dressed like businessmen unloaded the first coffin. They went up the steps and put it on a metal platform with wheels. The empty car moved aside, and the second car entered the square.
Inside the church they waited for the dead with the same expectation they would have for a bride and groom. Which brother was in which box? Did they have little plaques with their names, or was that not necessary? We live fighting against randomness: there has to be a protocol. Would it be the older brother who entered the church first—first to arrive, first to leave? The same employees carried out the same task. Afterward, the second car left the church door and parked beside the other one, in the middle of the square.
He switched off the radio. He wanted some excuse to call home. He let the feeling pass through him, the way he let mornings in the office pass. He didn’t want to turn himself into a bell tower. It was sunny, no one was left on the street, the kiosk and the bakery were shuttered. He thought of the priest, the poor guy, having to serve as a hinge, having to speak when there’s nothing to say. He thought of that little man he watched go in and out of the church each day, thought of his self-censure, of his self-control, of a priest’s forced cerebral mutilation, of his sacrifice for his parish, his loyalty to lies and ritual. Unless he was a con man and lived off others’ weakness.
Most people hadn’t gone to the wake, but some of them, the closest relatives, had. They had seen the boys displayed in their two coffins, humiliated like stuffed animals in the double zoo of their death: caged by rigor mortis and caged by the glass-topped coffins. Or perhaps it was their victory, their revenge, and it is the dead that watch over us.
And then he heard an engine approaching the square, a truck, it had to be from somewhere else, on that day, and it was already strange that it was squeezing its way down such narrow streets. He approached the door to watch it pass. It was carrying a load of hay bales. Bales of hay in January. You saw them going back and forth in June and July, after the harvest, or in the months following, but never at this time of year. . . They were the old style of bales, rectangular and small; someone must have ordered them for the animals they kept, they must be coming from Llagostera or Cassà, the truck driver was confused, he was looking for someone to ask what was going on, where were the owners of the house where he was scheduled to drop them off, why had he found it locked . . .
When he saw that he’d reached the church square, the driver put the truck in neutral in the middle of the street and got out of the cab. He was a tall man, about thirty years old, with short hair and a Van Dyke beard, and the strong body of a young hauler. He had bits of straw stuck in his blue sweater. Ernest half hid behind a column, and the truck driver looked toward the closed bakery and kiosk not understanding a thing. He checked his watch and then walked slowly over to the community social club. The door was open. He found the place empty except for Cindy, the South American girl who worked behind the bar. She must have explained to him what was going on, must have told him he should park and have a coffee while the funeral finished, because after a second the truck driver left the club, got into the cab, and parked down the street.
They died so young they took the whole town’s life with them, the trucker must have thought. He hadn’t parked in Vidreres, he’d parked in the Vidreres cemetery, with niches like houses; a cemetery with a kiosk, a bakery, and a bank; a cemetery with streets, with a church; a cemetery with a cemetery; with a club and a parking lot filled with empty cars. That’s what the afterlife must be like: solitude and walls.
Meanwhile, the priest spoke, and no one took their eyes off the two coffins, placed perpendicular to the altar at Christ’s feet. And while the entire town of Vidreres, locked up tight in the church, struggled not to imagine the dead brothers’ bodies, their faces, while they all tried to shrug off their curiosity, tried not to want to know what clothes the poor saps were wearing, nor who’d had to decide on the shirts the boys would wear to their own funeral and pull them out of the closet . . . Who had chosen the pants, the socks, the shoes, which weren’t their usual Sunday morning shoes but imposter shoes, an attempt to fool them, to pretend that perhaps they could warm their feet, as it should be in a tolerable world where parents died before their children . . . The pretense dignified the shoes, made them useful in their attempt to console, because useless objects are monstrous; he was sick of seeing it at the bank, money rotting in the vaults and creating bad blood between relatives . . . But, at the moment of truth, the shoes made the cadavers more contemptible, because death won the match, infecting the clothes and the coffins, infecting the church and all of Vidreres with its ugliness. Not even the consolation trick worked. When he got home each day, the first thing Ernest wanted to do was loosen the laces and take off his shoes . . . and those shoes would last longer than the feet they were on. Meanwhile, in the church, no one wanted to know who had pulled them out of the closet, whether it was their mother, their aunt, or their father, all three of whom were sitting in the front row with their backs to everyone and facing the coffins, contaminated;