emblem and his pride and joy (when this last fact dawned on me, I could not help but feel a twinge of resentment, for I had set my heart on that beauty, nor, at that precise moment, could I help but consider myself a wretched soul), as well as anything else of value they could find in the drawers following a quick skim through their contents: the gold watch he never wore, his collection of fountain pens, and not much else as far as I could tell, perhaps one or two of the bottles of wine left lying around, so temptingly, for all to see, though they didn’t even have the good taste to choose the finest among them. They had told me over the phone that they’d be back soon, as soon as they could all coordinate their schedules a little, to see what was to be done with the books and all the rest, so that they could strip the apartment as quickly as possible, since it was rented, the meter was still running, and it wouldn’t do to carry on paying month after month without rhyme or reason. In theory, the idea was to pack it all up in boxes and take it off to some temporary spot with enough room for it all, the house they owned in his hometown, no doubt, so as to sort through it all more calmly at some later date when they had the energy and some time on their hands. I pictured that heap of crates loaded on board a white van, heading for the country, before gathering dust in the woodshed of some ramshackle, cobweb-filled house, next to the farm tools, the rusty scythes, the foul-smelling clay pots, and the discarded wineskins, the tape sealing Jacobo’s watercolor prints, his books, his love letters, his toy soldiers, a whole life packed away inside cardboard boxes and sprinkled liberally with rat poison.
8
(condolences)
The wake prior to the incineration was held in the rooms of the Torrero cemetery. If Jacobo’s family had decided to bury his remains rather than burn them, they would have done so in his hometown. It matters not that he had made the decision some time ago to distance himself from that place and return to it as little as possible. This is a common state of affairs. As soon as someone has definitively lost any chance of making themselves heard or protesting, everyone else acts as they see fit. I’ve even seen sung masses, the choir packed with angelical children, to send off the most steadfast of nonbelievers, in the epicurean belief that death, like anything else, remains the preserve of the living. Perhaps it would not have been such a bad thing if Jacobo’s remains had come to rest in the place he had spent so many years, no matter how often he had bad-mouthed the lovely Provincia and all its kindhearted folk who had fashioned a whole sophisticated system for whiling away their time out of snooping on others, speaking ill of their fellow men, and leaping to conclusions. It was, when all is said and done, for better or for worse, where his home was. And a home, an abode in the broadest sense of the word, need not always as a matter of course be the place where one lives, it can also stand for just the opposite, the place from which one is determined to beat a retreat, the little flag with a pin for a mast stuck into a point on the map, signaling, on the one hand, the place where, by dint of centuries and fate, the exact makeup of your own blood, blend after blend, has slowly been concocted, and on the other, the reference point thanks to which one can make a getaway, letting, as is only right, a little air, the rivers, and even, if possible, the sea currents come between you and it, to flee and never to go back; for even if you are never to return, you need a place to which you never return, precise coordinates that mark the spot on which you have decided to set up the ghostly camp of your absence, the chair on which you do not sit, the walls you do not hide behind, the steps you do not take, and the thousands of eyes that do not pin you to the spot.
Quite a throng had gathered in the corresponding room of
8
(condolences)
The wake prior to the incineration was held in the rooms of the Torrero cemetery. If Jacobo’s family had decided to bury his remains rather than burn them, they would have done so in his hometown. It matters not that he had made the decision some time ago to distance himself from that place and return to it as little as possible. This is a common state of affairs. As soon as someone has definitively lost any chance of making themselves heard or protesting, everyone else acts as they see fit. I’ve even seen sung masses, the choir packed with angelical children, to send off the most steadfast of nonbelievers, in the epicurean belief that death, like anything else, remains the preserve of the living. Perhaps it would not have been such a bad thing if Jacobo’s remains had come to rest in the place he had spent so many years, no matter how often he had bad-mouthed the lovely Provincia and all its kindhearted folk who had fashioned a whole sophisticated system for whiling away their time out of snooping on others, speaking ill of their fellow men, and leaping to conclusions. It was, when all is said and done, for better or for worse, where his home was. And a home, an abode in the broadest sense of the word, need not always as a matter of course be the place where one lives, it can also stand for just the opposite, the place from which one is determined to beat a retreat, the little flag with a pin for a mast stuck into a point on the map, signaling, on the one hand, the place where, by dint of centuries and fate, the exact makeup of your own blood, blend after blend, has slowly been concocted, and on the other, the reference point thanks to which one can make a getaway, letting, as is only right, a little air, the rivers, and even, if possible, the sea currents come between you and it, to flee and never to go back; for even if you are never to return, you need a place to which you never return, precise coordinates that mark the spot on which you have decided to set up the ghostly camp of your absence, the chair on which you do not sit, the walls you do not hide behind, the steps you do not take, and the thousands of eyes that do not pin you to the spot.
Quite a throng had gathered in the corresponding room of
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