Death with Interruptions

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APART FROM A FEW RARE INSTANCES, AS WITH THOSE UNUSUally perspicacious people whom we mentioned before, who, as they lay dying, spotted her at the foot of the bed in the classic garb of a ghost swathed in a white sheet or, as appears to have happened with proust, in the guise of a fat woman dressed in black, death is usually very discreet and prefers not to be noticed, especially if circumstances oblige her to go out into the street. There is a widely held belief that since death, as some like to say, is one side of a coin of which god is the reverse, she must, like him, by her very nature, be invisible. Well, it isn't quite like that. We are reliable witnesses to the fact that death is a skeleton wrapped in a sheet, that she lives in a chilly room accompanied by a rusty old scythe that never replies to questions, and is surrounded only by cobwebs and a few dozen filing cabinets with large drawers stuffed with index cards. One can understand, therefore, why death wouldn't want to appear before people in that get-up, firstly, for reasons of personal pride, secondly, so that the poor passers-by wouldn't die of fright when, on turning a corner, they came face to face with those large empty eye-sockets. In public, of course, death makes herself invisible, but not in private, at the critical moment, as attested by the writer marcel proust and those other unusually perspicacious people. The case of god is different. However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes and not because he can't, since for him nothing is impossible, it's simply that he wouldn't know what face to wear when introducing himself to the beings he supposedly created and who probably wouldn't recognize him anyway. There are those who say we're very fortunate that god chooses not to appear before us, because compared with the shock we would get were such a thing to happen, our fear of death would be mere child's play. Besides, all the many things that have been said about god and about death are nothing but stories, and this is just another one.

Anyway, death decided to go into town. She took off the sheet, which was all she was wearing, carefully folded it up and hung it over the back of the chair where we have seen her sitting. Apart from the chair and the desk, apart, too, from the filing cabinets and the scythe, the room is otherwise bare, save for that narrow door which leads we know not where. Since it appears to be the only way out, it would be logical to think that death will pass through there in order to go into town, however, this proves not to be the case. Without the sheet, death seemed to lose height, she's probably, at most, in human measurements, a meter sixty-six or sixty-seven, and when naked, without a thread of clothing on, she seems still smaller, almost a tiny ado lescent skeleton. No one would say that this is the same death who so violently rejected our hand on her shoulder when, moved by misplaced feelings of pity, we tried to offer solace in her sadness. There really is nothing in the world as naked as a skeleton. In life, it walks around doubly clothed, first by the flesh concealing it, then by the clothes with which said flesh likes to cover itself, if it hasn't removed them to take a bath or to engage in other more pleasurable activities. Reduced to what she really is, the half-dismantled scaffolding of someone who long ago ceased to exist, all that remains for death now is to disappear. And that is precisely what is happening to her, from her head to her toes. Before our astonished eyes, her bones are losing substance and solidity, her edges are growing blurred, what was solid is becoming gaseous, spreading everywhere like a tenuous mist, it's as if her skeleton were evaporating, now she's just a vague sketch through which one can see the indifferent scythe, and suddenly death is no longer there, she was and now she isn't, or she is, but we can't see her, or not even that, she simply passed straight through the ceiling of the subterranean room, through the enormous mass of earth above, and set off, as she had privately determined to do when the violet-colored letter was returned to her for the third time. We know where she's going. She can't kill the cellist, but she wants to see him, to have him there before her gaze, to touch him without his realizing. She's convinced that she will one day find a way of getting rid of him without breaking too many rules, but meanwhile she will find out who he is, this man whom death's warnings could not reach, what powers he has, if any, or if, like an innocent fool, he continues to live, never once thinking that he ought to be dead. Shut up in this cold room with no windows and only a narrow door leading who knows where, we hadn't noticed how quickly time passes. It's three o'clock in the morning, and death must already be in the cellist's house.

So it is. One of the things that death finds most tiring is the effort it takes to stop herself seeing everything everywhere simultaneously. In that respect, too, she is very like god. For although the fact doesn't appear among the verifiable data of human sensorial experience, we have been accustomed to believe, ever since we were children, that god and death, those supreme eminences, are everywhere always, that is, omnipresent, a word, like so many others, made up of space and time. It's highly likely, however, that when we think this, and perhaps even more so when we put it into words, considering how easily words leave our mouths, we have no clear idea what we mean. It's easy enough to say that god is everywhere and that death is everywhere too, but we don't seem to realize that if they really are everywhere, then, inevitably, in all the infinite parts in which they find themselves, they see everything there is to see. Since god is duty-bound to be, at one and the same time, everywhere in the whole universe, because otherwise there would be no point in his having created it, it would be ridiculous to expect him to take a particular interest in little planet earth, which, and this is something that has not perhaps occurred to anyone else, he may know by some other completely different name, but death, the same death which, as we said a few pages earlier, is bound exclusively to the human race, doesn't take her eyes off us for a minute, so much so that even those who are not yet due to die feel her gaze pursuing them constantly. This will give some idea of the herculean effort death was obliged to make on the rare occasions when, for one reason or another, throughout our shared history, she has had to reduce her perceptive abilities down to our human level, that is, to see just one thing at a time, to be in only one place at any one moment. In the particular case that concerns us today, that is the only way to explain why she has not yet managed to get any further than the hallway of the cellist's apartment. With each step she takes, and we only call it a step to help the reader's imagination, not because she actually requires legs and feet to move, death has to struggle hard to repress the expansive tendency inherent in her nature, and which, if given free rein, would immediately explode and shatter the precarious and unstable unity so painfully achieved. The cellist who failed to receive the violet-colored letter lives in the kind of apartment that could be categorized as comfortable, and therefore more suited to a petit bourgeois with limited horizons than to a disciple of euterpe. You enter via a corridor where, in the darkness, you can just about make out five doors, one at the far end, which, just so that we don't have to repeat ourselves, gives access to the bathroom, with two doors to either side of it. The first door on the left as you go in, which is where death decides to begin her inspection, opens onto a small dining room which shows every sign of being little used, and in turn leads into an even smaller kitchen, equipped only with the basics. From there you go back out into the corridor, immediately opposite a door which death didn't even need to touch to know that it wasn't used, that is, it neither opens nor closes, a turn of phrase which defies the simple facts, for a door of which you can say that it neither opens nor closes is merely a closed door that you cannot open, or as it is also known, a condemned door. Death, of course, could walk straight through it and through whatever lay behind it, but even though she is still invisible to ordinary eyes, it nevertheless took a great deal of effort to form and define herself into a more or less human shape, although, as we mentioned before, not to the extent of having legs and feet, and she is not prepared now to run the risk of relaxing and becoming dispersed in the wooden interior of a door or the wardrobe full of clothes that is doubtless on the other side. So death continued along the corridor to the first proper door on the right and, going through that door, she found herself in the music room, for what other name could you give to a room where you find an open piano and a cello, a music stand bearing robert schumann's three fantasy pieces opus seventy-three, as death is able to read in the pale orangish light from a street lamp pouring in through the two windows, as well as, here and there, piles of sheet music, and, of course, the tall shelves of books where literature appears to live alongside music in the most perfect harmony, she who was once the daughter of ares and aphrodite, but is now the science of chords. Death caressed the strings of the cello, softly ran her fingers over the keys of the piano, but only she could have heard the sound of the instruments, a long, grave moan followed by a brief bird-like trill, both inaudible to human ears, but clear and precise to someone who had long ago learned to interpret the meaning of sighs. There, in the room next door, must be where the man sleeps. The door is open, the darkness, although it is darker there than in the music room, nevertheless reveals a bed and the shape of someone lying there. Death advances, crosses the threshold, but then stops, hesitant, when she feels the presence of two living beings in the room. Aware of certain facts of life, although, naturally enough, not from personal experience, it occurred to death that perhaps the man had company and that another person was sleeping beside him, someone to whom she had not yet sent a violet-colored letter, but who, in this apartment, shared the shelter of the same sheets and the warmth of the same blanket. She went closer, almost brushing, if one can say such a thing of death, the bedside table, and saw that the man was alone. However, on the other side of the bed, curled up on the carpet like a ball of wool, slept a medium-sized dog with dark, probably black hair. As far as death could remember, this was the first time she had found herself thinking that, given that she dealt only with human deaths, this animal was beyond the reach of her symbolic scythe, that her power could not touch him however lightly, and that this sleeping dog would also become immortal, although who knows for how long, if his death, the other death, the one in charge of all other living beings, animal and vegetable, were to absent herself as she had done, giving someone the perfect reason to begin a book with the words The next day no dog died. The man stirred, perhaps he was dreaming, perhaps he was still playing the three schumann pieces and had played a wrong note, a cello isn't like a piano, on the piano, the notes are always in the same places, underneath each key, while on the cello they're scattered along the length of the strings, and you have to go and look for them, to pin them down, find the exact point, move the bow at just the right angle and with just the right pressure, so nothing could be easier than to hit one or two wrong notes while you're sleeping. As death leaned forward to get a better look at the man's face, she had an absolutely brilliant idea, it occurred to her that the index cards in her archive should each bear a photograph of the person in question, not an ordinary photograph, but one so scientifically advanced that, just as the details of people's lives were continually and automatically being updated, so their image would change with passing time, from the red and wrinkled babe in arms to today, when we wonder if we really are the person we were, or if, with each passing hour, some genie of the lamp is not constantly replacing us with someone else. The man stirred again, it seems as if he's about to wake, but no, his breathing returns to its normal rhythm, the same thirteen breaths a minute, his left hand rests on his heart as if he were listening to the beats, an open note for diastole, a closed note for systole, while the right hand, palm uppermost and fingers slightly curved, seems to be waiting for another hand to clasp it. The man looks older than his fifty years, or perhaps not older, perhaps he's merely tired, or sad, but this we will only know when he opens his eyes. He has lost some of his hair, and much of what remains is already white. He's a perfectly ordinary man, neither ugly nor handsome. Looking at him now, lying on his back, his striped pajama jacket exposed by the turned-down sheet, no one would think he was first cellist in one of the city's symphony orchestras, that his life runs between the magical lines of the pentagram, perhaps, who knows, searching for the deep heart of the music, pause, sound, systole, diastole. Still annoyed by the failure of the state's postal communications system, but not as irritated as when she arrived, death looks at the man's sleeping face and thinks vaguely that he should be dead, that the heart being protected by his left hand should be still and empty, frozen forever in that last contraction. She came to see this man and now that she has, there is nothing sufficiently special about him to explain why the violet-colored letter was returned three times, the best she can do after this is to return to the cold, subterranean room whence she came and to discover a way of resolving this wretched stroke of fate that has turned this scraper of cellos into a survivor of himself. Death used those two aggressive words, wretched and scraper, in order to rouse her now dwindling sense of annoyance, but the attempt failed. The man sleeping there is not to blame for what happened with the violet-colored letter, nor can he have even the remotest idea that he is living a life that should no longer be his, that if things had turned out as they should, he would have been dead and buried now for a good week, and that his dog would be running around the city like a mad thing, looking for his master, or else sitting, without eating or drinking, at the entrance to the building, waiting for him to come back. For a moment, death let herself go, expanding out as far as the walls, filling that whole room and flowing into the room next door, where a part of her stopped to look at the sheet music open on a chair, it was suite number six opus one thousand and twelve in d major by johann sebastian bach, composed in köthen, and she didn't need to be able to read music to know that it had been written, like beethoven's ninth symphony, in the key of joy, of unity between men, of friendship and of love. Then something extraordinary happened, something unimaginable, death fell to her knees, for she had a body now, which is why she had knees and legs and feet and arms and hands, and a face which she covered with her hands, and shoulders, which, for some reason, were shaking, she can't be crying, you can't expect that from someone who, wherever she goes, has always left a trail of tears behind her, without one of those tears shed being hers. Just as she was, neither visible nor invisible, neither skeleton nor woman, she leapt, light as air, to her feet and went back into the bedroom. The man had not moved. Death thought, There's nothing more for me to do here, I'm leaving, it was hardly worth coming really just to see a man and a dog asleep, perhaps they're dreaming about each other, the man about the dog, the dog about the man, the dog dreaming that it's morning already and that he's laying his head down beside the man's head, the man dreaming that it's morning already and that his left arm is grasping the soft, warm body of the dog and hold ing it close to his breast. Beside the wardrobe blocking the door that would otherwise open onto the corridor is a small sofa where death has gone to sit. She hadn't intended to, but she went to sit down in that corner anyway, perhaps remembering how cold it would be at that hour in her subterranean archive room. Her eyes are on a level now with the man's head, she can see his profile clearly silhouetted against the backdrop of that vague, orangey light coming in through the window and she repeats to herself that there's no rational reason for staying there, but she immediately argues with herself that there is, that there is a reason, and a very good one, because this is the only house in the city, in the country, in the whole world, where someone is infringing on the harshest of nature's laws, the law that imposes on us both life and death, which did not ask if you wanted to live, and which will not ask if you want to die. This man is dead, she thought, all those beings doomed to die are already dead, all it takes is for me to flick them lightly with my thumb or to send them a violet-colored letter that they cannot refuse. This man isn't dead, she thought, in a few hours' time he'll wake up, he'll get out of bed as he does every day, he'll open the back door to let the dog out into the garden to relieve itself, he'll eat his breakfast, he'll go into the bathroom from where he'll emerge refreshed, washed and shaved, perhaps he'll sally forth into the street, taking the dog with him so that they can buy the morning newspaper together at the corner kiosk, perhaps he'll sit down in front of the music stand and again play the three pieces by schumann, perhaps afterward he'll think about death as all human beings must, although he's unaware that at this very moment, he is as if immortal, because the figure of death looking at him doesn't know how to kill him. The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying. A minute later, he was awake. He was thirsty. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. Death followed him. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. A little water remained in his glass. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. The dog returned, wagging his tail. Let's go back to sleep, said the man. They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap.