April 1979

I

When Lola got home there was nobody waiting at the door to give her a kiss on the cheek, as much as she’d have liked there to be. Only a few years ago the children would shower her with kisses when she came through the door, kisses that were sticky with chocolate, the sweetest and most essential kind of kisses. When the kisses stopped they were replaced by a flurry of questions, all starting with a “Mum, did you know?” Any problems were left at the door. There was space only for love in that house, even if it wasn’t the kind of love you get between two adults. Now the kids were teenagers and they didn’t rush to the door to welcome her home at the end of the day anymore. That’s why she noticed her husband no longer kissed her and even when he did, his kisses didn’t make her feel the same way she had before; there wasn’t any point in her lying.

She found her daughter Ana exactly where she knew she would, glued to the television. Her eyes glazed over as she stared at the screen and only occasionally did she tear them away long enough to take a bite of her sandwich, her movements more robotic than they were conscious. Ana was sat on the sofa with a plate on her knees; the plate itself sat on top of a kitchen towel so it didn’t burn her legs. She was watching a music show; famous groups and artists sang while flamboyant dancers filled the stage around them. The presenter was wearing a green jumpsuit, a modern thing with a red belt that tied it in at the waist and legs that billowed out like an elephant’s foot. Ana was fascinated by this woman, so blonde and always so well dressed. The envy and example for every teenager like her. Everything was perfect on the TV screen. The screen transmitted images of a world where the winners were always beautiful and happy, the kind of world that Ana dreamed of and wanted for herself. Ana looked up to this presenter, not to Lola, her mother, who was a strong, rebellious woman who fought for what she believed in. Girls at Ana’s age seldom look up to their mothers or find them interesting, quite the contrary in fact.

Her fixation on the TV and the fact she’d turned the volume up high meant she didn’t hear her mum get in. She didn’t realize she was there until she was stood right in front of her. Lola, elegant and wearing a smile on her face like always, greeted her daughter warmly and thanked her for heating up dinner at a sensible time.

“Is your dad back yet?”

“No, he’s not,” she said, furtively glancing at her mother without taking her eyes off the screen for one moment.

“He must be on his way. We left the office at the same time, but he had a few things he wanted to sort out. He shouldn’t be long. I’ll get dinner ready for us.”

“Make some for Roberto too, he’s not back yet,” said Ana.

Hearing her son was late back again didn’t exactly please Lola; the latest marks he’d brought home hadn’t been as good as normal. As she spoke with Ana from the kitchen, she started cleaning up the plates her dad, Ana’s grandfather, had left on the marble-topped table when he’d had dinner earlier. She lit the gas stove, put a pan on and laid three places at the table. She’d always been able to do several things and talk at the same time. Once she’d finished she went back to the lounge to try and talk with her teenage daughter, entranced as she was by the television.

“Is grandad already in bed?”

“Yeah, he went to bed early. I got home at half six and haven’t seen him.”

“You haven’t seen him? Those plates might still be left over from lunch then. Maybe he hasn’t had dinner. Go up to his room and find out for me.”

Ana let out a sigh, annoyed she had to go upstairs, annoyed at the interruption and annoyed her mother would simply not stop talking. The only saving grace was that it was an ad break so she took another bite from her sandwich and set off to find her grandfather.

He’d been living with them for five years. Three or four months after his wife had died, he’d turned up at their door without any warning and with plans to stay indefinitely after living in Argentina for almost fifty years. He’d spent almost his entire life as an emigrant and had actually spent more time living there than he had here. He came from both places, but was also from neither of them. His accent gave him away; when he was there it sounded like he was from here and when he was here it sounded like he came from there. It was a sunny day when he arrived at the door with a small suitcase, rang the bell and told his daughter Lola he was here to stay. Nobody was expecting it, but nobody asked any questions either. He was coming home perhaps because, in spite of his business and successes over there, he was on his own now. This is where he had his only family, his daughter, his grandchildren and also his home, and he was very welcome, he didn’t need to give any explanations.

Ana rushed to get back before the end of the ads and, as luck would have it, just as she stepped into the corridor she bumped into her brother Roberto who was in even more of a rush than her. She didn’t miss the chance to get him to go and find their grandfather instead.

“You’ve got to go and check on grandad. Mum’s cross with you for being late. She wants to know if he’s had dinner yet or not. Go and ask him.”

Roberto said he’d go. It meant he could delay the moment he had to face his mother for a bit longer; she wasn’t going to be in a good mood with him, that much he knew for free.

Arriving home late and getting bad marks all boiled down to the same thing: Roberto had started going out with a girl a few weeks earlier. He had asked a girl from class, Nuria, out on a date and now they were seeing each other. His exams fell at the exact same time he was walking around in a daze, thinking only about how he would ask Nuria to be his girlfriend. It took him a while to pluck up the courage. It wasn’t an easy thing to say, “Will you go out with me?” His closest friends, those who knew what Roberto was trying to do, thought Nuria was giving enough signs to mean she was interested in him too. They all agreed on that, but Roberto, after thinking about it non-stop hour after hour, sometimes managed to convince himself she definitely liked him back and sometimes exactly the opposite.

Whenever she was close to him, whenever she brushed past him in the chemistry lab where they were paired together because their surnames came next to each other in the alphabet, whenever he caught the scent of her perfume, Roberto felt as though his whole body was on fire. His heart would beat faster, he would feel as though he’d been turned inside out and his body would start shaking. If anyone saw him they’d think he was ill, not in love.

Sometimes he thought that when he finally got to kiss her, which is what he wanted more than anything in the world, he might even faint. Or maybe he wouldn’t know what to do, which would be worse because he’d want to die of shame. But in reality he’d already kissed her. He’d kissed her dozens of times, hundreds of times in his dreams, in his daydreams and as he lay in bed waiting to fall asleep. That’s when he kissed her most often.

Everything he felt he felt to the extreme: fear, love, confusion, nerves, happiness, pain. Nuria was on his mind all day long, from the moment he opened his eyes. She was the first person he thought about and the only thing he thought about. Nuria, Nuria, Nuria. It was as though there wasn’t room in his head for anything else. Nuria filled it all and she appeared everywhere, in maths equations, in chemistry formulas and in English vocabulary lists. Nothing was as interesting as she was.

They started spending more and more time together, and sometimes they even spent time alone. Everyone could tell they were in love. It was obvious. Sometimes the others would disappear so that it was just the two of them. Alone.

They laughed lots when they were together. She was fun, pretty and intelligent. They told each other all kinds of things; they always had something to talk about, but they never mentioned the things they really needed to tell each other and confess to. Roberto came close to saying it thousands of times, but he never managed it. He kept delaying the moment he would ask her to go out with him and his punishment for bad marks, having to spend several weekends grounded at home, didn’t help either. His best friend, Ramón, suggested he took a swig of brandy before asking her, he said it would give him strength, but Roberto wanted to be on the ball in front of her. The one time he’d had a bit too much to drink he’d acted really stupidly in public. Nuria was too important to leave things up to alcohol. Ramón, who had a lot more experience with women, spelled it out for him.

“You just can’t wait any longer, mate! What do you think she thinks you think?! She thinks you only want to be friends, that you’re never going to do anything! That’s enough to make anyone despair, Roberto! Drown her in boredom, why don’t you!” he finished.

Ramón’s analysis was damning, but true. All the fear, all the fears, had paralyzed him. He’d got stuck. He was scared that she didn’t love him and that would mean losing a friend and then he wouldn’t even be able to see her smile. That’s why he was OK with having a close friendship with her, speaking to her sometimes, smelling her scent and getting close enough to her that their skin would touch in stolen moments. But the truth was that none of that was enough. And so he decided to stop daydreaming and face up to reality, whatever the outcome.

She was stood in front of him, excitedly telling him about something or other. He looked at her, wondering what to do, what to say, how to say it. And that’s when it happened. He kissed her. Just like that. Out of nowhere. He kissed her. And the kiss spoke for him. Like when you see it happen in a film or read it in a book, so natural, perfect, soft. It lasted no time at all, but it also lasted a lifetime. And when their lips pulled away from each other, he asked her, “Do you want to go out with me?” And she said, “Yes.”

And so they were boyfriend and girlfriend, and Roberto got home late and she did too.

Time teaches you that things can change in an instant; they can stay exactly the same, not changing even a tiny bit for years and years, and then one decision can change the course of everything. There are decisions you can imagine thousands of times, but then you can’t bring yourself to actually go through with them. And then there are those decisions that mean changing our lives and these changes, even if we want them to happen, are scary because they are unknown and because nobody can guarantee they’ll have a happy ending.

But today Roberto could still feel the kiss Nuria had given him to say goodbye on his lips and it had felt mere moments old his whole way home. Maybe it was the wind, but he had felt the kiss still there, still dancing across his lips.

He pulled down on the door handle that led into his grandfather’s room; he was still in that lover’s daze and forgot to knock before he went in. Knocking wouldn’t have made any difference though because Anselmo was lying dead on the bed.

The room was quite dark, but the artificial light coming in from the street lamps outside meant Roberto could make out the body of the old man lying on the bed, slightly turned towards one side, as though he were asleep. He knelt down next to his grandfather, whose eyes were shut and whose hands were clasped together on top of his chest; there was a small bit of vomit on his pillow that made Roberto feel sick inside and wonder whether something had gone wrong. He lent in closer to try and figure out what was going on. He saw his grandfather’s unwieldy eyebrows and the peaceful expression on his face. It looked as though he was asleep, but falling out of his mouth was a pale string of vomit that left a whitish stain as it hit the pillow and caused Roberto some concern.

Roberto felt as though he couldn’t breathe. His chest was heaving up and down violently as he tried to find enough air to fill his lungs. His grandfather no longer appeared to be asleep, he looked dead. Roberto put his hand under his grandfather’s nose, trying to feel his breath run across his fingers, but he felt nothing at all. He felt for a pulse on one of his grandfather’s extremely thin wrists; both of his hands rested on his chest in an entirely undramatic way. He couldn’t find signs of life there either. He thought about taking the picture frame that was on his grandfather’s bedside table to see if the glass steamed up with his breath, but it didn’t. He put it back on the table. And he looked again at his grandfather, but this time he saw that he was dead.

He had wondered what it would be like when his grandfather died and had imagined it would be terribly painful and dramatic. But now his lifeless grandfather was there right in front of him, he couldn’t react, nor could he stop looking at him, stop looking at the body without the person, an empty shell. It felt morbid. He thought he was seeing something he shouldn’t be looking at, something that was extraordinarily intimate. Death should be an intimate affair, but nobody can control what happens when one dies, nor who can see you once you’re dead. He wanted to call for his mother, but he couldn’t speak because his voice drowned of its own accord and died in his throat before it ever made it out, entirely consumed by that moment he knew would be etched on his memory forever. It was then, not a moment before, as he remembered the others in the house and thought about his own pain, that tears flooded his eyes.

He got up from the side of the bed where he had been sitting and left the room, walking out backwards, watching his grandfather’s figure get further and further away until it looked as though he was sleeping again, like it had looked when he entered the first time. He closed the door behind him and when he was outside, called out quietly.

“Mum, Mum! Grandad’s dead,” he clutched his neck as his vocal cords completely failed him and found a piece of paper in his fist. He remembered taking it from his grandfather’s hand when he took his pulse. He tucked it into his shirt pocket and continued to clutch his neck, trying to force his voice out loud enough that people would hear. “Mum!! Grandad’s dead!!”

And this time his voice came out loud, cold and stilted. Ana and Nuria ran out of the kitchen and the living room, completely thrown, scared, possessed and bewitched by Roberto’s broken and bitter voice.

II

Day-to-day routines oppress feelings, kill off love, render people insensitive, deafen cries for help, make abnormal things normal and see people accept the status quo and give up fighting for anything else. The routine here was that after ten or twelve hours at work and one in the pub, Damián would walk in through the door, angry and without saying a word. Once he’d gone upstairs quickly and thrown his coat on the bed, he would sit down at the kitchen table and wait for his family to join him immediately and start dinner.

They weren’t strict rules, they were just part of the routine. Dinner had to land on the plate as soon as bums hit the chairs. There were no valid excuses for sitting down late to dinner; when he got home, books would be closed, the television turned off, phone calls finished up and everyone would congregate in the kitchen to start eating. The meal would begin in silence and then, once initial hunger pangs had been satisfied, they would start talking. Any deviation from these rules ended up, at best, with a fist slamming down on the table, but sometimes a plate was smashed against the floor or thrown against one of the walls, a swinging swipe might come down on one of the children. And that was the routine, everyone was used to it though nobody liked it.

But that Friday afternoon, once the keys had turned in the lock, Damián didn’t go straight to his room as he normally did. From the lounge they heard heavy steps and a call from Damián to:

“Come and see this!”

He seemed happy and excited. He carried on calling for his family, “Come on, come!”

Everyone left their natural safe harbour within the home, a house that had lots of residents but saw very few conversations take place. The mother left the kitchen, Ricardo came out of his room with a book in hand, Rita came from the bathroom where she’d probably spent some time preening in front of the mirror and Ramón was already in the lounge, stretched out on the pomegranate-coloured sofa; his father was so happy with his parcel that he barely noticed his son was there. He walked right past him, stepping over his feet and heading straight towards the television.

The package he was carrying wasn’t very big so Ramón ruled out the possibility it was a new colour TV, which was the only thing in the world he wanted. His best friend Roberto had one. He had a colour TV and all the latest gadgets on the market. His family were the first to have a yoghurt maker; it was not until years later that this kind of gadget reached Ramón’s home. Roberto’s family had been the first to decorate their house with wallpaper; they’d chosen one that was modern in design with huge and brightly coloured geometric patterns on it. They were the first to have leather sofas, the first to have a saloon car big enough for the whole family. They were always the first, sometimes the only ones; they were certainly the only ones with a pool and a colour TV.

Damián tore off the packaging and pulled out another package covered in plastic and sellotape that was a bit trickier to open and made him swear.

“Rosa, get me some scissors or a knife or something to open this goddamn parcel!”

Their mother rushed off for the scissors, groaning at the language her husband used, the kind of language they heard on a daily basis in their house. She was back quickly, rushed along by Damián.

Finally he opened the package and pulled from it the thing that had been causing such fuss: a TV antenna.

“It’s a rabbit-ear TV antenna,” proclaimed Damián with great excitement. “I’ve been thinking about buying it for ages and it’s finally here! Cor, look at it! We’re just as good as the neighbours, that’s why I work like a madman every single bloody day.”

“Watch your mouth, Damián!” Rosa said, confronting him. “And what exactly do we need a rabbit-ear TV antenna for? Was the TV not working before? You could have bought me a washing machine so I didn’t have to use a washboard, it kills my back, it really does…”

“That kind of thing is more expensive.”

“Well, my brother and sister already have one.”

“And I bet they’re paying for it in instalments. This family doesn’t pay for anything in instalments. If we don’t have enough money, then we don’t buy it.”

He put the new antenna on top of the TV set and moved the table it was sitting on so he could take the old antenna cable out and plug in the new one. The new antenna was a small thing; it had a white plastic base and two extendable metal rods coming out of it, very similar to the kind of rods cars have to pick up radio signals, but longer.

“Now you’re not going to manhandle the rods like animals and break them, are you? You’re all heavy-handed, you know, so make sure you move them carefully when you want to adjust them. Pull them out slowly and to bring them back in again don’t force them from the bottom; that will make the antenna double over and then it will lose its shape forever. Bring it down slowly, carefully, from the bottom, can you see?”

They all nodded but didn’t actually intend to do what he said. They nodded because it meant things could keep moving and they would get to see how the TV actually worked with this new antenna.

Damián asked Ramón to turn the TV on. Ramón got up from the sofa, plugged the TV in, pressed the button to turn it on and then pressed a different button to stabilize it. Right at that moment, as he was kneeling on the floor, his father’s hand swiped across him from above. And soon followed a long reprimand for not doing things “how God intended” and “how they should be done.”

“You don’t have any respect for anything. Do you think money grows on trees? God, I’ve told you thousands of times before that you have to turn the stabilizer on first and then the TV, not the other way round. That’s what the stabilizer is for, to make sure that a change in voltage doesn’t screw up the TV. A new one won’t suddenly appear if it breaks or do you think they give them out for free?”

The youngest ones sat on the three-seater sofa and didn’t pay much attention to the pre-programmed fuss that was kicking off. Nobody in that house batted an eyelid anymore at raised voices, they put up with them and that was that. Only when Ramón got really, really cross did they notice. But that hadn’t happened. There were already three of them sat on the sofa, including their mother, but they squeezed up so that Ramón, who was still being shouted at by his dad, could also fit on. They left some space for Damián in case he calmed down and wanted to sit and watch the TV. They were pressed up against each other like sardines in a tin. From the sofa they observed, but didn’t intervene in, the scene unfolding in front of them; the reprimanding wasn’t anything new to them and was quite a regular occurrence in that house.

The TV started to show signs of life with a thrumming, but the screen was still black.

“It’s warming up,” said Damián, “just wait a bit and you’ll see how great the image is. I tried it out in the shop. Now we’ll be able to watch the TV wherever we want, in the kitchen, in our rooms… We can leave it on the table and move it around and then we just connect it to the antenna and job done. We can watch it anywhere in the house, even on the patio if we want. And when the clock chimes on New Year’s Eve we can be eating grapes in the kitchen.” He was really excited with his new purchase.

The screen started to light up and thousands of little black and white dots appeared on it, flickering on and off while the thrumming continued, now quite high and really unpleasant.

There was nothing on the screen but Damián said that was because the rods needed to be adjusted. From the sofa they all sat watching the long, drawn-out process. Damián adjusted the two rods and started to turn them from the base that held up the V shape they made. He formed a wide V and opened the rods even further, moved them back together, pushed one back a bit and then both back together again…

Carme, the grandmother, came into the room quietly wondering why there was so much noise and excitement. There were some days when she was all there and others when she wasn’t, times when she could understand things and others when it seemed like she didn’t know what people were talking to her about and couldn’t recognize people. Time came and went in her mind like the images on the TV with that rabbit-ear antenna. Sometimes she could remember things and speak perfectly, sometimes the images got confused in her head rushing around with no direction or purpose. Sometimes images from the past took shape in her mind; these were moments when she could remember things from the deepest depths of her past with great precision but completely forget the present.

The old woman, who could have been thinking about the past or the present for all anyone could tell, sat down in one of the spare spots on the sofa. Rosa welcomed her mother-in-law with a smile, but the antenna had her undivided attention.

“Yes, yes, it’s working now… Ah, no, it’s gone now!”

“Yes, stop, stop! Now! Leave it there.”

“The spots are back! Try again, put it back where it was before, push it back a bit further.”

The image came and went. The sound was getting better. Sometimes they could make out the distorted face of Marisa Medina, a famous presenter, but it would then fall out of focus and the black and white dots would come back. The language Damián was using was too vulgar to put into words, as was where he said he’d stick the antenna if it turned out to be a rip-off and he had to take it back to the shop.

On the table in the hall a telephone rang unexpectedly. Ramón leapt up and left the living room. His friends knew that once his father was home they weren’t to ring him because he hated the phone ringing at home. One ring served as the perfect excuse for him to kick off a shouting match and hit out at the teenagers. He would accuse them of being on the phone for hours and wasting money.

“What on earth is the point of being on the phone when you’ve just been with your friends? It’s a waste of money. When I was young we didn’t have phones and we didn’t die if we didn’t speak to our friends for one afternoon. We didn’t even die when we didn’t speak with our girlfriends for one or two days at a time.”

Ramón couldn’t imagine who would be ringing at this time, but if it was a friend he was going to have strong words with him. That would have to wait until tomorrow though; today all he could do was get them off the phone as quickly as possible.

In the living room the image was perfect just for an instant. But when Damián took his hand off the antenna, the image disappeared again, even though the sound remained perfect in the background.

“When you’re holding the antenna the image is great. When you let it go it disappears. Leave your hand there!”

Damián’s anger really hit the roof then. It was hardly surprising, adjusting an antenna is tricky business and something that comes down to luck and luck alone. But in the midst of all this the TV started working, in black and white as it was supposed to be, but with a clear image on the screen. And Damián, satisfied with his purchase and completely forgetting everything he’d said about the shop and the equipment itself, said:

“There you have it, a portable TV! It’s going to change our lives.”

At that moment Ramón appeared in the doorway.

“Roberto rang. Anselmo’s dead.”

Everyone in the room was suddenly very serious. Roberto and his family, as well as being neighbours, were friends. Only the grandmother spoke.

“Anselmo died – again,” she said, looking down at her feet.

“No, grandma, this is the first time he’s died,” replied Ricardo kindly and no sooner had the words left his mouth than his father hit him across the cheek.

“Respect your grandmother, for crying out loud!! You don’t have any respect for her or her illness.”

“No, the other time he died, I killed him,” she mumbled, but nobody had anything else to add.

III

The wake took place in the very same room he died. The undertakers took care of everything from the moment they arrived at the house. They rang the doctor so the death certificate could be signed and they got all the most pressing papers in order. Once that was all done, they set about sorting everything else out. They dressed and arranged Anselmo’s body. They put it in a coffin and moved some furniture, including the bed, to Ana’s room so that they could drape pomegranate-coloured velvet curtains with golden tassels across one of the walls. It was in front of this wall that they positioned the coffin; the coffin lay on a pedestal draped with a velvet cloth that was almost like a theatre curtain. Everything felt like a set. The bedroom was ready for visitors and a frame with a studio portrait of Anselmo in Argentina when he was younger was put out; there was also a wreath of flowers hanging from either side of the window. The coffin was half-open, it covered the bottom half of his body but was open from the waist up. This way, visitors could see the body and those who wanted to could reach down and kiss the deceased.

Ana and Roberto had never experienced death so closely nor had they ever seen a dead person, but they weren’t scared, it was their grandfather. What they did feel was pain, an infinite kind of sadness.

Anselmo, like almost everybody, had already paid for his funeral. For years he’d been paying monthly fees to an insurance company so his family wouldn’t have to pay for anything when he died. He’d already chosen the coffin, the church, the number of priests, the mass that would be sung, the words that would be sent to the newspaper and said on the radio, the bus that would be sent to pick people up so they could go to the funeral with a list of all the stops that would need to be made because his family and friends were scattered across different towns located several kilometres apart. He’d also paid for the gravestone and had bought a plot in the cemetery so they would bury him in the ground because he didn’t like the idea of being slotted into one of those niches. Everything was paid for, even the wreaths: one from his children and another from his grandchildren. He’d also left a will and a verbal request too: year after year he’d repeated it tirelessly, imploring his family to make sure they looked into his affairs in Argentina, where he’d made a fortune as an emigrant and still had businesses.

All the neighbours came to visit. Friends came, as did acquaintances. Some people came for all the right reasons while others, more inclined to gossip, came to have a look at what the house was like and to see if the furniture was good quality and if there was enough food and drink for the people who had come to pay their respects. The wake lasted a lifetime and the hardest thing about it was the sleepless night when they sat up with the deceased.

Ramón behaved very well. When he found out Anselmo had died he supported Roberto as best he could and made sure to bring him news of Nuria, a task for which Roberto was forever grateful.

In the midst of all this theatre, Roberto noticed there was something about the man in the coffin that meant he didn’t look quite like his grandfather. It wasn’t rigor mortis, it was something else. The undertakers had put make-up on him and put something in his mouth and nose. He looked odd.

“He’s… different, isn’t he?” Roberto asked his sister as they both sat at the kitchen table laying out slices of cake on trays.

“A little bit, yeah. I think they put some kind of plug in his nose and a sort of glue in his mouth. I mean that’s what Divina said when she saw him.”

“What’s that for?”

“I don’t know. The mouth thing must be to keep it shut and the nose, well… you know…”

“No, what?” asked Roberto, intrigued.

“In case any liquid comes out, the same as the other…” Ana was speaking very quietly, whispering even though it was just the two of them in the room. She was whispering as quietly as she could, as though she didn’t want to talk about such terrible, ugly and unpleasant things.

“The other what…”

The girl shrugged her shoulders as though to say she didn’t want to say it out loud, that she didn’t like talking about death or dead people.

“Tell me!” said Roberto, anger taking hold now. He knew he wouldn’t like her answer, but such reluctance from his sister to speak about something that was so normal and natural annoyed him a bit.

“The other end, the sphincters…” said the girl.

“What about the sphincters? Can you just spit it out for once!”

“Well, that’s what I mean. Remember when he weed all over himself? When you die, your sphincters relax and dead people wee on themselves and sometimes they even poo. That’s just how it is. Didn’t you realize? Mum changed the sheets before the undertakers arrived because she didn’t want them to see he’d weed, didn’t you notice?”

Roberto was confused. His mum had changed the sheets with Ana’s help. He’d seen them moving the body, turning it over in the bed with a fair bit of force, using the sheets to help them lift him up. Lola had then gone downstairs to the bins outside and thrown the sheets away, tears escaping from her eyes.

“But why did she do that? The undertakers must be used to things like that. Didn’t you just say it happens to everyone that dies?”

“Yeah, the undertakers are probably used to it, but grandad’s not. Would you want someone to see you having wet your pants?”

“No, I guess not… but I wouldn’t want them to see me dead either.”

He thought a lot about this. He was having a lot of thoughts after his grandfather’s death. He preferred to remember Anselmo alive, but he couldn’t get the image of his grandfather’s closed eyes, his bushy eyebrows and his arms, neatly crossed together as though he was asleep, out of his head. Death wasn’t ugly in itself, what was uglier was everything that went on around it.

The house was like a party, people kept coming and going. There were people in the kitchen, in the living room, in the hall, standing in the corridors, in the room where the dead body lay and even more at the door, all making noise. At the wake tears mixed with conversations that were too lively, inappropriate for this time and place. From time to time the guests laughed. These were people that had come to be with the family, but Roberto found them unwelcome. They meant his work was never-ending; he spent morning, noon and night preparing liquor, coffee, biscuits and cakes to offer everyone, and he did the same again the next day too. It was endless.

The parish priest came the night before the burial. Don César came in through the door and everyone fell silent. Quietly and with the greatest respect they gave way to him as he walked towards the bedroom. He had come dressed in his “priestly” clothes, wearing a cassock. He wasn’t dressed like a normal person; their grandfather had always said, “They’re not people, they’re priests and they’ve got to show it.” Roberto smiled as he remembered other things his grandfather used to say. This was the first time the priest had shown his face at the wake despite all the hours they’d been there already and some of the guests had already passed comment on the fact he hadn’t been yet. It was well known in the area that this family, while Christian, seldom went to church and weren’t really very religious at all. They went to church only when it was absolutely essential they went. The parents were hippies and their children had grown up in this kind of environment too. Don César had borne a certain kind of resentment towards Anselmo for many years though it was unclear exactly where this had come from.

At the wake people said they’d known each other since childhood, that they’d grown up playing together and had gone to the same school. They’d both studied at the seminary like so many other children who didn’t have much money at home. Both were from humble backgrounds, but while Don César carried on studying to become a priest, Anselmo had to stop so he could lend a hand at home. At the age of seventeen Anselmo went off to Argentina, on his own and without a great deal of money to his name. Life had changed significantly for the two men since then. It had gone well for both of them, albeit in different ways.

The truth was that Anselmo had only ever planned to go to Argentina for a short while, but life never heeds the plans we make and he didn’t come back for fifty years, not even to visit, not even when his parents died. At a young age he married a girl from Argentina and they had their only daughter, Lola. And who would have guessed it would have been Lola that decided to go and live in a town she knew nothing about other than what she’d heard secondhand from Anselmo?

Lola renovated the family home and stayed there while Anselmo stayed in Argentina, not going to visit even when his grandchildren were born. Every Christmas and every summer he paid for his whole family to go and visit him in Buenos Aires, but he never went back to the town he’d grown up in. That’s why nobody expected his decision to go back when he was widowed. It wasn’t just a surprise for everyone in the town, but for his family too; they didn’t suspect he would have such a change of heart.

As well as the luxury office, Anselmo paid for the house to be renovated and for an immense extension to be added to the property with space for a garden and a pool too. The property was somewhat pretentious with high-quality stone features; the kind of cars and other luxury items the family owned also gave off an air of ostentation. Anselmo, who had emigrated without much money at all, had obviously made a fortune and he made sure it was plain to see. His businesses stayed in Buenos Aires but they carried on functioning. Anselmo had left a person who he completely trusted in charge over there and this meant he could live happily in Spain without worrying too much about the day-to-day running of his businesses.

Don César moved through the house towards the room where Anselmo’s dead body was lying so he could start the prayers before the funeral. The burial wasn’t going to happen until the next day. As he walked along the corridors, the priest noticed how many people had come to pay their respects and became aware of the splendour of the house and the wake. The parish priest couldn’t deny that he liked fancy burials, all the pomp and circumstance of flowers in the home and at the church too. Masses shared with other priests, sung and accompanied by the organ, were another thing he enjoyed. He didn’t often have the opportunity to oversee burials like that. And when it came to the matter of burying people, he had to admit he liked splendid events and this was undoubtedly going to be a magnificent funeral.

The priest prayed and took a small glass of liquor. He offered comforting words to the family and left. He was barely there for half an hour. Lola accompanied him to the door and that’s where she bid him farewell, contemplating just how little comfort his visit had brought her.

It was in the hours before the funeral that the greatest number of people came to the house. Having spent so much time focused on the wake the entire family was a bit out of it. People they knew came, as did people they didn’t, they hugged Roberto and showered him with kisses and hugs; Roberto couldn’t remember many of them. People said much the same thing: “Please accept my condolences,” “He was a great man,” “I’m sorry for your loss,” things like this. Roberto had been smiling, returning hugs and kissing people back mechanically now for some time.

That’s when, at the bottom of the corridor that led to the front of the house, he caught sight of Nuria’s beautiful long black hair. She appeared behind Ramón, who let her past and showed her the way. She held her head low and hurried into Roberto’s house. None of the adults knew they were together: at this kind of age these things aren’t made public, they’re kept hidden behind closed doors. Nuria was wearing a floaty white top through which you could just about catch a glimpse of her bra. She also wore a bright green miniskirt with different coloured flowers printed on it, a belt with a big gold clasp at the centre and platform shoes that were the same colour as her top. The outfit gave three or four of those present something to talk about; they didn’t think it was appropriate attire for a wake.

Nuria and Ramón walked towards Roberto. She gave him a kiss on each cheek, kisses that left behind them the scent of her perfume. Like everyone else, she said, “Please accept my condolences,” but it sounded different coming from her.

“How are you?” she asked.

“OK, well… you know…”

“I just came to say hi and give you a hug. I wish I could do more,” she said shyly.

“What more could you do?! You’re already doing loads. Thanks for coming,” Roberto brushed his hand against hers, but this was obviously not the time or the place for him to take it in his.

And at that very moment the magic between the lovers was broken as Ramón leapt forward, pushing past them so he could get a better look at what was going on in the distance. His grandmother Carme had come into the house. She walked through the crowds of people straight to the room where Anselmo was lying. She walked straight past Nuria and Roberto without even stopping to greet her grandson; it seemed as though she hadn’t recognized him at all.

The old woman stood at the entrance to the room looking at the dead body and the set the undertakers had constructed, complete with the velvet curtains and flower wreaths. Inside the room, to the right of the deceased, there were several women sat on chairs and on the other side, to the left, there was a pomegranate-coloured three-seater sofa where Anselmo’s daughter and granddaughter sat. There were some other people standing in the room, mostly men, the son-in-law, other relatives and friends. Some turned to look at Carme as she stood in the doorway.

Her eyes were fixed on the dead body. They turned to look at the photo that presided over the wake, the photo of Anselmo that had been taken when he was in Argentina. He can’t have been more than thirty-five years old in that photo. Once she’d taken everything in from her vantage point at the entrance to the room and had decided it was time, she rushed forward, followed by Ramón, who didn’t quite understand the way his grandmother was acting. She went towards the coffin and stood to one side of it. She spent a few minutes there too, quietly, just looking. And just as her grandson was about to intervene and ask her to go home with him, the old woman threw herself on top of the coffin and clung to Anselmo, kissing him on the lips as she said, “Forever, forever, forever.”

Those in the room didn’t know how to react, they couldn’t believe what was unfurling in front of their eyes.

It all happened too quickly for Ramón to be able to do anything. It was his father who stepped in. Ramón, eyes fixed on his grandmother, didn’t see Damián come in; he came in from the back of the room without saying a word, walked up to his mother, firmly but unhurriedly, and took her gently by the shoulders. In amongst everyone’s whispers, he said:

“Come on, mum, let’s go home. I’ll take you, OK?”

The old woman didn’t put up a fight and left the room with her son; looks of astonishment and silence followed them as they left. Roberto, Nuria and Ramón were also left speechless.

“He was cold,” said the old woman as she left the room.

“Yes, mum, he’s dead.”

“I know. Dead and cold.”

Once they’d left the room, a renewed hum of conversations that kept gaining in intensity took hold. Ramón, Roberto and Nuria didn’t speak about what had happened, knowing the old woman had moments when she knew what was going on and others when she didn’t.

As though nothing had happened, Ramón offered to walk Nuria home. Roberto gave her a kiss on each cheek again to say bye, trying to breathe in as much of her perfume as possible so he could still smell it later. And he watched her walk off, beautiful as she was, disappearing into the crowd, guided through it by Ramón.

They left and everyone at the wake went back to what they were doing.

Nuria’s visit had been quick, but comforting. The hugs, the condolences and the kisses continued. Until it was time.

IV

It was obvious Rosa wasn’t happy. She loved her three children tremendously and she’d given up work for them, but life with Damián wasn’t easy. They had been in love when they married, so in love that she’d have done anything for him; indeed, she did everything he asked, suggested, requested. Rosa’s life was about making him happy and reciprocating his love, but when their love started to wane, she was already used to doing what he wanted; it had become a habit, a sort of obligation. Rosa didn’t live for herself, she lived for everyone else, receiving very little in return; even her children were used to Rosa acting like this, it was what they expected.

Damián hadn’t always had such a sour character, though that’s not to say he hadn’t shown signs of it before. When they were young he thought jealousy was a sign of love. If another man so much as looked at Rosa, Damián would fly into a rage, but it wasn’t the other man he got angry with, it was Rosa. He always found some reason why men would look at her: her tight skirt, her high heels, the bright red lipstick she was wearing or a cleavage-heavy shirt she’d decided to put on. And so Rosa started buying straighter skirts, wearing lower heels, avoiding red lipstick and wearing floatier blouses. But there was always a new reason why men would look at Rosa as she walked down the street, something else to blame her for.

“I’m telling you because I love you. I love you so much I can’t stand anyone even looking at you. I couldn’t cope if you ever betrayed me,” explained Damián.

“But what do you mean, my love? When have I ever looked at somebody else? I only have eyes for you.”

Years later, when they got married and had Ramón, their first child, Damián thought it was a given that Rosa would stop working.

“Why would I stop working at the factory? Your mum can look after the baby while I’m at work, it’s what everyone else does.”

“And who’s everyone else? Those women that smoke and wear trousers? ‘Everyone else’ stays at home and looks after their kids, that’s what mothers are for. Or don’t you think I earn enough to keep you? Do you think I’m not good enough for you? Don’t you have everything you want?”

“For god’s sake, Damián, what on earth does that have to do with anything? You’re all I want and if you want me to leave work to look after the baby, I’ll do it. You don’t have to remind me I’m his mother. I love him so much but maybe when he’s older I could go back to work, what do you think?”

They had another son and then a daughter and Rosa never went back to work even though they needed the money more and more each day. And Rosa had to add something new to her list of things to do; she had to ask for money and keep receipts for everything. Damián quickly realized he could exert even more control over Rosa in this way and completely asphyxiate her freedom.

That day Damián walked back into the house with his arm draped around his mother’s shoulders. They didn’t say anything to each other as they left the vigil. He was always extraordinarily loving and caring with her. The old woman clearly had something on her mind, but she was calm and it was unclear whether her mind was in the moment, in the past or in a time she had lost or invented. Her mind hadn’t been working properly for a few years now. She’d been acting strangely for a while before going to the doctor and it was exactly two years since she’d been diagnosed with dementia. She’d deteriorated rapidly since then, her memory playing tricks on her, sometimes accurate and other times failing her at a moment’s notice.

Rosa was in the kitchen, sat at the table; like her mother-in-law, she was also thinking and when Damián and the old woman came into the room, she stood up. Something had happened. She thought Damián’s eyes looked wet with tears.

“Has something happened?” she asked with concern in her voice.

“Don’t get involved,” he said, ending the conversation abruptly and going to his room.

Rosa accompanied the old woman to the kitchen. It was clear something had happened, something her husband didn’t want to tell her about.

“Sit down here, just the two of us. Is that OK?”

The old woman looked at Rosa with a tenderness in her eyes as she smiled at her. She sat down next to her and took Rosa’s hand in hers. Then she lent forwards conspiratorially towards her daughter-in-law and said:

“You shouldn’t be here either. This isn’t where you’re meant to be, you’re not happy here, you’re not doing what you should be doing.”

Rosa let her mother-in-law’s hand go and stood up. Sometimes she thought the old woman didn’t have a clue what was going on and sometimes she thought she was very perceptive indeed.

“I’m going to make us a coffee, a weak one, OK?” she replied to her mother-in-law, her voice catching in her throat and her eyes brimming with tears.

V

The car was completely silent as they drove home from the cemetery. Nobody spoke, not the mother, not the father, not Roberto, not Ana and the fifth seat was empty now forever. Sadness mixed with tiredness and there wasn’t any energy left for conversation.

Don César led the funeral in the parish church. He was joined by two other priests and they sung hymns accompanied by an organist, exactly what Anselmo had paid for. The parish priest said some words. Don César sung particularly badly; he had the worst ear known to man and the worst voice on the whole planet; he knew all this, but that wasn’t going to stop him singing. Once upon a time, the parishioners and some other priests had asked him, very tactfully, to refrain from singing or to do it quietly if he felt a strong desire to do so. They’d even suggested he took a step back from the microphone so his voice didn’t blare out through it, but, stubborn as he was, he didn’t follow any of these suggestions, insisting that singing was in the liturgy, part of his function and simply what he had to do. Having a tuneful choir made absolutely no difference nor did the organ nor did a whole army of golden angels singing from heaven; when the priest started singing, everything went to pot. It was just unbearable.

Ana thought back to the ceremony as they sat in the car and couldn’t stop herself from smiling.

“I mean, Don César’s singing is something that if you don’t hear it for yourself, you just can’t get your head around it… How can someone sing so badly and have such an awful voice?”

They all smiled.

“And did you hear what Simón said at the back?” Roberto put on a voice to imitate the neighbour in question, “‘Who’d want to die and have to put up with this?’”

The whole family burst out laughing at Simón’s humour and the laughter did them all good.

Back at home they got comfortable, taking off the clothes they’d been wearing earlier and changing into dressing gowns, pyjamas and slippers. Everything had been tidied up. Matilde, who had been working for them for years, longer than the children could remember, had taken care of everything; when the children were younger and their parents were working all day, she’d helped to bring them up. The undertakers had carefully put the pieces of furniture they’d moved earlier back in their rightful places. They’d taken the curtains and flowers away and they’d cleaned up the petals that had fallen on the floor, it was as though nothing had ever happened. It felt nice to have an empty house again and to sit on the sofa and take a break without any vestiges of the wake around them. Ana and Roberto were watching the TV when their mother called from the kitchen.

“Come and sit down in here for a second, please. Your dad and I want to tell you something.”

“Why don’t we wait until tomorrow…?” asked Antonio.

“It’s better to get bad news out of the way all at the same time,” she replied, her children now on high alert wondering what was going to come next.

“What’s going on, mum?” asked Roberto.

“Take a seat, please. It’s nothing bad, just a change,” Lola paused for a moment trying to find the right way to have this conversation with her children; she’d imagined it so many times before. And she said it in one fell swoop: “Your dad and I are going to separate.”

“What?!” asked Ana immediately.

“They’re going to be passing a new divorce law soon. They’ve been talking about it for a few years now, but it won’t be much longer. Once it’s passed, we’re going to divorce, but until then we’ve decided to separate.”

“What do you mean? Why are you separating?”

“Your dad will find a new flat to live in and…”

“What?! But you’ve made this decision yourself!? What about us? You even looked at the law? You’ve planned everything behind our backs!” retorted Ana, incensed and on her feet now.

“But darling, to be in line with the law we’ll have to match one of their reasons for wanting a divorce and one of those is not living in the marital home anymore. If we don’t live together anymore, that will mean we can get divorced. We decided this years ago, but the law meant we couldn’t get divorced and I didn’t want dad to find out.”

“You didn’t want to upset grandad? And what about us? Don’t you care about us? Do you give a stuff if we’re upset? I hope they never pass that law!”

“They’re going to pass it, Ana,” said Antonio, her father, trying to calm things down. Meanwhile her mother sat down in the chair, thinking how badly she was handling things and remembering the many times she’d played out this difficult conversation in her head. “Even if some people don’t like it and even if the Church and part of Franco’s Old Guard oppose it, demonstrating on the streets, you can’t force people to live together when they don’t love each other anymore. Sooner or later it’ll get passed.”

“So you don’t love each other?” asked Robert, moving the conversation on, his voice tinged with sadness.

“Of course we love each other, the kind of love you have for somebody you’ve spent the most important part of your life with and who you’ve had two fantastic children with,” continued their father, “but we don’t love each other how couples, how married people ought to love one another. We share a lot of things with each other without really feeling that kind of love; we’ve still got time left to rebuild our lives.”

“Rebuild them with who? Who else is involved? Do either of you have lovers?” Ana was almost hysterical now, nearly crying as she spoke.

“There’s nobody else on either side,” Antonio carried on explaining, keeping his voice calm. “But we’re young and maybe in the future we might fall in love again, we can’t deny ourselves that.”

In the midst of this tense exchange, their mother took over from Antonio. She was very calm as she spoke.

“Nobody’s to blame, sometimes relationships simply don’t work. Ours stopped working years ago. And while you didn’t know and nor did grandad, we’ve been working for almost a year now in different offices and now he’s died it’s time we normalized the situation.”

“Normalized it? I don’t know anyone whose parents are separated,” said Ana, still visibly annoyed and affected by what her parents had just said.

“Well, there are couples who have separated and many more who are waiting for this law to be passed so they don’t have to live together anymore and so their situations can be legal.” Antonio hugged Ana and she started crying. He spoke softly, stroking her hair, “We’ll be together anyway, my love, we’ll see each other at the weekend and sometimes during the week too. I’ll still be your dad, nothing’s going to change for you and things will get better for me and your mum. We know you can get through this and we’ll all help each other, the only person that we thought wouldn’t understand was your grandad.”

Their mother continued:

“Your grandparents always had such an exemplary marriage. They loved each other so much, he looked after her and was always making sure she was all right. Every Sunday he’d take her breakfast in bed with a flower. And when she got ill he didn’t leave her side, he was with her until her very last breath. He didn’t come back here because of her and it was only when she died that he decided to come back. He’d never have been able to understand that while we love and respect each other we aren’t in love anymore and we want to live separate lives. Your grandfather was always very happy with your grandma, I didn’t want to upset him like this particularly given his heart problems and that heart attack he had. But now he’s not here anymore, things need to change. And they’ll get better.”

Roberto didn’t know how to react. The day couldn’t have been stranger or more intense. Their father told them he’d be moving out immediately, maybe in the next day or so, and he promised he’d call them and visit them all the time. Ana went to her room, shattered by everything that had happened. Antonio, now very serious, went up to his room. Their mother stayed in the kitchen making tea, obviously upset, and Roberto went back to the sofa with the sole intention of watching the TV to pretend none of this was happening.

Roberto’s thoughts were more concerned with Anselmo than anything else. All he could think about was the graveyard, the double-depth grave, the deepest plot reserved for his grandfather and another one on top where someone else from the family would be laid to rest at some point, as yet unclear, in the future. Their grandmother had been buried in Argentina, in Buenos Aires, where she was from and where they had married. Until today Roberto hadn’t known graves could have multiple “levels”. How little he knew about death!

Two men from the undertakers, dressed in cheap suits with shiny buttons, were the ones charged with lowering the coffin into the ground and they did so with the help of some ropes. That was really when they said goodbye to Anselmo. Everyone cried. As the undertakers loosened their hold on the rope in their hands, the coffin descended rapidly into the grave below. They lowered it and lowered it until it hit the ground at the bottom. Then two workers in blue overalls went down to where the coffin was and cemented three concrete slabs in place to separate the lower plot, where their grandfather was now shut off, from the top one which was empty. And then they erected a provisional gravestone that would be there until the proper one was ready; his name was engraved on it in the silver letters that he’d chosen, as he had done for everything else at the funeral. The wreaths from his children and grandchildren as well as other flowers were put on top of the grave, a mound of flowers that in the grey graveyard served as a beacon highlighting where the newest burial had been.

Sat thinking on the sofa, Roberto remembered about the piece of paper Anselmo had had in his hand when he died. He’d forgotten about it completely. A small piece of paper. It was actually a piece of paper taken from a square-ruled notepad, like the ones schoolchildren use. He’d put it in his shirt pocket without thinking about what had been written on it.

Why would his grandfather be taking a nap with a piece of paper in his hand? The doctor that signed the death certificate had said that with his medical history and at his age an autopsy wouldn’t be necessary and the most likely reason for his death was another heart attack as he was sleeping. The doctor had consoled Lola, assuring her he wouldn’t have felt any pain. If he hadn’t suspected anything was wrong, he wouldn’t have had time to react; that’s why they found him so relaxed and tranquil. He must have had the paper on him because he was planning to do something with it later on.

Worry filled Roberto’s mind when he remembered he’d left the paper in his shirt pocket. Scared he’d lost it, he got up straightaway. Maybe his mother or Matilde had already put it in the washing machine. He ran out to the kitchen.

“Mum! Where’s my green stripy shirt? Did you wash it?”

“I don’t know. When were you wearing it?”

“It’s the one I was wearing the day grandad died. You haven’t washed it, have you?”

“I haven’t washed anything recently, but Matilde might have done… What’s going on?”

“I left something in it!”

“Have a look in the washroom. Matilde normally checks pockets before she washes things. If she washed it and found something, maybe she put it there. What was it?”

Roberto didn’t reply and went to look in the washroom. There wasn’t anything on the washing machine or on the shelves, he fumbled around in the basket where they kept dirty clothes and sighed with relief when he found the shirt and saw that the paper was still in its left pocket.

“Here it is!”

A small piece of paper with his grandfather’s unmistakable handwriting. An inexplicable message written in blue biro: “Tell me you love me.” Roberto couldn’t take his eyes off the small piece of paper unfolded in the palm of his hand, he read it again and made sure he hadn’t got it wrong. He’d read it right the first time, it said, “Tell me you love me.”

It was nothing short of odd.

Lola shouted from the kitchen:

“Did you find it?”

“Yes!”

“What was it?”

“Nothing,” he shouted back, though he didn’t know why.

Text © María Solar

Translation © Harriet Cook