grace of the last sacrament, had expired in less time than it takes to say so. Worrying thoughts as to whether god had authority over death or if, on the contrary, death was above god in the hierarchy quietly gnawed away at the hearts and minds of that holy institution, where the bold affirmation that god and death were two sides of the same coin had come to be considered not so much heresy as an abominable sacrilege. At least that was what was really going on beneath the surface, whereas to others it seemed that the church's main preoccupation was their participation in the queen mother's funeral. Now that the sixty-two thousand ordinary dead were safely in their final resting place and no longer holding up the traffic in the city, it was time to bear the venerable lady, suitably enclosed in her lead coffin, to the royal pantheon. As the newspapers all agreed, it was the end of an era.
...
IT MAY BE THAT A VERY GENTEEL UPBRINGING, OF THE KIND that is becoming increasingly rare, along, perhaps, with the almost superstitious respect that the written word can instill into certain timid souls, has prevented readers, although they are more than justified in showing signs of ill-contained impatience, from interrupting this long digression and demanding to be told what death has been up to since the fateful night when she announced her return. Now given the important role that the eventide homes, the hospitals, the insurance companies, the maphia and the catholic church played in these extraordinary events, it seemed only fitting to explain in fulsome detail how they reacted to this sudden and dramatic turn of events, but unless, of course, death, taking into account the enormous numbers of corpses that would have to be buried in the hours immediately following her announcement, had decided, in an unexpected and praiseworthy gesture of sympathy, to prolong her absence for a few more days in order to give life time to return to its old axis other, newly dead people, that is, those who died during the first few days of the restoration of the old regime would have been forced to join the unfortunates who had, for months, been hovering between here and there, and then, as is only logical, we would have been obliged to speak of those new deaths too. However, that is not what happened, Death was not so generous. The week-long pause, during which no one died and which, initially, created the illusion that nothing had, in fact, changed, came about simply because of the new rules governing the relationship between death and mortals, namely that everyone would receive prior warning that they still had a week to live until, shall we say, payment was due, a week in which to sort out their affairs, make a will, pay their back taxes and say goodbye to their family and to their closest friends. In theory, this seemed like a good idea, but practice would soon show that it was not. Imagine a person, the sort who enjoys splendid good health, who has never suffered from so much as a headache, an optimist both on principle and because he has clear and objective reasons for being so, and who, one morning, leaving his house on his way to work, meets his local and very helpful postman, who says, Lucky I caught you, mr. so-and-so, I've got a letter for you, and the man receives in his hands a violet-colored envelope to which he might pay no particular attention, after all, it's probably just more junk mail from those direct marketing fellows, except that his name on the envelope is written in a strange hand, exactly like the writing on the famous facsimile published in the newspaper. If, at that moment, his heart gives a startled leap, if he's filled by a grim presentiment of some inevitable misfortune and he tries to refuse the letter, he won't be able to, it will be as if someone, gently holding his elbow, were guiding him down the steps to avoid slipping on a discarded banana skin, helping him round the corner so that he doesn't trip over his own feet. It will be pointless, too, trying to tear the envelope into pieces, because everyone knows that letters from death are, by definition, indestructible, not even an acetylene blowtorch at full blast could do away with them, and the ingenuous trick of pretending that he has dropped it would prove equally useless because the letter won't allow itself to fall, it will stay as if glued to his fingers, and even if, by some miracle, the impossible should happen, you can be sure that some good-hearted citizen would immediately pick it up and run after the person who was busily pretending not to have noticed and say, This letter is yours, I believe, it might be important, and the man would have to reply sadly, Yes, it is important, thank you very much for your pains. But that could only have happened at the beginning, when very few people knew that death was using the public postal service as a messenger for her funereal letters of notification. In a matter of days, the color violet would become the most hated of all colors, even more so than black, despite the fact that black represented mourning, but then this is perfectly understandable when you consider that mourning is worn by the living, not the dead, although the latter do tend to be buried wearing black. Imagine, then, the bewilderment, fear and perplexity of that man setting off to work and seeing death suddenly step into his path in the shape of a postman who will definitely not ring twice, for, if he hadn't chanced to meet the addressee in the street, he would simply have put the letter through the relevant mailbox or slipped it under the door. The man is standing there, in the middle of the pavement, with his superb health, his solid head, so solid that even now, despite the terrible shock, it still doesn't ache, suddenly the world has ceased to belong to him or he to the world, they have merely been lent to each other for seven days and not a day longer, according to this violet-colored letter he has just reluctantly opened, his eyes so full of tears that he can barely read what's written there, Dear sir, I regret to inform you that in a week your life will end, irrevocably and irremissibly. Please make the best use you can of the time remaining to you, yours faithfully, death. The signature has a lower-case d, which, as we know, acts, in some way, as its certificate of origin. The man hesitates, the postman called him mr. so-and-so, which means, as we can see for ourselves, that he's of the male sex, the man wonders whether to go home and tell his family of this irrevocable sentence or if, on the contrary, he should bite back his tears and continue on his way to where his work awaits him and fill up what days remain to him, then feel able to ask, Death where is thy victory, knowing, however, that he will receive no reply, because death never replies, not because she doesn't want to, but because she doesn't know what to say in the face of the greatest of human sorrows.
This episode in the street, only possible in a small place where everyone knows everyone else, speaks volumes about the inconvenience of the communication system instituted by death for the termination of the temporary contract which we call life or existence. It could be seen as a display of sadistic cruelty, like so many others we see every day, but death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough. She simply hadn't thought it through. And now, absorbed as she must be in reorganizing her support services after a long hiatus of more than seven months, she has neither eyes nor ears for the cries of despair and anguish uttered by the men and women who, one by one, are being warned of their imminent death, feelings of despair and anguish which, in some cases, are having precisely the opposite effect to the one she had foreseen, because the people condemned to disappear are not sorting out their affairs, they are not writing wills, they are not paying back taxes, and as for saying their farewells to family and close friends, they are leaving that to the last minute, which, of course, is not enough even for the most melancholy of farewells. Ill-informed about the true nature of death, whose other name is fate, the newspapers have outdone themselves in furious attacks on her, calling her pitiless, cruel, tyrannical, wicked, bloodthirsty, disloyal and treacherous, a vampire, the empress of evil, a dracula in skirts, the enemy of humankind, a murderess and, again, a serial killer, and there was even one weekly magazine, of the humorous kind, which, squeezing every ounce of sarcasm out of its copywriters, managed to come up with the term daughter-of-a-bitch. Fortunately, in some newspapers, good sense continued to reign. One of the most respected papers in the kingdom, the doyen of the national press, published a wise editorial in which it called for a frank and open dialogue with death, holding nothing back, with hand on heart and in a spirit of fraternity, always assuming, of course, that they could find out where she lived, her cave, her lair, her headquarters. Another paper suggested that the police authorities should investigate stationer's shops and paper manufacturers, because human users of violet-colored envelopes, if ever there were any, and they would always have been very few, would be sure to have changed their epistolary tastes in view of recent events, and it would thus be as easy as pie to catch the macabre customer when she turned up to refresh her supplies. Another newspaper, a bitter rival of the latter, was quick to describe this idea as both crass and stupid, because only an arrant fool could think that death, who, as everyone knew, was a skeleton draped in a sheet, would set out, bony heels clattering along the pavement, to mail her letters. Not wishing to lag behind the press, the television advised the interior minister to have policemen guard mailboxes and pillar boxes, apparently forgetting that the first letter addressed to the director-general of television had appeared in his office when the door was double-locked and no window panes broken. Floor, walls and ceilings revealed not a crack, not even one tiny enough to slip a razor blade through. Perhaps it really was possible to persuade death to show more compassion toward the poor unfortunates condemned to die, but to do that, they would have to find her and no one knew how or where.
It was then that a forensic scientist, well informed about everything that related, directly or indirectly, to his
