think to visit you, If justice is anything more than an empty word, the queen mother should go before I do, Well, I promise I won't denounce you to the king tomorrow, That's very good of you, your eminence, Goodnight, Goodnight.
It was three o'clock in the morning when the cardinal had to be rushed into hospital with an attack of acute appendicitis which required immediate surgery. Before he was sucked down the tunnel of anesthesia, in the fleeting moment that precedes a total loss of consciousness, he thought what so many others have thought, that he might die during the operation, then he remembered that this was no longer a possibility, and in one final flash of lucidity, he thought, too, that if, despite everything, he did die, that would mean, paradoxically, that he had vanquished death. Filled by an irresistible desire for sacrifice, he was about to beg god to kill him, but did not have time to formulate the words. Anesthesia saved him from the supreme sacrilege of wanting to transfer the powers of death to a god more generally known as a giver of life.
...
ALTHOUGH IT HAD IMMEDIATELY BEEN RIDICULED BY RIVAL newspapers, which had managed to draw on the inspiration of their principal writers for the most diverse and meaty of headlines, some dramatic, some lyrical and others almost philosophical or mystical, if not touchingly ingenuous, as was the case with the popular newspaper that contented itself with And What Will Become Of Us Now, ending the phrase with the graphical flourish of an enormous question mark, the aforementioned headline New Year, New Life, for all its grating banality, had struck a real chord with some people who, for reasons either of nature or nurture, preferred the solidity of a more or less pragmatic optimism, even if they had reasons to suspect that it might be merely a vain illusion. Having lived, until those days of confusion, in what they had imagined to be the best of all possible and probable worlds, they were discovering, with delight, that the best, the absolute best, was happening right now, right there, at the door of their house, a unique and marvelous life without the daily fear of parca's creaking scissors, immortality in the land that gave us our being, safe from any metaphysical awkwardnesses and free to everyone, with no sealed orders to open at the hour of our death, announcing at that crossroads where dear companions in this vale of tears known as earth were forced to part and set off for their different destinations in the next world, you to paradise, you to purgatory, you down to hell. Because of this, the more reticent or more thoughtful newspapers, along with like- minded radio and television stations, had no option but to join the high tide of collective joy that was sweeping the country from north to south and from east to west, refreshing fearful minds and driving far from view the long shadow of thanatos. With the passing days, and when they saw that still no one died, pessimists and skeptics, only a few at a time at first, then en masse, threw in their lot with the mare magnum of citizens who took every opportunity to go out into the street and proclaim loudly that now life truly is beautiful.
One day, a lady, recently widowed, finding no other way of showing the new joy flooding her being, although not without a slight pang of grief to think that, if she did not die, she would never again see her much-mourned husband, had the idea of hanging the national flag from the flower-bedecked balcony of her dining room. It was, as they say, no sooner said than done. In less than forty-eight hours the hanging out of flags had spread throughout the country, the colors and symbols of the flag took over the landscape, although more obviously so in the cities, of course, there being more balconies and windows in the city than in the country. Such patriotic fervor was impossible to resist, especially when certain worrying, not to say threatening statements, where they came from no one knew, began to be distributed, saying such things as, Anyone who doesn't hang our nation's immortal flag from the window of their house doesn't deserve to live, Anyone not displaying the national flag has sold out to death, Join us, be a patriot, buy a flag, Buy another one, Buy another, Down with the enemies of life, it's lucky for them that there's no more death. The streets were a veritable festival of fluttering insignia, flapping in the wind if it was blowing, and if it wasn't, then a carefully positioned electric fan did the job, and if the fan wasn't powerful enough to make the standard flap in virile fashion, making those whip-crack noises that so exalt the martially minded, it would at least ensure that the patriotic colors undulated honorably. A small number of people murmured privately that it was completely over-the-top, nonsense, and that sooner or later there would be no alternative but to remove all those flags and pennants, and the sooner the better, because just as too much sugar spoils the palate and harms the digestive process, so our normal and proper respect for patriotic emblems will become a mockery if we allow it to be perverted into this serial affront to modesty, on a par with those unlamented flashers in raincoats. Besides, they said, if the flags are there to celebrate the fact that death no longer kills, then we should do one of two things, either take them down before we get so fed up with them that we start to loathe our own national symbols, or else spend the rest of our lives, that is, eternity, yes, eternity, having to change them every time they start to rot in the rain or get torn to shreds by the wind or faded by the sun. There were very few people who had the courage to put their finger on the problem publicly, and one poor man had to pay for his unpatriotic outburst with a beating which, had death not ceased her operations in this country at the beginning of the year, would have put an end to his miserable life right there and then.
Nothing is ever perfect, however, for alongside those who laugh, there will always be others who weep, and sometimes, as in the present case, for the self-same reasons. Various important professions, seriously concerned about the situation, had already started to inform those in power of their discontent. As one would expect, the first formal complaints came from the undertaking business. Rudely deprived of their raw material, the owners began by making the classic gesture of putting their hands to their heads and wailing in mournful chorus, Now what's going to become of us, but then, faced by the prospect of a catastrophic collapse from which no one in the funeral trade would escape, they called a general meeting, at the end of which, after heated discussions, all of them unproductive because all of them, without exception, ran up against the indestructible wall of death's refusal to collaborate, the same death to which they had become accustomed, from parents down to children, as something which was their natural due, they finally approved a document to be submitted to the government for their consideration, which document adopted the only constructive proposal, well, constructive, but also hilarious, that had been presented at the debate, They'll laugh at us, warned the chairman, but I recognize that we have no other way out, it's either this or the ruin of the undertaking business. The document stated that, at an extraordinary general meeting called to examine the grave crisis they were going through because of the lack of deaths in the country, the funeral directors' representatives, after an intense and open debate, during which a respect for the supreme interests of the nation had always been paramount, had reached the conclusion that it was still possible to avoid the disastrous consequences of what would doubtless go down in history as the worst collective calamity to befall us since the founding of the nation, namely, that the government should make obligatory the burial or cremation of all domestic animals that die a natural or accidental death, and that such burials or cremations, regulated and approved, should be carried out by the funerary industry, bearing in mind our admirable work in the past as the public service which, in the deepest sense of the term, we have always been, generation after generation. The document went on, We would draw the government's attention to the fact that this vital change in the industry cannot be made without considerable financial investment, for it is not the same thing to bury a human being and to carry to its final resting place a cat or a canary, or indeed a circus elephant or a bathtub crocodile, for it will require a complete reformulation of our traditional techniques, and the experience already acquired since pet cemeteries were given the official go-ahead will prove extremely useful in this essential process of modernization, in other words, what has, up until now, been very much a sideline in our in dustry, although admittedly a very lucrative one, will now become our sole activity, thus avoiding, as far as possible, the dismissal of hundreds, if not thousands of selfless and courageous workers who have, every day of their working lives, bravely confronted the terrible face of death and upon whom death has now so unfairly turned her back, And so, prime minister, with a view to providing the protection merited by a profession which has, for millennia, been classified as a public utility, we ask you to consider not only the urgent need for a favorable decision, but also, in parallel, either the opening of a line of subsidized loans or else, and this would be the icing on the cake, or perhaps I should say the brass handles on the coffin, not to say elementary justice, the granting of nonrecoverable loans that would help toward the rapid revitalization of a sector whose survival is now threatened for the first time in history, and, indeed, long before history began, in all the ages of pre-history as well, for no human corpse has ever lacked for someone who would, sooner or later, come along and bury it, even if it was only the generous earth herself opening up to receive it. Respectfully hoping that our request may be granted, we remain.
The directors and administrators of hospitals, both staterun and private, were soon beating on the door of
