Strange Pilgrims

  OCTOBER 1980

  Maria dos Prazeres

  THE MAN FROM the undertaking establishment was so punctual that Maria dos Prazeres was still in her bathrobe, with her hair in curlers, and she just had time to put a red rose behind her ear to keep from looking as unattractive as she felt. She regretted her appearance even more when she opened the door and saw that he was not a mournful notary, as she supposed all death's merchants must be, but a timid young man wearing a checked jacket and a tie with birds in different colors. He had no overcoat, despite the unpredictable Barcelona spring and its oblique, wind-driven rain, which almost always made it less tolerable than the winter. Maria dos Prazeres, who had received so many men regardless of the hour, felt a rare embarrassment. She had just turned seventy-six and was convinced she would die before Christmas, but even so she was about to close the door and ask the funeral salesman to wait a moment while she dressed to receive him in the manner he deserved. Then it occurred to her that he would freeze on the dark landing, and she asked him in.

  "Please excuse my awful appearance," she said, "but I've lived in Catalonia for over fifty years, and this is the first time anyone has ever come to an appointment on time."

  She spoke perfect Catalan, with a somewhat archaic purity, although one could hear the music of her forgotten Portuguese. Despite her age and the metal curlers, she was still a slender, spirited mulatta, with wiry hair and pitiless yellow eyes, who had lost her compassion for men a long time ago. The salesman, half blinded by the light in the street, made no comment but wiped the soles of his shoes on the jute mat and kissed her hand with a bow.

  "You're like the men in my day," said Maria dos Prazeres with a laugh sharp as hail. "Sit down."

  Although he was new at the job, he knew enough about it not to expect this kind of festive welcome at eight o'clock in the morning, least of all from a merciless old lady who at first glance seemed a madwoman escaped from the Americas. And so he remained only a step away from the door, not knowing what to say, while Maria dos Prazeres pushed back the heavy plush drapes at the windows. The thin April light just reached the corners of the meticulous room, which looked more like an antique dealer's show window than a parlor. The objects in it were meant for daily use--there were not too many or too few--and each one seemed placed in its natural space with such sureness of taste that it would have been difficult to find a better-served house even in a city as old and secret as Barcelona.

  "Excuse me," he said. "I've come to the wrong door."

  "I wish that were true," she said, "but death makes no mistakes."

  On the dining room table the salesman spread open a diagram that had as many folds as a navigation chart, and sections in different colors with numerous crosses and figures in each color. Maria dos Prazeres saw that it was the complete plan of the immense cemetery of Montjuich, and she remembered with an ancient horror the graveyard in Manaus under the October rains, when tapirs splashed among nameless tombs and adventurers' mausoleums with Florentine stained-glass windows. One morning, when she was a very little girl, the Amazon in flood had become a sickening swamp, and in the courtyard of her house she had seen the broken coffins floating with pieces of rag and the hair of the dead coming through the cracks. That memory was the reason she had chosen the hill of Montjuich as her final resting place and not the small San Gervasio cemetery, so much closer and more familiar.

  "I want a place that will never flood," she said.

  "Well, here it is," said the salesman, indicating the spot on the map with a collapsible pointer that he carried in his pocket like a fountain pen. "No ocean in the world can come up this high."

  She studied the colored panels until she found the main entrance and the three adjacent, identical, anonymous graves where Buenaventura Durruti, killed in the Civil War, and two other anarchist leaders lay buried. Every night someone wrote their names on the blank stones. Wrote them with pencil, with paint, with charcoal, with eyebrow pencil or nail polish, and every morning the guards wiped them clean so that no one would know who lay under which mute stone. Maria dos Prazeres had attended Durruti's funeral, the saddest and most tumultuous ever held in Barcelona, and she wanted to rest in a grave near his. But none was available, and she resigned herself to what was possible. "On the condition," she said, "that you don't decide to stack me in one of those five-year compartments as if it were the post office." Then, remembering the essential requirement, she concluded: "And above all, I have to be buried lying down." For in response to the much-publicized promotion of prepaid graves, a rumor was circulating that they were making vertical burials to save space. With the precision of someone who had memorized and repeated a speech many times, the salesman explained that the story was a wicked lie created by traditional undertaking establishments to discredit the unprecedented sale of graves on the installment plan. As he spoke, there were three discreet little taps at the door, and he paused with some uncertainty, but Maria dos Prazeres indicated that he should go on. "Don't worry," she said in a very quiet voice. "It's Noi."

  The salesman took up where he had left off, and Maria dos Prazeres felt satisfied with his explanation. Still, before opening the door she wanted to make a final synthesis of a thought that had been ripening in her heart, down to its most intimate details, over the many years since the legendary flood in Manaus. "What I mean," she said, "is that I am looking for a place where I can lie down in the earth with no risk of floods and, if possible, in the shade of the trees in summer, and where I won't be pulled out after a certain period of time and thrown away in the trash."

  She opened the front door and in walked a small dog drenched with rain, whose dissolute appearance had nothing to do with the rest of the house. He was returning from his morning walk through the neighborhood, and as he came in he suffered a sudden fit of tumultuous excitement. He jumped on the table, barking in a crazed way and almost ruining the map of the cemetery with his muddy paws. A single glance from his owner was enough to restrain his impetuosity. "Noi!" she said without raising her voice. "Baixa d'aci!"

  The animal shrank back, looked at her in consternation, and two bright tears rolled down his muzzle. Then Maria dos Prazeres turned her attention again to the salesman, and found him mystified.

  "Collons!" he exclaimed. "He cried!"

  "It's just that he's upset at finding someone here at this hour," Maria dos Prazeres apologized in a low voice. "In general, when he comes into the house he shows more care than men do. Except for you, as I've already seen."

  "But he cried, damn it!" the salesman repeated, then realized his breach of good manners and begged her pardon with a blush. "Excuse me, but I've never seen anything like that, even in the movies."

  "All dogs can do it if you train them," she said. "But instead the owners spend their whole lives teaching them habits that make them miserable, like eating from plates or doing their business on schedule and in the same place.

  And yet they don't teach them the natural things they enjoy, like laughing and crying. Where were we?"

  They were almost finished. Maria dos Prazeres also had to resign herself to summers without trees, because the only ones in the cemetery had their shade reserved for dignitaries of the regime. On the other hand, the conditions and formulas in the contract were irrelevant, because she wanted to take advantage of the discount she would receive for paying cash in advance.

  It was not until they had finished and the salesman was putting the papers back into his briefcase that he looked at the room with more observant eyes, and he shivered in the magic air of its beauty. He looked at Maria dos Prazeres again, as if for the first time.

  "May I ask you an indiscreet question?" he said.

  She walked with him toward the door.

  "Of course," she said. "As long as it's not my age."

  "I'm in the habit of guessing people's occupations from the things in their houses, and the truth is that here I can't tell," he said. "What do you do?"

  Overcome with laughter, Maria dos Prazeres
answered: "I'm a whore, my boy. Or don't I look like one anymore?"

  The salesman turned red. "I'm sorry."

  "I should be sorrier," she said, taking him by the arm to keep him from crashing into the door. "And be careful! Don't crack your skull before you've given me a proper burial."

  As soon as she closed the door, she picked up the little dog and began to pet him, and with her beautiful African voice she joined in the children's songs that could be heard just then coming from the nursery school next door. Three months ago it had been revealed to her in a dream that she would die, and from that time on she had felt closer than ever to this child of her solitude. She had anticipated the posthumous distribution of her belongings and the disposition of her body with so much care that she could have died at that moment without inconveniencing anyone. She had retired of her own volition, with a fortune she had accumulated stone by stone but without too many bitter sacrifices, and she had chosen as her final home the very ancient and noble town of Gracia, which had already been swallowed up by the expanding city. She had bought the dilapidated second-floor apartment, with its perpetual smell of smoked herring and its walls eaten away by saltpeter but still showing all the bullet holes of some inglorious battle. There was no porter, and even though all the apartments were occupied, some steps were missing on the damp, dark stairways. Maria dos Prazeres had the bathroom and kitchen remodeled, covered the walls with bright fabrics, put beveled glass in the windows, and hung velvet drapes. Then she brought in the exquisite furnishings--the useful and decorative objects and the chests of silks and brocades, which the Fascists had stolen from residences abandoned by the Republicans in the stampede of defeat, and which for many years she had been buying one by one for bargain prices at secret auctions. The only remaining link to her past was her friendship with the Count of Cardona, who continued visiting her on the last Friday of every month to have supper with her and make languid, after-dinner love. But even that friendship from her youth was kept hidden, for the Count parked the automobile that bore his coat of arms at a more than discreet distance, and he walked to her second floor in the shadows, as much to protect her honor as his own. Maria dos Prazeres knew no one in the building except the people in the apartment opposite hers, where a very young couple with a nine-year-old daughter had moved in not long ago. It seemed incredible to her, but in fact she had never met anyone else on the stairs.

  And yet the distribution of her legacy revealed that she was more rooted than she had supposed in that community of unreconstructed Catalonians whose national honor was founded on the virtue of decent modesty. She had left even the most insignificant trinkets to the people closest to her heart, who were the people closest to her house. When it was over she did not feel very convinced that she had been fair, but she was certain she had not forgotten anyone who did not deserve it. She had prepared the bequests with so much rigor that the notary on the Calle del Arbol, who flattered himself on having seen everything, could not believe his eyes when he saw her dictating to his clerks from memory, in medieval Catalan, the detailed list of her possessions, along with the exact name of each item, and the complete list of beneficiaries with their professions and addresses and the place each held in her heart.

  After the visit of the funeral salesman, she became one of the countless Sunday visitors to the cemetery. Like her graveyard neighbors, she planted year-round flowers in the urns, watered the new grass and trimmed it with pruning shears until it resembled the carpets in the mayor's office, and became so familiar with the spot that in the end she could not understand why it had seemed so desolate to her in the beginning.

  On her first visit, her heart had skipped a beat when she saw the three nameless graves near the gate, but she did not even stop to look at them, because the vigilant watchman was a few steps away from her. But on the third Sunday she took advantage of a moment's carelessness to fulfill one of her great dreams, and with her lipstick she wrote on the first, rain-washed stone: Durruti. From then on, whenever she could she did it again, sometimes on one gravestone, or on two or on all three, and always with a firm pulse and a heart stirred by nostalgia.

  One Sunday, in late September, she witnessed her first burial on the hill. Three weeks later, on a cold, windy afternoon, they buried a young bride in the grave next to hers. By the end of the year, seven plots were occupied, but the short-lived winter passed with no ill effects on Maria dos Prazeres. She suffered no indisposition, and as the weather grew warmer and the torrential sound of life poured in through the open windows, she felt more determined to survive the enigmas of her dreams. On his return, the Count of Cardona, who spent the hottest months in the mountains, found her even more attractive than she had been in the uncommon youthfulness of her fiftieth year.

  After many frustrated attempts, Maria dos Prazeres succeeded in having Noi pick out her grave on the massive hill of identical graves. Then she devoted herself to teaching him to cry over the empty tomb so that he would be in the habit of doing so after her death. She walked with him several times from her house to the cemetery, pointing out landmarks to help him memorize the Ramblas bus route, until she felt that he was skilled enough to be sent on his own.

  On the Sunday of the final test, at three o'clock in the afternoon, she took off his spring vest, in part because summer was in the air and in part to make him less conspicuous, and turned him loose. She saw him go down the shady side of the street at a quick trot, his little rump tight and sad beneath his jubilant tail, and it was all she could do not to cry--for herself, for him, for so many and such bitter years of shared illusions--until she saw him turn the corner at the Calle Mayor and head for the sea. Fifteen minutes later she took the Ramblas bus at the nearby Plaza de Lesseps, trying to see him through the window without being seen, and in fact she did see him, distant and serious among the Sunday flocks of children, waiting for the traffic light to change at the Paseo de Gracia.

  "My God," she sighed. "He looks so alone."

  She had to wait for him for almost two hours under the brutal Montjuich sun. She greeted several of the bereaved from other, less memorable Sundays, although she almost did not recognize them, because so much time had gone by since she had first seen them that they no longer wore mourning or cried, and they put flowers on the graves without thinking about their dead. A short while later, when they had all left, she heard a mournful bellow that startled the sea gulls, and on the immense sea she saw a white ocean liner flying the Brazilian flag, and with all her heart she wished that it were bringing her a letter from someone who would have died for her in Pernambuco prison. A little after five o'clock, twelve minutes ahead of schedule, Noi appeared on the hill, slavering with fatigue and the heat, but with the air of a triumphant child. At that moment Maria dos Prazeres overcame the terror of not having anyone to cry at her grave.

  The following autumn was when she began to detect ominous signs that she could not decipher but that made her heart heavier. She drank coffee again under the golden acacias on the Plaza del Reloj, wearing her coat with the foxtail collar and the hat decorated with artificial flowers, which was so old it had become fashionable again. Her intuition grew more acute. Trying to understand her own disquiet, she scrutinized the chatter of the women selling birds on the Ramblas, the gossip of the men at the bookstalls--who for the first time in many years were not talking about soccer--the deep silences of the crippled war veterans tossing bread crumbs to the pigeons, and everywhere she found unmistakable signs of death. At Christmas, colored lights were strung between the acacias, and music and happy voices were heard from the balconies, and a crowd of tourists invaded the sidewalk cafes, but in the midst of all the festivities one could feel the same repressed tension that preceded the days when the anarchists had taken over the streets. Maria dos Prazeres, who had lived through that time of great passions, could not control her uneasiness, and for the first time she was awakened from her sleep by the clawing of fear. One night, outside her window, state security agents shot and killed a studen
t who had scrawled Visca Catalunya lliure on the wall.

  "My God," she said to herself in terror, "it's as if everything were dying with me!"

  She had known this kind of disquiet only when she was a very little girl in Manaus, at the moment before dawn, when the innumerable sounds of night stopped all at once, the waters paused, time hesitated, and the Amazon jungle sank into an abysmal silence that was like the silence of death. In the midst of that irresistible tension, on the last Friday of April, as always, the Count of Cardona came to her house for supper.

  The visit had turned into a ritual. The punctual Count would arrive between seven and nine at night with a bottle of local champagne, wrapped in the afternoon paper to make it less noticeable, and a box of filled truffles. Maria dos Prazeres prepared cannelloni au gratin and a young chicken au jus--the favorite dishes from the halcyon days of fine old Catalonian families--and a bowl filled with fruits of the season. While she cooked, the Count listened to selections from historic performances of Italian operas on the phonograph, taking slow sips from a glass of port that lasted until the records were over.

  After the unhurried supper and conversation, they made sedentary love from memory, which left both of them with a taste of disaster. Before he left, always restless at the approach of midnight, the Count put twenty-five pesetas under the ashtray in the bedroom. That was Maria dos Prazeres's price when he first met her in a transient hotel on the Paralelo, and it was all that the rust of time had left intact.