Surrounding the coffin were six candlesticks, dripping wax, the flame at their tips gradually shrinking around the charred wicks. At the head of Juan Robles’s casket, a metal crucifix glinted in the scant candlelight, and the curved torso of the cross projected its terrible shadow onto the wall deep in the chamber. Four potted palm trees and a few flowers from the neighbouring garden decorated the funeral chapel. The lid of the casket had been propped against one wall like an ominous door waiting to close forever. The Three Crones, huddled in one corner of the room, had just stopped clucking to spy on those three strangers staring at the cadaver as though at something outlandish. In the opposite corner, the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law seemed to be sleeping, cocooned within their capacious black shawls.
It certainly wasn’t the mud-stomper’s mortal flesh, already cold, that attracted the strangers’ interest. The essential thing, in their view, was Juan Robles’s imperishable soul, recently detached from its earthly coil and launched into who knows what obscure regions. What regions? For the astrologer Schultz, initiate of Eastern mysteries, the question permitted only one answer, and he was explaining this to his friend Tesler in the grave voice appropriate to such a mournful occasion. If every individual born into this world had just died in some other world, he said, and if every individual who died here had just been born on another plane of cosmic existence, it obviously followed that Juan Robles, now dead on earth, was at that moment crying for the first time in another world, eagerly clinging once again to a maternal nipple, being swaddled in solicitous diapers, and provoking a new set of joys and worries. In what form? Under what new life conditions? There lay the great question! But Samuel Tesler, accustomed to a more colourful philosophy, repudiated that abstract mechanism of births and deaths; moreover, to imagine the deceased Juan Robles already in another world, bawling and pissing his diapers, was an Orientalist notion that he, for one, had a hard time swallowing. For his taste, what was wanted was a tribunal of souls with plenty of pomp and colour, presided over by straight-talking judges who could meticulously ferret the dirt out of a conscience, post mortem. In the opinion of the philosopher of Villa Crespo, the soul of Juan Robles had been brought by jackal-headed Anubis to the ineluctable scale of merit- and demerit-points; the deceased’s heart would now be sitting on one side of the balance, while on the other side weighed the severe feather of the Law. What was Thot doing as he stood beside the weighing machine? Inclining his graceful ibis head, Thot was etching the exact weight of that heart on a little tablet.
Unfortunately, Schultz had never been able to stomach the sort of zoomorphic divinities his lugubrious interlocutor was referring to. To his mind, turning Thot into a dull bookkeeper was an act of lèse-majesté against the immortal gods, and weighing up the raw meat of Juan Robles’s heart was a gross display of butchery. In reality, his lugubrious interlocutor, being a Semite, tended more toward the ethical sense of things than to their metaphysical and profound meaning, because of racial influences causing him to see in every god a grotesque policeman.
— What about the Hebrew Kabbala? Samuel said acridly in refutation.
— That’s another kettle of fish, Schultz retorted.
Adam Buenosayres listened in silence to the polemic between his friends. In his mind the funereal scene, despite its garish reality, only prolonged the phantasmagorical series initiated that night by the group in their crossing of Saavedra. But Adam was sobering up now, the dense fumes of drunkenness breaking up enough that he could notice how profanatory was the tone of the argument between Samuel Tesler and the astrologer, standing as they were next to the black box, shaped like a ship, in which Juan Robles was sailing away. And furthermore, how striking was the absence of the soul in that vanquished body! Adam examined it where it lay: already the facial lineaments were sharpening, like the edges of a chunk of rock, the skin becoming clay-like, slick and opaque; a cold, earthy clamminess and a mineral silence seemed to waft up from that recently abandoned machine. Not ten hours ago had Juan Robles given up the ghost, and his body was already a mere clump of mud crumbling back into the earth it was made from, true to her plastic laws. “The soul’s instrument,” he thought. “It’s served its purpose and now the artisan throws it away before departing — a worn-out tool, all chipped and battered, spotted with bits of the earthy stuff it touched and worked throughout its days.” Adam looked again at the dead man’s face, tanned and hardened by the sun and the elements, then at the calloused hands, especially the fingernails — there were still traces of brick-making mud under them. An infinite pity invaded him; he felt the misery of that man as his own, and as everyone else’s too. And the soul? Samuel Tesler and the astrologer Schultz (two literary types, after all) insisted on dragging Juan Robles’s soul through every infernal twist and turn imaginable. But Adam trembled as he reflected on the fearful judgment awaiting the creature before his Creator. Through the alcoholic fog still clouding his awareness, he heard once again the admonitory drums beat within him, the eloquent resonance-chambers of his penitential night. “Not yet!” he cried within. “Don’t give in!” In spite of himself, he had raised his eyes to the bronze Crucifix, then looked away quickly. (Yes, a fish squirming on the hook, a fish no longer in the water nor yet in the hand of the fisherman.)
Just then, María Justa Robles entered, bearing coffee and little glasses of anisette on a tray held in both hands. Circumspect in her grief, María Justa went up to the three men who stood in vigil and silently offered them the tray.
— No, thank you, Schultz refused ceremoniously.
— Where are our friends? asked Adam.
— In the kitchen, she replied.
The three made polite gestures and went out to the yard, not without dedicating a final look at the deceased Juan Robles, wishing him god-speed. Then María Justa turned to the Three Crones lurking in their dark corner.
— Coffee? Anisette?
— Thank you, m’dear, murmured Doña Carmen, taking a cup from the tray.
— Ladies? María Justa invited Doña Consuelo and Doña Martina, who were hesitating.
— You’ve gone to so much trouble! whispered Doña Martina.
— You shouldn’t have! sighed Doña Consuelo.
Finally the two old women each took a cup of coffee. María Justa then approached the Three Necrophile Sisters-in-Law, who looked as if they were dozing, and offered them the tray. Three hands suddenly emerged rampant from amid the swaddling dark cloth, three hands or three claws that quickly snatched glasses of anisette and withdrew with their prey, sinking back down into the somber chaos of their shawls. María Justa, careful in her grief, put aside the load of drinks, picked up a pair of scissors, and went from one bronze candlestick to the next, trimming the curled wicks. One by one the flames shot up and chased the skittish shadows back into the four corners of the room. The Necrophile Sisters-in-Law, offended by the sudden excess of light, fled backward, like the shadows, and hid their faces in their shawls of mourning. At the same time the Crones’ faces were lit up: three faces amazingly unanimous in their expression of fateful tranquility. Then María Justa walked to the head of the coffin and contemplated the deceased for a long time. A single tear left her eye and rolled down her cheek. Then she picked up the tray and left the room, minimal and silent as ever.