It was a pink house, glistening nostalgically in the twilight. In that wet November, evening had come quickly, aided by gloomy, yellow clouds. The tomb had an austere triangular pediment, with a round window in the center. The door was framed by two niches, with two statues of polished brass. What human beings did those bronzes represent? What humility before the mystery of death? The statues were silently screaming, mad with horror or a terrible laceration of the bowels. You could see the roofs of their mouths and the molars at the backs of their throats, and there, behind their uvulae, they turned pink (in the twilight, perhaps) as though their throats and gullets were made of flesh, as if the terrible bronze encased still-living human bodies, with soft, palpitating organs, blood beating through the ducts of their veins, and minds feeling endless agony in every neuron. The bronze statues were frozen in defensive, blocking gestures, their fingers sprawled, their ribs visible, and their paunches clenched, desperate to break off their pedestals and run away through the endless cemetery. Only once, when the priest sprinkled everything with holy water did the strange building lose its enchantment. Rubbing their eyes, the people saw that, in fact, the two bronze Adonises were angels. Their mouths were open in song, and their eyes were lifted toward heaven. The service was long and tedious, and afterward (darkness had fallen completely, irradiated by the temple’s rosy crystal) the coffin was lowered down the steps of the tomb. A blackened iron door, very heavy and well oiled, opened into an empty room and a stone staircase leading to a basement. The pallbearers carefully shuffled the coffin on their shoulders, and the relatives followed. Maria thought that there would not be room for anyone else. She, in any case, did not want to go in. She had never liked funerals, or priests. She did not believe in the afterlife, or rather, she never thought about it. “Did anyone ever come back and say what it’s like? If you’re okay with yourself in your soul, there’s no reason to be afraid. Whatever will be will be.” But little by little, the crowd around her thinned out, everyone else climbed down, and there seemed to still be room inside. Soon, she was alone, in the creepy darkness and cold. The irregular architecture of the surrounding tombs, now pitch black, bit into the sky like the teeth of a saw. Here and there a statue (an angel blowing a trumpet with its wings outstretched) made a brown profile against the yellow dregs of the horizon. The cypresses looked like they were painted with bitumen, and their sinister branches shook. Maria, frozen with fear, climbed down the stairs.
At a great depth, far ahead of her, she saw two or three silhouettes advancing in the dark green, and merging into it. The steps seemed to have no end. Maria descended them for hours and almost forgot where she was, when she saw at the extreme end of the stairs’ diagonal a small rectangle of light. No taller than insects, the last people in the funeral train flashed for a moment in the slowly advancing light and disappeared through the clear portal. Maria followed them and found herself in a huge hall, moving forward in miniscule steps over a polished, imperial mosaic floor. The hall seemed to be round, but its sides were so far away that they almost disappeared into a pearly mist. Supported by colossal porphyry columns, a golden dome stood too high for words to describe, higher than the dome of the heavens for one who labored on the earth, and higher than the quartz sphere of the constellations. Monstrous sculptures were set into niches all around the room, alternating with red-brown columns. They were male and female nudes, painted the color of flesh, the women pink, the men olive, all with the same azure eyes and the same terror on their faces. Each of their toenails was as thick as a human body, and lost in the gold fog of the vaults, their faces shone only by the lights in their dilated eyes. Each giant exhibited a different, tragic debility: one woman’s left breast was afflicted with elephantiasis, hanging like a hideous sack down to her pubis. Another sculpture’s head was sunk into her neck, her sternum stuck forward like a bird’s. The man closest to her had a poliomyelitic leg, missing the thigh and hip, with only his femur, tibia and perineum sagging in pockets of wrinkled skin. The hernia of the next one filled his testicle, its sack hanging to the ground. Cripples, dwarfs, cachexics, coxalgics, myelomeningoceliacs, the monstrously obese, cyclopedes, those with cleft lips, eleven fingers and eleven toes, bruised skin from a cardiac deformity, lepers, those scarred by anthrax, by scrofula, by vitiligo … the curved line of giant statues embraced the room with a ring of mutilations, and the funeral train advanced across its endless surface, like a parade of mites.
Maria, her mouth agape, crossed the great colored surfaces, imagining, of course, that the floor of semiprecious stone (malachite? obsidian?) contained an enormous drawing, geometric or figurative, that she was too close to see. High above, near the apex of the vault, one must be able to glimpse the fabulous mosaic in its full meaning. The tentative steps of her cheap shoes were like the untrained fingers of someone who’d been recently blinded, or of a teenager touching a woman for the first time. Slowly, the pallbearers came to the center of the hall. As the funeral train progressed, they saw other views of the mausoleum. They could see symmetrical openings in the curved wall, between the niches and columns, portals with bronze inscriptions and intricate decorations, which led to never-ending galleries. Sweet and colorful light, like in a cathedral, filled the mausoleum from nowhere with a diaphanous jelly. In the withered silence, the only sound was the tap of shoes, punctuated and harmonious as the music of a carillon.
Maria passed through the group of relatives in mourning black. She could not look away from the coffin, which was now a shell of prismatic, tinted glass that the six pallbearers struggled to carry. How the dead body had changed! His features were decomposing, his eyes looked like two huge balls under the thick skin of his face, as if his eyeballs had merged with his cerebral hemispheres, and his nose and mouth had merged into a proboscis that ran down to his chest. His hands and feet had been reabsorbed into his belly and chest, which swelled into repulsive shapes. His clothes broke apart, his beard and hair were tossed around like fluff shaken off of a dandelion, and the whitish worm of his penis, gently palpitating, now lay, passive but alive, in the coffin’s elytrons. Maria touched the hard shell of translucent chitin. Her eyes dilated and goosebumps rose on her arms.