Don Hilarión remained in the same position for a few moments. Then his eyes opened and he noticed once again the Spanish paper he had been reading. In sudden rage, he crumpled it up into a shapeless ball and hurled it against the walls lined with his law books. Then he sat back, his breath coming in gasps, and his eyes roved over those books. For only a few dollars anybody could be a notario!
He felt an uncontrollable desire to tear those volumes from the shelves where they reposed, to trample them, to smash them. He made an effort to rise and something snapped inside of him sending a sharp pain from his chest along his arms. Everything reeled, everything went dark: “Dolores — Dolores—!” he cried with despair.
Doña Dolores was rushing along the long corridor, looking into every room: “Where are you? Where are you?” She finally reached his room: “Hilarión, what is it, Hilarión?”
Don Hilarión did not answer. He was leaning back in his chair, his head drooping on one shoulder, his arms hanging lifelessly down the sides.
“Hilarión, are you sick? Hilarión, speak! Hilarión—! Vicenta! Come!” she howled.
Don Hilarión was dead.
To try to convey in words the extremes to which Doña Dolores went in displaying her just, unquestionable sorrow, would be impossible and if possible, useless, since no one could conceive of it more than of the stellar light-years in a book of astronomy. One can conceive possibly the feelings of a panhandler who is seeking five cents for a cup of coffee and suddenly finds himself owning the treasures of Ali Baba, then one could raise that to the nth power, but it would do no good. One cannot conceive that, and yet this is but like an orange compared to the earth if one considers the sorrow of Doña Dolores, the full measure of her bereavement.
Even she felt that it was quite impossible to do complete justice to her position, and like a clever actor fearing that a role may lie beyond his dramatizing potentialities, she wisely and conveniently for the surrounding world chose to underact her part. In all her sympathy-acknowledging answers she was sober and introduced simple phrases such as: “No, nothing, my dear. He left us nothing but his good name and the honor of bearing it,” and “Yes, my dear, quite unexpected, but those who live honestly in spite of their poverty are always ready when the moment arrives,” or “That is right, my dear. Death is the common leveler and no amount of money can pave the road to the kingdom of heaven and it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle—” But her expression was a thing to behold and she always ended with the same words: “Ay! They did not baptize me Dolores for nothing!”
But throughout all this Doña Dolores smiled wisely, sadly and to herself, as one who is keeping a secret. She was preparing her great coup, her fitting and masterly stroke. When words failed, it was time for action, and since tears, sobbing, nervous attacks and bellowing could do no justice to the situation, she, Doña Dolores, the champion mourner, would not be caught napping. She would do something, she would do something that would show how she could feel such a thing, something that would break all previous records set by the loudest mourners in this world, something memorable that would put to shame the most rabidly unfortunate characters in history.
Two days after the death of Don Hilarión, Doña Dolores summoned a Spanish undertaker by the name of Zacatecas. They remained a long time closeted in Don Hilarión’s office, where the body lay in state. When they came out, enigmatic phrases were heard:
“You must reconsider the price, Señor Zacatecas. We are poor. He left us nothing but his good name and—”
“I know, madam, but this is a special job and besides, I may get into trouble and the least that could happen would be losing my license. Also remember that you would have had to buy a coffin.”
“Very well, Señor Zacatecas. Please hurry and do your best.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about that. I will do my best. Now I am going for lunch and to my office to get some things and will be right back.”
The Señor Zacatecas having left, Doña Dolores walked up and down the corridor several times, an unfathomable and resolute smile upon her lips.
When the Señor Zacatecas returned as promised with a large black case, she ushered him again into her husband’s office and left him there behind the closed door. After that she had to perform what she called the painful duty of taking some nourishment to remain alive for the children’s sake and then she sat surrounded by friends and acquaintances like a queen on a throne to bask in their admiring sympathy and discuss and comment at length with undisputed authority upon the exemplary past actions and never well-praised virtues of the illustrious and important defunct, while some black-attired guest summed up matters with a deep remark such as: “The real trouble with life is death.”
Time passed and a few close and dejected friends sat at her sadly regal, if materially poor table to “do something for life, since one can do nothing for death” by eating a hasty supper prepared and served by Vicenta with red swollen eyes and unsteady hands.
The children sat through all this together, their thin faces paler than ever, Angie crying intermittently under the protective arm of her brother.
“Vicenta, please see that the children eat something.”
“Yes — Doña Dolores,” she said shakily and she went to the children and, holding them tightly with trembling arms, she disappeared with them into the kitchen, sobbing.
The mournful gathering remained repeating the same words, singing the same praises until well into the night. The children also remained up, Doña Dolores affecting an adequate disregard for anything not connected with her bereavement.
And then the Señor Zacatecas emerged from Don Hilarión’s office where he had been all that time and called Doña Dolores, who responded immediately, reentering the room with him.
They remained there mysteriously with door closed quite a while and then she reappeared, followed by the Señor Zacatecas and closing the door carefully behind. Then she summoned everybody.
All the guests walked in single file along the corridor, Vicenta and the children bringing up the rear. They arrived as the Señor Zacatecas was taking his leave noiselessly like a shadow, and standing in front of the closed room, they met Doña Dolores, arms folded, beaming upon them her despair, her tragedy:
“I have summoned you all to witness the proof of my devotion.” She quoted the old saying cryptically: “Things you will see of the Cid, that will cause the stones to speak.” And she flung the door open.
The grief-stricken gathering crowded in the doorway and gasped.
Don Hilarión was sitting at his desk, in typical pose, pen in hand resting on a sheet of foolscap, his gold-rimmed spectacles balanced on his nose. There was even a frown clouding his noble brow as if it were laden with the problems and responsibilities of justice. The Señor Zacatecas had done a good job.
The wall behind his chair displayed a Spanish flag, adding to the sad arrangement a touch of glorious brilliance. It was a perfect picture of dignity, sacrifice and important futility. Doña Dolores had risen to unsuspected heights of genius to meet the challenge of the occasion:
“From now on,” she said throatily but with appropriate self-control and an edge of fatigue in her voice, “this will be his shrine, his sanctuary. He will sit among his legal books and papers, in the atmosphere that was his life.” She grew stern with the assurance of the cruelly wounded person before an appreciative, almost envious audience: “They shall not take him away from me. He was our only and most precious possession in our poverty. He was all we had. His exemplary life, his important achievements, no longer appreciated in these materialistic days, shall guide us in our dark hours of sorrow. He was a notario as you all know and he will remain one. Indeed death is the common leveler and all dead notarios are equal. In the new fields he is conquering, his well-justified ignorance of a vulgarly modern language will no longer stand in his path to glory. Here you behold Don Hilarión Coello, Notario.”