Homes for the third and fourth age, those charitable institutions created for the peace of mind of families who have neither the time nor the patience to wipe away snot, tend to weary sphincters and get up at night to bring the bedpan, were not long in coming and beating their heads against the wailing wall, as the hospitals and undertakers had done before them. To give justice where justice is due, we should recognise that the dilemma in which they found themselves, namely, whether or not to continue taking in residents, would challenge the forward-planning skills of any manager of human resources, as well as any desire to be evenhanded. Largely because the final results, and this is what characterises genuine dilemmas, would always be the same. Accustomed until now, as were their querulous colleagues of the intravenous injection and the floral wreath with the purple ribbon, to the certainty resulting from the continuous and unstoppable rotation of lives and deaths, some coming in and others going out, the homes for the third and fourth ages did not even want to consider a working future in which the objects of their care never changed face or body, except to display them in a still more lamentable state with each day that passed, more decadent and more sadly dishevelled, the face growing steadily more shrivelled, line by line, like a raisin, limbs tremulous and hesitant, like a ship searching vainly for a compass that fell overboard. A new guest had always been a motive for celebration at these eventide homes, it meant a new name that one would have to fix in one’s memory, particular habits brought from the outside world, eccentricities peculiar to them alone, like the retired civil servant who had to scrub his toothbrush every day because he couldn’t bear seeing bits of toothpaste stuck among the bristles, or the old lady who drew family trees but could never find the right names to hang on the branches. For a few weeks, until routine evened out the amount of attention given to all the inmates, he or she would be the newcomer, the youngster, for the last time in his or her life, even if that life lasted as long as the eternity which, as people say of the sun, had come to shine on all the people of this fortunate land, on all of us who will see the sun set every day and yet remain alive, though no one knows how or why. Now, however, the new guest, unless he or she came to fill some vacancy and round up the institution’s income, is someone whose fate is known beforehand, we won’t see him leave here to go and die at home or in hospital as used to happen in the good old days, while the other residents hurriedly locked the door to their rooms so that death wouldn’t enter and carry them off too, no, that, we know, is a thing of a past, a past that will never come back, but someone in government will have to consider our fate, us, the owners, managers and employees of these eventide homes, the fate awaiting us is that when the moment comes to down tools, there will be no one to take us in, we are not even masters of the thing which was, in a way, also ours, at least as regards the years of work we put in, and here, it should be pointed out, it was the employees’ turn to speak, what we mean is that there will be no room for people like us in the eventide homes, unless we can rid ourselves of some of the residents, an idea that had already occurred to the government following the debate about the plethora of patients in hospitals, the family, they said, should resume its obligations, but for that to happen there would have to be at least one member of the family with sufficient intelligence and enough physical energy, gifts whose sell-by dates, as we know from our own experience and from what the world shows us, last only as long as a sigh when compared with this recently inaugurated eternity, anyway, the remedy, unless someone can come up with a better idea, would be to create more eventide homes, not as has been the case until now, using houses and mansions that have known better days, but building from scratch vast new edifices, in the form of a pentagon, for example, or a tower of babel or a labyrinth of knossos, starting out with districts, then cities, then metropoli, or, to put it more crudely, cemeteries of the living where fatal and irrenunciable old age will be cared for as god would have wanted until, since their days will have no end, who knows when, for the crux of the matter, and we feel it our duty to call this to the attention of the relevant authority, is that, with the passing of time, not only will there be more elderly people living in these eventide homes, but more and more people will be needed to care for them, with the result that the rhomboid of the ages will be swiftly turned on its head, with a gigantic, ever-growing mass of old people at the top, swallowing up like a python the new generations, who, transformed for the most part into nursing or administrative staff to work at these eventide homes, after spending the better part of their lives caring for old crocks of all ages, both the normally old and the methuselahs, multitudes of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, great-great-great-grandparents, and so on, ad infinitum, will, in turn, pile up, one on top of the other, like the leaves that fall from the trees onto the leaves from previous autumns, mais où sont les neiges d’antan, the endless throngs of those who, little by little, spent their lives losing teeth and hair, the legions with bad sight and bad hearing, those with hernias, colds, those with hip fractures, the paraplegic, the now immortal geriatrics who can’t even stop the drool running down their chin, you, gentlemen of the government, may not want to believe us, but such a future is perhaps the worst nightmare that could ever have assailed a human being, such a thing would never have been seen even in the dark caves, where all was fear and trembling, and it is we who have had experience of the first eventide home who are saying this, and in those days, obviously, everything was very small-scale indeed, but our imaginations must serve for something, and to be perfectly frank, prime minister, hand on heart, rather death than such a destiny.
A terrible threat is endangering the survival of our industry, declared the president of the federation of insurance companies to the media, referring to the many thousands of letters which, all couched in more or less identical terms, as if they had been copied from a single draft, had, in the last few days, been flooding their offices, all calling for the immediate cancellation of the life insurance policies of the undersigned. These letters stated that, given the well-known fact that death had put an end to itself, it would be absurd, not to say downright stupid, to continue paying exorbitant premiums which would only serve to make the companies still richer, with no kind of balancing recompense for them. I’m not pouring money down the drain, said one particularly disgruntled policy-holder in a postscript. Some went further, demanding the return of sums already paid, but in these cases, it was clear that they were just making a stab in the dark, trying their luck. In answer to the inevitable question from journalists about how the insurance companies intended to fend off this sudden salvo of heavy artillery, the president of the federation said that, while their legal advisors were, at that very moment, carefully studying the small print of policies for some kind of interpretative loophole that would allow them, always keeping strictly to the letter of the law, of course, to impose on these heretical policy-holders, even if it were against their wishes, the obligation to continue paying premiums for as long as they remained alive, that is, for all eternity, the more likely option would be to reach some form of consensus, a gentlemen’s agreement, which would consist in the addition to policies of a brief addendum, with one eye on rectifying the current situation and with the other on the future, and which would set eighty as the age of obligatory death, in a purely figurative sense of course, the president was quick to add, smiling benevolently. In this way, the companies would receive the premiums, as normal, until the date when the happy policy-holder celebrated his eightieth birthday, at which time, now that he had become someone who was, virtually speaking, dead, he would promptly be paid the full sum stipulated in the policy. He should also add, and this would be of no small interest, that, if they so desired, customers could renew their contract for another eighty years, at the end of which, they would, to all intents and purposes, register a second death, and the earlier procedure would then be repeated, and so on and so forth. Amongst the journalists who knew their actuarial calculus, there were some admiring murmurs and a brief flutter of applause which the president acknowledged with a brief nod. Strategically and tactically, the move had been perfect, so much so that the following day letters started pouring in again to the insurance companies declaring the previous letters null and void. All the policy-holders declared themselves ready to accept the proposed gentleman’s agreement, and indeed one might say, without exaggeration, that this was one of those very rare occasions when no one lost and everyone gained. Especially the insurance companies, which had been saved from catastrophe by the skin of their teeth. It is assumed that at the next election, the president of the federation will be re-elected to the post he fills so very brilliantly.