A Game for the Living by Patricia Highsmith Page A

view—had felt grateful to have the lid of the coffin closed. And yet when he saw the shining dark brown wooden lid with its hideously functional-ornamental fastenings, he realized that however horrible her face may have been to look at, it could not have been more painful to his eyes than this permanently closed and fastened lid. The people ranged themselves all around the grave, trampling on near-by graves, and people stood with bowed heads in three or four of the paths around the grave, too far away to see or hear anything. There were young painters, middle-aged art dealers, a few officials from the Bellas Artes, shopkeepers, Lelia’s pharmacist, a couple of cousins from Guadalajara, whom Josefina introduced to Theodore. And there were flowers everywhere—wreaths leaning three deep around her tombstone, flowers in hands, in arms, roses and lilies and chrysanthemums and gladiolas and great yard-long garlands of red and white and purple bougainvilleas carried by some families who Josefina said had come up from Cuernavaca. There was little José and his family of many brothers and sisters. A man of about sixty with walrus moustaches, grey and drooping, stood with his hat pressed over his diaphragm and resembled, Theodore thought, a composite of retired Presidents of France. The priest was an anxious-looking, spare man with yellowish hands. His face held a worldly anxiety. He pattered on about Lelia’s glorious career in the arts, cut short so cruelly and without warning. Perhaps he had known Lelia, perhaps not. Lelia had not gone to church very regularly. Josefina glanced once at Theodore and shook her head slowly, as if to say that the priest was not what he might have been, but what could they do?
    And it really didn’t matter, Theodore thought. His proximity to Lelia’s body now did not seem to matter. He merely felt quiet and solemn as he did sometimes when visiting church or when hearing sacred music. He realized that for moments he had not thought of the question that had tortured him for the past sixty hours, even when he slept: who had killed her? He let his eyes pass over all the people he could see in front of him and by turning his head a little; he tried to see if any face set off a train of thought. But none did. Theodore looked up at a cruising zopilote which was paying no heed to the dead in the cemetery but was inspecting the adjacent field, where the carrion might lie unburied.
    Theodore woke up a little at the sound of the priest’s handful of soil clattering on to the coffin top. The familiar Latin went on and on as the gravediggers sprang to work. For a moment it seemed to Theodore that the bystanders flinched at each shovelful, but this impression changed. They stood unmoving, he thought, each with his own thoughts, and perhaps not even thoughts of Lelia just now, much as they had liked and loved her. The wreaths and the flowers rained down on the fresh grave until they were higher than the tombstone, which stood nearby, awaiting its final place. A choice of Josefina, it was a flat square of nearly white stone surmounted by an angel on one knee with arms outspread. Like the priest, it also sufficed, and Theodore even liked the outspread arms, because that had been Lelia’s attitude towards life. Then the sight of the cold stone angel and its significance struck him in the heart, and his eyes filled with tears. He looked at Ramón’s stern but composed face and listened to his own heart, that seemed to be flogging him to act before it was too late. Rape—and mutilation. He was looking now at the guilty man, Theodore thought. Ramón, whom Mexican justice had released, at best, would never punish sufficiently. All at once, Theodore yielded to the realization of Lelia’s last horrible moments of life. He exerted his imagination to grasp what she had suffered. And with a kind of relish and satisfaction, he let himself be borne up on a sea of hatred and wrath