Death with Interruptions by José Saramago Page A

was required to declare them dead, and agreements were reached with local councils that the burials in the maphia's charge should have absolute priority, regardless of the hour of day or night when it chose to carry these out. Naturally, all of this cost a lot of money, but now that the extras and the supplementary services accounted for most of the bill, the business continued to be profitable. Then, without warning, the tap from which had flowed a constant, generous supply of the terminally dying was turned off. It seemed that families, suffering an attack of conscience, had passed the word from one to the other that they were no longer going to send their loved ones far away to die, that if, in the figurative sense, we had eaten of their flesh, then now we would have to gnaw on their bones as well, that we are not here just for the good times, when our loved ones had strength and health intact, we are here, too, for the bad times and the worst, when they have become little more than a stinking rag that there is no point in washing. The undertakers went from euphoria to despair, were thrown back into ruin and the humiliation of burying canaries and cats, dogs and the rest of the menagerie, the turtle, the cockatoo, the squirrel, but not the lizard because that had been the only one that let its owner carry it about on his shoulder. The maphia remained calm, kept their nerve, and immediately set out to investigate what was going on. It was quite simple. The families told them, although not always in so many words, that acting in secret had been one thing, with their loved ones carried off at dead of night, and when there was no way the neighbors could know if they were still lying racked on their bed of pain or had simply evaporated. It was easy to lie, to say sadly, Still here, poor thing, when you met your next-door neighbor on the landing and she asked, So how's grandpa these days. Now everything would be different, there would be a death certificate, there would be plaques in the cemeteries engraved with names and surnames, in a matter of hours the whole envious, slanderous neighborhood would know that grandpa had died in the only way he could die, which meant, quite simply, that his own cruel, ungrateful family had dispatched him to the frontier. It makes us feel ashamed, they confessed. The maphia listened and listened and said they would think about it. This took no more than twenty-four hours. Following the example of the old gentleman on page thirty-three, the dead had wanted to die and their deaths would, therefore, be recorded on death certificates as suicides. The tap was turned on again.

 
     
     
     
     
    IN THIS COUNTRY IN WHICH NO ONE DIES NOT EVERYTHING was as sordid as we have just described, nor, in this society torn between the hope of living forever and the fear of never dying, did the voracious maphia succeed in getting its talons into every section by corrupting souls, subjugating bodies and besmirching the little that remained of the fine principles of old, when an envelope containing something that smelled of a bribe would have been immediately returned to the sender, bearing a firm and clear response, something along the lines of, Buy some toys for your children with this money, or You must have got the wrong address. Dignity was then a form of pride that was within the grasp of all classes. Despite everything, despite the false suicides and the dirty dealings on the frontier, that spirit continued to hover over the waters, not the waters of the great ocean sea, for that bathed other distant lands, but over lakes and rivers, over streams and brooks, over the puddles left by the rain, over the luminous depths of wells, which is where one can best judge how high the sky is, and, extraordinary though it may seem, over the calm surfaces of aquariums too. It was precisely when he was distractedly watching a goldfish that had just come up to the surface to breathe and when he was wondering, slightly less