Death with Interruptions (9 page)

The polemic about death singular or deaths plural, which was started by the spirit hovering over the water in the aquarium and by the apprentice philosopher, would have ended either in comedy or in farce had the article by the economist not appeared. Although, as he himself acknowledged, actuarial calculus was not his specialty, he considered himself sufficiently knowledgeable about the subject to go public and to ask just how, in about twenty years' time, give or take a year, the country thought it would be able to pay the millions of people who would find themselves on permanent disability pensions and would continue like that for all eternity and would, implacably, be joined by further millions, now regardless of whether you used an arithmetic or a geometric progression, disaster was assured, it would mean chaos, disorder, state bankruptcy, a case of
sauve qui peut,
except that no one would be saved. Confronted by this terrifying vision, the metaphysicians had no option but to button their lip, the church had no option but to return to their weary telling of beads and to waiting for the end of time, which, according to their eschatological visions, would resolve everything once and for all. In fact, going back to the economist's worrying arguments, the calculations were very easy to make, if a certain proportion of the active population are paying their national insurance, and a certain proportion of the inactive population are retired, either for reasons of old age or disability, and therefore drawing on the active population for their pensions, and the active population is constantly on the decrease with respect to the inactive population, and the inactive population is constantly on the increase, it's hard to understand why no one saw at once that the disappearance of death, apparently the peak, the pinnacle, the supreme happiness, was not, after all, a good thing. The philosophers and other abstractionists had first to get lost in the forest of their own lucubrations about the almost and the zero, which is the plebeian way of saying being and nothingness, before common sense could arrive prosaically, with pen and paper in hand, to demonstrate by a + b + c that there were certain far more urgent matters to consider. As was foreseeable, knowing as one does the darker side of human nature, when the economist's alarming article was published, the attitude of the healthy section of the population toward the terminally dying began to change for the worse. Up until then, even though everyone was agreed that the old and the sick caused considerable upsets and problems, it was nevertheless felt that treating them with respect was one of the essential duties of any civilized society, and consequently, although it did occasionally take some effort, the care they needed was never denied to them and, in a few rare cases, this care was even sweetened with a spoonful of compassion and love before the light was turned out. It's also true, as we well know, that there were a few cruel families who allowed themselves to be carried away by their own incurable inhumanity and went so far as to employ the services of the maphia to get rid of the miserable human remains that lay dying interminably between sheets drenched in sweat and stained by natural excretions, but they deserve our disapprobation, as does the family described in the oft-told tale of the wooden bowl, although, fortunately, as you will see, they were saved at the last moment from the final execration thanks to the kind heart of a child of eight. It is a tale quickly told, and we will leave it here for the illumination of new generations who do not know it, in the hope that they do not mock it for being ingenuous or sentimental. Listen, then, to this moral lesson. Once upon a time, in the ancient land of fables, there was a family consisting of a father, a mother, a grandfather who was the father's father, and the aforementioned child of eight, a little boy. Now the grandfather was very old and because of that his hands shook and when he was at table he sometimes dropped his food, to the great irritation of his son and his daughter-in-law, who were always telling him to eat more carefully, but the poor old man, however hard he tried, could not stop his shaking, which only got worse when they told him off, and so he was always staining the tablecloth or dropping food on the floor, not to mention on the napkin they tied around his neck and which they had to change three times a day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This was how things stood, with no hope of improvement, when the son decided to put a stop to the unpleasant situation. He arrived home with a wooden bowl and said to his father, From now on, you'll eat here, sitting on the doorstep, because that's easier to clean, and your daughter-in-law won't have to deal with all those dirty tablecloths and napkins. And so it was. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the old man sat alone on the doorstep, raising the food to his mouth as best he could, losing half on the way, while part of the other half dribbled onto his chin, with very little actually making it down what common folk would call his gullet. The grandson seemed entirely unmoved by the cruel treatment being meted out to his grandfather, he would look at him, then look at his mother and father, and continue to eat as if it were none of his business. Then one afternoon, when the father came home from work, he saw his son carving a piece of wood and assumed he was making himself a toy, as was normal in those distant days. The following day, however, he realized that the boy wasn't making a toy car, or at least if he was, he couldn't see where the wheels would go, and so he asked, What are you making. The boy pretended he hadn't heard and continued whittling away at the wood with the point of his knife, this happened in the days when parents were less fearful and wouldn't immediately snatch from their children's hands such a useful tool for making toys. Didn't you hear me, I asked what you're making with that piece of wood, the father asked again, and his son, without glancing up from what he was doing, replied, I'm making a bowl for when you're old and your hands shake and you're sent to sit on the front step to eat your meals, like you did with grandpa. These words had a magical effect. The scales fell from the father's eyes, he saw the truth and its light, and went at once to ask his own father's forgiveness, and when supper-time arrived, he helped him sit down in the chair, fed him with a spoon and gently wiped his chin, because he could still do that, and his dear father could not. History fails to recount what happened afterward, but we know for certain that the boy's carving was interrupted and the piece of wood is still there. No one wanted to throw it away, perhaps because they didn't want the lesson to be forgotten or because they thought that someone might one day decide to finish the job, which was all too possible when one bears in mind the enormous capacity for survival of the aforesaid darker side of human nature. As someone once said, Everything that can happen will happen, it's only a matter of time, and if we don't get to see it while we're around, it will be because we didn't live long enough. Anyway, just so that we're not accused of painting everything with colors drawn only from the left-hand side of the palette, some believe that an adaptation of this gentle story for television, some newspaper having first rescued it from the dusty shelves of the collective memory and brushed off the cobwebs, might help to restore to the shattered consciences of families the cult or cultivation of the incorporeal values of spirituality once nurtured by society, before the base materialism that currently prevails took possession of wills we imagined to be strong, but which were, in fact, the very image of a dreadful and incurable moral weakness. Let us not, however, give up hope. We are convinced that the moment the boy appears on the screen, half the country's population will race off in search of a handkerchief to dry their tears and the other half, being perhaps of a more stoical temperament, will allow the tears to roll down their face in silence, the better to show that remorse for some evil done or condoned is not necessarily an empty word. Let us hope we are still in time to save the grandparents.

Unexpectedly, and revealing a deplorably poor sense of timing, the republicans decided to choose this delicate occasion to make their voices heard. There were not many of them, they did not even have any representation in parliament, despite forming a political party and regularly standing for election. Nevertheless, they bragged about having a certain amount of social influence, especially in artistic and literary circles, whence came occasional manifestos which while, on the whole, well-written, were invariably bland and anodyne. They had shown no sign of life since the disappearance of death, not even, as one might expect from a supposedly radical opposition, in order to demand an explanation for the maphia's rumored participation in the ignoble traffic in the terminally dying. Now, taking advantage of the anxiety sweeping the country, torn as it was between the vanity of knowing itself to be unique on the whole planet and a feeling of deep disquiet because it was not like anywhere else, there they were bringing into question neither more nor less than the matter of the regime. Being, by definition, opponents of the monarchy and enemies of the throne, they thought they had discovered a new argument in favor of the necessary and urgent establishment of the republic. They said that it went against common logic for a country to have a king who would never die and who, even if he were to decide to abdicate tomorrow for reasons of age or declining mental health, would continue to be king, the first in an endless succession of enthronements and abdications, an endless sequence of kings lying in their beds awaiting a death that would never arrive, a stream of half-alive, half-dead kings who, unless they were kept in the corridors of the palace, would end up filling and finally overflowing the pantheon where their mortal ancestors had been received and who would now be nothing but bones detached from their hinges or musty, mummified remains. How much more logical it would be to have a president of the republic with a fixed term of office, a single mandate, at most two, and then he could go his own sweet way, live his own life, give lectures, write books, take part in congresses, colloquia and symposia, argue his point at roundtables, go around the world in eighty receptions, opine upon the length of skirts when they come back into fashion and on the reduction of ozone in the atmosphere if there is an atmosphere, he could, in short, do as he pleased. Better that than having to read every day in the newspapers and hear on television and radio the unalterable medical bulletin, still no change, about the patients in the royal infirmaries, which, it should be noted, having already been extended twice, would be about to be extended again. The plural of infirmaries is there to indicate that, as always happens with hospitals and the like, the men were kept separate from the women, that is, kings and princes on one side, queens and princesses on the other. The republicans were now challenging the people to assume their rightful responsibilities, to take destiny in their hands in order to inaugurate a new life and forge a new, flower-strewn path toward future dawns. This time their manifesto touched not only artists and writers, other social strata proved equally receptive to the happy image of the flower-strewn path and to those invocations of future dawns, and the result was an absolutely extraordinary flood of support from new militants ready to set off on a crusade which, just as a fish is a fish before and after it has been fished, had passed into history even before anyone knew it would turn out to be an historic event. Unfortunately, in the days that followed, the verbal manifestations of civic enthusiasm from the new supporters of this forward-looking, prophetic republicanism were not always as respectful as good manners and healthy democratic coexistence demand. Some even crossed the line of the most offensive vulgarity, saying, for example, when speaking of their royal highnesses, that they were not prepared to keep donkeys or dumb beasts with rings through their noses supplied with sponge cake. All people of good taste agreed that such words were not just inadmissible, they were unforgivable. It would have sufficed to say that the state coffers would be unable to continue to support the continual increase in expenditure of the royal household and its adjuncts, and everyone would have understood. It was true, but it did not offend.

It was this violent attack by the republicans, but, more important, the article's worrying prediction that, very soon, the aforementioned state coffers would be unable, with no end in sight, to continue paying old age and disability pensions, that prompted the king to let the prime minister know that they needed to have a frank conversation, alone, without tape recorders or witnesses of any kind. The prime minister duly arrived, inquired after the royal health, in particular after that of the queen mother, who, at new year, had been on the point of dying, but who nonetheless, like so very many others, still continued to breathe thirteen times a minute, even though her prostrate body beneath the canopy covering her bed showed few other signs of life. His majesty thanked him and said that the queen mother was bearing her sufferings with the dignity proper to the blood that still ran in her veins, and then turned to the matters on the agenda, the first of which was the republicans' declaration of war. I just don't understand what these people can be thinking of, he said, here's the country plunged in the worst crisis of its entire history, and there they are talking about regime change, Oh, I wouldn't worry, sir, all they're doing is taking advantage of the situation to spread what they call their plans for government, deep down, they're nothing but poor anglers fishing in some very murky waters, And, let it be said, showing a lamentable lack of patriotism. Indeed, sir, the republicans have ideas about the nation that only they can understand, if, that is, they do understand them, Their ideas don't interest me in the least, what I want to hear from you is if there's any chance they might force a change of regime, They don't even have any representation in parliament, sir, What I'm referring to is a coup d'etat, a revolution, Absolutely not, sir, the people are solidly behind their king, and the armed forces are loyal to the legitimate government, So I can rest easy, Completely, sir. The king made a cross in his diary next to the word republicans, and said, Good, then he asked, And what's all this about pensions not being paid, We are paying them, sir, but prospects do look pretty bleak, So I must have misread it, I thought there had been, shall we say, a suspension of payments, No, sir, but, as I say, the future is very worrying indeed, Worrying in what respect, In every respect, sir, the state could simply collapse like a house of cards, Are we the only country that finds itself in this situation, asked the king, No, sir, in the long term, the problem will affect everyone, but what counts is the difference between dying and not dying, a fundamental difference, if you'll forgive me stating the obvious, Sorry, but I don't quite understand, In other countries, it's normal for people to die, but here, sir, in our country, no one dies, think only of the queen mother, it seemed certain she was dying, but, no, she's still here, happily for us, of course, but really, I'm not exaggerating, the noose is well and truly around our necks, And yet I've heard rumors that some people are dying, That's true, sir, but it's merely a drop in the ocean, not all families can bring themselves to take that step, What step, Handing over their dying to the organization in charge of the suicides, But I don't understand, what's the point of them committing suicide if they can't die, Oh, they can, sir, And how do they manage it, It's a complicated story, sir, Well, tell it to me, we're alone, On the other side of the frontier, sir, people are still dying, You mean that this organization takes them there, Exactly, Is it a charitable organization, It helps us a little to slow down the mounting numbers of the terminally dying, but, as I said before, it's a drop in the ocean, And what is this organization. The prime minister took a deep breath and said, The maphia, sir, The maphia, Yes, sir, the maphia, sometimes the state has no alternative but to find someone else to do its dirty work, You've never said anything to me about this before, No, sir, I wanted to keep you out of a situation for which I take full responsibility, And the troops who were on the frontier, They had a job to do, What job was that, Of appearing to be an obstacle to the transportation of suicides, but not, in fact, being an obstacle at all, But I thought they were there to prevent an invasion, There never was such a danger, and, besides, we've made agreements with the governments of those other countries, and everything's under control, Apart from the matter of pensions, Apart from the matter of death, sir, if we don't start dying again, we have no future. The king made a cross beside the word pensions and said, Something needs to happen, Indeed, sir, something needs to happen.