Death with Interruptions (8 page)

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 distractedly, just how long it had been since he changed the water, because he knew what the fish was trying to say when again and again it ruptured the delicate meniscus where water meets air, it was at precisely this revelatory moment that the apprentice philosopher was presented with the clear, stark question that would give rise to the most impassioned and thrilling controversy ever known in the whole history of this country where no one dies. This is what the spirit hovering over the water of the aquarium asked the apprentice philosopher, Have you ever wondered if death is the same for all living beings, be they animals, human beings included, or plants, from the grass you walk on to the hundred-meter-tall
sequoiadendron giganteum,
will the death that kills a man who knows he's going to die be the same as that of a horse who never will. And, it went on, at what point did the silkworm die after having shut itself up in the cocoon and bolted the door, how was it possible for the life of one to have been born out of the death of the other, the life of the moth out of the death of the worm, and for them to be the same but different, or did the silkworm not die because the moth still lives. The apprentice philosopher replied, The silkworm didn't die, but the moth will die after it has laid its eggs, Well, I knew that before you were born, said the spirit hovering over the waters of the aquarium, the silkworm didn't die, there was no corpse inside the cocoon when the moth had left, but, as you said, one was born out of the death of the other, It's called metamorphosis, everyone knows that, said the apprentice philosopher condescendingly, That's a very fine-sounding word, full of promises and certainties, you say metamorphosis and move on, it seems you don't understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you'll never know what the things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them, Which of us is the philosopher, Neither you nor me, you're merely an apprentice philosopher, and I am merely the spirit hovering over the water in the aquarium, We were talking about death, No, not about death, about deaths, what I asked was why is it that human beings aren't dying, but other animals are, why is the non-death of some not also the non-death of others, when the life of this goldfish ends, and, I should warn you, that won't be long in coming if you don't change this water, would you be able to recognize in its death that other death from which at the moment, for reasons you don't know, you appear to be immune, Before, in the days when people died, on the few occasions when I found myself in the presence of people who had passed away, I never imagined that their death would be the same death I would one day die, Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it, And what about animals and plants, Well, I suppose it's the same with them, Each one with its own death, Exactly, So there are many deaths, as many as all the living beings that have existed, do exist and will exist, In a way, yes, You're contradicting yourself, exclaimed the apprentice philosopher, The deaths that oversee each individual are, so to speak, deaths with a limited life span, subaltern deaths, who die along with the thing they kill, but above them will be a larger death, the one that has been in charge of human beings since the dawn of the species, So there's a hierarchy, Yes, I suppose so, As there is for animals, from the most elementary protozoan to the blue whale, For them too, And for plants, from diatoms to the giant sequoia, which, because it's so big, you mentioned before with its Latin name, As far as I know, the same thing happens with them, So each thing has its own personal, untransmittable death, Yes, And then two more general deaths, one for each of nature's kingdoms, Precisely, And is that where it ends, the hierarchy of responsibilities delegated by thanatos, asked the apprentice philosopher, If I go as far as my imagination can reach, I can see another death, the last, supreme death, What death is that, The one that will destroy the universe, the one that really deserves the name of death, although when that happens, there'll be no one around to pronounce its name, the other things we've been talking about are nothing but tiny, insignificant details, So there isn't just one death, concluded the apprentice philosopher somewhat unnecessarily, That's precisely what I've been saying, So the death that used to be our death has stopped working, but the others, the deaths of animals and plants, continue to operate, so they're independent, each working in their own sector, Now are you convinced, Yes, Right, now go and tell everyone else, said the spirit hovering over the water of the aquarium. And that is how the controversy started.

The first argument against the daring thesis proposed by the spirit hovering over the water of the aquarium was that its spokesperson was not a qualified philosopher, but a mere apprentice who had never gone beyond a few textbook rudiments, almost as elementary as the protozoan, and as if that were not enough, these rudiments had been taken from here, there and everywhere, in stray snippets, with no needle and thread to sew them together even though the colors and shapes clashed horribly, it was, in short, a philosophy that one might describe as being of the harlequin or eclectic school of thought. That wasn't really the problem, though. It's true that the essence of the thesis had been the work of the spirit hovering over the water of the aquarium, however, one need only re-read the dialogue on the two previous pages to recognize that the apprentice philosopher's contribution also had some influence on the gestation of this interesting idea, if only in his role as listener, a dialectical factor which, as everyone knows, has been indispensable ever since the days of socrates. There was one thing, at least, that could not be denied, human beings were not dying, but other animals were. As for the plants, anyone, however ignorant of botany, could easily see that, just as before, they were being born, putting out leaves, then withering and drying up entirely, and if that final phase, with or without putrefaction, could not be described as dying, then perhaps someone could step up and offer a better definition. The fact that the people here were not dying, but all other living things were, said some objectors, could only be seen as proof that normality had not entirely withdrawn from the world, and normality, needless to say, means, purely and simply, dying when our time comes. Dying and not getting caught up in arguments about whether that death was ours from birth, or if it was merely passing by and happened to notice us. In other countries, people continued to die, and the inhabitants didn't seem any unhappier for that. At first, as is only natural, there was envy, there were conspiracies, there was even the odd case of attempted scientific espionage to find out how we had managed it, but, when they saw the problems besetting us, we believe that the feeling among the populations of those countries could best be expressed in these words, We've had a very lucky escape.

The church, of course, galloped into the arena of the debate mounted on its usual war-horse, namely, that god moves, as always, in mysterious ways, which means, in layman's terms somewhat tinged with verbal impiety, that we cannot even peer through the crack in the door of heaven to see what's going on inside. The church also said that the temporary and more or less lasting suspension of natural causes and effects wasn't really a novelty, one had only to recall the infinite miracles that had happened over the last twenty centuries, the only difference, compared with what was happening now, was the sheer scale of the thing, for what was once bestowed as a favor on one individual, by the grace of his or her personal faith, had been replaced by a depersonalized, global gift, a whole country being given, so to speak, the elixir of eternal life, and not only the believers, who, as is only logical, might expect to be singled out, but also atheists, agnostics, heretics, apostates, unbelievers of every kind, devotees of other religions, the good, the bad and the worse, the virtuous and the maphiosi, executioners and victims, cops and robbers, murderers and blood donors, the mad and the sane, all, without exception, were at the same time witnesses and beneficiaries of the greatest marvel ever seen in the whole history of miracles, the eternal life of a body eternally bound to the eternal life of the soul. The catholic hierarchy, from the bishops up, were not amused by these mystical tales issuing from certain members of their middle ranks avid for wonders, and they let it be known in a very firm message to the faithful, in which, after the inevitable reference to god's impenetrably mysterious ways, they repeated the idea which had already been expressed off-the-cuff by the cardinal, during the first few hours of the crisis, in the phone conversation he'd had with the prime minister, when, imagining himself to be the pope and asking god to forgive him for such foolish presumption, he had proposed the immediate publication of a new thesis, that of death postponed, trusting in the oft-praised wisdom of time, which tells us that there will always be a tomorrow in which to resolve the problems that today seem insoluble. In a letter to the editor of his favorite newspaper, a reader declared himself perfectly prepared to accept the idea that death had decided to postpone herself, but asked, with the greatest respect, if he could be told how the church had known about this, and that if they really were so well-informed, then they must also know how long the postponement would last. In an editor's note, the newspaper reminded the reader that it was merely a proposal, and one that had not as yet been put into practice, which must mean, he concluded, that the church knew as much about the matter as we did, that is, nothing. At this point, someone wrote an article demanding that the debate return to the question that had started it in the first place, was death one or several, should we be referring to death in the singular or death in the plural, and now that I have my pen in my hand, I would just like to say that the church, in adopting such an ambiguous stance, is merely trying to gain time and avoiding having to commit itself, which is why, as usual, it's busily trying to put a splint on a frog's leg, meanwhile running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. The first of these popular expressions caused some perplexity among journalists, who had never heard or read it in their lives before. So, faced by this enigma, and driven on by a healthy dose of professional competitiveness, they hauled down from the shelves the dictionaries they occasionally consulted when writing their articles and news items and set about discovering what that batrachian was doing there. They found nothing, or, rather, they found the frog, they found the leg, they found the splint, but what they didn't manage to do was to get at the meaning those three words clearly had when put together. Then it occurred to one of them to summon an old porter who had arrived from the provinces many years before and whom everyone laughed at because, despite all that time spent living in the city, he still spoke as if he were sitting by the fireside telling stories to his grandchildren. They asked him if he knew the expression and he said, yes, he did, they asked if he knew what it meant and he said, yes, he did. Explain it then, said the editor-in-chief, A splint, gentlemen, is a piece of wood used to hold a broken bone in place, That much we know, but what has it got to do with the frog, It has everything to do with the frog, because no one could ever put a splint on a frog's leg, Why not, Because a frog never keeps its legs still for long enough, So what does the expression mean then, It means that there's no point in trying, because the frog won't let you, But that can't be what the reader meant to say, Well, it's also used when someone is clearly just playing for time, that's when we say they're trying to put a splint on a frog's leg, And that's what the church is doing, Yes, sir, So the reader who wrote this is entirely right, Yes, I believe so, although, of course, my job is keeping an eye on who comes in and out of that door, You've been very helpful, Don't you want me to explain the other expression, Which one, The one about the hare and the hounds, No, we know that one, we practice it every day.