This week there was some very disturbing news, which I don't know if it's been talked about much. The funeral urn of journalist Joan de Sagarra was found in the charms of Barcelona, along with a multitude of cheap trinkets and bibelots, the kind of junk that usually ends up in secondhand markets, and which often comes from a dumpster or from emptying an apartment to be sold.
There are companies that do just that, emptying apartments. The heirs of a home that until recently was inhabited, most likely by an elderly person, find it full of memories, clothes, books, and objects that until recently surrounded the life of a relative who has just left them. What to do with all this? These companies take everything—furniture, clothes, kitchen utensils—and resell it, or throw it away if it's not very useful. This often happens with books: I often find hundreds next to the wastebasket, and people pick them up and take them home, or there are heirs who take them to sell secondhand. There are some booksellers who show interest (never if they are cheap, ugly editions of forgotten books; always when they can be beautiful editions of valuable works, for which there is demand, now also thanks to the shops). on-line, where everything is hunted). In the Sant Antoni market in Barcelona, there was the entire library of a famous Barcelona philosopher (Eugeni Trias), which arrived there who knows how. And now the ashes—only his urn, it seems—of a renowned journalist, a widely read and acclaimed chronicler, son, moreover, of one of the myths of modern Catalan literature. Why? How? How serious, what a mess, and what a shame.
And this leads me to think about everything we leave behind when we die. The body is still the smallest of the "remains" that remain there, still, because each person, ultimately, carries a whole truckload of moving behind them. There are the useless clothes, yes, and the appliances, and the memories, and if they're a writer, all their notebooks, unpublished papers, their own books, other people's editions, often signed. Furniture. Memories of memories, photos. Everything that each thing has of personal history is now lost forever, or else it falls into the hands of heirs who don't want it, or who, legitimately, can only feel it as a heavy burden, a headache (often surrounded by taxes or debts). It's as if death reveals even more the ingratitude of others, or their cold disinterest, or that, as the gravedigger in a JP Donleavy novel said, "Death is only a moment in the lives of others."
Be that as it may, death is too revealing, apocalyptic in an etymological sense. It lays everything bare. It suggests that too many things are failing in the collective and family sphere, or that we are turning life into a chronic breakdown, which death only comes to relieve. "We live between illusion and the obvious," says a character in my latest novel. I would dare recommend it to everyone if I weren't too bold.
