Vertical

They won't even ask for whom the bells toll, because they haven't tolled for the dead in this town for a long time. The heat clings to us under our black clothes. The sun rises indifferent. My glasses fog up with sweat and tears. I don't know how to say goodbye to her this morning. There are people who do not only die once. My father has his face covered in a harsh sorrow, which does not spill from his eyes. I don't want to enter the room with the coffin. I don't know how to look at death from so close. My aunt cries for all these heavy years, she cries for her childhood, she cries, she cries, the deep cry that says goodbye to a mother.

The hole in the ground is square and dark, the coffin has to go in vertically. It is hard for me to imagine that her body is in there, so far from this morning. I would like to be platonic, like my students every month of September. The ropes surround the top part of the chest, and the bottom one. The arms of these cemetery workers lower the box calmly, while the wood scrapes and hits the walls. I want them to place it horizontally, I want them to give it back to me, for them to give us one or two generous days, of the kind where I could call her grandmother without being a stranger.

They should ban flowers in cemeteries. Flowers are for life, for love, but not for death. They have left white roses and a wreath of chrysanthemums, just to the right of the hole, to place on top of the slab. In the patio of the house, she had a rose bush there, amidst the purple and yellow snapdragons. And an old olive tree, from which hung the swing that had held us all.

At the edge of the slab, a bee struggles fiercely to free itself from the spiderweb. Death is the final closure, yet, infinite times we let the paths we could have chosen die. The possibilities of the world of the living bifurcate, forcing us to choose. The bee has not chosen, this time, because freedom and spiders exist. How long can a worker bee live in the summer? Where might this one have been going? There should not be flowers in cemeteries.

Perhaps the spider is seductive, maybe she has promised her the white rose and tender love. It is soft to the first touch, the spiderweb. There is no brute force, it only clings, as if it were a second skin. The bee begins to move, uncomfortable, until it becomes wild, risky; it pursues the impulse that could still free it. The spider, sweet, weaves the taming, while the bee tries to beat its wings, fierce. The spiderweb is a vertical coffin.

They place the slab and it is still Saturday. I look in my phone notes for some verses by Lorca. A photograph of a shopping receipt, the recipe for the coca de trempó, the list of the songs that played at the Nacho Vegas concert; but the verses are not there. In our loves we must be like the bee and the orchid, a piece of advice from Deleuze, but the verses by Lorca are not.

Death and love sometimes resemble each other, they are a vanishing point that tirelessly seeks horizontality.

(Francisca Rosselló, Paquita Salera, Tita, in memoriam. To you, who always liked stories more than bells)