JOS{OONOSO
39
and walked home slowly down the sunny lanes, greeting acquain–
tances, stopping at times to stamp their feet and clap their hands to
drive the numbness from their fingers. A few steps ahead, Marla
Patricia and Marla Isabel, almost the same size, wearing identical
white fur hats and matching muffs, were proud to let the passersby
admire their erect posture and their elegant clothes.
They entered the alleyway that led to the back door of their
house, and suddenly the feathers of steam floating serenely out of
the four Marambio mouths were cut off. Aquiles and his wife stop–
ped dead. The girls screamed and ran to their parents' legs for
protection. Right there, in their own doorway, a hairy, dirty
human shape was curled up, covered by dank newspapers. They
carefully moved closer. Marambio poked the shape with his toe.
"He's dead," he murmured.
The woman leaned over to remove the hat that hid his face.
Marambio exclaimed: "Don't be an idiot. Leave him that way. Why
do you want to see his face?"
But the woman had already done it, and the dead man's face,
under the beard and filth, was transfixed by such an expression of
joy that Marla Patricia, approaching him without fear, exclaimed:
"Look, Daddy, look how pretty. He seems to be seeing ... "
"Shut up, don't talk nonsense," Marambio snapped furiously.
"It looks as if he is watching ... "
Before Marla Isabel could say what it looked as if the dead man
was watching, Marambio yanked his two daughters away and
pushed them into the house. They held hands and obeyed without
their usual pouts and sniffles when their father thwarted them, and
commented to each other how pretty dead people were, promising
they would never again listen to grownups, who were so afraid of
the dead. Marambio called the police to tell them there was a dead
tramp at the back door. And because Don Aquiles was a wealthy
man with a sense of civic duty, he said that since the man had died
on his doorstep, they weren't to dump the body in a pauper's grave.
He would pay for the funeral, not a first-class one of course-that
would be absurd-but a decent third-class one, which was probably
a luxury the nameless tramp would never have expected.
Translated
by
Andree Conrad
