The Boys Read Free Page B

. . . Who had chosen the pants, the socks, the shoes, which weren’t their usual Sunday morning shoes but imposter shoes, an attempt to fool them, to pretend that perhaps they could warm their feet, as it should be in a tolerable world where parents died before their children . . . The pretense dignified the shoes, made them useful in their attempt to console, because useless objects are monstrous; he was sick of seeing it at the bank, money rotting in the vaults and creating bad blood between relatives . . . But, at the moment of truth, the shoes made the cadavers more contemptible, because death won the match, infecting the clothes and the coffins, infecting the church and all of Vidreres with its ugliness. Not even the consolation trick worked. When he got home each day, the first thing Ernest wanted to do was loosen the laces and take off his shoes . . . and those shoes would last longer than the feet they were on. Meanwhile, in the church, no one wanted to know who had pulled them out of the closet, whether it was their mother, their aunt, or their father, all three of whom were sitting in the front row with their backs to everyone and facing the coffins, contaminated; no one wanted to imagine the expression on the face that handed over the boys’ changes of clothes, in a bag, to the man at the funeral home, a last package for the brothers, sent to hell . . . They had given the boys’ clothes—not new, not bought for the occasion, but already worn, already lived in, to a stranger, a man they’d never seen before, and that stranger put on some gloves and stuffed cotton into theboys’ noses and ears and then, with another stranger, stood the dead boys up, first one then the other, to dress them, and the boys stood like plastic dolls, and those strangers at the funeral home were now standing as well, behind the last bench, with their gazes on everyone’s backs, supervising the ceremony, waiting to take the coffins away again, because the coffins were theirs, they would always be, a dead man owns nothing. . . Those strangers would be the last ones to have seen and touched the brothers’ bodies. And while some inside the church tried to respect the memory of the dead . . . how does one respect a memory? How can you think about a dead man without mucking him up? How can you separate him from the living? While at the church they tried not to curse the brothers for what they represented: death before its time, the most absolute, double death, because an unexpected death is a death that doubles back on itself, that kills hope and longing, that doesn’t leave time for making plans or for renouncing making plans, it is a death that doesn’t let death live, doesn’t let it make a will, or project anything for what’s left of life; it kills the future like any death but also kills all possible expectations and therefore kills the past, a retroactive death, a death that shoots at itself from the future, that overtakes death, that passes it, the death of death itself, a death that commits suicide . . . While the adults rummaged through memories to make an inventory of what remained of the two boys—what images, which smiles, what residue they had left behind—they found some surprises, because, now that they were dead, the last time they saw the two brothers became the last time they would ever see the two brothers, and the memory grew laden with nostalgia for what theynow knew had been about to happen the last time they saw them. And the smiling faces of the brothers, who couldn’t imagine what awaited them. And the last words they said now meant different things, and therefore required a different answer from those who knew the future, a rectification from the prophets . . . And while they relived those last moments, they remembered how they themselves were at the brothers’ ages, what they were doing at the ages the brothers would remain, and they compared the two, and