Crocodile Tears by mercedes Rosende

Author:mercedes Rosende
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

XXI

It’s past midday in the Old Town.

Sometimes, like today, she goes out for a stroll and constantly changes her route to extend her walk, to postpone her return home. She wanders down cobbled streets, pretends to lose her way and then to find it again. At each corner she searches for them, the dead, as if on such afternoons all of them – Mother, Father, Auntie Irene – were headed for some meeting place to which she, too, had access.

She waits for it to be time; sometimes she wanders at length and searches for them in the places where they used to go, trying to remember what those people, their houses, were like back then. She pursues the names of the people who lived there and tries to remember if she ever went inside, what the furniture, the courtyards, the stairways and walls were like, if they echoed with the shouts of children or were silent. But all this effort just produces shades of the past, a sepia photograph.

It’s sunny today and she’s been wandering among strangers for almost two hours, walking and swallowing carbon monoxide; today there are businessmen and tourists, people rummaging through the garbage, office workers with lunch boxes, students and beggars. Ursula looks at everything and smiles discreetly – they’re not part of her past, they’re not the ones she’s looking for. Aloof and somewhat hostile, she walks among these strangers, observing them with curiosity, behaving the way an adult might behave at a circus or in a square where children are playing. She feels like crying, and she doesn’t feel like crying alone. That’s why she’s looking for the dead.

She stops among a crowd of foreigners taking photos in different languages. At a kiosk selling newspapers and magazines, she can’t help looking at the heavenly silky beings that appear on the covers; they are never second-class women, the kind who eat and get fat, they’re beautiful people in two dimensions, their skin smooth and glowing, people with no past beyond that moment when somebody photographed them, people who will never grow old.

She’s been walking for more than two hours now. It’s time. She goes up the worn marble steps, crosses the threshold of the chapel and enters the twilight of the silent frozen space. The gloom contrasts with the light outside. She walks; the air of the church, stale with mourning, is like some perverse, irreversible corridor. The central aisle is empty, barely illuminated by the light from the stained-glass windows above the small side chapels. There aren’t many people, just blurry shadows, faceless and reclining. A smell of incense seems to come from the stone tombs. The notes of an organ can be heard, but perhaps they are part of the dream from which she never quite awakens. A priest is saying Mass for five people at a side altar.

And, as always, she sees him again, Daddy, in a satin-lined casket resting on the catafalque, covered with flowers. And beneath the roses, carnations and

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