December 31, 2012
Manzanillo
The last thing he saw was the ceiling, an expanse of white. He opened his eyes, looked at the ceiling, then closed them and never opened them again. If he said anything, there was no one there to hear it. The maid found him the next morning.
Se?or Felipe, as he was known among the small circle of people he had befriended here, was seventy-eight and he had enjoyed robust good health until the past year. There was no single big thing wrong with him, just many little things. But the little things added up and the local health care was not the best. He liked to joke that he had not chosen this place for its health-care system. He had expected to live a very long time. His own parents had lived into their nineties, although he never saw them. They had harbored different hopes for their son, the one who understood numbers as if they were a language, yet also was sensitive to people, capable of eliciting their confidences, their dreams. Once his parents saw the path he had chosen, they no longer spoke to him. It was easier to pretend they were dead than to tell his wife that he had been disowned. He was a self-made man and he would make his own family, a better one.
He did, too. He had lived long enough to see his daughters grow into beautiful and accomplished women, to make mistakes and learn from them, to have children. Except—he had never seen any of those things.
He saw an expanse of white. A ceiling.
The maid was not disturbed by death. She had seen a lot of death. But she was upset when his only real friend, an abogado, a lawyer, told her that the body would be cremated. That was what her jefe wanted, the abogado said, but that did not sound right to her. They had talked often about religion, she and the jefe, and Se?or Felipe had said he was un judio, that his people did not believe in tattoos or cremation. But then—perhaps he was no longer one of his people. There was no evidence of religion in his life, unless women were a kind of a religion. For years, they had come and gone. He preferred European women, for some reason, as long as they spoke English. European, but never from Germany. With most of the wealthy Americanos around here, the women got younger and younger as the men got older, but her jefe liked women in their forties and fifties. True, those women were young enough to be his daughters now, but she liked the fact that he seemed to choose for brains as well as beauty. Plus, he made it clear that they could stay under his roof, but Consuelo ran the house.
The abogado was firm: The body would be cremated, the ashes taken out to sea and flung into the Pacific, which could be glimpsed through this bedroom window. The house would be sold and there would be sums, nice ones, for people such as herself, who had cared for Se?or Felipe all these years. Furniture would be sold, everything else was to be given away. If she wanted something, she should ask for it.
“Y las fotografías?” She indicated the set by the bed in heavy silver frames. But not like the frames the turistas bought, in the Mercado. These were smooth and heavy.
He shrugged. “If you want,” he said, mistaking her intent. It occurred to her that he would throw the photos away, which seemed sad to her. So she said she did, and, when he was gone, she slid the photos from the frames, which she would sell. She would give the photographs to the man who came to collect the body, ask that they be burned with el jefe.
There were six. She knew them well, after years of dusting them. One was of a beautiful woman, but very long ago, at a time when waists were cinched and eyebrows dark, arched. Bambi, 1961, was written on the back. The same woman, older but still beautiful, posed with three children, clearly her daughters. Harpers Ferry, 1974. There was one of each daughter, too. Linda, 1976. Rachel, 1976. Michelle, 1976. Pretty, but not as pretty as the mother, although who knows how they turned out, especially the littlest one, still chubby cheeked here.
And then there was the—well, she did not want to say she was a puta, but she wore little more than bra and panties and she leaned forward, blowing a kiss. Consuelo did not approve of her. But she was there, on his bedside. Maybe she was a cousin who had made bad decisions. Lord knows, Consuelo had her share of those. Cousins and bad decisions. She put that photograph with the others, too. There was no name or date on this one, just an inscription, beyond Consuelo’s limited English, although some words were clearly close to the Spanish versions: intelligence, ideas, function. She put all the photographs in the envelope and wrote a note, saying they were to go with the body. They would be a family again, she thought, which helped her accept the ugly fact of the cremation. They would all be together again, in the ashes, in the ocean, in the afterlife.
But Consuelo was wrong. Felix Brewer was alone when he died and he would be alone forever, whether in eternity or the Pacific, where five days later his ashes were distributed by an agreeable fisherman heading out for a day’s work. The fisherman did not make a ceremony out of it, just tipped the container in one swift movement. The dark beige ashes drifted and then sank, mingling with the sand they so closely resembled.
He was gone.