The Ghost

He realized that he had just died when he saw that his own body, as if it were not his but that of a double, had fallen across the chair, dragging it down as it fell. Corpse and chair were stretched out on the rug, in the center of the room.

So this was death?

What a disappointment! He had wanted to find out what the passage to the other world would be like, and it turned out that there was no other world! The same opacity of the walls, the same distance from one piece of furniture to the other, the same beating of rain on the roof. . . . And above all, how immutable, how indifferent to his death were the objects that he had always believed to be friendly! The lighted lamp, his hat on the hatrack. . . . Everything, everything was the same. Only the upset chair and his own corpse, facing the ceiling.

He came closer and looked at himself in his corpse as earlier he had been accustomed to looking at himself in the mirror. How prematurely old! And how wasted his outer skin!

“If I could raise the eyelids, perhaps the blue shine of my eyes would again ennoble the body,” he thought.

For, as it was, the closed eyes, the puffy cheeks and wrinkles, the hairy caves of his nostrils and the two yellowish teeth biting the pallid lip, revealed to him only his detestable condition as a mammal.

“Now that I know that there are neither angels or abysms on the other side, I shall return to my humble dwelling.”

And, amused, he drew closer to his cadaver—an empty cage—to enter it and revive it.

It would have been so easy! But he failed. He failed because at that very instant the door opened and his wife burst in, alarmed by the sound of the falling chair and body.

“Stay out!” he shouted, but without a voice.

It was too late. His wife threw herself upon her husband and, when she sensed that he was dead, started weeping profusely.

“Be still! You’re ruining everything!” he shouted, but without a voice.

What rotten luck! Why hadn’t it occurred to him to lock himself in during the experiment? Now he could no longer revive; he was dead, permanently dead. What rotten luck!

He watched his wife, who had almost fainted over his body; and he looked at his own body, with his nose like a prow between the waves of his wife’s hair. His three daughters came running in, as if they had been fighting over a piece of candy; they stopped suddenly; very slowly they approached, and then in a moment, embracing each other, they were all crying. He also wept, seeing himself there on the floor, because he understood that being dead is like being alive, but alone, very much alone.

Sadly, he left the room.

Where would he go?

He no longer had hopes for a supernatural life. No. There was no mystery.

And, greatly troubled, he began to go down the stairs, step by step. He stopped on the landing. He had just noticed, dead and all, he was behaving as if he had legs and arms. He had chosen as his point of perspective the place where he once had had physical eyes. Pure habit! Now he wanted to test his new advantages and he began to fly along the curves of the air. The only thing he could not do was pass through solid objects, which were as opaque, as unyielding as ever. He bumped into them. Not that they hurt him: he simply could not go through them. Doors, windows, corridors, all of the canals man opens to his activity, kept on imposing directions on him, checking him in his flutterings. He could just barely wriggle through a keyhole. In spite of being dead, he was not like a virus, that can go almost anywhere: he could only slip through those cracks that anyone could see in plain sight.

Would he now be the size of the pupil of an eye? Somehow he felt the same as when he had been alive: invisible, yes, but not incorporeal. He conserved the memory of his absent body, of the postures he had adopted before in each situation, of the precise distances to the places where his skin, his hair, his legs and arms had been. Thus he evoked about himself his own figure and he inserted himself into the place where, before, his eyes had been.

That night he kept vigil next to his corpse, beside his wife. Afterwards, he approached his friends and listened to their cohversations. He saw everything. Even up to the last instant, when the clods of earth in the cemetery resounded gloomily upon the coffin and covered it.

All his life he had been a family man. From his office to his home, from his home to his office. And nothing else, besides his wife and daughters. He did not have, therefore, any temptations to travel to the whale’s stomach or to roam through the great anthill. He preferred to sit in the old armchair and enjoy his family’s sense of peace. Soon he resigned himself to not being able to communicate to them any sign of his presence. He was satisfied with his wife’s raising her eyes to look at his portrait high on the wall.

At times he lamented not meeting, during his strolls, any other dead person, so that he might at least exchange impressions. But he was not bored. He accompanied his wife everywhere and went to the movies with the girls.

During the winter, his wife fell ill and he wanted her to die. He hoped that when she died her soul would come to keep him company. And his wife died, but her soul was as invisible to him as it was to the orphans.

He was alone again, even more alone since he could not see his wife. He consoled himself with the presentiment that her soul was at his side, also contemplating their children. . . . Would his wife realize that he was there? . . . Yes, of course! . . . What doubt could there be? . . . It was so natural.

Until one day, for the first time since he was dead, he had that sensation of the beyond, of mystery, which had so gripped him when alive: what if the entire house were populated with the shades of distant relatives, of forgotten friends, of Peeping Toms who were amusing themselves during their eternities spying on the orphans?

He trembled with disgust, as if he had stuck his hand into a cave of worms. Souls, souls, hundreds of strange souls, gliding over each other, blind to each other, but with their malicious eyes opened to the air that his daughters breathed.

He could not get over that suspicion, although, with time, he managed to stop worrying; what could he do!

His sister-in-law had taken custody of the orphans. There, once more, he felt at home. And the years passed. And he saw his three daughters die, one after the other, all unmarried. Thus was put out forever that conflagration of the flesh that, in other more prolific families, continues to spread out like a brush fire. But he knew that in the invisibility of death his family continued to triumph, that all of them, for the pleasure of feeling themselves together, were living in the same house, clinging to his sister-in-law like ship-wrecked souls to driftwood.

His sister-in-law also died.

He approached the coffin at the wake that was held for her, looked at her face that still offered itself as a mirror to the mystery, and he sobbed, alone, alone, so alone! There was no longer anyone in the world of the living who, by dint of affection, could attract all of them. There was no longer the possibility of their convening in one point in the universe. There were no longer hopes. The souls of his wife and of his daughters must have been there, amid the flickering candles. He said good-bye, knowing that they could not hear him, went out to the patio, and flew up into the night.