by John Foster
‘I would like to arrange for a funeral.’
The woman, who reminded me uncannily of the Queensland Tourist clerk, adjusted her spectacles and reached for a form.
‘What is the name of the deceased?’
‘Well,’ I said, as the full enormity of this encounter hit me, ‘actually there is no deceased.’
‘Oh, I see, sir,’ she said, ‘I expect what you are referring to is a pre-paid funeral. Is it for yourself?’
That was certainly not what I meant. In fact, although I could not say as much to the receptionist, there was not enough money in the bank to pay for this one necessary funeral, let alone a pre-paid one for myself. I would have to apply for a loan, though as the bank was so keen to lend money for caravans and cars and holidays in Spain, I didn’t anticipate any trouble in securing an advance for something infinitely more important.
Finally, when she understood the import of my visit, she summoned a grey man in a grey suit who escorted me into a counselling room. The neutral, understated, be-berbered look of this room aggravated me.
‘I have to arrange the funeral of my friend,’ I told the man, ‘and I need to know if there are any special complications because of AIDS.’
He assured me that there were no problems.
‘Is it true, though,’ I persisted, ‘that they put AIDS people in a plastic bag?’
‘Well,’ he replied, perfectly composed and with a fine evasiveness, ‘the Health Department requires certain precautions in case of contagious diseases.’
I pondered this for a moment. Green plastic or black? At any rate, heavy-duty plastic, I supposed. Was this really necessary? I let the moment pass: it was not worth creating a fuss over a plastic bag.
We moved on to the details. To be burned or buried, he wanted to know.
‘Buried,’ I said. ‘Definitely buried.’
‘In that case, sir, we can offer you two options. All our work from this side of town goes to Fawkner or Altona.’
Of Fawkner I had no conception whatever. Altona, though, I knew from the window of the bus that takes you to the Public Records Office. A more dismal place would be hard to imagine; sprawled on the fringe of the western plains, littered with basalt boulders and Scotch thistles and enclosed with cyclone wire, it could hardly be distinguished from the chemical storage plants and transport depots that surrounded it. Even the gum trees there were stunted, twisted, buffeted by the unceasing wind.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘they are both out of the question.’
He could see that I was going to be a difficult customer. Did I have any particular objection? It seemed unreasonable to tell him that the gates of the Altona Memorial Park, with their tacky iron lettering, reminded me eerily of Auschwitz. Instead, a phrase of Juan’s sprang to my lips and I said quite simply, prim as a Toorak matron, ‘They have no class.’
Such barefaced snobbery startled the man, and he was so evidently pained that I was tempted to assure him that of course I knew he was not personally responsible for the miserable destination of his handiwork. As an alternative I suggested Kew, a nineteenth-century garden cemetery that had acquired with the passage of time an appealingly rural atmosphere. I had walked there as a child with my grandfather, hunting for lizards that sunned themselves on the tombstones and dropped their tails when you tried to catch them. The man was doubtful. There were plots available from time to time at Kew, but they tended to be in the rambling, unkempt end of the cemetery, where briar roses and kiss-me-quick ran riot over the graves.
That sounded perfect. Still the man hedged. They would need to dig the grave by hand, he observed, as though the reversion to this quaint practice of a bygone age offended his sense of advanced professionalism. As it had never occurred to me that they would dig the grave by any other means, that was hardly an objection. Kew would be ideal, I said, and a phone call confirmed the arrangement.
From the Counselling Room we moved to the Selection Room, where the man brightened perceptibly in the congenial gloom. Here, it appeared, I would be required to choose between a casket and a coffin. He glided around the room, explaining the various shapes and timbers, lovingly running his hand along the polished grain of a deluxe model with satin padding. Moving down the scale, he advised delicately about prices, and as we left the caskets and entered the less ambitious coffin section, he confided to me supportively that there was after all something to be said for tradition.
What did I prefer? In fact, I found the whole extensive range repulsive. Yet in the few minutes of my acquaintance with the undertaking world, I had come to realise that it too had its pride, and if it had survived the assaults of Jessica Mitford and Evelyn Waugh there was no point in my tilting at it now. I side-stepped the question.
‘Do you have nothing in plain wood?’ I asked. ‘Pine, perhaps? Unvarnished, unpadded. I mean, more or less a box. Something natural?’
‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘There is no demand for anything in that line.’
That being the case, it seemed best to settle for the simplest, least offensive coffin, a chipboard model with a dark veneer. ‘A popular choice,’ he told me, which I quite believed, as it happened also to be the cheapest. But the chrome-plated crucifix would have to go.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘that is for our Catholic clients. May I ask what is your religious affiliation?’ My affiliation, I advised him, was C. of E., though what that had to do with arrangements for Juan was somewhat obscure. I thought I detected a hint of relief in his voice at this sign of normalcy. ‘That will be no problem,’ he said. ‘For Protestants we use a silver cross.’ It seemed that everything they touched in this establishment turned to chrome. You couldn’t win.
‘I would prefer it’, I said, ‘if you would leave the coffin completely plain. No crosses, no crucifixes, nothing at all.’
‘I understand,’ he said, making a note in his book and, perhaps, a mental note as well: Lapsed.
That was all. Further details could wait till the time came. And I was anxious to get to the market before it closed, hoping to find there the guavas for which Juan had unexpectedly asked; the ones that were pink inside.
Wednesday
Improbably, as it seemed to me, on Wednesday he was still planning for the future. The previous Easter we had bought a marzipan lamb from Vito Barone’s Sicilian pasticceria. Suddenly recalling this, Juan thought we should have another, and when I brought it in, he was freshly amused by its long neck and supercilious upturned nose, its tinsel halo, and its campy little legs with the painted toenails, delicately displayed on a ground of green jelly crystals. When Val dropped in to see how he was getting on, she admired the lamb.
‘It’s for Easter, Val,’ he explained, and the words came out so slowly that it sounded like a most important pronouncement. ‘Will you come to dinner with us at Easter?’ She apologised that her mother would be coming to stay with her at Easter. ‘Well, bring her too,’ he said.
His anticipation of the forthcoming holiday was heightened by a visit later that afternoon from Alison, the bishop’s daughter, who was flying in from New Zealand to help with the last minute preparations of a friend for an Easter wedding. When she came in with Ann direct from the airport, Juan greeted her with undisguised pleasure. It was almost nine months since her own wedding.
‘I thought you would be having a baby by now,’ he said. She laughed. Of all the visitors to the hospital, she was the most natural; and if she took in the drip and the bedpan and the rest of the paraphernalia of sickness, if she was startled by the skeletal frame that he had become, none of this affected the lively sympathy of her conversation.
How was the bishop? he enquired. The bishop was settled in retirement in a village in the Suffolk countryside. Did she remember the story about that other village, the place where the bishop had been sent as a young priest? It was a place so feudal that the cottagers depended for their electricity supply on a generator owned by the old woman who lived alone in the manor house. And she, to encourage habits of
thrift and early rising, switched it off each evening at sunset, so that the bishop had to compose his youthful sermons by candlelight. So we reminisced and laughed our way through the bishop’s stories until it was time for Alison to leave. Juan wanted to make her a present.
‘I’ll make you a linen suit,’ he promised, ‘with a silk lining.’ And there would be one for Ann as well.
When they were gone, and I was sitting at the end of the bed massaging his feet, he asked, ‘How much money is in my bank account?’ In fact it was a joint account that we had opened, more for the sake of impressing the Immigration Department than for our own convenience. There was about a thousand dollars, or at least there would have been had I not been drawing on it to meet the incidental expenses of the hospital stay. He was disappointed that it wasn’t more, but still, he hoped it would be enough.
‘I want you to buy a carpet for the front room, and a washing machine,’ he announced, ‘a front-end loader.’ For months we had been talking about the need for a washing machine. It wasn’t easy to manage diarrhoea-stained sheets in the bath, and we didn’t like to impose this kind of washing on Ann. We had decided that, if we could persuade the agent to pay for the plumbing, when he came home we would install a machine in the kitchen beneath a bench near the sink. It would need to be a front-end loader. But why was he thinking now about washing machines?
The subject continued to preoccupy him, and he took it up with the social worker when she passed by on her round. We both felt sorry for the social worker. We liked her well enough, and she so much wanted to be useful. She knew of every pension entitlement and sickness benefit that the Department of Social Security had ever invented, and she had bunches of application forms, but there were no forms for a person in Juan’s state of bureaucratic limbo—nor, for that matter, for his friend. Undeterred by her inability to assist us, she kept coming, in the manner of her profession ever hopeful, and now, after so many visits, came her moment. How much, Juan asked her, would a front-end loader cost? She didn’t know exactly; she guessed around six hundred dollars. I watched his face as he struggled with this piece of information and calculated and came to the conclusion that, if this were true, there would not be enough left over for the carpet. He burst into tears and his head fell back and rolled sideways off the pile of pillows. A nurse who had overheard the conversation came to the rescue.
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you can get a washing machine more cheaply at a discount store.’ This reassured him. She fluffed up the pillows and restored him to a more comfortable position.
‘Why do you ask, Juan?’
‘It’s for the apartment,’ he replied, close to tears again. ‘For Johnny.’
This was his will, the first part of the answer to that question he had put to me some weeks ago. ‘What will I do with my things?’
Thursday
The second part of his will he kept till the following evening. It was Holy Thursday, the commemoration of the Last Supper, the passover meal that ended at Gethsemane.
‘Will you be going to Mass tonight?’ Juan asked.
‘No, I want to be here.’ But perhaps in the night I would go to the vigil and keep watch for a while in the chapel of repose. If I could stay awake.
It was a long day, devoid of form, a mere prelude to the eventful evening. It was a day impregnated with the terrible sweet smell of shit. And he was sweating. And there was a last altercation with Angie, the Scotch nurse whose accent he loved, who was still valiantly trying to coax him into taking his pills. It was a contest of wills that she couldn’t win. At his insistence, I had been throwing them into the bin all week.
He was waiting, waiting for Murray, who came in that evening as he had for so many evenings, to chat while we ate or to share our meal, to arrange his gerberas and remove the droopy ones, to punctuate the evening news with his irreverent comments. That night there was no news and no meal. The thermos flask of soup that I had brought at lunchtime was still unopened; it was still warm when I poured it down the hospital lavatory the next day.
He tried to keep up a brave front with Murray, but the tears kept breaking out. ‘I’m dying, Murray,’ he sobbed, ‘I’m dying.’ The storm passed, and when he was calmer he asserted himself with a great effort of will, and said very solemnly to Murray, ‘I want you to have my bike, and my sewing machine.’ The second part of his will.
The next visitor was Rickard, who had come with Ann from the evening Mass and was on his way to the airport to catch a plane to Dublin where he had to lecture the Irish on their contribution to Australian history. From there, when we telephoned him with the news, he wrote back, his memory still impressed with his last night visit to the ward: the strangeness, the eeriness of it and Juan, lying there, fearful yet oddly patient, the tiny tears finding their way down his cheeks.
Out of that patience came the greatest sadness, a sadness that lodged in me, it seems, for ever. Four short words, neither a moan nor a cry, but a simple clear statement of infinite regret. ‘I have accomplished nothing,’ he said. How formal it sounded, how hauntingly Latin in its choice of the word ‘accomplished’.
They had always said that he wouldn’t amount to much. Alicia Alonso said that when he wanted to dance for the National Ballet. It was the same with the professor at Marymount—what was her name?—Haila. Haila Schwartz had given him an F for modern dance, which he could hardly believe, and the only reason she gave was that she didn’t like his attitude. Somehow it was always like that. Even when he played Lotto and tucked the tickets behind the icon of the Mother of Sorrows for luck, the numbers always fell the wrong way. Perhaps it would have been different if he had not left Cuba, if he had not set out that night with Alex through the salt flats. That had been a foolhardy thing to do when he couldn’t swim.
He had accomplished nothing, nothing that people would remember, nothing that would cause them to honour in him the name that had been borne by Cuba’s greatest patriot. He had not even finished his quilt, which still lay in a neat pile of patched squares on his sewing table.
There are poets who have written that death itself is a kind of accomplishment. Rainer Maria Rilke said something like that. ‘O Lord, grant to each man his own death, a death that proceeds from his life.’ That was all right for Rilke, with his pretty name and his faith in the great death that each one has within him. It was not what I wanted to say.
What I wanted to say to Juan had nothing to do with greatness. It was simply this: that he had loved me. But somehow it didn’t come out like that. All I could manage, all I could give him, was the remembrance of our togetherness. ‘There has been us,’ I said. And I know that he understood, because somewhere in that night, in the fragments of his dying, he said, ‘We made it, Johnny. Didn’t we?’
The next time I looked at my watch it was nearly midnight. Rickard’s plane would be departing. I sat on the bed, holding Juan’s hand. He needed a haircut, I thought, and the long curls against his forehead were wet with sweat. He had made now, I supposed, all the decisions that had to be made, farewelled his friends, disposed of his things. And still he was waiting.
‘Shall I call Father Jim?’
‘If you like,’ he said, as if it were I who needed to be supported for the rest of the way.
The priest came. ‘I’m so frightened,’ Juan confided to him, and I was taken aback by the marvellous matter-of-factness of Jim’s reply.
‘We’ll see what we can do about that,’ he said, in the drawling accent of his Botany boyhood. Priests deal in certainties, and this priest knew his craft. He slipped a stole around his neck, a strip of antique silk richly embroidered with gold.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Juan said.
‘You can hold it if you like.’
As he grasped the fringe of the embroidered stole, he noticed that further up it was fraying at the edges.
‘I’ll fix it for you, Jim,’ he said. ‘I’ll need silk thread.’
There were prayers, and he was anointed on the forehead and aga
in on the hands, and he received the sacrament that had been brought down specially from its lonely glory on the altar of repose.
We were very near the end now. He dirtied the bed, and when the nurses lifted him into the chair while they changed the linen, his eye fell again on the palm cross on the bedhead, and he instructed me to put it with him in his coffin. A second time his bowels moved. And then a third, and what came out looked like blood and water. Was it the guavas, I wondered?
Finally when he was quieter than he had been all day and appeared to be drifting off to sleep, I switched out the light.
‘Come to bed, Johnny,’ he whispered. So I took off my shoes and slipped into the bed beneath the blanket that was draped on a wire frame to spare his body the weight. I cradled him in the curve of my body and listened to his breathing. After a while I thought he was asleep, but he had one more question.
‘What time is the vigil?’
The vigil? There were so many vigils in this religious season: the vigil of Holy Thursday, the vigil of Easter. And there was our vigil, which was all but over.
Good Friday
It was broad daylight when I awoke. The breakfast tray was on the bedside table. He was still asleep. I slid out of the bed, and walked home to have a shower and shave.
The phone rang. It was Arlene, who had just come on for the morning shift. Did I want to be there at the end?
I ran back, and waited. He didn’t stir. Outside the window, I noticed, the claret ash had coloured magnificently. It had been a mistake to plant that crimson against a cream brick wall. The first leaves were dropping, floating really, early into the fall.
A nurse came in to sit with me. She brought a radio and switched it on to a programme of Easter music.
