Anoxia

1

She tries to look at the dead man through the viewfinder alone. He’s in front of her, but her eyes are fixed on the image formed through the lines: the coppery glow of the wooden coffin, bony hands intertwined on the chest, golden ring on the ring finger, suit charcoal gray, shirt white, tie black, with silver stripes, face lifeless. The pale surface of the skin, like marble, reflecting the light, forcing her to move the camera, and move it again, until she finds the perfect angle.
The cold in the small room in the funeral home bristles the hair on Dolores’s hefty body. She should have brought a coat, or at least a shawl to cover her shoulders and the slender silk of her blouse. She didn’t think before she left home, and now she regrets it. The aluminum tripod turned freezing as soon as she entered, and the camera is like a block of ice. She can feel it when she rests her cheek on it to check the image through the metal viewfinder. After deliberation, she chose the Nikon F4. It’s more than twenty years old and heavy as an anvil, but she likes it, she feels comfortable with it. And it was Luis’s favorite. For some reason, that, too, affected her choice.
She’s not alone there. The daughter of the deceased, in customary black, is accompanying her in silence. She can’t be too much older. Sixty, maybe. Dolores feels her inquisitive gaze with every small movement she makes. But still, she prefers being watched to remaining alone with the body.
Her movements are silent, slow, and respectful. Her voice is hardly audible as she asks for permission to move the flowers to clear her line of sight. She pushes aside the wreaths and places the tripod at the proper distance. She’s trying to be quick, and to focus on her work, knowing that her time there is borrowed, and she’s interrupting an act of mourning. And every slight shift, every minimal click of the shutter, recalls to her the discomfort of the woman there scrutinizing her with a vexation made evident no sooner than she’d entered:
“I’m respecting this, because it’s my father’s wishes,” she said in a dry tone, with a sour expression, before the worker opened the room for the viewing. “But this is a fixation of that crazy old man. So please, hurry up and get it over with.”
The crazy old man. Her words give form—however vague—to the voice that is the origin of all this. The phone call. Yesterday, late in the afternoon. A grave timbre, an accent she couldn’t identify. And the commission—the plea, rather—the strangest one she has ever received in all her days as a photographer.
“My friend died,” the voice said. “I promised him one last photo.”
For a few seconds, Dolores was unsure how to respond. A photo of a dead man? Was this some kind of joke? But the tone left no room for doubt. The caller was serious. He’d planned to do it himself, he said, but he’d had an accident at home and couldn’t leave. He would pay whatever she asked. And it wouldn’t be difficult: a few shots of the body, however she thought best, but only in black and white. If she could load the camera with Tri-X 400, all the better: not too grainy, and sensitive enough for a poorly lit space. The one thing was, he said, it was pressing. She would need to arrive early. Before the funeral. The very next morning.
After hanging up, she needed a few minutes to think. She hadn’t shot in black and white for years, but she still had some on the shelf in her storage room she could use if it hadn’t expired. She’d never done anything like this. With Luis, she’d covered everything: baptisms, weddings, communions, celebrations, she even photographed a traffic accident at the request of the local police. But a dead man . . . she’d never done anything like that.
And she still isn’t sure why she said yes the afternoon before. Perhaps it was the sense that he was begging her. Or because, for the first time in ages, she felt she could be useful, and that photography, at least in this instance, meant something again. Or maybe it was just an impulse, and she’d said yes the same way she might have said no. But she thinks there’s always a hidden reason to everything. She doesn’t know how to formulate it, but it’s what brought her there now, to the local funeral home, in front of a stranger’s body, observing his face attentively through the viewfinder, trying to concentrate, feeling on her neck the impatient gaze of the woman in mourning. The cold has crept into her body, and she has gooseflesh on her arms.
When she leaves, the early August heat greets her. She stands a few seconds in the doorway, sheltered in the shadows of the redbrick walls. It’s just a bay in an industrial park on the outskirts of the village. Far off, the sea. She feels the breeze, smells the slight aroma of salt, tries and fails to fill her lungs and exhales the undigested perfume of flowers and sterility that lives inside her now. As she tries to breathe, she sees familiar faces looking at her. She noticed them when she went inside. But she prefers not to go over to them, not to ask. She doesn’t want to know anything about the person she’s photographed. Their pain isn’t hers. It doesn’t concern her.
Not now.
She walks to the white Corsa and leaves her camera and tripod in the backseat. She moves like an automaton, trying not to think of other funeral homes, another time, other dead.
Before turning the key, she checks the rearview to make sure there are no cars behind her. From inside it, the furrows and spots on her skin, her sunken eyelids, look back at her, the curls of her hair gone gray and never dyed since. In a few months, she’ll be fifty-nine, but her face has lived several lives. Three, at least, in the last decade.
She tries not to look at the passenger seat, but she senses the dark absence there, the hollowness that has accompanied her for some time. It’s dense today, and hazy, and sucks up the air around it. She has to lower her window and stick her head out to breathe.
In her mind, the words of the dead man’s daughter echo.
That crazy old man, she keeps thinking.
This crazy old woman, she says to herself.