To continue being human, harboring illusion in the soul, frenetic desires in the heart, in the midst of this nightmare, I ask this of the gods.
Manuel Vilas, writer. April 1st. Twitter
One day before.
It is Tuesday, March 31. The epidemic has not yet reached its peak and we continue to die. At 11 in the morning a hearse stops at the doors of the chapel of the La Almudena cemetery, Madrid. He carries inside a coffin with the body of a woman who died of coronavirus. Spring has started, but today is one of the worst days of the year. At night it has snowed. It is very cold. The sky is a gray hood. The rain falls thick and freezing. Deacon Santiago Pérez comes out to the door of the chapel dressed in a white robe, a purple lenten stole across his chest and a satin mask made by a dressmaker from his parish.
-Dear family. Dear friends. A goodbye, a forever, a to heaven.
The priest begins the office. In front of him are the driver of the vehicle and three relatives of the deceased, the limit of assistants to the burials of victims of the Covid-19 imposed by the Government. It is also not allowed to celebrate funerals inside. That is why Santiago Pérez has taken out a small table on which he has placed the cross of Christ and a lighted candle. But the strangest thing, which shows hardest that this tragedy is breaking our symbolic structures in two, is that you can't even open the car door for the deacon to pour holy water on the coffin. Instead, he approaches the vehicle with the isopo and sprinkles three sad drops on the wide moon of the trunk.
The virus has performed a very painful double operation with death. It has increased in number in an unbearable way and at the same time it has suppressed it in an unbearable way: those who are dying cannot be accompanied in hospitals in their last hours, and when they die, their bodies cannot be seen or veiled and can only be dismissed by their narrowest core of relatives in the cemetery or in the crematorium. Thus, death is everywhere but has disappeared. We are living a collective wake without a body present.
"There has been a short circuit in the rites of passage that help us assimilate death," reflects María Cátedra, emeritus professor of Social Anthropology at the Complutense University of Madrid and author of Death and Other Worlds (1998). The professor explains that the rituality of death is made up of three steps defined as separation, margin and incorporation that have been broken during this crisis. In most cases, separation is maintained –when the patient is hospitalized– but the accompanying intermediate margin is eliminated until he loses his life and, finally, due to the cancellation of the wake and the reduction of human presence in burials and cremations to an aseptic minimum, the incorporation of the deceased into the category of the dead remains in a nebula. "It is a radical cut in our cultural processes of assumption of death, that not because they are rites and belonging to the dimension of custom are no longer fundamental," says Cátedra, who responds to us from his quarantine in a retired house in nature from the Sierra de Gredos.
In the La Almudena chapel, the hearse leaves. Soon one more arrives. "As you can see, I already have another, and then another and another," says the priest Santiago Pérez, who has seen how the activity in his chapel has tripled from about eight daily services before the epidemic to a long score now.
A few meters away is a gravedigger with a mask. The gravediggers of La Almudena do not want to appear in photographs or videos and talking does not motivate them in the least. They spend time working or talking in a circle with each other, some smoking with those serious and tanned faces of the trade. Each crew of four has gone from making about four daily burials to a dozen or more. They are spending strenuous days in which the worst, according to what they say, is to see the loneliness of families dismissing the dead. "The fear of contagion is the least of it," says the gravedigger next to the chapel. "What is a real hardship is to see a woman filming her father's funeral and then show it to the rest of the family. That is indeed a hardship."
We move through the cemetery to a burial and hear on the radio: "The emergency continues. The balance today maintains the constants of last week. In the last 24 hours, 837 other people have died." The tracks of La Almudena are empty. We arrived at the burial site and watched from a distance. The gravediggers introduce the coffin into the grave. There are three relatives covered with umbrellas, separated from each other two meters away and protected with masks. Nothing happens around, nothing moves. There is only silence. During the burial, you can only hear the chirping of birds and shovels of dirt. It is a farewell without flowers or human warmth. It is a pity.
The director of cemeteries of the public company Funeral Services of Madrid, Rafael Mendoza, reports that they have launched "emotional support programs for relatives to manage grief", with psychologists. They are also working on the option of enabling "farewells by streaming [digital live broadcast]". Technology to alleviate the vacuum. A resource forced by the circumstances that can help, without a doubt, but not replace human needs, according to Rosa García-Orellán, an anthropologist who studies the field of disease and death and professor of Health Sciences at the Public University of Navarre. "The arrival of this pandemic occurs in a context of digital revolution and the confinement at home leads us to live the mourning through smartphones and computers. The media tells us of priests who share funeral rites on YouTube or collective whatsapps and videoconferences in which people drain their pain from their homes. But in this 24-hour confinement day and night, although the screen is always by our side, there are many moments of solitude, and there is no hugging, no looking , of shared silences. Of emotions that cannot be transferred through keyboards or cameras. The body needs the other not only in a virtual way, but with that clandestine feeling of ours, "he writes by email.
From La Almudena we go to the M30 Municipal Funeral Home. In the hall we find the same: more empty. In an hour, only two people enter, disoriented, asking what to do to collect a relative whose body is in the Ice Palace, the makeshift morgue in Madrid to accumulate corpses. The information staff attends to them and returns to their task of answering the phone incessant calls. "In which residence has he died?" "M30 funeral home, good afternoon". "Now that service cannot be done. Later, when this has happened." "Everything is already managed, sir, but understand that we have to carry out an order and we are having hundreds of deaths every day." "M30 funeral home, good afternoon". "Thank you very much for the gesture, really," they respond to the call of a citizen who had worked in a mortuary and offered to come to help with whatever was needed.
"I'm exhausted," says one.
Hang up. Dream again.
We go down to the basement and we are greeted by a young man in a sober turtleneck, skinny jeans and comfortable sneakers. His name is Julio Benito and he is the head of the coffin store. It shows us hundreds of coffins arranged in rows. During a normal week, 200 coffins arrived at this mortuary. Since the epidemic broke out, they receive 200 a day. Benito says that the first days of the coronavirus crisis were distressing and that little by little they have been better organized. He is calm, although he does not hide the fact that they face a complex and unprecedented challenge: "We have had other serious moments such as the Spanair plane crash in Madrid [2008; 154 people died], but that was something that had a beginning and an end in a limited space of time. In this case, unfortunately, we don't know where the end is. " Next to it is a funeral van with a cardboard sign on the steering wheel that says: "Do not use. You have to disinfect."
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In another area of the mortuary funeral directors are preparing for their services. It is a large garage in which the first thing that catches the eye is the presence of two rows of coat racks full of so-called EPI (Personal Protective Equipment) suits. Drivers put on these plastic hooded coveralls to go to hospitals and homes for death from coronavirus. In an adjacent room there are several coffins with deceased and in each one there is a white sheet of paper that reads, written in pen or phosphorescent marker, the name of the person and the specifications "Covid" or "No covid". Workers move around the garage without the possibility of keeping the recommended safety distances in the event of a possible contagion, some of them regardless of the mask. As is the case, for example, with doctors in hospitals or with gravediggers in cemeteries, doing their job is leading them to openly expose themselves to the virus. Meanwhile, the forklifts arrive coffins with dead people with a frightening frequency. Operators place two in the middle of the garage and spray them with water and bleach. The crucified Jesus from one of the coffins is touched by drops of the disinfecting solution. The forklift goes up again, goes down, and one more coffin appears. A worker asks:
–Another covid?
"Yes," they reply.
Although they carry out their task mechanically - how to do it, if not? - they are not desensitized. "We are used to working with death, but we don't have a breastplate," says driver José Luis Pérez. He is a middle-aged man with a robust face, austere in words but delicate in treatment, with a presence of peaceful spirit that is welcoming in such a maddening setting. It tells us that the collection of deceased people at home is the hardest thing for them. "You are in front of relatives who cannot touch their dead and who will not be able to watch over them either," he explains. These days he has lived two episodes that he will find difficult to forget. A son who cried and apologized to his father for not being able to give him one last kiss and another who saw how they took his and could only raise one hand and whisper: "Goodbye, champion."
Pérez leaves the garage driving a hearse to the Gregorio Marañón hospital. When he and three other companions arrived in a van, they park at the entrance to the morgue, spread a plastic on the ground and laboriously get into their safety suits, closing the first gloves on the wrist with electrical tape and putting on another pair above. A few minutes pass, the morgue door opens and they enter the corpse of a victim of the virus. Inside they put it in two shrouds, one on top of the other, to seal it more. Then they take it out in the coffin and spray it with bleach. Entering hospital morgues, Pérez says, is also being traumatic. "It is not uncommon for us to see two or three bodies there, but to see 15 or even 20 together, so much accumulation, it becomes very uphill."
Going by taxi to the Crematorio Sur in Madrid on the radio, you hear the story of an evangelical pastor from the United States who gathered hundreds of faithful in his church and assured them that they were free of the pathogen there, in addition to advising them not to hesitate to embrace to each other.
"Buff," the taxi driver despairs behind his mask.
Upon arrival at the incinerator there is a hearse parked at its doors. A priest says a few words with two relatives of the deceased. When he is finished, he re-enters the mortuary and the man and woman who were with him slowly walk towards their vehicle. He takes a bottle of sanitizing gel out of his pocket. It lies down a bit. He passes it to her. They both walk away rubbing their hands.
The crematorium spokeswoman, Nuria Andrés, explains that they are calling the relatives of the deceased to know that they can come to give them one last goodbye, even in these limited conditions. "At least that way they have a chance to see his coffin," he says. She usually dedicates herself to communication tasks but now she is also helping out in the ovens, where she had already worked. "The amount of work is overflowing. We are working 200%, cremating 30 corpses a day, twice the normal amount, but we remain in control of the situation," he says. It leads us to the back of the crematorium, where the coffins go into the ovens, and there we witness - again - how water with lye is sprayed on them. The photographer asks Andrés if he can portray her and she is shy, although she accepts. That shyness, that beautiful and human reaction a few meters from four cremation ovens and while our world is shaking with panic, it is a small miracle.
At dusk we moved to the Ice Palace, the entertainment center that has become the most ominous symbol of the capital of Spain these days. Its icy skating rink is being used as a temporary mortuary to ease saturation of hospital morgues. The police guard the access and vehicles enter and leave: firefighters, funeral homes, a chemical company ... The shopping center is of a cold and impersonal architecture that conveys an even more pitiful feeling. There, looking at it without knowing what to say, one wonders what will become of this place. If its stigma will make us avoid it or if, perhaps, its stigma is precisely something that helps us after this nightmare to symbolize our pain, to give it a physical place, to provide a memorial space to this enormous faceless collective duel.
Silvia García, a neighbor of the neighborhood, passes loaded with two bags of the supermarket. She went to the Ice Palace as a child. She says that now she sees it and her soul falls to her feet, but she believes that even this building will heal: "You will see. Soon the laughter and the scampering will return."
The laughter, the scampering, the shyness.
Back to life.