It was a Sunday, in the early afternoon.

My mother appeared at the top of the stairs. She was dabbing her eyes with the napkin she must have taken with her when she went upstairs after lunch. She said in a blank voice: ‘It’s all over.’ I have no recollection of the minutes that followed. All I remember are my father’s eyes, staring at something behind me, in the distance, and the curled lips exposing his gums. I believe I asked my mother to shut his eyes. Also standing around the bed were my mother’s sister and her husband. They offered to help us wash and shave the body before it grew 13stiff. My mother suggested that we dress him in the suit he had bought for my wedding three years previously. There was an air of simplicity about the whole scene, no crying or shouting, just my mother’s red eyes and the frozen rictus on her face. Our movements were calm and orderly, accompanied by simple words. My uncle and aunt kept saying, ‘He made a quick job of it,’ or, ‘Doesn’t he look different.’ My mother spoke to my father as if he were still alive, or inhabited by a form of life apart, like a newborn baby. Several times she affectionately called him: ‘My poor little man.’

After my father had been shaved, my uncle straightened the body and held it up so that we could remove the shirt he had been wearing for the last few days and change it for a clean one. His head hung forward on his bare chest, mottled with tiny veins. For the first time in my life I saw my father’s penis. My mother covered it up quickly with the clean shirt-tails, joking a little bit: ‘Hide your misery, my poor man!’ When the body had been washed, my father’s hands were joined together around a rosary. I can’t remember whether it was my aunt or my mother who said, ‘He looks nicer like that,’ meaning more decent, more presentable. I closed the shutters and woke up my son who was having an afternoon nap in the next room. ‘Grandpa’s having a snooze.’

Notified by my uncle, the family in Y— came round. They went upstairs with my mother and me and stood in front of the bed, silent for a moment, and then talked in hushed voices about my father’s illness and his sudden death. When they came downstairs, we gave them something to drink in the café.14

I don’t remember the doctor who was called in to sign the death certificate. Within a few hours, my father’s face had changed beyond all recognition. Towards the end of the afternoon, I happened to be in the room on my own. The sunlight filtered through the shutters onto the linoleum floor. He was no longer my father. His sunken features seemed to have developed into one large nose. In his dark-blue suit, which hung loosely around his body, he looked like a bird lying on its back. The face he’d had just after his death – that of a man with wide, staring eyes – had already disappeared. I would never see that face again either.