We started to think about the burial, the funeral directors, the mass, the death notices, our mourning clothes. I felt that these preparations had nothing to do with my father. They concerned a ceremony which for some reason he would be unable to attend. My mother was extremely agitated and she told me that the night before he died, my father, who could no longer speak, had reached towards her in an attempt to kiss her. She added: ‘You know, he was a handsome lad in his youth.’

The smell set in on the Monday. It was something I hadn’t imagined. First faint, then overpowering, the stench of flowers left to rot in a vase of stagnant water.

My mother closed the business just for the funeral. Otherwise she would have lost customers and she 15couldn’t afford to do that. The body of my dead father was lying upstairs while she served pastis and red wine downstairs. In distinguished society, grief at the loss of a loved one is expressed through tears, silence and dignity. The social conventions observed by my mother, and for that matter the rest of the neighbourhood, had nothing to do with dignity. Between my father’s death on the Sunday and his burial the following Wednesday, the regulars would sit down and comment on the news laconically, in low voices, ‘He went out like a light,’ or else affect a cheerful attitude, ‘So the boss really let himself go!’ They told us how they felt when they had heard the news, ‘It knocked me for six, it did,’ or ‘I didn’t know what to think.’ They wanted my mother to know that she was not alone in her grief, an act of courtesy on their part. Many customers recalled the last time they had seen him alive and in good health, searching their memories for all the details of that last encounter, the exact time and place, what the weather had been like, the words they had spoken. Such a painstaking description of a time when being alive was taken for granted showed what a terrible shock my father’s death had been for them. They also asked to see ‘the boss’ out of politeness. My mother didn’t agree to all of the requests. She distinguished between the good customers, prompted by genuine feelings of sympathy, and the bad ones, whose sole motive was curiosity. Just about all of the regular customers were allowed to pay their last respects to my father. The wife of a foreman who lived nearby was turned down because he had always loathed her, her and her tight, puckered lips.

The undertakers came on the Monday. The stairway leading from the kitchen to the bedrooms turned out to be too narrow for the coffin. The body had to be 16wrapped in a plastic bag and dragged, rather than carried, to the coffin which lay downstairs in the middle of the café, closed for an hour. It was a laborious operation, punctuated by the men’s comments on the best way to proceed, how to negotiate the corners and so on.