The deceased possess things, by Juan José Millás

Years ago, preparing a report on prison lifea thief told me that he had entered a house that seemed empty, but in which there was a dead. He found him on the bed in the bedroom, covered with a blanket, curled up on himself, in a fetal position, as if death had surprised him in the middle of his sleep. He didn’t smell bad because he had mummified. The thief stared at him for a long time, as if he were trying to understand him.

-Understand that? -I asked for.

-I don’t know. Perhaps the mystery that the owner of the house was and was not there at the same time. He was there because I saw him, with my own eyes, but his body was empty. I left without stealing.

Such is, I believe, what amazes us about the deceased: their ability to be there and not be there at the same time. One day I asked the philosopher what a dead man was Angel Gabilondo.

“Something from someone,” he replied.

In fact, I thought something from someone who no longer owns anythingNot even your own body. But the corpse is still someone’s something, just as the recently deceased father’s plaid shirt remains the recently deceased father’s plaid shirt, which no longer exists. It means that the dead, at least for some time, have properties for which they do not need deeds.

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When my father passed away, I kept one of his jackets that I really liked and that fit me like a glove. But It took two years until I could make it my own. Until then, I would put it on from time to time and go out in the street with it, but when I got to the corner I would turn around and go home to take it off. she provoked me a strange feeling to appropriate it, as if it were a robbery, more than an inheritance. I thought about dyeing it with the idea that washing it would strip it of her identity, but I was ashamed that my father’s identity was lost in the bowels of a machine, along with clothes from unknown people.

Little by little, my father abandoned the jacket and now it is completely mine, although I remember him when I use it. I never wrote about the story that the thief told me because he managed to transmit to me a perplexity from which he is beginning to free me now.

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