Twelve square meters, maybe fifteen. Skai sofas, impeccable, cream color. Low tablets. A hanger white light All discreet. Modern, clean, impersonal. A door, closed, gives access to a toilet. Another, in the background, is open. In fact, it is only an opening, as if to make it easier to pass through, but almost no one ventures to pass through it.
It must be the waiting room of a notary, a dentist…? No: there would be more movement, posters, musical thread. This place, on the other hand, has bare walls and a dull air… It must be the business center of a hotel frequented by executives?… Neither: there are no computers. The reception of a real estate agency?… The person who comes to assist us looks, yes, like a flat salesperson. Or not flats, but a seller of something. He wears a beaming smile, like a toothpaste ad. A strange smile. Imperturbable, fixed, a smile that does not interact. That looks stuck in the cheeks with bobby pins. And we, remembering who is there – and is no longer there – on the other side of the door without a door, we begin to cry. And we notice the detail that distinguishes this place from any consulting room, agency, waiting room: and that is that on each low table there is a box, elegant and discreet, with tissue paper.
Why is everything so insignificant? What sin have we committed so that something as terrible as dismissing the one we loved the most, something as grand and terrible as death, takes place in some kind of office, between sofas and hangers? Why does the most sophisticated and richest civilization the Earth has ever known look ridiculous in this way next to the pyramids of Egypt, the Taj Mahal, the mausoleum of Julius II sculpted by Michelangelo, Mozart’s Requiem, The Passion according to Saint Matthew of Bach…?
I’m ready to convert! To which religion? Anyone; not because I aspire to meet my mother in another life – I’d like to, but I don’t have the confidence to do so – but to enjoy, even if it’s just a little, the dignity, the greatness, the consolation, which beauty offers us in such a bitter trance… But then, I enter any church and it happens to me. There is no salvation: today churches also look like offices.
