Free The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico by Antonio Tabucchi Page A

and implacable undertaker. Other undertakers, on the contrary, stress efficiency and modernisation. ‘Os únicos auto-fúnebres automáticos’ (the only automatic hearses) claims an agency which boasts four branches covering the whole city. Modernity and mechanisation are powerful attractions, but this advertisement is certainly playing on the customer’s curiosity. What on earth might automisation mean when applied to hearses? Worth checking out.
    Almost all the undertakers also stress their experience and serious professional approach. To get this over, theirads in the Yellow Pages are accompanied by the faces of the proprietors and their staff: the unambiguous faces of undertakers with years of honest and respectable work behind them. What matters here is reliability, competence and the division of labour. These people don’t disguise the physiognomy of their profession; on the contrary, they display the stereotype with pride. They have sorrowful but shrewd faces, long sideburns and often dark beards, very carefully trimmed. Their shoulders slope a little, they have black jackets, black ties and quite frequently glasses with heavy plastic frames. They know how to manage the business of death, that much is clear, that’s what they’ve always done and they’re proud of it. You can feel safe with undertakers like this.
    But the most interesting advert for the potential customer comes from a discreet undertaker which stresses its Serviço Permanente and offers this copy line: ‘Nos momentos difíceis a opção certa’ (The right choice at a difficult moment). Farther down in the ad, after the reassuring guarantee that the company uses only flores naturais , we have another line: ‘Faça do nosso serviço um bom serviço,preferindo-nos’ (make our service a good service by choosing us). To whom can these lines be directed if not to the interested party him- or herself? The preferred target of this thoughtful undertaker is without doubt the man about to die. It is to him that the company wishes to talk, come to an understanding, achieve complicity. There is something of the conjugal in these bare and at the same time anodyne lines: they seem the quintessence of a contract, or a commonplace, they would be entirely plausible in the mouth of Emma Bovary’s husband, in the evening in front of the fire. Or again in the mouths of any of us when we sit down to eat our dinner and set up a relationship of reciprocal connivance with what we call living.
    Places to die, means of dying – they are so many and so varied one would need to write a whole treatise to cover them. I would rather leave the question up to the user, if only so as not to deprive suicide of that flair and creativity it ought to have. However, one can hardly avoid mentioning the means which, given the city’s structure and topography, would seem to be Lisbon’s chosen vocation: the leap. I appreciate that the void has always beena major attraction for spirits on the run. Even when he knows that the ground awaits him below, the man who chooses the void implies his refusal of fullness; he is terrified of the material world and desires to go the way of the Eternal Void, by falling for a few seconds through the physical void. Then the leap is also akin to flight; it involves a sort of rebellion against the human condition as biped; it tends towards space, towards vast distances, towards the horizon. Well, then, when it comes to this noble form of suicide, Lisbon is certainly the location par excellence. Hilly, constantly changing, riddled with stairways, sudden terraces, holes, drops, spaces that open all at once before you, complete with historic places for Historic suicides (try the Aqueducto das Águas Livres, the Castle, the Tower of Belém), sophisticated places for Art Deco suicides (the Elevador de Santa Justa) and mechanical places for Constructivist suicides (the Ponte 25 de Abril),