Mrs. Enríquez was born in one of so many post-war years. Among briars and mud, she knew hunger and resilience before she learned to speak. Her genes, programmed to make an athlete, had instead produced a slight, wiry little woman with sinewy limbs, defiant cheekbones, and light feet. She moved with the energy and steadiness of someone who has not grown up burdened by a full belly, and having known every kind of limitation, she was never capable of the slightest excess.
Her mother was a nameless woman with soapy hands who dressed in black for half her life. Her father, a farmer who did not come back from the war. Years later they told her, with the macabre amusement of hindsight, that he had been killed with his trousers down behind a poorly chosen tree. The dead man left behind twins and two daughters, the younger of whom was Mrs. Enríquez, who in time watched all of them die. Whenever one of her siblings passed, she always murmured: “I’ll be next.” But when she was left alone, and that prediction could no longer fail, she went on watching others die — many of them born after her.
Mrs. Enríquez bore six healthy children, who in turn gave her fifteen grandchildren, several great-grandchildren, and many great-great-grandchildren. At eighty she was widowed. Her husband had been a porter at a ministry through whose doors powerful figures came and went with purposeful airs, winking at him as they passed. When he retired, the man refused to give up the wine no matter how often it was prescribed — too much leisure for too few interests, and an unceasing rain of alcohol that nourished an infallible tumour.
With such company, Mrs. Enríquez had little help in raising her children. She gave them all the same: good manners that the street promptly undid, and the education of a state school. And in the end, all of them lived working-class lives, with the typical problems and small concerns that entails.
Past ninety, she lost her son Alfonso. The tobacco smoke killed him, as she had predicted it would after his first cigarette. Despite their respective ages, his death hurt her as though she were losing a child, but by then her mind was fantasising without her permission, and before long she stopped remembering him as a corpse and began to see him drifting through the kitchen in search of cheese, or sitting in the living room watching a football match.
Already close to a hundred, Mrs. Enríquez was cared for in shifts by the living. They even drew up a rota to divide the time between the children, the grandchildren, the work obligations of those not yet retired, and other duties. The old woman could still stand on her own two feet, took walks with a beech-wood cane, and brewed herself chamomile tea. All her life she had had a reputation as a resilient woman, and after her hundredth birthday this quality became legendary. Her children proclaimed it and everyone in the neighbourhood acknowledged it. It was said that Mrs. Enríquez never fell ill. The truth is that she did, but her threshold for pain was so high that a bout of colic did not seem to her worth mentioning.
Her descendants, however, raised with far less hardship, were not so tough, and at the slightest ailment required the doctor. There was always one of them being tested for this or that. Mrs. Enríquez endured all of it somewhere between worried and bewildered, lost in the labyrinth of complaints and symptoms, until through that hypochondriac jungle certain realities would intrude. So it was that, past a hundred, her daughter Teresa died. The grief resembled that for Alfonso, but Teresa — or rather her ghost — began moving through the house more quickly than her brother had, and the old woman forgot she was dead. Of the four surviving children, the youngest, Ricardo, was already seventy, and more than one had grandchildren of their own; but since Mrs. Enríquez lost her way in the genealogical distances, to her they were all grandchildren as well.
Soon she had no children left, and before that she had already lost some of those grandchildren too. The first was Ángel, who at exactly fifty went to do justice to his name. Of her children, after Alfonso and Teresa, Fernando, Margarita, Ricardo, and Natalia all died. Within days, each had their corresponding ghost.
At a hundred and fifteen, Mrs. Enríquez saw more people in her house than when all of them had been alive; for every one of them, even those who had visited least, had settled into permanent spectral residence. The first great-grandchild to join the ghostly household was Domingo — whose name means Sunday — who died on a Monday; even in that he went too far. Adventurous and reckless, Domingo was one of those characters who make a point of being perpetually dissatisfied: he wanted to climb the highest mountains and leap from the tops of the deepest gorges. In the end, numbers moved him more than any accountant. No ordinary mountain would do, and his body lay wedged between two rocks on Everest, at over eight thousand metres above sea level. His spirit wandered through Mrs. Enríquez’s sitting room wearing snow-shoes, just as she had always pictured him, and no one seemed to find this strange.
The old woman had not forgotten her refrain: “I’ll be next.” Whenever anyone died — blood relation or in-law, even a neighbour or acquaintance — she would deliver the verdict. More and more she addressed it to the dead rather than the living, though for her they were all the same, and she was always wrong — to the point where her great-great-grandchildren began to go before her. When she was told of a death, she no longer knew who was telling her or who had died. Often she would see the ghost before its owner had actually died, so that she, unable to distinguish between bodies and spirits, would deny the evidence. The not-yet-dead let her keep her fantasies; after all, she was by now the oldest woman in the world, and had even appeared on the television news.
All of this strange world washed over the tiny, wrinkled body of Mrs. Enríquez and she barely noticed. Her immediate surroundings were so busy that she needed no other distractions. She watched it all in astonishment, as though it were a film. If she tried to converse with her ghosts, they either did not answer or spoke in enigmatic words that did not surprise her, for they came from her own mind.
She could no longer remember whether any descendants of hers were still alive beyond the walls of her flat. In fact, she still had a handful of great-great-grandchildren who had produced another handful of whatever comes after that, but the kinship was so remote that family feeling had been diluted to homeopathic levels. Mrs. Enríquez was looked after by a carer whom she cheerfully confused with the spectres. Since carers also died, their ghosts joined the crowd and new ones arrived with similar faces and similar names.
So passed an uncountable time — uncountable not for its length, but because Mrs. Enríquez lived outside the flow of ages. It was as though time had stopped and disconnected from a world that was rushing ceaselessly toward the shadows. She, however, was still there in her little sitting room, in a flat she no longer left, surrounded by images — some floating, others rigid and fixed to the walls. She barely moved and could hardly manage the walk to the bathroom along the endless corridor of bare walls.
How old was she? There was no one left to count. More than a hundred and thirty, certainly. Maybe a hundred and forty or fifty, or perhaps two hundred, thousands, or millions. So many that there was no one left outside; everyone had died. Even the sun was waiting for her before it took its leave. Her only novelties were the ghosts who periodically came to swell the crowd. The most recent ones she no longer recognised, but they did not surprise her either — she accepted them all as a matter of course.
Then one day, even the dead began to die, and they did so in the reverse order of their arrival. First a child whose name she did not know: he passed through a luminous doorway at the end of the corridor the day after he had appeared. This filled Mrs. Enríquez with a strange sorrow — an unfamiliar grief tinged with immeasurable old age. Then others left, quietly, one by one. They went without saying goodbye, like someone who slips away from a lively party because the energy has left them and they do not wish to make a fuss. The only thing the old woman noticed was that there were fewer and fewer people, though she could not say who was missing; yet she sensed it, especially when she looked for someone she remembered and could not find them — and then she would murmur her old refrain: “I’ll be next.”
But no. Mrs. Enríquez was still there as her grandchildren, her children, and her husband died a second time, and then her brothers and sisters — who had also been with her since their passing, though she had not seen them until much later, when the house was already full of spectres. Then her mother left, dressed in a black Sunday suit, and at last her father, whose face she had barely seen in life but recognised just as he was departing. At the end, only a stocky little woman remained, very like Mrs. Enríquez but smaller and thinner still. It was her grandmother, who left in little skips — she had died young — waving her hand like a queen.
Now she was alone. Truly alone. Neither the dead nor the living were there to keep her company. Even the house was dying around her. She noticed that furniture was missing, then walls, then rooms. Where were the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom? Only an empty sitting room remained, with a small window, but outside it was night and nothing could be seen. In that silence, the door through which everyone had gone — at the end of the corridor — glowed very faintly. It was in fact a bare doorframe, and in it a silhouette took shape. A young man dressed in white appeared, his face unseen. He approached the old woman very slowly and helped her to her feet with great tenderness. Mrs. Enríquez looked at him, but her eyes were so worn that she could only make out blurred shapes. He seemed to her an angel — without wings, but an angel. Is it my turn? she asked, faintly. No one answered. The young man helped her walk, step by step, toward the doorframe whose light was growing. On the other side, distant voices could be heard, laughter and singing. Behind her, no one remained; the world had ended and she was the last. She stepped into a light that grew ever more radiant, and her infinite wrinkles faded into it, with no shadow left to trace them.