The Mediterranean sun streamed through the window and reflected off the white floor. Blinded by the glare, I found myself in a perpetual cross-eyed squint during conversations with Altima’s attractive, well-groomed employees, including Josep, the dashing man in a suit who ran the whole operation.
In addition to Josep, sixty-three people work at Altima’s well-oiled facility. They pick up bodies, prepare them, file death certificates, meet with families, run funeral services. Altima handles almost one-quarter of all the deaths in Barcelona, which works out at ten to twelve bodies a day. Families choose between sepultura or incinerar (burial or cremation). Spain, thanks to its Catholic roots, has been slower to adopt cremation than most European countries; its cremation rate is at 35 percent, with urban Barcelona closer to 45 percent.
To understand the death rituals of Barcelona, you must understand glass. Glass means transparency, unclouded confrontation with the brutal reality of death. Glass also means a solid barrier. It allows you to come close but never quite make contact.
Altima boasts two large oratorios (chapels) and twenty family rooms. A family can rent one of these rooms and spend the entire day with their dead, showing up first thing in the morning and staying until the doors close at 10 p.m. And many families do. The catch is that the entire time, the body will be behind glass.
You have options as to the manner of glass you’d prefer be placed between you and your loved one. If you select a Spanish-style viewing, Altima will display your loved one in their coffin, surrounded by flowers, behind one large pane of glass, akin to a department store window. If you prefer the Catalan-style, Josep and his team will slide the open coffin into a Snow White display case in the center of the room. Either way, Altima can maintain a steady temperature around the body of 0–6 degrees Celsius (32–42 degrees Fahrenheit).
Behind the scenes, there were long corridors where the bodies in wooden coffins awaited their big moment. Pint-sized Alice in Wonderland metal doors opened to allow Altima staff to slip the body into its display or glass casket.
“What makes the glass casket Catalan-style?” I inquired.
My interpreter was Jordi Nadal, head of the publishing company that released my first book in Spain. Jordi was a Zorba the Greek character, dropping carpe diem–themed bon mots at every opportunity, keeping your wine glass full and squid and paella on your plate.
“Our Catalan families want to be closer to the dead,” was the answer.
“By putting them behind the glass like a zoo exhibit? What trouble are the corpses planning on causing, exactly?” is a thing I did not say.
The fact was, I had spent the whole week in Spain doing interviews with the national press on the ways modern funeral homes keep the family separated from the dead. Altima had read those interviews. That they had allowed me to make this visit at all was a miracle, and showed a willingness to engage on alternative methods that no American funeral corporation had ever shown me. I didn’t want to push my luck.
That’s not to say there wasn’t any tension. One employee, an older gentleman, asked if I was enjoying my time in Barcelona.
“It is gorgeous, I don’t want to leave. Perhaps I will stay here and apply for a job at Altima!” I said in jest.
“With your views we would not hire you,” he joked back, not without a slight edge to his voice.
“Do you have this phrase in Spanish, ‘Keep your friends close and enemies closer?’ ”
“Ah, yes.” He raised his eyebrows. “We’ll do that.”
The people I spoke to in Barcelona (regular citizens and funeral workers alike) complained of how rushed the process of death seemed. Everyone felt the body should be buried within twenty-four hours, but nobody was quite sure why. Mourners felt pressure from funeral directors to get things completed. In turn, the funeral directors protested that families “want things fast, fast, fast, in less than twenty-four hours.” Everyone seemed trapped in the twenty-four-hour hamster wheel. Theories for this time frame ranged from historical factors like Spain’s Muslim past (Islam requires bodies to be buried swiftly after death) to the warm Mediterranean weather, which would allow bodies to putrefy more quickly than elsewhere in Europe.
Prior to the twentieth century, it was not uncommon to believe that the corpse was a dangerous entity that spread pestilence and disease. Imam Dr. Abduljalil Sajid explained to the BBC that the Muslim tradition of burial in the first twenty-four hours “was a way to protect the living from any sanitary issues.” The Jewish tradition follows similar rules. Such fear across cultures inspired the developed world to erect protective barriers between the corpse and the family. The United States, New Zealand, and Canada embraced embalming, chemically preparing the body. Here in Barcelona they placed the body behind glass.
The shift toward removing those barriers has been slow-going, even though prominent entities like the World Health Organization make clear that even after a mass death event, “contrary to common belief, there is no evidence that corpses pose a risk of disease ‘epidemics.’ ”
The Centers for Disease Control puts it even more bluntly: “The sight and smell of decay are unpleasant, but they do not create a public health hazard.”
With this in mind, I asked Josep, the owner, if they would allow the family to keep the body at home, sans protective glass boxes. Though he insisted Altima rarely received such a request, Josep promised they would allow it, sending their employees out to the home to “close the holes.”
We took a freight elevator downstairs and stepped into the body preparation area. In Spain, bodies are so swiftly sent off sepultura or incinerar that they are rarely embalmed. Altima did have an embalming room, with two metal tables, but they only perform full embalmings on bodies that are being transported to a different part of Spain or out of the country entirely. Unlike the United States, where aspiring embalmers must pursue the overkill combination of a mortuary school degree and an apprenticeship, in Spain all training is done in-house, at the funeral home. Altima boasts of importing embalming experts from France to train their staff, “including the man who embalmed Lady Di!”
In the body prep room, two identical older women, in identical button-up sweaters with identical crucifixes around their necks, lay in identical wooden coffins. Two female Altima employees leaned over the first woman, blow-drying her hair. Two male employees leaned over the second, rubbing her face and hands with heavy cream. These bodies were on their way upstairs, destined to repose in glass coffins or behind glass walls.
I asked Jordi, my publisher, if he had ever seen dead bodies like this, without the glass barrier. With his typical verve, he allowed that although he hadn’t, he was ready for the encounter. “Seeing the truth like this, is always elegant,” he explained. “It gives you what you deserve as a human being. It gives you dignity.”