Cimetière Montmartre
Paris, 18eme arrondissement
France
France
Dear o,
An older woman with a wide-brimmed straw
hat, gardening gloves and a flower-watering bucket is sitting on the end of a
long stone slab of a tomb. She is stout
and sturdy, scattered and determined, lost and motionless. She says all this with her darting hands and
rolling shoulders, and with the tufts of hair jutting from under her hat.
She faces a pair of tombstones laid
over a single plot. The tall maroon
blocks are separate, but form the corresponding halves of a heart. The flowers she has laid, the decorations she
has placed, the love she has committed here is reserved to only one half of the
double grave, and its inscription reads only, ‘Simon’. The other half – her half – is blank. Holding out.
I’m not in a fatalistic mood. It is spring, after all. This morning’s sun was the most promising of
the year, and heat is the most obvious expectation for my voyage in the weeks
to come. For Spain and Morocco and the
rest of Africa I have built an image of endless, reckless, frolicking summer,
and I know it is an irrational flash shot against the backdrop of desert and
danger. I suppose what I mean is that I
seem split unto myself: I am feeling the blossom of life, but thinking the pincers
of death.
I am thinking death first of all because,
despite the licks and surfs of summer imaginings, the trip on which I am about
to embark will be by far the most dangerous thing I’ve ever come close to doing. Paris to Dar es Salaam via the Sahara, west
Africa, the Congo, Angola and Zambia.
There will be driving on wet roads, desert roads, war roads, and no
roads; there will be overwhelming sun, pernicious sand, and daily thunderstorms;
poor digestion and chocolate bar nostalgia; malaria and malaria medication
(thankfully not Larium, the nightmare drug) – hearts of darkness beating in
abundance. Tack on the worries others
would have me have: casual kidnapping, jungle Kalashnikovs, lions. I can’t help but feel I’m obliged to write a
letter to leave behind, titled, In Case I
Die. But I don’t know what I would
say. Some lesson I can’t qualify? Some wish I can’t justify? Some final scribbling attempt at immortality,
the illusion of which is my fingers curling up from a future grave? I can see them twist out the grey soil from
beneath, but they hold nothing. Part of
me thinks I want to pen such a thing just to prove I saw death coming, should
death come. So I can have said I said
so. How many other contingencies, then,
should I prepare for? If I spent the
rest of my life predicting my future I’d eventually get a lot of it right.
At the entrance to this place is a sign
that reads, Votre sérénité est notre
métier – “your serenity is our craft”.
To be honest, I think the ‘our’ extends a lot wider that the cemetery
workers. We have built this ritual
silence in respect to death for generations and civilisations, and the craft of
serenity is in our bones. Have you ever
been to graveyard at night? That is
history speaking; its ghosts too have been measured and made.
The woman is holding a stone, transferring
it from hand to hand, rolling its weight between her fingers. She is swaying like a metronome must sway
when you think it is still. What is her
craft? Gardening? Simon?
A future inscription?
Death is also on my mind because I am
dying. I have no disease, save for that
of life, and not so many years save the ones which haunt me in the dark. I am dying because I am alive. I don’t remember things like I once did. The facts and insights ingrained into my grey
matter seem all from the same era of adolescence and young adulthood, like I
can’t stay grown up, like I’m repeating myself, coarsening the old grooves when
I can’t form new ones. My vocabulary is
shrunk, sweet habits have subsumed mental adventure, exercise is hard. I notice how two weeks of big eating begets
an anchor in my gut, and two weeks of less sleep a hammer through my
skull. It’s starting to bother me when I
see a couple kiss in the park with their eyes open, and while I try to accept
it today, tomorrow I’ll think it should disturb everyone. Today I think I didn’t used to be this way;
tomorrow I’ll forget I was any different.
I am getting older. I am getting
old. I am dying. I’d quote Beckett – and who could be more
astute here? – but I am swollen with the fear of getting it wrong. Birth astride of a grave, and something
something.
But I’m not depressed about it, so don’t
worry. The endless rows of skulls and
femurs in the Paris Catacombs filled me with wonder and imaginative fire, not
dread: I saw people’s lives lead to hollow heads, rather than the events which
hollowed them. I am excited about the
future and want to dive into its blush and colour. There is not much thought to it. Spring floods are always nostalgic.
She points to the stone and whispers
something to Simon. She might not even
be making sound. She passes the stone to
the other hand, points, and says something else. She shrugs.
She places the stone down in front of the inscribed block, gets up,
picks up her watering bucket, adjusts her backpack, and turns to walk
away. The backpack straps dangle like
those of an absent-minded schoolboy. She
waddles down Avenue Berlioz, named after the French composer buried alongside,
and then stops and turns back. She seems
to think about returning to fix a flower or adjust the stone. But she goes on, and reaches the gate with
those wise old steps.
I go to the grave to see her work. It is not a stone. It’s a piece of bread, too round and
anachronistic to be from a boulangerie – she made it herself. She left Simon a piece of bread.
Blank tombstones don’t bother me. They could have just come from the factory or
shop, and can be broken up again. It’s
the ones that are placed and assigned yet left uninscribed, waiting polite and
inoffensive, that make me feel like I’m being walked over.
If it’s up to you, cremate me. Yours,
QM
 |
| Blank tombstone |
