By Neil King Jr.
For two hours we wandered the famous Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, that glorious monument to human vanity and our craving to remember, to memorialize, to put the passing flicker into stone. Nothing says “Nothing lasts” quite like that everlasting favorite, the decaying crypt. In Recoleta, Argentina’s rich and illustrious buried their beloved dead and swore unending remembrance and love, only to see the years and the rain and the weeds weave a different story.
We will remember you always, dear father, dear brother, dear wife, say those who have passed along, unremembered and unremembering. They leave tombs that are no longer tended, tombs for the rain, the tendrils of vine, the birds to do their work. We are mighty beings for a moment that feels like eternity, but even our pursuit of a more durable eternity in plaster or stone can be so humorously fleeting.
I loved the intricate artistry of the cobwebs, the little locks meant to keep the living from the tombs of the dead. I loved how the cemetery, with its elegant angels, clashed marvelously with the city beyond its walls. Here, the fallen hero carved in marble in the lap of an angel, and there, beyond the walls, a huge billboard with a happy young couple fully in the thick of it and the words, “Vivi la vida!” I lived the life indeed.
Further down stood the lovely and massive white marble monument to some dead grandee. A mother offered her breast and nipple to a suckling infant, whose foot poked into the stomach of his brother. That older child stood there, the fingers of one hand interwoven with the fingers of his mother, a tunic wrapped at his belly. He looked tenderly, knowingly, at the mortal passerby. His face was streaked downwards with perfectly straight rivulets of dark soot. Pine needles from the tree nearby had gathered in the marble nook where his mother’s hand held his, and where the foot of his brother touched his belly.
We all have the seeds of our end within us from birth. In some, that seed is germinating more actively. It gives pungency to our days. One is meant to pass solemnly through such places of death, but I saw it all as an elaborate jest, a tender inside joke, like a priest blessing you with both the sign of the cross and a wink. There is no remembering these dead, truly, but only the continuing flicker of life that is us, the brief witnesses, passing by.