Post by Grubb
Long blocks of outdoor cafes across from high fortress-like walls, crowds of people lining up at the entrance, street vendors yelling out in Spanish, I could be in Seville outside the Royal Alcázar, but here in Buenos Aires we’re joining a small group walking tour ready to explore the Recoleta Cemetery. No caliphs or kings haunt these walls, but that doesn’t mean the bones locked up inside the grandiose mausoleums making up the labyrinthine cemetery aren’t revered. Poets, presidents, generals, and prize fighters are given their resting place here. To take a tour through the sculpted tributes to these dead is to get a primer on Argentine history.
Plus Ella and I got this thing about cemeteries. If getting to a place involves a journey, we can’t resist visiting the local burial grounds. It’s our algebra of adventure: the distance traveled in space has to be relative to the distance we travel in time. Rome would be the model in this regard. And here in Buenos Aires, six hours after we landed, we’re tromping around where Eva Perón and Firpo are tucked in their tombs. (José de San Martin is buried in a Buenos Aires cathedral and Borges lies in Geneva.)
Our short Argentinian guide, Maro, made a great contrast to the overlarge stony white statues standing like sentries outside the formidable mausoleums. She was like a grace note on the pretensions of the over-prized. And her recounting the twists of fortune in Argentine politics since the Second World War was a lesson in reversals. Passing the excessive ornamentation of an ostentatious tomb it was hard to tell if the deceased was a winner or a loser. Take Firpo. He’s famous for losing against Dempsey, but he knocked Dempsey out of the ring and he didn’t get hoisted back into the ring with the help of spectators until seventeen seconds later even though the Argentinian judge counted only nine seconds. So: Winner? Loser? All I know is that Dempsey never got a tomb that measures up to this.
We’ve visited mausoleum dominated cemeteries in New Orleans and Lisbon, but they pale (forgive the pun) compared to the tight cluster of monumentality where these ghosts hang out. Formidably entombing the dead isn’t just an Egyptian thing. Apparently there have been attempts to break in and desecrate the resting places of scorned politicians. One corpse had his hands cut off and stolen. At that point a cemetery isn’t spooky, it’s deranged.
Wonderfully different! Meanwhile, we’ll be leaving shortly for Pismo Beach! 😉 Have a ball!
Have a great time in Pismo Beach.
Moira and I also have a thing for cemeteries, though usually we visit war cemeteries (without particular preference to which side won and which side lost — they are mostly just young lads who maybe were full of nationalistic spirit, but in the end, they died, unrecognized and usually under miserable circumstances). When we were in Egypt recently we spent over an hour at the El Alamein Commonwealth War Cemetery, and then visited both the German and Italian (typically bombastic) memorials.
Ditto on visiting cemeteries. They often have stunning views. In Italy someone has to keep paying annual rent on your space. If that stops they remove you. The sides of the cemeteries are littered with headstones of the displaced dead. Actually it seems like a pretty good system.
The Recoleta cemetery has the same death on the installment plan. The city government charges an annual fee and evicts (disinters?) the bones (or ashes) of those that don’t have descendants who can pay up. National heroes are exempt.