Ashes to Ashes
By MICHAEL SWAN
THE cemeteries of Roman Catholic countries succeed more than do our Protestant burial-grounds in denying death and giving the decaying remains a kind of immor- tality. In Mexico the Day of the Dead is a day of national holiday, when the cemeteries are full of happy families picnick- ing and drinking pulque by the graves of their parents. The sight in a Tuscan churchyard of a coloured and glazed photo- graph surmounting the tombstone of a girl brings a strange reality to her one-time existence. I remember one such photo- graph which was lit day and night by an electric torch, whose battery must have been renewed each week when the parents came with fresh flowers for their daughter's memory.
But these corners of cemeteries do not astound and delight so much as the miniature mansions of the rich, with their columns, pediments and metopes. I first saw a cemetery of this kind before dawn from a boat as we sailed down the coast of Corsica. In the half-light it appeared to be a distant town of Periclean Greece climbing the hillside. Yet, compar- ing the size of the houses with the apparent distance of the hills, I noted a discrepancy of proportion which gave me a sensation of seeing in two depths of reality. My pleasant illusion was ended by an American fellow-passenger who said, " Gee, that's a pretty dead-looking place," and then I realised how right he was.
Architecturally the Colon Cemetery in Havana is disappoint- ing. Cuban prosperity is comparatively recent; under the dictatorships of the past little money could be spared for the palaces of the dead, and all the magnificence I could find was an obelisk covered with carved drapery. I walked among the little tombs, remembering that it was somewhere in this ceme- v. tery that the dictator Machado was to have been blown up during the funeral of a colleague. Revolutionaries had tunnelled day and,night from a near-by house that they might lay the fuse and ekplosives, but at the last moment the place of burial had been changed.
An important funeral was to take place on the afternoon of my visit; crowds stood within the gates and lottery-ticket sellers walked among them shouting their numbers. Beyond the crowd I could see a hearse slowly moving along a side- road contiguous with the main road. A ragged cortege of negroes followed the hearse, and, suddenly filled with curiosity about the form of negro-burial, I kept pace with it. The chief mourners, two young girls, walked with their. arms round each other, their heads bent, and in tears, while the other members of the funeral talked happily and smoked cigarettes or half Coronas. I heard the sound of a brass band approaching along the main road.
Leaving the negroes, I went to the railings and watched an endless procession move slowly by in the opposite direction, a detachment of Cuban infantry followed by the brass band, a hundred policemen on motor bicycles, a detachment of armed police, and then the draped coffin on a gun-carriage drawn by horses of the cavalry. I asked a spectator beyond the railings who the dead man had been. He answered, in the ugly and almost incomprehensible accent of the island, that the man had been a senator. Death had come to him in a pecu- liarly Latin American manner. He had parked his motor-car at a forbidden position, and a policeman had come to tell his chauffeur to move away. An argument had ensued in which the senator took part; both sides shouted and the senator's hand went to his pocket to find his identification of importance. Alas ! The policeman had imagined that he was reaching for his gun, drew his own and did not wait a moment before shooting the senator dead. Now, with so many policemen called for this special duty, the Cuban police force was making its act of contrition.
I looked from this grand cortege across to the. distant rabble of negroes, and decided that their burial rites attracted me more. I overtook the hearse, and walked at the mourners' side as their feet squeezed the last juices from a bunch of poinsettias placed on a tomb the day before and now blown on to the road by the night winds. We turned a corner, and I found myself in the cemetery of the poor, acres of rough, grassless ground, covered with crosses like toy wooden swords —an allotment for the dead with rows of graves lying ready dug for newcomers. The bearers carried the coffin up and down across the loose mounds of earth, the two leaders with cigar- ettes hanging from their mouths. There was no ceremony; no words were spoken; no more happened than the rough lower- ing of the coffin into the earth and the raking of the loose earth into the pit.
The two girls who had been crying gave voice to their grief, wailing thinly in a shrill cantilena as the cross was thrust into the- earth. " Lucrezia Sereno," it read, " sus hijos y familia "—her sons and family. At the back of the group a young man, with long thin arms and legs, raised a meagre hand to his face and began to cry. The wailing seemed to have a sympathetic effect on him, for, as it reached its climax, he suddenly broke into a wild dance of death and grief; his arms struck outwards, his knees bent high to the dance, his head went down to between his knees and was then thrown far back in an extraordinary physical representation of grief and misery. His act was natural; he gave no thought to his movements; this language of death was more articulate than the words he was unable to formulate. They were movements which had been passed to him through the generations of his primitive for- bears, vestigial remains of some long-forgotten funeral celebration of the past, lost in the barracoons where his fore- fathers had found the desolation of the spirit.
Previous page
