You were suppose
d to have been immortal
That’s all they wanted
Not much to ask for
But in the end you could not deliver
~*~*
The choice was mine and mine completely
I could have any prize that I desired
I could burn with the fury of the brightest star
Or else, or else I could choose time
But remember, I was very young then
And a year was forever and a day
So what use could fifty, sixty, seventy be?
I saw the lights and I was on my way
And how I lived, and how they shone
But how soon the lights were gone…
She wasn’t a saint.
They call her one; Santa Evita. But she wasn’t, scratch the surface of the glamour and Eva Peron was a woman who clawed, scraped and slept her way to the top. She did a lot of good, but she was far from selfless.
Yet, standing in front of her grave in the endless Recolleta Cemetery , where she is buried in not the Peron but the Duarte family tomb, there are still fresh flowers laced into the grates of the doors. Argentina still mourns its Eva, even though she is so long gone now that she is little more than a legend.
We hadn’t intended to end up in Recolleta, but I wasn’t sorry that we had done so. One of the friends I was with had never been, and although Tolly and I had both been (her as recently as two days ago), it’s a place that you can find yourself lost in and not see what you did the first time. It’s very peaceful – this city of the dead – almost lullingly so. Eerily so. Tolly mentioned that it made her wonder if this was what Pompeii had been like before the disaster; only in these streets the residents do no roam, at least not in the conventional sense.
Evita is far from the only resident in this silent city; though her resting place is the most visited. Some, sadly, are no longer visited at all. Many of the tombs belong to families who descendants are long forgotten, looking through half-open locked grates one can see the entrancingly chilling sight of elegant decay. In one instance the stain glass roof had crashed to the ground, lying in pieces amongst the toppled masonry, the coffin itself sheltered and untouched in its niche as the ferns and flowers fought their way up through the cracks beneath it. There was something hypnotizing about it, Tolly almost had to pull me away.
Whose life was that? Whose child, whose parent?
It is not Evita’s grave that interests me here, it’s all the others that are swallowed up by her shadow. All the others time has forgotten.
The cats were gone, that was the one thing I noticed. There used to be cats roaming the cemetery everywhere, lazing in the shadow of long dead generals and patrolling the perimeter of Evita’s neighbours; but I didn’t see one today. Although Tolly said she spotted cat food near one of the benches.
Buenos Aires itself is a city I had not thought I would set foot in again. I was lucky enough to visit on one of the world cruises quite some time ago, one of my very first. Then, I went out alone, somehow more confident than I am now. So it was a different experience to explore Recolleta with someone else. We had started out with four people, but two of us turned a corner and vanished from the sight of the others before they even realized we’d gone; we eventually met up at a café and drank fresh juice and nibbled on warm croissants. There are worse ways to spend a day.
We’ve actually been in Buenos Aires three days, but the first day was Amras’ and my last day in port together, most of which was spent tracking down a desperately needed suitcase (but which also included breakfast at a lovely little corner café so I can’t complain), and he debarked the second day; which left me with today – and I wasn’t going to go out at all, but as it turned out I did need a little peace and quiet.
The puzzle that is the City of the Dead proved to be exceptionally good at providing that.
Even if it does give us a stark reminder that we are – none of us – immortal.