A Visit To Père Lachaise

("At last alone", reads the plaque by Arman, the great sculptor and artist)

The French in particular, and it seems that European in general, look to the past to assert their identity while we in the Americas look to the future in search of ours. And, it is no wonder that Europeans feel that way since they are surrounded by their history and the trappings of their culture. In Paris, for example, everywhere you go there is a monument, a building of historical significance, a street named for a king, a liberator, a scientist, an artist, a queen, and so on. There is no shortage of historical sites and certainly no lack of personalities after which one can name streets. It is so much so that some Boulevards take on several names in their various sections.

If museums are the keepers of artistic and cultural history, and places such as the National Archive are the guardians of the testaments to political and social events, a reminder, more poignant than any street name or painting hung on a museum wall, of the persons that created the art and put forth the policies are the tombs, graves, and mausoleums in the cemeteries of the city.

And, no cemetery is more celebrated or visited than Père Lachaise.

My wife is a great fan of cemeteries. She says that visiting the grave of a personality gives physical weight to an otherwise ephemeral presence created from mentions in books or images in photographs. She says it also lends the humility of a mortal body to a personality one might consider metaphorically eternal due to his or her achievements.

I usually just nod in agreement to these philosophical flights of hers and utter a "Yup" in order to prove I am paying attention.

We in the Americas don't have this cult of personality afforded to the long departed. I have never been to a major city, say San Francisco, New York, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, or Toronto where my host has said, "Oh, and by the way, you should visit the cemetery where John Doe and similar personalities are buried." Maybe I don't hang around with the right necrophiles or it is that we Americans, North or South, don't consider our cemeteries tourist attractions.

We in Mexico have a "cult of the dead" and there is a long and complicated religious, folkloric, and cultural history of rituals associated with the "Day of the Dead" (Día de los Muertos) but that is a very different thing from the sort of celebrity ogling that is associated with visits to the grave of people such as Jim Morrison or Chopin, to name a two among the hundreds of the famous that are buried in some of the most celebrated cemeteries of Paris.

Of course, there is a mini-industry that has grown up around these venues, namely the map sellers and souvenir shops that profit from the steady stream of tourist that flows in and out of these places.

Unless one of your loved ones or dear friends is buried there and you want to visit his or her tomb, there is no point in going into one of these cemeteries without a map. Hence, as soon as we left the Metro station, we made a bee line for the map salesman who was stationed by the first entrance to Père Lachaise.

My wife took a map and asked, "Combien?" He had heard us speak in English so he answered, "Trois, cinquent." (Three fifty).

"It says two fifty here," I said in French pointing at his price sign.

"I meant in dollars, monsieur," he answered without missing a beat.

My wife and I laughed.

"Where are you from?" he asked me.

"Guess," my wife said to him.

"Anglais," he said,

"No," I said.

"Americaine?"

"No."

"Néerlandaise?" (Dutch)

"No."

"Allemand?" (German)

"No."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Mexicaine," I said.

"Oh, y el sombrero?" he asked in a thundering voice that made people turn.

We were still laughing when we entered the cemetery.

Père Lachaise is a sad place not only because of its natural function but because of the many tombs that are unkempt and have fallen into a terrible state of disrepair. It is also a place of marked differences: next to a tomb with decaying iron work and sandstone figures with features that have been nearly obliterated by the passage of time and the weather, there might be a shining mass of polished granite and marble proudly proclaiming the name of its occupant or occupants in gold letters.

But, as advertised, midst the army of unknowns, celebrities, scientist, politicians, artists, and other notables are encrusted like nuggets midst the soil of a riverbed. We ran around, map in hand, going from section to section, searching out the tomb of our favorite celebrities, as if we were children on a scavenger hunt.

A small crowd usually milled around the tombs of the most celebrated and there was also the girl in short shorts who posed fetchingly next to the gravestone of someone or other. I sometimes wished the dead would rise from their graves and poke these idiots in the you-know-what with a femur.

Père Lachaise was built on a hill so going to the farthest sections is a steep climb. As we were trudging up the main avenue toward Section 85, in search of the tomb of our favorite author, Marcel Proust, we heard the ringing of a bell.

"Oh, oh," I said. "That probably means the place is about to close and they want us to go down toward the entrance."

"It can't be," said my ever incredulous wife, "it is only five o'clock!"

As we got to the top of the hill, we saw the guard; he was ringing his bell and urging the crowd to go toward the exits.

"I will have a talk with him," said my wife. "Why we just got here an hour ago."

I knew this routing well, so I just waited a few steps down for the inevitable to happen. She talked and argued, and the guard shook his head and rang the bell.

Finally, she came down. "It is just like these minor French functionaries," she huffed. "Give them a little authority and they become inflexible, intolerably authoritative."

I was about to say, "And it is just like a French tourist to want the rules bent to her purpose," but I thought better of it and just agreed with her indignation about the little guard with his bell being the least understanding fellow in the city.

Off we went to have a restorative in a near-by café. We settled on one on the Boulevard Ménilmontant; across the boulevard that was an imposing building with a very large chimney.

"I wonder what that could be?" asked my wife.

"Could be another crematorium, " I said facetiously.

"Oh, don't be silly. Let's ask the waiter."

"It is the Lycée Voltaire," she was informed.

"But, it has such a large chimney," she wondered. The waiter just shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.

"Perhaps, they give cremating classes," I suggested. "Or they have a ceramic class with a lot of students."

"Oh, really!" She protested. "Just for that, we are coming back tomorrow to the cemetery."

I groaned. I should have quit while I was ahead.

We went back today and here is proof: