Dance Macabre

Ever since I was a child, I had this fascination with graveyards. Cemeteries are like prisons; reservations designed to isolate, edge out, weigh down under granite and marble. They are an oasis of calm, respectful silence and often deserted.

To me, they represent the will to preserve an abolition of memory; a memento mori: a declaration of the transient nature of life. The gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those who have been blotted from the pages of life, forgotten elsewhere, but remembered here. And of course, a warning to sinners!

In Paris near the main markets, there is such a quiet place and peaceful place of repose. I went there once on a sunny October afternoon. While I was strolling the borderlands between here and there, trying to reflect the humanity of the buried departed, a stranger walked up to me. He drew a strange impression upon me at first.

- “The dead mean less and less to us.” he said, “they are cleared away with the utmost zeal and great speed.”

In equal measure, he was blinding and transparent. He seemed to merge with the landscape. I nodded by way of greeting and he continued: “Not many people come here anymore to visit the graves of their departed loved ones, maybe they´re reminded too much of their own pending doom. It is saddening that they stopped visiting their relatives or even strangers.”

He plucked away some weeds from a grave with visible displeasure.

“Who remembers them?” he asked, “Who remembers them at all?” I didn´t really know what to say. I just stood there watching him, dusting off a gravestone.

“The living and the dead don´t exist on equal terms.” He continued. I wasn´t sure he was actually talking to me.

“The dead are no longer left offerings of food and drink, on their graves or doorways or windowsills.” He turned towards me and said: “They also stopped frightening people on late night roads.” 

He locked his eyes with mine, and for the briefest of eerie moments, I felt like drowning in an ocean. He smiled a little crooked smile: “It´s not always so quiet here. October 31st is the buzziest night of the year here. You should come and see for yourself!”

I could think of nothing better than to let out a shy: “Oh.”

“I have a great awareness of death.” He went on “I worked here for many years now.” 

I was ready to bid this stranger goodbye, but my feet didn´t seem to want to move.

“There´s more to it. Would you like to hear my story?” he asked and to my amazement, I heard myself saying yes.

“Come back then, on October 31st!” and just like that, he disappeared between the gravestones.

I returned to my hotel room, thinking about the stranger I just met and trying to decide if I would go to the cemetery on Halloween night. He was probably an old and lonely man craving some conversation. I let my thoughts wander a little more over what he said, and I wondered if perhaps he didn´t want the dead to move on fully. Maybe that´s why he kept them company and took such good care of their final resting place with an almost overwhelming sense of empathy. Only humans raise stone monuments over the dead when all that remains are their actual remains. I think one can talk soul to soul in any profound and honest moment, anytime, anyplace. I accept that body and soul pass on once they are returned to Earth´s embrace.

I decided to accept the mysterious stranger’s invitation, thinking the necropolis would be nothing more than a magnet for the local youth, to celebrate All Hallows eve between atmospheric ostentatious memorials with lots of booze and weird costumes.

The cemetery was dead silent when I got there.  

“Better be as quite as possible,” I thought to myself, “it being Halloween night, it might be better to let them sleep.” 

Once I entered the gates, I heard a sound and was overcome with a sense of bizarre permanence. I found my host sitting on a grave between twin angels whose gaze and hands and wings focused on the soul that lay there.

- “You came back.” He smiled. “Come sit with me.”

Reluctantly I went to sit opposite him on the gravestone.

- “Poor old Europe was once plagued by a terrible suffering.” He started his story. “Death was all-conquering and cavorting indiscriminately with kings and clergy, peasants and paupers. Death was merciful then. Snuffing out the candles of the agonizing poor. They kissed his bony hand in gratitude for relieving them of their life of suffering and exploitation.

The tide changed, as it always does. Always: except for me. I´m earthbound to this garden of remembrance. I´m doomed to dwell, forever and a day at the grave of my once beloved. I have shed so many tears on her grave.

I craved an intimacy with Death; I traded my mortal soul. Uncanny ugly demons heard my plea and now, from behind this black iron fence, I tend to the final resting places of those who left the realm of the living. It is a place of reverence and eternal sorrow.”

He paused and said: “You seem puzzled.” I shook my shoulders in response.

- “You don´t understand, is that it?” this time I nodded my head in confirmation to his question.

- “Maybe I should start from the time when I could freely walk amongst the living, as their equal.” I shifted a little closer to him, to hear the rest of his story.

- “There was a maiden once. She was a sickly girl, but her innocence and beauty bewitched me. one day, a nobleman in title but a villain in character came to our village. Her beauty enchanted him as well. She was unaware of his noble birth, and she fought to resist him. His ardor and persistence made her succumb. He pledged eternal love…and she believed him.” He let out a deep sigh and then returned to where he stopped:

- “I came to know that he was already engaged to be married. I was the one who betrayed him to her. she lost reason and took her own young life. Guilt led him to have them bury her deep, here on this consecrated ground.”

With a broken voice he told me: “I was lost and full of remorse, and so I sold my soul to be near her forever.”

The moon fled. It seemed like the stars had changed their positions in the night sky. I grew anxious. I looked at the angels: they were no longer facing each other. The scroll held between them proclaiming eternal resurrection was broken. The ground started shaking. I feared being swallowed by an ocean of darkness. Stones tumbled, graves tore open, and ejected people. The trees started to groan. 

- “Every year, on the night of October 31st she rises.” He continued.

My body was trembling, and I looked frantically around, to see the inhabitants of the graveyard walk around in the decaying clothing they were buried in and make use of artifacts left in their tombs.

- “Have no fear!” he said as he was standing up, “At the arrival of dawn she will vanish back into her grave.”

I was petrified. He came standing next to me. I could hear chimes. 

- “Look at them!” he said, and he took my head between his hands to force me to behold the morbid spectacle.

- “I see them!” I cried, “I see them all!” I feared I was not going to survive the night. 

 And I saw him! A severe Master, lugubriously grotesque: Death! He was playing a gigue, endlessly scraping his violin. A low stately procession cried out to his cadence. They leaped beneath their shrouds. I could hear their bones knock.

Circles of corpses were holding hands and dancing to a lively waltz.

A vow! The Reaper taps a gravestone.

- “Here she comes!” my earthbound host shouted with joy.

Shrouded skeletons unearth a coffin. A putrid corpse opens the lid. An hourglass in her hand she steps out.

- “Her dress needs hemming, but she will not allow me to mend it.” my macabre narrator murmured. “She cannot suffer me near. She still loves him. He came to her grave once.” He continued as if the display I witnessed was part of my daily curriculum of events. 

She moves slowly toward the eternally heartbroken earthbound sexton. She seemed oblivious to the specters frolicking merrily around her. Two musicians came to flank her. A dancer´s veil had slipped; he´s naked now. He tries to clasp her as if in love. She runs…

- “She´s looking for him.” My macabre friend lamented.

- “Death comes to us all!” she shrieked in the back of the graveyard.

I saw peasants and kings dance together while she was lamenting pearly tears. 

A skeleton jumped up behind me: “Enjoy it now, it´s not going to last. Death can strike at any moment.” He shouted mockingly into my ear.

Shhhhhhh…. Suddenly the dance ended. The cock crowed. The dead jostled and took flight. She ran past the caretaker, back to her final resting place. Her shroud brushed him. He tried to touch it. she abhorred his appearance. He caught one of her pearly tears in his hand and rubbed it on his heart. 

- “She shines nocturnal beauty onto the world, doesn´t she?” It felt like his voice shocked me back into my body. “Long live the death!” were his parting words to me.

He returned to taking care of the tombs, the graves, the vaults, the mausoleums… and he´s still there: endlessly scraping his sad poem in praise of her. A never-ending song of mourning.