You Are Here

The Père Lachaise cemetery is older and larger than the one at Montparnasse. Vous êtes ici: an arrow points out that you are at the entrance to the rue Ménilmontant. Carlos takes down the names of people and the coordinates to their location, Rossana turns the map around trying unsuccessfully to find herself. You watch them. The fifth day in Paris, a cloudy day, you are the only visitors within view, maybe inside there are more people lost amid corridors and crypts in search of the Lizard King. You are tired, the walk through the city made your feet blister. Even while the trip has been fascinating, you cannot help but feel alien to this culture that in theory shouldn't be far removed from yours. You don't understand French, Carlos is the only one who speaks it well. You've lost your way on the metro a number of times, that other subterranean city, labyrinth of tunnels and metal. While they finish jotting down their list, you sit in a doorway to read an essay by Julio Cortázar, "Below Level": Like in the theater and the cinema, in the metro it is always night. True, but the metro asphyxiates and once inside it, one is both spectator and protagonist . . . the metro makes us, for a moment, pliable, porous, recipients of all that the freedom available on the surface deprives us, for to be free on the surface implies danger, a necessary option, a red light, crossing the street looking to the good side. You don't pick up on this feeling of freedom on the surface or underground, much less in the cemetery. You put the book away to begin the necrological and oniric excursion.

You find Balzac, Carlos insists on taking a picture. You aren't very convinced but let him do it anyway. The niche is fenced in so you can only admire its stone-carved book from a distance. It appears to be a somber, onerous tomb. Realist. Not so Oscar Wilde's, who believed one could resist anything but temptation. His sepulcher is white, modernist, covered in red, pink, and orange kisses. An hour goes by and you have only found these two names from the list. Three, by pure chance you run into a sumptuous monument where the Chaplin family rests.

Up and down paths, you arrive at a roundabout where a group of lost Italians all point in unison to a specific place on a map: noi siamo qui. Rossana insists on going directly to visit Morrison, Carlos wants an interview with Chopin. You would much rather converse with Cortázar, except that he is in Montparnasse and, outvoted by your companions, you had to renounce your will. The last day in Europe. You would have to leave without asking the grand cronopio why he decided to die in Paris.

Before getting to Jim, you photograph a sculpture: a woman in bronze with her back to the door of a burial chamber. She is draped in a veil that suggests her underlying nakedness, head bowed with her face hidden by a lingering hood. Her wide open arms block the entrance to the grave. Farther ahead you see another feminine figure: the composition is strange, life-size. A woman in a long, tight fitting dress, sculpted out of black rock. She desperately holds on to one of the sepulcher's windows as if someone were pulling her from the waist, trying to rip her away from death. This woman's face is also covered by a veil that allows you to guess her features, but not more than that.

Carlos and Rossana are nowhere to be seen. The time spent taking photographs has left you astray and now you search for the way back. You take out the map but it's the same as trying to decipher an electrocardiogram. You are in the middle of a street and you don't remember which way to...