ManicDDaily

I am on a brief trip to Buenos Aires.

As is almost always the case of my trips, my first day or so was spent bemoaning my wrong clothing. (Packing, see prior posts, does not come easily to me.)

Fortunately, hardly anyone helped me pack this time. This means that my mistakes require a lot of self-castigation, which, I hope, will cut short the bemoaning period. (It took almost an entire trip to Italy to get over the absence of a certain sweater my husband had grudgingly labeled, as I packed, as possibly good with a kilt.)

(Okay, my husband did give one piece of wrong advice this time too, about a certain very light black sweater, but neither of us thought of blazers–suit jackets!–so I won’t go into that.)

The point is here we are, my daughters and I, walking around a really very lovely place on a nearly perfect day, and I am silently (more or less) bemoaning my non-packing of a blazer–I have a zillion blazers!–and the Argentines are so formal, so stylish, and the weather so changeable, so blazer-worthy!

Then we go to Recolleta Cemetery. It is an odd tourist attraction–a stone garden of mausoleums–aisles and aisles of stone vaults, some incredibly grand–well, all once incredibly grand–some now decaying, bits of window broken, cobwebbed, others shinily reflective, the interior lace over their coffins unfrayed, their interior photos still glossy.

Statues of angels and soldiers, sleeping lions, busts of the dead. Some have bromeliads (a kind of fern) growing from their ears or torsos, others expressions you had to know to love. Cats, that all look related to each other–black and white, flat-nosed, long-haired, mangey–lounge about the pillared entrance.

All so over-the-top and Goreyesque to someone not used to mortuary art that we felt a little giddy,till we happened upon one small old bald man, in a dusty black blazer/suit jacket, carrying a bouquet of white carnations, the long stems wrapped in plastic. He walked stiffly, with a quietly stately totter from side to side. We followed him, at a distance. (This sounds kind of awful but we’d been following a lot of people at Recolleta, since we had not bothered to get a map and felt we should make an effort to find Eva Peron’s tomb.)

We did feel guilty after a while, and stopped following the old man, but then saw him pull out some keys, so circled back slowly. He had opened one mausoleum down a side aisle, and taken out a crystal vase of white chrysanthemums, almost exactly like the ones he was carrying only slightly, very slightly, wilted. He sat them up on a tomb on the other side of the aisle, and slowly set to work, taking out the old flowers, stripping leaves off the stems of the new, arranging them in the vase. He worked for a long time. We walked on. One tourist, braver than I–she wore flowered leggings–asked to take his picture. He smiled, but didn’t speak.

I just couldn’t take his photograph; for one thing, I was in tears, so instead, in my notebook, did the not- very-good drawings of him below; the bromeliad angel, above.