All Souls

Once again, the whole town congregated in one place today, so Patra and I naturally had to be there; this time we convinced Erika to go along. Under forbidding gray skies, the three of us made our way down from the old town, up past the new town, and into the municipal cemetery. Families were flocking through the gates with flowers in hand, or purchasing bouquets from the extensive supply being sold outside.

Inside, the space around the white tombs burst with color and noise. Hundreds of Spaniards had come to clean the headstones of their ancestors and leave red, white, purple carnations, lilies, roses. I felt a little guilty at being a tourist of sorts at this personal ceremony of remembrance, and the camera I had brought with me certainly did not come out of my bag. However, the general atmosphere seemed more joyful than sad—I saw three of my students, and they all waved at me and grinned hugely. We felt somber at the far end of the cemetery, though, where hundreds of spaces wait for bodies to fill them (caskets here, as in most of Europe, are stored aboveground). We noticed that a few of the slots had been very recently filled—as recently as October 23rd—and the families who came to visit were understandably more freshly grieving. The rain started then, and we left that quiet part of the cemetery to once again enter the bustling aisles of the dead—people pushing and praying and saying hello to neighbors and cleaning and arranging flowers. We didn’t exactly belong, but we felt lucky to be accepted as part of the mass.