Gran Canaria seen from Tenerife. |
(Words
before my grandfather Israel’s niche)
The morning of All Souls’ Day, my mother and I came
into the cemetery, in order to visit my grandfather’s niche, with a bunch of
white chrysanthemums, as if they were white symbols of immortality. The entire
cemetery irradiated a serene sadness, which didn’t invite to lamentations or
inconsolable sobs, but rather to melancholic thoughts, to the sad calm of the
great elegiac poems. Some birds –maybe goldfinches– sang with an unusual
strength, as if they weren’t in autumn, but in the beginning of spring, in the
period of courtship. Didn’t the birds have to keep silence this morning of All
Souls’ Day? –I asked myself. No: they had to keep singing, because nature
follows its secret rhythm; the celebrations and calendars of men don’t concern
it.
My grandfather’s niche faces south, towards the coast.
Although the cemetery is far from the ocean, this latter can be seen easily
from it, especially from its highest streets, because it’s built over a
hillside. Waves couldn’t be distinguished. The sun spilled itself over the
water like a diamond broken in countless fragments. The nearby island emerged
from the horizon with unspeakable clarity, showing me its bluish peaks. In that
moment, when I look it in the distance opposite the tombs of the cemetery, it
seemed me to be an image of the island of the blessed, where the righteous would
be taken to in order to rest from the hardship of life. I ran my hand over the
marble tombstone which closes my grandfather’s niche; it was hot, because it
was receiving all the light of morning. At least the sun warms up his bones
mercifully –I thought in that moment–, redeeming them from the gloomy cold of
the niche where they lie. My mother and I spread the chrysanthemums among a
crystal jug and two glasses put beside the niche. I remember then some verses of
Ugo Foscolo, that belong to his famous ode The
sepulchres: [...] Ahi!
su gli estinti / non sorge fiore, ove non
sia d’umane /lodi onorato e d’amoroso pianto ([...] Ah!, over the dead / flowers wouldn’t be
born if it wasn’t due to human / worries and loving tears.). How much
reason Foscolo had: only men, with their work, care and keep the tombs of the
dead, because their last dwelling–places are also subjected to the wearing away
of time. That morning, I cried in silence before my grandfather’s niche, with
resigned tears, with the certitude that death is a natural law, because our
complaints can’t help it. But death keeps hurting although we become aware of
its inevitability, because it leaves open the question about the last fate of man, that each one answers as well as he can. More than ten years have passed
from my grandfather’s death, but the sorrow inherent to his absence revives
when I come back to the cemetery.
My grandfather was
a socialist and supporter of secularism: there were drops of Jacobin blood in
his veins, as Machado would say. He belonged to a generation who had known a
wide range of humiliations: the ration books, the persecution of dissidents,
the somniferous allocutions of the dictator, the obligation of raising arms
when the national anthem played, and the marriage of ecclesiastic and civil
powers. According to Catholic orthodoxy, he should find himself in some kind of
hell, because of having separated himself from the Church. Some years ago, when
I went to mass every Sunday (although I wasn’t born in a too religious family,
I tried to follow the commandments of the Church during some time), worried for
the fate of my grandfather’s soul, I always said some prayers for it. However,
nowadays I consider that, if a God transcends reality and his mercy towards man
lacks any limit, as that same orthodoxy states, he must hardly to correspond
with the image of him that offer us some that arrogate the absolute knowledge
of his will with the boldness of human condition. While my mother and I were
gazing my grandfather’s niche in thoughtful silence, a sparrow passed by flying
beside us. Fast like a whistle, it disappeared among the cypresses of the
cemetery, drawing an undulating rhythm with its wings. Then I remembered the
words of Hyperion, the main character of the homonymous Hölderlin’s novel: Holy Nature!, you are the same inside and
outside me. Perhaps nature wasn’t the same inside and outside me, who was
crying before my grandfather’s niche, inside and outside all the sepulchres of
the cemetery? In truth my grandfather hadn’t died, I thought. In the same way
that rivers flow into the ocean, his spirit had joined to the stream of life
force which animates the entire universe, and he was outside the niche, in the
sparrow that had just passed by besides us, in the cypresses that grew slowly,
in the sun that warmed up his tombstone, in the infinite and calm ocean. And I
understood that I hadn’t to cry, but keep myself serene, because there truly wasn’t
any death, but transfiguration.
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