Accidental tourist: The fate worse than death

26 October 2014 - 02:01 By Greig Douglas
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Two tourists in a graveyard - alive but forever lost

I was surrounded by dead people. For this, I blamed my girlfriend: it had been her idea to come here.

"This is an exhausting cliché," I said to her. "It's been half an hour. Can't we leave?"

"Why?"

"Hunting around for Oscar Wilde's grave like this? It's touristy."

"I thought you wanted to see famous and sophisticated Parisians."

"Was it too much to expect that they'd actually be alive?"

"Think of it this way," she said. "You don't get into the Père Lachaise by dying; you get in by living - by truly having lived."

"And we got in through that side gate right there," I pointed out, "which means we're back where we started and still no Oscar."

"It's amazing and we're staying. Let's try going this way."

"I think it's starting to rain."

But she was off and I followed. We had no map, and for the most part trudged joylessly uphill and relentlessly in circles, induced by the old mossy tombstones into a contemplation of life's big questions, its most perplexing vagaries, and where, at the very least, Jim Morrison was buried.

At Chopin, interred without his heart, we stopped for a cigarette. Black filthy cats slouched past us.

"Death," she said as we walked by Balzac's fine head and perfect hair.

"So permanent."

A squawking crow contemplated us from atop a sculpture of a reclining painter. I took a photo. When framed, it might look quite edgy on our lounge wall, if we ever got home.

We moped on, the rain falling harder now. Near another mausoleum, a little golf buggy pulled up alongside us and a man in a blue hat and grey uniform gave us a series of orders in impatient French.

I heard trempé, fermer and vingt minutes. Then he buzzed away without giving us a ride.

"It's too wet," I said, "so we have to go; they're closing."

The French, it seemed, would say anything to get off work early.

"How do we get out?"

"Um, he didn't say. But we've only got 20 minutes, so."

The day darkened into a thick purple wall and the graveyard became a labyrinth. Nobody else could be seen. Lining the avenues were leafless, skinny black trees that waved in the wind and pointed nowhere. We passed generals and the revolutionaries who once opposed them. A French president, stunned by it all, lay dead under a blanket. Broke artists neighboured aristocrats, their tombs equally neglected. In the heart of the Père Lachaise, enchantment turned to menace. We didn't see Edith Piaf.

Lost: this had been the everyday theme of our days in Paris so far. For a couple of backward yokels from the cheap streets of Port Elizabeth, with our toddler French and bad jeans, the fundamentals of big city survival were enigmatic. (That's generous - this was a state of absolute disorientation and constant dread.) Travellers from New York, Tokyo, Moscow and Berlin seemed to have it easy. They knew how to flag down a cab and get a decent meal out of a harried waiter. They knew what to tip. They knew not to smile at strangers on the metro - or pet their dogs. They had a feel for space and distance and could intuit, through sheer force of their urbane charismatic confidence, exactly what Paris was asking of them.

"So we didn't have to truly live to get stuck in here forever," I said, stopping somewhere on a long avenue near a metallic fence. "We just had to get idiotically lost again."

But then she said: "I think this is him."

I can't forget the first time I saw it: a glass enclosure dripping lipstick. A winged sphinx - dense and light; impassive and knowing - floated above our judgment. All death is terrible, and Oscar's was especially grim, but at least he knew exactly where he was. - © Douglas is a freelance writer

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