Archive for May, 2008

Recoleta Cemetery

At 1800 hours the bell tolls and the gate to La Ciudad de los Muertos is closed. They lock up the dead. They put chains and padlocks on the door to each eternal home – to keep . . . someone . . . from getting out – or . . . someone . . . from getting in. Buried in compartments, surrounded by apartments – the dead are discontent. In this city within a city there is little peace when the living come to ogle as if at a zoo. So, the question that I ask of you is ‘who is watching whom?’

I thought I was rid of her. After all, winter was closing in on Buenos Aires and I was living in the middle of the concrete jungle, seven floors above the street, in an anonymous building. Accustomed to the constant clamorous street sounds I left the window open just a crack to allow for a little of that ‘good air’ to flow through my tiny apartment.

Last night, I twisted up a lather in my sheets trying to escape her tortuous high-pitched whining. I averted her assault by hiding undercover until, nearing oxygen-starved panic, I was forced to come up for a cool full breath.

One mosquito can ruin your whole night.

After my massage Christina led me quietly to the hydrotherapy room. I sat my skinny naked body down in a plastic chair facing an 8 x 8 empty space – with a white tiled wall and grey floor older than me – while the plate-sized shower head above me began pounding out a cool and uncomfortable spray. Behind the plastic curtain at my back, my masajista adjusted levers and dials, controlling temperature and pressure, on her console like the little man in The Wizard of Oz. I squirmed around in the chair to surrender each muscle of my back to the force while imagining myself as fragile as a prisoner at Auschwitz alone in a water chamber that was cleansing me of my sins. These and other images tortured me as I neared a sort of death of the past 50 years on this pivotal birthday. And then, I focused in front of me on the blank white wall of possibility.