The More We Pause, The Further We Go

The skull is staring at me.

She – let’s call her Maria - is embedded in concrete, shrunken and yellowed, stacked in a wall of thousands more exactly like her. It is not only skulls that are decoratively arranged around the door frames and arches of the chapel, but femurs too. And rib cages, which ingeniously line the vestibules and alcoves, perfectly shaped to fit their gentle curves.

Despite the many other skeletons, I can tell that this one - with her hollow eye sockets and sinister smile - is grinning right at me.

I lean in closer and realise that, unlike the bones we saw in Paris and Prague, there is no Perspex covering Maria. It is the first time I have seen a human skull so exposed. We are alone, and the emptiness bothers me.

As though reading my mind my sister sneaks up behind me and whispers “touch her.”

“What?” I hiss back.

“Touch her. I dare you.”

“No,” I say. Doesn't she know how culturally insensitive that is? How disrespectful? How unsanitary? Through my accompanying gesticulations, my elbow grazes Maria’s protruding teeth.

“Oh my God.”

I rub at the place my skin met her brittle bone, mildly horrified. My sister is too busy giggling to help.

When I had carefully planned our Évora itinerary, I didn't account for being bitten by a six hundred year old skeleton. In fact, I hadn't planned on visiting the Capela dos Ossos at all. The guidebooks had promised a charming medieval Portuguese town, which I assumed meant a breakfast of crisp yet gooey pastel de natas and a cheap, strong cafe before a wintry stroll to the Roman Temple.

The modest sign reading “Bone Chapel” was too tempting to pass up. We went inside, expecting a few skeletons in the shape of chandeliers, and were instead greeted with the entire population of medieval Évora, dug up as an architect’s experimental meditation on death.

The poem inscribed above the entrance instructs travelers to “reflect on your similar end.”

It is the intertwining of morbidity and intricacy that I recognise as uniquely Portuguese – sadness, beauty and simplicity as embodied by the Capela dos Ossos. The Franciscan monks had an eye for interior decoration with human remains.

Outside, the sun is spilling onto the cobblestones. We sit in the small grey square in silence, while I wonder if this is the start of a zombie film, or just a metaphor for something I can’t quite grasp. I clutch at my elbow instead.

“The more you pause,” the poem ends, “the further on your journey you will be.”