Argentinian chronicles

La Recoleta Cemetery, in Buenos Aires.

The moment you cross the gates you find something a decent cemetery should never lack: a gang of cats led by a hairy black cat. First thing I did was pet his head in exchange for some purrs and a glance from his deep green eyes. There’s something mystical about cats. Something they know and don’t care to share. Something that makes a cemetery the ideal place to contemplate them. They live in limbo between what’s alive and what’s apparently gone.

Instead of hiring one of the tours offered at the entrance I chose this cat as my guide (or maybe he chose me?) He took me through the marble streets and sat comfortably waiting for me on the steps of crypts that managed to give me shivers. Sometimes he would look at me from the door of a mausoleum and meow, as if pointing out the house of a friend he had learned to love over years of nights together. We were a funny sight. Both of us dressed in black, taking a walk. Someone even approached and asked if the cat was mine.

At one point I stopped to read the epitaph that Liliana Crociati’s devastated father had put on her grave. It was painfully beautiful, just like the bronze face of the girl who, along with her dog, adorned one of my favorite crypts. When I turned, my feline friend was gone, so I had to continue exploring the necropolis on my own.

Then I stumbled upon some deathly dwellers that kept spinning in my head, even weeks after I visited the cemetery. I don’t know why, but I was deeply moved by the statues. I couldn’t stop thinking about them; about their hands wiping away their stony tears, about how tenderly they welcome anyone who goes near the tombs they guard, about their monstrous proportions, and above all about their bodies embracing the place of someone they never met, but whom they have nevertheless sworn to mourn forever.

As I watched their faces I knew the sculptors had chiseled the motto of eternal sorrow into them. They wouldn’t live for anything else. They were destined to become a comfort that, in the end, when there was no one left alive to utter it, would say, “I remember,” “I'm thinking of you," “I’ll never forget you."

On my way out of the cemetery (to which I returned three times during my six-month stay in Argentina) I noticed my furry friend crouching in the corner of a mausoleum. We stared at each other one last time and then he vanished like the ghost he probably was.