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This week, a good writer and ethnographer friend shares some brief notes from his always-interesting field diary with us.
Bilbao - New York - Bilbao
"The small cemetery of Käsmu is one of those peaceful cemeteries by the sea. The church is made of wood, painted white, and a fence of the same material surrounds the tombstones. The most important discovery of those days was made in that cemetery. I could appreciate something that, until that moment, I had never seen before.
The man asked us to look at the inscriptions on the tombstones. Most had two names, with only one surname. On the tombstones were written the names of the husband and wife.
Hasso Liive (1935 - 1999)
Ilvi Liive (1938 - )
So I copied it into my notebook.
The funny thing was not that husband and wife were together. The surprising thing was that when one died, they also inscribed the other's name on the stone. And the one who remained alive, in the visits they made periodically to the cemetery, saw their name engraved on the tombstone. Alife and written. They knew where they would end their days, and with whom, necessarily.
Estonians believe that if they bury themselves together, in the afterlife also those people will remain together. That's what the owner of the beach house told us."
Kirmen Uribe
Bilbao - New York - Bilbao
Seix Barral 2009 - págs. 98 y 99
A Curious Estonian Custom
This curious custom caught my attention when I read it in the novel by the Basque Kirmen Uribe, returning from Madrid to Barcelona by train. The first thing I did, once at home, was to check the reality of this tradition, since "Bilbao - New York - Bilbao" is a kind of autobiographical diary in which fiction and poetry are intertwined and color with literature everything that is described there.
Searching the internet, after several failed attempts, I finally found a reliable page on cemetery culture in Estonia and Finland, written by Triin Viitamees of the University of Tartu. In it, we can read the following comparison:
"A basic difference between the Finnish and Estonian tradition is the data of a living close relative (for example the spouse) on the grave marker. In Estonia it is possible: the gravestone may carry the name and the date of birth of the surviving spouse, in such case the date of death will be cut in later. In Finland such equalising with death is not customary."
Therefore, it is confirmed that there are living people, in Estonia, who have their name already carved into the cold rock from which their own tombstones are made. It has to produce a strange sensation; Although, if you think about it, we all only need one last and unknown date for the chisel to sculpt our last epitaph.
A High-Speed Plot
The second thing that went through my mind, at almost 300 km / h., is an idea I had years ago for the plot of a story.
More or less, it went like this:
A person goes to a cemetery (let's say the April 13, 1998 and let's also say to the Recoleta cementery of Buenos Aires, such a splendid necropolis) to bring some flowers and pay homage to a loved one. Clueless, he gets lost in the corridors of the intricate cemetery and, in a secluded place, he finds an open grave with a tombstone in which his name and surname, his exact date of birth and the date of the next day, April 14, 1998, are inscribed.
The plot, from that moment, focuses on the contradiction that that person suffers for the next 24 hours. On the one hand, he is trying to convince himself that it is something irrational, but, on the other hand and at the same time, he is urged to take advantage of every last drop of his supposed last day.
The problem is that, to date, I have not come up with an appropriate ending:
- Does the prophecy end up being fulfilled and expire on such a terrible date?
- Does he die but end up being a fatal mistake of those in charge of the funeral home?
- Does he survive but not dare to approach a cemetery anymore?
We don't know.
What we do know is that it will undoubtedly be an exciting story.
We are, therefore, waiting.