Cementario de la Recoleta

Got up about 12:30pm, with the inevitable aid of a cleaner trying to get in. They are becoming a perfect nuisance. :-)

Went over to some cheap restaurant recommended in my guide, which I couldn't find, but there were others nearby. Had a pretty decent steak and chips (lunch or breakfast, call it what you will), then walked (by an indirect route, I figured I had time and would see a bit of the city) over to Cementario de la Recoleta.

On the way I crossed Av 9 de Julio. Seven lanes of traffic in each direction, not to mention a distinct road running parallel on each side. There was a pedestrian crossing but despite the drivers here seeming generally law abiding it made me feel pretty exposed crossing in front of seven lanes of waiting cars at a time. (As in Chile, it appears acceptable in practice - I have no idea what the law actually says - for cars to turn right or left even when the green man - well, it's not green here, but whatever - is on and allowing pedestrians to cross. This isn't strictly speaking an issue on Av 9 de Julio, at least where I crossed, but that kind of thing adds to my nervousness.)

The cemetery is pretty cool and freaky. It's absolutely enormous, it's like (and I know this is a hackneyed phrase) a city of the dead. You just walk around this vaguely grid-layout area surrounded by pretty impressive tombs, most of which are a couple of metres high and some have mini towers and god knows what on. You really can get lost in there, I remember thinking I had been walking for ages without stumbling across the exit. (Once you catch on, there is a sort of church tower which provides a visual clue as to the exit location when you manage to catch a glimpse of it.)

There were a few cats around the place, which I thought was cool. (I am not going to be buried there of course - I mean, apart from the fact I don't live here, I dread to think how much the land must cost - but while I'm still alive I like the idea of a few cats wandering around my grave, and once I'm dead I won't have an opinion.) I stroked a few, one was incredibly friendly. Later on I saw one sitting on a tomb wagging its tail a bit. I thought it looked slightly hacked off but I figured I'd chance my arm and sort of rubbed my fingers about half a metre from it and made "puss puss" noises to see if it was up for being friendly with me. It's not as if I just went and touched it without "permission". But the little fucker just shot its paw out at me and drew blood. It didn't growl or anything first. I like cats but for a second I could have booted the bastard. I may die of rabies, but I wasn't bitten so I am not pursuing the matter any further medically.

Anyway, imminent death aside, for the first 15 minutes or so it was pretty cool wandering around looking at all these tombs and thinking how exotic it all was. I also noted that a few were in incredibly poor condition, webs all over the door, dust everywhere, that kind of thing. You must need a good family or pots of cash to set up a trust fund to keep your tomb in order after you're dead. It says something about human nature that someone presumably cared enough, or wanted to make a show of caring, to pay for someone to have a tomb in this doubtless exclusive and expensive place, and then nowadays it's just falling apart.

The fly in the ointment was that Eva Peron is entombed there. Now, I know very little about her and if the guide book hadn't mentioned this I would not have given it a second thought. But since I had been stupid enough to read the guide book earlier, and since I was IN THE CEMETRY, I figured I really really ought to see where she was. Of course, since this is a cemetery not nominally a tourist attraction (though I didn't see a single relative communing with their dead, it was all tourists and one young couple sucking each other's faces off on the steps of a tomb in a quiet area off to one side - I'm not a religious man, but for fuck's sake people, show a little bit of respect - I was *so* tempted to walk up and pretend to be an overseas relative visiting the tomb of my grandfather) you can't have big signs saying "EVA PERON'S TOMB THIS WAY". (Oddly enough, one - exactly one - family tomb was signposted. I have no idea why.) I was, by the clock, in the cemetry for two hours, and I reckon I spent 15 or 30 minutes tops actually enjoying myself walking round. The rest of the time I was basically conducting a methodical search around the fucking place trying to find her tomb so I could look at the thing and clear off. Doubting all the time that I would recognise the thing if I saw it, although I hoped it would have a crowd next to it. I was gasping for a drink most of the time. I mean, I was thirsty, not just that I fancied a beer. Oh, and though no one else bothered, I figured I ought to keep my cap off to avoid offending anyone, which didn't help my comfort, although there was at least quite a lot of shade with the tombs being like small buildings.

My feet were killing me and I was pissed off as hell because I was continually recalling the words of my guide book. "Follow the crowds and you'll find Evita's grave." Like fuck. There IS no clear crowd. You get tourists milling up and down all over the fucking place. If I could have met the person who wrote that sentence instead of, I don't know, GIVING DIRECTIONS or MENTIONING THE NAME OF THE FAMILY AND TELLING YOU TO LOOK ON THE MAP AT THE ENTRANCE or DESCRIBING THE TOMB SO YOU'D RECOGNISE IT WHEN YOU FOUND IT at the time, I would have happily smashed their face in with a spanner. After an hour or so of futile methodical searching, I ended up stalking one couple who I saw arrive, since the woman said "over there" and I figured she might have some idea where to go, and I assumed they would want to go to Eva's tomb at some point. (Some people did seem to have printed maps, but my attempts to listen in on their conversations didn't help, and I had no idea where they got the maps from. When I finally left I saw there was a big plan in the entrance. However, since it turns out she is buried in some family tomb with a completely unknown name to someone like me whose knowledge of her is "she was called Eva Peron and was the wife or maybe mistress of some ruler, probably a dictator but I'm not sure, and I don't know what he was called", it wouldn't have helped even if I had seen it earlier.) The couple spent so much time examining random tombs (which of course I had had enough of some time ago) that I ditched them. In the end I loitered near the entrance and overheard some other tourists ask for directions, and I assumed they were asking for directions to the star attraction. So I stalked them instead, impatiently waiting as they looked at other things on the way. Eventually we came to some completely ordinary looking tomb (I mean, impressive, but nothing out of the ordinary by the standards of the cemetery) which had a bit of a crowd in front of it. I hardly dared hope, but I thought I might finally have achieved my goal and could leave. The suspense of waiting to get near enough to read the damn plaques nearly killed me. And I had at last got there. I took a couple of very token photos, not being able to get a particularly good view, but what the hell, I saw it, I was there, and that's what counts. It cost me enough bloody effort.

I did keep thinking I should just ask someone, but I just couldn't bring myself to be quite such a morbid gawking idiot as to essentially say to anyone (let alone the odd security guard type hanging around) "Hi, I'm an annoying foreign idiot - oh, and our countries were at war 20 years ago, we won, ha ha, though I see you are still a little sore about it - and I have no idea who this woman really is and in fact I'm not totally confident she was even called Eva Peron, but as I'm here wandering round looking at the tombs of random dead people for entertainment because it's a bit exotic to me, could you please direct me to her tomb so I can have a look at it just to tell people I've been there?".