My fifth-grade teacher at Jackson Street School, Ms. Cleona Picus, had some very good ideas about how to get students working together. I remember how, in teams of three or four, we built replicas of Native American villages—my group was in charge of constructing a Pueblo village from salt-flour clay. We also created our own marbled paper, turning our big, high-ceilinged classroom into an artist’s workshop. We also sang. Above all, we danced.
We danced to Chubby Checker’s version of “The Twist” and, on our knees, our heads and chests thrown back, tried our best to become “limbo stars” as we jerked to his “Limbo Rock.”
As part of music appreciation, we also did what you might call “interpretive dancing.” Ms. Picus put a record on the phonograph (yes, that was the word in those days for the heavy, cloth-covered contraptions that were standard in schools) and told us to spread out across the classroom. Once she lowered the needle onto the spinning vinyl disc, we began by listening, tuning in to the beat and the tone of the music. Then, once we were ready, we started to move, any way we wished, following no special pattern or steps.
That was the kind of dancing I preferred and, losing all inhibitions, I swooped around the room, waving my arms in all directions, transported by the music, transported by one particular piece of music, that still haunts me to this day:
For Halloween 1963, Ms. Picus played for us “Danse macabre” by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). It was a dance of death, our teacher told us, the dance of the dead who, one night a year, return to haunt the earth.
I listened to the music, I imagined ghosts and goblins buffeted by autumn winds, swirling among the treetops, pressing distorted faces against the windows of what were once their homes. Whirling around the classroom, abandoning myself completely to the music, I set in motion the creation of a very personal and romantic image of death.
One week ago, that image was shattered and, since then, the word “macabre” has taken on a different meaning for me. Looking in my Webster’s dictionary, I read that the word can apply to a personalized representation of death. It can also mean “gruesome” or “ghastly.” Those terms, much better than the swelling, swirling music of Saint-Saëns, describe what “macabre” means to me today.
One week ago, I visited the Paris Catacombs, the biggest underground cemetery in the world, home to seven million souls. It is a major tourist attraction and people from every corner of the globe come especially to see it, waiting in line, rain or shine, for a minimum of two hours. Once inside, they descend 130 steps and walk through a mile-long labyrinth of dank corridors. These are some of the abandoned tunnels of underground quarries, from which the limestone that built Paris was cut.
I have lived in Paris for over twenty years and, until one week ago, I had never visited the Catacombs. After having made the visit, I think I understand why:
Imagine a winding gangway in a coal mine, with, off to each side, hollowed-out breasts or chambers at regular intervals. Imagine dripping water, sweating walls, darkness broken here and there by flickering light. Once you have that in mind, fill up each chamber with thousands and thousands of bones, and you’ll have an idea of what the Catacombs are like…, but only an idea.
The horror of being there is something else.
In fact, the Paris Catacombs are not a cemetery. There are no marked graves, no headstones, not a single one of the dead is identified by name. In reality, it is an ossuary, a depository for the bones of the dead. Above the underground entrance, inscribed in stone, are the words, “Take pause: here begins the Kingdom of the Dead.”
Once over the threshold, the visitor walks between walls of bones, arranged so that the heads of femurs compose what might first be taken for a pebbly surface, broken at two levels by a long row of shiny marble spheres, that turn out to be skulls. Those walls are like dikes, holding back an avalanche of bones, deposited pell-mell in the abandoned quarry chambers. Here and there, the walls have given out. Those sections, visible to the public from behind iron bars, reduce death to a heap of rubble, forgotten, belonging to no one, hardly human at all.
When I came across a museum guard (for the Catacombs qualify as a museum), I asked if the exit was far away. Not too far, she told me. I almost ran to escape, climbing up a winding staircase, afraid to raise my head, afraid to see more stairs when I was so yearning for the light of day.
The Catacombs, I’d warn readers, are not for everyone, not for “the sensitive,” as I read in the museum brochure. I guess I belong to that category because they weren’t really for me, but now I’ve seen them, a once-in-a-lifetime experience I will never forget. Nor will I forget the intriguing history of the place, an underground Parisian cemetery created by King Louis XVI at the end of the 18th century, because, at ground-level, cemeteries were overflowing, pushing corpses to the earth’s surface or into the cellars of people’s homes.
In 1785, once the decision was made to move the dead to the abandoned quarries, for two years solid, day and night, processions lead by priests transported millions of bones across the city, depositing them in the underground chambers, consecrated by the Catholic Church.
Today, the cool, dank Paris Catacombs are one of the city’s “hottest” tourist attractions. Macabre, if you ask me, and I can’t figure out why each year 300,000 people make the trip to this particular “Kingdom of the Dead.” Maybe I’m just too “sensitive,” maybe I prefer to hear and imagine, rather than see, certain images of death. But, dear Readers, aware of the Catacombs’ popularity, I went there for you, and I’ll let you judge if, someday, you’d like to discover them yourselves.
