“Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”
-Edward Abbey
Dear Reader,
When I was in college I had an English professor who kept a skull on his desk. It was his momento mori, he told me, a reminder of the inevitability of his ultimate demise.
Needless to say, he wasn’t the cheeriest of gents.
He told us that he rarely gave A’s, and I didn’t get one from him, but I did learn to be a better writer and to appreciate the work of Flannery O’Connor and Southern Gothic writers in his classroom.
For a long time I carried an anthology of Flannery O’Connor’s works around me like a Bible, tucking it in the bookshelf of every new domicile with its yellow highlighter marks and underlined pencil stripes.
I thought of Dr. Somerville as I stared at the bones in the bone chapel of Evora, Portugal. I thought he would like it.
It certainly was ghoulish enough.
“This would be a good place for anatomy students,” I muttered while trying to figure out whether I was looking at femur, patella, or tibula bone cemented into the wall.
An inscription at the entrance reads, “We bones in here wait for yours to join us,” and the signs inside invite you to stay as long as you can stand it, while contemplating your own mortality.
The monks who created it hoped it would turn wealthy Evorians away from materialism and bring them to God.
“Really, it’s not too bad,” I said to my friend Maria (visiting from Montana). “The creepiest part of the whole thing are the mummified remains of the people up front in the glass boxes.”
The bones of the Franciscan monks who created the chapel were not cemented into pillars and walls like the rest of their 5,000 colleagues, but are kept up front in a small white coffin.
Next to them are remains in glass boxes with decaying bits of cloth around them. From the signs, we gathered they had been tested and they were female.
“So said a man,” I told Maria. “They tested her, and sure enough, she was female!”
Evora itself was a surprise.
Both Maria and I had in our minds a small hamlet, a walled village with a university where the very old and the very young mix.
We weren’t entirely wrong.
Within the walls of Evora are young and old.
I sat down to drink an “iced” coffee that was more like lukewarm coffee-flavored milk (nary an ice cube in sight) while Maria had a fresh-squeezed orange juice (a much better choice), both of us trying to recover in the 80ish plus heat after walking around to see the square, restaurants, shops, and churches.
Nearby, an elderly couple. each with long white hair, who looked vaguely liked wraiths soon destined for the bone chapel, sat next to young pretty things on the patio, who smoked and drank and laughed with midriffs casually bare. Their whole lives in front of them.
The effect was startling. Perhaps more of a mortality shock then the bone chapel itself.
Outside the walls of the oldest part of Evora is a city with a “Hilton Garden Inn” right across the street, and heavy traffic with tourist buses and cars, shops, and modern restaurants.
Fortunately, we made a mistake in booking our hotel for that night and ended up in the quiet village of Vidiguera, about an hour’s drive away, population 5,000 (approximately the same population as the bone chapel).
Our hotel was comfortable and clean, and the staff booked us a room with an incredible view of the Alentejo region.
I kept trying to figure out what this central region or Portugal reminded me of in my travels. Was it New Mexico? Arizona? Australia? Northern California? Southern California?
I’ve been told not to do this, to let places be their own place, to not make comparisons, but I have failed completely at this task.
“The heat is like New Mexico,” I told Maria, “but the region is so green. It doesn’t feel like a desert. It feels like northern California, or something? I don’t know.”
From Vidiguera we drove through cork forests and wildflowers, groves of olive trees, vineyards, reservoirs and lakes to the medieval village of Monsaraz where we spent hours marveling at Portugal’s beauty.
We couldn’t decide on a restaurant for lunch so we stopped in the tourism office in Monsaraz and asked for some advice. She was kind and booked us a table at a local winery, where we could tour the vegetable and botanical gardens the chefs used to prepare the food.
At one point, a man rode by on horseback while we were munching on dessert on the back porch. Huge boulders looked like they had been rolled near a tree as a backdrop.
“I keep waiting for Ferdinand the Bull to appear,” I told Maria. “He should be sitting underneath that cork tree over there, a flower in his mouth, swishing his tail.”
She agreed.
I reflected on our journey from the bones to the vineyard.
Picture perfect Portugal keeps reminding us how good it is to be alive.
Love,
Janelle
P.S. I want to thank
Thanks for your kind words, Janelle. Great post! - CW
Great writing as usual! I can't believe they thought the bones would be an incentive to be less materialistic.
If I were wealthy and shown a bunch of bones, I would double down on my spending to medical professionals, and, for that time, herbalists and botanists. Anything to avoid being attached to the wall. LOL:-)