Danse aux morts

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale / lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle / lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale.

Thou shalt have proof how savoureth of salt / The bread of others, and how hard a road / The going down and up another's stairs.
Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, Paradiso, Canto XVII, 58-—60

September 15, 2009

It is four in the afternoon but already turning dark and I'm squishing through the back roads through the village aux fleurs, past the calvaires and the lone, old, red-faced farmer who cracks open a smile for the last bit of directions. There is nothing on the roads, not even a Renault. It starts to rain and I run into the medieval church and into the dance of death.

There above me, under the wooden roof, over the peeling plaster that splatters over the cold stone, are a line of medieval figures: now barely inky silhouettes on the half-restored church. Each alternate figure is death, a yellow, skinny silhouette dancing hand in hand with everyone from the pope to the common man. "Everyone dies," whispered the little hunched figure, "no matter how high or low. The Danse Macabre was painted after the peste. To remind people."

I walk over to the door of nails where Madame Cojean has sat ten hours a day for the past 17 years. There in the gloom, she can rattle off the exact order of dancers on both sides of the church, without a pause or a peek above. Sitting here, with a grandchild in China and a husband dead and the village slowly emptying of young people, she has repeated endless tales of the Black Death and the Danse aux Morts to people from all over the world. Even, she adds, "to the Japanese."

But she gasped when she met her first Indian. "I always thought they were blond!"



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