“Cemeteries say a lot about life”

There is an amazing sun and there is also a man waiting on a bench. Around there are tombs with unknown names. The man comes, introduces himself and starts walking. Federico Jeanmaire used to do this, walk among the tombs in the cemetery. He did not do it alone: ​​his son accompanied him. The routine took place every Saturday: They walked around the neighborhood, around Chacarita, and went out to walk and chat, a tradition that dates back to when they walked to school talking about Descartes’ Discourse on the Method or about Wittgenstein. He no longer remembers how they got to the German Cemetery, but he does remember the loneliness in which they walked.

Today is not Saturday, but there is not a soul either -or there are many, depending on how you look at it-. With his son, the route hardly changed. “It’s more or less what we did,” she says as she walks down the first alley lined with tombs; What really catches your attention is that monument, which is very German.” The monument to those killed in the First and Second Wars is an obelisk and an eagle on a promontory.

“I was in Germany and they are not like that, this is more like the image that exists in the south of the Germans. You actually hear them speak, and it’s a very sweet language,” she says. He spent a month in Berlin. There he wrote many chapters of Wra, his longest novel that talks about the attack on the French port of Saint-Nazaire, in 1942. “TI had to investigate the lives of almost all the boys who died in that battle – all 18, 19, 20 years old – and the situation made me extremely bad.. At that time my son would have been 25, and I said, what do I know, that they cut your life short for a story as crazy as a war, at 20 years old.”

Death had become too strange for him. It was in that month that she also got used to visiting Café Strauss, at the entrance to the Berlin cemetery, in front of the Andenbuch bookstore of books in Spanish run by her friend Teresa Conti. “I found this coexistence between the living and the dead interesting. Besides, there the cemeteries are used, people use them as a place to walk,” she says and she remembers that, in particular, eBerlin even has an entire forest in which one day he got lost looking for the grave of one of the Strausses (Johann or Richardd).

“In the Chacarita cemetery there are also people who go riding their bicycles or go running, but there are no benches like here, see?” he points out a single-width square bench. “There is no such thing. The same thing happens in Berlin.” Think why it is that in Argentina there is not usually a resting place for the living who want to spend time with their dead.

Pondering that, it occurred to him. The idea was to make a new book to return to death, but to talk about life.: “Going back to death, but not with sadness, but with joy, what do I know, about the people I loved and today are dead, to start thinking about death, but about natural death, I don’t know what to call it.”

Those thoughts were transformed into notes, then into a kind of diary about his walks through the Berlin cemetery, in the Alemán in Buenos Aires and also in the one in Baradero, where he was born, and, finally, in What remains of life, published by Híbrida publishing house. “It’s a book about cemeteries,” she says, “but it’s not a, what do I know, gloomy book. I wrote it with the desire to write life.”

We continue walking, a voracious and friendly silence follows us. Outside, the living creak on their trains, their trucks hiss as they pick up speed. Inside, there is greenery and there are trees with their corresponding little birds. The sun indicates random graves that look nice and cared for. Their living ones protect them, and that is their act of love.

“Cemeteries say a lot about life. Not only can you tell the life of those who are in the cemetery, of the dead, but it tells a lot about how we live, how we are, how we relate to everything,” says Jeanmaire. “I remember the Helsinki cemetery: people use it, as if it were Palermo, to go for a run and to eat at noon; It is a beautiful place, full of trees. “People use it to live.”

There, The dead also accompany the living. Actually, they always do. “In my town, I had never been to the cemetery. Except for the day my dad died, then I had to carry the drawer and leave it. But I hadn’t gone until that moment. Not even when my grandmother, whom I loved, died. What do I know, you don’t care about going to a cemetery, unless you go as a child to play.” Then, he remembers the summers he spent in Córdoba in the mountains, when they would climb to enter the cemetery and then play scares.

“I think that in Berlin and with my son coming here, I kindly got used to the cemeteries, I began to see them in a very different way. I began to go to the cemetery in my town a lot, I began to visit my loved ones, Let’s say, and then I felt like writing that,” he confesses.

When he was a boy, in Baradero you had to “travel to the countryside” to get to the cemetery. At one point, the city swallowed him up. In the Baradero cemetery is the Jeanmaire family vault: a little house where his mother still comes in to change the flowers and where he can go down to the first basement to hit the lid of the coffin with the palm of his hand, greet his aunt Lía and what remains of her.

“The book asks, in a lot of moments, why is so little we know about our ancestors. It’s real, we know very little. And not because we are Argentines and many have come from somewhere else; it’s not that. You ask anyone in Europe if they know who their great-grandparents are and they have no idea… Because that is the interesting significance to my taste. Nothing to do with you being famous and then you’re Morrison and they’re going to see you in the cemetery. I am referring to family transcendence, So if you say: ‘Oh, I had a great-great-grandfather who smoked a pipe’, I don’t know. Know more or less things about the lives of those people where you come from.”

In the book he says that his grandfather, his mother’s father, was a sculptor, and He made his living making dolls. He never met him. One day her mother discovered the notebook where her grandfather did the calculations for the dolls’ mortar and she felt that she connected with it. “There, because I have the professional problem of reading, but I loved seeing that the guy wrote… I loved seeing his original handwriting.”

Somehow, they live in us. Time proves them right in front of a mirror that no longer returns their own body but rather their ancestral bald head: first the grandfather’s, then the father’s, and now their own. ““I’m not sure when one starts to be a remainder,” says the narrator in the book. “In any case, I sense that this happens well before death. We are a remnant as soon as others begin to see us precisely as a remnant. “When what we call old age happens to us.”

old agea book by Simone de Beauvoir, seems incredible to him. She mentions it because also – and above all – What remains of life It is a book about old age. “She tells how all societies relate to old age and she wrote that book because she hears someone say: ‘I never imagined that Simone was so old.’” At that time, Simone de Beauvoir was 50 years old and it was the ’70s.

“It hits him so much,” says Jeanmaire, “that he starts investigating it.” He discovers that the only society that considered the old as wise was that of the Romans, when they made the Senate “of the old patricians.”

Jeanmaire has been retired for a year. “Retirement is a way of telling you: ‘Bye, you’ve already given your all, you’re of no use, do what you can until it’s your turn.’” It doesn’t affect him because he writes and then he is happy with his time. Beauvoir’s research does not reach the East. “As far as I know, because I am very interested in the subject, in the East the value of old age is important, even powerful, that is, the oldest in a family is, in some way, the leader, the one who still commands.” . And, in some sense, in the countryside in Argentina that worked.”

At 21 years old, when he was traveling through Europe, A group of gypsies invited him to work with them in the grape harvest, in the south of France. He lived with them near a city called Narbonne. “For examplegypsies also respect the elderly: the oldest woman is the one who leads the clan.” your book The homeland He tells of his travels through Europe from this community of gypsies. He remembers that the first version of that book began with the phrase “I was eternal.” “Life was a party there; “You are never going to ask yourself: ‘Am I going to die?’, nor does it ever cross your mind.”

But life changes, many times and for many reasons. For Jeanmaire, this is the enumeration of those moments: the first time you fall very much in love with someone, when you become a father; the first time that another, whom your mind sees as a peer, considers you old…It’s just that at some point it becomes clear that you are closer to leaving than staying.”he concludes.

What remains of life satisfies his readers. A woman “quite important in the environment” wrote to tell her that it was a charming book. “People are really liking it,” she says. “I liked that it happened; “With this book I felt like it said something about me.”

“Me, writing this book was very good for me. I managed to get out of there much better than I had entered.. I found that as long as there is someone who remembers you, as long as there is someone who walks and looks at you, you don’t die as much. The theme of transcendence is a very big word, but it seems to me that it happens more because of that, because of details like remembering a grandmother or someone and really remembering. In other words, a person means something to you. “I’m not telling you to remember it every day, but in situations in which you need someone to be with you.”

Beyond the awards that he may continue to win and the books that he may continue to write before he dies, Federico Jeanmaire needs his son to accompany him on one more trip. He wants to know Egypt: walk and chat with him, admiring the legendary pyramids, those magnificent tombs whose function the world long ago forgot.

They were originally going to go at the end of the year, but their son may have to travel for work. Egypt will be left for next year. “Well, if you have faith,” he says that Federico told him, “that I can be there for another year, I have no problem waiting.” There are still months left.