‘Let’s go,’ said Sophie, tugging at the sleeve of his jumper. ‘I want to see Jim Morrison before it gets dark.’
She could be forgiven for thinking that it was close to sunset—the sun was low enough this time of year, but it was far too bright for night to be any kind of imminent possibility. Alex rolled up his sleeve. Two-thirty. Even in December they would have had two more solid hours of light. ‘It’s fine, Soph,’ he said. ‘We’ll make it. Give me a few minutes.’
She bit her lip. ‘Well, make it quick.’
A stab of annoyance passed through him, but he swept it aside. She wasn’t as interested in these things like he was—more of a shopper, really, and though he loved her very much she had certain tendencies that could very well be perceived as grating. Though where would he have been without them? Probably some kind of riverside poet scrawling down aphorisms on napkins with neither subject nor refrain. Instead he refocused his attention on the beautiful marble statue before him. A tall, female harpist arranged in an engrossed posture, as if her instrument was an object to be studied—but another angle revealed her eyes to be closed, mesmerized, feeling the music in the depths of her soul. His own eyes fell on a few words inscribed next to her foot:
Frédéric chopin. Né en pologne à żelazowa-wola. Près de varsovie.
It was quite a fitting tomb for a person of his stature. On all sides there were offerings of flowers, gifts, and even glued-on letters from people so moved by the nocturnes that they had taken out the time to scribble down gushing notes of gratitude that would remain forever unread. The long trip from Minneapolis had almost been worth it for this sight alone. The scratches of ‘love’ on either side in pencil and chalk and sometimes even lipstick had reduced Alex to tears—Sophie had gripped his arm and squeezed it, for just a second, and they had shared a brief kiss. So why was she so in the mood to leave? They might as well have flown to Amsterdam instead if that was the matter. Certainly he could not think of a single notable person buried in Minneapolis; at most it would be some kind of senator, not one of the world’s greatest composers of melancholy. And besides, she’d been the one to dedicate an entire afternoon of their week-long odyssey in Paris to the cemetery. Surely she wanted to do more than take a couple pictures?
‘Let’s head out,’ said Alex, yawning. There was no point staying there now that his attention had begun to wander back to the logistics of the trip.
‘Let’s do Jim Morrison next,’ she whispered. Neither of them were quite certain what the appropriate volume level was at this sort of place—yes it was a graveyard, sure, but the signs said that the French had also designated it to be a public park, and the fractured snippets of English they picked upon from fellow passersby established it to be a somewhat familiar tourist attraction. But they’d rather err on the side of caution than be caught dead talking loudly about the pizza place next door.
‘Where is he?’ he asked.
‘I’m looking it up on my phone.’
He grimaced. ‘You should use the map.’
‘The map’s kind of useless. I can’t really tell where we are.’
‘Yeah, but even so. I like the idea of having to look for these things a bit.’
‘Oh, come on. There are like a million of them. It’s easier if I just use my phone.’
‘Well—’ he said, then stopped on glimpsing the face that looked up from the phone screen.
‘Go on,’ she said.
He chuckled. ‘Oh, come here.’
He began to massage her shoulders, making her giggle.
‘Alright, alright,’ she said. ‘But I’m not navigating for you, babe. Do it yourself.’
Alex pulled the map out of her back pocket and unfurled it. Unfortunately she was correct—the map was in French, for one, which neither of them had any inkling of beyond the occasional ‘bonjour,’ and it seemed to be oriented in an unusual manner—North facing the bottom right corner, which meant that he had to hold it erratically, gripping the corners instead of the sides. Once he was able to locate them he found that the map would list the sector in which each of the famous graves could be found but provided no means to look up where each grave was in each sector. And taking a quick spin around, he would be very surprised indeed if any one of the sectors contained less than about a thousand graves each.
‘See what I mean?’ said Sophie.
‘Let’s play around with it for a bit,’ replied Alex. ‘Says here Jim Morrison is in sector 6.’
‘It shouldn’t be too hard to find. I’m sure there will be people congregating around him.’
‘I don’t know. There didn’t seem to be too many at Chopin.’
‘Jim Morrison’s a bigger deal than Chopin,’ said Sophie.
He snorted. ‘Sure.’
‘What?’ she replied. ‘Yes he is.’
‘In America, yeah. But this city? I find that hard to believe.’
‘I’m sure the French listen to the Doors.’
Alex shrugged. ‘Let’s just look for it.’
After a while the road narrowed down into a cobblestone path. ‘You really saved us,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The hiking boots. They were a good idea.’
She smirked. ‘I’m always right.’
He felt a rush of affection towards Sophie. She looked very pretty in the low sunlight, hair tied back into a ponytail, and he pulled out his own phone and snapped a picture before she could react. It was really a very good picture. Framed a little better and she would look not all that different from the harpist on the Chopin tomb: perhaps he could have a go at some cropping and editing once they returned to their hotel in the evening.
‘Check this out,’ he said, showing her the picture.
‘I look sweet. I should take one of you.’
‘Feels a bit weird taking pictures in a cemetery, doesn’t it?’
She shook her head. ‘You think too much. Let’s rush to Jim Morrison, we’ll grab a few there.’
Another pang of annoyance. There again with all the rushing. The cemetery was a lovely little spot in the far northeast of Paris—they had no reason to rush anywhere, especially not to something as lofty as the grave of Jim Morrison. He could not understand this obsession with Morrison. The article that Sophie’d been reading on the plane had identified him as the core inhabitant of Père-Lachaise, and though the list consisted of figures as diverse as Proust, Edith Piaf and even Gertrude Stein, it certainly did seem as they approached the little enclosure on one end of sector 6 that Morrison had more than the usual share of admirers—his was the only grave that was walled out by police barricades. That said, they didn’t seem to be accomplishing much at all: despite the fact that it wasn’t even possible to get within six feet of the thing, there were a great variety of tribute notes and flowers placed or even casually tossed onto the tomb. Two other tourists were waiting by the edge of the barricade when they arrived. A man and a woman, dressed in a combination of football jerseys and what could only be described as hippie apparel. The buckeyes jersey prompted Sophie to give them a casual “O-H!”, but the man laughed and told her that they were English and had merely thrifted the jerseys, while the woman asked if Sophie could take a picture of the two of them with the grave. After a short while they cleared away and he could see the full headstone, surprisingly plain for all the fanfare around it:
Jim Douglas Morrison
1943 - 1971
Kata Ton Δiamona Eaytoy
The latter of which, he discovered, was a Greek phrase that meant ‘be true to your own spirit.’ It would be funny if it were ironic, but Morrison was one of the few people against whom such a charge could not be levied.
‘So young,’ said Sophie. ‘Only 27. Have you heard that thing about the rock singers dying—’
‘Uh-huh,’ he replied. ‘Cobain, Amy Winehouse, all the rest. I’ve always wondered if they were, like, coordinating an effort, or something, or whether it really just is coincidence.’
‘Some kind of deal with the devil, probably,’ she replied. ‘What’s your favorite Jim Morrison song?’
He closed his eyes for a few moments. ‘The End, I guess,’ he said.
‘That’s a really weird one. Doesn’t he end with the story of Oedipus?’
‘Is that what that is? I guess there’s something about killing fathers in it. I really just like the music.’
She giggled, and Alex closed his eyes once more. Light My Fire, Peace Frog, Riders on the Storm—that was about it, really. Why was Morrison so popular? He’d had like one good album, all things considered, then passed away. But even so, it was best not to think of such things in front of the man himself: he didn’t want to cause any disrespect, so he stood there in silence.
‘Let’s go,’ said Sophie, tugging at his jumper again. ‘It says here that Oscar Wilde is nearby.’
‘Again?’ he exclaimed, incredulous. ‘We just got here, babe.’
‘Well what are we going to do, just wait around?’ she said. ‘I’ve already taken a couple pictures. Actually, that reminds me—do a nice pose, will you? Smile with your hands in your pockets, let me catch a picture of you and the grave together.’
He obliged, but shook his head. ‘Did you get it?’
‘See?’ she said, showing him the image. She had a real talent for these—no formal training, but excellent intuition. He looked quite smart in it indeed.
‘It’s a great picture. Let’s take one of the both of us together.’
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Let’s wait until someone passes by, then we’ll ask them to do it.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘Why not?’
‘I mean, I don’t like it. It feels weird. It’s a gravestone, not some kind of fancy car.’
‘That’s the dumbest thing you’ve said all day, Alex.’
‘What?’
‘I just took one for the Ohio State fans.’
‘Yeah, but they’re, like, Ohio State fans.’
‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I don’t know, babe, I just don’t like it, that’s all. But we’ll do it if you want to.’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t want to, anymore.’
Not this again. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Alex. ‘Let’s ask the next group of people to take a picture.’
She shook her head again, then made a gesture that indicated at clearing her head. ‘No, I’m not going to let you patronize me. We’re not going to do that.’ She picked up her backpack. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about something, forget the whole thing.’
‘Here’s your map,’ she said, pulling it out from her pocket again. ‘I’ll see you at Oscar Wilde. You can take all the time you want with your buddy Jim.’
He grumbled. Typical, but it was impossible to maintain any kind of frustration at Sophie—her tiny figure turning away to the left and disappearing behind another large series of graves made him melt, and he swiveled back to the grave one last time. Jim Morrison. It was his fault, really—what a loss for the cemetery! All these great people obscured by a midwit from California who had looked pretty and died before doing anything with it. He had no claim at all towards being a bigger attraction than someone like Chopin or Proust. Chopin, the composer of żal, whose preludes themselves were said to contain the sum total of piano music as an art. Or Marcel Proust, the delineator of melancholy—had Morrison ever written a single verse with the lasting power of the incident of the madeleine? And that wasn’t even to mention Oscar Wilde! And yet here you had Morrison, pretty-boy, famous for a photoshoot and goofy, snake-like antics on stage, some kind of ultimate commemoration of counterculture fantasy. For all he could tell he’d ripped his whole persona off Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground. Annoying couples and hogging the limelight even in death, fifty years later. What a plain, stupid grave, anyway! Unkempt was the word that came to mind. Why had Sophie wanted to rush here? He could not understand even a fraction of the appeal. Surely if he had made the trip on his own he would have skipped over Morrison altogether. Forget annoying—he was not even notable, in the grand scheme of things.
There was no one around. He took a few seconds to summon a large spitball and launched it straight over the barricade onto the headstone, where it stood glittering on the ‘I,’ his own tribute to the so-called ‘great man,’ and rushed after his wife, feeling, despite everything, quite pleased with himself.