“The Cemetery of Eternal Pleasures”. The Boa Morte tomb is full, but one of the coffins will have to leave – Life

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A TOUR THROUGH THE PRAZERES CEMETERY (given by Lourenço Boa Morte, cancer patient)

Dejected, Lourenço Boa Morte walks along the cypress avenues of the beautiful Cemitério dos Prazeres towards his final place in the world. He only has a few months left, that was the doctors’ fateful prediction. His sixty-year-old bowels are definitely lost. The damned cancer spread from the liver and advanced, like an unstoppable invading army, attacking the intestines and stomach. At a certain pace, that relentless exterminator brought him to the terminal phase without haste, but also without pause, just as he now approaches the «incredible tomb of the Boa Morte», as the eccentric family mausoleum was
baptized by uncles and cousins.

The Boa Morte laugh at their dead, at the three who founded the family more than a hundred years ago and at the eleven who continued it, with a thousand absurd and tragic, frightening or scandalous episodes. Lourenço, his brothers and nephews remember, with almost hysterical joy, that saga of crazy people swept away, the wonderful legend of the Boa Morte, who traveled the tortuous roads of a century of constant mutations, which began with the resounding fall of the Monarchy and the tragic Spanish flu, he had gone through the turmoil of the First Republic and created the Estado Novo, he had dealt with the Spanish war and the Second World War, he had witnessed the beginning of united Europe and the 25th of April, and he had also invented automobiles, household appliances, cell phones and computers.

«The Boa Mortes saw the world changing from their balcony», one of Lourenço’s uncles used to say. They followed the slow but drastic transformations in Portugal, with overwhelming passions and frenetic struggles, but without intense protagonism. History books would not talk about the Boa Morte, no one would “google” them in the future.

– We didn’t make revolutions – mutters Lourenço. – We weren’t even celebrities in cinema, music, art or politics.

On the surface, the Boa Morte were like millions of banal Portuguese, a strange mass of strangers who had only observed, always in anonymity, the Portuguese heroes who transformed the country. The Boa Morte had not been the protagonists of History, they had simply run along it, with a high dose of crazy. They looked like the crazy people who follow professional cyclists on a terrible mountain climb, encouraging them and waving their country’s flag. No one will ever know your name, but without these anonymous hysterics the stage wouldn’t be the same!

Boa Morte were like that, a little crazy but not crazy enough to be geniuses. Private madness, remembers Lourenço, stopping to observe the largest tomb in the Prazeres Cemetery, where D. Pedro Holstein, Duke of Palmela, and the aristocrat’s entire family are buried. Inside, there were more than two hundred dead.

– Maybe it’s just an urban myth, but this tomb is a permanent party! – exclaims Lourenço.

The family of the Dukes of Palmela was one of the oldest and most famous in Portugal and had marked the Portuguese 19th century.

In fact, the entire Cemitério dos Prazeres – a beautiful but at the same time paradoxical name for a place where the dead rest – was a repository of relevant figures in the History of Portugal, people who had filled two centuries with their merits and talents.

As for the Boa Mortes, the fourteen souls buried in that extravagant tomb had, above all, disrupted the lives of their family members, but none of them had even become a minister! Lourenço smiles, missing the times when everyone would get together around the big table in the Estremoz house. Then he sighs, disheartened. What impressed him was not his approaching death, he faced it with clear acceptance, a Buddhist inner peace.

– I had a full life – murmurs Lourenço.

A fun and happy childhood, studies at the Naval Academy, the sea, always the sea, many years visiting ports and countries, skipper of hundreds of boats. He knew people in Madagascar, Cambodia and Newfoundland, he had had dozens of girlfriends of multiple nationalities but he had always been free. He had run away from love, marriage, and children, just to be able to remain at sea, with no return date or paternal obligations. However, he had always missed his family, the Boa Morte. Once, in Chile, he was in a bar drinking pisco sour and had a fit of homesickness and didn’t rest until he called his grandmother Maria Vitória, just to hear her voice. Another time, in Newport, he shook off his sadness by imagining himself sitting around the large table in Estremoz’s house, surrounded by cousins ​​and noise, with a thousand conversations exchanged across that gigantic dark mahogany tabletop, strewn with glasses and plates. . It was what he lacked at sea, where there was camaraderie and women, but no family. He had always loved to be among her and now, as the hour of his death approached, he wanted to join his family again.

Unfortunately, the Boa Morte tomb was full! Someone would have to come out for him to enter, but Lourenço did not understand the reluctance of his brothers, Francisco and Rita, who did not accept removing some of the dead. Only he wanted to do it, certainly because he was the only one who was dying.

When he learned that he only had a few months left to live, a fixed concern had formed in his brain: the Boa Morte tomb had fourteen shelves for coffins, all occupied by the family’s dead. Where would he go?

In that family there was still no tradition of cremations.

The Boa Morte did not like flames and fled fire like the Devil from the cross. “I want a place in the tomb, I want my coffin there, I have the right to it!”, he had stated at a recent family dinner. However, his demand was looked askance at by his brother and sister, and Lourenço felt what he had felt throughout his life, that the two did not treat him as a one hundred percent pure Good Death.

– I was always the bastard – he grumbles.

He was not the son of Roberto Boa Morte and Maria Inês Mondego, like Francisco and Rita, or the two other brothers who had already died, José Diogo and Alice. It was the card that was out of the cards in his father’s life, who had impregnated a girl in Mértola and refused to support the boy, only doing so when the lady died and Lourenço, who was five years old at the time, was left alone in the world.

– We have the same father, I’m a Boa Morte like the others! – he now declares out loud, certain that no one hears him, as the cemetery is almost empty.

He had the same rights as his brothers and, therefore, someone would have to leave the tomb, someone who had less reason to be buried there.

– Or buried – he adds.

In fact, purebred Boa Morte only counted ten people. Three of the women were Boa Morte only by marriage: Maria Inês Mondego, the mother of her four brothers; Jacqueline, his brother José Diogo’s first wife; and also Mafalda, the second wife of the same brother. However, the first was Rita and Francisco’s mother and the other two had children still alive, Lourenço’s nephews. This left only one strong candidate for leaving: Nuno, his sister Alice’s husband. The couple had died in a terrible car accident and had been buried together. However, Nuno had only been married to Alice for a year, not
he had belonged to the Boa Morte family for a long time. Her parents had died and she had no brothers or sisters. As everyone liked the jokes he told, he was placed there.

– Are these reasons enough to keep him in the tomb?

The remaining tenants of the mausoleum were pure Boa Morte, from his great-uncle Fernando, the first to enter and for whom the tomb was built. Grandfather José Roberto and grandmother Maria Vitória had suffered a terrible heartbreak when Fernando Boa Morte died, hit by the bullets of the Spanish fascists, against whom he had fought in Badajoz, during the Spanish civil war.

– Unfortunately, he was a communist! – remembers Lourenço, a political passion that had generated strong discomfort among certain Boa Mortes. Perhaps as a punishment, poor thing, he spent almost thirty years alone in the tomb.

Fernando Boa Morte had died in 1936 and only had company in the tomb in 1970, when Natividade, Lourenço’s father’s sister, died. After that, the Boa Morte had died with some regularity. In the 1970s, two left, in the 1980s there was a hiatus in surrenders to God, but the 1990s were very “productive”, with the death of six family members. Finally, in the 21st century, four more Boa Mortes had left, filling the tomb.

– Some could be cremated…

Rita had not given her approval for cremation, with an irrefutable argument: her family members had died before this solution became fashionable, it would be evil to burn them now, when they could no longer decide anything.

– And put them in smaller ballot boxes? – Francisco had suggested.

The best decision was to place the bones of one of the dead in a small urn on the floor of the tomb.

– Yes, but who? – asks Lourenço.

After heated discussions, nephew Carlos’ suggestion was approved: Rita, Francisco and Lourenço had to choose “candidates” among their dead family members and then present their respective biographies, remembering what they had done, good and bad in their lives. Lourenço and Francisco would be “defense lawyers” for five dead people and Rita for only four dead people.

Naturally, after what he had said about them, Lourenço did not stay with the women already mentioned – Maria Inês, Jacqueline and Mafalda – nor with Nuno.

During a meeting at Rita’s house, which would also be attended by her nephews, each of the three brothers would make a presentation in defense of their “candidates”.

Afterwards, the living would vote, giving a white ball if they wanted the dead person to stay in the tomb and a black ball if they thought he should leave. Naturally, as Portugal is a democracy with rules, the family member who had received the most black balls would be removed.

– At least it seems democratic – Lourenço grumbles.

A strange cube now stood in front of the Boa Morte tomb, whose sides displayed various types of marble, with black and reddish veins. The general architecture was in the art deco style, in vogue in the 1930s, and the mausoleum featured a green iron door with stained glass windows at the top, which let light into the tomb even though they were frosted.

– Seen by the dead, we are strange distorted figures, with changing colors and shapes – sighs Lourenço.

Remember the high cost of the deposit. Grandfather José Roberto, the first of the Boa Mortes, had spared no expense when he ordered the construction of the place to bury his brother.

– But it never ended up here…

It was an irony in the family’s history: the first Boa Morte, patriarch of the lineage and builder of that mausoleum, was not buried there! He had died somewhere on a boat in Brazil and his body was never found. Grandmother Maria Vitória had mourned her husband for years, like Penelope waiting for her Ulysses, but José Roberto never reappeared and with difficulty the family had surrendered to the evidence: the millionaire founder of Boa Morte had disappeared forever.

– No one will defend you, it’s not necessary… – sighs Lourenço, before listing the fourteen dead there, to estimate the probability of each of them receiving black balls. – Who will be the strongest candidate for exit?