He started this story on a Saturday morning. He was somewhere between dawn and noon.
He sat on a thick green pillow at a Sasak warung, a small simple eatery. He'd found this place a couple of days earlier and liked it because it was quiet. The entire Air island was quiet. Maybe 1,000 residents.
It was one of three islands off the coast of Lombok in Indonesia. It was called Gili Air. It was quiet.
The bamboo pavilion where he enjoyed thick black coffee, hand rolled Drum cigarettes and serenity faced the ocean or maybe it was the sea or perhaps the Straits. Either one it was big and blue. Across the water was the island of Lombok. On this particular day Rinjani, the volcano at 3,500 meters was obscured by low grey and high white clouds.
He read "The Elephant Vanishes," a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami.
One of the main reasons he liked sitting here was because it was next to a small cemetery.
Ten or twelve small plots, a few eroded headstones with scattered grey and coral borders in a grove of small trees. Weeds and small pieces of trash.
He always found cemetaries when he roamed around the planet. Peaceful places where he learned and observed customs, habits, histories. Air. Bursa, Turkey, Grazalema, Spain to remember three.
How the small Spanish village in the Sierras used crypts near the Catholic church. How they were decorated with plastic flowers. How empty crypts held cleaning materials, rags, bricks and trowels.
How the grazing white and grey sheep near the Catholic Cemetario filled rising green fields. There was a beautiful single palm tree in the courtyard. Behind iron gates lay silent white crypts decorated with real and plastic flowers, names, dates and old faded curling black and white photographs of the dead where a procession of men laid a 40-year old friend of theirs to rest last week.
They slid his wooden casket into a long stone cold cement cavity, blessed themselves and returned to the village for sherry and conversation full of memories speaking about the man who died alone with no wife or children and above the crypts were gray cliffs and peaks in heavily wooded forests and the sky was a watercolor in progress as white, grey, orange and blue colors hurtled on an east wind. Where families of Egyptian vultures expanded their wings on thermals.
After this vision he returned to Spanish crypts.
He manipulated his camera obscura tool in fast fading light making images of interments with names and flowers, passages of memory in love and sadness, chiseled history and their pueblo connection. He imaged down cavities and shells of carefully constructed rectangular rows of empty passages.
They were invisible stories waiting to be told. Stories of desire, conflict, ambiguities, metaphors, and silence. Waiting for air to carry them to the listening faithful. They were silent stories, silent night of the pious, silent in their collective breathing. Stories inside stories.
Metta.
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