It seems that Samuel Beckett, resident in Paris for much of his life, visited the Vélodrome d’Hiver (which had been requisitioned as a staging point for Parisian Jews on their way to Nazi camps) in the ’40s, to watch the famous cyclist Roger Godeau. He asked the young autograph hounds outside what they were doing. “On attend Godeau” they replied. We’re waiting for Godeau.
In July every year, crowds gather in the Galician village of As Neves to honour Santa Marta de Ribarteme, the patron saint of near-death experiences.
After several days of fiesta, those who have had near-death experiences that year are carried in open coffins in a procession to church, where they attend Mass and give thanks to Santa Marta for having avoided the real funeral they just rehearsed.
[photo: Nelson d’Aires - click for link]
Coffins are conveyed by friends and loved ones and, in a kind of Beckettian penance, the old and lonely are forced to drag their own.
The ceremony has an implacable pagan logic to it, twisted into, and subverting, the Christian ritual. By all accounts many of those travelling in the coffin are terrified; the feeling not one of rebirth but of having cheated somehow, of having received a provisional reprieve from the ‘dark mansion of death’ that may be revoked at any time.
This equivocation seems to stem from Santa Marta herself. The sister of Mary Magdalene, she attained sainthood by helping people escape drowning, yet she is known, depending on whose version you hear, as the saint of near-death experiences, resurrection or death. Better to chance your arm than not, though, for what is there to lose? It reminds me of the story of the two thieves hanged with Jesus, as told by Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: one was killed, one saved. By golly, thinks the tramp, that’s not bad odds.
[photo: Gustavo Rivas - click for link]
