Sophia’s Visions · Other lives · Málaga, 1831–1968 · B2–C1
Gamel Woolsey and the English Cemetery
Sophia’s Visions: nineteen centuries from now, in a city at the far western end of our sea, there will be a garden of graves for strangers, and in it an American poet who chose to stay. Describing people and places with relative clauses (a poet whose husband…, the beach where…, sailors, none of whom…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight I saw a garden on a hillside above a harbour, Demetria: cypress trees, geraniums, and gravestones in English, German, French and Spanish.
A cemetery for foreigners? Here in Alexandria, a stranger who dies far from home is lucky to be buried at all.
That is exactly how it began. And one of the graves belongs to a poet who wrote about remembering only what was beautiful.
In the early nineteenth century, Málaga was a busy port, full of British merchants, sailors and wine traders. But Spain was a Catholic country, and Catholic cemeteries were consecrated ground: a Protestant who died in Spain could not be buried in them.
In Málaga, the bodies of Protestants were buried on the beach, at night, without any ceremony; it was said that some were buried standing upright in the sand. Sometimes the sea uncovered them. Many people, Spanish and foreign, found this shameful.
A city full of foreigners, and nowhere for them to rest.
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