Chapter 12
The familiar aspects of All Souls’ Day could not make us forget that the cemeteries were left unvisited. In previous years the rather sickly smell of chrysanthemums had filled the funeral limousine, while long lines of women could be seen making pilgrimage to the places where members of the family were buried, to lay flowers on the graves. This was the day when they made amends for the oblivion and dereliction in which their dead had slept for many a long month.
But in the plague year people no longer wished to be reminded of their dead. Because, indeed, they were thinking all too much about them as it was. There was no more question of revisiting them with a shade of regret and much melancholy.
They were no longer the forsaken to whom, one day in the year, you came to justif
