Rocket's Red Glare: Launching the Ashes of The Living Legend

For the last 28 years of my father’s life, he made the same pilgrimage every summer. It started in the UK with the boat races on the River Cam and Wimbledon, then to France by car or train. Some summers it included a stop in Paris, but always a week in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, arriving at the very end of June. From there it was on to The Fiesta of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain where he would arrive every 5th of July at noon. His kids and friends had a standing invitation to join him on any of the stops along the way. We always knew, depending on the date, where to catch up with him.

In 1995, after he died, my stepmother decided my father would take the trip one last time. She asked my brother and I to join her as she made the trip he did every summer, leaving bits of his ashes scattered along the way.

We started in England by scattering some of the ashes in the courtyard of his college at Cambridge, then south to France by train where we were met by some of his life-long friends, in particular the artist, well-known in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Alfred “Alma” Martinez and his wife Françoise.

My father first met Alma back in the 1960s in the town square in Saint-Jean where he was selling his paintings of Basque country landscape. My father was selling bullfight photos similarly propped up on easels. Alma bought one of my father’s photos while my father bought one of Alma’s paintings and the friendship began.

Once my father arrived in Saint-Jean each summer, the routine was pretty much the same. First there was the greeting of old friends and then the procuring of fireworks in Biarritz, the neighboring city, to be used for his annual Fourth of July celebration on the beach. On the Fourth we were back in Biarritz to the American Consulate for their annual Independence Day party.

In Saint-Jean we would have a dinner of Magret de Canard (a dish of seared duck breast) and moules-frites (mussels and fries) at the Vieille Auberge. Daniel Grant, the owner of the Auberge, always referred to my father as Inspector Maigret (from the famous character in the Georges Simenon novels) as my father always referred to his favorite dish as Maigret de Canard. After dinner we would head to the beach with our fireworks and start a bonfire. There we drank champagne and set off fireworks until the wee hours.

It was a bit of a somber affair when we arrived in Saint-Jean with my father’s ashes. There was a lot of “quel dommage” and the wringing of hands. The dinner at the Auberge was low key and the entourage to the beach quiet. I’m not sure what my stepmother’s intentions were as far as scattering my father’s ashes that night, but my brother and I knew instinctively how it had to be done. There was only one way out for The Living Legend. We gathered up all the small boxes left over from the fireworks and wooden matches and emptied the ashes into them. We tied them to the large rockets, toasted my father’s memory and proceeded to fire them off one by one over the Bay of Biscay.

This newspaper article in Le Semaine du Pays Basque appeared after shooting off my father’s ashes 

and refers to one Fourth of July party in Biarritz the actor Jack Nicholson attended.

When Alma’s wife Françoise realized what we were doing, she was scandalized and screamed that it was sacrilege. She was always very conservative, would never let us interfere with Alma’s “work” and never wore anything but black and white. (I always suspected she was color blind and the black and white clothing made it easier to put together her ensemble each day.) We tried to convince her that he would have wanted it that way, but she would not be dissuaded except by physical restraint until the last rocket was off.

We took what was left of my father’s ashes and headed to Pamplona. At noon on the opening day of the Fiesta we went to the then empty bullring where my father took so many of his great bullfight photos. In the center of the ring we dumped another canister of his ashes.

“Is that it?” I asked my stepmother. 

“I have one canister left,” she said, “For the enfermería.”

We were going to have one more wake for my father in the form of what in Pamplona is referred to as an enfermería, ostensibly a party given after each day’s running of the bulls through the streets to medicate the injured runners with booze. My father’s ashes sat on the table in the midst of the merriment.

Family members and a few close friends in attendance at the last enfermería.

The enfermería was at a restaurant called the Meson del Caballo Blanco in the old section of the city near the ancient city walls that overlook the River Arga. We walked to the wall and cast the ashes over. At that moment a gust of wind came up and blew the ashes toward a group of tourist at the wall just beyond where we stood. Judging from the rubbing of eyes and dusting of clothing, he was not well received. Surely it was my father’s rage at the indignity of dying.