“Does it make sense to point to a clump of trees and ask ‘Do you understand what this clump of trees says?’ In normal circumstances, no; but couldn’t one express a sense by an arrangement of trees? Couldn’t it be a code?”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar tr. Anthony Kenny
I
OLEVANO
I plans un mond muàrt.
Ma i no soj muàrt jo ch’i lu plans.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
vii / morți
IN ROMANIAN CHURCHES believers light candles in two separate places. It might be two niches in the wall, two ledges, or two metal cabinets, where the candles flicker. On the left side of the partition are the candles for the living; on the right side, the candles for the dead. If someone dies for whom in life a candle was lit in the left partition, then the burning candle is transferred to the right partition. From vii to morți.
I have only observed the tradition of lighting candles in Romanian churches; I have never practiced it myself. I have watched the candles flicker in their intended places. I have deciphered the letters above the partitions—simple niches in a wall, ledges, filigree containers made from forged iron or perforated sheet metal—and I have read them as names, designating the one space for hope, vii, and the other for memory, morți. One group of candles illuminates the future, the other the past.
I once saw a man in a film take a candle that was flickering for a relative in the niche of the vii and move it into the niche of the morți. From what-shall-be to once-was. From the fluttering of the future to the stillness of a remembered picture. In the film this observance was moving in its simplicity and acceptance, but at the same time it inspired disgust, obedient and impersonal, a mutely followed rule.
A few months after I saw this scene in a film, M. died. I became bereaved. Before bereavement, one might think of “death,” but not yet of “absence.” Absence is inconceivable, as long as there is presence. For the bereaved, the world is defined by absence. The absence of light in the space of the vii overshadows all flickering in the space of the morți.
Terrain
IN OLEVANO ROMANO I am staying for a time in a house on a hill. When approaching town on the winding road that leads up from the plain, the building is recognizable in the distance. To the left of the hill with the house is the old village, vaulting the steep slope. It is the color of cliffs, a different shade of gray in every light and weather. To the right of the house, somewhat farther uphill, is the cemetery—angular, whitish cement-gray, surrounded by tall, slender black trees. Cypresses. Sempervirens, the everlasting tree of death; a defiant answer to the unexacting pines, projected sharply into the sky.
I walk along the cemetery wall until the road forks. To the southeast it leads through olive groves, becomes a dirt road between a bamboo thicket and vineyards, and grazes a sparse birch grove. Three or four birch trees, scattered messengers, vagrants among olive trees, holm oaks and vines, stand at a slant on a kind of protuberance, which rises up beside the path. From this protuberance one looks to the hill with the house. The village lies once again on the left, the cemetery on the right. A small car moves through the village lanes, while someone hangs laundry on a line beneath the windows. The laundry says: vii.
In the nineteenth century, this protuberance might have served as a good lookout point for those who came here to paint. Perhaps the painters, pulling their handkerchiefs from their jacket pockets, carelessly and unwittingly scattered birch seeds brought from their northern-colored homelands. A birch blossom, picked in passing and long forgotten, spread rootlets here between blades of grass. The painters would have wiped the sweat from their brows and continued painting. The mountains, the village, perhaps the small columns of smoke rising above the plain as well. Where was the cemetery then? The oldest grave that I can find in the cemetery belongs to a German from Berlin, who died here in 1892. The second-oldest
