bold expression and a hat, of Olevano, born in 1843, died in 1912.
Below the vagrant birch trees, a man works in his vineyard. He cuts bamboo, trims the stalks, burns off the ragged wisps, brings the lengths of the stalks into line. He’s building scaffolding out of them, complicated structures made of poles, formed around the burgeoning grapevines. He weighs down with stones the points where the interlocked stalks met. Here the viti thrives between the vii in the distance, on the left, and the morți, somewhat nearer, on the right.
It is winter, evening comes early. When darkness fals, the old village of Olevano lies in the yellow warmth of streetlights. Along the road to Bellegra, and throughout the new settlements on the northern side, stretches a labyrinth of dazzling white lamps. Above on the hillside the cemetery hovers in the glow of countless perpetually burning small lights, which glimmer before the gravestones, lined up on the ledges in front of the sepulchers. When the night is very dark, the cemetery, illuminated by luces perpetuae, hangs like an island in the night. The island of the morți above the valley of the vii.
Journey
I ARRIVED IN OLEVANO in January, two months and a day after M.’s funeral. The journey was long and led through dingy winter landscapes, which clung indecisively to gray vestiges of snow. In the Bohemian Forest, freshly fallen, wet snow dripped from the trees, clouding the view through the Stifteresque underbrush to the young Vltava River, which had not even a thin border of jagged ice.
As the landscape past the cliffs stretched into the Friulian plains, I breathed a sigh of relief. I had forgotten what it is like to encounter the light that lies beyond the Alps and understood, suddenly, the distant euphoria that my father experienced every time we descended the Alps. Non ho amato mai molto la montagna / e detesto le Alpi, said Montale, but mountains are good for this shifting of light upon arrival and departure. At the height of the turnoff to Venice, dusk fell. The darker it became, the larger, flatter, broader the plain appeared to me. The temperature dropped below zero. There were dotted lights, even small fires in the open here and there, or so it seemed to me. I stopped in Ferrara, just as M. and I had planned to do on this trip. Ferrara in winter. The garden of the Finzi-Continis in snow or freezing fog. The haze of the pianure. Italy, a country to which we had never traveled together.
The next morning, I found the car with a bashed-in window. The backseat and everything stored there—the notebooks, books and photographs, the cases filled with pens for writing and drawing—were littered with shards of glass. The thief had taken only the two suitcases with clothing. One of them was filled with things that M. had worn in the last months. I had imagined how his cardigan would drape over a chair in the unfamiliar place, how I would work in his sweaters and sleep in his shirts.
I filed a police report. I had to go to the Questura, an old palazzo with a heavy portal. A small policeman sitting behind a desk in a chair with a high, carved back recorded my complaint. His police cap, adorned with a magnificent gold cord, rested on a pile of papers beside him, like a forgotten prop from a sailorthemed Carnival celebration.
On the recommendation of the lower-ranking police officer who had handed me a copy of the report, I spent hours searching for the stolen suitcases among bushes and shrubs, near the parking lot at the foot of the city wall. I found only a bicycle carefully covered with dried autumn leaves. When it became dark I gave up my search and made a few necessary purchases. That evening I noticed the address on the Questura papers’ letterhead: Corso Ercole I d’Este, the road leading to the garden of the Finzi-Continis.
The next morning I left, heading toward Rome and Olevano. It was bitterly cold, the grass atop the city wall was covered in hoarfrost, and large clouds formed before the mouths of the vendors assembling their stands on Piazza Travaglio. A few freezing African men loitered around the cafes. Market days promised more life and opportunity than other days of the week—some trading, help wanted, cigarettes, coffee.
The light beyond Bologna, the view from the highway, evoked memories of my childhood and were a strange comfort—even the gas station convenience stores, still selling those extravagant chocolate sculptures—as if the whole world could be so innocuous and incidental, as disconnected from all pain as the bright landscape that glided past me, a moving panoramastage which tried to fool me, in my deep fatigue that no amount of sleep would relieve, into thinking it was the only thing moving, and that I remained stationary. For a time, I believed it.
But after exiting the highway in Valmontone, I was in unknown territory, remote from the space of memory. As traffic crawled through the small town, I realized that this Italy was a world away from the country of my childhood experiences. Past a small hill range sprawled a plain, mountains surging at its other end. The summits in the second and third rows were capped in snow. Perhaps it was the Abruzzi already, still linked with outdated fantasies of wolves and highwaymen in my head. Disquieting terrain, like all mountains.
On my first morning in Olevano the sun shone and a mild wind rustled the withered leaves of the palm trees crowding my view of the plain at the foot of the hill. A bell struck every quarter hour. A different, tinny one followed a minute later, as if it had required this intermission to verify the time. That afternoon the sky clouded over, the wind became cutting, and a shrill noise began abruptly in the village. It appeared so far away, the village—a peculiar illusion seen from the house on the hill, as it took mere minutes to reach the square, where a festival was taking place. At this festival Befana presented children gifts to the tune of Italo pop. Befana, the epiphanic witch; the previous evening in small supermarkets grandmothers had haggled for discounts on cheap toys in her name. They had wrenched the gifts from the sale baskets that blocked the aisles at every turn. Silver-clad Barbie dolls, neon-colored soldiers, lightsabers for extraterrestrial use. An announcer called out, a timid choir of children’s voices repeated her, and again and again I heard the word Be-fa-na!, stressed on the first syllable, as the dialect demands.
On the night after the day of Befana, moped drivers dinned through the lanes, and I learned that here every sound is multiplied, broken by numerous surfaces and evidently forever sent back to this inhospitable house on the hill. I lay awake, contemplating how for the next three months to force my life into a new order that would let me survive the unexpected unknown.
Village
IN THE MORNINGS I would walk to the village via a different lane every day. Whenever I thought I knew every route, a staircase would reveal itself somewhere, or a steep corridor, an archway framing a vista. The winter was cold and wet; along the narrow corridors and stairs, moisture crackled in the old stone. Many houses stood vacant and around lunchtime the village was very quiet, almost lifeless. Not even the wind found its way into these lanes, only the sun, which usually stayed away in winter. I saw elderly villagers with scanty purchases, bracing their feet against the steepness. The people here must have healthy hearts, trained on these slopes, day after day, with and without burdens and beneath the weight of winter’s dampness. Some climbed very slowly and steadily, while others paused, drew breath—whatever breath there was to draw here, in the absence of light or any scent of life. On these winter afternoons, not once did I smell food. On brighter Sundays in the early afternoon, clattering plates and muted voices would sound from the open windows on Piazza San Rocco, but on gloomy winter weekdays the windows remained closed. There were no cats roaming about. Dogs which might have remained silent had they had a bone yapped at the occasional passersby.
Then one day the sun shone again. The elderly came out of their houses, sat down in the sun on Piazzale Aldo Moro and squinted in the brightness. They were still alive. They thawed like lizards. Small, tired reptiles in quilted coats trimmed with artificial fur. The shoes of the men were worn down on one side. Lipstick crumbled from the corners of the women’s mouths. After an hour in the sun they laughed and talked, their gesticulations accompanied by the rustle of polyester sleeves. During my childhood,
