young. Perhaps they were young in Rome, rogues in yellow shoes with mopeds, and young women who wanted to look like Monica Vitti, who wore large sunglasses and stood in factories by day, occasionally partaking in demonstrations, arm-in-arm.
Above the valley whitish plumes of smoke unfurled, more buoyant than fog. After the olive trees were pruned, the branches were burned—daily smoke sacrifices in the face of a parasite infestation that threatened the harvest. Perhaps the stokers stood in the groves by their fires, shading their eyes with their hands, looking to see which columns of smoke rose in what way. All was blanketed in a mild burning smell.
Cemetery
IN THE EARLY MORNINGS I would walk the same route every day. Up the hillside, between olive trees, curving around the cemetery to the small birch grove. The two kiosks with cheerful-colored greenhouse flowers and garish plastic bouquets weren’t open yet. The municipality workers, busied since my arrival with thinning out the cypresses that had grown into one another, arrived in a utility van and unpacked their tools. The roadsides were littered with debris from the felling: sprigs, cones and pinnate, scaly leaves. Beside the cemetery entrance larger tree clippings piled up, thrown together sloppily and interspersed with stray tatters of plastic bouquets: pink lily heads that refused to wilt, yellow bows. Seen from here, the house on the hill lay between the village in the background on the right, and the cemetery in the foreground on the left. A different order. The village, quiet in the blue-gray morning light. Behind the cemetery wall the men called loudly back and forth to one another.
From the birch grove I looked onto the village and the cemetery; in the mornings not a sound from there reached this spot. I could see only white smoke past the wall and a row of ascending cypresses. Tree remains were being burned. The arborists were not yet felling. They first brought their small sacrifice. They must have stood there watching the fire. When the smoke thinned, the first saw revved.
In the afternoon I visited the graves. Both flower kiosks were open. On the left fresh flowers were for sale: yellow chrysanthemums, pale-pink lilies, white and red carnations. The kiosk on the right offered artificial flower bouquets with and without ribbons, hearts, little angels and balloons of various sizes. The woman selling flowers at the kiosk on the right was occupied with her phone for the most part, but occasionally cast me a sullen, mistrusting glance.
I searched for a term for the grave walls that made up a large part of the cemetery. Stone cabinets with small plaques, mostly bearing the name and a photo of the deceased, rendered on ceramic. Rocchi, Greco, Proietti, Baldi, Mampieri. The names on the graves were the same as those above store entrances and shop windows in the village. The walls are called columbaria, I learned, dovecotes for souls. Later someone told me the grave compartments are referred to in everyday language as fornetti. Ovens, into which the caskets or urns are slid.
The cemetery was always busiest in the early afternoon. Young men above all fulfilled their duties as sons and grandsons then; they would race in, jump out of their cars, slam the doors and slide rattling ladders up to their fornetti, in order to trade wilted flowers for fresh ones, wipe off the photographs, check the small burning lights. Old men scuffled by the grave walls, exchanged greetings, carried wilting bouquets to the trash and filled the vases with fresh water for the flowers they had brought with them.
In front of each fornetto was a small lamp, evoking an old petroleum lamp, or a candle, or an oil lamp like in The Thousand and One Nights. The lamps were hooked up to electric cables which ran along the lower edge of each tier of the grave walls, and burned at all times. Lux perpetua, someone explained to me. Everlasting light. In daylight their faint glow was barely perceptible.
On rainy days I would stand by the window, not wanting to go out. I fought fatigue brought on by the heavy, wet air. Sometimes the rain was mixed with snow. From the rear windows of my house, which faced north, on the low ground to my left I saw the new housing estates of Olevano, the road to Bellegra, the paved market place, the new school and the sports field, all lying between the cobbled-together, angular new construction and the hillside too steep to develop, with its narrow sheep pastures and a holm oak forest.
Above on the right was the cemetery, a darkly framed stone lodge with a view out onto the ripped-open valley. From their lodge, the dead could watch how ambulances were cleaned at the foot of the hillside, while paramedics made phone calls and smoked; how Chinese merchants set up their booths on Mondays, in order to sell cheap household goods, artificial flowers and textiles; how soccer games took place at the sports field on Sundays. Whistles and calls would echo from the hillside during soccer games, and the dull-green ground glistened in the rain, while old women on the steep path up to the cemetery slowly carried their umbrellas through the olive groves.
Dying
NOT LONG AFTER ARRIVING in Olevano, I had a dream:
I encounter M. He is standing in a doorway. Behind him is a room filled with white light. M. is like he used to be: calm, composed, plump again almost.
There’s nothing terrible about being dead, he says. Don’t worry.
Half-awake, I remembered the dreams I had of my father after he died. My father always stood in the light. Waved. Laughed. I stood in the shadows. At first farther away, then ever closer. In one dream he took me sledding and stayed behind in the white hills, laughing, while alone on the sled I glided down into a snowless valley.
In the afternoon that same day, farther down in the village I saw a dead person being brought out of a house. The body was laid out on a gurney and covered from head to toe. Two paramedics wheeled it through the building entrance into the street, where an ambulance waited. The front door to the multistory house was open behind them. No one followed the paramedics and in every apartment the street-facing blinds were pulled down. No one stood on a balcony and raised a hand to wave farewell. The ambulance blocked traffic on the steep road to the village and the tunnel into the hinterland. A small traffic jam had formed, drivers honked their horns. The gurney appeared strangely tall to me, as if distorted; an adult would stand barely a head above the gurney’s edge and while contemplating the dead body, feel like a child. I imagined standing at the gurney at eyelevel with the dead man, whose eyelids had already been pressed shut, as that is the first task of paramedics and doctors once death is established. The eyelid of the dead becomes a false door, like those found in Egyptian and early Etruscan tombs. The blanket on the dead man gleamed matte. It appeared to be of a heavy, black, synthetic material, like a darkroom curtain.
Clouds
IN THE MORNING at times the clouds hung so low that the landscape all around was invisible. I heard buses droning uphill, voices, the village bells, too, which struck every fifteen minutes. Noises from a different world, and nothing visible but clouds. Over my head the village sounds met the sputtering caws of chainsaws in the cemetery. Come fog, the tree fellers still worked. Their calls could be better heard through the clouds than clear air and, as if in reply, these short, fitful reports from the land of the morți followed the inquiring sounds from that of the vii.
Throughout the day the clouds lifted, broke open, scattered as slack veils and sunk into the valleys. They hung awhile in the holm oaks on the steep hillside, a spindly, disused small coppice, where in the thin tracks between the trunks, objects were put to pasture. Worn-out and rejected objects hung, hindered by the trunks while rolling downhill, diagonally between trees and shrubs: furniture, appliances, mattresses. Delicate vines unfurled like dreams across the covers.
In the afternoon the plain at the foot of the Olevano hill lay dark and severe below high rainclouds, which drifted across the sky over the mountain peaks in brown and blue tones, suffused with yellowish veins of light. The volcanic
