the Pizzuti undertaking business was represented not only in these vaults; it was omnipresent in the village, and the finely lettered windows might have merely advertised the place where the coffins were stored, conveniently located directly across from San Rocco, the church nearest to the cemetery, whose bells were always first to strike the hours and quarter-hours. There was a Pizzuti wreath and flower shop farther below in the village, where women were invariably occupied with putting together large, colorful floral arrangements, and farther was a large storefront office with catalogues in the display window featuring coffins and grave decorations. There the bereaved were advised on next steps. A glossy gray-black hearse, which had the same inscription as the windows next to the butcher’s, often edged broadly through the narrow village lanes, usually empty, and it always caused a bit of commotion when rounding the particularly sharp and tight curve in front of the Arab greengrocer. Occasionally I saw the hearse, filled with flowers and wreaths, parked next to the church when a burial lay ahead. Funeral services were all held in San Rocco—or at least I never observed the Pizzuti hearse at any other church. The driver, in livery and a large hat, stood like a watchman beside the vehicle as singing came from the building. On such occasions the square was usually full of men. Women went into the church; I once saw the crowd part for two women in black, forming an honor guard, and as soon as they had disappeared behind the church’s doors the men reconvened into the same group they had formed beforehand, smoking and talking gravely. The Pizzuti driver, who also smoked, always had company, but in contrast to those around him there was something about his posture that was almost soldierly, due perhaps to his heavy peaked cap with a golden P.
I avoided looking at the coffin, which after the service was brought out to the hearse and slid into a sea of flowers. Sometimes after arriving back at my apartment I would look out the window down to the street, where an unfailingly small funeral procession trickled to the cemetery. The guests had surely already expressed their sympathy at the square, and for many this journey would have been too arduous. I was never witness to a ceremony, never saw a coffin being lowered into a grave or slid into a fornetto. I only came across the accumulated bouquets and flowers, which wilted away and ultimately ended up on one of the trash heaps, evidently later dispersed among small fire pits and burned. Animals also tampered with the trash, and, on stormy days in particular, dogs appeared, having found their way in between the bars of the gate, and descended on the artificial flowers, shredding them and trailing torn petals out into the street.
Blackbird Days
THE DAYS GREW LONGER, but barely warmer or brighter. At the cemetery I listened for birds and heard none, nothing but the jeer of a jaybird in flight, the raspy sounds of magpies lingering outside the cemetery, or the hooded crows. The crows liked to gather in loose groups at the edge of the olive groves, near the road, where scraps that still yielded sustenance could always be found. The cemetery was, nevertheless, not quiet; there was always a clanking of ladders, a rush of water filling up watering cans, engine noises from the various equipment with which workers felled, sawed, and chopped, sucked up leaves in corners. Cemeteries are usually home to birds—I would have expected to find coal tits here, linnets and nuthatches, even black woodpeckers and tree creepers. In lieu of their calls, the air was filled with the drone of a radio mast, which, bounded by clumps of bamboo, rose up directly next to the cemetery. Scattered cypress saplings buckled over, as if in pain, right-angled away from the droning mast. The unbroken buzzing ran beneath the occasional small talk of grave visitors like a murmur. Elsewhere, I saw birds: in the bushes along the path to the birch grove were small flocks of long-tailed tits and, on brighter days, warblers; farther up the mountain I heard goldfinches. Above the olive groves that surrounded the house I heard the green woodpecker but never saw it. The shattering and shrill, yet often also heartrending, wistful, and anxious sequence of tones that the green woodpecker uttered became, in this winter quarter year, the sound that grew entwined with the village, the house, the groves, the hillsides, drawing everything to it—the light, the colors, and the ever-shifting layers and grades of blue and gray in the landscape. On mornings without rain, it was the first bird I would hear; with its call it seemed to be forever letting itself plummet from a high point, because despite the call’s loudness and density, it faded as if dying away, as if the bird were capitulating, falling silent in the face of something larger again and again, without my ever having seen it, even at times when its call sounded so near and hung so out in the open, distant from all treetops, that the invisibility seemed incomprehensible, unfathomable, as if either this call or the invisibility were a trick, an uncanny joke played on me every day anew by someone unseen. Even the childhood lesson, to look for the green woodpecker in the grass, was no help and the bird remained a sound, which came closer to my heart each time I heard it, without ever taking visible shape.
In late January, wet snow fell. For two days the clouds hung so low that I never saw the village. I labored on my daily walks through the heavy damp air and swaths of wet wood-smoke. I met the caretaker at the gate, a nervous woman constantly busied with the fastidious cleaning, putting-in-order and arranging of the estate. She lived with her sister in a narrow house next to the entrance gate. In the mornings, at the break of day I would hear the two women exchanging words loudly. The sister stood on her tiny balcony, while the caretaker, on her equally tiny terrace, chopped wood for her oven, or hung laundry to dry. I saw her every day, yet knew nothing about her family, her history, her life—nothing aside from these reciprocal shouts at dawn, which occasionally sounded like quarrels, and the television’s flickering in her room past nightfall. I preferred to keep a distance from her nervous desire for order. But on this day, shrouded in white, wet clouds, when she appeared all at once communicative and calmer, she pointed upwards—surely to the sky, which couldn’t be seen—and said: Giorni della merla!
The blackbird days are the last of January, in Italy supposedly the coldest of the year. So cold that one day a blackbird and its young, freezing, searched for shelter in a chimney. On the first day of February the sun shone and the blackbird, once white and radiant, emerged dyed forever black from the soot, but the bird was content, grateful for the sooty chimney’s warmth. This story of plight and metamorphosis with its subsequent moral—sealing the winter fairy tale like a leaden stopper—is told in several variations, but it always involves these days of the year, and they are always referred to as the days of the blackbird.
On the first of February the sun shone this year, too. The caretaker, rushing past, promised the end of winter, while the cheesemonger, accompanied by his daughter’s grinning nods, explained that proper winter only begins in February. With his hand in front of his apron he demonstrated the height of the snow some winters—and never until February! he said. So much for blackbirds! He made a dismissive gesture with his hand and I paid his daughter, who on that day wore an old-fashioned mob cap, like a chambermaid from an early film.
In the afternoon I found a dead bird on my narrow apartment balcony, from which I could see only the cemetery and not the village. In the morning, viewed from this angle the cemetery hung like a colorless, angular bulk in the shadows; it could have just as well been a factory, a bunker, or a prison, untouched by the morning light. Now the sun shone brightly, and the cypresses stood as sharply excised figures against the blue sky. For the first time since my arrival, the balcony tiles were warm from the sun. The small bird lay there as if nestled against the wall to bask in the light, and it was still soft and warm, but no longer living. I found no injury. It was a coal tit, its small head bore an all-black hood, which began at its beak and left blank a white spot on the back of its head. Around its neck, too, was a black line. The hood glistened in the sun, and the cream-white down on its belly trembled in the gentle breeze. Its back was dark gray, its wings somewhat darker with two rows of extremely delicate whiteish flecks, between which the feathers appeared blacker than on the rest of its wings. How tiny, how surreally small creatures look, once drained of life. The bird lay so light in my hand, as if it were hollow: it weighed practically nothing, a pitiful thing, which now so soon after its death one could hardly imagine capable of life.
I waited until dusk and once the television in the caretaker’s room began to flicker I buried the bird between the olive trees below the terrace.
