photograph. Then the coffee maker hissed, and the coffee boiled over, and my living hands had to break away from M.’s white hands in order to turn off the stove and remove the pot, but I inevitably burned myself, and this pain made me aware that I hadn’t relearned anything yet.
Arduously and despite what my hands had unlearned, I fumbled my way to my camera and to photographing. I lifted the camera and looked through the viewfinder. At last I clumsily tore open a box of film and began loading the camera. Over the years it had so often seemed as if the movements performed by my hands had become part of me. While working with my negatives I sensed retrospectively that each instance of changing film—the pressure of the crank, the spool, and the camera’s external coating on my fingertips, the smoothness of the black film leader, the process of inserting the leader into the spindle—had left an impression on me, and that these gestures had been added to my repertoire of hand movements. Executing them had moored a memory in this part of my body, which became operative and led the process, even if in my thoughts I was somewhere else entirely. Each sheet, with its four slots for negatives, was a testament to this habit’s gradual colonization of my hands. That had satisfied me. Now, sitting with my back to the sun and the view to the valley, with uncertain hands I needed half an hour just to load a roll of film. I had to recall what the numbers meant on the rings for exposure time and aperture, how to operate the light meter.
Each exposure was an effort. I stared into the viewfinder and forgot what it was I wanted to see there. I photographed details of the plain with and without the olive fires, the village in the morning light, and three columbaria in the rear, new part of the cemetery. Once I took my camera along up to the birch grove and photographed the village and the house on the hill. I photographed the vineyard, where the old man had now prepared all his grapevines for spring. Afterwards I went to the cemetery. I had one exposure left. The cemetery lay empty and silent—it was early afternoon, not the usual visiting time. Only between the columbarium walls on the street-facing side did I hear two women’s voices. They spoke so monotonously that I thought they must be praying, but as I turned the corner of a grave wall I saw the two women kneeling on the stone ground, busy cleaning the gravestones of two neighboring for-netti, conversing all the while in this droning, prayer-like tone. Cleaning products lay beside them and fresh artificial flowers, vase and all, as if of a piece. I could barely understand their conversation; their dialect clipped words at their roots. When they caught sight of me they fell silent, as if by arrangement. “Can I help?” asked the one, then the other in echo, once she saw me. I was startled and stepped back. What was there to say? There was nothing to help with. They eyed the camera hanging from my neck with suspicion, it seemed to me. I might have appeared as an intruder to them, a meddler who had no one there to mourn. They might not have been mourners; perhaps they were busying themselves, merely out of a sense of obligation, with the fornetti of long-dead aunts or uncles, childless distant relatives whose legacy they had perhaps partially inherited and whom they felt to owe certain duties, like the cleaning of gravestones and replacing of years-old artificial flowers, gone brittle and pale from the wind and weather. My wandering through the cemetery among the graves of people whose terminated lives I had no connection to might have appeared strange to the bereaved, offensive even. I took off, saving my last exposure for a different occasion.
In the evening I stood at the window and looked out into the darkness. Twilight was almost always beautiful, the sun often appeared as it set, and the cemetery hovered in an orange light in which the cypresses were no longer so black that they looked cut-out, but rather blue and deep and seemed to almost lean slightly toward the village and the house on the hill. The village in turn now lay cool-gray until the street lamps were illuminated and light was flicked-on behind the windows. On the plain it was never entirely dark. One could make out points of light from larger towns in the distance, street lamps which lined smaller roads that were invisible by day, and the headlights of cars that came in a long, uninterrupted line from the west in the evenings, allowing me to trace the path that I had taken. As it turned to night the volcanic mountains stood out all the clearer against the sky, which appeared as if illuminated from a great distance. That must have been Rome reflecting.
I stood at the window for hours as if inside a bell jar which had covered me and displaced me to my childhood, when in the afternoons and evenings I often felt incapable of doing anything but look out the window. Save that now beneath my hands on the window ledge I could feel M.’s hands. I didn’t see them like I had that morning, only felt them and wondered if this was what had taught me to forget my own hands.
Palestrina
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY, a bit past Valmontone, a sign for Palestrina caught my eye. When I stood on my veranda in Olevano and gazed westward I would search for the town, which was linked in my mind to the composer. Lassus, Palestrina, Ockeghem, Tallis. Music that belonged to the milky, shadowless light of my life in England, a light that didn’t exist here. Many years ago, I sang in a Palestrina mass and felt myself go missing from the world in the music. Without a lament, I became invisible and could no longer see.
I set off, picturing the intersection with this sign. I had spent weeks on the hillside with a view across the plain, and was now surprised by the landscape of abandon that I encountered below at the foot of the hill. It must have escaped my notice on the way there, surely because my gaze was directed only at this mountain town in the distance, where shelter was supposedly waiting for me.
Once I had the steep, winding road behind me and drove on level land, the splayed feeling faded from the landscape. The copses, bushes, avenue trees and willows along small brooks, which from above were smoothly arched lines drawn in the landscape, slid into view here below, shrinking its vastness to a series of plots. At a distance from the road were abandoned buildings, which had perhaps once been small factories or served some agricultural purpose. Flags fluttered timidly in a mild wind in front of a shop selling discount wedding dresses. In several places they had begun leveling streets into the landscape, but I could see where they had already abandoned their work. On one such obviously deserted construction site there was still large machinery, its wheels already overgrown with scrub. The land was primed for building and the crooked signs announcing the housing development, having deteriorated into jagged fragments, protruded over the fence; a mobile home, surely there for the consultation of future home owners, was stuck above its wheels in the miry ground. Starlings circled over the fields, which perhaps were already irresolute fallow land. The plowed earth was light brown, tinged violet in the winter light. I turned onto a larger road, passed by the ragged winter remains of a tree nursery next to a tropical plant nursery, beside which was a garden restaurant with hacienda in its name. Strings of colorful lightbulbs were wound around the bare trees. Two colossal cactuses towered beside the blocked driveway gate, looking like papier-mâché. The waiters probably wore sombreros and on weekends there would be a party band with Mexican sounds, and the musicians—hobby guitarists and dazed rumbarattlers hailing from villages between Valmontone and Olevano, men between forty and fifty who were too old to get out of there—were given shots of tequila on the house and left with a meager pay. Now everything was shuttered and barricaded. The musicians would spend their evenings sitting in front of the television or solving crossword puzzles until spring arrived.
The road to Palestrina led uphill, with gentle curves and steep precipices on the one side and forested hillsides rising on the other. There was a dizzying bridge over a gorge, then the small village of Cave, which in old ochre and pink wanted to be beautiful, having either avoided the ugliness of Olevano’s hinterland or successfully hidden it from passers-through. Merchants were breaking down the market; had I studied the faces more closely on Monday, I might have recognized some of them.
Palestrina was a cat city. After a violent sleet shower the streets were empty but for the white, sand-colored, and calico tabby cats on every corner, entrance, and stoop, in makeshift shelters at the edge of fallows. Some were trusting and hopeful, others lurking and anxious, yet not feral and gaunt like their cousins in Eastern Europe—more like shrewd guardians of secret places, which feared you might find them out, discover their hideaways. Now and again a moped
