and the clattering would echo from the hillside, a phantom moped following close behind in the air. The raspy soundtrack of the hopelessness enveloping this region.
Palestrina proved to indeed be the birthplace of Giovanni Pierluigi, as they call him here. Open to the public, his birth house was gloomy and tended by a peculiar guard, who I imagined spent the long hours and days without visitors rehearsing his smoldering gaze. In our short conversation he claimed to not know that Giovanni Pierluigi is called Palestrina in other parts of the world. Maybe he was telling the truth.
I ascended the steep road until my leaden heart made itself known. Among small rust and rose-colored houses with corrugated iron roofs and bristly rock gardens, I stood and looked out to a different plain. At the foot of the mountain was the new town of Palestrina, every bit as haphazard as the rear side of Olevano, but more inhabited. At some distance, sticking out from the ochre-colored apartment buildings and gray single-family houses like a small foreign land, was the cemetery, marked by thick black cypresses, which towered behind a whitish wall—the graveyard’s local dress. A necropolis, which perhaps had always been there, fuori le mura, was located precisely at the center of my field of vision from here above, but also from the temple, which was situated somewhat farther below, where the city sloped into terraces and headed for the graveyard. A bit farther to the right, to the west, the landscape opened up into a large expanse and there, in fact, began Rome. Briefly I even thought I saw the sea in the far distance. Above this expanse and the bright horizon hung a large, dark blue cloud with brownish bulges, which frayed at the edges into yellow-green trembling feathers and ribbons. The visibility beneath this cloud was clear and sharp, until it began to rain again, dissolving everything into nebulousness, and even the cemetery became a blurry speck in which the cypress tops now swayed.
I searched for shelter in the museum that sat crowning, enthroned on the old temple. The rooms were filled with grave goods, stone sculptures, vessels and jewelry. I contemplated the cippi of Etruscan tombs, cone-shaped hewn stones which once marked tomb entrances, and perhaps—like the pebbles once laid again and again to separate graves in Jewish cemeteries—the boundaries of the tomb. Your realm of the dead extends up to here. From a small gallery above a pit, water rushing in its depths, one could view the Nile mosaic, an enormous series of panel pictures composed of tiny stones which depicted the fabulous creatures, landscapes, and monsters of Egypt—a story in images on the back of a massive river which might also have inspired fear in the Romans. The Tiber trickled more modestly into the sea. The Egypt of the mosaic harbored sad centaurs—half-man, half-donkey—chameleons, and various monkeys. Black men appear as hunters with bows and shields. A hippopotamus bathes in the river. Herons in flight seem to plummet to the earth toward an enormous, half-erect snake, already devouring a bird.
It stopped raining. Through a window I saw the sun in the west, surrounded by ragged violet, orange, yellow, and brownish clouds. The light streamed through the window, watery and soft. Only because of this light, an object in a display case caught my eye: a ring, the grave good of a woman, a mother of two children by two different fathers, according to the description. The ring itself, the thin metal band, was unremarkable, but in its setting was a miniature portrait of the deceased woman, a solemn face against a dark ground, sealed beneath a crystal, not clouded by a single flaw, whose cut and curvature made it seem as if she were looking at me, alive and urgent, from an unspeakable distance.
Maria
CLOUDS SLIPPED BETWEEN the hills, draping everything in damp white. A very thin rain fell, at times in drops so wispy and wafting that it was probably only the clouds themselves, spreading out their moisture. The white fields began moving, uncovering views—the cemetery emerged, fragments of its outer wall, the grave walls, the trees, and amid this shapelessness everything seemed much closer than usual. Then it disappeared again. Sunlight seeped into the clouds and reached the cemetery, while everything else still lay in fog, hidden. The cemetery glowed golden above an ocean of clouds, an island of promise which beckoned no one, as the village was still hidden, had possibly vanished altogether.
On my walk with the camera I had lost my cable release. The golden cemetery island in the air went unphotographed. At first, I was distressed not by my loss of the cable per se, but of the cable as witness to one day two years ago in winter—the gray, mild, mistletoe-winter, a winter without abnormalities—when we wandered through the streets, thinking about “next year” and “in two years” and the “future” in general and I bought it at a shop with used camera accessories, to replace a lost one. We both ran our fingers through the slack knot of cable releases, which lay in a basket, twisted into one another like half-hibernating, languid, fearless snakelets, and M. eventually pulled out this especially robust, light-gray coated one, which I took and used and now had lost. My distress over the cable falls under one of the potential curses of bereavement that I gradually became familiar with: weighting objects qua testimony. The attribution of participation in a moment past. A small piece of back-then, which should act as if it could moor the past tense onto the broken-off banks of the present. Idle lists of a forlornness that knows not what to do with itself.
In the afternoon it became brighter and the light beneath the evenly pale sky was nearly spring-like. In the unfamiliar landscape I learned to read the spatial shifts that come along with changes to the incidence of light. I’d never lived with such an expansive view of the country and now noticed every day how new shadows formed, new silhouettes emerged, and a lower hill lying to the south, upon it the village of Paliano, became rounder and softer, appeared to move ever closer. I went out looking for the cable, tracing my route across the cemetery. The columbaria facing the street seemed like a labyrinth to me that day, ladders strewn every which way, and for the first time I noticed that one wall with grave compartments was practically empty. In the empty, nameless cavities people had placed small lamps and flowers; in one compartment was a framed photograph, so faded that I could barely make out anything at all. I scanned the ground where I thought I had been standing yesterday in front of the women. At the opposite end of the path a girl walked between the columbaria in circles, speaking out loud. At first sight I thought she must be talking to her dead, to whatever lay locked in the ornamented fornetto-drawer behind the marble panel, but surely she spoke only into her phone.
I found my cable in a small pile of litter which had been either swept or blown by the wind against a grave wall: tattered petals of artificial flowers, small branches, cigarette butts, a trampled green lighter. The gray cable blended in with the light gray concrete drawers and ground, and it was only the shimmering metal ends that caught my eye. It lay in front of a grave marker bearing the name Maria Tagliacozzi. She died in 1972 in August, 60 years old, and was mourned by a brother and sisters. Above the name was a ceramic medallion, featuring a photograph of the deceased. A beautiful woman, loose curls tumble over her shoulders, her face made up as if for a performance, with a polka-dotted scarf wrapped around her neck. A face characteristic of the late forties, maybe fifties. She looked a bit like a film actress, perhaps due to the angle at which she stares into the camera, her gaze somewhat tilted and upturned, in contrast to the stiff, head-on shots adorning other graves. I tried to recall a film suited to her face and expression, but came up with nothing. On the ground in front of her grave was a small Aladdin lamp. Its fluted glass chimney was crooked, and the small bulb didn’t glow, although it was connected to a cable. Perhaps it needed to be replaced. Who looked after her lamp? Her brother—elderly, short of breath? Or one of her sisters? It was unlikely: this year Maria Tagliacozzi would have been 103. Did she have nephews and nieces? I would bring her a flower next time. Maria Tagliacozzi could be my dead for the remainder of my stay in Olevano, and give cause to my daily cemetery visits.
I took the long way through the olive groves and past the old man’s vineyard. Everything seemed to point to spring, even if the white smoke of burning branches and leaves rose over every valley for miles and even the plain. Fire cures and blighted offerings. Without olives the region would be utterly lost.
It was already getting dark when I passed by the vineyard. Cats arched their backs in the pale grass on the wayside.
