The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  “You’re not driving like a real Italian,” Hildi said.

  “Sorry. You want me to speed up?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Sort of. You know, you don’t have to take me flying just to get me to go to bed with you.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “You could just ask.”

  “What about your rules?”

  “The rule is that I’m not going to tell you I love you.”

  He laughed. “You’re being a bad girl now.”

  “I know I’m being a bad girl,” she said. “If I had a cigarette I’d light it now. But I can’t help myself. A girl doesn’t like to be alone all the time. No one touching her. I feel like I’ve been here before. It’s all familiar. Desire. Loneliness. Need. All the things I was going to put behind me.”

  “Why do you want to put them behind you?”

  “I don’t like feeling that I’ve disappointed everyone, that I’ve deceived myself and everyone else. I didn’t finish college. I didn’t finish my marriage.”

  He looked at her.

  “Watch where you’re going.”

  “I am watching.”

  The flight club, a little building at the end of the runway, reminded Hildi of the little airport in Galesburg. Nondescript. It had started to sprinkle, and they got wet walking from the car. Checco’s sister, Marina, was there too in the flight club lounge, wearing dark glasses. And with her dog, Bruno. They’d gone to hear her twice at Club Dante, near the piazza, where the dog had sat on the stage with her. A cello player—the same one who sometimes played in the piazza—put a floor under her rich alto voice, warm and bluesy. She’d finished the first set with a couple of songs in English—“Summertime” and Elton John’s “Georgia”—without a trace of an accent, though she didn’t speak English.

  “You sing beautifully,” Hildi said, sitting down next to Marina on an old sofa. She waited for Checco to translate. It was awkward, having to ask someone to translate, but Hildi didn’t care.

  “ ‘My manager told me I have to sing without hunching my shoulders,’ ” Checco translated for Marina.

  “Pensi che incurvo le spalle quando canto?” she asked, turning to Hildi, and Hildi could almost understand her without waiting for Checco to translate.

  “I don’t think you hunch your shoulders at all,” Hildi said. She felt comfortable right away in the flight club lounge. “You sing beautifully,” she said again, and Checco translated.

  “Oh, va’ avanti,” Marina said, and laughed.

  “She says you can pet the dog,” Checco said.

  Hildi kissed Bruno on the top of his head and inhaled his nice rich doggy smell. She passed Marina a plate of the sandwiches—prosciutto and rucola—that Chiara had brought. Checco was edgy because of the weather and didn’t want anything. He stood at the window.

  It wasn’t exactly a rich man’s club, but a club for men of a certain class who understood how to wear expensive old clothes. The tables were covered with flight magazines, books, and calendars, and taped on one wall was the front page of the Galesburg Register-Mail, with a picture of Enzo and Chiara at the airport. An antique rug on the floor had seen better days and so had the comfortable chairs that were arranged around it, but everyone was beautiful: Checco’s father, Chiara, Marina, Bruno.

  “So you really did go to Galesburg,” Hildi said to Enzo. “All the way from Rome.”

  “Just like you come all the way to Rome from Galesburg. In Galesburg we’re eating at the Landmark and Chez Willy’s,” he said, “and the Coney Island. Now will you believe me?”

  “Did you fly over in your Stearman?”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “There are only four Stearmans in Lazio,” he said, “the area around Rome. And there are lots in England. But you don’t fly a Stearman across the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “How did they get them to Italy?”

  “By ship.”

  The blue-and-yellow Stearman, visible on the runway through a large window, was beautiful too. At two o’clock Checco went out and walked around the plane, looking up at the sky. When he came back in he wasn’t happy.

  “You can’t fly today,” his father said. “It’s already raining. I want you to take a look at this mole.”

  “I want to show Hildi the plane first.”

  “Okay, but then I want you to take a look.”

  It had been a U.S. Army plane. Built in 1942. Then a mail plane, then converted for crop dusting, and then converted again to a sports plane. Checco showed her the welds where the plane had been refitted with a larger engine.

  They couldn’t fly because of the weather, but they climbed up into the two cockpits anyway. Hildi stepped onto the large lower wing, reached up and grabbed hold of the handles on the trailing edge of the top wing, stepped in to the rear cockpit, and took her seat. Checco strapped her into a four-way harness and put on her headset before climbing into the forward cockpit.

  They sat on the runway and talked to each other through the headsets, and after a while it seemed to Hildi, as she listened to Checco talking, as if they were flying—flying in the old way with a compass and charts only, climbing to three thousand meters to clear a mountain, shuddering as they exceeded the stall angle, picking up a low wing with the rudder, and coming in for a full-stall landing. It was as if she were inside him, seeing what he saw, and she liked this.

  No planes were going in and out at the small airport, but they could see the big planes from Leonardo da Vinci disappearing into the cloud cover. Afterward, as they stood next to each other, she wanted him to touch her the way he was touching the plane, as if it were a spirited horse that needed calming.

  “You could stay here, you know,” he said. “At least till Christmas. At least till Maddelena finishes the mask. I could help you find a room. Or you could live with Marina. We could—we could go flying. When the weather’s better.”

  She had trouble saying no. She didn’t want to surrender to this feeling, not because it was strange, but because it was familiar. She’d been down this road before.

  “It’s hard for me to say no,” she said. “I’ve always been a yes kind of girl. It’s been a problem.” But she said no.

  Back inside they talked more about Galesburg with his father and his girlfriend. Everyone was so friendly. Marina was beautiful too, and she loved to fly. “ ‘With my brother, of course. Sometimes he lets me take the controls!’ ” Checco translated.

  “You can do that?”

  “ ‘With Checco there, yes.’ ”

  “What about the dog?”

  “ ‘He stays with Papà.’ ”

  Hildi couldn’t keep her hands off Bruno.

  Enzo kept mentioning names, people he’d met in Galesburg, till they finally found a mutual acquaintance—a woman who worked at the Civic Art Center and who brought a little dog to the center with her. Enzo and Chiara hardly knew her—Hildi hardly knew her—but it was a link.

  Enzo asked Checco something which Ceccho didn’t translate. “Papà, not here,” he said.

  “He wants Checco to look at a mole on his back,” Chiara explained to Hildi.

  “It’s swollen,” Enzo said, starting to take off his shirt.

  “Look,” Chiara said; “you make Hildi blush.” She looked at Hildi. “It’s nothing. Just Italian men.”

  It was raining harder, and according to the weather radio there was no letting up in sight.

  Checco checked the mole. “Papà,” he said, “it’s no different from the last time I looked.”

  “Should I have a biopsy?”

  “Is it sore?”

  “No, but I think it’s inflamed.”

  “I’m telling you—” Checco switched from English to Italian.

  “I’m going to put this on film,” Chiara said, but by the time she got her camera, Enzo was already buttoning his shirt.

  “My son, the doctor,” he said, “won’t order a biopsy.”

  Checco tried to explain. He wasn’t that kind of doctor. He did scienti
fic research … But his father just shook his head and put his arm around Hildi.

  “Not that kind of doctor,” he said. “Mamma mia.”

  It was the first time Hildi had heard anyone in Italy say “Mamma mia.”

  Hildi almost stumbled on the steps outside Checco’s apartment. She waited for him to unlock the door—a single-key lock for the front door, three locks for the apartment itself. One long key and two short ones. She had a similar long key and a similar key holder.

  “Can I get you something?” he asked when they were inside. “An espresso? Chocolate? Campari?”

  She picked up a peach from the bowl of fruit on the table, and he washed it for her. He brought her a plate, and she ate the peach, as she’d learned to do, with a knife and fork.

  His apartment was not a rich man’s apartment, but it made her think of the flight club, and of Oblonsky in Anna Karenina, who knew just what clothes to wear when he went hunting or fishing. Not the latest thing, but old clothes with some depth to them. She’d just read this passage to Nana.

  “I’ve been waiting for something to happen,” she said, “and I guess this is it.”

  “Accidenti!” Checco said.

  Checco sat down next to her. He didn’t push her at all, just the opposite, and Hildi understood that this too was a strategy. But she also understood that she was the one driving, the one flying the plane, the one deciding to bank left or bank right. Or just keep on going straight ahead. Which is what she’d wanted to do all along. From the beginning. The rest was all talk. It was time to shut up.

  “Look me in the eye,” she said.

  He looked her in the eye, one eye at a time.

  “What do you see?”

  “I see myself swimming.”

  “Damn,” she said, “that’s just what Maddelena said you’d see. How did she know?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She started undressing, sitting on the edge of the sofa and pulling her sandals off with her toes. She stood up and pointed at Checco, her wrist limp. “You. Checco,” she said. “Follow me.”

  “Subito,” he said.

  “I’ve been trying to live in the present moment,” she said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? But what is the present moment if it isn’t a sackful of memories and thoughts about the future? If you had no memory—nothing but the present moment—you wouldn’t understand anything that was going on.”

  “Maybe you don’t want to narrow the present moment down quite that far. Maybe it just means not to worry too much about the past or about the future.”

  “Okay. I’m going to focus on what’s happening right now. My whole body is focusing on that. But I’m still thinking about your father’s mole and about going to Mexico with my ex-husband. Well, he wasn’t ‘ex’ at the time. I feel like I’m inside a musical instrument—a big one—a piano or a cello like the one at Club Dante. It’s so loud I can’t hear the music. Or inside a painting, and it’s so dark I can’t see what the painter has painted.” And then she shifted gears: “Is your father’s mole okay?”

  He laughed an easy child’s laugh. “He’s had it all his life.”

  “I’d like this to be some kind of ritual—what we’re doing now—some kind of ceremony. So we don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.”

  “It is a ritual, probably older than marriage itself. The bottle of Campari, the bowl of fruit on the table, the peach, a man and a woman sitting next to each other.”

  “I’m trying to commit it to memory. Capture it. The bowl of fruit. The tablecloth. The pigeons on the balcony. It’s like a painting by Chardin.” She walked into the bedroom in her bare feet, holding her sandals by their straps.

  It was like her first time and her last time. It was like climbing a very tall ladder. Climbing up to the top, she felt the strain in her thighs and her calves, ladder rungs under her arches, and then climbing higher and higher. She remembered a painter on a very tall ladder painting the belvedere on their house. Standing down below, in the drive … she’d been looking up at him. She’d just come home from school. She was not afraid of heights, but seeing him standing on the very top rung of the ladder had given her butterflies, the same butterflies she was feeling now, but she knew better than to say “I love you.” Instead she said, “Not yet.”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Not yet.” Climbing higher and higher. “Not yet. Not yet.” And then she was standing on the top rung, like the painter. “Okay,” she whispered. “Now.” And then she was falling over backward.

  And she was thinking that now that that was out of the way, they could move onto something else. But what? What lay beyond this? Maybe this was as far as you could go. Two people who have made love for the first time and are looking forward to doing it again. And again. Maybe this was as far as she’d ever gotten.

  CHAPTER III: CROSSING THE ALPS

  By the end of their third week in Rome Louisa had to admit, at least to herself, that her spiritual quest had come to nothing. She’d dragged Hildi—always a good sport—to see most of the Caravaggios in Rome, but the Caravaggios hadn’t spoken to her. Not even La Vocazione di San Matteo in the back of the French church. What had seemed perfectly clear at home in her kitchen when she’d looked at the reproductions in Helen Langdon’s Caravaggio—which Elizabeth had given to her, and which she’d brought with her to Rome—now seemed confused and murky. Standing with a dozen other tourists in the darkness at the back of the French church and peering into the Contarelli Chapel, she wasn’t even sure which of the men was Saint Matthew—the man with the beard or the man counting the money. She wasn’t sure which man Christ was pointing at. Three people in the picture were pointing at other people: Christ was pointing, Saint Peter was pointing, and the man with the beard was pointing; but it wasn’t clear whom any of them were pointing at. And Christ’s limp wrist bothered her. She had to keep feeding the meter so the light would stay on.

  It bothered Hildi too. “If you’re going to point at someone and say ‘Follow me,’ ” Hildi said, “you’ve got to do better than that.” And she demonstrated, holding her arm out and pointing straight at her grandmother and saying in a loud voice that made the other tourists turn to look at her, “Nana, follow me.”

  She should have listened to Father Cochrane, who’d tried to tamp down her sudden enthusiasm for a spiritual adventure. She’d called him the night of Bart’s death, feeling guilty about casting the first stone at her husband of over fifty years. Real remorse was something new for her. Down in the cooler with Bart stretched out between them, she’d laid out her spiritual agenda: fasting, prayer, a retreat at the Cistercian convent up in Dubuque, and the pilgrimage to Rome to see the Caravaggios. The Calling of Saint Matthew. Instead of applauding, Father Cochrane had counseled moderation, counseled her to go slow, but she’d ignored his advice and had spent a week in the convent preparing for the trip by fasting and praying, and had been so weak she’d lost control of her suitcase on one of the escalators at O’Hare. The suitcase had tumbled down the escalator, and she’d fallen down the moving steps on top of it. She was lucky not to have broken something, and when she thought about it now, she felt like a foolish old woman.

  At the end of her junior year at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, Louisa had fallen in love with her Italian professor, Gianluigi Bevilacqua. Actually she’d been in love with him since the beginning of her freshman year, and had expressed her love by studying hard, spending hours in the language lab, and translating Leopardi. “D’in su la vetta della torre antica,” she said aloud, the first line of “Il passero solitario”:

  From high atop the ancient tower,

  Solitary thrush, you sing to the fields

  Until the day is done,

  And your melodies meander through this valley.

  What Louisa knew about passion she’d learned from Gianluigi one summer—the summer after her junior year—in Gianluigi’s little apartment on Broad Street, just across the Santa Fe tracks. Passion had been a light that illuminated everything in her
path, that lit up dark corners in the library and dark corners in her soul. She’d started smoking too, sitting next to Gianluigi on the edge of the bed after making love, enjoying one of his Italian cigarettes. And in the end it had been the cigarettes that gave them away, when Gianluigi’s landlady had smelled smoke, burst into their room, and reported what she’d seen to the dean of women at the college. Gianluigi was dismissed and had to go back to Rome, and Louisa was forced to drop out. He’d promised to send for her, but by the time he wrote to her, it was too late. She’d been frightened; she’d had no money; her grandmother had washed her hands of her. She’d turned to Father Arnie, the young priest who ran the Newman Center at the college, and Father Arnie had found a job for her with the Oldfield family answering the telephone at the funeral home, which was where she’d met Bart. She never smoked another cigarette, but she missed them, and she would have smoked one now if she’d had a pack in her purse, though Hildi would have a fit when she came home.

  So what? Louisa didn’t care. She didn’t like being left alone to fend for herself while Hildi went off with her doctor. The doctor who’d been stopping by to check on her mal da gola, Louisa realized, had really been stopping by to see Hildi, and really, she’d known it all along. This afternoon they’d gone flying—Hildi and the doctor. It was after eight o’clock, and they hadn’t come back. Louisa tried to take some pleasure in Hildi’s good fortune, if that’s what it was, but she couldn’t do it.

  She decided to go out. She could at least walk down Via delle Mantellate, where Gianluigi had lived. She had it marked on her map. It was a short street next to Carcere Regina Coeli, Queen of Heaven Prison.

  Walking down Via della Lungaretta she stopped to study the menus of the different restaurants. She hadn’t eaten in any of them because her mal da gola had not only shaped their days, it had made everything, including the wine, taste off. By the time she crossed Viale di Trastevere it felt like rain. She was tempted to turn back, but instead she bought a small umbrella from a street vendor who was also selling suitcases, flashlights, and backpacks.