Remembering Light and Stone

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘Amy’s a mess by now. I mean she’s done everything, she’s done drugs, done alcohol, been in the hospital twice to dry out; she’s divorced, she started her own business and it folded, she went back to waiting tables. She’s mixed up, and she’d tell you as much. But what did my family expect? Did they want her to sell Girl Scout cookies and dress the tree once a year and buy two hundred dollar’s worth of groceries once a week, and then everything would have been OK? In all the confusion, Amy’s at least trying to find out what’s missing at the centre of herself, and she admits that there is something missing, something wrong. Neither my grandmother nor my mother ever had the consciousness to know that about themselves. It’s been awful, but I believe it’s been inevitable, that there’s some sort of crazy logic to it. I do think about my grandmother a lot. Compassion’s important. Particularly when you don’t understand, you have to try to be compassionate.’

  He was quiet for a few moments, then he said, ‘What about your grandmother, what was she like?’

  I said, ‘She was very tough too.’

  The door of the church opened, and another tiny congregation came out, including the two women who had passed us earlier. The bells of the church began to ring, and Ted looked at his watch. ‘We’d better get going.’ We went into the bar and paid for the coffee and cakes. The calendar behind the bar said that it was Sunday, the 29th of October, 1989. Within an hour the streets would be completely deserted. Already we could smell the odour of pasta sauces coming from high, open windows; from some, the clink of cutlery on plates could be heard. We squeezed past some cars parked absurdly tightly, and then suddenly Ted grabbed my arm.

  ‘Look, Aisling, there’s something I want to show you. Look up there, see what it says on that house over there? That’s where Dostoyevsky finished writing The Idiot. Isn’t that something?’

  6

  On the Monday after I had been to Florence, I called down with Franca after lunch, to give her some sweets which I had brought back for her. I found her in a bit of a temper, polishing the white tiles of the hall by sliding up and down heavily with two thick pads of felt strapped to her feet. She was pleased with the sweets. She always liked to think she’d been remembered. There was a real child in Franca. She went on polishing the floor as she talked to me.

  She had had a row with her daughter Lucia on Sunday. Lucia had wanted to go to Rome with her friends to have a cup of coffee, but Franca, usually indulgent, had put her foot down and refused to be budged on the matter. It’s over a two-hour drive from S. Giorgio to Rome, which may seem like a stupidly long way to go for a cup of coffee, but that’s the whole point. It was popular with the young people there to drive miles and miles for some trivial reason – to Florence for a pizza, to the coast for an ice-cream or a sandwich, or to spend half the night driving to a disco in the next region. It’s like the poor man’s version of the millionaire who flies to Paris to buy a box of chocolates, or to have lunch – it’s the grand gesture, not the thing itself that counts. For once, Franca wore Lucia down, but it wasn’t a total victory. They had been invited to have lunch at Franca’s old family home, in the hills behind S. Giorgio. Lucia decided that if she wasn’t going to Rome, she wasn’t going there either. They had a grand old row, but in the end Lucia did stay in S. Giorgio. It was very unusual for them to have a fight like this (partly because it was very unusual for Franca to refuse Lucia anything). Lucia must have been quite shocked by it. The following day, Monday, they were both still smarting.

  I liked Lucia a lot. She was a source of great wonder to me, when I thought of myself at the same age. I remember being forced to live in a plum-coloured school uniform, studying until late into the night, conning the past historic of the verb ‘to drink’ in French, while listening to the storms coming in off the Atlantic. I used to see Lucia coming home from school. Sometimes I’d watch her walk across the square in a warm golden light with a couple of girls her own age, while I was out standing on the balcony. They sang softly together. The first time I heard it, I couldn’t believe my ears, when I remembered the bus home from school in Ireland. Nobody sang sweet songs there; instead we all smoked and swore like a Black Maria full of lifers. Lucia had a Swatch with a blue sky and clouds on the face. All around the circumference, where the numbers should be, it said in French ‘Life is not a valley of tears.’ I wish I’d had a watch like that when I was fifteen.

  Franca took the pads off her feet and brought me into the kitchen. She wanted to give me some of the cheese which her sister made, sheep’s milk cheese.

  ‘You must come up to the farm sometime,’ she said as she wrapped up the cheese. ‘I know you’ve been up into the hills, but you really will have to come with me. Come up at the end of the year, when they’re killing the pig.’ Lots of families in the country there fatten up a pig, and then in the middle of winter, the pig is slaughtered and butchered.

  ‘Not to see the pig being killed, of course,’ Franca added. ‘That’s not very nice to see. But it’s interesting to see how they cut everything up, and make hams and salami and sausages. They say you can use every bit of the pig except its squeal. It’s always a good day, always a good lunch to be had, a real classico.’

  I said I’d like to go along.

  ‘You can bring a friend too,’ she said, grinning at me.

  I said primly, ‘Thanks.’

  She put the packet of cheese on the table in front of me. ‘You’ll enjoy that. It’s good, pure, real cheese. No additives or chemicals in that.’

  There certainly weren’t. Eating the cheese that night at dinner was the strangest sensation. I can only say that it was the oldest-tasting thing I have ever eaten. I could imagine shepherds in the hills eating such cheese hundreds of years ago, and it being exactly like that: the same sourish softness, oozing a little whey. It tasted as if there had been minimal human interference, as if it hadn’t been made into cheese, but had simply been allowed to turn into cheese in its own time. The other things I ate that night, including a cake, a yoghurt and some bread, all tasted ersatz in comparison to the cheese.

  It made me think of how we don’t know the future, and we’re forgetting the past. People in the past couldn’t imagine the future in physical terms, because they didn’t know the things there would be. We can’t imagine the past because we can’t forget the present, it clutters us out. The sense of the past that I got from the cheese interested me, because the future interests me, particularly the ability to read the future – not fortune telling, not pretending to know exactly what will happen. Nothing interests me less than astrology and all that mumbo-jumbo. But to know the spirit of the future is the important thing, and the people who can do that do it because they really understand the spirit of their own age. They aren’t taken in by what seems to be the prevailing spirit of the times. Dostoyevsky could read the future in this way. It’s one of the reasons I like his work so much.

  When I was growing up in Ireland, I knew I wanted to leave, but I didn’t know where I would go, I didn’t know how it would be. I used to wonder what I’d be doing, and what I’d be like, when I was thirty. It was strange now to be in that future, which wasn’t, of course, as I had imagined it. I suppose I had thought I would be happier, and again I thought of Lucia. It wasn’t fair to compare me to her. It wasn’t my fault, all the things that had happened. She didn’t know what it was to grow up feeling dread in her own home, or what it was to fear someone everyone said she should love. I didn’t want to think about where I would be after ten more years.

  At the end of that week, Franca came to me, and asked would I do her a favour. She wanted to go to the ceremony in the cemetery for the Day of the Dead, but her mother-in-law wasn’t well. She wanted me to go with her, and although I didn’t really want to, I said that I would.

  On the morning of the day, I met Franca downstairs. She was holding a pot full of bright yellow chrysanthemums, and a stout candle encased in red plastic. She had done a good trade in candles like this in the past week. Almost e
veryone bought them to place on or before the tombs of their families. It was a bitingly cold day. As it wasn’t too far, we walked to the cemetery, which was beyond the town walls, on a slope at the back of S. Giorgio. It was old, and had become too small for the community. A new and bigger cemetery had been built down in the new part of S. Giorgio, for the people who lived there.

  ‘Che freddo!’ said Franca. Franca spent half the year saying how cold it was, and the rest of the time complaining about the heat. She took a few months at the transition from winter to spring and from summer to autumn to devote the full extent of her moaning to the effects of the change of the season, which she said gave her all sorts of allergies and aches and pains and moods. On this morning, though, I had to agree with her. It was no simple matter to stand outside in the cold for almost an hour. As we passed through the gates in the high walls, into the dimness of the cypress-shadowed cemetery, Franca commented, ‘Look at all these old ladies. Don Antonio had better not keep us here any longer than he has to, or he’ll have a few more dead bodies to pray over than he did at the start of Mass.’ A few people turned to look at us disapprovingly as we giggled, and we did our best to look serious.

  The Mass was to be said at a place which itself looked like one of the many mausoleums around the cemetery. It was a structure which consisted of a roof, three walls and a gate, which enclosed an altar. The gate, usually padlocked, had been opened, and a linen cloth and golden vessels had been set out. Don Antonio was just beginning to say Mass when Franca and I joined the huddle of women in front of the small chapel. I didn’t concentrate much upon what was being said. I let my mind wander freely, but I tried to keep a look of complete distance and abstraction from my face – although I don’t think anyone would have noticed.

  I looked at Don Antonio as he fumbled through the motions. After all these years, it looked as if he too was trying not to let people see how much of a habit it had become to him, how little it meant to him. He also looked as if his mind were elsewhere, but maybe it just seemed that way. Maybe I was doing him a great injustice. He was so old. By the law of averages, he would soon be dead too, probably one of the first there to die. I wondered what it was like to know that you were at the end of your life. I was thirty then. I hadn’t come round to the idea of death, of the inevitability of my own death. It wasn’t something I cared to think about, I still held it to be an event that would be far in the future. I knew that to be too hung up on it would be a bad thing, because it would be a distraction from life. I had had more than enough of death in Ireland – not just personal bereavement, but the way it was in the air the whole time. People at home always seemed to be talking about who was dead, or just about to die, and they were always going to funerals. When I moved to France, I found it so strange. People must die in France as they do in Ireland, but it’s more unobtrusive there. I was seventeen when my father died. I know that I was gossiped about because I didn’t cry much, because I didn’t seem to be particularly sad. I was gossiped about years later for exactly the opposite reason when my mother died, for crying too much. They said I felt guilty, and they said I deserved to, for having gone away and left my mother on her own. I didn’t care what they said. I knew my own heart on these things, and that was what mattered. They hadn’t had to live my life, they didn’t know the things that had happened, they didn’t know the complicated web of lies, secrets and violence there had been. I loved my parents after my own fashion, I can only suppose that they loved me after theirs.

  Italian cemeteries are so different from graveyards at home. I like the place where my parents are buried; it’s small and green and it overlooks the Atlantic. I found cemeteries eerie places in Italy, too neat, too enclosed. I hate the dryness of them, the lack of soil. It’s like being put away in a cupboard rather than being buried. I let my eyes wander around the place. Lots of the older tombs had photographs fused to them, on small ceramic ovals. The one nearest to me showed a man called Umberto Rossi, who died in 1936. The picture showed him, dark eyed and wearing a soft hat. Under the photograph were inscribed the words ‘I know that I will rise again.’ That suddenly struck me as being completely absurd. How could anyone ever think that he would live again, with his soft hat, this man from the past? It was all dust, whatever of the soul, the spirit. I couldn’t believe that the body would rise: the idea of it repulsed me. What was I doing there?

  They had reached the point in the Mass when the priest told them to put their flowers and candles before the graves, and then he started to sing a hymn in a wavering voice. The people joined in loudly as they lit the candles, and dispersed in the cemetery to put flowers and lights in front of the tombs of the people they had loved, their sons and wives and fathers and husbands and daughters. I thought it was the saddest thing, this remembrance. The power of human love can unsettle me, even though I know that there are only two things at the centre of life: the search for love, and the fact of death. Somebody gave Umberto Rossi flowers and wept for him.

  Franca was tugging at my sleeve. It was only when she handed me a big white handkerchief that I realized I was crying too.

  7

  I often used to wonder if Adolfo, the waiter in the café that I used to go to in S. Giorgio, ever guessed that there was a reason for my early-morning visits, and what that reason was. Probably not. He never showed any signs of doing so. I only went there when I felt I had to. I would often call in of an evening, or after work, to sit on the spindly gilt chairs and read the papers there. But I never dropped in so early in the morning without my reason for doing so. Sometimes I would wake early at that period in my life, feeling very depressed, and then not be able to get back to sleep, so I would go to the bar to have a coffee and cake, and try to get myself ready to face the day. It usually helped to some degree.

  It was barely seven when I went into the bar on that particular morning. I said hello to Adolfo and ordered a cappuccino and a cornetto with jam. I watched him as he made the coffee with a few deft movements, some bangs and hisses from the chrome coffee machine, and then the cup was set on the steel counter before me with a flourish. He flicked open the lid of the metal sugar container on the counter, and I helped myself, with the aid of one of the abnormally long spoons in it. Patting some chocolate powder on to the top of the milky foam he said, ‘The cakes are arriving now,’ and nodded towards the door.

  A man was coming into the bar as he spoke, carrying on his shoulder a long shallow cardboard box, which he put down on the counter. Adolfo immediately started to lift the cakes from it, with rapid fluent movements of a pair of tongs, and to arrange them in the glass-fronted case directly under the counter.

  ‘Ecco!’ He had arrived at the cornetti and handed me one across the counter, wrapped in a small paper napkin. I took it, and continued to watch him while I ate, and drank my coffee.

  Sometimes I would feel it was foolish to take not just such interest, but such solace, from this spectacle. There is something ridiculous about it, like buying yourself something small when you feel down, a bar of Swiss chocolate or some expensive soap, and absurdly feeling a bit better because of it. I pulled the cornetto apart. It was still warm and flaky because it was so fresh. It oozed apricot jam. I watched Adolfo as the man kept carrying in boxes of cakes, and carrying out empty ones when Adolfo had finished with them. The glass case quickly filled up with flat tarts full of yellow custard and scattered with crushed almonds; pies covered with heavily glazed fruit; rolls of apple strudel full of spice, sultanas and pine-nuts. The last box carried in contained savoury things, which were set in a space reserved for them on the left: crisp bread rolls with cheese and salami protruding from them; long savoury pastries full of smoked ham and egg. I admired the speed and neatness with which Adolfo emptied the boxes and filled the case, gently layering some of the flat cakes like tiles on a roof. I felt safe and contented to be there, in the warmth, with all the colours and the smells of the cakes. I felt as Hansel and Gretel must have done before they realized that the witch in the ging
erbread house was going to eat them. Below the cakes there was a closed glass case, where there was a display of bottles of champagne, surrounded by paper streamers. Behind Adolfo there were glass shelves, laden with boxes of chocolates and expensive biscuits, together with glass jars filled with chocolate money, silver dragees, sugared almonds, and sweets wrapped in coloured foil.

  The preceding afternoon, it had clouded over, and started to rain. It was seldom showery in S. Giorgio, and when the rain did begin, it could settle down without stopping for two days. This time it rained heavily, steadily, and I stood by the window looking out at it, until the apartment seemed to be totally enclosed by the weather, wrapped in greyness and darkness, and it triggered off in me a sense of desolation. Everything in my life – everything I valued and had struggled for, suddenly struck me as reprehensible. My independence, my job, my apartment, the books and music which meant so much to me, the whole external aspect I presented, all struck me as absurd. I thought of all the effort and energy I had expended and still needed to exercise every day to keep this whole show together, and it seemed pointless and foolish. I felt that I didn’t have the energy to keep it all going. My life was fuelled by pure will. Nothing was left to chance, everything was willed, worked for, and yet it wasn’t making me happy, it was just a new trap I had made for myself.

  I felt my life beginning to unwind around me in a way that was no less terrible for it having happened many times before. I started to think of Ireland, of my family, my home; started to remember all the things I was trying to forget. I couldn’t control my own mind, the old self-loathing, the familiar, bitter dissatisfaction with everything. The grey rain hammered down, driving in against the windows. I was too conscious of my self, of my own body, and I wanted desperately to flee myself, even if only for a short time. The rain was nailing me in, I felt as if I were in a cage. The rain sheeted across the square. It was too cold and dark to go out, and in any case, I was already too far gone, and where was there to go? I tried twice to call Ted but he wasn’t there. On both occasions I could hear the phone ring and ring in the empty apartment. What good would it have done even if I had spoken to him? What difference would it have made, even if he had been there with me in S. Giorgio that night? When these fits of desolation came upon me, I felt completely isolated, irrevocably lonely, and to be with someone, particularly someone I liked, only made me more aware of how cut off I was from them, how isolated.