Loris will write a poem about it, Antonio said. That’s how he deals with stuff.
True, I said. Which may help him. But I don’t know about Raffaella . . .
Encountering her in la colla later in the day, I realized Raffaella didn’t actually need consoling. She’d recognized there was nothing anyone could’ve done; she was letting it go. And Mia, she said, needed a good romp. Cooped inside during the rain-filled midday, the dog was restless now that the sun had come out again—so the two of them were going up to the high meadows of Logarghena. Mia had already clambered into the backseat of the car.
Up there, said Raffaella, the air’s so bright and fresh. I need it, to clear my head. And Mia will tear around and chase sticks, just like a puppy! On an afternoon like this, you can see all the way to Corsica from there . . .
That enormous emptiness, as Kinnell writes in “Wait,” asks to be filled.
7. Go Tell Your Father
Two murders and a suicide.
Quite a surprise, this news. We’d no idea that our borgo had been the site of such drama. Not recent drama, but still . . .
Elide tells us the stories as she sits in la colla, waiting for her friend Rina—with whom she oversaw the renovation of the Madonna—to make her way slowly down from her apartment. Rina lives by herself on the second floor of a house partway up the main lane; weather permitting, Elide joins her each afternoon for a few hours of outdoor chat and surveillance. The elderly widow of a contadino who, before his death several decades ago, managed the small farm below the village walls where Elide still resides, this woman with thick white hair and brilliant azure eyes is the borgo’s newscaster.
One murder, she explains, was committed by a man who, off his rocker to begin with, grew enraged when his wife asked him to hand her a tool for some task she was performing. He picked up a block of wood and cracked her head open with it. I try not to picture the whole scene, but can’t help imagining at least the start of it: the wife saying something like dammi quello martello—give me that hammer—and extending one hand carelessly toward her husband, while the other hand holds a nail in place on the wall. The wife thinks she’s in the middle of hanging a watercolor; they are standing next to the fireplace, the woodpile . . .
The other murder occurred when a man who’d been dumped by his betrothed killed her as she stood staring out a window of the house they’d shared. The view from the window must’ve been lovely; the woman would’ve seen the rolling foothills of the Appennini, the valley, maybe even the Alpi Apuani in the distance. The man was standing outside. He saw her gazing—not at him but at the church—and took aim and shot her. Again I imagine the scene prompting the act: the woman must’ve told the man what he didn’t want to hear; he’d stormed out; she was left alone to gaze out the window at the church, from which (she was musing) God or Jesus or Mary or some saint or other ought to step forth to help her, though none felt close at hand. Only pain did—and fear of her ex-fiancé with his temper . . .
Elide’s a fatalist, Antonio says to me after we’ve bid her good afternoon. She accepts these tales of violence; they don’t really shock her. People can get crazy around here—that was Elide’s prefatory comment, before her narration began. Her half-smile registered not amusement but acceptance: no point being baffled, this is just how things sometimes go.
* * *
Then there was the suicide, which took place roughly thirty years ago. I ponder the event as we walk up the lane to our house.
Elide’s father-in-law shot himself in her house.
Her husband was out in the fields, per usual. The mother-in-law was in the house but not present in the bedroom where the act took place. It was Elide’s ten-year-old daughter who entered the room and found her nonno, who’d propped a rifle between foot and jaw and pulled the trigger.
Such a mess, Elide says, shaking her head, you wouldn’t believe it. I had to send my son to tell my husband what happened—I couldn’t go, I had the girl to deal with, and my mother-in-law . . . And then we had to spend close to a million lire in court! That’s close to two thousand euro, a lot of money. To prove he hadn’t been murdered by one of us!
Do you know why he did it, we ask.
Elide shrugs. He had asthma and emphysema, she answers.
That’s it? I ask, incredulous. He wasn’t dying of something?
No, she says, and shrugs again. A million lire, she repeats. The whole thing such a mess. And for my girl . . . it wasn’t good.
It most assuredly wasn’t, I silently agree.
Then there’s her brother. I try to picture it: the boy trotting out to the pig shed, calling Papa! Papa! The father not noticing or hearing at first, then stopping whatever he’s doing—feeding the animals, washing out the slop—to stare at his boy, who’s very agitated and yelling something absurd: Nonno’s dead, Nonno shot his head off! That boy, grown now like his sister, must still be seeing the confused anger on his father’s face, still be hearing his outburst—porca Madonna, what are you saying? Still unsure, all these years later, which was worse: the event itself, or having to deliver the news to a man who, in the instant of hearing it, was transformed from father to son himself, a stunned boy.
Of course such things happen all over the world, not just in remote Italian villages. I’m scornful of the crazy-villagers trope, the mythologizing of violence in small rural communities, as if such places are inherently predisposed to it. Hardly. It happens anywhere, everywhere.
Outside Denver, Colorado, for instance. In La Repubblica we read that a man walked into a packed movie theater—the new Batman film was being screened—and started firing. Killed a dozen people and wounded close to forty others, including an infant. Fancied himself the Joker; dyed his hair red for the role. Amassed such an arsenal of guns and ammunition in his apartment that the authorities say they’ll have to blow up the whole booby-trapped place, rather than risk sending personnel to clear it out.
Do we know why he did it? Was he dying of something? Perhaps. Of something in his mind, though we’ll never be sure what it was. In any case, he’s one of those people who submit without warning to their demons, and do their bidding. Here in Castiglione, no one’s heard of the Joker, and ordering boxes of bullets by mail is well-nigh impossible. One can, however, easily get one’s hands on a block of wood, and a hunting rifle’s not too hard to find. It’s just a matter of what the demons say to do, and when they give their orders.
Elide’s stories get me thinking, not just about acts of violence I’d like to label parlous or ludicrous and be done with (though of course nothing’s that simple), but about the need for drama in the first place.
Come up for coffee! Rina calls as we pass beneath her house the next day. Rina’s front windows give onto the village’s main lane. It’s hard to avoid her if she’s on the lookout for company; she’s old and lonely, and we are drama, for her. Come up and talk to me, she means. Come tell me something I can’t see on TV, haven’t heard fifty times already from Elide, would like to hear from my niece or nephew if they’d bother to visit, which they don’t very often, since I’m their spinster aunt and they have no time for me—as I understand, for I’d feel the same were I in their shoes . . . Come enliven the looping-back-on-themselves days I have left! Come tell me something I can feel strongly about!
It’s different when I call my mother.
She admits she has little in the way of news for me, and is eager to hear mine. (The other cat, she asks, not the one you call Tristana—the dandy, Big Boy, is that his name? Does he still hiss at Tristana when you feed the two of them?) Yet although she takes my stories seriously and listens with attention, my mother knows how to detach as well as to engage.
Her heart attack and broken pelvis have recalibrated her expectations. She’s focused on her day-to-day experience, which, boring though it mostly is, nonetheless validates the fact that she’s no longer lost in the haze of medications that clouded her thinking and feeling for months. Her wit’s fully in
place: she enjoys jokes and tales of folly. I make sure to save up “you won’t believe what X did” vignettes, to make her snigger. (She howls when I tell her about a funny bumper sticker: Jesus would slap the shit out of you.)
But she can take only so much information about the outside world before growing tired. And her hearing’s worsening. She’s worn aids for a while, but they’re not helpful when she’s in a conversation with more than two or three people; the voices’ volumes and timbres compete, confusing her. When she finds herself in a group—family, friends, it doesn’t matter—Mom is adept at dropping out without making anyone feel awkward. Sitting silently, hands in lap, she offers a bemused half-smile while other people produce words. Unless the topic really absorbs her, she’s content to let it go.
My siblings and I check in on Mom in person or by phone, as we’ve always done. It’s the steadiness that matters. As a family of adults, we’ve never communicated frequently; weekly check-ins are the norm. My parents neither expect nor want more. But when my siblings or I get busy and a fortnight passes between calls, my mother’s aware of it.
My father notices such gaps, but not as keenly. Not that they’re discussed: Mom’s the last person in the world to remind her kids to call. When I forget, as I sometimes do, the remorse I feel is like no other; it doesn’t go away even after I phone and talk with her. It accretes. Sometimes I feel I’m storing it up, perversely, in anticipation of her death, so that it will break over my head in a huge wave and wash me away.
Grief will do that instead, I expect. But I don’t yet know what that icy water will feel like. Remorse is familiar.
My mother has never needed theatricality from her family—no passion plays or tragedies.
Her life has been filled with its own quiet forms of drama, starting with retinitis pigmentosa and continuing with the gradual loss of most of her hearing. Debilitating arthritis plus several falls have led inevitably to her current wheelchair-bound state. All more than enough to make even a reasonable person think, now and then, about staving in somebody’s face with a log, or blasting somebody out the window, or filling one’s coat pockets with stones and marching straight to the nearest river.
I’ve never asked my mother if she’s had such fantasies. Now and then she’s cracked a little, and something shows through a chink in her armor. Mostly, though, she’s unbreachable. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve heard my mother articulate anything having to do with her body and its woes.
She can be surprisingly hard-hearted. It’s not her default setting, but it’s not an aberration, either. Mom can handle only so much evidence of troubled passages or rocky moments before changing the subject. Dilemmas of work or romance, bouts of anxiety: such challenges have generally elicited from her little more than a shrug and a smile. Lapses in confidence—her kids’, her husband’s—are for her close to unseemly; she has no patience for failures of resolve. After great pain, a formal feeling comes, wrote Emily Dickinson. A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
My grandmother Nell was a different bird.
Nell was three weeks shy of her hundredth birthday when she died, of natural causes, in a hospital near her home in New Jersey. She lived in a marvelous house on a steep hill overlooking the Delaware River—the kind of place children love to visit, with narrow staircases, a second-story porch, and an attic straight out of a storybook, dim and book-stuffed, where my grandmother slept. The view from her porch was a bit like ours in Castiglione: trees everywhere, a lush, susurrating swath of green. There were orange daylilies clustered at the top of Nell’s driveway, just like those a half-mile down the road from us here. The riverbank on the other side of the Delaware, across the way, was in Pennsylvania—a fact that fascinated me when I was young. I loved the notion of two states divided by flowing water, a river in neither one place nor the other.
A year or so before her death, Nell tried to kill herself. To do so, she implicated several family members in the act. First she called my mother—her daughter-in-law—and announced her intention. My mother called my father, who was at work—in a classroom nearly two hours away, teaching math at a private day school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. (I picture a schoolboy knocking on his classroom door, politely advising him to go to the headmaster’s office. There, a nice pearl-earringed secretary would explain that his wife had just called, sounding a little agitated . . .) In the meantime my mother phoned her only sibling, Katie, who lived a half hour from my grandmother. Katie drove over. The front door was unlocked, so she entered the house and went upstairs and found my grandmother, alive though not fully lucid, in a bathtub full of reddened water.
The hospital social worker assigned to her case described Nell’s attempt as “non-trivial.” It was intentional, not an accident, yet seemed not to have been undertaken so she’d definitely succeed.
It soon emerged, once Nell began talking (and she was a great talker, always), that she’d been less hell-bent on offing herself than on getting everyone’s attention, my father’s in particular. She wasn’t happy about how she was being managed by him in her old age. Theirs was a contorted relationship, and this was the final kink in a chain of conflict and mutual misunderstanding.
Her act messed with my father’s mind, needless to say. It messed with mine as well, since I was quite close to Nell. Yet I hadn’t had to play Katie’s role and call the ambulance, haul Nell out of the tub, and wrap towels around her wrists. Nor had I had to play my mother’s role, that of the person most punished in this drama: the one who could do nothing but inform others. The one whose nose was rubbed in her powerlessness.
Afterward, Nell tried to explain to all of us what she’d been thinking and feeling, but we couldn’t get it. Our shock, anger, and sorrow foreclosed any real possibility of understanding. You should’ve seen it, she said accusingly, I’ve been trying to tell you . . . (Those lovely dreadful lines from another Stevie Smith poem come to mind: I was much too far out all my life / and not waving but drowning.)
After a bit, we all stopped speaking of the matter. Whatever chance there might’ve been for mending the rift vanished when, eleven months or so after her suicide attempt, she began to have trouble breathing, was taken to the hospital, and died peacefully a few days later, in her sleep, as any ordinary ninety-nine-year-old lady might do. She was cremated and her ashes scattered in her garden, as she’d requested.
To nobody’s surprise, my mother wanted no part of that valedictory ritual. It was undertaken by my father, who executed Nell’s wish in considerable haste.
I can still picture him in his mother’s rectangular flower bed, armed with a bucket and, briefly, an old rake from the garden shed. The rake’s crooked tines were barely able to scratch the soil; after a bit, my father replaced the useless implement with a rusty but sturdy spade. He worked alone. I stood at the front door and watched him fling the bucket’s contents here and there—unable to decide if this laying-to-rest of a parent’s clumpy dust was more comic than pitiful, or vice versa. In any case, he soon got the job done, and washed his hands of her.
* * *
Teach us to care and not to care: that wonderful line from T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” comes to mind as I visualize my grandmother.
Though the poem ends with a prayer to the spirits of fountain, garden, river, and sea, it’s really a poem about private demons and their lures. Eliot’s answers to them—his Christian sureties, doubt-tinged though they may be—have never satisfied me. Demons don’t bother with the mind and its gymnastics; they go for the emotional jugular. They turn strong feeling upon itself, weaponizing it for their own purposes.
I’ve always loved that poem. And I have Nell to thank for it. One mild summer afternoon when I was a teenager, my grandmother sat me down at her small kitchen table, opened her dog-eared copy of Eliot’s Collected Poems, and tracked “Ash Wednesday” with her forefinger. Teach us to sit still / Even among these rocks, she murmured. The words riveted me; I repeated them si
lently to myself, aware as I did so that I, like Nell, rarely ceased moving. In that moment all I wanted (and I wanted it with every molecule in me) was to stop: to be able to sit still.
Yet the prospect was terrifying, for it meant I’d have to confront these rocks. Although I could only guess what they might signify for Nell, I already knew what they were for me. These rocks: words and acts that couldn’t be undone, entrances and exits blocked by error and folly. Rehearsal, it seemed, wasn’t rehearsal at all, but actual performance; and in an eye’s blink the curtain would fall, our lives would be over and done with—
Listen to the whole thing now, said Nell.
She started at the beginning and read it through, beautifully. When she arrived once more at these rocks, a raw anxiety coursed through me. What if I bungled my life’s chances, or, worse, became too scared or sad to try?
Suffer me not to be separated, my grandmother intoned, concluding the poem’s final prayer, and let my cry come unto Thee. Then she stood and began busying herself with kettle and teapot.
Oh, great, I thought as I fetched cups and saucers. Who the heck knew who Thee was? Blessèd sister of rivers and whatnot—ah, the poem’s ending was a gorgeously worded disappointment. Nonetheless, when I reread “Ash Wednesday” at home on my own (Nell lent me her copy), I found myself fervently sharing one of the wishes voiced by the poem’s speaker: that I may forget / These matters that with myself I too much discuss. Yes, I thought, why not just cancel all this existential difficulty, turn away from it . . .
But could I really do that?
Doubtful, I consoled myself with another pair of lines, each offering not an idea but an image: Rose of memory / Rose of forgetfulness. Two roses, each representing a basic human impulse: to retain, to let go.
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