The Detour

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “Because I think we’re going in circles.”

  The toddler was crying now; Mamma Digirolamo had picked her up, but couldn’t carry her for long. Marzia would have to take her. We lost some good muscles on the right.

  We trudged out of the woods and up a hill, where we caught a tantalizing breeze, then down into the green woods again. We set down the coffin, taking a longer break.

  I was about to press Rosina for more information when an old man with a flat cap came walking toward us, walking stick over one shoulder, whistling. We gingerly lowered the coffin and stood next to it. He raised a hand in greeting. I was hoping that he was a priest in disguise, that we had been trying to rendezvous with him and that explained the circuitous route. But he approached Cosimo and Zio Adamo and Mamma Digirolamo with too much exuberance and ease for that to be the case. Hugs and kisses were exchanged; Cosimo delivered a rambling address; the neighbor lowered himself onto the coffin lid with a heavy sigh and took out a pipe. Mamma wrapped her heavy forearms around herself, under her wide bosom.

  “Are we going soon?” I whispered to Rosina.

  “He believes we’re having a picnic.”

  “I thought we were having a picnic, after the burial.”

  “Our neighbor doesn’t know about the burial.”

  “And the coffin?”

  “Does it look like a coffin to you? He believed us when we said it was a picnic table.”

  The neighbor pricked up his ears at the German and said something to Cosimo, who made a show of introducing us. “I told him that you have come,” Cosimo translated for me, “to learn more about the truffle-hunting season. You are here three months early, but he is not surprised. Bavarians aren’t always the brightest.”

  “Thank you very much, Cosimo.” And to the neighbor: “Grazie.”

  We gathered around the ersatz picnic table, wiping our foreheads, fanning ourselves with our hands. The neighbor’s eye kept flitting from person to person, eyeing Mamma’s shoulder bag, round with the bread loaf inside, and the straw-wrapped wine bottle slung over Zio Adamo’s shoulder. They hadn’t offered anything yet; the neighbor hadn’t offered to leave. Sweat glistened on our faces. The hillside promised to be cooler, but we couldn’t yet ascend. Finally, Mamma Digirolamo grunted and dropped the bag at her feet—There, fine, have at it—and Rosina took out the bread and cut everyone a slice.

  We ate in the wood, in the sultry shade, the old neighbor munching happily on his slice of festive bread, peeling his hard-boiled egg, chewing his slice of sausage, eyes squinting with pleasure, while everyone else glanced nervously from one face to the other, nibbling unhappily. Finally, the neighbor stood up and rapped his walking stick hard against the coffin top, making Mamma Digirolamo wince.

  As soon as he was out of view, Mamma Digirolamo exploded with a torrent of spitting and cursing, signs of the cross, and gestures up through the heavily leafed trees.

  “He’s joking with us, she says,” Cosimo explained over his shoulder.

  “The neighbor?”

  “No. Enzo. She says he put the neighbor in our path. She says this is just his kind of humor—to make his own funeral such an inconvenience.”

  “But Cosimo,” I said, ignoring Gianni’s scowl, “why are we taking this route? Are we hiding the body in the woods?”

  “No, back up to the hill.”

  “The one we almost climbed, just past the field?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why didn’t we go straightaway?”

  Mamma Digirolamo unleashed some kind of lament.

  “She does not like the talking—from any of us,” Cosimo explained, breathing heavily. “To do this right, we must be quiet.”

  “I know, but really, this is heavy.”

  Rosina cut in: “We are confusing his spirit. My mother is from the South, and this is her family’s tradition. Enzo died a bad death, we haven’t done a proper Mass, and he will want to stay on this earth, so we can’t make it easy for him to find his way from the grave back to the house. We go in circles—Sì Mamma, prego!—until we’ve walked enough to confuse him. Then maybe he’ll stay in the grave long enough to give up and go away to heaven.”

  She risked upsetting her mother further to add, “You wonder why I moved away to Munich? Because of things like this.”

  “Maybe we will walk all the way to Munich.”

  She pushed her face into her sleeve, stifling a small noise. “I’m not laughing.”

  “Of course you aren’t. Who could laugh at a time like this?”

  Rosina tucked her chin and cheek down into her shoulder, until she had enough composure to say, “You will stay for dinner, of course.”

  Mamma Digiloramo shushed us again before I could answer.

  I’m not sure what I expected from the burial itself. This being Italy, perhaps I expected opera—or at least oratory. Instead, there was only more work. The walls of the grave sloped and the bottom wasn’t wide enough for the poorly made coffin. We all waited as Cosimo stripped off his overshirt and, in white undershirt and dusty trousers, jumped down into the grave to square the corners better. That was the most disturbing moment of the day: seeing him down there, head lower than the level earth above, occupying the space in which his twin brother’s body would remain for perpetuity. From above, seeing his tanned shoulders, and staring at the nubby dark-gold hair that had loosened and grown curlier with the day’s work and humidity, the resemblance was more clear than ever.

  The hole was widened, the box lowered, and Zio Adamo said a slow and halting prayer. Then Cosimo picked up a shovel again and I picked up the other. It took longer than I expected, and it was different than just watching, waiting, or weeping. The physicality of loading each weighted shovelful felt like a very purposeful attempt to put a barrier between all of us and what had happened—but that barrier was not a denial or a distancing. It did not feel peaceful. But it felt necessary. There were worse ways to say good-bye to someone. And there were worse things: like not saying good-bye at all.

  With the last tamping of metal against earth, Cosimo dropped the shovel and turned to shake my hand, then pulled me into a full embrace. “Grazie, molto grazie.”

  “I’ve done nothing, Cosimo. Really—nothing.”

  But he held me still, so grateful that it only made me feel terrible for what had happened and regretful that I couldn’t do more. And still he embraced me, until my own muscles loosened and I stopped resisting, until I returned the full measure of his embrace and the touch itself seemed to change that feeling of frustration into a purer grief, a simpler camaraderie. His strong back weakened; I felt gravity working on him. He was starting to collapse; he was choking up. He had sleepwalked through a long list of tasks, and now that he was nearing the end, there was no relief, only confusion. He stepped back and turned and stalked down the hill, back toward the house, and Mamma Digirolamo hugged me quickly before following him, her worry turned toward the surviving son, who had held up somehow through all this but might not hold up much longer.

  The rest of us stayed up on the hill. I wandered away to look at the five other gravestones—an 1896, a 1911, two 1918s, and the newest one, 1935.

  “That one is my father’s,” Rosina said, coming up behind me.

  Several paces away, just downhill from the graves, Gianni ate another piece of picnic bread, leaving the eggshells scattered in a half circle around his feet. Then he lay down with a hat over his face. Marzia lay down, too, on her side, her eyes open but glazed. In that position, I could see the draping of her loose yellow dress over her round belly. It had taken me this long to realize she was pregnant—not too pregnant to help carry a coffin, evidently. Regarding her rounded form, and imagining the new baby who would be born just when the olive harvest was coming in, I found myself envying Gianni for all he had here: the family pleasures that would coincide with the changing seasons, and the fact that he and Marzia had an imaginable future together.

  Their daughter, Renata, tried crawling over her f
ather’s legs. When she was shooed away, she came to sit in front of Rosina, who took the child’s chubby hands in her own and played a finger game with her, acting out a story about a rabbit and a wolf. The first time, the little girl liked the attention well enough, but the third and fourth time, she was beside herself with tense glee, understanding now the fate that awaited her, once the wolf came in for the kill, snatching the make-believe rabbit, and all of it ending with a tickle. Every possible emotion flashed across the little girl’s face—from worry to joy to surprise to recognition, and just a little horror when the wolf finally pounced. But then it was all fine again, and that was the fun of it, enduring the tension to get the pleasure, understanding one couldn’t have the one without the other.

  “I’ll stay—but just for dinner,” I told Rosina.

  She smiled. “I thought you would.”

  A feast was laid out, late that afternoon, at a table outside under the trees. Mamma Digirolamo set eight plates for the adults and then caught herself, claiming she was really setting one for Renata, who was old enough to have her own plate now rather than eating off her mother’s. There was too much food. It would have been the right amount for a normal funeral, if everyone had been invited: farming neighbors, old schoolmates, cousins from faraway, Farfalla and her family, other hope-filled young women who’d stayed available as long as they could, Enzo’s polizia colleagues and the eight or ten men in town with whom he had most frequently shared talk of fast automobiles or football. They would have filled the house and covered the terrazza. They would have emptied the cellars and the cupboards and scraped clean all the plates.

  But instead, this: the only seven adults who knew of Enzo’s death, the only seven who would know for a few more days. So, the plates remained full. But there was no sense of waste. It seemed that the Digirolamo family needed the look and the smell of abundant food—the splitting crust of bread, the fruity gold of olive oil pooling at the bottom of a shallow dish of potato gnocchi—to remember that they were not the ones who had stopped living.

  Pushing away her plate, Mamma Digiloramo began to tell a story about Enzo, using a deep and castigating voice, but it was clear from the reactions of her listeners that the story was more mocking than serious. Marzia erupted into laughter first, holding her daughter’s curly head loosely in her hands, playing with the silky strands as she listened; then Rosina laughed, and even Cosimo managed a crooked smile. No one translated, but there was no need. We were hearing, I could guess, about the time Enzo first got lost in a market; next, about some confusion over a farm animal; later, about an early girlfriend who—this made clear from the way Mamma pushed her own shelf of cleavage up toward her neck—was amply endowed. I didn’t struggle to understand the words;

  I just sat, glad to be forgotten, and studied the faces and voices of this family, the differences and similarities, the way Rosina’s throaty laugh resembled her mother’s, the way fatigue and sadness showed on Zio Adamo’s face, as they did on Cosimo’s, even when he was smiling. When they toasted some anecdote I couldn’t understand, I raised my own glass, toasting what perhaps only a stranger could see and what is so hard to appreciate in one’s life: the continuity of family; the elastic, accommodating permanence that persists despite the transience of flesh.

  When even the light conversation had stopped, even the occasional mumbled request for another slice of bread or another glass of water or wine, Gianni pushed himself back from the table and began to deliver an address that I mistook as a eulogy of some kind until I saw Mamma Digirolamo’s hands go to her cheeks. Cosimo leaned forward in his own chair, then stood with a hand up, signaling Gianni to desist.

  Cosimo addressed me directly for the first time since dinner had begun. “We should leave as soon as possible, but we still have to wrap the statue again, for safe transport.”

  “But what did Gianni say?”

  “Take your time. Finish your meal. I will go look for some blankets and padding and then meet you by the truck.”

  I turned to Rosina. “What did Gianni say? What did your mother get upset about?”

  “He said that the carpenter who made the coffin heard things in town. The head of the polizia is coming here again tomorrow morning, for a friendly visit.”

  “If they know something, why didn’t they come today?”

  “Because they had a telegram today. They are waiting for visitors coming to join them from Germany.”

  One day late, and the gears were efficiently turning. I seemed to be the only one who was not surprised.

  “Buona notte,” Cosimo said to his mother, but Mamma Digirolamo objected, fingers grasping at his forearm.

  Marzia, with sleeping Renata clinging to her hip, began to pick up the plates, but then Gianni said something to her and she set the plates down and entered the house behind Zio Adamo. Gianni delivered terse instructions to Rosina and followed his wife, leaving only Mamma Digirolamo arguing with Cosimo, Rosina, and me.

  Cosimo twisted his arm away, extracting himself from his mother’s grip, and with a regretful, tired look, turned his back. She stood, whipping the napkin out of her lap. She approached me and I stood as well, lowering my head slightly, ready to accept another of her wide-bosomed, maternal embraces.

  With my eyes down and my arms slightly out, I could smell the warm blend of yeast and oregano on her approaching breath. I was starting to say “Buona notte” when she slapped me with astonishing force.

  “Mamma!” Rosina shouted with horror.

  Mamma Digirolamo pursed her lips and walked into the house.

  Rosina ran around to my side, holding a wet napkin, which I took and touched absentmindedly to my face.

  “She caught me by surprise,” I managed to say, working my jaw, still registering the heat of that small handprint on my cheek.

  “She’s mad at you for taking Cosimo away so soon.”

  “But he has to go. Gianni said it. The polizia are coming. We have to get the statue out of here.”

  “Believe me, she wants you and the statue to go. But she doesn’t want Cosimo out of her sight. He’s in no condition to travel.”

  “He isn’t, but I need him.” I touched my face again. “I thought your mother liked me.”

  “She did. But now you’re going to betray her. She doesn’t forget.”

  Rosina turned away and lost herself in contemplation of the table loaded with leftover food, glasses, and dirty plates. The other women had left. The men, except for Cosimo, who was occupied, couldn’t be bothered with domestic details. From the droop of her shoulders, I gathered that this was nothing new. She stood and stacked several of the dishes, moving around the table haphazardly, carrying them to a tub on an outside counter.

  “Do you want me to bring the other plates?”

  When she didn’t answer, I began to carry them one at a time, stacking them next to her and standing for just a moment to catch the scent of her skin before returning to the table. Another plate, stacked on top of the last; another intake of breath. It was possible that she was waiting for me to go away, that she was annoyed by my presence. But then again, her head was tilted just to one side, as if she were trying to catch something too—a sound, a smell, a memory. I lingered next to her after I’d stacked the last one.

  “We shouldn’t wash them,” she said without turning, holding a plate caked with sauce. “We should break them.”

  “Break the plates?”

  “It’s a tradition.” She sounded distracted. “Like taking a long route to the grave. Like the picnic bread and putting mementos in the coffin.”

  “Really?”

  Instead of answering, she turned and flung the plate into the air, over the table, and into the stone oven at the far end of the terrazza, where it smashed into a dozen pieces. The noise woke her from her half trance. She pressed her hands to her face, horrified and gleeful.

  “You’re certain this is a tradition?”

  “Hand me another.”

  The first had been a lucky h
it. The second missed the mark and went flying to one side, landing in the soft grass unbroken.

  “I’m sure you could do it better,” she said, breathing more heavily now, cheeks flushed. “Show me the correct way. Don’t you spin around, before you let go? Show me how to hit the oven again. I want the biggest possible explosion.”

  I hadn’t thrown a discus in years, and these plates were too big and greasy besides. She was more likely to fling a plate into the house.

  “Come on, Ernesto. Show me.”

  “Your mother will be upset, seeing all this mess.”

  “Let her be!” Rosina’s voice had jumped, like a violin string cranked taut, to a higher pitch. “She’s been upset with me for years. She’s never stopped being upset! And your time is up as well, don’t forget. She slapped you. Don’t you feel angry about that?”

  “Just surprised …”

  “Then throw one for Enzo. Throw one because he got you into this mess.”

  But I’d long since stopped blaming Enzo.

  My silence and inaction only enraged her more. “You should be furious!”

  “I am furious,” I said, but my voice was only weary.

  “You’re not!” She grabbed another plate, used the back of one hand to scrape away the messy sauce, rearranged her grip and prepared to let it fly. “I’d love to see you furious!”

  “No, you wouldn’t.” Her increasing volume made me feel only more subdued. “I have to help Cosimo with the statue. I have to go.”

  She returned the plate to the counter, looking disappointed. Bringing a dirty finger up to a wayward strand of her hair, she dragged more sauce across her face, which she tried to wipe away discreetly with the back of her wrist. “I saw your statue. I went and took a good look today in the back of the truck after the burial.”

  “And?”

  “It wasn’t worth all this.”

  When I said nothing, she continued, emboldened. “That is the problem with a thing—a thing that one person owns and sells to someone else, and that everyone wants.”

  “That is the world of art.”