were dotted lights, even small fires in the open here and there, or so it seemed to me. I stopped in Ferrara, just as M. and I had planned to do on this trip. Ferrara in winter. The garden of the Finzi-Continis in snow or freezing fog. The haze of the pianure. Italy, a country to which we had never traveled together.
The next morning, I found the car with a bashed-in window. The backseat and everything stored there—the notebooks, books and photographs, the cases filled with pens for writing and drawing—were littered with shards of glass. The thief had taken only the two suitcases with clothing. One of them was filled with things that M. had worn in the last months. I had imagined how his cardigan would drape over a chair in the unfamiliar place, how I would work in his sweaters and sleep in his shirts.
I filed a police report. I had to go to the Questura, an old palazzo with a heavy portal. A small policeman sitting behind a desk in a chair with a high, carved back recorded my complaint. His police cap, adorned with a magnificent gold cord, rested on a pile of papers beside him, like a forgotten prop from a sailorthemed Carnival celebration.
On the recommendation of the lower-ranking police officer who had handed me a copy of the report, I spent hours searching for the stolen suitcases among bushes and shrubs, near the parking lot at the foot of the city wall. I found only a bicycle carefully covered with dried autumn leaves. When it became dark I gave up my search and made a few necessary purchases. That evening I noticed the address on the Questura papers’ letterhead: Corso Ercole I d’Este, the road leading to the garden of the Finzi-Continis.
The next morning I left, heading toward Rome and Olevano. It was bitterly cold, the grass atop the city wall was covered in hoarfrost, and large clouds formed before the mouths of the vendors assembling their stands on Piazza Travaglio. A few freezing African men loitered around the cafes. Market days promised more life and opportunity than other days of the week—some trading, help wanted, cigarettes, coffee.
The light beyond Bologna, the view from the highway, evoked memories of my childhood and were a strange comfort—even the gas station convenience stores, still selling those extravagant chocolate sculptures—as if the whole world could be so innocuous and incidental, as disconnected from all pain as the bright landscape that glided past me, a moving panoramastage which tried to fool me, in my deep fatigue that no amount of sleep would relieve, into thinking it was the only thing moving, and that I remained stationary. For a time, I believed it.
But after exiting the highway in Valmontone, I was in unknown territory, remote from the space of memory. As traffic crawled through the small town, I realized that this Italy was a world away from the country of my childhood experiences. Past a small hill range sprawled a plain, mountains surging at its other end. The summits in the second and third rows were capped in snow. Perhaps it was the Abruzzi already, still linked with outdated fantasies of wolves and highwaymen in my head. Disquieting terrain, like all mountains.
On my first morning in Olevano the sun shone and a mild wind rustled the withered leaves of the palm trees crowding my view of the plain at the foot of the hill. A bell struck every quarter hour. A different, tinny one followed a minute later, as if it had required this intermission to verify the time. That afternoon the sky clouded over, the wind became cutting, and a shrill noise began abruptly in the village. It appeared so far away, the village—a peculiar illusion seen from the house on the hill, as it took mere minutes to reach the square, where a festival was taking place. At this festival Befana presented children gifts to the tune of Italo pop. Befana, the epiphanic witch; the previous evening in small supermarkets grandmothers had haggled for discounts on cheap toys in her name. They had wrenched the gifts from the sale baskets that blocked the aisles at every turn. Silver-clad Barbie dolls, neon-colored soldiers, lightsabers for extraterrestrial use. An announcer called out, a timid choir of children’s voices repeated her, and again and again I heard the word Be-fa-na!, stressed on the first syllable, as the dialect demands.
On the night after the day of Befana, moped drivers dinned through the lanes, and I learned that here every sound is multiplied, broken by numerous surfaces and evidently forever sent back to this inhospitable house on the hill. I lay awake, contemplating how for the next three months to force my life into a new order that would let me survive the unexpected unknown.
Village
IN THE MORNINGS I would walk to the village via a different lane every day. Whenever I thought I knew every route, a staircase would reveal itself somewhere, or a steep corridor, an archway framing a vista. The winter was cold and wet; along the narrow corridors and stairs, moisture crackled in the old stone. Many houses stood vacant and around lunchtime the village was very quiet, almost lifeless. Not even the wind found its way into these lanes, only the sun, which usually stayed away in winter. I saw elderly villagers with scanty purchases, bracing their feet against the steepness. The people here must have healthy hearts, trained on these slopes, day after day, with and without burdens and beneath the weight of winter’s dampness. Some climbed very slowly and steadily, while others paused, drew breath—whatever breath there was to draw here, in the absence of light or any scent of life. On these winter afternoons, not once did I smell food. On brighter Sundays in the early afternoon, clattering plates and muted voices would sound from the open windows on Piazza San Rocco, but on gloomy winter weekdays the windows remained closed. There were no cats roaming about. Dogs which might have remained silent had they had a bone yapped at the occasional passersby.
Then one day the sun shone again. The elderly came out of their houses, sat down in the sun on Piazzale Aldo Moro and squinted in the brightness. They were still alive. They thawed like lizards. Small, tired reptiles in quilted coats trimmed with artificial fur. The shoes of the men were worn down on one side. Lipstick crumbled from the corners of the women’s mouths. After an hour in the sun they laughed and talked, their gesticulations accompanied by the rustle of polyester sleeves. During my childhood, they were young. Perhaps they were young in Rome, rogues in yellow shoes with mopeds, and young women who wanted to look like Monica Vitti, who wore large sunglasses and stood in factories by day, occasionally partaking in demonstrations, arm-in-arm.
Above the valley whitish plumes of smoke unfurled, more buoyant than fog. After the olive trees were pruned, the branches were burned—daily smoke sacrifices in the face of a parasite infestation that threatened the harvest. Perhaps the stokers stood in the groves by their fires, shading their eyes with their hands, looking to see which columns of smoke rose in what way. All was blanketed in a mild burning smell.
Cemetery
IN THE EARLY MORNINGS I would walk the same route every day. Up the hillside, between olive trees, curving around the cemetery to the small birch grove. The two kiosks with cheerful-colored greenhouse flowers and garish plastic bouquets weren’t open yet. The municipality workers, busied since my arrival with thinning out the cypresses that had grown into one another, arrived in a utility van and unpacked their tools. The roadsides were littered with debris from the felling: sprigs, cones and pinnate, scaly leaves. Beside the cemetery entrance larger tree clippings piled up, thrown together sloppily and interspersed with stray tatters of plastic bouquets: pink lily heads that refused to wilt, yellow bows. Seen from here, the house on the hill lay between the village in the background on the right, and the cemetery in the foreground on the left. A different order. The village, quiet in the blue-gray morning light. Behind the cemetery wall the men called loudly back and forth to one another.
From the birch grove I looked onto the village and the cemetery; in the mornings not a sound from there reached this spot. I could see only white smoke past the wall and a row of ascending cypresses. Tree remains were being burned. The arborists were not yet felling. They first brought their small sacrifice. They must have stood there watching the fire. When the smoke thinned, the first saw revved.
In the afternoon I visited the graves. Both flower kiosks were open. On the left fresh flowers were for sale: yellow chrysanthemums, pale-pink lilies, white and red carnations. The kiosk on the right offered artificial flower bouquets with and without ribbons, hearts, little angels and balloons of various sizes. The woman selling flowers at the kiosk on the right was occupied with her phone for the most part, but occasionally cast me a sullen, mistrusting glance.
I