searched for a term for the grave walls that made up a large part of the cemetery. Stone cabinets with small plaques, mostly bearing the name and a photo of the deceased, rendered on ceramic. Rocchi, Greco, Proietti, Baldi, Mampieri. The names on the graves were the same as those above store entrances and shop windows in the village. The walls are called columbaria, I learned, dovecotes for souls. Later someone told me the grave compartments are referred to in everyday language as fornetti. Ovens, into which the caskets or urns are slid.
The cemetery was always busiest in the early afternoon. Young men above all fulfilled their duties as sons and grandsons then; they would race in, jump out of their cars, slam the doors and slide rattling ladders up to their fornetti, in order to trade wilted flowers for fresh ones, wipe off the photographs, check the small burning lights. Old men scuffled by the grave walls, exchanged greetings, carried wilting bouquets to the trash and filled the vases with fresh water for the flowers they had brought with them.
In front of each fornetto was a small lamp, evoking an old petroleum lamp, or a candle, or an oil lamp like in The Thousand and One Nights. The lamps were hooked up to electric cables which ran along the lower edge of each tier of the grave walls, and burned at all times. Lux perpetua, someone explained to me. Everlasting light. In daylight their faint glow was barely perceptible.
On rainy days I would stand by the window, not wanting to go out. I fought fatigue brought on by the heavy, wet air. Sometimes the rain was mixed with snow. From the rear windows of my house, which faced north, on the low ground to my left I saw the new housing estates of Olevano, the road to Bellegra, the paved market place, the new school and the sports field, all lying between the cobbled-together, angular new construction and the hillside too steep to develop, with its narrow sheep pastures and a holm oak forest.
Above on the right was the cemetery, a darkly framed stone lodge with a view out onto the ripped-open valley. From their lodge, the dead could watch how ambulances were cleaned at the foot of the hillside, while paramedics made phone calls and smoked; how Chinese merchants set up their booths on Mondays, in order to sell cheap household goods, artificial flowers and textiles; how soccer games took place at the sports field on Sundays. Whistles and calls would echo from the hillside during soccer games, and the dull-green ground glistened in the rain, while old women on the steep path up to the cemetery slowly carried their umbrellas through the olive groves.
Dying
NOT LONG AFTER ARRIVING in Olevano, I had a dream:
I encounter M. He is standing in a doorway. Behind him is a room filled with white light. M. is like he used to be: calm, composed, plump again almost.
There’s nothing terrible about being dead, he says. Don’t worry.
Half-awake, I remembered the dreams I had of my father after he died. My father always stood in the light. Waved. Laughed. I stood in the shadows. At first farther away, then ever closer. In one dream he took me sledding and stayed behind in the white hills, laughing, while alone on the sled I glided down into a snowless valley.
In the afternoon that same day, farther down in the village I saw a dead person being brought out of a house. The body was laid out on a gurney and covered from head to toe. Two paramedics wheeled it through the building entrance into the street, where an ambulance waited. The front door to the multistory house was open behind them. No one followed the paramedics and in every apartment the street-facing blinds were pulled down. No one stood on a balcony and raised a hand to wave farewell. The ambulance blocked traffic on the steep road to the village and the tunnel into the hinterland. A small traffic jam had formed, drivers honked their horns. The gurney appeared strangely tall to me, as if distorted; an adult would stand barely a head above the gurney’s edge and while contemplating the dead body, feel like a child. I imagined standing at the gurney at eyelevel with the dead man, whose eyelids had already been pressed shut, as that is the first task of paramedics and doctors once death is established. The eyelid of the dead becomes a false door, like those found in Egyptian and early Etruscan tombs. The blanket on the dead man gleamed matte. It appeared to be of a heavy, black, synthetic material, like a darkroom curtain.
Clouds
IN THE MORNING at times the clouds hung so low that the landscape all around was invisible. I heard buses droning uphill, voices, the village bells, too, which struck every fifteen minutes. Noises from a different world, and nothing visible but clouds. Over my head the village sounds met the sputtering caws of chainsaws in the cemetery. Come fog, the tree fellers still worked. Their calls could be better heard through the clouds than clear air and, as if in reply, these short, fitful reports from the land of the morți followed the inquiring sounds from that of the vii.
Throughout the day the clouds lifted, broke open, scattered as slack veils and sunk into the valleys. They hung awhile in the holm oaks on the steep hillside, a spindly, disused small coppice, where in the thin tracks between the trunks, objects were put to pasture. Worn-out and rejected objects hung, hindered by the trunks while rolling downhill, diagonally between trees and shrubs: furniture, appliances, mattresses. Delicate vines unfurled like dreams across the covers.
In the afternoon the plain at the foot of the Olevano hill lay dark and severe below high rainclouds, which drifted across the sky over the mountain peaks in brown and blue tones, suffused with yellowish veins of light. The volcanic mountains before Rome loomed lucid and crisp against the distant glow that opened up behind them. Sometimes a remote stripe of sun would blaze a trail to the southwest and briefly illuminate the hovering Pontine Marshes, which in a different light were hardly perceptible. Smoke rose from the olive groves below Olevano and even farther, toward Palestrina. The farmers tirelessly burned the clipped olive branches and fallen leaves. Occasionally a more slender, more dazzling beam of light burst from one of the yellowish veins in the clouded sky and fell like a finger, pointing diagonally onto a column of smoke, as if it were a sacrifice, chosen by a higher hand.
Heart
ON CLEAR DAYS in the first weeks of January, the village lay as if quarried from red stone in the light of the sun, which rose between the mountains behind the cemetery. From my veranda I watched it awake into a toy world, moved by invisible hands: windows opened, a garbage truck crept backward through the lanes, and small figures in blazing vests carried over the trash cans, emptying them into the barrel. Past the palm tree I looked down directly onto the greengrocer that opened its doors around this time. The Arab men arranged the displays, bright oranges slipping into my view of the gray lane. On a large cart lay a mountain of artichokes. In the courtyard behind the closed gate next to the greengrocer, broken plywood crates towered beside mountains of spoiled oranges, tomatoes, heads of green cabbage or lettuce, visible only from here above, a concealed pendant to the neat arrangements in front of the shop. The men, the stands with fruit and vegetables, the garbage truck—it all seemed to be part of a distant theater. Or an unusual theater, whose performances are viewed only from a distance. There was no audience up close.
Behind the village, hills ascended blue and gray, the highest ridge crowned with a row of parasol pines which from here below looked like an ossified platoon, scattered colossal soldiers of an army, perhaps, a rearguard bereft of all hope and any prospect of returning home, cut off from intelligence and provisions, standing exposed at this height to all harsh and bitter weather, lost in contemplation of the valleys. From up there they would have seen boulders, barren grasslands, Olevano in the distance, maybe the village on the right, the dark cemetery lodge on the left, between them the house on the hill—a different order.
As the sun rose higher, the red wore off and the village turned gray. I set out for the gray village, for the greengrocer where Arab men in black anoraks and gloves made calls over Arabic music playing on the radio, or spoke to one another in quarreling tones. They let the weight of their fingertips rest lightly on the scales when weighing the produce and always added a gift to the purchased goods.
I bought oranges and artichokes. The bag was light, but walking home my heart was always so heavy, I thought I wouldn’t be able to carry it back to the house. Again and again I stood still and stared, abashed by my