birds—I would have expected to find coal tits here, linnets and nuthatches, even black woodpeckers and tree creepers. In lieu of their calls, the air was filled with the drone of a radio mast, which, bounded by clumps of bamboo, rose up directly next to the cemetery. Scattered cypress saplings buckled over, as if in pain, right-angled away from the droning mast. The unbroken buzzing ran beneath the occasional small talk of grave visitors like a murmur. Elsewhere, I saw birds: in the bushes along the path to the birch grove were small flocks of long-tailed tits and, on brighter days, warblers; farther up the mountain I heard goldfinches. Above the olive groves that surrounded the house I heard the green woodpecker but never saw it. The shattering and shrill, yet often also heartrending, wistful, and anxious sequence of tones that the green woodpecker uttered became, in this winter quarter year, the sound that grew entwined with the village, the house, the groves, the hillsides, drawing everything to it—the light, the colors, and the ever-shifting layers and grades of blue and gray in the landscape. On mornings without rain, it was the first bird I would hear; with its call it seemed to be forever letting itself plummet from a high point, because despite the call’s loudness and density, it faded as if dying away, as if the bird were capitulating, falling silent in the face of something larger again and again, without my ever having seen it, even at times when its call sounded so near and hung so out in the open, distant from all treetops, that the invisibility seemed incomprehensible, unfathomable, as if either this call or the invisibility were a trick, an uncanny joke played on me every day anew by someone unseen. Even the childhood lesson, to look for the green woodpecker in the grass, was no help and the bird remained a sound, which came closer to my heart each time I heard it, without ever taking visible shape.
In late January, wet snow fell. For two days the clouds hung so low that I never saw the village. I labored on my daily walks through the heavy damp air and swaths of wet wood-smoke. I met the caretaker at the gate, a nervous woman constantly busied with the fastidious cleaning, putting-in-order and arranging of the estate. She lived with her sister in a narrow house next to the entrance gate. In the mornings, at the break of day I would hear the two women exchanging words loudly. The sister stood on her tiny balcony, while the caretaker, on her equally tiny terrace, chopped wood for her oven, or hung laundry to dry. I saw her every day, yet knew nothing about her family, her history, her life—nothing aside from these reciprocal shouts at dawn, which occasionally sounded like quarrels, and the television’s flickering in her room past nightfall. I preferred to keep a distance from her nervous desire for order. But on this day, shrouded in white, wet clouds, when she appeared all at once communicative and calmer, she pointed upwards—surely to the sky, which couldn’t be seen—and said: Giorni della merla!
The blackbird days are the last of January, in Italy supposedly the coldest of the year. So cold that one day a blackbird and its young, freezing, searched for shelter in a chimney. On the first day of February the sun shone and the blackbird, once white and radiant, emerged dyed forever black from the soot, but the bird was content, grateful for the sooty chimney’s warmth. This story of plight and metamorphosis with its subsequent moral—sealing the winter fairy tale like a leaden stopper—is told in several variations, but it always involves these days of the year, and they are always referred to as the days of the blackbird.
On the first of February the sun shone this year, too. The caretaker, rushing past, promised the end of winter, while the cheesemonger, accompanied by his daughter’s grinning nods, explained that proper winter only begins in February. With his hand in front of his apron he demonstrated the height of the snow some winters—and never until February! he said. So much for blackbirds! He made a dismissive gesture with his hand and I paid his daughter, who on that day wore an old-fashioned mob cap, like a chambermaid from an early film.
In the afternoon I found a dead bird on my narrow apartment balcony, from which I could see only the cemetery and not the village. In the morning, viewed from this angle the cemetery hung like a colorless, angular bulk in the shadows; it could have just as well been a factory, a bunker, or a prison, untouched by the morning light. Now the sun shone brightly, and the cypresses stood as sharply excised figures against the blue sky. For the first time since my arrival, the balcony tiles were warm from the sun. The small bird lay there as if nestled against the wall to bask in the light, and it was still soft and warm, but no longer living. I found no injury. It was a coal tit, its small head bore an all-black hood, which began at its beak and left blank a white spot on the back of its head. Around its neck, too, was a black line. The hood glistened in the sun, and the cream-white down on its belly trembled in the gentle breeze. Its back was dark gray, its wings somewhat darker with two rows of extremely delicate whiteish flecks, between which the feathers appeared blacker than on the rest of its wings. How tiny, how surreally small creatures look, once drained of life. The bird lay so light in my hand, as if it were hollow: it weighed practically nothing, a pitiful thing, which now so soon after its death one could hardly imagine capable of life.
I waited until dusk and once the television in the caretaker’s room began to flicker I buried the bird between the olive trees below the terrace.
Market
MONDAY WAS MARKET DAY in Olevano. Serving as the market square was the concrete area next to the school, situated at the foot of the hillsides, which were developed only after the tunnel was excavated. At some point it must have been located at Piazzale Aldo Moro, long before the square was given this name. Every town in Italy has an Aldo Moro square, and each one seems to have been torn from some pleasant former purpose, eclipsed by the shadows the new name cast. The tunnel, which had transformed Olevano into a through-town and led through the rock, couldn’t have been more than a few decades old. Had my father ever found a reason to take us to Olevano, we might have discovered another village at the end of the winding—perhaps never-paved—road, which looked only to the west and toward Rome. Small paths would have led along the ridge and through the village to the hinterland, past the house where I was staying, which now sat directly above the tunnel entrance on the hill. There, curious hikers from foreign parts could walk to the Villa Serpentara in the holm oak hills and to Bellegra. The tunnel undoubtedly shifted and distorted the Olevanesi’s maps. How strange it must have been to suddenly be able to go through the mountain instead of having to ascend and descend it. The tunnel was a damp pipe, which always smelled of diesel fumes from the buses. It was not long, but very narrow, and described a slight curve. Quickly it became the pride of the village—after its construction it was a frequent subject of postcards. Yellowed black-and-white photographs on the matte, sturdy cardboard of earlier days, their borders once-white, show the entrance of the illuminated tunnel at night: the opening of the mountain, crusted round with craggy cliffs, lights reflecting on wet asphalt, no vehicles or pedestrians in sight. Pictures of forbidding nights. After the tunnel construction was complete, Olevano performed another act of land reclamation: the drained flatland between thousands of river arms flowing near the sea. Houses were built on the back hillsides, which surely had once been forested, and at the bottom of the small valley, where a number of rivulets converged from the mountains, everything was asphalted, the stream courses buried beneath the school, beneath the sports field and the market square, which was occasionally used for other public events. The rivulets crept to a stretch of water, united at the edge of the leveled land, and at the foot of a rocky slope, overgrown with bushes, they flowed farther downhill between blackberry vines and willow thickets. On the terrace-like expanse above the slope were houses, their balconies and loggias hanging directly above the precipice. In many places along the road to Bellegra, similar reckless developments had cropped up, which, seen from the rear windows of my apartment, appeared unsystematic and disordered—clusters of houses, apartment blocks, skeletons of buildings partly gnawed away by time and weather in a raw state of incompletion. Dimly glowing street lamps signaled the unfinished streets which might never had names, and even in the completed houses I rarely saw an illuminated window. The terrain lay raw in the light of day and dismal by night, perhaps even inconsolable over its utter ineptitude, suited neither as landscape nor shelter.
From my veranda every morning I saw people coming from the westward small plain, where the vegetable gardens lay beneath hoarfrost. By bike or small delivery wagon, occasionally even by donkey, the vegetable gardeners brought their produce to the village. Artichokes, puntarelle, black cabbages, and endives. After the nightly white frost, a residue from the smoke plumes of olive