He turned to me sharply, as if to say, Am I not correct, madam?
Startled, I said nothing.
And so we entered a gallery of that amazing cemetery which was to become for us a huge prison and abattoir of mystifying horrors.
Like any good guide, Gabriella began discoursing as we gazed along the first of the lengthy gloomy arched galleries, statues on plinths inside niches, ornate plaques crowded between the niches, the regular slabs underfoot covering the dead sealed away beneath.
“. perhaps our cemetery here in Genoa is the most astonishing in Europe. The revolutionary Enlightenment no longer wished to use churches and churchyards to bury the dead. The posh old families, some rich ever since Genoa contended with Venice for mastery of the Mediterranean. New nineteenth-century bourgeois wealth demanded sculptural realism like three-dimensional photographs in stone. At first a classical romanticism, then symbolism, and ultimately art deco. Angels of consolation becoming disturbingly erotic and sensual. Death becoming an uneasy ambiguous mystery — ”
“Excuse me,” said a tall skinny Dutchman, “why the different colors of the candles?”
We were beside a memorial to a nun, whose photograph taken long ago was surrounded by dozens of little imitation candles jostling on ledges, with lavish fresh bouquets to either side; she was still adored. The pseudo-candles, squat tubes with a protected bulb shining dimly atop each in the shaded daylight, were like feeding bottles with plastic teats for babies or maybe squeezy bottles of skin cream. Some were blue, others red, though all bore an oval image of the Pope gesturing a blessing.
“Some,” said Gabriella, “shine for a week, others for a month.”
Ah, different sorts of battery.
We would need those pathetic little lights later.
A profusion of galleries was here, and a huge population of marble statues seeming particularly lifelike because of darker dust upon them. As Gabriella escorted us, talking now and then, I came upon a bald- headed, long-bearded monk, his hood resting on the back of his neck, who had turned away — permanently — to consult a little book. He was yet another statue, as if petrified while alive. Trickles of white stains seemed caused by windblown rain that had reached him; but what took my attention most regarding the masses of more sheltered statues was how the dark grey dust of a century and a half had added a velvety shading to all the pleats and folds of drapery, intensifying the naturalism. Too vast a task, presumably, to keep so many hundreds, or thousands, of statues clean. I licked my finger and rubbed a sculpted leg. The moisture made a little dark mark, yet my fingertip came away clean, not coated in grime.
“The dust becomes united with the stone,” said Gabriella, noticing. “That adds chiaroscuro.”
Indeed. Some of the realism was astonishing. The sheer details of stockings or of a baby’s bonnet, for instance! Families or individuals in perfectly rendered clothing of the nineteenth-century middle class stood or knelt by memorials, grieving or consoling or gazing. Stone doors stood ajar, as though the soul of the departed had only just disappeared through them.
And then the sensuality of female curves, and drapery, and petrified flesh! A beautiful young woman nude to the waist swooned in the arms of a robed Death, his veiled skull apparent; yet at the same time this couple might well have been dancing a tango.
Emerging into sunlight, we took in a fieldful of more orthodox modern gravestones and flowers, lined with many tall slim cypresses and junipers, beyond which a great stairway ascended to a domed Pantheon flanked by monumental colonnades. Behind and to the sides, a wooded hill arose, from which hundreds of white mausoleums reached up like temples or the spires and towers of cathedrals.
Yet by now we’d used up the time alloted for our glimpse of the necropolis of Staglieno. Shepherded by Gabriella, the twenty-odd of us trooped back along a gallery towards the gateway.
Just then the tombstone-slabs, which composed the floor of the gallery, trembled. The gallery itself shuddered, and daylight dimmed. Dust didn’t exactly stir into the air, yet visibility lessened considerably as though the air itself had become grey.
Gabriella called out, “I think that’s an earthquake tremor, but don’t worry.” She was a busy, practical woman, mid-forties. “Genoa is actually on a fault line. However, a big quake offshore in 1887 didn’t do much harm to this cemetery even though many buildings in the city were badly damaged.” Was our guide being totally honest? “So you’re in a safe place. Probably there’ll be no more tremors. I’ve lived here all my life.”
So we proceeded onward.
Could clouds have suddenly darkened the sun at the very same moment as the tremor? No doubt that was a coincidence, yet I almost felt as if — so to speak — reality had shaken somewhat. Strangely, we seemed to walk for ages, as though we were treading the same slabs over and over again, although we weren’t, for I looked down in puzzlement at the progress of my feet.
From the office inside the gateway, a couple of middle-aged men in shirtsleeves emerged. The cemetery’s superintendent and a subordinate, a caretaker maybe? Jabbering at one another, they stared up at what we could see, now we were in the open, was a dull pearly sheen masking the sky, as if a peculiar bank of mist had descended over the cemetery — and I was surprised to see the very same just outside the gateway, as if that was an exit to nowhere and nothing rather than to parked cars and a tour bus.
“Signora Vigo!” Of course the superintendent would know all the tour guides by name. Urgently he gestured Gabriella to come — along with the rest of us, who crowded as best we could, in the wake of the two men and Gabriella, into an office where a largish TV set was showing silently in flickery black-and-white what I took to be an old Japanese monster movie.
An enormous tentacle- headed thing with a scaly body and what looked like stumpy, spiky wings was standing up in the sea near an ocean liner. The creature was a grotesque blend of octopus, humanoid, and dragon, and dwarfed the boat, which seemed the size of a toy. Waves from the monster’s motion through the water caused the vessel to tilt alarmingly, though it righted itself. What giant bathtub had this epic been filmed in?
I couldn’t understand any of the rapid- fire Italian, perhaps Genovese dialect, being exchanged between the two men and Gabriella, who looked ashen. Abruptly the movie changed its scene to a view of New York, where another of those monsters stomped in the Hudson River as if that was merely a shallow gutter. The malign creature towered above the skyscrapers of Manhattan, which it began to wreck, flailing elephant-trunks of arms before turning and heading seawards, as if toward its proper home, capsizing merchant ships and ferries like scraps of flottsam.
To my astonishment the channel was CNN, an English-language banner running along the bottom of the screen. An old monster movie showing on CNN? And in flickery black and white? With no sound? I realized that the TV hadn’t been showing CNN when we crowded into the office; spontaneously the TV had jumped channels. And now I caught up with the words as they scrolled sideways.
GIANT SEA MONSTERS ATTACK SHIPS WORLDWIDE.
The channel hopped again. Paris, obviously; Arc de Triomphe in the distance. Creatures exactly the same in appearance as the enormous “sea monsters” — yet now more like two storeys high rather than two thousand — were proceeding with a rolling gait along the Champs Élysées destroying cars either by collision or by treading upon them. All silently. I glimpsed two of the tentacled dripping behemoths themselves colliding and fusing of a sudden into one — while further along the avenue I could swear that a single creature became two identical creatures. Suddenly the TV went blank.