An equivalent problem for the very rich might be to have the remains of their dear departed stolen from the expensive family vault. Then a few days later comes the request for a ransom. It happens occasionally. The rich are inevitably churchgoers here. Indeed, it’s an interesting party game to ask people if they know of any rich, famous businessman or celebrity who is not a practising Catholic. When the head of the Ferruzzi family refused to pay a few billion Lire for the corpse of his dead father-in-law, the kidnappers sent a message to the newspapers, denouncing the industrialist for his shameful lack of respect.
But a more mundane unpleasantness that might occur in Montecchio’s cemetery on the Day of the Dead has to do with the loculi, the niches in the wall into which coffins are slid. Colloquially, these are known as fornetti, little ovens. Since there is no earth to cover the coffins, they have to have a metal lining inside and are sealed so as to be airtight. The corpse thus burns itself up under its own steam as it were.
But the unpleasantness has to do with the flowers. Each loculo has its little metal ring for a vase. You remove the vase, chuck the old flowers, put in the fresh ones and put the vase back. But for the upper rows of loculi you’ll need a small step-ladder to get up to the vase. Step-ladders are provided, although you may have to wait. Worse still, you may find, especially on the Day of the Dead, that holders of the bottom loculi (notoriously wealthier) have invaded the floor space with an extravagance of flowers. This means it will be difficult for you to site your ladder. You move the flowers. The person who placed them there returns and complains. Arguments are not unusual. Voices echo round the stone walls. The Arena prints a story about a group of old men who came to blows in Verona’s cimitero monumentale.
‘Non fortuna, sed labor’, claims pompous gold lettering in black marble referring to the exploits of some local entrepreneur. As with the graves in the ground there is a hierarchy with the loculi. You can have the cheaper variety where you are pushed feet first into a long deep niche, or the more expensive version where you are introduced sideways and have a whole two metres of façade space. Which lends itself well to declarations of undying love or long lists of achievements, grandiose claims: Industria ed onestà, boasts another marble slab. The more preposterous dead. But for the most part the stones are simple: the name, the dates, a photograph, a tiny red light or lumino. These lights were once candles, but are electric now. All the loculi and indeed the graves are wired up. It’s part of the package. The electricity board sends the bill and gives warning before cutting you off.
We walk about. There’s a buzz of low voices, the clipping of heels along the porticoes where flowers abound, the scraping of step-ladders. A subdued murmuring echoes back and forth between the high walls, the graves. The word ‘poveretto’ can occasionally be heard. It is very civilised. Sober, but not gloomy. There are smiles, exclamations, perhaps some tears where a knot of well-dressed folk are visiting the more recently deceased. The day is bright, the flowers attractive, likewise the sun on clean stones. People come, pay their respects, go. Old attachments are at once acknowledged, distanced, given structure. There’s a sort of serenity about it, which is charming in its way.
We find il professore’s loculo: Umberto Patuzzi. The photograph is recognisable, although one had almost expected to see him standing beside one of his road signs — to where? Purgatory? Paradise? With his little backpack. Instead, he is wearing a collar and tie like the people walking along the gravel paths around him. And he, or perhaps Maria Rosa, resisted the temptation to put in a photo of a much younger man. He looks his sixty something years. Whereas Lucilla has already chosen her grave snap; and shown it to us. A flirty, well-built young woman of thirty years before. ‘They feel sorrier for you,’ she explains.
Beside il professore’s small slab is a square of blank cement: the freshly inserted Maria Rosa, as yet without her stone. It’s disgusting, Lucilla tells us that evening, that Signora Marta, being the niece and closest relative, hasn’t even ordered a stone yet. It simply makes it clearer than ever that she never cared for the woman, she just wanted her money. Well, she’ll never get it. Nor her flat. Never, never, never! After her day dutifully carrying flowers around, Lucilla is burning with rage again. ‘Because the flat is mine, mine, mine,’ she shrieks, giving me a key to the garage at last.
And indeed our position in Via Colombare appears to be getting more precarious. Following Maria Rosa’s death, Signora Marta produced a will apparently written in the last days of the old woman’s life. It leaves all the property to her and she is eager to sell the flat as soon as she has the title deed in her name. Fortunately, Lucilla has produced her will too and is contesting Marta’s, saying the signature must have been assisted and is thus invalid. Indeed, she is now accusing Marta of corruption and fraud and her lawyer has asked for the opinion of a handwriting expert. But Lucilla wants to sell too if she wins. Either way we lose.
And we begin to get telephone calls. The woman with the twig broom and the garage extension doesn’t want to be nosy, but is the flat for sale? And who owns it exactly? Her nephew will soon be finishing university and … For a couple of weeks we get one or even two such calls a day. So and so has mentioned to so and so that Flat 4 Via Colombare 10 may be for sale and since their daughter is shortly to be married …
From over his wall, where he is digging the ground to let the frost in, Lovato watches. He hangs around, and when I’m out there doing some condominium duty, he motions to me to show he wants to speak. Is the flat for sale? His daughter and son-in-law are cramped living with them. There’s only one garage for two families, and if …
Thus, it occurs to us at last that when all those people came out on to the street that first day we arrived, it wasn’t just because they wanted to enjoy the spectacle of Lucilla’s raving. No, they all have designs on our flat. Pretty well every family in the street. If it becomes available they want to be able to buy it. For the dream of so many of these people is not only to remain at home, but to have their children and grandchildren remain at home too. They would do anything to stay in the same village and as near as possible to all their relatives from birth until death; and afterwards too, the attraction of the vault as opposed to the grave in the earth being precisely that proximity: Papà at the bottom, then Mamma, the brothers, the sisters, the children and all the long slow recycling afterwards.
Most of them seem to manage it — to stay at home that is. The local paper tells us that some 70 per cent of residents in Montecchio were born and bred here (the figure is disturbingly close to the Christian Democrat vote). For myself, I can never decide whether this indicates a sad lack of any sense of adventure, or the true flowering of wisdom. The way I can never decide if the formal atmosphere of annual cemetery visits is the height of civilisation, or merely a suffocating cultural inertia. In any event, the effect on house prices in a place where the population long outstripped new building will be obvious enough.
Lucilla’s lawyer is bullish. So Lucilla asks us if we would mind prospective buyers coming in to look at the flat. She can thus have a contract drawn up even before the place is actually hers. This is nerve-racking. We suggest she might do better to show them her own flat which after all is the mirror image of ours, and, frankly, rather better furnished. She responds well to flattery. Troppo gentile, Signor Tino. And people gaggle round the top of the stairs being shown into her flat. Lucilla’s is always the loudest voice. The words valido and discreto are heard, perhaps in unconscious imitation of Giampaolo. Viewers study the fittings, practised hands swing the front door to and fro to feel the weight. Clearly, it will need reinforcing, another security lock perhaps, but over all …