Death is a blank mirror, emptied of all it has seen and shown.
Death waits, was waiting, but I took the plane to Cape Town, instead.
L, U, C, I, E
My name’s Lucie — no, not with a ‘y’. I’ve been correcting that all my life, ever since my name was no longer vocables I heard and responded to like a little domestic animal (here, puss, puss) and I learnt to draw these tones and half-tones as a series of outlines: L, U, C, I, E. This insistence has nothing to do with identity. The so-called search for identity bores me. I know who I am. You know well enough who you are: every ridge in a toe-nail, every thought you keep private, every opinion you express is your form of life and your responsibility. I correct the spelling because I’m a lawyer and I’m accustomed to precision in language; in legal documents the displacement of a comma can change the intention expressed in a sentence and lead to new litigation. It’s a habit, my pedantry; as a matter of fact, in this instance simply perpetuates another orthographic inaccuracy: I’m named for my father’s Italian grandmother, and the correct Italian form of the name is Lucia. This had no significance for me until I saw her name on her tomb: LUCIE.
I’ve just been on holiday in Italy with my father. My mother died a few months ago; it was one of those journeys taken after the death of a wife when the male who has survived sees the daughter as the clone woman who, taken out of present time and place to the past and another country, will protect him from the proximity of death and restore him to the domain of life. (I only hope my father has understood that this was one-off, temporary, a gift from me.) I let him believe it was the other way round: he was restoring something to me by taking me to the village where, for him, I had my origin. He spent the first five years of his life dumped by poor parents in the care of that grandmother, and although he then emigrated to Africa with them and never returned, his attachment to her seems never to have been replaced. By his mother, or anyone else; long after, hers was the name he gave to his daughter.
He has been to Europe so many times — with my mother, almost every year.
‘Why haven’t you come here before?’ I asked him. We were sitting in a sloping meadow on what used to be the family farm of his grandmother and her maiden sisters. The old farmhouse where he spent the years the Jesuits believe definitive had been sold, renovated with the pink and green terrace tiles, curly-cue iron railings and urns of red geraniums favoured by successful artisans from the new industrial development that had come up close to the village. The house was behind us; we could forget it, he could forget its usurpation. A mulberry tree shaded the meadow like a straw hat. As the sun moved, so did the cast of its brim. He didn’t answer; a sudden volley of shooting did — stuttering back and forth from the hills in cracking echoes through the peace where my question drifted with the evaporating moisture of grass.
The army had a shooting range up there hidden in the chestnut forests, that was all; like a passing plane rucking the fabric of perfect silence, the shots brought all that shatters continuity in life, the violence of emotions, the trajectories of demands and contests of will. My mother wanted to go to art galleries and theatres in great European cities, he was gratified to be invited to speak at conferences in Hong Kong and Toronto, there were wars and the private wars of cartels and, for all I know, love affairs — all that kept him away. He held this self hidden from me, as parents do in order to retain what they consider a suitable image before their children. Now he wanted to let me into his life, to confirm it, as if I had been a familiar all along.
We stayed in the only albergo in the village and ate our meals in a dark bar beneath the mounted heads of stag and mountain goats. The mother of the proprietor was brought to see my father, whom she claimed to remember as a small child. She sniffled, of course, recollecting the three sisters who were the last of a family who had been part of the village so long that — that what? My father was translating for me, but hesitantly, not much is left of his Italian. So long that his grandmother’s mother had bred silkworms, feeding them on mulberry leaves from her own trees, and spinning silk as part of the home industry which existed in the region before silk from the Orient took away the market. The church square where he vividly remembered playing was still there and the nuns still ran an infant school where he thought he might have been enrolled for a few months. Perhaps he was unhappy at the school and so now could not picture himself entering that blue door, before us where we sat on a bench beside the church. The energy of roaring motorcycles carrying young workers in brilliantly studded and sequinned windbreakers to the footwear and automobile parts factories ripped his voice away as he told me of the games drawn with a stick in the dust, the cold bliss of kicking snow about, and the hot flat bread sprinkled with oil and salt the children would eat as a morning snack. Somewhere buried in him was a blue-pearl, translucent light of candles that distorted ‘like water’ he said, some figures that were not real people. In the church, whose bells rang the hours tremulously from hill to hill, there were only the scratched tracings of effaced murals; he thought the image must have come from some great event in his babyhood, probably the local saint’s day visit to a shrine in a neighbouring town.
We drove there and entered the chapels along the sides of a huge airport-concourse of a basilica — my mother was not a Catholic and this analogy comes to me naturally out of my experience only of secular spaces. There were cruel and mournful oil paintings behind the liquid gouts of votive candlelight; he dropped some coins in the box provided but did not take a candle, I don’t know whether the dingy representation of the present snuffed out his radiant image or whether his image transformed it for him. We had strong coffee and cakes named for the shrine, in an arcade of delicious-smelling cafés opposite. He had not tasted those cakes for fifty-eight years, since Lucie bought them as a treat; we had found the right context for the candles that had kept alight inside him all that time. The cafés were filled with voluble old men, arguing and gesticulating with evident pleasure. They were darkly unshaven and wore snappy hats. I said: ‘If you’d stayed, you’d be one of them’ and I didn’t know whether I’d meant it maliciously or because I was beguiled by the breath of vanilla and coffee into the fascination of those who have a past to discover.
At night he drank grappa in the bar with the proprietor and picked up what he could of the arguments of village cronies and young bloods over the merits of football teams, while the TV babbled on as an ignored attraction. These grandchildren of the patriarchs blew in on a splendid gust created by the sudden arrest of speed as they cut the engines of their motorcycles. They disarrayed themselves, flourishing aside tinsel-enamelled or purple-luminous helmets and shaking out haloes of stiff curls and falls of blond-streaked locks. They teased the old men, who seemed to tolerate this indulgently, grinningly, as a nostalgic resurrection of their own, if different, wild days.
No women came to the bar. Up in my room each night, I leant out of my window before bed; I didn’t know how long I stayed like that, glitteringly bathed in the vast mist that drowned the entire valley between the window and the dark rope of the Alps’ foothills from which it was suspended, until the church clock — a gong struck — sent waves layering through the mist that I had the impression I could see undulating silvery, but which I was feeling, instead, reverberating through my rib-cage. There was nothing to see, nothing. Yet there was the tingling perception, neither aural nor visual, that overwhelms in the swoon before an anaesthetic whips away consciousness. The night before we went to the cemetery, I was quite drunk with it. The reflection of the moon seeped through the endless insubstantial surface, silence inundated this place he had brought me to; the village existed out there no more than it had ever done for me when I had never sat in its square, never eaten under the glass eyes of timid beasts killed in its chestnut forests and mountains, or sat in the shade of its surviving mulberry tree.