We had four days. On our last afternoon, he said ‘Let’s walk up to the old cemetery.’ My mother was cremated — so there was no question of returning painfully to the kind of scene where we had parted with her; still, I should have thought in his mood death was too close to him for him to have found it easy to approach any of its territory. But it seemed this was just one of the directions we hadn’t yet taken on the walks where he had shown me what he believed belonged to me, given in naming me.
We wandered up to this landmark as we had to others. He took a wrong turning into a lane where there were plaster gnomes and a miniature windmill on a terrace, and canaries sang for their caged lives, piercingly as cicadas. But he retraced our steps and found the right cartographical signals of memory. There was a palatial iron gateway surmounted by a cross, and beyond walls powdery with saltpetre and patched with moss, the black forefingers of cypress trees pointed. Inside: a vacuum, no breath, flowers in green water, withered.
I had never seen a cemetery like that; tombs, yes, and elaborate tableaux of angels over grave-stones — but here, in addition to a maze of these there were shelves and shelves of stone-faced compartments along the inner side of the walls, each with its plaque.
Were the dead stored, filed away?
‘When there’s no room left for graves, it’s usual in this country. Or maybe it’s just cheaper.’ But he was looking for something.
‘They’re all here’ he said. We stepped carefully on gravelled alleys between tombstones and there they were, uncles and aunts and sons and daughters, cousins who had not survived infancy and other collaterals who had lived almost a century, lived through the collapse of the silkworm industry, the departures of their grown children to find an unknown called a better life in other countries, lived on through foreign occupation during a war and through the coming of the footwear and automobile parts factories — all looking out from photographs framed under convex glass and fixed to their tombstones. No face was old, or sick, or worn. Whenever it was they had died, here they consorted in the aspect they had had when young or vigorously mature.
There were many Albertos and Giovannis and Marias and Clementinas, but the names most honoured by being passed on were Carlo and Lucia, apparently those of the first progenitors to be recorded. Five or six Lucias, from a child in ringlets to fat matrons inclining their heads towards their husbands, many of whom were buried beside them; and then we came to — he came to — her grave. Her sisters were on either side of her. I couldn’t read the rest of the inscription, but LUCIE was incised into the ice-smooth black marble. I leant to look. Go on, he said, giving me the example of bracing his foot on the block that covered her. Under her oval bubble of glass the woman was composed and smooth-haired, with the pupil-less gaze of black eyes, the slightly distended nostrils and straight mouth with indented corners of strong will, and the long neck, emphasized by tear-drop earrings, of Italian beauties. Her eyebrows were too thick; if she had belonged to another generation she would have plucked them and spoiled her looks. He put his arm on my shoulder. ‘There’s a resemblance.’ I shrugged it off with his hand. If your name is on your tombstone, it’s definitive, it’s not some casual misspelling. Why wasn’t she Lucia, like the others?
‘I don’t really know — only what I was told by my father, and he didn’t say much … parents in those days … the sisters kept their mouths shut, I suppose, and in any case he was away working at the docks in Nice from the age of eighteen … Apparently she had also gone to work in France when she was very young — the family was poor, no opportunity here. She was a maid in an hotel, and there’s something about her having had a love affair with a Frenchman who used the French version of her name … and so she kept it, even when she married my grandfather.’
While he was talking a dust-breeze had come up, sweeping its broom among the graves, stirring something that made me tighten my nostrils. The smell of slimy water in the vases of shrivelled flowers and the curious stagnant atmosphere of a walled and crowded space where no living person breathed — what I had taken in when we entered the place was strengthened by some sort of sweetness. With his left foot intimately weighted against her grave, the way a child leans against the knee of a loved adult, he was still talking: ‘There’s the other version — it comes from her mother, that it was her mother who was a maid in Nice and my grandmother was her illegitimate child.’ I was looking at the foot in the pump-soled running shoe, one of the pair he had kitted himself out with at the market in Cuneo on our way to the village. ‘She brought the baby home, and all that remained of the affair was the spelling of the name.’ Dust blew into my eyes, the cloying sweetness caught in my throat and coated my tongue. I wanted to spit. ‘ … what the maiden sisters thought of that, how she held out against them? God knows … I don’t remember any man in the house, I would have remembered …’
The sweetness was sickly, growing like some thick liquor loading the air. We both inhaled it, it showed in the controlled grimace that wrinkled round his eyes and mouth and I felt the same reaction pulling at my own face muscles. But he went on talking, between pauses; in them we neither of us said anything about the smell, the smell, the smell like that of a chicken gone bad at the back of a refrigerator, a rat poisoned behind a wainscot, a run-over dog swollen at a roadside, the stench, stench of rotting flesh, and all the perfumes of the living body, the clean salty tears and saliva, the thrilling fluids of love-making, the scent of warm hair, turned putrid. Unbearable fermentation of the sweetness of life. It couldn’t have been her. It could not have been coming to him from her, she had been dead so long, but he stayed there with his foot on her stone as if he had to show me that there was no stink in our noses, as if he had to convince me that it wasn’t her legacy.
We left saunteringly ignoring the gusts of foulness that pressed against us, each secretly taking only shallow breaths in revulsion from the past. At the gate we met a woman in the backless slippers and flowered overall local women wore everywhere except to go to church. She saw on our faces what was expressed in hers, but hers was mixed with some sort of apologetic shame and distress. She spoke to him and he said something reassuring, using his hands and shaking his head. She repeated what she had told him and began to enlarge on it; I stood by, holding my breath as long as I could. We had some difficulty in getting away from her, out beyond the walls where we could stride and breathe.
‘A young man was killed on his motorbike last week.’
What was there to say?
‘I didn’t see a new grave.’
‘No — he’s in one of the shelves — that’s why … She says it takes some time, in there.’
So it wasn’t the secrets of the rotting past, Lucie’s secrets, it was the secret of the present, always present; the present was just as much there, in that walled place of the dead, as it was where the young bloods, like that one, tossed down their bright helmets in the bar, raced towards death, like that one, scattering admiring children in the church square.
Now when I write my name, that is what I understand by it.