Mrs. A. had backed away. Renato had bowed his head, disappointed. He’d turned around, and the darkness had swallowed him whole.
That night Babette had driven her husband away, despite her love for him: a fitting sign of her extraordinary attachment to life.
Around that same time I, too, had a dream. I was in a deserted underground parking garage. A shrub was growing from a crevice in the midst of the asphalt. When I went closer to look at it, I saw that the shrub was actually the majestic canopy of a tree, whose trunk descended several feet belowground, so far down that I could not make out its base. When I woke up, I associated that image with Mrs. A.—but I never had a chance to tell her.
She belonged to that species of shrub that insinuates its roots into chinks in walls or cracks in sidewalks, that climbing variety for which an opening of just a few scintillas is sufficient to cling to, and then cover a building’s façade. Mrs. A. was a weed, but one of the most noble ones. Even the mistakes she made in the final months of her life—giving up long before it was time, not preparing for the interminable future that would come after her, her dismay—were perhaps inevitable ones. There is no place for the thought of death in those who possess such an excess of life: I saw it in her, and I see it every day in Nora. The thought of death is only for those who are able to release their grip, for those who have already done so at least once. It’s not even a thought, maybe more like a memory.
There was one thing she had provided for, however. Mrs. A. had made sure she had a place beside her husband’s grave. There must have been a moment, an afternoon, perhaps, when she walked to the village cemetery clutching her black handbag, then from it extracting the cash to pay for the earthen bed that would receive her. I don’t know if it took place before or after the cancer appeared, but I know for certain that even then it wasn’t death’s goading that drove her, but rather her love for Renato. She wouldn’t have been able to stand being separated from him for another eternity.
“We should think about it, too,” I said to Nora as we passed through the gate of the cemetery. I made believe I was joking, but I was serious.
“You always said you wanted to be cremated.”
“Maybe I’m changing my mind.”
She pursed her lips mischievously, as if to say that she would think about whether or not to keep me beside her all that time. Then she looked around, lost. “How are we going to find her?”
Since we hadn’t followed the procession on the day of the funeral, we didn’t know where Mrs. A. was buried. One of the cousins had given my wife sketchy directions, which, considering her negligible aptitude for orientation, had become utterly useless.
“Earlier you said in back. Let’s go try over there.”
We divided up the aisles, as if it were a treasure hunt. Which, in a way, it was.
It was Emanuele who found her. “Come here! She’s over here!” he shouted.
We ordered him to lower his voice, because it wasn’t polite to yell in a place like that.
“But we’re outside,” he protested.
He was more at ease than we were among the dead. Afterward I thought that they couldn’t help but be pleased to hear our son’s crystalline voice, “a singer’s voice,” as Mrs. A. used to say.
The long white marble slab was clean, washed by rain or by someone who’d come by fairly recently. Emanuele climbed on top of it. Nora was about to stop him, but I held her back: she would have let him do it. He patted the color photograph of Mrs. A. and studied the one of Renato beside it uncertainly. “Ciao,” he said.
Lying on the marble, tummy down, one ear pressed against the stone, he listened for quite some time. He was speaking to her in his mind, I think, because his lips were moving, though barely perceptibly. Then he got up on his knees and gave a sigh, a comical, somewhat affected sigh, like an adult.
Finally he spoke her name out loud: “Anna.”
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