The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  She passed the farmacia where she’d had her prescriptions filled. Signs outside the restaurants advertised strange drinks: caipirinha, mojito, sex on the beach. Sex on the beach cost four and a half euros. Five dollars.

  Christmas lights were strung over the street, though it wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet. Red stars at the apex of each string were flanked by icicle lights. She stopped outside Carlo Menta, where Hildi and the doctor often ate, and studied the menu. Hildi was right: the prices were very reasonable and the restaurant was full—people eating and drinking, talking and laughing. She looked through the mullioned window, searching for Hildi and Dottor Tonarelli, who had become “Francesco,” and then “Checco.”

  In her navy cardigan and wool coat, Louisa felt invisible. Was she turning into one of those old people who complain about everything new—computers, smartphones, the Internet, MP3 players, e-readers (though she appreciated Hildi’s Nook)? She kept her head down. In spite of the drizzle the street was full of young people. Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, where rival popes had battled it out long before the Great Schism, was crowded. The restaurants all looked inviting. The piazza itself looked inviting. More young people. Couples. Beggars. Buskers. Some of them a little scary looking. Rough. Loud voices. She was frightened. But energized too.

  She sat for a while by the fountain to listen to a man playing a cello under a makeshift umbrella, opened the copy of Leopardi’s Canti that had belonged to Gianluigi and read over some of the poems they’d studied in class, poems that she’d memorized as a student—“Il primo amore,” “Il passero solitario,” “L’infinito”—and then she read over Gianluigi’s letter, folded in the book, begging her to follow him to Rome. It had been folded and unfolded so many times it was falling apart. She didn’t need to open it to know what was in it. In it he wrote about the piazza, Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere—the piazza she was sitting in now—how it could all be hers, not just the piazza, but Rome itself, the Eternal City.

  Via della Scalla took her from the piazza to Via della Lungara, where there were no more lights, no more intimate restaurant spaces, separated from the sidewalks by rows of potted plants, where people ate outside even in November. The sidewalks on Via della Lungara were too narrow. She passed the Palazzo Corsini, where she and Hildi had seen another John the Baptist, and Hildi had asked her if Caravaggio was a homosexual. Actually John reminded Louisa of Gianluigi. Boylike. Fragile. It reminded her that she would never embrace a man again, much less a handsome young man like John the Baptist. It wasn’t desire she felt, but the loss of desire, the longing that was left when desire was gone.

  It was too dark to consult her map. She passed the prison Regina Coeli and almost missed Via delle Mantellate—Cloak Street, Robe Street. She would have liked an espresso, but the little bar on the corner across from the prison was closed. The traffic noise made her nervous. She turned down Via delle Mantellate. The huge blankness on her left was the wall of the prison. Past the prison the street opened up a little, but it was dark and empty except for people coming and going through the entrance of an art studio, which had a light over the door: Studio Stefania Miscetti. The rain had started up again, and the people were struggling with umbrellas. Louisa waited till she was past them before opening her own little umbrella. It was hard to see the numbers, and the numbering system was confusing. Red numbers for shops, blue numbers for apartments; they ran up one side of the street and then down the other. There were four or five names on the brass plates outside each door. When she finally found the name—Bevilacqua, bell three—she hardly knew what to do. What did she want to happen now? She couldn’t conjure up any fantasies. Just a series of blank slates. What was she afraid of? She worked up her courage and touched her finger to the tip of the brass button at first, feeling the cool metal, then pressed hard. She could still hear the traffic noise, but muted. She kept her finger on the bell. And waited. She pressed her ear to the little speaker, and waited for someone to say Chi è? There was no response. She took her finger off the button and then pressed it again. And waited. She couldn’t be sure it was actually ringing.

  Suddenly she was tired, as tired as she had ever been, on the verge of collapse. Rome had been too much for her. She hadn’t been fasting, but she hadn’t been eating well. Nothing tasted good. She was too tired to retrace her steps. Too tired to move, she started to cry, still holding her finger on the bell, still holding her umbrella against the thin rain.

  She had no idea how long she stayed there, pressing the bell. She was still crying when a woman who’d been standing outside the art studio came up to her and asked her if she was all right.

  “I’ve been in Rome for three weeks,” Louisa said in Italian, “and I’ve been sick the whole time, and I fell in love with one man and then married someone else.”

  The woman ducked under Louisa’s umbrella. “Did you ever know a woman who didn’t do the same thing?” she said. “You never forget your first love. But it’s good to hang on to that feeling when you want to have a good cry—to flush out your system.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “Sì, sì. Every now and then.”

  “I’m sorry,” Louisa said.

  “I always feel better afterward. And that young man. How old were you?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Over fifty years ago. Longer. Fifty-six years.”

  “And he hasn’t changed a bit, has he? He’s still lovely and kind and gentle, still has all his hair?”

  Louisa nodded. “Something like that.” She switched the umbrella from her left hand to her right.

  “But you never had to live with him?”

  “No.”

  “And the man you married? How long did you live with him?”

  “Fifty-five years.”

  “So you got to know him very well?”

  “When he died I was glad. For a while. I said terrible things, and so did everybody else.”

  “You know,” the woman said, “it’s like that for everybody. Well, not everybody. But for a lot of women.”

  “For you too?”

  “Of course.”

  “But then that night I called the priest, and we went down to the basement, where my husband’s body was still on a gurney in the refrigerator—my husband was a funeral director and so is my son. Father Cochrane blessed him, and he blessed me too, and I felt I’d stepped into the light.”

  “And so you came to Rome? A pilgrimage?”

  “Sort of. I wanted to see the Caravaggios. I thought I did.”

  “There are no Caravaggios here.” The woman laughed and removed her keys from her purse. “Not on Via delle Mantellate. Not one.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Let’s get out of the rain.” It took two keys to unlock the front door. “You’ll see for yourself. Not one Caravaggio. But I’ve just come from an exhibition by a woman from Bologna. She’s made a map of Trastevere out of thread and hung it from the ceiling. It’s astonishing, really.” She looked at her watch. “Too late now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Louisa said. “I was looking for my old Italian professor. I have a book of his that I want to return.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “Gianluigi Bevilacqua.”

  “You won’t find him here either.”

  “No, I didn’t think so. But I saw the name …”

  “You’d have to go to Campo di Verano. But not tonight. Too far, too dark. But there’s no need, really. The dead are never far from us, don’t you think?”

  Louisa didn’t know what to say. She followed the woman up a dark stone stairway. The dim lights on the landings went out before they got to the top of the stairs. Once in the apartment Louisa could see that the woman was about her age. Short. Thin. Gray hair. The apartment was simple and inviting. There was a bowl of fruit like a still life on the granite top of a handsome cabinet, and the bookshelves, full of books, had been built to measure.

&
nbsp; “Tell me.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “You were one of his students?”

  “For three years. He was the only Italian teacher. Most small schools in the United States offer French and German and Spanish but not Italian. We read Farina’s Fra le Corde d’un Contrabasso, and then later we read Leopardi. That’s the book I brought. Leopardi’s Canti.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Gianluigi read it every year. We read it together.”

  “ ‘This lonely hill was always dear to me, and this hedgerow.’ Leopardi taught us about passion and about the beauty of nature.”

  “Gianluigi loved it in the United States, you know,” the woman said, “but he was homesick. He wanted to come home. He missed Rome. Let me get you a glass of wine.” The woman looked out a window recessed in the wall of books. “It’s still raining, but you’ve had some nice weather. Not too cold. Not for November.”

  Louisa started to cough. “I’ve had this mal da gola ever since we got to Rome. It’s done something to my taste buds. Wine tastes off. I haven’t tried any for a while.”

  “Maybe a cup of tea.” While the woman busied herself in the kitchen, Louisa looked at the books, many of which were in English.

  “I’m Elena, by the way,” the woman said, coming back with two cups of tea. “Elena Bevilacqua.”

  “Gianluigi’s wife?”

  “Sí.”

  Of course, Louisa thought. What was I thinking? “I hope—” she said, but she wasn’t sure what she was hoping.

  “It’s all right,” Elena interrupted.

  “I’m Louisa,” Louisa said. “Louisa Oldfield.”

  “Here’s what you’re looking for,” Elena said, pointing with her nose. “Next shelf up, a little to the left. Let me set this tea down.” Elena set the tea down on the coffee table and went to get the sugar bowl.

  Louisa wasn’t actually sure what she was looking for. Elena came back with the sugar bowl and pulled a book off the shelf.

  “He loved Wordsworth,” Elena said. “Maybe even more than Leopardi. For Leopardi, nature was never our mother, always our stepmother.”

  Louisa opened the book and looked at the title page: Il valore di ricordo: la poesie di William Wordsworth, un selezione, tradotto e curato da Gianluigi Bevilacqua.

  “We went to England once,” Elena said, “right after we were married. The Lake District. We didn’t have any money. We stayed in youth hostels. Couldn’t be together at night on our honeymoon! They were like dormitories, one part for men and another for women. We walked everywhere. And then one morning the woman who ran the hostel took me aside and told me it would be all right to go to my husband, and I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She had to take me by the hand and practically pull me. Everyone was gone, you see. They were closing for the day. They close the hostels early. You have to be out by nine o’clock. I was already wearing my backpack. I don’t wish to be young again, not really, but …”

  “Was he your first love?”

  She laughed. “My fourth or fifth,” she said. “But that morning in the youth hostel, when everybody was gone … The earth moved.”

  “The earth moved?”

  “Sì, the earth moved. I had to laugh when I read Hemingway—The Sun Also Rises—because I knew what the old woman was talking about. Pilar was her name, right?” Elena laughed at herself and poured more tea.

  They’d been speaking in Italian, but now Louisa asked, “Do you speak English?”

  “French. I used to teach French in the Liceo Scientifico Kennedy. Gianluigi taught English and did some translating too. I can read English, but I don’t like to speak it. I read The Sun Also Rises in English, and Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey.’ “That blessed mood,” she said in English, “in which the burthen of the mystery …’ I forget how it goes.”

  Her accent was terrible and Louisa wondered if this was the way she sounded to Italians when she spoke Italian. There was no way to know. If you ask an Italian, he’ll say, “You speak beautiful Italian.” And you can’t hear yourself in another language. But she was too tired to worry about her accent.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I walked. From Via della Luce, near the river.”

  “Let me walk you to the bus stop. The buses won’t run much longer. Do you have a ticket?” Louisa didn’t. Elena gave her one. “You don’t want to get arrested.”

  The bus stop was in the piazza where the two streets on different levels came together. A list of stops was posted on the sign for the number twenty-three bus.

  “Ponte Palatino’s where you get off,” Elena said.

  They waited a long time chatting about this and that—about men and about love, about the Regina Coeli prison—and about the exhibit Elena had seen that night at Studio Stefania Miscetti. After about five minutes Elena lit a cigarette. She was still smoking it when the bus arrived. The smoke smelled good. Like an open fire. Like sitting next to someone you love on an unmade bed.

  When Louisa caught a glimpse of Santa Maria in Cosmedin on the other side of the river, where she and Hildi had put their hands in the Bocca della Verità, she realized she’d missed her stop. At first she was alarmed. Hildi would be worried. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. She’d spent enough time worrying about Hildi.

  But she was frightened too. She should have gotten off at Ponte Palatino. Then she should have gotten off at the next stop. She thought of people hanging on to the ropes that hold down a balloon. If you don’t let go right away, at the same time as everyone else, you’re suddenly up in the air. If you let go within another two seconds, you’re all right, but after that it’s too late, you’re too high up in the air. The bus crossed the river and she sat back. She would go to the end of the line and then ride the bus back. She was pretty sure it stopped on the other side of the Isola Tiberina.

  They were on a big wide street. Was that the Pyramid of Cestius by the Protestant Cemetery? She’d like to be buried in the Protestant Cemetery. With Keats and Shelley. At least Shelley’s heart, snatched from the flames.

  It took half an hour to get to the end of the line. Out the window she could see big nondescript apartment buildings. Identical, with identical balconies.

  She told the driver she was going to ride back into town, and he told her she’d have to wait fifteen minutes. The driver got off the bus, sat on a bench, and lit a cigarette. Louisa could smell the smoke through her open window. She got off the bus and sat down on the bench next to the driver.

  “It smells so good,” she said, holding back a cough. “I wanted to come closer.”

  He pulled a box of Marlboro Reds from the inside pocket of his bus driver’s uniform, tapped out a cigarette, and offered it to her. “Good for a sore throat.”

  “I haven’t had a cigarette in years,” she said. “And I’ve had a mal da gola ever since I got to Rome.”

  “But tonight,” he said, “something has happened?”

  “I met the wife of a man I was in love with over fifty years ago. She lives on Via delle Mantellate. That’s where I got on the bus.”

  “By the prison,” he said. “This man you loved,” he said, “he was in the prison?”

  “No, no. This was back in the States. He was my professor. He’s dead now.”

  “Amore,” he said, putting the cigarette to his lips and sucking in the smoke and then letting it out slowly. He held the cigarette out at arm’s length and looked at it. “The world’s best cigarette,” he said. “Marlboro Red. When you’re angry, they calm you down. When you’re unhappy, they lift you up. Some people say they’re too strong, but that’s because they’re too weak. The people who say that, I mean.”

  “Maybe I will have one,” Louisa said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Volentieri. It will help your mal da gola.”

  He lit a match and cupped his hands around it, and she leaned forward till the tip of her cigarette touched the tip of the flame. She sat back and relaxed, letting the smoke surround her.


  “Amore,” he said again, looking at his watch. “Five minutes and we’ve got to go.”

  “I need to get off at Ponte Palatino,” she said.

  “On the way back,” he said, “you’ll be on the other side of the river. You want Monte Savello. I’ll let you know when we get there.”

  Checco and Hildi were both at the door. Hildi was frantic and couldn’t keep from scolding Louisa. “How could you do this to us, Nana? Do you have any idea how worried we were? If you’d just get a telefonino, this wouldn’t have happened. You could have called me, or you could have called a taxi. You’ve been sick, and now—Where did you say you were? What did you think you were doing? Can you tell me that? What were you thinking? Were you thinking at all? And you’ve been smoking. Nana, what’s got into you?”

  Checco laughed, opened a bottle of Frascati, and poured three glasses. The wine was cold and slightly effervescent. Louisa couldn’t believe how good it tasted.

  * * *

  It was not till two years later, after Hildi had been killed, that Louisa fully realized, as she relived it in her imagination, that the month in Rome had been one of the happiest times of her life, that like Wordsworth she had crossed the Alps into Italy without realizing it, that she’d been happy without realizing it—not just at the end, when she’d cooked a Thanksgiving turkey for Hildi’s friends, and Maddelena had brought the dozen beautiful masks Checco had bought—but from the very beginning: from the waiting room at the guardia medica to the darkness at the back of San Luigi dei Francesi, waiting for a voice to say “Follow me”; even lying in bed with a slight fever, while Hildi read to her about Anna and Vronsky and about Kitty and Levin; even when Hildi, wearing a dress that barely covered her crotch, went out at night, leaving her all alone; even looking through the mullioned window of Carlo Menta at all the people laughing and talking, eating and drinking; even pushing Gianluigi’s bell as hard as she could, standing in the rain with her ear pressed against the little speaker, waiting for someone to say, “Chi è?” Who is it? Even smoking a cigarette with the bus driver and then going back to a place that had begun to feel like home with the smell of tobacco on her breath and in her clothes; even being scolded by Hildi as if they’d traded places and Hildi was now the grandmother and she, Louisa, was a young woman again on the brink of a new life.