The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  Simon brought out the clothes that Elizabeth had put in the plastic shopping bag, a brightly colored patchwork dress, yellow and green. Guido looked at Simon. Simon nodded. They lifted her up and slid the dress over her head and adjusted the straps. Guido called the morgue attendant, and they wheeled her back into the cooler.

  Afterward, standing at the foot of Ponte Palatino, Simon noticed helicopters.

  “Keeping an eye on the river,” Guido said. “Worried about flooding.” Simon knew about the floods in Florence, but he didn’t know that the Tiber flooded too.

  “Oh my, yes,” Guido said.

  About thirty feet below them, in front of San Bartolomeo, a TV crew was covering a funeral. Simon and Guido watched the TV crew from the bridge. A big Mercedes hearse was parked in front of the church. An enormous wreath was carried into the church. “Four hundred euros,” Guido said.

  Simon nodded.

  “The well of Aesculapius is in the crypt of the church,” Guido said without offering any more information.

  They stood and watched for a long time. A canteen had been set up for the TV crew. Simon couldn’t see how the hearse got into the piazza in front of the church. You could walk down a set of stairs, but there was no visible road.

  What were they waiting for? Simon was waiting for the end, for them to bring the coffin out of the church, for the people to spill out into the piazza.

  But then the hearse drove off, along the broad sidewalk that ran along the river, and the TV crew began to dismantle the camera and another crew started loading equipment over the side of the embankment. A hoist of some kind was attached to a very tall ladder that went all the way down to the sidewalk along the river, where still more crew members loaded the camera equipment onto four-wheeled dollies, which they pushed down to the tip of the island. Huh?

  Simon touched Guido’s arm. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Guido spoke to a man at the base of the TV crane and came back. “It’s a funerale finta,” he said. “A fake funeral. They’re making a film. I guess it’s a different kind of truth.”

  Simon laughed and shook his head, and then he started to cry. He pulled a tissue out of his pocket and a comb fell out onto the small square paving stones. Some of the stones had been dislodged, and Simon could see that they were pointed on the bottom.

  He’d have to give her up. Might as well do it now. But no. Not yet, but … soon.

  When Simon got back to the hotel Elizabeth was lying on the bed. She hadn’t changed her clothes. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t sleeping. Her cell phone was next to her.

  “You get everything taken care of?”

  Simon sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on the top of her head. He spread his fingers out.

  “It’s all taken care of,” he said.

  “Now what?”

  “People will come to a place at the hospital. They call it a camera ardente.”

  “You have to pay?”

  “Of course. There aren’t any funeral homes in Italy. I didn’t know that. Maybe six or seven. Guido is interested. Not easy to find space. Parking. He invited us to supper.”

  “Are you crazy? Italians don’t invite you to their homes.”

  “It’s a professional courtesy.”

  “It’s very unprofessional, if you ask me.”

  “He’s called an impresario.”

  “I thought an impresario was someone who manages an opera company or who organizes concerts or magic shows. Like Andrew Lloyd Webber or Billy Rose.”

  “I guess they organize funerals too.”

  “You can go. I’ll stay here.”

  “Lizzy—” She said nothing. “I’ll call him.”

  Simon used Elizabeth’s cell phone to call. He explained. Guido wanted to speak to Elizabeth. She shook her head, but Simon handed her the phone and she started speaking in Italian. Explaining. But then he could see she was changing her mind. “Va bene, va bene.”

  “He’s very persuasive,” she said.

  Via Santini, on the other side of Mercato Cosimato, was empty at night. It was a playground area. They stopped to buy some flowers on the way. Elizabeth insisted. It was just something you had to do in Italy. Guido lived above a shop that sold fresh pasta. Tortellini, tortelloni, ravioli. It was still open.

  “Bell one,” Elizabeth said. “Second floor, above the shop. Look for the name. Fioravanti.”

  A disembodied voice asked who it was and then buzzed them in. The door on the landing was open. Guido appeared briefly, a cell phone at his ear, and then retreated. As soon as they entered the apartment Elizabeth said, “He’s lonely. That’s why he invited us.”

  Simon shushed her. “He speaks English.”

  “Yes,” Guido said, coming back into the room. “And your wife is right. I am lonely.”

  Elizabeth apologized. In Italian. They spoke in Italian, which Simon couldn’t follow.

  They ate a Roman dish that had been one of Guido’s wife’s specialties. Cacio e pepe.

  “Parmigiano-Reggiano?” Elizabeth asked as Guido served the spaghetti.

  Guido shook his head. Pecorino Romano. Parmesan didn’t have enough bite. He asked about the funeral-home business in the United States, and they shared undertaker stories: bodies purging, falling out of caskets, misidentified bodies, bodies buried with valuable jewelry.

  Simon told the story of the removal he’d gone on with Hildi. How they’d played pinochle with Mrs. Johansen while they were waiting for the coroner to come to sign the death certificate, and how he and Hildi had sung “You Are My Sunshine” on the way home, and then they’d stopped for a beer, and how Hildi had wanted funerals that told the truth about death, which he’d already told Guido.

  “You never told me that story,” Elizabeth said, and she started to cry.

  “I never told anyone,” Simon said.

  “So, she was going to partner with you, take over the business?”

  “That was before she came to Rome. She loved it here. And she was in love. I’m glad she had this time, glad she had an Italian lover. Every woman deserves at least one Italian lover. My mother had one.” And he knew that Elizabeth had had one too, and in retrospect he was glad. Why not? He reached for her hand.

  “You’ll do fine,” she said.

  The family kept Guido busy. Hildi’s brother, Jack, wanted justice or vengeance. He wanted the driver of the hit-and-run car hunted down and crucified, but it wasn’t going to happen. They stood at the scene of the accident, at the end of Ponte Garibaldi, with a policeman and with Checco. They looked up and down the one-way street along the Trastevere side of the river. Witnesses? Jack had read too many detective novels and thought there had to be someone who’d noticed. They could do a door-to-door. But all the old women who sat by their windows all day twitching their curtains would have been in bed at two o’clock in the morning.

  Louisa wanted to have Hildi buried in the Protestant Cemetery with Keats and Shelley and Joseph Severn and John Addington Symonds, but this would be difficult if not impossible. “It’s not really the ‘Protestant’ cemetery,” Guido explained. “It’s really the ‘non-Catholic’ cemetery, for non-Catholics only, and (a) Hildi was nominally a Roman Catholic, and (b) she did not have an Italian identity card.” Elizabeth wanted cremation, but this too presented difficulties. They would have to prove that cremation was in fact what Hildi herself had wanted. It could be done, of course. Guido could manage the paperwork, the affidavits, which would have to be notarized or authenticated. Simon and Elizabeth would have to testify under oath that their daughter had expressed a strong desire to be cremated.

  About twenty people gathered in the camera ardente at Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, where Hildi’s body was on display in the fiberglass casket that she would be cremated in. Guido had put up notices at the consortium office where Hildi had worked, outside her old address on Via della Luce, and outside her most recent address, where she’d been living with Checco in Piazza de’ Renzi. It was awkward at first
. People didn’t know whether to speak Italian or English. Simon and Jack were the only ones who didn’t know Italian. Checco’s sister, Marina, was the only one who didn’t know English.

  Checco sat by himself with his head in his hands. His sister released her Seeing Eye dog, Bruno, who went around the room sniffing everyone, introducing them to one another. And then he went to Checco and sat with him. The body had not been embalmed, but it had been refrigerated and was still presentable.

  Checco had moved to the casket and, in spite of Bruno’s ministrations, was struggling to hold himself together. Simon recognized the signs and went to him, put his hand on his shoulder. Touched him. The two of them stood by the cremation casket, as if they were guarding it. Simon, in undertaker mode, adjusted Hildi’s hands. Checco moved as if to stop him but then put his hands over his face again.

  Simon was glad to get a glimpse into Hildi’s life in Rome. Glad that there were people here, so far from home, who had loved her. Not just Checco and his sister, but friends from work, from the consortium, from her old neighborhood on Via della Luce, who spoke to Louisa in Italian. A Dutch opera singer, Italian neighbors, the woman from the mask store, Maddelena. Hildi was leaving a trail of friends behind her.

  There was nothing to eat or drink, nor was there any service, but friends got up and spoke, mostly in Italian, which Simon was able to understand—the feelings if not the words. Louisa and Jack sat together. Simon and Elizabeth sat with Checco, who had assumed the role of chief mourner. Simon comforted him but did not give way himself till later. He touched Checco’s arm, and Elizabeth held his hand and spoke quietly to him in Italian.

  Simon and Elizabeth stayed in Rome to wait for Hildi’s ashes. They went to San Luigi to see The Calling of Saint Matthew. Simon fed the light meter till he ran out of coins, and then they walked back to the hotel over the Isola Tiberina, past San Bartolomeo, where Simon and Guido had watched the funerale finta.

  They spent time with Checco and his family; they ate at Carlo Menta; they went to hear Checco’s sister sing at Club Dante. She and Bruno came to their table and sat with them during her breaks, and Elizabeth rested her hand on Bruno’s head. They went to the mask store and saw Hildi’s face in the window in different guises—masks made from the original mold—and Simon bought a lot of masks: a clown, a plague doctor, the Caravaggio Medusa for Louisa, suns and moons and elves and Renaissance ladies, a Bacchus and a satyr, two long-beaked birds. Maddelena tried to restrain him, but he knew what he wanted, and she gave him a substantial discount.

  The consulate said it would take seven or eight weeks to get the ashes, but Guido had them in three days, another professional courtesy. Checco wanted some of the ashes, and Simon asked Guido to open the urn. Still another professional courtesy.

  Checco was almost apologetic for “stealing” their daughter, for living together without her parents’ permission (or even their knowledge). Checco had been worried about this. He didn’t know how Americans would react. He’d worried about preventing her from going into business with her father. She had assured him that her parents wouldn’t mind their living together, but she hadn’t wanted to disappoint her father. They both had worried about it. They had been planning to get married. They had considered various scenarios: spending half the year in Rome and half in Galesburg. Maybe Checco could practice medicine in the United States. Maybe Hildi could become an impresario funebre in Rome. Checco spoke about these ideas seriously, as if they were problems that still needed to be resolved.

  CHAPTER V: THE TRUTH ABOUT DEATH

  Hello, everybody. I’m Elizabeth. Simon’s wife. I want to tell you about the last years of Simon’s life. He was a good man, and I loved him with all my heart (at least most of the time). And I want to tell you about Olive (our black lab) and a little bit about myself too. And I want to tell you the truth about death.

  PART I: SIMON

  After Hildi’s death a chilly wind blew through our lives, blew right through the double-glazed windows and the storm doors, whistled through the fireplace chimneys, hummed under the wide eaves. You don’t get used to something like that, but you learn to work around it. And work was what we did.

  I taught my classes and resumed work on a long-term project about the puzzling figures that decorate the margins of medieval books of hours and books of prayers—ass-kissing priests, sciapods, grylli, drunken apes, potbellied heads, putrifying corpses—which I planned to call Marginalia. (Sciapods, in case you’re wondering, are humanlike creatures with one gigantic foot, big enough so that they can lie on their back and hold their foot up as an umbrella to shade them from the sun. Grylli usually have two legs, a head, and a tail, but no body or arms. They’re often wimpled like nuns or have manes like lions.)

  Simon instituted most of the changes Hildi had wanted. He encouraged people to have funerals at home. And he encouraged the bereaved to help him wash the body—or at least hold the dead person’s hand, as he had held Hildi’s hand in the obitorio in Rome—while he did the prep. Not during embalming, of course, but he made it clear that embalming was not necessary, that you could keep the body in relatively good shape for quite a while in the refrigrator or for several days at home by placing chunks of dry ice under it at strategic points. He encouraged cremation as an inexpensive alternative to a traditional burial. He hung paintings by local artists and people bought some of them. But the most important thing of all was the dog.

  It had begun with a letter on a website. It was the end of August. We hadn’t gone to the lake that summer and were restless. Simon had read the letter aloud to me as I had been watering the plants in the front windows.

  “ ‘Hi, everybody! I’m Olive! I’m three years old. I’m a big strong girl, but not too big, about sixty pounds with lots of love to give! I had a family a long time ago, but they weren’t very nice to me. The Guardian Angels came to my rescue and have been very kind to me, but I’ve been living here at the shelter for almost a year, and I’m starting to get sad. Just look at my picture, and you’ll see! Every time a car drives up I think maybe it’s someone who will take me to my forever home. Maybe you’ll be that person. If you think you might be that person, please call the shelter and leave a message for me. Okay?—Olive.’ ”

  “Simon,” I’d said. “You sound as if you think the dog wrote that letter.”

  Simon had taken off his glasses and was reading from the computer screen. “Well,” he said. “It’s a good letter. You want to hear another one?”

  “No,” I’d said. “It’s shameless.”

  “That’s all right,” Simon had said. “Olive’s is the best. Come and look at her picture. She’s beautiful.”

  “I do not want a dog.”

  Olive—sixty pounds, a black lab mix, glossy black—was wearing a blue-and-yellow bandanna.

  “If she’s been at the shelter for a year,” I’d said, standing behind Simon and looking at the picture on the computer screen, “there must be something wrong with her or someone would have taken her to her ‘forever home.’ ”

  “I suppose that means till she dies.”

  “What else could it mean?”

  Well, I thought later, maybe a dog would be good for Simon. We picked up Olive for a trial run. She’d already had a litter, but the puppies had been adopted early on. “Sometimes a dog gets picked up and then has to come back,” the woman at the Guardian Angels shelter said. “I guess it’s just the way things are. People don’t think it through. One lady brought her dog back because it barked at the neighbor’s dog. What was she thinking when she got a dog? It’s a terrible moment when the dog realizes it’s going to be abandoned a second time.” I took this as a warning.

  The first night at the funeral home Olive checked everything out, but she wouldn’t get into the crate we’d bought at the pet store. The crate was in the laundry room.

  Olive barked and barked and kept on barking till Simon let her out of the laundry room, and then she slept on a quilt on the floor at the foot of our bed.

>   She didn’t poop for a couple of days. But she peed a lot and ran around the enclosed parking lot. Simon got several books on dog training—books by monks and dog whisperers, books that recommended using treats as rewards for good behavior, books that recommended clicks, and books that said your dog wouldn’t be happy until you completely dominated it. Simon spent some time working on the basic commands—though Olive already knew what she needed to know about “Sit,” “Stay,” “Stand,” “Down,” “Come,” and so on—but he didn’t bother with therapy-dog certification. He wasn’t worried about her knocking people over or banging into their walkers, and after a couple of months she started working at the funeral home. She enjoyed her “work” and wore a smart forest green uniform with a yellow bandanna around her neck. Gilbert fretted about insurance—What if she bit someone? What if she jumped up on the casket?—but Olive always paid attention and took care of the people who were grieving hardest, and after a while he stopped fretting, because even Gilbert could see that the love Olive was offering was simple and profound, kind and compassionate.

  Olive liked to empty every wastebasket in the house at least once a day. She liked to turn up dead pigeons by the railroad tracks or dead squirrels from Hope Cemetery and bring them to one of us. She liked it when I started yelling at Simon to take away the dead bird or the dead squirrel or whatever it was. I’d wave my arms as if I were trying to signal someone who was a long way away, and Simon would try to tug it out of her mouth till finally she’d drop it at his feet. She liked to pick up toads in the pachysandra patch around the oak tree at the back of the fenced-in area and carry them around in her mouth. She liked getting me up in the morning—Simon would already be downstairs in the kitchen and would have closed the bedroom door behind him—and in the evening she liked to drag the Scottish plaid wool blanket off the couch and make it into a bed on the floor. Sometimes she folded it over carefully, and sometimes she just wadded it up. She liked to stretch out on the couch (when I wasn’t there), or at least pull a cushion off the couch and use it as a pillow.