Antonio chats with the barista as she prepares us another espresso. I stare into space, immobilized by the daze-making effects of our afternoon in the mountains. So much marble, such a vast whiteness! The sunlight spilling across the quarries was brilliant, almost blinding, and the air much colder than down in the city.
I stomp my feet lightly on the floor of the caffè to get the blood circulating. Into my head comes an e. e. cummings poem, the one that begins Buffalo Bill’s / defunct and then—in a tone of admiration larded with irreverence—tells of the legendary cowboy’s prowess at shooting clay pigeons. The poem ends with a sardonic question: how do you like your blueeyed boy / Mister Death. There’s no concluding question mark or period; the poem just abruptly stops.
Well, I think, Bononi with his blue eyes never rode a watersmooth-silver stallion. Yet in his own way, he, too, could shoot down onetwothreefourfivepigeonsjustlikethat. But no more.
I have a thing for Carrara marble. It is vivacious in appearance yet calming to the touch. Vulnerable to stains and scratches, it remains lustrous even when beat-up, desirable even if discolored. The men who quarry it, i cavatori, speak of it in tones of exhaustion and reverence. A great many local kitchen countertops and bathrooms are made of it, as are innumerable Lunigianese tombstones. Around here, if you want a good mortar and pestle, the right work surface for making bread, or a nice grave, you choose Carrara marble.
I touch it whenever I see it. Don’t forget, it seems to say, the fate of the Roman city Luni, which once ruled our quarries . . . Nothing remains of that city now. Starting in the seventh century, Luni was attacked by Lombards, then by sea pirates, and later by an Andalusian emir—a freed slave and former high official of Córdoba’s caliphate. Luni’s residents fled to nearby Sarzana, never to return; and as the coastal plains on which it had been constructed gradually gave way to wetlands, Rome’s once-prominent outpost disappeared. Still, the city does live on, as the lilting name of the region: Luni-gian-a. It has become music.
Standing in the hospital’s obitorio with the other mourners, I didn’t want to look at Bononi’s body. So I concentrated instead on the marble floor. It was grayish white, its texture mottled and lustrous.
As we walked from the obitorio to the duomo where Bononi’s coffin was transported for a memorial service, I saw marble everywhere. Carrara’s main cathedral, reconstructed between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, has a soberly beautiful façade, striped with pale and dark layers of marble. Inside, mullioned windows let in daylight thin and pallid as creamy silk. Around a hundred of us filed in silently and took our seats on wooden pews. A priest from Fivizzano led the service.
In a closing homage to the deceased, a man intoned one of il professore’s poems. I’d always liked listening to Bononi recite his work, but in that ill-lit, chilly cathedral, the lines sounded bombastic. Closing my eyes, I heard Bononi himself contemplating the end of his contest with life: and only one of us will win.
When I call my mother a few days later, to update her on the situation at the castle—Raffaella is struggling in the aftermath of Bononi’s death—Mom receives the news with her usual sangfroid. Then one of her hearing aids whistles, and she asks me to hold on so she can adjust it.
I’m back, she says after a moment. And I’ve put my tape player on the floor—maybe that’ll help with the feedback . . .
What are you reading, I ask after she stops fiddling with the aid, finally silencing its shrill cries.
Well, I’ve almost finished a pretty good mystery. By the way, how do you say books in Italian?
Libri, I answer.
I’m thinking of rereading your friend Nuala’s book, Mom continues. Remind me again of its title?
Are You Somebody? I answer, returning mentally to the first time I read that memoir. How heart-throttling its honesty . . . I’d never come across an account of an Irish life—of any life—offered in language like Nuala O’Faolain’s. Excoriating, celebrating, vivisecting, mourning: she did it all. Both as a writer and as a woman, Nuala was formidable; no one ever got a curveball past her, as my father would say.
It was my mother who first told me about Are You Somebody?, back in the late 1990s; she’d heard about it on the radio. Trust me, she said, you’ve really got to read this one. Introduced by a mutual friend, Nuala and I first met in Brooklyn in 2003, and quickly grew close. As it happened, she lived a couple of blocks from me, so we saw one another a few times each month. We had a favorite spot for brekkers, as she called it: eggs, bacon, coffee for her, tea for me. An astonishing talker, Nuala bristled with intelligence, humor, scorn, longing, and pain. No subject was off-limits, but she loathed chitchat. I’d enter our breakfast joint and scan it for her blonde head; Nuala would be seated in “our” booth, reading the paper, readying to lob earfuls of opinion at me. Politics enraged and galvanized her; literature was sustenance. She was wonderfully well-read. During each breakfast, our emotional lives would be subjected to intense examination—exhausting, exhilarating.
I’m healthy as a trout, she told me in passing in 2008, a week or so after complaining of a leg that felt oddly heavy—I just don’t know what this feckin’ leg-dragging is all about . . . That was shortly before a young intern in a New York hospital emergency room announced, rather as if he were letting her know she had the flu, that there was a tumor in her brain. She died a few months later, at sixty-seven.
Yes, Mom responds, breaking into my reverie. Yes—I’d like to read that book again. It was so good. Can you order it for me?
Sure, I say. Anything else you want?
I’m getting tired of thrillers. I’d like something big, a nice long novel I’ve never read before. How about Crime and Punishment?
Yikes, Mom, I answer. Now there’s an undertaking . . . I’ll try to get you the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky.
Whatever you think’s best, my mother says.
After our conversation ends, I look for my copy of Crime and Punishment on the bookshelf in the living room, then realize it’s in Brooklyn.
I locate the novel’s first chapter online and reread the opening, that moment when Raskolnikov, the murderer-to-be, asks himself what people are most afraid of. His answer is chillingly simple, and just as chillingly complex. A new step, their own new word, Raskolnikov asserts. And what a step he takes!
I’m sure my mother will respond to the book, but it may keep her awake more than she’d like. Though I haven’t reread the novel in ages, I recall how much its protagonist’s eerie clarity spooked me. Smart, unreliable, utterly mixed-up—his name suggests the Russian word for split—Raskolnikov is nonetheless sure of himself. How could that be possible, I recall wondering when I first read the book. To be so regularly self-confident and such a god-awful mess at the same time? A quick search online for quotes from the novel yields one answer: . . . in the midst of my laughing I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again . . . round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.
Then I replay in my mind the close of my conversation with Mom. You’d better read the novel, too, she said. I did once, Mom, I replied. But I should reread it. Problem is, I’ve got stuff I’m teaching, plus there’s always other stuff my students tell me about . . . It’s endless—I’m forever falling behind.
Well, read this book, my mother ordered sternly. Because I’ll need to talk to you about it.
To everyone’s surprise, we get snow in Castiglione in February.
Raffaella and her dog romp in it, and I’m relieved to see her laughing for the first time in months. We make snow angels in the midday glare. Raffaella bakes one of her chocolate cakes, and we have big slices of it with hot strong coffee in her kitchen.
She’s awaiting Bononi’s ashes, which his brother obdurately refuses to bring to the castle. They’re at war, Raffaella and the Bononi family, over the question of how to deal with il professore’s remains. Bononi wanted nothing to do with marble headstone
s. His wishes (written out in his shaky hand, shortly before his demise) were that he be interred below the castle’s tower, in the upper part of the garden. His brother has interpreted his words to mean that the ashes should go inside the tower, in an urn—not outside, in the earth. Since no agreement has been reached, the ashes remain with the brother.
Antonio and I go to Switzerland for several weeks at the start of March. We’re in residence at Looren House, an international center for translation.
I’ve never worn sunglasses in winter, but I do in Switzerland; the snow’s dazzle is near-blinding. We’re snow-surrounded, snow-dominated. We take afternoon walks in the stuff; it’s deep but surprisingly powdery. In the evenings, after hard work and the nice fatigue of our snow walks, we make dinner and drink red wine with the other translators at Looren House. If no common language exists—and some evenings it doesn’t—we talk collectively around our mutual-comprehension difficulties, triangulating among English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, and Dutch.
A poet who writes in Romansch arrives for a day; we all listen to him read with his Dutch translator. The two of them sound like strange birds, chippering and swooping. I don’t need to understand a word to know I like the poems a lot.
Have you finished Crime and Punishment, I ask my mother when I call her in mid-March after our return from Switzerland.
Almost, she says. It’s great! I’ve had to take it slow, but it’s been so worth it—such a wonderful book. How far are along are you? When can we talk about it?
Oh, Mom, I say, I haven’t even started . . .
You haven’t? she says. Yes, I know, you’re translating. Well, get going—I don’t have all the time in the world.
I say nothing to that. There’s nothing to be said.
You know, Mom adds, the only reason I’ll excuse you is that you’re supposedly working on your own writing, in addition to the translation. Have you finished the draft of your novel yet?
Ma . . .
Oh, all right, she says in that larky tone she’s always done to perfection: half remonstrance, half indulgence. As if to say, how do I put up with you? As if to say, I do put up with you, you know. But you’re dawdling.
She doesn’t push further, yet I sense the subtext: she’s impatient with me. I’m impatient with me, too. At this juncture it’s tricky telling the difference.
We shift subjects. My mother goes into detail about my father’s recent visit to the doctor (he has, it seems, a heart-related ailment of his own, though not as serious as hers), and I find myself tuning out, summoning to mind various book titles I’ve urged on her in the past. Some she’s liked a lot, others not as much, a few not in the least.
She responded very strongly to Julia Glass’s debut novel, Three Junes. I’ve yet to read it, though Mom’s pushed me to. I’m balky about some of her suggestions, aware of the double standard I’m imposing; my mother is invariably open to my urgings. In this realm I like to feel independent, not an obedient daughter but recalcitrant, even rebellious. I fear I’ll dislike a book she admires, and then I won’t hear the end of it. Truth is, my reading life has never been very susceptible to other people’s urgings. This isn’t normally an issue between my mother and me, but in recent years she’s been keen for us to read certain titles together, and I’ve resisted.
We’ve managed nonetheless. She loved Sándor Márai’s Embers; its careful unpacking of a friendship appealed to her. And we both liked a novel by Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, for its strangeness of setting and action. She was impressed by several stories of Edna O’Brien and William Trevor that I pressed her to read. Milan Kundera, however, left her cold, as did Italo Calvino—a disappointment to me, as they’re among my favorite authors.
Like her, I’ve learned not to press too hard. Our shared love of reading is the main thing. One of my greatest quiet pleasures is watching my mother with her audio player in her lap, listening deeply to a book. And one of hers is hearing her adult children read aloud to her; when we do, her face softens in contentment.
Is she recalling, I wonder, those few years when, still sighted, she could read to her very young kids? I have no clear memory of this, though it must’ve occurred. That experience is inscribed on the wax tablets of our minds, as Socrates described memory. Some of it is blurred by now, perhaps. But Mom was trained by Braille to read even the lightest of markings, the faintest trails; I expect she can make out what I cannot.
Finished with her medical update, Mom returns unexpectedly to the subject of books.
I reread your first novel a few weeks ago, she says.
Startled, I say nothing at first, my chest tightening with unexpected fear. Am I afraid she’s read the novel again because something about it dissatisfied or baffled her the first time? Or that she liked it then, and wants to refresh her memory before leaving it behind for good?
Why, Mom? I ask.
Oh, I don’t know, I just felt I . . . I wanted to reread it, that’s all. And I liked it just as much the second time around.
As quickly as she’s introduced it, she changes the subject. Has she sensed my discomfort, or is she dodging her own? We chat briefly about my father’s forgetfulness (he claims, Mom reports, that he’s got CRS disease—Can’t Remember Shit), and then the call’s over.
I pull on my sneakers for a walk to Croce so I can gaze at the borgo from across the way. The midafternoon air is crisp; I gulp it down. Tristana follows me, then stops when we near la colla. The most dog-like cat in Castiglione, she’s clear about her loyalty’s limits. With one agile leap she’s on the wall, then over it and into the underbrush, off to her own investigations.
I walk uphill. At the old chapel of L’Annunziata, a nicely restored inn up the road, I slow down to catch my breath.
I’m hearing my mother’s voice in my head. Not words; just tones, the music of it. As if she’s singing me into courage and calm. Anxiety is time’s useless cloak, she’s singing. And death’s trying to strip me of it. I should in any case let it go.
I stop walking, close my eyes, and inhale. An image arrives of the floor in that cool, dim room in Carrara where Bononi’s body was laid out for viewing. The marble so soft-looking, as though he and the rest of us could sink into it. The floor might’ve been a cloud that had drifted down our way, settling beneath our feet.
12. Listening in the Dark
Castiglione is profoundly quiet. Also surprisingly noisy.
A few weeks during each summer, the itinerant priest who serves our part of Lunigiana comes to the little church up by the castle. The click of his heels is audible as he trots along the cobblestone lane, an all-black shadow in a hurry—he’s always late for Mass . . . After services, the bell in the castle’s tower rings; across the valley, another answers from the church in Virgoletta. (The two villages’ bells aren’t synchronized, so the hours get sounded twice, a few minutes apart; I never know which is the right time.) Intermittently, a couple of donkeys weigh in dolefully. Feral cats quarrel from time to time.
So the silence does get broken. But there are not many human voices, rarely any mechanical noises, and no music save that of birdsong. Which isn’t to say Castiglione’s gloomy; the vistas are too broad for that. And a hum of energy is palpable here, even after the sun goes down. From the woods come occasional warnings, jeerings, protests; now and then an outright shriek, the kind that stops a person’s blood.
Mostly, though, the nights are void of sound. And of light, too. Unless the moon is out, the sky is a jeweler’s pitch-black velvet cloth sprinkled with diamonds. The borgo’s wrought-iron streetlamps (few in number, all dim) do nothing to dull the sparkle. Neck craned to take it all in, a little dizzy, I feel sometimes I’ll fall upward into it.
What’s ineffable in Castiglione—the traumas and scars of history, the seasons’ rigors and reliefs—stirs each individual consciousness like some invisible spoon. There are few of us here, but our collective seeping-forth of experience and feeling is without pau
se; the brew thickens.
We’re all mindful of living in a near-deserted space. There’s no longer a powerful capitano in residence in the castle, as during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There are no more Florentine noble families in the palazzi below the church, no more peasants in the stone houses flanking the borgo’s main lane, no more soon-to-be emigrants to L’America, no more Partisan sympathizers, no more postwar returnees. Nor any current dwellers under the age of fifty.
If during an afternoon walk I encounter one of my neighbors, I can sense in his or her expression some perception starting to stretch like a cat after a nap. Or some strong emotion contracting into a tight hard knot, some inchoate longing about to emerge. My neighbor can sense, I’m sure, the same things in me. But nothing’s said of any of this; we speak instead of weather or food. We haven’t words for this stirring within us, or for how we’ve each been spending at least a little of our time since we last met: with the dead, who regale us with tales we fear we’ll forget, or distort in the retelling.
An owl sometimes breaks the quiet. How to feel when it addresses us so eerily, comically, menacingly, sorrowfully?
I once heard the Emerson String Quartet play the last quartet of Shostakovich’s cycle. Before the music began, the hall’s lights were turned off. The four musicians sat at a distance from one another, not in their usual cluster, and proceeded to play in pitch-blackness.
It’s a slow-moving piece, that fifteenth. Adagio all the way. Slow, yet beautifully taut. On the score, the composer wrote instructions for the first movement: “Play [it] so that flies drop dead in mid-air and the audience leaves the hall in sheer boredom.” That evening, however, as the first haunting notes emerged out of nowhere and the quartet commenced its tense journey from agita to acceptance, no one in the audience was bored. We were all balanced on a razor’s edge between exhilaration and dismay, our collective breath held.
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