The Truth About Death (4 page)

“Very old days. They had cooling boards too and gravity embalming. You’d have to carry buckets of blood out to the outhouse.”

“Don’t you think it’s important? Don’t you think people would … I don’t know … feel it’s important? Don’t you think there’s a kind of communal memory about this sort of hands-on experience? Look at Mrs. Johansen. She wanted to clean up her husband, at least a little. She wanted to touch him, she wanted to put her hands on him.”

“It’s messy,” Simon said. “Dead bodies don’t last very long. The insides … Never mind.”

“I know it’s messy. That’s why it’s important. Life is messy. That’s why it’s better to get your hands dirty than to post a Facebook photo of the dead person for people to ‘like.’ ”

“You’d put us out of business in a year! You want to bring someone who’s grieving into the prep room and hand them a suction trocar and say ‘Have at it’?”

“Pop, you know that’s not what I mean. I mean help wash the body—that’s all. Touch it with their hands. Not be afraid of the dead. Help dress them. Embalming’s not really necessary anyway, is it? I mean Jews don’t get embalmed, do they? The Amish man didn’t get embalmed. Why not just let them help wash the body?”

“And pack the orifices so they don’t leak?”

“That too,” she said. “What did they used to do?”

“The women took care of it.”

“Figures.”

Simon finished his beer. “How much did you win?” he asked.

“About three dollars,” she said. “I forgot to remind Mrs. Johansen about Stormy and Salty. I wanted to tell her how Grandpa Bart and I used to ride them around the paddock. Or just sit on them and talk to each other.”

“You’ll have another chance to talk to her.”

“Do you think Nana will go to Rome?”

“No idea. Do you want to go with her if she does?”

“I want to stay here with you,” she said. “I just want to sit here and have another beer.”

“We’ve got to get Mr. Johansen into the cooler.”

“He’ll keep for a while, won’t he? One more beer?”

“He’ll keep for a while, but not too long, not in this heat.”

CHAPTER II: HILDI IN LOVE

Hildi had been anxious to get on with her new life. Her new vocation. She’d been anxious to strengthen the bonds that bound her to her father and her mother, that bound her to a place where she’d been happy—the whole family living together in the funeral home. Two apartments. Upstairs divided. Grandpa Bart and Nana and her mother and father, and her brother too. A beautiful old house with seven working fireplaces. Now three working fireplaces. A carriage house in the back that had been converted into a garage. A paddock, not a parking lot, where she’d looked after Stormy and Salty. She remembered the way Stormy had scratched her head against the two-by-four that Bart had nailed up to
stabilize the gate, and how Salty had liked to have her forelock braided.

For the first time in a long time, if ever, she’d experienced a sense of a larger purpose. Not large enough to overwhelm, but large enough to give her a sense of direction, a sense that her life might matter to someone other than herself and her parents—and her grandmother, of course.

But then she went to Rome with her grandmother, and Rome took her by surprise. She fell in love with Rome and felt something happening inside her, as if she’d become pregnant and a new and different kind of happiness was growing inside her.

She worried at first about Nana’s sore throat and persistent cough, but she was reassured by the doctor at the
guardia medica
on Viale Trastevere who listened to Nana’s back to check for pneumonia, and to Hildi’s back too, just in case. He took Nana’s temperature and prescribed Ciproxin. The medical care at the
guardia medica
was free, but Nana would have to pay for the Ciproxin.

Hildi didn’t expect to see the doctor again, but he stopped by their apartment the next morning at the end of his shift to check on Nana. He took her temperature and listened to her back again and left a big fat Italian thermometer with Hildi and told her to call if Nana’s fever went up. And then he went to Bar Belli with Hildi to get a
dolce
and a cappuccino for Nana’s breakfast.

Every morning Hildi and Nana went out to see a Caravaggio or two. Afternoons Nana stayed in bed with a slight fever. Hildi liked being in charge, liked taking care of Nana, who had taken care of her so many times. Liked figuring out the bus routes, liked keeping them supplied with tickets, liked reading to Nana in the afternoons, taking her temperature
with the big fat Italian thermometer. Nana’s fever was never more than one degree centigrade above normal, just enough so she could relax and not feel guilty about staying in bed. Hildi knew the feeling from when she was a child and didn’t want to go to school, how nice it was to stay in bed with a book and have someone bring you tea with honey.

She liked shopping with Marcella, the nosy neighbor, who wanted to practice her English and who enjoyed introducing Hildi to all the shopkeepers: at Antica Cacciara, where she bought salami and cheese, olives and wine; at the
macelleria
across the street from Antica Cacciara, where she’d buy a couple of chicken thighs or a couple of pork chops; at the bakery on Via della Lungaretta where she bought two little round loaves of bread every day; and at their last stop, the Antica Frutteria on the corner of Via della Luce, where she bought fruit and vegetables.

And she liked having tea or coffee with Marcella
,
and not just with Marcella, but with Roberto from the rental agency; and with the Russian woman Anastasia, who came to clean the apartment; and with a Dutch woman—Griet, an opera singer—who’d asked her for directions at the foot of Ponte Palatino.

All these new friends thought she needed help, instruction. They were all eager to teach her about Italy, about Rome: Why the food was better in Rome than in Florence or Bologna, and the importance of certain unwritten rules: don’t cut spaghetti up with your knife and fork (like an English tourist); don’t put Parmesan cheese on
spaghetti alle vongole
; don’t ask for a cappuccino in the afternoon.

Hildi was grateful for this kind of instruction. She had a sense that she’d never get it quite right, but that was okay because there was always someone there to correct her.

And there was the doctor, of course, Dottore Francesco Tonarelli, who had stopped by on Wednesday and then again on Friday to check on Nana. Both times he’d gone to Bar Belli with Hildi. He was the only one who didn’t seem to think she needed tweaking, didn’t need a course in how to behave in Italy, and so Hildi was happy, even excited, to go out to dinner with him on Wednesday night, the middle of their second week in Rome. She spent some of the money her father had given her on a new outfit—new shoes and the kind of long sweater that everyone was wearing over tights, that looked like a
very
short dress. She’d given Nana her Ciproxin and tucked her in with
Anna Karenina
—on Hildi’s e-reader, a Nook—and was admiring herself in the glass doors of one of the bookcases in the living room when she heard Nana shuffling down the hall.

“What on earth … ?” Nana was looking at her watch, which she held in her hand.

“I’m going out for a while,” Hildi said.

“It’s almost nine o’clock.”

“That’s early in Rome.”

“But where are you going?”

“Just out. I need to get out for a while.”

“But we went out this morning. Doria Pamphilj. We saw
Mary Magdalene Penitent
and
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
and the Breughels. And you went out this afternoon. You did the shopping.”

“And now I’m going out tonight. I won’t be late.”

“But where will you go?”

“I’m going to meet a man, okay?”

“But how did you meet a man?”

“He’s the mysterious passenger who got on the train in the middle of the night, like Count Vronsky.”

“I hope his intentions are better than Count Vronsky’s.”

“I’m twenty-five years old, Nana, and I’m going out. Do you want me to help you find your place on the Nook? Levin and Oblonsky are having dinner in a French restaurant.”

“I’m not senile. At least Anna’s back in St. Petersburg.” She sat down on the sofa that opened into the bed that Hildi slept on.

“There you are. Do you want me to leave my
telefonino
?”

“If your
telefonino
is here, then I can’t call
you
, can I? Besides, I don’t know how to work it anyway.”

“I’m glad you’re starting to feel better,” Hildi said.

“I’m
not
feeling better,” Nana said.

“I’m going to meet the doctor,” Hildi said. “Dottore Tonarelli—Francesco, or Checco—at a restaurant on Via della Lungaretta.
He
has a cell phone. You could always call
him
.”

“I see,” Nana said, and shuffled back to bed, and Hildi tried to imagine her grandmother young and in love with her Italian professor, a shadowy ghost that haunted the family archives.

Via della Lungaretta was definitely touristy, but there weren’t that many tourists in November. Hildi stopped, as she always did, to read all the menus posted outside the restaurants, which were mostly empty. Maybe it was too early. Or maybe it was too late. She wasn’t sure. Not yet.

Sometimes she wished she knew Italian, but she liked not knowing it too. Liked relying on other senses. Sights, sounds, smells: Christmas lights up over Via della Lungaretta, chestnuts roasting on a street corner, the lights of the little parachutes that the children launched high into the air above the piazza with a sort of slingshot, the cello player in the piazza, water gurgling in the fountain, every little corner a thing of beauty. Well, most little corners.

She studied the menu outside Carlo Menta while she waited for Checco. It was more or less the same as all the other menus, except that it was very inexpensive. Through the window she could see that it was full of people—including children of all ages—eating and drinking, talking and laughing, the way a restaurant should be. She checked herself for nerves. None. Only a little sadness, as if she were starting down a familiar road and wasn’t sure about her own intentions. She didn’t really need another adventure.

Checco arrived, and a girl who didn’t seem to know Italian very well—probably Albanian—showed them to a table. They ate some bread and drank some wine. Hildi told him she was going to be an undertaker.

“An
impresario funebre
,” he said, and he told her that he worked one twenty-four-hour shift a week at the
guardia medica
but that his real specialty was a rare pathology—
linfomi cutanei
—a kind of skin cancer.

“Corpses and skin cancer,” she said. “We make quite a pair.” And she told him her ideas about changes she wanted to introduce in her family’s funeral home—get a dog, put up works of art by local artists, hire local musicians, bring in members of the deceased’s family to help prepare the body. And she was surprised to learn that there were no funeral homes in Italy. Just those little offices like the one she walked by every morning on the other side of Piazza San Cosimato when she went shopping with their neighbor. The
impresario—
that’s the undertaker—goes to the deceased’s house or to the hospital to prepare the body.

Hildi liked this idea and thought she’d suggest it to her father. “I suppose it doesn’t matter where the body is prepared,” she said to Checco. “The important thing is that the dead body forces you to confront the big questions.”

“And these big questions are?”

“Oh, you know, about the meaning of life, about love, death.”

“Oh,” he said, “those questions.”

“Well, it’s more than that. You have to ask yourself about courage and fortitude; you have to ask yourself about hope and love. And the interesting thing is,” she said, “that these questions change. At least the answers do. If you were dying fifty years ago—maybe a hundred years—you’d be afraid of going to hell because you’d lost your faith or had fallen into despair, or just had too many sins on your conscience. But I think that if you’re dying today, you’re more likely to be afraid that you haven’t really lived your life at all, afraid that you’ve just been passing the time, afraid that life itself—not just your own life, but
life—
is meaningless.”

“And you? Are you just passing the time?”

“Right now? Probably. Waiting to go home. Get to work. Step into my new life.”

“In general?”

She shook her head. “Not anymore.”

The waiter came to take their order. He and Checco seemed to be old friends, but Hildi couldn’t be sure. Maybe all Italian waiters acted like old friends.

Checco described his own work. His research group—International Extranodal Lymphoma Study Group (
IELSG
11)—was working on a prognostic model to improve the therapeutic approach to two different lymphomas. The prognostic model was built to fit a Cox proportional hazard model, which he explained also. The results would be published in the
Annals of Hematology.

She asked if
linfomi cutanei
was genetic, and why did genes want to screw up people’s lives? How did skin cancer help
genes increase and multiply? And he said that it probably wasn’t genetic, though there was some evidence to suggest that non-Hodgkins lymphoma might have a genetic component, and that genes didn’t “want” anything. They just occasionally misfired.

He told her that one day a week he worked as a
medico scolastico.
It took a while for her to figure out that a
medico scolastico
was a school nurse. Once a week he drove to a little town north of the city and vaccinated the children, screened them for hepatitis B and other infectious diseases, and talked to them about hygiene.

“What about head lice?”

“Ah, yes,” he said.
“Pidocchi del capo.”

“I had head lice when I was in fifth grade,” she said. “I had to put Vaseline on my hair. It was horrible.”

“Yes,” he said. “Ordinary shampoo doesn’t work at all.”