The Truth About Death (7 page)

He laughed an easy child’s laugh. “He’s had it all his life.”

“I’d like this to be some kind of ritual—what we’re doing now—some kind of ceremony. So we don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.”

“It
is
a ritual, probably older than marriage itself. The bottle of Campari, the bowl of fruit on the table, the peach, a man and a woman sitting next to each other.”

“I’m trying to commit it to memory. Capture it. The bowl of fruit. The tablecloth. The pigeons on the balcony. It’s like a painting by Chardin.” She walked into the bedroom in her bare feet, holding her sandals by their straps.

It was like her first time and her last time. It was like climbing a very tall ladder. Climbing up to the top, she felt
the strain in her thighs and her calves, ladder rungs under her arches, and then climbing higher and higher. She remembered a painter on a very tall ladder painting the belvedere on their house. Standing down below, in the drive … she’d been looking up at him. She’d just come home from school. She was not afraid of heights, but seeing him standing on the very top rung of the ladder had given her butterflies, the same butterflies she was feeling now, but she knew better than to say “I love you.” Instead she said, “Not yet.”

“Not yet,” she said. “Not yet.” Climbing higher and higher. “Not yet. Not yet.” And then she was standing on the top rung, like the painter. “Okay,” she whispered. “Now.” And then she was falling over backward.

And she was thinking that now that that was out of the way, they could move onto something else. But what? What lay beyond
this
? Maybe
this
was as far as you could go. Two people who have made love for the first time and are looking forward to doing it again. And again. Maybe
this
was as far as she’d ever gotten.

CHAPTER III: CROSSING THE ALPS

By the end of their third week in Rome Louisa had to admit, at least to herself, that her spiritual quest had come to nothing. She’d dragged Hildi—always a good sport—to see most of the Caravaggios in Rome, but the Caravaggios hadn’t spoken to her. Not even
La Vocazione di San Matteo
in the back of the French church. What had seemed perfectly clear at home in her kitchen when she’d looked at the reproductions in Helen Langdon’s
Caravaggio
—which Elizabeth had given to her, and which she’d brought with her to Rome—now seemed
confused and murky. Standing with a dozen other tourists in the darkness at the back of the French church and peering into the Contarelli Chapel, she wasn’t even sure which of the men was Saint Matthew—the man with the beard or the man counting the money. She wasn’t sure which man Christ was pointing at. Three people in the picture were pointing at other people: Christ was pointing, Saint Peter was pointing, and the man with the beard was pointing; but it wasn’t clear whom any of them were pointing
at
. And Christ’s limp wrist bothered her. She had to keep feeding the meter so the light would stay on.

It bothered Hildi too. “If you’re going to point at someone and say ‘Follow me,’ ” Hildi said, “you’ve got to do better than that.” And she demonstrated, holding her arm out and pointing straight at her grandmother and saying in a loud voice that made the other tourists turn to look at her, “Nana, follow me.”

She should have listened to Father Cochrane, who’d tried to tamp down her sudden enthusiasm for a spiritual adventure. She’d called him the night of Bart’s death, feeling guilty about casting the first stone at her husband of over fifty years. Real remorse was something new for her. Down in the cooler with Bart stretched out between them, she’d laid out her spiritual agenda: fasting, prayer, a retreat at the Cistercian convent up in Dubuque, and the pilgrimage to Rome to see the Caravaggios.
The Calling of Saint Matthew.
Instead of applauding, Father Cochrane had counseled moderation, counseled her to go slow, but she’d ignored his advice and had spent a week in the convent preparing for the trip by fasting and praying, and had been so weak she’d lost control of her suitcase on one of the escalators at O’Hare. The suitcase had tumbled down the escalator, and she’d fallen down the
moving steps on top of it. She was lucky not to have broken something, and when she thought about it now, she felt like a foolish old woman.

At the end of her junior year at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, Louisa had fallen in love with her Italian professor, Gianluigi Bevilacqua. Actually she’d been in love with him since the beginning of her freshman year, and had expressed her love by studying hard, spending hours in the language lab, and translating Leopardi.
“D’in su la vetta della torre antica,”
she said aloud, the first line of “Il passero solitario”:

From high atop the ancient tower,

Solitary thrush, you sing to the fields

Until the day is done,

And your melodies meander through this valley.

What Louisa knew about passion she’d learned from Gianluigi one summer—the summer after her junior year—in Gianluigi’s little apartment on Broad Street, just across the Santa Fe tracks. Passion had been a light that illuminated everything in her path, that lit up dark corners in the library and dark corners in her soul. She’d started smoking too, sitting next to Gianluigi on the edge of the bed after making love, enjoying one of his Italian cigarettes. And in the end it had been the cigarettes that gave them away, when Gianluigi’s landlady had smelled smoke, burst into their room, and reported what she’d seen to the dean of women at the college. Gianluigi was dismissed and had to go back to Rome, and Louisa was forced to drop out. He’d promised to send for her, but by the time he wrote to her, it was too late. She’d been frightened; she’d had no money; her grandmother had washed
her hands of her. She’d turned to Father Arnie, the young priest who ran the Newman Center at the college, and Father Arnie had found a job for her with the Oldfield family answering the telephone at the funeral home, which was where she’d met Bart. She never smoked another cigarette, but she missed them, and she would have smoked one now if she’d had a pack in her purse, though Hildi would have a fit when she came home.

So what? Louisa didn’t care. She didn’t like being left alone to fend for herself while Hildi went off with her doctor. The doctor who’d been stopping by to check on her
mal da gola
, Louisa realized, had really been stopping by to see Hildi, and really, she’d known it all along. This afternoon they’d gone flying—Hildi and the doctor. It was after eight o’clock, and they hadn’t come back. Louisa tried to take some pleasure in Hildi’s good fortune, if that’s what it was, but she couldn’t do it.

She decided to go out. She could at least walk down Via delle Mantellate, where Gianluigi had lived. She had it marked on her map. It was a short street next to Carcere Regina Coeli, Queen of Heaven Prison.

Walking down Via della Lungaretta she stopped to study the menus of the different restaurants. She hadn’t eaten in any of them because her
mal da gola
had not only shaped their days, it had made everything, including the wine, taste
off
. By the time she crossed Viale di Trastevere it felt like rain. She was tempted to turn back, but instead she bought a small umbrella from a street vendor who was also selling suitcases, flashlights, and backpacks.

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,
MP
3 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.”