The Truth About Death (8 page)

“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.

“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.

CHAPTER IV: PROFESSIONAL COURTESY

Simon and Gilbert were in Simon’s office going over the details for the Connolly funeral when Marge, Simon’s
receptionist, said there was a phone call for Simon from Rome. Simon picked up a Bob Dylan
CD
from the desk and handed it to Gilbert. “You want to put this in the machine. Don’t start it till about ten thirty.” Mrs. Connolly had been one of Elizabeth’s students at the college. Her husband was a musician and wanted
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
to be playing when people came in for the funeral. Gilbert wiped the
CD
case, which was smudged, on his pants: on the jacket Dylan and a girl were walking down a street in New York, Dylan in his thin jacket, the girl’s head on his shoulder. 1963. Simon had been twelve years old, starting seventh grade at Churchill Junior High.

He picked up the phone, expecting it to be Hildi. It would be five o’clock in Rome according to the little alarm clock he kept on his desk set to Rome time. She’d completed a semester in the mortuary science program at the community college in Galesburg and then had gone back to Rome for the summer. But she hadn’t come back from Rome in the fall.

He no longer worried about Hildi’s brother, Jack, who was now running a very smart restaurant in New York—Bistrot Jacques. But he still worried about Hildi. An old habit. So far away. He’d been getting letters and calls, so he knew she was happy. He could feel it over the phone. He could feel the heat coming out of the receiver, as if it were a blow dryer burning his ear. He knew she had a job she loved, and he knew that she was in love herself. And he knew that she wasn’t coming back, wasn’t going to take over the business. And that was okay, even though he’d already changed the sign. He’d received an offer from one of the big chains—Service Corporation International. Elizabeth wanted him to take it. But he couldn’t get himself to do it. Not yet.

It was nine o’clock in the morning in Galesburg, five
o’clock in the afternoon in Rome. Hildi had been killed in an auto accident at two o’clock that morning. Two o’clock in Rome. She’d been dead since eight o’clock last night, Galesburg time. Hit-and-run. Simon was prepared for almost anything from Hildi, but not this. The nervous young man on the telephone, who was probably Hildi’s age, said she’d been hit by a car at the foot of Ponte Garibaldi, where Lungotevere Raffaello Sanzio turns into Lungotevere degli Anguillara—streets running along the Tiber—and had been taken immediately to a hospital on Isola Tiberina. She’d just crossed the Ponte Garibaldi. Lots of things would have to be done. He interspersed the list with condolences. How sorry he was. The papers, forms, arrangements. Simon would have to contact an Italian funeral director. The consulate had a list of funeral directors who spoke English. He could fax or e-mail the information.