Читать книгу Grove - Esther Kinsky - Страница 21

Maria

CLOUDS SLIPPED BETWEEN the hills, draping everything in damp white. A very thin rain fell, at times in drops so wispy and wafting that it was probably only the clouds themselves, spreading out their moisture. The white fields began moving, uncovering views—the cemetery emerged, fragments of its outer wall, the grave walls, the trees, and amid this shapelessness everything seemed much closer than usual. Then it disappeared again. Sunlight seeped into the clouds and reached the cemetery, while everything else still lay in fog, hidden. The cemetery glowed golden above an ocean of clouds, an island of promise which beckoned no one, as the village was still hidden, had possibly vanished altogether.

On my walk with the camera I had lost my cable release. The golden cemetery island in the air went unphotographed. At first, I was distressed not by my loss of the cable per se, but of the cable as witness to one day two years ago in winter—the gray, mild, mistletoe-winter, a winter without abnormalities—when we wandered through the streets, thinking about “next year” and “in two years” and the “future” in general and I bought it at a shop with used camera accessories, to replace a lost one. We both ran our fingers through the slack knot of cable releases, which lay in a basket, twisted into one another like half-hibernating, languid, fearless snakelets, and M. eventually pulled out this especially robust, light-gray coated one, which I took and used and now had lost. My distress over the cable falls under one of the potential curses of bereavement that I gradually became familiar with: weighting objects qua testimony. The attribution of participation in a moment past. A small piece of back-then, which should act as if it could moor the past tense onto the broken-off banks of the present. Idle lists of a forlornness that knows not what to do with itself.

In the afternoon it became brighter and the light beneath the evenly pale sky was nearly spring-like. In the unfamiliar landscape I learned to read the spatial shifts that come along with changes to the incidence of light. I’d never lived with such an expansive view of the country and now noticed every day how new shadows formed, new silhouettes emerged, and a lower hill lying to the south, upon it the village of Paliano, became rounder and softer, appeared to move ever closer. I went out looking for the cable, tracing my route across the cemetery. The columbaria facing the street seemed like a labyrinth to me that day, ladders strewn every which way, and for the first time I noticed that one wall with grave compartments was practically empty. In the empty, nameless cavities people had placed small lamps and flowers; in one compartment was a framed photograph, so faded that I could barely make out anything at all. I scanned the ground where I thought I had been standing yesterday in front of the women. At the opposite end of the path a girl walked between the columbaria in circles, speaking out loud. At first sight I thought she must be talking to her dead, to whatever lay locked in the ornamented fornetto-drawer behind the marble panel, but surely she spoke only into her phone.

I found my cable in a small pile of litter which had been either swept or blown by the wind against a grave wall: tattered petals of artificial flowers, small branches, cigarette butts, a trampled green lighter. The gray cable blended in with the light gray concrete drawers and ground, and it was only the shimmering metal ends that caught my eye. It lay in front of a grave marker bearing the name Maria Tagliacozzi. She died in 1972 in August, 60 years old, and was mourned by a brother and sisters. Above the name was a ceramic medallion, featuring a photograph of the deceased. A beautiful woman, loose curls tumble over her shoulders, her face made up as if for a performance, with a polka-dotted scarf wrapped around her neck. A face characteristic of the late forties, maybe fifties. She looked a bit like a film actress, perhaps due to the angle at which she stares into the camera, her gaze somewhat tilted and upturned, in contrast to the stiff, head-on shots adorning other graves. I tried to recall a film suited to her face and expression, but came up with nothing. On the ground in front of her grave was a small Aladdin lamp. Its fluted glass chimney was crooked, and the small bulb didn’t glow, although it was connected to a cable. Perhaps it needed to be replaced. Who looked after her lamp? Her brother—elderly, short of breath? Or one of her sisters? It was unlikely: this year Maria Tagliacozzi would have been 103. Did she have nephews and nieces? I would bring her a flower next time. Maria Tagliacozzi could be my dead for the remainder of my stay in Olevano, and give cause to my daily cemetery visits.

I took the long way through the olive groves and past the old man’s vineyard. Everything seemed to point to spring, even if the white smoke of burning branches and leaves rose over every valley for miles and even the plain. Fire cures and blighted offerings. Without olives the region would be utterly lost.

It was already getting dark when I passed by the vineyard. Cats arched their backs in the pale grass on the wayside. In the gardens below the vineyards, which until now had lain asleep, life stirred. People busied themselves in their makeshift, cobbled-together sheds, and dogs leapt along the fences. Early spring was taking possession of the terrain. I took a long detour to the village, which let out farther down, practically at Piazzale Aldo Moro, at the small main road. The street lamps radiated a yellow light, the shops were illuminated. There were few pedestrians. I could already hear a woman’s voice yelling monotonously from below. ‘Tekiah! Tekiah!’ I understood from a distance, well aware that it could only be an illusion. The woman shouted repeatedly, without varying the volume or urgency of her tone. As I approached, I saw her standing in front of a large house on the corner, where the lane with the post office and the courthouse met the main road, and I understood that she was calling “Maria.” Relentlessly, without pause, “Maria! Maria!” It was a large house that she stood in front of, a beautiful, old building with a wide, carved entrance and many windows, and I wondered why I had never noticed it before. The light was on in several windows of the house, but I saw no one moving through the rooms. The doorbell panel was illuminated, there must have been six apartments in the building. A ways farther uphill, the Arab vegetable and fruit stands lay in dim light. No one noticed the woman. She stepped back into the street, as if to get a better view of the interior, and continued calling without pause. The street was full of her shouts for Maria, and no one appeared who felt spoken to. It was difficult to tell how old the shouting woman was. Perhaps she was in her early fifties. She wore a light winter coat with a belt, noticeably more fashionable than what most women here wore. The whole scene, the way she called, looked up, stepped back, even her clothing had something theatrical about it, the way she first stood, then paced up and down on a very small section of sidewalk by the door, the gesture with which she ultimately raised her hand and placed it to her ear, as if straining to hear sounds from inside the house, a sign from Maria, but above all, her monotone call—all that was a performance for an audience unfathomable to me, which sat somewhere silent in the dark, maybe even holding its breath in suspense.