The funeral of Maria Luisa Rafaella Ciervo
The funeral of Maria Luisa Rafaella Ciervo was poorly attended.
This was, in part, because this last clear blue-skied Saturday of September was also the day that Tiziana Maria Lupo (second daughter of Titi and Antonio), and Domenico Giuseppe Gallo (only son of Nicla and Pepe) had chosen to finally get married. The wedding ceremony wouldn’t happen for at least another hour or so, there being only the one priest anymore, and it wouldn’t happen here in the Santa Maria Maggiore in the center of the village, but rather in one of the smaller chapels, likely the one which was accessible by limousine, it being on a small yet open piazza and not jammed between crumbling buildings on impossibly narrow winding stone streets. There the photographer would make the most of the ornate late-Baroque plasterwork, soft peach walls and artificial candlelight, certainly sending a drone up towards the dark and un-restored painting on the ceiling to get a dramatic bird’s-eye video of Tiziana’s tearful walk down the aisle in silver stilettos to a soulful rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah; the singer, who understood a little English, thoughtfully leaving out the part about someone being tied to a kitchen chair. The lens of the drone, an “extra” for which Tiziana’s parents had paid dearly, would alight on Tiziana’s snug iridescent white dress with its long train flecked with pink, silver and lavender mirrored spangles, then on the shimmery taffeta one-shouldered pinkish-lavender fishtail dresses and glossy ironed hair of the four bridesmaids and matron-of-honor; their bouquets of pink, purple-dyed and silver dipped roses; then on the dark lavender sharkskin suits and balding shiny heads of the groom, the ushers and the best man. The stationary video cameras down in front would not miss a single sequin in this affair that would perfectly describe how “elegance” had come to be interpreted in the years since Maria Luisa Rafaella Ciervo had given any thought to such things.
Had Maria Luisa known that the mass commemorating her quite timely, if not maybe just a little late, passing would coincide with the wedding day of these two young--santo cristo in what kind of world can thirty-seven be called “young”? In her time it was already entirely too old for a wedding and all that it implied, but still, had Maria Luisa known of the coincidence, she would surely have been mortified. The mere suggestion of possibly inconveniencing others in any way was not something her personal make-up allowed for.
On further reflection, Maria Luisa was just as likely to think, but only for a moment, an instant really, that it truly was a shame that the timing of this wedding, on this day of all days, meant that anyone still left in village who might have been inclined to come to the 9:30am funeral mass was instead at the beauty parlor or barber or pressing a shirt or futilely trying to bribe one of the children to have a bath or yelling at another to stop fighting with her brother already for the love of the madonna you’ll ruin your new dress.
Truthfully, there probably weren’t many folks who’d have come even if the funeral happened on the Friday before or the Sunday after instead because, as it happens, 103 years, four months and nineteen days is along time to wait for one of life’s most defining moments and most people to whom Maria Luisa had been important were themselves long dead.
In the church then on this especially beautiful Saturday morning, light streaming in from the large east-facing doors, sat Barbara Gianni, four rows from the front, left side. Behind her to the right was Annunziata “Nunzia” Maria Mele, a simple woman in her late 60s who’d lived with her parents, their only child, until her mother died; then with her father until he died and then, not feeling confident enough at forty-three to live all alone in the small house where she was born, with distant cousins on her mother’s side who’d lived up the street. She has only once in her life ever left the village. It was to go to Salerno by bus one mid-December afternoon with a group from church to see the lights the city had put up for Christmas and to eat warm zeppole drizzled with honey. Annunziata, torn between glorious wonder at it all and an overwhelming sense of terror and doom, decided that once was enough. What else could there be to see?
Since her distant cousins, childless, had died some years previous, Nunzia had kept up her daily walk up to the Santa Maria Maggiore for the ever more sparsely attended 7am mass, often staying on to sweep the square in front of the church or to attend whatever other events that might follow the early mass. This is how she came to be in the small party of mourners at Maria Luisa’s funeral. She didn’t actually know Maria Luisa except to see her now and again. They’d hardly exchanged more than a few words in the seventy-odd years that they’d lived roughly 200 meters from each other, on different narrow stone streets in this village. They weren’t unfriendly. Nunzia was just agonizingly shy and it had simply never occurred to Maria Luisa to make any sort of overture beyond, “good morning” or “Madonna mia, what weather today, no?” and words like that.
Two rows in front of Barbara sat Angelo Giuseppe D’Amato, a lawyer in his early sixties. Barbara doubted very much that Angelo actually practiced law but this was how he’d introduced himself to her on the street one morning not long after she first arrived, and again thereafter on numerous occasions. In spite of what, in Barbara’s unprofessional opinion, were some obvious and potentially severe intellectual deficiencies which might prevent the attainment of any career, not just law, she continued, so as not to confuse him with Angelo the Butcher, Angelo with the small brown dog, and all the other Angelos in this town, to refer to him as Angelo the Lawyer. He was another orphaned adult who found solace in the church and who took very seriously his task, by now long mastered though no less anxiety producing, of keeping the incense burner full. Like Nunzia Maria Mele, Angelo had no specific connection to the deceased, nor had he been invited to the wedding of Tiziana and Domenico.
Barbara waited patiently in her pew while the four members of the choir not otherwise engaged this morning waited patiently in their box while Don Carlo, the “new” priest who’d arrived in the village a mere seven years ago, stood at the altar waiting patiently, for some signal from within perhaps, to begin, at some point hopefully soon, the service.
At the base of the altar there were more bouquets of chrysanthemums and lilies than Barbara expected to see, many of them likely sent by the ageing children who still remembered and thought kindly of “Donna” Maria Louisa, as they were taught to call her by the good souls of their long-departed parents. Some of the other bouquets may have been sent by the elderly offspring of the former colleagues and students of Vincenzo Gaetano D’Amato (no relation to Angelo Giuseppe D’Amato the Lawyer), husband of Maria Luisa, peace to his soul. Vincenzo died early one rainy spring morning when he didn’t take seriously the landslide barrier erected on the easiest route from their village to the neighboring one and was washed down the side of a mountain in their light green Fiat 500C Giardiniera, taking with him their oldest child, 6-year-old Elena. Maria Luisa was at home with the twins, newborn boys, wearily trying to figure out how to feed them both and still have time for anything else during the day or night. It would be many years before she had time to either grieve her daughter or forgive her husband.
The twins, as it turns out, took after their father in that they were both careless and unlucky.
The older of the two, Gaetano Vincenzo, was fifteen and in love with Rosangela when he failed, in spite of it being May and certainly knowing better, it being the month of both Mary and of serpents, to bring a stick with him into the tall grasses and flowers on the hillside. He was bit on the ankle by a viper. A shepherd found him, a bouquet of wildflowers in his hand, only two hours later but entirely too late.
The younger twin, Michele Luigi, fled his tiny hometown at seventeen for a city across the sea and found himself near the top of the tallest tower one clear September morning in his pajamas and robe, having gone up only because he’d locked himself out of his apartment while putting the recycling out in the bin and needed to get his keys from his “roommate”, as they still called each other after all these years. He came down, hand in hand with Steve, in a deluge of fire, smoke and ash. Only Maria Luisa knew for certain that he was gone, and not, as would be reported later and for many years to come, missing. Resting on an old straw-seated chair in a patch of sun in the garden that afternoon, as was her habit after lunch, she was startled out of her drowsiness by a magpie flying overhead. The flicker of a shadow crossed her face just long enough to let her know, with incontestable clarity, that something terrible had just happened; that a loss, permanent and final, had occurred. It was the neighbor running up the cobblestones to push open the gate who identified and named the event, but, even as details unfolded, escalated and then, after much time, faded, in Maria Luisa’s memory there remained only the shadow of a bird.
One arrangement at the foot of the altar in the Chiesa Maria Maggiore, maybe the largest, would have come from Fillipa Ciervo, the childless only grandchild of Fillipo Ciervo, peace to his soul, an older brother of Maria Luisa. He was the only one of her seven siblings, all boys, to have both survived into adulthood and to have remained in Italy, emigrating north and, to their mother’s colossal distress, marrying a sophisticated young woman from Milan who couldn’t boil an egg, never mind make a passable ravioli with sheep’s milk ricotta the way they should be made per l’amore di dio what would they eat?
Two of Maria Luisa’s brothers had died as children, one was called to the lord in Libya in the Second World War, and the remaining three, along with any potential progeny, had long disappeared into the hectic and complicated folds of the Americas. One had gone to Venezuela never to be heard from again and two, having started out in Jersey City, NJ, had since dispersed as far and wide as California and Florida. The Americans, as they were called between Maria Luisa and the remaining extended family, came back to the village only once, in the summer after the death of young Gaetano, for the funeral of their mother, matriarch of the family. Whichever of the descendants of the Americans who might have remembered that an aunt, great or great-great, still lived, until the day before yesterday, somewhere in the south of Italy, had not in very many years thought of her and would have probably assumed, should anyone have asked, that she’d long since gone to the other side.
“In the name of the father, and of the…”
Finally Don Carlo touched his forehead and began to speak. Barbara listened to the timeworn words as they floated up towards the rafters. Following them with her gaze she noticed a small circle of black flies dipping and weaving overhead. It was September after all; of course there were flies.
“No one remembers this but I tell you, believe me,” said Maria Luisa on a different September morning, a couple of years earlier. She was Barbara’s next-door neighbor for the nine years that Barbara had so far lived in this village. Maria Luisa looked at Barbara pointedly, nodding; her eyebrows raised high on her wrinkled forehead. In her lap was a basket of wild chicory greens that she’d gathered earlier, before the fog had lifted from the valley, from between the rows of grapevines planted on the lowest terrace of the garden that some distant ancestor had carved into the side of the high rocky hill upon which sat the village. Maria Luisa picked off the yellowed or bug-eaten leaves and discarded them into an old bucket at her side, keeping the choicest part of the greens for today’s soup.
“We never had flies in September. Never. Of course in May they came when the ground was warm to go with the sheep up to the mountains. But September? Bah.” Maria Luisa shook her head. “You know what we had in September? Butterflies. Orange ones. They would try and come inside all the houses like the flies do now. When I was a little girl, she died, my great-grandmother. I was eight, maybe nine years old and she was small like me. Only maybe just a little bit taller.” Maria Luisa squinted through the space between her thumb and forefinger. “But very strong. She carried the firewood on her head all the way from the forest up to the house in town. You would walk next to her and you would feel safe next to her in the woods when we would collect chestnuts, even though there were wild boars who also wanted the chestnuts. She would give you her stick and then you felt strong too, walking with her.” Maria Luisa sat up proudly in her straw-seated chair, holding an imaginary walking stick.
“Sometimes when you helped her in the kitchen she would smile at you like she knew a secret, like maybe she was going to tell you a big happy secret. Only she didn’t ever tell. But just knowing that she knew something wonderful was enough to make you happy inside. Anyway, when she died and we were all in the church—the whole village practically—the butterflies came. I was the youngest of all my brothers and cousins and I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing. Can you imagine?” For a moment Maria Luisa’s blue eyes grew round.
“Of course I was crying a little because I was sad but laughing too. It was funny, all these butterflies coming in and landing on the casket and the altar and the flowers and the priest and on people’s heads. My mother smacked me,” She said, leaning over and whacking Barbara’s arm. “So I tried to be quiet. And then two of my brothers and a couple cousins all started laughing too, maybe because I was making funny noises trying not to laugh or maybe because there came even more and more butterflies, the whole place filling up. So we were there up in front trying not to laugh but laughing anyway and my mother was going to kill us, and my grandmother, who would never kill us because she loved us too much, was going to kill both my mother and my aunt for having children who would dare to laugh at a time like this. Which of course made everything funnier because when you’re a child you think someone killing people is a funny thing.”
Maria Luisa paused, wiping the merriment from her eyes with the edge of her shawl. She hadn’t lost the thread of the story; she’d just remembered something.
“You know that was the last time I think I saw the butterflies come inside like that. I don’t know,” she said, swatting at the air, “now we have these flies.”
Barbara, the hard wood of the pew digging into her back, looked up at the flies. She counted them: five, maybe six. Barbara felt an anxiousness flutter inside her ribcage and breathed deeply. She had been thinking quite a lot lately about all the “last times” that occur on a daily basis that one doesn’t always take note of but that become inextricable from our present. The first time that it had occurred to Barbara that a “last time” had occurred, un-noticed, un-marked and un-celebrated, was eleven years earlier, when her youngest son, having finished high school had decided to forego college for world travel. At the end of the summer, before dawn one morning, she drove him to the train station from where he’d insisted on departing, backpack on his shoulders, for points north, the airport in New York and then… an indefinite itinerary lasting an indefinite amount of time. On the drive home, she found herself overwhelmed by a single thought: there had been, many years earlier, a day that was in fact the very last day that she had held her son, perched on her left hip, one arm around him and the other, invariably, set to another task: stirring something on the stove maybe or holding his older brother’s hand crossing a street. She couldn’t remember. There was this day, this last day, and she’d missed it; hadn’t even noticed until fifteen or sixteen years later that it had happened.
The first times were easy to spot. She’d witnessed most of them, marked them with a kiss, a misty eye, clapping hands, a call to her mother: A step! A haircut! A tooth! A shave!
The last times were all trickier to spot, hidden in the mundane. They’d been left to fade away until the day, always September, that they’d come up to be mourned all at once on the drive home from the station at 5:34am. Somewhere between the waterworks and heavy sighs came the realization that she’d missed the fact that she’d also missed all her older son’s last times and hadn’t even realized until now, this very minute. Guilt piled on top of the grief and Barbara transitioned to loud hiccupping sobs.
But would she have stopped herself from putting either of them down had she known it was the last time she’d hold them like that, snuggled warm and soft against her side? How long could’ve it gone on anyway? Both her sons were over six feet tall now. These moments were just the normal stuff of life, almost impossible to measure, celebrate or even see.
Still, this idea of last times and of the way they had of slipping past unnoticed took root somewhere inside Barbara. Her awareness intensified and she began to collect these moments purposefully, in the same way she collected firsts, just more quietly: a pause, a careful filing away of a memory. Some were easy to spot: the last pecan ever collected from the tree in her backyard in her old house in Georgia before they’d had to cut it down; the last day that Daniel ever lived in that house, before the divorce; the last time she ate at the pizzeria here in the large piazza in the center of the village before the pizza maker retired and not one of his children or grandchildren, by now far away and speaking other languages, wanted to take it over. Some last times weren’t obvious until well afterwards, like the time several summers ago when she’d run into Marco on the street in the evening after dark while on bicycle, on her way to dinner with friends. He stopped her and they talked for a moment in the light rain, he waving a loaf of bread in the air, exasperated as ever by the latest in a long line of unsuitable lovers; she, as always, laughing with him, not at him. Kissing twice, once on each cheek, they parted. He would return to Torino after the August holiday to die by February of pancreatic cancer that no one knew was there until it was too late to even try to treat.
Most of the last times in Barbara’s growing collection were intimate, some more significant than others but most probably meaningless to anyone but her. She didn’t see this as a morose endeavor and treated these moments with the tenderness and reverence she felt they deserved. As her collection grew, however, Barbara became ever so slowly aware that things had started to take a more serious turn, a broader scope.
In the damp coolness of the dimly lit church where overhead gathered several more flies and down in front lay Maria Luisa Rafaella Ciervo, ostensibly resting, Barbara thought about the fact that Maria Luisa Rafaella Ciervo was, until the day before yesterday, the last person alive to have known, though evidence of her own sight, that September once brought orange butterflies, not small black flies, into the houses.
It should not be discounted that Giuseppina Franca Mele, a distant cousin to the Nunzia Maria Mele who was sitting behind Barbara in the church, was still alive and had heard, on more than one occasion, from her great uncle Franco, that there had once been houses full of butterflies, but she’d long stopped talking about it, talking instead, like everyone else, of having to keep windows closed during the loveliest time of year or of what besides that sticky paper could be used to control the problem. Besides, she hadn’t actually seen the butterflies herself so she couldn’t attest to the verity of Uncle Franco’s memory.
Giuseppina Franca had also heard, probably also from her great-uncle, that there were once deer in the forest outside the village, but unlike Maria Luisa she’d never actually seen one, never mind been close enough to a young doe almost to touch its brown coat, but not succeeding in touching it because that would have meant moving from her rock-still position crouched on the forest floor and to move would have risked scaring the magnificent creature away. Maria Luisa did, after some time, move, but only after the doe had bounded gracefully up the steep slope of chestnut trees and disappeared. At that point Maria Luisa realized that her legs were scratched, her hem torn and her basket of butcher’s broom shoots, collected like asparagus in the spring, was half-crushed under her bottom.
“I ran all the way home,” said Maria Luisa, shawl drawn tight over her shoulders as she rearranged the logs sticking out from the fireplace. The days were short and dreary now and Barbara had gotten into the habit of making excuses to stop by and see the older woman, without making it obvious that she was in any way checking in on her, as if she were elderly and frail and needed anyone’s pity thank you very much. Today Barbara brought a couple slices of the banana bread she’d baked that morning in an effort to bring some extra warmth into her kitchen while she wrote. Maria Luisa had gotten used to the strange American recipes that she came up with and regarded her gifts with less and less suspicion, especially if they were sweet. She sat back down next to her plate of banana bread and cup of weak coffee.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything but I was so excited. And then my mother was angry with me of course for coming home with squashed shoots and not very many of them. What do we care for a deer if you didn’t bring it home? She says. There were mouths to feed and I had ruined our pranzo.”
Maria Luisa sipped her coffee and broke off a small piece of the sweet bread to nibble on before continuing.
In the church, the four choir members were singing, led by Don Carlo, his lovely tenor slightly roughened by his fifty-odd years. Salve Regina, madre di misericordia, vita, dolcezza e speranza nostra, salve. A Te ricorriamo….
Barbara whispered what lines she knew, while her list of last times grew by pages in the space of this September morning.
This was, in part, because this last clear blue-skied Saturday of September was also the day that Tiziana Maria Lupo (second daughter of Titi and Antonio), and Domenico Giuseppe Gallo (only son of Nicla and Pepe) had chosen to finally get married. The wedding ceremony wouldn’t happen for at least another hour or so, there being only the one priest anymore, and it wouldn’t happen here in the Santa Maria Maggiore in the center of the village, but rather in one of the smaller chapels, likely the one which was accessible by limousine, it being on a small yet open piazza and not jammed between crumbling buildings on impossibly narrow winding stone streets. There the photographer would make the most of the ornate late-Baroque plasterwork, soft peach walls and artificial candlelight, certainly sending a drone up towards the dark and un-restored painting on the ceiling to get a dramatic bird’s-eye video of Tiziana’s tearful walk down the aisle in silver stilettos to a soulful rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah; the singer, who understood a little English, thoughtfully leaving out the part about someone being tied to a kitchen chair. The lens of the drone, an “extra” for which Tiziana’s parents had paid dearly, would alight on Tiziana’s snug iridescent white dress with its long train flecked with pink, silver and lavender mirrored spangles, then on the shimmery taffeta one-shouldered pinkish-lavender fishtail dresses and glossy ironed hair of the four bridesmaids and matron-of-honor; their bouquets of pink, purple-dyed and silver dipped roses; then on the dark lavender sharkskin suits and balding shiny heads of the groom, the ushers and the best man. The stationary video cameras down in front would not miss a single sequin in this affair that would perfectly describe how “elegance” had come to be interpreted in the years since Maria Luisa Rafaella Ciervo had given any thought to such things.
Had Maria Luisa known that the mass commemorating her quite timely, if not maybe just a little late, passing would coincide with the wedding day of these two young--santo cristo in what kind of world can thirty-seven be called “young”? In her time it was already entirely too old for a wedding and all that it implied, but still, had Maria Luisa known of the coincidence, she would surely have been mortified. The mere suggestion of possibly inconveniencing others in any way was not something her personal make-up allowed for.
On further reflection, Maria Luisa was just as likely to think, but only for a moment, an instant really, that it truly was a shame that the timing of this wedding, on this day of all days, meant that anyone still left in village who might have been inclined to come to the 9:30am funeral mass was instead at the beauty parlor or barber or pressing a shirt or futilely trying to bribe one of the children to have a bath or yelling at another to stop fighting with her brother already for the love of the madonna you’ll ruin your new dress.
Truthfully, there probably weren’t many folks who’d have come even if the funeral happened on the Friday before or the Sunday after instead because, as it happens, 103 years, four months and nineteen days is along time to wait for one of life’s most defining moments and most people to whom Maria Luisa had been important were themselves long dead.
In the church then on this especially beautiful Saturday morning, light streaming in from the large east-facing doors, sat Barbara Gianni, four rows from the front, left side. Behind her to the right was Annunziata “Nunzia” Maria Mele, a simple woman in her late 60s who’d lived with her parents, their only child, until her mother died; then with her father until he died and then, not feeling confident enough at forty-three to live all alone in the small house where she was born, with distant cousins on her mother’s side who’d lived up the street. She has only once in her life ever left the village. It was to go to Salerno by bus one mid-December afternoon with a group from church to see the lights the city had put up for Christmas and to eat warm zeppole drizzled with honey. Annunziata, torn between glorious wonder at it all and an overwhelming sense of terror and doom, decided that once was enough. What else could there be to see?
Since her distant cousins, childless, had died some years previous, Nunzia had kept up her daily walk up to the Santa Maria Maggiore for the ever more sparsely attended 7am mass, often staying on to sweep the square in front of the church or to attend whatever other events that might follow the early mass. This is how she came to be in the small party of mourners at Maria Luisa’s funeral. She didn’t actually know Maria Luisa except to see her now and again. They’d hardly exchanged more than a few words in the seventy-odd years that they’d lived roughly 200 meters from each other, on different narrow stone streets in this village. They weren’t unfriendly. Nunzia was just agonizingly shy and it had simply never occurred to Maria Luisa to make any sort of overture beyond, “good morning” or “Madonna mia, what weather today, no?” and words like that.
Two rows in front of Barbara sat Angelo Giuseppe D’Amato, a lawyer in his early sixties. Barbara doubted very much that Angelo actually practiced law but this was how he’d introduced himself to her on the street one morning not long after she first arrived, and again thereafter on numerous occasions. In spite of what, in Barbara’s unprofessional opinion, were some obvious and potentially severe intellectual deficiencies which might prevent the attainment of any career, not just law, she continued, so as not to confuse him with Angelo the Butcher, Angelo with the small brown dog, and all the other Angelos in this town, to refer to him as Angelo the Lawyer. He was another orphaned adult who found solace in the church and who took very seriously his task, by now long mastered though no less anxiety producing, of keeping the incense burner full. Like Nunzia Maria Mele, Angelo had no specific connection to the deceased, nor had he been invited to the wedding of Tiziana and Domenico.
Barbara waited patiently in her pew while the four members of the choir not otherwise engaged this morning waited patiently in their box while Don Carlo, the “new” priest who’d arrived in the village a mere seven years ago, stood at the altar waiting patiently, for some signal from within perhaps, to begin, at some point hopefully soon, the service.
At the base of the altar there were more bouquets of chrysanthemums and lilies than Barbara expected to see, many of them likely sent by the ageing children who still remembered and thought kindly of “Donna” Maria Louisa, as they were taught to call her by the good souls of their long-departed parents. Some of the other bouquets may have been sent by the elderly offspring of the former colleagues and students of Vincenzo Gaetano D’Amato (no relation to Angelo Giuseppe D’Amato the Lawyer), husband of Maria Luisa, peace to his soul. Vincenzo died early one rainy spring morning when he didn’t take seriously the landslide barrier erected on the easiest route from their village to the neighboring one and was washed down the side of a mountain in their light green Fiat 500C Giardiniera, taking with him their oldest child, 6-year-old Elena. Maria Luisa was at home with the twins, newborn boys, wearily trying to figure out how to feed them both and still have time for anything else during the day or night. It would be many years before she had time to either grieve her daughter or forgive her husband.
The twins, as it turns out, took after their father in that they were both careless and unlucky.
The older of the two, Gaetano Vincenzo, was fifteen and in love with Rosangela when he failed, in spite of it being May and certainly knowing better, it being the month of both Mary and of serpents, to bring a stick with him into the tall grasses and flowers on the hillside. He was bit on the ankle by a viper. A shepherd found him, a bouquet of wildflowers in his hand, only two hours later but entirely too late.
The younger twin, Michele Luigi, fled his tiny hometown at seventeen for a city across the sea and found himself near the top of the tallest tower one clear September morning in his pajamas and robe, having gone up only because he’d locked himself out of his apartment while putting the recycling out in the bin and needed to get his keys from his “roommate”, as they still called each other after all these years. He came down, hand in hand with Steve, in a deluge of fire, smoke and ash. Only Maria Luisa knew for certain that he was gone, and not, as would be reported later and for many years to come, missing. Resting on an old straw-seated chair in a patch of sun in the garden that afternoon, as was her habit after lunch, she was startled out of her drowsiness by a magpie flying overhead. The flicker of a shadow crossed her face just long enough to let her know, with incontestable clarity, that something terrible had just happened; that a loss, permanent and final, had occurred. It was the neighbor running up the cobblestones to push open the gate who identified and named the event, but, even as details unfolded, escalated and then, after much time, faded, in Maria Luisa’s memory there remained only the shadow of a bird.
One arrangement at the foot of the altar in the Chiesa Maria Maggiore, maybe the largest, would have come from Fillipa Ciervo, the childless only grandchild of Fillipo Ciervo, peace to his soul, an older brother of Maria Luisa. He was the only one of her seven siblings, all boys, to have both survived into adulthood and to have remained in Italy, emigrating north and, to their mother’s colossal distress, marrying a sophisticated young woman from Milan who couldn’t boil an egg, never mind make a passable ravioli with sheep’s milk ricotta the way they should be made per l’amore di dio what would they eat?
Two of Maria Luisa’s brothers had died as children, one was called to the lord in Libya in the Second World War, and the remaining three, along with any potential progeny, had long disappeared into the hectic and complicated folds of the Americas. One had gone to Venezuela never to be heard from again and two, having started out in Jersey City, NJ, had since dispersed as far and wide as California and Florida. The Americans, as they were called between Maria Luisa and the remaining extended family, came back to the village only once, in the summer after the death of young Gaetano, for the funeral of their mother, matriarch of the family. Whichever of the descendants of the Americans who might have remembered that an aunt, great or great-great, still lived, until the day before yesterday, somewhere in the south of Italy, had not in very many years thought of her and would have probably assumed, should anyone have asked, that she’d long since gone to the other side.
“In the name of the father, and of the…”
Finally Don Carlo touched his forehead and began to speak. Barbara listened to the timeworn words as they floated up towards the rafters. Following them with her gaze she noticed a small circle of black flies dipping and weaving overhead. It was September after all; of course there were flies.
“No one remembers this but I tell you, believe me,” said Maria Luisa on a different September morning, a couple of years earlier. She was Barbara’s next-door neighbor for the nine years that Barbara had so far lived in this village. Maria Luisa looked at Barbara pointedly, nodding; her eyebrows raised high on her wrinkled forehead. In her lap was a basket of wild chicory greens that she’d gathered earlier, before the fog had lifted from the valley, from between the rows of grapevines planted on the lowest terrace of the garden that some distant ancestor had carved into the side of the high rocky hill upon which sat the village. Maria Luisa picked off the yellowed or bug-eaten leaves and discarded them into an old bucket at her side, keeping the choicest part of the greens for today’s soup.
“We never had flies in September. Never. Of course in May they came when the ground was warm to go with the sheep up to the mountains. But September? Bah.” Maria Luisa shook her head. “You know what we had in September? Butterflies. Orange ones. They would try and come inside all the houses like the flies do now. When I was a little girl, she died, my great-grandmother. I was eight, maybe nine years old and she was small like me. Only maybe just a little bit taller.” Maria Luisa squinted through the space between her thumb and forefinger. “But very strong. She carried the firewood on her head all the way from the forest up to the house in town. You would walk next to her and you would feel safe next to her in the woods when we would collect chestnuts, even though there were wild boars who also wanted the chestnuts. She would give you her stick and then you felt strong too, walking with her.” Maria Luisa sat up proudly in her straw-seated chair, holding an imaginary walking stick.
“Sometimes when you helped her in the kitchen she would smile at you like she knew a secret, like maybe she was going to tell you a big happy secret. Only she didn’t ever tell. But just knowing that she knew something wonderful was enough to make you happy inside. Anyway, when she died and we were all in the church—the whole village practically—the butterflies came. I was the youngest of all my brothers and cousins and I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing. Can you imagine?” For a moment Maria Luisa’s blue eyes grew round.
“Of course I was crying a little because I was sad but laughing too. It was funny, all these butterflies coming in and landing on the casket and the altar and the flowers and the priest and on people’s heads. My mother smacked me,” She said, leaning over and whacking Barbara’s arm. “So I tried to be quiet. And then two of my brothers and a couple cousins all started laughing too, maybe because I was making funny noises trying not to laugh or maybe because there came even more and more butterflies, the whole place filling up. So we were there up in front trying not to laugh but laughing anyway and my mother was going to kill us, and my grandmother, who would never kill us because she loved us too much, was going to kill both my mother and my aunt for having children who would dare to laugh at a time like this. Which of course made everything funnier because when you’re a child you think someone killing people is a funny thing.”
Maria Luisa paused, wiping the merriment from her eyes with the edge of her shawl. She hadn’t lost the thread of the story; she’d just remembered something.
“You know that was the last time I think I saw the butterflies come inside like that. I don’t know,” she said, swatting at the air, “now we have these flies.”
Barbara, the hard wood of the pew digging into her back, looked up at the flies. She counted them: five, maybe six. Barbara felt an anxiousness flutter inside her ribcage and breathed deeply. She had been thinking quite a lot lately about all the “last times” that occur on a daily basis that one doesn’t always take note of but that become inextricable from our present. The first time that it had occurred to Barbara that a “last time” had occurred, un-noticed, un-marked and un-celebrated, was eleven years earlier, when her youngest son, having finished high school had decided to forego college for world travel. At the end of the summer, before dawn one morning, she drove him to the train station from where he’d insisted on departing, backpack on his shoulders, for points north, the airport in New York and then… an indefinite itinerary lasting an indefinite amount of time. On the drive home, she found herself overwhelmed by a single thought: there had been, many years earlier, a day that was in fact the very last day that she had held her son, perched on her left hip, one arm around him and the other, invariably, set to another task: stirring something on the stove maybe or holding his older brother’s hand crossing a street. She couldn’t remember. There was this day, this last day, and she’d missed it; hadn’t even noticed until fifteen or sixteen years later that it had happened.
The first times were easy to spot. She’d witnessed most of them, marked them with a kiss, a misty eye, clapping hands, a call to her mother: A step! A haircut! A tooth! A shave!
The last times were all trickier to spot, hidden in the mundane. They’d been left to fade away until the day, always September, that they’d come up to be mourned all at once on the drive home from the station at 5:34am. Somewhere between the waterworks and heavy sighs came the realization that she’d missed the fact that she’d also missed all her older son’s last times and hadn’t even realized until now, this very minute. Guilt piled on top of the grief and Barbara transitioned to loud hiccupping sobs.
But would she have stopped herself from putting either of them down had she known it was the last time she’d hold them like that, snuggled warm and soft against her side? How long could’ve it gone on anyway? Both her sons were over six feet tall now. These moments were just the normal stuff of life, almost impossible to measure, celebrate or even see.
Still, this idea of last times and of the way they had of slipping past unnoticed took root somewhere inside Barbara. Her awareness intensified and she began to collect these moments purposefully, in the same way she collected firsts, just more quietly: a pause, a careful filing away of a memory. Some were easy to spot: the last pecan ever collected from the tree in her backyard in her old house in Georgia before they’d had to cut it down; the last day that Daniel ever lived in that house, before the divorce; the last time she ate at the pizzeria here in the large piazza in the center of the village before the pizza maker retired and not one of his children or grandchildren, by now far away and speaking other languages, wanted to take it over. Some last times weren’t obvious until well afterwards, like the time several summers ago when she’d run into Marco on the street in the evening after dark while on bicycle, on her way to dinner with friends. He stopped her and they talked for a moment in the light rain, he waving a loaf of bread in the air, exasperated as ever by the latest in a long line of unsuitable lovers; she, as always, laughing with him, not at him. Kissing twice, once on each cheek, they parted. He would return to Torino after the August holiday to die by February of pancreatic cancer that no one knew was there until it was too late to even try to treat.
Most of the last times in Barbara’s growing collection were intimate, some more significant than others but most probably meaningless to anyone but her. She didn’t see this as a morose endeavor and treated these moments with the tenderness and reverence she felt they deserved. As her collection grew, however, Barbara became ever so slowly aware that things had started to take a more serious turn, a broader scope.
In the damp coolness of the dimly lit church where overhead gathered several more flies and down in front lay Maria Luisa Rafaella Ciervo, ostensibly resting, Barbara thought about the fact that Maria Luisa Rafaella Ciervo was, until the day before yesterday, the last person alive to have known, though evidence of her own sight, that September once brought orange butterflies, not small black flies, into the houses.
It should not be discounted that Giuseppina Franca Mele, a distant cousin to the Nunzia Maria Mele who was sitting behind Barbara in the church, was still alive and had heard, on more than one occasion, from her great uncle Franco, that there had once been houses full of butterflies, but she’d long stopped talking about it, talking instead, like everyone else, of having to keep windows closed during the loveliest time of year or of what besides that sticky paper could be used to control the problem. Besides, she hadn’t actually seen the butterflies herself so she couldn’t attest to the verity of Uncle Franco’s memory.
Giuseppina Franca had also heard, probably also from her great-uncle, that there were once deer in the forest outside the village, but unlike Maria Luisa she’d never actually seen one, never mind been close enough to a young doe almost to touch its brown coat, but not succeeding in touching it because that would have meant moving from her rock-still position crouched on the forest floor and to move would have risked scaring the magnificent creature away. Maria Luisa did, after some time, move, but only after the doe had bounded gracefully up the steep slope of chestnut trees and disappeared. At that point Maria Luisa realized that her legs were scratched, her hem torn and her basket of butcher’s broom shoots, collected like asparagus in the spring, was half-crushed under her bottom.
“I ran all the way home,” said Maria Luisa, shawl drawn tight over her shoulders as she rearranged the logs sticking out from the fireplace. The days were short and dreary now and Barbara had gotten into the habit of making excuses to stop by and see the older woman, without making it obvious that she was in any way checking in on her, as if she were elderly and frail and needed anyone’s pity thank you very much. Today Barbara brought a couple slices of the banana bread she’d baked that morning in an effort to bring some extra warmth into her kitchen while she wrote. Maria Luisa had gotten used to the strange American recipes that she came up with and regarded her gifts with less and less suspicion, especially if they were sweet. She sat back down next to her plate of banana bread and cup of weak coffee.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything but I was so excited. And then my mother was angry with me of course for coming home with squashed shoots and not very many of them. What do we care for a deer if you didn’t bring it home? She says. There were mouths to feed and I had ruined our pranzo.”
Maria Luisa sipped her coffee and broke off a small piece of the sweet bread to nibble on before continuing.
In the church, the four choir members were singing, led by Don Carlo, his lovely tenor slightly roughened by his fifty-odd years. Salve Regina, madre di misericordia, vita, dolcezza e speranza nostra, salve. A Te ricorriamo….
Barbara whispered what lines she knew, while her list of last times grew by pages in the space of this September morning.