I STILL FIND IT HARD TO BELIEVE that my father is dead and gone forever.
After a violent influenza, he insisted on being released from the hospital and going back home. There was a childlike cunning in the way he convinced the doctors that in his own room, he would have everything he needed, from a call bell to his eyeglasses, ten pairs of them. He was always fumblingly putting them on and taking them off, and each time he would look around with the curiosity of a blind man seeing things for the first time. In fact, he already knew the end was at hand. He was so in touch with his brain that he could even show me where the seat of his illness was. “Something happened here,” he would say, pointing to a spot behind one of those big ears of his. “This is where the trouble is, but they,” indicating the whole hospital, “don’t believe me.”
He hadn’t been back home long before he had the first real signs that his absentmindedness was taking on a new dimension. He could never find things when he looked for them. I scotch-taped the bell to the head of the bed and put his glasses in the special place he indicated to his left. We all did everything we could for him. But life seemed to trickle drop by drop into his nearly invisible veins, only to rush out again with piercing pain.
All the while, he held on to his sense of humor. The house was filled with glucose drips, and he would wink at me: “Arrigo, things couldn’t be better.” He pronounced the whole disease a farce and managed more than once to convince us all. When the long sleeping began, he would wake up incredibly refreshed and come out with marvelous remarks, flashes of love, and uncomplaining sweetness. Once, after sleeping for three or four days straight, he woke up and, seeing the whole family gathered around his bed, looked me in the eye. With perfectly feigned seriousness he asked, “Are we all dead?”
At Easter he told me to bring him some champagne. I moistened his lips with it, and he blew me a kiss. “Get drunk on the rest,” he said in a feeble voice.
Three weeks later, he started taking strange and increasingly deep and infrequent breaths, and life went out of him. It was a Saturday evening, and I am sure he planned it that way. “Sunday they work,” he must have thought, “and Monday they have nothing to do, because the bar is closed, so they can have the funeral then.”
All I remember of his dead body is the very pale, calm drawn face and the suit hanging on his legs the way only dead men’s suits do. The undertaker turned up his nose at the idea of the pine coffin my father wanted, but we finally found one in Mestre. A few years before, when I commented on an expensive cashmere jacket he had bought for himself, my father had responded without blinking an eye: “It didn’t cost me a thing. I just decided that I want a simple pine coffin when I die instead of the fancy stuff. The money you’re going to save — that’s what paid for the jacket.”
The coffin looked homemade. We found some blunt screwdrivers to fasten the lid. It sat slightly askew on our shoulders, because my son Giuseppe is six feet tall, I’m five eight, I don’t remember who the other man was, and then there was Sandrino, who had worked at Harry’s Bar for more years than anyone could remember. Everyone called him the ebullient mouse man because he was just “five lire” tall.
There were seven splendid gondolas. “Make sure all the brass is polished,” my father had instructed me, and it was. The weather was cold, and a sharp wind drove low gray clouds before us. When we came abreast of Harry’s Bar the storm burst, just the way he liked it. Then we reached the Rio della Paglia, a turn to the right and then left as far as the hospital, and finally out into the wind with all the motorboats and vaporini slowing down to watch those seven gondolas and their sixteen magnificent gondoliers.
There was something cheerful and weddinglike in the air. We reminded one another of the acute observations my father used to make, of his simplicity, and of the humorous way he dealt with things that would make anyone else weep. We carried him on our shoulders inside the cemetery, the most beautiful cemetery in the world, in my opinion. A moment to look at the coffin on the ground before the rapid shoveling covered it in a matter of moments. He was buried according to his wishes, between two strangers, with the openness of a man who seeks out others to share life with and also to share death with.
I imagine that one day I, too, will get up there, and a nice solemn voice will say: “Besides all the other bad things you have done, now this!”
And I will ask, “What?” pretending not to understand.
“You know perfectly well what. You did not have a blessing said for your father at his grave.”
“But he didn’t want a blessing to be said.” He had never had anything to do with the church and refused to talk to a priest, even on his deathbed.
“How do you know? He might have changed his mind at the last moment, for example.”
“Pardon me, but would a blessing have made any difference?”
“You are ignorant, impertinent, and also a sinner.”
“In that case I apologize. I only asked because a moment ago I thought I had a glimpse of him over there, with that bearded writer. And don’t ten me they were not drinking a bellini together. But forgive me.”
That is how I think I will catch up with him, probably by the skin of my teeth. He showed me so many things, but I’m sure he had a great many other things he wanted to show me as well, not to mention all the things he will have thought of since his arrival there.
In the meantime, he will surely have persuaded them to change the color of the sky, make the stars shine brighter, and shift some inconvenient cloud, because I know that is what he is like, the way we all knew him.