A GAS-BLUE NOVEMBER DAY. MY grandmother rode sidesaddle on the back of a donkey, its mane braided with ribbons and dried flowers. Milo held the reins and led her slowly across the footbridge, at the head of the procession, two-hundred-or-so people trailing behind in their wedding and church clothes, bearing gifts, two donkeys hauled carts in the rear, one with those too feeble to walk, and one with a band of local musicians playing drums, mandolins and accordions. During its glory days, the town had hosted an annual donkey race, with jockeys in silk jerseys competing from nearby farms and towns. Now, the donkeys had to be rented from an agriturismo in the valley, where tourists slept in overpriced yurts and were led along the river and told stories of Etruscans saving their tears in ceramic jars. Ida Serafino, in her dove-grey turtleneck dress and black stockings, rode on the back of a jenny named Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit trees, gardens and orchards.
It wasn’t clear who had conceived of the birthday procession—or was it a parade?—but it unfolded like some time-honoured Umbrian tradition. Reunited friends reminisced and held hands, grandmothers carried babies, old men in dun-coloured suits chided each other for still being alive. A group of Augustinian nuns, from the pilgrimage town that Rose visited every year, walked along in their black habits and orthopedic shoes. At the end of the footbridge, the carts were unhitched so that the donkeys could climb the gentle incline of the wide stone stairs. Nina’s cousins and the veteran waiters, solemn as pallbearers, carried half a dozen elderly former residents, some in wheelchairs, up into the piazza. Silvio Ruffo, dressed in a moth-coloured suit and homburg, refused to ride on a donkey or be borne aloft. Instead, he used his cane to pick his way into the piazza.
The parish priest waited in front of the church to give Ida Serafino her birthday blessing, dabbing holy water onto her forehead as a bookend to her baptism a century earlier, on another continent, and then she was helped back into her saddle and paraded like some ancient, hilltop bride around the square, waving and smiling at the marvelling witnesses to her tenure on the planet. Then, representatives from each of the other old Valetto families led their own rented and festooned donkeys around the square to great applause. Milo’s sons, Nico and Antonio, both in their fifties, led a donkey draped in the family flag—an anvil, a reared horse, a lemon tree. The Ruffo coat of arms, borne along by Roberto Ruffo, consisted of a cypress, a snake and a lodestar.
After the procession, we all fanned out into the narrow alleyways and headed down to the terraced villa gardens, where guests could set their gifts on a long trestle table and antipasti and aperitivi waited among the espaliers. Although it was unseasonably warm for November, Milo had placed a dozen propane patio heaters at regular intervals, and the guests clustered around them in small groups, nursing flutes of prosecco and small plates of crostini and bruschetta smeared with nettle cream and herbs. The musicians flanked the guests, playing regional folk songs, the singer recalling lost loves and ruined harvests and wolves in mountainside lairs. I wanted to believe that the band had walked up from the valley, but the truth was that Iris had found them online, a group of Rome-based web developers who played chamber and folkloric music in their spare time. I watched as Alessia nodded along to the music, a glass of unsipped prosecco in hand, while Susan and Marcella stood protectively on either side, occasionally fetching her a canapé.
After half an hour in the gardens, the guests were invited into the villa itself, Rinaldo in the entrance hallway to help with the removal of their coats, hats and shawls. He’d arranged a series of coatracks and benches along the walls, each of them numbered to help the guests find their garments after the party. In his heavy tweed jacket and paisley foulard, he was all banter and pleasantries, a Victorian butler at a country estate. Another spread of antipasto—draperies of paper-thin charcuterie—had been laid out on the enormous mahogany table along one side of the dining room, but the guests were more interested in wandering the ground floor of the villa, an elderly Serafino sister or the centenaria herself as tour guide. Nobody suspected the decades of neglect that had unfolded in these now bright, taffeta-lamped rooms, the fireplaces roaring with burning chestnut and oak, the mantels adorned with flowers, the crushed-velvet sofas dusted and perfumed. In the billiard room, the men ruminated on games of skill and chance, on British imports, on dead relatives who’d made furniture or pianos. The billiard table was set up as if for some perfect, hypothetical game, the lintless green baize drawing admirers like a dazzling lakeside meadow.
Before long, the charcuterie and prosecco merged into Montefalco Sagrantino wine and il primo, the guests somehow instinctively knowing when to take their seats. It wasn’t clear whether my grandmother’s seating arrangements—all those place cards in swooping calligraphy—were an act of willful calculation or oversight. Former estranged neighbours were forced to find their adjacent place settings, while divisions of class, politics and faith were ignored at many of the tables. Atheists were seated next to the devout, conservatives next to liberals. I found myself wedged between a Venetian dentist whose father had been born in Valetto and an Umbrian farmhand. Susan sat across from me, next to an Augustinian nun who, between birdlike sips of prosecco, interrogated my daughter about the mechanics of social media, a Dantean realm that was strictly forbidden at the convent in Perugia where she’d lived for two decades.
The Serafino widows, released from the kitchen, had all been spread out, each of them taking up the role of table hostess. Iris and Violet sat with their adult children and grandchildren, who’d come in from Rome and Naples, and Rose sat with the other nuns from Perugia and her hairdresser from Bevona. As the guest of honour, Ida sat at the front of the room with Nina, Alessia and some distant Australian Serafino relatives. All of the Ruffos sat at the same table, with a Brooklynite thrown in for good measure. And as a nod to the impending denunciation, Ida had asked for the stuffed head-and-shoulders of a wild boar to be brought up from the cellar and hung—glass-eyed, tusked, black-snouted—directly above Silvio Ruffo’s place setting.
Elisa, Donata and Nina’s cousins stayed in the kitchen, sending the bow-tied waiters out with the first course—umbrichelli in a sauce of black truffles and anchovies, dusted with local pecorino. Still coming to terms with the awkward seating arrangements, the guests were forced to switch topics and offer up an assessment of the venerable local pasta. Milo, who kept moving between rooms to restock the fireplaces, listened to their favourable assessments from the hearthstone beside the small stage set up for the musicians. Everyone seemed to agree that while anchovies were not native to landlocked Umbria, the sauce was deliziosa and the pasta was perfectly correct, a victory for Donata, who’d spent a full day hand-rolling every strand.
When the second course and side dishes came out—a choice of wild boar stew sprinkled with gremolata or pomegranate guinea fowl, both served with broad beans, chicory and baked polenta—I watched Silvio Ruffo eating under the boar’s head. From scanning the place cards, I noticed that Greta Ruffo, whose fictional fever had lured my mother from the villa in 1944, sat with her husband quietly, barely talking to the rest of the family. She was in her seventies, a fashionable woman in a pantsuit and scarf, with high cheekbones and dyed auburn hair. She didn’t seem to acknowledge the three generations of pharmacists—brother, father, nephew—on the other side of the table, and I wondered what she knew of her father’s history. Her brother was big-jowled and slow-blinking, wearing an Armani blazer and polo shirt. He and his cheerful middle-aged son, Roberto, sat on either side of Silvio Ruffo.
With dessert and the toasts approaching, my emotions felt washed out and obscure. My mind drifted to my basement in Michigan, to my bookshelves and email inbox, to the guest lecture on abandonment I should have finished by now. It was Susan’s voice that brought me back to a table of dinner guests looking at me.
‘Dad,’ she said from the other side, ‘Sister Baldoni asked if you knew about the Roman settlement of Carsulae.’
The nun smiled at me, her cheeks flushed by prosecco.
The Venetian dentist looked up from the guinea fowl he was dissecting with surgical gusto and said, ‘It was destroyed by an earthquake in the first century BC, if I remember correctly.’
‘Yes,’ I countered, feeling a little upstaged, ‘and then deserted.’
The sister looked at me blankly, so I repeated this in Italian. She asked whether I’d visited the ruins of Carsulae on my tour della desolazione and I realised Susan had been giving her an overview of my research and my recent book without my noticing. I shook my head.
The nun pointed at me sternly across her plate with her knife. ‘You and your daughter must come to our little town and see the ruins and the fourteenth-century frescoes. Come visit when your aunty Rose is called to her next pilgrimage.’
I wasn’t sure I was ready to see Rose on her knees before the patron saint of impossible causes. The Umbrian farmhand confessed that he’d never been to Perugia proper, even though it was less than a hundred kilometres away. The talk at our table continued in this cautious manner for the better part of an hour. Conversations about Umbrian towns and fava bean festivals and the varying weather across the valleys, mountains and lakes. I could hear a similar drift of talk at the nearby tables, but at a few tables the sound was mostly of clinking silverware below the accordion and mandolin of the band. I decided to make a sortie to my grandmother’s table, to see how she and Alessia were holding up.
‘The food is magnificent,’ said Ida, as I leaned beside her chair. She gestured with her chin at the Ruffo table, where the old pharmacist was spooning chunks of polenta into his wild boar stew. ‘Even the old devil is eating with abandon. For a man of his age and build, he has quite the appetite.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I’ve been watching him eat.’
Alessia sat beside my grandmother. She’d been served the guinea fowl, which stood untouched beside her pasta bowl. From across the table, the husband and wife from Melbourne smiled at us in appreciation of the food, oblivious to our conversation.
‘You know,’ Ida said confidentially, ‘in the The Zanetti Book of the Table there is a recipe for folaghe in umido … for stewed coot … and it’s the only meal that my mother said was banned in her household when she was growing up.’ She took a breath, looked back at the Ruffo table. ‘It was a cursed meal, said to kill anyone who cooked or ate it. The coot is this funny little migratory bird and a terribly good swimmer. Travels by night in huge flocks. Sometime in the nineteenth century, fishermen came from all over Italy to hunt these birds from boats on Lake Massaciuccoli … near Pisa … and my great-grandfather was among them. They brought down six thousand coots in one day and my ancestor was shot and killed in the tremendous shower of all that lead.’ She brought her attention back to her plate and half-eaten meal. ‘We should have asked Elisa to serve Silvio Ruffo a bowl of stewed coot while everyone else got the boar or the fowl.’
Through a gap in the tables, I could make out The Zanetti Book of the Table over in the corner, splayed open on its Victorian Bible stand, and I wondered if it contained other cursed recipes, or annotations on how to poison a despised dinner guest with a sliver of death cap mushroom in a bowl of hare stew.
‘Almost there,’ said Ida, patting Alessia’s hand. ‘Once the desserts come out, Iris will address the guests.’
Alessia didn’t lift her eyes from her water glass and I returned to my table, where I caught a dwindling conversation between the dentist and the nun about the intricate embalming practices used to preserve the bodies of the saints. Susan sent me a text that I read under the table:
You missed the unabridged history of the mummification of the saints! Everything good over at grandma’s table?
I texted her back:
Tutto bene! I should go check in with Elisa.
The kitchen was full of waiters delivering empty plates to Nina’s dishwashing cousins. I found Elisa off to one side, bent over a dessert cart, decorating a cake with the precision of someone defusing a bomb. Her hair pulled back, she was wearing one of my grandmother’s old monogrammed white chef coats, the sleeves dusted in cocoa powder. As an ode to the last Fiorentina pear tree growing in the valley, Elisa had put a pear and chestnut cake on the menu for dessert, but she’d also made a surprise birthday cake for Ida—a tower of chocolate layered with mascarpone cream filling and topped with Baci hazelnut chocolates from Perugia. She’d given me a sneak preview of it earlier in the day. ‘Do you think your grandmother will like it?’ Elisa asked as I stood by the cart.
‘She’ll be speechless. We can never repay you for this.’
‘It is a gift,’ she said, placing a Baci on the top layer, ‘so no repayment is required.’
‘The food is superb, all of it. Thank you so much for everything. Really.’
‘It was a team sport, right down to the chicken livers your grandmother prepped.’
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’m guessing you’re not great at accepting compliments or gratitude.’
She looked up at me, smiled, straightened, wiped one hand down her chef coat. ‘That’s fair, sorry. You’re welcome. I’m just nervous for what comes next. How is it going out there?’
I gave her the state of play in the dining room, right down to her mother’s untouched guinea fowl, Silvio Ruffo’s appetite, and the mummification discussion at my own table.
‘We better get to the cake and speeches then,’ she said. ‘Since I couldn’t fit a hundred candles on the cake, I had to improvise.’ She’d found a candle in the form of a C and she placed it onto the top layer and took out a lighter from her chef’s coat. ‘When I push the cart into the dining room,’ she said, ‘you will need to start singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to get everyone going.’
When I came back into the dining room singing tanti auguri a te the nearby tables joined in, and soon the whole room cheered and sang as Elisa pushed the chocolate cake toward my grandmother’s table. Ida was predictably touched, holding Alessia’s hand on one side and Elisa’s hand on the other while she blew out the burning C with a fitful breath. The band riffed a few celebratory tunes and then the waiters brought out the other desserts, the coffee, grappa and nocino, while ex-pats and Umbrians continued to shout buon compleanno! from the sidelines. Then, Iris walked to the stage and took the microphone from the singer and the band went in search of their dessert.
In her wool day-frock and pearls, a tiny balloon of grappa in hand, Iris thanked the guests for coming from near and far and asked for a round of applause for our illustrious chef, Elisa Tomassi. I stood up from my chair to clap and soon the whole room joined me in a standing ovation. Across the tables, I made eye contact with Violet and when she gave me a little wave and mouthed brava! I realised that she’d finally softened toward Elisa. How could the devotion of the menu and cooking go unnoticed, from the ode to Ida’s restaurant to the hand-decorated chocolate tower? Over at the dessert cart, Elisa waved to the applauding crowd and proceeded to slice into the uppermost terrace of her cake.
When the guests sat down again, Iris addressed them from the stage: ‘A lot can happen in one hundred years. In the case of my mother’s century, I am talking about the invention of antibiotics, television, the jet aeroplane, the personal computer, the submarine, the bikini, the internet … not necessarily in that order. I would be here all afternoon if I continued.’
A wave of gentle laughter lapped among the tables.
‘We have gathered here to celebrate the life and times of Ida Serafino, born Ida Maria Zanetti, in Leichhardt, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, one hundred years ago today. As you can tell from the photographs around the room, Ida was a rare beauty. It’s easy to see why my father, the late Aldo Serafino, was levelled by her on a trip to Rome in 1927. At the time, Ida was working as a maid and helper to a governess for a friend of her mother’s family. In fact, Ida is as lovely today as she was back then. For her three surviving daughters, we have the privilege of living in her gracious presence each and every day. So, I’d like to raise a glass to a century of Ida walking among us. May her remaining years be peaceful and filled with joy!’
Iris raised her glass and the guests cheered salute!
‘As a way to celebrate my mother’s life,’ she continued, ‘we thought we would invite her friends and family to offer up remembrances of Ida during her many years in Valetto, or even just to recall the history of this place where she has lived for so long. Allora, so, who would like to begin?’
What followed were warm-hearted speeches from former residents and relatives. An elderly Umbrian woman recalled coming to the villa as a young girl with her mother, that every winter Ida Serafino opened up her house to the surrounding farmers and their families. The rooms smelled of roasting chestnuts, the woman said, and Aldo Serafino would teach the farmers how to play billiards with the official British rules, and she would hear the pock pock of the colliding wooden balls while Ida found clothes for the children that her own daughters no longer needed. A cousin from Australia, roughly my age, talked about her late mother’s affection for Ida, even though they had only seen each other a few times in their adult lives, about the way Ida’s Christmas letter each year was accompanied by a palmful of fennel seeds and a handwritten recipe copied from the family gastronomic album. A blunt-faced man, whose childhood home had fallen into the valley in the 1970s, remembered the festivities in the square, the bonfires and the enormous cauldrons stirred with paddles and filled with red wine and floating oranges, the Good Friday processions when the crucifix was taken from the church and the residents played the Romans in pursuit of the Saviour.
Unexpectedly, Milo took the stage with a small glass of nocino and told the story of working for his father at the villa, that he had known Ida Serafino since he was a newborn, that she had attended his christening and overseen the house where he’d found his life’s purpose. ‘You have been the lamp burning at the end of the hallway for as long as I can remember, Signora,’ he said. His speech was oddly touching and I briefly forgot all about the denunciation and contemplated a remembrance of my own—the times Ida read me Ovid aloud on the terrace, the Cokes she’d given me in the bookish jumble of her bedroom. Violet and Rose had agreed not to give speeches, that Iris, professor and accomplished public presenter, would speak on behalf of the Serafino sisters, and so after half an hour, it appeared that the speeches were winding down and that Alessia could make her way to the stage. I glanced over at my grandmother’s table, where Ida, still moved by Milo’s speech, dabbed both eyes with a crumpled tissue. Beside her, Alessia sat crosshatching the frosting on her cake slice with the tines of a fork.
As the guests returned to their own tableside banter, to the business of pouring coffee or sipping a digestivo or eating dessert, something happened that we didn’t anticipate: Silvio Ruffo pushed back his chair, stood slowly, and began to hobble toward the stage with his cane. It couldn’t have been more than thirty feet he needed to travel, but I remember the sensation that time was dilating, that he’d been moving across the terracotta tiles for eternity. The clinking of silverware welled up from the corners of the room, where the waiters were bussing the last of the dinner plates, and above the diners’ heads I could see Elisa watching Ruffo’s advance, arms folded, her head cocked incredulously to one side. When he finally made it to the stage, he gripped the microphone with one hand, brought it a few inches from his mouth, and shot a pneumatic sigh through the PA system. His suit coat was unbuttoned, his trousers hitched with suspenders almost up to his sternum, a stem of dried lavender in the buttonhole of his lapel.
‘Signore e signori, my name is Silvio Ruffo and I am ninety-six years old.’ He took little sips of air, coated the room with his amplified, wheezing breath. He reached behind each ear to calibrate his hearing aids, first one, then the other. ‘I was born here, in the town that has been slowly dying for centuries, in one of the houses that is still standing. It’s been there, right across from the church, since 1756. Not quite as old or fancy as the villa we now stand in. My father started the pharmacy across the bridge and I took it over and then my son and now my grandson runs it. We have always been simple, hardworking people. We have cured Valetto’s headaches and fevers and eased her gases for a long time.’
Pockets of generalised, polite laughter. Alessia still refused to look up from her cake plate. I saw my grandmother place a consoling hand on her back.
‘What I remember about this town is the same thing I remember about Italy. That she was once a solid thing built with the toil of honest hands, with dignity and fervour, but that she let her springtime bloom go to seed. We have all lost the eternal flowering of our youth.’
He took a breath, gazed up at the ceiling fresco, made a little sonic dent with his chin against the microphone.
‘Today, this place, like most of the country, is filled with false and sentimental ideas about who we really are. The truth is that we’ve been ruined by communists and the Mafia and British imperialists and it’s been that way since the last war. Italy died, if you ask me, on April 28, 1945.’
This was the date Benito Mussolini was executed. This recollection hovered for a moment before it shot through the room with such force that people nearly dropped their dessert forks. For the first part of Silvio Ruffo’s speech, the guests had deferred to this ancient, ravaged head behind the microphone, to the omniscient, gauzy regard, but now they groaned, folded napkins and let them drop on top of cake plates. A few couples got up and walked from the dining room into the brightly lit hallway. Elisa crossed the room to be with her mother while Roberto Ruffo stood from his table, buttoned his sports coat and started for the stage to prevent further embarrassment to the family name.
‘Roma è eterna,’ Silvio Ruffo enunciated into the microphone, ‘All men die but ideals alone can live forever. The Italy that I believed in, la patria, with her ginestra flowers and piney woods and golden orange groves, with her laurels and true people united by a common cause … she can never truly die. Everything I did here, for the true cause, so that ancient Rome could flourish again in our blood and bones, came from the righteous chambers of my own heart and mind …’
I remember intercepting Roberto Ruffo as he made his way to the stage and the startled look in his eyes when I told him, in Italian, to take his fascist mongrel of a grandfather back to his seat. When he bristled, I stepped up onto the lip of the stage and forced the microphone from Silvio Ruffo’s varicose grip. I stood close enough that I could smell the grappa on the old man’s breath, see the cheese crumbs on his lapels, but he regarded me as if at a rheumy distance, blinking slowly, patiently, as if he’d conceded a pawn in the dwindling twilight of a chess match. From the side of his mouth came Non puoi fermare la storia. You cannot stop history. And then he turned back to his audience, telling them that uniform Christian thought and action was the very thing that we had all lost, and so I grabbed him by the elbow and began to forcibly remove him from the stage. Roberto Ruffo yelled at me to unhand his grandfather and then, somehow, Milo and his two sons materialised at the foot of the stage. In the commotion, Milo implored me to please release Signore Ruffo, that they would escort the two gentlemen back to their seats.
‘Per favore, Hugh, lascialo andare.’ Please, Hugh, let him go.
I turned to see that I was now holding a very old man who weighed less than a hundred pounds by the back of his spindly neck. I could feel the tremolo of his pulse against my fingertips and the talcy parchment of his skin. I could see the whites of his watery eyes as he kept me walled in his peripheral vision. Pushing some air between my lips, I let my hand go slack at his neck and brought my fingers to my sides. Milo continued to triage Roberto’s rant while one of the Scorza sons extended an arm to help the elder Ruffo, who used his cane to step off the stage. We all watched and listened as the contrail of Ruffo indignation faded across the room and the family delegates reclaimed their seats.
I stood alone on the stage. For a moment, it looked as if three generations of Ruffo pharmacists might gather their things and retreat in protest, so I brought the microphone to my mouth and said, ‘My name is Hugh Fisher. I stand here today as the son of the late Hazel Serafino, the youngest of Ida’s daughters. You must excuse my actions, but Silvio Ruffo has done grave harm to my family, to my mother.’
The room guttered into silence as the Ruffos settled in their places. In fives and tens, one table at a time, all two hundred guests turned their attention toward me. The dead were being invoked, ancestral lines were being named. The waiters stopped clearing dinner plates and stood motionless in this newly charged atmosphere.
‘My mother was nine years old in the spring of 1944, when Silvio Ruffo, as the town’s only member of the fascist party, abducted her and Alessia Perigi from the villa and cruelly interrogated them. Alessia was one of the refugees from the north that my grandmother took in during the war. My mother has passed away but I believe she never fully recovered from this ordeal, that it stunted her. Perhaps not just because of the interrogation itself, but because of what happened afterward, because of the deaths of innocent men. She blamed herself.’
I looked out at the tables and waited for the next thing to come out of my mouth. I expected my throat to be burning with rage, to feel my heart hammering in my chest and ears, but I felt oddly calm and unhurried. Whatever adrenalised flood had led me to grab the old fascist by the neck had ebbed away. I was self-possessed, making an inventory of the room—the shoes pointing my way under the tablecloths, the poised coffee cups, the burning chestnut logs snapping in the hearth. I pointed toward my grandmother’s table. ‘Alessia Perigi is still alive and sitting here with my grandmother.’
Alessia sat with her eyes down, Elisa and my grandmother holding her hands.
‘Silvio Ruffo kept the girls locked in the cellar of his house for three days before they escaped. This is all documented in letters from my mother and in the testimony I’ve heard from Alessia Perigi. Today, we, the Serafino family, denounce the actions of this man and we demand a public apology.’
In Italian, my denunciation was all staccato consonants and enunciated vowels. I could feel it ripple through my jaw and throat—Oggi noi, la famiglia Serafino, denunciamo le azioni di quest’uomo e chiediamo una scusa pubblicha … I moved the microphone into my other hand and took a breath, just as Roberto Ruffo waved a big arm in the air, loosened his tie and delivered a soccer stadium roar that boomed under the frescoed ceiling—Che carico di stronzate! What a load of bullshit! He surveyed his family at the table, looked indignantly at his father and grandfather, O-mouthed and appalled. ‘This American bastard knows nothing about this town. He insults us like we are fucking dogs!’
Greta Ruffo sat very still, her face ashen, her husband’s hand in hers. A few tables away, Nina was helping my grandmother from her seat and they were negotiating whether or not to use the wheelchair. Then I saw Elisa guiding Alessia by the elbow into the curving aisles between the tables. The four women started slowly toward me, and I watched as my aunts, one by one, fell in behind them, slow and dignified in their day frocks. Before long, all nine of us were crowded onto the tiny stage, Alessia small and frail beside me. Elisa took the microphone from me and very slowly handed it to her mother, who held it like a burning candle. When she bent her elbow to bring it closer to her mouth, I wondered if she’d ever heard her own amplified voice.
When it finally came, her voice was small but definitive. She didn’t look at the crowd, but at some private point through the windows at the back of the room. ‘È vero,’ she said, recoiling for a second against the reverb. ‘It is true that on May 16, 1944, when I was eight years old and Hazel Serafino was nine, Silvio Ruffo came down to the villa and asked us to visit his sick daughter, Greta. He told us that if we came to his house, we could share the treats that he’d bought for her.’
Alessia stood very still and straight, an invisible wire connecting her spine to the ceiling. ‘When we got to the house, we fell asleep with something he put into the hot chocolate and we woke up in the cellar. It was not until the third day that we could escape.’
Roberto Ruffo yelled, ‘Queste sono tutte bugie!’ These are all lies!
Elisa leaned into the side of her mother’s head and whispered something. Alessia took the microphone in both hands and floated it a few more inches from her mouth. She clenched her eyes shut, opened them, found her visual ballast at the back of the room again.
‘He led us into his study and made us take off our clothes and stand on two chairs. He rubbed animal fat onto our bodies and let his dog scratch and growl and nip at us until we told him what we knew. It felt to me like we stood on those chairs for a very long time, but in truth I don’t remember how long … He told us that he would kill our families unless we told him when and how Aldo Serafino had left the villa, whether the family was hiding British prisoners of war. We told him about the two escaped prisoners hiding in the cave below the villa gardens and a few days later their bodies were found mutilated in the piazza.’
By the time she lowered the microphone to her side, Roberto Ruffo had stopped yelling. Distantly, almost imploringly, he said, ‘Queste cose non sono vere. La signora sta ricordando male. Succede.’ These things are not true. The lady is misremembering. It happens. Then he looked at his father beside him, and then at his grandfather on the other side. The old fascist regarded the space above the table, the way he did during a chess match, then shook his head very slowly and resolutely. He folded his arms and set his jaw in defiance. ‘See,’ said Roberto Ruffo, widening his attention back to the transfixed room, ‘none of this can be true.’
Alessia shifted her weight from foot to foot and made eye contact with the members of the Ruffo table for the first time. ‘In the wall of the cellar,’ she said simply, ‘we scratched our initials and the date with a nail. Perhaps it is still there beneath the house.’
All two hundred guests, who’d been levelled by this rupture of the celebratory peace, allowed themselves to now discuss the allegations at hand. Many had been forced to sit with strangers and old adversaries, and so the deliberations were cautious, almost formal, a roomful of conference attendees discussing some hypothetical moral failure. But then a few former residents old enough to have roiling memories of the war spoke up, their voices trembling and overwrought. They affirmed Silvio Ruffo’s connection to the fascist party, that he was widely known as an informer to the Germans, and that they’d kept him alive because of the pharmacy. ‘We turned a blind eye after the war,’ said a hard-bitten man from Spoleto, ‘as long as he moved away. In hindsight, we should have shot him out in the woods or hung him from the bell tower.’
The Augustinian nun at my table, flushed to the earlobes with prosecco, tales of saintly plunder and a public denunciation, stood abruptly in her black habit and orthopedic shoes and suggested that we investigate the allegations by going to see if the initials were still inscribed in the cellar wall. The other nuns from her convent levied a wary glance at her from their tables, but the idea was already galvanising the room. Aunt Iris, stirred by this forensic turn of events, called out from the stage, ‘An excellent idea, Sister!’
Roberto Ruffo got up from his chair and addressed the nun across a few dozen heads: ‘Let’s say the initials are there, Sister. How do we know the girls didn’t play sometime with Greta down in the cellar?’
Roberto Ruffo and the nun stood staring at each other over the sea of cake plates and emptied grappa glasses.
I heard a woman’s voice and it took me a moment to realise that it didn’t belong to the nun, that it belonged to Greta Ruffo. She remained seated, clutching her husband’s hand.
‘Could you repeat that, Signora?’ asked the nun.
‘I wasn’t friends with Hazel Serafino or any of the children at the villa. They never came to my house when I was in school. At the end of April 1944, my brother and my mother and I all went up into the mountains to stay with my mother’s parents. My father stayed behind to watch over the house.’
Roberto Ruffo began to pat down his trouser pockets. ‘We have stored pharmacy supplies in the house for many years and I have the key right here. We have nothing to hide. Please, anyone, come see for yourselves!’ He said it with such bravado that I suspect he couldn’t imagine more than a few morbid guests taking him up on his offer.
But something unnameable was pressing down on the room. We had opened up a fissure in the town’s history and stood staring into its seismic depths. The guests remained silent for a long time, unsure of where to look or what to do with their hands, making small calibrations of wristwatches, necklaces and water glasses, caught between Italy’s ironclad sense of decorum and her centuries-old infatuation with spectacle. Even if most of the room knew that these allegations were true, I didn’t expect many would want to bear them witness.
The Augustinian nun went to the front of the room, took Alessia by the hand and led her out into the entrance hallway. In twos and threes, and then fives and tens, the rest of us followed, funnelling back out into the sunny Umbrian afternoon, our centennial birthday procession flowing in reverse, up through the terraced gardens and back into the alleyways, the Ruffos pulled magnetically through the crowd, Roberto Ruffo still in flummoxed denial, Greta still holding her husband’s hand, the fascist grandfather trailing slowly in the rear with his cane. I walked somewhere in the middle of the crowd, pushing my grandmother along in her wheelchair.
We all assembled outside the Ruffo house, amid the silken flags and wooden benches in the piazza. The accused stood twenty feet away, facing the stone steps, and the guests flanked him on either side, behind some invisible cordon. Roberto Ruffo climbed the stairs, unlocked the door and switched on the hallway light. Alessia trailed behind the nun, picking her way up the stairs with her alpine walking stick, followed by Elisa and my aunts, then Susan and Marcella. My grandmother insisted on coming inside, so Nina, Milo and I helped her out of her wheelchair and very slowly up the stairs, one at a time, and then down the long hallway. We passed rooms filled with boxes and slip-covered furniture, rooms choked with the smells of old newspapers, bandages and topical ointments. The door to the cellar had to be jostled into submission and the stairwell lightbulb had burned out long ago, but with a few mobile phone lights we all ventured down slowly, Nina and Milo bracing Ida’s forearms for support, and me in front to block a potential fall.
With the nun at her side, Alessia took her bearings at the bottom of the stairs and led us to the now-empty shelves against the stone wall. She took hold of Elisa’s phone and began to scan the wall with a spray of digital light. Even now, Roberto Ruffo prattled in denial, apologising for the state of things, telling us how the cellar hadn’t been used in many years and that he suspected, actually felt quite certain, that rats had taken up residence. ‘In the winter,’ he said, ‘they seek shelter and can squeeze through the tiniest chinks in the stonework …’ Alessia moved around the space with the light, picking out pockmarks and divots, the fingertips of one hand splayed against the wall as if to read Braille. Eventually, she lit up six inches of etched stone:
H.V.S. + A.C.P.
Maggio 1944
We all studied the spot. Alessia said, ‘Hazel Veta Serafino e Alessia Carmen Perigi,’ and Roberto Ruffo, who’d finally stopped speaking, stepped forward, craning into this tiny LED universe. He traced one fingertip along the curvature of the letters and it seemed important to him that we see him deliberating, nodding, deciphering. Then he reached inside his trouser pocket, pulled out his own phone, and adjusted it to turn on the flash before capturing the illuminated square. He looked down at the photo on his screen, studied the transcript of the proof, then looked back at the wall to compare it with the proof itself. He made a small clicking noise with his mouth, shone his phone at his feet, and lit his own methodical ascent up the stairwell and into the hallway. We could hear his footsteps above us as he walked down the hallway toward the front door. Milo and I helped my grandmother back up the stairs, while Elisa and Marcella helped Alessia. We emerged in front of the birthday guests, disoriented, our eyes adjusting to the daylight. My grandmother, exhausted, sat back in her wheelchair and Nina placed a blanket over her lap. Silvio Ruffo had turned away and now stood with his cane, looking into the air above the valley through an aperture of space between two houses.
Roberto Ruffo stood inside the conferring semicircle of his family, showing them the picture on his phone, beginning with his father, then Greta and her husband, then the rest. He walked over to his grandfather and held the phone out in front of the old man’s face, but Silvio Ruffo shook his head and looked down at his feet. Frustrated, Roberto turned away to find that the crowd had formed a long line behind him, orderly as a bank queue, and they were waiting for the excavated proof to be passed around. He obliged and the phone moved along at a clip, beneath nods and sighs and grave shakes of the head. When it came full circle, Roberto put the phone in his trouser pocket and folded his arms. After a moment, I realised that all two hundred of us were staring at the back of Silvio Ruffo’s bald head as he gazed out onto the valley. It was unclear what would happen next. We were a people tethered to history but loosed from protocol.
From the stone steps, Iris cleared her throat to get everyone’s attention and said, ‘If nothing else, we demand an apology. A public acknowledgement of the pain and suffering this man has caused our families. Some gesture of remorse.’
A murmur moved through us and settled into communal agreement, but Silvio Ruffo refused to acknowledge the voice from the stairs or the crowd behind him. He walked slowly across the square with his cane and lowered himself onto the church steps. As he sat, a few inches of his hairless, papery shins appeared above his black dress socks. It’s hard to say what he could have done in the unravelling minutes to appease us. Begged for forgiveness, wept into his moth-coloured suit sleeve, prayed to Santa Maria Goretti, the patron saint of forgiveness? Frustrated by his position across the square, some of the guests began making sorties and delegations over to the church steps, entreating and threatening the old man on behalf of the Serafino and Tomassi-Perigi families, appealing to his sense of decency, to the Ruffo family name. It had the atmosphere of some ancient morality play, a stylised public reckoning.
There were deliberations about strategy among men who played bocce together, speeches of recrimination from war veterans, reframings of history by widows who swore they would never step foot inside the Farmacia Ruffo again. Silvio Ruffo ignored all of these appeals and when a widow took it upon herself to slap his face in outrage, none of the Ruffos intervened on his behalf. They stayed in their semicircle at the periphery of the square.
When I finally walked over to stand directly in front of Silvio Ruffo, I asked him calmly to apologise and accept responsibility for what he’d done. I could see pinpricks of red blushing to the surface on the cheek where the widow had slapped him. He looked up at me from the wide church steps, blinking slowly, his mouth slightly open as if in thirst, and then he reached behind both ears and switched off his hearing aids. In an instant, I could see the sonic world drain away from his oyster-coloured gaze. And it was from inside that fortress of silence or half-sound that he continued to stare up at me, holding me in place for several seconds. Then something shifted, and he reached for his cane to pivot himself up off the steps, and he moved into a gap between two houses, out toward the perimeter path above the valley.
The crowd implored the Ruffo family to take charge of the situation, to convince their elder to return and ask for forgiveness, but the family looked on helplessly. Some yelling and sobbing ensued, and it was Sister Antonio, the Augustinian nun, who discovered, all at once, that it was coming from a dozen children who were standing in our midst. Our communal reckoning with the past was already traumatising the present and the future. The nun announced that this was no spectacle for children and their parents, slightly stupefied and ashamed, began to hold the younger ones close and then usher their charges back to the villa to collect coats and shawls and children’s backpacks.
‘Before you all leave,’ Iris said from the stone steps, ‘Silvio Ruffo needs to be taken from this place and he can never return. When he dies, he cannot be buried in the Valetto cemetery. We must all understand this, even the children.’
It had the ring of textbook sociology or anthropology, of something lifted from a study of degradation rituals. We were sending him into exile. The Ruffo family seemed to grasp this banishment immediately, as if an ancient code of conduct lingered in their veins. In the Ruffos’ ragtag Umbrian lineage—peasant forefathers, Roman confederates, invaders and defenders of the isthmus—some had surely been outcast along the way. When they buttoned their coats and cinched their scarves against the cooling afternoon, we all understood that they had brought their belongings with them from the villa, that regardless of the outcome they had known there would be no return to the Serafino hearth. Roberto Ruffo looked up at Alessia on the stone stairs of the house, made the sign of the cross, kissed his fingertips. He said, ‘Signora, on behalf of the Ruffo family, I am deeply sorry for the actions of my grandfather. It is a stain on our family name that cannot be erased. May God grant you peace.’ When they walked away, it was toward the Etruscan archway and the footbridge and not in the direction of their disgraced patriarch. The front door of the Ruffo house stood open, a single lightbulb still burning from the depths of the hallway.