The foglio matricolare arrived from Loredana’s lawyer the next week in a heavy, formal envelope, the name of the firm embossed on the outside. The photocopy was dark, the letters obscured at a crease in the middle, but the document had been transcribed into type, with an English translation affixed to the back. I glanced over the original, briefly, before turning to the translation, grateful I hadn’t had to again decipher the strange handwriting and abbreviations. The dates spanned from 1940 to 1946, and the names of the places were strange: Ravenna, Tobruk, El Alamein.
I read it all, quickly, standing in the apartment, then again, more slowly, in a too-expensive restaurant near Loredana’s apartment. In times of great excitement I was calmed by being alone in public, and I’d ordered a glass of wine, a lemony white, my off-season Jewish artichokes lay on my plate like small dead birds. I usually spent money cheaply, the more expensive something was the more I was reminded of the source of my income, but today I sat alone at my table with my fancy wine as I read and reread the words, shuffling the papers back and forth, trying to cull memories that weren’t my own out of nothing more than dates and locations. There was training in the north, in Ravenna, before he’d been sent to Libya, Tobruk, then to El Alamein, the site of a major battle. In February 1941 he was declared a prisoner of war of the English. He was repatriated in 1946, almost a year after the end of the war.
I was bewildered. The facts were in my hands, but instead of detailing a life I could envision, they had made Vietri’s story even further from my comprehension. I sipped my wine. His apartment in Rome had yielded nothing, I’d never been to Libya, to England, or even Ravenna, had only vague images from the Aeneid, Jane Eyre, sandy beaches and shipwrecks, country manors and exiled children. A life as a list of places and dates, it reminded me of my mother’s medical records I’d come across while snooping in my father’s papers during high school, the cold, cleanly cut bureaucracy of it was horrifying to me, how could a life be reduced to these few facts? It was a violence I feared for myself, if the diagnosis happened to me, everything I’d thought and felt and feared rendered as a handful of dates, places, medical or military labels, a metamorphosis from human being to data. How did I ever think I would be able to understand Vietri’s life, what did the books he had ordered from the store have to do with this list? I wondered what would solve this, meeting Vietri, maybe, or reading a thousand-page novel covering every scene of his life. How would I ever be able to understand the world before me?
I met signora Elena in a leafy piazza in a neighborhood I’d never been to, west of the river. Her aide, Pilar, and I had arranged the meeting over the phone in Spanish. I’d had to get a new cell phone, there was no way to arrange the meeting without one, Romans would have no more gone without a mobile than without shoes. Pilar first had to clear it with signora Elena’s two sons, both of whom had migrated north, one to Germany, the other Milan. Fifteen years before, signora Elena’s now deceased husband had spoken about his experiences as a prisoner of war in Australia for an oral history project based in London. He’d been in the same unit as Vietri in Libya, had been in Ethiopia before that. Their unit number had been listed in the foglio matricolare, and I’d found her husband’s brief account when I’d searched for the number online. I’d then located his widow in the phone directory, at last, the pagine bianche had yielded information, I’d begun to wonder if it was just an aspirational document. I’d known he was from Rome from his testimony and I’d guessed correctly that when he returned he hadn’t left again.
When I’d first called, Pilar had told me that if I spoke with signora Elena she wasn’t sure what I would get. I didn’t know the relevant vocabulary in Spanish, so when I’d asked if she had Alzheimer’s or dementia, I’d had to use the English words, and she hadn’t understood. I was reduced to asking in Spanish, pathetically, how is her brain? Pilar responded fluidly that it was like a river and you never knew what course it would run through that day, or how muddy the water would be, if it’s stormed the day before, of course, she said, it will dredge up the silt, and it will be hard to see through the water, claro? I said it was clear, and I’d wanted to tell her how much I admired how she’d expressed it. But my cheap replacement Nokia seemed like a poor device to convey such a message, and my Spanish had been so wobbled by the recent Italian.
Pilar kissed me on both cheeks when I approached, and I did the same with signora Elena, bending down to her wheelchair, and told her it was a pleasure to meet her. I used the formal address, but my tone was as if I were speaking to a child. It was only when I said her name that she made eye contact with me. I’m named after a queen, you know, she said, gripping my hand as I sat on a bench facing her, she was parked so that only an inch or two remained between us. She must have been ninety, if not older, and her skin felt as cool and smooth as an apple’s. I told her I knew that very well, and that I wanted to hear about when she was a girl and Elena was queen and her husband had been in the war. She seemed confused by the noun war, and I clarified, went to Ethiopia, Abyssinia, I corrected, and then again, to Africa. She perked up at the final name. L’AhOoEi, she said, l’aooee. I thought at first she was saying the name of a place I didn’t know, but then when I replayed it slowly in my head, I recognized the acronym. L’AOI, Africa Orientale Italiana. I asked if her husband had gone there. She cracked a smile, one that resulted in a bit of drool on the top of her bosom. Pilar wiped it away efficiently. Signora Elena began to sing, quietly, at first, so that I couldn’t hear the words . . . Faccetta nera, faccetta nera, she sang. Little black face, she was singing, little black face.
I exchanged glances with Pilar, knew that mine was a panicked expression. The park was full of echoes of her and signora Elena, mostly duos made of an old woman, white hair, white skin, and a young woman with a brown face, or, I supposed, a black one. But no one looked toward us. I drew a breath. Signora Elena, I said, what is that song? Can you tell me about it?
He used to tease me, she said. He’d sing it right here, she raised her hand unsteadily and gestured back toward her earlobe. I made sure we were married when he left, she said with a satisfied straightening of her shoulders.
What did he tell you about the war? I asked. Did you get letters from him?
Oh, yes, yes, she said. Letters from Africa. She slowed her pronunciation: Addis Ababa. She gripped my arm and leaned closer to me. One envelope was full of red sand. No letter, just sand. Like the sun. She occasionally jerked her neck in a strange way that put to mind a deranged bird, an ostrich perhaps, or a turkey, but each word she spat out was clear. I pressed my finger to the grains and put them in my compact. There were not many left after the journey.
What did the other letters say? I asked.
They said what letters say, she replied. He’ll be back soon, he misses the food and his mamma. Then he said he was just across the water, that he could see Sicily. I’d never seen the ocean, what did I know? The desert, I’d never seen a desert either. These letters didn’t always come, she said.
What happened then?
She looked away.
Did he go to Australia?
Australia? No, no. She looked worried, glanced around suddenly as if the park were closing in. Not Australia.
I felt my time running out, I had to ask. Did you ever meet anyone after the war that he’d known from the army? Did he ever tell you about anyone he met there?
She shook her head, looking down. It was so long ago. He didn’t like to talk about it. She released my hand. I didn’t tell him either about the things that happened here while he was away. She met my gaze uncertainly and I could see that the sharpness had worn out of her eyes. I sat back on the bench, looking around the park to distract myself, I was embarrassed by the emotional force of my disappointment. It had been silly to hope that she might have news of a man her dead husband had known sixty years before.
I walked with Pilar as she pushed signora Elena’s chair back toward her apartment. You know, Pilar said, when signora Elena was occupied, her face buried in the fluff of a giant white dog, there are some papers, some photographs, in the apartment. I think she doesn’t even remember she has them, or she would want you to see. I found them in the desk when I was cleaning, I do the cleaning while signora Elena naps. It’s your grandfather you’re looking for, yes? Maybe you can come by tomorrow when she is sleeping in the afternoon and look at them. I don’t think it will hurt, but if signora Elena is asleep she won’t know to mind. She started to tell me about her grandfather, who’d been one of the early members of the Peruvian National Symphony Orchestra, he’d taught her to play the flute, both the wooden instrument and one made of silver kept in a case that only he was allowed to touch. She spoke of the emails she sent her sister to read to him, but how he was too unwell to speak on the phone. I wonder sometimes, she said, if he’s died and no one has told me. I would have gone back for the funeral, those are important to us. But I wouldn’t have been able to return here, I don’t have the right card. She shrugged, smiling downwards. But who knows? As long as I am in Italy he is alive and my sister reads him my letters. When did your grandfather die?
I wondered when in my Spanish I had implied that I was looking for my grandfather, tried to remember how I’d phrased my research. I paused. Seven years ago, I said finally, which after all was the truth.
Signora Elena’s apartment was large and surprisingly dark, given the high ceilings. The windows, instead of filling the rooms with light, emphasized the shadows, the wood-paneled walls and enormous furniture gave a feeling of weight and heft. I could imagine that everything had been laid out in precisely these arrangements for decades, the furniture sinking into the floor so that the wood and tile melded and became one. The desk, a huge sideboard of nearly black wood, dominated the main room over the armchairs and green sofa. Pilar had let me in quietly, turning the knob as she closed the door so that the click was muffled, though it scraped roughly as she shut it. I don’t think her sons will mind, she said again, softly, but it takes so long to ask. And they’re so far away, they might not understand. She opened a drawer at the bottom of the desk on the left-hand side, took out a small box, and withdrew from it a stack of papers and photographs. I took them from her and sat down on the couch. Pilar remained standing. I looked at the photographs first. A group shot, all the men in uniforms in a desert landscape, Ethiopia or Libya, I was ashamed to not be able to tell the difference, but the cacti next to them looked the same to me as in the American Southwest. Another photo in which a man stood in front of a car with its engine open, clutching a tool, his arm slung around another man, both with cigarettes hanging languidly from their mouths. I looked closely at the second man’s face, they both looked young, but the second man looked prepubescent. I could practically see the wispy blond hairs of his upper lip.
Pilar had moved to the kitchen, I could hear her moving around, and I began to read the newspaper clippings, mostly announcements of Italian military victories. Beneath that was a stack of letters, in cramped feminine handwriting, thirty of them or more. I read the top few, slowly and laboriously, on top of the handwriting the dialect was strong, the grammar older and more formal, I barely understood anything. I was guessing at several letters of the alphabet, realized how lucky I was that Loredana’s lawyer had typed the military records for me. From what I could tell they were written by signora Elena, she mostly spoke, I guessed by the nouns, about her mother and his mother, various people who could have been neighbors or siblings, and what food they’d been able to make that week. In the creases inside the envelopes and under the places that stamps must have gone there were scrawled, in even harder-to-read writing, what I came to realize were dirty messages to her husband. I let out a laugh that I then stifled, hoping Pilar hadn’t heard. After I read a few of the letters as best I could, I began to flip through envelopes, scanning idly for dates. I wondered what had happened to the letters her husband had written, if she hadn’t kept them or if something had happened to them in Rome during the war. He must have brought hers back, keeping them through his time in Australia. Pilar had come back into the room, and just at that moment my hand brushed a letter toward the bottom of the pile that was stiffer than the rest. I pulled it out. The envelope was unlabeled, and it was heavier than the other envelopes. It was stiff because, as far as I could tell, it had never been opened, it was still sealed.
Pilar was watching me, had asked if I was done. Si, I said, not knowing if I was starting a sentence in Spanish or Italian. I was desperate, suddenly, to read the last, unopened letter, but it was clear Pilar was ready for me to go, I didn’t want to get her in trouble, and reading the letters had taken so much time, there was no way I’d have time to read this last one before signora Elena woke up. But what kind of a man brought a letter back from the war and kept it for fifty years without ever sending or opening it? Or rather, I thought, what kind of letter?
I stood up, thanking her in Italian for letting me examine the papers, and began to walk them back to the desk. I’d covered the letter with the stack of newspapers when I’d stood up, but I kept my thumb on it as my fingers curled to support the stack. Pilar smiled and held out both hands to take it from me. I smiled back and handed her the top of the stack, with the newspapers and photographs, as if the whole thing were too heavy. When she turned, bending to put them back into their box in the drawer, I slipped the letter under my shirt, a corner tucked into my jeans, and lowered the rest of the pile toward her while she was still bent. I thanked her again, warmly and sincerely, and left the apartment with my bag pressed to my side, holding the letter in place.
I waited until I was safe within the walls of Loredana’s apartment to open the envelope. Sitting cross-legged on my bed I cracked the stiff paper with my finger, the glue was so fragile it needed only the suggestion to part. Inside was not a letter but two photographs. In one, a fearsome archangel with six wings loomed down from a mosaic, his beard enormous and his eyes full of rage. The other photograph showed a man in uniform, his face entirely shadowed by the wide brim of his helmet, standing in a field next to a pile of bodies. I knew it was corpses that lay in piles next to the man and behind him, but my conscious mind did not know how I knew, I couldn’t see hands or limbs or anything really that was identifiable, only the small dark circles of heads, but I knew on a primal level, as a human being, that what I was looking at were other human beings. I exhaled. In the background, behind these figures, a line of trees faded into a forest.
The photographs were brittle and I tried to touch only the edges as I examined them, afraid they would crumble to dust in my hands. There were no dates, no names, but on the back of the photograph of the angel mosaic, it was a postcard, not a photograph, were written two words, Debre Libanos. When I typed these strange words into Google, pulling myself into the library, my curiosity stronger than my horror, it was immediately in front of me, it was a Christian monastery a few hours north of Addis Ababa, where, in 1937, Italian soldiers had massacred, depending on which sources you credited, either four hundred or two thousand monks, priests, and pilgrims after an assassination attempt on the governor of the colony. They had divided the monks and priests from the others, loaded them onto trucks in groups of thirty to fifty, and driven them to a field, where they were lined up and shot with machine guns. The pilgrims, local families who had come to the monastery to celebrate the feast day of its patron saint, were sent to concentration camps already established for their compatriots in the desert. Only a handful ever returned. The bodies of the holy men were left in piles in a shallow gulley so that, twenty-three days later, a boy from the local village who’d heard the gunfire found them still there, partially eaten by several species of large carnivores now on the verge of extinction.
I stood and left the library, still clutching the dry paper in my hand until it crinkled in my grip and the sound returned me to my senses and I returned the photographs neatly to their envelope and stored it in the drawer of my nightstand. My thoughts moved quickly, overwhelmingly, there were dozens more things I needed to look up, the Ethiopian orthodox church, the preceding massacre in the capital, concentration camps, but as I left the apartment building and began to walk south, my thoughts were overrun by the warm, gentle wind, they became blurrier, more languid, and I let myself sink into this state, this muddy pool of thought. What did it mean that signora Elena’s husband had kept these souvenirs of the massacre until his death, kept them next to the letters from his wife, what did it mean that the envelope had never been opened? Had he taken the photograph, was he the man pictured, had it been given to him, when would it have been developed? Vietri was too young to have been in Ethiopia, but he’d been in Libya, he might have known signora Elena’s husband there, he might have seen these pictures, might have heard the stories. I wandered through neighborhoods I didn’t usually visit, my turns were random, but I felt a kind of deep energy that caused me to turn uphill, for example, where I usually would have avoided the slope. I walked, I thought of the bones of the monks in their field, I kept walking.
The summer Andrea and I were thirteen he’d spent devising as many tests as he could for me. This, of course, was how I thought of it, not that Andrea’s motivations were any clearer to me at present. He told me we should visit a church, some excuse, like it was where our grandparents had been married, where my mother had been baptized. He’d laughed when we’d entered the foyer and seen the skeletons looming down, the thighbones protruding from the walls in menacing patterns, arranged by the monks of the order after their brothers’ passings. I did my best not to start, and I could tell Andrea was disappointed, he kept pointing to the various posed dead men, one writing with a quill, one sweeping the floor, and asking which one I liked. This one? This one? Your children, they’ll be beautiful! He’d added an appreciative hand gesture, here and there. I kept a postcard from the church, a photograph of the bone altar, in my desk drawer through college, it had said something to me about mortality and commitment and groups of men in isolation that I thought might be important to remember.
I thought of the Ethiopian monks, thought of their bones left exposed on the ground until the end of the war. I thought of a twenty-year-old boy with barely a mustache who finds himself in Africa. Was it atonement that Vietri was pursuing through his books? If it was, what could have possibly taken him so long to begin? It had been almost seven decades since the end of that war, millions of lives had already been lived in their completion. Just because he was too young to have been in Ethiopia, just because he wasn’t there, he hadn’t taken part in this particular massacre, was that better, or was that just luck, how could being absent mean he was innocent? And if it didn’t, if he wasn’t innocent, what was I doing chasing after him, what was I doing with my years? And if this was his great sin, what was mine?
Sometime before my eleventh birthday, my mother had consulted with herself and decided to taper her medication down to nothing, and she promptly developed the idea that my father was holding my grandfather hostage. She began to retrieve my father’s receipts from the trash and write down the mileage in his car each day when he returned home, making circles on maps she would hide in deep in the cabinet under the bathroom sink. My father had pretended not to notice her trips to the garage.
One day she’d picked me up from the fifth grade and drove us out to Yuba City, past the orchards and lazy streams, to towns made up of no more than a grocery store and motel surrounded by almond groves. She checked us into a Motel 6, smiling warmly at the Sikh man behind the front desk. We can trust people with beards, she whispered loudly, and I cringed as he walked us to our room, hoping there was some way he hadn’t heard, hoping also that this embarrassment so deep in my middle it felt like dread was of the normal, eleven-year-old variety, like when my friends at school would roll their eyes and call their mothers crazy.
For two days she would only let us eat apples. Fruit is the only thing we can trust, she said. She’d bought several pounds at a farm stand on the way, but she didn’t seem to notice the ants that had found a rotting one, deep in the bag, and I cleaned the black line of them as best as I could with toilet paper from the bathroom. I worked on my homework on the bed while she had conversations into the phone, talking strangely, with soups of unrelated words, though I could hear the operator message telling her the numbers she was dialing were no longer in service, and the eventual flat beep, but she would pause to listen as if someone were on the other end. Once, when I thought she was in a good mood, humming to herself, studying a map of Northern California, I’d asked if I could call my dad. Her mood flipped, and she’d unplugged the phone from the wall and clutched it to her breast like a baby.
The third night, when she was deeply asleep for the first time and I was wobbly from hunger, I called my father and told him the name of the motel. That night, after he’d arrived, was the last time I saw my mother outdoors, her hair unbrushed and her eyes furious, red and blue lights behind her, illuminating the almond trees. I fell asleep in my bed after eating half a jar of peanut butter, and when I woke in the morning, my father told me he had surrendered control of my mother to the state of California.
My father deposited her monthly disability check into my bank account, he’d told me once that he’d married her and could pay for her care but that I might as well get something out of her condition, as he called it. It was this money, guilt money, eleven hundred dollars a month, that had, supplemented by my part-time jobs, paid my tuition and rent at Berkeley, that had accumulated while I worked at the bookstore after college, this money that I’d used to travel for these months, that had paid for my hostel bed at fifteen euro a night, and now the room at Loredana’s. Sometimes I wished my father would divorce her and start over, try to be happy with someone else, reclaim the life that had been taken from him, but he seemed content to keep her as his anchor, distantly attached, but in the end unreachable.