I kept my promise and accompanied my grandmother to the cemetery to celebrate her husband on the day of the dead. Even though it was only ten o’clock in the morning, it was dark out, a salty wind blew hard, and damp black rain clouds hung heavily over the city. Except for when I was small, when she swore she took me around Naples for fresh air and sunshine, either carrying me or walking hand in hand, we had never gone out together. This was the only time.
It was anything but easy. The city streets were jammed with traffic, crowded buses inched forward slowly, the road to the cemetery was one long procession of families on their way to say hello to their loved ones. My grandmother seemed awfully fragile, she walked slowly and leaned on my arm, wearing her one black dress and holding her purse tightly to her chest out of fear of thieves. Eventually, we arrived. When we reached my grandfather’s burial niche, she let go of my arm slowly and stood sedately in front of the marble plaque with its three brownish photographs and three names: that of her husband and his mother and father. The photo of her husband, the man who had fallen to his death, showed him looking young and strong. If he could’ve seen my grandmother, he probably would’ve said: who the hell is this? The wet marble sparkled from all the votive lights on the pezzotto that Lello had applied to a strip of metal that he had installed in the groove between the burial niche cover and the ledge.
“It’s so beautiful with all this light,” my grandmother said, sighing with satisfaction under the dome of her umbrella.
“I went over the top,” I said, “I told him to put up eight lights.”
“Better to live large than be stingy.”
“Are you going to pray now?”
“No.”
“Then what’re you going to do?”
“I’m going to talk to him a little bit in my head.”
I nodded and asked her if I could leave her on her own for ten minutes without running the risk that she’d go wandering off and that I’d lose her. Concerned, she asked me what I had to do that was so urgent that it couldn’t wait, and I lied and told her I had seen a friend and wanted to say hello. She begrudgingly gave me permission but as soon as I got to the end of the path, she shouted: don’t run, be careful, don’t hurt yourself.
I found the custodian and showed him the paper that Lello had given me with the location of the girl’s grave. He told me how to get there: go right, then left, then up some stairs, then down some stairs, and off I went under the rain and dark sky to the Paucillo family crypt, where the gate sat open even though not a soul—living, at any rate—was around. It was as if it had been abandoned, inside I found rotting leaves brought in on the wind, scorpions, shrews, hairy spiders. The only thing that shone brightly was the pezzotto with eight votives that Lello had set up in front of the plaque that read: EMANUELA PAUCILLO, 1944-1952.
I put on a doleful face and listened to the sound of the rain and to the scurrying mice for a while. But then I couldn’t resist, I took out a piece of paper and pen and wrote: do you mind if, for the rest of my life, I continue to call you the girl from Milan? Then I folded up the piece of paper and slipped it into one of the two cross-shaped fissures in the marble. I was pulling my hand away when the eight votive lights suddenly went out, and the crypt sank into darkness.
I got scared and thought that maybe Emanuela Paucillo wanted to reclaim her true identity, so I rushed back to my grandmother in the drizzling rain. She was raging mad, as were all the other relatives near her who were visiting their dead. Everybody was screaming and yelling: this always happens, every single day of the dead. They paid all that money for lights—to those thieves, tricksters, swindlers, sonsofbitches—that worked at first, then flickered, then came on again, then stutavano forever.
“Well, if that’s the case,” I said eagerly, “we have to go and complain.”
“Yes,” my grandmother agreed.
Five or six of us started down the path, with my grandmother and I out in front. Along the way, we encountered other clusters of unhappy relatives who had also spent good money to bring their loved ones as much light as possible, and now, despite having paid, down there—they said, pointing to the earth, now muddy with rain—it was darker than ever.
We reached the main mausoleum and crowded around its entrance. It was pitch black inside, too, and people there were even more irate. We joined forces with other mourners on the ground floor, while families on the floors above, where entire walls of niches had gone dark, leaned out over the railings and shouted down insults: harsh words and wild phrases, insults having to do with orifices that had been violated or soon would be, together with the sound of people slapping themselves weakly in preparation to slap others much harder—the debt collectors, the electricians, and the debt collector-electricians—in front of whom they’d soon be waving their receipts.
My grandmother felt linguistically at ease, I less so; I was educated and would’ve preferred protesting in Italian. Moreover, it was not some dodgy racketeering gang facing the crowd, but Lello—with his nice round face, like a blond Norwegian sailor—and—standing next to him, maybe just visiting or maybe recently hired—Nina. At first, I felt a little worried for them, but then I relaxed. I looked at them and saw how perfectly matched, invincible, and well-equipped they were to deal with the furies of the world. They’d sort everything out capably and maturely, first by striking awe into the crowd and then by promising, in their university-student Italian with its light Neapolitan inflection, the immediate restoration of light. The only thing they were feeling in that particular moment was the fullness of life. They were so happy about being together that they would’ve been content in even the direst situations: in a police station, among the sick and wounded in an emergency room, at war, and, of course, standing in front of a crowd of angry mourners. Even when I looked at them, those two glowing vendors of light, I only saw the very faintest fringe of death.