Every morning I walk up to the bakery and back, a total distance of two city blocks. Serravalle is a small town. You say buongiorno to just about everyone you meet. It’s a sign of civility. But not all buongiornos are alike.
Hum the first three notes of the musical scale, do re mi. Around here, to someone you don’t know, or to someone you would prefer not to talk to, if you make eye contact, you say “buongiorno” in a barely audible voice, sounding the first and third notes in the scale, do mi mi. The second syllable is stressed, but only slightly: buon-GIOR-no. Do MI mi. And you keep walking. There are fresh pastries up the street, after all. There’s cappuccino to drink and a newspaper to read. When you greet someone you recognize, on the other hand, the greeting changes: buon-giorn-no, mi do do. Equal stress on each syllable, which is another way of saying no stress. The falling intonation, for some reason, is a little more welcoming, allowing a brief opening for a quick exchange of pleasantries—Rain? Cold. I bambini?—but you can pass on that if you’re in a hurry or if you’re not in the mood.
This morning, when I stepped out of our building, an old gentleman was walking up the street. I must have looked familiar. He gave me the second buongiorno, which I was more than happy to return. I’ll talk to anyone.
He stopped and squinted at me. “Do I know you?” he asked.
He might have been eighty, which meant he could have known my in-laws years back. I told him who I was. We talked for a minute, and sure enough, there was history. He did know them. He had lived in the United States when my in-laws were there. He worked on some of the same job sites as my father-in-law.
We shook hands. “Duilio,” he said. I leaned in, and he said his name for me again, twice. Duilio. Do-EEE-lee-o.
All those syllables. It was going to be fun greeting him, “Buongiorno, Duilio,” which would require a third, more musical buongiorno. Eventually we might progress to the familiar “ciao.”
I presented myself, Rick, conscious, as always, of my conspicuously monosyllabic name, also offering “Riccardo,” which I do not like much, vaguely hoping more syllables made my name—and me—easier to remember.
In five minutes, he told me a little of his story. With his wife and two daughters, he had lived in the United States for fifteen years. Then they came back to San Marino. A common story, I pointed out. To this he wagged an index finger. His wife was sick, he said. There was no treatment for her over there, so they came back. When I wondered, he shook his head. No, she was gone.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “And your daughters?”
“My daughter,” he said, gulping air. His eyes squeezed shut; I thought for a minute he would laugh. He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket. After they came back, the older daughter never adjusted to living over here. She tried. He said she knew four languages. In the end she couldn’t find herself here and moved back to the United States. He dabbed at his eyes a couple of times and apologized for crying.
“She lives in Florida now,” he said, adding, “It’s terrible for a father.”
“The other daughter?” I asked.
“Good,” he said. He held up a thumb and forefinger. “Due figli.” She has two children.
We stood together on the sidewalk. We shook hands again. He apologized again for crying. “Duilio,” I said, “I’ll see you.”
Later in the day, I will make the short walk up town three or four more times. I go to the grocery store, I go to the butcher shop, I go to the coffee bar that has a strong wireless signal. Evenings, for the benefit of night air (and to force myself to stay awake), I walk up to the edge of town and then back down to our apartment. It takes five or ten minutes, unless there is someone to talk to. The old town is little more than one narrow street. Mornings and afternoons it gets clogged with pedestrian traffic, with wide buses that rock like ships in a narrow canal, with throngs of kids rushing to and from school.
Here everyone walks. There is so much buongiorno.
Maybe that’s why I’m so aware of older people here. Because everyone walks.
Those walks I take up town, I see a dozen older gentlemen like Duilio. Three stand on the corner, avid conversationalists, tapping each other’s chests with the backs of their hands, explaining points with expressive fingers. Others are doing the old man walk: leaning slightly forward, hands joined behind their backs, taking slow, deliberate, contemplative steps.
Early Tuesday mornings I stand next to women my age and older, buying fruits and vegetables from the vendor in the piazza. I ask, “Does anyone make a sauce with stridoli?” Three old women tell me their recipe. “What do I do with lischeri?” A panel discussion ensues. “When do you add lemon juice? Do you add it at all?”
Back home, in suburban Detroit, I see old people at the senior center (they have their own dedicated place)—on exercise machines, drinking coffee in a round table group I rarely join. I see seniors in grocery store parking lots, at the hardware store. There is something poignant about some of these sightings. An older man piles canned goods and frozen dinners on the cashier’s conveyer. I think he must be heating food for himself, eating alone. An older woman slowly backs her car out of a parking spot, straining to see, sawing the vehicle back and forth. She takes forever. I think, Why is she still driving? The thing is, living there, she has to drive.
Simone de Beauvoir, in The Coming of Age, observed, “We have always regarded [old age] as something alien, a foreign species.” At home, old age is like that, mostly impersonal. I don’t know that man in the grocery store. I’ve never seen him before. I don’t know that old woman trying to unpark her car. I’ve never seen her before. At home, I’m astonished at how infrequently I see people I recognize in public places. For over thirty-five years I’ve lived in that community. I know the houses, roads, stores, buildings. Every day back home, as often as I walk here, I’m in my car. I merge with traffic coming and going. I know the community the way I know my own home. Yet when I park in the lot in front of Trader Joe’s and get out of the car, I often wonder, Who are all these people?
Maybe it’s not the difference between Italy and the United States. Maybe it’s the difference between a small town and suburb. Would suburban Milano feel like suburban Detroit? Doesn’t Serravalle feel like Freeland?
“Buongiorno, Maria.”
I’m walking home from the bar one morning. She’s leaning against the wall outside the middle school, resting. The mother of one of my wife’s childhood friends, Maria is ninety and is dressed in a black skirt and fitted waist-length jacket, her thick gray hair pinned back, a colorful scarf tied around her neck. She’s going up to the bar for coffee, or she’s going up to the church for mass. When I explain to her who I am, which I do every time I see her, she warbles something in dialect that I don’t understand and then says, “I’m still here. Do you believe it?” She raises a hand to one of my cheeks, pulls me to her, and kisses the other cheek. She laughs her high, liquid, musical laugh.
There are two beauty shops in this town. My wife’s aunt, also ninety, gets her hair done once a week. She describes the gaggle of widows that congregates there every Thursday. They discuss how wonderful it is being widows, with no husband to wait on or walk around or drag after them. It’s so liberating once they’re finally gone. One of the women says, “I keep waiting for my husband to die. I wait and I wait and I wait. He just won’t die!”
And they all laugh.
Over the last day or so, I’ve re-read Philip Roth’s Everyman, a book I brought over here with me five or six years ago. It’s a dark novel, an unflinching meditation on old age, in tone somewhere between somber and harrowing. Near the end of the story, the main character finds himself living alone on the Jersey shore. Largely because of betrayals and mistakes he has made in life, now in his seventies, he is totally isolated, preoccupied with his accelerating physical decline. He gets news one day of three contemporaries, one dead, one dying, one diagnosed. “Old age isn’t a battle,” he says. “It’s a massacre.”
It must be a massacre here too. In the piazza, at the edge of school, and along the streets are small billboards with manifesti posted. These are reminders of those who have died, broadsheet posters with names, dates, and a line or two of text, many with color photographs of the departed.
I stop in front of a billboard one morning, across the street from the house where my wife was born. Enzo, the retired baker, is standing there too, looking.
“Buongiorno.”
“Buongiorno.”
On the board are four men my age and older (I picture their wives rejoicing) and a young man, twenty-one years old. I ask Enzo if he knew them.
“Yes, a couple of them very well. But sometimes, you know, the manifesti are from towns up the road”—he points up the mountain—“for the relatives and friends who live here. Everyone knows everyone.” Pointing at the twenty-one-year-old, he says, “The young people, those are the hard ones.”
A few months ago, a manifesto for my wife’s uncle was posted there. When I was here two years ago, there was one for Enzo’s brother.
“We’re still here,” I say.
“Yes, we are.” He turns to me and smiles. “We’re carrying the flag.”
I rattle the package I’m holding, tell him I should get going. He knows what it is. Until he retired ten years ago, it was his bakery. The cake I’m bringing home this morning he must have made for years and years, hundreds of them, probably thousands. It’s an inch thick, round, smaller than a pizza. The baked dough is dark brown, heavy with cooked grape must and raisins, topped with walnuts and almonds, and then drizzled with honey.
“Piada dei morti?”
“Yes,” I say. Bread of the dead. They only make it in the fall, for the day and month of the dead. “My wife loves it.”
“Bones?”
Yes, the baker tossed in a couple of cookies too, called bones of the dead. I rattle the package again. I’m ready to walk. “See you around, Enzo.”
“Buona giornata,” he says.