We would stop at a grocery store in Voghera on the way.
Fruit, whatever was good that week. Cheese. Some small treats. Then the rest of the way to Pontecurone, and up the stairs, and into Lilliana’s room, where we would put it all out on whatever surface was available and eat it together. She called these picnics. Facciamo un picnic. We had them every visit for five years and I do not think I have ever enjoyed a meal more.
She was ninety-one when I met her and ninety-five the last time I saw her. She had one leg. She was living in a rest home she had not chosen, in a town that was not her town, with a walker parked beside the bed. And the afternoons were, without exception, delightful.
For anyone arriving here first: she was my father’s sister. He didn’t know she existed, and I found her the year he died. She was born in New York and given away as an infant by her mother, and carried across the ocean to Costa Vescovato, and raised there by her aunt and uncle as their own — and disowned, along with all of them, by her grandmother. That is the previous four essays in a sentence. I did not understand any of it for a year after I met her.
I want to spend this essay there, because the four essays before it have been an account of a concealment, and concealment is not what those years were about. Those years were about a small handbag.
We noticed, early on, that the other residents had them — little bags tied onto the frames of their walkers, for glasses and tissues and whatever else a person needs to carry when both hands are occupied. Lilliana did not have one. So on the next trip we brought her one, and she tied it on, carefully, and it stayed there for the rest of the time we knew her.
That is the register of most of what I have to report.
The trinkets, the leg, the ships
She would ask, always very politely, whether we might bring small things from New York — for herself, for her doctor Samantha, for her friend Anna. So we did, every June, and the asking was itself a kind of gift, because you do not ask that of strangers.
Everyone in that building knew who we were there for. Which is how I found out that there was a complication.
The nurses had a particular way of confirming it. I was forever forgetting which floor she was on, so on the first visit of each summer I would ask, in Italian, for Signora Rovelli, and the attendant — always a woman — would nod, and then point at her own right leg and make a brief chopping motion across it, and look at me. Yes. That Signora Rovelli.
It startled me the first time. It was not disrespect. It was simply the most efficiently distinguishing feature available.
I asked Lilliana about this once and she explained that there was another Signora Rovelli in the building. Her sister-in-law. Her brother’s widow.
The two of them had not spoken in years. I did ask, once, what had happened. She looked away and waved her hand — dismissing the woman out of the room, more or less — and began to say something, and then stopped herself and said it wasn’t worth explaining.
I never asked again. I did note the shape of it.
They lived on separate floors, and the staff took some trouble to keep it that way. And when her nephew came from Costa Vescovato to visit his mother, he did not come up to see Lilliana, because his mother did not permit it. What he did instead was send his son. Alessio was a young teenager then and was very close to Lilliana, and while his father sat with his grandmother downstairs, Alessio would slip up to Lilliana’s floor to see her.
A boy conveying affection between two people who were not permitted to be in a room together. In this family, that is practically a job description.
I want to be accurate about how she carried it, because it would be easy to make her sound besieged and she was not. She had friends there. She moved around the building freely, as freely as one leg and a walker allowed, and she did not have the air of a woman watching a staircase. She was living her life in the space available, which was the thing she had always done.
But she had given that nephew her house. And she was still being kept at arm’s length by somebody in her own family, in the last building she would live in, in her nineties. It bothered me a great deal more than it appeared to bother her. I turned over, more than once, whether there was anything I could do — whether we could bring her to New York, to live near us, or with us.
Her health made it impossible. I never raised it with her. We carried on as we were.
And on her own floor she was among friends. Anna Albasini was her closest friend there, a warm, funny woman who spoke no English and no French and no Spanish and talked to Lili and me anyway, at length, in Italian, entirely unbothered by the arrangement. It was Anna who called her La Vagabonda — the wanderer — with enormous affection. Once, Lilliana arranged for Anna’s family to bring us Piemontese cakes, hazelnut and chocolate, which were among the best things I have eaten in my life.
Samantha and Anna both told me, separately, that Lilliana could not sleep the night before we arrived.
Which produced one of the iconic moments of the whole five years. Before I learned enough Italian to write to Samantha directly, we had a scheduling mix-up, and Lilliana spent a day expecting us when we were still in America. When we finally walked in, not knowing any of this, she looked at me with unmistakable annoyance — and it was Alice’s look. Exactly Alice’s look. The same face my great-aunt made at me for forty years when I had done something thoughtless. I was so glad to see her that I probably grinned at her, and the annoyance evaporated in about four seconds, and we had our picnic.
I did not know then that she was my father’s sister. I knew that I had just been looked at by my own family.
The advertisement
Here is how she got out of Costa Vescovato.
It is a story I return to, because it is the family’s own story played in another key. Adelaide and Giovanni left that village and went west, and came back, and went again, and their children crossed the Atlantic back and forth for decades — always the same axis, always the same destination, always New York.
Lilliana left it too. But she went east. Through the canal, out past Suez, to ports her grandparents had never heard the names of. And like all of them she circled back periodically. And like almost all of them she ended where she had started.
The same motion in the opposite direction, for a different reason. A variation rather than a repetition.
She worked in the village post office with her mother, Maria. She was young. And one day, thumbing through a magazine, she came across an advertisement: a shipping line wanted someone to run the nursery on its passenger ships.
She applied without telling her mother. She assumed nothing would come of it.
Something came of it. She was asked to come to Genoa — and she went to Genoa without telling her mother either. She was offered the job.
Then she told her mother. And Maria was elated.
I want to be careful with this, because it is the hinge of everything I am trying to say. That was a secret. It was concealment, in a family that had concealment for a technique. And it was the opposite of every other secret in these five essays. She did not keep it quiet in order to keep somebody out. She kept it quiet because the thing was not real yet, and speaking about it too early would have collapsed it into a conversation — into other people’s opinions, into her mother’s hopes and fears, into a plan that could be argued with. So she held it, silently, until it existed. And then she gave it away.
She spent fifteen years on the Genoa–Far East route after that, minding other people’s children between ports. She learned her English there. It was that English she used, seventy years later, to hand me my family in the first ten minutes of the first evening.
When she told me about the ships I told her about my father — that he had been a sailor all his life, happiest on the water, and that the two of them could have gone out together.
And somewhere in the middle of saying it, I understood what I was actually describing, and it arrived as a loss.
It took hold like a current. It pulled me into water I had managed to stay out of for years, and for the next few minutes I was not entirely in the room.
She would have got on with all of them. My father, my mother, my sisters. I could see it with an unhelpful degree of clarity — Lilliana at the table, Lilliana out on the water with my father, Lilliana dropped into a family dynamic that has never been simple and that she would have made lighter merely by being in it. She did not feel to me like a relative I had acquired late. She felt like the good part of my own family, arriving intact, seventy years behind schedule.
That is the one place where my feeling about Alice stops being complicated, and I want to be exact about it, because it was a turn and I felt it turn.
Until that afternoon I had been, privately, defensive of her. I had spent years establishing what she did, and had gone on protecting her the entire time I was doing it. She was old. She had her reasons. She had been young once in a village she did not choose and restless in a marriage she had not chosen either, and she ran, and who was I to judge. I had been holding a line for her against my own evidence.
And then I was sitting across from a woman in a bed, imagining a boat trip that could not happen, and I looked at her face.
I had seen that expression before, but never in that concentration. Longing, and something worn smooth by having been carried a very long way. She had spent a life looking for these people. I was describing them to her, in a rest home, at the end of it.
È troppo tardi. It’s too late. And it came to me, sitting there, that it’s too late had an instigator. It did not simply become late. Somebody made it late, and went on making it late for seventy years, deliberately, and never once relented.
One letter added and one letter changed. That was the whole mechanism. It cost nothing, and it rendered an entire family French and invisible from both sides of the ocean — invisible to a woman making crossings to find them, invisible to a man making crossings to find his wife, invisible to a boy at a kitchen table being taught the language of a country his family was not from.
I have written elsewhere that French was drained of something for me over those years with Lilliana. That afternoon is when it started. It began to sit awkwardly in my mouth, carrying an imprint it had not carried before. This is not a verdict on the language, or on any of what was made in it. It is simply a casualty of a method. And I am sorry to report that it has not come back.
So I was angry, and I accepted that I was. Rarely, I still am. But the anger, when it comes, arrives alongside loving her rather than in place of it, and what is mostly left now is acceptance — and a wistfulness for what might have been available to everyone, Alice included, had a few decisions gone differently.
Her gravestone reads Love is stronger than death.
Nobody in the family is sure who chose those words. It may have been my father. It may have been my mother. One more thing about Alice with no name attached to it.
I have come to know that they’re intertwined; two irreducible truths, and that she also demonstrated the harder half of it: love and its damage are not opposites. She carried both. So do I.
In any case, there was nothing to be done about any of it. The gap had been manufactured decades before either of us could have raised an objection, and it could not be closed after the fact.
But I had found her. And we had time, and we spent it, and we were honest and open and kind with one another. That turned out to be the entire remedy: presence, and acceptance. You cannot recover the years. You can decline to spend the ones remaining the way the people who purported to manage this family squandered all the others.
The gap was artificial, and it was cruel, and it accomplished nothing that anybody needed. What Lilliana, Lili and I let flow into it was none of those things.
All of that moved through me while we were talking. I did not stop the conversation and I do not think she saw any of it. I went with the current until it set me down again in the room — where Lilliana was laughing, and telling me that she had suffered terribly from seasickness. Fifteen years of it.
“That never stopped me,” she said.
Which is to say she would have gone anyway. She would have got into the boat with my father, and been sick over the side, and enjoyed herself enormously.
I have thought about those four words more than she could have known. A baby given away by her mother in New York, carried across an ocean to a village, raised there by an aunt and uncle as their own — and then, along with all of them, put out of the family by her grandmother. A woman who then spent her life leaving — the ships, the thirty years at the bottom of Africa, the habit of departing for the East each June. A widow who came back to the same small village anyway, presumably to be near family, and found the family she had. Then the tractor, and the leg, and the fall on her own floor, and a rest home she had not chosen with a relative one floor down who would not speak to her.
She was seasick for fifteen years and went anyway. That is not a metaphor I am imposing on her. It is a description of how she conducted herself, and I watched her do it every June for five years.
What I want to say about it is this: she was not managing a set of opposites. She was not weighing the good against the bad and arriving at a net figure. Both were simply present, and she lived in the room they were both in.
A secret that opened a life. Held in silence so that it could arrive; disclosed the moment it was real.
There are two inheritances running through this family, and I had only noticed one of them.
The day that didn’t happen
One summer I had an idea I was very pleased with.
I proposed taking her out for a day. A car, a driver, Costa Vescovato and Tortona, lunch somewhere, a gelato, an afternoon of driving through the hills. She had not been out of that building in years. I thought she would love it.
I should be honest and say that I would have loved it, and that this was part of why I proposed it.
She hesitated. She was worried about her blood pressure. I told her we would only go if she was comfortable, and left it with her.
Before we left that afternoon, she said she would go.
I was delighted. I was also not certain. Something in the way she agreed made me think she was agreeing for our sake rather than her own.
I went ahead anyway. I found someone in Pavia who knew a driver, arranged a day later that week, and came in the next morning and told her it was all set.
And I saw fear in her eyes.
It lasted a moment. She would not have said anything — she had agreed, and she was not going to go back on it, because the stubbornness ran in that direction too. So I said that actually I wasn’t sure the driver could manage it after all, and that I would find out.
The next day I told her the driver had never called me back.
That was a lie. I had already cancelled him. And I watched a woman in her nineties become visibly, enormously relieved, and understood that I had come very close to taking somebody who could not refuse me on a long day out that frightened her.
It was in the space left by the cancelled day that I thought of the laptop.
We sat on a sofa in the lounge on the ground floor, the three of us, and I put the computer on my knees, and we went to Cape Town.
Her memory was immaculate. She found the house she had lived in — directing me, street by street, correcting my turns. She found the district where her husband David had worked. She looked at the buildings and the light and told us what had been there and what had not.
Then Costa Vescovato, and we drove up the one street.
Then New York. I showed her 13 Mott Street. I showed her the neighborhoods where I had lived, and where her father had lived when he was in the city.
We were on that sofa a long time. It was one of the best afternoons of my life. La Vagabonda travelled that day — Cape Town, Piemonte, Chinatown — from a lounge in Pontecurone, with her family, in her own time, with somebody to talk to.
I had tried to take her out into the world in a car and had nearly frightened her. So the world came to her instead.
Pavia
After the first trip we never went back to Costa Vescovato. Not once, in five years. It was not a decision, exactly. There was no reason to spend an afternoon in a small village when we could explore a lifetime in a room in Pontecurone.
We stayed in Pavia instead, and took the regional train down — over the Ticino as you leave the station, over the Po a few minutes later, over the Staffora coming into Voghera, and over the Curone as the train pulls into Pontecurone, which is named for the bridge across it. Sometimes we rode the whole way; sometimes we got off at Voghera, where there were good shops for the picnic, and took a car the rest of the way. What had started as a method for knowing when to get off a train turned, over five years, into something closer to a liturgy.
And Pavia turned out to matter for a reason I could not have engineered.
Lilliana’s mother, Maria — also a Rovelli by birth, though not a blood relation, which tells you something about that region — was from Pavia. Lilliana had been extremely close to her. They had worked together in that post office.
When she learned that we were staying in Pavia and coming down from Pavia to see her, she was visibly moved. Her mother’s city, delivering her family to her, once a year, in June.
We chose Pavia because it sits between Milano and Pontecurone and because we like to walk at night, and it is a wonderful city to walk in. It has a university, and beautiful churches, and the Certosa, and very good food, and mosquitoes of real conviction.
It also has, we gathered, an ancient quarrel with Milano that has not entirely subsided. When we told friends from the north that we were staying in Pavia and liked it, the response was reliably the same, delivered with a shrug: the Certosa and the mosquitoes, and that’s it.
It was harmless. It also made me laugh in a way I could not immediately account for, until I realized what it reminded me of — a place with a wall around it, and a reputation among outsiders for being not worth the trouble of entering.
Full moon June
She had a rule about departures, from the shipping years.
If the ship left just before the full moon, she said, the passage was always difficult. The thing to do was to wait for the full moon and go just after it. It had to do with the Suez transit — the tides through the canal were less dramatic once the moon had turned. Full moon June was how the crews carried it: June being the month the Far East runs departed, and the month that had been auspicious for her all her life, full of the promise of adventure.
She told me this in the first letter she ever sent me, the one Samantha typed for her after eight months of silence.
So we went in June. And the first summer after she wrote to me, we happened to arrive just after the full moon — which I would like to claim was deliberate and was in fact nothing of the kind.
Luck, then. Except that I have never been able to leave that word alone.
Joseph Campbell used to talk about unseen hands: the help that turns up, unaccountably and repeatedly, once a person has actually committed to something. I am aware of how that sounds.
I am not going to pretend the other four summers were arranged by anything. They weren’t. We came when we could get away, and the moon did what it does. But that one arrival landed on her rule without anybody consulting it, and by then I had accumulated a list of such things that is now several essays long — and at some point a list like that stops being a collection of anecdotes and becomes something I can only call poetic. Not decorative. Poetic in the older sense: made. Shaped. And not by me.
I will come back to that in the next essay, because I have arrived at opinions about the word luck that took me a long time to reach and that I am not certain I can defend. For the moment I will let it sit where it landed.
I have described the difficulty in these essays at some length: the burned papers, the cut photographs, the excisions, the ten-year disappearance, the man on the roof in Florida. I have not described enough of the other thing, which was present the entire time and which I want to name properly before this arc closes.
Astonishment. Not wonder in the decorative sense — the older thing, thaumazein, the shock that there is anything here at all and that it has shown itself to you.
It was in the room every afternoon. That she existed. That she had been holding the whole record for ninety years with nobody to give it to. That an advertisement in a magazine in a village post office had produced the English she needed to tell me. That a menu came off a sidewalk in Manhattan and a door was propped open on Mott Street. That the language invented to keep me from my family was the one language my host in Costa Vescovato happened to speak.
None of that is explicable and I have stopped attempting it. What I have come to think is that astonishment and anxiety are not opposites and do not take turns. They are co-present. Every one of those afternoons contained both — the difficulty and the marvel, in the same room, at the same time, on the same tray of fruit and cheese.
The failure, when this family failed, was not the anxiety. Anxiety was in that room on all of those afternoons too, and nothing went wrong.
What went wrong is that somebody treated it as an intruder. As a thing arriving from outside, with a face on it, to be repelled or cut out or burned. And in order to do that you first have to get the trouble outside yourself — which in practice means getting a person outside yourself: a daughter’s suitor, a husband’s other household, a name on a census page.
Then the stance hardens. The hardened stance becomes a monument. And thereafter a person walks along a path of small hard monuments, looking back down it and forward up it, and calls the path time.
The cost is not really paid by whoever was expelled. Or not only. It is paid by the one doing the expelling, because every one of those judgments quietly removes a little more of what they were standing on. You cannot abstract yourself from a family and go on being held by it.
My great-grandmother did this with scissors. My great-aunt did it with an incinerator.
My grandfather did it from a roof, above a restaurant window, with a footstool — which is a thing you have to bring with you once you have run out of ground.
Astonishment is what a monument is built to stop.
Which means the two are much closer together than they look. Anxiety and astonishment arrive at the same door, by the same route: something you thought you knew becomes suddenly unfamiliar. What happens next decides which of them you are left holding. Harden against it and it stays anxiety, and hardens along with you. Leave it standing open and the same unfamiliarity turns out to have been astonishment all along — that this is here at all, that it has shown itself, that you are in the room with it.
She never said any of that to me. She had no use for sentences of that kind. She simply did it, every afternoon, into her nineties, with one leg, in a building she had not chosen. Lili and I sat with her and did it too.
That is how the three of us got into the place we spent five summers in. Not by resolving anything. Rather by not shutting the door on the first feeling that came through it.
Next, and last in this sequence: the final visit, what she pressed into Lili’s hand as we were leaving, and how it ended — “The Only Thing I Have.”
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