The package, and eight months
I came home from Italy in August of 2015 and spent about a month assembling everything.
The photographs from Alice’s apartment, including the ones of Giovanni and Adelaide that my father and I had found when she died — the couple in Costa Vescovato, and the same couple in Madison Square Park in Manhattan, fashionable and young — which had sat, unlabeled and unexplained, in the possession of a woman who insisted the family was from the south of France. The fragments of letters. A photograph of my grandmother and Alice together as children, with Tortona written on the back. My grandmother as a young woman, alone, smiling, standing in front of a house that I have always taken to be in Queens, with the words La mia casa! written across it. The census page. The certificate from the vast New York bureaucracy. Writings and photos of the New York family. My own research, such as it was.
I mailed the whole of it to Pontecurone.
When we met I had asked her whether she had photographs of the family. “I had some,” she said, “but many of them were lost when I moved back from South Africa, and I’m not sure where the rest of them are.” She paused. “I would love to see my grandfather’s face again.”
It took me a while to understand what I had actually done, which was to send them home. Giovanni and Adelaide left Costa Vescovato in 1884, and their photographs ended up in a drawer in Manhattan, in the keeping of a daughter who spent seventy years denying that they were hers. I put them in a parcel and posted them back to within twenty miles of the village they were born in — to a woman whose own grandmother, when she wanted somebody gone, took a photograph and cut the face out of it.
I stood in the post office with a hundred and thirty years of a family in a box, and paid for postage.
And then, nothing. I had no telephone number for her, no email. No address for anyone else in Pontecurone. I confirmed the package had been received at the Casa di Reposo, but I couldn’t confirm it had found its way to Lilliana. I assumed she had it. I didn’t want to push. I wanted Lilliana to take her time. Months went by, and I began to construct the explanations a person constructs — the package was lost; she had thought better of the whole thing; something I had sent deeply offended her; the door had closed the way every door in this history closes. It was uncomfortable and it was also entirely familiar. I simply lived with it.
I was waiting, in other words. Which is what she had been doing since before I was born.
Then, in May, out of nowhere, an email arrived — typed by her doctor, Samantha, and dictated by Lilliana. Warm, chatty, grateful for the photographs, full of new detail about her life, hoping we would meet again. Eight months of silence, and no explanation offered for it, and none needed.
She mentioned, in that letter or one soon after, that her trips to the Far East aboard the cruise ships she worked on would always depart in June, and that the month had been auspicious for her all her life, full of the promise of adventure. However, she also noted that timing was crucial. “If we left just before the full moon our passage was always difficult. The best was to wait for the full moon and then depart just after it. ‘Full moon June’ is how we remembered.”
I made plans to see her immediately. We went that summer in June (just after the full moon!), and every summer after, five times in all.
The sentence I couldn’t hear
There is one thing from that first hour, described in the previous essay, I have not accounted for.
Your grandmother had four children. A girl and three boys. Said twice, with a stare, by a woman who then declined to say anything further about it — and set aside by me, that same evening, as the one lapse in an otherwise flawless performance of memory. My father had two brothers. No sister. Of that I was certain.
It took a year.
What happened in between was ordinary research. I was drafting a chronology of the New York Rovellis and I went looking for steamship records, and I found that Alfonso and his wife Maria had traveled to New York and been in the city shortly before Lilliana was born. I put the arrival dates into the timeline where they belonged. And I remember thinking: how odd, that her parents should have been in New York so close to her birth.
Then, the following summer, in her room, she was telling me about her parents — how long they had struggled to have a child of their own. I knew by then that she had a brother very close to her in age. Very close. I said something about how surprised they must have been to conceive so quickly after all that difficulty. And Lilliana said, mildly, that sometimes when there is a baby in the house, a woman can finally conceive one of her own.
That is when it assembled. The travel records. The brother’s age. And a sentence delivered to me a year earlier, twice, with a stare, by a woman who had been instructed to be kind.
My grandmother’s first child was a girl. My grandmother had her alone, and could not raise her. Her brother Alfonso and his wife Maria — who could not have children — came to New York, and took the baby, and brought her back to Costa Vescovato, and raised her as their own. Adelaide found out, and disowned all four of them: my grandmother, her brother, his wife, and the child.
Lilliana was my father’s sister.
She was my aunt. She had told me so in the first minutes of our meeting, in the only way she was prepared to tell me, and I had corrected her twice and then filed her under mistaken.
Readers of the previous essay will recall what I had noticed about her the moment I walked into that room: the shape of her face, which was my father’s face; her hands, which were his hands; her mannerisms; her love of the sea. It was, in retrospect, so obvious as to be almost comic. And I — the one person on my side of the family who had spent his adult life trying to get at the truth — managed to suspend all of it in order to preserve what I held as the last stable fact about my father’s family.
The other silence
I want to be exact about what happened next, because it is not what a reader might expect and it is the truest thing I know about that woman.
I never asked her. Not once, in the four or five years that remained.
Discretion in family matters was second nature to me — it is, I suppose, the one part of my inheritance I received intact — and there was also a practical reason for care, which I did not learn about until after she died.
Italian inheritance law is strict. Lilliana had given her house in Costa Vescovato to her nephew, her brother’s son, about a year before we met. It was one of the last significant things she had, and she had settled it, and settling it must have taken some doing at ninety. And then a stranger walked into her room unannounced, from America, and turned out to be her closest living blood relative.
I am not making an accusation and there is nobody here to accuse. But I have tried to sit inside the position she was in that evening, and it is not a simple one. She was elated — I have that from her doctor, and I could see it in the room. She was also, in the same hour, watching a settled arrangement become potentially unsettled by the arrival of the one person she had spent her life looking for. To say the word out loud, as a fact, in front of witnesses, would have introduced something into her nephew’s affairs that she had no way to manage from a bed in another town.
So it makes complete sense to me that a woman of ninety-one, delighted and careful at once, would decline to put certain things into a sentence. It would make sense even if she had not been discreet by nature. And she was.
So we did not put it into a sentence. And for the rest of the time we had, I considered her my aunt, and Lili and I were both entirely certain that she considered herself my aunt and me her nephew. Not by inference. By the way the afternoons went.
I have spent this series trying to describe experiences in which the feeling arrives before, or without, or alongside the information, and refuses to be reduced to it. This was the clearest instance of my life. I did not love that woman because of the steamship records. The connection was there in the first ten minutes, before there were any facts at all, and every fact that arrived afterward simply found the connection already in place and settled in beside it.
There are two silences in this story and they are not the same silence.
Alice’s silence was engineered to keep people apart, and it succeeded — magnificently, for ninety years, at the cost of everything. Lilliana’s silence was something two people inhabited together, both of us knowing, neither of us needing it said. One concealment destroys a family. The other, it turns out, is one.
I would like to leave the distinction there, cleanly, and I can’t.
One of my sisters told me, some years ago, that our mother had once confided a fear to her about me. The fear was that I would turn into Alice.
Readers of an earlier essay will recognize where my mother got the image. I was about eleven, in the back of a car on dark roads coming home from a film — Polanski’s Knife in the Water — and my father had asked me what the title meant, and I had worked it out: a knife moves through water without leaving a trace. He was pleased. He announced it to the car. And from the front seat, under her breath, not to me, my mother said: Sounds like Alice.
That was the first shadow anyone in my family ever cast on my great-aunt in my hearing. It was also, I understand now, a description she already had in hand — and years later she attached it to her son.
I took the fear to mean a particular kind of life: that I would end up alone. Not lonely, necessarily, and not unhappy — a principled eccentric on his own terms, answerable to nobody, living exactly as he chose, and leaving, in the end, no trace.
I was surprised when my sister told me. I am comfortable alone and I am, I will concede, an eccentric, but I have managed to remain close with a small number of people my whole life. And in truth I am not certain what my mother meant, or precisely what she was afraid of. She did not explain it to my sister and she never raised it with me.
However, what I can say is that looking at my life through this story, rather than through her fear, I have not managed to dismiss it — because she was not wrong about the material. I am the discreet one. I am the one who does not ask. I have a lifelong instinct to hold a thing back, to wait, to protect a person from information — and that instinct is not different in kind from the one that produced the false France and the incinerator of the previous essay. It is the same faculty. What differs is where it points.
I have come to suspect this is why the disclosure happened to me and not to someone else in the family. A person with no discretion would have asked Lilliana outright in the first hour, and would have gotten what Alice always gave: a closed door and a change of subject. A person with no appetite for the truth would never, as mentioned in a previous essay, have picked the menu up off the sidewalk. What was required was somebody who could hold a question open for years without forcing it — which is to say, somebody built exactly like Alice, aimed the other way.
My mother saw the trait clearly. What she could not have known was its direction.
The names
There is one more thing, and it belongs to my grandfather, whoever he was.
He appears in the record under more than one name. He was “Michael” and he was “Morris Lewis” and he was, when he first met my grandmother, married to somebody else. She had four children in the years that followed — Lilliana, then three boys, the youngest my father. She told “Morris” her name was “Martha Rouvelle”.
So they met under assumed identities and stayed inside them. He was a man with two names and a wife elsewhere. She was a Frenchwoman from near Marseille, of a family that had scattered to South America and could not be traced. Neither of those people existed.
Her actual name, the one on the record in Costa Vescovato, was Myriam Elisa Martha Rovelli. Four names, and she appears to have used most of them at one point or another. She was Martha in New York. She was Lizzy to her relatives in Italy — Lizzy being a form of Elisa. And Lilliana told me her father had mentioned other surnames over the years: “Rawley” was one, and there were others I have since lost.
She was also, at least sometimes, Myriam. My father remembered being out with her as a small boy in Queens and having a woman greet her by that name. When he asked about it, she told him it was a name used by “some women who were associated with a Church,” and offered nothing further. He came to understand, later, that there was a particular neighborhood in Queens, far from where they lived, where this happened — that there was a baker she liked who called her Myriam, and a policeman on the street who did the same. In that neighborhood she was Myriam, and it was evidently no secret there.
And there is a photograph. I found it in a box of Alice’s things: my grandmother as a young woman, alone, smiling, standing in front of a house — the house I have always taken to be in Queens — with La mia casa! written across it. My house. Writing on a photograph means it was sent to somebody; possibly to Alice, possibly to Costa. I do not know whose house it was, or when she stood in front of it, or who she was on the day she did. I know only that a young woman with several names wanted somebody, somewhere, to look at her standing in front of a house and be told that it was hers.
It is possible — and I can do no better than possible — that the house in that photograph is where she was Myriam.
I mailed it to Pontecurone with everything else.
And there is a hole in her life about ten years wide. From roughly the age of sixteen until she met the man who became my father’s father, in her middle twenties, I have found no trace of her anywhere. No census line. No address. No employer. Whatever she was doing in that decade, and under whichever of her names she was doing it, she left it empty.
I have wondered whether the gap and the alias are the same story.
Nobody recorded when Adelaide cut my grandmother out of the family. Lilliana knew that it happened and knew roughly why; she did not know the date, and there is no document. But a young woman who has been put out of a family has to go somewhere, and has to be somebody while she is there. The Myriam years may be exactly where she went. A church, and some women associated with it. A baker who knew her name. A policeman on the street who knew it too. It is not much, but it is a life, and it is more of a life than the record grants her anywhere else in that decade.
Which is why I keep returning to the photograph. She looks happy in it. She looks, if I am honest about what I see, triumphant — a young woman standing alone in front of a house, telling somebody: mine. I will never know whether I am reading it correctly.
What I know is that shortly afterward she became someone else.
What strikes me about the Myriam story is not the alias. It is that the invention kept failing in exactly one way. A baker knew her. A policeman knew her. Alice’s version of the family held up everywhere in the world except in the streets where somebody actually recognized somebody — which is precisely how it failed with me, in Little Italy, where the shopkeepers took one look and called me Angelo, and told my mother, flatly, that I was Italian no matter what she said.
And once it failed catastrophically, at a children’s birthday party.
My father’s eldest brother — Ron (Ronny as a child) — was at a party one weekend, and my grandfather came to collect him. He was always very fond of Ron. “Ron was the apple of my father’s eye,” my father used to say. “He could do no wrong.” The tension between the three of them — my father, his brother, and their father — ran the whole length of their lives.
My grandfather spent some weekends with my grandmother and the children in those years, and this was one of them. Also at that party, unexpectedly, was a little girl whose family knew my grandfather from the other household, under the other name.
She could not understand what she was seeing. Why was Michael Lewis taking Ronny Rouvelle home? She said it, and then she said it again, and she would not let it go, in the way that children will not let go of a thing that does not add up.
Shortly afterward, “Morris” moved the family into a larger place and moved in with them.
I cannot quite read that as a happy ending, although it may look like one. A man was cornered into choosing a household by a child at a birthday party. And after the move, according to Alice, his sisters would come and stand in front of the house and shout at my grandmother that she was a home wrecker.
These families could construct a country. They could not do anything about a neighbor. And they could do nothing whatsoever about a child who kept asking the same question.
What my grandmother actually told my grandfather about her origins I do not know and cannot now recover. But something was said, and something worked, because a man does not spend two decades with a woman without ever getting a satisfactory answer unless he has been given an answer that closes the subject.
I have thought about the difference between the two sisters’ methods.
Alice’s (like her mother Adelaide) was subtraction. Burn the papers, cut the face out of the photograph, decline to have the conversation, and go on declining for a hundred and one years. A knife through water. Nothing to grip, nothing to follow, no trace.
My grandmother’s may have been the opposite.
Beginning in 1918, navies experimented with painting their ships in violent geometric patterns — not to blend them into the sea, which is impossible, but to make them unreadable: so visually loud and so wrongly shaped that an observer could not judge their heading, their speed, or their distance. It was called: Dazzle camouflage. You conceal a thing not by hiding it but by making it impossible to contextualize.
I cannot prove that my grandmother worked this way. I can only note that a woman who cycled through surnames, who claimed a country she had never lived in, and who married a man under a name that was not hers, was not practicing subtlety. She was producing too much, not too little.
And this is speculation, and I want it labeled as such — but it has occurred to me more than once that the sentence which came down to me through two generations of men may have started with her. My grandfather told my father that anyone who learned the truth of the family would feel the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He said it about her family. But she was the one in that house with something to keep from him. If she told him, early, that her people’s history was of that kind, she would have accomplished in a single sentence what the rest of her invention accomplished over decades. She would have made him stop asking. And he would have carried it forward in good faith, and handed it to his son as a warning about the Italians, and his son would hand it to me in a living room in March of 2009.
I have no way to test that. I record it because it is the shape this family keeps producing.
And none of it began with them.
I want to go back one more generation, because of three books.
When my father and I cleared Alice’s apartment in 1997 we found books among her things. Three of them matter.
The first is a two-volume English–French dictionary from Librairie Garnier Frères, red covers gone soft, so old I cannot find a date in either volume. Inside the first, in black ink, in French: Ce livre est la propriété de Mlle Alice. This book is the property of Miss Alice.
And then, after the name, added later in pencil: Rouvelle.
And beneath that, in pencil, fainter still: Cannes.
The ink is still bright. The pencil has nearly gone. But the sequence is not in doubt — the ink came first, and the surname and the town were added to it afterward, by hand, in the medium you can rub out. Not Marseille, either. Cannes. An earlier draft.
In the second volume, in ink: Un jour viendra!!!
A day will come. Three exclamation points.
The second book is inscribed To Alice, Bon Voyage, signed by a friend named Fanny whose surname I cannot make out, and dated June 12, 1920 — which is precisely the crossing that carried her to Italy to marry Carlo Raviola. It is Woman Triumphant, by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, translated from the Spanish; the original is La maja desnuda, after the Goya. It concerns a painter named Renovales and his lifelong search for his true ideal of beauty. A Spanish novel, in English, given to an Italian girl travelling as a Frenchwoman, for the voyage to a marriage she would run from thirteen years later.
The third book was published in New York in 1898 by A. L. Burt, of Duane Street. There is a Victorian girl on the cover in a green dress, her hair loose. Inside the front cover, in a hand that is not Alice’s — I have compared it — somebody has written:
Adelaide Rouvelle.
Opposite the signature, stacked vertically, are four numbers: 18, 25, 2, 9. Ages, possibly. I have no idea.
For a long time that signature was the best evidence I had that Alice had been telling the truth: the French name, in ink, a generation before the census page. Later, once everything else had come apart, I assumed Alice had written it herself at some point to keep her story consistent. The handwriting says otherwise.
And I have to confess something about this book, because it bears directly on everything these essays have been about.
I have handled it many times in twenty-eight years. Until a few days ago I would have told you with complete confidence — and I did tell people — that the title was Alice Winkoop, Artist.
It is not. It never was.
The book is called Annice Wynkoop, Artist: The Perseverance of a Country Girl.
I had been reading my great-aunt’s name into that cover for nearly three decades and had never once seen what was printed on it. When I looked properly, as I wrote this essay, it felt as though the title had changed while I watched.
And then there is the author’s name, which I also managed never to see.
Annice Wynkoop, Artist was written by Adelaide L. Rouse.
Adelaide. Rouse.
Somebody wrote Adelaide Rouvelle inside the front cover of a novel by an Adelaide Rouse. It is one small French-sounding step from Rouse to Rouvelle. It is no step at all from Adelaide to Adelaide.
I cannot prove what happened. I can only set the objects side by side: a book by an Adelaide, signed with that Adelaide’s first name and a Frenchified version of her surname, in a hand that is not my great-aunt’s — and a dictionary in which the word Rouvelle is pencilled in after a name written in ink, with a town in the south of France pencilled underneath it, and then a second volume announcing that a day will come.
That is not a family remembering where it came from. That is a family being drafted.
Adelaide’s father died when she was a child, and her mother remarried a man named Bonadeo who held land in Costa Vescovato. Mother and daughter took his name. By every measure available to them it was a rise. It was also the first time Adelaide’s name changed, and she was old enough to understand precisely what had been done and what it was worth.
Then the sky changed.
Krakatoa erupted in August of 1883, and for months afterward the ash suspended in the upper atmosphere turned sunsets across the entire world — including over a hill village in Piemonte — into something no one living had seen: greens and violets, and a red that stayed long after dark. People recorded it as a portent. A great many of them made drastic decisions underneath it.
Adelaide married Giovanni around this time and became Adelaide Rovelli. By the spring of 1884 she had persuaded him to sell land and take her and their infant daughter to New York.
The daughter’s name, on the shipping record, was Elisa. She died in New York, as a baby.
My grandmother, born afterward, was Myriam Elisa Martha.
I did not notice, until I set these essays beside one another, what happens to the first daughters in this family. Elisa dies in infancy in New York. Lina is summoned home across an ocean and dies under a mulberry tree and is left in the common ground. Martha’s first child is a girl and is handed across an ocean to somebody else. Three generations, three eldest daughters, each lost by a different mechanism.
And a woman of ninety-one in a bed in Pontecurone, saying to a stranger: she had four children. The first was a girl.
Lilliana also told me that for some years Adelaide stayed on in New York with her daughters while Giovanni took the boys back to Italy to work — and that it was suspected, in the family, that during those years Adelaide was living a double life. She did not elaborate. I did not press.
So: a woman whose name had already changed twice before she was married, living apart from her husband in New York, under family suspicion of a second existence — and a book on her shelf signed Adelaide Rouvelle.
If Adelaide made that name, she would have kept it from Giovanni. That would have been the entire point of it.
Which raises a question I cannot answer. Alice was living in Costa Vescovato when Adelaide died in 1930. Did she find the book? Did she carry it back to New York, and use it, when she ran from her husband on a January night three years later — not inventing a French family at all, but inheriting one, already made, already tested?
Was Annice Wynkoop, Artist a playbook?
And there is a second question, which is worse.
Adelaide and my grandmother annihilated each other. Of all the poisoned relations in that family — and there were many — theirs was the most complete: mother and daughter, each cut entirely and permanently out of the other’s life.
I have come to wonder whether what passed between them was recognition. Sometimes the most violent conflicts between people occur because the other person is holding up the very thing we cannot bear to see in ourselves. The technique — the new name, the second self, the life conducted just out of view — was indispensable to Adelaide and intolerable in her daughters. She could not control what she was looking at. So she negated the person showing it to her.
The Major General. The policewoman. The dominating force of a family and, by all accounts, of a village. And she had been changing her name since she was a child.
I will never know. Like a great deal in this history, it is something I have to accept without possessing, and I have come to believe those are genuinely different operations. Accepting a thing lets it keep its depth. Possession is an act of confinement, and confinement, in my experience, produces ignorance.
Baltimore / Miami
In 1950 my father, the last of the children, left home for college. And that year, with the house finally empty, my grandparents obtained a marriage license and were married in Baltimore, Maryland — one afternoon, no witnesses. Baltimore in that era was, as my father described it, something like Las Vegas: a jurisdiction where you could apply in the morning and be married in the afternoon and nobody checked whether you were already married to someone else. It was chosen for exactly the reason all the other instruments in this history were chosen. It would take your word for it.
Which is what the occasion required. Two people who had met under invented names, and lived together for a quarter of a century, and raised four children, had to travel to a particular city in order to be married — because it was the one place that would not look into either of them.
Six weeks later my grandmother was dead — a stroke, and then a heart attack.
I found the record of that marriage — and Alice’s, and Carlo’s — while I was living in Baltimore, because I had moved there for work.
And here is the reversal I have been circling since the first of these essays.
My grandfather told my father that if anyone ever learned the truth of the family, the hair on the back of his neck would stand up. That sentence came down to me intact — my father repeated it at his house in the spring of 2009, said his own father had given it to him, and then changed the subject, exactly as it had been designed to make him do. It is the only instruction that ever came down that branch of the family, and it is the precise opposite of the one my great-uncle Alfonso gave his daughter in a village in Piemonte: find them, be kind, but tell them the truth.
My grandfather meant my grandmother’s family. He meant the Italians, the village, whatever was on the other side of the story his wife had invented. He handed his son a warning about them.
He was a man living under at least two names. He was married to another woman while he fathered four children with a woman using a false surname. He married her at last in a city chosen because it would not ask.
And in 1979, retired to Miami and in his early eighties — shuffling a little, walking with a cane, yet always impeccably dressed, slim, a full head of white hair, Cuban cigars and a scotch on the rocks in the evening — he decided he needed help around the apartment, and hired a live-in assistant. Her name was Gloria. She was from Texas, in her sixties, buxom and boisterous and enormously friendly.
They lived in that apartment together for a year or two. And then, apparently out of nowhere, he asked her to marry him.
She said no, politely. They argued. She left the apartment upset and rode down to the lobby, where she ran into a friend, another resident, a man. He saw the state she was in and asked her to sit with him in the restaurant on the ground floor. They took a table by the window, looking out at the pool.
My grandfather came down looking for her. He saw her sitting with the man. He came to the table and asked her to come back upstairs, and she refused, and turned away from him to look out the window at the pool. He stood there, saying nothing. Then he walked out — and stopped in the entrance of the restaurant, looking at them. Her friend told her he was standing there. She did not turn. She went on looking out the window in silence.
He went back to the apartment and picked up a small footstool and carried it to the roof. He set it near the railing above the restaurant, on the side facing the pool, and climbed onto it, and went over.
He landed where she could see him.
About fifty-five years earlier — I told this story in the previous essay — Alice had sat with the two of them at tea at the Plaza, had demanded that her sister leave with her, and had been asked, instead, to leave herself. She went out into the snow on Fifth Avenue and stopped at the window, and stood there looking in at this man she detested and at her sister, who did not look back. She stood a long time. Then she walked away.
She stood in the snow. He fell through the humid air.
The hair-raising history was not on the other side of the family. It was in the room with him — and it had been in the room the whole time, in every room, quietly, for as long as any of us had been alive.
My grandfather had asked his eldest son, Ron, his favorite, for a loan not long before. Ron refused him. And in the days after his death, my father and that brother — who had not spoken in years, since the day the brother told my father that if he left the business he would kill him — each maneuvered to arrange the funeral in a way that excluded the other. My father got possession of the casket somehow and had it flown to New York. I remember being brought in to say goodbye and then brought out again, so that my uncle and his family could take their turn.
That is a very compressed account of a great deal, and I am aware that I am doing to my father’s family exactly what I have spent this whole sequence objecting to: summarizing, and moving on. There is a reason. That side has its own history and it is genuinely the hair-raising one, and it will not fit here. It is owed its own telling and it will get one.
I don’t say this to convict a man I never met. I say it because it is the exact structure of everything else in this story: the warning that keeps you from the door is issued by the person standing behind it. My grandfather was, in his way, doing what Alice did with the incinerator and what Adelaide did with the scissors. He was managing the record. And what he handed down was a sentence engineered to stop his son from looking — which worked, and which then came down to me intact, and which I heard, in a living room in March of 2009, as an invitation.
Alfonso handed his daughter a different sentence, and she carried it for ninety years, and used it.
The envelope
I have left something out of the order of events, and I left it out on purpose, because it is easier to describe once you know both families.
Shortly before Lili and I flew to Italy in 2015, one of my sisters mentioned that she had taken a genetic test. It had been a gift from her husband, who is European American — Italian on his mother’s side, French on his father’s — and who had heard fragments of our story and was curious. The results weren’t back. I got on the plane with that pending.
I want to be honest about what it meant to me on the way out and what it meant on the way home, because it changed completely in between.
On the way out it was a threat to my research. Alice had insisted, for my entire life and with real anger at the end, that the census page was a clerical error and the Rovellis were nothing to do with us. Some part of me — the part that had made the decision on Mott Street to let it be — had never entirely stopped granting her the possibility of being right. What if the test came back and said France, or said anything at all that let her keep her story.
By the time I flew home the fear had inverted, and it was much worse. I had sat in a room in Pontecurone with a woman I had known for one hour and felt something I had no vocabulary for and have been trying to describe ever since. If the test said we were not related, then that feeling was — what? Two lonely eccentrics mistaking each other for family. A hallucination of belonging, produced on both sides by decades of wanting it. I did not want the results anymore. I wanted the afternoon.
The envelope came a few weeks later.
38% Italy. With 12% traces of Spain, Portugal. 36% Persia. The rest was a mix of Greece, and MENA (Middle Eastern / North African).
Father: Italy/Spain. Mother: Persia.
No Russia. No Germany. No Jewish ancestry. And, of course, no France.
Read one way, that is total vindication. Costa Vescovato confirmed. The oaks confirmed — Spain, right there in the trace elements, corroborating a story handed down through a priest, a researcher in Texas, and a woman of ninety-one in a rest home. Lilliana confirmed. The feeling in that room confirmed by the last authority anyone thinks to consult, and confirmed after the fact, which is the only way it could have been.
Read the other way, it is a door closing.
A Russian, a German, and a Jew. That was Lilliana’s list of my grandmother’s young men, delivered in the first hour of our first meeting as the explanation for why Adelaide had cut her out of the family. And my father’s family had always said that the man in our house was the Russian one — Moscow, originally. He told me so himself, once, in the only letter he ever wrote me.
The test finds no Russia. No Germany. No Jewish ancestry. Every candidate anyone ever named is gone.
Which leaves two possibilities and no way to choose between them. Either the man was not who he said he was, or he was not my father’s father. I have no instrument that can distinguish those, and everyone who could is dead. A man who had spent his life under two names lost the third thing he had: his origin.
There is a version of this in which my father’s parents were both Italians, lying to each other about it, for twenty-five years.
However I want to be careful here, because this is where a certain kind of writing would reach for a revelation. It isn’t one. The man I called “Grandpa” remains my grandfather in every sense that governed my childhood — a man I have barely described in these essays and will have to, who wrote to me exactly once, from Florida, about having been an athlete in Moscow. What changed is only that the record behind him went blank, at the exact moment the record behind my grandmother came fully into view.
The same envelope did both. One line recovered in full, back through five centuries to a stand of oaks in Spain. The other sealed — not hidden anymore, but unrecoverable, which is a different and more permanent condition.
Appearance and withdrawal, one last time, in a single piece of mail.
“I’m Italian”
Two things happened around that test that I have never been able to file.
The first is that my brother-in-law, who had given it as a gift, was annoyed by the result. He had expected it to come back negative. However after seeing the results, his position, as I understood it, became that we had no business claiming Italian heritage on the strength of a laboratory report. He has never asked me a question about any of it since. In fact, I have barely spoken to him about anything since.
I find I can’t be angry about that, because it is simply the family response arriving from an in-law: the account is settled, the identity is built, and new information is an intrusion rather than a gift. It just arrived from an unexpected direction.
The second is about my father.
That Christmas — a few weeks before he died, a few months before I met Lilliana, and after I had finally given him a copy of Alice’s marriage certificate to Carlo, and the village and the name — he went to my brother-in-law’s family for the holiday. Italian mother, her sisters, their husbands. And a father who was born in Marseille.
At some point in the conversation my father announced, to the room: “I’m Italian.”
He had been to Italy several times as a French-American tourist. He would never go as an Italian-American. He had spent his whole life inside his aunt’s invention and had lost a plan to go looking, and had received the truth late, from his son, later than he should have. And in the last weeks of his life he stood in somebody else’s dining room and claimed it out loud, to strangers, without qualification.
Afterward my brother-in-law told me: “When your father said that, he gained several friends for life.... and made one enemy to the death.”
The enemy was his father. A Frenchman from Marseille — which is, of course, precisely the city Alice spent seventy years insisting we came from.
And there is one more turn in it that I only learned later. My brother-in-law’s father was born in France of Corsican descent, which means that this entirely French gentleman carries an Italian surname, and spoke French at home to his son, and married an Italian American woman.
So at that table sat two men holding the same two identities in opposite hands. One was Italian by blood, French by manufacture, and had spent seventy years being told which. The other was French by blood, Italian by name, and had raised his son in French inside an Italian American family.
My father announced himself, and the room split.
Facts, and what precedes them
Lilliana died in March of 2019.
Her doctor, Samantha wrote to me afterward. Samantha had been kind to her for years and was kind to me then, and she told me what Lilliana had confided over the course of those years: that she had been looking for her family in New York for most of her life; that she had made trips, and found nothing, because she never knew the name had been changed; that when I finally and completely unexpectedly arrived, shortly after the disabling accident that would keep her confined to a rest home in Pontecurone, she was elated — and also grief-stricken, because it had come at the end, when she could no longer travel to us, and could no longer even bring us into her own house in the village. “È troppo tardi,” she said often. It’s too late.
Samantha confirmed the rest of it too. Who Lilliana was. Whose daughter. She wanted me to understand why there had occasionally been a distance in her, or a wistfulness, which I had noticed and had never once mistaken for coldness.
I had thought, before it came, that the confirmation would be a detonation. It wasn’t. It arrived like weather that had already been forecast by the sky itself. It was a gentle corroboration of something I had known for years in the only way that finally counts — which is to say, not as information.
The facts took longer to arrive than the truth of the feeling. That is the sentence I keep coming back to, and it is the closest thing to a finding that this sequence has produced. A century of concealment can suppress the record completely. It cannot suppress the recognition. Something got through anyway — through a menu on a sidewalk, through a propped door, through a language invented to keep me from ever needing it, through a woman who told me the truth twice in the first hour while I told her she was mistaken.
Lilliana and I both knew. Neither of us said it. That was not an omission; it was the form the thing took.
For most of my life the facts were what I wanted — the names, the village, the certificate, the proof. They were also what sustained her. Each of us was holding a file on our own side of an ocean with nobody to hand it to. And then we were in a room together, and the file turned out to be a conduit rather than a destination. What it delivered us to has a name, and the name is, inevitably, French: connaissance. A knowing that is also an acquaintance. Knowledge you cannot acquire, only be inside of.
There is what we want to possess, and there is what is simply ours. I spent decades assembling the first in order to be handed the second — and the second arrived in the first ten minutes of the first evening, years ahead of anything I could have proved.
And the other half of my inheritance stays where it is. I have a grandfather with two names and no origin, a warning he issued about somebody else’s family, and a genetic report that quietly removes every explanation anyone ever offered. That will not resolve. There is no Lilliana on that side — no one was appointed, no one was instructed, nothing was kept. The devil’s milk is always sour. I have stopped going back to that source expecting it to sweeten, which is not the same as ceasing to look.
What I can say is that one branch of this family produced a man who told his daughter to find her people and tell them the truth even though it would be hard, and the other produced a man who told his son that the truth would raise the hair on his neck and then changed the subject. Both instructions were obeyed. You can see, from here, what each one cost.
Be kind, but tell them the truth.
She did both. It took me a year to hear the second one and no time at all to receive the first.
These four essays tell how I found Lilliana Rovelli. They do not tell what the five summers with her were like — the picnics in her room, the afternoons we spent walking through Cape Town and Firenze and Mott Street on a laptop screen, the last time we saw her. And they do not tell the other half of this family: my father’s father, and what was on that side. Both are coming.
Almost Visible is a notebook of encounters with art, sound, space, and attention. If this one opened something, consider sharing and subscribing.