A smooth sea
My father died in January of 2015, in his sleep, of natural causes.
That would have surprised a good many people, his doctors among them. From the heart virus in his thirties onward he went through one serious illness after another, and for most of his adult life he seemed to be teetering at the edge. When my mother was dying, several years before him, he stopped eating and developed pneumonia, and my sisters and I were told he might follow her. He didn’t, and no one quite understood how. He outlived, by a long way, the age at which his mother and both his brothers had died. In his seventies, when I was helping him manage his care, his cardiologist told me: “I have no idea how your father is still alive.” I think I knew. He was determined and stubborn — a Rovelli stubbornness, as it turns out, though he never knew where it came from — and he simply refused.
The last few years were hard all the same. His mind, always sharp, had begun to fail him, and fierce independence and stubbornness are difficult companions for a mind going into fog. Those years were complicated and sad, in ways I am not going to set down here.
About ten days before he died he called me, upset. He was trapped in Puerto Rico, he said, in a storm, and he had been trying to reach my mother and couldn’t get through. I assume he had been dialing our old number in New York and getting a stranger. He was in fact in his apartment, with a caregiver, and otherwise fine. I told him I would call my mother for him, and that he had nothing to worry about.
A week later he left a message for one of my sisters. His voice was clear and strong. Movers were coming in three days to take his things. He wasn’t clear about where he was going, but he wanted her to know that he would, in fact, be moving on Monday. She called the people looking after him and was told he was fine.
On Monday, the day he had said he was moving, he died in his sleep, during a large snowstorm.
At the funeral I gave the eulogy, and I told a story about the two of us and a storm.
When I was an adolescent, beginning to drift off into my own space, he decided we should reconnect around something we had always enjoyed together, and he took me to Florida — Tampa, this time — to go sailing in the Gulf. We flew into Tampa and took the Intracoastal Waterway out of Tampa Bay to open water. The trip went well until another boater in a marina gave us bad advice about the weather and the tides. We miscalculated how long a stretch would take, and we were caught in a storm.
At some point the jib tore and had to come down. The boat was small — twenty-four feet, I think — with nothing at the bow to hold on to on either side. Someone had to go forward in heavy seas and driving rain, and it was going to be him. Before he went, he told me what to do if he fell overboard: throw the cushions over and keep going. He showed me the compass heading to hold. I took the tiller.
I remember everything about the next few minutes. The wind and rain in my face. The pitch and roll of the boat in the deep swells. My father lurching and steadying himself as he worked his way forward, in a yellow raincoat with his red sweater showing at the collar. My eyes never left him, and my arms strained to keep the tiller straight. I felt synchronized with him, and with the rhythm of the waves. It seemed to take forever, but he got the sail down and free of the stay it was clipped to — and then I realized he had to come all the way back, retracing his slippery steps in that wind with a great crumpled sail under his arm. If he could reach the middle of the boat, I knew, there would at least be lines and handrails on either side.
He climbed back into the cockpit.
“Made it!” he said, exhausted, smiling. “Good job with the tiller!”
I couldn’t answer. He was breathing hard. For a while neither of us said anything; I kept my hand on the tiller, and we both looked ahead. Then he looked at me through the wind and the rain.
“A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor,” he said, with a small sideways smile. It was a habit of his: borrowing a line that wasn’t his own, a little grand for the occasion, and smiling to let you know he knew it — and that it was true anyway, and that this was the moment for it. He wore borrowed words the way he wore borrowed names: lightly, while inhabiting them.
We looked at each other for a moment, and then he turned to check the bow and the heading, and I watched him, and time seemed to fold in on itself. I saw him in a bed in a darkened room, close to death. I heard him shouting at my grandfather on the phone. I imagined him facing my uncle, and all the other things he had somehow come through. And I saw him, in that moment, as exactly what he had just said: a skilled sailor.
I told him how proud I was of what he had done, and how glad I was that he was still alive.
And then I threw up over the side of the boat.
Telling it again at his funeral made me feel closer to him. And all the rest of it — the storm in Puerto Rico, the movers, the snow — was going around in my mind while I spoke.
Second family
Herb — the cousin from my grandfather’s side who had driven up from the Carolinas to show me two photographs of his mother with my grandmother — did not come to the funeral. Someone else from that side did.
After the eulogy, my mind still full of warm and complicated recollections of my father, a woman I didn’t recognize came up to me. I had seen her arrive and noticed that she wasn’t talking to anyone. She had a glass of wine. She didn’t introduce herself, and she began telling me something I couldn’t, at first, quite follow. I could smell the alcohol on her breath, and she was slurring her words. I gave her the benefit of the doubt: I assumed she had come to pay her respects, and that the drinking was her way of coping. I smiled at her. She didn’t smile back, and that was when I understood what she was saying.
She was there to make me understand that my father was from a “second family.” That we had nothing to do with my grandfather’s first family — his real one, was the implication — and that we were, in some way she seemed to regard as obvious, less. And she had proof: the names my father had given my siblings and me showed, she went on, that he had felt no allegiance to his father’s first family. She seemed to think that in spite of everything he ought to have named his children in some way that aligned us with them. In essence, standing at my father’s memorial, drunk on our wine, she was calling him and all of us bastards.
I realized she was one of my father’s cousins from his father’s side.
And then, while she talked, I found myself remembering Alice’s account of the women from that family standing in the street outside my grandmother’s house, more than once, shouting that she was a home wrecker — one of them, I assume, this woman’s mother. Blaming my grandmother for something that was at the very least a joint effort with my grandfather, who was at the time literally married to someone else, and lying to her. My grandmother was alone. I had heard that story all my life, and I had watched what it still cost Alice to tell it. Standing in front of this woman I felt, for the first time, a small fraction of it myself: the contempt, the judgment, the certainty, aimed at my father in his coffin and at the rest of us by extension.
It had been over seventy-five years since those days in the street, shouting at my grandmother. Everyone who could have been hurt by it was dead, including the man in the casket. She said it anyway.
I threw her out.
On my way back in I ran straight into Mike — my father’s best friend since they were both boys, and my godfather. He had seen what happened, and he wasn’t angry, and he didn’t make anything of it. He just reminded me that my father had had nothing to do with his cousins. He has always maintained that that side of the family was awful to my father from the beginning, and that my father simply dismissed them. What he meant was: let it go. It doesn’t matter.
He was right. That group was going to believe whatever it chose to believe, and identify with whatever it chose. I don’t regret letting her know how I felt, but I have no illusions that it changed anything. Seen from where they stood, a grandson of that household throwing a cousin out of a memorial would only confirm what they already thought of us — that we were wild, and illegitimate. The value is in the letting be, not in the getting even.
There was one more thing about her complaint that I only saw later. My father carried his mother’s invented surname for most of his life, and at times his father’s — which was invented too. I never knew my grandfather’s real surname, and I don’t believe my father did, or anyone else. Every surname anyone in that household had been given was borrowed or made up. Which of them, exactly, she thought we ought to have honored, I can’t tell you.
There is a postscript to that day, and it is the time I forgot Mike’s rule.
Some time later, one of my sisters happened to meet a man from that same branch in the city where she now lives. They worked out the connection, and he told her he was writing a history of the family. He sent it to her, and she sent it on to me, knowing perfectly well what it would do to me.
Our branch was a footnote. He had several of the names wrong. And my father and his brothers were described, in passing, as a kind of mafia.
That stopped me, because nobody on that side could possibly have known we were Italian. As far as they were concerned we were the Rouvelles, from somewhere near Marseille. The slur arrived anyway — not from knowledge, just from the ordinary habit of reaching for the most convenient insult. It was the same trope I declined to use in the first of these codas, turning up uninvited, applied by people who had no idea it fit the facts even partly.
I asked my sister for his number and called him. And I found myself delivering, in no uncertain terms and at some volume, exactly the kind of tirade I used to hear through the wall at seven in the morning. Near the end of it, it became clear he had no idea who I was. I finished anyway, and hung up.
I am still angry with that group. I also find my own performance on that call very funny. For about four minutes I was my grandfather.
Twenty-five pages
Clearing out my father’s things after his death, I found a document I had never seen: about twenty-five handwritten pages from my grandfather, addressed to his sons. An account of his life.
It is hard to read, both for the handwriting and for what it contains, which is business. Nearly all of it. Ventures, partners, setbacks, recoveries, money made and lost.
My grandmother appears once.
When your mother died I lost all my ambition. I had no desire to work or remain active. I was concerned that I would lose everything. It took months for me to find the motivation to resume my life and get back to work.
That is the whole of it. Resume my life; get back to work. In that sentence they are the same thing.
My father had read it, years before. He told me once that he was shocked it was almost entirely an account of business, and then he never mentioned it again.
So my grandfather wrote twice that I know of. To a boy he barely knew, he wrote about Moscow and about winning races — the one point of contact he could find. To his sons he wrote about business. To neither of us did he write about Riverside Drive, or the first wife, or the second name, or the woman who told him she was French.
The letter that was trying to reach someone is lost. The twenty-five pages that weren’t are in a folder in my apartment.
That wasn’t really her
Ron’s eldest son was, like me, close to Alice, and he had a mild interest in the family’s history. We talked about it a few times, long before I knew anything about Italy. He told me what Alice had always maintained: that we came from somewhere in the south of France, near Marseille.
He also told me he had a large painting of our grandmother, which I had never seen.
I mentioned it to my father, and he arranged to collect it.
It is a big canvas, and very heavy. My grandmother is seated in a chair in a fur stole, with a large ring on her finger, elegant and composed. It is signed, but I have never been able to make out the signature. It is dated 1950 — the year she died, and the year of the marriage license in Baltimore.
My father looked at it and said:
“That wasn’t really her. That looks more like what my father wanted people to think she was.”
Everyone who had known her agreed. It was a fantasy: a woman with four given names, several surnames, an empty decade and a family she had been cut out of, presented as someone else entirely. I assume my grandfather commissioned it. Whoever painted it signed in a hand nobody can read.
The painting went with my father to the house he built in the country.
He built that house himself, alongside his own crew, brought up from New York and living in rented Winnebagos on the site while they worked. It stood about a mile from a harbor where, more than twenty years earlier — a college student sailing up the coast with two friends, not paying much attention to the forecasts — he had been warned by the Coast Guard that a hurricane was coming, and put into the nearest port to wait it out. The storm passed. They sailed on. He had no idea he would ever come back. Decades later, after a different kind of storm, he built his refuge a mile from that same shelter, and kept his small sailboat, which he loved, in the very marina where he and his friends had sat out the storm.
“The only time I feel truly at peace,” he told me, “is on the water.” He went on sailing well into old age, and maintaining the boat himself. The harbormaster and the people who worked the marina called him the ancient mariner.
I think I understand that better now. He lived his whole life under names someone else had made up, and he never once spoke about it — no one on either side of my family ever did. Perhaps the water was the one place that didn’t ask him who he was.
The house was the place he was proudest of in the world, and it was where he and my mother made a life that the rest of the family, somehow, never quite managed to intrude upon.
It belongs to one of my sisters now. I am not going to write about its present condition.
On a recent visit I noticed the painting was no longer where it had always hung. My sister said a renter had moved it behind a chest of drawers. I looked; it wasn’t there. I eventually found it in a storage area in the basement, beside the hot water heater, packed in among boxes as if it were something waiting to be thrown out.
I was afraid it would be ruined — mold, damp, years of it. It was so hemmed in by junk that at first I couldn’t move it, and when I finally got it free I was startled all over again by how heavy it was. I carried it into a drier part of the basement and looked it over.
There was no mold. It was in excellent condition. It had come through years of neglect without a mark.
It’s still down there.
I keep thinking about what survived in this family and what didn’t. The letters that might have explained everything went down an incinerator chute. Faces were cut out of photographs, two generations running. The one letter my grandfather wrote to me is lost. And the portrait of my grandmother that was never her — the stole, the ring, the composure, a signature no one can read — sits in a basement in perfect condition, too heavy to move easily, having outlasted nearly everything that was true.
The fabrication turned out to be the most durable thing anyone in this family ever made.
The same silence
Finding my family seems to have cost me my family.
I should say first that I understand it. Before the genealogist’s census page, I was a person of French descent. That identity was a comfort and a floor for me — I have written about standing in my foyer with the document in my hand and feeling the floor go. I didn’t give it up willingly. It was taken from me by a piece of paper, in the space of a minute, and for a long time afterward what replaced it felt like nothing but loss.
What I eventually found on the far side of that was a freedom I hadn’t expected. Not because I now knew I was Italian and Persian rather than French, but because I had seen, close up, in my own family, how provisional all of it had been from the start. The name had been changed by hand. The country had been made up. Whatever I was, I was not the label.
The rest of my family hasn’t followed me there, and I don’t think they want to. At first I imagined they would be as excited as I was — that someone might want to travel to Pontecurone and meet Lilliana. Nobody did. What I had found was received, for the most part, as an embarrassing story that one hoped would never become public.
There was no confrontation. Nobody argued with me. The word simply spread, and people of my own generation — siblings, cousins — stepped back, and stayed back, and it became understood, without anyone ever saying so, that it was acceptable to have little or nothing to do with me. I was very close to my elders all my life — Alice, my mother’s father, my parents — closer, I think, than the others were, and I suspect the distance had been there under the surface long before any of this. The discoveries only gave it an occasion.
I don’t feel bad about it. In an odd way it has made things simpler for everyone.
On the rare occasions I am with my extended family, someone will sometimes start telling a story about our grandparents that I know to be only half true — a version that keeps everyone where they need to be. And there is a moment I have learned to recognize. Partway through, whoever is telling it remembers that I’m in the room. Nobody looks at me. The story runs out of air and fizzles, and the conversation moves on. I never say anything.
It seemed to me early on that there were two roles available. I could be the outlier with the documents, setting the record straight at every gathering. I had no interest in that, and I declined it. So I became the other thing, which is nothing in particular. I’m not there, and neither is the information. What’s left in the room is the same silence there always was.
I see the shape now, and I find it more fascinating than painful.
Alice hid the past from the family. The family now hides from the past. She did it with scissors and an incinerator; they do it by not turning their heads. The silence is exactly where it was. Only the people have changed places.
These essays haven’t been hidden. They’re on a public page, under my name, available to anyone who wants them. As far as I know, none of my family has read them. On the visit when I found the painting in the basement — not long after I had begun publishing this history — one of my sisters asked Lili, out of the blue, what Substack was. I assumed she had seen the link in the signature of my emails, and I admit to a moment of concern: the awkwardness of a sister reading what seems to be our forbidden history, the one the rest of the family has chosen to ignore. It turned out she hadn’t clicked the link. She was only wondering. The curious cloak of invisibility remains intact.
Alice kept the truth in a drawer and then burned it. I have published it, and the effect is almost exactly the same.
And my mother’s fear came true. I did become Alice — not in method, but in position. I’m the one the family has quietly arranged not to discuss. She got there by hiding. I got there by telling.
There are exceptions, and they matter. I have one niece who I believe will want to know, and with whom I think I could talk about all of it. My friends — the real ones; I lost a few, as I’ve written elsewhere, when I left composing for visual art, and learned something about identity from that too — were puzzled at first, perhaps a little worried that all this would change me. When they saw it hadn’t, they simply carried on. And in Costa Vescovato, Carla and Antonella know the whole story and have offered it to my cousin, who doesn’t want it. I write to the family there every year on Lilliana’s birthday. Since her death, no one has written back.
Here is what I think the shape is.
Everyone in this story was trying to hold on to something. Adelaide, the order of her family — who belonged in it, and who had been put out of it. Alice, the past, and a version of herself that could not be found. My grandfather, his son, his record, and at the very end a woman from Texas who said no. The cousin at the funeral, her place in the first family. The people of my own generation, the identities they were handed and would rather keep. And me — I should say it plainly — the facts. The proof. The certificates and the census page and the steamship records.
None of it held. In every case the attempt to keep the thing seemed to produce its own withdrawal. Adelaide’s family scattered and left her in the common ground. Alice’s past came back to her on her deathbed, as a name she called out to a room that didn’t know it. And the French she had used to hide where we came from turned out to be the very thing that opened it: in Costa Vescovato, it was French — Carla, Lili and I speaking it together — that let Carla understand what we had come for. My grandfather’s son walked out of the office he had been placed in, and the last thing my grandfather said to anyone was a fall past a window.
The history itself behaves the same way. In a hundred years it has gone from being hidden on purpose to being ignored on purpose, and it has never once been possessed by anybody — not by Alice with her matches, not by my family with their averted eyes, and not by me with my documents. I have about all the facts I am ever going to have, and I do not own any of it. It stays where it is, half in the dark, as though it had an inertia of its own. When I was six I felt the silence in our apartment as a presence, almost a creature in the rooms. I’ve come to think the history is like that. It is not something anyone gets to hold.
And yet something did come to me, and it came precisely where I stopped trying to hold anything. It wasn’t the facts. Those were always going to be partial. It was Lilliana. A woman in a bed in Pontecurone who told me the truth in the first ten minutes, and five summers of afternoons with her that no document could have given me and no family could take back. The census page was never mine. Our respective encounters with each other were.
I have written a book about this, from a more explicitly philosophical direction, with art as its primary way of asking. The essays in this notebook were meant as another way of asking the same question, through my own experience: what it means to be exposed to one another without being able to own one another. I did not expect to find it worked out, in full, in my own family, across five generations and two continents.
Every time someone in this history reached toward another person — a sister, a son, a husband, a past — something withdrew. The withdrawal took different forms: a burned letter, a refused visit, a name changed by hand, a face cut out of a photograph. And every attempt to manage it — to fix the facts, settle the story, keep hold — only showed the facts to be what they had always been: contingent. What is left, once all of that has been tried, is the reaching itself, toward someone who stays partly in shadow — moonlit rather than floodlit, never reducible to the brightest detail anyone can find. That is what love has looked like in this family, whenever it showed itself at all. Not possession. Exposure.
What turned out to be my own was nothing I could have collected. It is the fact of being inside all this, alongside everyone else in it — each of them tuned to it in their own way, none of them reducible to what I know about them. That co-presence, never resolved, is what keeps the experience new. What we try to possess withdraws. What is actually ours arrives only when we stop.
I’m not interested in deciding who is right. That would only be one more hardened position, one more small monument on the path — and I have been on the telephone at full volume myself. What I care about is what has actually appeared: the menu on the sidewalk, the propped door, a woman in a bed saying she had four children, a painting beside a hot water heater. And the fact that the same shape keeps coming round. In an earlier essay I wrote about the poet Robert Pinsky’s “figured wheel,” and about how things return. What I didn’t know then is that they return with everyone in a different seat.
Attending to that is not the same as doing nothing. It is closer to the opposite. It means keeping my attention on what shows itself, rather than on managing what anyone makes of it — myself included.
As far as I know, three people in this story left instructions about the same secret.
Alfonso, to his daughter: Be kind, but tell them the truth.
My grandfather, to his son: If you ever learned the truth of the family, the hair on the back of your neck would stand up.
Catherine, to her son, about the friend whose secrets she had promised to keep: When the time is right, the truth will come out.
One was a mandate, one was a warning, and one was a promise. Lilliana carried out the first in the first hour I knew her. My father obeyed the second by never asking. The third didn’t say who would bring the truth out, or when.
I think these essays were the time. Not because I chose it, but because by now everyone the secret was meant to protect is gone, and the pieces that were kept — in a rest home in Pontecurone, in a son’s memory of his mother, in a painting beside a hot water heater — had appeared, one at a time, to someone willing to listen.
When my living relatives tell their half-true stories, I think of my father in his living room, standing in front of that heavy canvas and saying the one true thing anyone ever said about it.
That wasn’t really her.
I don’t say it. It has all been written down — and even written down, she doesn’t hold still. I still don’t know where she is buried. I know more about who she was than anyone has known in a hundred years, and I couldn’t paint her either. Every fact opens onto another name, another crossing, another costume. It is Alice’s favorite music all over again: Debussy’s moonlight over a masked dance, Italians in French dress, and all of us, in one way or another, still in the costumes we were handed — under a light that shows everything and fixes nothing.
What remains, when the stories run out, isn’t a likeness, and it isn’t a verdict. It is an unfoldment that keeps renewing itself, and I am inside it — a sea that keeps giving rise to forms I encounter but can neither possess nor control, and in which I am at once the sea, the forms, and the encounter. My acceptance of that, and of my place within it, is what I can truly call my own. And the sign of it in this history, every time, is the same: astonishment that she was here at all, and still is.
This closes Finding the Rovellis. The story appeared while I was keeping this notebook in real time, and the notebook — with whatever else my life brings into it — goes on. Next week I’ll post Nostra Lilli, the piece of music I composed for Lilliana. After that, new material. If you arrived for this history, thank you for staying with it.
Almost Visible is a notebook of encounters with art, sound, space, and attention. If this one opened something, consider sharing and subscribing.