This is the last of six essays about finding my father’s family, written and published in sequence. Most of the names and situations here are introduced in the earlier ones, and it will read better alongside them — but here is the shape of it. My great-aunt Alice spent her life insisting we were French. We were not. In 2015 my partner Lili and I found the family village in Piemonte, Italy, and in a rest home in the nearby town of Pontecurone we found Lilliana Rovelli, who had been keeping the family’s record for ninety years and who turned out to be my father’s sister. We returned to see Lilliana every June for five years. What she told us changed our lives.
This is the last of those visits, and what came after.
The last visit
We knew, in the ordinary way one knows, that she was slowing.
That summer we had what I can only call the first and last Rovelli family reunion. It was Lilliana, Lili and me, and my cousin’s wife and son — who have always been kind to me — in the large vestibule on her floor where residents received their visitors. There was food. There was a great deal of laughing. It was, for perhaps two hours, exactly the thing a hundred years of concealment had prevented.
My cousin did not come.
He is the man Lili and I passed on our first walk up through Costa Vescovato — watering his lawn behind that wire fence, the one who waved back at us, and about whom Lili said a few paces later that she thought I was related to him. Thirty-six hours after that he was the last door left in the village. Every other Rovelli had turned out to be no relation. And he was the one who told us that his aunt was the historian, and that she was in Pontecurone.
He is the reason I found her at all.
For reasons that are his, and that I have written about elsewhere, he chose not to engage with any of what followed. I never saw him again after that afternoon at the fence. And he was not in the room that day.
I have stopped reading his absence as something between the two of us. It is structural. It is one more appearance of the same gap that has been running through this family for generations, and it was in place long before either of us arrived to inherit it. I have come to treat it as a feature of the landscape.
A feature of it. Not the whole of it. His wife and his son were sitting right there.
And running underneath it, audible to me at least, was è troppo tardi. It’s too late. She had said it to Samantha — Lilliana’s doctor, and her confidante — over the years, and she had said it to me too, a few times, in English — and then snapped out of it and carried on. But it hung around her like a ghost. I caught myself in the middle of the laughing close to tears, not from grief exactly but from the arithmetic. We had managed this once. We were managing it in a rest home. We were managing it at ninety-five.
The moment passed. The party went on. That is also true and I am not going to sacrifice it to the sadder sentence.
Before it broke up she had everybody exchange contact information. She was deliberate about it, and she supervised it. I have come to think that was the point of the whole gathering — that she had organised it in order to leave the two halves of this family able to reach one another after she was gone.
When it was time to go we said our goodbyes and then went to find Anna, and Anna was not in any of the usual places. We found her in her room. She was crying.
We hugged her, and she told us a great many things in Italian, most of whose words we did not understand and all of which we understood.
Then we went back to Lilliana’s room.
Neither of us could put down what Anna had just handed us. We were saying goodbye, and our eyes were filling, and I remember working hard not to let Lilliana see me cry — because I knew that some of what I was feeling was not about the day at all. It was the anticipation of losing her. We had left her at the end of other summers. This was not like those.
I hugged her, and when she let go I turned my head away to gather myself.
When I turned back into the room, Lilliana had taken Lili’s hand and pressed something into it.
A necklace. A small heart, about the size of a quarter, in some rose-colored stone that neither of us has ever been able to identify, ringed with tiny diamonds — we have never determined whether they are real — on a leather cord worn soft with wearing.
“It’s the only thing I have that I can give you,” she said.
Lili took it gently and hugged her, and I could see that Lili was crying too.
I felt my chest flutter. I inhaled sharply, without deciding to. The tears started. The feeling was immense and it was still building. I glanced toward the doorway — the ordinary reflex, the exit — and I paused.
And instead of managing it, which is what I would ordinarily do, I let it come.
I remember the thought clearly. I wanted to be in this, with Lilliana and with Lili, and not standing off to one side of it watching myself have it. My family had spent a century managing identities — who was to be told what, who was to be cut out, which surname was in use this decade — and the only thing that management ever produced was atomisation. People alone in apartments with the photographs edited.
Lilliana had never done that. Not once, as far as I could ever tell. Every story she told me about her life — the ships, the ports, thirty years at the bottom of Africa, going out to pick olives at eighty-seven — had happened to her because she was present for it and let it happen. She was not a manager of herself.
And I could feel the inheritance in me right then, doing what it does: standing up like a wall, offering to hold me at a comfortable distance from my own experience and to call that composure. Watching myself would have been a performance. This was not a performance. This was actual life, occurring, in a room, with a limited amount of it left.
So I let the wall go. I stayed where I was and let the feeling rise and ebb on its own terms. It was intensely sad and it was also, somehow, joyful — both entirely accurate, neither cancelling the other — and I was inside it rather than beside it. And this is the part I did not expect: I was steady. The closeness itself was the stabilising thing. Grounded, in the middle of a vortex.
I thought of my father, who had her face and the same quality she had: the capacity to be in a situation without managing himself inside it.
I was with the two of them in that room while it happened. The same room where, four years earlier, an old woman I had never met turned her head on the pillow and recited my family’s names and told me she was my relative, and I had put my hand out on the spare bed because I was suddenly floating.
We embraced, and said goodbye again, and I reminded her that they would be serving dinner shortly.
She informed me that it was not yet dinner.
I said I thought it was. She said it was not. The Rovelli stubbornness, in its home territory, undefeated.
We walked out of her room. And when we passed the dining room it was, of course, dinner — plainly, visibly dinner.
I noted it, and thought: it is her decision, and she is entitled to it. And I kept walking.
I got as far as the stairwell. And with my foot over the first step down, I turned around and went back to get her.
This specific instance was not the moment to let things be.
A few minutes after we had finally said goodbye, we found Lilliana attempting to get into her nightgown and somewhat tangled in it. Lili helped her out, explaining that it wasn’t bedtime, that it was dinnertime, that we had just walked past the dining room. Lilliana found the entire situation extremely funny.
We helped her into her sweater. We walked her down. When she saw that it was in fact dinner she accepted this without comment, and we took her to her seat, and kissed her goodbye, and left.
We decided to walk to the station at Pontecurone rather than call a car to Voghera. I had the schedule and we could make it on foot.
On the way we passed a small church and went in. There was nobody inside. Lili and I walked around it separately, without speaking, and I knew that we were thinking the same thing and that neither of us was going to say it.
Another silence in the history of this family. An empty church in Pontecurone, at the end of a day, two people not saying the thing.
But it was not the old silence. Nothing was being withheld and nothing was missing. It was the other kind — the kind that comes after, when there is nothing further required. I remember standing in that church and understanding, without any particular drama, that I was not looking at this story any longer. I was inside it.
We walked on to the station and took the train back to Pavia.
What Samantha wrote
There is a saucer magnolia in this story and I need to introduce it.
For one of my parents’ anniversaries, one of my sisters bought them a saucer magnolia and planted it near the front of their house. My mother loved that tree. Saucer magnolias bloom early — they are the first thing awake, purple and white, while everything around them is still bare wood.
My mother, who had enjoyed excellent health her whole life, began having stomach trouble one summer and felt that something was wrong, and, entirely out of character, went to a doctor. She was told it was indigestion and given an antacid. It was not indigestion. By the time anyone understood what it was, it was too late.
When she died I went to stay with my father, and I remember the magnolia in full bloom at the front of the house, ahead of every other tree on the property. I have not been able to see one since without seeing her.
The apartment I was living in when I met Lilliana had a back bedroom that I used as a studio. Its window faced a saucer magnolia.
In early March of 2020 the news was full of Italy. The lockdowns were beginning. I had called Lilliana a few times without reaching her, which was not unusual — her phone plan wouldn’t carry international calls, so she couldn’t ring back, and it routinely took several tries.
Then the magnolia outside my window came into bloom, and I had a feeling I could not talk myself out of. I thought about the last visit. She had not been frail — at ninety-five she was still strong, and her mind was still hers — but the decline from the previous summers had been unmistakable, and Anna had wept when we left. I thought about what the news must be doing to her, in a building full of very old people.
Then Alessio’s email arrived.
It was five words: Lilliana is died. It was not Covid.
I have read that sentence a great many times. He was not reporting a cause of death. He was refusing one. He was making certain that the pandemic did not get to absorb her — that nobody, later, would be able to file her under the general catastrophe and stop asking.
Because what happened was this. During the lockdown the Italian government sorted physicians into essential and non-essential. Samantha — Lilliana’s doctor for years, and her friend, the person who typed her emails and knew what she confided — was classified non-essential and was not permitted to come. The Casa di Riposo lost most of its staff almost at once. And Lilliana, who was ninety-five and had one leg and could not get out of bed unaided, died there without adequate care. Samantha wrote to me afterward and told me so, and told me that a great many of the other residents died the same way.
She died alone, in a bed, in a building she had not chosen, because an administration had determined that her doctor was not necessary.
I have not been able to go back to Italy since. I loved being there. I have not gone.
What Samantha described has tortured me in a specific way, which is that none of it was malice. Nobody hated the elders in that building. They died of management — of a rule applied at scale, without attention, in a house whose entire purpose was care and repose. There is a particular obscenity in dying of inattention inside a building named for rest.
I have written in these essays about another woman in this family whose death was assigned to a pandemic. My great-aunt Carolina — Carrie in New York, Lina in Costa Vescovato — died in 1918 after a walk under a mulberry tree, and the story that came down to me in New York was that she had died in the Spanish influenza. That was not true. The pandemic was used as a cover.
A hundred and two years later a pandemic was used again, in the opposite direction: not to conceal a death but to be refused as an explanation of one, by a teenager, in five words, in a language that was not his.
It was not Covid.
Somebody in that family had finally learned to say the thing out loud.
Samantha’s letter told me the rest. That Lilliana had spent most of her life looking for her family in New York. That she had made the crossings and found nothing, because nobody had told her the name had been changed. That when I walked in unannounced — eighteen months after the accident that ended her traveling — she was elated, and also grief-stricken, because it had come at the end, when she could no longer come to us and could no longer even bring us into her own house.
And Samantha confirmed who Lilliana was. Whose daughter. She wanted me to understand why there had sometimes been a distance in her, a wistfulness, which I had noticed and had never once mistaken for coldness.
She also told me, in the same letter, that she had just had a daughter of her own.
I wrote back and thanked her for being kind to Lilliana for all those years, and told her that the arrival of her daughter seemed to me like the circle continuing to turn. I meant it as consolation, which is what people mean by it. I have since thought it was also simply accurate.
Un jour viendra
It has not happened.
Some time after she died, Carla and Antonella — another Rovelli in the village, no relation to me — started a project gathering the stories of people who had left Costa Vescovato. It was meant to be celebratory. My first attempt at writing any of this history was written for them, in Italian, and sent to Costa.
They wrote back warmly. They acknowledged how hard this family’s history had been. And they told me that my cousin was not interested in reading it.
Among Alice’s things I found a very old two-volume English–French dictionary. In the second volume, in ink, somebody had written: Un jour viendra.
A day will come.
So far it has not, and I do not blame him. He has his reasons and they are not mine to publish.
And it takes nothing away from what I actually received, which was Lilliana. Hours and hours of her. A promise made to her father discharged into my hands after ninety years. A bond that neither Lili nor I have ever had the slightest doubt about.
She intended to reconnect a family. What arrived instead was a friendship between an old woman in Pontecurone and two people from New York, which is not what she was aiming at and is not nothing. It is the pattern I keep finding in this story and I have stopped calling it disappointment. The intention was hers, and it was a good one, and the outcome kept its own time.
What is most authentically ours appears to be exactly the part we cannot possess or arrange.
The paradox, stated from inside it
Now I have to account for something, and the only honest place to do it is here, in the last of these essays on finding my family, while I am writing it and you are reading it.
I am the discreet one. That has been the argument of these essays: that I never asked Lilliana the direct question, not once in five years; that I let a woman of ninety-one tell me she was my aunt in the only way she was willing to, and did not force it; that the instinct to hold a thing back rather than press it is the one part of my inheritance that arrived intact.
And I have just spent six essays and something over thirty thousand words publishing my family’s most private business to strangers. Names. Aliases. A birth out of wedlock. A bigamous household. A suicide. A woman disowned. A child given away across an ocean. All of it, in public, under my own name — which is itself one of the names in question.
I have no clean way to reconcile those two facts and I am not going to pretend to.
What I can do is show you the seam.
In drafting these essays I changed my uncle’s name. He has been dead for more than thirty years, but his widow is alive, and although the chance that she will ever encounter this is close to nothing, I changed it anyway. I also moved a city. The building my grandfather jumped off the roof of was not in the town I said it was in. And earlier, at an earlier stage of drafting, I changed the name of the woman who was with him in the last hours of his life — and then changed it back, because she has been dead for decades and could not possibly be harmed, and because I noticed, when I asked myself what I thought I was protecting, that I had reached for the alteration by reflex.
That is the family instrument. In my hands. On this page. Used, I think, for decent reasons, but used.
And there was the driver who never called me back.
I have thought about that one a great deal. It was a concealment. I told it to a woman I loved, to spare her having to disappoint me, and it worked, and I would tell it again tomorrow. Alice’s began, I suspect, as something not so different in kind — a protection, of somebody, possibly of herself — and it ran for a hundred years and cost a family everything it had.
I cannot draw a bright line between those two acts. I can only report that one of them ended in an afternoon on a sofa in Piemonte looking at Cape Town, and the other ended at an incinerator chute in Washington Heights.
So it is not the case that I was discreet and have now become the opposite. That framing — the hardened stance, the before and after, the little monument — is precisely the thing I have spent six essays watching people build. I was discreet and I am discreet. I disclosed and I am disclosing. Both are the same motion at different distances from the object: the reaching-toward that first shows up as restraint, because pressing would collapse what is arriving, and later shows up as speech, because the thing has arrived and now wants to be shared.
Alfonso understood this, which is why his instruction has a conjunction in it rather than a full stop. Be kind, but tell them the truth. Not one or the other. Both, at once, held in tension, permanently.
Lilliana understood it in a post office at nineteen, holding a magazine.
And I notice, writing this, that I opened the previous essay with a handbag. A bag conceals what is in it. That is what a bag is for — not to hide the things, but to let a person carry them while both hands are busy doing something else.
That is the whole of it, more or less.
The necklace, again
Some months ago Lili and I were talking about Lilliana. We do this fairly often. We had gotten to the last visit, and Anna in her room, and how she had seemed a little less sharp than usual that day.
And Lili said, “And then she gave me the necklace.”
I had forgotten it completely.
Not misplaced the memory — forgotten it, as if it had never happened. And then, a beat later, Lili asked whether I knew where it was, and I said yes of course, and felt the floor go, because we had moved recently and I had absolutely no idea.
It was Lili who found it. She went through her things and came back with a small translucent wax envelope, carefully folded, with the heart inside it exactly as it had been. She had preserved it for years without mentioning it.
Of course she had. It was Lili who stepped toward the propped door on Mott Street while I stood on the sidewalk explaining why we shouldn’t go in. It was Lili who said let’s go twice, six years apart. It was Lili who was awake in a kitchen in Costa Vescovato speaking French while I slept in an adjacent room. She has been the keeper of this thing at every point where I have put it down.
We took the heart out and held it, and the memories came flooding back, and we talked about Lilliana for a long time, and then we put it away again.
It is near me now, as I write this.
Lili has never worn it. The band is very worn and would not survive being worn; replacing the band is not something either of us can contemplate. So it stays with us and does not go out, which is — I did not see this until I wrote it down — exactly the condition of the woman who gave it to us. Kept safe. Not permitted to travel. La Vagabonda in a wax envelope in a drawer.
I did not choose that either. It simply turned out to be the shape of the thing.
There is a late poem of William Carlos Williams, The Ivy Crown, that I committed to memory almost forty years ago, in the wreckage of a young romance, because it was the only thing that seemed to release me from it. I have carried it ever since and it has gone on unfolding — meaning a different thing to me in each decade, none of the earlier meanings turning out to be wrong. It is spoken by someone no longer young, to someone he loves, and its argument is that the imagination can be laid across the sorry facts of a life so that what stands in front is the flower rather than the thorn. Not because the thorns are not there. Because it is possible to will the arrangement.
Schopenhauer says that a man does what he wills but does not will what he wills, and I think he is right, and I think most people take it as bad news. I did not choose to be the one this happened to. I did not choose the discretion, or the appetite that pulls against it, or the fact that a takeout menu was lying face up on a sidewalk in the late spring of 2009.
But I have become resistant to calling any of that chance.
I said in the previous essay that I would come back to this, and that I was not sure I could defend what I had arrived at. I still am not. Here it is anyway.
The magnolia bloomed when magnolias bloom. It happened to be outside my window, and it happened to be the tree my mother loved, and it bloomed in the week I could not reach Lilliana on the telephone. Nothing was arranged. Nothing was random either.
I have come to think that randomness is what you get when you insist on identifying as the author — when you take the wanting to be yours, and the willing to be yours, and then find that the world does not deliver on schedule and conclude that it must therefore be arbitrary. Possession is what scatters it. Stop trying to own the current and it stops looking like noise.
I am aware that this sentence is being typed by a man whose name appears at the top of six essays.
I want to be plain about something here, because I have spent five essays describing people who erased other people, and I do not want to be misread.
I am angry about what happened in Pontecurone in the spring of 2020. Not in their way. Adelaide’s anger did the erasing; Alice’s anger did the erasing. Mine is at an erasure, which is a different thing and points in the opposite direction.
A system that used the language of care, and gathered up the people least able to manage without it, and then — when the situation became inconvenient — reallocated its resources elsewhere and left them to die in chaos, alone, in a building whose name means rest.
There is an image in the Williams poem of children who pick flowers and then, once the flowers are in hand, lose all interest and let them fall by the side of the road. That is nearer to it than malice is. Nobody hated them. The interest was simply withdrawn once the having was done.
That, too, is a failure of attention. It is the same failure I have been describing all along, at a scale that kills people.
What I have instead is a habit of noticing markers. Buoys, if you prefer — and readers of an earlier essay will know why that word belongs to Alice. The menu. The propped door. The word on the departures board. The oaks under the station. A novelist’s name inside a cover. A tree in a window. I treat them the way you treat features of a landscape you are moving within: I do not possess them and they do not possess me, and I have learned not to press them, because they open when they are ready and not before.
That was Alice’s mistake, I think, more than any lie she told. She tried to hold the will in her own hands and administer it, for a hundred and one years, and it went where it was going anyway — four generations later, through a great-nephew she had specifically instructed to stop looking.
Her favourite piece of music, all her life, was Debussy’s Clair de lune.
I never looked into its history until this week, which I now regret.
Debussy began the Suite bergamasque around 1890 and then left it alone. When a publisher finally talked him into releasing it in 1905, he revised it heavily and changed the names of two of its movements. The third — the famous one — had been called Promenade sentimentale for fifteen years. He renamed it Clair de lune shortly before it went out into the world.
A piece of music that changed its name just before publication. Hers.
The new title came from a Verlaine poem of 1869. The poem addresses a soul as though it were a landscape, and fills that landscape with masked and costumed figures playing lutes and dancing — masques et bergamasques — who are, for all the festivity, almost sad. They sing about love and good fortune and appear not to believe a word of it. Above them, moonlight, described as beautiful and sad at once.
And bergamasque — this is the part I had to sit down about — refers to the masked festival tradition of Bergamo, in northern Italy. The stock peasant characters of the old Italian theatre, transplanted into an elegant French entertainment.
Northern Italian peasants in masks, performing as French.
Now hold that against the story Alice told me for forty years about her own parents. They met in the south of France, she said, at an evening dance, where my great-grandfather — a musician from a poor family, whom she always called Jean — was playing. Her mother’s people disapproved of the match, so the two of them ran away to New York.
None of that happened. Giovanni came from a landholding family in a Piemontese hill village of five hundred people — land the family had come into, generations earlier, by way of an uncle who was a priest — and there was no dance in the south of France.
If anything the invention ran the wrong way round. The poor musician was a fiction. And it was Adelaide who, some years later, persuaded Giovanni to sell off part of that land to pay for New York.
But it is the same scene. Music, France, apparent gaiety, sorrow underneath, and northern Italians inside the costumes.
I do not believe Alice knew any of the history behind her favorite piece of music, and how it aligned profoundly with the web of fantasy she spun for most of her life. I would guess she simply loved the sound of it and went on loving it for a century. But of all the music available to a person, the piece she chose was one that changed its name before publication, and took the new name from a poem about Italians in French dress, pretending to be happier than they were.
Moonlight. I called the previous essay Full Moon June. One of these women loved the mysterious light of it — the light that softens outlines, encourages fantasy, and keeps everything usefully vague. The other used it to know when to sail.
Her necklace is near my hand as I write this, and fragments of that piece have been drifting through my head all day.
Unpredictable, certainly. Not random.
I finished this essay on my parents’ wedding anniversary, which I did not plan, and which was also the anniversary of Alice’s own wedding — the one in Italy, to Carlo Raviola, that none of us knew anything about until after she died, and which is very probably the explanation for her famously unaccountable behaviour at my parents’ wedding — behaviour nobody present ever forgot or could account for, so unlike her ordinary meticulous self-possession that it stayed in the family as a small unsolved thing. I have come to think of it as the first loose thread. It is certainly one of the reasons I was curious enough, decades later, to keep pulling.
While I was working on the last pages, my sister — the one who bought the magnolia and planted it — sent me a text out of nowhere with a link to something she thought was funny.
And this afternoon I am finally going to speak to my godfather, my father’s best man, who once — as I have described elsewhere — found me wandering the city as a small boy and walked me home. He had contacted me out of the blue within an hour of my publishing the third essay in this series, after more than a year of silence between us. For a moment I thought he must have seen it. He had not. He was simply checking in. We have been playing telephone tag for ten days, and it resolves today, of all days.
None of that was organised by anybody. All of it arrived.
My father gave the eulogy at Alice’s funeral in 1997. He did not know any of what is in these six essays. He never would. And he ended it like this:
And to the person who fiercely guarded the secrets of the family for reasons we may never know, I say goodbye, Alice. Goodbye, my friend.
He knew there were secrets. He knew he was not going to be told them. He said goodbye to her anyway, and called her his friend, and meant it.
Five Junes. A handbag tied to a walker. Fruit and cheese in a room in Pontecurone. Four rivers each way. An afternoon on a sofa in Cape Town, Piemonte and Chinatown. Two women, one letter apart, who loved each other on sight. A heart in a wax envelope.
Past all accident, Williams says.
She is my father’s sister. She told me so in the first ten minutes, and I told her she was mistaken, and she looked at me, and let it go, and waited.
This closes Finding the Rovellis. There is one more thing to write about this family: my father’s father, whoever he was, and the half of the record that cannot be recovered. That will come, and it will be its own thing rather than part of this.
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