Like Family (9 page)

T
here are progressions whose epilogue is written in the prologue. Did anyone, including Mrs. A., even for a minute think that things could go any differently than they did? Did anyone ever mention the word “cure” to her? No, never. At most we said that things would get better, but we didn't believe that either. Her decline was wholly inscribed in the pulmonary shadow etched on the first thoracic plate. All these cancer stories are the same. Maybe. That doesn't mean that her life wasn't unique, deserving of a story all its own; until the very last moment, her life was worthy of the hope that fate
might make an exception for her: special treatment in exchange for the services she had rendered to so many.

The way things were between us after the summer, Nora and I had no thought for anyone else. It was one of Mrs. A.'s cousins who called us on a day in late November. “She wants to see you. I don't think she will last much longer.”

We discussed whether we should bring Emanuele with us. I argued yes, that it made no sense to deprive a child of the sight of suffering, and besides, he was big enough to handle it. But Nora didn't want the image of Mrs. A. dying to wipe out all the other memories.

She was right. All that remained of Babette, under the many layers of blankets in the strange bed, was a shrunken, gray form. The room was permeated with a sickly-sweet medicinal odor and something indefinable that, when I bent down to brush the skin of her cheek in a hesitant imitation of a kiss, I found was coming from her lips: a whiff of fermentation, as if her body had already started dying from inside, one organ at a time. There was a strange light, shimmering and somewhat otherworldly, perhaps because of the gleaming elements that reflected it: the gold-embroidered
bedspread and translucent curtains, the gilt wardrobe handles and brass fixtures.

As soon as she sat down on the edge of the bed, Nora burst into tears. I saw them again then, after nine years, in the same roles as before but reversed: Mrs. A. lying down and my wife at her bedside. She was trying to fasten a bracelet around Babette's skeletal wrist, one we had bought her so that she might have a sign of us to accompany her on her upcoming journey, but Nora's fingers were trembling and she kept missing the clasp. Even in their reversed roles, it was Mrs. A. who tried to console. “Don't cry, Nora,” she said, “don't cry. For a while we were good company for each other.”

I left the room, closing the door behind me. Nora's tears had melted something inside me, unlocked a tenderness that had never gone away, and despite the tragic nature of the moment I felt an incongruous relief. We had bought some white tulips because they were Mrs. A.'s favorite flower and because showing up with assorted gifts seemed like an effective defense against the circumstances. Marcella looked for a vase, and I busied myself arranging the flowers in it after
trimming the stems. I made an effort to keep up a conversation to prevent her from returning to the room where, I sensed, she would have liked to keep an eye on the situation, lest her cousin indulge in inappropriate confidences with my wife. I wanted to make sure Nora had all the private time she deserved.

When I went back to the bedroom, I placed the vase on the nightstand. There was a photo of Renato that I had seen elsewhere, taken in winter on the seaside promenade in Sanremo. Maybe thinking that he was waiting for her was enough to give Mrs. A. renewed strength, a strength that did not require flesh and bones or a voice.

“So, then, take care,” I said to her.

She smiled at me. There was no need to pretend anymore. Death was already there among us, occupying the empty half of the bed, waiting quietly.

Mrs. A. was still gripping Nora's hand, or vice versa. “Look after her, always,” she urged me.

“Of course. Always,” I promised.

Nora turned slightly toward me, as if to say, “See how easy it is? Why couldn't you do it sooner?” I leaned over and kissed my wife on the temple.

“Now we'll let you rest,” I said to Mrs. A., though she was already half asleep. Who knows where she found the energy to stay awake for those few minutes, which painkillers and tranquilizers she had struggled against, just to make sure that Nora and I swore we would go on taking care of each other.

We left her sleeping soundly. As I walked away from the room, I glanced toward the window. Through the lace curtains and double panes, I would not have been surprised to see an exotic bird with yellow and blue feathers and a long white cottony tail perched on the windowsill, its dark eyes, serious and compassionate, trained on all of us.

_____

A few days later, Nora bought a perforated pan for roasting chestnuts. The metal was shiny and untarnished, very different from Mrs. A.'s battered, rust-covered one. Every autumn Babette had performed that ritual. She went looking for chestnuts in the woods behind her house, gathered them when they were still in the husk, then appeared at our place to roast them. I'd help her score them one by one, and that evening
we would dine on chestnuts and milk sweetened with honey.

“They won't be as good as hers,” Nora says
.
“They're from the supermarket. But let's give them a try.”

As we eye the golden meats somewhat dubiously, she asks me to pour her some wine. “I thought I would switch schools for Emanuele,” she announces.

“Oh?”

“Next year. They aren't doing enough for him where he is now. They don't understand him. She always said that. Besides, it's not right to tear up a child's paper.”

“Teachers tear up papers. They always have.”

“Not today. Today they don't do that anymore.” She pauses to take a sip from the glass, then passes it to me. “I also thought that if they didn't renew your contract, it wouldn't be so bad.”

“I think it would.”

“It might be a good opportunity to try something different. Maybe elsewhere, for a while. I don't know.” She puts a hand on my hip. “What do you think?”

“I don't know. It seems like such a lot of new things all at once.”

“No. Here, take a look. Do you think they're done?”

_____

One night during her illness, Mrs. A. dreamed about Renato. It seldom happened that he came to her in her sleep. But that time he was standing in front of her, elegant as always, but with an incongruous felt hat pulled down over his head. He kept his hands shoved into his jacket and, not taking them out, gently invited her to follow him. “Come, it's time.”

Mrs. A. was afraid he might be hiding something dangerous in his pockets, so she asked him to show her his palms. He ignored her. “Let's go, it's late,” he repeated.

“I don't want to, not yet. Go away!”

Mrs. A. had backed away. Renato had bowed his head, disappointed. He'd turned around, and the darkness had swallowed him whole.

That night Babette had driven her husband away, despite her love for him: a fitting sign of her extraordinary attachment to life.

Around that same time I, too, had a dream. I was in a deserted underground parking garage. A shrub was growing from a crevice in the midst of the asphalt.
When I went closer to look at it, I saw that the shrub was actually the majestic canopy of a tree, whose trunk descended several feet belowground, so far down that I could not make out its base. When I woke up, I associated that image with Mrs. A.—but I never had a chance to tell her.

She belonged to that species of shrub that insinuates its roots into chinks in walls or cracks in sidewalks, that climbing variety for which an opening of just a few scintillas is sufficient to cling to, and then cover a building's façade. Mrs. A. was a weed, but one of the most noble ones. Even the mistakes she made in the final months of her life—giving up long before it was time, not preparing for the interminable future that would come after her, her dismay—were perhaps inevitable ones. There is no place for the thought of death in those who possess such an excess of life: I saw it in her, and I see it every day in Nora. The thought of death is only for those who are able to release their grip, for those who have already done so at least once. It's not even a thought, maybe more like a memory.

There was one thing she
had
provided for, however. Mrs. A. had made sure she had a place beside her
husband's grave. There must have been a moment, an afternoon, perhaps, when she walked to the village cemetery clutching her black handbag, then from it extracting the cash to pay for the earthen bed that would receive her. I don't know if it took place before or after the cancer appeared, but I know for certain that even then it wasn't death's goading that drove her, but rather her love for Renato. She wouldn't have been able to stand being separated from him for another eternity.

“We should think about it, too,” I said to Nora as we passed through the gate of the cemetery. I made believe I was joking, but I was serious.

“You always said you wanted to be cremated.”

“Maybe I'm changing my mind.”

She pursed her lips mischievously, as if to say that she would think about whether or not to keep me beside her all that time. Then she looked around, lost. “How are we going to find her?”

Since we hadn't followed the procession on the day of the funeral, we didn't know where Mrs. A. was buried. One of the cousins had given my wife sketchy
directions, which, considering her negligible aptitude for orientation, had become utterly useless.

“Earlier you said in back. Let's go try over there.”

We divided up the aisles, as if it were a treasure hunt. Which, in a way, it was.

It was Emanuele who found her. “Come here! She's over here!” he shouted.

We ordered him to lower his voice, because it wasn't polite to yell in a place like that.

“But we're outside,” he protested.

He was more at ease than we were among the dead. Afterward I thought that they couldn't help but be pleased to hear our son's crystalline voice, “a singer's voice,” as Mrs. A. used to say.

The long white marble slab was clean, washed by rain or by someone who'd come by fairly recently. Emanuele climbed on top of it. Nora was about to stop him, but I held her back: she would have let him do it. He patted the color photograph of Mrs. A. and studied the one of Renato beside it uncertainly. “Ciao,” he said.

Lying on the marble, tummy down, one ear pressed
against the stone, he listened for quite some time. He was speaking to her in his mind, I think, because his lips were moving, though barely perceptibly. Then he got up on his knees and gave a sigh, a comical, somewhat affected sigh, like an adult.

Finally he spoke her name out loud: “Anna.”

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