No Time to Lose
the second of three essays
The menu was lying face-up on the sidewalk.
This was the late spring of 2009. Lili and I were spending our first weekend together in Manhattan, at a hotel she loved on the northwest corner of Washington Square Park, and we set out early on the first Saturday of June to wander. Heading south on MacDougal, maybe fifty yards from the hotel, I saw a takeout menu — the kind that accumulates in the entryways of apartment buildings until someone sweeps the whole drift of them into the street. Noodle Village, it said. An address on Mott Street.
I knew the building very well.
I took a breath.
I let it go.
Then I stopped, and went back, and picked it up, and stood there holding a restaurant menu as if it were a letter from a friend, which, in a way I could not yet have explained to the woman watching me, it was. We continued south with the park on our left, and I began telling Lili a story I had never told anyone in order, because I had never possessed it in order. A building on Mott Street where I was born. A great-aunt who had steered my father there decades before without ever explaining why. A census report with the wrong name on it, or the right one. An incinerator.
Lili listened. Then she asked the only question the moment required.
“How far is Mott Street from here?”
“Not far.”
“Let’s go.”
I have a history of walking from Washington Square Park to Mott Street. I wrote about it in a previous essay and I won’t retell it here. I will say only that the walk, performed as a young child, alone, wandering the city, was significant because it marked a deviation — a liberation from a prescribed path, an early and independent perambulation, a delicious first feeling of swimming with the currents of the city and of how those currents could carry me to unexpected vistas and, ultimately, home. I felt embedded in the city, and I loved it.
That early June morning I didn’t retrace my former steps. I allowed a current to take me home again, this time with a companion — and once again the current had surprises to reveal. We accepted its invitation.
We arrived at 13 Mott Street and stood at the doorway, and I was filling in details for Lili — the neighborhood, the building, what little I held with any certainty — when she pointed out that the door was open.
Not ajar. Open — propped, the way apartment front doors get propped on delivery days, as if the building had been expecting packages, or welcoming us. Noodle Village, the restaurant whose menu I had lifted off a sidewalk half a mile away, occupies the ground floor of 13 Mott Street. It suddenly became an invitation. We stood on the sidewalk and looked into the dark hallway and I felt the specific hesitation of a threshold that is legally nothing to you and is also the only address your body has ever considered original. I was born in that building. My grandmother had lived there, and her mother, and a great-grandfather who had been the superintendent, as my father had — though, save for my father, I knew almost none of this yet with the solidity of fact. What I knew was a census line and a name with two spellings.
Yet, in spite of the invitation and the open door, I hesitated.
“I’m not sure if we should go in.”
“The door is open,” Lili said, stepping toward the threshold. “We’re here. The door is open. You found the menu. I think we’re supposed to go in.”
Embedded in the current.
We crossed the threshold.
We entered.
Unexpectedly, it felt like nothing had changed. The building had been a bit rickety when we lived there, and it remained a bit rickety now. I could hear a restaurant, and smell it, exactly as when I was young. As we started up the wooden stairs I saw the hall water closet on the second floor, at the top of the flight, where it had always been, and my timidity vanished and my pace quickened, and I heard myself say a sentence that had been waiting in me, intact, for decades:
“Let’s go to the roof!”
We came out into the flat bright air above Chinatown. I had stood on that roof as a small child, held up over the parapet to watch a parade cross below — a dragon the length of the block, drums arriving out of order with their own strikes. That memory belongs to another essay and I will leave it there. What I felt on the roof in 2009 was not the parade. My mother had been dead two years. I stood on top of the building that was home but was not home, in a neighborhood that had changed its language twice since my family had lived in it, holding a takeout menu, inside a wash of memory and feeling, and I was suddenly grieving — for her; for Alice and her life of secrecy; and for the strange fact that the address of my birth was a place the world had had to prop open for me.
On the street afterward I made a decision — made it, I should say honestly, not in bitterness but in warmth, inside the good and complicated memories of my mother and of Alice, wanting suddenly to balance and stabilize, to guard rather than to excavate. I remember the wording of it, because it was worded, deliberately, the way you word a thing you intend to hold yourself to. Let it be. The dead had arranged their concealments with great care. Who was I to be the flood.
I want to be honest about that decision, because this essay is, among other things, an account of how little it turned out to weigh.
By the time I stood on that roof, the world had already begun overruling me. I just didn’t know the schedule.
The previous year — late 2008, over a Thanksgiving weekend — a friend of the family, the kind of friend who treats an unsolved thing in your life as a standing assignment, had listened carefully to my composite of the family history, and to how the search had brought me to a dead end, and had gone digging on his own, and come back with a single word: Costa. A place attached to the family, somewhere upstream of all the stories. His first guess was that it was in Spain. Remember that guess. It was wrong, and I have since learned that it was also, in a way that took a century and an ocean to disclose, the truest thing anyone had said about us in decades. But that belongs further on, and mostly to another essay.
Then, in March of 2009 — during my spring break, before the menu, before Lili — I was at my father’s house with my cousin, the one who appeared in the previous essay, and again the conversation drifted to the family mystery. My father was in his late seventies then. He had an idea, which he presented the way he presented all his ideas, as a settled plan awaiting only scheduling: we would go to Italy. We would search for the family together. I listened, smiling along with his excitement, while somehow knowing it would never happen. As he went on he began recalling vague things, half-memories, and I remember distinctly wondering whether the passion of the plan might pry some deeply buried memory loose — something that would finally shed light — and then he said something I had never heard in my life. He said that his own father had told him, once, that if anyone ever learned the truth of the family, the hair on the back of your neck would stand up.
“What could that mean!?” my cousin asked.
“I don’t know,” my father said. And then, seemingly as the line had originally been intended, he changed the subject.
We had hit a dead end that came with a flashing danger sign, and we turned back. But I kept the sentence. It was the first confirmation, from inside the family, in the family’s own relayed voice, that there was a truth of the kind that has hair-raising as its known property — that the concealment was not an accident of emigration and lost addresses but a made thing, maintained, with a warning attached and handed down like the silver.
So when I picked the menu off the sidewalk that June, it was not a beginning. It was a delivery, long scheduled. The word Costa, the wrong country, my father’s Italy plan, his father’s warning — all of it flowed through me on that sidewalk in the time it took Lili to ask her question. The decision I made on Mott Street — let it be — was made by a man already carrying the instructions for its reversal.
And the reversal came fast. Within weeks of the roof, still in that same season, I went back to searching — quietly, at night, alone, online, the way you quietly continue observing a thing you have publicly renounced. And I found it: a website, a small archival project someone had built cataloguing Italian marriages in New York, and in it a record — Alice Rovelli and Carlo Raviola, married in New York, he of Costa Vescovato, Piemonte. Not Spain. Not France. A village small enough that the record functioned as a map with one pin in it.
I copied everything down. I mailed a request into the vast New York bureaucracy for a copy of the certificate, and waited, and it came, and I studied it the way you study a thing that is converting, line by line, from theory into fact. It was all becoming quite real. Some time later I mentioned the website to one of my sisters, and when she went to look, she told me it wasn’t there. I checked. The site was gone — not the page, the site. I still have the link; it opens onto nothing. I have no idea how long that archive stood in the world, but I had evidently passed through it very shortly before it receded — one more small piece of the puzzle that, by chance, I was able to take in before it disintegrated. In this family even the disclosures observe the family custom: they appear, they are seen or they are not, and they withdraw.
And I did tell my father. I want that on the record, and I want the rest of it on the record too: it took longer than it should have. I hesitated — out of some inherited respect for Alice, some discomfort at exposing secrets she had defended to the point of fire. And I came to understand that my father felt the same withdrawal I did, and felt it as love. He wanted to know. He also loved Alice and wanted to keep her safe, even where that safety cost him a connection to family — to an authentic sense of family itself — that we both understood Alice held the key to, and guarded the door of.
As it turns out, and as future writings will have to explain, my father’s own sense of family was unresolved down to the identity of his father. Finding that impossible to settle, he had done what one does: carried on. And the carrying on involved leveraging the slipperiness of the truth into a simulated solid ground. Over the years the unknowns hardened into familial axioms, and the axioms generously shielded each of us from a different fear. We all seemed to understand that pulling the thread might unravel the shield, and so in the critical moments all of us hedged and retreated — each for our own reasons, each silently. It was a strange manifestation of “family,” and its physics were consistent: the closer I came, the more strongly I was drawn in and pushed off at once.
At some point the exposure took over. It appears I was simply the one who finally looked.
My father died in January of 2015. He never went to Italy. We never went together.
I have to live with the order of those sentences. This essay is partly how.
Six years is a long time to hold a map with one pin in it.
I could dress the gap in practicalities — work, the caregiving years, the ordinary submersion of a life — and the practicalities would all be true. But every motion toward the family had always produced an equal and opposite motion away, and it would have been strange to be exempt. The friend finds Costa; Costa is in the wrong country. I find the record; the record’s archive vanishes. I obtain the certificate; I hold it. I stand in the building of my birth; I decide to let it be. My father announces Italy; the announcement itself somehow certifies the trip will never occur. Approach, recoil. Disclosure, dissolve. I do not offer this as mysticism. I offer it as an honest description of what it is like to move toward something that was hidden by people who loved you, when the hiding was itself a form of the love, or wore its clothes. You are never only doing research. You are always also disobeying someone.
But the physics had acquired, in June of 2009, a variable it had never had to solve for. It was Lili who stepped toward the propped door while I stood on the sidewalk reciting reasons. It was Lili who said I think we’re supposed to go in. The inertia in this history was old, and patient, and armored, and it had met every previous searcher alone. It had not met her.
What finally broke the gap open was not resolve. It was a gig — and it was Lili.
In the summer of 2015, a few months after my father’s death, Lili and I were invited to be visiting artists and make a site-conditioned work at Stazione di Topolò, a festival in a village of a few dozen souls hung on the Italian side of the Slovenian border.
The way we came to be there belongs to the constellation of coincidence that runs through all of this writing. We had first heard of the festival from our friend the Italian mezzo-soprano Carlotta Buiatti — except that when she mentioned it, in the spring of 2014, while the three of us were discussing making a project together, she couldn’t quite recall the name and called it “Woodstock-opolo.” It ran in a small mountain village not far from her home town, she said, and had a wonderful reputation, and she thought it might interest us. Then my father died, and in the months after I decided I would go to Italy, and I began writing to friends with Italian connections asking for suggestions — places to see, and particularly venues for art. One of them suggested Stazione di Topolò and sent me the email address of its founder and director. I wrote to him. He looked at Lili’s work and mine, and invited us as visiting artists. The whole exchange took about a week — no committees, no seasons of waiting, none of the usual friction of art adventures. The door, like the door at 13 Mott, was suddenly propped open.
And then we brought Carlotta in. She had named the place; we had found, unexpectedly, a way through; and we invited her to make the piece with us. It was a very happy loop.
We had met Carlotta two years earlier, in Paris, when we were there for an exhibition of ours at the Palais de Tokyo. We nearly sublet her apartment. I remember sitting with her and explaining — because by 2013 I had at least accepted the outline of it — the story of a family that had claimed France and turned out to be Piemonte, and I remember that I told her this story in my French, which is to say in French with an Italian accent, the accent that had been the story’s evidence all along, walking around inside my mouth. Readers of the previous essay will understand why I now find it hard to say anything neutral about the fact that the first Italian I told was a singer whose surname begins with Bui. I noticed it then only as a pleasantness. I notice it now the way one notices a watermark.
The piece was called “An Ideal Space on the Frontier”: an installation and performance made in an abandoned schoolhouse in the village. While we were installing the work we uncovered a sewing machine — old, and extremely well built, the kind of object that outlasts the whole purpose of the room it stands in — and we brought it into the piece, and I thought, without pressing the thought, of the women of my family, who had been seamstresses in New York, at machines exactly that serious.
The piece was about the in-betweenness that exists on a frontier. We were thinking about Topolò as a border town — its abandonment, and its temporary summer episodes as a festival — and about the potential that abandoned spaces hold for becoming. A classroom becomes an art installation becomes a performance venue becomes abandoned again. Becoming as the subject.
And, importantly, a piece made at an art festival, intended to be looked at. Observed from outside of it.
What I did not realize, standing in that schoolhouse arranging an argument about thresholds, was that I was already inside one. I was embedded in an unfolding that would take me past everything I knew, if I simply allowed it. The difference is that my embeddedness was not a subject. It was a matter of being. I was in it — and observing it was impeding it.
And one day Carlotta, Lili and I took a long hike out of Topolò, up past the abandoned guard towers, to the Slovenian border, and as we walked I told Carlotta the rest of what the research had revealed since Paris. I was carrying the story of a family sealed by a border of its own invention, telling it while stepping over an actual border that no longer mattered — a line on the earth that had been guarded, and then simply stopped being guarded, and now let three people on a spirited randonée cross it mid-sentence. I noted the instruction in that. Borders are maintained. When the maintenance stops, they become paths.
We finished the piece. We did several performances. We had days remaining in Italy, and a map with a pin in it, six years old, and this time I said so out loud.
Lili said, “Let’s go.”
The same two words she had said on the sidewalk outside our hotel in 2009. I have come to understand that she only ever needs the two. This time I didn’t rationalize. I listened.
The way to Costa Vescovato from Topolò is not designed to exist. Carlotta drove us down out of the village to her home town, Cervignano, and from there we took a train toward Milano, where we would change for Tortona, the last real town before the hills that hold Costa. It was July and hot. On the platform in Milano-Rogoredo, in the southwestern periphery of the city, waiting for the connection, I looked up at the departures board and watched our train, and then the next, resolve into two words: CANCELLATO. SOPPRESSO.
I knew what the words meant. Cancelled. Suppressed. I knew they were railway vocabulary, dry as timetables. And I stood on that platform and received them as addressed to me personally, in the imperative. The whole ambient evening agreed — the station felt wrong, and the neighborhood we retreated into, hard by the tracks, had the roughness and sparsity that reads as omen. We had lost the day. I felt becalmed. The last train that could have delivered us to Tortona was gone, and I suddenly had room to rationalize.
We found a somewhat run-down hotel, checked in, studied the morning schedules to Tortona, wrote to our host in Costa Vescovato to say we wouldn’t make it until tomorrow, and went out to find dinner.
We came back and Lili slept. I sat at the desk in the hotel room in the heat and experienced, for some hours, the strongest pressure I have ever felt to abandon anything. It did not present as doubt. It presented as conscience. Go back. Leave it. You are betraying a trust.
Cancellato. Soppresso.
Alice had burned the papers herself, with her own hands, at the end of a century of life; who was I, two generations on, to walk into the village and undo a bonfire. I felt that I had entered a vortex, and I mean by that word only this: a system of circulation older and stronger than my own intentions, in which every previous approach had been turned — including approaches I did not yet know had been made. That knowledge was still up ahead, in a bed in Pontecurone. The inertia I had been dealing with my whole life was present that night in all its armor.
I would like to report that I overcame it with some decisive interior act. What actually happened is that the night ended, and there was a morning train, and Lili was already packing.
The morning train to Tortona was sweltering and packed, and we had all our luggage with us, including the equipment from the residency. For the first twenty minutes we stood pressed among tourists and people going to work — until we noticed that the car ahead of us was empty.
We knew something wasn’t right, yet the promise of open space and a seat was too much. At each stop we worked our way closer, and finally, gently, pushed ourselves in.
There was no turning back; the cars on either side were crammed. Ours had no air conditioning, like the one before it, with one added feature: none of the windows opened.
I had a plan for that hour, worked out the night before at the desk. I would count rivers.
The regional trains cannot be relied upon to announce anything, and I had no intention of overshooting Tortona, so I had learned the crossings by heart. Three. First the Ticino, wide and scenic, just past Pavia. Then, a few minutes later, the Po itself — the great river of the north, running west to east across the whole top of the country — which was not only a landmark but a border: on the far bank we would have left Lombardy for Piemonte. Then, last, as the train slowed for Tortona, the Scrivia, a gravelly mountain torrent coming down out of the hills we were going to.
So I spent that hour sealed inside a car whose windows did not open, watching for moving water. The Ticino came. Then the Po, enormous and slow and beautiful, and I remember thinking that it was the first thing all day that was going where I was going.
We passed through Pavia on the way. I registered it as a station name and nothing more. I had no idea that Pavia would become, in later years, the place we stayed and the place we set out from — that this crossing would become the crossing, made over and over.
Our carriage was spacious, scenic and awful, filled with anticipation, excitement, anxiety and fear, and we were sealed in it.
Tortona, fresh air, a cold drink, then a cab — it took a long while to find a driver willing to make the run — and then ten miles into the hills, and here the story changes light.
Because the country coming up around the car was beautiful. I had spent so long approaching Costa Vescovato as a sealed file that I had never once imagined it as a landscape, and it turns out to be rolling hill country, vineyards and grain going gold in late July, the air through the window suddenly soft and clean after Milano, carrying cut fields. The village appeared the way hill villages appear, assembling itself out of the curves — a cluster of roofs, a campanile, one main street climbing. Late afternoon, low sun. My family’s concealment had a birthplace, and the birthplace was surrounded by lovely rolling hills, colline dolci, and no one had ever mentioned that either.
The arrival itself was less pastoral. Within minutes of stepping out at the house of Carla — our host, of whom much more shortly — I was inside a dispute: a man staying there, who worked with his wife for Carla’s brother at the agriturismo nearby, decided our driver had overcharged me and took the matter up with him directly, in rapid Italian, on my behalf but well past my ability to participate. So my first minutes in my great-grandparents’ village were spent standing beside an argument conducted in a language I did not speak, about money, concerning me, resolvable by no action of mine.
I subsequently learned that such arguments had been conducted by my relatives in previous generations, on this same road, over this same subject. My great-uncle Camillo — one of Adelaide’s favorites — was a spendthrift who took cabs from Costa to Tortona, to Alessandria, even to Genoa, and left his mother to settle with the drivers when they arrived. It is safe to assume she argued for the best price. But I didn’t know any of that yet. Standing there in the late sun beside two men bargaining over my fare, I only wondered whether the village was administering its orientation program.
We were also, by then, very hungry, and we discovered what the village had not thought to mention: there is no restaurant in Costa Vescovato. And so, in the late-afternoon sun, we set out to walk the town — to find food, to find our bearings, to find whatever a person expects to find on streets he has crossed an ocean to stand in.
I need to describe how I walked, because Lili has since described it to me. I walked up the middle of things. Slowly. Standing very tall, taking long deliberate steps, turning my head in unhurried surveys from one side of the street to the other — reading doorways, reading lintels, reading the faces of houses for any legible sign of my family. I was not performing anything. I was searching, and the searching had a gait. It would be years before I learned — from a woman I had not yet met, lying in a bed I had not yet climbed to — that my great-grandmother Adelaide had been remembered in this village for precisely that: a powerful physical presence, most noted when she walked through the town, tall and slow and surveying, on exactly these streets. I walked into Costa Vescovato for the first time in my life doing an impression of a woman I had never known, whose place on the family tree I could not yet have confidently drawn. Nothing in me knew. Everything in me knew. I have stopped trying to arbitrate between those sentences.
Partway up the hill toward the town center we passed a man watering his lawn — the only person, as it turned out, we would see on the entire walk. His house was unlike the others: it stood behind a wire fence, not chain-link, something closer to what you would use to pen livestock, a security perimeter, strange and emphatic in a village where every other threshold stood open to the street. We waved. We said “Ciao!” He returned it. A few paces on, Lili said, quietly, “I think you are related to that guy.”
I want to record that sentence exactly as it was: an intuition, offered in passing, about a stranger behind a fence. We kept walking.
We crested the hill at the town center and, on the far side, saw a small sign for the cemetery at the bottom of the slope, and walked down to it. The cemetery of Costa Vescovato does not run to headstones; it is built of walls — walls of plaques, and many of the plaques carry small enamel photographs of the dead, so that walking its lanes is walking a gallery of faces. And there, in a cluster whose arrangement announced kinship before any inscription did, I found Giovanni. My great-grandfather. And beside and around him, two men: Alfonso. Camillo. Camillo’s plaque held his photograph, and I stood in the low sun looking at the face of a great-uncle I had never seen and had never once heard called by that name — because Alice, all my life, had given me her brothers as Alexandre and Christophe. I did the arithmetic a person does in a cemetery, standing up, unassisted: Alfonso must be Alexandre. Camillo, then, was Christophe. The French names peeled off the wall like labels in the heat, and under them were Piemontese men with photographed faces, and I was fairly sure, and could confirm none of it.
Two absences, and I set them down as I found them, without explanation, because I had none. I could not find Adelaide. And I could not find “Carrie” — the sister Alice had told me died young. A wall of the family’s faces, and the two women missing from it. I noted the cold spot and walked on. Someone I was about to meet would need about an hour to settle everything I could not confirm in that cemetery — the names, the arithmetic, and the absences, though the absences are a later essay’s weight to carry.
So we left the cemetery having seen, without knowing it, my cousin, and having recovered, without being able to prove it, the actual names of my great-uncles. The village had answered its first questions the way this family answers all questions: accurately, and without corroboration.
That evening, hungry past politeness, we found our way to the agriturismo run by Carla’s brother, where by pure calendar luck a small farewell buffet was laid for a group of students finishing a season of work and study there — bread, some cheese, fruit. It was offered to us with complete generosity and we ate ravenously, and I record the menu not as complaint but as fact, because of what the fact did to me: we had arrived in my family’s village with very little, unable to explain ourselves, unable at first even to feed ourselves, taking gratefully whatever the place extended. Somewhere in the middle of that bread and fruit it occurred to me that I had been given, in miniature and in kindness, a taste of April 1884 — of what Adelaide and Giovanni met when their ship emptied them into New York with a child and a language that didn’t work and not enough money to live or leave. The village was not being inhospitable. The village was being exact.
The next day the physics returned, and I went under.
We had one full day left and no way to use it. Carla — warm, endlessly obliging — spoke no English, and our Italian was nowhere near the task of explaining that we were not tourists, that the American at her table believed his great-grandparents had walked out of this village a hundred and thirty years before, that we needed, somehow, an introduction to the town’s memory. Every attempt collapsed into pleasantries. The whole trip — the vanished website, the cancelled trains, the six years, all of it — had delivered us to within a few hundred meters of the answer and installed a glass wall of grammar. I did what despair does when it has a bed available. In the afternoon I lay down and slept, out of inertia and fatigue and frustration, in a room on the same floor as Carla’s kitchen.
What happened next happened a few meters from my head, without me, which I have come to believe is the point.
Lili, aware of how little time we had, was trying to get our mission across to Carla, and proposed a workaround: Carla should speak Italian, and Lili — a Spanish speaker — would try to catch it, the two languages being close enough to hope. Lili also speaks English, and French, and she moves among the three languages the way water finds a channel. The French in particular runs as a current under the others and surfaces on its own, unannounced. She rarely registers the crossing.
Somewhere in that attempt her Spanish turned into French.
Carla answered in French. And by the time Lili understood why she could suddenly understand Carla so well, the door had opened — almost at the last minute, and not by anything either of them had decided to do. Carla spoke French. She had studied it at school, here, in this Piemontese hill village, and had evidently been waiting decades for the chance. Lili explained, in French, why we had come. Carla lit up, and within minutes was on the telephone, excitedly making arrangements for us to meet representatives of the various Rovelli factions sprinkled all over this tiny hilltop town. Then she took the following day off from work to make sure we met all of them.
Lili came in and woke me. I will hear the sentence for the rest of my life:
“Carla speaks French!”
French had been Alice’s cover. It was the language and the invented identity that kept her safe from her own Italian heritage, that kept the family off her trail and kept me off it too. And at the final moment, it was French that unlocked the door where all the secrets were kept.
I had been asleep. The disclosure of my family arrived, like everything else in this history, while the searcher was withdrawn — except that this time the withdrawal was mine, and the appearance came anyway, carried by others, through a doorway, in the language of the lie.
Costa Vescovato is full of Rovellis. This should have made everything easy and made nothing easy — the name saturates the village without the villagers all being kin, the way a quarry saturates the local stone. Carla walked us through the town all the next day, door to door, Rovelli to Rovelli, translating our purpose into each kitchen, and each visit ended the same way: warmth, wonder, and no connection. By late in the day we had run out of Rovellis save one.
The last house was the house behind the fence.
He was outside again, and he let us through the wire, and Carla explained, and he listened, and he was gracious, and he said he honestly could not tell whether we were related. But — and here he said the thing the whole day had been walking toward — his aunt would know. His aunt was the historian of the village. Not of the family; of the village. The distinction mattered and I heard it matter: whatever we were, whoever we turned out to be, there existed a woman who held the memory of the entire town, and she was his aunt, and her name was Lilliana, and she was living now at the Casa di Riposo in Pontecurone, some miles away.
Before we left, Carla suggested a photograph, and so there is a photograph of that afternoon — the fence, the lawn, the four of us arranged and smiling. I mention it and set it down.
We were scheduled to leave the next morning. I began composing the polite version — perhaps we could stop at Pontecurone on the way to the train, if it wasn’t too much, Carla had already given us so much — and Carla was already refusing the entire construction, keys in hand.
“No, let’s go right now. There is no time to lose.”
I have turned that sentence over for years. She could not have known what she was correcting. Six years with a map in a drawer; a father who died holding an unscheduled plan; a lifetime of later deployed as the family’s load-bearing wall — and a Piemontese host with an afternoon off diagnosed the entire structure in six words and drove at it, fast. We sped out of Costa Vescovato toward Pontecurone in the falling light, and for once in the history of this family, an approach was not answered by a withdrawal. The road stayed open the whole way.
The Casa di Riposo Don Orione in Pontecurone is a large old institution with high ceilings and the particular hush of places that hold many last chapters at once. Carla led us in and spoke to the nurses. There were stairs — three flights of them — and I climbed them behind her with my heart doing something I declined at the time to name, and we came down a corridor to a room, and in the room, in bed, was a very old woman, lying down, whom I took to be asleep.
Carla, in her excitement, walked right in and started talking.
I learned only later, from Carla herself, what those first minutes of Italian contained, and I set it down here because it is the tenderest slice of the whole day. Before saying one word about America, or family, or a century of concealment, Carla laid before Lilliana a question of village jurisprudence: whether it was right to charge me for the night the cancelled trains had kept us from arriving. I had insisted on paying; Carla was conflicted; and Lilliana — a town elder, a woman whose counsel people sought — considered the matter properly and ruled that if I was willing to pay, then it was, in fact, fair. The books were balanced. Only then, with the accounts settled and the stranger established as a man who paid his debts, did Carla explain who the stranger thought he was.
The old woman in the bed turned and looked at me.
And then Lilliana Rovelli — whom I had never met, in a rest home in Pontecurone, in the middle of Piemonte, in Italy — began to speak, and she spoke in perfect English, in the accent of a New York none of us was standing in, slowly, clearly, a recitation:
“Giovanni. Adelaide. Alfonso. Camillo. Lizzy. Lina. Alice.”
And then:
“I am your relative.”
The names. The names I had spent a lifetime excavating one at a time out of censuses and evasions and a burned archive’s ash — the true ones, and the ones I had only decoded off a cemetery wall two days before, and names I did not have at all — an old woman I had known for one minute laid them out in order like a hand of cards she had been holding since before my birth, waiting, apparently, for someone to finally sit down at the table. And then she answered, in four words, the question Lili had asked in passing at a fence, the question the census had asked, the question I had been asking all my life.
The room began to spin. I put my hand out and leaned on the spare bed behind me, certain for a moment that I was going to faint onto it, and the room went on without me — Carla, Lili, the reciting woman — while I held on and understood that the file was not merely open.
The file had a keeper. The keeper had been waiting. The keeper spoke English.
What she told us — that day, and across the summers that followed, and what it does to every stone already laid in these essays — is the third essay.
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