Other People’s Bodies by B.A. Van Sise
Cimitero delle Fontanelle, Italy, 2015. (B.A. Van Sise/Getty News)
The dirty man in his dirty clothes is leaning on his dirty stick next to an open pit in the ground. The pit is full of bones. So, too —if you’re technical about it— are he and I.
He points at them and asks me, again: “Well,” he says, “do you want them or not?”
I stood, speechless, over this hollow hole of bones: I remember these people. Or at least I’m trying to: it’s a memory of a memory, a story told to me in a younger life: my mother had been there for their rural Italian burial and she, for decades now just as dead as them, had told me all about it.
It is in certain moments that one thinks about the subtler shades of human life: I can name the first time I, walking down an alley and hearing footsteps behind me, grew scared. I can tell you with any certainty when first I yearned for the touch of someone else. Even with questions of degrees, shades of understanding, I can say when I had my first kiss, the first time I danced with someone, the first time I made love, the first time I fell in love. And, yes, standing over skeletons, one senses the gravity of these moments while living them.
That is all to say this: all the biggest memories in our lives are of other people’s bodies.
I first got interested in genealogy when I was a boy, after the death of my mother. You don’t meet many teenaged genealogists, but then again how many orphans does one really bump into in our modern, medical society? Archivists were always surprised when some pockmarked kid would shuffle up to their desks, and then grow dismayed and finally amused when they saw how serious I was about all of it. This, by the way, is a common story: most genealogists get interested because somebody who’d once felt just a little too present in their lives suddenly became too absent; if you send a letter to your departed dearest, you’ll never receive a reply. Paper ancestors, however, are much easier to get a hold of- and maintain relationships with- than real ones.
Unlike most genealogists, I hold no fantastic affection for my ancestors. Truth be told, if I ever found myself in the great hall of my forefathers I’m sure they’d be just as disappointed in me as I in them. Instead, my interest is mostly the detective’s urge, the scientist’s query. I have the curiosity of a coroner, who can find the cause of death but never actually undo the murder; I just want to find shipwrecks in oceans of time. One must go into it with no illusions: I know perfectly well that my ancestors are as stupid as sinking stones. I know that they are completely unaware of my existence. I know that as much as I look for them, they are not hoping to find me. Not ever.
Over the years I’ve made a few trips- usually late stage additions to already existing travel assignments- for the purpose of doing family research. In Scotland, I raised a pint in my great-grandfather’s village; even dead for decades, he could not find the time to meet me there. In Germany, I went to the places my Jewish mothers had been erased from, where they are now no more obvious than holes in water. This squalid, useless little town in Sicily where you and I are now standing together was home to my grandfather’s mother. Finding myself on the Italian mainland to teach a photography workshop, it was an easy hop, skip and jump down to poke through some records, drink a little glass of wine, and see what’s what.
I knew my grandfather well: lived with him for a while when I was a kid. He was a wildly literate man who had been inordinately proud of his own grandfather, another wildly literate man– a notary in a time when almost no Italians could tell one letter from another. My grandfather was a voracious reader who had, in turn, made me into a voracious reader, and I guess I just hoped I’d be able to go to this little town, find a piece of stone somewhere that someone had carved a name onto, and read it.
These people felt, in a way, familiar: after all, my mother had attended their funerals and told me about it even as a boy: a new world retelling of the pagan old ways, recounted the same way tepid, conforming modern Norwegians might regale of the Viking hordes. She told it in sepia tones: there were horses, sad women in black. Her own funeral, instead, was in technicolor: cars, highways, traffic. We watched television after.
Italian cemetery practices are, to the American mind, strange. Graves are not purchased but rented; you take out a contract on the place where you’ll rest in peace but, in a nation that hasn’t really known peace since the time of Caesar, your long death is short-lived: depending on the length of your lease, in twenty to fifty years you’ll be evicted from your grave and thrown, one presumes with a certain Dickensian flair, into the town’s common burial pit. It’s gotta be a real party in those town ossuaries: anybody who’s anybody, who’s dead, is there.
It’s a hard idea to cotton onto, especially in a nation so overwhelmed with Christianity: a nonchalant pile of broken bodies lying in a hole in the ground, all jumbled together. After all, these folks are Christian, and Christians believe that when Christ comes there’ll be a resurrection. So what happens when their Messiah finally does turn up and the ossuary doors swing open? What horrible beast, what thousand-legged animal will come scuttling out?
At the cemetery I speak to the custodian, tell him the names of the couple buried there; she died not long after the war, and her husband the notable notary spent a little longer in the world before departing it in 1959. “There’s no way they’re still here,” says the custodian, “it’s been too long.” I explain to him in a bondsman’s key that I’ve come all the way from America, and ask him to check. He sighs, and agrees, and then pulls out the book of burials: the dustiest, oldest tome I’ve ever seen: a farce of an archive, wrapped in cobwebs. No need wondering about Jesus, after all, I think to myself. He’s probably listed in there, too.
“Well, well, well,” he says after paging through about a quarter of the book. “I was wrong. They’re here.” He writes down the little numbers in the ledger and says “okay, follow me, I’ll take you there.”
Walking through the cemetery, it’s clear that nobody keeps close hold of the actual terms of these burial leases: plenty of plots here date back to the time of the first and second world war. It’s drizzling— the ground softly muddy— as the custodian, spider-dwelt book of burials under his arm, walks me through aisles of old gravestones adorned with little pictures until finally we come to an open, cement-lined hole in the ground. The hole had once been lined with mosaic, blue and yellow ceramic tiles- the broken pieces of them are everywhere- and the slab that had covered the whole thing has been shifted about a foot to the side.
“There is a crack in everything,” once wrote Leonard Cohen, “that’s how the light gets in.” Also bugs. Also the rain.
“Well, I imagine we’ll be throwing them in the ossuary pretty soon,” says the custodian. I cannot take my eyes off of it. I have to look. I have to. I turn my eyes into the pit, and the custodian, surely a man who has no delusions about death- brings his along, too.
Now, like most people with idle fantasies, I have the bad habit of imagining my ancestors as something out of, oh, Renaissance paintings: elegant people living lives of luxury, their legs, arms, tits akimbo, eating peeled grapes after a long, tiring day of upending hot oil on pesky peasants.
The reality is not as rosy: in the pit were lying four exposed bodies, one on top of the other. They were small, their clothing in little tatters: at the top I could see that well-read man in his blue coat, his yellow, greasy skull resting on top of his wife’s. You could see they’d all once been wrapped in shrouds, but their boxes had mostly broken down to splinters and knobs until finally all four of them- him, her, and her parents- were lying on top of one another, mingled like the mud around them, like red earth and pouring rain. The grim, perhaps funny reality is that this guy had spent this last century lying on top of his mother-in-law.
I watched them with a great deal of sadness. I watched them with a great deal of love. It didn’t feel, strange as it might sound, macabre, though after a moment I admitted to myself that I was nevertheless holding a wake for them: had they just died, I might have kept an eye out to make sure they didn’t move, that they weren’t to make one last bid to cheat fate and the undertaker. I marveled at their little bodies; my head sits six feet off the ground, but even stretched and unbound they all seemed a foot or two shorter. They and I, in fact, seemed to be of such different sizes that we might be different species: were the huge people that made me really so small? Or had they just contracted in the womb of eternity?
The truth is that nothing had made their life more available to me than the leaving of it. Still, they were strangers, and I startled when the custodian, who’d grabbed a wooden pole propped up against the next grave, poked me.
“We’re just throwing them in the ossuary,” he said. “You seem to care. Do you want them?”
It’s a hell of a big question.
The first problem is that one has little practical purpose for four dead bodies: they’re rubbish at dancing, awkward to have around during house parties. The other problem, quite frankly, is the waiting bureaucrat at my faraway, hometown airport: I live in a world they couldn’t imagine, but more importantly in a nation they only dreamed of. What in the world would I ever tell the man from United States Customs?
“So, hey,” he’d say, “do you have anything to declare?”
No, Sir, I do not.
“Really? It seems you have a skull under your arm.”
Nope.
“And it, uh, looks like you.”
Back in the real world, I shook my head no- I oddly just couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud, knowing that I was dooming them to the furrow. But then I remembered that my mother, whose funeral I attended as a boy, had attended theirs while not much older, and that she’d told me about it while sitting at a 1990s kitchen table sipping on a Marlboro cigarette. When you listen to a witness, you become a witness: she’d gone to their first funeral and brought me along. I was here for their second, still carrying her with me.
Standing over the bones, I knew I’d mucked up the transportation: I’d come here not in a car, but in a time machine.
Back then, these other people’s bodies had more life to them- well, some of them, anyway. He woke up to find her dead and, as was the custom, did the last thing he could for her: laying her out in the bathroom, he rubbed the bar of soap between his two hands to form a lather he then ran over her back. The water ran down onto their, now his, floor, and slid down the tiles into the corner of the smoothly and slightly sloped room. He ran the sponge under the water again, warmer now, until every trace of soap was gone, and washed her body clean before any stranger might see or know her. He retrieved her dark dress, the one with the little white polka dots that always fit her so cleanly, from the closet and clumsily stretched it over her, contorting her body under his arms to do the job. He was surely glad no one could see this last, awkward dance, and felt the awful beigeness that follows a death grow inside him as he noticed her begin to stiffen. He then carried her back to the bed, kissed her gently on the lips, picked up the phone on the nightstand, and called the carriage man.
They came, an hour later, a black cart drawn by a brown horse, and asked him to step out of the room when it was time for the gristly business: two men wrapped her up in a white bag, laid her out on a stretcher, and carried her out stiltedly. The funeral would be the following morning at the town cemetery, perched high in the hill to the east of town. Like in many out-of-the-way Italian towns, the cemetery was placed away from the city center and had been since the time of Napoleon; it was a measure against cholera, and to protect the public health. Angela would go into the mosaic-tiled tomb of her family, along with her parents and, some tomorrow, him. His grandparents were in the space right next to it.
Funerals had changed since he was a boy. He could remember the day when he was eight and his grandmother died, suddenly, of a heart attack. In that time, even a day was long to wait, and the body had to be put away almost immediately. But now the mortician- himself now, too, a resident of the cemetery- rushed to post notifications around the town: on the side of the church, on the city hall, next to the post office. The whole process must still have felt so antiquated for something great-great-grandfather, a person alive in his modern times, had to see with his own eyes: his wife laid out in a parlor as almost immediately dozens of friends and relatives showed up at the door, quietly, to see her and say goodbye. The next morning, another black carriage drawn by another rather wilted horse appeared right at the front door of their home, which was nestled in the valley of small rills and paper mills that cut and wove up into the mountains. Most of the folks who’d visited the prior afternoon came back, bringing with them their own children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, friends, employees: a cast of hundreds. The mortician brought in a box, plain enough, and loaded her into the back of the carriage, and the crowd assembled behind it. Children and grandchildren, the several dozen people born of her body, made of her clay, trailed closest behind. My mother is there, in the crowd, small, and so am I, now, too. We’re followed by all the others, and we walk slowly behind the carriage as it wends through the town, past the checkered church at its square, before it ducks back down an alley and into another and back again, a preposterous route of hard turns left and right down obscure little lanes. The carriage, the coffin and the crowd cling shoulder-tight with the homes of the people who’d turned out from them to follow it, canopied by laundry strung from one balcony to the next. A few old ladies watched down from the windows, lowering buckets on strings down, with flowers inside.
The whole thing was an old superstition: it’s important to get lost. It was meant to keep the gone from finding their way home. Grandma was placed into the tomb on top of her parents, themselves on top of two small metal boxes full of little brown bones- older ancestors who’d been compacted down after they’d been reduced to rocks- and the whole thing was closed over. Returning, they took the straight path back to the house, where all of the aunts cooked, and cooked, and cooked — everyone’s favorite things, a carnival of smells: sweet, earthy tomatoes and peppers roasting, the salty waves of starchwater curling over in the pasta pots, the fish roasting in the oven, the artichokes frying in the oil. At the center of the table, his back to the wall, great-great-grandfather sat, small and hunched over his plate, silently squirreling it all into his mouth with a spoon. All the children made chatter around him, too young to be solemn and too happy to be sad.
The eldest aunt took a break from keeping guard over the children to make a plate, as is the custom, and pile it high with macaroni and meat. She dropped a thick dollop of sauce over all of it, and set it outside the front door. Hospitality, in Italy, does not end with heartbeats, and so there it sits, in case the wayward should find their way back after they’ve gone to ground. If they turn up, everybody figures, the dearly departed should at least eat something, and then, like all good houseguests, understand the message: please come back, but please don’t stay.
B.A. Van Sise is an author and travel photographer, an Independent Publishers Book Awards gold medal winner, a New York State Artist Fellow, and recipient of the Prix de la Photographie Paris and the Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction. His work has been shown in expansive solo exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, the Center for Jewish History, and in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. He is the author of four books: the photographic monographs Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry (Schaffner, 2019) and Invited to Life: After the Holocaust (Schiffer, 2023,) and the upcoming On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues (Schiffer, 2024,) Other People’s Ghosts and Light in the Places Where They Dwell.
23 November 2023
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