Francesca Iurlaro
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On the road, persimmons hang from trees like heavy breasts. How can abundance and grief coexist?

         My father and I drive daily to see his best friend Tommaso. I witness my father’s pain move around like a heavy giant, clumsy, until he sits on a chair by his best friend’s deathbed.

         He never takes Tommaso by the hand, for fear of breaking his friend, maybe? but mostly himself.

Now that the end is near, there must be some kind of planning, some sense of future abundance within reach, however miserable our grasp. I tell my dad, let’s bring lunch to Tommaso’s family every day. He nods, in silence. Silence is an unusual state, for him, the man with a loud, unrequested opinion on everything. Whenever my father is at loss for words, a door opens between us, a channel of communication.

          Tommaso’s daughter Eleonora is vegan, and my dad comes from a family of butchers: what will we even cook, his frightened eyes ask? Catholics use meat to participate to the mystery of Eucharist; but on Fridays of Lent, Catholics abstain from eating meat. I think we can come up with a few vegan recipes, I tell him, hoping to sound reassuring. He nods, again.

           In the desert of hopeless death, Catholics abstain from eating meat. When death is impending, it is natural to refrain from eating flesh; we are not vultures hovering around. Without any hope of resurrection, eating meat is pointless—what’s there to participate to? The mystery of death needs the mystery of life. But before resurrection, life is not an option. We abstain from eating meat as we wait for death. We can’t know for sure that death will turn into life, again. Terror, despair—the touchstone of true faith, waiting with no hope, waiting for nothing in return. But because it happened once that a God incarnated into our world, there is hope in eating dead meat because, should it live and breathe through us once again, the promise of resurrection is fulfilled, and we might feel like gods again. Life always comes back to us, after the end.
 

          Day one: we cook minestrone, Italy’s staple vegetables soup. It means ‘big meal’, from the Latin minestrare, to serve, to govern. In Apulian dialect, the verb is still used: ministrare, ‘to serve a meal’. It has a governmental, pastoral quality I can’t quite translate, and that is quite the opposite of serving. It is always the person in charge of the kitchen who ‘administers’ food.

The evening before, we go grocery shopping. I say, let’s use fresh borlotti beans for texture. My father looks at the price and shrugs: the beans are a bit expensive. He is as worried about money as unconcerned by it altogether when it comes to Tommaso. My dad’s financial doom—his raging family wound. The house he helped my grandparents buy; the support they never gave him. Tommaso and his family of rowdy children—our family.

            In the car, the radio plays old song from the 70s. Back then, my father didn’t know Tommaso yet. They met right after I was born. In the 70s, my father was still in Puglia. His parents made him drop out of high school when he was sixteen, to work in tobacco fields. He gave his parents all the money he made, and he often accompanied his father on long trips on his truck. It stayed in the family, I think, this passion for driving together somewhere.

          Hills unfold gently one after the other as my father drives smoothly. More persimmon trees. In the late November light, the future looks like a Garden of Eden with no humans.
 

 

A song on the radio:

 

Tutto quanto mi sembra giusto                                                          

Quando fuori è mattina presto

Ogni via ha ancora un suo colore

Per farle tutte uguali

Basteranno due ore

 

(Gianni Togni, Semplice)[1]

 

 

         Day two: vegan lasagna. This is a harder challenge for my father because it implies an impossible ingredient: SOY MILK BÉCHAMEL. He watches me make three batches of it and completely fuck up the first one. The second and the third are creamy enough and don’t smell like a lump of flour. He tries it with a spoon, and nods quietly.

         He layers all the ingredients, mushrooms, béchamel, potatoes, béchamel, radicchio, béchamel, walnuts, between the flaccid pasta sheets. We add some soy milk before we put the tray in the oven, so the lasagna doesn’t dry too much.

        That dad approves of this is really the measure of his grief: in the face of impending loss, EVEN SOY IS FINE. Can I use margarine, for the béchamel, I ask?

Quiet, again. Yet, his bulging eyes say:

 

NO MARGARINE, PLEASE.

 

Olive oil is where my father draws the line of life.

 

         The next day, we carry the lasagna in the car but feel hungry during the drive. We stop for a small bite of focaccia, and we share it in the car, in a supermarket parking lot.

         All my childhood memories involve Tommaso in some form. I also owe him something important: my smile. A dentist, Tommaso saved me from a childhood of constant bullying at school, because my teeth were crooked and protruding, and accompanied me into my glorious era of braces. The hygienic pain of my teeth moving; the joy of a new smile when Tommaso finally removed the braces. I went from being called a rabbit in school to, in more recent times, being with a man who told me: you have such a beautiful smile I want to lick your teeth and feel the taste of your lunch.

 

The bullying is never over.

Tommaso once drove us to a small town in central Italy where my father had just been relocated, just to see what it was like. He drove fast, and recklessly, but claimed he was driving adagio, adagio, while my sister vomited all her insides. It was like witnessing my father’s first day of school. His best friend was driving him to his new place, so he could look around, see how it was, familiarize himself with the environment before it all began.

           In the car, we are all children. Fathers are thing of the past; fathers are a thing of the future.

My father never wanted to teach me how to drive. He said he didn’t want me to make the same mistakes he makes, but in 32 years, I have never seen him make one. Unlike Tommaso, he is a very careful driver.              Once we were in a tunnel and a car behind us somehow didn’t see us. It would’ve crushed us if my dad didn’t press the accelerator, and thus accompanied the crash, gently. How did that instinct even come to him—accelerating instead of braking in the face of fatal danger? How was that a mistake?

          Fatherhood is a specter coming from the future. The present is a drive test for children without a license. Adagio, adagio, my father will be gone too. But because we have cooked vegan lasagna together, and we were children together once, in the car—will my father be with me, in the future, when he dies?

 

 

Onda su onda,

Mi sono ambientato ormai.

Il naufragio mi ha dato la felicità

Che tu, tu non mi dai.

 

(Bruno Lauzi, Onda su Onda)[2]

 

          At lunch, lasagna is inevitably dry and lacks a bit of flavor. But the effort we put into making it cheers everyone up momentarily. Out of nowhere, a bureaucratic problem appears—the palliative care doctors never received the request for Tommaso’s medications—and my dad devotes himself to disentangle it, while I wash many, many dishes.

          Day three: lentils soup. Tommaso once took us to picnic in a lentil field as violet as lavender. Then we hiked on a mountain; when we reached the top, the breathless view a lake, down in the valley. It was a summer day, but it was so cold that my father and Tommaso wore blankets as jackets. Wild horses around us raced as fast as our hearts.

          Day four: fava bean purée with chicory. A dish from Puglia, a dish from home. When they came to Puglia to visit us for the holidays, Tommaso’s children were freer, fiercer than I ever was. They climbed trees as I watched, they slapped each other in the face as I sensed danger; they savaged rooms, gardens, cars, beaches, terrorized other children. I was too fascinated to call for help, too excited make them stop.

They laughed and laughed as I wished I could join.
 

           Downstairs, in Tommaso’s kitchen, we, the children of yesterday, are today’s self-conscious millennials. The boys fight, as they used to, throwing pillows and phones at each other. Eleonora and I yell at them, then we laugh; it feels like 1999 all over again. We, the children, we cry and fight and throw phones around. Then we all laugh; will we laugh at Tommaso’s funeral, too?[3] Hushed voices: consider inheritance law. I think of the house where my grandparents live in now, which was bought with my dad’s money—shouldn’t it be his? It will eventually be.

           One day it will be mine. All it takes to own stuff is to be a child. Legal mastery outlives us; objects obliterate us. We drink our coffees corretti with anise-liquor and then silence inevitably falls.

          What are fathers?[4] God sacrificed his son so that all mankind could be rescued. Yet, God doesn’t have a father himself. What does he know of fathers?

          Here’s what we know about them: children laugh and laugh and have no burden.

Day five: we bring chicken broth, like the one Tommaso always makes for Christmas.[5] Is today supposed to be a feast? Now that we have cooked meat I am afraid we will jinx this vegan vigil, this Counter-Easter of the Father.

          My father wraps the steel pot in a cloth, and ties its edges on the top, so the broth doesn’t spill along the way. Tommaso dies while we’re in the car. When we get there, he is already gone, but he’s still there. So many persimmons on the hills! My father drives gently as the radio plays:

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                                Gimme, gimme, gimme, a man after midnight.

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[1] ‘It’s early morning outside and everything feels right, every street still has its own color. It’ll only take two hours before they will all look the same.’

[2] ‘Wave after wave, I got used to this already. The shipwreck gave me the happiness that you, you never gave me.’
 

[3] The priest dangles his incense bearer towards the casket as a phone starts ringing. Whose phone is this? The muffled sound of the ringtone coming from under layers and layers of incensed, Vatican-approved purple robes suggests it is the priest’s. We laugh, we laugh, and then we giggle—people are staring, but we don’t care. We laugh and laugh, we just can’t stop. Tommaso just called!
 

[4] Tommaso’s children ask my father: will you still be friend to us, even when dad is gone?  We laugh, we laugh, we are all children.
 

[5] I deliver the eulogy: on the pulpit, I read with a heavy heart. There was an abundance to Tommaso: his generosity made all his friends become friends with each other. How can grief and abundance coexist? Every Christmas, Tommaso used to take the word ‘stuffing’ very seriously. He stuffed the chicken with all sorts of dried fruit, apricots, chestnuts, dates, turning each bird into a yearly cornucopia. We all laughed because it often tasted disgusting; but we ate and laughed nonetheless. It was baroque: abundance reminds you you’re alive, even when it’s redundant. Life is redundant. The priest’s phone has stopped ringing, because I am the priest, now. We all laugh, we all laugh, and I think we’ll never stop.