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“I just want permission to visit the cemetery,” I stuttered in Italian. The priest rolled his eyes. The left one took its time rolling back into place. He stared at me as best he could and mumbled under his breath.
“Did you catch that?” I asked Pippo.
“He says you can go, but to be quick because there will be a funeral service right before sunset. According to him, your people are in row thirty-four.”
“Wow. He knew that off the top of his head.”
“It is a small village, Sara.”
I asked the priest if we could leave my luggage inside the door to the church for a bit. He begrudgingly agreed with a nod and shuffled off. I considered bringing the box of Rose’s ashes with me. After all, she wanted to be scattered close to the family plot, close to her mother. But I wasn’t ready to part with them yet, so I left them with the rest of my bags.
The streets of the town might have been a labyrinth, but there was a meticulous order for the dead. The grounds of the cemetery were well kept and tidy. Small stone mausoleums ascended out of the dirt, each one bearing four or five names of relatives stacked on top of one another inside. We made our way to row thirty-four and as the priest had promised it was filled with my ancestors. Quintu, Manfredo, Miceli, Luca, Giovi, Adianu, Santo. Enza, Ireni, Gianna, Lia, Itria, Talia, Valentina.
I tried to remember the year Giovanni came to America, the year Serafina died. Was it 1925? The dates on the headstones were mostly in order.
But she wasn’t there.
“There’s no grave for Serafina Marsala or Serafina Forte,” I said to Pippo, even though he must have realized the same thing by the way he was backtracking and inspecting each headstone.
“It would be Serafina Forte on the gravestone. Women do not change their last names when they marry like Americans usually do. They keep their father’s name. Like you kept yours.” He attempted to make sense of the missing grave. “Perhaps because she died before her husband and because he had already left for America, maybe they buried her with her own people, with her mother and her father. We can go back and ask the priest. There is probably a record of the wedding and a recording of her death. It is all written down in a big book in the rectory I’m sure.”
The priest was even more chagrined to see us when we found him in his small office, tracing his fingers along the text in a massive book that resembled some kind of registry. Once again I let Pippo explain what we needed while I tried to make myself shrink into the veil covering my hair.
“Serafina Forte, husband Marsala?” Pippo repeated the things he’d said earlier in Italian. “Died close to 1925. Is there a listing for her in your records?”
The priest glanced back down at his book and then rose with painful effort and shooed us out of his office with all his energy.
“Lei non è qui,” he nearly shouted. She is not here.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Once he had gotten us outside, he repeated himself and this time he lunged toward me and spit on the ground.
“Quella donna non è qui. Non seppelliamo donne come lei.”
I turned to Pippo. “Did he say the church doesn’t bury women like her?”
Pippo gripped my arm again. “Sara, we should go.”
The priest glared up at me and pointed at the gate with a long yellowed fingernail before limping back into the church.
I let Pippo collect my bags for me. We stayed silent until we were off sacred ground. “What was he talking about and what did he mean, ‘women like her’?” I asked.
By the way he sped up it was clear that Pippo didn’t want to answer my question. His response was cautiously polite.
“Priests will not bury someone who fell out of favor with the church, who they believe committed an unforgivable sin. For example, those who took their own lives are not buried in cemeteries. Those who have taken the lives of others.”
“She died of an illness,” I insisted, while Rosie’s letter tugged at the back of my mind.
Pippo was apologetic now, but also at a loss. “I am sorry, Sara. I do not have any more answers for you. I wish that I did. The priest read through the church records and he clearly found something he did not like.”
“Can we ask to see those records?” Even as I asked it, I knew it was naïve and stupid.
“He would never allow it. Privacy.”
The entrance to Hotel Palazzo Luna was hidden a few doors down another alleyway so narrow the walls grazed my shoulders. It was a weathered but imposing yellow building with wide green shutters, five stories high and teetering on the edge of the hillside. Vines of electric pink bougainvillea nearly obscured the front door, which was locked. No one answered the bell, while Pippo kept checking the time on his phone.
“You need to leave?” I asked.
