They pulled another body from the lake last week. Sometimes it takes days to resurface, but the lake always gives back what it takes.
That bulky yellow helicopter found the boy. We call it the Canary but only for its color and flight. It doesn’t warn against death like in a coal mine; rather, it eulogizes. It sings an anti-lullaby, an agonizing keen that never wavers. It is the most foreboding of hearses because we can never tell whether it is coming or going. When the Canary passes, we stop and watch and guess. Its ominous drones shake our spirits as much as the walls of these ancient homes built before Italy was even a nation.
This town has become a museum, a memorial to what we have lost. It is a quaint Italian postcard you’d send to a relative: the cobbled stone and crumbling brick, the noisy neighbors who sing as much as they argue, the lingering smell of sautéed garlic, an open invitation to dinner.
This town was home to 984 people. When the Canary passed, that figure became 983. And then at 3 p.m., the sixteenth-century church bells’ doleful beat, with its interminable pauses, told us to prepare for a funeral. I believe the boy was twenty years old, and he will remain twenty years old forever. We dread the day his younger sister becomes an adult, older than her older brother, and must leave him behind for uncharted waters. Those of us still here will help her navigate them, but we cannot dream for her. It will always feel like we failed her in some way. It’s a feeling you get used to when you must live among what you’ve lost.
The worst part about such a loss is how gradual it seems. It creeps on you, until it becomes a new normal. One way or another, the youth leave us. They move to the city for school or a temporary job and then stay. Unless you are a fisherman or a farmer or a bartender, it’s unlikely that you have a job in this town. Most people must look to the city for their livelihood, and cannot be blamed when they do not return. The distance to the city is not long, but it is worlds away.
That is life in a dwindling community eroding by the day, adagio, slowly, like a seaside cliff. You don’t notice the creeping onslaught of change when you live within it every day; it is only visible on the rare occasion when one leaves, returns and sees it anew.
This town has become a museum, a living testament to what we have chosen to forget. Legacy is a specter; it is the wind that has always hugged the canyons that cradle the lake. Depending on the direction, down lake or uphill, the wind has a name, but it has long been forgotten. Sometimes you hear it whisper, but it speaks an ancient tongue that no longer appeals to us.
Ritual has become relic. Customs have become dusty antiques. It is the existential crisis facing all of Italy, where the average age is forty-four, the third highest in the world. The cemeteries are full and houses are empty, abandoned and left to their ghosts.
It is what happens when, within the span of a decade, a digital revolution brings us up to speed with one world and leaves us stuck in another. In the name of innovation, a tectonic, cultural shift, shook these rural villages, whose technology and infrastructure was built by ancient Rome. We have not been the same since.
We do not have Uber; Netflix does not work when it rains. We attempt to get our drinking water from mountain springs and eggs from our neighbors’ chickens, but it is more out of guilt for willfully neglecting the traditions of our home. Somewhere along the way this town did a spring cleaning of those traditions only to forget where it placed them. It only has memories of once-sprawling festivals that grow smaller every year, of people making their living from the land that now sits untilled, of shepherd paths that have since grown over but once took you to mountaintops. The town, these people, still hold these memories dear, but who does tradition serve if the next generation isn’t able to embrace it?
This town has become a museum, an exhibit frequented by the very people whose fathers built it. They are home yet they are tourists. They marvel at the way their ancestors existed, wax nostalgic upon the stories they heard but would never want to live. It is but the way of a modernizing world: always scrutinizing, pinching inefficiencies like ticks, preening its feathers only to become dirty again.
Some of us still hike up into the woods and chop down old trees to warm us in the winter, only to turn on the heater when we are too lazy to build a fire. Some still try to grow vines of tomatoes and grapes by tying them to sticks until some unforeseen pest comes along and sends us to the supermarket. Some still scour the hills for precious mushrooms and chestnuts, but we Google how to cook them. This modernizing world has yet to engineer a vegetable that tastes better than what grows in one’s own garden. It has yet to formulate how many tablespoons are in a grandmother’s pinch of salt. (Hint: It is never enough.)
We no longer have time for recipes, not the way we used to. Over centuries, they had been passed along like heirlooms by their stewards, bequeathed with care, not simply because you are related but merely because you are willing. You must first hear their caretakers’ stories. You must first earn their trust over time. But we no longer have time for the storytellers. The time it takes to learn a family recipe is inefficient. It will not pay our bills. It will not give us the job we desperately seek. Only when we hear those sobering 3 p.m. church bells toll for our grandparents will we regret. Only then will we discover that tradition is both a shadow and ghost.
This town has become a museum, a reminder of what used to be. Hungover and nicotine-deprived retirees clamber into the bars at 8 a.m. and order a caffè corretto, a shot of espresso with a drop of liquor. But in this decaying village where the bartenders are also your neighbors, it is more often a shot of liquor with a drop of espresso. And when they tell embellished tales of their youth, often unsolicited, these hardened men with leathery faces smile wistfully and slap their knees in laughter. That mirth is a medicine they desperately need.
They explain the history of the wooded paths I walk and I buy them their drinks like I’m feeding the meter. It all goes on some running tab I pay at the end of each month and they joke that it is a tax write-off for an aspiring writer. Diving into their memories, the villagers disclose their favorite fishing holes, the secret paths that lead to waterfalls, the shaded hillsides where you can find porcini mushrooms in the height of autumn.
To them, I’m a messenger, a vessel for their stories, a map of the places they can no longer enjoy. Even though I am an outsider, they have absorbed me into their lore. After years listening to their tales, maybe they see the duty I feel to honor that past, their past. Maybe they know their fables will live with me long after the bells ring for them; I think that is why they smile. Because maybe there is a chance that one day the world will hear their stories. Because maybe this old Italy can exist within the new one.
There is one man I have yet to speak to. The Canary came for his son years ago, not long after I first arrived here, and people say it broke him. He is a cantankerous, corrupt man with a bad tan, as if trauma had been burnt into his face. I always say hello to him and I hope it consoles him, even though I feel it never does.
This town has become a museum, a celebration of life. It is both an appreciation of yesterday and a warning for tomorrow. It is both a sobering lesson of who we were and how we can be better than the shadows that follow us. When tragedy strikes, we mourn what we failed to do, even if we did what was expected of us. And when we celebrate, we pour our wine by the liter and wonder whether it’s the last time we will gather for such an occasion. That glass of wine is neither half-full nor half-empty; we only swill it and appreciate it, because here, even the present feels like a memory.
But today, we can step away. Today we can celebrate, because today, at 3 p.m., the church bells rang — jubilant, festive tolls that warmed us like some long-awaited dawn. The town’s population is back to 984, and we await her name.
Tonight, we will gather and toast to her health. Tonight, we will sing the songs of her ancestors, for these are the traditions that made us. They are the ghosts that travel with us until we, too, must pass them along to a world that continues to move beyond us.
