As soon as this bus came to a halt I was going to have to create something meaningful with nothing but a tiny container of ashes. I tried to do some deep breathing, pulling the stale air of the bus through my nostrils. After a few breaths, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Daniel, reaching over from the seat next to me.
“Look,” he said, motioning out the window. “It’s so green.”
He still looked a little out of it from the Dramamine. His hair was messy, and his eyes were glazed. But I followed his pointer finger to the landscape rushing past the bus, and it was, without a doubt, green.
I didn’t know much about Sicily, but I had imagined it sunbaked and dusty, beige cities edged by rinds of twinkling turquoise water. But this was the height of spring, and the land outside was an unending sweep of green hills leading to the foot of olive-colored mountains. The only break in the wall of green was the occasional citrus grove, bursting with fat lemons.
I felt a momentary calm come over me. How could anything bad happen in a place that looked like this? I wasn’t the only one moved. When I turned to look at the back of the bus, I saw Paul aiming a state-of-the-art digital camcorder out the window, trying to capture what I’d just been admiring. He was showing a sizable amount of plumber’s crack, and Archie was behind him, helping him hold the camera steady.
An hour passed like this. A series of gorgeous landscapes and hairpin turns down narrow roads. After a while, I started to take the scenery for granted. My eyes glazed over and I let the green of the land and the blue of the sky blur together. I had been dozing off and on for about fifteen minutes when the bus took a sharp turn around a bend and I opened my eyes wider. I caught sight of something in the distance. Up a steep grassy hill, split in half by a row of cypress trees, was a tight cluster of little houses. A small walled-in town.
The layout was a perfect rectangle. I had never seen a town so compact and perfectly planned. But that’s because it wasn’t a town at all. As we got closer, I could see that the small-scale houses were made of stone. And they weren’t houses. They were mausoleums.
“Stop!” I said. “Stop the bus, please!”
At the sound of my voice, Capo stomped on the brakes, and the bus jerked to a skidding halt on the winding road. I held on to Daniel’s arm and braced myself. Behind me, Paul slammed into a seat back, somehow keeping hold of the camera as his black-rimmed glasses launched from his face.
“What in the hell was that?” he said.
I met each of the men’s eyes individually. I cleared my throat.
“I apologize for the abrupt stop, guys, but... um... I’d like to step outside just for a moment to see something. Thanks.Grazie.Thanks.”
I motioned to a stunned-looking Daniel, and he followed me off the bus and onto the gravel-strewn road. There were no other cars and the air was as fresh as I’d ever breathed. I crossed the road and began to walk up the hill toward the walled cemetery-town before me. Daniel was a step or two behind.
The others were slow to leave the bus but, by and by, I heard the sounds of their voices, too. Eventually, I reached an open gate and stepped inside to find a series of streets, complete with tiled signs, lined by one-story crypts, each bearing a small black-and-white photo of the entombed.
I started walking down a street named Viale SanGiovanni, and as I got farther toward the center, the tombs became more ornate. Some of them were more like churches than homes, their facades swirling with carvings of angels. But of course there were churches; I was in a city for the dead.
It should have been spooky. We were the only ones in the cemetery, walking the streets of a literal ghost town. But, when I approached one particular mausoleum with a small dome on top, I looked at the two images of a married couple, grinning in black-and-white, and I felt comforted somehow. At least they were together.
I turned around to see Daniel watching me. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn’t know what. Then I heard a loud, unintelligible sentence from behind me.
“What was that?” I asked.
Capo took a step forward.
“Un terremoto,”he said.
He paused a second, squinting as if he were searching for something on the horizon. Then he shook his hands. “The earth... quakes!” he said.“Capito?”
“There was an earthquake here?” Daniel asked.
“Si,”said Capo.“Un terribile terremoto.”
I noticed then that Paul was filming this, too. Capo walked up and stood directly in front of the camera, as ifhe had just been waiting for this moment to host his own television show.
“The wholecittà...tuttodestroy.Abbandonato!”
I looked again at the little crypt homes.
“These are the victims?”
Capo seemed to understand. He nodded and gestured toward the crypts. I reached out and touched a wall. It was rough and chalky against my palm.
“So, this is the only town left?” I said.
Everyone was quiet.
