My mother visited the cemetery first every day, then every week, then every month, and then through the long years when she could not walk any more she told me "Bring a flower to Fernando" - my youngest brother who lived just one day. But I am not sure I can reach his small tomb this year, where in my personal tradition I used to pause and remember the morning of his birth at home, him crying and breathing in pain, and the drive to hospital in days when many women still used to give birth at home with just a midwife. It is somehow beautiful to think that she has reunited with him now, the child she could not nurse, whose diapers she could not change, and no first word listen, no first step see, no first school day remember. Every day of her life she thought of the experiences he did not have.
The cemetery of L'Aquila - most of it - is red zone. Our poor old dead will have to do without their colourful flowers this year. I know they don't care, the problem is that I do miss the moments of arranging the flowers in the copper vase before the tombstones. I may symbolically place the flowers in a pot over the one table in the temporary room where we do everything these days (sleep, eat, connect to the Internet, study, dry the clothes) - but it will not be the same. The floods and earthquakes and tornadoes that were until some months ago "next door", knocked at my door last April. The enormity of the loss is still not yet experienced. Every day brings something that is no more, and the feeling that we will not regain what was lost. A different city will be here, maybe not in my lifespan, a city I may help to build, but my spaces, corners, alleys, favorite shops, the theatre, cinemas, the concert hall, the library, the market in the central square with "my" fruit vendor, "my" small bakery with its wonderful pizza, the cappuccino at "my" bar and the bartender I used to exchange some words with every day, the museum with the huge mammouth skeleton that all young children wanted to see and that had some slight damages at the ribs too -, my newsagent, all the usual appointments of my life of before have all been wiped away and turned into memory places.
The cemetery too. Some of the blocks where thousands of our dead have been resting undisturbed, on the outskirts of the wounded city, are red zone too. Who knows when they will be given back to us. Who can think of the old dead when there have been new dead and when the living are struggling to rebuild a ghost of the previous life they had. But it is sad, so sad not to have this year those peaceful moments before the tombstones of our dear ones. It is so sad that the past was cut out suddenly too, when the floor below our beds, below our feet, and the roofs above our heads were no more safe places. Our saying "tieni i piedi per terra" is ironical, since the earth moved under our feet.
I did not want to leave my city when I was young and in search of a job, I stayed and enjoyed my low-tone life "far from the madding crowd", in a provincial town where the things we loved and the politicians we hated were always comfortably the same. Changes came through the years, but we - the unconscious soul of the city - slowed them down, and the web hotspots rose in the basements of old palaces. Though the 70 thousand aquilans will have new or repaired houses in the coming months and years - and this is good - the loss of the past is unreplaceable. The continuum between past and present was cut, the red-zoned cemetery reminded us - in case we were forgetting - that what is ahead is a new, unknown life, a new as yet unknown city will rise, and the new quarters will have no roots or identities. The roots are only in the memory now.
When the blocks in the red-zoned cemetery will be demolished and rebuilt - how many years in the future until this happens? - we may go in search of the new sites where our old dead we used to visit before the quake will be placed back to rest. The very use of a future tense is a question, no certainty. Do we have the time in front of each of us to wait for this future to take place and become a reality in everyday life? Will our children ever feel the tie that comes with repeated experiences of every year and ever feel the need and joy to take flowers to their grandparents? And as to those who still have the ties in the bookcases of their memories, as to me, when the red-zoned city will be rebuilt - if in my lifetime - I know that my bar, and bakery, and newsagent, will never be there again.