Anne Schuchman
New Voices Award Finalist
36 Hours in Lecce
I’m taking a trip to Lecce, a city at the bottom of the heel of the Italian boot, along with my sister and our aunts. It’s the kind of trip that might show up in one of those “36 Hours in…” travel articles—picturesque baroque churches, pedestrian streets, Aperol spritzes at golden hour. But for my sister and me, these 36 hours are something else altogether.
I feel a pressure in my head, behind my eyes, that I attribute to travel—I always cry on planes. I’ve been talked into going with a package tour, even though it makes the entire process more complicated, like a well-meaning toddler who says, “I help!” when you know if you just did it yourself, it would be faster, cheaper, and good enough. But this time I let it go. Because this is my first trip with my sister since her phone call two years earlier, the one when I went on and on about my sciatica before finally asking, “And how are you doing?”
My sister and I will arrive in Lecce a day before our aunts and have a day and a half together to discover the city on our own before the tour actually begins. At least for these 36 hours in Lecce, the cancer will stay in the background, as if saying quietly, don’t mind me, I’ll wait. Grief has brought us to Lecce. It’s anticipatory grief, but it’s grief all the same.
Car service, plane, another plane, and finally another car service. Our driver, a young, burly guy named Stefano (whom our aunts will later insist on calling Ste-FAH-no, no matter how many times I nudge them by repeating STE-fa-no), drives the Mercedes minivan past some of Puglia’s 60 million olive trees, many of them devastated by the bacteria Xylella fastidiosa. The name rolls off Stefano’s tongue, as though he’s reciting a spell from Harry Potter. The dying trees seem caught between the dry earth and the heavens, reaching up with their withered limbs, like giants falling in battle. My first impression is a scrabbly graveyard.
Sometimes called the Florence of the Italian South because of its role as a cultural center, Lecce itself is a work of art. Made from a local type of limestone, its buildings are shades of ochre, peach, and honey, dotted with fossilized shells, like intricately carved sandcastles as they glow in the sun. It looks like one very heavy rain could wash the whole city away.
Stefano delivers us to the Apollo Suites, a hotel in the same building that houses a hundred-year-old theater. Our hotel room is actually a small apartment with two bedrooms, a kitchen with bright green-enameled cabinets, and, most wonderfully, a terrace where we can sit and watch the sunset. To spare my sister the stairs, I take the bed in the loft.
When I was young, my two sisters—one six years older, and this one, four years older— would give me piggyback rides. I always preferred being on this sister’s back because she seemed so much more solid. Strong. Safe. I’m almost as familiar with her body as my own, having grown up together and shared a room. But more familiar now, having helped her through radiation, surgery, and just taking a shower (Avert your eyes, she laughs).
As we unpack, she tells me she needs to show me something. It’s gross—like that scene in Alien. After losing weight over the past two years, she’s gained a bit back, which seems like a good sign. But as she pulls up her shirt, I see her belly is swollen, like a cruel satire of pregnancy. Her doctors have said it’s nothing to worry about, but she’s a doctor herself, and a specialist in one body in particular: her own.
You look great, never better! I lie, and she laughs, then looks down at her belly, and says, Ugh. That ugh means three things:
1. It’s cancer
2. It’s growing
3. It’s going to kill me
That’s the closest to a complaint I’ll ever hear from her.
I tell her it’s hardly noticeable, at least with her shirt down, so stop flashing people, this isn’t New Orleans, and she laughs again and pulls her shirt down.
We sit on our terrace, perched over the pedestrian Via Trinchese, Lecce’s pedestrian-only main drag where the evening passeggiata happens. As though everyone has received a telepathic message, around 6:30 p.m., the “golden hour,” the Via Trinchese fills with people of all ages— strolling families, flirtatious teenagers, seniors arm-in-arm, dogs sniffing in greeting. It feels like the entire city has turned out on the street for an hour, stopping for a coffee, ice cream, or perhaps an aperitivo, before arriving in the main piazza of Lecce, named for the patron saint, Oronzo, who boasts a convoluted legend involving a shipwreck, the Apostle Paul, a beheading, and the miraculous salvation of the town from the plague.
“I love this,” my sister says in an almost whisper. I take this to mean this moment, the passeggiata, young people, old, city, ice cream, strollers, dogs, Sant’Oronzo, maybe life itself. Whenever I travel, I wonder, Could I live here? Usually, the answer is no, or maybe just for a while. But that day in Lecce, I think, yes, I could live here. Or was that because wherever she was felt like home?
I’d like to pluck this moment in Lecce—the hotel terrace, the passeggiata, and the city at sunset—and seal it safely in a snow globe. Because just three months later the cancer loses its patience and comes back with a vengeance.
*
We’re together on New Year’s Eve, and she’s feeling fine—great, even. For some reason, maybe the three glasses of Champagne, I decide to try and do a cartwheel—I’ve never been able to do one. It ends badly, but with laughter.
“I can still do one!” she says, and demonstrates with a perfect cartwheel in the middle of the living room, raising her arms in triumph.
“And she sticks the landing!” I say.
But two weeks later, her back is aching, and she goes in for an MRI. It’s back. I know it wasn’t the cartwheel that did it, yet somehow it feels like cancer couldn’t let that moment of joy go unchallenged.
When I help her after this, her third and final surgery, she thanks me, thanks me for being strong. I stammer, “Oh, sure, it’s nothing; I’m sure anyone could do it…” She meets my eyes in a way I never want to be seen. I don’t feel strong—or maybe I don’t want to be strong. My head starts to hurt—not a headache, but pressure, like my brain is swelling, blowing up like a balloon from the inside. Maybe it’s from holding the tears in. This last surgery is successful in a way, I suppose, because now there’s something definitive. Only, the diagnosis is something so rare—rarer and more lethal than being struck by lightning—there’s little information, much less hope. “I have no regrets,” she says, “just—I was really looking forward to being a grandma.”
*
My sister and I leave the Apollo Suites and are swept along with the passeggiata to Piazza Sant’Oronzo. Someone is playing the melody from a rap song on an electric cello, and the sound fills the shell-shaped piazza. Old men perch on a low wall near the Roman amphitheater, arms
crossed, like black-and-white feathered magpies, carrying on their conversation from the afternoon, or the evening before, or maybe a year ago, about politics, or soccer, or do you remember… Their wives sit nearby laughing, interjecting every once in a while into their conversations, O ma sta’ zitto te. At a certain point, everyone knows it’s time to go home. With its combination of architecture from different eras that shouldn’t work together but does, antiquity meets modernity—Lecce is new to us, at least. Everywhere you walk, history is under your feet. A few years ago, a homeowner discovered Roman ruins while renovating his basement. Now he runs a small museum out of his home. Ever since the seas retreated, people have lived here, died here—a few remembered, but mostly forgotten. We’re here for just a few days, but our ghosts will go on walking in Lecce.
*
A year later, I’m deleting old photos on my phone, and I come across this trip. I can’t get rid of a single one, not even blurry ones, the ones that show my sister only in partial view or from the back. Because isn’t this the way we really experience the world—off-center and partially obscured? The photos seem like testimony: she was here. And maybe our ghosts really are still in Lecce. Both of them.
It feels greedy somehow to be so attached to this one sister, when we come from a family of six—three girls and three boys—all relatively close, both in age and affection. A large family possesses always-changing alliances, but as long as I can remember, it was me and my sister. With six, there could never be a “middle child.” But now we are five, and I’m that middle child.
*
We wander that first night, my sister and I, and decide to go for a drink, intending to move on to dinner. Perhaps because of its role as a university town, Lecce has a well-developed café culture. We choose one of the bistro-type places that line Piazzetta Santa Chiara, a small but lively park named for the nearby church, and with temperatures still comfortable in mid-October, we sit outside. My sister orders something familiar, an Aperol Spritz, while I get a Hugo Spritz instead—Saint-Germain and Prosecco with a small fistful of mint leaves muddled at the bottom of the glass. The appetizers are generous, and the aperitivo becomes dinner, so we scrap our plans to go elsewhere, and head back to the hotel.
As I look back now to that night in Lecce, I think maybe we should have shared a bed after all, like we sometimes did when we were kids, and I’d wake up from a nightmare or wetting my bed. We could have just lain there, our arms draped over each other, like two teddy bears.
*
Hospice is the slowest form of slow travel. She wanted to die at home, but they were afraid she wouldn’t survive the trip from the hospital. This seems ridiculous—she would laugh about this, I think. Instead, she’s in the hospital where she once worked, now surrounded by family and friends, like a room full of women in labor, midwifing each other through the pain. She always had cold hands and would apologize to her patients, but right now her hands feel warm.
A few hours after I arrive at the hospital, she has one lucid moment. “Look who’s here,” her husband says to her, and she looks up, gives me a tight smile, and whispers, “Thank you.” And again: boom, boom, boom. I can hear my heart in my head. It feels like my brain is going to squeeze out through my eyeballs. There’s a strange sort of shame in dying, in death, isn’t there? But you know what kind of people die? All of them. That was a trick question.
A nurse pulls me aside. “You’re her sister?” “Younger sister,” I say, a spark of vanity. “She was—is—our doctor. My son’s. He’s disabled. She was perfect. When I saw who I was assigned to, I told them I just couldn’t, I just can’t…”
I glance over at my sister, her dry mouth gaping, hands drawn into claws, looking hard and plastic like a mannequin. I wouldn’t want to be her nurse either.
Her daughter snuggles up with her, showing her videos on her phone. Her brother, shoulders curved, looks up every once in a while, blinks away tears, and says, you look great, Mom—doesn’t she? Another nephew has brought me an enormous burrito wrapped like a newborn, only in foil, not a blanket. I wonder if you can be physically sick from grief, but practically swallow the burrito whole and it stays down. Grief makes me hungry. And I think, wouldn’t it be nice if a bomb would just fall on this hospital room and take us all out, all at once?
Everyone goes into the hallway for a few minutes, leaving the two of us alone. And then it’s just me and my sister. I want to run away, and I want to stay there forever. I climb into bed with her and hold her and tell her how much I love her and how much I will always love her and that I’ll make sure her kids are ok and that whenever I see a butterfly I’ll think of her—or is it a dragonfly—a cardinal—a rainbow? Fuck it, something. And I tell her everything and absolutely nothing. I tell her I’ll write about her, and I realize that sounds like a threat, not a promise. She dies six hours after I leave.
*
That day in Lecce, we stumble upon a wedding at the baroque church of San Matteo, where a FIAT 500 waits outside. The carved façade of the church is incomplete—the devil, legend says, in a fit of jealous rage killed the sculptor before he could finish it. I find myself photographing not the bride and groom, but my sister, who has somehow joined the wedding guests and is cheering right along with them—the only blonde.
We visit so many churches. In every one, I light a candle, pretending it’s for someone—anyone—else. But it was always for her.
We visit the Museo Storico, and say as we walk from piece to piece: “I like this one, I don’t get that, look, that’s future you.” Then we pass a mummified skeleton in an open tomb. “That’s a little too on the nose,” my sister says.
*
Two days after she dies, I’m at the doctor for a UTI. He asks if there were any circumstances that might’ve led to it…a wet bathing suit, something like that? I mention that I’d just gotten back from a family beach vacation—but I don’t tell him how my sister had rallied to get there, struggled to get to the beach, and in the end just stayed in the car. And how the thought, she’s never going to see the ocean again, had hit me like a wave. I just say my sister started hospice right after the trip, and I had stayed with her for a few days before she died. He reaches for a prescription pad and asks, “Was hospice at home or the hospital?” “Hospital,” I say, as he writes the prescription. And by the day of the funeral I feel fine.
*
A memory surfaces: I’m maybe nine, she’s thirteen. We’re in a pool together, doing that thing where you dip your head back into the water then swing upwards so your hair slicks back. A friend of hers says, “You have the exact same face!” We look at each other and laugh, because it’s not true. She has a small mole just to the right of her mouth. She has pierced ears. And her eyes are such a light brown they almost seem gold. She’s my sister; she’s not me.
Now I look in the mirror and try to force her face to appear. Maybe pencil in a mole, dye my hair blonde. But the only face I see is my own. At the chapel, though, people are startled by our resemblance. “Oh, you must be her sister,” they say. “What a wonderful friend, doctor, neighbor she was, you know, she saved my life, we used to call her the Princess Diana of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania—she was so kind, so generous.”
I agree with everything. But I also resent them a little for trying to take a part of my grief. I feel greedy, but maybe it’s all I have. After the funeral, I stand for a moment at the doorway of the chapel, looking down the grassy slope in front, the light rain that hasn’t let up. This is bullshit, I say, and head to my car.
I come across a few voicemails from my sister on my phone—from before—and try to figure out how to save them. I could ask my kids, but if I do, they will look at me with that sad and sorry look that reminds me that they lost their favorite aunt and, also, you’re old. At least for now I can still see her; can still hear her voice. I hold onto her. Like those blue-black mussels attached to pilings, encrusted with barnacles—so many barnacles they hardly look like mussels any more. They just carry the weight and hang on. Because grief isn’t something you live through; it’s something you live with.
*
Three months after the funeral I go back to her house, to help her husband go through some of her things. It’s clear he hasn’t touched anything. Her deodorant’s still there on the bathroom sink, a bra tossed over the edge of a laundry basket, her shoes waiting by the back door. It looks as though she was right in the middle of something and suddenly got called away.
I sometimes imagine going back to Puglia, but this time by myself. I could go all the way to Santa Maria di Leuca, the port town at the end of the heel of the boot, the southernmost tip of the Italian peninsula: Santa Maria de Finibus Terrae, Saint Mary at the end of the world. At the port there’s a long jetty made up of concrete boulders that resemble pieces from the children’s game of jacks—she loved that game. We visited it on our trip—the end of the world—and took a boat ride on the Adriatic Sea. My sister raised her arms in joy and let out a whoop into the wind.
What would I find if I went back to the end of the world, back to that jetty? I imagine she’s there—been there all this time. And when I find her, she says nothing, just smiles and pats the rock next to her. Come. Sit with me.
Just like I promised, I’ll write to try and find her, to fish her out of my heart. I think she must be here, must be somewhere on the page. But I write and delete and write and delete, and I don’t find her in the words. The curving letters try to hold her in, but she keeps drifting toward the margins. Maybe, I think, she’s in the white spaces around the words, between the words, around the letters themselves. Maybe I need to keep writing until there’s no white space left.
*
Back in Lecce, our aunts arrive, and we join the passeggiata and walk down the Via Trinchese to a popular pizza joint where we get a large sheet pan of pizza and a few Italian beers. Or maybe it’s wine. We’re surrounded by people: families, groups of teens, older folks. Then the vacation really begins.
But for a day and a half, it was just the two of us. No siblings. No parents. No husbands or even children. Just me and my sister. That’s what you can do with 36 hours in Lecce.
Anne Schuchman, PhD, MFA, is a writer and translator (Italian) in northern New Jersey.