Remembering Light and Stone by Deirdre Madden

what will happen. Nothing interests me less than astrology and all that mumbo-jumbo. But to know the spirit of the future is the important thing, and the people who can do that do it because they really understand the spirit of their own age. They aren’t taken in by what seems to be the prevailing spirit of the times. Dostoyevsky could read the future in this way. It’s one of the reasons I like his work so much.
    When I was growing up in Ireland, I knew I wanted to leave, but I didn’t know where I would go, I didn’t know how it would be. I used to wonder what I’d be doing, and what I’d be like, when I was thirty. It was strange now to be in that future, which wasn’t, of course, as I had imagined it. I suppose I had thought I would be happier, and again I thought of Lucia. It wasn’t fair to compare me to her. It wasn’t my fault, all the things that had happened. She didn’t know what it was to grow up feeling dread in her own home, or what it was to fear someone everyone said she should love. I didn’t want to think about where I would be after ten more years.
    At the end of that week, Franca came to me, and asked would I do her a favour. She wanted to go to the ceremony in the cemetery for the Day of the Dead, but her mother-in-law wasn’t well. She wanted me to go with her, and although I didn’t really want to, I said that I would.
    On the morning of the day, I met Franca downstairs. She was holding a pot full of bright yellow chrysanthemums, and a stout candle encased in red plastic. She had done a good trade in candles like this in the past week. Almost everyone bought them to place on or before the tombs of their families. It was a bitingly cold day. As it wasn’t too far, we walked to the cemetery, which was beyond the town walls, on a slope at the back of S. Giorgio. It was old, and had become too small for the community. A new and bigger cemetery had been built down in the new part of S. Giorgio, for the people who lived there.
    ‘Che freddo!’ said Franca. Franca spent half the year saying how cold it was, and the rest of the time complaining about the heat. She took a few months at the transition from winter to spring and from summer to autumn to devote the full extent of her moaning to the effects of the change of the season, which she said gave her all sorts of allergies and aches and pains and moods. On this morning, though, I had to agree with her. It was no simple matter to stand outside in the cold for almost an hour. As we passed through the gates in the high walls, into the dimness of the cypress-shadowed cemetery, Franca commented, ‘Look at all these old ladies. Don Antonio had better not keep us here any longer than he has to, or he’ll have a few more dead bodies to pray over than he did at the start of Mass.’ A few people turned to look at us disapprovingly as we giggled, and we did our best to look serious.
    The Mass was to be said at a place which itself looked like one of the many mausoleums around the cemetery. It was a structure which consisted of a roof, three walls and a gate, which enclosed an altar. The gate, usually padlocked, had been opened, and a linen cloth and golden vessels had been set out. Don Antonio was just beginning to say Mass when Franca and I joined the huddle of women in front of the small chapel. I didn’tconcentrate much upon what was being said. I let my mind wander freely, but I tried to keep a look of complete distance and abstraction from my face – although I don’t think anyone would have noticed.
    I looked at Don Antonio as he fumbled through the motions. After all these years, it looked as if he too was trying not to let people see how much of a habit it had become to him, how little it meant to him. He also looked as if his mind were elsewhere, but maybe it just seemed that way. Maybe I was doing him a great injustice. He was so old. By the law of averages, he would soon be dead too, probably one of the first there to die. I wondered