BY ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

I first consciously experienced grief through my maternal grandmother. Unlike my mother in every way other than a faint physiological echo about the cheekbones, she was a powerful and tender woman. Also innocently sexual in her youth. Large-breasted always. A hungry laugh. She taught me to Charleston . Those quick green eyes, that fine black hair, a pure complexion. Her feline mien. Nellaaaaaaaa! I remember her calling. Nella! She strides through memories in large black sunglasses and halter-necked tops, playing tennis, posing in boats, slim and lovely against those Alpine backdrops. I loved her tremendously. She died when I was sixteen.

On her return from the city at lunchtime, she searched for me in the school playground. Sometimes she called my name; I sprinted to embrace her. There would be kisses – I still miss her foaming embrace - and she would hand me a paper cup (red and white, with a smooth lip) of salty chips from town. They were lukewarm, but I devoured them. Her smile was lovely delicate shy. Dainty mother-of-pearl teeth. (Men were entranced.) She brimmed with love, and was Persian in her intensities. At all times, she was fragrant with Spanish talcum powder or Chanel. After hours in the kitchen, she was flushed. The heat and steam, that perfumed broth. (She could be tough: that chopping board was grooved, her knife blade thick enough.) Showcased in sandals, those toenails painted pink. I remember her walking beneath the vines, collecting sprigs of rosemary and basil in a basket, dappled by shade, leaves brushing her skin.

Born in Ferrara , that stern northern Italian city of tall elms, she is now part of its history. Ferrara is a thousand love stories and wars; it is famous throughout Italy for producing beautiful girls. Deaf Zio Tonino, a perfect rosebud in his buttonhole, still cycles on its cobblestones as Zia Nanda stirs his quadrettini , but the lovers Ugo and Parisina were incarcerated in the Este Castle dungeons in the fifteenth century and then decapitated. Donizetti resurrected them through opera in 1833, and mad bad Lord Byron (whose father is said to have committed suicide, whose maternal grandfather drowned himself in the Bath Canal in 1779, and whose great-grandfather killed himself in 1760) was also drawn into their grief: 

The past is nothing - and at last

The future can but be the past.

These were the vie my grandmother strolled and on which, to the strains of an accordion and with her brothers and their friends, she danced. The middle of five children (Aurora, Giuseppe, Giuseppina, Alfredo, Antonio), she loved her eldest brother best. Photographs show a lean and handsome man, refined in profile, tall. He was a horseman, popular, but ended as cannon-fodder at Tripoli . She never recovered. When his name was mentioned, her eyes sparked with love or pain. Never a big talker, she did not share her grief; I saw it lodge, a kind of fish-bone, in her throat. This said, her sense of propriety was not rote. She may have developed it as a courtesy to others during war, when the maintenance of optimism is a military strategy.

I recall sensing grief as subtle, as a deeply private set of feelings tinted the palest rose or gray. My response was respectful. In grieving for her brother, my grandmother accessed a space where she existed exclusively as his sister. She grieved not only for him but for the self she was with him, for the self she was before bereavement, and for her dreams; her every hope had to be adjusted so it did not feature him. I wish I had known Beppe Mistroni, one of the two men she profoundly loved. So instead of telling me of Beppe, she told me of Ferrara during World War II: Jews stashed in attics, people machine-gunned by Nazis outside cinemas, her mother-in-law beneath the peach-tree in the cortile , Zia Nanda wolf-whistled as she paraded those big shapely hips, skinny little Zio Tonino running over cobblestones to a bomb shelter with my blonde mother (a bundle of straw) beneath his arm. There was no missile more devastating for my grandmother than that telegram delivered in 1943. Zio Tonino keeps it in a drawer.

In retrospect, my awareness of these intricate feelings of my grandmother's was unusual, or perhaps it was no more than sensitivity to a woman I adored: I could not say which. She was a complex woman and I was a complex child, but we were simplified by love.

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