The Garden of Letters (21 page)

Dalia slipped into unconsciousness, just as the baby was pulled from between her legs, pale and lifeless. Marina worked swiftly, cutting the umbilical cord and gave Vanna the dead infant to clean and swaddle, so that it could be prepared later for its wake and burial.

After Dalia’s placenta was expelled she began to hemorrhage, and Marina looked for any tears that might be causing the bleeding, hoping she might be able to sew them shut. But there was nothing she could repair.

Her small, quick hands found the uterus, and she discovered what she feared the most. The uterus was lax and boggy. She desperately tried to massage it, but it refused to contract, and Dalia became blue underneath Marina’s desperate fingertips.

After twenty frantic minutes, the girl was so cold to the touch that Marina knew the only decent thing to do was stop.

“She is with the baby now,” she said, her eyes lowered and her heart heavy. Marina had delivered Angelo and had been looking forward to ushering his child into the world. But now there would be two funerals instead.

Angelo’s mother began to wail and pounded her fists into her heart. Vanna, out of a maternal instinct, began rocking the lifeless baby in her arms. With her mother’s cries in the background, Vanna found herself making a shushing sound, as she brought the porcelain-perfect infant up to her face. Even though she knew her nephew’s cheek was cold and his skin china white, Vanna believed that the rocking in her arms and gentle humming could somehow ensure the infant a more blessed and peaceful sleep.

No one could believe the room that Dalia had kept hidden all these months. When they began to prepare the burial for her and the baby, it was Vanna who first discovered the room with all of Angelo’s letters pasted inside.

“Mamma!” she screamed, running next door where her mother and Vanna’s other sisters had already begun preparing Dalia’s body for the wake.

Her mother was bent over Dalia’s limbs, a soft washcloth in her hand.

“What is it, Vanna?” Angelo’s mother had been weeping since the tragedy. Her grandson, swaddled and pale, looked like a frozen ghost. He was placed in a wicker basket on a table. Tall candles were already lit beside him.

“You must come! Immediately, Mamma. To Dalia’s bedroom!”

Angelo’s mother was trapped in a deep fog of sorrow and could not understand why her youngest daughter would be so disrespectful. The ritual of cleaning the body before burial was a sacred one.

“Vanna! Please stop this,” she reprimanded her daughter. “We need to make sure that Dalia is ready to be received by God.”

“No, Mamma. Please come. Please.”

Her mother put down her cloth and washed her hands.

Then, with great fatigue and a grief-stricken heart, the old woman walked to Angelo and Dalia’s house.

Just before he married Dalia, Angelo had taken over a small cottage walking distance from his parents. It had been the home of his grandmother, and was only a few steps away from where his parents lived. He had such wonderful memories of visiting his grandmother there. The house was always filled with the smell of fresh garlic and simmering tomatoes. After her death, it had fallen into disrepair. The vines of roses that she used to cultivate on the trellis near her patio had become wild and overgrown. The white walls of the living room were now a cloudy sepia. The whole house reminded Angelo of a faded postcard from a summer holiday long ago.

But in anticipation of bringing his new bride home, he had spent nearly two weeks throwing himself into every aspect of its repair.

He had brought Dalia home to a place where he believed they would make their own little family, and in which she would find comfort and beauty. The rooms faced out to the sea, their marital bed was made with crisp white linen edged in blue, and every wall in the house he had personally covered with several coats of fresh, white paint.

Now when the women walked into the house, a hush fell upon them. Dalia had maintained perfect order. The kitchen was spotless. The living room had one sofa and a small table with a few ornaments. There were several neat piles of books scattered throughout.

“Come,” Vanna said. She spoke in a whisper to her mother and took her by the hand.

The two women walked toward the archway of the bedroom.

Vanna pushed the door slightly and led her mother inside.

Not a single word or a single breath passed between the two women for several seconds. Just as Vanna’s had done minutes before, Angelo’s mother’s eyes widened with both wonder and disbelief. In between pockets of pale blue paint and bursts of shimmering white clouds, the wall and ceiling was papered with her son Angelo’s words.

She turned to Vanna, her wrinkled fingers covered her mouth. “My God,” she said. “How she loved him.”

“And he her . . .”

The two women stood there looking at every corner, every crevice of the room, with their mouths half open. Neither of them could believe that Dalia could have undertaken such an enormous project during the months of her pregnancy. But right beneath their noses, she had created a room that was both a sky and a garden of letters. A place that was now frozen in time, the letters pressed to the walls like dried flowers. The plaster itself reinforced, by words from a heart that beat thousands of miles away.

They laid Dalia out in her wedding dress, with a garland of lemon blossoms in her thick, black hair. Her eyelids had been weighted so they would remain shut, giving the appearance that she was sleeping. Beside her slept the swaddled infant. His white face had started to become mottled, so that even in death it looked like a sculpture. But now instead of white porcelain, the infant looked as though it had been chiseled from blue-veined marble.

The crying in the house went on for days. An express telegram was sent to Ethiopia, telling Angelo the tragic news.

Angelo, however, did not receive the telegram until two weeks later. A week before, on an emergency trip to another camp several miles from his own, his jeep was ambushed. The driver was shot and lost control of the vehicle. It crashed and turned over on itself, pinning Angelo’s leg under the chassis. Now, days later, he was in recovery from the surgery, his leg bandaged, one of his toes amputated, and his head in a fog of morphine.

Angelo’s superior officer made the decision to wait to tell Angelo the telegram’s contents until he had recovered from the immediate trauma of his accident, afraid that the news would affect his recovery.

Letting a few more days pass, the colonel eventually made his way into Angelo’s tent. Angelo was sitting with his foot propped up and a book between his hands.

“Reading, as usual?” the colonel asked him.

Angelo put the book down and looked at his superior officer. “Yes. It’s hard to concentrate on the words, though. My mind is still groggy.” He pointed to his foot. “It’s also hard to get around. I imagine I’m going to drag it around like a club, even once I’m off the crutches.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure out a way to manage it in no time. We need you in the medical tent . . .”

Angelo smiled.

The colonel hesitated for a second and Angelo, sensing something was wrong, suddenly grew serious as well.

“You’ve had a telegram from back home,” he said, taking it from his breast pocket. The yellow paper shook slightly as he placed it in Angelo’s hands.

Angelo looked at him for more information. But the colonel only lowered his eyes and said, “I will let you read the contents in private . . . but please know we are doing our best to make arrangements for you to go home as soon as possible.”

The colonel quietly left the tent as Angelo took his finger and opened up the telegram.

“Come home for emergency. Terrible tragedy. Wife and baby lost in delivery.”

Angelo’s body began to shake. He tried to get up to reach his crutches, but he fell onto the tent’s dirt floor, his body too weakened to get to the crutches. The men in the camp heard his wails, and everyone stopped what they were doing, their hearts breaking to hear their comrade in so much pain. But it was Nasai who reached him first, who picked him up and held him. Who brought him his crutches so that Angelo could eventually stand.

Angelo staggered out into the sunlight, the dunes of Ethiopia stretching into the horizon, and openly wept without shame.