Christmas Eve is the traditional time for ghost stories and so I am offering the beginning of one. It is also an offering to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year that marks the return of the sun. I wish everyone a very meaningful holiday.
Darkness and Light
She died on the shortest day of the year. At four o’clock in the afternoon. The day and her life closed at precisely the same moment. Her four-year-old life and the fourth post-meridian hour.
I had hoped that Isabelle would recover. I had imagined her dancing in the sunshine on midsummer’s eve, at the festival we held every year at the villa. Our villa on Via Costantinopoli was the best-kept secret in Naples. And at out secret festival all Sebastian’s friends danced around the pool. It was always warm enough to swim on that June evening, the longest light of the year.
It had taken Isabelle half a year to decide that she no longer wanted to dance and perhaps she did well to decide thus. Perhaps – if she had recovered – she would no longer have been able to dance, and this would have been too much to bear. For her and for me.
She had been in quasi-drowsiness through the September harvest fest. She seemed to wane with the light during the autumn. The arriving winter eclipsed her.
I didn’t cry. I had been grieving since that other earlier solstice, the one that so deceptively prolongs the light. You don’t notice the dying days because they are so bright and lively.
Maria tried to comfort me. “All that lives dies,” she said. “Isabelle will go into the earth, like the seed for a lovely tree,” she told me. “Somewhere she will bloom again.”
Was Maria suggesting re-incarnation? There is a glimmer of hope in that. At least she didn’t say that Isabelle was so pure that God took her for Himself. This confirms my suspicion that there is nothing Catholic about Sebastian’s household. They are all pagan.
If Isabelle, like plants and hibernating animals, is only lying dormant – like the wild creature that she was, or perhaps is still – seeking darkness only for a time – I can hope. Maria says that the light is returning. Nothing truly dies; it just changes form.
italian scrapbook 