I can’t move today. My cousin died unexpectedly. I found out yesterday around the flatiron, I had to stop, are you kidding? Am I reading the Italian right? Angela died? It was the end of the afternoon, the comedy set I did just before imbued with strings of joy and dissonance, as I left, feeling good, and then, boom, Vesuvius strikes, when he does, and death is a clarifier. Nothing really matters, except living life as fully as you can and appreciating those that you love, because it’s final, and so, I took a long walk with her, held a space for her… I guess her body was done, I guess she always marched to the beat of her own drum. She said, “we’re really all alone in life…” so she departed just like that, after a family lunch, and I thought, as her sister said “at least the whole family was together,” so she wasn’t alone in life, not at all. She was surrounded by grandbabies, her children, her sister, her husband. I’d like that, at the end of my life, to say, “my whole family was there…”
She was a real friend, actually. She never crossed boundaries with me, she never played “parent” with me, and in the end, as people could really put on a whole show for me around my family story, she never did. She maintained boundaries so elegantly, and she was the one who embraced me during the worst — the totally worst, which she’d say, with her whole body, a real friend — moment of your life. She was at least open to me. I grieve her, I do. She was a real friend, you know, people come and go, she said. Hm, I thought about it, gazing upon a garden, aloe vera. She wasn’t sentimental, at all, like her husband, if it was over, it was over. Basta. She had real guts, I mean the guts to feel, to tell someone they mattered to her, and she meant it. She always called me an inspiraton even in my darkest moment. I needed that because that was a terrible time. “You are an inspiration.”
It was unexpected, sudden, and a real shock. I thought we had years ahead of us. I thought I would see her again.
She was the most adorable person with a cute short haircut, a rotound woman, a gifted cook. That was the first thing my father said about her, that she was a dream of a cook, and she was, she had the green thumb inside. I called her husband a siren in my draft, as she really was, but when I thought about cooking, and the aromas in the air, she could conjure, she was a siren much sneakier. I’ll always remember how she stuffed the meat with prosciutto with a wooden spatula, amazing, the Christmas cooking a real marathon. I remember how she could put down another plate so unassumingly, as if it were just another plate, just turning it, another plate. It was so funny, her humor. She had a diffused quality, or she acted as if things just happened around her, so she didn’t need to yell or move. And somehow, in my mind, she’s cheering me on. “Go Meri!!!” What a bello idea, a real goodbye, I wonder if Italians write obituaries, I have never been to an Italian funeral. I’m not Italian. I’m American. But I’m an American cousin. She didn’t even know how we were related, sometimes, which was funny about the Neapolitans, because it wasn’t exactly hard to remember. We’re just cousins. But I considered her to be my friend. I would have flown there for her funeral, if I had a pot to pee in, but I would have gone. So I’ll visit her, one day, just a couple of people on earth. She had that feel about her too.
She’ll always be eternally at the kitchen table snipping broccolini radiating under the overhead bulb. Right by the door, the glass door. In the winters, yellow jasmines would fall from the canopy of twising bark over an outdoor kitchen table, with produce looking like it exploded everywhere — green —green! Just a festival of rough greens and artichokes! And it spilled onto the table inside. And she’s just snipping. What a painting, I thought, or wrote, in the book I was trying to write about them? One filled with so much heartache. She, in her eyes, I felt her the second I stepped foot onto her property — on the Sorrento Coast, Vico Equense, Seiano, technically. It startled me, her gate just closed behind me. “An empath?” It was a spontaneous thought. I felt her, I did the second I stepped foot onto her property. “An empath?” What was I even saying? It’s one thing if you say you’re an empath, it’s another if someone hasn’t seen you in 15 years, returns, and steps foot on your property and thinks, an empath? And that’s not exactly my scene. She stirred me somewhere dark and deep, like the deep sea, her black eyes, innocent to their pressure, and so, she was a mysterious woman. I dubbed her High Priestess in the tarot deck, so she stirred me in deep places, which I had to navigate cautiously, at her kitchen nook, where we would speak in the mornings…
Angela always told me I was beautiful. She said my mother was beautiful, actually, at the kitchen table, she had guts, Angela, that’s what I mean. People don’t tend to say that, just to say, especially without anything attached. She sometimes couldn’t get over my body, as I learned to wear a tank top in front of a mother and maybe a father, but I would always cover up when he came around, as I’m a modest person, and I get nervous, but I learned to receive a — she thought I was a pin up. So she, her bright face, appeared out the window, having climbed over with her friends in the backseat of this zipping tiny European car. “You look so beautiful!” She cried. They were getting pizza down the cliff. I finally put on some make up. She didn’t even… need to see me. So my mother, what an ugly person, an ugly woman, a woman who was sexually inappropriate with her child, you understand, yes, she was beautiful, but it was hard to stomach it, and once you met her, we’d be in another dimension. When Angelica Leibowitz told me that, I was nine, and when I heard that, for the first time in my thirties, I couldn’t even begin to tell you how utterly disgusted I was, so she was so ugly, it was so ugly, and she was a beauty who could hold a lot, though I never said any of that, since it took a whole draft to realize that, that she said that, that my mother was brutal, and that brutality why it lingers, I don’t know.
It’s hard to explain, the light on the Sorrento Coast, her house, her in the kitchen, the garden out the facade, as the house is practically made of glass. The effect she had, the scene had, on me, as a lover of light. I contemplated her empathic quality, because what a strange, sudden thought to pop up in my mind, and the way I jolted, too, because I felt her, instantly upon arrival. She was in the kitchen too, I had to cross a garden to get to her front door. She lived in a garden nestled in the cliffs of Seiano, a paradise, a heaven on earth, so that’s just how she lived. I thought her to be a Venus, a true Venus, in that, everything in her house looked like art to me. Everytime I saw her at the kitchen table with the piles and piles of broccolini, I saw a painting, and a good one, one that might get me a career. It was beauty, in the air the mystery, a figure I do not know. So I started taking photographs — that summer—of the effect of the glass, how the garden became a painting — it merged into the kitchen. Vines wrapped around the lighting fixtures like ghosts, a photograph. The way the light at the end of the day bathed that simple white corner in gold, it was God, and it was just a chair. A painting. She had an effect on me. She drew out an eye from me, or her character did, but it was inspired by her. She inspired me through the lens of beauty. Made me reflect on it.
It began with the, uh, mother comment, because she said it more than once, too. She innocently — evidently — commented that my mother was beautiful again. After what I told them, that was strange to swallow, just because calling my mother beautiful was… well, left me blank and speechless. But Angela followed me… through the pages… her character became a great beauty, she had transformed, because that’s just what happened— The first time I saw on her on the page, she appeared to me the most beautiful woman, as if the idea turned inside out, as if beauty were a deep subject and a wound in me. She saw me for my beauty, I had a hard time there, so as a Venus, the effect she had was…artistic. I saw a painting, always, whenever I remembered her, as if beauty, a deep subject…
The first time I lay eyes on her, when I was recalling it in memory, she brought the kitchen into resonance, where that detail popped up, and then that one, the flour, and suddenly, there was a composition around her, and she didn’t even have a face, she became one with the room. So thick paints, that one. She was a Venus. Like, I could have been a visual artist or something, once I healed that wound, or got in touch with it. A Cherub, sometimes, Angela. It makes sense. She had an Italian elegance with Neapolitan charm. One who inspired a great beauty… it was a discovery for me on the page, seeing her suddenly, it took my breath away. On the Feast of Santa Lucia, she appeared in my mind to make her grand entrance into the house in Ottaviano, the walls the color of sand, as if her sister’s house were the shore, and the windows are so grand, and the floor was linolium, you see, a painting, so it cast a moonlight glow in the room. She was wearing, like a Nike, a purple flag wrapped up in an indigo rope, with palms in her arms, and by God, it looked like the NYU flag that I saw waving out of time, the first time I had an altered experience of time, just synthesized arond her, a dramatic, chic Greek goddess. I remembered peering into the flag, this strangely slow-moving image with some swirling sensation, like what am I reaching for, what’s reaching for me, and there she was, pouring into the house in that dress, her husband bursting into song. They came in song, Oh Mari, Oh Mari… I had never heard such a beautiful melody, skiiers on the TV, it was a miracle. “From Santa Lucia the cold is on its way!” She cried. I thought, that dress, it spontaneously happened in my mind. Beauty, it was a subject that pained me, because there seemed to be so much pain in it, I mean, people don’t always understand what makes them beautiful… so Angela became the most ravishing woman of them all.
I had ideas, serious ideas, as to what I would paint as a painter, I saw the rest of my life, even, though I can’t paint. So that’s Angela. She settled on the radiator, in her Nike dress, beneath a window so big it opened from the wall like a door, which at night was glass, so black, glossy. The reflection of the kitchen in it was like a photograph, and there she was, still this Nike, with her feet on the sand, the floor, and she was framed, in a kitchen, and it became mysterious, beauty. That’s the effect she had, she, it, the idea, I don’t know you see. But that healed me somewhere so deep, so for what it’s worth, she was a woman I appreciated very much for respecting me. I really, I got a lot of flack for my personality, I really did see a person more like a jewel, I did try, always, to see the good in everyone.
Piles and piles of broccolini on her kitchen table, she was always snipping these curly leaves with long green stems all Christmas season… snip, snip, snip, I thought, there’s something about the kitchen, the produce, as a painting would resonate as so natural, raw, a little broccolini heart between two stems. Nature is sensual, and she’s unassumingly snipping around. We used to have conversations between the roufage with our coffee cups in the mornings. When she rested her cheek on her fist, she looked like a cherub. She always thanked me for these intimate chats as she was a woman who appreciated intimacy, and I did, too, a simple exchange, though it wasn’t always simple, because they had thwarted me the moment I got back, I was unprepared, unarmed, but she always held a space for me, or we started conversing between green seas, and it was always when I felt too vulnerable that she always thanked me for the conversation we had. She thanked me for the summer we spent together, when I was in really terrible shape, too, she did. I thought that she was a true empath, actually. I felt her the second I stepped onto her property, “is that an empath?” It’s one thing if you say you’re an empath, it’s another if someone says that about you before you even see you! Angela! Meri, she said. She struck me in deep waters, she stirred me in mysterious places, so I felt like I had an energetic exchange with her, that she wasn’t aware of. She told me about a family constellation workshop she did, where, she couldn’t even believe it, how they were able to embody people’s family dynamics, and they had never even met them. They had no idea who they were.
“Everything is energy,” she said in staccato notes. “Everything is energy.” She went back to snipping broccolini.
I grieve her, I do.
She moved through life as a feeler, it was pure in her, she practiced yoga on mountaintops with extrordinary views of the deep blue sea amongst donkeys and horses. She wore pink eyeglasses and navy sunglasses, big, chic, as I associate that side of the family with the color navy. They were sort of on the French end of Naples, real bon vivants, who enjoyed wine in glass bottles, who loved to eat, to make a production of a meal. She was in tune with the energy of life, for her, energy was her way in and through. She didn’t always know what she was picking up on. I asked her if she related to that idea, did she feel empathic, she didn’t even know what that meant. She did, she said she did. I wondered if it was always the most straightforward condition to have. But it was more her gift for drawing whatever needed to come out — I can only speak for myself. Without a doubt, if I was holding something in, I would say something, not meaning to, and I always had to be slightly conscientious, because she had that effect. She could diffuse her energy in a room of people, as if she went into soft focus… she had an unstoppable pout, her lips. I’ll always remember the year I went back to Naples, they didn’t stop singing to me, and her face was always wide and bright. She was always throwing her body into the emotion, “LOVE MERI LOVE!”
The throes, that she doesn’t have to deal with anymore.
In the tarot deck, as Naples possesses an occultish edge, she was High Priestess. She was gentle, soft, tender, but she could become rugged and tough and meaty. Her black eyes. Her husbands are mesmerizingly blue. They fell in love at first sight. She was a freshman in high school, and he was just leaving, literally, and they locked eyes down the hall, and that was it. That’s it, that’s Vico, her husband. They stirred up a scandal because her family thought they should wait until Angela was older, but Vico protested, revolted, and continued to — in the end, Angela left high school and married him.
She lived among the blooms off the coast of Vico Equense, in a small house tucked in a garden, with orange trees, lemons, grapefruits. The garden keeps blooming all year: daffoldils, roses, agatha panthus, bougainville, jasmines, lilies, it was always blooming! She had seen this house in a dream, wanted it, manifested it, even, so she went back to all there is… that lives, grows, dies, keeps growing. I don’t know if I feel that there’s life after death, I don’t know, but I went through a feeling of total peace, like she was at peace. I went through moments of fear. I went through moments, come on, Angela, if that book does get there one day, I am going to be so sad you aren’t there. I was sad to lose her, so soon, even if she was, I don’t know how old she was, but I thought she had at least another ten years. Just thinking about her grandchildren, she just had her fourth, a baby girl, the first, out of three young boys. But at least they were all together, that they were able to be present for one another too, and I keep thinking, I would love to have what she had, more so than fame and glory as this became some point that I got encouraged to aspire to, not like it’s wrong, but in the end, I think that’s what matters the most, to be loved, to have truly loved, and to leave in love… Eugene Carrière, a painter I became so enthralled by, just his compositions, but more so his personhood, his final words upon his deathbed, and he left behind 13 children, they were: love each other wildly, love each other wildly…