Free I Didn't Do It for You by Michela Wrong Page A

evening light, I decided to take up Cicoria’s suggestion. The old Italian cemetery sprawls in rococo magnificence on the edge of town, next to its strangely anonymous modern Eritrean equivalent. Bougainvillea billows around weeping angels, stone fingers tear stone hair in grief. Between the cypresses, separated by a yellow scrub rustling with crickets and lizards, the old family mausoleums stand proud. In the more recent section, the gravestones bear Tigrinya lettering and photographs of Eritreans in graduation robes, instead of portraits of stolid Italian matrons in black. But the old mausoleums are exclusively the white man’s province. Serenaded by cooing doves, I strolled between the mini mansions, reading the names which must have once featured in local newspaper articles and taken pride of place on government committees. ‘Famiglia Ricupito d’Amico’, ‘Famiglia Giannavola’, ‘Famiglia Antonio Ponzio’. Asmara’s burghers had not stinted when it came to their final resting places. With their gothic turrets and marbled doorways, the chapels were more substantial than many Eritrean homes. This was a cemetery built by a conquering power, established by people so sure they were in Africa to stay they had laid down vaults for the great-grandchildren they knew would succeed them.
    As one of the colony’s earliest settlers, the Cicoria family had claimed a prime site near the entrance. The chapel next door was being used as a storeroom by the elderly graveyard workers, paint tins resting on the floor. Undoing a rusty wire securing the door, I slipped inside. All Souls’ Day had just beenand someone had left flowers, an old family friend, perhaps, able to grant the Cicorias the forgiveness they seemed incapable of offering one another. Water dripped from the cut blooms, gathering in a small rivulet that ran along the floor. Looking at the black-and-white photographs marking each resting place, I was struck by the hardness of the expressions. No smiles or tenderness here. The face of Antonio Cicoria, Filippo’s bridge-building grandfather, bore the deep grooves of a life in which nothing had come easy. Flinty and implacable, he looked a paterfamilias who would wield the belt with enthusiasm when disciplining wife and children. Another white-haired Cicoria stared from the slab above, chin jutting aggressively. Was this the hated father? There was no inscription, but he bore a passing resemblance to Filippo. The Italian equivalent of ‘What’s it to you?’ seemed to hover on his lips. With relatives like this, I thought, no wonder Cicoria had run away.
    As I headed for the gates, I noticed a pile of splintered gravestones stacked in a corner. Every man tries to leave his mark upon the earth, but even stones eventually wear out. When these headstones had cracked, no solicitous Italian descendant was left in Eritrea to order a replacement. Would Cicoria’s body be brought here when his straining breath finally ran out? It seemed unlikely. And once the family friend stopped visiting and the rusty wire dropped off the door, this chapel, too, might end up serving as a workman’s shed. I was to visit the cemetery many times after that, but only once overlapped with a relative fussing over a tomb, a young meticcio based in Rome. On his rare visits to Eritrea, he said, he fought a losing battle against the weeds slowly obliterating his parents’ grave. Burial grounds, like hospitals, need fresh clientele to stay alive. In Asmara’s cemetery, you could feel the Italian story coming to a stop.
    Clever as he was, Martini could not have got it more wrong. He never faltered in his belief in a future white Eritrea, a littleItaly in Africa. Amid the bombastic self-confidence of the late 19th century, it seemed a foregone conclusion, so certain that only the methodology remained to be discussed. But Martini’s ‘doomed’ native proved more resilient than