The Expedition

A family secret

Photo taken by me at the cemetery of my hometown.

Are you sure this is the cemetery? I asked Giulia. Yes, she was sure. She had been there once, when she was little, and said we should look for a family tomb with a vaulted ceiling. Recently, she had received a bill for some "ceiling repair expenses" from the person who manages her family’s cemetery sites, which she learned referred to this very one. Is that an actual job? I asked, incredulous. Apparently, she replied, with a hint of irony that must once have been incredulity for her, too. 

When she called to ask if I could help her find a tomb she forgot existed, I said yes, even though it meant a drive of nearly five hours. I love cemeteries, and Giulia’s sprawling genealogical tree always seemed to unveil plenty of mysteries. On our way there, she shared memories of a Sunday visit from decades ago, of hands clasped behind her back as her parents spoke in hushed tones. I remember a photo of a man with round glasses, she said, framed as if it were a painting.

We went through all the family tombs one by one, often stopping to comment on names, photos, and epitaphs. They were all arranged along the inner perimeter of the cemetery, forming a rectangle that enclosed a graveyard with narrow paths running amid planted crosses. It helped that the place wasn’t too large, as a small-town cemetery should be, though they had added a new wing, some time ago -- one of those ugly, modern concrete structures that feels more like a repository for human remains than a home for the dead, and a reminder that people didn’t stop dying. It was a clear, warm afternoon on an early summer weekday, the cemetery was deserted, and Giulia’s white clothes contrasted with her tanned complexion. 

But I have no recollection of who’s buried here, what part of the family they are from and all, she continued. They must be people I know close to nothing about, perhaps from three or four generations ago. As we moved along, she started to tell me a story -- or rather, a string of disconnected stories barely held together by whispers and memories, pieces of her family’s history she had picked up over the years, which no one could confirm or deny anymore.

Her voice was quiet, as if she were afraid of waking something long dormant. She spoke of an ancestor who had vanished on a trip to Uruguay, leaving behind suitcases filled with paper bills of a currency that didn’t exist anywhere in the world, and a collection of letters written in a language no one could decipher. Another ancestor had supposedly died young somewhere in Siberia during World War One, as he never returned. One day, many years ago, an aunt received a package containing worn-out military clothes that might have belonged to him. The package didn’t have a sender address, and no one could figure out how it had found its way to her aunt. In a pocket, the photo of a mysterious woman, unknown to everyone it was shown to, had a date handwritten in blue on the back: April 4th, 1914. 

She paused and looked around, her gaze sweeping over the rows of tombs, as though searching for something, a hidden clue or a fragment of memory etched into the stone. We walked in silence for a while. After a few moments, she spoke again. There was a cousin, she said, from my mother’s side, who was supposed to have inherited the whole family estate, but no one ever saw her again after she left for Paris. My mother always said that one day she would come back, that she had simply gone away to study. But time passed, and still she didn’t return. Years later, a letter arrived from an unknown sender, containing a photo of her and a set of keys. On the back of the photo, her date of birth and death, along with an address: 18 Quai de Conti, VIème, Paris. One of my mother’s uncles went there and, in her study, found the manuscripts of five novels, which he brought back with him and had published anonymously. They received immense success, and the unknown identity of their author remained an unsolved mystery that drew the attention of readers, writers, and intellectuals all over the world, fueling further success. 

We kept walking, her stories unraveling and folding back on themselves like dreams. It felt like opening a small, dusty drawer in an old dresser that hadn’t been touched in decades. When we came to a halt, she looked up at the tomb in front of us, her face hardening with something like recognition. Here, she said. I followed the direction of her gaze, and saw the framed photo of the man with round glasses. There was no name, no birth or death date, and no epitaph. Only an old black-and-white photo of this man, framed as if it were a painting, leaning against the wall of the tomb. A tomb that, sure enough, did have a freshly repaired vaulted ceiling.

How do you know this gentleman is family? I asked. She seemed to be lost in thought while staring at the photo. I was standing in this exact spot forty years ago, she said, hiding behind my dad’s leg while he told me the story of that man. 

He was German, she continued without taking her eyes off the photo, but married a distant aunt of my dad’s and at some point settled around here, because only here could he live in peace. He was a highly regarded fiction writer, with several publications that had attracted the attention of prominent literary critics from across Europe. Yet he didn’t like to talk about his novels and led a reclusive life. It seems his books were hard to find. They told stories woven with sophisticated plots and precious bibliographic or literary references, and his refusal to appear in public created a sense of mystery about his true identity that soon became an obsession for the critics and scholars most interested in him. He was an enigmatic figure -- nobody knew his whereabouts, or the way he looked. Some claimed to have seen him in Mexico or Argentina, though without tangible proof. Others bragged about frequenting him, or being acquainted with him, only to be proven wrong whenever they failed to secure his attendance at important conventions on German literature. He never went to any of those, apparently, and never gave interviews or frequented anybody. He was just a shy and reclusive character whose only preoccupation was to write his fiction the way he liked it, with no regard whatsoever to what the public or the critics thought or liked. When he passed, he left precise instructions to be buried here without any name or other information, except an old black and white photo for the few ones who really knew him.

It’s all suddenly coming back, she said. How could I have possibly forgotten about him? His story was our family’s best kept secret. So well kept, in fact, that even I forgot about it. 

His name was Benno von Archimboldi.¹  

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1. Benno von Archimboldi is a central yet enigmatic character in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, which inspired this piece. He is a mysterious, reclusive German novelist whose works have attracted a devoted following and scholarly interest. Throughout 2666, Archimboldi becomes a sort of mythical figure, particularly to a group of European literary critics who are obsessed with finding him. His identity and whereabouts are a mystery that drives much of the narrative. I obviously strongly recommend Bolaño’s 2666, which has gained a reputation as one of the most ambitious and enigmatic novels of the 21st century. Its manuscript was found among Bolaño’s papers after his premature death in 2003. In 2004, 2666 was published in Spanish, followed by an English translation in 2008, which propelled Bolaño’s fame internationally.