Alberto’s Box. This is a small wooden box. It is locked.
That’s how I began my Facebook status update in early March 2020. I included a picture of a wooden box, then I went on:
The box was made by my late husband when he was a schoolboy. It was his private box where he would keep things he didn’t want to lose. I’ve seen inside it in the past, he would sometimes pull things out to show me. He also kept his passport in there until his memory started to go with the dementia he suffered with. The box hasn’t been opened for at least four years, if not longer, and has been near my bed since hub’s death over two years ago.
The box is the last thing for me to go through. I haven’t been ready to do it.
I thought I had the key but the key I thought belonged to the box will not turn and I am not sure it is the correct key. I don’t know if the key is just stiff, or if it’s just the wrong key. I don’t want to break the lock or the box so have to figure out a way to get it open.
In the early years of Alberto’s illness, it seemed bizarre that Facebook had become part of my personal support system. I shared some fairly intimate things as my life tumbled into its role as his Carer. Carer in those circumstances was something I felt unqualified for, didn’t want and was scared of. Hobson’s choice hardly covered the way I felt about it.
By Diagnosis-Day the Dementia journey with Alberto was already an odyssey in progress. Progress made horribly real as the Doctor presented the result of tests when the stark sound of its name assaulted our ears. I was never sure if Alberto understood the words that day, simple words that left unsaid the fact he would descend deep into an obliteration of self that is the main characteristic of the disease. Only one of us would be left behind.
FB was my tether, odd maybe but it helped me stay grounded. It tethered me to a new normal. It functioned as constraint, no plummet for me when the abyss yawned its occasional invitation to me. Who knew? Facebook as a safety harness, a substitute connection for the lifetime one I was losing daily to this cruellest of diseases.
After the March FB status update I set aside all thoughts of the box. Setting it aside wasn’t a challenge given I’d lived with both the idea and fact of it excluding me for so long. That was until, a few weeks later, when I discovered a bunch of keys at the top of a previously little used kitchen cupboard. There among the many keys on Alberto’s key ring lay the small key that would open the Box.
People often scan through updates on Facebook without noting details or if they do will quickly consign the detail to their personal ‘no need to keep’ filter. I do not assume people have read my posts and try to make each status update autonomous. Therefore the second update about the box, in mid-April repeated and expanded on the first:
I met Alberto two weeks after my 13th birthday. We were married two weeks after my 16th birthday. Alberto was five years older than I but still so young.
While he was still at school Alberto made a wooden box. He kept his passport and other stuff in it, I always thought of it as his treasure box. The box had a key and was locked.
In time we decided I would keep the passports together so his passport was no longer in the box. In fact I know that in the box were some nude photos of me but Alberto had agreed with me that they should be destroyed after I pointed out to him that if we both died in an accident our sons would be opening the box and that is not an image you want your sons to see! (Even if I did look rather good!). Other than that I did not know what was or is in the box.
I know there will be nothing in the box that he or I would be ashamed of, Alberto was a totally honourable man, so in a way I suspect there will be a few sentimental items and maybe even some fairly boring paperwork.
For more than four years for sure I know that the box has not been opened, I know this because Alberto had Alzheimer’s and neither he nor I knew where the key to the box had gone. We had moved house and that is a great time to lose track of where things might be.
We were married for 54 years. I was his carer for the last of those years. Alberto died two years ago in January 2018, by then finding the key to his box wasn’t something he thought about.
The box has remained locked. I’ve thought about getting a locksmith to try to open it but balked at that. I did not want someone else to open it. So I decided the box would remain locked until I found the key and if I didn’t find it then it would remain locked.
By chance this week, I found a bunch of keys belonging to Alberto and instantly recognised the small key that fits the box.
I haven’t opened the box.
I know I will at some time but not until I am ready.
There were replies to this post from close friends, Facebook friends and relatives, all were kind, some deep and some that made me laugh out loud.
Childhood friend: ’….so that epistle was just teasing?’
And again ‘…Just a suspense thriller right?
FB friend: ‘…I need box closure! 🙂
The childhood friend from above: ‘…Me too.’
A fellow artist I’d met at the 2004 Olympic Art Exhibition in Athens wrote: ‘…An archive most valuable and deeply personal signifies deep bonds of love between each other Furthermore the box seems to have been made in a woodwork class note dovetail joints:
My reply was: ‘…It was indeed made in a woodwork class at school. He got an A for it, I recall he was very proud of that A. Alberto was a ‘can do’ guy, there was nothing he wouldn’t put his hand to (with me along as goffer). We did things that now, when I look back, I’m surprised we managed not to kill ourselves, but it was fun and satisfying. In a way the only thing was that Alberto worked too much, was never happy unless he was doing something.
From one of my sons: ‘…:Not right now, but when I’m out of isolation, if you want someone there when you’re ready to open it up, then Mum, you know I’m always here / there, for you !! Xxxxxx
A niece: ‘…I’m sorry the only thing I got out of that was nude photos, you cheeky devil xxx
My response to my niece: ‘…Behave! Just remember before we were parents, grandparents and great-grandparents we were people!
Back to childhood friend: ‘… You get us all excited and then decide not to open it? Cruelty to the max.’
My reply accompanied by three laughing emoji’s was: ‘…I never said I would tell anyone what was inside!!!
From another childhood friend ‘…..Ha us Borough girls all have risqué photos we wouldn’t want our kids to see. Shows how much passion our relationships embraced. Now Miss Marple if that was me I would have had that opened a long time ago… but it’s your choice ….don’t keep us waiting too long girl xx’
This particular friend’s reference to ‘Borough’ was to the place where we were born, a central area of town that had its heart ripped out in the 1960’s. Until then the neighbourhood produced some strong and sometimes odd characters. One, a well-known comic-book writer. However, all that is a different story. I will not digress.
Alberto might have made the box with wheels on if he had known how mobile it would become. The Box roamed from room to room during our many house renovations. It was something to stand on for extra height, or served as the stool I would park myself on while waiting instructions to lift my end of this or that joist. For a stool it had barely the bum space of the narrowest of economy airline seats, but made up for that by being as tall as a barley stalk bent in a summer breeze in our favourite field. Just the right height to perch on it served the sitting function well enough. Alberto laughed the first time I called it the Bum Box while we searched for and found it under a pile of plaster boards. The Bum Box was made of pinewood, dovetailed joints held it together, the lid hinged and only open when unlocked. There is a small keyhole at the front.
By the time Alberto died the Box’s exterior was a little battered, pretty much like we were by life. As I plonked it onto my bed to take its Facebook photograph, I mused that it was 64 years old, I’m sure I heard the echo of the Beatles singing: ‘Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m sixty-four?’ I’m not sure I will if and when I open it. A year and a bit into widowhood I considered giving it an overhaul, a sand and re-varnish would make it look like new. But no, each scuff, each scratch, and each dent is its history, as much a part of the Box as the dovetails Alberto made all those years ago.
Replies to my Facebook posts are kind, some are funny, and they make me laugh just as they would have made Alberto laugh. I live close to the churchyard where Alberto is buried and can see his grave from my kitchen window so I do not have to speak loudly for him to hear.
In my mind, and I suspect in the minds of the many others Alberto cooked for, Kitchen and Alberto paired together like Salt and Pepper or Peaches and Cream. Alberto cooked. His career was in catering management, but even with no formal chef training he was a great cook.
I cook but do not enjoy it that much, so now when I’m in the kitchen I’ll sometimes look across to where he lies in the earth and call across to him and ask: ‘Why aren’t you here doing the blasted cooking?’ I say to him, ‘I would love chicken stuffed with mozzarella, wrapped in prosciutto, topped with parmesan cheese; you know I can make it but, it just doesn’t come out the same as when you did it’.
Alberto cannot hear me, he died. He didn’t pass (that particular euphemism always makes me think of a car overtaking another.). He died, he died before dawn, life left him while I was holding his hand and singing an Italian lullaby to him, the lullaby Connie Francis sang in the film, Follow the Boys, we had both loved that film way back when.
Even though Alberto died I still relay news to him and in my head, hear his response. I tell him that there is a short story competition I’m thinking of entering, I add that the competition has different categories and is only for the over seventies. Wryly, I comment to him that it is probably a last chance saloon given there is no vaccine for a virus called Covid19. Oldies are dropping like flies and who knows, I might be in the next batch. I hear him chuckle just as wryly as I had, then he says go for it anyway. Many years ago Alberto encouraged me to apply for a prestigious award in my new career as a painter, I feel he is encouraging me in a similar way now, although this is not to be a new career. ‘So’, I ask, ‘are you ok with me writing about your Box?’
I ask him if he remembers the nude photos he’d taken of me and kept safely stored under lock and key in the box. I knew he had enjoyed looking at them, especially while I was away doing a Fine Art Master’s degree in Spain. Later when we got older, we talked about how we wouldn’t want our boys to come across those photos if we were to both die in a car accident, or something equally catastrophic, so we burnt them in a little ceremony that saw the end of some of our youthfulness.
We didn’t die in an accident. I heard him say you ‘were so beautiful and there were times I’d wished they were still in the box.’ Alberto always told me I was beautiful. I asked him, ‘What’s in the box now?’ He didn’t reply.
This all sounds somewhat romantic. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t.
It is a dilemma, the Box was, and is Alberto’s secret place, the one place he could keep his treasures, his secrets, if he had any. Do I have the moral right to open it? Does death negate the right to privacy? I think about Franz Kafka wanting his writing destroyed at his death, and think to myself as many others have, thank goodness that instruction was ignored. However I know that Alberto was not a Kafka, he was, like me, an ordinary person.
I knew about Alberto’s first love, he told me about her, he told me she had become pregnant by someone else but he loved her and still wanted to marry her. He told me all this before we married, he told me about his ups and downs, his history. He was brought to England as a young boy of eleven. He told me how he didn’t want to leave Italy but had no choice. With those exchanges over the years almost by osmosis, his history became mine and mine, his.
We were passionate, how could it have not been? Each with a strong character, forged through respective difficult childhoods that made us both tough and determined to make things better. As a team we were what the French would call, ‘Formidable’. It was impossible for those strong characters to have gone through so many years together without mountains to climb. We climbed our mountains, stood on peaks and enjoyed the views.
In between owning and running his own businesses Alberto was General Manager of a National catering company with its head Office in Oxford. He always wanted my company and I would often go with him. When he was in meetings I would go and visit the Ashmolean or Pitt Rivers Museums. Often on these Oxford bound sunny days I’d catch a gleam in Alberto’s eye and answer with one of my own. The car would be tucked in at the edge of a wood, we’d steal into dappled greenery and make passionate, almost illicit, love. If I wanted to I could plot meadow, mountain, hill or valley locations in the UK as well as in Alberto’s native Tuscany, in Italy, where nature and the sunshine brought out our physical passion. Each location was kindred to our mountain peaks. I do not want to.
In the early stages of Alberto’s illness when it was still safe to leave him alone for a few hours, I would find different locations in the countryside to sit and draw I would be out in the countryside for as long as it took to do a drawing and to attempt to pull together the wounds in each and every one of my cells that hurt with the fear of what was happening to Alberto. Later I painted a series of paintings based on those locations. The paintings were not my usual abstracts, they were landscapes with painted coordinates of their origins, location as part of the painted surface.
I named those landscape paintings ‘Call of Nature’ mainly for my own amusement as reference to where I had needed to pee. My humour was an element of physic self-defence that would keep crept in, plus I never could break the habit of having a cuppa before I went out. Often it amuses me to play with titles for paintings. I know I could paint a series with the locations of where Alberto and I made love under the sky, our mountain peaks. It would certainly be a large number of paintings. I won’t, though. In this case I don’t think I could come up with a good enough title for them. The call of nature paintings may have to stand as monument to our loving passions.
My countryside outings came to an abrupt stop after I got home one day to discover the smoke-alarm wailing. Alberto sitting in the sitting room commented that the alarm was faulty, which was a new one on me. I checked the kitchen and just managed to get the fire that was taking hold under control before it would have been necessary to call the fire brigade. Alberto had decided to repair a countertop edging, had lit the gas hob, put the new edging near the even heat to soften it then apparently distracted, forgotten about it. It caught fire and spread to other surfaces. I knew after that we would never again reach mountain summits, we wouldn’t even be able to try for the foothills.
The key to the box is on Alberto’s keyring, as mentioned in my Facebook update it had been at the top of a kitchen cupboard. It was in a plastic container right at the back of the shelf, unlikely to have been found if the shelf had not been pressed into service to stash packets of crisps brought as my guilty secret lockdown horde. A crisp craving led to a desperate search of the shelf which produced one lonely packet of sea salt crisps and one set of lost keys.
Finding the keys reminded me of the enormous number of keys Alberto always managed to accumulate, He could have been called a Chatelaine but Alberto was a man in such a way that I could not attach a word that refers to a female keeper of keys, no wonder JK Rowling used ‘Keeper of the Keys’ for Hogwarts.
This small old fashioned key seems to have Siren qualities, I resist .Another day, perhaps, or maybe another day is a luxury in these strange times.
It is Sunday morning and the time has come. The key doesn’t seem to have released the lid, but it has turned so I give the Box a thump, push up on the lid, and it opens. I see a carbon copy book Alberto used to hand write letters in, he never did get his head around computers. I lift the carbon book out and see below letters I sent to him from Spain, there are other things in the Box but suddenly I just cannot face it. I shut the lid quickly. It is too painful to go through today, it may be too painful to go through tomorrow. I cannot read the letters, letters penned by me to Alberto.
Our relationship was passionate, at times it was also painful, I just cannot re-visit it now. I don’t remember what we were writing about in those letters, it might have been pedestrian, loving or just too painful. In the end love.is such that I cared for this man I’d spent a lifetime with through to the illness when black humour was the only thing that kept me sane. At the end I was alone with him, held his hand in the moment and beyond of his death. Perhaps the Box needs to stay locked.
Many years ago we would go to watch the wind ripple through a Barley field off the canal towpath at the edge of our village. Good years, the weather would be kind and the barley would sway and not bend, other years the wind would be stronger and some stalks would buckle. Alberto’s eyes light up to see the barley wave at us the last time we stood together at the edge of that field. His memories had been erased by the disease yet I tried to imagine there was still something that remained, the essence of a memory that resisted its death. I thought of the times when things were good, when we might have traced the outline of each other’s face with an ear of barley, tickled nose and chin and laughed. This time Alberto soon became agitated and wanted to go. Irritation hits me first, then deep sadness that I am the only one left as keeper of our memories. It wasn’t the wind or pollen that stung my eyes as we made our way home.
Sunday Night, I note the sky is crystal clear, grab a blanket and settle outside to watch the stars. The Lyrid meteor shower comes around in April each year. I tell Alberto I hope to see some meteors, maybe pretend they are falling stars to make wishes on. Less prosaically I add, ‘it’s a bit chilly out here’ and hear him answer me in that wry way he has, ‘Not as chilly as down here! I chuckle through my tears. Stars become brighter as artificial lights are extinguished.
I had been so fearful through Alberto’s illness, his death, fears for my family, my aloneness. Now fear stalks me in a new form, its cause a worldwide pandemic I had not imagined. My thoughts shift to the mantra I’d borrowed, ‘This too, will pass’. For a few seconds the abyss beckons, but morphs into the long slow sigh that escapes from deep in my chest.
Earth might have drawn in a surprised and deep breath of air as we humans were locked down, now she releases it in the soft disbelief of a bequest the scourge on humanity has given her. I think of Alberto’s box, the Bum Box, it stays locked.
Linda Sgoluppi 