That Summer in Sicily (19 page)

“ ‘Where there is no State, someone steps forward, for better, for worse, to take on the role of the State. The clan is Sicily’s State.
La Mafia.
Interesting, don’t you think, that its name derives from the Arab? From
mahjas.
Sanctuary. Refuge. Place of succor. That’s what the medieval bandits had in mind to provide for themselves and for their families when they began their missions. Twelfth-century Robin Hoods, they were. Who could fault them? Swashbuckling brigands out to thieve those who had more bread than they could eat in a day. Does that sound familiar to you, my dear? Were you not a swashbuckling
brigantessa
yourself? Stashing bread and cheese and cakes in your pockets so you might feed your sister? You can understand how this all began but can you, can anyone, understand or defend its evolution? The clan no longer steals sheep or butchers cows by the light of a clandestine fire, drags the bloody parts of them back to their villages. Like lions taking their kill back to the lair. They leave that sort of activity to the unenlightened. They want more now. Now, they want everything. Now they want to crush the poor as they were once crushed. Memory does not always arrive whole from its journeys across the generations. Over seven or eight or nine centuries and, more recently, under the strategic guidance of the victors of the Great War, the clans have reached far beyond their humble, rural roots. Like Etna, the Mafia spits violence at will. It spits at the State when, every once in a while, it stirs from its langourousness. It spits at the Church, which has always been prone to its own form of sanctified violence. It spits at anyone daft enough to stand in the way of its eruption. And so where are the defenders of the poor? Where are the hussars who will ride over the mountains to save them from the wolves? I shall tell you where they are. Sitting at table with the clan. Feasting and plotting their glories. Just as they were last evening. All the tribes are in league. They are as one. Mafia, Church, and State. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Leo has yet to—how shall I say this?—Leo has yet to hold this truth in reverence.’

“ ‘And he won’t,’ I say. ‘He never will.’

“ ‘You puzzle me, Tosca. The sage in you puzzles me. And so is there nothing to do?’

“ ‘It’s you who say there is nothing to do.
All the tribes are in league.
Leo is his own tribe and if there is something to do, he will do it. Not you. Not me. I remember years ago your telling me that it would be you who would catch Leo when he faltered. You said,
And he will falter.
I promised myself then that it would be me rather than you who would be close enough to catch him. We were both wrong, both presumptuous, weren’t we? I know now that
falter,
Leo shall never do. But you, Don Cosimo, have you faltered? Where is your place in all this hierarchy? ’ My unusual use of the formal address causes him to look sharply at me.

“ ‘I have no place save as the prince’s confessor. Through my own crises of faith and through the behavior and refusals of behavior that have resulted from those crises, I have forfeited most all other duties and rights associated with my ordination. The Curia has yet to defrock me only because of Leo. Because of his full and indisputable knowledge of certain events and practices within the Curia. And because of his generous support to the parish. To the Dioceses. Funds and favors—and perhaps even silences—that they know he would withdraw should I be further stripped. You see, dear Tosca, Mother Church is the only true whore in Sicily. You know well enough that I think Leo to be foolhardy, imprudent, and yet my allegiance is to him. My allegiance will always be to
Candide.
’ ”

CHAPTER XIV

“L
EO KEPT OFTEN APART FROM ME AFTER HIS MEETING WITH
the clan. And when we were together, I felt the distance between us even more than when he’d go off by himself to ride or when, having locked its door, he stayed hours alone in the library. When he did talk, it was about his fear. Not ostensibly of course, since he couched the fear behind fake practicalities.
We must discontinue our morning rides because there is so much more to do at the
borghetto, he would tell me when the evident truth was that, with the new systems in place and in operation, the peasants had always less need for us. For instance, efficiency and yield had increased at an almost incalculable rate in the fields. The peasants were better housed, better fed, better clothed, better cared for than most of them had been in all their lives. These fundamentals intact, the two programs that next concerned Leo—the school and the infirmary—also flourished.

“Cosettina had so progressed in her studies and had expressed such longing to take on the post of
maestra
that, for her seventeenth birthday, Leo gifted her a small, thin briefcase covered in red ostrich skin and engraved with her initials. Inside it was a note of congratulations to the new
maestra
of the
borghetto
school. I, myself, had been advanced to the post of Saturday-morning Story Lady.

“Even my weekly presence in the infirmary had become redundant, since the doctor’s visits had been increased to thrice weekly and the State had begun to send ’round nurses and social workers to assist him and, I suspected, to gather intelligence. Talk of Prince Leo’s
borghetto
and his new programs had quietly traveled across the straits and up the peninsula.

“Countering Leo’s insistence on the peasants’ greater need for us, I would remind him that it was the development of their independence that was his ultimate goal. He would acquiesce. Until he’d spun another veil.
I need more rest, Tosca. And you,
amore mio,
you must return to your studies of the classics. I’ve been neglecting my business affairs and must be more diligent with attorneys and accountants and agricultural consultants. I have a ‘farm’ to run, after all,
he would tell me, fixing his gaze somewhere just above and to the left of mine.

“I understood that he feared, not for himself, but for me. Together in the early quiet of the woods, I would make as accommodating a target as would he. And so our morning rides were abruptly suspended, as were my solo jaunts. My own fear thrived, undisclosed. Little by little, Leo clipped and pinched at our already reserved lives. A boy dragging a stick through the sand, he drew the boundaries of his unassailable realm. As though the clan could not scale the walls, we were to live inside the palace. The gardens, the lemon groves, the
borghetto,
and some of the closer fields were as far away as we would venture. But this would pass, I told myself. He is suffering the first cut of horrific fear. He will take up his peace again in the spring, I told myself. He would take up his peace again in the spring after that. For nearly three years, he at best mustered only a figment of it. And even then, it came and went, his peace. Slits of light from behind the shade. Yet in all that passage of time, no more red-sealed invitations written on thick vanilla-colored paper were delivered to him at breakfast. Neither summonses nor admonitions interrupted his days. Nary a snake in the grass where he deigned to walk. Though we never again,
would never again,
ride together nor go out upon our little journeys to the sea, we adapted. In truth, the way we lived during that time was not so different from how we’d lived when I was younger. Once again we followed the rituals. It was the only life that the princesses had ever lived and the one that, when she was present, Simona fell into with comfort. If we wanted new clothes, merchants or their representatives ported trunks and wheeled wardrobes into the small
salone.
If we wanted music for an evening, concertists were invited to sing and play. If we wanted to have supper in the
borghetto,
laden with baskets of sweets and fruits, we walked over the meadow to join our neighbors. We often worked mornings in the fields, side by side with the peasants or with the
ortolani
in the palace gardens. I wanted to learn to cook, and so stayed with the palace brigade among the roasting pans and the simmering pots and the heaps of flour lined up on the scrubbed wooden table where the pasta and the bread were made. And there were always guests. More even than in my earlier days. Generations of cousins and widowed aunts and longer-widowed great aunts and brothers-in-law and friends of friends arrived and departed and arrived again. As if it were true. As if there really was safety in numbers. And if there were whisperers in their ranks, I never heard them. Somehow and at some point, I had become one of them.”

“It was Ascension Day, the day when fresh water is said to become holy and when the peasants go to bathe themselves in the healing waters of the ascending Christ. And then to rest in the sun, to eat their bread and ham, and to drink their wine. Though we’d always gone with the peasants on this holy day, Leo had preferred, this time, to remain quietly at the palace. But the day had not been quiet.

“It’s just after sunset now and Leo and I and Cosimo stand in the road beside the
borghetto
to wait for the procession of old carts that carry the women home. We see the lights from a long way off across the spring-shorn fields, the scintillas of the candle lanterns swinging from the axles of the wagons. As they come nearer, I can hear the carts creak and groan under the weight of the women who sit upon unsteady chairs, lace shawls over their braids and about their shoulders. I know that they are holding hands and I strain to hear them singing plainsong under the rising May moon. I wish that I were with them in their tilting chairs, swaying in rhythm to the slapping of the horses’ flanks, the heavy clumping of their hooves over the ancient stones.

“We’ve come to the
borghetto
not to welcome home the peasants as much as to prepare them for what they will find. For what is no longer here. Surely they will smell the smoke, see the black smudges swirling about the twilight. There has been a fire. Skillfully set and left to rage while the peasants were away. The
borghetto
left to burn. From the palace veranda where we went to sit with our coffee this morning, Leo and I saw the flames leaping from the buildings. Men from the palace household had seen them before we did, were already on their way, Cosimo among them. We’d telephoned several of the villages. More help arrived. Onto the bed of a truck we’d thrown garden tools. We’d joined the line, hurtled shovels of earth, relayed water from the well in feed buckets. Chaste weapons to stay the beast. Even as it tired. Even in its last throes. The sleeping quarters are least damaged. The
mensa,
the kitchens, the chapel are all stone shells heaped with smouldering ash. We know, perhaps everyone knows, this fire is a calling card. The clan is a persevering suitor. Inventive, unpredictable, compelling.

“Yet the next day officials, summoned by Leo from Enna, investigate the site with the thoroughness of archaeologists. The fire was not set. No indication of arson is established. The fire was not the work of the clan but of simple distraction. The bakers’ distraction. Once the oven was hot enough to shovel in the risen loaves, the bakers—as they do always—swept the oven floor clean of the piles of white-hot embers, heaved pailsful of the live ash behind the bakehouse. But this morning, in their rush to join the departing wagons on their way to the river, they were careless. The undampened embers fell upon dry grasses. Too close to the woodpile. The dry grasses were like tinder, the embers caught the wood. The fire seethed, spread. When it reached the containers of cooking gas in the
mensa,
it exploded. Rather than giving himself over to relief that the fire was accidental, Leo resists believing the authorities.
Might not someone have instructed them to call it ‘spontaneous’? Who can be certain? After all, have we Sicilians not cultivated secrecy to a fine art? Every last one of us?
Far more than what had become his usual expressions of quixotic terror, it was this incident of the fire and Leo’s refusal to accept its innocent source that showed me the force of his ravings. And against those ravings, logic is feeble as the trickle of water that could not stop the blaze.’ ”

“ ‘One evening during this long epoch of our siege, Leo came to my rooms. Agata opened the door to his knock. Seated at the pianoforte, a silvery-brown tea gown puffed up about me on the little bench, I was trying to play
Saint-Saëns.
Still trying. Still working on
Le Cygne.
Leo arranged himself on the
divanetto.

“I began to silently mouth the words even before he could say them aloud.

“ ‘It’s a swan, Tosca. The music was composed to give the impression of a swan. There is no indication that an elephant approaches.
Piano. Piano, amore mio.
’

“ ‘But I’m so big and these keys are so small. What do I do with all my strength?’

“ ‘Strange, but it’s precisely your strength about which I’d like to speak this evening.’

“I rise from the bench, go to him to receive his demure double kiss, and he pulls me down to perch on the edge of the small hassock in front of where he sits. Without overture, he says, ‘Essentially I have no heir. I am the last one, the last to be born of this noble, ignoble lineage of mine. I have no sons. Only those two twittering, rustling reflections of their mother, save their souls. Simona has raised them as her personal pets. I have given them only my name. It’s as though she somehow separated and replaced even the blood in them that was mine, though God knows, it was my very blood for which she married me. But I’ll get to that. I tell you once again, I have no heir. I am concerned not at all for Simona’s material comforts since she owns more land and more grand edifices than she’s had time or will to look upon. Our marriage was motivated not only by my father’s debts but by her father’s wiliness. Her father offered no dowry, you see. An unheard-of display of arrogance. He wanted his daughter’s wealth to stay with her, not to be drunk or whored or gamed by some blackguard. Certainly a husband would have the peripheral benefits of her wealth, but he would have access to only that part which Simona, herself, deemed worthy to share. Had Simona been lovely or talented or simply kind, simply tender, she might have attracted suitors even under those hostile conditions. That she was none of these had its effect. By the time my father presented the idea of my marriage to her, she was dangerously near to twenty-five—the official age when a never-married woman becomes
la zitella,
a spinster—and her father had softened, if only slightly. The two men had been lifelong friends. My father, Laurent, needed help. And if only to save face, Federico’s daughter needed a husband. It was all accomplished with grace. Dutiful and correct in my liaison with Simona, I also kept certain elements of my former life uninterrupted. I was eighteen years old, Tosca. Not much more than a boy. A boy sent off to do his duty for his family. Not unlike being sent off to war.
From the rich
zitella’s
bed, you will provide salvation for us all, my son.
The compromise worked for everyone. Or so I’d believed until I fell in love with you. All this is to tell you that you are my family, Tosca. You and Cosimo and the peasants. And all I have will be yours. Cosimo and I are seeing to that.’

“I have been listening to him as to a fable. Yes, as to a strange, sad fable. And so when he said, ‘To seal the pact, I want you to have this,’ I was startled. Even though I’d already known, if not in such cold detail, much of what he’d been telling me, hearing it all in a piece like that caused grief in me and something akin to anger.

“ ‘Your father was as cruel as mine,’ I tell him.

“He shakes his head in defense of his father. He fumbles trying to unbutton the vest pocket of his rumpled suede riding coat, which, though he hasn’t mounted a horse in three years, he wears almost exclusively. His long, thick fingers tremble as he tries to grasp something tucked away there. He pulls out a small purse shaped like an envelope. Made of quilted silk in a burnt brown color. Leo opens its clasp and takes out a necklace. A square-cut emerald hangs from a short braided chain of rose-gold. In his open palm, he holds it out to me. Says, ‘I have always imagined that this, hanging from my mother’s neck above my crib as she sang to me, must have been the first object I saw. It’s not likely true, but it hardly matters. Until the night she died, I don’t recall ever having seen my mother without this. If we were to have been married, this would have been my wedding gift to you.’

“I don’t take the necklace; I hardly look at it, but rather at him. Trying to tell him that it’s not an emerald that I want or need. Not even his mother’s emerald. I try to say that I would have loved to have been his bride but that I am content being who I am to him. Even though, until now, I’ve never been certain of who that might be. Surely I don’t want to be his heir. I say all of this, I say more than this, and he hears me. Puts the necklace back in its burnt-brown purse.