That Summer in Sicily (23 page)

“Less than a week later Cosimo comes to fetch me in the old gray Chrysler, its shuddering, as it idles in the drive, as violent as my own. I take a last look about. I touch the emerald at my throat. I wear my mourning dress. A beaver coat that touches the tops of the high thick heels of my lace-up shoes. A black velvet toque I’ve tilted over the crown of my braids. Cosimo carries my trunk, I, the suitcase that holds the medicine bag. I am settled in the passenger seat where Leo always sat. I take a deep breath, and in it there is the still-lingering perfume of neroli oil. As Cosimo shifts the car and we begin to move, I turn to see Agata and Mimmo standing in the portico, chins high, hands at their sides. I place my splayed, gloved hand against the window.”

CHAPTER I

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON AT FIVE WHEN
I
GO TO MEET
with Tosca under the magnolia, I find her somehow changed, as though her great, powerful presence has waned, given way to a winsomeness, a fragility, even. She is older, and yet more a girl. Tosca continues her story.

“A just-foaled, unlicked beast staggering against a sharp wind, I hold my hat in place with one hand, the suitcase packed with the medicine bag in the other, and hobble along the oil-slicked, burnt-smelling trackway. I cannot keep pace with the young porter who drags my trunk from the train. He turns every few meters to see that I follow. Still I lose sight of the small, thick figure of him snaking in and out of the billowing steam and among the crushing throngs. Each time a whistle is pulled, I am startled, panicked, close to tears. Once out onto the street, I stand there beside my bags and look about as though I’ve not been transported one hundred kilometers distant from the palace but catapulted into another universe by some hell-born fiend. I nearly laugh at the essential truth of this. Curse Mattia. I hear dialect spoken and, though its city form is different enough from the mountain one, I stay still to listen to it, take comfort in it. My heart beats more slowly. I am still in Sicily.

“I wave my hand in the general direction of the bank of taxis across the way. This has little effect save from one of the drivers, who waves back and blows me a kiss. I watch what other people do. I do what they do. Step right up to the driver’s window, lean in to tell him my destination. It works. My driver wears a red fez and some sort of military jacket, unfastened to reveal the stupendous girth of him. He rolls out of the car, stows my trunk in the boot, nods at me to get going. Get in. I slide into the seat, he slams shut the door and lurches into the frantic dusk of Arabia.

“The city looks freshly sacked. Buildings black and hollow, as though great fires have only just been spent in the bellies of them, sit cheek by jowl with sublime palaces that glitter, unembarrassed, I think, by the cruel obstinacy of their survival. Palermo is in conflict with itself. It’s good that the traffic moves slowly. Good that the driver bounces in time to the merciless screech of his radio, the tassel on his fez swinging up to brush the roof of the taxi on every third beat. These past twenty or so minutes mark by far the longest stretch of time during which I have not thought of Leo. This, too, must be good. Before I would have wished him to, the driver stops abruptly in front of a narrow red-stuccoed palazzo with arched and colonnaded windows. He places my trunk on the narrow sidewalk while I gather together the fare. So rarely have I handled money that I thrust what are far too many coins into his roughened paw. Patiently, still bouncing to his music, he counts out the correct amount, pockets it, takes my hand, turns it palm up, and slaps down the remaining coins. Wishes me a good evening. I stand there watching the taxi until it’s out of sight. I wave too late for the driver to see me, even had he been looking in his mirror. Maneuvering first the trunk and then the suitcase up the few steps to the entrance, I press the button under the small brass plaque.
Pensione d’Aiello.
”

Even though she and I have been sitting together for hours each day for the past week or so while she tells me another and then another part of this story, Tosca looks at me then almost in surprise. How did I come to be here with her in the darkening under the magnolia?

“What was it like? Your arrival in the
pensione
?” Banality meant to lead her back into the story. Rather she smiles, sits quietly.

“I hardly recall anything of that first evening. Those first days. I do recall what didn’t happen. You see, I’d thought that the new place would make
me
new as well. That the journey would strip me clean. Eclipse the noises. I’d thought to outrun the ghosts, outwit them. I’d counted on Palermo, the refuge of
the new place,
the refuge of a train ride, the sympathy of a malodorous man in a red fez, to do for me what I hadn’t been able to do for myself. But the man in the red fez and the train and the city were powerless against the ghosts. Leo, Cosimo, Mattia. All of them had gathered, awaiting me in the third-floor room in
pensione d’Aiello.
Over and over again, I heard Simona saying
find your own way home.
”

I’d grown used to the stylish tripping of Tosca’s storytelling. Ebullient or wistful, the plummy tones of her voice never faltered. She’d trace back and forth, picking up threads she’d dropped, but always, she’d had the next thing and the next thing after that to say. Now she is cautious.

“I don’t think I can tell you about those years in Palermo without telling other people’s stories along with my own. Stories that are not mine to tell. Life until I left the palace was largely about Leo and me. In Palermo it included, it grew to include, many others.”

“Did you fall in love again? Is that what you mean?”

“Perhaps that, too. Not only that. During that time Palermo was a city even more explosive than it had been during the war. An ancient, exhausted city in the throes of yet another rising-up from the ashes. Only then it wasn’t the Greeks or the Saracens or the Normans who’d invaded. It was the boys from the mountains. Hungry, desperate boys from these mountains. And a few boys from across the sea.”

“What sea?”

“American soldiers. I’m talking about American soldiers—some of whom were island born, who had emigrated to and been naturalized in America—who landed back here in 1943. The American invasion of Sicily re-formed the clans from their historical careers as rural brigands—the boys who’d slit throats for a sack of flour—into another class of criminal. There were drugs to traffic, State funds to embezzle, protection fees to collect, a black market to exploit.”

“What did all that have to do with you?”

“Think about the frescoes in the dining hall. About the fragments within the allegories that are empty. Those blank spaces. They are empty because there wasn’t enough of the original design left for the restorer to re-create those portions with authenticity. The restoring artist would have had to paint his own figures and, hence, dishonor the intrinsic virtue of the work. It’s quite the same with a life. There are blank spaces that I cannot fill.”

“
Io capisco. Io capisco.
I understand,” I tell her even as she picks up her brush.

“I was a Pirandello figure, Chou. A character in search of an author. In search of a story. So used to the prescribed life in the palace, so used to the bells and the rituals, even used to Simona selecting my clothes, to Agata taking care of them, of me. In fifteen years, I’d never chosen my own food, never thought about what something cost. I’d never drawn my own bath. I don’t even know if, from the time I was fifteen and understood that I loved the prince, I don’t know if I ever had a whole thought that didn’t include him. As a six-year-old motherless child, I’d been far more skilful at the business of living than I was at twenty-five. I’d once believed that Leo had made a woman out of the girl in me and yet the greater truth might have been that he’d kept me, I think unwittingly, a child. He refined and inspired and educated and protected me so that without him to breathe the very life into me, I died, too. A character in search of an author.

“I chose one dress and I wore it every day. A dark brown dress with a pattern of white camellias and small green leaves. A long brown woollen shawl. Thick black stockings and black lace-up shoes. My hair I fixed in a single plait, let it fall down to the small of my back. I wore a white basque. Wanting nothing of the forced intimacy that would come of my sitting at table thrice daily in the
pensione,
I lied to my patrons. Told them I’d made other dining arrangements. Besieged by ghosts, I would be one, too.

“I would slip down three flights of carpeted stairs, leave quietly of a morning. Return then as quietly to rest. Back down again in the afternoon, the early evening. A final, stealthy turn of the long, flat key in the lock and I’d climb to my room for the night. Two exits, two entrances without speaking a word. An easy ghost I was.”

“I began my exploration of the city by following people. Some days I would let myself be led to the waterfront, sometimes to the markets. In each place, I began to draw my own route. Make my own map. Where to sit to watch the boats. Mark the hours when the fleets came in, went out, came in again. The fishermen’s wives who waited. Sun-browned faces slashed with lipsticked mouths, bosoms spilling out of tight cotton pinafores, fraying sweaters straining across thickened waists. Patched rubber boots over unmended stockings, they marched three or four abreast to the edge of the pier and I thought them a dazzling troupe. I waited for them as I might have for friends, forgetting that I was invisible to them. In the markets, I would always have two 100-lira coins ready in my hand. A sack of plums. Two scoops of pistachios, salted in the shell. Always a slice of pecorino
pepato
and a quarter loaf of sesame bread. Or two flats of Arab bread from the man everyone called Santo. Though I might go to the same merchants and even buy the same things for days on end, no one paid notice to the good ghost I’d become. Whatever change remained from my purchases I would drop in the upturned hand of the gypsy who smelled of night jasmine and old sweat and who crouched near a fishmonger who I think was her son. Recognizing her as a ghost, too, she was, for months, the only person in whose eyes I looked.

“Though everyone who had something to eat ate it on the street, I was embarrassed to do likewise. On a bench in the
Favorita,
my lookout place between the shacks and the oil drums on the pier, in one place or another, I would dine. Unwrapping my cheese from its thick white paper, I would sometimes think of the crumble of pecorino that the shepherds would chisel from their great, dark yellow rounds for Mafalda and me in the markets and how she would hold her mouth open for it, a famished little bird. Now I could buy as much cheese as I wished. As though I had children to feed, a husband on his way home to lunch,
di più, di più,
more, more, I would say to the merchant as he moved the great glistening blade of his cutter above a larger and yet larger wedge of the cheese. I would try to taste it with the old hunger. I’d close my eyes and wait for the burst of sharp, sour heat on my tongue but I felt nothing. I’d refold the thick white paper ’round the cheese and put it in my bag, walk along until I came upon a child bent on some mission or another or, less often, a group of children playing, and offer the cheese. Oh, the wonder, the ecstasy it never failed to cause, that slice of cheese, and that impulse would always make me think about the many emotions of which hunger is made.”

“Everywhere I walked, I looked for him. Not a conscious, deliberate search, mine was the instinctive chase of the lover longing for the beloved. In the market, in the bar, in the street, along the pier, I am a constant huntress tracking her dead prince. The sighting of any man, tall and light-haired, visible above the crowd, would stop my heart. I would run, snake through the throngs, traverse screeching traffic to intercept him.
Leo. Leo.
I would call and people would make way for me, shouting oaths or cheering, applauding the classic scene of a woman in pursuit of a man, their eyes saying
get to him, kiss him, shoot him, do what you must. But get to him.
And so it was not at all startling to me when, one day, I saw my mother.

“Her same fragile beauty I think to see in a woman who stands among those waiting for an
autobus.
Tendrils of straw-colored hair fall from a kerchief tied behind her head. Just like my mother. A pale blue cotton dress with padded shoulders and black leather pumps with white cotton socks turned down at the ankles just like my mother’s Sunday clothes. I stop on the edge of the group as though I, too, have come to wait for the
autobus.
I stare at the woman who I am certain is my mother. Unlike the times when I’d approached a man who I thought to be Leo and then saw it was decidedly not him, now I am sure. The still sane part of me knows it is the madness of grief that makes her appear now. But why doesn’t she look at me? How can she not see me if I can see her? I walk closer to her, stare openly at her. I study her as though she is wax.

“
Mamà, it’s me,
I tell her softly.
Mamà, can you see me? Tosca,
she whispers.
Che cosa ci fai qui?
What are you doing here?

“She is not Mama. She is Mafalda. Mafalda, who is now the same age, nearly the very same age, as my mother was when she died. As my mother was when I last saw her. In the almost thirteen years since I have seen my sister, she has grown to be the
sosia,
the twin image of Mama.

“
‘Ciao, piccola,’
I say. She allows my embrace but does not return it.

“ ‘What brings you so far away from your palace, Tosca?’ She pulls away from me, adjusts her kerchief, narrows her eyes so tears won’t fall.

“ ‘I, I live here now.’

“ ‘Oh, does your prince also have a palace here?’