That Summer in Sicily (26 page)

“At some point Nuruzzu had bent to kiss me good-bye, left me at the table in the
caffè
behind the Vucciria. I’d hardly noticed for the sound of Leo’s voice. He pushes at me.
Most landowners permit their peasants only enough to keep themselves upright. Only enough to keep themselves productive. The nobles feast, the peasants provide. I want the end of that. At least on my own land.

“But how, Leo? How do I help them? Do I save Nuruzzu? Do I take a room for her at Aiello and do we both live like ghosts, she hiding from the villains, me hiding from you? There are so many of them, Leo. So many like Nuruzzu. So many like me.”

“It is a morning in November and rain purls against the windows of the
caffè
behind the Vucciria. The little room seems less shabby in the bluish light of the storm and, with the edge of my shawl, I rub the steam from the window next to my table. Nuruzzu is late. I crush pine-nut biscuits into my hot milk, eat them like soup. Rub the steam from the window again. A red-kerchiefed blur, she races past the window then. Snakes through the crowded area of the bar, settles herself across from me. She wears dark glasses and I do not wish to see the vileness they shroud.

“ ‘Tonight you will not go to work. Neither will you go tomorrow night. I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you. To beg you to let me help you.’

“ ‘You do help me, Tosca. More than you know. Besides, it’s not so bad. Last night one of my clients invited me to supper and I went with him. I felt pretty. Two men were waiting for us as we came out of the
taverna.
My cavalier was beaten more fiercely than I.’

“If you had a place to live, I mean if you didn’t have to worry about
how
you were going to live, would you leave your villains?’

“I might think I could. Until I remembered that they would never let me.’

“Falsely playful then, she removes the glasses, thrusts her face close to mine. ‘Why?’ she laughs. ‘Are you going to take me home with you, Tosca? Introduce me to your brother? Is that what you have in mind? It hurts to think of freedom even for a moment. Don’t make me think of freedom, Tosca.’ From slits of blackened swollen flesh, two tears cling.

“ ‘I’m going to find a place to live. For me. And for you. Maybe a place with rooms for others, too. I want to buy an apartment.’

“The glasses in place once again, she laughs another kind of laugh. ‘You want to
buy
an apartment?’

“ ‘Truth is, I want to buy a whole
palazzo,
’ I tell her.

“She appraises the shoes I’d bought in the market for 75 lira. Leo’s suede riding jacket under my shawl. I do not convince her of my power to acquire.

“ ‘You’re not anyone’s paid girl, are you? I’ve never asked you about your living arrangements. I thought you would have told me if you’d wished me to know,’ she says.

“ ‘I’m on my own, Nuruzzu. I was married once, but my husband died. I’m a widow,’ I tell her.

“ ‘I see. You’re so young. The war?’ she asks softly.

“ ‘One of the wars, yes. I have enough to take care of both of us,’ I say.

“ ‘But you’re serious, aren’t you?’ she asks.

“ ‘Very serious.’

“ ‘And very mad. They’ll throttle you, leave you to the dogs. I belong to them. Should you be fool enough to
intercede,
you wouldn’t be able to hide from them any more than I would.’

“ ‘I’ve already been through that.’

“ ‘What do you mean?’

“ ‘I mean that I’m not afraid of your friends.’ ”

Once again, Tosca is quiet. Sometimes she moves her mouth as though trying out the next words. She doesn’t say them to me.

“
Nuruzzu.
It’s not a common name, is it?” It’s I who break the silence.

“Not so common.”

“One of the village women is called Nuruzzu. At least that’s the name I heard the other women call her.”

“Yes, she is Nuruzzu.” Tosca looks at me then. Arranges her mouth in a crooked smile. “She is
the
Nuruzzu. Our friendship has lasted for a very long time. You see, for the next seven years after that day in the
caffè,
Nuruzzu stayed with me. And from time to time and for certain periods, many other of the Maqueda ladies and ladies from other quarters of the city also stayed with me.

“At first we lived on one floor of a derelict
palazzo
not far from the Quattro Canti. We made a life, Nuruzzu and I. Like brides, we set up house. We bought beds and mattresses and sofas and a dining room table. A gas stove we paid four men to haul from a dockside junkman. Pots and pans. Towels and sheets and blankets. We organized ourselves like an institution. Nuruzzu had her jobs. I had mine. We interviewed the women who desired to live in the house. Sent them for medical examinations. Filed the results. Issued clean, if used, clothing, bedding, a copy of the house rules, which included two showers a day. We instructed them in their daily housework. Found jobs for many of them. If they worked outside the house and continued to live with us, they tithed. Visitors only on Sunday afternoons and always in the
salone,
always in company. Some women came to stay with their children, with their mothers in tow. I took on the care of them. Of the little ones and the oldest ones. It was like being back at the
borghetto.
We set up a kindergarten for our own children and opened it to others whose mothers did not live with us. Nothing grand, mind you.

“People referred to the women as
i virgineddi.
The little virgins. Our apartment was known as The House of the Little Virgins. The sarcasm attached to the name was soon diffused into a kind of awe, though.
Awe
at the immense conceit of our undertakings, I think. As our ranks increased, I transferred us to a
palazzo
that was all our own. What Nuruzzu had predicted came to pass. We lived with threats and, more than once, almost died of the intended execution of those threats. An unyielding lot we were, though. Help came from unexpected sources. From rebellious factions within the clans themselves. Perhaps the greatest help came from our own fatalism.

“How amused we became by the high pitch of our recklessness. A recklessness that, over the years, earned a kind of underground fame for the house. Not as a refuge for the broken but as a place rife with small wonders. Wonder at our very existence in light of the clan’s code of pitiless revenge. How had we saved ourselves? Why were we left to our own devices?”

She screws up her long, feline eyes to some far-off horizon.

“Blank spaces in the allegories,” I say.

She nods her head.

“I never spoke to anyone of my finances. In draconian fashion, I bargained in the markets, grimaced each time I reached inside my pockets as though crabs lived in them. Haunting the secondhand shops for almost everything we needed beyond food, I began to scrimp the way I’d learned to do as a child. I can tell you that it was far more satisfying to invent some savory pap from scraps than it would have been to roast a joint each night. I feared the intemperance, the nonchalance of the palace. You see, I never stopped wanting to live in the
borghetto.
I suppose to this day, I’ve never stopped wanting to re-create it. The way the
borghetto
became after Leo’s interventions. The careful measuring out of the daily bread distinguished from the feasting days. The balance. The washing and cleaning, the distribution of clothes and shoes. The security of supper. That’s what we had in the House of the Little Virgins.”

“It’s not so different from life here,” I say.

“No, not so different, though here we have more. More space. Surely we have more peace. I’ve never understood what incident or what passage of time caused my need to return to the mountains. I might have stayed the rest of my life in Palermo. It was a good life. It became a good enough life. I think it was when I began considering how much more could be done up here with all this land, all these rooms. I hadn’t known that part of my mind had already been at work here at the villa. Fixing and restructuring, planting, building. Cooking.

“I didn’t give my householders in Palermo a great deal of notice about my leaving. I put the running of the place in tried-and-true hands. You see, a year earlier Mafalda had come to live with Nuruzzu and me in the House of the Little Virgins. She had visited us over the years, observed us, once in a while, she would come to supper with us. And when I told her of my plan to return to the mountains, it seemed also right that I tell her about the lodge, the land, and all the rest. When I said that I would look for someone to whom I could entrust the running of the Palermo house, she simply said, ‘I’ll do it.’ And she did.

“I left funds just as Leo had left funds for his peasants when he’d parceled his land to them. All the operational pieces were in place. To whomever among the
virgineddi
might have wanted to go with me—to begin again in the mountains—I bid welcome. I announced my plan at supper one evening, said I’d be leaving early the next morning. Without a word, Nuruzzu left the table, packed her things, buttoned her sweater, zipped up what she thought to be proper boots for country life, tied a kerchief under her chin, and, so prepared for departure, sat stiffly on the sofa to await the sunrise. Only she came with me.”

“Came here with you?”

“Yes, here. We came home to this
place.
Nuruzzu and I. Mafalda stayed in Palermo for three years longer and then she, too, joined us here. But when Nuruzzu and I first arrived, Lullo still lived here. Lullo, the caretaker, and Valentino, his beautiful red-haired boy who’d grown up and was just married by then. The three of them lived and worked together in the villa and on the land. Though they’d labored with great constancy against the natural decay of things, theirs was a small bane against time.”

“S
WITCHBACKING THROUGH THE HILLS IN A BATTERED BLUE
truck, we arrived, Nuruzzu and I and our driver, who was the owner of the truck. I sat up front with him.

“Nuruzzu arranged herself in the truck bed among the sparse piles of our belongings. It was the first time she had ridden in any sort of vehicle since the days when she’d been ported back to Palermo from her imperfect escapes. Steadying on her thighs a box of thirty cannoli from the Benedictines, Nuruzzu sang, screeched out into the mountain air she’d never before felt or breathed or ever thought she would.

“I don’t know if I had fixed expectations of what or who I’d find at the villa. I just knew it was the right place to be. That it had become the right place to be.

“As the driver careened onto the long pebbled road, I took from the pocket of my dress the key that had lain among other keys in a long metal box for those eight years, the same yellow string still looped through its hole identifying it as the key to the hunting lodge. A talisman. The doors would be open.

“The accidental gardens flourished, the blown roses climbed, the pines soared and quivered in the hot gusts of a half-hearted breeze, and, as it had been on the day I first saw it, there was no sign of a mortal hand. I went to sit in the lap of the magnolia.

“I was there when Lullo and two ancestresses from Leo’s hunters stumbled up, running from some back field, alerted by Nuruzzu, still singing, still screeching. As if he’d been expecting us, he shouted out a perfunctory
ben tornata a villa Donnafugata, signorina,
nodded to Nuruzzu and the driver, began carrying our things through the doors.”

I watch her as she ploughs the bottom of a sea, searching for some lost shard. She looks about the gardens. Does she see herself in the lap of the magnolia? I can see her there.

“Taking Lullo’s lead, we began immediately to call the place
the villa.
We loved the name
Donnafugata.
Fitting. Allusive. Ironic. Only we two would ever know how fine a name it was. Only Nuruzzu and I would know.

“Though detritus furnished every room, I think we did little more on that first day or the first days after that than bathe and eat and sleep. I remember that Lullo made a fire when Valentino and his wife came in from the fields at sundown. She is the woman, by the way, who looked into your eyes on that first day when you skulked about the kitchen. She is Annamaria. There was an unspoken and collective need to be, for a while, all in the same place, and so we piled sofa pillows and musty bedding ’round the fire. Feasted on the cannoli. I don’t think we ate anything before or afterward. We drank tea and fed pieces of the pastry to the dogs. Though we hardly said a word, we laughed. While we slept that evening, Lullo made his rounds.
La Tosca è tornata.
”

“Let me explain that Leo had parceled, to some of the peasants from the
borghetto,
lands that adjoined the farms belonging to the villa. These new landowners—just as had the new landowners who’d been deeded parcels near the palace—converted outbuildings into dwellings or built farmhouses, stone by stone. Each farmer lived on his own land. Each farmer worked his own land. Additionally each one of them worked, in some way or another, on the farms belonging to the villa that were the once mostly unproductive farms Leo had bequeathed to me. The farmers, rather than taking some share in the crops from the villa farms or even some share of the cash profits those farms brought in over the years, banked every lira. It was Lullo himself who oversaw the account. The account they’d opened in my name. The accumulated sum was not formidable, but when I added it to what I had, what was still being released to me monthly, there was a sufficiency. With the help of the farmers, Nuruzzu and I began to put the villa in order. And after we accomplished the fundamental interior and exterior improvements, we worked on the farms themselves. We bought equipment, made roads, laid irrigation pipes, planted orchards, enlarged the producing fields to include immense plots of fallow land. Once again, we did what Leo did. Do you remember my telling you that after he’d died I’d wanted to
be
Leo? To the farmers, I
was
him.”

“And as Lullo never stopped expecting me to return, neither did all the rest. To welcome me, they came in pairs, in clutches. Some of them came alone. With none of them was there much to say or to listen to. As though we’d already caught up moments before. They brought wildflowers tied with hempweed. Oranges still on their leafed twigs. Jugs of wine and wheels of cheese. Braised lamb in an iron pot tied up in a white cloth. One afternoon a neighbor packed the makings of supper in a washtub, carried it on her head up from the village. She’d brought enough food for twenty and we laughed at the profusion of her gifts, told her she must stay, invite her own family to our table, and I think that’s how being together began again. Without the burden of festival or mourning about us, we sat together and I was at home. I remembered how the peasants had placed jars of wildflowers on their single front steps when the
borghetto
was first reconstructed. How those flowers had symbolized their finally being
at home.
I did the same. I was beginning to draw circles, and I liked that.

“As I’d done with the Maqueda ladies back in Palermo, I made it known to the farmers that if and when any one of them—in sickness or in health—should desire to join Nuruzzu and Lullo and Valentino and Annamaria and me at the villa, the doors would be open to them and to their families. Too, I made known the details that would accompany such a decision. As there had been in Palermo, there would be rules, work commitments. There had to be.

“No one came scurrying over the hills dragging their mattresses. They were mystified. Timidity, I think. And that immutable sense of feudal correctness. As they would never have consented to live in the same place where their prince lived, so would they refuse to live in the same place where I lived. Once again, to them I
was
Leo. But also at work was the momentum of the short span of years that had passed since they’d become independent farmers. Coming to stay with me would be going backward. Backward into the old
borghetto.
Or would it? Did they prefer living separately? Were they nostalgic for their tribal life? Even if they were, perhaps their children or their children’s children were not. Our joining together was well-reflected in all quarters. But in these thirty-two years since I’ve come home, the impedimenta of timidity and feudal correctness have fallen far away. It was indeed nostalgia for the tribe that took over, after all. Took over and thrived.
Almeno, finora.
At least, until now.”

Nostalgia for the tribe.
A lovely phrase, I think. Already I feel nostalgia for
her.
For these hours we’ve spent under the magnolia. Turning the last page of
Anna Karenina,
the curtain fluttering down to hide Pinkerton, weeping. Small deaths. She is speaking again.

“I said,
at least until now.
That’s the story I wanted to tell you, Chou. Someone else will have to write the ending. A story without an ending and with some of its pieces missing, but nevertheless it’s what I wanted to
try
to tell you. I am pleased that I did. I do hope that my superfluity of words has somehow compensated you for the uncharitable silence with which my countrymen greeted you a few weeks ago. My rudeness being as sincere as my kindness, I might well have done as they did. I am comfortable not knowing why I did not. Have I tired you over these days? Or have you grown so used to being the audience that . . .”

“No, I’m not at all tired. It’s only that I think we all die a little when something good finishes. Something beautiful. When something beautiful finishes far more than when something painful ends.”

“But therein lies the marrow, doesn’t it? How each of us distinguishes the two sentiments. What we say is beautiful from what we say is painful. I think they’re often quite the same. Truth is, we die a little for both of them. That’s how we use up our time.”

I stay quiet and she does, too, until she says, ‘You’ll find the dress that Agata fixed for you in your room. There will be guests for supper tonight. Old friends who grew up in the mountains but who live in Palermo now. One or two who live nearby.”

“Has Fernando told you that we are leaving tomorrow morning? Heading for Noto, I think.”

No answer. Not even a nodding of her head. “
Aperitivi
at nine in the
salone francese.
It’s a room I don’t think you’ve seen as yet and the light is quite marvelous there at that hour. I know how you love the light. It’s nearly eight now. We should both be at our toilettes, don’t you think?”

We rise, gather glasses and pitchers, place them in the wagon with some others to be taken to the kitchen. I run on ahead of her.

The born-again silvery-brown taffeta dress is arranged on our bed, pinched in at the waist, the skirt spread out as in a shop window. Without looking in a mirror, I hold it against me. Was it her dress? Or Simona’s, or one of the princesses’? Imagining the afternoons, the evenings when the dress was new, when the dreams of those women were still new, when my own were, I hold it against me for a long time. I close my eyes and hold it against me until I find Tosca, barefoot in her organdy nightdress, flying over the cold stone steps of the palace to find her prince, and Simona with her bobbed hair set in tight waves wearing the gray dress sewn with shiny beads, and Charlotte and Yolande in white stockings embroidered with butterflies, and the peach-skinned girl whirling in the moonlight. I find the peasant women in thin cotton smocks tramping over the stones with wine jugs on their heads and babies tied to their chests and the Maqueda ladies with the wavy pomps dragging the tables and chairs together in the darkened bar under the whirring of the fans and Nuruzzu sitting on the sofa, her sweater buttoned up, her kerchief tied. The widows are there, too, screeching and washing their hair in the fountain, and so is Isotta in a satin gown, sipping cognac, negotiating with Death. There is another figure in my pageant. She is very small. Almost all I can see of her are eyes, large, dark, and somber. Masses of curls nearly hide the rest of her face but I think she is me. I think all of them are me. I think all of us are one another.

I hadn’t seen the note that Fernando had left on the bedside table. He writes that he’s been back to the room to bathe and change, then gone on some mission to Enna with Valentino. They might be a bit late in returning, but I am to go ahead without him. We’ll meet in the
salone francese,
he writes.

I undress, pour the heels of all the perfumes and oils and soaps into the tub, and twist the faucets open all the way, expecting the thin streamlets that normally fall from them. This evening water gushes hot and quick onto neroli, lemon, lavender, frothing them to an iridescent meringue. I scrub and think how I wish I had known the prince.

It’s already past nine as I step into the silvery-brown dress. As though it was made for me. That’s how it fits, how it feels. The long-cuffed sleeves Agata has cut away entirely, as she has the stiff stand-up collar. From the once demure bodice she has carved a deep heart-shaped décolleté, anchoring it with thin shirred straps. What she’d cut from the length of the skirt is now a wide sash to wind ’round and ’round the waist for a kind of corset effect. I crisscross the satin ribbons of my sandals. A rim of kohl for the eyes, a slick of Verushka for the mouth. No time to fix the hair still damp from the bath. A loose knot I make of its untidiness, leaving it to hang over one shoulder. I have no evening purse, no pearls. I cut short the stems of two creamy roses, wrap the thorned ends of them in a tiny tulle and lace doily that sits under a bud vase, and push the nosegay between my breasts. Thinking of Tosca and Flaubert and the rose petal between Roseannette’s lips, I walk down the stairs to find the
salone francese.

Opened only part way, I stand before the tall, chipped gilt doors. The leaving sun slashes pink across the room and tinges bronze the profiles of a small complement of men and women posed about a vast grouping of love seats and chaise longues flung with lengths of worn brocade that might have once been blue, as though the task of upholstering the lot had long since been abandoned. The men and women hold old-fashioned coupe-shaped glasses, speak in lulling voices, and the pink light flashes, falls away even as I stand there so that they and the stone-floored room with the cornflower-blue silk walls are lit now with only the quivering flames of candles massed on tables, mantles, sideboards. It is Cosimo who sees me as I enter, who comes toward me with his arms open.