That Summer in Sicily (29 page)

Cosimo had kept Leo’s library. Cataloged in boxes strewn with tobacco to discourage mold and the indiscriminate hungers of winged creatures, Leo’s books had been stored in the sacristy and behind the altar in the church of San Rocco. When I returned from Palermo, Cosimo and Mimmo transferred most of them to the villa. As much as Leo longed for me, I think, did he long for his books, and above all things, they remained his prizes. And so he read by his fire or in the shade of his loggia. He dined and drank modestly, if with pleasure. From time to time, he joined the household at table. He was always ready to meet with any of them, to talk about the smallest, the gravest of problems. He waited for me, listened to me, loved me. Reveled in my love for him. As we had once done on the far more inconsiderable space of our dark red rug with the yellow roses, we made a whole world of those rooms. While I attended to the villa, he wrote, listened to music, played his flute. He rode for hours every day—in winter, going out just before sunset while in summer, leaving long before dawn. Over the years I never stopped asking to go with Leo on his rides, but he never once permitted it. The fear of vendetta rationalized away, still there remained some pale shade of terror in him for me.

Thinking him to be one of the household whom you’d not yet met, you must have, more than once, seen him in his arriving or departing. Also, it was Leo who complimented your silvery-brown dress on that last evening. When he shook your hand in greeting and introduced himself, it was as
Leo-Alberto.
As it always was on those rare occasions when he was among people outside of the “family,” his wish was to remain unknown to you. But I will say that his reason for joining us that evening, at least in part, was so he might “meet” you. He knew, of course, of our talks under the magnolia.

As I look back upon these fresh pages, I fear I’ve told you much too much while, at the same time, I have once again left what must be bewildering vacancies in my story. I, too, am often still bewildered. But even if I could tell you more, I’m not certain I would.

I wrote repeatedly to Simona from Palermo, asking after her and the princesses. Though she always answered me, her letters were shadowy, stilted. I was hurt by what seemed her change of heart toward me. It was I who stopped writing. I’d kept silent for longer than a year when Carlotta wrote to tell me that Simona had died. A violent illness to which she willfully, swiftly surrendered. Sometimes I still wonder if Simona wasn’t the wisest one of all of us and if her polite turning away from me was more a stepping back, a way to help clear my path of the past so I might do what she’d said I must do.
Find your own way home, Tosca
.

Carlotta had written that she and Yolande would stay on in Rome, where they’d been living when Simona became ill. She’d said any further plans were uncertain. I wrote my condolences and several subsequent letters but I never heard another word from them. Soon after I’d left Palermo and gone back to the mountains, I’d invited them to visit. Carlotta came alone. And she’s never gone away. So the first and only journey Leo made after his return was to Rome. To visit Yolande. Cosimo went with him, and it’s from him that I learned something of what happened on that day. Leo has never spoken of it to me.

Cosimo said that Yolande was ensconced in irredeemable spinsterhood in a glorious old palazzo in the Parioli, that she had agreed to receive her father only after an hour of his pleading and cajoling through the auspices of her majordomo, who spoke with him through the
citofono.
I doubt that the prince expected his elder daughter would run down the stairs and fall into his embrace screaming with rapture, as had Carlotta. Still, his pride, what was left of his paternal instinct, must have been sorely tried as he climbed the stairs to Yolande’s apartments. Venturing no farther than the palms and the gilt of the anteroom and remaining unacknowledged, Cosimo stood like a second in a parlor duel while Leo approached Yolande, who’d sat—albeit at its edge—on a small divan in the
salone.
She did not rise to greet her father nor did she invite him to sit. With no preamble, Yolande asked Leo why he’d come. Perhaps wondering himself, Leo stayed quiet. Into the silence, Yolande proposed that his reason was, of course, money. Akin to telling him that the cook would wrap a loaf for him if he’d go to the back door, his elder daughter told him there were
certain proceeds
from
certain sales
that, if he would meet with her attorneys, might be signed over to him. But otherwise . . . by then Leo could not have spoken even if there were words he’d still wanted to say from those that, over the years, he’d practiced, tried on, thrown off, tried on again until he’d thought some had begun to fit. By the time she sat there talking about proceeds and attorneys, I fear he could recall not one of those words or
why
he’d wanted to say them. No one changes. Yolande never touched her father nor he her. Leo turned to go, restoring the rhythm of the princess’s afternoon. Just as his leaving had done always.

Illuminated by Leo’s scrupulous observations, my will to provide for the widows and the others at the villa leapt from cautious devotion to obsession. Though life at the villa had proceeded nicely indeed, once he’d returned, once he was there, everything was better. It wasn’t as though what was difficult or exhausting went away so much as it was that our collective affinities—what the widows and all the others and I had in common—were exalted. What you saw and felt while you were here with us, what held you in such thrall, was that. Was him.

It was nearly two years ago that Leo became ill. He chose not to submit to therapies and treatments. He trusted destiny to give him enough time. And so the illness had its way with him, seemed to be setting up to stay. It was then that Leo took things over. He did as his mother had done. For the second time, Leo arranged his death. Almost to the moment, he decided when he was ready to leave. Leo was his mother’s son.

He never spoke of dying but rather about the sea, the sea that lay in wait for him behind the trees. In the sounds of his own tired, broken lungs and in the roar of his tortured breath, he heard the rasping of waves. He heard the sea. Hell imagined by a man who loves the earth? Rifles cocked, aimed from behind the yellow-leafed oaks? I never knew whether he feared or yearned for that sea. I still wonder.

Cosimo and I would spell each other and, often, both of us stayed whole days and nights together with him. We set up camp by his bed, warmed soup over his fire, roasted bread, fed bits to him as to a tiny bird. More than once Cosimo offered to hear his confession, but Leo said Cosimo already knew too much. And when Cosimo wanted to perform extreme unction, Leo smashed the vial of oil Cosimo held in his hand, saying that a send-off from him could only be to Hades, and they both laughed. They laughed, perhaps understanding that laughing was the right way to turn the last page on nearly sixty years of life lived, more or less, in company with each other. As Cosimo describes his love for me, theirs, too, was another kind of love.

I recall that when their laughter quieted and the silence was too big to fill with words, Leo reached his arms up to me. Like a baby wanting to be held. And so I held him. Rocked him. Noticing that the flesh of him seemed less even by the hour. He looked at me then and spoke to Cosimo. He told him that he’d rather kiss me with his last breath than kiss the cold, metal feet of an icon. The nailed feet of the crucified Christ.

Look your last on all things lovely,
Leo quoted, quickly damning himself for not recalling whom. Deciding to make the phrase his own, he said it over and over again.
Look your last on all things lovely. Yes, I would rather kiss my Tosca.

One evening, Leo told us that he would be pleased to say goodbye to his family. He, of course, meant the widows, the farmers. Especially those who’d been with us so long ago “when we were little,” he’d said. He always called it that. The era of our lives before he went away. “When we were little.” I told Agata of Leo’s wish and she informed the rest. Asked them to collect early next morning. Gathering before sunrise, they lined up on the stairs, on the landing, in the corridor outside his rooms. Everyone came, Chou. The field workers, the gardeners, the artisans, the villagers. They came in generations—fathers and sons, grandfathers and their sons and their sons’ sons, mothers and their children. Agata and I were still bathing him, tidying up his rooms while Cosimo revived the fire. Prayed. While they waited they sang. They sang all the songs from the harvest and the threshing. The ones Leo had taught the oldest ones among them. They sang all the songs of all the people who’d ever sown a field of wheat on this island. Singing all the songs of everyone who’d ever believed in a fistful of tiny seeds that, by the graces of the gods, might grow up into the sustenance to keep them all for just a while longer, they stood there. They sat there chanting and singing. Weeping. They were the
addolorati.
They were Demeter grieving for her baby girl. And Mary for her boy. Which I think is the same as grieving for ourselves. For the pain that lingers and the joy, flitting, teasing, that terrifies us more. Their sound was shrill and fierce and, in a way, a battle cry. They would not let their prince go quietly.

And when Agata opened the doors to them, they entered a few at a time, filed by Leo’s bed, kissed the bumps his feet made under the quilt, or took his hand and held it to their lips. Leo asked nearly every one of them some question or another. Oh, you wouldn’t believe the things he remembered about them, Chou! About their illnesses, their foibles. He remembered even their dreams. I think it was mostly their dreams that he remembered. How he wanted to talk! But when the breath wouldn’t come, he’d whisper up his admonitions, his affirmations. He promised to look after them from wherever this next confounded journey was to take him. He promised over and over again that he would look after them. He kissed each one’s hand.
As the peasants kissed his hand, he kissed theirs in return. That gesture no one had ever seen—the noble returning his peasant’s kiss.

That morning strengthened Leo, kept him alive a few days longer than both he and the looming black presence might have intended. Cosimo refused to leave Leo, save for his own abbreviated ablutions. He would sleep in a chair by the fire, otherwise sit there or pace back and forth and ’round and ’round, all the while talking to his friend, telling him stories. I slept on the bed next to Leo, my legs and arms twined in his as though, if I stayed still enough, he would forget I was there, take me with him as though I were part of him. I
was
part of him. I am part of Leo, Chou, and I think that you know that as well as anyone ever has or ever will.

I woke one morning and before opening my eyes, I knew that he was gone. Cosimo had discovered him earlier, left me to sleep in his still warm arms while he went to see about things.

Only Cosimo and I buried him. And not in the cemetery but on the rise of the hill at the edge of the farthest field. In the place where he’d appeared one afternoon, years and years ago, when he’d come back from some extended business or other he’d had to settle in France and thought he’d missed the first day of a harvest. A lanky blond wazir swooping down from another place, tearing off his coat, impatient to get the scythe in his hand, hailing Demeter, praising the Lord God Almighty, fairly trembling with the joy of being back on his land, with his family. That’s the place where the prince sleeps.

And it’s from here that I am writing to you.
Io vengo qui con il crepuscolo.
I come here with the dusk. As soon as I can smell the darkness rolling in over the fields, I pack up my sack. Sweater, shawl, some good gin in Leo’s father’s boot flask. With the sack slung across my chest, dragging my chair behind me, I meet the goats on the narrow path, high-stepping the opposite way, going home to the other side of the mountain, the silky tufts on their foreheads blown back by the wind, their bells walloping madly in the blue-black cave the darkening makes, and we greet one another. All of us en route to our own peace up here on a hill in the middle of an island. An island in the middle of a sea, in the middle of the world.

Tonight wisps of cloud dandle a March half-moon that makes a silver sea of the wheat. On the ramparts above, wolves bay and, across the precipice, small fires dance here and there. Shepherds cooking their supper. Save me and my trappings, one could hardly put a date to this georgic hill, this high place where the old gods walked and slept, perpetrating ecstasies, wielding incubus. How little have three thousand years changed us!

I settle myself among the rock roses and the cushions of wild thyme and stay long after the light goes. I have always been enchanted by the night, by the sense not of ending, but of beginning that it brings. I sit here wrapped in my shawl which still smells of him, sipping, smoking, sifting through the years.

Sometimes I reach down to touch the stone Cosimo and I placed for Leo midst tufts of Demeter’s marjoram. Like two aging picadors, we stalked the temple ruins one evening until we found a thin, worn slab of marble we knew Leo would like. Cosimo wanted to take it to the mason in the village to inscribe but I did it myself. I did not make a wonderful job of it what with my slanting, left-handed scrawl drawn with an old iron nail. Still, it looks right. It says,

LEO

The Last Prince

1912–2000

FINE