That Summer in Sicily (7 page)

CHAPTER VI

I
DON’T RECALL WHETHER IT WAS ON THE EVENING OF THE SAME
day that Cosimo told me his story or an evening soon afterward when I’d decided to accept Tosca’s invitation to see the frescoes in the changing light. I know it was a Friday, and that Fernando and I had set the next morning as our departure.

When I enter the dining hall at six she is there sitting by a spent hearth, a book opened on her lap. We greet each other, she resumes her reading, and without further discourse, I begin my tour. I wander about the vast room, head thrown back, marveling at the exalted beauty of the frescoes in the softer light. I stay for perhaps twenty minutes, during which time we say nothing more. I want to ask her about the artists, the epochs of the work. About the allegories themselves. About why there are so many blank spaces in the frescoes. I stay silent, though, sensing she is a reluctant docent. Lost in a last look, my back turned to Tosca, an Italian voice speaking in rather tentative English asks, “Do you drink gin? I have some good Genever gin if you’d like me to fix you a drink. It’s about that time, isn’t it? I mean for you English.”

Perplexed, I stay fixed, my back still turned to Tosca. And to the voice. It can’t be her speaking and yet, as I turn to her and understand that it
is
she, I begin to laugh.

“Why didn’t you tell me you could speak English?”

“Why should I have done that?” she asks in mock smugness. “I also speak French and read in Greek. What’s more I dance and sing, play the pianoforte. I’ve yet to tell you about any of those accomplishments. I neither felt nor do I feel now the need to impress or comfort you with the sound of your own language. We
are
in Sicily, after all. I simply wanted a gin tonic and thought you might, too. That I offered it to you in your own language was fairly involuntary. An impulse.”

She speaks English splendidly. A Sicilian contralto singing the role of a Berkshire matron, I think. “Did you once live in England?”

“No. Never. I’ve never set foot off the island even once in my life.”

She says this with neither pride nor regret and leaves no pause for my response. I find it curious, though, that she answers much more than my question asked. She proceeds. “I studied English and French when I was young and have read the nineteenth-century English writers over and over again for most of my life since. I don’t like them in translation.”

“I see. Actually, I’m not English but American, and I prefer vodka.”

“I have that, too.”

She rises, walks her mannish walk to a far corner of the
salone,
pauses before a narrow armoire, the rough wood of it painted a pale yellow-green like the heart of a celery. She opens its doors to reveal a bar—mirrored, upholstered in midnight-blue velvet—that would rival the lobby bar of any good small hotel in Manhattan or Vienna or Rome. From a small black enamel refrigerator she takes a bottle labeled in red Russian script. With a heavy hand, she pours from it into a cut crystal wineglass. Offers it to me.

“I have no ice,” she says without apology.

“I don’t take ice,” I tell her in an icy tone. Tosca’s refined scorn has something of mockery about it this evening. A stylish disdain that causes mine. She putters about with her gin tonic while I stand behind her. She turns to me, then raises her glass.

“To your health,
signora,
” she says. Once again that counterfeit gentility.

“Alla vostra salute, signora,”
I wish back at her. One less cube in my voice.

We remain standing, looking at each other, appraising each other. I suppress a laugh. At myself, at her. At us standing in the
salone grande
of a glorious villa set among the barren mountains at the center of an island where only the past seems present. A black faille sheath, an emerald at her throat, long brown fingers twined about the Baccarat stem, she sips and I think she, too, wants to laugh. At me, at my jeans, my three-day-old T-shirt, my great head of hair, once again unshackled. She walks back to her chair and motions for me to sit across from her.

“I rather do like speaking in English. I haven’t done so in years. I fear all that’s left are phrases from Dickens or the Brontës which, by now, I can parrot. I don’t know if I could find the words for a spontaneous conversation with you, but I might like to try.”

“But I think we’ll be leaving tomorrow or the day after . . .”

She steps quickly, resolutely, upon what she does not want to hear. “Yes, of course, you’re right. We’d only just have begun and then off you’d go.”

As further proof of her Anglo-Saxon penchants—or only to prolong the moment—she says, “There’s a
New York Times Magazine
over there in the top drawer of that console. Perhaps you would like to look at it.”

“Thank you. I’ll take it up with me if you don’t mind,” I tell her, and go to fetch it from the tall French Empire chest she indicates.

“Ah, here it is. Lovely,” I say but notice how faded, wrinkled it is. I look at the date. January 1969.

Now I do laugh. “But
signora,
this is a museum piece.”

Resuming Italian, she says, “Not at all. What do you suppose has changed in twenty-five years or so? I found the journal to be well written back then when someone or other left it behind. I thought it set things out rather nicely, addressing the events of the day, which are, of course, the same events of this day. Think of it. Even if its theater and its motives are being played out in a different geography, there’s still war, isn’t there? Still avidity and hate and violence and fear. Poverty and righteousness are still thriving. As are revolution and arrogance and lies. There is always perversion and torment, of course. What I particularly admired about this paper was the shrewd touch of pathos and poignancy strewn among the squalor and the filth. You know, The Good News. So, should I wish to be informed of events outside these mountains, I read
The New York Times Magazine.
I’ve perhaps reread it every two or three years just to be certain I’ve not missed anything. I have also been known to thrash about in that same console where I keep a Sony television. Black-and-white and with its own antenna and a twenty-two-centimeter screen on which, should nostalgia move me, I can view the nightly news broadcasts from Rome or Milan. As I might an old movie. But unlike when I watch an old movie, the news broadcasts leave me empty, angry, and I must tell myself yet again that one need tune in only once in a lifetime to the nightly news to know the chronic story of man. To know how wrong the world is. How
wronged
it is. I don’t hide from the wrong. Surely I don’t deny it. It’s only that the wrong has yet to find its way up here. And I do my best to confound its path.”

Still standing with the magazine in my hand, I say, “I do appreciate the thought,
signora.
”

I turn back to the “media chest,” open the archival drawer, and gently replace the magazine, then return to my chair across from hers.

I understand that her device is sarcasm and that her message is visceral. The past is the present. The human condition endures. A venomous reading of Cosimo’s same dictum. Perhaps I prefer his. We say nothing. I look at her, wondering why I resist her. The authenticity of her. The wisdom. She repels me. She enchants me. There is so much sadness just beneath her skin. Like so many of us, perhaps she is greedy about her sadness. And the scorn, the mockery, are confines that she sets out to protect it.

We are still silent when three widows enter to set the table for dinner and Tosca, distracted by their presence, perhaps dismayed by it, begins to fidget with her glass, smooths her perfect corona of braids. Smiles fitfully. I rise, place my drink, unfinished, on a small table, and thank her. Tell her I’ve some work to do before dinner.

As though she hasn’t heard me, she asks, now reverting again to English, “Have you brought other clothes? Something elegant, I mean.”

“A nice dress. Gray tulle.” I tell her, wondering why she would be interested in my wardrobe.

As though “nice gray tulle” did not signify
elegant
to her, she says, “Maybe I have something that Agata could fix up for you. In fact, I think I do. Sometimes we have outside guests to supper and we all dress up a bit.”

“As I said, I believe we’ll be leaving tomorrow . . .”

Again, she will not hear what she does not want to hear. “It’s not often there’s someone new to present, you know.”

“Agata, vieni qua, tesoro.”
Agata arrives trotting, breaking only long enough to take her orders to look at whatever’s left in the trunks in the old dressing room. And to take me with her.

Trunks? Dressing room? I follow Agata up three flights of wide, worn stone stairs. At the top we follow a corridor scented with mold to enter a room furnished all in armoires and dressers and trunks, accessorized here and there with mousetraps, those sprung, those still baited. The mold is masked by the perfume of decaying rodent. Backstage at some decrepit theater. Agata bends into and riffles through a large trunk. I see only her prosperous black-silked derrière and hear her mutterings and beseechings to the Madonna. Holding up some sort of dress or gown in what might be a silvery-brown color, she declares it
quella giusta.
The right one.

“
Spogliati,
take your clothes off,” she commands.

Moments later, wearing what must have been a lovely pre-war tea gown, I am being twirled about by Agata. The bodice is too tight and the skirt is too long, but Agata begins a ruthless pinching of the seams, roughly gathering the hem and draping it here and there, telling me to hold it exactly the way she places the stuff in my hands. She stands back for the effect.

“Non é male,”
she says. “
Potrebbe essere molto carino.
Not bad. It could be very sweet.”

So abruptly disturbed after its long repose that, when I let go of it, there are two large, jagged holes in the fine old tea gown where my hands had held it. This time Agata calls upon Santa Rosalia.

“
Toglilo adesso e dammelo.
Take it off now and give it to me,” is the next command. Still zipping my jeans, smoothing my hair, I run to catch up with Agata, who has the wounded silvery-brown thing under her arm, but she disappears down one corridor or another, and when I arrive back at the dining hall, Tosca is no longer there among the widows who prepare the tables.

Later, as we dress for dinner, I tell Fernando of my visit to see the frescoes and of Tosca’s thoughts about current world events. I tell him that she spoke to me in English.

“After all these days—how long has it been, nearly two weeks that we’ve been here?—what do you think of Tosca? What will be the impression you leave with tomorrow?” I want to know.

I’m crisscrossing the thin suede ropes of my new black sandals ’round my ankles, my calves. I’ve also taken out the gray tulle ballerina dress that has been rolled up in my lingerie bag since Venice. A shawl. Tosca’s question about my clothes has inspired me.

“First of all, I don’t think we’ll be leaving tomorrow after all. When I went to settle up our account just a few moments ago, she reminded me that
ferragosto
is not the prudent time to be on the road. She’s right, of course. Whatever direction we take, we’ll be among the raging hordes of vacationers. She says that in a few days, perhaps another week, the roads will be clear. Even the weather is due to break, according to her.”

I hobble on one sandaled foot into the bathroom, sit on the edge of the tub behind where he shaves. “So easily has she convinced you to stay for
another week
? It wanted only a traffic report and a weather prediction? Such an easy mark you are.”

“Not so. She hardly set out to
convince
me of anything. She only presented additional information that caused me to change my mind. And why are you so dressed up this evening?”

“Tosca. She wanted to know if I’d brought elegant clothes. I thought I’d demonstrate my collection.”

So easily has she convinced you,
he mimes.

For the next day or two I don’t see Tosca, save in purposeful flight about the villa and the gardens or glimpses of her at lunch and dinner. She never stops to mention the state of the silvery-brown tea dress or if or when the outside guests would come to supper. I remain mildly curious about both.

One evening as we enter the dining hall, Agata rushes up to escort us away from our regular places at table, takes us to sit with Tosca and Cosimo. Almost at once, Tosca begins speaking to me in English.

“Have you had a lovely day? Tomorrow will be somewhat cooler.”

She tries out little niceties. She asks me if this form or that grammar is correct. Cosimo has commandeered Fernando’s attention and I am left to Tosca’s will.

“I’d like to tell you a story, Chou,” she says. “Oh, I don’t mean right now, of course. But soon. It’s a long story, you see. I wouldn’t be able to tell it to you all at once. It might take a few days. A week. I don’t know. But it’s a good story, I think. I’ve never tried to tell it from beginning to end but I want to tell it to you and I want to tell it to you in English. I suppose I’m thinking that if I tell it in a language other than my own I will still feel as though I haven’t really told it at all. Does that make sense to you?”