That Summer in Sicily (9 page)

“The cooks and Agata arranged with the stableman to let me use one of the horses. A jockey’s thin, spare frame under an ancient’s brown face, the stableman would be waiting on the west side, the hidden side of the barn, holding the reins of one beauty or another. Saddled, ready. I’d become something of a heroine since the day early on in my palace life when I’d stolen a barely broken mare and ridden her bareback to my father’s house. Laughing and smiling and regarding me with an expression of hosannah, the stableman would help me tie down my goods, set me up there on the horse like a small warrior queen, give the hind end of the horse a good whack, yell out his blessing for the journey, and I’d trot off. Around the lemon groves. Down the white road.

“And so my plan to run away, to escape the yellow-haired devil and his candied figs and his Ave Marias and his wife with the beads on her dress and his daughters with the butterflies on their stockings, the plan to escape the palace and return to my life with The Tiny Mafalda was adjusted. If I couldn’t yet manage to run away from the palace for good, then my twice-weekly run on a horse to visit Mafalda with food would suffice. I found relative peace within my nine-year-old soul as long as I was certain that my sister was not hungry. I don’t know why I worried almost not at all for her safety. Why I trusted in my father’s heart—black and cold as it was—not to hurt Mafalda. All these years later I still don’t know why I trusted him, but I did.

“Soon I began to supplement my food gathering with the collecting of clothes for my sister. Nothing quite so blatant as I’d done during that first week when I’d left my new white pinafore with Mafalda and returned to the palace wearing my dead mother’s blue housedress with the pink roses. Nothing like that. Assuming a genteel subtlety, I’d take stockings from Agata’s mending basket once in a while, or a chemise. A pair of culottes. A silk undershirt with a pink ribbon woven ’round the neck. Sometimes from my own things, sometimes from the pile left in the wash basket outside Charlotte and Yolande’s rooms, I’d steal the best I could find. Sweaters and shawls and lap robes, I’d steal from the salons and from the schoolroom and even from the chapel. I never ransacked private quarters, but rather pinched things that were left behind or forgotten or misplaced from the rooms where we all spent time together. The pickings were wonderful. The Tiny Mafalda and I hid the silken, woolen, feminine treasures from our father in the little room where the washing tubs and mops and brooms were kept. Where he’d never set foot.

“And by the time my sister was seven and I was just past ten, we’d put by a veritable trousseau for her. At least in our own wondering eyes. She had food, she had clothes and blankets and books and trinkets enough to keep a rustic breed of princess in good stead, and that’s when the Arab in me began to urge The Tiny Mafalda to sell the surplus in the markets. Practicing the same restraint as I had used in acquiring the goods, she would offer a single item at a time. And only once in a while. Women began to seek her out, enquire if she had, perhaps, a nightdress. Another shawl with long silk fringe. Of course if word had reached our father, if the truth had been revealed that his daughter was unloading stolen goods in the markets and stashing lire in the hems of her petticoat, I don’t know what grim justice he would have meted out to her; and not because of what she’d done but because she hadn’t brought her earnings home to him. Yet we hardly worried about someone telling our father. A wonderful thing about being Sicilian. One of the wonderful things. The silence, I mean. My father never found the food stashes or the clothes or the secret pocket in the petticoat hem. Or, if he did, he neither confronted The Tiny Mafalda nor disturbed her treasures.

“I arranged my visits so that I would not see my father; the high point of my cleverness, I’d thought. Week after week, month after month. A sober Jeanne d’Arc riding fast over the white road, potatoes and sugar and lacy culottes were my arms against Mafalda’s hungers. Such a vainglorious little girl I was that I’d never noticed the scent of the yellow-haired devil everywhere about my undertakings. It was Leo. Long afterward I learned it was he who’d made the path from me to Mafalda. It was he who’d understood that we were lonely for each other. He who had given Agata and the stableman and others the word to facilitate my missions. To hide the doll with the blond braids woven with tiny ears of corn and dressed in a long white gown in the wooden box in the
dispensa.
To strew the chapel and the salons with shawls and sweaters. It was Leo.

CHAPTER II

“A
ND IT WAS
L
EO WHO, AFTER A WHILE, BEGAN INVITING
T
HE
Tiny Mafalda to the palace for Sunday lunch with—it was easy to understand—the intention of her eventual residence there. He would send a driver to fetch her in the morning and she would be enfolded into the rituals of the palace’s
Buona Domenica,
Good Sunday. Soon she became a pet among the staff, and even Yolande seemed enchanted with her. A rosy mignon,
una pupetta,
as they called her. A little dolly. Yet my sister, terrorized by the sheer numbers of people moving about the palace, by the way they spoke, the way they looked, by all those faces bending down to her, the unfamiliar hands pulling at her curls, did not return the affection. Whereas I thrived upon the immoderate proportions of the palace, The Tiny Mafalda cringed, cowered. Clinging to me, speaking only to me, barely whimpering a word to anyone else, The Tiny Mafalda was shy, sullen. At Mass, she wept. At table she wept, the tears spilling through the plump, babyish hands she held tight over her eyes.

“ ‘
Amore mio, cos’ hai?
What is it, my love?’ ” I would ask her over and over again. She would slide herself down from the satin cushions of the pew or the red damask pillow on her chair to a safer place to weep.

“ ‘But don’t you want to live here with me?’ I would ask her. ‘Here you will have
three pretty dresses and eat cakes with violet icing every morning at eleven,
just like the princess in the story. Don’t you remember?”

“ ‘I don’t like pretty dresses anymore. And I don’t like cakes. I want Mamà to come back and you to come back and I want Papà to come back, too. I mean, I want him to come back from his being so mad all the time. Why did everyone go away, Tosca? Don’t you see, if I go away, too, there will be no one left at home to wait for the time when everyone returns? Don’t you understand that?’

“My sister’s response to this time in our lives has always been a symbol for me, demonstrating that it’s not the events, not the traumas or the perpetrators of those traumas that shape us. It’s the stones. How the runes fell when we did. I was I. She was she. We’d been born of the same man and woman. Lived the same life. Though we loved each other mightily, we were day and night. So it was The Tiny Mafalda herself who foiled my father’s and Leo’s plan for her to live at the palace. She’d appointed herself guardian of the little house down the white road, over the two hills. She knew where she belonged even if the rest of us had forgotten.”

“But what happened to Mafalda? Did she come to live at the palace after all? She’s here now; when did she . . .”

“You must not keep interrupting me. Be patient and your questions will be answered in good time. Allow me to tell the story as I recall it.”

Keep interrupting? I’ve hardly breathed,
I say to myself. I nod my head.

She proceeds.

“Life at the palace—often disciplined, harmonious, and sometimes tumultuous, perplexing—began to feel, more and more, like
my
life. Apart from the carnal pleasures of the table and the aesthetic charms of the place itself, it was the schoolroom where I first felt at home. And it was there where I was
diva.

“You see, I’d learned to read when I was five. A rare enough accomplishment for a child in our village, rarer still for a girl than a boy. My mother had sent me to the village convent school where Suor Diana, a small, round nun with a whiskered chin and licorice breath, was
maestra.
I think there must have been no more than twenty students, collectively, in all the grades. It was she, Suor Diana, who would urge me to sit with the older children who were learning to read rather than with my own age group, who were still shouting out the alphabet. And every Saturday when I’d go with the nuns to clean the church and ready the altar for Sunday Mass, Suor Diana and I would spend an hour, two hours together, whatever time we could manage, and she would help me to read. Read aloud to me. Urge me to read aloud to her. By the time I was brought to live in the palace, I’d made my way through every textbook, every coverless, crumpled-paged book on the shelves of the children’s library in the convent house, every church pamphlet about the missions in Guadalajara and West Africa. And whenever I could get one, I’d read a newspaper, front to back, marking the pages with a fat blue Crayola wherever I didn’t understand something. I’d bring the desecrated document to my Saturday sessions with Suor Diana and, between mysteries and fables, she would translate the strange language of journalism for me, revealing the even more fantastical stories of politics and the arts and the misdeeds of a group of very bad men from the countryside that the newspaper called
the clan
.

“And so at nine I could read far better than Yolande, who was nearly nine herself, while Charlotte, at seven, still battled with twenty-word picture books. It wasn’t that the princesses were less bright than I; rather it was that their education was so broad they’d yet to become proficient in any particular subject. In their curriculum, a smattering of French sufficed. An even lighter quota of English. There were faint allusions to world geography and Italian history. Mainly it was Latin, catechism,
The Lives of the Saints,
music, painting, and needlework—relieved by comportment and elocution—that composed the princesses’ workdays. And I was to step in with their drill. Early on I began to ask for more to read. I would devour what I was given and ask for yet more. Doubting my comprehension, the teachers asked me to recount the stories of the books I’d read;
un divertissement
—as Mademoiselle Clothilde, the French tutor/governess/general
professoressa,
would call it—to color the moments of our short intervals between studies. Agata would bring us coffee-stained milk and hard sweet biscuits and I would stand and speak of one book or another. One day the yellow-haired devil was invited to hear my synopsis of
Cuore
by de Amicis and, inspired by his presence I suppose, or, more, by some stroke from the gods, I spoke at length and somehow more confidently than I had ever before, delivering my thoughts with emphatic sweeps of my arms, embellishing my talk with comparisons of other books of the genre and, here and there, quoting a passage or two, a phrase, perhaps, from the text. When I finally curtsied to Leo as I’d been taught to do by Mademoiselle Clothilde and then sat down in my place between the princesses, there was silence. No polite applause and mumbles of
‘brava’
coming up between bites of the sweets. The princesses sat stonily, upturned faces stiff as their shantunged bodices, and the other teachers, too, stood immutable for such a long moment that I—breathless, euphoric from the job I knew I’d done well—felt myself to be the only one still alive inside the benumbed spectacle of the schoolroom. Until Leo stood. He thanked me with a half nod, then summoned the teachers to the far side of the room, where he gave succinct, life-altering instructions for my intensified studies. And then he was gone. Once again, it was Leo.”

CHAPTER III

“F
ROM THAT DAY FORWARD
I
READ AND WROTE AND STUDIED
like a Jesuit acolyte, all the while retreating farther and farther from the frilly surfaces of palace life. Leo, himself, took over my Latin instruction, added lessons in Greek, piled my reading table with volume upon volume of Greek myths so that I came to know more about the lives of the ancient gods than I’d ever known about the saints. I asked him once if I was not committing a sin by studying the pagan gods when I might have been reading in my
The Lives of the Saints.
He, who had been standing, sat down next to me and said, as if in confidence, that someday I would understand there was no difference between the saints and the pagan gods, that they were quite the same personages, if with certain portions of their biographies and other certain parts of their characters more exalted in one historical era than another. His breezily if quietly spoken illumination had stunned me to slack-jawed silence, but still the prince had more to say.

“ ‘It was man who took the gods from Olympus and placed them in the church, Tosca. Gave them new names. Changed their histories to suit, shall we say, more contemporary needs. That’s not a bad thing or a good thing, it’s just what happened. As you advance in your studies of both mythology and religion, you’ll find the samenesses yourself. Be open to them. I think Demeter, goddess of agriculture and motherhood, will recall events in the life of
la Madonna.
Learn all you can of Demeter, Tosca. She is very present in all our lives. Especially we who live here where she lived.’

“I am trembling with the further revelation that the Greek goddess of agriculture, who, the prince has informed me, so resembles the mother of God, lives in some far-flung wing of the palace.

“ ‘Where exactly are her rooms?’

“ ‘Her temple, Tosca. The ruins of the temple of Demeter lie on a mountain outside the walls of Enna. And there are also ruins of another of her temples right here on our land.’

“Calmed by the kilometers of distance that lie between the goddess and me, now I worry that she lives in ruins.

“ ‘You will come to understand the splendor of all the gods, their importance to our understanding of ourselves. They are us, Tosca. And we are them.’

“I want to ask him if Don Cosimo agrees with all this about Demeter being so much like Mary and why there is no statue of her in the chapel or why there is no Santa Demeter, but he’s pacing up and down now, flinging his arms and speaking in Greek and then in Latin and then in French until he finally gets back to me and Italian.

“ ‘Have you found Sappho yet, Tosca?’

I cringe, thinking this Sappho must be the twin of Santa Rosalia, but I hear him telling me that she was a
poetessa.

he quotes, all the dramatics gone now. He says the lines again. Asks me to repeat them with him. I try. More than I can remember all the words, I can smell the frankincense. I tell him this. He tells me he knows that I can.

“The prince constantly consulted the other teachers on my progress and steered the overall process of my education. Allowed unlimited access to his library. When I’d climb the winding stone steps up into the tower where it was housed, he seemed to always be there. I’d open the heavy doors and see him, disheveled in the chaos of his tomes. My curtsy. His nod. Aba-jours set behind each chair cast a melancholy light upon the table at which he sat. So dim and yellow was the light that the leather-bound spines towering in the stacks all ’round seemed shadows. I could smell them, though, that good, fine smell of old books, and I’d take the torch from the table, climb the ladder to fetch what I wanted. Sit back down then, always leaving a chair between Leo and me, but still close enough. Near enough to his own scent, the scent made of neroli and damp tweed and of the mud still on his boots, and in a quiet purl of joy, I’d wend my way through Sappho.

“There were days when prayers and garden walks and even meals seemed interruptions to my studies. I preferred my books to our two-hour lunches. All the dressing and undressing and dressing once again, the twitterings of admiration from guests and visiting family toward the princesses, the play of light and dark upon the moods of Simona and Leo. Too, there was an increased flurry of visitors, of people settling in to stay because of what Leo and Cosimo called
la grande guerra,
the great war. It seemed that our region of the island lay relatively out of harm’s way, and thus the palace became something of a refuge. I studied more.

When it was warm, I read in the gardens or in the lemon groves, stretched out on a long marble bench, the lion-paw legs of it gnarled in tree roots and half sunk into the soft black earth. My book held above my head, I lay there on the secret baldacchino, the great oily leaves of the trees curtains that commanded dusk at noon.

“And whenever I could beg a reprieve with a sick headache, I kept my own company in my rooms. The early exuberance I’d felt at the palace was overtaken by a kind of gratitude for patronage, for my being kept, without care or obligation, so that I could learn.

The only rivals to my studies were the horses. I loved one of the Egyptian mares above all the rest in the stable and Leo saw to it that she was kept for me, readied for me each morning. I rode with whatever party was going out on a given day, Leo and Cosimo always among them, always leading. Especially when I didn’t know the other riders very well, if they were recently arrived guests, for instance, I would stay close to Leo and Cosimo. Though I’d long been rescued from my bareback days, Leo knew I would just as soon do without the formalities of a saddle and so he would often dismount, check my stirrups and cinches, tell me to sit straighter. Sometimes he’d reach his hand up to the small of my back.

“ ‘Arch right here. Deepen the curve,’ he would say, pressing hard.

“I liked that. I liked it very well, and so I would slouch all the more next morning. Wait for his hand. Though I would begin a trail with the group, I’d soon go off on my own. Longing for speed. Risk.”

“One late afternoon in the winter of 1942, Leo asked me to walk with him in the garden. A rare occurrence it was to be so summoned by him. I recall it was very cold and that I’d come out with only Agata’s shawl, which she always hung on a hook by the garden door. I’d wrapped it carelessly about my long gray woolen dress and Leo pulled it tighter ’round me, chided me for leaving my coat behind. I remember he did that. I remember thinking that his wanting me to be warm must mean that he had bad news to tell me.

“ ‘Mafalda has been sent to live with your mother’s sister, my dear. Your father came to see me this morning to tell me so that I might tell you. You see, she hasn’t been well, and since your father can’t be at home to watch over her and since Mafalda chose, forcefully chose, not to come here to be with us . . . ’

“He breaks off, knowing that I know what Mafalda had chosen.

“ ‘But we’ve arranged a way to keep contact with her, with your aunt and the others in Vicari. I’ll see that you’re taken to visit her as soon as things become more secure. Meanwhile your sister is in good hands and so are you, and that’s what matters. In times like these . . . ’

“He talks faster and faster, inserting inanities as though I were a child. As though he’d forgotten that I was twelve, halfway to thirteen. As though he didn’t know what I knew very well. That my father had been trying to pawn Mafalda upon one relative or another for a long time. Leo spoke as though he’d forgotten that I’d reconciled my father’s need to live without my sister as much as I had his need to live without me. That Malfada has been reconciled to live without me, too, hurts far more. For these past three years I’d believed ours was only a physical separation. Not so now.

“ ‘Don’t, please don’t think that you can ride those eighty kilometers to Vicari as you once did those few from here to your home. I mean, your other home.’

“Awkward in even the simplest discourse about my life before coming to the palace, I help him.

“ ‘I won’t. I could. I think I could but I won’t.’

“ ‘I have the address so you can write to her, send her things if you wish.’

“ ‘Yes. Thank you.’ ”

“As it turned out, the address that my father gave to Leo was not at all the one where my sister was sent. Or at least was not the one where she stayed for very long. And when Leo sent word to my father that he needed to see him, it was discovered that even he no longer lived at the horse farm, the barns empty, the house abandoned.”