The Four Corners of Palermo (13 page)

I mumbled a string of excuses, I talked about the risk of having babies, I begged her to forgive me. She went into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. I leaned against the door and listened to her sobbing softly on the other side.

“Sophie, please, open the door.”

The only answer was the splash of the tub filling with water.

Deep within her, a parallel tragedy had just been consummated. Heroin, whore. The two tracks down which her life was running: the demands of drug-dealing pimps the world over, the hungry yearning to seize the opportunity of a beautiful, penniless woman who was also a heroin addict. An ideal victim. With my hypocritical act, the product of male selfishness, I had reminded her just how much of a victim she was. In all her indubitable perfection.

I went back to my bedroom, stretched out, and waited for her to find it within herself to forgive me for my sheer vulgarity. I couldn’t think of anything but my own selfishness. A foolish question dictated by the blindness of love made its way into my mind: What if Fabrizio had been wrong?

I pulled her suitcase out from under the bed. I opened it and rummaged through, finding clothing, pairs of panties, a book by Verlaine, various skin creams, a couple of letters from her grandmother postmarked Deauville, three new insulin syringes. I zipped it shut and pushed the bag back under the
bedframe. Sophie had locked herself in the bathroom. I waited for her to come out and then, after an hour or so, fell asleep.

In my dreams, I saw her, abandoned, under the Pont Neuf. My arms reached out to her, standing on the deck of a Parisian
bateau mouche
, a tourist glimpsing the life of an enchanting and desperate young woman, in the vain hope of catching her in passing, rescuing her from her fate. In my dream, Sophie’s eyes were glazed over, filmy, and she looked at me with the detachment of the terminally ill.

At four in the morning, Fabrizio walked into my room, waking me up.

“Get up and come with me. Sophie. In the bathroom.”

“What is it, Fabri?”

“Just come with me.”

I imagined the most obvious thing to imagine. I followed him with a piece of tumultuous heart, the only shred left to me: the rest was a dog’s breakfast. The bathroom door was ajar, and Sophie was immersed in a tub full of water.

The water was transparent, no streaks of blood, no sign of razor blades. I touched Sophie and woke her up; she was ice cold. She reacted by saying something to me that I couldn’t understand. On the floor by the tub was the hypodermic she’d used to shoot up. Luckily, before getting in the water, she’d left the door ajar. Her nudity made her look small, cadaverous, completely defenseless.

I gave her my bathrobe and helped her to my bed.

She fell asleep on her side, her back to me, far away. I decided that I wouldn’t go to work the next day. I left a
message with the newspaper switchboard in the middle of the night, saying that I had a fever. It was partly true.

When we woke up, any remaining barriers of hypocrisy were gone. I asked the most useless question possible: “Why, Sophie?”

“Just because.”

“It’ll kill you.”

“I don’t give a shit. I just want to feel okay right now. Do you have a problem with that?”

I asked a few other questions, of a more technical nature: who, where, when. She decided to tell me what I wanted to know, in a remote tone of voice, as if she were talking about someone else.

“That Salvatore gives it to me, but I also get it from a guy I met the first few days I was in Palermo. He’s an aristocrat, and aristocrats always have baggies of smack. I met him through a friend of Elena’s. I was already shooting up in Paris, with that photographer I ran away from. He lived to shoot up. I wanted to know if there was another possibility: Brussels, Elena. I was sure I’d be able to do it.”

“But then you started it up again. Why, Sophie?” I asked, sticking with the theme of pointlessness.

She shrugged.

“That’s just the way I am.”

She stopped talking. She prepared her bag for the day’s work. I stopped asking questions. She didn’t say goodbye, just closed the door behind her. She didn’t have a set of house keys; she’d never asked for them, I’d never offered.

That afternoon I had a long talk with Fabrizio. I told him about my conversation with Sophie, her confessions. And
that guy, Salvatore, and the nobleman whose identity we were able to guess.

We decided that the summer was over and, whatever else we did, we needed to take a holiday. A long rest from Palermo, a vacation from death and heroin. September was the month for travel, just him and me. We’d taken our first trip together when we were eighteen, after finishing high school. That very afternoon we decided where we’d go: Amsterdam. For a month.

“What about Sophie?”

We agreed that we couldn’t leave her alone in the apartment. We knew what drug addicts were like. At that moment, I took a few more steps down the ladder that leads from worthy to worthless. And they were not to be the last.

“I’ll make some phone calls. I’ll see if there’s someone who can take her in.”

Fabrizio considered that a wise idea.

That night, Sophie came home. She barely said hello.

She went into the bedroom and lay down.

Almost everything between us was broken. I was afraid of that girl, I wanted to get rid of her, get her far away from me, from my life, her and her syringes, like a handgun aimed at me with the safety off. Then I felt her heart against mine, I’d look at her face, her eyelashes, the lips I would have been glad to dive into and drown. She was still essentially a woman in danger, a Guinevere among Guineveres, and that fact summoned me imperiously back to my duty. I couldn’t. I shouldn’t.

Lancelot syndrome.

I went into the living room and I called Vittorio. I’d met him at more than one party: he was a skinny, wealthy man,
much older than me, born into an excellent family, with plenty of real estate to spare. I told him about Sophie, about the fact that I was leaving, and asked him if he could take her in for a month or so.

“We’ll come get her as soon as we get back.”

I neglected to tell him about the heroin. Vittorio had seen Sophie at a dinner party with Elena, and during our phone conversation he’d referred more than once to her as that
“bellissima francese.”

He agreed to take her in.

I hung up the phone.

Lancelot had just shot himself in the head.

There was something inexplicable there, just as there is in any self-destructive gesture. In the years that followed, I tried to review the cowardice of that period, the decision to get rid of Sophie as if I were flicking a speck of fluff off a navy-blue blazer. I was a conflicted young man, capable of witnessing an autopsy impassively, or evaluating the effects of a .357 bullet on a human cranium, but incapable of talking to an addict whom I loved, or at least I thought I loved. A drug addict who, at that very moment, was the most defenseless young woman on earth, a tiny creature glimpsed on open terrain by a bird of prey: life. I wasn’t indulgent with myself in the months that followed. Then, after a number of years, I grasped what I ought to have understood then and there: I was just a kid immersed in a reality that nowadays would have been a bloodthirsty video game. An avatar moved by the joystick of chance, incapable of decisions and actions guided by a sense of justice
.

Sophie continued along her way through the shadows, doing
her best to escape the swooping talons of life for as long as she could. I hurried away from the clearing, in search of a small salvation in the distance that separated me from her. These were natural acts, dictated by the instinct for survival: she had hidden from me the fact that she was a heroin addict, and I had concealed from her the fact that I still wanted the future that was mine by right
.

We said our hasty farewells. I borrowed Fabrizio’s Renault 4, did my best not to look her in the eye, and put her suitcase in the back. Sophie let herself be transported as if she were a package, putting up no resistance, final recipient unknown; she knew she’d made a mistake, that she surfed through life and had taken another spill. The wave of that Palermo summer had washed over her, knocking her down hard: she didn’t expect her weakness to be punished so harshly by the same young man who had described the Baedeker of the stars to her, who kissed her on the eyes and read her Verlaine, the boy in whose arms she had curled up and snuggled. She, the little French girl tossed here and there by the wind.

I delivered her to Vittorio on an afternoon in early September. She was wearing a white tank and linen Bermuda shorts, with a pair of Converse All Stars on her feet. She’d made up her face, red lipstick, mascara to lengthen her eyelashes. She was heartbreakingly beautiful. I was ashamed of myself, of my lack of courage. Sophie entrusted me with one last commiserating glance. I tried to kiss her on the cheek, but she turned her face away. I drove off staring into the rearview mirror: I saw Vittorio picking up her bag as she trailed along after him. Then she turned for a moment
to watch my car as it vanished into the distance. The sun picked out the red of her lips.

Nine years later, in 1992, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were killed in Palermo. I worked on both massacres without uncovering anything interesting. Then, over a dinner one night, I discovered another murder; the victim was a fragile and touchingly beautiful young woman killed in Paris by a heart attack: Sophie
.

Blood ties are stronger than a scirocco wind, deeper than the abyss: they are something primordial, something that comes out of nature. A Sicilian knows it from birth, from the first time that, without really understanding it, he experiences the sacred quality of a mother’s touch, a father’s voice. Of course, everyone else knows it, too, whether born farther north or to the south. But many Sicilians, in all their charming conceitedness, are convinced that the world’s most dominant blood type is type S. Not type O, type A, type B, or type AB, but type S: “S” as in Sicily. Their diversity, their imagined supremacy, often makes Sicilians easily recognizable wherever they live. There’s an old statistic that said that there were 5.5 million Sicilians living on the island, but there were 15 million more scattered around the world. A great many more than the Irish
.

These days, I feel that tie myself, perhaps because I’ve lived far from Palermo for almost thirty years now. Or else because on certain foggy mornings I feel a yearning for that original light, for wind and the smell of salt water: I have drops of seawater in the double helix of my DNA
.

Life takes us elsewhere, we chase after dreams and then, one day, we dream of life. In 1958 Leonardo Sciascia described a Sicilian office worker who was told that he was being transferred: he’d leave his job in a small town and move to a city. But, the official
hastened to tell him, he’d make sure the man was transferred to a city nearby. “No,” said the office worker, “I’d prefer if it was a city far away: somewhere outside of Sicily, a big city.” “Why do you want that?” the official asked in astonishment. “I want to see new things,” said the office worker
.