That Summer in Sicily (24 page)

“ ‘Why didn’t you let me know where you were? Why did you abandon me or hide from me or whatever it is that you did?’

“I pull Mafalda over to a bench that has just been vacated since the
autobus
has arrived but she pushes me away, reaches up the flat of her hand, and strikes my cheek. She strikes me three times before I have the presence to take hold of her arm. She screams, ‘Me?
Why did I abandon you?
Are you sure you remember things as they really happened, Tosca? You left me and you left Papà and . . . ’

“ ‘Mafalda, stop it. Stop it. You didn’t know, you were too little to understand, but the truth is that Papà sold me to Leo. He traded me for a horse, Mafalda.’

“ ‘I know that. I know that was how it began. You love to say it, don’t you, Tosca? You love to be the victim, the poor little orphan girl sold to a prince. Truth is, Papà did you a favor sending you to them. He didn’t sell you into slavery after all, he set you down inside a fairy tale. But you could have returned. You weren’t held captive, were you? I can understand why you would have stayed there for a while, a year or two if only for the relief, the change. You were still little, too, and your head was turned. But to stay? I never believed that you would stay with them. I waited for you. Papà waited for you, too.’

“ ‘You’re lying. Papà forsook me and you know that. He wouldn’t let me return. Have you forgotten that?’

“ ‘He was testing you. Even I could see that. He wanted you to prove to him that you preferred life with us over life with them. I believe that, Tosca. But you surrendered so easily to the temptations of the palace.’

“ ‘I was nine years old, Mafalda. I was frightened and angry and grieving and hungry and yes, at that time in my life I suppose I did choose Leo over Papà. But I stayed at the palace, in part, because I believed it was the best way to take care of you. You were too young to understand that, and perhaps I was too young to have carried through with my plans as fully as I might have. Yes, you’re right, I had my head turned. But taking care of you was what I’d set out to do. And I did, didn’t I? Didn’t I come to see you whenever I could, bring you presents? But when you went away and then when Papà did, too, all I could do was wait. Remember,
you who knew where I was.
Leo and Cosimo worked for years at finding you, following the thinnest threads. They wrote letters to the communes and dioceses of the towns and villages where people with our name and Mamà’s name were registered. More than once they traveled to talk to someone who knew, someone who remembered . . . but nothing. I’ve been angry with you, too, Mafalda.’

“ ‘You have no reason to be angry with me. You’re angry with yourself because I’m different from you. Maybe you envy me a bit, Tosca. Envy me because I didn’t sell out. The best way you could have helped me would have been to share bread and cheese with me and to stay close to me. We were fine, then, Tosca. We were just fine. I won’t say that I didn’t look forward to your gifts but you see I was already safe. I still knew what we used to know together. I knew that I would always
get by.
That no matter what, I would always be able to
arrange
things. Somewhere along the way I guess that turned out not to be enough for you. Getting by. Arranging. But it’s always been enough for me. It’s still enough for me, Tosca.’

“We are quiet, appraising each other, each one of us beginning to speak, both deferring. Silence. Until Mafalda says, ‘And when Papà got sick—did you even know that he was sick?—he told me that I, too, would have to go to live with the prince’s family. I cried and screamed and begged him not to bring me to Leo and that’s when he made arrangements for me with
zia
Elena. He brought me there, promised to visit me soon, and that was the last time I saw him.’

“Mafalda sits on the bench then. Perches on the edge of it, her face pale, tortured. I look at her hands, which are red and dry, old for a woman of twenty-two. For the Bellini Madonna whom she so resembles. As though they are borrowed hands or hands fixed, by error, onto the slender white wrists of her. I sit next to her. Hold her hands in mine. She tells me, ‘When Papà didn’t come to see me, I got myself back to our place. It took me a week, but I got there. Too late. He was gone, everything was gone. I didn’t want to go back to
zia
Elena. Things were not so good there. I never even considered knocking on the great doors of the palace. And so I have been on my own since a few months before I was twelve. Mostly it was easy to find work, since I would do almost anything to earn my food and a place to sleep.’

“ ‘But why, why didn’t you come to me? Ask me for help? Why didn’t you
allow
me to help you?
I didn’t know. How could I know?
All this time, I didn’t know.’ I’ve pulled Mafalda to her feet and now I’m screaming and weeping and shaking her. Then holding her to me.
Why? Why, piccola?

“ ‘Because I didn’t want your gifts, your food, your clothes. I wanted
you,
Tosca. I wanted us to be a family.’

“Mafalda is quiet then. Wipes her face with a fresh handkerchief pulled from her purse. ‘I will take the next
autobus.
It’s due in a few minutes. I have an appointment that I intend to keep.’

“ ‘An appointment? You can’t mean that you won’t come with me now. We can sit somewhere and talk, I can take you back to my room. I don’t even know why you’re here or where you live; you can’t just get on an
autobus
after thirteen years . . .’

“ ‘I’m still trying to find Papà. Whenever I’ve had money to spare, I’ve spent it in looking for him. I know what it’s like to write pleading letters to strangers. I’m here in Palermo to see a woman who knew Papà. I think they were lovers. A long time ago, when Papà and I were still together, I found a letter, a note really, among his things. I kept it. I don’t know why I kept it except that it was a sweet note, written on pretty paper. Signed
Loretta.
I liked the name. Long afterward when I began trying to find him, it was this Loretta, this Signora Capella, to whom I first wrote. I was living in Piazza Amerina then. She never wrote back to me and so I came here, went to the return address on the letter. Of course, she’d moved, or at least the
portiniera
said she had. I never thought about her again. I managed to discover some other remote leads, but I think he’s long since died. Or so I thought until a few days ago, when I received a letter from this Signora Capella. I’ve kept in touch with the people for whom I worked in Piazza Amerina and they forwarded her letter to me. She asked me to telephone her, and when I did, we made an appointment for today. Nothing, not even you, Tosca, could keep me from going to her.’

“ ‘Meet me afterward. I’ll be wherever you say.’

“ ‘Come with me, Tosca.’

“ ‘I don’t care to come with you. I’ll wait for you.’

“Mafalda rises, begins walking toward the bus, which has just lumbered up to the curb in front of us, the hiss of its opening doors muffling her parting word.

“ ‘Tomorrow,’ she says.

“She mounts the steps, pays her fare, turns back toward me, and waves.

“ ‘Pensione d’Aiello,
’ I shout.
‘Pensione d’Aiello.’ ”

·                           ·                           ·

“I go out early the next morning, buy bread and cheese from the
gastronomia
down the street, a sack of ripe brown pears, a liter jug of red wine, then head back to the
pensione
to wait for my sister. I ask Signora d’Aiello for glasses, plates, napkins. A knife. I tell her that I am expecting company. She says we are welcome at the family table for lunch or dinner. Offers to fix tea, to send for pastries, and seems disappointed when I respectfully refuse. I straighten up my already very orderly room, take up my book, and I wait. I can’t read, though; I can’t rest, I can’t stay quiet. Alternately I pace and look out the window. By five I begin to reason with the fearful voice inside me.
But she didn’t give a precise time, did she? And if she has a job, which she surely has, she’s had to work all day. The only thing she said was ‘tomorrow,’ and that could mean any number of things. Not a visit but a call. Not a call but a letter.
At ten I eat the bread, drink some wine, undress, and go to bed.

“For three days, I trace the same template. By the fourth day I begin to wonder if I’d only imagined Mafalda. I try to find some evidence of our meeting, but of course, there is none. I’ll take an
autobus
to her village, to Piana degli Albanesi. Thirty kilometers away, perhaps less. And it’s not a place so big that it will be difficult to locate her. How many Bellini Madonnas can there be in Piana degli Albanesi? It’s three in the afternoon on the fourth day and, my morning’s shopping in a sack slung on my shoulder, I am on my way to the bus station. How I wish I had a horse. How much simpler it had been when we were little and I knew the way, knew where to find my sister. It occurs that she has stayed away these past few days so she might think upon what we said to each other. So that we both might think. I queue at the ticket desk, try not to look out of place. I have not ridden on a public bus since before my mother died. Mafalda taps me gently on the shoulder.

“ ‘Are you on your way to find me, Tosca? I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you sooner. Papà is dead.
La signora
Capella didn’t want to tell me on the telephone. He died in the spring, but she only learned about it a few weeks ago.’

“I take her arm and we begin to walk outside to the street.

“ ‘She couldn’t tell me very much except that Papà had been living in Calabria. That he’d been sick, in varying degrees of gravity, for a long time. Though they continued to correspond, she herself hadn’t been to visit him, nor he to her, for four years. When so much time passed without receiving an answer to her last letter, she called his landlady and it was she who told
Signora
Capella that Papà had died. That’s when she wrote to me in Piazza Amerina. She and I will go to visit his grave, have Masses said for him. I hope you’ll come with us. Now you know all that I know. I needed to be alone for a while before coming to see you. You understand, don’t you?’

“ ‘Let’s go to my room,’ I say.”

“Mafalda lies down on my bed and I sit in the chair that I have placed beside it. I want her to talk. I desire only to listen. She seems at ease and begins to tell me things as she recalls them, without order, without finishing one piece before launching into another and then returning to an earlier event, trusting me to follow her. I do. Prone in the soft curves of the feather bed, she is very beautiful. Her telling seeks neither pity nor wonder.

“She has worked in a fish-canning factory as a cook’s helper on a deep-sea trawler; she has been an au pair to an English family living in Taormina; she has moved about the island harvesting grapes and almonds and olives with itinerant farm workers. I understand about her hands now. She has lived in Piana degli Albanesi for almost two years and she thinks she will stay there. She works as a seamstress and a house model in a small, exclusive atelier owned by two French women. Sometimes a client will come to them for a wedding dress from as far away as Rome, she tells me. The two French women are wise, I think to myself, to have found this lovely creature to do justice to their skills. But now she is talking about a man. She loves a man called Giorgio. By day, he is a clerk in the city hall in Piana degli Albanesi and by night, a violinist in a chamber music orchestra. He is the eldest of the eight children—two boys and six girls—of a Slavic mother, a Sicilian father. She tells me about his eyes—gray and sharply slanted, gift of his mother. She says that he goes to her apartment and cooks for her in the afternoon after his day work is finished, leaves her supper warm in the oven, flowers on her table. A note. And then he’s off to rest and later to play his violin. He comes to stay with her on the weekends, but only sometimes. As much as she likes to be with him does she like to be alone. Besides, she must study, since she is attending classes at the technical school that will prepare her to receive an accountant’s license. I think that somehow the accountant, the house model, and the almond picker seem equally fine careers for this Madonna. She tells me that Giorgio has bought her a hope chest, that his mother and sisters have set about to fill it with embroidered linens and towels and nightdresses and even with baby clothes. Giorgio asks Mafalda to marry him every Sunday after Mass. She doesn’t know yet if someday she will say yes. She has worked so hard, this little sister of mine. She has done what I have not yet done. She has found her own way home.

“When it’s my turn to speak, I try an abridged reading of the events. When I tell her that Leo is dead and at whose hands he died, she weeps. She asks my pardon for her sarcasm regarding Leo when we met on the street. She says that she never considered the possibility of our falling in love. The age difference. The cultural differences. His wife and children. I tell her nothing about Leo’s legacies to me, fearing that bank accounts and hunting lodges and emeralds would cause further estrangement between us. A greater divide. Mafalda asks why I stay in the
pensione,
which must cost far more than would a modest apartment. I lie, say I’ve just begun to look about. And as for finding work, well, she is an expert, she says. She will help me. She will share her earnings with me should I have need. And yet she is reluctant to promise that we will see each other often. Her life is already full, she tells me. She sits up, dangles her thin, little-girl legs, her thin, small feet in the ankle socks and the black pumps over the side of the bed, holds her arms lax upon her thighs. She looks at me, says, ‘Tosca, it’s too late for us to be a family. At least I think it is. And now that I know that Papà is gone, I think that, in a way, I am a family of one. I’ve made a good life. Someday I may choose to share it with Giorgio or even with you, if you might want that, but for right now, I want very much to keep to myself. It was a wild, hungry road I traveled from the horse farm to reach my little flat in Piana degli Albanesi. Much of the time the march was hard, I can tell you that. But I did it.
My being at home is so new.
I still wake up and can’t believe that the bed on which I lie is
my own bed.
That I actually
live
somewhere. That I’m no longer passing through. That I can bathe whenever I want, that I have some pretty clothes, that I have two pots and an entire set of dishes with blue and silver rims ’round the edges. I can’t begin to tell you how I marvel at everything. But you, your will, your character are so strong, Tosca. I think you could upset the balance, the delicious balance of this new life of mine. I can’t let you in. I won’t take the risk. I am not punishing you for your earlier decisions, but neither can I disregard the consequences of those decisions. I can’t do that right now. We have led separate lives and I believe that’s how we should proceed. If you let me know how you’re faring, I’ll do the same. We won’t lose track of each other again, that much I will promise. I’ll invite you to Sunday lunch one of these weeks, perhaps present you to Giorgio. Will you let me sleep here tonight? It’s so late now and I’m so tired.’