That Summer in Sicily (27 page)

“La Chou-Chou.
Buona sera.
”

Escorted and presented into their midst, I immediately wish I’d stayed in my reverie under the iridescent meringue. Here in the
salone francese,
I am an old prom queen misdirected into the sanctum of an Armani summit. Each one here is draped severely in black. Not widow black but chic black. Caught narrowly and left to puddle above the heels of alligator shoes, silk pleated-front trousers flutter down the long legs of the men. More black silk in T-shirts or open-necked dress shirts, longish, wide-shouldered jackets. Including Cosimo—who is dressed as they are all dressed—there are four of them. Two women wear short black jackets constructed with the precision and inflexibility of armor. Stiff peplums flare out from thin waists and hover above toneless derrières sheathed in tulip-shaped knee-length skirts. Bony bare sun-browned legs and narrow feet totter upon the heels of jeweled pumps. Tosca wears one of her blacks, a chiffon tunic that covers her up to her emerald in front and bares the burnt-almond Saracen skin of her back and shoulders. I am the single flaw in this living frieze and though I want to run out and away from it, I take the coupe-shaped glass of sparkling wine that is offered to me and drink to their collective health. They drink to mine. I can’t recall even one of their names and I wonder about the Venetian, whether I’ll ever see him again. I wonder who these people are. I wonder why Tosca didn’t lend me a black dress.

One of the men, perhaps the eldest of the group, perhaps sensing my discomfort, compliments my dress.

“Do I recall, Tosca, that you once had a dress in that same wonderful color?” he asks of her while smiling at me.

“I might have,” she says to him. And then to me, “As I’ve told you, Chou, we’ve all known one another for centuries. Of what we don’t recall about ourselves, the others are always ready to remind us.”

Forgetting the torment of the old prom queen, I look at Cosimo, think how fond I have grown of him. Too, I could soften to the eldest Armani whose
mise
and whose manner, closer up, is less studied than that of the others. When we are called out into the dining hall, it’s one of the other Armanis, though, who crooks his arm, nods at me,
“Con piacere, signora.”

He is called Icilio, he tells me. I sit between him and Cosimo, who is already deep in discourse with one of the peplums. Across from me sits Carlotta, and next to her is Fernando’s empty chair. Elijah, where are you? Tosca sits across from Icilio, and for a while I hope it will be to her rather than to me that he will intend the nasally delivered orations he’d begun on the way to the hall. Meanwhile I am distracted by supper.

Long terra-cotta dishes of
sarde a beccafico,
fresh sardines stuffed with fried bread crumbs and garlic and pine nuts and raisins and baked with fresh bay leaves and olive oil. There are trays of
panelle,
fritters made of chickpea flour; great metal dishes with sizzling black olives that have been roasted with lemon and garlic; there is
maccu,
fresh fava beans braised in olive oil and wild fennel, puréed and smeared on charred bread.
Fangottu,
monumental white china bowls, are heaped with pasta sauced with raw crushed tomatoes, olive oil, and shreds of pecorino still too young to grate. It is Saturday, and Furio is at table orchestrating the passing and tearing of his two-kilo sesame-crusted breads cleverly slashed so that, as they baked, they took on the form of immense golden crowns. There is lamb roasted with mountain mushrooms and wild herbs. Sausages and small potatoes wrapped in pancetta, speared onto wine-soaked twigs and grilled over vine cuttings, are piled onto wooden boards and carried ’round the table. Still no Elijah. I ask Tosca if she is concerned that Fernando and Valentino have not yet arrived.

“Not at all,” she says. “You see, when Valentino goes to town, he does errands for everyone else who has neither time nor opportunity to go himself. The trip always takes a while.”

“But it’s nearly eleven and everything’s been closed for hours.”

“The deliveries,” she says. “He must stop in five or six or more places to bring what’s been commissioned. A coffee. A grappa. Some gossip. A hand of
briscola.
”

“
La signora
is missing her husband. This is lovely.” It’s Icilio who puts his large, smooth brown hand over mine. To comfort me.

“No, it’s not that I miss him as much as that I wish he were here.”

“Is there a difference?”

“This is our last evening at the villa. That’s all. It’s only that.”

Icilio leans close to me, watches as I fumble trying to slide the sausages and potatoes from the twig. Setting down knife and fork, I turn to face him. It was that for which he’d been waiting. In a quieter but still grandiloquent tone he tells me that life is meant to
un armonia di amore, dovere e tradimento.
A harmony of love, duty, and betrayal. He says that each one is essential to the other. Not one of them can survive alone. No two of them can survive without the third.

He pauses then. A sip of wine. I’m still looking at him but thinking that I’m already struggling with the old prom-queen complex and now these damn sausages welded to a twig and he wants to be provocative, wants to talk about betrayal and harmony and the stuff of true love.

“Are you saying that rather than coming to supper this evening, my husband is elsewhere betraying me?”

“If he is not betraying you this evening, he will only have to betray you tomorrow morning unless, of course, he has already betrayed you yesterday. Love is not love without duty and betrayal.”

“I see. Together, they make harmony.”

“Excellent. You have understood.” He sips his wine. Picks up his twig and bites cleanly and with finesse directly into the sausage and potato. Pats his lips with his napkin. “Of course it’s true for you, as well.”

I laugh perhaps a little too heartily, since one of the peplums swivels her blonded head toward me in what seems dismay. I think this Icilio is saying that my love for Fernando will not be a harmonious love unless I betray him. That it is my
duty
to betray him if I love him. Yes, I think that’s what he’s saying and, too, I think his is far and away the most brilliantly delivered seduction of my life. I tell him so. He thanks me. Refills my wineglass. Disposes of the lush scorched meat of another twig. Tells me how fetching are the roses tucked into my dress.

“Sicilians dwell in a sub-rosa world, you know. Under the rose. The implicit word. The gesture, cloaked. I will tell you another, more subtle, significance of sub rosa. A girl called Rosalia is our saint. We are
under the protection of Rosalia.
We trust ourselves to a virgin hermit and should she not be clever enough to save us, we can always turn to our goddess farmer. Do you know of our Demeter?”

“I do.”

“Good. So you know, then, that we Sicilians, most especially we Sicilian men, believe in the power of beautiful women.”

“I suppose I do.”

“Pindar called us men in love with brazen warfare. Though I do like the sound of that phrase, alas, he was wrong,
signora.
Pindar was wrong. Or perhaps he was only half right. We are
mama’s boys,
homespun, silver-tongued, Machiavellian. Everything we’ve learned, we’ve learned from women.”

“A goddess-worshipping culture.”

“Far more than that,
signora.
Far more than that. All Sicilians think they
are
gods. We pastoral Sicilians know that we are. Descended directly from Hera and Zeus and Poseidon and Hades himself—hardly a united family or one shy of terrifying characters—we understand and accept our wisdom and greed and infinite powerlessness as birthrights. Heredity. The gods lived right here where we live. They built temples, worshipped one another and themselves, wreaked havoc, murdered, loved, feasted, swindled, raped one another’s wives, stole one another’s children, surrounded themselves with beauty. They slept on beds strewn with wildflowers and drank their wine from alabaster cups. And, except for those—for the wildflower-strewn beds and the alabaster cups—all of us who have come after them have lived or are still living versions of the same lives they did. As you have undoubtedly noted, the past is not dead here. It hardly ever sleeps. That’s why we are not much interested in change and not at all interested in changing ourselves. We are already perfect in the same imperfect way that the gods were perfect,” he says as dishes of watermelon jelly are set down along with doilied trays of little peach tarts.

Elijah has yet to arrive. What with the sizzling olives, my discreet glances down the table at Furio—which only Icilio has noticed—the twigged sausages, all the Armanis, sub rosa and wisdom and greed and murder and swindling and alabaster cups, I’ve hardly had time to think of Fernando. Everyone is moving out into the gardens.

Tosca comes to whisper that Fernando is upstairs in our rooms. She tells me that he left word in the kitchen, asked that I be told he was tired. That he went to rest and to wait for me. That I shouldn’t rush. I excuse myself and run up to him.

Fully dressed, Fernando sleeps. A
canarino,
a cup of water steeped with lemon peel, still warm, is on the night table. I sit beside him, stroke his forehead. The Venetian farmer is finally exhausted from nearly a month in the orchards and the fields. Banker’s hands roughed, pale skin flushed to a dark ruddle, he has worked and, I suppose, played in a way he never had before. He stirs, murmurs something about grappa and Valentino, and I understand that with the lemon
tisana,
he meant to calm his stomach.

“I’m going back down to say good night. I’ll be right back.”

He sits up then. “I think we should leave this evening.”

“But you’re so tired. A good sleep and then we can be off.”

“No. I want to drive in the darkness rather than the daylight. I’ll get up and pack the last things. Let’s just slip away.”

“Are you sad to be going? Is that it?”

“It’s not sadness. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not sadness. I’ve never had homesickness, but I think that’s what I’m feeling. It’s like when you say you feel
bittersweet.
I could never really understand what you meant, but I suppose I do now.”

“Bittersweet. Life played on the minor keys. Small affirmations of beauty.” I caress his face. “Will you betray me tomorrow morning, or have you already betrayed me this evening?”

“What?”

“I’ll be right back.”

When I return to the garden, all the torches and candles are spent. The household has retired. Even the Armanis have started back for Palermo or are tucked away in the villa. No, Icilio is still here. Sitting with Tosca near the magnolia. Still unseen, shall I slip away? Bid them good night? If we leave this evening, I’ll not see her again. Icilio strikes a match and as it flashes, I say,
“Buonanotte, Tosca. Signor Icilio
.
Volevo solo dirvi buonanotte.”

Icilio lights a cigarette and, still talking, they stand, begin walking toward me.

“I was waiting for you; we were waiting for you,” Tosca says. “Is Fernando feeling better?”

“Yes, I think so. I’ll just get back to him, then.”

“I’m going up as well. I can’t seem to persuade Icilio to stay the night, though.”

“If I can arrange it, I always prefer to spend Sundays in Palermo.”

“Ah, Signore Icilio misses someone. Isn’t that lovely?”

Tosca seems perplexed. A three-cheek kiss for Icilio. And, for the first time, one for me. Her hand on my face, she says, “You were welcome when you arrived and you are loved as you leave us.”

She’s gone. I stand with Icilio and we watch her until she reaches the door. I am still looking in Tosca’s direction when he barely brushes my face, still warm from Tosca’s hand, with his lips. He begins to walk away. I am nearly at the door when he stops, calls out in a stage whisper, “
Signora. Signora.
”

I swing ’round, press my back against the door.

“In another time, I, too, would have loved you. I would have loved you very well.”

I climb the stairs to Fernando, wondering about Icilio’s theory. I wonder about betrayal and duty. I wonder about love.

Fernando has packed our things, written a note to Tosca, one to Valentino, one to Agata. I trade the silvery-brown dress for jeans and boots. A fresh white shirt. I am folding the dress, tucking it into my case, when Fernando says, “Come here. Stay with me for a while before we go.”

We lie down face to face on the bed, talk a little about the route. It takes a few minutes before we realize that we don’t want to go to Noto at all. Or anywhere else in Sicily, for that matter. We want to go home. The quickest, fastest route back to Venice. Each one relieved to learn the other one agrees. We check ferry schedules. We can be halfway up the coast of Calabria by sunrise. In Venice for a late supper.

We carry our things down and I wait in the garden with them while Fernando goes to fetch the car, to drive it to a place closer than the distant villa gates where it has been parked since we arrived. I sit in the cleft of the magnolia. When I hear Fernando’s approach to the little gravel lot on the other side of the villa, I begin dragging the bags across the garden to it. He comes to help me and, in a few moments, everything is stowed. I have never seen this side of the villa and so look about. Look up to a wide loggia that runs the whole length of the outside wall and has the same red marble columns that march along the loggia on the ground floor. It would be large enough to hold ten couples waltzing. Or just one. Or a daybed wrapped in opalescent curtains with a heavy satin border. Fernando has started the motor again. I get in, close the door quietly. As he maneuvers the car to face the private roadway, I look up at the loggia. I see a face in the upper window framed in a Gothic arch. A silhouette. A shadow. I see two shadows.

EPILOGUE

MARCH 2000
A Letter from Tosca

L
UI É MORTO
. H
E IS DEAD
. I
T’S BEEN ONE MONTH AND THREE
days since Leo died. Yes, you’re reading correctly. I said
since Leo died.
It was Leo with whom I lived for these past years since his “resurrection.” His reappearance. I imagine your perplexity. I hear you asking,
But why didn’t you tell me?
Or perhaps,
Why did you deceive me?

I could answer by saying,
I am Sicilian.
Tell you that mystery and even duplicity are my birthrights. That
chiaroscuro
is another form of storytelling. I could say that silence is not always meant to conceal but sometimes to enfold, to keep safe. Or I could propose that sins of omission may not be sins at all. Besides, what woman worth her femininity has ever told all of her story? Surely you have not, my darling friend. As the gods do, we reveal ourselves—if we reveal ourselves at all—to whom we choose and in our own good time.

It was in 1968, five years after I returned from Palermo with Nuruzzu to set up life here at the villa, when Leo came winding up the pebbled road one morning, flinging open the door of the old Rover while the motor was still running, unfolding himself from behind the steering wheel to stand there grinning at Agata and the women in the garden, holding a finger to his lips to silence them. He walked inside, listened for me, came to the door of the
salone francese,
where I was still trying to play
Saint-Saëns.
A long, lean spectre in sore need of a shave and a good scrubbing, he was wearing the same jodhpurs and riding boots he’d been wearing on the last evening that I saw him. And I was wearing his old suede jacket. The first words I heard him speak in fourteen years were,
It’s a swan, Tosca. The music was composed to give the impression of a swan. There is no indication that an elephant approaches. Piano, piano, amore mio.

No need to scream, Chou. I can hear you asking,
Why? Why did he leave you to suffer all that time? Why didn’t he tell you that he was well?
The truth is, at that moment, I had little need for the
why
or the
how.
After the first great convulsion of stupor, there was a noise inside my head like a tumbril trundling over a cobbled street and after that, after looking upon him as he stood there in the doorway, there was an immense, a sublime reckoning. My only need was to continue looking at him, to run toward him, not unlike I did on that evening when I was fifteen. This time, though, he caught me in his arms, crushed me against his chest. This time, it was he who did the kissing. My face and my hair and my mouth. And then he swung me ’round and ’round, his hands clutching me under my arms, until I couldn’t tell if I was seeing the end of some dream or whether the dream was only just beginning. We laughed, raised up screams and shouts of praise to the gods and yet we did not speak, words most often seeming paltry noise in times of pure joy. Still not saying much, I took the prince by the hand, walked him through the villa, showed him rather than told him what we’d done together. As we walked, we met up with all those people from our past—with darling Agata, with little red-haired Valentino who’d grown to be such a fine man, with Olga of the peach-skin cheeks, and with Cosettina, who kept crossing herself and touching Leo’s face as she would the face of St. Francis. Cosimo came running in from wherever he’d been causing his usual fuss and the two old mates held each other for so long that we finally had to separate them. And when we came to the kitchens, all the widows—even the ones Leo had never known before—made an intolerable cacophony of screeching and ululating, chanting and praying. The Tiny Mafalda was among them. She’d stayed apart from the rest who’d run to stand about Leo in an admiring circle. But he saw her, knew instantly who she was, and went to her. Lifted her into his arms as he’d done when she was six.

There is another beautiful woman who’s waiting to welcome you home, Leo, I’d told him then. Besotted with emotion, trailing the household behind him, he let me pull him along through the garden. We stopped at the bakehouse door. Her face floured like a geisha’s, Carlotta and two others were pulling out the second bake, shoveling the rounds into cooling baskets. I think Leo saw the scene rather than the people, because he just stood there and smiled. Then Carlotta whispered,
Papà.
She said it louder then and ran to him, finally screaming it,
Papà, Papà!

There is another sin of omission that I must now confess. Carlotta is the Italian version of Charlotte. In her case, Princess Charlotte. When she came to stay with us soon after I’d returned from Palermo, she requested that we call her by her Italian name. Why didn’t I ever tell you that she was Leo’s daughter? You know the answer by now. I am Sicilian. She is Sicilian, too. But I will tell you, Chou, that even after all these years, I can still hear Carlotta screaming
Papà.
A case when words did not make a paltry noise upon pure joy.

·                           ·                           ·

Even before I was ready to start asking questions, Leo began to lay down the pieces for me. I will tell you that, for days and weeks, he carefully dosed out the events, trying to be certain that I’d taken in one part before he proceeded to the next. I have already dreaded reaching this point in my letter to you since the complications of what he told me—early on as well as over the long years afterward—and the further complications of what Cosimo told me are thick and tortuous. There are times when, even now, I lost my way inside the story. Yet, try to guide you through it I must. Else I might simply end my letter here. Which I may very well decide to do. But first I will try to reconstruct Leo’s story.

Leo told me that it was Cosimo who’d saved him. Saved him from himself and then saved him from the clan. You see, Leo had arrived at the desperate conclusion to surrender himself to them. To present himself to the same man, this Mattia, who had come to whisper threats in his ear on that evening when he’d been summoned to meet with the clan. Leo had decided to do this even though he had received neither a word nor suffered the least untoward action from the clan during the three years which followed that evening. He’d been left undisturbed save by his own fertile conjecture. Yet, fear having worn him to a kind of madness, Leo had decided to remind Mattia of his promise.

Leo knew that Simona and the princesses were out of harm’s way, perceived as they were so separate from him, but it was some injury to me, to the peasants, to Cosimo, that agonized him day and night. Though I think you never would, you might ask me why he simply didn’t cease his activities, continue to help the peasants in less conspicuous, less antagonistic ways. Live out his life quietly with me. The story would have to have been about another man, Chou.
We’re all who we are endlessly.

At this time Leo was all but finished with the legal business of partitioning the land, of preparing the channels through which the peasants could sell their crops, of setting up accounts for them, arranging for twice-yearly withdrawals should funds be needed to supplement their first trafficking with profit and loss. He’d thought of everything. He’d made his arrangements for me, for Cosimo. And as though, with all this in place, his earthly work done, he was ready to pay for his deeds as Mattia had promised he would have to pay. Simply put, Leo told Cosimo that he would no longer wait for the clan to come to him but that he would go to them. The prince would no longer live perched on the rim of the well.

Leo informed Cosimo of the day on which he’d planned to go to Palermo to find this Mattia. He set down all his final desires, instructions, caveats. Left locked metal boxes and their keys in Cosimo’s care. Transferred and consolidated to a single safekeeping the funds and deeds and jewelry that had been deposited in various banks. He was ready. In the meantime, Cosimo had arrived at his own desperate conclusion. As I write all this, I find myself thinking of Isotta. Of Leo’s mother and how she set about arranging her affairs and then arranging herself for death.

Anticipating Leo’s proposed journey to Palermo, Cosimo himself went to call on Mattia. I suspect the man must have been intrigued by Cosimo’s request for an audience, which, in any case, was granted with ease. With no evidence of the bodyguards, the cohorts who Cosimo had thought would be present, Mattia saw the priest alone in a sitting room filled with lilacs. Callas sang from
La Traviata.
Though neither of them could have been comfortable, they played the role of old friends, sipped coffee and whiskey and smoked the cheap Toscano cigars of which Mattia was fond.

As he was obliged to, the priest fired the opening volley. He asked Mattia why he hadn’t yet taken Leo. Why he’d left him, it might seem, in peace for those past three years.

Has the Church taken to soliciting confessions? Another aberration from Rome?

Point one for Mattia. Cosimo proceeded. He told Mattia that Leo’s work was very nearly completed. Cosimo began to offer details of the partitioning but Mattia waved his hand as if to say,
I know that. I know all that.
Cosimo then asked Mattia why he’d allowed Leo to continue with the very programs that the clan found so offensive.

Mattia answered,
Being men of honor, we’ve had our struggles over your prince, Don Cosimo. To make a martyr of him might have caused more grief than will the execution of his “programs,” as you call them.
Mattia told Cosimo that he believed the clan’s dilemma over the “disposition” of the prince might have inflicted a far greater punishment on him than would have the bullet through his heart that he’d so long been expecting. Cosimo verified that the sinister abeyance of word and action from the clan had indeed had its brutal effect upon Leo. It was then that Cosimo said,
I think it’s time you killed him, Signor Mattia.

Pretending tranquility, Mattia looked at Cosimo. Asked him if he had also thought about how and where they might dispose of the prince.

Una lupara bianca, Signor Mattia. When he’s walking across the meadow to the
borghetto
. There are stands of pines. Beeches.

A well-delivered and properly cold-blooded recitation, Don Cosimo. Am I to understand that you have joined us in our displeasure with the prince? Have I missed something, some dissonance between the two of you? That would distress me. I mean, it would distress me to be uninformed. But yes, yes, white for a prince. Yes, that’s good. But tell me, Don Cosimo, what is it exactly that you will gain by your prince’s demise? Is it the
puttanina
you want? She is beautiful, I admit. But I’d understood that you’d been having her since she was a child. Excuse me if I offend you. I don’t mind telling you that I’ve thought about taking her for myself. Perhaps we could share her, Don Cosimo. Once the prince is no longer, what would you say to our sharing the
puttanina
?

Cosimo knew that Mattia’s discourse was meant to mortify him, enrage him. To take him off his game. Cosimo stayed the course and it was Mattia who was disarmed. Cosimo said,
I shall get to my motives for this
lupara bianca,
but first, Signor Mattia, would you please be kind enough to tell me what
you
will gain by prince Leo’s death?

Vendetta is not an intellectual concept. We, my brothers and I, will gain that particular form of peace of mind which a man of honor feels when he keeps his word. Leo said it himself that night. Don’t you recall? You must do what you must do and so must I, he said. Leo has kept his word. We shall keep ours.

What if you kept your word to punish Leo, but what if you did it in a way that was, as you said yourself a few moments ago, “a far greater punishment than the expected bullet in his heart”?

Cosimo told Leo that Mattia openly displayed his agitation. Said that he kept lifting and replacing the telephone receiver that sat on the table between them.

Cosimo, we’re both busy men. I thank you for your visit. In parting, let me assure you that I will give due consideration to your, to your
words.

Cosimo said that Mattia rose, offered his hand to Cosimo but that he, Cosimo, remained seated and said,
Please, Signor Mattia, I’ve not yet answered your question. You wanted to know what it is that I will gain by the prince’s demise. I think that’s how you put it. The demise that I intend—the
lupara bianca
of which I spoke—does not have to mean his death. It can signify his removal, his exile, the end of all his freedoms. Another kind of death. It does not have to mean his physical death. You, as a man of honor, will save face, will keep your promise to punish Leo. Punish him even more than your threats and your silences have punished him already. The prince is not your enemy. He did not take from you; he did not call for rebellion; he mustered no one to move against you; he does not want what you have; he seeks neither power nor influence but only to help half a hundred men, women, and children who were hungry. The prince is also a man of honor, Signor Mattia.