That Summer in Sicily Page 11

  “ ‘Does helping you mean I won’t be able to live down there? Is my helping you meant to keep me from that desire? Please don’t treat me as a child. I’m not a child, sir. I don’t think I ever was. Besides, what could I do to help you?’

  “ ‘I will tell you what you can do. In time, I will tell you, but first please try to understand that my not wanting you to live in the borghetto is for your sake. More than for mine. If you were to go, all you’ve gained by studying and reading would become part of your past. The free reign of your curiosity would end. No time to read, Tosca. Can you imagine a life with no time to read? If the borghetto is where you want to be, you can be there, but without closing up your life here. You can have both.’

  “ ‘Sir, I don’t want both. I want to go home. And since that’s not possible, I think I can find a home down there.’

  “ ‘Perhaps you could. Sanguine as you are, you might do it, Tosca, but I refuse to be part of it.’

  “ ‘Are you saying that you won’t allow me to live in the borghetto?’

  “He looks at me and, just above a whisper, says, ‘No. Of course I’m not saying that.’ He laughs then. ‘You are not my prisoner.’

  “ ‘Then who am I? Who am I to you?’

  “Leo remains quiet. Picks up the green and black pen, caresses it with the flat of his thumb. I want to be caressed.

  “ ‘I think you are an extraordinary young woman of whom I’ve grown very fond. I would like very much to always have you near.’

  “He says the last words slowly.

  “Why doesn’t he ask me who he is to me? Because he knows? He stays quiet, absorbed in the green and black pen. He continues, ‘Even if I weren’t so selfish in wanting to keep you with me, I would still warn you against going to live down there. Though you imagine yourself to be of the peasants’ tribe—as you put it—they do not recognize you as one of them. You are perceived as another daughter of mine by most of them. By some others you are marked in another way. Una bella puttanina. A beautiful little whore. I know you’ve heard the whisperers in the drawing room. They’ve wanted you to hear them. And me as well. They would like nothing more than for me to deny or, better, to confess, but I speak only of harvesting machines and the price of coal, titillating them with reserve. But there are whisperers everywhere. In the borghetto, there would be whisperers. As my daughter, as my lover, either way, the peasants will shun even the suggestion of intimacy with you. And yet, if you were to be placed—if I were to place you—that is, if it would please you to be placed in some authoritative position, the peasants would welcome you. You would be sufficiently set apart for their comfort. They would be free to interact with you within the boundaries of your position.’

  “ ‘But what position?’

  “ ‘As the teacher of their children. Their maestra. Everyone knows that you have been rigorously educated. Everyone knows that you are a superior student. Where you would not be accepted as an equal, you would be very much embraced as someone of a higher rank who’d come to teach their children.’

  “ ‘And what would happen to my status as la bella puttanina? Are you saying that if I become la maestra, the whisperers will stay quiet?’

  “ ‘No. The truth is that you shall remain sport for the whisperers no matter what you do. And, I think, no matter where you go. My long-ago taking of you as my ward secured that. Despite my intentions and my subsequent actions, I secured that.’

  “ ‘So I’m marked. Stained. In the palace as well as in the borghetto.’

  “ ‘Marked, yes. Stained, no. But this is much too much for you to hear all at once. What has taken me months to decide, I’ve set down before you in an afternoon. Let’s stop now. We’ll speak a little each day. About the ideas. About all of it.’

  “For the first time since he began talking, he smiles. It’s nearly dark in the library and he rises to switch on two of the abat-jours, but even the quiet luster they make seems rude. An unexpected ending. He must feel it, too, as he quickly turns off the lamps, lights a candle and a cigarette with a single match. Apologizes for not offering a cigarette to me.

  “ ‘You know I don’t smoke,’ I tell him, liking that we’re speaking of something as adult as a cigarette.

  “ ‘You might want to begin when I tell you what we’re going to do.’

  “He says this as he sits back down in his chair, stretches his arms out straight on the library table, the cigarette held between his lips. More than his pipe, I like seeing him smoke cigarettes. He was smoking a cigarette that evening. He’d held it between his lips then, too. I saw it when I threw open his door. He took it from between his lips and tossed it into the fire. Walked quickly, nearly ran toward me. Tosca, what is it? I saw his naked torso above his riding pants. His voice breaks through my thoughts now. He’s talking about the ride he took with Cosimo a while back. He’d like us all to take the same trail someday. Perhaps on Sunday. A long ride, he’s saying. To the hunting lodge. A fine old place, he’s telling me. Cousins are staying there now. Wild birds. Wild hare. Potremo pranzare là con loro. We can lunch there with them. Let’s see what Sunday brings, he’s saying. The chapel bells ring. Fifteen minutes until vespers.

  “ ‘It’s true, you know, Tosca.’

  “I’ve said a dopo, later. I’ve curtsied, turned to leave. I look back at him to learn what it is that’s true.

  “ ‘My wanting very much to always have you near.’ ”

  CHAPTER VII

  “A FEW DAYS LATER, LEO AND COSIMO AND I DRIVE TOGETHER to the borghetto. I have never ridden in an automobile since that first day when these two came to fetch me at my father’s place, to bring me to the palace. Gangly, sweaty little-girl thighs showing beneath an outgrown dress, sticking to the leather seat. My young woman’s legs so long now, I fit myself, half supine, into the child-sized back seat, among the folds of my pale pink dress. Cosimo was driving on that long-ago day as he does now, Leo in the passenger seat. Is this the same automobile? I trust him to understand the question. He does. Tells me it is the same. He shakes his head in some kind of wonder, smiles. We’ve already arrived.

  “In the almost seven years that I’d lived in the palace, I’d seen little beyond the courtyard of the borghetto. Beyond where the goats, chickens, geese wander about, where the shoemaker sets up shop sometimes, where the rabbit hutch stands in the shade of a small stand of poplars. Nothing much beyond that but now, in company with a group of men who Leo introduces as contractors, we three walk through or look into every building in the little community. Single-story structures built of stones and some pasticcio of bricks and wood; there is no sign of comfort. There is dignity. The intention of harmony. The mensa, dining hall, smells of sunlight and of tomatoes cooked in a pot where tomatoes have been cooking since forever. And at the long tables dressed in every color of oilcloth and on the bare benches beside them is where I think I’d like to sit. There is a dormitory where some of the unmarried men sleep. A bakehouse, a cheese-making hut, a smokehouse, and a chapel. A schoolroom. The remaining structures are divided into small, low-ceilinged, dirt-floored sleeping quarters where families and often the animals sleep together. There is a long, wide trough from which the animals drink, the same source of water where the clothes are washed, scrubbed on flat stones. There are neither bathing nor sanitary facilities. I think of my own childhood home and its relative splendor. I think of Leo’s telling me that I am romantic.

  “There are few people about—only those too young or too old to be in the fields or those otherwise occupied in the bakehouse or the kitchen. I stay a while to watch these women at work. With none of the haughty joy they spilt at the festa, they move about their tasks nearly in silence. Not the press of daily business, theirs is the work of survival. I go to sit near an old man—it’s the same old man who played the mouth harp at the festa, or at least I think it is. Upon his skinny knees, he holds a black-eyed baby who screams, half in delight, half in want of swifter delivery of the pap the old man spoons into its tiny maw. I wan
t to stay with the old man and the baby. I would give them both a good washing, put them down to sleep while I cooked for them. Leo calls me closer to the group.

  “They speak of cutting windows in the exterior walls, of finishing interior walls, of roof tiles and chimneys and separate barns for the animals; a bath house, a lavanderia, a latrine. There would be real beds built into the sleeping quarters. There would be a coal-fed stove with ten burners in the kitchen. I try to follow the discussion but, more, I follow Cosimo with my eyes as he walks about the place, opening and closing doors he’d already opened and closed before, as though trying to comprehend the misery. I leave the other men and join him.

  “ ‘It will want a year or maybe two, Tosca, but Leo will transform this place. Make it a model, an example other landowners will follow. Either that or they’ll make an example of him. Shoot him dead for interrupting the way of things.’

  “I know the priest is joking when he says shoot him dead. Yet the phrase seems crass said here, where Filiberto had lain only days earlier. The priest disturbs me. Perhaps this was his intent. I will not let him know of his success.

  “ ‘You mean other latifondisti.’

  “He looks at me, holds my gaze, then smiles. ‘Yes, other latifondisti.’

  “ ‘What will you do to help in all this?’ I ask Cosimo, wondering if Leo has spoken with him about the idea of my becoming the schoolmistress.

  “ ‘Mostly I’ll rescue Leo when he falters. He will falter. What’s to be done here is the smaller part of the plan. It’s the work to prepare the fallow land for planting, the work to encourage the peasants to use new equipment and accept new methods of farming that will daunt him. But even those are not the major parts of the plan. You see, Leo swears that, in his lifetime, he will parcel off the land to the peasants and to their children, make them independent farmers who will work to feed themselves, sell their surplus, begin to know the grim joys of handling cash. That will be his magnum opus. His great imprudence, perhaps. I am not convinced that the peasants who rise above their station find happiness. Rather, they find another kind of poverty. Discard their humanity or trade it for more bread. People should be what they were born to be, Tosca. Born to work the land. Born to own the land.’

  “Shocked by his own gaffe, the priest cuts off his soliloquy, puts a hand to my shoulder, and says, ‘You are so much a part of the prince’s family that I find myself forgetting that—I mean to say, it’s as though you’ve always been here, Tosca.’

  “ ‘Va bene, Don Cosimo. Capisco. It’s okay. I understand,’ I tell him.

  “Once again, he looks at me as though I’m new or different somehow. I am different. Not just that my usual heavy taffeta skirt and starched blouse have been surrendered to this silky dress that stops above my ankles, nor that my braids are coiled above my forehead rather than in two fat buns about my ears; not just these make me different, and Cosimo is improbably quiet now, as though trying to connect this Tosca who is almost sixteen to that other one who had been nine. The budding maestra to the horse-stealing savage. Surely Leo has not spoken with him about me. Cosimo has begun talking again.

  “ ‘As I was saying, some are born to work the land. Some to own the land. Tightening up the vast and historical distances between their tables, their beds, their birthing and dying—the reforms Leo has in mind to establish are just. But I wish he’d leave it at that. There is no need to parcel off the land. His is a wild scheme, my dear. Wild in the perilous sense. If only he could understand that the peasants would be happy enough just to sleep apart from their pigs.’

  “Why does he talk to me of these things? Wild in the perilous sense. Does he think I have some sway over Leo? Of course he doesn’t think that. But why then . . . He has taken up his story.

  “ ‘The prince is a complicated man, Tosca. So complicated that his ideas can seem simple. Especially to himself. He says there are no villains, no heroes. He says all of us are base and all of us are kind, if not in equal proportions. He’s Christ-like. Sometimes. When he’s not being Tolstoy. But he is always Candide. He persists that what he’s doing here does not make him a liberal, a progressive. Calls himself a patrician with a patrician’s detachment to things not his own, says he’s not trying to change things anywhere else but right here. In other words, Leo’s world is small. His land. His peasants. Men and women whom he does not idealize, by the way. But for whom he feels responsible. He wants them to ennoble themselves, work with all their might, have the security of a laden table and a decent bed. He wants to take care of the whole lot of them as though they were his children.’

  “Cosimo can hardly expect me to understand this business of reforms and sleeping apart from pigs and patrician detachment any more than Leo could have expected me to take in all he’d said that day in the library. And yet, I did understand Leo. And I think I do understand the priest. Mostly I understand that Leo is good.

  “I walk, look about the borghetto with Cosimo, but all I hear is Leo’s voice. It’s true, Tosca. My wanting very much to always have you near. Words of love. Were they not words of love? Paternal love? Romantic love? I speak with Cosimo hardly knowing what I say. Less what he says. To my graceful biding of time with the palace regimes, I will now add Leo’s revelations. Those which I understood and those which he left in the half-light of that candle on the library table. What I know for certain is that it will be me who rescues Leo when he falters.

  CHAPTER VIII

  “THE GREAT WORK IN THE BORGHETTO BEGAN THAT SUMMER OF 1946. The peasants went about their usual days in the fields while truckloads of day workers—many of them freshly discharged soldiers—began the tasks of restructuring the buildings. The peasants moved their pallets and personal belongings into the kitchen or arranged them along the walls of the dining hall and sometimes out into the open air while the men worked so the cottages—as Leo took to calling the sleeping quarters—would be readied by late autumn. Each day’s progress brought cheers of delight from the peasants as they returned home from the fields to see another row of windows, yet another portion of the roof laid in terra-cotta tiles. Perhaps even more than the bath house and the laundry and the barns for the animals, it was the stoves in the kitchen that caused the greatest hallelujah. The stoves and the abundance they promised.

  My excitement at being able to observe the work was akin to that which I’d felt when Leo first took over the pace and the content of my studies. I would ride down with Leo and Cosimo each morning and then, forgoing the ritual tea parties with the princesses and Simona and the teachers, I would go there again in the late afternoons. I thought of little else but how beautifully the village was being restored. Even the schoolroom. When there was no one to catch me at it, I would stand at its doorway and imagine myself walking among the tables and desks, reading to the children as Suor Diana had read to me, and Leo tramping in to hear them recite the Greek alphabet, to tell them the story of his beloved Demeter. It was the day of my seventeenth birthday when the schoolroom was finished. Without his saying so, I knew it was Leo’s gift to me.”

  “His once faithful presiding over palace life gave way to his frequent absences. He would lunch in the fields with the peasants. Bread and oil and tomatoes and wine. Like an errant boy, he could be seen on a Sunday morning disheveled, breathless, taking the stairs two at a time on his way to a bath before Mass. And at those times when he was present among the palace household, he seemed always to be looking somewhere beyond. Beyond the great blue and white tureen from which he no longer served the soup. Beyond Simona’s bobbed hair set in tight waves and beyond the points of her red cheeks. Beyond the princesses and beyond me, too. Impassioned by this work with and for the peasants, the prince was a man living a great love.

  “Delicate as lace, the spaces between Leo and Simona were worked slowly and with the same politesse as the perfunctory, obligatory arrangement of their union had always been worked so that, in their eventual estrangement, the pattern of their lives, on its face, hardly changed. Refined adj
ustments. Tacit concessions. A year, perhaps more, passed with no more than these to imply that the artfully played farce of their marriage had been revised.

  “Simona began to operate the household as if Leo no longer lived in his own palace. Stepping up the pace of her already legendary entertaining, she took on the triple role of grand dame, martyr, and femme fatale, one affectation more frenzied than another and all of them meant to gather about her those who would champion her in ridicule of Leo’s purportedly crazed behavior. Panderers to her wishes she found in lush numbers. The moment we step down to them is the moment they will step over us. The nobles’ creed, Simona would say it in her martyr’s voice and, softly, gutturally, whatever bejeweled troupe over which she held court that evening repeated it.

  “And to what hell did she assign me during that time? Her perfect pawn, she was kinder than ever to me, the nubile evidence of her bountiful sufferance. I paid small attention to her dramas for, like Leo, I was living a love. I had officially become la maestra in the borghetto.”

  “With neither credentials nor certification but with guidance from teachers from a school in Enna whom Leo and Cosimo had consulted, I went to work. A single rudimentary curriculum was offered to children ages five through twelve. Beyond the age of twelve, it would, for the time being, still be necessary for children to work alongside their parents. Per ora, per ora. For now, Leo would say again and again.

  “Nine students composed my class. Three five-year-olds, one who was six, four who ranged from seven to nine, and one lovely thirteen-year-old girl called Cosettina.’

  I break the pact to refrain from questions.

  “Was she that Cosettina? The one who . . . ?”

  “She was that Cosettina. Sixty-one when she died.”

  I’m sorry for my interruption, since now Tosca stays quiet. I ask her if she will please go on.