That Summer in Sicily Read online

  “Are you menstruating?”

  Rather than her riding clothes, she wears a lovely black dress made of something like faille, I think, a sheath that ends just above the ankles, no sleeves, her smooth, muscular arms darker even than the tawny skin of her face. Bare feet in silk sabots with a thin, high heel. Coiled and plaited more extravagantly than it was the day before, her hair smells like orange blossoms. The emerald is at her throat. We meet, nearly head-on, as I am entering and she is leaving. Now it’s I who doesn’t understand.

  “Are you menstruating?” she repeats crossly.

  “Do you mean right this moment?”

  “Yes, right this moment. The women will neither permit you to touch the food nor do they want you to pass through the kitchen. They believe you’re menstruating. If you are, your presence will bring down a curse upon the food and perhaps even upon they who are foolish enough to admit you into their sanctum in such a state.”

  The awkwardness I’d felt moments before has escalated to hot embarrassment.

  “That’s medieval.”

  “It’s much older than that. Still valid, though. So, are you menstruating?”

  “Well, not exactly. Sometimes, lately, my menses are, you know, irregular.”

  “They could tell by looking into your eyes. I admonish you to please stay out of the kitchen. Here there is no trifling with the sacred.”

  She walks past me, stops a few meters out into the garden, turns head and shoulders ’round to say, “A chant comes from the back of the throat rather than the diaphragm. It’s not at all like singing. You’re gorgeous with the braids, by the way.”

  The least she might have done was to point me in the direction of the red tent, I think as I watch the long black figure of her until she’s out of sight. I think further: Here I am twice expatriated. First from America. Now from Venice. Here is like no other place. Once again, I am a beginner.

  CHAPTER IV

  IT WAS GOOD THAT I HADN’T WORRIED FOR FERNANDO. IT SEEMS that Agata had gone to fetch him soon after I’d left our room. Sat him down to breakfast with some of the men, the second shift on their way to the orchards. The Venetian boy had spent his morning among the almond trees. Made friends with a red-haired farmer called Valentino who is the son of the former caretaker of the villa. Fernando says that Valentino was born at the villa in 1939, that he’s lived and worked here for most of his life. Since long before Tosca’s era. He tells me all this with a fresh enthusiasm, a rare flush of joy. He takes a breath then, looks at me as though I’ve just arrived, stretches his lips into the letter-box grin, kisses me hard on the mouth, pulls me in the direction of the dining room. “I knew it,” he says fixing his gaze upon my hair.

  “Oh, my braids. I have double vision but I love them. I’ve been banned from the kitchen.”

  “Excellent. You won’t mind so much then that we’re leaving after lunch, will you?”

  “Why? We’ve just arrived. Has someone told you we must?”

  “No. No one has said a thing. Which is one of the reasons why I think we should go. I still don’t know the first thing about this place and it makes me uncomfortable. For instance, what does it cost to sleep and dine here? There are no tariffs posted; there seem to be no other ‘guests,’ if that’s what we are. I have this eerie sense that everyone here was someone else before they arrived. You know, like the island where all bad boys are turned into asses. I expect to look in the mirror and find I’ve become a crusty old farmer. And you, with the braids, are already halfway to widowhood. Let’s get away while we can, my love.” He laughs then at his own cleverness. “Besides,” he continues, “we’ve had the rest we needed. Our plan was to escape from these mountains. Here we’ve only gone into a deeper isolation, albeit one where people speak. But it’s time to get on with our journey.” Another letter-box smile. “I do like the braids.”

  He’s holding me softly by the shoulders and, in his way, making perfect sense. But I’m not going anywhere.

  “I saw them making these magnificent eggplant and, for supper, they’ve braised lamb in the embers of the hearth. Let’s ask about the details—the financial ones, I mean—and then we’ll see. We’ll talk about it again later. Okay?”

  “Okay. Okay for the eggplant and the lamb. But no widow’s weeds.”

  “No widow’s weeds.”

  Though no one whom we ask directly answers our questions about tariffs, we stay that day. We stay the next day and the day after that. We never decide to stay but simply get caught up in the imperishable rituals and rhythms of the villa. There are bells to wake us, bells that announce prayer and work, bells that summon us to table, back to prayer, back to work. Back to table. A rejoicing, harmonious, sometimes solemn life, the boundaries of acquaintance, friend, and family are as tightly woven as the widows’ hair. No one seems to count upon one person’s attentions but on the benevolent vigilance of the tribe. They seem to fare well. There are moments that do indeed recall The Red Tent; others—especially when Tosca is present—recall The Leopard. Most often the scenes are straight from Cinema Paradiso.

  The unassailable matriarch and protectress of all who rest in her embrace, Tosca holds benign, unconditional sway. Mystery is almost palpable about her. Never appearing at breakfast, she—dressed in the old, exquisitely cut men’s clothes she was wearing when we first saw her—rides out to the farthest fields in the early mornings and, when she returns, retires to some private place until nearly noon. Her hair freshly twisted into its coils and loops, she struts about the villa and the gardens in one or another of an endless repertoire of good black dresses, the square-cut emerald hung from a short braided chain of rose gold resting in the hollow at the base of her throat. In the garden or in a corner of the dining hall, Tosca conducts much of the house business with Mafalda, her sister, who is the land overseer, and with the two widows who perform as account supervisor and general house manager. There are always others who join them, those who have been to the village or to Enna or even farther afield and thus have gossip and reportage to offer. They discuss the more efficient production of cheese, the rebuilding of a barn, the reconstruction of yet another unused space within the villa into bedrooms, the wholesaling of the orange crops, the harvesting of neroli—the fragile blossoms of the orange tree, for which perfume makers are willing to pay extravagant sums. Always there is talk of food. With delegates from the cooking and baking widows, Tosca writes menus, speaks of what’s coming into ripeness in the garden, wonders how to serve the tomatoes that evening, agrees to the collective desire for a Saturday lunch of spit-roasted baby goat pierced with cloves and turned over a fruitwood fire. All ’round them—as it is all ’round every visible, discernable corner of the villa—there is no truce in the mayhem. It’s not until the evening hours, after the household has dined, after everyone’s work is finished, that the villa settles into a pearly kind of quiescence. It’s then that Tosca hosts a sort of open house.

  Villagers climb the hill to the villa to join the householders. Hair neatly tucked under kerchiefs, fresh aprons over their work clothes, the women come up to sit under the pergola with Tosca and the widows while their men, Sunday-best wool vests buttoned against the sultry night, come to play cards down in the wine cellar with the farmers. “Just like cream, women always rise to the top,” Tosca repeats each evening as the men separate from their consorts.

  Most all the women take one of Tosca’s long, thin cigars from the proffered box, each one lighting another’s, the way the faithful light one another’s candles in a procession. The women choose their poison from the bottles lined up on a table on the far side of the pergola. Mostly they pour out whiskey or a potion brewed from honey and lemon verbena into thimble-sized cups, just enough to wet their lips. Sometimes they just sit there in the hot, wet perfume of the sun-crushed jasmine, smoking and sipping, not wanting or needing to talk. When they do speak, it’s nearly always about men. About falling in love and making love and professing love, about the difference between infidelity and
disloyalty. Sometimes they sing the same song I’d heard the widows singing on the first morning we arrived. The one about grief and rapture. When they’re finished—for the moment—with talking about men, they speak of their children.

  A woman called Nuruzzu speaks of her worries for her just-married daughter.

  “She’s a woman. Like a chameleon does, a woman quietly blends into all the parts of her life. Sometimes you can hardly tell she’s there, she’s so quiet going on about her business. Feed the baby. Muck the stables. Make soup from stones. Make a sheet into a dress. She doesn’t count on destiny for anything. She knows it’s her own hands, her own arms, her own thighs and breasts that have to do the work. Destiny is bigger in men’s lives. Destiny is a welcome guest in a man’s house. She barely knocks and he’s there to open the door. Yes, yes. You do it, he says to destiny and lumbers back to his chair.”

  As each woman ends her story or her thoughts, they all take up their chants for a few moments. Then another woman begins.

  “Our babies cried when we left them and we cry when they leave us. Echoes. Proud almost to arrogance then, we pushed them about in their carriages. Dutifully, wearily now, they push us about in our chairs.”

  “Our children don’t know us as we are now. Less do they know us as we were. Oh, how I wish they could have known us as we were. Do you think they would recognize their young selves in our young selves? I wish they could have seen us in all our clumsiness and selfishness, which is so like their own clumsiness and selfishness right now. There’s another echo for you.”

  “We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it. We were children loving our children. And that’s who we are still.”

  Rather than meeting in the pergola, one evening all the women gather in and near the door to the birthing room. Though I don’t understand the reason for the change of venue, I follow along, walking more or less alone. The birthing room is positioned in a first-floor wing of the villa that I’ve not yet seen. Not at all the clinical space I’d imagined, the room seems more a chapel, save the hospital beds and a few practical accessories. Long, wide windows with heavy silk curtains are open to the soft night. A gently lit Tiziano Saint Anne—Roman saint of expectant mothers—hangs on one ochre wall and a reproduction Raffaello Madonna who cradles her sleeping son against her red-robed breast hangs next to it. A small, ruined marble Demeter, Greek goddess of fertility and motherhood, stands on a pedestal in front of the two paintings. Passive against contrast or contradiction, the widows’ reverence of and familiarity with these three images is equally fervent. They chant and pray and bless one another. “We are all women,” Nuruzzu says to me, saying everything.

  In the far and darkened corner of the room, two beds, side by side, are occupied. In groups of two or three, the widows go to the beds and speak softly to the women who lie in them. Once again, they chant and pray and then quietly move on so the next group of widows can make their visit. I wait for Nuruzzu to come back to the place where I stand in front of the paintings and the statue and then walk out of the birthing room with her. Without my asking her to, she tells me the story of the two women in the beds.

  One is a widow called Cosettina, she begins. Already I am confused that a widow lies in the birthing room, but I say nothing.

  Cosettina has lived at the villa for ten years or more and, along with her kitchen duties, she held informal classes for those other widows who had never learned to read or write. And for those who enjoyed sitting of an evening while Cosettina read aloud. Cosettina had been a schoolteacher in Enna for much of her life. And a friend of Tosca’s for longer than that. If not her desire for it, her capacity to work had been steadily decreasing over the past year. Fainting spells. Mild heart attacks. One attack that was not so mild. Dottoressa Rosa, the young Palermitana who’d come to practice general medicine in the mountains, diagnosed, medicated, watched over Cosettina with hope until a few weeks earlier when, after other episodes and complications, she told Tosca it was time for Cosettina to be transferred to the hospital in Enna. Cosettina refused to leave the villa. And Tosca agreed. It was “at home” where Cosettina would wait for death. A room was arranged for her close to the dining hall so, with her door open, she would feel almost as though she were dining with the household. Tosca and the other widows lavished Cosettina with love. She became their collective child, each of them spoon-feeding her, surprising her with a sweet. With a flower. Each evening, by candlelight, they bathed her shrunken limbs with soft cloths and warm olive oil. Dressed her like a doll in embroidered shifts and tied her braids up with ribbons cut from someone’s old pink nightdress.

  On the day we’d arrived at the villa, Cosettina was very near the end of her life. I understood that it was Cosettina for whom Carlotta had cried that first day. Nuruzzu explained that the widows took turns keeping vigil over her through each night. And that Dottoressa Rosa continued her daily visits. When Tosca took her turn by Cosettina’s bed, Cosettina used the occasion to lobby for one more move.

  “Let me be in the birthing room,” Cosettina had asked Tosca. “Let me stay there. It won’t be long and I’ll be quiet about my leaving. No fuss. Nothing. I promise. I want to give up my old soul to the next baby who’ll be born here. I think it’s just that you let me be there.”

  I guess Cosettina had been expecting Tosca to refuse or at least to put up a fight but, Nuruzzu said, this morning she was carried to her bed in the birthing room where she would lie in company with St. Anne and Demeter and la Madonna herself. And in the next bed, a young village woman called Viola awaited the birth of her first child. Both women were approaching their time, said Nuruzzu.

  After the visit to the birthing room, all the women stood or sat or milled about the garden. Tosca passed about the cigar box, saw that refreshments were served, and then walked past where I stood with Nuruzzu and some others and went back into the villa. When she returned only a few moments later, she quietly announced that Cosettina had gone. All was peaceful, she said. And, by the way, she said, Viola’s daughter, though she had not yet consented to appear, seemed to be making preparatory motions in that direction. Tosca passed among the women quietly, inviting all of them into the dining hall to say the rosary together for Cosettina. The men were called in to join us. Electricity is little used in any case at the villa, but that evening Tosca called for the lights to be spent, for the candles to be lit. She shut certain windows, opened others, turned the mirrors to face the walls. Finally she sat, and someone began saying the beads. Partway through the third group of Hail Marys, a shuddering wind blew through the long cavern of a room, and Tosca smiled.

  “Ciao, Cosettina. Ti voglio tanto bene. Good-bye, Cosettina. I love you very much.”

  No one had been crying until then, at least not so you could hear it. But by now they were all crying. Sobbing and weeping and repeating the same farewell to Cosettina. There was so much noise about us that it’s a wonder we heard that first great squealing, screeching bellow from the birthing room. Viola named her daughter Cosettina.

  The next day is Saturday. Long awake, I lie in bed waiting for the light. Waiting for the angelus. Rather than its jaunty clanging out into the mists, a fretful, tinny bell whines. For Cosettina. And with the lament still riding the air, there came then a jubilant thundering of bells. For Cosettina.

  There are fewer people at breakfast, since some have ridden or walked into the village to hear the funeral mass at San Salvatore. Many of those who remained have set to work, in one way or another, preparing for the baptismal ceremony that will take place at noon. In these mountains, there is time lost neither in sending off a soul to paradise nor in washing a new one clean for its walk upon earth. Everything is taut, clear. Embraceable.

  I rise to leave the breakfast table but then stay put. Antonio Banderas is walking my way. Walking past me. He smells of yeast. A widow rushes toward him and says, “Ah, Furio. Hai già finito? Vieni a mangiare qualcosa ade
sso. Have you finished already? Come to eat something now.”

  The itinerant baker. So Antonio Banderas roams the Madonie mountains pretending to be an itinerant baker. A magnificent cover. Where else, how else, could he find peace from that grappling Melanie Griffith? In a thin white T-shirt, jeans, work boots, a black cotton stocking cap covers his hair, stops just above the Arab eyes.

  Until now I’d wondered why the household needed another baker.

  I sit back down, lean on my elbows, drum the fingers of one hand slowly on my cheek. Carlotta comes to sit with me.

  “Have you met Furio?” she wants to know.

  I smile and shake my head, and she begins to tell me about him. Says that he arrives before dawn each Saturday, descends upon the villa in a sputtering cinquecento, trailing a wagon that holds his kneading machine and sacks of the only flour with which he will bake. Stuff that is raised and water-milled by a friend near Caltanissetta. Like a holy relic, she says, he keeps a glass jar of furiously bubbling yeast on a black velvet cushion on the seat next to him. Conflicting emotions play upon Carlotta’s face, and I think she sits here with me speaking of the baker as a distraction. I move my chair closer to hers. She says that Furio travels about the most remote of the villages and hamlets, wherever an old stone oven has survived. He is hosted in each place, she says. Paid a pittance for his labors if he is paid at all. He dines and sleeps wherever he stops to bake. A folkloric kind of saint, she calls him. Of course he has a woman in every village, she says. Children, too, she thinks. Though not here, she assures me, sweeping her arms wide. At least his women have good bread and they see their man—happy and loving and gentle—once a week. I think it’s more than many women have, she says.