That Summer in Sicily Read online

  “Are you faring well? Fending for yourself, are you?” she asks.

  “I’m fine. Fernando, too. Though I do feel, you know, in the way a bit. All these family events.”

  “Yes. Of course. It’s why no one asked you to come along this morning. An awkward moment for you. But . . .”

  Carlotta stops. Looks down at the pattern of red roses and green leaves stitched onto the tablecloth. Traces it with a forefinger.

  “I’ve just come from Mass. Actually, I always feel just a little ashamed of myself when I go to a funeral. No matter how I try to prevent it, there always comes that moment when I say—even through the sincere weeping for the one who is gone—I’m fine. It’s she who’s gone. It isn’t me there in the fine polished box. It’s okay. It will never happen to me. The world will end before it will happen to me.”

  “Unless it’s our own child who’s gone, I think we all cheer silently for our own survival. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  She doesn’t seem to have heard me.

  “Only once. A very long time ago. There was a funeral during which that moment never arrived. Only once.”

  I stay quiet.

  “I do hope all of this, all of us, won’t drive you away. I mean, please do stay a while longer. You will, won’t you?”

  “Of course she’s staying.” Tosca has approached the table from behind us. She walks to the other side of it, comes to sit across from us. A widow brings her coffee.

  “I’ve noticed that you are enamored with the frescoes in this room. Am I right?”

  “I guess I do look up a great deal when I’m here,” I concede.

  “I’ve been meaning to invite you to come see them in the early evening light. The colors somehow become softer and more intense as the sun shifts. At this time of year, I think they’re loveliest at about six or so. You’re welcome to take a look.”

  At least there is no fear of menstruating women laying waste the plump-flanked, rolling-eyed gods and goddesses under the shifting sun. “I would like that. Thank you.”

  Tosca and Carlotta must have things to discuss. I excuse myself. The truth is not that I’m so sensitive to their needs as I am to my own. I feel uncomfortable in Tosca’s presence. There’s an austerity to her that seems so out of place here. Her gaze pierces, unnerves. And yet, as I’d felt from the first day, unless she’s near, something always seems missing.

  CHAPTER V

  IN HIS CONVINCING GUISE AS RURAL PRIEST, IT IS, MOST UNEXPECTEDLY, Christopher Plummer who seeks us out most often at table, who stops me in the halls on my way to and from our room to ask after my comfort.

  “Would you like to see the chapel?”

  “La signora and I will be in the blue salon at four, if you’d like to join us for tea.”

  “I would be pleased to show you the library.”

  “Do you ride?”

  When Don Cosimo corners me for a moment or two, it’s always to trill out some Ciceronian jewel about the history of the villa. When it was built. That its principal architect was a descendent of the designer of the fifteenth-century hospices in the Burgundian town of Beaune. That its particular architectural amalgam of fifteenth-century rural French and seventeenth-century Italian motifs makes it rare. Perhaps unique. The priest seems eager to speak. He invites me to join him in the gardens where he reads every afternoon at five under the magnolia tree. Promises that it’s there and then that offers the only quiet hour of daylight about the villa.

  · · ·

  As the angelus rings five the next afternoon, Cosimo, like a tall black ship ploughing a calm sea, approaches the table under the magnolia where I sit expecting him. Neither of us says a word of greeting. He settles himself into a chair, pushes out a long sigh through a broad smile, and I slide my green glass bottle of water toward him across the pits and scars of the marble table. He has his own refreshment. In a single swift movement from a place under his skirts, he brings forth a flat, leather-wrapped bottle and loosens its cap. Tilting it to his lips, he takes long, gurgling pulls of something that smells more like spinach or grass than whiskey or wine.

  “Pot liquor from boiled chard” are the first words he says as he secrets the bottle back in place.

  He has brought no book that I can see. I close mine. Wait. He tells me that he is seventy-six years old. He must know that his face and form demonstrate at least fifteen years less—perhaps twenty less—since he pauses after his announcement, waiting for my compliments. I do not disappoint him. He says he’d been ensconced as the household’s resident cleric and as the prince’s chauffeur when the prince took Tosca to live in the palace fifty-six years previously.

  “This palace?”

  “No, no. This is not a palace. Tosca lived in the Anjou palace with the prince and his family. A baroque palace that his ancestors raised up in the middle of endless lemon groves. Hasn’t anyone offered to take you there? A few hours’ drive from here,” he says.

  Having yet had little traffic in my long life with castles and villas and hunting lodges and palaces, I have belied the truth to the priest that I am hard put to define their differences. I shall try not to let on, too, that I do not know the fundamental story of Tosca and the prince, which, it seems, he thinks I must have learned through some other auspices. I do recall, though, during that first lunch, Carlotta saying, La signora inherited the villa from an Anjou prince whose ward she once was. I shall not tell the priest that I have been privy to anything beyond that piquant admission. I will listen to him. My listening will be rewarded, for I will learn that he has seen everything, that he knows everything, that he remembers everything. I will learn that should there be a fray in that knowledge, in that memory, the priest will work the threads together with the prowess of a Flemish weaver.

  “She was, even then, of that splendid arrogance—haughty, proud. She wore thick black braids like a crown. No one was ever certain if she was cursed or blessed, but surely there was something of the sorceress about Tosca. Leo claimed her when, I think, she was nine. Her beauty was already fearsome. It was mostly about her eyes. Pale wet jade they were, and set in skin the color of almonds burnt by the sun. Green eyes so long they seemed to intrude upon the high, sharp bones of her cheeks, and I used to think they were the eyes a mermaid would have. Tosca’s eyes were a siren’s eyes. Yes, she was ten or maybe still nine when he brought her to live in the palace. A common enough feudal custom, this noble, sanctioned purloining of the children of one’s peasants or of anyone else, for that matter, who lived inside or on the fringes of an aristocratic province. It was an honor of sorts for the family of the child and an auspicious stepping-stone for the child herself. Despite any misuse along the way. At the very least the child would be fed and clothed. Schooled. Misuse, the child would know wherever she lived. You might ask, was this custom spurred by goodness? Spurred by lust? The motives fluttered, blended. Who could know one from the other? And so, normally enough, everyone—including me—believed that the prince had ‘requested’ Tosca. As it turned out, it was Tosca’s father who’d offered her to the prince. He was a horse breeder. A horse thief, from time to time, I guess. Anyhow, the prince had a stallion that Tosca’s father wanted more than he did his daughter.

  “That morning when the prince went to fetch Tosca—an event carefully arranged between him and the girl’s father—he settled her in the back of his great open Chrysler, arranged her down in the small space behind where he and I sat. You see, I was his driver. A young priest, locally born and freshly ordained from the Jesuits in Palermo, I’d been taught to drive so I might conduct my bishop to and fro, engagement to engagement. I believe it was my driving skill rather than my spiritual gifts for which the prince originally requested my presence at the palace and arranged for my posting to San Rocco, the nearest village church. As confessor-chauffeur, one duty made me privy to the imperatives of the other. A most efficient use of my time. In any case, I remember that morning of Tosca’s courtly abduction by the prince. I remember the way she sat t
here in that little well of sun-baked leather, a small brown hellion contemplating battle. When her father leaned, with false affection, into the car to embrace her, she bit him. Spat at him then with the force and speed of a born blackguard, and I think that must have been Tosca’s first open rebellion. I will tell you that it was not her last. She may not have wanted to go away with the prince but she most certainly did not want to stay with her father. In a wide grin of heart-warming vendetta, that unloved and unloving father then heaved a great bloody sack of birds and rabbits down onto the thin bare thighs of his little girl. The animals’ heads lolled about over the top of the sack and rested on her chest, the just-killed flesh of them already stinking of rot. Booty signifying his appreciation to the prince for relieving him of the burden of his first-born daughter. A morning’s hunt was Tosca’s dowry. And good riddance to you, he’d said in a voice he thought only Tosca could hear. After all, he had the other daughter—younger, obedient, if not as beautiful as Tosca. The younger one would take decent care of him. Carry and fetch and muck. She was more likely to stay quiet in the night. Of course, if Tosca’s mother had been alive . . . but that’s another story.”

  The priest is quiet then. Considering, I think, “the other story.” How things might have been if Tosca’s mother had not died.

  “Though I’ve told this story before, it was a very long time ago. I’m not even certain if it was only to myself that I told it. Shall I proceed?” he asks, looking at me as though I’ve just arrived.

  It’s he who had bid me here; it’s he who has begun, unprompted, to speak of the past, and yet it’s I—as I have at almost every juncture of these days here at the villa—who feels like the encroacher. Still, the truth is that I do want him to proceed.

  “Only if you wish to,” I tell him.

  He closes his eyes.

  “When we arrived, the prince relieved the little girl of her bloodied sack—the cruel placement of which he’d not seen before—and threw it to the ground. He lifted Tosca from her seat, wiped her dress with his handkerchief, and, as though she were a lady he was courting, showed her the way through the palace gardens. Oh, those gardens. A beguiling commotion of roses and lilac and wisteria and camellia grown so entwined as to seem all of the same root, it was a garden where bronze goddesses spat water from the nipples of their high, proud breasts and where the upper branches of oaks were fanned by the drooping fronds of old palms. It was there that Tosca would be schooled, with the prince’s daughters, by a French governess. Tosca of the pale green eyes and the Saracen skin would be tamed, formed. Refined. But it would be a long time before much princely sway took hold of her.

  “Days after her arrival at the palace, Tosca scaled the lemon-grove walls, took herself a horse from the stable—a just-broken mare who’d never been ridden, or so the grooms would later tell the story. She mounted her bareback. Tosca was bent on her father’s place to fetch her goats. And, as it turned out, to gift her little sister the new black boots with the buttons up the side and the now torn, horse-sweat-smelling white silk pinafore she’d been dressed in that morning by a maid called Agata. Even though Tosca knew these undreamt-of treasures would be far too big for her little sister, she wanted her to have them. Amulets for the future, I think. And maybe proof of her love, though surely Mafalda must already have had rich evidence of it.

  “Barefoot then and wrapped in her dead mother’s housedress, Tosca rode dutifully back to the palace, her goats—which Mafalda feared and loathed—trailing along on ropes held tight in her hand. Tosca knew it was the palace where she must stay at least for a while. Until she could finesse some other plan. Besides, the palace was flush with spoils to pillage for Mafalda. That was reason enough for Tosca to stay. She watered and fed the horse, closed the stable door. Tethering her goats, for the moment, to the ankles of one of the nipple-spitting goddesses, Tosca wiped her face with a handful of fallen magnolia blossoms—a beauty secret learned long ago from her mother—and presented herself on the veranda in time for lunch.”

  I needn’t have worried about my perceived encroachment since the priest seems to have, once again, told the story to himself.

  “It all sounds familiar somehow,” I say. “It’s Lampedusa, if with more tenderness.

  “Familiar? I hope it’s familiar. It’s the human story, which repeats itself endlessly if only to prove that the past is not dead. That the past wears different costumes. Sometimes. Especially in Sicilia. There’s always a prince and a palace. Always a priest. And there’s always a girl. The protagonists are eternal. With each performance the characters proceed as if they were the first ones to ever act it out. As if they didn’t know how the play would end. Yes, shades of Lampedusa. It was he who said that all lovers play the parts of Romeo and Juliet as though the facts of the poison and the tomb had been concealed from them. He reminds us of the power of lust over the misery it can bring about. Yes, Lampedusa. Among others.”

  He looks at me then, says, “Time has obliged Tosca. Her face is much as it was on the day when I drove the prince to fetch her from her father save that now she is more lovely, more terrifying. More lovely and more terrifying than she was at eighteen or than she was on the night when I brought her the prince’s riding jacket.”

  He says this last in a voice that comes from farther away. I don’t understand about the riding jacket.

  “When was that? When was it that you brought her the prince’s riding jacket?”

  He rises gingerly, as though in pain, steadies his hands on the table. He says, “It was long ago and in another life. Maybe in a dream.”

  I think that Christopher Plummer has long been in love with Tosca.

  Wanting to keep him, I say, “Lei é una creatura affascinante. She is a fascinating creature. Did you love her, too?” I look down at my hands, the last words slipped out in a whisper.

  “Sometimes an ‘unlived’ love can be the best kind of love. One has only to put a face to love to be happy in it. It’s not knowing who your love is or where to find her that makes for madness. Having been her best friend, witness, confidante, advocate since she was ten years old, I will say that, yes, in my fashion, I was in love with her. I might say that I am in love with her still.”

  CHAPTER VI

  I DON’T RECALL WHETHER IT WAS ON THE EVENING OF THE SAME day that Cosimo told me his story or an evening soon afterward when I’d decided to accept Tosca’s invitation to see the frescoes in the changing light. I know it was a Friday, and that Fernando and I had set the next morning as our departure.

  When I enter the dining hall at six she is there sitting by a spent hearth, a book opened on her lap. We greet each other, she resumes her reading, and without further discourse, I begin my tour. I wander about the vast room, head thrown back, marveling at the exalted beauty of the frescoes in the softer light. I stay for perhaps twenty minutes, during which time we say nothing more. I want to ask her about the artists, the epochs of the work. About the allegories themselves. About why there are so many blank spaces in the frescoes. I stay silent, though, sensing she is a reluctant docent. Lost in a last look, my back turned to Tosca, an Italian voice speaking in rather tentative English asks, “Do you drink gin? I have some good Genever gin if you’d like me to fix you a drink. It’s about that time, isn’t it? I mean for you English.”

  Perplexed, I stay fixed, my back still turned to Tosca. And to the voice. It can’t be her speaking and yet, as I turn to her and understand that it is she, I begin to laugh.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you could speak English?”

  “Why should I have done that?” she asks in mock smugness. “I also speak French and read in Greek. What’s more I dance and sing, play the pianoforte. I’ve yet to tell you about any of those accomplishments. I neither felt nor do I feel now the need to impress or comfort you with the sound of your own language. We are in Sicily, after all. I simply wanted a gin tonic and thought you might, too. That I offered it to you in your own language was fairly involuntary. An impulse.”
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  She speaks English splendidly. A Sicilian contralto singing the role of a Berkshire matron, I think. “Did you once live in England?”

  “No. Never. I’ve never set foot off the island even once in my life.”

  She says this with neither pride nor regret and leaves no pause for my response. I find it curious, though, that she answers much more than my question asked. She proceeds. “I studied English and French when I was young and have read the nineteenth-century English writers over and over again for most of my life since. I don’t like them in translation.”

  “I see. Actually, I’m not English but American, and I prefer vodka.”

  “I have that, too.”

  She rises, walks her mannish walk to a far corner of the salone, pauses before a narrow armoire, the rough wood of it painted a pale yellow-green like the heart of a celery. She opens its doors to reveal a bar—mirrored, upholstered in midnight-blue velvet—that would rival the lobby bar of any good small hotel in Manhattan or Vienna or Rome. From a small black enamel refrigerator she takes a bottle labeled in red Russian script. With a heavy hand, she pours from it into a cut crystal wineglass. Offers it to me.

  “I have no ice,” she says without apology.

  “I don’t take ice,” I tell her in an icy tone. Tosca’s refined scorn has something of mockery about it this evening. A stylish disdain that causes mine. She putters about with her gin tonic while I stand behind her. She turns to me, then raises her glass.

  “To your health, signora,” she says. Once again that counterfeit gentility.

  “Alla vostra salute, signora,” I wish back at her. One less cube in my voice.