That Summer in Sicily Read online

  We remain standing, looking at each other, appraising each other. I suppress a laugh. At myself, at her. At us standing in the salone grande of a glorious villa set among the barren mountains at the center of an island where only the past seems present. A black faille sheath, an emerald at her throat, long brown fingers twined about the Baccarat stem, she sips and I think she, too, wants to laugh. At me, at my jeans, my three-day-old T-shirt, my great head of hair, once again unshackled. She walks back to her chair and motions for me to sit across from her.

  “I rather do like speaking in English. I haven’t done so in years. I fear all that’s left are phrases from Dickens or the Brontës which, by now, I can parrot. I don’t know if I could find the words for a spontaneous conversation with you, but I might like to try.”

  “But I think we’ll be leaving tomorrow or the day after . . .”

  She steps quickly, resolutely, upon what she does not want to hear. “Yes, of course, you’re right. We’d only just have begun and then off you’d go.”

  As further proof of her Anglo-Saxon penchants—or only to prolong the moment—she says, “There’s a New York Times Magazine over there in the top drawer of that console. Perhaps you would like to look at it.”

  “Thank you. I’ll take it up with me if you don’t mind,” I tell her, and go to fetch it from the tall French Empire chest she indicates.

  “Ah, here it is. Lovely,” I say but notice how faded, wrinkled it is. I look at the date. January 1969.

  Now I do laugh. “But signora, this is a museum piece.”

  Resuming Italian, she says, “Not at all. What do you suppose has changed in twenty-five years or so? I found the journal to be well written back then when someone or other left it behind. I thought it set things out rather nicely, addressing the events of the day, which are, of course, the same events of this day. Think of it. Even if its theater and its motives are being played out in a different geography, there’s still war, isn’t there? Still avidity and hate and violence and fear. Poverty and righteousness are still thriving. As are revolution and arrogance and lies. There is always perversion and torment, of course. What I particularly admired about this paper was the shrewd touch of pathos and poignancy strewn among the squalor and the filth. You know, The Good News. So, should I wish to be informed of events outside these mountains, I read The New York Times Magazine. I’ve perhaps reread it every two or three years just to be certain I’ve not missed anything. I have also been known to thrash about in that same console where I keep a Sony television. Black-and-white and with its own antenna and a twenty-two-centimeter screen on which, should nostalgia move me, I can view the nightly news broadcasts from Rome or Milan. As I might an old movie. But unlike when I watch an old movie, the news broadcasts leave me empty, angry, and I must tell myself yet again that one need tune in only once in a lifetime to the nightly news to know the chronic story of man. To know how wrong the world is. How wronged it is. I don’t hide from the wrong. Surely I don’t deny it. It’s only that the wrong has yet to find its way up here. And I do my best to confound its path.”

  Still standing with the magazine in my hand, I say, “I do appreciate the thought, signora.”

  I turn back to the “media chest,” open the archival drawer, and gently replace the magazine, then return to my chair across from hers.

  I understand that her device is sarcasm and that her message is visceral. The past is the present. The human condition endures. A venomous reading of Cosimo’s same dictum. Perhaps I prefer his. We say nothing. I look at her, wondering why I resist her. The authenticity of her. The wisdom. She repels me. She enchants me. There is so much sadness just beneath her skin. Like so many of us, perhaps she is greedy about her sadness. And the scorn, the mockery, are confines that she sets out to protect it.

  We are still silent when three widows enter to set the table for dinner and Tosca, distracted by their presence, perhaps dismayed by it, begins to fidget with her glass, smooths her perfect corona of braids. Smiles fitfully. I rise, place my drink, unfinished, on a small table, and thank her. Tell her I’ve some work to do before dinner.

  As though she hasn’t heard me, she asks, now reverting again to English, “Have you brought other clothes? Something elegant, I mean.”

  “A nice dress. Gray tulle.” I tell her, wondering why she would be interested in my wardrobe.

  As though “nice gray tulle” did not signify elegant to her, she says, “Maybe I have something that Agata could fix up for you. In fact, I think I do. Sometimes we have outside guests to supper and we all dress up a bit.”

  “As I said, I believe we’ll be leaving tomorrow . . .”

  Again, she will not hear what she does not want to hear. “It’s not often there’s someone new to present, you know.”

  “Agata, vieni qua, tesoro.” Agata arrives trotting, breaking only long enough to take her orders to look at whatever’s left in the trunks in the old dressing room. And to take me with her.

  Trunks? Dressing room? I follow Agata up three flights of wide, worn stone stairs. At the top we follow a corridor scented with mold to enter a room furnished all in armoires and dressers and trunks, accessorized here and there with mousetraps, those sprung, those still baited. The mold is masked by the perfume of decaying rodent. Backstage at some decrepit theater. Agata bends into and riffles through a large trunk. I see only her prosperous black-silked derrière and hear her mutterings and beseechings to the Madonna. Holding up some sort of dress or gown in what might be a silvery-brown color, she declares it quella giusta. The right one.

  “Spogliati, take your clothes off,” she commands.

  Moments later, wearing what must have been a lovely pre-war tea gown, I am being twirled about by Agata. The bodice is too tight and the skirt is too long, but Agata begins a ruthless pinching of the seams, roughly gathering the hem and draping it here and there, telling me to hold it exactly the way she places the stuff in my hands. She stands back for the effect.

  “Non é male,” she says. “Potrebbe essere molto carino. Not bad. It could be very sweet.”

  So abruptly disturbed after its long repose that, when I let go of it, there are two large, jagged holes in the fine old tea gown where my hands had held it. This time Agata calls upon Santa Rosalia.

  “Toglilo adesso e dammelo. Take it off now and give it to me,” is the next command. Still zipping my jeans, smoothing my hair, I run to catch up with Agata, who has the wounded silvery-brown thing under her arm, but she disappears down one corridor or another, and when I arrive back at the dining hall, Tosca is no longer there among the widows who prepare the tables.

  Later, as we dress for dinner, I tell Fernando of my visit to see the frescoes and of Tosca’s thoughts about current world events. I tell him that she spoke to me in English.

  “After all these days—how long has it been, nearly two weeks that we’ve been here?—what do you think of Tosca? What will be the impression you leave with tomorrow?” I want to know.

  I’m crisscrossing the thin suede ropes of my new black sandals ’round my ankles, my calves. I’ve also taken out the gray tulle ballerina dress that has been rolled up in my lingerie bag since Venice. A shawl. Tosca’s question about my clothes has inspired me.

  “First of all, I don’t think we’ll be leaving tomorrow after all. When I went to settle up our account just a few moments ago, she reminded me that ferragosto is not the prudent time to be on the road. She’s right, of course. Whatever direction we take, we’ll be among the raging hordes of vacationers. She says that in a few days, perhaps another week, the roads will be clear. Even the weather is due to break, according to her.”

  I hobble on one sandaled foot into the bathroom, sit on the edge of the tub behind where he shaves. “So easily has she convinced you to stay for another week? It wanted only a traffic report and a weather prediction? Such an easy mark you are.”

  “Not so. She hardly set out to convince me of anything. She only presented additional information that caus
ed me to change my mind. And why are you so dressed up this evening?”

  “Tosca. She wanted to know if I’d brought elegant clothes. I thought I’d demonstrate my collection.”

  So easily has she convinced you, he mimes.

  For the next day or two I don’t see Tosca, save in purposeful flight about the villa and the gardens or glimpses of her at lunch and dinner. She never stops to mention the state of the silvery-brown tea dress or if or when the outside guests would come to supper. I remain mildly curious about both.

  One evening as we enter the dining hall, Agata rushes up to escort us away from our regular places at table, takes us to sit with Tosca and Cosimo. Almost at once, Tosca begins speaking to me in English.

  “Have you had a lovely day? Tomorrow will be somewhat cooler.”

  She tries out little niceties. She asks me if this form or that grammar is correct. Cosimo has commandeered Fernando’s attention and I am left to Tosca’s will.

  “I’d like to tell you a story, Chou,” she says. “Oh, I don’t mean right now, of course. But soon. It’s a long story, you see. I wouldn’t be able to tell it to you all at once. It might take a few days. A week. I don’t know. But it’s a good story, I think. I’ve never tried to tell it from beginning to end but I want to tell it to you and I want to tell it to you in English. I suppose I’m thinking that if I tell it in a language other than my own I will still feel as though I haven’t really told it at all. Does that make sense to you?”

  She knows it does.

  “I know that Cosimo has been telling you tales out there in the garden every day, and . . .” She smiles. Throws up her hands in a gesture of uncertainty. “Maybe it’s just a desire to speak in English while I have the chance. No, it’s not that. Not only that. I think it’s because you’re someone from the outside. Yes, I want to try out my story on someone from another place. I want to tell it to you, leave it with you, I guess, knowing that you’ll go away. Knowing that your return here to us is improbable and, since my preferred method of travel is on horseback, the chances of our ever meeting again in your territory are equally improbable . . .”

  In the space by the side of her plate, Tosca rolls her napkin into a tight cylinder, then unrolls it, smooths it flat upon the table. She repeats this business several times, then begins rolling it from a single corner, gathering up the other edges and folding them toward the center to fashion a pouch of sorts. A pocket. A place to save her story? I look at her and understand why, a few days earlier, she’d daunted Fernando’s resolve to leave. Tourist hordes and traffic notwithstanding, it was because Tosca was not ready for us to leave. I recall Fernando’s early take on villa life. 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.

  Why does Tosca want us to stay? Can it really be so that she can tell this story of hers? And if it is, why would she want to tell it to me? Oh, I heard her reasons: I’m an outsider, she won’t ever see me again, the story will be told yet remain as though it was never told at all. Still. Perhaps this desire of hers will fall away like the old taffeta of the silvery-brown dress. Perhaps not, though.

  The next afternoon, it’s Tosca rather than Cosimo who waits for me at the table under the magnolia.

  CHAPTER I

  “SE STAI ASPETTANDO UN RACCONTO DI UNA CENERENTOLA Siciliana . . . If you’re waiting for a story about a Sicilian Cinderella . . .”

  “I’m not waiting for any sort of story at all,” I say, still standing, uncertain whether I want to stay. “I usually sit with Cosimo at this time. To read, to talk.”

  From her high-backed white iron chair with the red velvet cushion, she tugs at the less regal one next to it, beckons me to sit. I do. An assent. Into a thin, tall glass she pours out a cloudy stream of almond milk from a small pitcher, adds water from another pitcher, unscrews what looks like a medicine bottle, and with a dropper, doses the whitish swirling mixture with a few drops of neroli. Essence of orange blossoms. She stirs the drink with a long silver spoon, stirs it ferociously, removes the spoon, and lays it, bowl down, upon the table. A high priestess in full ceremony, her movements seem liturgical. She places the glass in front of me.

  “The elixir of Sicily. Bitter. Sweet,” she tells me. Warns me.

  I run my finger along the rim of the glass. I smile at Tosca.

  “It’s like you, then. Also you are the elixir of Sicily. Bitter. Sweet.”

  She begins to laugh and, I think, to blush, though it may be only a lozenge of light flitting about the leaves that ruddies her skin.

  “I knew you were the right person. I mean, I’m glad you’re here. Glad you’ve landed here. Exactly here.”

  I sip the drink. I like it and sip it again, feel it caressing the knob in my chest. A tightness I hadn’t known was there until now; or is it the one to which I’d grown accustomed over these past few weeks? Longer than that. I turn to Tosca as though it’s she who has the answer, but she’s busy with her potion. Pouring, stirring into her own glass. She drinks nearly half the drink in one long pull. As though to leave, she rises then, walks a meter or two to where another table sits—a rusted metal one upon which pots of herbs are piled randomly—and plucks, from here and there about them, withered leaves, holding the brown, dry things in one hand, proceeding to purge the plants with the other.

  “It just never works,” she says, but whether to me or to herself I cannot say. “I mean, trying to domesticate wild herbs.”

  Surely she is talking about more than the parched marjoram. Walking back to the table where I still sit, she sinks into the faded red cushion of her chair as if into some wreckage, her own wreckage I think, and crushes the dead leaves in her hand, holding out the dust of them in her palm for me to sniff. I oblige, but sense nothing but her own perfume.

  Tosca begins.

  “I had two childhoods. The first was spent with my family. My mother, my father, and my sister. My sister, whom my mother called la-piccola-Mafalda, The Tiny Mafalda—as though it were a single word—from the moment she was born and whom I’ve been calling the same ever since. When my mother died, my sister and I looked after my father as well as we might have been expected to do at ages five and eight. My father was never much good at looking after anyone save his horses. Save himself. But I was good at it and The Tiny Mafalda was good at it and so, together, we were fine. Fine enough. In our village, eating at least once a day and sleeping less than six to a broken bed and with no one beating or raping you on a regular basis meant you were fine. It was only with the perspective of the next childhood that I began to understand how poor I’d been, how poor my family had been. Not with space or silver or brocade or feather beds did that perspective come. It came with food.

  “I’d never understood how hungry I’d always been until the time when I sat at the prince’s table and ate and ate until I was full. Oh, that didn’t happen on the first day and maybe not in the first week. But I’ll get to that.

  “I suppose it’s true that, on the day when the prince came to fetch me from my father’s house, I acted the nine-year-old savage. I know Cosimo told you that. I was using anger and orneriness to cover my fear. Fear of a new devil. My father was the known devil, but who was this smiling yellow-haired devil who spoke in such a soft voice? And then there were his wife and his daughters, another kind of devil. His wife. The princess Simona. Neither kind nor cruel, neither beautiful nor ugly, she was a fluttering presence who interested me far less than did the young princesses, Yolande and Charlotte. They, too, were unlike anyone I’d ever known or seen. They had names I’d never heard. They wore white stockings embroidered with butterflies and white leather shoes tied with satin ribbons and, though they were seven and eight while I’d just turned nine, they seemed to be ages older as they scurried about the grand place with such purpose, curtsying to the tall yellow-haired devil with the soft voice who was their father. As though this family had come from another corner of the earth than mine rather
than from across two hills and over a few kilometers of narrow white road; yes, that’s how I felt. As though they had come from another corner of the earth. We were geographical neighbors in the way Sicilians are neighbors, and yet one of their more modest drawing rooms was larger than my church, and the house where I’d lived would have been lost in the space of their pantry. And there were so many people. Not just the mother, the father, and the children but cousins, aunts, a governess who spoke even more strangely than the family, a music professor, a Latin professor, an art professor. A priest. Others whom I can’t remember now. Everywhere there were servants. And guests in arrival and departure, and so it was like living in the puppet theater I’d once seen at the market in Enna. The constant entrances and exits of splendidly dressed people reciting their lines so perfectly. I watched. I watched them all and, little by little, the savage motherless green-eyed child from the horse farm grew calm. Calm enough to become curious. And then calm enough to dare join in the show myself.

  “With bells and gongs and Ave Marias to mark the hours, the household regime was rigorous, compulsory. We three girls were awakened, scrubbed, combed, braided, dressed by a thirteen-year-old maid called Agata. Our Agata. Yes, it was she. The same. You’ll get to know far more about Agata.

  “The household gathered in the chapel for prayers and benediction at 7:45, breakfasted together in one of the smaller dining rooms at eight. We walked in the garden until nine when lessons began in the schoolroom. At one o’clock the household and guests assembled at table in another of the smaller dining rooms for lunch—a procession of tureens and platters and trays carried ’round by servants amidst the dull chink cut crystal makes as it collides in endless wishes of salute, salute. Never risking the bad fortune that comes with crossing arms, each one walked about the table until he or she was certain to have touched everyone’s glass at least once. Twice was better. Only the yellow-haired devil stood, unmoving, at his place while all of us went to him. Even the princess Simona seemed allegra in her stroll about the table, wishing good health, sometimes patting a face or an arm almost affectionately. I don’t recall her ever touching my face back then. I remember a gray dress of hers, though, one sewn with shiny beads at the top, and how her bobbed hair was set in tight waves and how the points of her cheeks went red and how she was almost pretty at that time of day.