That Summer in Sicily Read online

  “ ‘It was man who took the gods from Olympus and placed them in the church, Tosca. Gave them new names. Changed their histories to suit, shall we say, more contemporary needs. That’s not a bad thing or a good thing, it’s just what happened. As you advance in your studies of both mythology and religion, you’ll find the samenesses yourself. Be open to them. I think Demeter, goddess of agriculture and motherhood, will recall events in the life of la Madonna. Learn all you can of Demeter, Tosca. She is very present in all our lives. Especially we who live here where she lived.’

  “I am trembling with the further revelation that the Greek goddess of agriculture, who, the prince has informed me, so resembles the mother of God, lives in some far-flung wing of the palace.

  “ ‘Where exactly are her rooms?’

  “ ‘Her temple, Tosca. The ruins of the temple of Demeter lie on a mountain outside the walls of Enna. And there are also ruins of another of her temples right here on our land.’

  “Calmed by the kilometers of distance that lie between the goddess and me, now I worry that she lives in ruins.

  “ ‘You will come to understand the splendor of all the gods, their importance to our understanding of ourselves. They are us, Tosca. And we are them.’

  “I want to ask him if Don Cosimo agrees with all this about Demeter being so much like Mary and why there is no statue of her in the chapel or why there is no Santa Demeter, but he’s pacing up and down now, flinging his arms and speaking in Greek and then in Latin and then in French until he finally gets back to me and Italian.

  “ ‘Have you found Sappho yet, Tosca?’

  I cringe, thinking this Sappho must be the twin of Santa Rosalia, but I hear him telling me that she was a poetessa.

  Leave Krete and come to this holy temple

  where the graceful grove of apple trees

  circles an altar smoking with frankincense

  he quotes, all the dramatics gone now. He says the lines again. Asks me to repeat them with him. I try. More than I can remember all the words, I can smell the frankincense. I tell him this. He tells me he knows that I can.

  “The prince constantly consulted the other teachers on my progress and steered the overall process of my education. Allowed unlimited access to his library. When I’d climb the winding stone steps up into the tower where it was housed, he seemed to always be there. I’d open the heavy doors and see him, disheveled in the chaos of his tomes. My curtsy. His nod. Aba-jours set behind each chair cast a melancholy light upon the table at which he sat. So dim and yellow was the light that the leather-bound spines towering in the stacks all ’round seemed shadows. I could smell them, though, that good, fine smell of old books, and I’d take the torch from the table, climb the ladder to fetch what I wanted. Sit back down then, always leaving a chair between Leo and me, but still close enough. Near enough to his own scent, the scent made of neroli and damp tweed and of the mud still on his boots, and in a quiet purl of joy, I’d wend my way through Sappho.

  “There were days when prayers and garden walks and even meals seemed interruptions to my studies. I preferred my books to our two-hour lunches. All the dressing and undressing and dressing once again, the twitterings of admiration from guests and visiting family toward the princesses, the play of light and dark upon the moods of Simona and Leo. Too, there was an increased flurry of visitors, of people settling in to stay because of what Leo and Cosimo called la grande guerra, the great war. It seemed that our region of the island lay relatively out of harm’s way, and thus the palace became something of a refuge. I studied more.

  When it was warm, I read in the gardens or in the lemon groves, stretched out on a long marble bench, the lion-paw legs of it gnarled in tree roots and half sunk into the soft black earth. My book held above my head, I lay there on the secret baldacchino, the great oily leaves of the trees curtains that commanded dusk at noon.

  “And whenever I could beg a reprieve with a sick headache, I kept my own company in my rooms. The early exuberance I’d felt at the palace was overtaken by a kind of gratitude for patronage, for my being kept, without care or obligation, so that I could learn.

  The only rivals to my studies were the horses. I loved one of the Egyptian mares above all the rest in the stable and Leo saw to it that she was kept for me, readied for me each morning. I rode with whatever party was going out on a given day, Leo and Cosimo always among them, always leading. Especially when I didn’t know the other riders very well, if they were recently arrived guests, for instance, I would stay close to Leo and Cosimo. Though I’d long been rescued from my bareback days, Leo knew I would just as soon do without the formalities of a saddle and so he would often dismount, check my stirrups and cinches, tell me to sit straighter. Sometimes he’d reach his hand up to the small of my back.

  “ ‘Arch right here. Deepen the curve,’ he would say, pressing hard.

  “I liked that. I liked it very well, and so I would slouch all the more next morning. Wait for his hand. Though I would begin a trail with the group, I’d soon go off on my own. Longing for speed. Risk.”

  “One late afternoon in the winter of 1942, Leo asked me to walk with him in the garden. A rare occurrence it was to be so summoned by him. I recall it was very cold and that I’d come out with only Agata’s shawl, which she always hung on a hook by the garden door. I’d wrapped it carelessly about my long gray woolen dress and Leo pulled it tighter ’round me, chided me for leaving my coat behind. I remember he did that. I remember thinking that his wanting me to be warm must mean that he had bad news to tell me.

  “ ‘Mafalda has been sent to live with your mother’s sister, my dear. Your father came to see me this morning to tell me so that I might tell you. You see, she hasn’t been well, and since your father can’t be at home to watch over her and since Mafalda chose, forcefully chose, not to come here to be with us . . . ’

  “He breaks off, knowing that I know what Mafalda had chosen.

  “ ‘But we’ve arranged a way to keep contact with her, with your aunt and the others in Vicari. I’ll see that you’re taken to visit her as soon as things become more secure. Meanwhile your sister is in good hands and so are you, and that’s what matters. In times like these . . . ’

  “He talks faster and faster, inserting inanities as though I were a child. As though he’d forgotten that I was twelve, halfway to thirteen. As though he didn’t know what I knew very well. That my father had been trying to pawn Mafalda upon one relative or another for a long time. Leo spoke as though he’d forgotten that I’d reconciled my father’s need to live without my sister as much as I had his need to live without me. That Malfada has been reconciled to live without me, too, hurts far more. For these past three years I’d believed ours was only a physical separation. Not so now.

  “ ‘Don’t, please don’t think that you can ride those eighty kilometers to Vicari as you once did those few from here to your home. I mean, your other home.’

  “Awkward in even the simplest discourse about my life before coming to the palace, I help him.

  “ ‘I won’t. I could. I think I could but I won’t.’

  “ ‘I have the address so you can write to her, send her things if you wish.’

  “ ‘Yes. Thank you.’ ”

  “As it turned out, the address that my father gave to Leo was not at all the one where my sister was sent. Or at least was not the one where she stayed for very long. And when Leo sent word to my father that he needed to see him, it was discovered that even he no longer lived at the horse farm, the barns empty, the house abandoned.”

  CHAPTER IV

  “IT MIGHT SEEM STRANGE, CHOU, BUT NEITHER BEFORE NOR then nor on into that autumn and winter was there anything much at all in my life to suggest that the world outside the palace was at war. Save the newspaper reports, the radio broadcasts to which Leo and Cosimo and whatever males were in residence at the palace at the moment listened to with such attention, all seemed remarkably the same. In fact, I found it shocking one morning when we
three girls were walking to the schoolroom and Yolande said, ‘Ach, how weary I am of this war and its privations.’

  “Even Charlotte seemed at a loss, and certainly I didn’t know about privations. She explained that no more pastries would be coming in the weekly supplies from Palermo because there was no sugar. She said that her mother had told her so. Could we imagine such a thing? No sugar?

  “Apart from the pastries, after a while there were no supplies at all to fetch in Palermo. But I never knew about that, either. I never heard about rations or bombardments or how many Italian boys were being killed or taken prisoner on the Russian front, or about those who froze to death in their Mediterranean-weight uniforms or died of hunger even before the Russian winter could take them. Save the wilderness of sugar, there was no truth to taint the punctual discharging of the events of palace life for we three girls. Even the closer-to-home truth was never spoken. The truth that, in the borghetto, six hundred meters from the sparkling gilt gates of the palace, children had gone and would still sometimes go to bed without supper. Or that the stores in the peasants’ magazzini had been sorely thinned if not depleted, and that until the spring wheat could be harvested there would be no bread on their scrubbed oilclothed tables. What I did begin to understand was that Leo was somehow distracted, sad. Even more silent than usual. During that last period of the war, he and Cosimo and some small company of household men would often be gone for days. Disappear. If not without telling Simona, certainly without telling anyone else. When they’d return it would be in some strange truck or farmer’s wagon loaded with oil and tins of vegetables and meat, sacks of rice, food for whatever animals were left. All of it covered with tarps and rags so that the shapes underneath looked eerily like bodies. Sleeping. Dead. They’d gone to bargain with the black-marketeers in Palermo or wherever it might have been where there were goods to be had. I would learn that Leo had unfolded astounding sums of beautiful ten- and twenty- and fifty-lira notes so that his peasants might eat. And when, in the final, most hungry weeks before the gardens and fields would begin to yield and black-market goods were nowhere to be found, Leo opened the palace storerooms to the peasants. When the peasants would hesitate over the last barrel of oil, the prince would assure them that there was more. There wasn’t more. Cosimo still tells the story of Leo’s cleverness in urging the palace cooks to use lard when there was no oil.

  “ ‘But the lard is rancid, sir. Green as grass.’

  “ ‘That’s when it tastes best. Go ahead now and fix a good lard pudding. Are there any prunes left? Add some prunes.’

  “How Cosimo loves to tell that exchange! Poor Simona not only had no sweets but was served prunes and lard for lunch while the peasants were blessing whatever they had with her finest virgin oil and her confessor was stifling laughs, shifting pieces of the hellish pudding about his plate. In his dedication to the welfare of his peasants during the war, Leo was triumphant.

  “In 1943 the Americans debarked on the island. The Germans had already been here for more than a year, protectorates of the homeland of their Italian allies, basing their command at Enna. But when the enormous numbers of Americans with their cannons and heavy armature plunged through the waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea and onto the Sicilian shores on that day in May, the far fewer and less potently supplied troops of Tedeschi chose retreat. Days after the American arrival, King Vittorio Emanuele nullified the governing power of Mussolini and placed a general called Badoglio in charge of the government. Whatever government there was. Early in September 1943, Italy officially asked armistice of the Americans and hence, for us, the war was over. As I’ve said, I never knew it had begun.

  “The only casualty that invaded the palace walls came in the form of three Americans. I don’t know how many hundreds or thousands of American soldiers were billeted at Enna, first as liberators, or was it conquerors?—there are still those who dispute this point—and then as keepers of the peace after the armistice. Hotels, private homes and villas, convents, and military barracks were requisitioned to lodge them. Leo went to visit their commander, invited him to lunch. Noblesse oblige. Cosimo tried to dissuade him from the deed, warning that if the Americans witnessed the beauty of the palace, surely they would claim it, too, but Leo was convinced to demonstrate noble Sicilian life and culture to the Americans. Proud that his daughters and his ward might address the guests in their own language, we were extraordinarily primped and polished for the occasion. Clutching nosegays of white roses and repeating our mantra of Good afternoon, sir, and welcome to our home, we waited on the veranda. I don’t really know what I or Yolande or Charlotte expected of these Yankee soldiers, but surely it was something other than what they were. One was very fat and tall, the one who I think was the general. Of the other two I recall only their voices, which were loud and shrill in the quiet sanctum of the great dining room. We thought them scandalous for the noises they made when they chewed, for how they laughed with their mouths open and full. Leo cringed. Cosimo snorted quietly into his cups. I don’t recall whether Simona sat with us. When all was said and done, I, myself, found the Americans charming, in their way, perhaps because they were the single close-up symbol to which I’d been privy in all the hugger-muggery of that epoch. It would be a decade later and in another life before I would come to understand even some of what had been la grande guerra.”

  “Pindar and Caesare; the inevitable The Lives of the Saints; French, English, Italian literature. Geometry, astrology. The pianoforte. I heard Mass from the family pews, spooned my puddings at the family table, linked my arms with the princesses in the family strolls about the garden. I was one of them. I was not one of them. It must have been about then, when I was fourteen, that I began to be included in the admirations of the visitors. The extended family. The savage green-eyed motherless child had grown to be a young woman. Well-spoken, graceful, bright. There were whisperers.

  “ ‘Have you heard her play Brahms?’

  “ ‘They say she’s memorized Virgil.’

  “ ‘A perfect Parisian accent.’

  “ ‘A brilliant horsewoman.’

  “ ‘Poverina, and to think of what her life might have been if not for Leo!’

  “ ‘The prince has such a good heart.’

  “ ‘The prince has such a good eye.’ ”

  CHAPTER V

  “SOON AFTER THE PEACE WAS FIXED, LEO AND SIMONA HOSTED A party. Not one of our own boys or the men who had been called up or volunteered themselves to fight, not one had been lost. Eleven from among the borghetto had gone to war, six from the palace staff, and though three were severely wounded, all seventeen had returned.

  “It was the third of May 1945, and to initiate the festa, Cosimo said Mass for the combined congregations of the household and the borghetto rather than performing the usual separate celebrations of the holy sacrament. At sunrise in the gardens, in the fickle, unconsecrated shade of the oaks, Cosimo said Mass for everyone. And afterward, we all walked, single file, upon the packed-earth paths among the wheat fields on our way to a copse of cedars by the river.

  “A group of men had gone out the evening before to arrange the wood for the cooking fires, to rake the earth under the trees, pound torches into the ground. Under the sun, not yet high but already mean, we walked. Each of the men carried some crate of food—oranges, artichokes, potatoes—or parcels of linen or some bench or chair across his shoulders or led a pair of lambs or goats to sacrifice. Two had mandolins strapped across their chests and bundles of kindling tied on their backs. I remember them especially, for at the time, I’d begun to think I was mad with love for one of these troubadours though I never could decide which of the two it was. That day both were wearing shiny black trousers with a satin stripe down the leg, the splendors of which caused their chums to claim they’d looted graves, taken the pants off dead men, so as to be smartly turned out for the festa. The suggestion might have been true. And the women?

  “Sure as she-goats over the stones, wide, strong flanks lurching to
and fro under thin cotton smocks, some with suckling babies swaddled to their breasts, they all toted jugs of water or wine upon their heads and sang some ancient song about sisterhood, about a pact to tell one another when a husband was untrue. To tell and then to help the betrayed wife to murder the betraying husband. They sang it over and over again.

  “Now you’ll recall that this was 1945 and there were more vehicles belonging to the palace than I could count. And by this time there was also some manner of gasoline to feed them, the trucks and Jeeps and cars, and yet we walked. Simona and the princesses walked. Everyone wanted to walk.

  “By the time we’d all reached the river, the advance guard had fires leaping, had dispatched, gutted, skewered the lambs and goats, rubbed the little carcasses with oil and filled their cavities with handfuls of wild herbs. As though all seventy or eighty who composed the group were following the steps to the same primal dance, everyone got to work. I thought the scene they made was lovely. More beautiful even than the condoling dreams I would call forth as a little girl, dreams upon which I’d paint big-bosomed aunts who smelled of soap and sugar and uncles with Sunday shoes and caramels in their pockets for me. I’d invent a grandfather in whose embrace I would sit and trace the furrows of his sunburnt cheeks while he sang to me. In those dreams, my mother would never cry and my father would be the wise, reasonable capo famiglia who protected us all. But these characters I drew in those old dreams might have been great white snowy owls for all they resembled the real ones with whom I’d lived. Yet mine was every child’s dream, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it yours, Chou?”