That Summer in Sicily

by Marlena de Blasi

  Neither young nor old, she, too, is in costume, if of a different sort: Wellingtons and jodphurs and a suede riding coat. For a moment she pauses under an oak tree, and the shadows of the leaves make a black lace shawl about her head and shoulders. Magisterially, then, she goes among the women, observing what they do, nodding or shaking her crown of gray braids according to her pleasure, her displeasure. Surely she is Tosca.

  “They’re singing of the inevitably unequal proportions of grief and rapture in a life. Did you know that?” asks the woman.

  I wonder if the disdain in her bearing, in her voice, is a cover for timidity. As she approaches us, I nearly gasp at her beauty. “Did I know that they were singing about that or do I know that it’s true?” I ask.

  “Perhaps I meant both. I’m Tosca Brozzi.”

  “Buongiorno, Signora. Noi siamo de Blasi da Venezia.”

  “I know. I know. There’ll be time to talk about your journalistic failures at table. I suspect we’ll get ’round to ‘grief and rapture,’ as well. We’ll be sitting down at one. I’ll let you know later if there’s room for you to stay. You can wash and rest in there,” she says, gesturing toward the great black doors of the house or the villa or the mansion. The castle. Whatever it is.

  We hesitate, and she says, “Agata is there to show you the way.” Fernando and I look at each other, the look asking, Do you want to stay? Do you want to see this through? He takes my hand and pulls me toward the open doors.

  Yet another woman in black is this Agata. She shakes our hands and speaks less assuredly in Italian than did Tosca, mixing it with dialect, but not so thickly that we cannot understand her. Be understood by her. She smiles and chatters, leading the way down a dark corridor lit by the flame of a single candle set in a wall sconce, then opens a door upon a large square room that smells faintly of fresh paint. Yellow walls, a paler yellow sofa, and a pair of blue damask love seats. A mottled gold-framed mirror leans out over a small white marble fireplace. Lavender is massed in great rope-bound bunches and sits in corners on the marble floors, beside the chairs, on a peeling gilt table, in the lap of the hearth.

  “Si accomodi. Be comfortable.”

  She opens a door to a small bathroom and takes fresh towels from a cabinet.

  “Vi porto un aperitivo tra poco. I’ll bring you an aperitivo in a while.”

  When she closes the door, I expect it will be the end of the dream.

  “Is this real?” we ask each other at the same moment.

  Now we hear our own laughter.

  “I don’t know where we are or with whom, but I know we’re safe. We’re in the right place,” Fernando says.

  “Journalistic failures. How does she know about . . .”

  “Because no one spoke to us doesn’t mean that they don’t speak to one another.”

  “Are they all widows out there?”

  “I think so.”

  “Is this a rest home with a duty roster? Or a commune? I mean, they can’t all be her relatives?”

  “No, it’s not a rest home. The women are all much too vibrant. Some of them are relatively young. I don’t think it’s a commune, either. I don’t know what it is.”

  With lemon soap and squares of rough white linen, we scrub our faces and upper bodies, anointing and splashing ourselves with the contents of a jumble of apothecary bottles with hand-wrought labels. Neroli oil, neroli water, lavender water, rose oil. We rub the dust of Sicily from our feet, from our sandals, smooth our hair, button our shirts back in place, and, fearing a deep sleep should we sit, we stand in the freshly painted yellow room and shake our heads in wonder.

  “I want to look about the place. I want to see more of it, don’t you?” I say.

  “This is a private home. We’ll be shown what they would like us to see, when they would like us to see it. Patience.”

  “Let’s go back out to the garden, then. And to the car. Clean shirts and . . .”

  “I think we’ll be going back to the car soon enough. After lunch, I mean. I doubt we’ll be staying long afterward.”

  “I don’t know what to think of this Tosca. She seemed like an extra from the set of Quo Vadis as she came striding through the garden, bursting in upon the enchantment.”

  “Actually, she is more Felliniana. Yes, Fellini would have cast her in La Dolce Vita. But she speaks. I’m indebted to her for that.”

  We gather our things and walk back down the candlelit corridor, headed for the garden, when Agata opens a pair of wide carved doors and sweeps her hands in a welcoming gesture. We enter not into a room but into the declining sumptuousness of a regimental hall. Fragments of frescoed gods and goddesses—plump flanked and rolling eyed—hurtle across the high crumbling walls, giving erotic chase up onto the great vault of the ceiling. And under the frenzy of this cupola, three massive tables are set. The underwater silence of the gardens, gently penetrated by the women’s chants and their laughter, has given way to domestic pandemonium. This is Tosca’s dining hall.

  Five or six or more of the widows float in and out of the space, porting platters and trays and covered tureens, placing them on the side tables and buffets that line the walls. They all shriek at once, most often addressing someone in the farthest reaches of the hall or in far-flung rooms. Unseen doors are repeatedly slammed; unskilled, unshy hands pound scales on a piano located somewhere on an upper floor. In cussing pursuit of a newborn orphan lamb escaped from the kitchen where it had been brought to be bottle fed, two older men search the premises, discover the tiny creature in peaceful sleep, nearly invisible among the worn cushions on a velvet chair. One of the men places the now-protesting lamb ’round his neck like a scarf, says he’ll carry him back to the kitchen. I want to go to the kitchen.

  Keeping a few paces behind the man with the lamb collar, I follow him out of the house, through the walled garden, and past two small beehive-shaped stone outbuildings, one of which houses a wood-burning oven. On a long marble-topped table in front of it, neat rounds of flour-dusted dough have been set to rise in the sun. I have never seen dough set to rise in the sun. I am still inside the dream. Though I want to stop the dream here, at least for a while, to stay with the dough and the sun and the good smells that linger from an earlier bake, I run to catch up with the man and the lamb. Down a wide white graveled path lined with yews, he is heading for what looks like a barn that sits close by the edge of a wheat field. I crunch along the gravel behind him and I know that he knows I am following him. In fact, he half turns every so often and smiles, as though in encouragement. The man and the lamb disappear into the barn, and when I arrive at the threshold of the open doors, I stand before the most splendid kitchen I’ve ever seen.

  For this past year—this first year of my life in Italy—I’d cooked in the tin-can Playskool kitchen of Fernando’s bunker by the sea. Or not cooked, as it usually turned out, since my new husband—despite the truth that he knowingly, willfully married an impassioned cook—prefers to dine as he’d always dined: One hundred twenty-five grams of spaghetti cooked halfway to flexibility and slathered with two soupspoonsful of bottled sauce. A salad with no vinegar or salt. And if he was celebrating, a slate-thin cut of a chicken’s breast hardened in a Teflon skillet. A slice of lemon. I rock on the dusty heels of my old boots at the door of paradise.

  Yet more of the black-dressed women are at work. Or are they the same black-dressed ones who were under the pergola with the beans or in the walled garden? Do they simply shift geography? No, these are most definitely women I’ve not yet seen. White aprons to the ankle, black scarves wrapped pirate-like, hiding their crowns of braids, exposing faces, exalting black Arab eyes. They all seem to have the same eyes.

  Massive dark wood beams hang low over what must be more than two hundred square meters of dark red tiles. Rough plaster walls are washed in the same color as the parched wheat blowing in the field outside the door. The great stone paws of some mythic beast rest on the hearth floors of two stupendous fireplaces that, like flaming sphinxes, cr
ouch at either end of the room. There are three ancient marble sinks, one of them fashioned from a baptismal font. There is an ancient cast-iron, wood-fired stove and a sparkling dark green Aga, the latter seeming to be out of use since the cooks all hover about the old one as well as in the environs of a six-burner gas range. There are no machines in evidence, but rather racks and racks of knives and utensils and culinary battery. Two long worktables are positioned in disparate parts of the space and four or five women are at work behind each one of them. I step inside, say permesso in a voice that no one hears above the collective din. Some look at me and smile; most go about their business. I step farther inside.

  Baronial armoires and dressers and cupboards are stashed with porcelain, ceramics, terra-cotta pots and dishes, glassware, silver, copper, pewter, linens, candlesticks, pitchers, serving platters, and stacks and stacks of bowls. The dresser drawers hang open and show linings of old fabric—faded, torn, marked with unsharp knives. In one of the dressers, a deep long drawer is kept open just wide enough to form a perfect vise in which to secure a vertically placed three-kilo round of bronze-crusted, wood-charred bread while a widow carves thick, rough slices of it, letting the crumbs fall in upon the velvet. In another dresser with the same sort of very long drawers, cheeses—already aged and ready for the table—are kept swaddled in white linen. Like a great, tall jewel box, the interior walls and shelves of one armoire—devoted to the keeping of sweets—are upholstered in torn, faded yellow brocade. On the deep shelves sit tins and glass jars and yard-long rectangular tarts spread with jams or chunks of caramelized fruit. On one shelf there are silver trays laid with tiny pastries shaped like peaches or oranges, glazed in barely pink icing and ornamented with perfect stems and leaves cut from candied angelica. I hear my own barely contained gasps of delight as I watch the women ready plates and baskets and trays to be carried to the dining hall. My hands itching to touch something, I keep them behind my back. Keep the hopeful smile upon my face.

  “Posso aiutarvi?May I help you?” I ask in several ascending registers.

  Their efficiency is complete, though, and all the goods are in hand or ensconced upon the folded white cloths that they place over their pirate headdresses to cushion the burden of a wash basket full of bread or one of biscotti or of peaches and plums still nodding on their branches. And the parade begins. Out the door they walk, hips swaying, backs and shoulders arched, breasts thrust. Chanting, praying. Alone, I bring up the rear, try to walk the way they walk, swish my hips under my jeans, hold my head as though an amphora of wine rests there. It feels good. The sun is torrid upon us, the scents of the food are glorious, and as I run my hand along the prickly leaves of the yews lining the white gravel path I feel so grateful to be inside this dream of Sicily.

  CHAPTER II

  IN THE DINING HALL THERE IS A PREPONDERANCE OF WOMEN. Perhaps there are forty of them with twelve or so men scattered among the three tables. Freshly slicked hair, some sort of jacket over buttoned-to-the-throat shirts, three of the men might be under thirty, while the others—prepared in equally elegant fashion—might be a generation or so older. Save Tosca and I and two others, all the women wear mourning.

  Agata shows Fernando and I to our places—his next to the lamb rescuer and mine near a woman who she presents as Carlotta. We are introduced as i Veneziani. The marked skin on Carlotta’s hands says she might be sixty, yet her great black fawn’s eyes and small-boned thinness make her seem a girl. Both Carlotta and a somewhat older-looking woman called Olga, who sits opposite from us and shakes hands with me across the table, wear dark print dresses of a vintage 1940s’ style. Every woman in the room wears her hair in some construction of intricate braids. I try to smooth my loose, long, too curly hair and feel barbaric.

  “Where have you been?” Fernando wants to know.

  “I went to see the kitchen,” I tell him grinning.

  Everyone seems to be seated except Tosca and the tall, stout man with whom she confers near one of the tables. Though their backs are to us, the way they stand, almost touching, and lean to listen to each other makes them seem a couple. So Tosca has a husband, I think, and yet, when they turn to take their places at table, I see that the man, a magnificent Christopher Plummer look-alike but with those same black Arab eyes, is wearing a cleric’s collar. A priest. He seats Tosca, remains standing, and strikes a glass with a knife handle. Closes his eyes, opens his arms wide, palms upward, and begins to pray. Everyone takes the hand of the person next to her or him. Heads are bowed and lips move in loud personal thanksgiving. Pitchers of wine and water are passed and laden serving plates fly in all directions, buon pranzo.

  “Allora, come si chiama questo posto?” I ask Carlotta, pretending to have forgotten the villa’s unforgettable name.

  “Non ha un nome veremente ma la gente locale l’ha sempre chiamata Villa Donnafugata. É una lunga storia. It doesn’t really have a name but the local people have always called it Villa Donnafugata. The house of the fleeing woman. A long story.”

  I don’t tell her that it’s precisely a long story that I’d like to hear but only smile and say, “Ho capito, ho capito.” I understand.

  Carlotta continues, though. In a quiet, aristocratic voice that contrasts with the lusty dialect of the others ’round us, she tells me that the villa is an eighteenth-century Anjou castle built originally to be that noble family’s hunting lodge in this part of Sicily. La signora—as she refers to Tosca—inherited the villa from an Anjou prince whose ward she once was. She acknowledges my widened gaze.

  “Yes, la signora’s life has often been a very romantic one,” she says, lustrous eyes flashing and, perhaps, about to spill tears.

  She tells me that, bit by bit, la signora restored the place. For more than thirty years, la signora has lived here with—and at this point Carlotta hesitates as though even she is not certain who all the residents might be—a number of her friends and friends of friends.

  “People in need. Of other people, mostly,” she says. “When villagers, local farmers, find themselves alone—widows, widowers—many of them come to make their home here. If they have grown children, some prefer to live together with them, but for others, well, they find that the sort of communal life we have here helps them to stay well, to stay young. And if need be, we have a health-care facility and staff nurses, visiting physicians. The women are like sisters; I’m sure you’ve already noticed that. In fact, many of them are related by blood or by marriage. Most of them were neighbors in the village or worked side by side in the fields all their lives. We are all related by affection. We are part of one another’s history. We are Sicilian.”

  She says this last as though there is nothing more to say.

  Wanting her to tell me more, after a while I ask her, “How many people live here?”

  “It changes. People die, but also babies are born here.”

  “Babies? Here?”

  “Yes, babies. We have a birthing clinic here. A beautiful facility, very small, though, with room for only three or four women. Two of our widows were midwives, and they are training some of the younger women to take their place. Obstetricians from the city visit weekly, but often I think they come because they like to be here. Because they like to dine with us. By the way, we’re a bit excited today since one of our expectant mothers is very close to her time. Very close, indeed. You can imagine how many aunties and uncles and surrogate grandparents each of our babies has. Mother and child can stay for as long as a year if they like. Until they can get situated more permanently.”

  I note that Carlotta does not speak of unwed mothers, of homelessness, of poverty. Rather she has said: People who need other people. We are all related by affection. We are part of one another’s history. We are Sicilian.

  My gaze is drawn over and over again to a woman who sits to the left of the priest. Carlotta looks at me looking at the woman.

  “She, the one sitting next to Don Cosimo, is la signora Tosca’s sister. She is la signora Mafalda.”


  So Christopher Plummer is called Don Cosimo. And to his left, the small woman with the blond braids and the beautiful profile is Tosca’s sister, the one who’d been sitting and writing in the cleft of the magnolia when we arrived. Mafalda. Carlotta. Olga. Agata. Don Cosimo. I look from one to the other. I want to ask Carlotta if she knows whether we’ll be staying beyond lunch but the question, any way I could pose it, might be awkward for her to answer. I must wait for word from la signora herself.

  Instead I ask, “But how does the household function? Does everyone have a specific job?”

  “We all do what we’re good at doing. And since there’s so very much to do to maintain a place as vast as this,” she says sweeping her arms, throwing back her head in laughter, “with so much land, the animals, the gardens, our work is almost constant. Sometimes I think the truth is another, though. That the work is only an intermezzo, un divertimento, to fill the scant hours between meals. We eat often and well here, signora. . . . Io non ricordo il suo nome, scusatemi.”

  “Mi chiamo Chou-Chou e mio marito è Fernando.”

  I don’t know if Carlotta has heard me, since she’s begun speaking in dialect with another of the women about, I think, the imminent birth of the baby. But perhaps it’s not that, since their faces demonstrate sorrow rather than happy anticipation. Carlotta excuses herself, rises, and together with another woman leaves the dining hall. I take a moment to look about the room. To study the people. Never have I seen or imagined anything like this. Like them. I hear the woman called Olga telling Fernando that thirty-four widows are presently in residence in the villa. Further, she tells him that during the harvests of wheat and grapes and olives, twenty or more women from neighboring villages join the widows in their work. Day by day, she says, the thirty-four resident women perform all the cooking, baking, preserving, serving, cleaning, scrubbing, polishing, sewing, mending, washing, ironing, and the tending of flower, herb, and vegetable gardens, as well as the tending of the courtyard animals. She says that the household presently counts well over half a hundred souls within its walls. Fernando asks about the men who live here.