That Summer in Sicily

by Marlena de Blasi

  “There was a mandatory riposo until 4:30, when tea was served in the garden or, in winter, in the schoolroom. Though lessons resumed at five, on some afternoons we girls were allowed to close our books and sit by the fire with our sewing until seven, when Agata came to rescue us, to help us dress for dinner. Aperitivi were served in the room where we breakfasted and then we walked, en masse—often more than twenty strong—down the long, dark corridors to the main dining hall.

  “In light of the grande bouffe that was lunch, dinner seemed penitential—broth, cheese, glaceéd fruits, biscuits. Wine. A common, catching sulk prevailed. A whole day’s worth of grievances accumulated, carried to the silk-draped table, passed about like soured milk. Simona had perhaps quarreled with the governess or the governess with the art professor and surely there were dramas among them less perceptible to me. Nevertheless they always seemed to be played out in the evening. I would sit there in my white dress, my braids coiled so tightly above my ears that my head ached, and think how very much the same the event of supper was here at the palace as it had been at home. Always having to worry if my father was angry or why, or if it was I who caused the anger. Worse was wondering if it was I who should be at work making his anger go away. Yet here among this vast polished cast, the game of mea culpa, tua culpa was played out with far more skulk. How I would long to be alone with The Tiny Mafalda in the narrow pallet of a bed that was ours. What price this thin white dress. This supper.”

  “I had a room in the children’s wing, two rooms really; the furnishings, the walls, everything was colored pale yellow and white. Even the floors were yellow and white, great marble squares laid in a pattern that made me dizzy. And a bathroom of my own with a tub big enough to swim in, or so it seemed, though I didn’t know the first thing about swimming. I didn’t know much about bathing, either. I’d never had a bath in a tub except when my mother would plunk The Tiny Mafalda and me in the washtub out in the garden on the days when the washing water wasn’t all that dirty. I missed The Tiny Mafalda.

  “There was an alcove behind my bed where Agata slept, and I would talk to her about my sister. Sometimes that helped, but mostly all that helped were the times when I’d run away. Or ride away, back home. I’m sure that Cosimo has told you about my escapes, since I believe they are his favorite memories of me. My escapes and my thievings. Of course, the two were connected. They were connected to hunger, just as I think most crimes are connected to hunger. One hunger or another.

  “Every time I sat down at table with the household, all I could think about was my sister. What was she eating for lunch? Was she eating at all? Did my father remember to leave money for her to do the shopping? I was tortured by my worries for her. Time and time again, I would wait until Agata and the rest of the household were napping and then creep out of the bedroom, step lightly down the stairs and across what seemed the immensity of the halls and the corridors and out one door or another, out one passageway or another. Free. Away into the damp, cool respite of the garden. Push open the great creaking gate and don’t look back. Now run. Faster. Some sack or bag fastened to me, something good for my sister. It felt fine to run, to sweat, to feel the sack slapping against my leg. Slower, then, when I’d reached the road. Hike the white road, cross the hills back home.

  “Not announcing my return as anything extraordinary, I would just pick up where I’d left off, look through the cupboard and in the baskets for whatever there was to cook and get to work. The Tiny Mafalda would be dancing ’round me, kissing me, reaching up to hold me about the waist and squeezing me with all her baby-girl’s strength, and I would start in weeping and then she would and then we’d both be laughing and crying and my father would walk in and, without so much as a word from him, or him hearing a word from me, I’d be hurled down onto the bed of his truck and, with Mafalda stamping one foot and then the other on the bottom step of the porch and screaming at him with all her might to let me stay, he’d drive, pell-mell, back across the hills. Back down the white road. Back to the palace.

  “After those episodes I knew that my father, having to punish someone, would be even less tolerant of my sister. I would learn that on those evenings he would sometimes eat whatever was there and not offer anything to her. I don’t think he ever knew that the first thing Mafalda and I would do on those days when I came back home was to hide the food I’d thieved from the palace. Or did he? And if he did know, is that why he’d finish up the cabbage and the bread and never save a scrap for her? Did he know she was up there sitting on the little pallet, her steady nibbling keeping time with her snuffling?

  “Once delivered back to the palace, desperate as only a child can be desperate, I’d take to my bed. Trembling, the raging inside my chest suffocating me until, as if from some faraway place, I would finally hear Agata’s voice. Until I would feel the caressing of her cool hands through my wet matted hair. She would peel off my clothes, fill the great tub with water that was always too hot, scald and scrub me red and raw, pull a shift over my head. Lay me down to sleep.

  “The next day did not bring my contrition. Truth is, I loved stealing that food to take to my sister. I don’t know if it would have felt half so good if the plunder was for me, myself, but stealing for Mafalda was thrilling. I would imagine the light coming on in her big, sad eyes and I’d start right back in with my scheming and thieving. I’d take more. Always more. Oh, it wasn’t as though I had to work very hard at collecting the food. Early on, Agata understood what I’d been doing and why, and she and another maid helped me. In a wooden box in the dispensa they would hoard cheese, dried sausages, dried fruits. Even two of the cooks became conspirators. Whatever pie or cake or biscuit they baked, they baked a Mafalda-sized version, wrapped it in a fresh white cloth, and into the wooden box it went. Whereas I’d begun by keeping apart some of my bread at each meal and supplementing it with the meager pilfering of the cupboards—a handful of rice tied up in a handkerchief, two potatoes, things like that—it wasn’t long before the weekly or biweekly stash was more than I could carry. Additional accomplices rescued me.

  “The cooks and Agata arranged with the stableman to let me use one of the horses. A jockey’s thin, spare frame under an ancient’s brown face, the stableman would be waiting on the west side, the hidden side of the barn, holding the reins of one beauty or another. Saddled, ready. I’d become something of a heroine since the day early on in my palace life when I’d stolen a barely broken mare and ridden her bareback to my father’s house. Laughing and smiling and regarding me with an expression of hosannah, the stableman would help me tie down my goods, set me up there on the horse like a small warrior queen, give the hind end of the horse a good whack, yell out his blessing for the journey, and I’d trot off. Around the lemon groves. Down the white road.

  “And so my plan to run away, to escape the yellow-haired devil and his candied figs and his Ave Marias and his wife with the beads on her dress and his daughters with the butterflies on their stockings, the plan to escape the palace and return to my life with The Tiny Mafalda was adjusted. If I couldn’t yet manage to run away from the palace for good, then my twice-weekly run on a horse to visit Mafalda with food would suffice. I found relative peace within my nine-year-old soul as long as I was certain that my sister was not hungry. I don’t know why I worried almost not at all for her safety. Why I trusted in my father’s heart—black and cold as it was—not to hurt Mafalda. All these years later I still don’t know why I trusted him, but I did.

  “Soon I began to supplement my food gathering with the collecting of clothes for my sister. Nothing quite so blatant as I’d done during that first week when I’d left my new white pinafore with Mafalda and returned to the palace wearing my dead mother’s blue housedress with the pink roses. Nothing like that. Assuming a genteel subtlety, I’d take stockings from Agata’s mending basket once in a while, or a chemise. A pair of culottes. A silk undershirt with a pink ribbon woven ’round the neck. Sometimes from my own things, sometimes from the pile left in t
he wash basket outside Charlotte and Yolande’s rooms, I’d steal the best I could find. Sweaters and shawls and lap robes, I’d steal from the salons and from the schoolroom and even from the chapel. I never ransacked private quarters, but rather pinched things that were left behind or forgotten or misplaced from the rooms where we all spent time together. The pickings were wonderful. The Tiny Mafalda and I hid the silken, woolen, feminine treasures from our father in the little room where the washing tubs and mops and brooms were kept. Where he’d never set foot.

  “And by the time my sister was seven and I was just past ten, we’d put by a veritable trousseau for her. At least in our own wondering eyes. She had food, she had clothes and blankets and books and trinkets enough to keep a rustic breed of princess in good stead, and that’s when the Arab in me began to urge The Tiny Mafalda to sell the surplus in the markets. Practicing the same restraint as I had used in acquiring the goods, she would offer a single item at a time. And only once in a while. Women began to seek her out, enquire if she had, perhaps, a nightdress. Another shawl with long silk fringe. Of course if word had reached our father, if the truth had been revealed that his daughter was unloading stolen goods in the markets and stashing lire in the hems of her petticoat, I don’t know what grim justice he would have meted out to her; and not because of what she’d done but because she hadn’t brought her earnings home to him. Yet we hardly worried about someone telling our father. A wonderful thing about being Sicilian. One of the wonderful things. The silence, I mean. My father never found the food stashes or the clothes or the secret pocket in the petticoat hem. Or, if he did, he neither confronted The Tiny Mafalda nor disturbed her treasures.

  “I arranged my visits so that I would not see my father; the high point of my cleverness, I’d thought. Week after week, month after month. A sober Jeanne d’Arc riding fast over the white road, potatoes and sugar and lacy culottes were my arms against Mafalda’s hungers. Such a vainglorious little girl I was that I’d never noticed the scent of the yellow-haired devil everywhere about my undertakings. It was Leo. Long afterward I learned it was he who’d made the path from me to Mafalda. It was he who’d understood that we were lonely for each other. He who had given Agata and the stableman and others the word to facilitate my missions. To hide the doll with the blond braids woven with tiny ears of corn and dressed in a long white gown in the wooden box in the dispensa. To strew the chapel and the salons with shawls and sweaters. It was Leo.

  CHAPTER II

  “AND IT WAS LEO WHO, AFTER A WHILE, BEGAN INVITING THE Tiny Mafalda to the palace for Sunday lunch with—it was easy to understand—the intention of her eventual residence there. He would send a driver to fetch her in the morning and she would be enfolded into the rituals of the palace’s Buona Domenica, Good Sunday. Soon she became a pet among the staff, and even Yolande seemed enchanted with her. A rosy mignon, una pupetta, as they called her. A little dolly. Yet my sister, terrorized by the sheer numbers of people moving about the palace, by the way they spoke, the way they looked, by all those faces bending down to her, the unfamiliar hands pulling at her curls, did not return the affection. Whereas I thrived upon the immoderate proportions of the palace, The Tiny Mafalda cringed, cowered. Clinging to me, speaking only to me, barely whimpering a word to anyone else, The Tiny Mafalda was shy, sullen. At Mass, she wept. At table she wept, the tears spilling through the plump, babyish hands she held tight over her eyes.

  “ ‘Amore mio, cos’ hai? What is it, my love?’ ” I would ask her over and over again. She would slide herself down from the satin cushions of the pew or the red damask pillow on her chair to a safer place to weep.

  “ ‘But don’t you want to live here with me?’ I would ask her. ‘Here you will have three pretty dresses and eat cakes with violet icing every morning at eleven, just like the princess in the story. Don’t you remember?”

  “ ‘I don’t like pretty dresses anymore. And I don’t like cakes. I want Mamà to come back and you to come back and I want Papà to come back, too. I mean, I want him to come back from his being so mad all the time. Why did everyone go away, Tosca? Don’t you see, if I go away, too, there will be no one left at home to wait for the time when everyone returns? Don’t you understand that?’

  “My sister’s response to this time in our lives has always been a symbol for me, demonstrating that it’s not the events, not the traumas or the perpetrators of those traumas that shape us. It’s the stones. How the runes fell when we did. I was I. She was she. We’d been born of the same man and woman. Lived the same life. Though we loved each other mightily, we were day and night. So it was The Tiny Mafalda herself who foiled my father’s and Leo’s plan for her to live at the palace. She’d appointed herself guardian of the little house down the white road, over the two hills. She knew where she belonged even if the rest of us had forgotten.”

  “But what happened to Mafalda? Did she come to live at the palace after all? She’s here now; when did she . . .”

  “You must not keep interrupting me. Be patient and your questions will be answered in good time. Allow me to tell the story as I recall it.”

  Keep interrupting? I’ve hardly breathed, I say to myself. I nod my head.

  She proceeds.

  “Life at the palace—often disciplined, harmonious, and sometimes tumultuous, perplexing—began to feel, more and more, like my life. Apart from the carnal pleasures of the table and the aesthetic charms of the place itself, it was the schoolroom where I first felt at home. And it was there where I was diva.

  “You see, I’d learned to read when I was five. A rare enough accomplishment for a child in our village, rarer still for a girl than a boy. My mother had sent me to the village convent school where Suor Diana, a small, round nun with a whiskered chin and licorice breath, was maestra. I think there must have been no more than twenty students, collectively, in all the grades. It was she, Suor Diana, who would urge me to sit with the older children who were learning to read rather than with my own age group, who were still shouting out the alphabet. And every Saturday when I’d go with the nuns to clean the church and ready the altar for Sunday Mass, Suor Diana and I would spend an hour, two hours together, whatever time we could manage, and she would help me to read. Read aloud to me. Urge me to read aloud to her. By the time I was brought to live in the palace, I’d made my way through every textbook, every coverless, crumpled-paged book on the shelves of the children’s library in the convent house, every church pamphlet about the missions in Guadalajara and West Africa. And whenever I could get one, I’d read a newspaper, front to back, marking the pages with a fat blue Crayola wherever I didn’t understand something. I’d bring the desecrated document to my Saturday sessions with Suor Diana and, between mysteries and fables, she would translate the strange language of journalism for me, revealing the even more fantastical stories of politics and the arts and the misdeeds of a group of very bad men from the countryside that the newspaper called the clan.

  “And so at nine I could read far better than Yolande, who was nearly nine herself, while Charlotte, at seven, still battled with twenty-word picture books. It wasn’t that the princesses were less bright than I; rather it was that their education was so broad they’d yet to become proficient in any particular subject. In their curriculum, a smattering of French sufficed. An even lighter quota of English. There were faint allusions to world geography and Italian history. Mainly it was Latin, catechism, The Lives of the Saints, music, painting, and needlework—relieved by comportment and elocution—that composed the princesses’ workdays. And I was to step in with their drill. Early on I began to ask for more to read. I would devour what I was given and ask for yet more. Doubting my comprehension, the teachers asked me to recount the stories of the books I’d read; un divertissement—as Mademoiselle Clothilde, the French tutor/governess/general professoressa, would call it—to color the moments of our short intervals between studies. Agata would bring us coffee-stained milk and hard sweet biscuits and I would stand and speak of one book
or another. One day the yellow-haired devil was invited to hear my synopsis of Cuore by de Amicis and, inspired by his presence I suppose, or, more, by some stroke from the gods, I spoke at length and somehow more confidently than I had ever before, delivering my thoughts with emphatic sweeps of my arms, embellishing my talk with comparisons of other books of the genre and, here and there, quoting a passage or two, a phrase, perhaps, from the text. When I finally curtsied to Leo as I’d been taught to do by Mademoiselle Clothilde and then sat down in my place between the princesses, there was silence. No polite applause and mumbles of ‘brava’ coming up between bites of the sweets. The princesses sat stonily, upturned faces stiff as their shantunged bodices, and the other teachers, too, stood immutable for such a long moment that I—breathless, euphoric from the job I knew I’d done well—felt myself to be the only one still alive inside the benumbed spectacle of the schoolroom. Until Leo stood. He thanked me with a half nod, then summoned the teachers to the far side of the room, where he gave succinct, life-altering instructions for my intensified studies. And then he was gone. Once again, it was Leo.”

  CHAPTER III

  “FROM THAT DAY FORWARD I READ AND WROTE AND STUDIED like a Jesuit acolyte, all the while retreating farther and farther from the frilly surfaces of palace life. Leo, himself, took over my Latin instruction, added lessons in Greek, piled my reading table with volume upon volume of Greek myths so that I came to know more about the lives of the ancient gods than I’d ever known about the saints. I asked him once if I was not committing a sin by studying the pagan gods when I might have been reading in my The Lives of the Saints. He, who had been standing, sat down next to me and said, as if in confidence, that someday I would understand there was no difference between the saints and the pagan gods, that they were quite the same personages, if with certain portions of their biographies and other certain parts of their characters more exalted in one historical era than another. His breezily if quietly spoken illumination had stunned me to slack-jawed silence, but still the prince had more to say.