That Summer in Sicily

by Marlena de Blasi

  I know she seeks no answer.

  “How each one of us adjusts the dream to accommodate real life. That’s what separates us. One blames and wails while another gets to work. At the end of any human story, I think it’s only the capacity to reconcile the dream with reality which separates characters. Well, by then, by the time I was fifteen, I’d long been finished with whatever blaming and wailing I was going to do but, from time to time, I was still wont to take out the pieces of those old dreams and give them free run over me. But the sight of that festival I came upon by the river ripped open the small place inside me where I’d hoarded the old pictures. Washed it clean and made room for something real. I understood that what I was seeing, what I was coveting in that riverside scene, was already mine. Even though I’d never lived among that race of graceful creatures, I was of them. Their legacies were mine, their culture was mine, and I felt that as fiercely as I did that the make-believe life in the palace was not mine. But I’m going too fast with this story and I know that I am. Let me get back to the festa.

  “A group of women were smashing artichokes against flat rocks and stuffing them with a paste of oil and herbs just like we do here at the villa. Someone else was fixing sardines with great chunks of tomatoes in long, shallow pans with holes poked in their bottoms and setting them to smoke over embers of dried wild fennel stalks. Tables made of boards and barrels were covered with embroidered cloths and laid with stacks of tin plates, and the men drank in time with their work and the women sang in time with theirs, and one could hardly tell who belonged to the palace household and who to the borghetto. Everyone seemed happy mixed up together. I was happy. Leo seemed happy. He seemed exuberant, in fact, striding from one vignette to another, putting his hand to the preparations, tasting a sauce, filling and refilling the cups of his peasants. Shirtsleeves, riding pants, boots, all that blond hair slicked back with neroli oil and sweat, he was beautiful, and there wasn’t a woman there—save his own wife and daughters—who didn’t think so. And that was the second thing I’d understood on that third of May. I understood that it wasn’t one of the troubadors in the tuxedo pants I wanted. I was in love with the prince.”

  “The festa went from lunch to riposo and on to foraging walks in the woods and fishing in the river and then back to the table. There was music all day long, but when the sun began to set and the just-lit torches glistened up in the white fog off the river, the troubadors exchanged bold, bright songs for minor-key wails, strumming them softly, the taut, tinny pings mingling with the wind. Two girls began to dance. I knew one of them. She was called Lidia and I’d seen her sometimes when she’d come to help the palace maids. I didn’t know the other girl. She was different from Lidia. Different from all of us. The skin of her was the color of ripe peaches set in a red glass bowl and her eyes were long, dark Arab eyes. Her high, unbound breasts moved under her loose white dress as she swayed tenuously, her eyes looking somewhere far away. I think all she could see were the stars.

  “Face to face, the girls held one another by their elbows, their bodies illumined by the two small fires that burned on either side of them. The troubadours having laid down their mandolins, there was no music. No one would have heard it anyway since everyone sat or stood or crouched in a circle ’round them, hardly breathing for their enchantment with the peach-skinned one. Lidia sat down after a while, leaving her partner to dance alone, and an old man with a mouth harp sent up a mesmerizing keen that seemed to rouse the peach-skinned girl from her trance. She moved her arms and legs as though she’d just awakened from a long sleep. Stretching herself, testing herself until, in a slow, deliberate pirouette, all the while kilting up the skirt of her dress, securing it in a knot high up on her thighs, she began to turn in place. Tight, contained turns, her neck proud, her arms arched in a wide embrace, she propelled herself slowly, seeming to listen for the next cue from the old man with the mouth harp until, hearing it, she twirled faster. Faster yet and now in the classic ballerina’s pose—one leg bent, the small bare foot of it held fast against the other knee—she whirled herself upon one long, powerful leg. Faster, faster yet until it was she who commanded the man with the mouth harp and his keen became a hectic, passionate scream and still she whirled faster, flinging the mass of her dark ringlets to slap against her shoulders, always bringing her eyes back to the same critical point as she completed another turn. Faster, always faster, she hurled her splendid body until, like a dervish, she seemed to dissolve into the dark starry night. White smoke with black Arab eyes. Always she turned her Arab eyes back to him. Always back to Leo.”

  “There was nothing left for any of us to do after the peach-skinned girl’s dancing and, little by little, the festa was broken down, packed up, and we walked, single file, upon the packed-earth paths among the wheat fields back home. Half crazed with envy of the girl who—even to my fifteen-year-old eyes—had surely offered herself to Leo, I refused the jasmine-scented bath Agata had drawn for me, threw myself, facedown, upon the yellow and white bed. I wept. The whole night through I wept, grieving with that envy but just as much for something else. Something that I think was an ending. You see, as the peach-skinned girl danced in the dim light of those last flames, it felt as though she’d taken something from me. With every turn, she took more. And as she spun herself fast into that black night, the whole of my childhood went with her. Broken, empty, I was less than I’d been before, or was it only that I was different? Agata kept vigil over me all that night, rocked me in her arms until dawn seeped between the shutters and, as though the new light would stay the pain, told me, ‘It’s over now, little one.’ I remember her saying that, her tiny oval eyes swollen from sympathetic tears, her own thin body trembling with exhaustion.

  “Yes, it’s over, I’d told myself, too. Kept repeating the phrase. Too, I repeated what I’d told myself the day before by the river. The scene ripped open the small place inside me where I’d hoarded the old pictures. Washed it clean and made room for something real. But what was real? Was my love for Leo real? Was my envy of the peach-skinned girl real? Was life at the palace real? Was the festa by the river real? Maybe dreams are all we have. Maybe trying to live dreams is to dash them on the rocks.

  “Three revelations battled for my attention. I loved Leo. I was envious of the peach-skinned girl who I began to see more as the symbol of all women, any woman who might inspire Leo’s affection. I was shocked to admit that this envy must include Simona herself. As I considered this, the list of potential irritants became very long. But the third revelation was, I think, the most shocking of all. I could no longer be at home in the palace. Now that I had witnessed how the peasants lived, it was in the borghetto with them where I wanted to be. I didn’t care about embroidered stockings or ornamented puddings or Greek or Latin or Brahms or even The Lives of the Saints; I wanted to work in the fields and carry wine on my head and swing my hips and sing sad songs about love. I wanted to ride bareback again, I wanted to feel that hole in my stomach at high noon and fill it with soup and bread, and I wanted to kiss Leo. Shrieking from the soul of me was the desire to kiss the prince. Each revelation battled against another until the stones fell in place. First I must get to Leo.

  “I would get to Leo before the peach-skinned girl would get to him. Before he could get to her.”

  “By this time, Agata had washed and dressed, gone to inform the household that I was unwell on that morning after the festa, telling them she would look after me, keep me quietly in my rooms. I began to form my plan.

  “In part, it was Flaubert who guided me that morning. Flaubert via Mademoiselle Clothilde. You see, while Charlotte and Yolande and I would be at work with our written lessons, Mademoiselle often read by the schoolroom fire or in her chair under the magnolias. During a certain period, she seemed always to be reading books by someone named Flaubert and, more often than not, one book in particular. Its title was Education Sentimentale. Delicate brown script on a burnt-brown suede cover and I’d longed to read it. After bouts of thi
eving food and clothes for The Tiny Mafalda, my skills were sharp for the unsanctioned borrowing of Mademoiselle Clothilde’s books. I’d never kept any one of them long enough to distress her unduly, for in an afternoon or overnight, I’d gorge upon one or another of them and nimbly position the book just to the left or the right or under or over the place where she’d left it the day before. By the time I’d taken Education Sentimentale for the third time, Mademoiselle asked me what I’d thought of it. She revealed that she wasn’t much older than I when she’d first ‘come upon’ it. I remember we laughed an almost complicit laugh, though neither of us—or was it only I?—could have imagined using certain passages from the book to seduce the prince. And yet it was exactly memories of Flaubert that cleared my head that morning after the festa, that set me upon my path to Leo.

  “Only Agata would be privy to my plan. And once she heard it, she sat quietly, swallowing hard a few times, looking at me as though I were someone else. Appraising me.

  “ ‘Get in the tub,’ was her first directive.

  “She put me in to soak and, meanwhile, scrubbed my hair with French soap, rinsed it with cold water and white vinegar and lemon juice, and then rubbed every centimeter of me with a tulle bag stuffed with crushed almond shells. Wrapped in a towel, I sat while she brushed my hair, twisted hanks of it up into strips torn from an old sheet. She rubbed me all over with neroli oil, burnishing my skin with a piece of linen until I shone like satin in the firelight, and I slept then. A cold cloth across my eyes, I slept while Agata sat beside my bed, transforming an organdy skirt into a nightdress, trimming it with lace she’d removed from a pair of Simona’s pillowcases. Then, Agata slept, too, with the nightdress across her lap, and she was sleeping still when I awoke and slipped from the bed into the dressing room to look at my naked self in the big yellow-framed mirror.

  “Gangly and long where she’d been plump and hard, I struck the same pose the peach-skinned girl had struck. One leg bent, resting upon the other, arms reaching out in a half circle, neck stretched, chin up, I lacked only the old man with the mouth harp to get me started. I tried a turn. Fell back halfway onto my bony derrière, re-struck the pose. Agata had come to the doorway but, rapt as I was in pursuit of the peach-skinned girl’s twirls, I hadn’t noticed. When she could no longer keep her laughter to herself, she threw off her dress, her slip, her camisole and culottes and joined me in front of the mirror. She would show me how. A less likely ballerina than even I, we left off the dancing in favor of the rose-petal kiss. A kiss like the one Roseannette gave to Frédéric in Education Sentimentale.

  “I told Agata how Roseannette had held a rose petal between her front teeth, inviting Frédéric to nibble it, an aperitif before her lips. We practiced. Yes, that would work. Agata dressed herself, disappeared out the door, and when she returned, pulled a tiny gold pot from the inside pocket of her dress. Simona’s tiny gold pot. Simona’s pillowcases. Simona’s husband. She rouged my nipples, then the soft, fleshy part of my lower lip, told me she’d bring me some dinner, and was off to her chores. Agata had done some reading of her own, I’d thought. I lay down and reviewed the plan.

  “I was to rest until the household was quiet, until Agata came to my door to tell me that Leo had gone to his rooms. She would busy herself in his wing for thirty minutes longer, determine that he remained in his rooms. That he was alone. She would then come back to take the rags from my hair, brush it loose, button the nightdress, and send me on my way to him. A rose petal between my teeth.

  “But what would Leo think as I stood before him? What would the prince do about the rose petal? About me?

  “It was true that I had grown taller than I had grown full but it was also true that my nubility had flowered. I’d seen the recognition of it in Simona’s eyes. In the eyes of the princesses and of the young priest who’d come to help Cosimo, and in the eyes and the blushes of the adolescent males from the borghetto who I’d seen throwing coins to determine which of them would bring the firewood to the schoolroom or who would saddle my horse and, for a half second, hold me about the waist as I mounted. Nearly everyone’s gaze reflected the changes in me except Leo’s gaze.

  “Truth was, I’d been slowly falling in love with the prince since I was nine years old. I liked everything about him. I liked his voice and the shape of his jaw and the rough feel of his coat brushing my shoulders when he adjusted my chair at table. For months, years, I’d lived in constant expectation of seeing him, if only as he passed the door to the music room, or of hearing him in discourse with Cosimo or one of the overseers or some attorney or local politician as I raced by one salone or another. How many errands and duties had I contrived only to put myself in his way?

  “As I lay there waiting for the time to pass, I wondered about things that, before now, I’d always tried to push away. Why did Leo bring me to the palace? Why did people whisper as I left a room, or stop whispering when I entered one? Was my sense of exile—of belonging nowhere and to no one—was it real, or was it an empty husk I cherished, proof that I was once the savage motherless child? Proof that perhaps I was still? I lay there with my hard little rouged nipples and my silky skin and my lemon-smelling hair tied up in rags and, as though some phantom inquisitor had entered my rooms and made himself comfortable at the foot of my bed, I was assaulted with questions. Who was I to be contemplating another woman’s husband? Were the whisperers right? Was I, among other perhaps more noble reasons, brought to the palace to be the prince’s whore? And, on this first day of what I thought to be my newborn adulthood, was I behaving with the passion of a woman or only with the wantonness of a hell-bent child? I did not know.

  “I heard every mournful clang of the chapel bells, my thoughts advancing and retreating with each quarter hour from four in the afternoon until nearly midnight, my heart shuddering at every stroke, the shame in me keeping time with the excitement.

  “Agata had not returned save to leave a supper tray. Leo must have had guests, or perhaps he was in the library. Perhaps he’d gone away, but no, if that were so, Agata would have come to tell me. Yes, she would have come to tell me, and surely she’d be here at any moment to say that all was well. To brush my hair. But, no. There was no Agata as the bells tolled midnight, nor when they began their remorseless counting all over again from one. With the edges of my blanket, I rubbed the rouge from my mouth and my nipples, and I slept.”

  “I’d been sleeping for only moments when Agata came to wake me, to tell me it was time. Leo was in his rooms. The corridors were clear.

  “Hurry, she kept repeating, as much to herself as to me. Fumbling with the rags and the brush and fastening the nightdress with two buttons wrong, she pushed me out into the hall, made the sign of the cross over me, and closed the door hard in my face. I began to run. At the first flight of stairs, I hesitated. No rose petals. No rouge. No shoes or slippers, and the stone was cold. Even in May, the stone was cold and I barely touched it, barely touched the banisters as I turned up the next flight. The next. I had never been to Leo’s rooms, not officially, though in my early reconnaissance of the palace, I’d gone up to find the prince’s apartment. To walk to and fro in front of the place where he slept. To stay, for a while, where he was. To listen at his door. Now I listened at his door. Nothing. I knocked.

  “ ‘Avanti. Come in.’

  “Frozen. Silent. I wait. I knock again.

  “ ‘Avanti, Cosimo. Sono ancora in piedi. Come in, Cosimo. I’m still upright.’

  “I open the door and, standing by the fire, his half-dressed figure seems a kilometer distant from me.

  “ ‘Tosca. Are you ill? What is it?’

  “He walks swiftly toward me, and I walk more swiftly to him. We are about to collide but I, daughter of a horse thief, bareback rider from the age of three, I, horsewoman superb, I leap at the prince, mount him, wrap my legs about his waist as I would a horse’s belly. His shock of yellow hair is a mane. I kiss the prince. With my un-rouged lips, I cover his face with kisses. His face, his he
ad, his ears, his eyes. He is pulling at my arms, pushing my face away from his, and all the while I am kissing him. He pulls my body from his, drops me to the floor. With an open hand, he straightens his hair. Reaches for a red dressing gown. I rise. The door is still wide open and, tying the belt of the red dressing gown, he walks past me to it. Holds it wider. His eyes look somewhere beyond me. I walk to the door, halt before him. Look up at him, dare him to look back, and he does. At once vague and transfixing is his gaze, and it’s I who looks away first. I walk out the door, walk imperiously down the corridor as though two pages hold the exceedingly long train of my gown. He watches me. Surely he must be watching me, but no. I hear his door shut, and then I run.”

  CHAPTER VI

  “NEXT MORNING NOTHING IS CHANGED. I’D KISSED LEO, EVEN IF he hadn’t kissed me back. I’d calmed the envy in me over the peach-skinned girl, or pretended I had. Nothing is changed save that, dressed in one of Agata’s severe cotton work dresses, my hair braided into a single plait that hangs to my waist, I sit at breakfast ravening my way through enormous quantities of bread and butter and warm milk, asking politely for more. And more. Apart from these symbols of metamorphosis itself, nothing at all is changed.

  “ ‘Tosca, is that one of Agata’s dresses you’re wearing?’ In my general direction and rather too brightly, Simona asks this.