That Summer in Sicily

by Marlena de Blasi

“ ‘Yes. I’ve traded her some of my dresses,’ I say as though it was the most reasonable business.

  “ ‘But if yours need adjusting, the sarta will take care of them for you. No need to wear Agata’s things.’

  “ ‘No, it’s not that mine want adjusting but only that I prefer Agata’s clothes.’

  “Leo says nothing. The princesses giggle. As she folds her napkin, slips it into the silver ring, Simona announces that I am never again to come to the table dressed in anything but my proper clothes. It is, of course, that very phrase that I’d hoped to elicit . . . you are never again to come to the table dressed in anything but your proper clothes. You see, I didn’t want to come to the table. Not this table.

  “After tea, I ask for a word with Leo. We walk to the lemon groves, and there I begin to tell him of my desire to move to the borghetto. I thank him for the fine life he’s given me for six years, explain to him that I think it’s time for me to get to work in another way.

  “ ‘I believe I’m better suited to work in the fields, to help in the kitchens, to care for the smaller children than I am to this life.’ I point in the direction of the palace. ‘Mine is not an impulsive request, sir. I’ve considered it for a long while now. In fact, I think that, somewhere in my mind, I’ve been considering it almost from the beginning.’ He thinks I am being false and that I want to leave the palace because he’s rebuffed me. He thinks I am embarrassed. I try to address the sentiments he’s yet to voice.

  “ ‘My request has nothing at all to do with our meeting last evening.’

  “ ‘Our meeting? Yes. I mean, no. Of course, our meeting. I wouldn’t think you’d want to leave because of that.’ As he’d done the night before, he runs an open hand through his hair. ‘And what about your studies? You’ll have precious few hours to read and I’d dare say nothing of privacy if you live down there. And what about your riding? I think you are a very romantic young woman, Tosca. And I think you see everything and everyone in a romantic way. Life is not easy in the borghetto.’

  “ ‘Nor do I find it so in the palace.’

  “He laughs now. Really laughs. Sits on the stone bench where I’ve lain so many mornings to read. ‘Nor do I find it so in the palace.’ Is he only miming me, or could he be speaking for himself? He’s quiet then. Smiling a bit or trying not to, I think.

  “ ‘You see, sir, when I first came to live here I admit that I was astonished by the palace and by all of you. I was astonished by everything. I loved swishing down the halls in my pretty dresses and I loved every ceremonious event of our days. But I want to tell you that, except when I was studying or reading, I soon began to feel as though I was playacting. You know, as if we were all reading parts from a long, long fable that didn’t seem to have an ending. Not a sad ending and not a happy ending, either. Over time this life has begun to feel less and less like a real life. I remember how I used to live before I came here, and those memories make me feel lonely. It’s not that I want to be poor again or hungry again but, strange as it might seem, I think I was happier then. Especially before my mother died. And especially when I had The Little Mafalda to care for. It was my life. For all these years since, I’ve been living someone else’s life. Yours and the princesses’ life. Pardon me, sir, but sometimes I don’t feel so grateful to you for taking me from my old life because all I’ve done is to trade one kind of poverty for another. You understand, don’t you, sir? About that poverty you can feel inside.’

  “Leo is not smiling now but looking at me as though he has seen something new in my face. He studies me.

  “ ‘Allow me some time. Perhaps there’s a way that you can have both the palace and the borghetto.’

  “I nod my head, then curtsy and begin to walk back through the garden. I think that more than the palace and more even than the borghetto, what I really want is for him to love me.”

  “For days, I think it might have been weeks even, I’d resumed my place in the schoolroom, the chapel, at table. I’d not worn any but my own clothes. I’d chosen to bide time gracefully. And then one late afternoon when I enter the library, Leo is there, as though awaiting me. No books are spread open; not even the abat-jour is switched on. I start as if to leave, as if I’ve interrupted him, but he invites me to take a chair next to him.

  “ ‘I’ve been thinking about something that appears, now, to include you, and I believe it’s time, yes, it’s the right time for us to talk about it.’

  “The words something and it he says with distastefulness, as though they signify something unpleasant. Or perhaps awkward. In any case, it seems strange to sit next to him with no chair between us as we usually sit. And with no pale yellow light and no books. The prince twirls a green and black fountain pen between his fingers and, in that short silence, I think I understand the nature of his intended talk. I smooth my skirts, sit straighter, hands clasped together and resting on my thighs. Leo is going to talk about sex.

  “ ‘Do you know the meaning of the term latifondo?’

  “Surely neither Education Sentimentale nor any of the other books I’d read ever addressed this latifondo. I consider the Latin roots and come up with ‘ample bed.’ I fear he is proposing some extraordinary act and so rise to leave.

  “He seems not to notice my change in position and proceeds, ‘Latifondo is the term used to describe vast tracts of land. A person who owns these vast tracts of land is known as a latifondista. I am a latifondista, Tosca.’

  “Well, at least he’s admitted it. That he’s a latifondista. Though I still don’t understand what his ownership of vast tracts of land have to do with his liking ‘ample beds.’ He is talking, twirling the fountain pen. I try to listen.

  “ ‘I inherited lands from both my father and my uncle and, over these past eighteen years since the property has been totally under my care, I’ve done very little to make the best use of it. We plant only a relatively small portion of the fields, use some for grazing and let the rest lie fallow. The truth is that most of my land is abandoned. I’ve made no investments in equipment, irrigation systems. I haven’t built even the most modest of roads to facilitate the transportation of crops if there were any.’

  “Certainly he is finding it difficult to get to his point. Grazing, abandoned, irrigation are three words that ring more loudly than the rest, but still I can’t find my place in what he is saying. I am looking intently at him, though, as if I understand completely. Sagely and with pursed lips, I nod every now and then. He continues.

  “ ‘Many latifondisti are against the reforms that the State is beginning to set forth as solutions to the misery so many Sicilians are trying to survive. The devastation of the war will be insoluble without reforms, but Rome is damnably slow. It will be years yet until the laws are laid down and years after that before anyone will begin to yield to them. If anyone will ever yield to them. There is no State, there is no Italian government bent on the feeding of the poor. We who have must change things.’

  “He has my attention now. His voice is quiet, almost a whisper.

  “ ‘Peasants from all parts of the island, from all parts of the mezzogiorno, the south, are rioting. They’re starving to death, they are watching their babies starve to death, and yet we—they—are surrounded by nothing but land. Fallow land. Rich fallow land from which more food could be grown than the peasants have ever dreamt of. Yet hunger is historical on this island, Tosca. Centuries of hunger were sometimes interrupted only by famine. And the so-called fortunate ones, the sharecroppers—like my sharecroppers—are hardly thriving. Mezzadria is a medieval scourge. More slaves they are than farmers, the sharecropping peasants are rarely allowed the half which, by its very meaning, mezzadria promises. Most landowners, most latifondisti, permit their peasants only enough to keep themselves upright. Only enough to keep themselves productive. The nobles feast, the peasants provide. I want the end of that. At least on my own land. My wife says I’m a zealot. I think Cosimo agrees with her.’

  “I am surprised by this familiarity he
uses in speaking of Simona. Not saying that she’s waiting in the chapel or that she will be late to table but something the two of them have discussed privately.

  “ ‘I am not calling for the decline of the gentry but for the decline of my own exploitation—albeit unwittingly—of my own peasants. What other of my dispassionate class choose to do or not do, that will belong to them. If absolutism and repression suit them, so be it.’

  “He repeats, so be it. Over and over.

  “ ‘Tosca, tu ricordi quel ragazzo che suonava il mandolino durante la festa vicino al fiume? Do you recall that boy who played the mandolin during the party by the river?’

  “ ‘Yes, I remember both of them,’ I tell him, thinking of their purloined tuxedo trousers.

  “ ‘The one called Filiberto, do you know who I mean?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ I repeat more emphatically.

  “ ‘Well, a while back, I don’t know, perhaps two or three weeks ago, someone—I don’t know who—was walking about the borghetto, talking to several of the men. The boys. He was recruiting. He was looking for those who seemed the most desperate among the peasants. These recruiters know the signs. He settled on Filiberto. Filiberto, whose parents are both ill, whose brothers and sisters—all five of them—are always hungry. Yes, the recruiter settled on him. Desperation makes good desperadoes, you see. The recruiter offered food and medicine to Filiberto—food and medicine that I should have been providing, food and medicine that the boy was too proud to ask of me, to beg of me—in exchange for a simple deed. A few moments of work. But first he invited Filiberto to join him and his friends at a place somewhere in the hills, sat him down at his table where, together, they ate and drank and laughed and smoked cigars. Theirs was a complete seduction of the desperate Filiberto. He was being asked to be part of a club; he was being asked to belong. He would be doing men’s work. This felt good, felt right. After all, he’d be working for his family, wouldn’t he?

  “ ‘I can hear them, Tosca. I know just what they said. Lie quietly under the olive tree whose trunk is split in two, they told him, and when the man with the green shirt passes by, aim for his face. Yes, to destroy the face of a man is the greatest disrespect. Aim for the face. The moon will be bright, Filiberto. You’ll see the target clearly. You’ll be positioned directly in his path. Aim for his face. You do know how to shoot, Filiberto? Every good peasant can shoot. Here, this is your lupara, your shotgun. When the man in the green shirt crosses over the path that leads to the woods, that’s the moment. Pull the trigger. Wait five seconds. Listen. Pull it once again. Slip into the woods. Run home. Sleep. Tomorrow the sacks will be outside your door. Beans, rice, potatoes, sugar, coffee. Cigarettes. The medicine in a white box. Before dawn.’ ”

  “He’d risen from his chair to pace. He’d been shouting when he hadn’t been whispering. When he looks my way, he sees that I sit with my head down. He thinks that I’m weeping. I am weeping. Almost quietly swallowing the sobs.

  “ ‘Tosca, forgive me. I didn’t mean to tell you all of this. I’d only wanted to talk with you about, about you. About you and the borghetto.’

  “ ‘It’s okay that you told me.’ I sob without restraint now. ‘But Filiberto, what’s happened to him?’

  “ ‘He’ll be buried tomorrow. There were no sacks outside his door yesterday before dawn, and when he went to try and find his way back to the place in the hills, someone shot him. Thrust him down at his mother’s door. A grotesque, faceless heap.’ And now the prince is weeping.

  “ ‘Lord help me, why have I told you? No one from the palace knows or no one knows yet or perhaps they do, but this business belongs to the borghetto. They’ll deal with it alone, want nothing of me, of us. The pain is too great. The tragedy belongs to them alone.’

  “ ‘Why?’

  “ ‘Are you asking for a reason, a motive? It could be the ease with which Filiberto was convinced to carry out this act, it could be that these men thought him weak. That he could be bought for rice and cigarettes, yes, they might have thought him weak. And so used him and discarded him. Not the right material.’

  “ ‘But if these men are killers, why didn’t they kill the man with the green shirt themselves? Why did they have to find someone like Filiberto to do it for them?’

  “ ‘Theirs was an expression of their Sicilianness. They place themselves outside of and hence are indifferent to any form of reason or law but their own. There is no State in Sicily. The feckless governing that is meted out of Rome has never breeched the narrow chasm of sea that separates Sicily from the peninsula. Rural Sicilians have been living a brigand’s life for as long as they’ve been hungry. There is no State to protect Sicilians. Men have made their own State. Perhaps it is the Scylla herself who holds the heads of State underwater while she sings her siren song. Thrashes them against the rocks for her pleasure. Yes, perhaps it’s the Scylla who has kept the State from its arrival in Sicily. The men who killed Filiberto—and it may very well not have been the same ones with whom he made his pact—determined that he was in some way troublesome. No cunning. No courage. It’s possible that the person who ordered Filiberto’s death thought he wasn’t good. You see these clans, these bandits, believe in their own goodness, their righteousness.’ He walks to my chair, places his hands on my face. ‘I and my pitiful little revolution are too late. I’m too late, aren’t I, Tosca?’

  “ ‘No. Not even a prince could have changed Filiberto’s destiny. And I don’t think you can change mine, either. If you think that because of this, this happening, that I will no longer want to live down there, think again. It makes me want to go all the more.’

  “ ‘Yes. Sempre di più. Always more. Even now, the effects of the festa are still at work on your sense of romance. Oddly enough, even after all that’s happened, they are at work in me, as well. But, as the story of Filiberto has screamingly brought home to us, the festa was not a view on the everyday life of the borghetto. Not since my father was alive has there been any such event.

  “ ‘Rather than leaving them to piece together the means for some austere form of celebration that would be highlighted by my sending down some token sweet or whatever else I might convince the cooks to furnish, this time I sent a driver to take fresh sardines from Trapani. Cosimo and I went to the markets in Enna and brought back every beautiful vegetable and fruit we could find. I cracked barrels from the palace cellar, had firewood brought in. I did what I should have been doing for all these fifteen or twenty years since my father’s been gone. But I did not take his example. His generous, affectionate example. I opted to follow the culture of the haves and the have-nots. Accepted it as a societal truth, telling the hungry people who worked for me to eat from that proverbial cake. I sat indulging my passions in my saddle or my reading chair or at table and, once in a while, I wandered down to the borghetto to feign commiseration or to pay fleeting respects to the sacrament of a baptism or a wedding. To lay a flower on a coffin. And yes, sometimes I’d wander down to drink wine with the father of a freshly blossomed girl, to view her as I would a horse I’d like to buy, and, often as not, I’d ride away with an appointment for another jus primae noctis, right to the first night. I’m not telling you that I am evil or even that I am without sympathy. I am telling you that I have been ignoble, and to admit ignobility may be the greatest form of a man’s own damnation of himself. I have been smug and full of pretense and triviality. I have been corrupt in my passivity. It wanted a war, Tosca, to wake me. There are things I saw in the borghetto during these past years, things Cosimo and I witnessed, that I can never forget. Though I may not have been the direct cause of that suffering, I am not without blame for it. Of what happened to Filiberto, I am the cause. And I shall have to live with that in the best way I can.’

  “ ‘Filiberto made his choice.’ ”

  “ ‘Filiberto made a desperate choice.’ ”

  “ ‘Perhaps. But mine is not a desperate choice. It’s not the festa that brought me to my desire to live in the borghetto
. It’s the people, sir. The peasants themselves. I’m one of them and I want to be among my own people.’

  “He is quiet for what seems a long time. As though the green and black pen absorbs him entirely. ‘That’s an interesting conclusion. What you’re saying is that you want to go home. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  “ ‘I didn’t think of it precisely that way, but, yes. Now that you say it, it’s my way back home. The borghetto is home.’ I say this slowly, testing the words. wondering if they’re true.

  “ ‘Don’t you think that, given the chance, any one of the young women your age or younger or older, almost anyone from the borghetto, wouldn’t trade places with you?’

  “ ‘Perhaps any one of them would. At least for a while. Until the pull of kinship takes over. The need to be among one’s own tribe. What you can’t live without is very different from what we can’t live without. My little sister understood that before I did.’

  “ ‘But you understand it now? I see. Once again, you are being romantic. But let’s go forward. You know that the peasants don’t dance and sing every day. Good. And you must know that they work far longer than they rest. You know that, don’t you? But did you know that often there is not enough food on their tables? My own farmers are hungry, Tosca, while we sit up here already sated, waiting to be served some quivering, towering pastry that we nibble as though it was made of poisoned jelly.’

  “ ‘But I know that the cooks send down baskets and boxes full of food to the borghetto.’

  “ ‘Yes, the leavings on our table are given to the peasants. Feeding the animals. Parting with what one doesn’t want is not giving. I can do better than that. I shall do better than that, Tosca. I shall never again keep anything worth giving away. I am not so romantic to think I can compensate these people for their own suffering or for the historical poverty that is their legacy. Was. Was their legacy. But I can help them now. The misuse can end with me. Will you help me?’