That Summer in Sicily

by Marlena de Blasi

“Cosimo would join me in the schoolroom at eight each morning, greet the children with me. Buongiorno, monsignore. Buongiorno, professoressa—as much threat as greeting in their singsong shouted reply. Some days Cosimo would say the rosary with them or read from The Lives of the Saints. Always he would bless them. Kiss the top of each of their heads as they stood in a row before him, then stand still for their strangling hugs and wishes for his good day. And then we began. Quite literally. The alphabet. The saying and the writing of the characters. Quickly this proved too stringent. Who could sit still for so long, who could be indoors for so long, who could not laugh and say bad words for so long? Journeys to the latrine. Cosettina gone to herd escapees. Tragic screams over the rights to the stub of a pencil. Was it true that I carried cioccolatini and bread and cheese in my purse for them? They were hungry, and I knew how that hunger felt. I could call it up like my father’s face. Their faces. Even as they shout and run and screech for me to watch them at some feat performed among the hot stones, the burning sand, the haunted starveling faces of them show through their deception. They are only in the disguise of children.

  “ ‘But they’re holding pencils and touching paper and listening—even if only for a minute or two at a time—to what you are trying to tell them. Patience. It’s a beginning,’ Leo would say.

  “Sometimes the children would take my hands, pull me out into the courtyard, ask me to come to the mensa with them, fight over who should sit next to me if I ever did come. I never did, though, until one of the women, Cosettina’s mother, invited me. I remembered months before when I’d first seen the mensa and how I’d longed to sit there. Be part of them. I knew now that Leo had been right. The only way to be part of them was to keep my distance. Be of service but be separate. The peach-skinned girl was there. They called her Olga.

  “ ‘Olga, vieni più vicino. Olga, come closer,’ the men beckoned her. A red and green kerchief, bright red and green as though it was Russian, she’d tied like a turban about her head and from it fugitive curls lay flat upon damp cheeks.

  “ ‘Pazienza, pazienza, c’è abbastanza. Patience, there’s enough,’ says the peach-skinned girl.

  “Carrying a great flat basket heaped with tiny spring onions, dirt still clinging to the gossamer fringe of their just-dug roots, Olga flits up and down the oilclothed tables, handing them out, those onions, like jewels. Two to a person. One for a child. On my plate, she places three, bends her head ’round to kiss my forehead. Says, Benvenuta. Welcome.

  “Cosettina is spooning maccheroni e ceci, someone else piles bread in front of me, another fills my cup, half and half, from the jugs of water and wine. They whack the onions on the side of the table to dislodge the dirt, drag each one through the tin can of coarse gray salt that sits on every table. As close as these mountain people have ever come to the sea. Bite the crunchy, salty white bulb, let it burn the mouth. A spoonful of pasta, a bite of onion. Pique the hungers. Gratify the hungers. The poor are masterful at both. I did what they did. I did what I used to do. I did what, for such a long time, I’d wanted to do.”

  CHAPTER IX

  “THE REVITALIZING OF THE FALLOW FIELDS, THE CARVING OUT of rudimentary roads was accomplished in a single spring and summer. It was 1948. A year after the reconstruction of the borghetto itself. Once again, workers were imported from many parts of the island so the peasants might keep to their routines. Keep to the business of feeding themselves. Leo took less and less from the peasants’ harvests of fruits and vegetables. Less and less of the capricious bounty from the olive trees and the vines. To supplement the needs of the palace, Leo brought the oldest of the peasant men up to transform great swathes of the formal gardens into orti, vegetable and herb gardens. Pumpkins and artichokes flourished where once there were beds of roses. Leo adored this allegory. The old men, too, were transformed. They were doing something for the prince, especially for him. A bent and wrinkled band of cherubim, they dug and planted and weeded, tenderly bathing the seedlings, huddling about the pristine rows, willing the buds to swell and the leaves to flare. And they did.

  As did the first crops in the newly planted fields. Wheat and corn and barley and fava beans swelled under the meek sun of winter and, sown again in spring, these same crops roasted under the great flames of the summer sun. As did, mysteriously, la novara—tomatoes and watermelons. These last asked no rain, no water fed to them from the new blue pipes laid like arteries under the flesh of the earth. Like succulents in the desert, la novara bloomed from the parched earth. Under the glittering beams of Demeter’s smile, the peasants said. It was she and San Isidoro and Santa Rosalia and Zeus himself who were variously invoked and presented with, each peasant according to his own fondness, some small sacrifice. A loaf of bread. A wreath of wild poppies. A great fire tended through the night of the full moon.

  “Significant changes had already softened their lives, and this first harvest augured well. Women swept and scrubbed their sleeping quarters and over every new windowsill there was lain, each morning, a new mattress to air and take the sun. From bolts of heavy canvas and thick fustian cotton, the women fashioned curtains for their doors and put jars of wildflowers on their single front steps. They were at home. Crisscrossing lines of lurid-colored clothing and linens flapped like buccaneer flags across the courtyard, and the bakehouse did two shifts a day. The children queued every second Saturday morning outside the tiny whitewashed room designated as an infirmary for compulsory visits with an itinerant doctor. A birthing room was arranged adjacent to it and the resident midwife in the borghetto fussed over its furnishings and counted out the new white towels, folding and refolding them every chance she got, and the mood in the borghetto was jubilant that summer of 1948. A temperate Sicilian jubilance. Don’t let the gods know how well things go lest they be tempted to send down some scherzo, if only to keep things interesting. S-h-h-h.”

  CHAPTER X

  “ ‘BUT THEY HAVE STOLEN FROM THEMSELVES. IT’S UNTHINKABLE.’

  “ ‘Nothing is unthinkable if you will only refrain from limiting yourself to the boundaries of intellect. You insist on rational thinking in an irrational situation, Leo.’

  “Leo and Cosimo are alone in the breakfast room when the princesses and I approach the door. We hear this exchange. Look at one another, wondering whether we should enter. No one else seems to be at table with the two men. Yolande steps in first, and Charlotte and I follow her. The two men are sitting at the far end of the table. They do not acknowledge us. We sit, and Yolande rings the bell. The maids bring coffee and milk and bread and biscuits, but only Yolande begins to eat and drink.

  “ ‘Papà?’ Charlotte calls out.

  “ ‘Si. Buongiorno, ragazze. Tutto bene?’ He hardly looks our way, rises, waits for Cosimo to rise, and they quit the room without another word.

  “ ‘Don’t you know?’ Yolande asks me.

  “Yolande is nearing seventeen, yet her face and body linger in some thwarted pubescence. Pinches of cornstarch paste she wears here and there about her cheeks and chin to mask the damage she’s done overnight to her blemished skin. She is awkwardly plump and, when she speaks, it is too often with infantile petulance, jutting forth her broad, square jaw. Leo’s same broad, square jaw. She has Leo’s eyes, as well, though. Blessing enough for anyone. Like the violets under the lemon trees. I look at her.

  “ ‘Don’t I know what?’

  “ ‘About the trouble in the borghetto. I went down to the kitchen to ask the cook to fix frittelle this morning and I heard them saying, Qualcuno ha rubato tutto. Someone stole everything.’

  “ ‘Perhaps you misunderstood. Don’t be concerned . . .’ I tell her.

  “ ‘I am only concerned that no one has brought the frittelle,’ she assures me.

  “Charlotte sits holding her carefully buttered bread. Casts her fawn’s eyes back and forth between her sister and me.

  “ ‘Don’t worry, Tosca. Papà will take care of them.’

  “An exquisite infanta in her full white dre
ss and blond braids, Charlotte is the dainty issue of her parents’ cold alliance. Suffusion of their coalesced charms. I think of my sister, who is one year younger than Charlotte. Wonder for the tenth time already that morning about The Tiny Mafalda. Charlotte and I have been chums in a closer way of late. Different from the initial and perfunctory rapport that proximity forced upon we three girls. I rarely speak more than a few words to Yolande in a day. But Charlotte, when she can, comes to visit me in my rooms in the evening. This sometime ritual began years ago—she was perhaps nine or ten—when she appeared late one night and, uninvited and without a word, tucked herself next to me in my bed.

  “ ‘Is it true that you are Papà’s puttanina?’

  “ ‘Do you know what that word means, Charlotte?’

  “ ‘Yes, I think it means very good friend. Or little doll, like puppetta. It sounds just like puppetta. Mamà said, Oh, Leo why don’t you go to visit your puttanina. I know she meant you, Tosca, because it was you about whom they were speaking. So what I want to know is how I can become Papà’s little doll just like you are. I don’t think Papà likes me very much. But I like him so very much, Tosca.’

  “I’d told Leo of my conversation with his younger daughter and he laughed until tears fell. Then another kind of tears came.

  “ ‘I’ve been trying all these years to be with my children, especially with Charlotte, but Simona will not have it, he said. Someday I shall explain this to you.’

  “I come back from my reverie to see Yolande, in her exasperation with the cook, busying herself with the bell. I blow Charlotte a surreptitious kiss. Rise to gather my things. Late for school. From the door, I whisper, ‘I know he will. I know your papà will take care of them.’

  “But there is no school that day. Nor has anyone gone to work in the fields.

  “Everyone is in the courtyard of the borghetto. The peasants are gathered ’round Leo, who stands in their midst, chickens scurrying about his high polished boots. Children huddle their mothers’ legs or sleep in their arms. The sun is pallid in a sky the color of stone.

  “No one speaks. Moving only her hand, Cosettina beckons me to stand near her.

  “ ‘I am not angry and I do not seek any sort of retribution. But I must know who it was among you who did this. Who, just as we are beginning to live the results of our work, has seen fit to thieve us. To thieve himself. Because I am convinced that whoever took the stores was one of us. One of us who was in collaboration with outsiders. There are signs and proof that this is the case. All I ask is that you make yourself known to me. There will be no punishment, per se. I want to understand what it was that could turn a member of this family against the rest of us.’

  “There is silence. The thick, inexorable silence of omertà is broken only by the scratching of the chickens and murmurings of fidgeting babies.

  “ ‘I will be in my office until vespers. I will wait for you,’ Leo says, as if addressing a single person. And then he’s gone.

  “Leo had assigned the building of a new storeroom. Brick and stone, it had a proper roof of new red tiles and its cement floor was painted a metallic gray, like the hull of a warship. He stocked it with drums of olive oil, demijohns of wine, sacks and sacks of legumes. At one end of the place, he’d put in worktables and a small stove. It was to be a laboratorio, a workroom where some of the women would prepare conserves and marmalades with the oranges and lemons from the agrumeti and the sacks of dried pears and apples and almonds Leo had brought in. These would have been an unimagined luxury. Even the stove is gone. The still shiny gray floor is empty, save two demijohns of wine and the cauldron in which the jam would have been cooked.

  “I go to Leo’s office. The door is open and he is reading in a black leather armchair.

  “ ‘It wasn’t so much, Tosca. A token of my patronage. A small covenant, I suppose.’

  “ ‘How could it have been taken with no one knowing?’

  “ ‘Someone knows. Perhaps most of them do. They’re Sicilians. It wouldn’t have been difficult to port the whole lot away in the flatbed of a single truck. Three, maybe four, strong men would have needed less than an hour. The goods have already been reordered. I know that no one will come to see me before vespers.’

  “ ‘I have. I’ve come to tell you that you’ll feel much better if you will think of the peasants rather than of yourself. At this moment. Loro sono vergognati. They are ashamed. You are wounded, as a father would be. You gave your children gifts and one of those children wanted not the gifts, but what the gifts could buy. Think of how the other children suffer for the deed of that one.’

  “He looks at me. Begins to rise from his chair but I don’t wait. I fall into a curtsy, if less deeply than usual, and walk out the door.”

  “There is a trail that splits the lower pastures where the sheep graze in summer, and Leo and Cosimo and I have been riding it these past mornings, greeting the peasants on their way to the fields. This morning two men lie to the side of our path, nearly concealed in the high grass and the plumes of the wild carrots. Leo dismounts, then Cosimo does. Both tell me to stay astride. But not to ride off. I look at the men and they appear to be sleeping. Whole, save the wide black-red gashes in their throats. In a low-growing scrub of wild marjoram, the old man with the mouth harp sits against a purplish rock. When I look at him, he takes up the little iron thing and begins to blow.”

  “Cosimo has ridden on ahead. To get to the church, I think, and Leo and I ride, slowly and without speaking, until we are nearly at the stables. He says then, ‘They neither desired nor needed me as arbitrator. Just as it was when Filiberto was murdered and they wanted me to keep my noble distance. Cose nostra. Our things. This was another of their things. They took care of it. I’m certain that none of them was conflicted over what was necessary to do. And it was done. Deft, inflexible, despising.’ ”

  CHAPTER XI

  “ ‘MY GRANDFATHER WOULD STAND AT THE EDGE OF THE FIELDS when the peasants were sowing or harvesting and recite hymns to Demeter.’

  “ ‘Is that what you’re going to do?’

  “It’s Sunday morning in the late September of 1948 and Leo and I, having raced over the wide, just-harvested field of a neighboring landowner, have stopped to wait for the other riders to come into view. More than a year has passed since he first spoke of the hunting lodge to me, but today we are a party of twelve bound for that very place, awaited there by cousins, Leo’s bird-shooting companions, a contingent from the palace staff who’d gone ahead to help the lodge caretaker—a man who Leo calls Lullo—to prepare a feast of colombacci, wild doves, for our Sunday lunch. The week before, the birds had been left to swing from the eaves of the barn, to hang into putrescence, Leo says, promising that the rotting innards of them will have been pummeled into suave pâtés with grappa and wild herbs, a lush paste to smear over slabs of wood-baked bread. A leccarda, in salmì, roasted with lard and juniper; he recites a litany of dishes and I tell him, spoiling his hunter’s glee, that all I shall eat is soup.

  “From the high palisade above the field where we wait, shards of shale and small stones fall. Sheep graze up there and perhaps one has strayed to the verge, disturbing the fragile rock, or is it not a sheep who’s strayed? A hawk, unseen, thrums it wings, and I think it’s only he who knows what moved the stones as, side by side, we sit in our saddles, horses bending to crop the wheat stubbles. It is my eighteenth birthday. Leo has yet to make his good wishes to me. Nor has anyone else. Tradition has it that, on one’s birthday, a small gift waits beside one’s breakfast plate. The household comes in to join the family to sing tanti auguri. This morning, nothing. I shall be eighteen without them. I dismount and, without asking, tie my reins to the pommel of his saddle. I walk away a bit from Leo and his fiendish talk of corrupted birds. He follows me.

  “ ‘I’ve been thinking that I would. I mean, that I would like to do what my grandfather did. To recite the old hymns during the harvest. The idea came from the ortolani who tend the palace vegetable gar
dens. Whenever I can, I go to sit nearby them as they work, open a book to read but instead listen to them speaking of Demeter and San Isidoro as though they’d grown up with them, which, I suppose, they did. Over the years I have passed far too little time with the peasants out in the fields or anywhere else about the farms, and so it was a revelation to me to hear these old men going on about Greek history, telling one another, in their rustic way, stories about Demeter and Persephone and Hades and Zeus and The Son of Kronos, embellishing the tales here and there, waving their arms and raising their fists, shouting sometimes or speaking softly, as though they were acting out the dramas. Which, of course, they are.’

  “He says this last as though it were yet another revelation.

  “ ‘That history is as much theirs as is the history of their own families. As much as the story of Jesus and Mary. They are descendants of the ancients who, with Demeter leading them, grew the first wheat from barren fields. That’s how it all began, Tosca. With Demeter and with their ancestors, and I envy them their easy alliance with the past. I sit and read about it but they live it. I sit with my books while they, who can’t read, carry it forth. Pass it on. As much as they can. If they could, I think many of them would be content to go back to the georgics, to Homeric chants and scythes and plow horses and passing ’round the saint. You think that I’ve forgotten what day it is, don’t you?’

  “I overlook the question. Pretend to. ‘Passing ’round which saint?’

  “ ‘The sainted wine skin. Better, a jug. Seven times between sunrise and sunset, women and maidens would walk the ranks of the harvesters with bursting wine skins or jugs of it on their heads. And the men would drink. Years ago, when all the work was done by hand, the sowing and the harvesting were as ritualistic as folk dances. Every move was choreographed. There were pipers who beat out music so the peasants could move their scythes in rhythm.’