That Summer in Sicily

by Marlena de Blasi

  “ ‘Like this?’ I stride the shorn field, twisting my wrist as though it held a scythe, swinging my body as though it were cutting wheat. As though it were dancing.

  “ ‘Yes. Somewhat like that,’ he says.

  “I run back to him. ‘One field. Let’s just harvest a single field in the old way. For good luck. As a prayer. The other fields would be cut with the machines. Will you do it?’

  “ ‘Is that what you’d like as a birthday gift? A ceremonial harvest? I can’t put all the pieces together by tomorrow when we begin, but I can try to be ready for the last field. Five, maybe six days from now. Is that it? Is that the gift you’d like?’

  “I look at Leo, watch him pull a sack of fried sugared bread from his saddlebag. He feeds the horses and I wonder, for what must be the ten thousandth time, who am I to you? Yes, I answer to myself, I would like this ceremonial harvest as my gift but, as much, I would like to understand: Who am I to you?

  “Since that afternoon in the library when Leo first began to tell me about his plans for the borghetto, for the peasants—that day just after Filiberto had been murdered—we two have been working in a kind of partnership. It has become the natural, the waited-for event when we meet once or twice each day to speak of his progresses, to speak of mine.

  “ ‘The farthest northern field has been planted. The machinery broke down and broke down again but, somehow, the last rows were finished before sunset. I drove the tractor.’

  “Cosettina read magnificently today and the children were so quiet. Enchanted by the story. Enchanted by her, intrigued that one of them, one of their own, had mastered all those jumbled letters that actually form words. They raised their hands, asked questions. It was wonderful.

  “ ‘Will you spend some time in the infirmary tomorrow morning? The doctor will instruct you on what to look for. The children are fearful of him. And timid in my presence. They trust you.’

  “As a couple might, as a father and daughter might, we collaborate. Much of the time, this suffices. It contents. The household and the peasants have come to look upon this collaboration with a benign neutrality. It is only the whisperers whom we fatigued, the famished music-hall audience come to see the lusty tale of the prince and the puttanina. Only a bucolic poem read by the hero and his muse did they get for their money. But Simona had strutted in the wings, poised to deliver a lascivious intermezzo. She brought lovers to stay at the palace. Sometimes introduced them into the family circle as distant cousins or sons of old friends. They sat at table with us, at Mass with us. They lounged in the salons. Gave orders to the staff. Leo was gracious. The princesses were mortified; other guests, visiting family, were outraged. The tables turned. Whisperers always know the right thing to say.

  “I, for one, have always taken Leo’s part. By birth, by comportment, it’s he who is the noble. Simona is nothing more than rich.

  “ ‘Her character has always been, shall we say, hysterical.’

  “ ‘Frenzied.’

  “ ‘Despotic.’

  “ ‘Poor dear princesses.’

  “ ‘Poor dear Leo.’

  “ ‘And that lovely Tosca. Where does she fit into this grand imbroglio?’

  “They want to know. I want to know.”

  “We walk our horses up the long pebbled road to the lodge, hand them over to the stablemen as the cousins and the hunting mates come out to greet us. All I see is this place Leo calls the lodge. A castle, it is. A turreted tower—no, two towers—with bowed iron balconies wrapped about the mullioned windows like the bones of a hooped skirt. Like those at the palace, the great marble portals are ornamented with the crests of the illustrious Anjou. Below, vaulted loggias are sustained by red marble columns, the carved capital of each one the face of a goddess. A saint. I am beginning to understand. The roof, steep and peaked in a way I’d never seen, is covered in small ovals of what look to be porcelain. As though the gods, sated from feasting, hurled their plates down upon the castle and, liking the felicitous pattern in which they fell, fixed the pieces of them in gold light.

  “And what good ghost was it who long ago flung fistfuls of seeds from the towers? Everywhere ’round the place there are accidental gardens, blown tarnished roses gorging on the sun, climbing where they will, oleander tall as old trees and, here and there, soaring rusty mountain pines. The dappled trunk of a lone magnolia is cleaved to form a bed. There is no sign of a mortal hand.

  “ ‘Gianpiero Sultano, ti presento Tosca Brozzi.’

  “Leo introduces me to his guests and I smile, say molto lieto, but I see only the gardens. I am not yet present among the embracing and greeting. I am in the tower flinging hollyhock seeds. Sleeping inside the heart of the magnolia.

  “While we still mill about, small cups of cool almond milk are passed to us by a beautiful red-haired boy. The caretaker’s son. In short leather pants and a fine white shirt, his feet brown and bare, he is called Valentino. He may be seven, and I think he must be the official host of the day, as he tells the other women riders and me of the ewers of lemon water and towels he’d set out for us on a table under a pergola.

  “ ‘Venite, Venite,’ he says, leading us inside the shade with the same joy as if the path led to the baby in the manger.

  “A long stone table has been laid under the loggia on the side of the house that looks to sheepfolds and an olive grove. Baskets and buckets of wildflowers and weeds and thick ochre candles in black iron holders ornament the table. Everyone is seated. The maids and the stablemen who’ve come from the palace. Lullo, the caretaker, and Valentino, his son. At the palace, the maids and the stablemen do not sit at the prince’s table. Now each person takes the hand of the person next to him and Cosimo says grace. I am seated between Leo and Valentino. It is the first time I hold Leo’s hand.

  “Terra-cotta pitchers of wine and plates and platters of the glorified doves are passed from person to person rather than being served by a steward. A composite of the way things are done at the palace and the way things are done in the borghetto. The best of each has come together here. I take a thick trencher of bread spread with the black paste and bite it directly from my hand as the others do. As Leo does. It’s splendid, and I take another. Lullo holds forth.

  “ ‘Roast the grappa-washed innards in a copper pan over a good fire with rosemary, salvia, black olives, garlic, the dried peel of an orange, and red wine. As the wine is consumed, add more. Never let the pan parch. Never let the innards drown. When the mess is black as old blood and the perfumes cause madness, scrape it into a mortar and pound it to butter. Let it rest in the mortar under a clean white cloth for two days.’

  “Amen, we say as one.”

  “Bottles of marsala and moscato and small silver cups. Plums on their leafed branches in bowls of water. Biscuits crusted in sesame seeds. Almond paste formed and colored to look like India figs set on a tray among the real fruit. ‘Guess which is which,’ Valentino challenges, placing the tray before us. It’s nearly five and only Leo, Cosimo, and I still sit at table, most others having made for the darkness of their bedrooms. A blessed rest.

  “We will return to the palace in the automobile that one of the staff had driven earlier to the lodge. Our horses will be fetched and transported back tomorrow. We will start out at dusk, stopping halfway at a locanda of which Leo is fond. A stone house, or the ruins of it, set in a pine woods. There’ll be cheese and wine. A walk to stretch our legs.

  “ ‘I will stay the night here,’ says Cosimo. ‘Go on to Enna in the morning and be back at the palace by dinner. The Curia is not pleased with me.’

  “Leo laughs. ‘That must mean that God is dearly pleased with you, my friend.’

  “The two men rise, shake hands. Embrace.

  “ ‘A domani, Cosimo.’

  “ ‘A domani, principe. A domani, Tosca.’ The priest takes my hand, brings it to his lips without touching them to my skin. ‘Tanti auguri,’ he says. “Tanti auguri, cara Tosca.’ He takes his leave.

  “The all-mo
rning ride, the sun, the wine. The great dreamy work of flinging the seeds from the towers. The innards of a dove. I would like to sleep. More, I want to stay with him. Is it my birthday that makes me bold?

  “ ‘You brought me to the palace all those years ago with the intent of making love to me, didn’t you?’

  “Leo has been feeding bits of almond paste to the hunting dog that sits at his feet. He looks at me now while still running his hand across the dog’s muzzle. He nods, as though he has been expecting my question.

  “ ‘The intent, as you call it, was not defined as such. You were a child. And I knew any number of delightful women with whom I might amuse myself. Certainly when I first saw you, the potential of your beauty struck me. Intrigued me. But I did not pace the upper floors, waiting for you to ripen.’

  “It’s I who am caught off guard with his parry. His openness. I like it, and yet it frightens me. A rite of passage.

  “ ‘You know it was your father who offered you to me. He found you incorrigible even at nine. He called you a scowling vixen. Said your sister was as meek as your mother was. When he came to me to propose your becoming my ward, I could barely hear him out. I’ve always found it painful to listen to one father or another—more, to a mother—who has decided to surrender a child. Whatever the reason. Often they are babies, newborn bastards whom the nuns have refused because all the cribs in the convents are full. Since the rich don’t seem to breed as easily as the poor hereabouts, sometimes the bastards are sold to a barren couple who will often pass off the child as its own miracle. And, in my position, there are always the children of one’s own succumbed peasants. Influenza, consumption, a tired heart that explodes one afternoon in the fields. A slip, a fall, a cry for help unheard over the noise of the thresher. Often there is neither sufficient space nor food among the other families to permit any one of them to take in another little soul. Said little soul is then bathed and dressed and combed and brought to the servants’ entry. With apologies. With gratitude. From time to time my parents had as many as ten or twelve of these orphans in our home.’

  “ ‘Has it happened to you? Did people leave babies in your care?’

  “ ‘Of course it’s happened. But Simona is not a woman like my mother was. I pushed fat white envelopes through the Catherine wheel of one convent or another. Waited by the gate for some shrouded nun to take the swaddled bundle from my arms. I have always done this myself. Thinking that somehow my personal passing over of the baby would assure care and safety. Even affection. I have a book that records each child’s placement. And the yearly envelopes that I continue to send in their names. Still I am plagued. The giumpe is often not sacred.’ Elbows on the table, head in his hands, Leo is quiet. After a while, ‘But what your father did was rare, at least in my experience or my memory. I’d never before been faced by a young, able-bodied man who enjoyed what was, for those times, a relatively thriving business and yet who sought to ‘turn over’ to me his perfectly healthy, perfectly bright, perfectly lovely nine-year-old daughter.’

  “ ‘I’ve never thought about what your first encounter with my father must have been like. I mean, how the two of you arrived at your agreement. I’m certain my father made no such thing as a sentimental appeal. A straight-forward business discussion it must have been, for I was neither a bastard nor an orphan. I was chattel. An excess of goods that could be turned into cash. Or was it horses? Rather than my father beseeching you to take me because he couldn’t care for me, he sold me to you, didn’t he? I knew it back then as I know it now.’ I am shocked at my own words.

  “The spilling of bitterness was not deliberate and yet I have launched it. Leo comes to where I sit, bends to take me in his arms. A paternal embrace. I push him away. I stand up before him in a coquettish pose.

  “ ‘Look at me. Am I a pitiful creature? Am I broken, cowering because my father didn’t want me? I think not. I won’t tell you that I have never felt sadness because of his treatment, his eventual liquidation of me. I won’t tell you that. But whatever pain there was had begun to dissolve before you came to fetch me. You didn’t save me, sir. I saved myself.’

  “How ungrateful I am. What devil do I channel? I sit back down. Leo sits next to me. Without looking at him, I dare to touch the back of his hand that rests on his thigh. I touch his hand with the tips of my fingers. Penitence.

  “ ‘Tell me about your father. Some of what you remember about him,’ Leo says, shifting my hand to lie inside his.

  “ ‘Early on even my instinctual love for my father began to feel wrong to me. At first, when my mother died, I would reach out to him. Mimic her, I suppose. After all it was my turn to be Mamà, wasn’t it? I’d put an extra biscuit beside his coffee in the morning, which, because they were all counted out and had to last for a certain number of days, he must have known meant one less for me. He always ate the biscuit but he never said thank you. He hardly spoke to me at all.

  “ ‘He never came home until late in the evening. I would put The Tiny Mafalda to bed, tell her the story of the princess who had three beautiful dresses and who bathed in warm milk and ate cakes with violet icing every morning at eleven and whose mother promised she would never, ever die. I would kiss her, hold her hand until she fell asleep, and would go then to sit on the step outside our house, the cat in my lap, to wait for my father. Sometimes I would fall asleep like that, awakening only when the cat started at my father’s approach.

  “ ‘Papà, I was waiting for you. Are you hungry? I left an egg for you and some bread.

  “ ‘He’d sit and eat the egg, tear at the bread with his teeth the way Mama told us only animals did. I’d stand beside the table babbling on about how long it took for The Tiny Mafalda to fall asleep, or about how her arm still hurt and her shoulder in the place where she’d fallen on it last week. And if there wasn’t any, I’d always invent some good news for him. Mama used to do that, too. About the hay looking as though it would last another week or about the mushrooms I’d found under the big pine that morning on the way to school and that I’d already set to dry on the roof. I’d stand there talking and talking, not daring to stop for fear of the silence I’d hear instead of his voice responding to me. I didn’t like the silence between him and me. He’d open the spigot on the barrel and hold his glass under it, all the while looking at me. Drink down the wine in one or two long swallows. Unbuckle his belt, step out of his pants, and lie down on his bed, which I’d made up with the sheets that Anna Lavanderia had left all clean and folded that afternoon or, if it wasn’t her day, the ones I’d smoothed and tucked tight under the mattress just the way he liked them.’

  “ ‘Who was Anna Lavanderia?’

  “Does it really matter who Anna Lavanderia was? I ask myself. I understand that my story makes Leo feel sad, that he searches for an excuse to distract me from it, and I oblige.

  “ ‘Anna Lavanderia. That was what everyone called la lavandaia, the washerwoman, who went from house to house—each one on a certain day—to do the washing and the hanging out to dry in the sun. She’d come back in the afternoon after her rest for the folding and the ironing. Mostly rich people used her, but since The Tiny Mafalda and I were just too small to handle the weight of the sheets, my father began bartering with Anna when my mother died. A sack of tomatoes and two cabbages one week. Artichokes or rice or sometimes things from the dispensa that I’d thought I’d hidden from him. Like sugar and real butter to make a cake for Mafalda.’

  I return to my story.

  “ ‘So, still saying nothing, my father would lie down on his bed, fold his arms under his head, and stare at me. I never could tell whether he was waiting for me to bend to kiss him the way Mama had taught us to do. But I never did. I never once bent to kiss him after Mama died. I’d take up the cat, climb the ladder with the fat beast in my arms, and settle us both down beside The Tiny Mafalda. I’d stay awake for a while, at least until I heard the even rumbling of his sleeping breath. I was the vigilessa, the guardian. The cat and I. Together
we would keep The Tiny Mafalda safe.

  “ ‘But it wasn’t long before I stopped being the next mama and started being just plain Tosca. It wasn’t right that I try to be mama. It felt like I had to go to confession every time I’d flash him my big, sweet mama smile and tell him I’d saved an egg for him. The mama smile felt like a lie. It felt better when I just went about my business, not even considering what might or might not make him happy. I began to think only about The Tiny Mafalada and me. And about my friends and my teacher and the people who were so happy to see Mafalda and me in the market every morning.

  “ ‘I’d put my mother’s brown purse across my proud flat chest, and even though it hung down below my knees, I thought it made me look fancy. How I loved that purse! How I loved brushing my sister’s hair, braiding it tight and neat, using my own spit to smooth it ’round the parts and tying the ends with red ribbons, sometimes pink, buckling her sandals, taking her by the hand. Sei pronta? She was always ready, as though we were going to a fair or a festa. The market was like having relatives to visit. Like it must be having a grandmother. Anyway, I loved that it was my sister and me off to buy the cabbage or the potatoes or two hundred grams of maccheroncini or whatever it was I’d cook that day for our supper. Every merchant gave us something extra. Sometimes a fistful of parsley or an apple cut in two, a handful of golden zibbibi that we’d never eat on the spot but that I’d put in my bag so The Tiny Mafalda and I could have a tea party later. One of the shepherds almost always took his knife from his belt and chiseled out a nice, big crumble of his oldest pecorino. One part into the bag, the other divided into two pieces. With the same reverence I’d show for a communion wafer, I’d tell Mafalda to stick out her tongue and I would place it directly into the tiny open waiting mouth. A hungry little bird. The other into mine. Now don’t chew, I’d tell her. Let it melt. Let it fill your mouth, your nostrils, I’d say, and I knew that she loved that burst of big, harsh flavor the way I loved it. Even when it didn’t, we would tell each other that the flavor lasted all the way back home.