That Summer in Sicily

by Marlena de Blasi

  “ ‘I was supposed to go to school and leave my sister with her doll and the bread that was her lunch, and sometimes I would. Sometimes I would take her with me, let her sit on my knees or in the back of the schoolroom, where she could play with the other children who were left in the care of their older siblings. But often I didn’t go to school at all in those months right after Mama died. As soon as we came home from the market, I’d start right in cooking the supper. As though I had ten children and six starving shepherds to feed, I would chop and boil and fret over the cabbage or the potatoes, set the table, make things look nice. I found that I could be perfectly happy even without my father’s love. You see, I’d figured it out. With the help of Francesco Brasini.’

  “ ‘What did you figure out? And who was Francesco Brasini?’

  “This time Leo is not trying to distract me but is genuinely rapt and wanting to follow my story.

  “ ‘It doesn’t matter who he was. It only matters what he did. If you’ll listen, you’ll understand. I figured it out like this: My father was never kind to my mother, and so why in the world would he be kind to me? And why would I expect him to be kind to me? I figured out that he wasn’t kind because he couldn’t be kind. He wasn’t a kind man. Like he wasn’t a tall man or a blond man or a man with big feet. Understanding that made me feel better. Some people are born empty, sir. All manner of good deeds and patience and loving kindness can’t even begin to fill them up. My father didn’t smile at me or talk to me not because I wasn’t a good person or a worthy person but because smiling and talking and being kind were not things he had the capacity to do. He couldn’t grow blond hair and he couldn’t smile. That’s how my eight-year-old mind began to comprehend things. And once I’d got all that clear and straight in my mind, I was able to get other things clear and straight. Like how one part of a puzzle put in place helps you to see where the other pieces fit. What I learned about my father helped me to be ready for Signor Brasini.’

  “ ‘Tosca, who in hell is this Brasini?’

  “ ‘Your interruptions force me to repeat myself. My father didn’t smile at my mother or talk nicely to her or hold her face in his hands and kiss her lips the way I’d seen Signor Brasini do to his wife one day in the market. I never forgot that. The way Signor Brasini just stopped and turned to his wife, put his big farmer’s hands out and caressed her face, pulled her close to him and kissed her just like in the films. He kissed her for a long time and then he looked at her and smiled. I watched Signor Brasini and his wife. I watched them putting onions in a sack from the pile in the back of lo Mastro’s truck. They even smiled while they were choosing onions, sir. And when I saw all that, I knew that their way would be my way. Their way, not my father’s and my mother’s way—their way was how I wanted my life to be. I knew that someday I would be loved by a man like Brasini. Or was it that I knew that I couldn’t love a man if he wasn’t like Brasini? All of which led me to the truth that there are two types of men in the world. Those like Brasini and those who are not like Brasini. Those who would take your face in their hands and kiss you like in the films and those who would never in ten million years take your face in their hands and kiss you like in the films. But the sort of man who wouldn’t do it, well, it wasn’t his fault. He just couldn’t do it. Just like my father couldn’t be kind. Some men were never going to grow blond hair and were never going to hold a woman’s face in their hands and smile at her as though she was an angel. And no matter what that woman did or said or looked like or was, she couldn’t make him take her face in his hands and kiss her like in the films. Now, as I said, I was about eight that morning in the market when this epiphany struck me. I might have been seven. But that’s what helped me to not feel hurt even knowing that my father didn’t want me. And it also helped me to recognize you. You are definitely a Brasini, sir. I knew that by the time I was ten, maybe eleven. But what I’m trying to say is that once I’d understood the Brasini theory, I slipped myself off the hook about my father not wanting me. The emptiness, the conflict, the guilt that I might have carried ’round my neck for my whole life, I just put down right where I stood. I threw it all down and walked away from it. I understood how things worked and how they didn’t work. And if it’s not true, if this is not the way things work and don’t work for everyone else, well, then let me just say it’s how things work for me.’

  “ ‘I find it improbable that a child of eight—even a Tosca of eight—could find her way through such an emotional forest.’

  “ ‘It’s not improbable at all. That children don’t always say what they know doesn’t mean they don’t know it. Sometimes it’s enough for them to just stay quiet with what they know and what they feel. Sometimes they suffer for what they know, or, as in my case, they are liberated by it. But either way, they don’t necessarily talk about it. I thank Signor Brasini for showing me, in the full light of day, how other people went about their lives. Without him, I might have thought that men were all like my father. And, while I’m at it, I thank my father, too. And not only because it was you to whom he sent me. I thank him for being so constant in his impassivity. It wouldn’t have been much longer before I’d have run off from him anyway. I would have taken The Tiny Mafalda with me, though. And don’t think for a minute that I couldn’t have arranged a life for us.’

  “ ‘You would have made a good job of it. I know that.’ Leo pours a few drops of moscato into two of the silver cups and offers one to me. Holding his cup high, he says, ‘Tanti auguri, Tosca.’

  “We sip the wine, stay quiet. He has once again taken my hand in his.

  “ ‘Who am I to you, sir? Do you think of me as your daughter?’

  “ ‘No. Not my daughter. Though I feel, have always felt, duty-bound to you, ready to defend you—though the gods know you hardly need a cavalier. You invoked a curious affection in me almost immediately. You made me laugh with all your boldness, your fight. I admired you and I think I was envious of you. Folding your arms and sticking out your chin, refusing everything you didn’t want and taking an extra portion of all you fancied. And I don’t mean only at the table. You were a hellion, my sweet. More than half savage when you arrived. But what my sentiment has become for you, I cannot tell you. Surely it’s changing. It’s changing as we speak. Suffice now to say what I’ve said before. I am happier when you’re near. And that, for a very long time now, I’ve felt a grand inclination to hold your face in my hands.’

  “ ‘And to kiss me like in the films?’

  “ ‘Perhaps that, as well.’ Letting go of my hand, he rises and walks about for a bit. He comes back to where I still sit and looks down at me, his fatherly face restored. ‘But you should rest now, Tosca. I’ll ask Valentino to show you the way to the mansarda. The rooms up there are quiet, and there might even be a breeze on the loggia. Valentino will bring cool water and whatever else you might want. He’ll come to wake you when it’s time to leave. I think at eight or so.’

  “He is already off to find Valentino and I pick up my little silver cup, thrust the tip of my tongue into its hollow, and lick the last sun-dried drop of moscato.”

  “I stop counting after five flights of narrow stone stairs, each one of which seems to veer off in a different direction. Valentino leads the way to a double wooden door, unlocks it, leaves the key in the hole, places water and a glass and two small linen towels on a table in the salone where we enter, wishes me a buon riposo, and quickly retreats. Even by palace standards, the room is large, its ceiling a high silver-gray vault, its walls covered in tufted watered silk the color of coffee beans. A man’s salone, I think, running my hands along the top of a faded brown velvet settee where Leo might have rested his head. My boots make a hollow sound on the bare stone floors as I walk from room to room, opening and closing doors. I find several where all the furnishings are covered with sheets and thick canvas throws and one empty room where rolled carpets line the walls. On one side of a long corridor I notice the faint outline of a flush door with no knob. A singl
e push of my hip opens it to reveal yet more rooms with long unwashed windows flanked by tatters of drapes. Behind another door there is a bedroom decorated much like the first salone. A bed draped in layers of brown silk seems almost small, adrift on the great sea of the stone floor. A chandelier with tiny bronze brocade shades on each candle-shaped light swings low over the bed. There is a single chair, a dresser with no mirror, and a small chest of drawers. On one wall doors are open to the loggia, from which the wide view of the land stops only at the horizon, at the place where the nearly colorless honeydew sky bends into the wheat. The loggia is empty save a four-postered daybed laid with fresh white sheets and pillows and surrounded by opalescent curtains, thin as a spiderweb and weighted with a wide border of heavy rose-colored satin. I will rest here, I decide. But I’ve forgotten to take the water and so must first traverse the whole apartment to retrieve it. On my way back to the loggia, I stop again in the bedroom. I slide open each drawer of the little chest. What am I looking for? Is it these? Two thin silk white nightdresses, perfectly ironed and folded. A bottle of perfume with a beveled glass stopper. Chanel No. 5. I unseal the stopper, begin dabbing myself with the perfume, which is not Simona’s scent. If no one will ravish me, I will ravish myself, I think, quickly unfastening the buttons on my shirt, throwing off my canottiera. I throw down the stopper, too, pour the perfume over my chest, rub it into my arms, my neck. Pulling the pins from my braids, I pour what’s left of it in my hair. I walk out onto the loggia, kick off my boots, and wearing only my riding pants, I part the thin curtains of the daybed and lie down. The curtains sway to a rogue breeze and I wonder about the woman who is not Simona and who wears Chanel No. 5 and thin white silk nightdresses. I hold my perfumed arms across my face, and from behind them, I sing. Tanti auguri a me. Tanti auguri, cara Tosca. Happy Birthday to me. Happy Birthday, dear Tosca. There is wind now, and it whips the scent of reaped wheat roasting in the late sun and mixes it with the smell of the rain rumbling its way west across a darkening sky. Proclaiming itself. The rain will fall before sunset. Will Leo come to lie with me before the rain? I submit to the wind, let it play across my body as the sky turns almost to night and the curtains sway faster. I hear something then, someone in the adjoining room. I rise to my knees, instinctively holding my hands over my bare breasts. Leo walks out onto the loggia, walks slowly to the daybed. He carries my shirt and my canottiera in his hands. I am still kneeling, still covering my breasts. Without parting the curtain, Leo takes my face in his hands, kisses my lips through the spiderweb. Still without parting the curtain, he gently pulls my hands away from my breasts and places his own hands where mine were. He caresses my breasts. He throws off his clothes then and parts the curtains, pulls me down onto the bed. It’s Leo who is on his knees now, unfastening my riding pants, sliding them down and off. He pushes his open hands hard over the length of my limbs, molds the flesh with his fingers, pummels it over and over again. All of me. Leo is a sculptor who will shape a woman from a girl. The light returns, red and gold now, and the wind rages and the heavy satin border of the curtain slaps hard and constant against the bed like the flounce of a Spanish dancer’s skirt.”

  “As we drive back to the palace I understand that everything that happened in my life before this afternoon was preparation for it. I understand that all that is yet to come will be because of it. Because of this afternoon. I understand there will be rapture and there will be grief and that I will be safe from neither of these. I lay my head on the prince’s shoulder.”

  CHAPTER XII

  “LEO KEPT HIS PROMISE. ON THE SIXTH DAY OF THAT FIRST harvesting of the newly planted fields, he was ready. He’d resurrected old scythes from some half-forgotten place and taken them to be sharpened by the man in the borghetto who kept the axes and hunting and kitchen knives in good form. Then he sought instruction on how to use one from the most veteran of the peasants. Umberto, he was called. Well, the other men came ’round, wanting to learn, too, which is what Leo had hoped for. And so they did. One evening after Leo and I had taken supper with the peasants and all of us were sitting out in the courtyard on the steps or on stones or wherever we could find a place to be still and wait for a breeze to rip the windlessness of the night, I remember one of the peasants shouting the suggestion that they should practice their reaping dance right there. They cleared away brooms and shovels and buckets, the things that passed for children’s toys, shooed the animals back, and with Leo and Umberto in the lead, made their formation. Under a rising waxing moon and in the light of the single torch still lit near the mensa, they strutted and swung to the prince’s rhythm, to the rhythm of Umberto’s proud, brittle gait, and all of us were quiet as we were when the peach-skinned girl twirled under another moon. How beautiful they were moving through that powdered light. All those men with all those dreams.”

  “It is perhaps two hours before dawn on the day of the ceremonial harvest, the day when the last field is to be cut by hand. The road leading from the borghetto to the field is already trafficked with trucks and wagons porting the peasants. Leo, Cosimo, and I are among them, as are a father and son from Enna—pipers both—whom Leo has located and commissioned for this day. Several of the smaller boys from the borghetto stand near them, each one wearing a drum—primitive, handmade—tied about his waist or hung from some string or strip of fabric about his neck. Valentino, the little red-haired boy who lives at the hunting lodge, stands there, too. Also with a drum. He has been imported, no doubt, to fill out the ranks of the corps, and every once in a while, one of them taps out a sharp roll. As though to test the instrument. To test himself.

  “We all speak barely beyond a whisper, as though someone sleeps nearby. As though the enemy crouches in the tall, still wheat. At the far end of the field, sheets are spread on the ground and baskets of bread and cheese are laid upon them. Jugs of wine lined up. The oldest women and the youngest girls who will pass these to the reapers stand at the ready. I hadn’t noticed before, but all the men are barefoot. And now—the habitual coppola cast aside—they tie kerchiefs low on their brows. Slapping the handles firmly into their waiting hands, Leo distributes the scythes to the first team and they position themselves at the starting place. The second and third relays line up behind them. In suspense, thick as the blue-black air, we await the sun god. I barely breathe for the haunting beauty of the scene, a fragment of our collective existence, or is this moment all of existence, distilled? The darkness shatters, breaks into lilac dust, and the smudged lines of night take on the form of day. People look at one another, say good morning, pat one another on the back. The women kiss one another on both cheeks and, with no more prelude, Apollo torches the purple gloom with a great rubescent flash, staining the sky in all the reds of the world, and the pipes screech and the boys beat the drums and the reapers bless themselves, bellow hallelujah to their goddess, and the fierce slashing begins. Just as it was under the moon in the courtyard, the prince and Umberto lead out, plunging themselves into the deep, high-grown rows, swinging the scythes high and wide and in perfect rhythm as though both were born to it, and it makes me wonder if both were. The relays follow one after another, each one completing a row and passing his scythe on to the next man in line. For every four reapers there is a gatherer, a man who follows in their tracks, collects the cut stalks in the crotch of a forked branch. The gatherer then ties the stalks into a great sheaf with a length of dried hempweed, and heaves the sheaf, finally, into the pile to be threshed. After two or perhaps it was three or four turns with the scythe, Leo goes to stand at the top of the field, triumphant, not for himself but for them. Sweat and tears staining his chaff-whitened face, the prince recites Demeter’s hymn. In his great, croaking basso, he chants:

  I begin to sing of rich-haired Demeter, awful goddess. Of her and her trim-ankled daughter whom Hades rapt away, given to him by all-seeing Zeus, the thunderer. Apart from Demeter, lady of the golden sword and glorious fruits, she was playing with the deep-bosomed daughters of Oceanus and gathering flowers
over a soft meadow, roses, crocuses, and beautiful violets, irises also and hyacinths and the narcissus, which Earth made grow at the will of Zeus, and to please the Host of Many, and to be a snare for the bloomlike girl—a marvelous, radiant flower.

  “The pipes moan and the drummer boys beat their sticks upon the hide drums and the “saints” are passed, not seven times between sunrise and sunset but each time the bells ring the hour, and the men drink the wine and eat the bread and they finish the field in the early evening just as the light begins to leave. Leo gives the call to halt work and the peasants fall where they stand, lie back upon the stiff gold stubble and look up at the sky, breathing hard and laughing and yelping. Olympians not for glory but for food. They help one another to their feet and, in a line, pass by Leo, who waits to shake their hands. The older men kiss Leo’s hand rather than shake it, resuming the ritual they’d seen their fathers and their grandfathers perform after the harvests when they were young. As the peasants kiss his hand, he takes their hand. Leo kisses the peasants’ hands in return. A gesture that no one has ever seen—the noble returning his peasant’s kiss. A sparrow flutters its wings inside my heart. Cosimo makes the sign of the cross. The moment we step down to them is the moment they will step over us.

  “ ‘Scemo. Scemo beato, blessed fool.’ Cosimo’s whisper is angry. He looks at me. Repeats the phrase.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  “LEO REMAINS INEXHAUSTIBLE IN HIS WORK FOR AND WITH HIS peasants, though once the first great leaps are accomplished, the shape his work takes on is less conspicuous and, hence, less irritating to Simona’s sensibilities. A stiff cordiality once again reigns at the palace. Simona seemed to have passed through her salacious phase. Or perhaps it was that she continued to live it but with greater reserve. I don’t know. What she did expose the household to was the epoch of her Grand Tours—recurring and extended journeys to the Continent. Whirling about in extravagant traveling costumes and veiled hats, trilling out orders to the servants about how to handle her trunks, when to expect cousins from Rome or Milan and where they should sleep, what they should be served, she would take the princesses—by then eighteen and nineteen years old—roughly by their shoulders, hold their heads to her sable-trimmed breast, and pucker rouged lips repeatedly in the direction of their cheeks. They would curtsy. ‘Buon viaggio, Mamà.’ She, sniffling into a tiny lace handkerchief, would glide away. Marie Antoinette on her way to the Tower. Down the steps, into the waiting automobile. Polychrome postcards and brown paper–wrapped packages, exotically stamped and illegibly cancelled, arrived regularly for the daughters, yet their detachment to these was such that stacks of the unopened boxes, silver trays piled with the high-colored, unread cards, languished on hall tables.