That Summer in Sicily

by Marlena de Blasi

  “I will tell you that I sometimes envied Simona her freedoms. I would try to imagine myself stepping into the backseat of the long, green Bugatti, boarding the ferry at Messina, settling into the overnight train for Venice. Though Leo was often present in those fantasies, there were those in which I remained alone.

  “Once, after another of Simona’s departures, I ask Leo if we two might speak to Yolande and Charlotte. Propose our own sojourns together with them. Reticently, he agrees. At supper that evening, he begins breezily enough.

  “ ‘What would you say, my mountain-bred daughters, to the idea that we four have a holiday together? Perhaps to ride the train from Enna to Palermo, stay in a fine hotel on the water, go to dine in fish restaurants whose terraces are built on stilts pounded into the floor of the sea?’ he asks, his voice falling more timidly with every word until it settles back into his usual indifference as he finishes the sentence. They have hardly raised their glossy, braided heads from their soup.

  “Since I’d never been farther away from the palace than the destinations of our morning rides, I am hard put to take on the job of tantalizing the princesses. I can only suggest what I would like to do. I take a turn.

  “ ‘Have you ever thought about camping in the mountains, roasting sausages over a fire, sleeping under the stars?’

  “Repelled, Yolande says, ‘No, I have never thought of any of those things.’

  “I refuse to surrender.

  “ ‘Would you like to walk in a big city?’

  “Noise. Confusion.

  “ ‘To swim in the sea?’

  “ ‘We don’t swim.’

  “Leo begins to speak about their studies while I am still launching one-line propositions. What else can I present to girls whose armoires bulge with French silks, who live in a palace furnished in sixteenth-century antiques and adorned with Renaissance sculpture and paintings? Surely not the prospect of shops and museums and galleries. I have never been to visit a museum. At least I shall make them laugh.

  “ ‘How about a castle in Spain?’

  “All three pelt silence at me. Their truth is round, perhaps inviolate. They prefer their rituals to the placing of a single white kid–shod foot into the outside world. The morning hairdos; the dressing, intricate as a matador’s; the endless buttering of hard toast, the endless passing of silver trays, the endless presentations of towering, many-colored cakes. Dispassionate, blunted discourse when there must be discourse at all. The bells to rise, the bells to dine, the bells to study, the bells to pray, the bells to sleep. Ave Maria.”

  “ ‘It’s because of me,’ I say to Leo later.

  “ ‘But it’s not. It’s because of they, themselves.’

  “ ‘They are still in their childhood.’

  “ ‘Yolande is one year less than you. Charlotte is two years less than you. But perhaps you’re right. It is not uncommon for women of our class to remain forever in childhood. Aged girls they become. But their disinterestedness in me is as old as they are. Since the days of their births, I have tried to know them, to impose my presence on their lives in even the most perfunctory ways. Daily curtsies. Christmas kisses. There have never been greater expressions of filial affection than these. I was dismissed, excluded, first by their mother and then by them. Beyond my place at table and at Mass, I represent nuisance, obstacle to the otherwise consecrated order of their lives. You have long been witness to this fact.’

  “He is angry at the private pain that my meddling has uncovered. Angry that there is pain. I go to stand beside the chair where he sits in the library.

  “ ‘I’m sorry. It’s only that I thought, by now, we might begin to be together with them in a different way. If we keep trying, perhaps . . .’

  “ ‘No amount of trying will change a thing. We shall all go on endlessly being ourselves. They are not you, Tosca. They are not me. They are of another race. They are of Simona’s race.’

  “ ‘And now who is dismissing? Excluding?’

  “ ‘Does not your Brasini theory apply to women? Some people are born empty, sir. All manner of good deeds and patience and loving kindness can’t even begin to fill them up. Isn’t that what you told me you’d learned by the time you were eight years old?’

  “A quiet, neat throttling are his words.

  “ ‘Why did you marry her, anyway?’

  “ ‘I shall tell you that story. One day soon, I will tell you more of that story.’ ”

  “From every quarter there is unspoken acceptance of Leo and me. Of our shared life. Of our romance, decorously, tactfully avowed. All know it is not I who caused the schism between Leo and Simona. Most especially does Simona know that. Neither interloper nor third in a ménage, I am a woman who loves and is loved by another woman’s husband. I live in the house where they live. All know that theirs is an arrangement rather than a marriage. And as well, all know that the sacrament of matrimony is insoluble. Inexorable in the eyes of Mother Church. Leo will always be married to Simona. Until death do them part. Most of the household is better acquainted than I with the early circumstances of their pact. But I understand that—in this time, in this place—betrothals such as theirs are legion. They are legion in every part of the world among the wealthy. Sentimentally, these betrothals are without significance. There are times when the burden of these truths, of these purported truths, falls like a bludgeon. Though I know that I could no longer live without Leo, I sometimes pretend to plot my departure, fantasize my going away from all of them, my slashing a path out of their labyrinth. He is not mine. His home is not mine. Even the labyrinth is not mine.”

  “I sit reading in the garden one afternoon, waiting for Leo to return with Cosimo from their weekly appointments in Enna, when I hear the delicate crunch of her shoes on the stones, look up to see Simona moving toward me, her path encumbered by the luxuriant reach of artichoke fronds. She kicks, swipes, mutters at them.

  “ ‘I shall never quite adjust to this invasion of vegetables among my roses.’

  “She doesn’t say, nor to this invasion of you among my roses, though I think it is even more true. I nod to her, smile. Her smile is false.

  “She is already seated when she asks, ‘May I join you?’

  “Still I say nothing. Still I smile. She takes my book, reads the title aloud in English.

  “ ‘Great Expectations. Apt,’ she says, her smile less false. ‘It’s so unusual to see each other without the multitudes about us,’ she says as to a dear friend.

  “For a moment I think she must be talking to someone else before I hear her saying, ‘Yes, without the multitudes.’

  “Now I am stunned, fixed into my silence, but she seems to neither notice nor be distressed by this. As though it were the most natural thing in the world, she speaks of her latest journey, the insuperable differences between Sicilian and Viennese pastries, pinches the stuff of my yellow crepe dress, says she found one very much like it for herself in a little shop in Milan, and with no further patter, says, ‘And so what are your plans, Tosca? You’ll soon be twenty. I suspect you’ll soon be thinking about your marriage.’

  “Once again, I hear what she omits. You’ll soon be thinking about your marriage rather than my marriage. But I am mistaken. Simona proceeds.

  “ ‘What I want to say is that I hope you’ll not be too hasty. The post-war climate out there in the world is anarchic at best. I know life is confining for you here but, bit by bit, we’ll help you to expand your horizons, shall we say. Great expectations. Lovely to contemplate.’

  “My silence is immutable, and now I doubt my ability to hear. To discern her words. She has spoken like some loving aunt, has used the we, referring to hers and Leo’s joint concern over me. She has more to say.

  “ ‘Mountains on an island are doubly remote, my dear. Twice removed. But also twice as predictable. Almost everything that happens, happens over and over again. You know—perhaps Leo has told you—that my mother and father lived much as he and I do. Together, yet not at all together.
It’s quite common here where the protection, the maintenance, and the passing-on of the patrimony takes precedence over all other matters. Certainly over something as evanescent as love. Stones and earth and buildings,’ she raises a thin, white, sapphire-braceleted wrist to take in the palace behind her, ‘these are the lasting things. These are what count.’

  “I look at Simona and she fidgets with the sapphires, with her rings, her hair. She meets my gaze then and we stay that way for a while. Comfortably, I think, and saying more in those few moments with our eyes than we’ve said to each other for all these eleven years.

  “ ‘I hope that you know, that you understand, I feel no rancor toward you. Though I did. Rancor, or was it pure envy, jealousy? At first, I thought you quite adorable, actually. An unbroken colt with those long, spindly legs. We were all quite enamored with your spirit. Mostly you were just another face ’round the table until I noticed other people noticing you. Leo, of course. But everyone else, too. Though I didn’t want Leo for myself, I didn’t want you to want him. Strangely, I didn’t see it—your romance—as Leo’s betrayal. He’d had so many women before you. I saw it as yours. I felt that you’d betrayed me. You see, unconsciously, I’d begun to think of you as one of my daughters. Indeed, it was as though a daughter had betrayed me. I’d been doing for you all, nearly all, that I did for the princesses. I chose your clothes, saw to your medical care, discussed your education with the teachers. I insisted upon your catechism instruction, that you take your first Holy Communion with Yolande and Charlotte. Your Confirmation into the Church. Knowing her sensitivity, her bent toward tenderness, I arranged for Agata to watch over you. I am not a motherly woman, Tosca, though I’ve tried to be. But as motherly as I’ve ever been, I have been to you. Not much, was it? Is that what you’re thinking?’

  “I shake my head. A frail denial. I close my eyes, see my mother’s face. My sister’s face so like hers.

  “ ‘Ah, Tosca,’ she sighs, and I think it is a sigh of ending, though I can hardly fathom what was the beginning of her soliloquy or why I still cannot speak to her. She is quiet but she does not rise to go, and I wonder if she has dismissed me with that sigh, if it is I who should rise to go.

  “ ‘Of course my envy of your beauty was a normal response. You turned fifteen in the year when I turned forty. You, at the beginning; I, passing the first milestone on the way down. I’d never before paid much attention to the seven years of difference between Leo’s age and mine. Suddenly my forty years to his thirty-three seemed some horrid breach that widened at a furious pace until I staved off time, yes, until I dammed the rushing waters with all those bodies. My new friends. The men and the boys. My paid paramours. I am loath to recall those days, but recall them I do. While you and Leo were finding your way to each other—do you know that I anticipated your coupling, shall we call it, almost to the day? And did you know that I could see the change in you even as you sipped your coffee?—while you and Leo were finding your way to each other, my impulse was to despair. I’d been fine during all those years of his dalliances in which the women were as insignificant to him as I was. Life was balanced. You disarranged that balance. You see, I am not at all certain that I’d ever witnessed love. Before you and him. It’s rare enough, you know. Certainly I’d never felt it—or even mistaken it—for myself. Even the thought of happiness terrifies me. Fragile as a blown rose. Why would anyone choose happiness over the long-enduring qualities of fear and pain? I’ve often wondered if fear and pain would die, too, if I’d only let them. If I would stop caring for them, fussing over them. I suppose I’ll never know. I’ll never know what you know, Tosca. I’ve thought about this rather a great deal over these past two or three years. I do truly wish you well. I’ve sensed lately a bit of skittishness in you that I’ve never seen before, and that’s why I wanted to speak with you. You’re restless. Perhaps dwelling upon the complexities. There will always be complexities, my dear. Don’t go away, Tosca. Stay here. Love him, if you do. If you dare. Love him a little for me.’

  “All the words said, she wept. I had been weeping for a while by then and, through the tears, she seemed a gauzy spectre, an eloquent ghost in blue-spotted chiffon. How her bobbed hair was set in tight waves and the points of her cheeks went red, and how she was almost pretty at that time of day. A woman come to soothe me. To tell me that the labyrinth is, indeed, my labyrinth.”

  “As life at the borghetto continues to improve and as Leo sees, senses, a growing serenity among the peasants, he, too, takes on a greater tranquility. We wander off on our first jaunts away from the palace. We pack one of the trucks with firewood and baskets of provisions and some sort of Army-issue cots and feather quilts and candle lanterns and drive through the mountains to a high plateau where we sleep in a field of wild marjoram and hyssop and mint. Leo crushes handfuls of the herbs on a stone, brews a tisana with them over the fire, serves it to me in a mother-of-pearl cup, tells me it was with this elixir that the Eleusinians—when she rested in their camps—comforted a mourning Demeter.

  “We drive to the sea, and when I finally look upon it, I run from the car. Tearing at my skirt, my shirt, pulling my camisole over my head, loosening my plait, I race into the surf. Splashing, screaming, diving, swallowing the good briny juices of it, I am sluiced and lustrous, a long brown fish prancing in the curling steel-blue waves on the edges of my island. But then I miss the mountains. Wherever it is on the island that Leo takes me, I find beauty and feel joy. But always I miss the mountains. I miss the horses. I miss my everyday life. Yolande and Charlotte are wiser than I.

  “As we had done for years by now, Leo and I continue to ride each morning. We no longer set out with palace guests or with Cosimo to trot upon the conventional trails of the social rider, but rather we take to the less-traveled mountain or woodland paths or head for open meadows on the high plateau where we can race. Where we can feel free. Though we might easily arrange our days and nights to include a rendezvous within the palace, these pre-dawn journeys become our courting hours. I think it is the private joy of rising, dressing, and meeting in the dark kitchen where Leo—yellow curls sleep-matted to his temples—would be pouring out two tiny cups of espresso. We run then, shivering, across the gardens to the stables, thieves in the thick quiet of the night. Even the horses seem conspiratorial, patient as meek children as we saddle them, ready ourselves then with sweaters and tweeds that we keep there in the barn. When there is no moon, we take the open trails, and when there is, we ride twisting paths in and out of silent, spookish woods.

  “One morning, as the dark is fading, we dismount and lead the horses up to a clearing, step warily along a palisade and into the new pearly light. We stay still, stroking the horses’ necks, waiting for the sun. A hot, violent wind swarms among the dry yellow leaves of the oaks behind us and the soughing of them sounds like a woman crying. Shivering even under the weight of Leo’s old suede jacket, how cold I am, trembling and trying to hear the woman whose cries are softer than the raucous hissing of the leaves. The wind sweetens then and the light roars up behind the mountains, firing the stone and the sky in long yellow flames. And the crying ceases and we walk, less warily I think, along the rim of the cliff, and when we reach the plateau and remount, we ride hard, ride to breathlessness, find shade, walk the horses to cool them. Settle ourselves to rest. In the delicious trembling light under the branches of old poplars, we are lovers.

  “Most mornings we ride to the half-ruined locanda in the pine woods, the place where we’d stopped to drink wine and walk a bit on the night of my eighteenth birthday. We stay a while there in a small salon, the pale-green paint of its high walls bruised, peeling, the red-tiled floor worn to undulations, the ivory satin skin of the chairs and sofas in tatters. A dark wood Bechstein grand sits at the far end of the room and sometimes I sit to play Saint-Saëns. To play Le Cygne. Leo stands, eyes closed, arms folded upon his chest, to listen. I play only a few measures before he interrupts.

  ‘It’s a swan, Tosca. The music was co
mposed to give the impression of a swan. There is no indication that an elephant approaches. Piano. Piano, amore mio.’

  “There is always tea, still tepid, in a porcelain jug. Bread, marmalade, some sort of biscuit. A melon, artfully carved. A few wild berries in a mended pink dish, the leaves and stems of the tiny things still dusty from the woods. Flowers and blossoms on branches stand in a blue and white ginger jar on the wide stone mantle. We neither hear nor see a soul though our benefactors live in a far wing of the house. Soft, tree-filtered light pours through the wavy glass of the long, many-paned windows and onto us, over us, reclined upon a plush, fringed carpet embossed in great yellow roses. We lie there on the yellow roses before the fire and pretend we are at home. We talk and fight and laugh and eat and drink. We sleep and dream upon the dark red carpet with the yellow roses as though its length and width mark the confines of the world. I run my fingers through the silky fringe of the carpet as I listen to Leo speak. Arms raised over my head, sometimes I clutch at the fringe, hold it in my fists. In the ice-green light, the thin, shimmering underwater light of those mornings, the dark red carpet with the yellow roses does mark the confines of the world. And when the clock in the hall outside the door chimes eight, we gather ourselves to leave. We must be back at the palace, back at the borghetto to begin our day’s work.”