That Summer in Sicily

by Marlena de Blasi

  But if we return to the question of philosophy, you will see that, in his own way—by subsidizing his relatives who lived on the farm—Mattia had done the same thing that Leo had done for his peasants. The circumstances and the results were certainly different but, in the end, both men, both Mattia and Leo had done the same thing. I don’t think it was until Cosimo sat with him, smoking Toscanos and drinking whiskey while Callas sang—I don’t think it was until then that this truth impressed Mattia. The truth that the prince and the clan’s chieftain had certain sentiments in common. Perhaps their very characters were not dissimilar, one from the other. And perhaps, just perhaps, Mattia began to think that, in his place, he would have done what Leo had done. Supposition, I know.

  During all those years Leo never asked Mattia about time. About when or if he could leave the farm. Go back to find his own life. Nor did Mattia once broach the subject. I believe that Leo’s exile ended when Mattia died. No one from the clans presented himself in Mattia’s place, though Leo expected such. Waited for some unfamiliar automobile to move down the long gravel path. He waited for a year after Mattia’s death, but no one came. Thus Leo believed that his debt was paid, that it was time for him to leave the farm. Though they were sad to lose him, the family always knew that Leo would not stay forever. I do not believe that any of them were ever told that they were keeping Leo prisoner for all those years. I think that Mattia must have asked them to give Leo refuge as a favor to him. Told them some story about Leo having fallen on hard times. That he’d needed to stay apart for a while. Perhaps Mattia told the family that Leo was a fugitive whom he’d promised to protect, this being more truth than fiction. Also, I do not believe that Mattia involved any other member of the clan in his decision to let Leo live. To his brothers, he might have claimed that some other faction of the clan was responsible for the supposed lupara bianca. It might have been one of those times when several factions took credit for a kill without anyone knowing which faction actually consummated the deed. He might have closed the issue of Leo in some other way and at some great cost to himself. But close it, Mattia did. However he settled it, though, the settlement included me. My safety. Mattia insured that no one from the rural clans either prevented my going to or tracked my existence in Palermo. This is not supposition.

  Bread and cheese in his pockets and warm rain in his face, it was May, late May, when Leo said his farewells to the family, walked out over the fields and down the steep rocky crags to the half-made roads that led back home. He said that he never expected me to be at the palace, but that it was there where he must begin. Where he would begin his search for me. Someone would be there. Someone would know something of me. Would he find Simona and the princesses? Would he find Cosimo? He could say nothing to anyone of where he’d been. He would tell no one but me. But where would I have gone? Would I have so adjusted my life as to make his reappearance an intrusion? Did I love someone else, had I married someone? He arrived at the palace finding it all but abandoned, if not quite in ruins. He ran up the endless stones of the stairway to the entrance, beat the great tarnished lion’s head against the massive door. He screamed, C’è qualcuno? Is anyone here?

  But the door was unlocked and, his boots raising a hollow ruckus down the long uncarpeted hall, he saw Mimmo swishing a mop along the marble stairs. He called to him, but Mimmo kept on with his mop. Leo called to him once again. This time Mimmo—without looking ’round at the ghost who sounded so like his prince—answered, yes sir?

  Leo called him a third time. Still not turning toward him, Mimmo said, You’re late for lunch, sir, but I’ll see what I can find for you in the pantry.

  I have my lunch, Mimmo, Leo said, pulling out the unwrapped bread and cheese, small spoils from a fourteen-year crusade.

  In magnificent Sicilian arrogance, Mimmo leant the mop against the bannister, pulled a set of keys from the pocket of his trousers, and threw them over the bannister down to Leo, allowing himself only the swiftest glimpse of the ghost. Mimmo then picked up the mop and, looking down at the stairs, he said, You’ll find her at the hunting lodge, sir. She’s grown even more beautiful, sir.

  When Leo was out of sight, Mimmo sat on the stairs and wept for wonder and for joy. This last event was told to me by Mimmo himself.

  Do I anticipate you correctly? Are you wanting to know how the clan responded to Leo’s return? We have established that Mattia—in a way that he may have kept concealed from everyone—closed the case on Leo. But when Leo reappeared—though he hardly went about the villages flaunting his resurrection—the clans all over the island would have known it within hours. Was there shock among them that one faction or another had not disposed of the prince as they’d so long believed? Had they, indeed, believed that at all? Did any of them surmise or suspect Mattia to have been Leo’s savior? And, if so, would they be willing, or more importantly—being who they were—would they be able to refrain from vendetta against Leo now? Far stronger for the imposed calm of his exile, Leo claimed that they would. Cosimo agreed. But I, too, was stronger for my own exile. My own ventures with the clans. I had my own reasons to believe that there would be no vendetta. As it turned out, all three of us were correct.

  To a Sicilian, artful deception rarely invites vendetta since artfulness demonstrates respect. And Mattia was nothing if not artful. Hence, he was nothing if not respectful to the clan. The clan, as it turned out, chose to acknowledge the respect rather than the dupe. The clan’s acceptance of Mattia’s dupe was not a form of surrender but one of resignation. An overburdened and humble resignation. A kind of draw. A Sicilian often prefers a draw over a win. A draw can be better than a win. Denying triumph to the opponent is more thrilling than one’s tasting triumph one’s self. A Sicilian’s triumph is his denial of victory to his opponent. Leo allowed Mattia—and, essentially, the clan—his victory even if Mattia did not cause Leo’s death. Mattia’s and the clan’s victory was greater than it would have been had they simply murdered Leo. Quieted him with that aforementioned bullet in the heart. Mattia made it possible for the clan to have more. Better than causing Leo’s death, Mattia took Leo’s life. I hope you will pardon my repetitiveness as I try to explain all of this, Chou. Perhaps I do so as much for myself as for you.

  Leo chose the rooms at the top of the villa, enclosing himself there in a monkish way, never brandishing his survival as a trophy, a sign of success and, hence, appeasing, I believe, whoever might have been left with a yearning to kill him. It was Leo’s delicacy with the pride and the egos of others, his gentility, his unprincely way of being that kept the balance of the draw and that would have made malevolence toward the aging prince seem vulgar.

  The prince lived a reserved, almost shadowy incarnation for those years after he returned and until his second death. He rarely met with passersby, guests, those outside the family. Save members of the clan who visited him with an almost dutiful and, what one might think to be affectionate, regularity. Icilio, whom you met while you were here, among them. Icilio was Mattia’s son, and it’s possible that the father passed on a word or two about Leo to him. I do not know.

  Cosimo had kept Leo’s library. Cataloged in boxes strewn with tobacco to discourage mold and the indiscriminate hungers of winged creatures, Leo’s books had been stored in the sacristy and behind the altar in the church of San Rocco. When I returned from Palermo, Cosimo and Mimmo transferred most of them to the villa. As much as Leo longed for me, I think, did he long for his books, and above all things, they remained his prizes. And so he read by his fire or in the shade of his loggia. He dined and drank modestly, if with pleasure. From time to time, he joined the household at table. He was always ready to meet with any of them, to talk about the smallest, the gravest of problems. He waited for me, listened to me, loved me. Reveled in my love for him. As we had once done on the far more inconsiderable space of our dark red rug with the yellow roses, we made a whole world of those rooms. While I attended to the villa, he wrote, listened to music, played his flute. He rode fo
r hours every day—in winter, going out just before sunset while in summer, leaving long before dawn. Over the years I never stopped asking to go with Leo on his rides, but he never once permitted it. The fear of vendetta rationalized away, still there remained some pale shade of terror in him for me.

  Thinking him to be one of the household whom you’d not yet met, you must have, more than once, seen him in his arriving or departing. Also, it was Leo who complimented your silvery-brown dress on that last evening. When he shook your hand in greeting and introduced himself, it was as Leo-Alberto. As it always was on those rare occasions when he was among people outside of the “family,” his wish was to remain unknown to you. But I will say that his reason for joining us that evening, at least in part, was so he might “meet” you. He knew, of course, of our talks under the magnolia.

  As I look back upon these fresh pages, I fear I’ve told you much too much while, at the same time, I have once again left what must be bewildering vacancies in my story. I, too, am often still bewildered. But even if I could tell you more, I’m not certain I would.

  I wrote repeatedly to Simona from Palermo, asking after her and the princesses. Though she always answered me, her letters were shadowy, stilted. I was hurt by what seemed her change of heart toward me. It was I who stopped writing. I’d kept silent for longer than a year when Carlotta wrote to tell me that Simona had died. A violent illness to which she willfully, swiftly surrendered. Sometimes I still wonder if Simona wasn’t the wisest one of all of us and if her polite turning away from me was more a stepping back, a way to help clear my path of the past so I might do what she’d said I must do. Find your own way home, Tosca.

  Carlotta had written that she and Yolande would stay on in Rome, where they’d been living when Simona became ill. She’d said any further plans were uncertain. I wrote my condolences and several subsequent letters but I never heard another word from them. Soon after I’d left Palermo and gone back to the mountains, I’d invited them to visit. Carlotta came alone. And she’s never gone away. So the first and only journey Leo made after his return was to Rome. To visit Yolande. Cosimo went with him, and it’s from him that I learned something of what happened on that day. Leo has never spoken of it to me.

  Cosimo said that Yolande was ensconced in irredeemable spinsterhood in a glorious old palazzo in the Parioli, that she had agreed to receive her father only after an hour of his pleading and cajoling through the auspices of her majordomo, who spoke with him through the citofono. I doubt that the prince expected his elder daughter would run down the stairs and fall into his embrace screaming with rapture, as had Carlotta. Still, his pride, what was left of his paternal instinct, must have been sorely tried as he climbed the stairs to Yolande’s apartments. Venturing no farther than the palms and the gilt of the anteroom and remaining unacknowledged, Cosimo stood like a second in a parlor duel while Leo approached Yolande, who’d sat—albeit at its edge—on a small divan in the salone. She did not rise to greet her father nor did she invite him to sit. With no preamble, Yolande asked Leo why he’d come. Perhaps wondering himself, Leo stayed quiet. Into the silence, Yolande proposed that his reason was, of course, money. Akin to telling him that the cook would wrap a loaf for him if he’d go to the back door, his elder daughter told him there were certain proceeds from certain sales that, if he would meet with her attorneys, might be signed over to him. But otherwise . . . by then Leo could not have spoken even if there were words he’d still wanted to say from those that, over the years, he’d practiced, tried on, thrown off, tried on again until he’d thought some had begun to fit. By the time she sat there talking about proceeds and attorneys, I fear he could recall not one of those words or why he’d wanted to say them. No one changes. Yolande never touched her father nor he her. Leo turned to go, restoring the rhythm of the princess’s afternoon. Just as his leaving had done always.

  Illuminated by Leo’s scrupulous observations, my will to provide for the widows and the others at the villa leapt from cautious devotion to obsession. Though life at the villa had proceeded nicely indeed, once he’d returned, once he was there, everything was better. It wasn’t as though what was difficult or exhausting went away so much as it was that our collective affinities—what the widows and all the others and I had in common—were exalted. What you saw and felt while you were here with us, what held you in such thrall, was that. Was him.

  It was nearly two years ago that Leo became ill. He chose not to submit to therapies and treatments. He trusted destiny to give him enough time. And so the illness had its way with him, seemed to be setting up to stay. It was then that Leo took things over. He did as his mother had done. For the second time, Leo arranged his death. Almost to the moment, he decided when he was ready to leave. Leo was his mother’s son.

  He never spoke of dying but rather about the sea, the sea that lay in wait for him behind the trees. In the sounds of his own tired, broken lungs and in the roar of his tortured breath, he heard the rasping of waves. He heard the sea. Hell imagined by a man who loves the earth? Rifles cocked, aimed from behind the yellow-leafed oaks? I never knew whether he feared or yearned for that sea. I still wonder.

  Cosimo and I would spell each other and, often, both of us stayed whole days and nights together with him. We set up camp by his bed, warmed soup over his fire, roasted bread, fed bits to him as to a tiny bird. More than once Cosimo offered to hear his confession, but Leo said Cosimo already knew too much. And when Cosimo wanted to perform extreme unction, Leo smashed the vial of oil Cosimo held in his hand, saying that a send-off from him could only be to Hades, and they both laughed. They laughed, perhaps understanding that laughing was the right way to turn the last page on nearly sixty years of life lived, more or less, in company with each other. As Cosimo describes his love for me, theirs, too, was another kind of love.

  I recall that when their laughter quieted and the silence was too big to fill with words, Leo reached his arms up to me. Like a baby wanting to be held. And so I held him. Rocked him. Noticing that the flesh of him seemed less even by the hour. He looked at me then and spoke to Cosimo. He told him that he’d rather kiss me with his last breath than kiss the cold, metal feet of an icon. The nailed feet of the crucified Christ.

  Look your last on all things lovely, Leo quoted, quickly damning himself for not recalling whom. Deciding to make the phrase his own, he said it over and over again. Look your last on all things lovely. Yes, I would rather kiss my Tosca.

  One evening, Leo told us that he would be pleased to say goodbye to his family. He, of course, meant the widows, the farmers. Especially those who’d been with us so long ago “when we were little,” he’d said. He always called it that. The era of our lives before he went away. “When we were little.” I told Agata of Leo’s wish and she informed the rest. Asked them to collect early next morning. Gathering before sunrise, they lined up on the stairs, on the landing, in the corridor outside his rooms. Everyone came, Chou. The field workers, the gardeners, the artisans, the villagers. They came in generations—fathers and sons, grandfathers and their sons and their sons’ sons, mothers and their children. Agata and I were still bathing him, tidying up his rooms while Cosimo revived the fire. Prayed. While they waited they sang. They sang all the songs from the harvest and the threshing. The ones Leo had taught the oldest ones among them. They sang all the songs of all the people who’d ever sown a field of wheat on this island. Singing all the songs of everyone who’d ever believed in a fistful of tiny seeds that, by the graces of the gods, might grow up into the sustenance to keep them all for just a while longer, they stood there. They sat there chanting and singing. Weeping. They were the addolorati. They were Demeter grieving for her baby girl. And Mary for her boy. Which I think is the same as grieving for ourselves. For the pain that lingers and the joy, flitting, teasing, that terrifies us more. Their sound was shrill and fierce and, in a way, a battle cry. They would not let their prince go quietly.

  And when Agata opened the doors to them, they entered a f
ew at a time, filed by Leo’s bed, kissed the bumps his feet made under the quilt, or took his hand and held it to their lips. Leo asked nearly every one of them some question or another. Oh, you wouldn’t believe the things he remembered about them, Chou! About their illnesses, their foibles. He remembered even their dreams. I think it was mostly their dreams that he remembered. How he wanted to talk! But when the breath wouldn’t come, he’d whisper up his admonitions, his affirmations. He promised to look after them from wherever this next confounded journey was to take him. He promised over and over again that he would look after them. He kissed each one’s hand. As the peasants kissed his hand, he kissed theirs in return. That gesture no one had ever seen—the noble returning his peasant’s kiss.

  That morning strengthened Leo, kept him alive a few days longer than both he and the looming black presence might have intended. Cosimo refused to leave Leo, save for his own abbreviated ablutions. He would sleep in a chair by the fire, otherwise sit there or pace back and forth and ’round and ’round, all the while talking to his friend, telling him stories. I slept on the bed next to Leo, my legs and arms twined in his as though, if I stayed still enough, he would forget I was there, take me with him as though I were part of him. I was part of him. I am part of Leo, Chou, and I think that you know that as well as anyone ever has or ever will.

  I woke one morning and before opening my eyes, I knew that he was gone. Cosimo had discovered him earlier, left me to sleep in his still warm arms while he went to see about things.

  Only Cosimo and I buried him. And not in the cemetery but on the rise of the hill at the edge of the farthest field. In the place where he’d appeared one afternoon, years and years ago, when he’d come back from some extended business or other he’d had to settle in France and thought he’d missed the first day of a harvest. A lanky blond wazir swooping down from another place, tearing off his coat, impatient to get the scythe in his hand, hailing Demeter, praising the Lord God Almighty, fairly trembling with the joy of being back on his land, with his family. That’s the place where the prince sleeps.