The Florios of Sicily

by Stefania Auci

  Vincenzo is walking behind the wall on Via degli Argentieri. He has not left the city yet but soon will. He kicks out of the way a stray dog rummaging through the garbage and covers his face with a handkerchief to shield himself from the stench that rises from the sewer drains. Everything carries an inescapable smell of death.

  At the top of Via della Zecca Regia stands a carriage with darkened windows, escorted by two men with rifles. Giulia, wearing a hat with a veil, is standing by the carriage, searching the street for him. As soon as she sees him, she clasps her hands over her chest and runs toward him.

  “You’re coming with us,” she says without even greeting him.

  He shakes his head, says he cannot leave yet. “The house is not far from Monreale and is well protected,” he says to her. “Giovanni and your parents will join you there tonight. Don’t go out, and have as little contact as you can with people you don’t know,” he orders.

  Giuseppina’s crying and Angelina’s whining voice can be heard from the carriage. Giulia holds on to his hands, overwhelmed with anxiety. “You’ll come soon, won’t you?”

  “Yes, yes, I will. Now, you all be careful, have the bedding boiled and—”

  She kisses him as though she will never see him again. “I don’t want to go,” she says, clutching his wrist. “Let’s send the girls away. I’ll stay with you . . .” she implores. “Who’ll look after you if you get sick?”

  He shakes his head, says he doesn’t want her to, that she, too, must be safe. He practically pushes her into the carriage, while Angelina climbs onto her lap.

  Come soon, her eyes seem to say beneath the veil. Don’t leave me alone.

  Vincenzo is forced to look away. He can’t bear to watch them go, knowing the disease could kill them within a day and a night. This could be the last time they see one another. Children are easy prey for this disease.

  The day before, he made a similar carriage available for his mother and the servant women, and escorted them to the gates of the city. He sent them to the estate in Marsala, where they will be safe.

  He cannot leave yet, however. He still has to make sure the warehouses are protected, take care of the supplies, and tell the French suppliers not to send goods that can’t pass through customs, since the city is in disarray and nobody is minding the Customs House.

  Suddenly, a man emerges from the alley outside Palazzo Steri, and calls out loud to him: it’s Francesco Di Giorgio, who’s in charge of trade with the Sicilian provinces. “Don Florio! I’ve found you! Come! It’s a disaster!”

  Vincenzo’s anxiety turns to fear. “Is it the supplies?”

  “The valerian tincture, pepper, cardamom, and mint essential oil . . . Nothing, all gone! The little that was left has been requisitioned. When I left I saw a crowd I didn’t like outside the store . . . They’re all desperate. Apparently they’ve set fire to and ransacked a pharmacy in the Tribunali district. In the countryside they’re even murdering priests because they say they spread the infection . . . People are going crazy!”

  “Damn!”

  They run to the aromateria. The fountains in Piazza del Garraffello have been pulled out; a black X has been painted over some of them. The smell of quicklime, used as disinfectant, wafts in gusts, mixed with the stench of the latrines.

  In Via dei Materassai, they come across a wall of people. Carmelo Caratozzolo, the aromateria manager, is standing outside the door, his arms raised. “We’ve run out of everything, I swear! There are no ships coming, so there’s no restocking! We have nothing left!”

  “What do you mean? Not even laudanum?” A man in front of him begs, his hands joined together. “How will I soothe my wife’s pain? She’s writhing in bed . . .”

  Another young man, barely older than a boy, is desperate. “Not even a small bottle of valerian? It’s for my daughter, my little girl!”

  Behind them, men and women curse, beg, and press to get into the store.

  Vincenzo has to plow through, pushing them away with his elbows. The terror that deforms the faces of these men is more evil than the cholera: he can feel it on his skin and can’t get away from it; it’s as though his arms and legs were hog-tied.

  “I don’t believe it!” an old man shouts. He grabs a stone and hurls it at the window. “You’ve accumulated the spices so you can give them to your friends!”

  At this, Vincenzo stirs himself and leaps forward. They mustn’t destroy the aromateria. Everything he is begins and ends within those wood-paneled walls. He first walked in there at the age of eleven, when his uncle took him there and showed him the sign with the injured lion and, in a way, he never left it. More than anything else at this moment, he wishes he could have Uncle Ignazio next to him, and hear his reassuring voice.

  “No!” he cries but his voice cannot rise above the roar of the crowd.

  “Let’s take it all ourselves!” someone else shouts.

  Vincenzo comes between the human mass and Caratozzolo. “Stop!” he yells with all the breath in his body.

  The people freeze. Everyone looks at him with a mixture of hatred and hope.

  “Don Florio, for the love of God,” the young man says, falling at his feet. “Help us. At least you help us!”

  Vincenzo turns to Caratozzolo, but the latter keeps shaking his head. He has tears in his eyes because he truly wishes he could help these wretched people. “Don Florio stands witness. We really have run out of everything. Believe me!”

  Vincenzo shows them the palms of his hands. “It’s true, I swear it. I know many of you: you’re Vito,” he tells the young man. “You work at the fish market, your father, Biagio, is a ship’s carpenter and you have a little girl the same age as my daughter. And you’re Bettina, Giovanni the marble polisher’s wife. Behind you there’s Pietro, the stonecutter. I know you and your families because I live here, too. And if I swear to you there’s nothing left, then you must believe me.”

  “Lies! You’ve saved all the spices!” a voice from the far end of the square shouts. “Now get out of our way before we remove you!”

  The crowd mutters, waves, stirs, presses.

  Vincenzo opens his jacket and unbuttons his waistcoat. He reveals his bare chest, on which the first few white hairs are sprouting. “You want to kill me? Here I am. I’m not pulling back. But if I tell you there’s nothing, then you have to believe me. Everything’s gone. I don’t even have anything left for my own family.”

  The stonecutter has an outburst of anger. “You’re saying that because you’re going to sell it to your friends!”

  Vincenzo laughs, from rage and despair. He opens his arms. “What did you say? What friends? Can you see any carriages here? Or soldiers? No!” He grabs Caratozzolo’s arm. “There’s only me and this wretch left in the aromateria. I’m here just like all of you, and if I get sick then I’ll die like a dog, just like you. If I tell you we have nothing left it’s because we have nothing left. The supplies at Palazzo Steri are finished. Until the health restrictions are lifted, nothing can get through.”

  Bettina, the woman, steps forward and takes him by the sleeve. He can’t bear the painful incredulity on her face. “How is it possible? You’re the largest trader in Palermo and you don’t have anything left? If that’s true, then . . .”

  “Do you want to see for yourself?” Vincenzo indicates the aromateria. “Go in.”

  Silence falls on the square. For a moment, nobody stirs. Then, slowly, the crowd opens up amid sobs and cries of despair, breaks apart, and disperses.

  In the end, only the young man on the ground is left. Vincenzo bends over him, puts a hand on the back of his neck, and says in his ear, “Go home, son, and pray to God. Only He can help Palermo.”

  Vito bursts into tears. His tears get under Vincenzo’s skin, because now a father’s weeping sounds different to him. Because he imagines himself there, on the ground, kneeling in the mud, wretched and devastated, searching for medicine for Angelina or Giuseppina or, even worse, for Giulia.

  The weepin
g haunts him even when, the following day, he reaches the house in Monreale, where Giulia and the girls are staying. He locks himself in a surly silence. At night, though, unable to sleep, he goes into the room where his daughters are asleep, their hair spread on the pillows, mouths ajar. He sits next to them and listens to their breathing. They’re well, they’re alive.

  He doesn’t know if he can say as much about Vito’s girl.

  * * *

  Vincenzo Florio, a Palermo trader and industrialist, owner of schooners, sulfur mines, wine cellars, and tonnaras, member of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, underwriter as well as finance intermediary, is in slippers and shirtsleeves in the modest kitchen of the mezzanine apartment in Via della Zecca Regia. It is October 1837 and the cholera epidemic is finally over after claiming more than twenty thousand lives in the Palermo region.

  They’ve been lucky. They’re all still alive. Entire families have been wiped out.

  Vincenzo has dined with his illegitimate family: Giulia and his daughters. Tomorrow, he’ll go to his mother’s in Via dei Materassai. Life is finally getting back to normal.

  The girls are already asleep, watched by a nanny. They are lovely and well brought up. Giulia speaks to them in French, a language she learned in Milan as a child. She reads them bedtime stories.

  She is still as simple and pragmatic as when he first met her.

  Vincenzo watches her tidy up the room and add coal to the brazier. She soaks the vegetables then struggles to open a can. “Can you help me?” she says, indicating the can of tuna in brine. It comes from the Arenella tonnara, which he owns in partnership with a half-Frenchman, Augusto Merle, who had relocated to Palermo.

  He takes the can and opens it with a knife. The brine squirts up after the metallic click, and a smell that reminds him of his childhood spreads through the room.

  The images blend into one another. He recognizes the kitchen in Piano San Giacomo and a shape, with its back to him, pulling chunks of fish from an earthenware pot sealed with wax.

  Is it Paolo, his father, or Uncle Ignazio?

  The shape turns to him.

  His father.

  He sees once again the bushy mustache, the stern expression. He watches his father immerse the fish in hot water to get rid of the salt, and say something to his mother about being able to keep the fish for weeks in olive oil.

  Something makes a sound in his head, a click, like a clock.

  Oil. Tuna.

  He’s dragged back into the present, and his memories return to the semidarkness. Giulia thanks him. He watches her rub her hands with lemon to remove the smell.

  “I could get you a cook,” he says all of a sudden.

  She shakes her head. “Your mother would keep saying that I make you squander your money. I already have a maid and a nanny for Angela and Giuseppina. Besides, I enjoy cooking.”

  He insists. “There’s my housekeeper’s daughter. She’s a good girl, and does heavy work, too. I’ll send her over.”

  The response is an impatient sigh. “Sometimes it feels like being your wife. I talk but you don’t listen.”

  Vincenzo puts his arm around her waist. She hugs him, goes past the English-style beard, and kisses him, standing on her toes. She gestures at him to follow her. “Bring the lamp,” she whispers with the intimacy of lovers who want each other precisely because of that, each other and nobody else.

  They sleep together like man and wife. However, beyond these walls and beyond the courtyard of Via della Zecca Regia lies Palermo. She, too, is a possessive lover, and Vincenzo knows it: jealous, fickle, and capricious, capable of blooming and self-annihilating in a single night.

  But appearances conceal a soul of shadows.

  Vincenzo knows this darkness well, and mirrors himself in it. He can’t afford to lower his guard because what his woman forgives him, the city does not. Palermo will continue to love him, to love the Florios for as long as they keep bringing it money and comfort. The city is going through a mysterious state of grace at this time: it’s sprouting more colors, filling with new construction sites and buildings. And Palermo needs his money, the Casa Florio money.

  * * *

  With his shiny shoes and linen jacket, Carlo Giachery watches Vincenzo think. Because he knows Vincenzo is turning something over in his mind and stopped listening to him a few minutes ago. “Vincenzo?”

  “Eh?”

  “I’ve been talking to you for some time. Is it my voice that’s inducing you to distraction or is there something you want to tell me?”

  Vincenzo makes an apologetic hand gesture. “Both, actually. What were we saying?”

  “That the Nuova Badia nuns are complaining about the noise made by the cotton mill looms. It’s the monks right next door to it who should be complaining, not them. Who knows what’s going through their birdbrains?”

  Vincenzo props his chin on his joined hands. “That’s Sicily all over. No sooner do you try to do something different than somebody will always start whinging and whining because either you’re disturbing them, or they don’t want it, or they tell you what to do, or they simply try to piss you—”

  “I get it.” Carlo sniggers into his mustache. Literally. “I was thinking of putting up some cork cladding to muffle the sound but I don’t know how much it would help. The devouts are also complaining about the steam from the machines.”

  “They’re looms. It’s steam. Hot water! In England, they were already using it twenty years ago and nobody dared say anything. Let them recite a couple more rosaries and keep their windows shut. Instead, listen . . .” He looks for a piece of paper and reads it again. The furrow between his eyebrows gets deeper. “Read this.”

  Giachery puts on his spectacles and concentrates. “Sales of tuna have fallen.”

  “At all tonnaras, not just here in Sicily; there’s a drop in demand also for sardines and mackerel.”

  “I see.” Vincenzo gestures at him to continue reading. “Why do you think that is? Is it still because they think they cause scurvy?”

  “Yes. The British are withdrawing and so are other ship owners. But I know it’s not true. My family has been trading in brined fish for years, and eating it, and nobody’s lost their teeth.”

  “Who knows? Of course, a drop like this . . . it’s not significant yet but it could become so.”

  Vincenzo makes a gesture of annoyance. “Fresh meat is preserved with ice from the Madonie Mountains. But tuna has always been salted.”

  “Perhaps a different method . . .” Carlo is pensive. “Like smoking, but I don’t know if it’s suitable for tuna. Or else—”

  Click.

  Vincenzo looks up.

  Click.

  His father soaking the fish in oil after desalting it because . . . Click.

  He dives into his papers, looking for the calendar. “When’s the next mattanza . . . ? The next slaughter in Arenella is in ten days’ time. So . . .”

  Giachery observes him. Vincenzo is animated with a frenzy that almost makes him look younger.

  “Why does meat decompose, Carlo?” he asks, standing up. He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Because worms start eating at it. But if the meat is cooked, then it becomes more resistant. And how do you preserve it for a long time to stop it decomposing?” He places himself in front of Carlo and leans toward him. “Say if I want it to keep for six months or a year, or even longer, for example for an ocean voyage, what do I do?”

  He whispers the answer in his ear.

  * * *

  In May, with the warmth of spring, the first tonnaras are dropped. It’s a plentiful catch, and the sailors thank Saint Peter and Saint Francis of Paola for granting such abundance.

  In May, cans, some made of tin, others glass, full of tuna in oil, are safely stored in Giachery’s pantry, under the puzzled but watchful eye of Carolina, his wife.

  They’re here, waiting for the correct period of time to pass.

  A year.

  A year, before the experiment can prove success
ful. Before cooked tuna, covered in oil, sealed in a container, can survive a sea voyage or in any case be preserved long-term. Vincenzo is really trying. With his stubbornness, with the notion that if he doesn’t try something new, nothing can change.

  And he wants to be in control of his life.

  In June, with blinding sun and laundry drying in the first breath of scirocco wind, Giulia takes Vincenzo’s hand and tells him she is pregnant again.

  * * *

  On December 18, 1838, at dawn, somebody knocks at the Florios’ door in Via dei Materassai. The knocking soon turns to punching.

  Giuseppina hears the noise and stops the servant girl on her way to open the door. “Who is it?”

  She sees a breathless maid rush into the house. “I’m looking for Don Vincenzo,” she says with the hint of a curtsy. “It’s important. My mistress . . . My mistress is in labor.”

  Giuseppina pushes her out. “So? Out—you and her!”

  Vincenzo appears. His eyes are still half-asleep but become alert as soon as he sees the servant. “Ninetta, what is it?”

  “Signora Giulia sends me. It’s time, Don Florio.”

  “Oh, heavens, today of all days!” He runs his fingers through his hair. “I have a meeting about the cellars and I can’t miss it, she knows that. Tell her I’ll be there later. I can’t now.”

  The girl quickly vanishes down the stairs.

  Giuseppina shuts the door with an outburst of anger. “She comes to find you even here?”

  “I ordered her to.”

  “She’s not even your wife. What does she want? More money?”

  Vincenzo gets dressed in a hurry, his mind in the bedroom in Via della Zecca Regia, where, he is certain, Giulia is crying out in pain. At the same time he wonders when his mother had become so cold-hearted. In recent years she has grown thinner and let herself go. Her face, which should have softened with age, looks instead as if covered in a crust of resentment against the whole world.

  He, too, is getting old: there are gray locks in his hair. His eyelids are heavier, and his face is furrowed with wrinkles. Vincenzo had shelved the idea of a high-rank marriage some time ago. It’s hard enough to find a rosebud to marry a man of forty, let alone a man with three bastards to support.