He does a few strokes then turns on his back. He can now see the tonnara from the sea, and house lights reflected in the gulf. One in particular.
The bedroom where Giulia is waiting for him.
Casa Florio. Giulia. His home. His life.
He lies on the surface, spits out a mouthful of saltwater, and laughs.
When was the last time he felt so free? Has he ever felt so free?
* * *
This October light is soft. It has shades of topaz, the mellowness of brass. It bounces off the tuff houses in Arenella and spreads over the sea, which has lost its brilliant summer color and taken on autumnal hues. Even the sand looks dull and no longer has that gleam that forces you to squint.
Almost six years old, Ignazio is leaning against the jamb, unsure whether to go to the beach or go back into the courtyard. He is drawn by the whisper of the sea, by a voice he cannot yet fully understand. All he knows is that it’s more than the chatter of his sisters, Giuseppina and Angelina, who are embroidering under the trellis, with the nanny and their mother.
He takes a step forward. The sea is calling to him.
Giulia looks up, searching for him. “Ignazio? Where are you going?” she shouts with a mixture of chiding and tenderness.
And, hearing this voice, he can’t resist and turns back.
Giulia puts her embroidery in her lap and hugs him. “Have you finished the homework the teacher gave you?”
He nods. “I’ve also done a drawing. A ship.”
Of course, Giulia thinks. What else would he draw? She smooths down his hair and the little boy moves his cheek close to her hand.
Ignazio thinks there’s no woman more beautiful than his mother. Not even Madmwazel Brigitte, with her strange r’s and blond hair.
Giulia knows that no man has ever looked at her—or ever will—with eyes as full of love as those of her son.
A sound of tinkling, followed by the snorting of horses, makes them turn toward the front door. The custodian opens it wide and a dark carriage drives in and heads to the corner opposite the trellis. The vehicle has not even stopped when Vincenzo jumps off and strides nervously to the entrance.
Giulia goes toward him. “Vincenzo,” she calls. But he makes an abrupt gesture to keep her away or perhaps just to silence her. “We didn’t expect you so early,” she says, as her daughters and the nanny stand up and mutter a greeting, their heads bowed.
“It’s nothing, Giulia. Don’t you go butting in as well.” He disappears through the door leading to the stairs, leaving in his wake the sound of heels clicking on the stone steps.
Ignazio sees his mother clasp her hands to her chest and drop her head.
How many times has he seen this kind of scene? How many times has he felt anger toward his father—an anger even stronger than the fear that man instills in him? His father is forever frowning, his face is always stern. He is often brusque with his mother. Why? Ignazio doesn’t understand.
He goes to his mother, silently, and looks at her with tenderness. Giulia says softly, “Your father is an important man, Ignazio. He’s not a bad man. It’s just the way he is. It’s his manner.”
“But he makes you cry.” He reaches out with his little hand, as if he wants to collect the tear stuck in his mother’s eyelashes.
Vincenzo’s furious voice, then the sound of doors slamming, is heard from upstairs. Strangely, Giulia smiles. “I’ve shed so many tears over him that one more makes no difference. I know your father, I really do.” She huddles in her shawl and looks up at the square tower. “I’m going to see what’s happening. You stay here with your sisters.” And, as Vincenzo has another angry outburst, Giulia disappears with a swishing of fabric, swallowed up by the darkness of the corridor.
Ignazio looks around. His sisters and the nanny have resumed their embroidering. He hears his parents’ voices grow distant.
The whisper of the sea comes again, carried by a light Gregale wind.
The child sneaks to the front door, and goes through it. Before him lies the Arenella sea.
Nobody notices him.
He goes out. For the past few days, his parents have forbidden him to go to the cliffs at the foot of the tower and climb the nearby stack. They’re too slippery, they said. And yet he spent the summer skipping around there and never fell. He even went for a swim on a couple of occasions. However, he didn’t have the courage to do like the fishermen’s children, who dive from the Balata, the large stack beyond the point of the bay. Besides, his father promised he would teach him to dive off there next summer, because the Florios have to be able to swim, because they have seawater and blood mixed in their veins.
Ignazio lets go of the ocher wall, walks across the beach, and edges his way through the rocks. A crab appears from a spur covered in dry algae. He sees it, reaches out to grab it, but the crustacean is faster, flattens itself, and scurries into a crack.
“No!” he exclaims, leaning forward. His leather sole slips on the dry seagrass, he loses his balance, sways, and falls into a puddle of stagnant water.
Ignazio whimpers softly. He looks at his hands: his palms are grazed. He struggles back to his feet. His injuries are throbbing and stinging from the salt but that’s not what worries him. His clothes and shoes are dirty. His mother will be angry.
Stupid crab, he thinks, annoyed. How can he remedy this mess?
He cautiously approaches the water. He knows the sea is deep in this spot because in the summer the Arenella kids dive there and resurface with bags full of urchins they then eat on the beach.
He bends down and, cupping his hand, gathers a little water to clean his shoes. The salt seems to sting even more. Biting his lip from the pain, Ignazio leans over and his stomach tenses up and he has a shudder of panic. The waves are tall and spray him. He clings to the rock, tries to balance himself and gather water with both hands. He staggers.
His heart in his throat, he stares into the sea, which has become very black. There’s no fish darting about, nor a dance of the anemone, or algae clinging to the cliffs. There are increasingly tall waves that end up soaking him wet.
Mamma’ll be so angry, he thinks. And Papà . . .
Better not think about that.
He must go back. He feels something behind his breastbone but can’t give it a name.
Holding on to a cliff, he tries to turn around and lift his feet, which seem trapped in the puddle.
The wind grabs him, makes him lose his balance, and drags him down. The impact with the water is ice cold and empties his lungs as though someone has sat on his chest. He opens his eyes and reaches up with his arms but the sea closes over him in a foam-and-glass embrace. He feels something seize his legs and drag him down. So he kicks, hitting first the water void, then a submerged cliff. The impact is so strong that one of his shoes flies off.
He’s blinded by terror. He opens his mouth to scream but the saltwater floods his trachea. “Mamma!” he yells with all the breath he has left, just as a wave carries him up into the air, like a jolt, then sucks him back down. “Mamma!” he cries out and swallows more water, coughing.
“Mamma!” he pleads desperately, as everything around him turns black.
* * *
“So that’s what happened, you see? We displayed a steam press at the Exhibition, last summer, the first hydraulic press built in Sicily, for Christ’s sake! And so they ask us for a supply of pans and spoons, and we can’t do it within a month. And why? Because there isn’t enough coal, we need more but we don’t have any here, so I have to order it from France. And the ships that should transport it aren’t coming, while the foundry has to pay a penalty.”
In Vincenzo’s office, in the heart of the tower, files are shifted, papers passed from one hand to the other. He finds a folder, opens it, grabs a paper, then puts it down again.
Giulia watches his jerky movements. “You knew it wouldn’t be easy to manage a foundry here in Palermo,” she murmurs. “Even Ben Ingham pulled out from the business.” She
approaches him and puts a hand on his arm.
“Nothing’s ever easy in this city, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything.” Vincenzo stops. Giulia’s touch has the power to calm him. He takes a deep breath. “Giachery and I have read the penalties stipulated by the contract in case we fail to deliver. I don’t want to pay them. And I had here some documents that—”
But Giulia is not listening to him anymore.
She frowns, her face turned toward the window. She thought she heard . . . She practically runs to the sill and leans out. “Angela! Giuseppina! Where’s your brother?”
The two girls and the nanny look up. “He was here with us . . .” Mademoiselle Brigitte replies as she stands up and looks for him. “Mais oui, he was wandering around here. Isn’t he with you?”
Giulia is startled. Perhaps she’s wrong . . . Yes, she must be. And yet she could have sworn she heard her son calling her.
She rushes out of the room and down the stairs. “Ignazio!” she calls.
Nobody answers.
Could he be hiding?
“Ignazio!” she repeats. She walks around the courtyard and calls again. She becomes increasingly anxious.
Still in his office, Vincenzo shrugs. Giulia worries too much. At his son’s age he would run away to La Cala, to the harbor alleys, and nobody was concerned for him. Ignazio must be loitering next to the boats between the slide and the marfaraggio, or else on the beach, throwing pebbles. What can possibly happen to him?
In the years to come, he will often remember this moment. But he will be unable to say just what prompted him to go to the windows overlooking the cliffs. A gut feeling? Or chance?
That is how, through the foam, against the cliffs beneath the smallest stack, he sees first a hand, then a leg. A body thrashing about, being hurled against the rocks, wrapped with algae that seems to drag him down.
Another thing he will not remember is whether or not he cried out.
What he thought, however, will be etched in his mind forever.
This can’t be happening to him. Not to my son.
Giulia sees him run past her, across the courtyard, while pulling off his jacket and plastron. When she realizes he’s running to the cliffs, she slams her hands over her mouth and follows him. As soon as he reaches the front gates, Vincenzo kicks off his shoes. Then he lunges toward the sea and dives in.
Images get trapped in her eyes and carve their way into her mind as though made of bronze. “Ignazio!” she screams. “Ignazio!” She climbs on the rocks, tears the hem of her dress, reaches out with her arms, and calls her son again. She sees Vincenzo surface, then disappear once again in the dark water. There’s a body thrashing amid the algae. Or is it being moved by the waves?
He’s still alive, isn’t he?
Behind her, Angela, Giuseppina, and Brigitte are crying and frantically clinging to one another. The nanny is sobbing, shouting in a mixture of French and Sicilian that she has no idea how this could have happened, but Giulia is not listening. “Vincenzo!” she cries. “Ignazio!”
It’s Ignazio who emerges first. His eyes are closed, he’s pale as a sheet, but shuddering and coughing . . . Giulia starts and bursts into tears. Thank God he’s coughing! It means he’s alive!
Vincenzo surfaces immediately afterward. He’s shivering from the cold and has scratches on his arms and legs but he doesn’t care. He lays the child on the beach and pushes Giulia away when she tries to take her son in her arms.
“Leave him! We must turn him on his side! He has to spit out the water!” He hits him hard on the back.
Ignazio quivers under the blows, moans, and vomits seawater and remnants of food. He opens his eyes for a second and sees only his mother’s terrified face. “Mamma . . .” he mutters, his voice hoarse from salt and the screaming. “Mamma . . .”
Giulia starts to cry her eyes out. “My baby . . .” She snatches off her shawl and wraps it around him as he continues to cough and shake. Vincenzo lifts him in his arms and heads to the tower.
“You two!” he orders his daughters. “Get a physician—move!” Then his eyes drift to the nanny. His voice is an angry snarl. “And you, useless woman, get out of my sight. I don’t want to see you ever again by tonight. My son nearly died. He got away from your surveillance and you didn’t even notice! There’s nothing so precious to me as this little one. So get out!”
Upset, still crying, Brigitte moves back then runs to her room.
Giulia is hunched over Ignazio and doesn’t completely take in what Vincenzo has said.
But Angelina does hear him. A crease of pain appears on her face that’s halfway between a child’s and a woman’s. “Let’s go,” she says, tugging at Giuseppina. Then she tells her to stop sniveling, because Ignazio is fine, he’s just been a hooligan and is going to get a fever now. She doesn’t even know where the anger in her chiding comes from. As she hears the sand, hardened by the salt, squeaking under her shoes, she locks her pain away in her heart, and conceals thoughts that cannot see the light of day. But she knows what her father meant, and will remember it for years to come.
* * *
That night, Giulia sleeps in Ignazio’s room. The physician has reassured her and said the child is fine, that he has at most caught a chill, and his bruises and scratches will hurt, but that’s all. He’s given him honey and licorice syrup for his throat, and recommended heat packs on his chest.
But she cannot believe it and doesn’t want to leave him. That he is alive, that her husband snatched him from death—to Giulia all this suggests a miracle.
Her husband, Vincenzo, saved him.
During those instants, she didn’t see the slightest fear or despair in his face. Only raw willpower and an almost superhuman determination she knows well.
However, Vincenzo hasn’t been anywhere near Ignazio since bringing him into his bedroom. He vanished to his office in the tower. It was Giulia who stayed with the child, made him drink hot broth, and changed his clothes.
At one stage, Giuseppina came in, her eyes red and her hands still shaking from the shock. She clasped the little one to her chest, kissed his damp hair, and whispered strange Calabrian words Giulia didn’t understand. All she knows is that Ignazio is the only grandchild to whom her mother-in-law shows any affection.
Now, calm at last, mother and son fall asleep. They have their heads on the same pillow, their fingers interlaced. Ignazio fidgets and coughs. Giulia holds him tight. Finally, they both fall into a deep, welcome slumber.
It’s the middle of the night when the child wakes up with a start. A sound, a door creaking: maybe somebody’s come into the room. He clings to his mother’s arms, squints, and peers into the darkness.
His father’s here.
He’s sitting in the armchair, his face ravaged by tension, his hair untidy. His hands are joined in front of his face and he’s looking at Ignazio in a way the boy finds astonishing. It’s an expression of relief, panic, and exhaustion. And affection.
He has never looked at him this way.
He immediately understands that his father got frightened, and this notion alone upsets him. Fear for him because—maybe—he loves him.
He wants to reach out to him, tell him to come closer, but cannot. Sleepiness and tiredness have the upper hand. He drifts back to sleep with a gentle feeling of warmth.
He does not see—cannot see in the dark—that his father’s eyes are brimming with tears.
* * *
In the days following the accident—that is what Giulia insists on calling it—Ignazio stays in bed: the fever, caused by the shock and the cold, has come over him. The child spends his afternoons in his room, alone. Brigitte left in a rush and his sisters are now studying with their mother.
His legs drawn up under him, curled up in a nest of blankets, Ignazio is leafing through a book from his father’s library. It’s not a book for children but he doesn’t care. What’s important is not to think, not to remember the terror of dying alone, beneath gallons of water flooding
his lungs. That was—he knows and tells himself—the first time he experienced the fear of death. It’s a feeling he will carry inside for the rest of his life.
He therefore immerses himself in the book before him, reads aloud a syllable at a time, looks at the illustrations, allows the unfamiliar words to curl in his mouth as he kneads them with his tongue.
Ships. So many of them.
It is how Vincenzo finds him when he returns from the Oretea foundry, after an entire day spent talking to the workers, making sure that the coal, iron, and tin would arrive in time.
He opens the door and stands on the threshold. “What are you doing?” he asks. “What are you looking at?”
Ignazio looks up and Vincenzo can’t help noticing the resemblance to Giulia. And yet at the same time there’s something that reminds him of the uncle whose name his son carries, the Ignazio who raised him and was always watching over his shoulder. A sort of calmness, an expression that’s both placid and determined.
The little boy slips out from under the blanket and gives a little bow. Without saying a word, he hands him the book.
“Statistical Chorographical Customs Situation of Sicily by Francesco Arancio.” Vincenzo cannot repress a laugh. “Are you reading this book?” There’s surprise in the question but not mockery, and Ignazio senses it.
“I like looking at the maps and the steamers,” he explains, indicating the pages his father is leafing through. “Look,” he adds, pointing at a page. “There’s La Cala. Here it tells you how the rivers end up in the sea, past the walls.”
Vincenzo nods and looks askance at his son, who is shyly telling him what he saw through this thick network of lines and words.
He has grown before him without his noticing. It’s high time he started taking care of him, because Giulia is a woman, after all, and Ignazio can’t cling to his mother’s skirts forever.
“We’re going back to Palermo the day after tomorrow,” Vincenzo suddenly says, closing the book and returning it to him. “It’s getting cold here.”
But that’s not the only reason. If he can read an atlas, then he’s capable of studying in earnest, so he must start immediately, without wasting any more time.
The Florios of Sicily Page 31