At least until now.
He moves quietly about the room.
He goes up to the second floor, where his mother still lives. Giuseppina didn’t want to leave. He sees her sitting in the salon, holding her rosary beads, dozing in an armchair. Strands of white hair are escaping her cap. Her hands are skinny, with age spots. He remembers them as strong, red from lye or icy water, or covered in flour. Or soiled with blood.
It’s a blurred memory that turns into a feeling of emptiness. He could have had a brother or a sister . . .
He takes a step back. The lines on Giuseppina’s face tell a story of bitterness. He knows she misses Ignazio more than his father. He feels sorrow and tenderness for her and her seventy years so full of pain.
He walks across the rooms, past the salon. He goes to his bedroom, lies down on the bed, seeking Giulia’s scent but not finding it. The sheets have been changed and smell of soap.
He closes his eyes as the sense of emptiness mutates into tiredness, then anxiety again.
What will happen now? he wonders. How generous will the king be and how far is his pardon going to reach?
He turns over, his eyes shut. Frustration gives him a bad taste in his mouth.
The prince of Satriano, he thinks. He’ll get me out of trouble. He owes it to me.
Six years earlier, Vincenzo saved Carlo Filangeri, Prince of Satriano, the shame of bankruptcy with a loan. He gave it to him even though the man had called him a “laborer.” As a matter of fact, that was the reason he lent him the money, so he would remember that a person he considered inferior had saved him from ruin.
Besides, Vincenzo then thought, it’s always useful to have connections at court.
The prince informed him through an intermediary that he wouldn’t have to pay for the consequences of having been “close” to the rebels or that regrettable incident of buying rifles on behalf of the revolutionary government. Naturally, he would have to return the silver taken from the churches but that would probably be all.
And yet.
Vincenzo decided to take away from this revolution the following lesson: to remember never to trust politicians. Use them, manipulate them if necessary, because every man has his price. But never, ever trust them blindly.
His tension slowly dissipates. Sunlight heralds the start of the day. He gets up and changes his clothes. He asks one of the manservants to call Caruso so he can freshen up and have breakfast.
When the secretary joins him, Vincenzo indicates the table. “There’s coffee and biscuits. Please help yourself.”
The man eats slowly and glances at his employer’s face, then says, “The royal messenger must be here by now. He was already expected yesterday evening.”
“Yes, I think so.” A pause, clenched between his teeth and the tension. “Then let’s go to the Palazzo di Città.”
* * *
To avoid being recognized, the two men wrap up in old cloaks. The silence in the alleys is now replaced with a hubbub that increases as they approach the Palazzo di Città. When the streets start to fill with people, they realize something’s happened. Beyond the Quattro Canti, where the gallows stand, there’s a sea of people shouting. They change route and slip into the alley parallel to the church and monastery of Santa Caterina. However, after a while they have to fight their way through the crowd, which smells of sweat and anger. “Quickly, let’s go in,” Vincenzo tells his secretary. “This doesn’t bode well.”
Lights and voices are bursting out the large lobby windows. A clerk is throwing documents into the fireplace. Slumped in a chair in the corner, Baron Turrisi is panting, his hands joined.
Baron Pietro Riso goes up to Vincenzo, followed by an evidently relieved Gabriele Chiaramonte Bordonaro. “Royal pardon for all of us. Exile for the others. The people are furious but they can’t see that it could have been a lot worse. No death sentence . . . though no doubt he will find some other way of punishing us.”
Caruso mutters, “Thank God.”
Vincenzo just nods, then asks, “Who’s being sentenced to exile?”
Riso opens his arms. “The ones who were most at the forefront: Ruggero Settimo, Rosolino Pilo, Giuseppe La Masa, the prince of Butera . . . Forty or so. It’s turned out well.”
At that moment a man bursts into the room. He looks distraught, his receding hairline flushed. “You!” he says, pointing a finger at the two aristocrats and Vincenzo. “You sold our island for a plateful of lentils.”
“It’s over, Don Pasquale,” Baron Turrisi says, trying to calm him down. “I understand your ideals have been disappointed, but there was nothing else we could do—”
“It’s Signor Pasquale Calvi to you. My political convictions refuse the titles of nobility. And with you, of course, there’s no hope anything could ever change.” He stares at them with incendiary rancor in his eyes. “My companions and I dreamed of a free Sicily, an independent land confederated to Italian states. None of you really believed in this ideal. None! We fought for nothing. And now because of your apathy, we will all have to pay for you. My name is on the exile list. I am forced to leave my country—me! Yes, your fear has condemned me and other children of this land to the fate of exiles. If you’d had courage, if you’d agreed to get armed and fight, by now the Neapolitans wouldn’t be at the city gates.”
Vincenzo doesn’t let him continue. “Enough proclamations and rhetoric, Calvi. Thank heavens there isn’t a cross next to your name or by now you would be at the Ucciardone fortress, and I would have taken you there myself, I can assure you.”
Mors tua vita mea.
Pasquale Calvi takes a step toward him. His despair is as corrosive as acid. “And you have the audacity to speak? When Ruggero Settimo and I begged you to defend the city, you pulled back, just like all the others, starting with those dogs next to you, Chiaramonte Bordonaro. And you surrendered to Filangeri. Cowards!”
“You asked us to get ourselves killed! We have lives, Calvi, and want to keep living them. Don’t you understand that by surrendering we avoided a bloodbath?”
But Calvi will not listen. “You, Florio, not only are you a jumped-up louse but you have a black soul. You’re a dog. You should have defended the city, not dropped your pants at the first threat for the sake of your interests.”
“Do you have any idea how many people I give work to?” Vincenzo roars, drawing closer. “Do you have any idea what Casa Florio is?”
The man pushes him back. “Damn you!” he cries. “I hope you go to hell, you and your money, and your breed—may you weep over it to the last cent! I hope you weep just as I must weep!”
Vincenzo’s heart is suddenly wrapped in darkness. He feels it rise to his head and obscure his eyes. “Are you trying to curse me?” His fists frantically open and close. “Because if so, I’m also good at curses, except that mine come true right away.”
“Enough, Calvi,” Baron Turrisi says, seizing him by the arm. “It’s over. How could we possibly resist once Messina and Catania had fallen? With what weapons? With what supplies? What did you have in mind—half a kingdom? A republic within the crumbling walls of a city? There was nothing else to be done. The king’s pardon is already a big deal.”
Calvi looks at him as though seeing him for the first time: with horror and contempt. “For you, perhaps.” Shouts can be heard through the windows, and stones thrown at the palace walls. “Can you hear the people of Palermo? They don’t want to surrender!”
A stone lands on the floor, chipping a tile. Pasquale Calvi opens his arms. It’s hard to ignore the distress in his face. The distress of a man in love with his land, who believed in the possibility of a different future and devoted himself to an ideal wholeheartedly, sacrificing his own life. The distress of a man forced into exile. “You’ve condemned our land to slavery. May the memory of what you’ve done keep you awake at night, and may your sons someday rise against you and blame you for your cowardice.” He runs out as the city quivers with shouts and gunshots.
Turrisi w
ould like to look out the window but hesitates and turns back. “We’d better leave. We’ll come back when tempers have cooled.”
They say goodbye with a nod and slip out amid office employees and clerks. The doors shut behind them.
Part Six
Tuna
October 1852 to Spring 1854
Nuddu si lassa e nuddu si pigghia si ’un s’assumigghia.
You don’t leave or choose somebody unless you resemble them.
—SICILIAN PROVERB
While in the rest of Europe pro-independence movements struggle to regroup after the revolts in 1848, Ferdinand II is trying to restore unity in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. For that, however, he makes very unpopular decisions: he imposes a hefty national debt and suspends until further notice the constitution promulgated by the Sicilian Parliament in March 1848. The people and local administrations, weary of the extended period of instability, accept these taxes. The aristocrats equally distance themselves from any attempts at rebellion, which, however, keep arising. These are isolated cases, though, chiefly linked to the countryside, and have no real resonance in the cities.
The pressure applied by the British government to lessen the tax burden and the repressive atmosphere does little good. And so the Bourbon reign becomes the archetype of a reactionary power characterized by deep unease, both in the country and in its international relations. Ferdinand’s son, Francesco II, who ascends the throne in 1859, therefore finds himself surrounded by an often reactionary aristocracy that jealously guards its privileges. Unable to move away from his father’s political tendencies, Francesco actually prevents the south from making economical and social progress.
Still, the patriotic momentum of the 1848 exiles does not wane but persists in the writings and interventions of many of them, including Giuseppe La Masa, Ruggero Settimo, and a young, combative lawyer from Ribera, near Agrigento: Francesco Crispi.
THE NETS HAVE BEEN CAST, the mesh is stretched. The tuna will come into them on a full-moon night.” This is what Herodotus wrote in the fifth century B.C. This is how it has been for centuries. Until now.
Tuna: a peaceful animal with silvery skin, able to swim for many miles in shoals of hundreds of individuals. Huge masses that stir the seas, filling it with splashes, waves, and sounds. In the spring, when the temperature is mild, they travel from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean in order to reproduce. Their flesh is fatty, their bodies ready to mate.
This is when the tonnara is lowered.
Because the tonnara is not just a building, a marfaraggio.
It’s also a contraption of nets with a succession of chambers: a method invented by the Arabs and passed on to the Spaniards, which reaches its climax in Sicily.
The tonnara is a ritual.
The tonnara is a place where entire families have been living for centuries: the men at sea, the women in the plants. In the winter, maintenance work is done on the ships and the nets are mended. Spring and summer are the time for slaughter and processing the catch.
They call this gentle-eyed monster the “sea pig” because no part of it is ever thrown away: not the tender, red meat, which is processed, salted, and sold in large barrels; not its skin and bones, which are dried, powdered, and used as fertilizer; not its fat, which is used for lamps; and not its eggs, which become expensive roe.
The tonnara is alive because tuna exists.
Salt and tuna have been walking hand in hand forever, albeit in a different form, since tuna cannot leave the sea.
* * *
Thanks to military achievements after the reconquest of Sicily in 1849, Carlo Filangeri, Lieutenant of the Kingdom of Sicily, Prince of Satriano, Duke of Taormina, is sitting in his elegant office with timber paneling and decorated with the coat of arms of the city of Palermo. Beyond the window, a warm, late October sun is spreading over the Palermo rooftops, forming lace shadows through the cathedral battlements.
In front of him, on the other hand, lies a series of letters: fiery words dripping with venom, a paper duel between Vincenzo Florio and Pietro Rossi.
Two years ago, in 1850, it was actually Filangeri who wanted Vincenzo Florio to be appointed as negotiations manager at the Royal Bank of the “Royal Dominions beyond the Lighthouse”; in other words, Sicily. He was sure that Florio was ready to go beyond his wide circle of commercial activities. A man as shrewd as he could also be useful in the administration of the kingdom.
Filangeri massages his whiskers, smoothing the curls that come halfway down his jaw. This is a real nuisance.
Pietro Rossi is the president of the Royal Bank. A man close to the Crown, powerful, respected, meticulous, and inflexible. He demands maximum correctness from everyone. Such an uncompromising man cannot take to somebody like Florio, who is constantly stopping and starting, who takes on a business then sets it aside for another, and is only interested in getting rich.
“Let that jumped-up laborer be a storekeeper,” Rossi once told Filangeri. “Let him go on trading with his boats and leave politics to those with a genuine desire to serve the people.”
Then, less than a week later, he provided evidence that Vincenzo had not carried out his task as negotiations manager in an exemplary manner: he had been unexplainably absent from meetings and had not attended registration activities. At the end of the message, Rossi suggested that Florio resign to avoid the embarrassment of his—by now inevitable, he thought—removal.
Filangeri would never do anything like this, however, not without giving Vincenzo a warning. He therefore summoned him and explained the situation, and thereby confirmed the suspicions Florio had been harboring for some time.
“I will ruin this waste of space,” Vincenzo hissed. “He’s slandering me before the minister and the finance director, here in Sicily and before you.”
“Come now, Don Florio . . . You could take part in the Royal Bank’s activities a little more. Attend meetings for instance. After all, I believe you have a large number of associates and presumably trusted people capable of standing in for you. Alternatively, step down from this position that brings you neither prestige nor money. Why do you want to make your life harder?”
“Thank you for your concern, but I know how to run Casa Florio, and things progress only if you’re at the helm, if you take care of them,” Vincenzo had replied with a grim expression. “That someone like Rossi should come and tell me how to behave is a real insult. I work hard, and dozens of families in the city have an income thanks to me. And he thinks I should sit around waiting for stewards to bring payment receipts and bills of lading. In other words, he wants me to be a paper pusher. Try to understand my reasons. Some things have to be managed . . . from the inside. Only those who work here or have friends in this place”—he opened his arms and indicated the building—“perhaps people with money. You’re a friend and I am grateful to you, but I don’t care about the money earned from the position: what I care about is work.” He looked up at Filangeri from below. His eyes were tired but determined. “You must help me, Prince.”
Filangeri moistened his lips and rubbed his sweaty hands on his thighs. Vincenzo was not asking him for a favor but had just given him an order. “You know, Don Florio, it’s not easy. He accuses you and has involved the director . . . I have to forward the request and—”
“Forward it,” Vincenzo interrupted him. “Send it to the director, naturally. I don’t wish to put you in an awkward position, I wouldn’t dare. But I would like to remind you that I can be grateful to my friends and ruthless to my enemies. And you know well how great my gratitude can be.”
Filangeri didn’t reply, but just stared at him. Vincenzo Florio had always been his safety net. When his lifestyle had exceeded his limits, and he was about to be crushed by debts or the shadow of bankruptcy was looming over him more than ever, Florio was there to rescue him. Naturally, he had given him a hand after the revolution, but that was nothing in comparison to all the times when . . .
He had no choice, he forwarded Rossi’s
letter to the director of the Finance Department of the General Lieutenancy of Sicily, but added that his claim was debatable to say the least, and that it would be better to find another solution. That there was no point in being so rigid.
The dismissal request lapsed.
But Rossi did not give up. And neither did Vincenzo.
Filangeri sighs. Whatever happens, this business will not turn out well. He collects the papers and sits back down heavily. He will speak to the finance director. This business has been going on far too long now; it runs the risk of paralyzing the activity of the Royal Bank. And he will add that it’s in nobody’s interest to stand in the way of a man like Florio.
* * *
Along the road that leads to Marsala, a carriage escorted by two men on horseback is swaying in the wind. It reaches the Florios’ courtyard, goes through the gates, and stops with a creak. The horses emit an exhausted neigh.
The November sky is a colorless blanket. The rough, gray sea is also roaring with a dissent that’s hard to interpret. The Aegadian Islands are faint marks on the horizon. Fall 1852 has walked in without knocking, bringing with it days steeped in frost that hardens the soil.
Giovanni Portalupi welcomes his brother-in-law with a handshake. “Welcome.”
“Thank you.” Vincenzo’s greeting is rough. “What a stupid day. Nothing but wind and clouds. If only it would rain.” Without adding anything else, he walks past Giovanni and heads to the main house.
A young man gets out of the carriage. He is tall, slightly overweight, wrapped in a cloak that conceals his body. He goes up to Portalupi and shakes his hand. “How are you, signore?”
“I’m well, thank you. And your father?”
“He’s not too bad, thank God. He’s stayed behind in Palermo, at the Casa Florio office.” Vincenzo Caruso, Giovanni’s son, fiddles with his bag and takes out some letters. “From your sister. She sends her regards.”
“Thank you. How is she?”
“Strong and courteous as ever. The girls keep her busy, and then there’s Ignazio.”
The Florios of Sicily Page 34