“Ah, I wondered about that when I was walking by the lake with Beppe. In one of the fishmongers, I noticed the swordfish on his counter had a neat section cut out of its back. Also, I couldn’t see where the harpoon had struck the fish; there didn’t seem to be any mark or wound. Now, it all makes sense.”
“I hope you are hungry. Would you like to make the salad?”
“Sure, whatever I can do to help.”
“Good. There you have tomatoes, cucumber, red onions, olives, celery. Here is the knife; a sharp knife, eh? And over there is the oil and vinegar, salt and pepper.”
Caterina smiles. “How are you going to cook the swordfish, Antonio? A recipe handed down from generation to generation; one kept secret on pain of death?”
He laughs, generously. “No, it is no secret. Only a complete idiot could make swordfish inedible. Enzo and me, we like to keep our cooking simple: a sauce of parsley, garlic sliced thin, salt, pepper, lemon juice and white wine. Grill the fish for five minutes, add the sauce and grill for another five. See what I mean? Only a complete idiot…”
“No such thing as a bad cook, Antonio, only bad ingredients.” Caterina sets to slicing the vegetables. “When I was watching the fishmonger, I noticed he was butterflying small fish to order. Sauri negri I think they were called.”
He nods. “Sauri negri: silver with blue and green on the top, like a small mackerel you would say.”
“Yes. Only he was dropping the guts and the spine of the fish into a bucket, which I assumed he was going to throw away until an old man came in and bought them. Were the bones for his cat?”
Antonio shakes his head. “No, not for his cat, for him. You see, it doesn’t matter how precise the fishmonger is in cleaning the sauri, there is always some meat left on the bones. The old man would have taken them home and boiled them with garlic, vinegar and mint: boiling them makes the meat that is left fall away from the bone, so it is easier to pick out and eat, and with what is left he makes a soup. We use every part of the fish, even the parts of the fish many people would throw away.”
They sit at his kitchen table and the swordfish tastes so very different from the swordfish she buys in her local supermarket back in… in England; for though the steak is thick, firm and fleshy, it is so much lighter and more succulent.
“It is fresh, eh?” Antonio says, as he notices her eyes close in appreciation.
“Isn’t it just. I had no idea.”
And when he nods in approval of her salad, Caterina cannot hold the colour of her pleasure from rising to her cheeks.
They talk, what about she does not remember later, and there are no uncomfortable pauses or silences while they wander from one topic of conversation to the next; they seem to flow with each other in easy and all directions, like the changing tides of the Strait, except without their negative influence.
She watches him as he explains about how, in the days of his grandfather when their boats were without engines, the fishermen would tow the fulue, the larger of the two boats Beppe had shown her by the lagoon, out to their posts in the Strait, where they would station them: i terra those near the Sicilian shore, i fora those near the Calabrian and i menzu those in between. The lookouts, the avvistatore, would then climb the tall masts, much as Giuseppe and Pasquale do every day, and spot the swordfish, directing the smaller boats, the luntri, towards them.
Antonio is patient with his explanation and Caterina is a ready and perhaps, given her days on the feluca, attentive listener.
“How do they manage to spend all day perched so high up on that tiny platform?” she asks.
Except for his chin, which is a little angular in its curve, Antonio’s face is quite square and very evenly proportioned; for while his cheekbones are prominent, they are no more prominent than his nose or his forehead. He has shaved the stubble from his chin, a small detail, yet a detail that earlier in the day she had caught herself wondering about; wondering whether he would, for her. And she is glad he has, because his skin is coloured the deep brown of mahogany and his complexion is smooth as if polished by one of the cotton wool clouds that float above Aspromonte. Yet it is his eyes that draw hers: the blue is remarkable, mesmerising, spellbinding and at times Caterina has to look away because she knows she is staring.
“If I am honest, I don’t know,” he replies. “Only a brave man or a fool would pass his days up there in all the heat. There are days it is so hot that when Pasquale comes down, I think he will have shrunk and be half the man he was when he climbed up in the morning. Imagine, six o’clock in the morning until nine o’clock at night: fifteen hours.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “All I know for certain is that I could not do this. Sure, the pressure on me to hit my mark is great, but to take the risks that Pasquale takes day in day out is beyond reason. Perhaps we are lucky he is so mad. Perhaps one day I will see his body fly from the top of the tower and crash into the sea. I don’t know: he is mad, quite mad.”
“Has a woman ever climbed to the top?”
“A woman? Why would she? In fact, why would anyone, doesn’t matter if they are a woman or a man… why would anyone if they didn’t have to?”
“Beats me, Antonio. You wouldn’t catch me up there if the many–headed monster was chasing me. Can I do the dishes?”
He looks at her, quizzically. “Why? Do you have to go so soon?”
Caterina laughs but, as she sweeps the hair from her face, she is careful not to let him think she is laughing at him. “No, I just thought you might like me to do the clearing up seeing as you went to the trouble of catching and cooking the fish. Why don’t you put some music on; music you like.”
“Oh, the music is mostly Enzo’s.”
“Mostly,” she says, smiling playfully, “means not all.” The cat follows her into the kitchen and is rewarded for its patience with the morsel of swordfish she has kept aside expressly for the purpose. “What is your cat’s name?” she calls.
“Aida,” he replies.
“As in the opera?”
“Exactly. Not my choice, Enzo’s.”
“Why Aida?”
“We had a tomcat. He appeared on the doorstep and laid claim to us; quite the warrior, he was. At the time, Enzo was dating a girl who liked opera; she named him Radames. Well, we didn’t know what his name was, did we? Then one day, Radames brought his girlfriend home with him, so it was only natural we named her Aida.”
“What happened to Radames?”
“Oh, a big fight one night. I think he took a beating and his ego never recovered. You know, old lions and young lions. Besides, we had no way of knowing how old he was when he adopted us.”
A delicate and curiously lilting medieval folk tune, a variation of a slow Tarantella played on a lazy mandolin, floats like the vapours of a soothing drug.
As she dries her hands, Aida stares up at her. “So,” her eyes say, “you’ve finished the dishes. What are you waiting for? Go and join him on the sofa.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Caterina mutters.
She settles a little awkwardly beside Antonio, but not too close. “I… Well, I… Thank you for dinner,” she says, her words strung together in a flat, rather formal manner.
“I make you nervous?” he asks, half statement, half question.
His candour catches her unprepared and she sits up, leans her elbows on her knees and looks sideways, slightly over her shoulder, at him. “Yes.”
Caterina pauses, buying time by studying the glass of wine in her hand. “And no. No, Antonio, you don’t make me nervous; I think I manage that all on my own.” She pauses again and turns back to look very directly at him. “And yet, in a curious way, you do. Or maybe it’s not you, maybe it’s us, you and me sitting here. Maybe it’s simply the idea of me sitting alone with you, a man, any man… Please don’t take that the wrong way; I don’t mean any man, I mean… It’s just the whole idea of
it, of you, of us. I haven’t been out to dinner or sat like this talking with a man who isn’t a family friend since… well, since my husband died. You must have felt this way after your wife deserted you and Enzo, so I guess you know how I feel.”
“Yes.” And that is all he says as he sits and watches her; a hunter once wounded by his own harpoon; a man unwilling to reveal the extent of the pain the wound caused him.
“Yes?” she repeats. “Just yes, nothing else?”
“Yes, it is no surprise and no, you should not be nervous. Did you not look in the mirror before you came out this evening? Did you not see the new Caterina, your hair, what the sun has done for you, how your eyes shine? If I did not know you came from England, I would think you were Messinese.”
She delivers Antonio a knowing look, not cynical, not unforgiving, just knowing that if he does not want to talk about himself, then she is not inclined to talk about herself, either. “Perhaps I am, who knows?”
Her glass is empty: he refills it, returns to sit down and waits, expecting.
“Two years before my husband died, not long before he was diagnosed…” A thought creeps up and startles her. “Or maybe he already knew he was ill, I don’t know. Anyway, we went to stay in Taormina; a holiday, a short break. God knows, there was never such a thing as a long holiday, not with Charlie. He’d get fidgety after a day by a pool; he bored easily; always wanted to be out and about, seeing this, playing that; never sat down. I sometimes wondered whether he revolved more relentlessly than the planet.” She sips her wine and stares into the distance. “We were in Taormina and I went to one of the churches, the Santa Caterina. Well, I would, wouldn’t I?
“We stayed at Casa Cuseni, did all the things tourists do; you know, strolled up and down the corso, saw the amphitheatre, dined al fresco. But two things stuck with me: one, we went down to the beach by Isola Bella and two, I went on the tour and learned all about Robert Kitson and Carlo and how they’d adopted a child from the ruins of the Messina. But both of them reminded me of my nonna’s story: you see, after the earthquake, my grandmother, who was only fifteen at the time, was found in an aid station by a woman who had been nursing an English lady at Isola Bella. My nonna’s family had all been killed, so this woman took my nonna back to England with her, which is where she grew up and married.” Caterina silences, thinks for a moment and then turns back to him. “So, when you say I could be mistaken for a Messinese I’m not surprised, because not only am I one quarter Sicilian, when I learnt all about Casa Cuseni and remembered my nonna, I felt as though in some way I’d come back to a beginning.”
“And that,” Antonio says, taking what she has told him one step further, “is why you speak Sicilian like a Messinese.”
“Yes, although I learnt as much from my father as I did from Nonna Lilla.”
“Nonna Lilla,” he repeats, frowning in thought, “and your father.”
“Yes. He spoke Sicilian, too. He told me Nonna Lilla always spoke to him in Sicilian whenever she didn’t want others to know what she was saying.”
“Tell me about him, your father. Is he still alive?”
“No. As I told you, my father died the same year as Nonna Lilla, when I was only eleven. He was blinded during the war and I’m not sure he ever truly recovered. He met my mother while he was in hospital; she was his nurse. I’m not sure that I was planned, if you know what I mean by that.”
His expression suggests he doesn’t.
“Well, my mother was a fair bit younger than him and he was in his fifties by the time I came along. I sometimes wonder whether it was my mother who wanted me perhaps more than my father. She told me that it was while he was serving in Sicily that he lost his sight; he was badly burned about his face and his lungs were damaged. I remember him as a slightly sad figure.”
“He was here in Sicily?”
“Yes, so she told me. He was in the navy and his boat was sunk, though I never remember him talking about it. I was probably too young to understand and you know what that generation was like; getting them to talk about their experiences was like trying to open a tin with your bare hands.”
“What was his name?”
“Nicholas, Nicholas Vincent Lock.”
Antonio looks up at the ceiling and rubs his lip with his fingers.
Caterina waits, patiently. “Why do you ask?”
He lowers his head and rubs his hands lightly together. “Oh, no reason. It was only that my mother told me that one night not long before the British and Americans came to Messina, she and her father and mother watched a ship sink out in the Strait. She said a British naval officer was rescued by an Italian sailor and that they cared for the man until the Germans had gone back to Calabria.” Antonio returns his attention to remembering.
“I doubt that was anything to do with my father: with his wounds, he must have required considerable medical care. And besides, I would imagine there were many ships lost to the waters of the Strait during the war.”
“Yes, many ships and many lives. You should ask Beppe; he may remember such things. He was only a boy at the time, but the old man has an encyclopaedic knowledge and, when it comes to the Strait, the most extraordinary memory. I sometimes wonder if he doesn’t remember exactly where the pebbles were fifty years ago.”
Aida sits at her feet, watching her, asking in that way polite cats ask, if she can sit on the sofa or perhaps on her lap.
Caterina smiles, pats her thigh and Aida pauses, decides, climbs stealthily, turns about, settles and purrs.
Antonio smiles. “A fisherman’s cat knows who to love, eh?” He pauses; his half–taken breath, his hesitation, the way he dips his head slightly before returning his gaze to her, suggests he is steeling himself to ask an awkward question.
In turn, she rounds her shoulders and looks away as though she knows perfectly what he is about to ask and would prefer he didn’t.
“Caterina, you said you went to Taormina before your husband was… was diagnosed: please tell me, what happened to him? Tell me about him. You don’t speak of him and if I am to know you, it is better that you tell me rather than allow his memory to come between us.”
She opens her mouth to reply, but finds she has not yet thought how to answer such a question. Blood surges to her face like a red fountain gushing up through thick fog, a jet of thick and powerful liquid that blasts aside her every effort to suppress it. Her breath comes in rapid, short, sharp bursts as though she is about to hyperventilate and the heat in her cheeks is hot to her touch when she puts her hands up to hide her face.
“And what about your wife?” she asks, through her hands. “You never use her name when you speak of her; you always refer to her as Enzo’s mother. Is she a ghost? Doesn’t she have a name? Or is it that you cannot bring yourself to say it?”
Antonio, though, is calm in the face of her storm; in fact so calm is he that it seems he has predicted the sudden gathering of her clouds and has reefed his sail in preparation for her tempest.
“Vanaria,” he says. “That is her name. You would have thought I should have known things were not going to work out with her. After all, she is as her name suggests, Vana, vain through and through. Or perhaps that was what drew me towards her, her vanity.” He scoffs, casually, as if he has consigned a distasteful fruit to a hedgerow. “I should have seen it; she was always dressed in a fashion that spoke to the lion in men. And me, a fisherman! Oh, don’t worry; many people warned me, people like Beppe and Angelica and some of my friends, even those who could never shift their eyes from her.” He pauses, a half–smile, resigned, possibly a little self–pitying or critical of his own naïvety.
“Vanaria,” he says her name again, so that she will be certain he has no issue with saying it, “was my wife; I sent her away or she left me, it makes little difference–” Antonio stops in mid–sentence. “No, I am wrong; it makes all the difference: it was a decision we made
, together, and she is no longer my wife. Your husband was taken from you and so he will always be your husband. He will always be with you.”
Aida, growing aware of the hardening in the supple contours of her lap, raises her head, concerned.
Caterina stares back at Antonio and though to some small degree they are tinted with regret, her eyes now blaze with the sun of her anger. “Yes, Antonio, you are so right. You are so perfectly, so bloody absolutely and so terribly righteously right.”
Realising that Caterina has not finished or is perhaps only just getting started, Aida rises, stretches and leaps down, only to stand and stare at her.
“And that’s the problem, isn’t it, Antonio. That’s the problem. For whatever I do or wherever I go, I can never get away from him, my husband, Charlie: get away from him or from the memory of how he died, how he was taken from me and how I failed him. I guess,” she says, looking down at the gold band of her wedding ring, “I’ll just have to put up with the burden of that knowledge until God decides to relieve me of it, in just the same way he woke up one morning and decided to ruin my life by taking Charlie away from me.”
Chapter 14
She leans against the upturned hull of a dinghy and gazes at the line of feluche and their tall towers reaching up to the powder–blue sky. The bakers had been open and the woman behind the counter had smiled and without asking had handed her a brioche, a bag of almond biscuits and a bottle of water.
Waiting, plagued by doubts, chased by her fears and humbled by her outburst, Caterina gazes out across the calm of the sea.
Pasquale is first. He greets her, though it is perhaps too early to smile. Then Giuseppe appears and not far behind him the young Ninolino and Karl. And even though she looks to have brought her provisions for the day, they know better than to ask her if she is coming with them, for that decision is not theirs to make. “Good morning, signora. Good morning. A nice morning. I hope you slept well.”
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