Secrets in Sicily

by Penny Feeny

  27

  Lily stood in the corridor with her forehead pressed against the window. The train was rumbling through the poorer suburbs of Rome and a tangle of overhead pylons. In the deepening dusk the street lamps came on, customers spilled out of sleazy bars into the hot night. In scruffy apartment blocks she caught lighted glimpses of families eating dinner, children going to bed, the flash of a television screen. She could see now, clear-eyed and merciless, how foolish she had been. Why hadn’t it occurred to her that Carlotta might reject her? That she’d have another family and no interest in her old one? If Lily hadn’t tracked her down, the lost opportunity would have been frustrating, but it wouldn’t – couldn’t – have been more painful. And all she’d wanted to know, for thoroughly valid reasons, was who the fuck she was!

  The rhythm of the train and the sway of the carriage along the track were soothing. Maybe that knowledge wasn’t as important as she’d thought. Maybe what was important was who she was going to be. In the future. Carlotta-who-used-to-be-Concetta Galetti, had renounced her own beginnings, hadn’t she? What mattered was not yesterday, but today. And tomorrow.

  Lily had calmed down since leaving Carlotta’s apartment. At the time she’d been in such a state of fury and confusion she’d stomped off in completely the wrong direction. Lost and bewildered, she’d been saved by a tavola calda. She’d ordered a slice of pizza and, unfolding her map yet again, asked for directions. Then she’d sat on the bus, stalled by traffic, trying to drown out her misery with her Sony Walkman. The taste of the greasy pizza wedge had lingered on her tongue and in her throat, salty like teardrops.

  When she arrived at the hotel she found she’d missed the group’s airport transfer by less than ten minutes. The desk clerk commiserated, and encouraged her to take the express train to Fiumicino. Stazione Termini was a seething hive, swarming with people, but, apart from the begging children with cardboard labels around their necks, nobody took any notice of Lily. She searched the departures board and was mesmerised by the range of destinations. There were tempting foreign cities like Paris, Vienna and Sarajevo, as well as those criss-crossing the length and breadth of Italy: Milan and Bologna, Ancona and Naples, Bari and Palermo.

  A shiver danced up and down her spine. Palermo was in Sicily. It was where they’d flown when they’d gone on holiday to Villa Ercole. The convent of Beata Vergine Maria was also in Sicily. And the towns of Santa Margherita and Roccamare. Carlotta wasn’t the only person with information about her origins.

  She joined one of the interminable queues for a ticket booth, but she was no longer in any hurry. In fact, there were hours to kill before departure, which she spent grazing and browsing. The ticket for the sleeper had saved her the cost of a hotel and when she returned to board the train she felt no trepidation. Quite the opposite. The long string of carriages loomed high above the platform, with steep steps up to their doors. The windows were smeared with dust and the corpses of tiny flying insects. The bodywork was dun-coloured, like the parched southern countryside. The train wasn’t elegant or streamlined. She knew it would rattle and clunk and the upholstery would be worn and there’d be no air-conditioning. Yet Lily considered it the most exciting piece of apparatus she’d ever seen, taking her on a quixotic leap into the unknown.

  She traipsed along the platform searching for her couchette until her progress was blocked by a group of young men. Half of them were wearing the khaki uniforms of military service. The others were casually dressed. The two factions seemed to be arguing, though Lily couldn’t tell what their quarrel was about. She muttered, ‘Scusi,’ and tried to forge her way through. The men weren’t physically fighting, but there was a strong undercurrent of aggression, a resounding number of ‘vaffanculo’s and the smell of alcohol. Not so different from Salisbury, she thought, when the squaddies had a night’s leave.

  They were jostling each other and she became caught in the fray, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But she was wearing stout footwear; she had sharp elbows and well-developed muscles. There was a brief outburst of wolf-whistles – admiring or insulting, she couldn’t tell which – and she held her head high and ignored them. Then, as she was leaving the trouble-makers behind, the strap of her back-pack snagged on someone else’s and crashed to the ground, spattering its contents. She lunged towards it protectively. You could never tell whether it might get robbed or used as a football. That used to happen frequently at school and although these boys were older, around her age, their behaviour was equally juvenile.

  In fact, the fallen bag broke the tension. The soldiers discharged a volley of raucous comments, probably lewd, linked arms and wandered off. Three of the youths in civilian clothes helped to scoop up her possessions and hand them back. Lily stuffed them into her rucksack, keeping her head down, muttering thank yous. It was a minor incident and she didn’t want to see it as an omen of any kind.

  The train was now rolling through fields that were empty and dark; the scattering of lights in the hills were out-dazzled by the stars in a clear night sky. In the compartment behind her, her fellow occupants – a quiet couple with a young son and a pair of middle-aged women, one of whom was enormously fat and continually fanning herself – were discussing the sleeping arrangements, who would take which berth. The fat lady declared she couldn’t possibly climb to an upper bunk. She roared at the idea; she had to be at the bottom. She fanned her chins with giggles and gales of laughter. Sleep was still far off for Lily so she’d escaped into the corridor.

  A young man was approaching from the end of the carriage, and something oddly familiar struck her about his gait and, as he came closer, his intense blue eyes. He had sleek black hair and teeth that were white and even when he smiled. She stood back to give him room to pass, but he didn’t. He stopped. Then she realised he was one of the guys who’d rescued her stuff, the one who’d handed over her Walkman and her passport – imagine if that had gone missing! She should thank him again.

  But he spoke before she did, saying softly, ‘Ancora cammina sulle mani, Lily McKenzie?’

  Do you still walk on your hands? She understood the words instinctively. She didn’t even need to translate them in her head. She turned to face him properly. No wonder those blue eyes had seemed familiar. ‘Oh, my God! Marcello Campione! It’s you, it’s really you!’

  ‘Ciao, Lily.’

  ‘How on earth… I mean, how did you know it was me?’

  He grinned more widely. ‘I saw the name on your passport. The date of birth…’

  Neither could be expected to recognise the other as a stranger on a railway platform, but once you knew, once you looked closely, the ten-year-old was still there, in them both. He was taller than she was now, suave and clean-shaven. She felt dirty and bedraggled in comparison.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Can you?’

  ‘Walk on my hands? I don’t know. I haven’t tried it for ages.’

  Those languorous summer holidays, the innocent beach games of her childhood, the freedom of Villa Ercole: the memories welled up inside her and trickled down her cheeks as tears.

  Marcello flattened himself, as she had done, as another passenger went past and said curiously, ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m tired and emotional, I guess. It’s been a difficult day but, believe me, it’s wonderful to see you again!’

  He glanced into her compartment. The fat woman had opened up a cool box and was handing around snacks. Together with the box and her travelling companion she took up a lot of space. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘We have a couchette for six, but there are only three of us. If no one joins at Naples, there is plenty of room to share.’

  Lily grabbed her bag and followed him, delighted by this change in circumstance. Marcello Campione, who’d have thought it? And he had come to her aid – for a second time. ‘Do you remember,’ she said, as they lurched along the corridor, ‘at Ferragosto when I picked up a prickly pear and you pulled all the spines out of my palm with your teeth?’

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bsp; His shoulders jerked upwards in a gesture of disbelief. ‘No!’

  ‘What about when you came to Villa Ercole on your bike and I got a puncture?’

  He nodded. ‘That, I remember. It was the last time I saw you.’

  His two friends, sprawling across the leatherette seats, she also recognised from the platform scuffle. When she entered, they swung their feet to the floor and rose to shake hands with courteous formality. He introduced them as Fabio and Gilberto, fellow students. Fabio was slight and dapper with a neatly trimmed beard. Gilberto had a chubby face and round glasses; he asked, with some concern, if she was all right.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Lily. ‘But those soldiers…’ (who must be somewhere along the length of the train) ‘Did you know them or something?’

  ‘We never met them before.’

  ‘So why did they have it in for you?

  Marcello said, ‘There’s often bad feeling between the guys who are obliged to do military service and those who escape it. That’s why they try to needle us. They want to force us into a fight because they reckon they’ll win. It’s part showing off, part jealousy.’

  ‘Isn’t everyone supposed to do military service in Italy?’

  ‘Everyone is supposed to pay taxes in Italy too,’ said Gilberto and the three of them laughed uproariously.

  ‘It depends on your situation,’ said Marcello. ‘But there are ways to avoid it. You might have a medical condition or be the family breadwinner. Or if you’re a student you can defer it.’

  ‘What are you studying? Not English? You speak it really well.’

  ‘Civil engineering. But I spent most of last year working on a project in Malawi. The others came from so many different countries we had to use English as our common language. My accent is okay?’

  ‘Yeah, brilliant!’

  Gilberto and Fabio were less fluent. They preferred to stick to Italian, but Lily was pleased to find that she could follow much of what they said. And join in. They had with them a bottle of grappa alla ruta which they poured out into paper cups and which helped to loosen her tongue. The atmosphere was festive. They had finished their exams and the summer lay ahead. First they were going to help Marcello’s cousins with the tomato harvest and then, in August, they would go to the beach for idle days of soaking up the sun.

  Around midnight the train stopped at Naples, but no new passenger interrupted their party. They opened the window to let out the blue fug of cigarette smoke and as the train sped south through the sultry night, Lily felt a transformation taking place. She was relaxing, becoming garrulous and impulsive: she was turning back into a Sicilian! At two o’clock they agreed they should try to snaffle a few hours’ sleep before the sea crossing. Marcello and Lily lay across from each other on the lower bunks. She expected to stay awake because her mind was teeming, but the rolling motion of the wheels lulled her into a doze.

  She was roused by a cacophony of noise, of clanking and grinding and whistling and a bellow of instructions. Marcello was bending over her. ‘You must see this, Lily,’ he said.

  ‘Why, where are we?’

  ‘They’re putting us on the ferry.’

  ‘The whole train?’

  ‘Certo. Come on deck and you can watch the sun rise over Sicily. It is very beautiful.’

  This was an understatement. Lily had slept in her clothes; she only had to put on her trainers to leave the carriage and go up to the deck of the ferry, to see Messina rising out of the sea ahead of them, pearly pink and glittering in the new dawn. She fumbled for her camera and angled the lens. She had four or five frames left on her film and didn’t know how well she could capture this moment of arrival. But even if the photos were rubbish, simply looking at them could reignite a thrill. She was coming home.

  Sadly, Messina at close quarters lacked the miraculous quality of Messina as mirage. The town had been devastated by an earthquake a hundred times worse than Belice, one that killed tens of thousands of inhabitants, and it had been completely rebuilt. It was a port where people passed through and seldom lingered.

  ‘You’re not getting off here?’ said Marcello, as the ferry manoeuvred into the harbour, lining itself up with the train tracks on dry land.

  ‘No, my ticket’s to Palermo.’

  ‘Then you must stay with us.’ Gilberto and Fabio nodded in agreement. ‘The train will divide for Catania and Siracusa and you don’t want to get stuck in the wrong carriage.’

  Lily could think of nothing she wanted more than to keep to company she trusted.

  ‘And after we arrive in Palermo, are you going to Villa Ercole again?’

  This was the point where her ideas ran out; being hungover and short of sleep didn’t help either. ‘I haven’t made up my mind. They’re not expecting me. Actually, I jumped onto this train because…’ no, it was too difficult to explain ‘… because I wanted an adventure.’

  ‘Brava!’ said Gilberto.

  Lily said, ‘Do you think your cousins could do with an extra pair of hands to help pick their tomato crop?’ When Marcello hesitated, she added quickly, ‘I wouldn’t be a liability. I know what to do. I’ve worked for market gardeners in England and I’ve been studying horticulture. That’s why I came to Italy in the first place, to visit famous gardens, but it would be great to get experience of a farm here too. Have you done it before?’

  She hoped this might be her trump card, but Marcello said, ‘Every summer since I was fourteen.’ He flapped a hand in his friends’ direction. ‘Not these two, però. For them it’s their second year.’

  This was more promising. ‘Bed, board and pocket money,’ said Lily, recalling the annexe at Villa Ercole, which had been used by seasonal farm workers before Gerald turned it into a holiday let, ‘is all I’d want. Is that what you get?’

  The boys exchanged glances, nodded. Marcello said, ‘Va bene, perchè non?’

  Why not indeed? ‘I won’t outstay my welcome. But for a few days while I get my bearings… it would be… favoloso.’

  Things were most definitely looking up. There was just enough time between their arrival at Palermo station and the departure of their bus to Castelvetrano for Lily to buy a postcard, a gaudy montage of tourist sights, and a stamp. She addressed it to Jess (she didn’t know where Alex was) and scribbled on the back:

  Guess where I am!!!!

  28

  The original Campione estate had been divided, a generation previously, between two brothers. One owned the olive grove where they celebrated Ferragosto every year; the other had taken on the tomato farm. The Pomodoro Campiones, as Lily thought of them, lived in an old stone farmhouse surrounded by long rows of tomato vines, like a spider in the centre of a web. Here the produce wasn’t grown in the polytunnels that were beginning to proliferate in other regions, but cultivated in the traditional way. All the fruit would explode into maturity within the space of a few weeks, hence the urgent, demanding nature of the work. Prime beef tomatoes would go to market, the plum varieties would be sent off for canning, with a proportion kept back for the household, to be bottled into sauce or turned into strattu, a luscious thick paste spread onto trays and left to dry in the sun.

  When Lily showed up, her hosts were boisterous and welcoming but uncertain what to do with her. The house was occupied by Marcello’s cousin, Alfredo, his wife, Daniela, and their one-year-old twins, his parents, who still ran the farm, and an elderly, deaf uncle. The senior Signora Campione was reluctant to let Lily sleep in the barn with the boys (and other random helpers drafted in for the duration); it wouldn’t be appropriate. She had to find her a bed in the main house. A small store in the cellar might be suitable, once the boxes had been cleared away to make room for a mattress.

  ‘Please don’t go to this trouble for me,’ begged Lily.

  ‘There is no window,’ said Signora Campione. ‘But you will be cool. And you won’t be affected by bats.’

  ‘Bats!’ She’d been scared of the bats on Favignana and, in the years since, they were still the w
ildlife she found most threatening, though she couldn’t explain why. She didn’t plead to be allowed to sleep in the barn after that. However, she did resist the assumption that she would be involved in the cooking: skinning and pulping the fruits, stirring them in the huge copper pans until the mass reached the right consistency. Lily had watched Dolly at these activities and she knew she’d rather be outdoors, however heavy the labour or fierce the sun. She could wear a hat, couldn’t she?

  ‘Oh, do let me work outside,’ she said. ‘I’ve done lots of gardening and pruning and fruit-picking, but I’m absolutely no good at cooking.’

  ‘You say you are Sicilian,’ said Signora Campione. ‘But you do not know how to cook!’

  ‘I expect it’s because I grew up in England,’ she said, reaching for the convenient excuse. Alex’s interest in food had been minimal and Jess’s was erratic. She and Harry often had to fend for themselves.

  ‘Then we must teach you!’

  Lily was saved by Gilberto. With great charm, he explained that, if possible, he would prefer to stay indoors with the two signoras. His skin was fair and inclined to burn and he loved to cook. They swapped places.

  The working days were long. They rose early, before it got too hot, and took a midday siesta. Those were the times Lily felt the most isolated. Alone in her dungeon, with only her Walkman to listen to, she pictured the boys carousing in the barn, propped against the pillows, blowing smoke rings into the rafters, no fear of bats. But then she’d fall asleep with fatigue and Marcello would have to thump on her door to rouse her for the afternoon session.

  As she threaded her way along the vines, she liked to imagine a kinship with her ancestors. Most of them would have been agricultural labourers, employed much as she was now, snipping the bunches of tomatoes systematically from the bottom to the top (because the lower fruit ripened first), cradling them carefully into their baskets, emptying them regularly into crates. The only difference would have been the use of donkey and cart rather than the flat-bed truck Alfredo drove.