Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  Dante sat heavily on the bench, looking at the floor.

  Franco went out. A draft of cold wind sliced through the room and the chapel door slammed shut.

  ‘Who are the signori?’ said Czeslaw.

  ‘The signori are the friends of friends,’ said Dante. He was breathing quickly. ‘They are everywhere.’

  ‘Will they hurt you?’

  Dante straightened. ‘There is nothing they can do to me.’

  ‘And the witness?’

  Dante didn’t reply.

  ‘Whom do I thank?’ said Czeslaw. He saw the priest’s hand tremble on his knee.

  Czeslaw waited for a moment then said, ‘Was there a witness?’

  Dante looked him in the eye. ‘My son, there is always a witness in God.’

  ‘So this is the map you were using,’ said Dante in French. He pushed aside the bowls of soup, the platter with a few crumbs of bread. The bottle of wine sat, un-poured. Czeslaw supposed the old man didn’t like wine with his soup.

  He studied Dante’s hands resting on the fibrous parchment. The skin was creased like tissue paper; the fingernails deeply grooved, their white moons tinged blue.

  The priest traced a line along the Italian coast, south from Venice, pausing at the notations of money written beside the occasional village.

  ‘I made good time along the coast,’ said Czeslaw, ‘until I got to Castelmontrano. Falling rocks blocked the road. I had to turn inland.’

  He had got out of the car to feel the fury of the sea. The waves were tipped with luminous green as they dashed themselves against the black rocks. Foam was hurled against the cliffs, white-green rain fell on him as he stood, swaying in the wind. The horizon was lost in the black sky. Somewhere out there were Tunisia and Algeria. Just a boat ride away.

  Dante pointed. ‘Santa Margherita, you are here. Castelmontrano is on the other side of the hill.’ He retraced Czeslaw’s journey across white paper. ‘But no Trepani, no Ferromignana.’

  ‘It is a Dutch map,’ said Czeslaw. ‘They are meant to be the best.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Dante. The light from the fire turned his eyes gold. ‘But mapmakers are storytellers. They only include what they think is important. Sometimes the blank spaces tell you more.’

  He carefully opened the map to its fullest. Europe and the Mediterranean lay spread across the low wooden table. The Jesus stared upwards, his hands pointing west and east, to China and the Americas, his feet planted in the beginnings of Africa.

  ‘Mappaemundi,’ said Dante reverentially. ‘A map of the world. I have seen similar charts on the walls of the Galleria della Carte Geografiche in the Palazzo Vaticano.’

  ‘Rome?’ said Czeslaw with the familiar catch in his heart.

  ‘Map-makers were once known as world describers,’ said Dante. He ran his hand gently down the elaborately painted side panels, over the dragon with the human head rearing in the small ocean between Sicily and Tunisia. Along the creases the ink was scratched, the coloured paint flaking. But the blues and reds were still vivid.

  ‘Magnificent,’ said Dante softly. ‘The blue: powdered lapis lazuli. Sulfide of arsenic for the desert.’ His finger hovered above the gleaming palm leaf centred over Rome. ‘Gold powder with ox bile? No, real sheet gold.’ He traced the edge of the continent. ‘Wood cut then hand coloured. Sixteenth century. The great age of mapping.’

  ‘My father’s map,’ said Czeslaw.

  Dante examined the illustrated panels which made up the borders. ‘See these tables in Latin? Lists of popes, Roman emperors. And these pictures: Noah and his ark, the Temple of Solomon, the Battle of Lepanto where the Christians defeated the Muslims. This is a history of civilisation. Sub specie religionis Christianae. A world within the world of the map.’ He touched the gold palm leaf. ‘Rome as the centre of religious belief, Italy as the centre of the world.’

  Czeslaw said, ‘My father told me it was a Dutch map. A copy.’

  ‘It could well be,’ said Dante. ‘The Dutch were in love with maps. They hung them on their walls. They saw their charts almost as paintings.

  ‘In his picture Art Of Painting, Vermeer paints an elaborate map of the Netherlands on the wall. Apparently, the map he painted did exist, it was a real map, a sixteenth-century map of the Netherlands as it should be, with all its traditional borders. Supposedly, the point of the picture is not the map: it is the artist in his black beret, maybe Vermeer himself, who is painting a portrait of a girl holding a thick book, a wreath in her hair. She is Clio, the muse of history. History is at issue here. So maybe the map is the point of the picture. At any rate, the map is so finely detailed that it has become one of only two copies of that real-life map. The original, the real map, has been lost. The picture has become a map itself.

  ‘We in Sicily are obsessed with maps,’ said Dante. ‘Only our obsession with our honour is greater. Sicily has been at the mercy of maps for thousands of years. Kings we never heard of claimed our soil on the notion of territory defined by longitudes and latitudes. Men fighting and dying for ink lines on old parchment. For abstractions.’

  ‘Not only soldiers,’ said Czeslaw, his fingernails cutting into the soft leather of the bag in his lap.

  ‘Treasure seekers?’ said Dante. ‘Yes, Sicily has been plagued by them. Sweeping down from the north, coming up from Africa. The coast is littered with the broken crockery of ships trying to land here. We have never had a decade in which we have not been invaded. Everything has been taken except for the pagan sacrifice tables. Not for any superstition but because they are too heavy to lift.’

  He sighed, took out a pouch and rolled himself a cigarette, gazing into the fire. ‘I do not think this map is a copy.’

  Czeslaw said, ‘I am an accessory to theft.’ He thought, To more theft.

  Dante said, ‘Only because you believed your father.’

  Czeslaw stared at the bag sitting like a dark stain across his thighs. He threw it on the floor.

  Dante looked at the bag and at the map. ‘The notations of money you have made here and here and here,’ he said. ‘This is what you gave to each village you came through?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Czeslaw, making no move to pick up the bag. ‘I confessed to the priest in each village.’

  ‘Confessed your crimes?’

  ‘The crime of being my father’s son. And I gave them money not to do business with my father again.’

  ‘And you think they will not do business?’

  ‘The priests took the money.’

  Dante closed his eyes. ‘So this journey you are on,’ he said, ‘is not for pleasure.’

  Czeslaw said, ‘It is a penance.’

  Dante smoked his cigarette in silence.

  ‘I want to start again with a blank map,’ said Czeslaw. ‘That is why I am travelling.’

  ‘There can be good memories,’ said Dante. ‘Good journeys in time.’

  Czeslaw said, ‘My good memories . . . ’ He hesitated. ‘So few.’ He felt gravel beneath his feet, heard the sound of horses whickering, saw a long row of half-doors, horses looking out at him, ears pricked. They knew he had sugar and apples for them. ‘My only pleasant memories have nothing to do with earthly goods.’

  Outside, the light began turning over into dusk. The fire burnt low and Dante slipped more logs onto the embers. A chorus of dogs howled for a few moments, stopping in mid-yelp.

  The priest picked up the leather bag and placed it on the edge of the map. He touched the oily surface. ‘I feel the sea.’

  ‘Whale leather,’ said Czeslaw. ‘Specially cured, an old Polish recipe, so that the hide doesn’t crack.’ After a long moment, he said, ‘What is inside is a terrible burden.’

  Dante considered him, then he bent over the map again.

  They gazed at the grid of latitudes and longitudes. Clumps of fine black inverted Vs covered the heart of Sicily, running through Santa Margherita, nearly down to the double black line of the sea.

  ‘The hills are at their highest here, th
eir most barren,’ said Dante. ‘From Santa Margherita, the ground flattens before the final cliffs overlooking the sea.’

  ‘The forests are sparse,’ said Czeslaw.

  ‘We have been cursed since the war,’ said Dante. ‘The sea winds stripped the soil. Everything is stunted here now.’ He tapped the map. ‘There used to be a village at the cove called Castelmontrano. Before the war, the floods. We were fishermen then. Coast dwellers. Now we tend goats.’

  ‘Why leave?’

  Dante hesitated. ‘The villagers were driven out.’

  ‘And you?’

  Dante rested his chin on his walking stick. ‘That is my penance. To stay with them.’

  It was the half-veiled hour between the end of dusk and the beginning of true night. The wind dropped and, briefly, the air was warmer. Czeslaw and Dante left the church and climbed through the shadow of the tower. They went up the broad stones set into the hillside until they reached a flat path with a broken wall on either side.

  Dante raised his lantern and Czeslaw saw a mosaic set into the paving stone: a picture of a man, clad in white with a wreath on his head.

  ‘Roman,’ said Dante. ‘We are standing on the wall of a Roman fort, before the lava came.’

  ‘There are black faces,’ said Czeslaw, pointing below the village, ‘painted on the hillside.’

  ‘Sicily has been invaded from the north and the south for three thousand years,’ said Dante. ‘The Greeks, the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Saracens, the Germanic tribes, the Normans. You can find daggers and implements from all the different ages. Above Castelmontrano, there is the stone table where they sacrificed humans to Baal.’

  They looked at the sprinkling of yellow lights below. The layout of the streets made no sense, running off at crazy angles, some so steep they were only reached by steps between the levels, the houses built so close together that there was no way in that Czeslaw could see.

  ‘There are villages built on top of villages here,’ said Dante. ‘Ruins on ruins, from before the Romans. Lowland villagers often moved to hilltops to escape marauders.’

  ‘Practical,’ said Czeslaw.

  ‘Isolated,’ said Dante. ‘Inward-looking. Festering.’ He rubbed his chin on his stick. ‘Once you are in a maze, unless you know the trick, you cannot leave.’

  A lantern was lit suddenly beneath them, revealing a walled area of cleared earth criss-crossed with ropes at head height and pale squares that swung in the low light: lines of washing.

  The wind swirled up the hillside. It blew through the lines so the sheets flapped back and forth in angry snaps, revealing a group of women. The women’s hair escaped from their black scarves, lifting in tendrils to the sky. A moment later, the wind reached Dante and Czeslaw, making the priest’s robes billow around him.

  ‘It wasn’t good for the children,’ said Dante, ‘when we moved.’

  Czeslaw peered through the dusk but it was only when the group stood directly under the lantern that he saw Rosita, surrounded by three others. The grey-haired woman who had been in the barn raised her hand and slapped Rosita. The sheets dropped, obscuring his view.

  ‘It’s a village matter,’ said Dante, behind him.

  ‘If she is in trouble because of me . . . ’

  Dante caught Czeslaw’s arm. ‘You can’t interfere. You are already . . . ’ He said, ‘Rosita is the Mayor’s daughter. She has protection.’

  The sheets lifted again. Rosita was shouting, her words spiralling up to them. The grey-haired woman shouted back. The sheets dropped over them.

  ‘What are they saying?’ Czeslaw asked Dante. ‘She’s not telling them I seduced her?’

  The lantern’s light was trapped in the hollows under the priest’s eyes. His eyes became black pools, his face a mask. ‘You would have been better to take Rosita’s offer,’ he muttered.

  Dante walked slowly along the parapet. Czeslaw hesitated. The last dusk light was gone, the lantern cloaked. The sheets were faint squares in the gloom. The wind lifted, the sheets rose. Czeslaw stared over the low wall. The sheets swooped down then lifted again. The wall seemed to sway against his thigh. The yard was empty. Rosita and the women were gone.

  Czeslaw stood at the window in Dante’s room. The shadow of the tower made it seem like night already.

  ‘Even in the bright sun of the farmyard,’ said Dante, ‘there is the smear of blood on the hay stalk, the dog jumpy on the chain. Smoke from a shotgun. Shouts on the wind. Agonies.’

  The firelight was low in the room, wavering over the tapestry on the wall and the rug on the floor. The smoke rose in black veins to the rafters. Dante sat, his chin on his stick, staring into the fire.

  ‘Villages do not change much,’ he said. ‘The people look around and say everything in their village is the same: the drunkard is still drunk, the woman who secretly hated her children still secretly hates her children. The priest – ’

  ‘ – is still saintly,’ said Czeslaw.

  Dante grimaced. He bent over the tray and poured two glasses of wine. The liquid was black, the light from the fire slicked the surface with orange.

  ‘You should leave early tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll sit up with you tonight.’ He took a sip and closed his eyes. ‘That is all I can do.’

  Czeslaw drank and put the glass down, held his head in his hands. He said, ‘I can’t confess to my past sins because I have forsaken my past life. I have no memory of it. I have given away my father’s money to pay for his sin.’

  Dante waited.

  Czeslaw picked up the bag. ‘I stole this from the man who stole it.’

  He untied the gold string and smoothed back the leather. An oblong shape lay there, wrapped in ivory silk.

  Inside was a book, the pages bound into a cover of black leather. Czeslaw used his fingernail to open the cover, turn the pages. The paper was nearly diaphanous, covered in bold sprawls of inked writing.

  ‘Wax weave pressing,’ said Dante. ‘It looks almost new.’

  Czeslaw turned the pages. The language was French: diary writings, scraps of poetry, sketches of landscape: the desert, mountains rising out of a flat plain under a crescent moon.

  Dante read, ‘We are made so that nothing contents us.’ He said, ‘You stole this because it has value?’

  ‘Its value is obligation. I am the son of the man who stole it.’

  Dante thought. ‘The writer values it?’

  Czeslaw hesitated. ‘The writer is – was – a traveller. I have his family’s address in France. I will give them the book and a photograph I found of my father. Then – it is God’s will. Once I have returned the book, I will go to Rome.’

  ‘For absolution,’ said Dante.

  ‘To enter the seminary, yes.’

  ‘To pay for someone else’s crimes?’

  ‘Yes.’ Czeslaw clasped Dante’s hands. ‘The minute I saw you, I knew it was a sign that I was on the right path.’

  Dante said, ‘There is a terrible irony here, that you were sent to me.’

  Czeslaw dreamed he was in the barn again. He saw the grey pelt hanging over the hay scattered on the stone floor. The chain creaked as it turned. Turning and turning and –

  He woke to a drawn-out note of rage, the echo of it deepening and narrowing in his ears. Man or beast?

  He was no longer in Dante’s room but lying on a straw mattress beneath a vaulted ceiling. Moonlight fell through the small windows, enough to see the stone walls and floor in blacks and whites. Stalks jabbed into him; there were no sheets, no pillows. He wore a rough cotton shirt and trousers, not his. His feet were bare. They had taken his clothes and he was naked underneath. They would have seen the cuts on his back when they stripped him.

  He sat up, awkwardly. His hands were bound. A thin piece of wire wound tightly around them, the ends twisted together. He slid off the bed, his legs heavy.

  He went around the room: small windows in three walls, a thick door on black metal hinges in the fourth. The door handle was an iron wolf’
s head. He tried to turn it. Locked. He banged on it, shouting, the sound rushing into his ears like treetops being torn up for spite by the black wind.

  No reply.

  He walked around the room again, slowly, feeling in front of him with his feet, his clasped hands. Nothing but the bed and a heavy sideboard in dark unpolished wood. He kneeled on the cold floor and pulled at the hanging metal strips which made the handles. The sideboard doors didn’t move. His fingers probed the small dark shadow beneath the right handle. A keyhole.

  He went to the nearest window, unlatched it, hooked the window back on its metal arm. The frame was cold beneath his hands. He looked across the church’s flat roof to the village.

  He was in the stone tower.

  He leaned out. The wind slapped at his cheek; far below, the trees were wrenched back and forth. He stared down the jagged side of the mountain: too high to jump.

  He swallowed his rising panic and examined the wire around his wrists. The ends were separate. If he could part them further . . .

  He bent his head and tried to get his teeth between the wire ends. The metal scraped his gums and blood flooded his mouth. But he opened the gap enough to wedge one end under the metal window arm. He twisted his hand and, before it slipped, the gap widened. He bent his head again and jerked his jaw, only stopping to spit out a mouthful of blood. The wires parted further.

  His lip and chin were badly cut and he spat out two more mouthfuls of blood before he was able to catch one end and hold it with his thumb and forefinger while he gripped the other with his teeth.

  Moving his jaw in careful circles, he slowly unwound the wire. It dropped to the floor and lay on the pale stone like a red ribbon. When he used the shirt to wipe his face, the material stained pink.

  It was only then that he realised he hadn’t seen the leather bag.

  It couldn’t all be for nothing. The quarrel with his father, this trip.

  He went to the door, shouted until the trembling in his throat shook him to his knees. He pressed his face against the wood, the metal hinge cold against his forehead. A line of light crept under his closed eyelids and colder air brushed his mouth.