by Peter Robb
The erotic drawings! Were these the nineteen that had been taken from the strongbox, the one to which only Marta Marzotto and Fabio Carapezza had the keys? Had she got them back? Had she got her letters back? As the ambassadress discreetly but firmly pushed me into the other room, I glimpsed the countess nude on all fours and what was either a serpent or a giant phallus waving behind her. The drawings looked animated, vigorous, charming. It was my opinion that Marta Marzotto had done a great deal for Renato Guttuso’s painting. I hoped to sidle back later, but as things turned out I never had a chance. In the other room was a life size German plaster statue from the last century, of a gipsy woman in a rocking chair suckling a child. It was shoved into a corner. The countess had kept barking her shin on it.
Marta Marzotto now reappeared, fresh and radiant. Another friend arrived, a wan woman who seemed to be in jewellery. She had no appetite, but Marta hustled her up to the table with the rest of us. It’d be just a casual bite, she said. Scraps, mainly. The manservant in the striped jacket came and went. He brought meaty moist prosciutto crudo pieces and a dark rucchetta salad. Rich venetian ox tail stew and slices of fried polenta. I like it best like that, said Marta Marzotto, heaping our plates. Slices off a huge pink mortadella. You must have some of this, said Marta. It’s a present from Pavarotti. The mortadella looked not unlike its donor, minus beard and teeth. There was a subtle chicken and lemon casserole. The most beautiful gorgonzola I’d ever seen. Entire, hacked open and voluptuously spilling out its creamy blue guts. The countess offered wine from an unlabelled bottle. A fine fruity white wine that was drunk even less than the food was eaten. We ate with massive, weighty cutlery made for real hands, and drank from Marta’s fantastical coloured goblets of Murano glass. A gloriously insubstantial coffee semifreddo. Have some more, said the countess generously, shovelling semifreddo on to my plate. It’s warming up.
I’m trying to diet Marta, whined the lady of the jewels. And you do this to me.
Marta Marzotto and the ambassadress were talking about their travels. I was eating. My children all adore Australia, said the countess kindly. Love it. Go there all the time. And New Zealand. I do too. I’ve been to Adelaide. She paused. Ugly little town. My children are direct descendants of Frederick Barbarossa.
We love Sydney, said the ambassadress. So many friends. Love going back. We love Australian films.
Adored The Piano, said Marta Marzotto tonelessly.
Bad Boy Bubby, said the ambassadress with a sudden force that startled the others. A very unusual film. About this boy kept in a room all his life—She started to run through Bad Boy Bubby. The countess looked bored. When the ambassadress mentioned cockroach eating, the countess’s eyes narrowed and she poured a little wine. When the ambassadress got on to the suffocation of the parents wrapped in cling wrap, the countess rattled her heavy cutlery. I’m going to Argentina, said Marta Marzotto suddenly. To stay in the Casa Rosada. Menem keeps asking and asking and finally I’ve just got to go. After Venice. After Kenya.
Isn’t Menem a sweetie? said the ambassadress. We love him. What do you think of her? Such a publicity seeker. All that performance about leaving him and moving out of the Casa Rosada. A president’s wife –
Want to see my new clothes? asked Marta Marzotto suddenly. I’ve just had a showing. She jumped up suddenly and ran from the room. She came back pushing a chrome clothes trolley on coasters, packed with autumn ready-to-wear in synthetic fabrics. The ambassadress sprang from the table and rifled through them. She pulled on a quilted parka, turned up its collar and strutted and struck catwalk poses in front of Marta’s antique mirror.
My sister-in-law might like these, I said, looking at some dresses. I could get her a present.
Get you a discount if you buy in Milan, said the countess. At the main store.
You could export to Australia, I said. Italian fashion –
Tariff barriers, snapped the countess quickly. Prohibitive duties. No way I could run a profit. She paused. Besides, they’ve got THEIR OWN UGLY LITTLE FASHIONS over there. She ordered coffee. The stately Sri Lankan sailed from the room without acknowledging her. I can’t get him to listen. Takes no notice of me at all. He’s always like this before he goes home.
His mind’s elsewhere, explained the ambassadress from Uruguay. He’s living in another world.
I hope the Ivory Coast couple won’t be like that, said the countess. Then we had real coffee, as good as you might expect in Milan. I sipped it and looked at this strong woman, this survivor, and imagined Guttuso, or rather Sciascia’s imagining of him. He wanted to keep everyone happy … In spite of his virility, he was very fragile psychologically. As for the aftermath,
It’s a story out of Pirandello. That’s the only Sicilian thing about it. There are so many different truths that you can’t piece the thing together.
You know what I think? Pasquale had said back at the mill. They just sat round the table and divvied the money up between them. The communist party and the Vatican.
And the son? I asked. What about the adopted son?
Naturally they had to keep the friends in Palermo happy.
XI
A MAZE MAKER
BRONZE ARCHANGELS looking over my shoulder, I sat one muggy day in Palermo on the cool white steps at the base of piazza San Domenico’s monument to the Virgin and worried at Sciascia’s words about the painting of La Vucciria, or rather the Vucciria market itself, the hungry man’s dream just out of sight below me. Sciascia had mentioned certain sweet and savoury dishes that contain everything, where the savoury merges into the sweet and the sweet into the savoury. With their suggestion of a gorgeous fantasy anchored in a palpable sensuous reality, something out of the Arabian Nights, the words were wildly romantic and at the same time domestic, familiar. What was Sciascia talking about? Then I remembered caponata.
The caponata I first knew had been a cheap cold dish eaten at night at a trestle table amid the traffic at Porta Capuana in Naples, a change from steamed mussels. Anchovy and chopped octopus tentacle and black Gaeta olives, with a bit of salad and some broth slopped over a flat and rocklike hard biscuit. Elizabeth David described this accurately as a primitive fisherman’s and sailor’s dish. She called it caponata alla marinara. It was only when craning over a neighbouring table once, under the fluorescent lights of the Horse Shoe, through the flying bread and the slamming plates and the wine-splashed paper cloths, that I realized caponata in Palermo was something very different. It was the colour that struck me first. The colour of darkness. A heap of cubes of that unmistakeably luminescent dark, dark purply-reddish goldy richness, glimmerings from a baroque canvas, that comes from eggplant, black olives, tomato and olive oil densely cooked together, long and gently. The colour of southern Italian cooking. Caponata was one of the world’s great sweet and sour dishes, sweet, sour and savoury.
The eggplant was the heart of caponata. The celery hearts were the most striking component: essential and surprising. Pieces of each were fried separately in olive oil until they were a fine golden colour and then added to a sauce made by cooking tomato, sugar and vinegar with a golden chopped onion in oil and adding Sicilian olives, capers and bottarga, which was tuna roe dried into a block and sliced or shaved or grated for use. This, however, was only the beginning of the full blown caponata. I doubted whether any prized bottarga was grated into the one the Horse Shoe served up daily in great quantities for next to nothing. The Horse Shoe’s was delicious, but essentially a vegetable dish. I used to eat it with their boiled beef. Elizabeth David had a perfunctory version from a French cook book of 1913 which got it from the German ambassador’s cook in Rome. She presented it with a very English putdown. An interesting dish … Try it in half quantities. A Palermitan wrote that he who has not eaten a caponatina of eggplant has never reached the antechamber of the terrestrial paradise. He described its taste as
a composite flavour comparable to no other, but which recalls nostalgically exotic lands and seas, whose mingled aromas evoke the
chief characteristic of Sicilian cuisine, the field on which all the other cuisines give battle to each other.
What the writer meant was made clear by Ada Boni in her Talismano della Felicità. After adding the golden eggplant and celery heart pieces to the sweet and sour sauce of tomato, capers and olives, she added severely, you will have already prepared separately some baby octopuses and possibly a small lobster … You may also add if desired some slices of swordfish cooked in a little oil. After the baby octopuses, the lobster and the swordfish slices were added to the pot, the St Bernard sauce had to be prepared. This contained almonds, anchovies, orange juice, and grated chocolate among more mundane ingredients, and had to be spread over the caponata after it had cooled completely and was arranged on a dish in the form of a cupola. All that then remained was to garnish the caponata with pieces of hard boiled egg, shrimps and lobster claws. It was caponata, I decided, that Sciascia had in mind. A lot of the ingredients were displayed in Guttuso’s painting of The Vucciria.
You could tell from the comment that what really interested Sciascia in all this wasn’t the abundance but its absence, not the food but the hunger, just as he said elsewhere that Guttuso unlived even as he lived, that the painter’s blazing vitality was veined by negation and death. Guttuso remarked himself about Sicily’s heterogeneous richness that in Sicily, you can find dramas, pastorals, idylls, politics, gastronomy, geography, history, literature … in the end you can find anything and everything, but you can’t find truth … It was like Lampedusa on the short life truth had in Sicily, how it was always being seized on and twisted into something else by interested parties. It was less a problem for a painter dealing in images than a writer who dealt in words. Truth was a function of language, like its opposite. Lying really is a cursed vice, Montaigne had said. It’s only words that link us together and make us human. Sciascia’s terse, stripped down stories found their own truth in the absence of certainty, the impossibility of knowing, and I wondered what Sicily that came from, and what it had to do with The True History’s hope of shedding light. The best word is the one not spoken was a mafia saying much quoted by Giovanni Falcone. How close was Sciascia to his own forger priest, the one in The Council of Egypt who’d said History’s all an imposture. History doesn’t exist?
* * *
THE TRUTH for Sciascia started where he’d always lived, in the bleak interior town of Racalmuto in the hills above Agrigento. He wrote about what he knew. He started slowly and modestly as a writer, not working at it full time until he was forty-eight, but even as his fame grew, first in Italy and then spreading abroad, Sciascia stayed where he’d always lived, in Racalmuto. He was the grandson of a caruso, a miner in the nearby sulphur mines, and the son of a mine company clerk. After the war he became a primary school teacher in Racalmuto, where he felt unease at instructing children faint with hunger in the achievements of the Italian renaissance. Racalmuto was a mafia town, and nearby Agrigento on the coast, after Palermo and Trapani, was the biggest mafia centre in Sicily. Sciascia wrote about what he knew.
In every town and every neighbourhood, the mafia bosses and their associates were as well known as the carabinieri and their commanders. The politicians they brought along—recommended to the electorate—were also well known … and so were their systems of illegally making money … Far from hiding, the bosses made a show of themselves. They never pronounced nor accepted the word mafia and liked to use the word friendship instead. They were sceptical and pessimistic about their fellow-men, society and its institutions. The institutions for their part denied the existence in Sicily of a vast and efficient criminal network called the mafia …
Racalmuto is another Sicilian town whose name has an Arab origin. The name of Sciascia’s town in Arabic meant the dead village or the ruined homestead. It should have been a warning. I wanted to see, though, the town Sciascia stuck in all his life and wrote about, directly and indirectly, so much. It had no special notoriety in the history of art or crime that I knew of, was neither large nor small. A Leonardo Sciascia Foundation was set up there after Sciascia died, but I’d heard it soon expired from lack of funds. Except as Sciascia’s town, I’d never heard Racalmuto mentioned at all. It’d be a Sicilian experience.
A swarm of schoolkids and students were heading home from Palermo for the weekend, each with a fluorescent Invicta backpack, and I had an ugly scuffle for a seat on the bus. The rather few other passengers buying tickets and waiting around amid these teeming contemporary adolescents were instantly recognizable from early Sciascia. There were youngish housewives and white-haired women in black, elderly men in cloth caps with leathery faces, the odd priest and carabiniere. Most of the minor figures from Sciascia’s first mafia novel The Day of the Owl were heading inland that day, including, by the look of them, the barber, the police informer, the very young widow and the tree pruner. There were no killers I could identify. Even in the fifties, when cars were still a notable luxury, killers didn’t use public transport.
The bus left Palermo at the beginning of a hot afternoon. By the time it’d wound up, through orchards and vineyards at first, whose leaves were reddening and falling, into the arid hilly vastness of the Sicilian interior, dropped its load of homegoing students bit by bit at little towns along the way, stopped for flocks of skinny sheep and their pedestrian shepherds, passed various strange and uncompleted concrete roadworks, the roads getting ever steeper and narrower and more twisted, the landscape dryer and rockier, and finally, after struggling through a funeral crowd outside a grey baroque church, dropped its last few students and me on the stony outcrop with a mass of terraced dun-coloured tiled-roofed houses crouching on it which turned out to be Racalmuto, it was nearly dark. Sciascia spoke once of the two faces of Racalmuto, the mild and sunny slopes below the town on the seaward side, planted with vineyards and olive and almond groves, and the harsh and sulphurous inland side. In the spiralling approach to the hilltop, both sides looked pretty bleak in the fading light.
It was suddenly chill and at moments a faint drizzle condensed out of the darkening air. I was still dressed for the warmth of Palermo and shivered. Most of the town was above me and everything around was closed and shuttered. The bus would go back at dawn, and having arranged to be collected then at the edge of town I set off to find a place to sleep and see what I could before dark of the town where Sciascia had spent his life. I set off along one of the narrow sightless streets that curved along the side of the hill like an old sheep track. It was hemmed in by houses on each side, their doors opening directly into the traffic. The doors would’ve opened directly into the traffic, if there were any traffic and the doors ever opened. They were all now tight shut, and heavy wooden shutters were drawn across the windows. Sometimes through the slats I thought I glimpsed a glimmer from a low-watt electric bulb. Here and there was a pane of glass covered inside by lace through which an inhabitant might or might not have been peering. All the doors and shutters were thickly painted in the same milk-chocolate brown that is the only colour you see painted on wood in these towns. Was it taste, or was the milk chocolate paint cheaper than the dark green used on shutters in the cities? There was nobody in the streets. There were no cars. There were no shops.
Then there was some traffic. A funeral procession was shuffling toward me down the narrow street. It must have been the big funeral we passed in the bus. Since my year in Trani, when every grey winter afternoon the funeral processions passed under the window, all but the very poorest accompanied by a band playing an off-key dead march as a chill wet wind blew in over the Adriatic, I have tried to keep out of the way of funeral processions in small southern Italian towns. The funerals in winter are almost as grim as the weddings in spring. The lugubrious tide was washing closer now, filling the street. With the air of someone who’d just remembered leaving a saucepan of milk on the stove, I doubled back and up the nearest uphill alley to the next sheep track.
This street was identical to the first, narrow, shuttered, empty and getting da
rker. Some way along was a cavernous bar where I had a coffee, which failed to warm. I remembered the always boiling coffees that puncutate Sciascia’s stories. The barman didn’t know of any hotels or pensioni around. He was sunk in some morose thoughts of his own so I didn’t ask what was more urgently on my mind, which was where the centre was, some people, movement, life. You couldn’t see where they led, these narrow streets curving level along the contours of the hill, interrupted here and there by interminable flights of of broad stone steps, ascending in dizzying recessions of almost touching parallel lines, like some creation of an obsessed child with a pencil and ruler, something to run up endlessly in a dream, and each, as someone says somewhere in Sciascia, surmounted by an ugly baroque church.
I continued along this lifeless street, blind, closed, dark and empty, while the thought gnawed at me that maybe the next parallel was full of people, animation, light and places to eat and stay. There was no way of knowing, and I’d glimpsed enough of this town to intuit that I could walk these streets to exhaustion without finding the nexus of life I was looking for, round and round the stony outcrop. Perhaps these horizontal streets weren’t in fact parallels, like altitude lines on a map but a single spiral, one immensely long street winding through the deserted town from top to bottom, like the thread in a screw. Then in the shadows I saw another hearse, another glimpse of polished mahogany, another silent crowd shuffling toward me. Or was it the same funeral procession, dogging me up and down the narrow parallels or winding round and round Racalmuto on its way to the graveyard? I turned and ran some way up the nearest flight of steps.
Outside a garage in a little piazza made where the hillside bulged a bit a greasy mechanic was fiddling with a Fiat. A rush of grateful relief came for this normality. I asked if he could direct me to an hotel. There was none, he told me amiably. Not in Racalmuto. A pensione? However simple? Not in Racalmuto. With a brittle laugh I enquired how a town of well over ten thousand people could be without a single place to stay. There used to be a hotel, he reminisced in a wondering singsong, years and years ago. Then it closed. Although he seemed not entirely at ease with the concept of a centre, he gave me some suggestions for getting to where the middle of Racalmuto might be and I set off again. By now, my one thought was to get out. Forget Sciascia’s house. Forget colour. It was getting colder. There was no bus till dawn. Heading off along a street the mechanic had recommended, I saw a light in the distance, livid neon. It was a shop window. Approaching eagerly, I saw it was a butchery and was closed. A single irregular sign read FRESH MEAT. Turning, I saw a lone figure, a man in a cloth cap and a slate-coloured jacket walking slowly toward me. As I approached, he changed his route almost imperceptibly and averted his eyes, though mine were fixed on him. Clearly he didn’t want any trouble. Didn’t want to get involved in anything that might—Mi scusi, I said loudly. There was nobody else around. He had to stop.