The Midnight Boat to Palermo and Other Stories

by Rosemary Aubert

  When my mother was home, which was most of the time, she was a good mother. She sewed, she cleaned, and she made a tomato sauce that was famous in our little village. To this day, I can see her standing at the stove preparing it. She would start by heating a huge black iron pan and carefully dripping onto its hot surface a thin dribble of the purest olive oil. Then she would take a bud of garlic and carefully separating out each clove, would peel it with her slow, strong hands. When the heated oil had turned the garlic as golden as itself, she would add pieces of beef. This meat, too, would soon turn a golden color, filling our little house with its aroma. When the meat was done, she would add the tomato paste. It has been more than forty years since I have seen these things, but I remember as if I were standing there now how she would go to a little pantry off our kitchen, a place that was always cold, no matter the time of year, and from one of its shelves, would take an earthenware crock of tomato paste. This paste had been dried in the sun by her own grandmother, and it was almost black. Of course, I used to think it looked like poison. Yet even then I understood that the tomato paste made the sauce rich and thick and gave it such a deep flavour that it seemed to have been cooked forever. However, when she added this ingredient, my mother had to be very careful. If she added too much, or if she didn’t cook it until it, too, was almost golden, the sauce would be bitter—a failure. After the tomato paste, the only other ingredient she added was fresh tomatoes. And one other thing—the secret. When the sauce had cooked for two hours, my mother would add a little cupful of sugar. It was my job to bring her the sugar from a cupboard across the kitchen, and I would sneak a taste for myself before I got to her side. When she caught me doing this, she would laugh.

  Thursday was the day she made sauce. And Thursday was the night that it was my father’s turn to meet the midnight boat to Palermo. I always thought that my father died on a Friday, but now I understand that was too simple a way to look at things. He was found dead on a Friday. He was killed on Thursday—the Thursday we, he and I, like always, were supposed to meet the Palermo boat but didn’t.

  My father, and all the other men in the village, worked in the sugar factory. Being only eight years old, I thought the factory had been there forever. Now I see that was wrong. It could only have been set up after the war, when I was two or three. When I was little, though, the sugar factory was one of the centres of my life. Though my own children seemed to spend all their time in school when they were eight years old, I certainly did not. There was only one teacher, an old woman whose son had gone away and never come back and who could speak of little else, even when she was supposed to be teaching us math or the history of the rulers of Sicily. It was easy to slip out of school—or not to go at all, which was what I often did. The minute I was free, I headed for the factory.

  Now it is very important for me to explain that I did not go to the factory to eat the sugar. The mysterious thing about the factory was that nobody was ever allowed to eat the sugar there. Zi Antonio had forbidden it. Anyone who so much as tasted the tiniest bit would have to leave their work—forever. Zi Antonio was the mayor of our little village, though that word—mayor—is another that we never used, that I never even learned until I came here. My father told me that Zi Antonio said it was bad business to eat your own product, that that was how people lost money, that it showed a lack of respect.

  I had another way of looking at it, and it was one of the reasons that I visited the sugar factory so often. In order for this to make sense, I have to describe how the sugar factory looked. Though now that I finally know what I’m really describing, I must admit that this might not at all have been how the factory was—just how it looked to me when I was eight years old.

  Unlike any other building in our village, the factory was built of some clean, smooth material—concrete, I’d say. And it had no windows. The only way you could see inside was if you stood by the wide rear door, which I often did.

  The roof of the factory was covered in pipes, sticking up toward the sky. Sometimes steam shot up from them like a volcano. When this happened, it scared me and I ran away. But I always came back.

  The only times I ever stayed away for long were the few times that Zi Antonio, himself, chased me. He hardly ever came to the sugar factory, though he seemed to be everywhere else in town, including our house. As I recall, the first time he caught me, I was merely wandering about the factory yard. Out there were piles and piles of barrels just like the ones we got when we met the Palermo boat. He caught me completely by surprise. I was leaning over a row of barrels, thumping them, the way I’d seen my mother thump an eggplant to see if it was ripe. I’d just about decided that the barrels were empty, when I heard a shout close behind me. I jumped a mile. Zi Antonio towered over me like the picture of the ogre in the storybook my cousin Teresa had sent me from America. I started to cry.

  Now I have to say about Zi Antonio that he always treated me and my brothers and sisters very well. “No, no, no,” he said simply and shooed me away.

  The second time he caught me, I was doing the same thing. The barrels seemed empty that time, too. The third time Zi Antonio said that if I continued to play there, my father would lose his job.

  What I was really trying to figure out was whether the sugar in the factory was poison and whether something the men did to it made it not be poison anymore, so that when it left the factory we could eat it.

  Everybody knew that Zi Antonio was the boss of the factory. We knew also that he was a special friend of the old woman who was our teacher. We knew, too, that Zi Antonio was somehow in charge of the parish church, though we assumed that must only be when the priest wasn’t praying or doing holy things. Zi Antonio, for instance, was in charge of charity—being a very generous man. He was also always present at funerals, consoling the mother and the widow.

  Zi Antonio was also a special friend of my mother. It was because of him, I always thought, that she took such care every Thursday when she made the sauce, for he was always our dinner guest on that night.

  It was regular as the clock. All afternoon my mother would cook the sauce while my father worked at the factory. Zi Antonio would arrive. My father, being a quiet man, would say very little at the table, but Zi Antonio was funny, and his jokes kept us in stitches.

  I ate faster than the others because I had to get ready to go with my father to meet the Palermo boat. I packed us a lunch. I got our sweaters and blankets. And I filled the lantern we needed to signal the big boat and let the sailors see what they were doing when they lowered the barrels into our boat.

  Once in a while, a wind would arise, or the open boat would be slashed by rain, but my trust in my father was absolute. I see now that what I was doing with him was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done, but I felt more safe then than I have ever felt since.

  I would ask him to tell me his stories of the sea, and he always did. He knew about pirates, about explorers, about the sacred missionaries of the Church.

  As we pulled away from the beach behind the sugar factory, the sun would be low over the water. I would lie against the pile of blankets as my father rowed slowly away from the village. As the last thing to fade from sight—the chimneys of the sugar factory—slipped away, the rocking of the boat would start to get to me. I would doze off. Often, the next thing I knew, I would be lying on the boat bottom staring straight up toward the stars.

  Nothing in my life since has ever equalled the peace of those voyages. It seemed we drifted out there for hours. In the silence of the night, I asked my father what was in the barrels that we took from the Palermo ship into our own. He smiled and said that it was a syrup from far away, that it was needed in order to make sugar. Sugar cane? I asked him. But his eyes were trained on the water and he didn’t answer.

  I also asked him why nobody at the sugar factory could eat the sugar. This was a trick question. I knew, as all children do, that sometimes if you ask a question over and over again, the answer that has always been the same answer, can
slip into a different answer—the truth. But he said, as he always did, that it was bad business, that it showed a lack of respect and that all the sugar in the factory belonged to Zi Antonio.

  He said that Zi Antonio was the boss of the sugar factory but that he, too, had his own bosses and no matter how you lived your life, there was always somebody who had the power to tell you what to do. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  I asked him why we had to wait so long. This he had explained again and again. He said that the boat to Palermo had left a country called Turkey, that when a ship was at sea, the wind could speed it or slow it, that the waves could be so high that the boat had twice as far to go—up one side, down the other. I laughed at his joke and, huddled in my warm sweater, settled back to enjoy the sandwiches I had made for us.

  Often, when the boat did come, I’d been asleep, and sometimes I only woke up when I heard the shouts and saw the barrels being lowered down. Then I would fall asleep again and not wake up until our little boat reached the shore. I would crawl out onto the sand and wait there as my father rolled the barrels up into the yard of the factory. Then, he would take my hand and lead me along the path that went to our house. We’d tiptoe in, and he would tuck me into bed. Usually I was fast asleep before my door even closed, my sisters breathing silently beside me.

  My memory of those nights is so vivid and complete that I remember every detail of the night that was different—the night my father was killed.

  For some time before that, the arguing of my parents had been often and loud. They’d always argued, but never so much or so violently. One Thursday, my father came home from work in the middle of the afternoon. He looked different—angry and even scared. He told my mother that the sugar factory was about to close. Then, he started to drink wine. Usually, he had a little wine with his supper, but this day, he started drinking in the afternoon, which I had never seen before.

  As always, my mother was cooking the sauce for supper. Despite the troubles of my father and the fact that she was fighting with him, her hands were sure as she dropped the meat into the sizzling oil. When he realized that she was making Thursday dinner as if nothing had happened at the sugar factory, he started to yell at her. How could she have Zi Antonio for dinner when he was about to ruin them all? She said Zi Antonio had nothing to do with whether the factory stayed open or closed. I had no idea what any of this meant. I was waiting for my mother to add sugar to the sauce. My father grew more and more angry. Then he stormed out of the kitchen. I ran after him, but he slammed out of the house. When I went back to the kitchen, I saw that my mother had the little cup of sugar resting on the cupboard. I stepped up, stuck out my finger and reached up to coat it with sugar. To my amazement, my mother slapped my hand so hard that I hit it on the edge of the cupboard and cut it. She didn’t even offer to help me. She told me to get out, to wash it off, and to come right back. I did everything she said. A little later, my father came back and went into my parents’ room, where he remained.

  Zi Antonio did come for supper that night, but there were no jokes. He wasn’t even hungry. All we ate was salad, cheese and bread. He and my mother whispered as we all sat at the table. I thought they were whispering to keep from waking my father who had fallen asleep after drinking all that wine. I kept waiting for my father to wake up, for us to go out to the boat. But every time I tried to get up from the table, my mother told me to sit down.

  After a long time, my father did wake up, but I knew it was too late for us to go out. It was already dark. My mother now seemed a lot less angry than she’d been. She had even put aside some sauce for my father, and she cooked him macaroni and ladled the sauce onto it. He, too, must have been over his anger, because I could see how hungry he was. He ate it all. Then he went back into the room he shared with my mother, stretched out across the bed and fell back to sleep.

  I was heartbroken. All day I’d thought about our trip out to the Palermo boat, and now, clearly, we weren’t going. I went to bed myself.

  But I had a hard time sleeping. In the middle of the night, I got up to ask my parents if I could get in bed with them until I fell asleep. I crept down the hall. Their door was open, and I looked in. They were lying side by side. A broad ray of moonlight fell straight across my father’s face. He had told me again and again that it was bad luck to sleep in the moonlight. Here he was, sound asleep, completely unprotected from the moon. But even more disturbing was the sight of my mother. The moonlight fell on her face, too. She was not asleep. Her eyes were wide open, staring straight up and full of tears that fell down her face, sparkling like diamonds in the pale light.

  I knew then that she was sorry they had fought. I knew, too, that their room was no place for me. I went back to my own room and fell asleep.

  Things happened very fast after that. The next day, my father couldn’t wake up. The doctor came. Then the priest. He was dead before either got there. They said it was the shock of knowing that the factory was going to close. They said he must always have had a weak heart. They said it was such a shame—a man in his thirties with five children….

  Zi Antonio saved us. He told my mother that he would look after us all. He said that his bosses had decided to send him to Canada. He said we could all go with him. My mother wore black clothes all the way to Canada. We had stopped in Rome to get them.

  After we got to the new country, our lives settled down. It was strange at first to have Zi Antonio with us every day, instead of one day a week. It was strange to have a father—he and my mother soon married—who worked in an office every day instead of a factory. And it was strange to live in a real city instead of a village. But there were so many good things—the school, the museum, the parks, the friends. Before long, I forgot about Sicily. I never, of course, forgot about my father. But it hurt to think of him dying at such a young age. He had been my friend. Now I had other friends. And after a while, I hardly thought about him at all.

  Zi Antonio offered to send me to university, but I was rebellious. When I left school, I, like my father, went to work in a factory. It was clean work. If you paid attention and worked quickly, you could make good money. I started at the machines, sewing pajamas. I soon moved up to hand-stitching dresses, and then, I became one of the senior women. At the time I left, I had been making the finest wedding gowns, beading lace that cost five hundred dollars per meter.

  After many years, the orders started to fall off because of the dresses from China. One by one the women had to be let go. Finally, there were only four of us left—the wedding women. Every day for two years, I had gone in thinking it would be my last day, and one day it was. The boss was crying. She didn’t even have the money to give us a settlement. The last thing she did was pay the wages she owed us. That was it.

  Except for the counsellor. The boss gave a little speech about how the government had provided counselling for us all. We could learn to write resumes. We could explore retraining. We could learn creative writing—to get in touch with our inner selves, she said.

  What could my resume say? That I had been sewing for thirty years? For what could I retrain? And I had already taken a writing course from the government.

  The only program left was “Looking into Ourselves.” So it was this workshop that I signed up for, this workshop in which I discovered the secret I had been keeping from my “inner self” all my life.

  It happened so simply and so suddenly. I went to the community center where the workshop was to be held. At first everyone was nervous and embarrassed. But it was all women and pretty soon we started to chat. As the weeks went by, I started to feel comfortable talking to the women in the group, who ranged in age from a little younger than me to a little older.

  One night, there were some young women there—all sitting together and so pretty, the way my mother was the day she left our village to come to Canada with my step-father.

  One of these girls told us that she went to a different group every night in order to never have to spend an e
vening alone. The silence was total as she told us in a shaky voice that she had been a drug addict.

  Now of course, for women my age, to have a granddaughter on drugs is the ultimate terror. I had even gone to a lecture once about all the different drugs and the history of where they came from, sponsored by the police.

  The girl spoke only a little—laughing and crying as she told us about herself. What she said was that the first time she ever saw heroin, it looked just like sugar. That it sparkled and she had put out her finger and taken a little and tasted it, expecting it to be sweet, but it was bitter. And that should have told her all she needed to know.

  I saw it then. I saw the whole thing. I saw my father lifting up his arms to receive the barrels of opium from Turkey—just like the police told us about. I saw the factory with its frightening pipes and its strange white product that no one was allowed to eat. I saw Zi Antonio with his fine suits, with the respect, the fear of everyone in our village. And I saw my mother slipping a silk blouse out of a shiny paper bag from Rome.

  I picked up my coat and my purse and I walked out of the center and all the way home.

  But even then, I had only figured out part of it. It took me until far into the night before I realized what Zi Antonio and my mother were doing every Thursday night. And then, most cruelly of all, I remembered my mother’s sharp anger the day I watched her put the secret ingredient into her famous sauce. The day I reached out my finger to taste the sugar as I had done so many times before.