by Andrea Lee
Next day we said good-bye to Ginevra and everyone else, left Favignana on the ferry, and drove for five hours until we got to Palermo. Palermo was darker and more confusing than even the oldest darkest parts of Rome, and felt dangerous: a maze of little streets like tunnels, crowded with cars and trash and people strolling in and out of shadows. Old buildings were covered with stone carvings—shells, nymphs—all crusted with ancient grime that turned them into monsters. Mom and I started teasing Federico about having a secret life as a Mafia don, and instead of doing his Godfather imitation, he said in quite a serious voice that people here lived with the Mafia as a fact of life, like the weather. Mom said that it couldn’t be that drastic, that this wasn’t the Middle Ages, but Fede just clucked his tongue, the way he does when he disagrees. From Palermo we had to catch a plane for home that night, but first we went to visit a prince and princess who were friends of Fede’s, and lived above the harbor in a palace made of blackened stone. Fede told us that the building was partly a tonnara, like one of those on Favignana. He said that the prince’s family had for centuries owned fleets of ships, and that these old noble families had the habit of living above the store. Nowadays they had no more ships, but the prince had smart sons who had made a restaurant and discotheque in the part where they used to butcher the tuna.
So we went through a tall carved doorway and up slippery steps into a garden with palm trees and a stone railing at one end, where you could see the city, and ships on the water below. The garden was dry and wild and full of stacks of boards and huge dusty vases and cats walking among old tools and iron pipes, and one corner was crowded with strange-looking cactus plants that the princess collected. The princess was not very tall and had bright blue eyes, a pointed nose, and gray hair in a braid down her back. She looked stern but friendly as she walked toward us with a cigarette in her hand, and then she grabbed Federico and hugged him and called him an old vagabond, and asked him why it had taken him so long to bring his bride to see her. She had a rough voice almost like a man, and she gave Mom and me big smacking kisses on our cheeks and said we were beautiful girls.
I had a Coke and the grown-ups drank coffee as we sat on creaky red couches in a long room filled with books and Chinese vases as tall as I was. Leaning in a corner beside a television was one of those old-fashioned high bicycles. Federico was tired from driving, and stretched out for a nap while the princess took Mom and me on a tour of the palace. First she showed us a round brick tower that was a gift from an empress of Russia. The empress had been a guest in the palace, and her thank-you present was a Russian tower. After that we walked through dark rooms with marble floors and piled furniture covered with sheets; some rooms had chandeliers and some had ceilings painted with scenes from mythology, and one very big room held nine—I counted them—grand pianos. I tried to play one and it just rattled. We passed through a sort of pantry where in the wall were built dozens of wooden drawers with the Latin names of herbs on them in black Gothic letters: she told us it used to be the pharmacy for the household. Then there was a room full of things from Africa: shields, masks, and even a stuffed shark. But the best was when the princess ducked into a bathroom and came out with a bulgy plastic shopping bag that turned out to have crowns in it: six real crowns or diadems, as Mom called them, made out of real gold set with blood-red stones that were Sicilian coral. They had been bridal crowns for women in the family, and nobody in the world had a collection like that, and it was kept in the bathroom because no thief would think of looking there. The princess set one on my head, and I performed a pirouette and a curtsy for her, and she laughed and told us about a German governess she had when she was my age. This strict governess ruled her life completely, except for an hour a day when she could run wild. She could do anything she liked in that hour—be rude, wet, filthy—and the only rule was not to get killed. I liked this story very much, and the princess, too. You could still see the wilderness twinkling far inside her blue eyes.
Back in the room with the Chinese vases, the prince had arrived and was chatting with Federico. They stood up when we came in, and the prince kissed the air over my mother’s hand and mine too, and looked at Mom and then said to Fede that he didn’t deserve his good fortune. The prince was tall and had straight gray hair down to his shoulders. He wore khaki pants and a pair of old sneakers, and was tanned as dark as the fishermen on Favignana. Federico had told Mom in the car that the prince was seventy years old and that he stayed young through wickedness; that he was a famous viveur who led the princess quite a life. I thought that he looked not wicked but kind and that, gray hair or not, he and the princess were the most exciting people I had ever met. He sat down and took my mother’s hand between both of his and said in a soft voice that she was a work of art, and that if she didn’t mind he would talk to Federico but look at her. The grown-ups all laughed at that, the princess more than anyone, and I noticed how straight her spine was as she sat on the red couch, like a queen on a chessboard.
I wandered around looking at some old model planes on the bookshelves while the grown-ups drank whiskey and Federico and the prince talked about their fishing adventures together in Kenya long ago. Then they all started gossiping about people they knew, and I tried to make myself invisible so I could listen. In fact they forgot about me for a while and began to tell stories about young wives playing tricks on old husbands, about husbands fooling around in Africa with beautiful African girls, about a new medicine made in Cuba from sugarcane that knocked the spots off Viagra, and about a woman who had such huge breast implants that she couldn’t go deep sea diving. They went on talking, and I heard the princess say to my mother: “It’s only fair to explain to you, my dear, that I have a very particular kind of marriage. I have to take care of both my husband and his fidanzate—his girlfriends. Otherwise he makes a muddle of things.”
“It seems perfectly reasonable to me,” said Mom. “But it’s delicate work.”
“There are diplomats in my family,” said the princess. “And a couple of saints.” She smiled, and both women glanced at me. Then the princess called me over and slipped her arm around my waist and told me that if I promised to visit her at Christmas she’d stuff me with cassata, a celestial pudding that looked like a white mountain, and only ever tasted good in Palermo.
On the way to the airport, Mom said: “That marvelous woman. Why does she put up with it? Why does she stay?”
“What woman?” I asked, though I knew she was talking about the princess.
Then Federico, who was smoking a cigarette and driving very fast in and out of traffic, said: “She stays because he is marvelous, too. And she’s actually quite happy. If you think otherwise, you’ve missed the point.”
“And what point is that?” asked Mom coldly.
“The point of everything you saw this weekend.”
Mom said, in a still colder voice, that she hadn’t known that this was supposed to be an educational tour, but that even a benighted foreigner like herself could grasp that the main theme over the last two days had been simple inhumanity. Imagine, she said, singing hymns while you slaughtered tuna. Or being a wife who felt it was her duty to help out a husband’s outrageous affairs. She grabbed up her hair and clipped it tightly the way she does when she gets mad, and I thought they were finally going to have the fight that had been brewing since we arrived in Sicily. But Federico, who can lose his temper over incredibly small things, for some reason didn’t seem to mind at all. He laughed and threw his cigarette out of the window, and said that Mom was melodramatic like all Americans, and one day when she grew up she might realize that Sicilians understood the real nature of the world better than anybody else. And why, he added in a plaintive tone, hadn’t he chosen to marry a good Sicilian woman?
“Well, why didn’t you?” asked Mom, settling back in her seat. Strangely enough, she didn’t seem at all angry anymore.
At the airport I made a depressing discovery: the plastic bottle full of hermit crabs I’d collected on Favignana
was a plastic bottle full of dead hermit crabs. Of course my mother and Federico had been telling me that for two days, but I’d ignored them. Now it was clear, because the crabs really stank. I didn’t want to show the bottle to Mom, because I knew what she’d say, but I showed it to Fede and he whispered: “Shall I throw it out?” “Yeah,” I said, so he strolled away when Mom wasn’t looking and stashed the bottle in a trash bin. I felt gloomy until he went off to the souvenir shop and came back with a bag of marzipan fruit; then I cheered up as I bit into a pomegranate and tasted the familiar sickening flavor of sweet almonds. Mom grabbed a piece of marzipan too—a prickly pear—and as she did, Federico shot me a wink. We were in the plane by then, racing through the night away from Palermo over the Strait of Messina toward Rome and the known world, and as I leaned against my reflection in the window and imagined the dark sea below, it seemed like great luck to be flying home with a mouth full of sugar.
Winter Barley
1. THE STORM
Night; a house in northern Scotland. When October gales blow in off the Atlantic, one thinks of sodden sheep huddled downwind and of oil cowboys on bucking North Sea rigs. Even a large, solid house like this one feels temporary tonight, like a hand cupped around a match. Flourishes of hail, like bird shot against the windows; a wuthering in the chimneys, the sound of an army of giants charging over the hilltops in the dark.
In the kitchen a man and a woman sit eating a pig’s foot. Edo and Elizabeth. Together their years add up to ninety, of which his make up two-thirds. Edo slightly astonished Elizabeth by working out this schoolboy arithmetic when they first met, six months ago. He loves acrostics and brainteasers, which he solves with the fanatical absorption common to sportsmen and soldiers—men used to long, mute waits between bursts of violence. Edo has been both mercenary and white hunter in the course of an unquiet life passed mainly between Italy and Africa, between privilege and catastrophe. He is a prince, one of a swarm exiled from an Eastern European kingdom now extinct, and this house, his last, is a repository of fragments from ceremonial lives and the web of cousinships that link him to most of the history of Europe.
The house is full of things that seem to need as much care as children: pieces of Boulle and Caffiéri scattered among the Scottish furniture bought at auction, a big IBM computer programmed to trace wildfowl migrations worldwide, gold flatware knobby with crests, an array of setters with pernickety stomachs in the dog run outside, red Venetian goblets that for washing require the same intense concentration one might use in restoring a Caravaggio. In the afternoons Edo likes to sit down with a glass—a supermarket glass—of vermouth and watch reruns of Fame magically sucked from the wild Scottish air by the satellite dish down the hill. With typical thoroughness he has memorized the names and dispositions of the characters from Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts and has his favorites: the curly-haired musical genius, the beautiful dance instructor he calls la mulâtresse. The television stands in a thicket of silver frames that hold photographs of men who all resemble Edward VII, and women with the oddly anonymous look of royalty. Often they pose with guns and bearers on swards blanketed with dead animals, and their expressions, like Edo’s, are invariably mild.
To Elizabeth, Edo’s kitchen looks unfairly like a men’s club: brown, cavernous, furnished with tattered armchairs, steel restaurant appliances, charts of herbs, dogs in corners, Brobdingnagian pots for feeding hungry grouse shooters, and green baize curtains, which, as they eat tonight, swell and collapse slowly with the breath of the storm. The pig’s foot is glutinous and spicy, cooked with lentils, the way Romans do it at Christmastime. Edo cooked it, as he cooks everything. When Elizabeth visits, he doesn’t let her touch things in the kitchen—even the washing up is done in a ritual fashion by the housekeeper, a thin Scottish vestal.
“These lentils are seven years old,” he announces, taking another helping.
“Aren’t you embarrassed to be so stingy?”
Dried legumes never go bad, he tells her, and it’s a vulgar trait to disdain stinginess. His mother fed her children on rice and coffee during the war, even though they crossed some borders wearing vests so weighted with hidden gold pieces that he and his sisters walked with bent knees. Edo grew up with bad teeth and an incurable hunger, like the man in the fairy tale who could eat a mountain of bread. He has a weakness for trimmings and innards, the food of the poor.
Elizabeth knows she adopts an expression of intense comprehension whenever Edo reminisces; it pinches her features, as if they were strung on tightening wires. Still, she doesn’t want to be one of those young women befuddled by lives lived before their own. She grew up in Dover, Massachusetts, went to Yale, and hopes that one day she’ll believe in more than she does now. At the same time she has a curiously Latin temperament—not the tempestuous but the fatalistic kind—for someone with solid layers of Dana and Hallowell ancestors behind her. This trait helps her at work; she is a vice president at an American bank in Rome. Tonight under a long pleated skirt she is wearing, instead of the racy Italian underwear she puts on at home, a pair of conventual white underpants and white cotton stockings held up with the kind of elastic garters her grandmother’s Irish housemaid might have worn. Edo has been direct, and as impersonal as someone ticking off a laundry list, about what excites him. She is excited by the attitude in itself: an austere erotic vocabulary far removed from the reckless sentiment splashed around by the men she knows in Rome, Boston, and Manhattan.
Elizabeth discovered early on that the world of finance, far from moving like clockwork, is full of impulse and self-indulgence, which extend into private life. When she met Edo she had just come out of a bad two years with a married former client from Milan, full of scenes and abrupt cascades of roses, and a cellular phone trilling at all hours. In contrast, this romance is orderly. She supposes it is an idyll when she thinks about it, which, strangely, is almost never; it flourishes within precise limits of ambition, like a minor work of art. The past he sets before her in anecdotes—for he is a habitual raconteur, though rarely a tedious one—keeps the boundaries clear.
* * *
Africa; dust-colored Tanzania. Edo is telling her how his mother once got angry on safari, blasted a rifle at one of the bearers, missed, and hit a small rhinoceros. Under a thatch of eyebrows Edo’s hooded blue eyes glow with a gentle indifference, as if to him the story means nothing; the fact is that he couldn’t live without invoking these memories, which instead of fading or requiring interpretation have grown more vivid and have come to provide a kind of textual commentary on the present. His hair is white, and he has a totemic Edwardian mustache. His cheeks are eroded from years of shooting in all weathers on all continents. It’s the face of a crusty old earl in a children’s book, of Lear, and he is appropriately autocratic, crafty, capricious, sentimental.
He watches Elizabeth and thinks that her enthusiasm for the gluey pig’s foot and the rhino story both grow out of a snobbish American need to scrabble about for tradition. Americans are romantics, he thinks—“romantic” for him is the equivalent of “middle-class”—and she is no exception, even if she does come from a good family. Accustomed to judging livestock and listening to harebrained genetic theories at gatherings of his relatives, he looks at her bone structure with the eye of an expert. She is beautiful. Her posture has the uncomplicated air of repose which in Europe indicates a wellborn young girl. But there is an unexpected quality in her—something active, resentful, uncertain, desirous. He likes that. He likes her in white stockings.
She says something in a low voice. “Speak up!” he says, cupping his ear like a deaf old man. He is in fact a bit deaf, from years of gunpowder exploding beside his ear. He often claims it turned his hair prematurely white and permanently wilted his penis, but only the first is true. “You’re a gerontophile,” he tells her.
She’d said something about storms on Penobscot Bay. The rattling windows here remind her of the late August gales that passed over Vinalhaven, making her grandmother’
s summer house as isolated from the world outside as a package wrapped in gray fabric. She recalls the crystalline days that came after a storm, when from the end of the dock she and her cousins, tanned Berber color and feverish with crushes, did therapeutic cannonballs into the frigid water. She sees her grandmother in long sleeves and straw hat, for her lupus, dashing down a green path to the boathouse with a hammer in her hand: storm damage. In the island house, as in Edo’s, is a tall clock whose authoritative tick seems to suspend time.
* * *
Elizabeth and Edo finish the pig’s foot and stack the dishes in the sink. Then they go upstairs and on his anchorite’s bed make love with a mutual rapacity that surprises both of them, as it always does. Each one has the feeling that he is stealing something from the other, snatching pleasure with the innocent sense of triumph a child has in grabbing a plaything. Each feels that this is a secret that must be kept from the other, and this double reserve gives them a rare harmony.
Later Edo lies alone, under the heavy linen sheets, his lean body bent in a frugal half crouch evolved from years of sleeping on cots and on bare, cold ground. He sent out the dogs for a last piss beside the kitchen door, and now they sleep, twitching, in front of the embers in his fireplace. He has washed down the sleeping pill with a glass of Calvados that Elizabeth left for him and lies listening to a pop station from Aberdeen and feeling the storm shuddering through the house, through his bones. He imagines Elizabeth already asleep in the bedroom with the Russian engravings, or—hideous American custom—having a bedtime shower. He has never been able to share a bed with a woman, not during his brief marriage, not during love affairs with important and exigent beauties. It gives him a peculiar sense of squalor to think of all the women who protested or grew silent when he asked them to leave or got up and left them. Alone among them, Elizabeth seems to break away with genuine pleasure; her going is a blur of white legs flashing under his dressing gown. Attractive.