That Summer in Sicily (10 page)

CHAPTER IV

“I
T MIGHT SEEM STRANGE
, C
HOU, BUT NEITHER BEFORE NOR
then nor on into that autumn and winter was there anything much at all in my life to suggest that the world outside the palace was at war. Save the newspaper reports, the radio broadcasts to which Leo and Cosimo and whatever males were in residence at the palace at the moment listened to with such attention, all seemed remarkably the same. In fact, I found it shocking one morning when we three girls were walking to the schoolroom and Yolande said, ‘Ach, how weary I am of this war and its privations.’

“Even Charlotte seemed at a loss, and certainly I didn’t know about privations. She explained that no more pastries would be coming in the weekly supplies from Palermo because there was no sugar. She said that her mother had told her so. Could we imagine such a thing? No sugar?

“Apart from the pastries, after a while there were no supplies at all to fetch in Palermo. But I never knew about that, either. I never heard about rations or bombardments or how many Italian boys were being killed or taken prisoner on the Russian front, or about those who froze to death in their Mediterranean-weight uniforms or died of hunger even before the Russian winter could take them. Save the wilderness of sugar, there was no truth to taint the punctual discharging of the events of palace life for we three girls. Even the closer-to-home truth was never spoken. The truth that, in the
borghetto,
six hundred meters from the sparkling gilt gates of the palace, children had gone and would still sometimes go to bed without supper. Or that the stores in the peasants’
magazzini
had been sorely thinned if not depleted, and that until the spring wheat could be harvested there would be no bread on their scrubbed oilclothed tables. What I did begin to understand was that Leo was somehow distracted, sad. Even more silent than usual. During that last period of the war, he and Cosimo and some small company of household men would often be gone for days. Disappear. If not without telling Simona, certainly without telling anyone else. When they’d return it would be in some strange truck or farmer’s wagon loaded with oil and tins of vegetables and meat, sacks of rice, food for whatever animals were left. All of it covered with tarps and rags so that the shapes underneath looked eerily like bodies. Sleeping. Dead. They’d gone to bargain with the black-marketeers in Palermo or wherever it might have been where there were goods to be had. I would learn that Leo had unfolded astounding sums of beautiful ten- and twenty- and fifty-lira notes so that his peasants might eat. And when, in the final, most hungry weeks before the gardens and fields would begin to yield and black-market goods were nowhere to be found, Leo opened the palace storerooms to the peasants. When the peasants would hesitate over the last barrel of oil, the prince would assure them that there was more. There wasn’t more. Cosimo still tells the story of Leo’s cleverness in urging the palace cooks to use lard when there was no oil.

“ ‘But the lard is rancid, sir. Green as grass.’

“ ‘That’s when it tastes best. Go ahead now and fix a good lard pudding. Are there any prunes left? Add some prunes.’

“How Cosimo loves to tell that exchange! Poor Simona not only had no sweets but was served prunes and lard for lunch while the peasants were blessing whatever they had with her finest virgin oil and her confessor was stifling laughs, shifting pieces of the hellish pudding about his plate. In his dedication to the welfare of his peasants during the war, Leo was triumphant.

“In 1943 the Americans debarked on the island. The Germans had already been here for more than a year, protectorates of the homeland of their Italian allies, basing their command at Enna. But when the enormous numbers of Americans with their cannons and heavy armature plunged through the waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea and onto the Sicilian shores on that day in May, the far fewer and less potently supplied troops of
Tedeschi
chose retreat. Days after the American arrival, King Vittorio Emanuele nullified the governing power of Mussolini and placed a general called Badoglio in charge of the government. Whatever government there was. Early in September 1943, Italy officially asked armistice of the Americans and hence, for us, the war was over. As I’ve said, I never knew it had begun.

“The only casualty that invaded the palace walls came in the form of three Americans. I don’t know how many hundreds or thousands of American soldiers were billeted at Enna, first as liberators, or was it conquerors?—there are still those who dispute this point—and then as keepers of the peace after the armistice. Hotels, private homes and villas, convents, and military barracks were requisitioned to lodge them. Leo went to visit their commander, invited him to lunch.
Noblesse oblige.
Cosimo tried to dissuade him from the deed, warning that if the Americans witnessed the beauty of the palace, surely they would claim it, too, but Leo was convinced to demonstrate noble Sicilian life and culture to the Americans. Proud that his daughters and his ward might address the guests in their own language, we were extraordinarily primped and polished for the occasion. Clutching nosegays of white roses and repeating our mantra of
Good afternoon, sir, and welcome to our home,
we waited on the veranda. I don’t really know what I or Yolande or Charlotte expected of these Yankee soldiers, but surely it was something other than what they were. One was very fat and tall, the one who I think was the general. Of the other two I recall only their voices, which were loud and shrill in the quiet sanctum of the great dining room. We thought them scandalous for the noises they made when they chewed, for how they laughed with their mouths open and full. Leo cringed. Cosimo snorted quietly into his cups. I don’t recall whether Simona sat with us. When all was said and done, I, myself, found the Americans charming, in their way, perhaps because they were the single close-up symbol to which I’d been privy in all the hugger-muggery of that epoch. It would be a decade later and in another life before I would come to understand even some of what had been
la grande guerra.
”

“Pindar and Caesare; the inevitable
The Lives of the Saints;
French, English, Italian literature. Geometry, astrology. The pianoforte. I heard Mass from the family pews, spooned my puddings at the family table, linked my arms with the princesses in the family strolls about the garden. I was one of them. I was not one of them. It must have been about then, when I was fourteen, that I began to be included in the admirations of the visitors. The extended family. The savage green-eyed motherless child had grown to be a young woman. Well-spoken, graceful, bright. There were whisperers.

“ ‘Have you heard her play Brahms?’

“ ‘They say she’s memorized Virgil.’

“ ‘A perfect Parisian accent.’

“ ‘A brilliant horsewoman.’

“ ‘Poverina, and to think of what her life might have been if not for Leo!’

“ ‘The prince has such a good heart.’

“ ‘The prince has such a good eye.’ ”

CHAPTER V

“S
OON AFTER THE PEACE WAS FIXED
, L
EO AND
S
IMONA HOSTED A
party. Not one of our own boys or the men who had been called up or volunteered themselves to fight, not one had been lost. Eleven from among the
borghetto
had gone to war, six from the palace staff, and though three were severely wounded, all seventeen had returned.

“It was the third of May 1945, and to initiate the
festa,
Cosimo said Mass for the combined congregations of the household and the
borghetto
rather than performing the usual separate celebrations of the holy sacrament. At sunrise in the gardens, in the fickle, unconsecrated shade of the oaks, Cosimo said Mass for everyone. And afterward, we all walked, single file, upon the packed-earth paths among the wheat fields on our way to a copse of cedars by the river.

“A group of men had gone out the evening before to arrange the wood for the cooking fires, to rake the earth under the trees, pound torches into the ground. Under the sun, not yet high but already mean, we walked. Each of the men carried some crate of food—oranges, artichokes, potatoes—or parcels of linen or some bench or chair across his shoulders or led a pair of lambs or goats to sacrifice. Two had mandolins strapped across their chests and bundles of kindling tied on their backs. I remember them especially, for at the time, I’d begun to think I was mad with love for one of these troubadours though I never could decide which of the two it was. That day both were wearing shiny black trousers with a satin stripe down the leg, the splendors of which caused their chums to claim they’d looted graves, taken the pants off dead men, so as to be smartly turned out for the
festa.
The suggestion might have been true. And the women?

“Sure as she-goats over the stones, wide, strong flanks lurching to and fro under thin cotton smocks, some with suckling babies swaddled to their breasts, they all toted jugs of water or wine upon their heads and sang some ancient song about sisterhood, about a pact to tell one another when a husband was untrue. To tell and then to help the betrayed wife to murder the betraying husband. They sang it over and over again.

“Now you’ll recall that this was 1945 and there were more vehicles belonging to the palace than I could count. And by this time there was also some manner of gasoline to feed them, the trucks and Jeeps and cars, and yet we walked. Simona and the princesses walked. Everyone wanted to walk.

“By the time we’d all reached the river, the advance guard had fires leaping, had dispatched, gutted, skewered the lambs and goats, rubbed the little carcasses with oil and filled their cavities with handfuls of wild herbs. As though all seventy or eighty who composed the group were following the steps to the same primal dance, everyone got to work. I thought the scene they made was lovely. More beautiful even than the condoling dreams I would call forth as a little girl, dreams upon which I’d paint big-bosomed aunts who smelled of soap and sugar and uncles with Sunday shoes and caramels in their pockets for me. I’d invent a grandfather in whose embrace I would sit and trace the furrows of his sunburnt cheeks while he sang to me. In those dreams, my mother would never cry and my father would be the wise, reasonable
capo famiglia
who protected us all. But these characters I drew in those old dreams might have been great white snowy owls for all they resembled the real ones with whom I’d lived. Yet mine was every child’s dream, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it yours, Chou?”

I know she seeks no answer.

“How each one of us adjusts the dream to accommodate real life. That’s what separates us. One blames and wails while another gets to work. At the end of any human story, I think it’s only the capacity to reconcile the dream with reality which separates characters. Well, by then, by the time I was fifteen, I’d long been finished with whatever blaming and wailing I was going to do but, from time to time, I was still wont to take out the pieces of those old dreams and give them free run over me. But the sight of that festival I came upon by the river ripped open the small place inside me where I’d hoarded the old pictures. Washed it clean and made room for something real. I understood that what I was seeing, what I was coveting in that riverside scene, was already mine. Even though I’d never lived among that race of graceful creatures, I was
of
them. Their legacies were mine, their culture was mine, and I felt that as fiercely as I did that the make-believe life in the palace was
not
mine. But I’m going too fast with this story and I know that I am. Let me get back to the
festa.

“A group of women were smashing artichokes against flat rocks and stuffing them with a paste of oil and herbs just like we do here at the villa. Someone else was fixing sardines with great chunks of tomatoes in long, shallow pans with holes poked in their bottoms and setting them to smoke over embers of dried wild fennel stalks. Tables made of boards and barrels were covered with embroidered cloths and laid with stacks of tin plates, and the men drank in time with their work and the women sang in time with theirs, and one could hardly tell who belonged to the palace household and who to the
borghetto.
Everyone seemed happy mixed up together. I was happy. Leo seemed happy. He seemed exuberant, in fact, striding from one vignette to another, putting his hand to the preparations, tasting a sauce, filling and refilling the cups of his peasants. Shirtsleeves, riding pants, boots, all that blond hair slicked back with neroli oil and sweat, he was beautiful, and there wasn’t a woman there—save his own wife and daughters—who didn’t think so. And that was the second thing I’d understood on that third of May. I understood that it wasn’t one of the troubadors in the tuxedo pants I wanted. I was in love with the prince.”

“The
festa
went from lunch to
riposo
and on to foraging walks in the woods and fishing in the river and then back to the table. There was music all day long, but when the sun began to set and the just-lit torches glistened up in the white fog off the river, the troubadors exchanged bold, bright songs for minor-key wails, strumming them softly, the taut, tinny pings mingling with the wind. Two girls began to dance. I knew one of them. She was called Lidia and I’d seen her sometimes when she’d come to help the palace maids. I didn’t know the other girl. She was different from Lidia. Different from all of us. The skin of her was the color of ripe peaches set in a red glass bowl and her eyes were long, dark Arab eyes. Her high, unbound breasts moved under her loose white dress as she swayed tenuously, her eyes looking somewhere far away. I think all she could see were the stars.

“Face to face, the girls held one another by their elbows, their bodies illumined by the two small fires that burned on either side of them. The troubadours having laid down their mandolins, there was no music. No one would have heard it anyway since everyone sat or stood or crouched in a circle ’round them, hardly breathing for their enchantment with the peach-skinned one. Lidia sat down after a while, leaving her partner to dance alone, and an old man with a mouth harp sent up a mesmerizing keen that seemed to rouse the peach-skinned girl from her trance. She moved her arms and legs as though she’d just awakened from a long sleep. Stretching herself, testing herself until, in a slow, deliberate pirouette, all the while kilting up the skirt of her dress, securing it in a knot high up on her thighs, she began to turn in place. Tight, contained turns, her neck proud, her arms arched in a wide embrace, she propelled herself slowly, seeming to listen for the next cue from the old man with the mouth harp until, hearing it, she twirled faster. Faster yet and now in the classic ballerina’s pose—one leg bent, the small bare foot of it held fast against the other knee—she whirled herself upon one long, powerful leg. Faster, faster yet until it was she who commanded the man with the mouth harp and his keen became a hectic, passionate scream and still she whirled faster, flinging the mass of her dark ringlets to slap against her shoulders, always bringing her eyes back to the same critical point as she completed another turn. Faster, always faster, she hurled her splendid body until, like a dervish, she seemed to dissolve into the dark starry night. White smoke with black Arab eyes. Always she turned her Arab eyes back to him. Always back to Leo.”

“There was nothing left for any of us to do after the peach-skinned girl’s dancing and, little by little, the
festa
was broken down, packed up, and we walked, single file, upon the packed-earth paths among the wheat fields back home. Half crazed with envy of the girl who—even to my fifteen-year-old eyes—had surely offered herself to Leo, I refused the jasmine-scented bath Agata had drawn for me, threw myself, facedown, upon the yellow and white bed. I wept. The whole night through I wept, grieving with that envy but just as much for something else. Something that I think was an ending. You see, as the peach-skinned girl danced in the dim light of those last flames, it felt as though she’d taken something from me. With every turn, she took more. And as she spun herself fast into that black night, the whole of my childhood went with her. Broken, empty, I was less than I’d been before, or was it only that I was different? Agata kept vigil over me all that night, rocked me in her arms until dawn seeped between the shutters and, as though the new light would stay the pain, told me, ‘It’s over now, little one.’ I remember her saying that, her tiny oval eyes swollen from sympathetic tears, her own thin body trembling with exhaustion.

“Yes, it’s over, I’d told myself, too. Kept repeating the phrase. Too, I repeated what I’d told myself the day before by the river.
The scene ripped open the small place inside me where I’d hoarded the old pictures. Washed it clean and made room for something real.
But what was real? Was my love for Leo real? Was my envy of the peach-skinned girl real? Was life at the palace real? Was the
festa
by the river real? Maybe dreams are all we have. Maybe trying to live dreams is to dash them on the rocks.

“Three revelations battled for my attention. I loved Leo. I was envious of the peach-skinned girl who I began to see more as the symbol of all women, any woman who might inspire Leo’s affection. I was shocked to admit that this envy must include Simona herself. As I considered this, the list of potential irritants became very long. But the third revelation was, I think, the most shocking of all. I could no longer be at home in the palace. Now that I had witnessed how the peasants lived, it was in the
borghetto
with them where I wanted to be. I didn’t care about embroidered stockings or ornamented puddings or Greek or Latin or Brahms or even
The Lives of the Saints;
I wanted to work in the fields and carry wine on my head and swing my hips and sing sad songs about love. I wanted to ride bareback again, I wanted to feel that hole in my stomach at high noon and fill it with soup and bread, and I wanted to kiss Leo. Shrieking from the soul of me was the desire to kiss the prince. Each revelation battled against another until the stones fell in place. First I must get to Leo.

“I would get to Leo before the peach-skinned girl would get to him. Before he could get to her.”

“By this time, Agata had washed and dressed, gone to inform the household that I was unwell on that morning after the
festa,
telling them she would look after me, keep me quietly in my rooms. I began to form my plan.

“In part, it was Flaubert who guided me that morning. Flaubert via Mademoiselle Clothilde. You see, while Charlotte and Yolande and I would be at work with our written lessons, Mademoiselle often read by the schoolroom fire or in her chair under the magnolias. During a certain period, she seemed always to be reading books by someone named Flaubert and, more often than not, one book in particular. Its title was
Education Sentimentale.
Delicate brown script on a burnt-brown suede cover and I’d longed to read it. After bouts of thieving food and clothes for The Tiny Mafalda, my skills were sharp for the unsanctioned borrowing of Mademoiselle Clothilde’s books. I’d never kept any one of them long enough to distress her unduly, for in an afternoon or overnight, I’d gorge upon one or another of them and nimbly position the book just to the left or the right or under or over the place where she’d left it the day before. By the time I’d taken
Education Sentimentale
for the third time, Mademoiselle asked me what I’d thought of it. She revealed that she wasn’t much older than I when she’d first ‘come upon’ it. I remember we laughed an almost complicit laugh, though neither of us—or was it only I?—could have imagined using certain passages from the book to seduce the prince. And yet it was exactly memories of Flaubert that cleared my head that morning after the
festa,
that set me upon my path to Leo.

“Only Agata would be privy to my plan. And once she heard it, she sat quietly, swallowing hard a few times, looking at me as though I were someone else. Appraising me.

“ ‘Get in the tub,’ was her first directive.