That Summer in Sicily (4 page)

“Of the room? It’s wonderful.”

“This
place. These people.
”

“It’s all wonderful. As much of it as I can understand, since I still don’t know
what
this place is.”

“They’re all so beautiful. Have you ever seen so many beauties in one room? Did you notice the priest? And Carlotta looks like a China doll. And the woman who was telling you about the place, what was her name?”

“Olga. It was difficult for me to follow her dialect . . .”

“No, I mean she was beautiful, too. Maybe it’s only that they all look well and peaceful. Happy. Except for Carlotta, who was worrying over one of the widows who she thinks is dying. Did you know that there’s a birthing clinic here?”

“I can’t imagine it gets much use, what with the average age of the women being sixty-five or so.”

“It’s for other women. Women who need help, Carlotta said. Women from the nearby villages. I saw the kitchen, Fernando.”

“Yes, you already mentioned that,” he says through his thin letter-box smile.

“Enormous. Two fireplaces. And they chant when they cook, too. Do you think we can stay for a while?”

“I don’t know.
La signora
may not be willing to extend her pity for more than one night. Besides, this isn’t exactly the place that came to mind when we talked about where we’d like to go next. I agree that it’s a fascinating sort of retreat, but might it not become difficult to bear all this excess? So many people, so much food, so much mystery. So many roses, for Christ’s sake.”

“I think this Tosca woman has made a sanctuary rather than a retreat. Actually it’s a small universe, contained, utopian in its way, I think. A rarefied refectory and boarding house and working farm where people who want to be together come to live. And, from time to time, to die.”

“Was it the kitchen?”

“Was what the kitchen?”

“You’re smitten, my love.”

“Who’s smitten? It’s only that this has been a joyful revelation. I mean, this is a society that I would never have believed could exist.”

“You walk through a garden or two, wash your face with orange-blossom water, sit down to lunch with fifty Sicilian widows, all of whom wear their hair in braids, and you’ve been transformed. I know that look. It’s the same one you get after you’ve been to the Rialto. I saw it for the first time when we were in the water taxi on the way to the airport. That time you were smitten with me.”

“Thirty-four. Thirty-four widows live here. Are you jealous of thirty-four widows?”

“More confused than jealous. I thought it was only Venice and I who could affect you so. Please don’t tell me you want to begin braiding your hair and wearing black.”

“I’d make a fine widow.”

“I thought you made a fine bride.”

We undress, fold down the covers, and fall upon the bed.

“Did you see that emerald necklace she wore?”

“What emerald? Who?”

CHAPTER III

T
HE WHINNYING OF HORSES, THE HOLLOW, EVEN CLUMPING OF
hooves upon stone awaken me before dawn. More spent than we’d realized, we have slept through our first evening at the villa. I go to the still open window and look down to see two men formally dressed for riding. I think one of them is the priest, and as I look more closely, I see that perhaps the other person is not a man at all but Tosca herself. Branches of pine and the barely thinning darkness conceal them, making a conspiracy of their soft voices. They mount and ride off. Taking on the clandestine flavor of the scene, I wash and dress and, with my boots in hand, tiptoe along the narrow corridors, through the alcoves to the door. Furtively I open and close it. Put on my boots. And now?

I walk downstairs and outside and follow perfumes of wood smoke to the bakehouse. The ovens must have been lit hours ago but there is no sign of rising bread here. No sign of a baker. On the worktables there are flat pans of skinned pistachios and almonds, a bowl of yellow raisins and one of glistening crystallized clementines. What must be two kilos of butter in a stoneware crock. A tin of dark sugar. A jug of olive oil, a two-liter bottle of black rum, and a kilo-bar of pastry-maker’s chocolate. Pastry-making day. Sweet Jesus, I’m back inside the dream. If I could find a few eggs, I could put together a pair of clementine tarts drizzled with rummed black chocolate, a batch or two of pistachio biscotti, a few olive oil cakes stuffed with almond paste. Nearly snorting with covetousness, I look up and down the gravel paths hoping to see where the widows might be but there is no one. Surely they’re in the kitchen. As I start up the path I hear their chanting floating up from the villa garden. I turn back.

Bending into the fountain, a group of widows are washing their hair. Washing one another’s hair. Laughing, screaming, they pour jugs and pitchersful of cold water over foaming heads, and the scents of lemon and neroli are sharp and strong. Heads swathed in thick white towels, they go to join the other widows who stand near the magnolia in two long rows, each one braiding the hair of the widow in front of her. Pulling combs and pins from apron pockets, their fingers fly, slicing swift perfect parts, pulling, twisting the hair into braids and coils and mounting them, fastening them into loops and crowns. When the hair of the widow who is first in line is finished, she goes to the back of her line to work on the hair of the last widow. When they are finished, they sign the cross on one another, take up their chanting, and disperse every which way to whatever work is theirs. The ceremony has taken perhaps ten minutes and, like a Mass, every movement had significance. Though they’d noticed that I stood quietly just beyond, only now do they greet me. One wants to take me into the dining hall for breakfast; another asks after Fernando. I would like to have my hair braided. Looking from one to another of them, I ask the question, but they are all speaking at once and do not hear me. I take hanks of my hair and begin twisting it, asking the question again with my eyes and, without a word, one of the widows takes my hair in her hands, pulls it and me out of the fray, and sets to work. Fearing I am too tall for her to easily reach the top of my head, I want to ask if I might sit for the operation, but her solution is to stand behind me, to pull my head sharply down and back, curving my torso to her working height. Silently I submit. Chanting, she parts my hair with the side of a thumbnail; chanting, she yanks and plaits and twines the hair, riveting each braid to my scalp with a long, sharp pin. Still chanting, she rubs something waxy or oily between and over the braids and comes to stand in front of me. I straighten myself to face her and she says,
“Bellissima,”
and summons the few others who are still nearby to look at me. There is gleeful and positive accord. I don’t say that my temples are so taut that I see double or that I feel twenty head wounds where the pins went in. All I say is thank you as they sign the cross over me, lead me into the dining hall. I like it here, I say to myself. I say it over and over again.

I sit and drink the bowl of good coffee that a widow pours out from shoulder height, French style, from a white porcelain pitcher at the same time she pours steaming milk. The potion splashes a little on my fingers, and I lick the hot, creamy stuff, suck the burn away. Thick slices of wood-roasted bread are piled into baskets, pots of butter and jams and preserves of every color and texture line the tables. I break my toast into small pieces and dip them into the coffee and look about to see if there is someone whom I recognize from the afternoon before. Where is Tosca? I find myself wondering this as though the scene could not be complete without her. This surprises me. I wander back out into the garden, where two groups of widows have set up ’round worktables. At one, four widows are sewing by hand the final stitches and hems upon what look like ball gowns or some sort of fancy costumes. When I ask about them, they say they are making their “final” dresses. Elegant, ornate, they would never permit themselves such dresses in life. In death, though, well, that’s another matter, they say. There is ebullient discourse and a trading of prayers and chants with the widows at the second table.

There the widows sit with bushels of artichokes, the six- or eight-inch stems of which have already been trimmed and peeled. The great, round thistles are wonderful to see. Holding them by the stems, the widows slice away the evil points of the leaves with short, sharp knives, then whack the things against the large, flat stones that each one has by her work space. With a single fierce twist of the knives, they remove the chokes, stuff the empty maws with fistfuls of mint pulled from a great pile of it in the center of the table. Standing behind the mint, one widow has been smashing endless heads of purple-skinned garlic and smearing the paste into a marble bowl. The others take heaps of it onto their knives and rub it into the mint, onto the inner surfaces of the artichokes. Tightly packed into shallow pans then, the stems all pointing one way. Swirls of good green oil, a shower of sea salt, splashes of white wine, lemons—sliced thinly—heaved over all so that almost nothing of the green shows through. So many lemons. More oil. But sparingly this time. I am breathless at the ease and speed and beauty of their motions. Other widows come to collect the artichoke-filled pans—two widows to each pan—to carry them off to the ovens. I step forward to ask if I might help with the transport. Smiles. Back-handed fluttering of fingers. I should be waking Fernando, bringing him some coffee, but I don’t want to miss a moment of any of this. I tell myself he’d prefer to sleep as I follow the artichokes to the kitchen.

I try to count the widows who move about there, but they move so swiftly and look so much alike that I can’t say. Twenty perhaps. Weren’t some of them just in the hair-braiding lines? Twenty pirate headdresses, forty hands, twenty registers of chanting, praying. I watch as the first pan of artichokes is shoveled into the oven of the wood-burning stove and then move along the back wall closer to one of the fireplaces where a widow is shaping flat breads, baking them on hot stones laid in the embers, stacking them into cloth-lined tubs. In the hearth at the other end of the room and over a much quieter, barely burnishing fire, terra-cotta dishes of wine-soaked lamb are set down among the embers, covered with inverted lids over which more embers are shoveled, so that by supper time, the flesh will be charred and smokey, velvety enough to eat with a spoon.

Two men carry in bushels of eggplant. Long, slender, tight-skinned purple ones with leaves and stems intact. I think they say something like
let us know if you’ll need more, otherwise we’ll leave them for tomorrow.
Long, slender, tight-skinned,
just-harvested
eggplants. A quick rinse in the baptismal font, then onto the worktable to be dried, stems trimmed. Leaving them whole but making deep cross-hatch cuts over the entire surface of them, the widows roll the eggplants in a bin filled with a blend of flour, bread crumbs, sea salt, and grated pecorino. They roll and pat and roll again, pressing the dry mixture into each tiny crevice, and then lay the strange-looking beasts onto paper-lined trays, port them across the room to the gas burners where other widows wait to plunge them, a few at a time, into boiling oil, then leave them to float about undisturbed until the inner flesh of the eggplant is softened and collapsing and the outer, exposed flesh and the skin are darkly bronzed and crisped. Pulled out with a skimmer, set back on the paper-lined trays, great crystals of gray sea salt are rubbed between the palms over the blistering-hot things. Whisked off to the dining hall. I will learn that these eggplants are served nearly cold and still crisp with a wild marjoram-sharpened raw tomato sauce. I will learn that they are purposefully not served hot from the pan but left to cool so that the flavors mingle and intensify. Too, I will learn of my alarming capacity to gorge upon them.

I am crazed by now with the need to get in there and cut and pat and plunge myself. I lean fetchingly against the doorway, scuttle about the perimeters of the room, daring to enlarge my advance but never entering the main territory. I am invisible. The widows interrupt their chanting and praying only to laugh or to weep. They pray over each other, over the worktables, over the fires. They pray over the eggplants and the knives and the flat-bread dough rising outside the kitchen door. Incantations, exhortations. Curses. As widows and farmers pass to and fro before me, I ask if there’s anything I might do. I ask twelve thousand times. More smiles. More back-handed fluttering of fingers. They don’t understand me. I’m sure they simply don’t understand. I mount a campaign to communicate with monosyllabic cries of joy and curiosity and hand gestures of rolling, stirring, chopping. This brings two of the widows to where I stand near the door. Gently they push me out into the greater light, look hard at my face. Shaking their heads, they leave me there and go back to work. What is it? What did they see? I am the new girl in town, even with my crown of braids. I start back on the path to the villa, hardly glancing at the pastry-making widows along the way. They’ll never learn my
truc
for pistachio biscotti. Nor the one for the olive-oil cake with the heartful of almond paste. I touch my braids. I try out the chant that they sing most often. I sing it louder. It hardly matters not being able to participate. Being here is everything. I do not notice that Tosca stands in the main doorway of the villa as I approach it.

“Are you menstruating?”

Rather than her riding clothes, she wears a lovely black dress made of something like faille, I think, a sheath that ends just above the ankles, no sleeves, her smooth, muscular arms darker even than the tawny skin of her face. Bare feet in silk sabots with a thin, high heel. Coiled and plaited more extravagantly than it was the day before, her hair smells like orange blossoms. The emerald is at her throat. We meet, nearly head-on, as I am entering and she is leaving. Now it’s I who doesn’t understand.

“Are you menstruating?” she repeats crossly.

“Do you mean right this moment?”

“Yes, right this moment. The women will neither permit you to touch the food nor do they want you to pass through the kitchen. They believe you’re menstruating. If you are, your presence will bring down a curse upon the food and perhaps even upon they who are foolish enough to admit you into their sanctum in such a state.”

The awkwardness I’d felt moments before has escalated to hot embarrassment.

“That’s medieval.”

“It’s much older than that. Still valid, though. So, are you menstruating?”

“Well, not exactly. Sometimes, lately, my menses are, you know,
irregular.
”

“They could tell by looking into your eyes. I admonish you to please stay out of the kitchen. Here there is no trifling with the sacred.”

She walks past me, stops a few meters out into the garden, turns head and shoulders ’round to say, “A chant comes from the back of the throat rather than the diaphragm. It’s not at all like singing. You’re gorgeous with the braids, by the way.”

The least she might have done was to point me in the direction of the red tent, I think as I watch the long black figure of her until she’s out of sight. I think further: Here I am twice expatriated. First from America. Now from Venice. Here is like no other place. Once again, I am a beginner.