That Summer in Sicily (14 page)

CHAPTER XI

“ ‘M
Y GRANDFATHER WOULD STAND AT THE EDGE OF THE FIELDS
when the peasants were sowing or harvesting and recite hymns to Demeter.’

“ ‘Is that what you’re going to do?’

“It’s Sunday morning in the late September of 1948 and Leo and I, having raced over the wide, just-harvested field of a neighboring landowner, have stopped to wait for the other riders to come into view. More than a year has passed since he first spoke of the hunting lodge to me, but today we are a party of twelve bound for that very place, awaited there by cousins, Leo’s bird-shooting companions, a contingent from the palace staff who’d gone ahead to help the lodge caretaker—a man who Leo calls
Lullo
—to prepare a feast of
colombacci,
wild doves, for our Sunday lunch. The week before, the birds had been left to swing from the eaves of the barn, to hang into putrescence, Leo says, promising that the rotting innards of them will have been pummeled into suave pâtés with grappa and wild herbs, a lush paste to smear over slabs of wood-baked bread.
A leccarda, in salmì,
roasted with lard and juniper; he recites a litany of dishes and I tell him, spoiling his hunter’s glee, that all I shall eat is soup.

“From the high palisade above the field where we wait, shards of shale and small stones fall. Sheep graze up there and perhaps one has strayed to the verge, disturbing the fragile rock, or is it not a sheep who’s strayed? A hawk, unseen, thrums it wings, and I think it’s only he who knows what moved the stones as, side by side, we sit in our saddles, horses bending to crop the wheat stubbles. It is my eighteenth birthday. Leo has yet to make his good wishes to me. Nor has anyone else. Tradition has it that, on one’s birthday, a small gift waits beside one’s breakfast plate. The household comes in to join the family to sing
tanti auguri.
This morning, nothing. I shall be eighteen without them. I dismount and, without asking, tie my reins to the pommel of his saddle. I walk away a bit from Leo and his fiendish talk of corrupted birds. He follows me.

“ ‘I’ve been thinking that I would. I mean, that I would like to do what my grandfather did. To recite the old hymns during the harvest. The idea came from the
ortolani
who tend the palace vegetable gardens. Whenever I can, I go to sit nearby them as they work, open a book to read but instead listen to them speaking of Demeter and San Isidoro as though they’d grown up with them, which, I suppose, they did. Over the years I have passed far too little time with the peasants out in the fields or anywhere else about the farms, and so it was a revelation to me to hear these old men going on about Greek history, telling one another, in their rustic way, stories about Demeter and Persephone and Hades and Zeus and The Son of Kronos, embellishing the tales here and there, waving their arms and raising their fists, shouting sometimes or speaking softly, as though they were acting out the dramas. Which, of course, they are.’

“He says this last as though it were yet another revelation.

“ ‘That history is as much theirs as is the history of their own families. As much as the story of Jesus and Mary. They are descendants of the ancients who, with Demeter leading them, grew the first wheat from barren fields. That’s how it all began, Tosca. With Demeter and with their ancestors, and I envy them their easy alliance with the past. I sit and read about it but they live it. I sit with my books while they, who can’t read, carry it forth. Pass it on. As much as they can. If they could, I think many of them would be content to go back to the georgics, to Homeric chants and scythes and plow horses and passing ’round the saint. You think that I’ve forgotten what day it is, don’t you?’

“I overlook the question. Pretend to. ‘Passing ’round which saint?’

“ ‘The sainted wine skin. Better, a jug. Seven times between sunrise and sunset, women and maidens would walk the ranks of the harvesters with bursting wine skins or jugs of it on their heads. And the men would drink. Years ago, when all the work was done by hand, the sowing and the harvesting were as ritualistic as folk dances. Every move was choreographed. There were pipers who beat out music so the peasants could move their scythes in rhythm.’

“ ‘Like this?’ I stride the shorn field, twisting my wrist as though it held a scythe, swinging my body as though it were cutting wheat. As though it were dancing.

“ ‘Yes. Somewhat like that,’ he says.

“I run back to him. ‘One field. Let’s just harvest a single field in the old way. For good luck. As a prayer. The other fields would be cut with the machines. Will you do it?’

“ ‘Is that what you’d like as a birthday gift? A ceremonial harvest? I can’t put all the pieces together by tomorrow when we begin, but I can try to be ready for the last field. Five, maybe six days from now. Is that it? Is that the gift you’d like?’

“I look at Leo, watch him pull a sack of fried sugared bread from his saddlebag. He feeds the horses and I wonder, for what must be the ten thousandth time,
who am I to you?
Yes, I answer to myself, I would like this ceremonial harvest as my gift but, as much, I would like to understand:
Who am I to you?

“Since that afternoon in the library when Leo first began to tell me about his plans for the
borghetto,
for the peasants—that day just after Filiberto had been murdered—we two have been working in a kind of partnership. It has become the natural, the waited-for event when we meet once or twice each day to speak of his progresses, to speak of mine.

“ ‘The farthest northern field has been planted. The machinery broke down and broke down again but, somehow, the last rows were finished before sunset. I drove the tractor.’

“Cosettina read magnificently today and the children were so quiet. Enchanted by the story. Enchanted by her, intrigued that one of them, one of their own, had mastered all those jumbled letters that actually form words. They raised their hands, asked questions. It was wonderful.

“ ‘Will you spend some time in the infirmary tomorrow morning? The doctor will instruct you on what to look for. The children are fearful of him. And timid in my presence. They trust you.’

“As a couple might, as a father and daughter might, we collaborate. Much of the time, this suffices. It contents. The household and the peasants have come to look upon this collaboration with a benign neutrality. It is only the whisperers whom we fatigued, the famished music-hall audience come to see the lusty tale of the prince and the
puttanina.
Only a bucolic poem read by the hero and his muse did they get for their money. But Simona had strutted in the wings, poised to deliver a lascivious intermezzo. She brought lovers to stay at the palace. Sometimes introduced them into the family circle as distant cousins or sons of old friends. They sat at table with us, at Mass with us. They lounged in the salons. Gave orders to the staff. Leo was gracious. The princesses were mortified; other guests, visiting family, were outraged. The tables turned. Whisperers always know the right thing to say.

“I, for one, have always taken Leo’s part. By birth, by comportment, it’s he who is the noble. Simona is nothing more than rich.

“ ‘Her character has always been, shall we say, hysterical.’

“ ‘Frenzied.’

“ ‘Despotic.’

“ ‘Poor dear princesses.’

“ ‘Poor dear Leo.’

“ ‘And that lovely Tosca. Where does she fit into this grand imbroglio?’

“They want to know. I want to know.”

“We walk our horses up the long pebbled road to the lodge, hand them over to the stablemen as the cousins and the hunting mates come out to greet us. All I see is this place Leo calls the lodge. A castle, it is. A turreted tower—no, two towers—with bowed iron balconies wrapped about the mullioned windows like the bones of a hooped skirt. Like those at the palace, the great marble portals are ornamented with the crests of the illustrious Anjou. Below, vaulted loggias are sustained by red marble columns, the carved capital of each one the face of a goddess. A saint. I am beginning to understand. The roof, steep and peaked in a way I’d never seen, is covered in small ovals of what look to be porcelain. As though the gods, sated from feasting, hurled their plates down upon the castle and, liking the felicitous pattern in which they fell, fixed the pieces of them in gold light.

“And what good ghost was it who long ago flung fistfuls of seeds from the towers? Everywhere ’round the place there are accidental gardens, blown tarnished roses gorging on the sun, climbing where they will, oleander tall as old trees and, here and there, soaring rusty mountain pines. The dappled trunk of a lone magnolia is cleaved to form a bed. There is no sign of a mortal hand.

“ ‘Gianpiero Sultano, ti presento Tosca Brozzi.’

“Leo introduces me to his guests and I smile, say
molto lieto,
but I see only the gardens. I am not yet present among the embracing and greeting. I am in the tower flinging hollyhock seeds. Sleeping inside the heart of the magnolia.

“While we still mill about, small cups of cool almond milk are passed to us by a beautiful red-haired boy. The caretaker’s son. In short leather pants and a fine white shirt, his feet brown and bare, he is called Valentino. He may be seven, and I think he must be the official host of the day, as he tells the other women riders and me of the ewers of lemon water and towels he’d set out for us on a table under a pergola.

“
‘Venite, Venite,’
he says, leading us inside the shade with the same joy as if the path led to the baby in the manger.

“A long stone table has been laid under the loggia on the side of the house that looks to sheepfolds and an olive grove. Baskets and buckets of wildflowers and weeds and thick ochre candles in black iron holders ornament the table.
Everyone
is seated. The maids and the stablemen who’ve come from the palace. Lullo, the caretaker, and Valentino, his son. At the palace, the maids and the stablemen do not sit at the prince’s table. Now each person takes the hand of the person next to him and Cosimo says grace. I am seated between Leo and Valentino. It is the first time I hold Leo’s hand.

“Terra-cotta pitchers of wine and plates and platters of the glorified doves are passed from person to person rather than being served by a steward. A composite of the way things are done at the palace and the way things are done in the
borghetto.
The best of each has come together here. I take a thick trencher of bread spread with the black paste and bite it directly from my hand as the others do. As Leo does. It’s splendid, and I take another. Lullo holds forth.

“ ‘Roast the grappa-washed innards in a copper pan over a good fire with rosemary, salvia, black olives, garlic, the dried peel of an orange, and red wine. As the wine is consumed, add more. Never let the pan parch. Never let the innards drown. When the mess is black as old blood and the perfumes cause madness, scrape it into a mortar and pound it to butter. Let it rest in the mortar under a clean white cloth for two days.’

“
Amen,
we say as one.”

“Bottles of marsala and
moscato
and small silver cups. Plums on their leafed branches in bowls of water. Biscuits crusted in sesame seeds. Almond paste formed and colored to look like India figs set on a tray among the real fruit.
‘Guess which is which,’
Valentino challenges, placing the tray before us. It’s nearly five and only Leo, Cosimo, and I still sit at table, most others having made for the darkness of their bedrooms. A blessed rest.

“We will return to the palace in the automobile that one of the staff had driven earlier to the lodge. Our horses will be fetched and transported back tomorrow. We will start out at dusk, stopping halfway at a
locanda
of which Leo is fond. A stone house, or the ruins of it, set in a pine woods. There’ll be cheese and wine. A walk to stretch our legs.

“ ‘I will stay the night here,’ says Cosimo. ‘Go on to Enna in the morning and be back at the palace by dinner. The Curia is not pleased with me.’

“Leo laughs. ‘That must mean that God is
dearly
pleased with you, my friend.’

“The two men rise, shake hands. Embrace.

“ ‘
A domani,
Cosimo.’

“ ‘
A domani, principe. A domani,
Tosca.’ The priest takes my hand, brings it to his lips without touching them to my skin.
‘Tanti auguri,’
he says. “
Tanti auguri, cara
Tosca.’ He takes his leave.

“The all-morning ride, the sun, the wine. The great dreamy work of flinging the seeds from the towers. The innards of a dove. I would like to sleep. More, I want to stay with him. Is it my birthday that makes me bold?

“ ‘You brought me to the palace all those years ago with the intent of making love to me, didn’t you?’

“Leo has been feeding bits of almond paste to the hunting dog that sits at his feet. He looks at me now while still running his hand across the dog’s muzzle. He nods, as though he has been expecting my question.

“ ‘The
intent,
as you call it, was not defined as such. You were a child. And I knew any number of delightful women with whom I might amuse myself. Certainly when I first saw you, the potential of your beauty struck me. Intrigued me. But I did not pace the upper floors, waiting for you to ripen.’