That Summer in Sicily (25 page)

“She washes, refuses a nightdress from me, pulls off her outer clothes, sets her black pumps on the windowsill like an icon, kneels by the bed to pray, then settles herself under the covers.

“ ‘Do you want me to tell you a story?’ I ask, going to her, bending to her, lightly running the back of my hand over her face.

“ ‘I missed you for years, Tosca. How I longed for you, cried for you. I remember that sometimes I circumvented Jesus and
la Madonna
and even Santa Rosalia and I prayed directly to you.
Don’t let me go, Tosca. Don’t ever let me go.
I cried for you more than I did for Mama. I can barely remember her. I think that in my baby’s mind, you really took her place. You became the mother. My mother. And then you went away, too. I don’t want a story. We can’t go back, Tosca. We can’t. No one can. Papà is dead. Mama is dead. I’m happy there was this splendid love between you and Leo, but he is dead, too. And we two are no longer those little girls who held hands in the night. You should never have let go of me, Tosca. Not for anything.’

“I sit in the chair while she sleeps. I doze fitfully, as though I am on watch. Once, when I awaken, it’s just before dawn and I see that she is gone. She has written a note on a flyleaf that she has torn from my book. She includes her address, the telephone number of the atelier. Tells me to use the number only in times of emergency. She asks me to write to her when I have a fixed address or if I am in need. She has enclosed 2,000 lira in the folded peach-colored paper.”

“I saw Mafalda from time to time. She earned her accountant’s license, she parted with Giorgio, offered the full hope chest to one of his sisters who was to be married. Slowly she took on the economic affairs of several small businesses. She moved into a larger flat, fell in and out of love in rapid, fevered succession, though no one won her heart. Surely I did not. Yet on a late afternoon in December perhaps six years after that day at the
autobus
stop, we were walking in the city, talking about her work as I recall, walking quickly so as to keep ourselves warm and, as though it were the most habitual gesture, she slipped her arm through mine, kissed my cheek, arranged her mouth in that elusive Bellini smile.”

CHAPTER II

“F
AR LESS EVENTFUL THAN
M
AFALDA’S LIFE WAS MY OWN
. T
HERE
were days when I’d all but decided to return to the palace. Simple enough. A train going the other way. But when I looked again, I saw that, in those first months, the distance had grown, the space between the palace and me. Mines lay buried along the road back.
Not now, not yet,
the other ghosts would tell me.

“In the sun-baked stupor of high summer, I wandered less about the city. Rather I would sit for hours in the
caffès
under the scant succor of a Campari umbrella, smoking black-market cigarettes from a short silver holder I’d fished from among Isotta’s jewels. My preferred drink was warm Coca-Cola sipped through a paper straw. If in one place people encroached upon the ghost of me, jostling familiarly upon my small private territory, I would secure lira under some glass or dish, move a few meters down the Via Maqueda to the next bar. I don’t know when it was that I first began to arrange my time so that I would arrive at the last bar on the Maqueda, the one on the corner of Via del Bosco, at six every afternoon.

“Posed against white canvas drapes and under freshly washed black awnings, fancy ladies in silky dresses, their hats stuck with velvet roses, cluster in twos and threes over teacups and Brandy Alexanders and small sumptuous cakes tinted green and pink. I sit inside, though, under the whirring wings of the ceiling fans, in the dusky precinct of the bar. The smallest table, the one flush against the wall. It’s always free. From there I can see them as they enter. The other ladies. Often as many as ten of them, though I think sometimes there are more. Eyes squinting at the smoke of the cigarettes they hold between their lips, metallic voices ripping through the hush, they push and tug tables and chairs together and sit in comfortable sisterhood. They wear silky dresses, too. Shorter, clingy ones and higher heels on their white sandals. Eyes fetchingly smudged with peacock or turquoise, hair rolled into wavy pomps. One night before going to bed, I’d tried to roll mine the way they did theirs. Just to see how I’d look. I thought I liked it, but surely it wasn’t the right hairdo for a ghost. Perfect for them. Whoever they are. Who are they? A company of dancers? Laundry workers just ending their shift? Shopgirls on their way home? They are young. As young as I am. Younger than I am.

“Nearly all the afternoons of that summer I sit at my small table against the wall in the darkened bar on Via Maqueda. And as the merchants in the markets and the fishermen’s wives on the pier had left me unheeded, so do the ladies with the wavy pomps.
La puttanina,
the whisperers in the palace had called me. Now, here I sit in quiet contemplation of real ones. Courtesans.
Les demi-mondaine
in the flesh. It wanted weeks before the signs fell into a limpid truth. How they’d primp into their tiny mirrors, pass lilac perfume and rouge ’round the table like bread, break into raucous screams at stage-whispered confessions, open their purses to one another. Coins, pills, handkerchiefs. How ravenously they would eat! As though they’d been half-starved. The way the barman touched them with his eyes. Slain lambs on hooks, his gaze slid from one to the other of them. Which haunch would he choose? Mostly what revealed the Maqueda ladies to me was the sadness showing under the rouge. Under the pomps. My own sadness deepened for theirs. And once I’d understood who they were, I began to wonder if, sitting here in the shadows, I’d been granted a Dickensian look at myself. As I might have been if not for Leo. Can it be true that I am, at last, recognizing that Leo saved me? That I might not have had the strength to save myself? That, at best, I might have died of the same febrile desolation that I have always believed took my mother? Can it be true that I am ready to loose the rapturous hold of my mostly unnamed hate? Of despair? Can I keep for longer than a moment the truth that hate and despair are two of the disguises that fear wears most often?

“Day after day, I sit in the shadows on the edges of the Maqueda ladies’ tables, listening to them. From my purse I sometimes take out the thin green bank book stamped with dates and deposits and withdrawals and balances. At the beginning of each month when I’d go to the bank to sign for the next dose of funds, I would find that I’d spent not even a small portion of the previous month’s stipend. Aware of the growing balance in the account, I never thought—beyond the next carton of cigarettes or the next bar bills or the next sack of pistachios or the two splendid banknotes that I would fold into a yellow envelope and slip under the door of Signora d’Aiello’s office on the first Monday of every month—I never thought about the privilege of my position. And then there was the original stash of bills that had been stowed in the medicine bag with the jewels. I’d never even counted them. Now I watch a Maqueda lady counting out coins, stacking them in front of one of her colleagues. The receiving one keeps telling her, ‘No, no. You can’t always save me.’

“There are days when a man comes to sit inside the bar with the Maqueda ladies, the low-pitched drift of his dialect landing close to my table by the wall. They open their purses to him, too. Rolls of banknotes from some. A few coins from others. With the back of his hand, he throws a hard, quick blow onto the cheek of one of them. A random warning from which they all cringe. In his loping shiny-shoed wake, they are silent. Tears. Oaths. I make an oath.
I have been smug and full of pretense and triviality. I have been corrupt in my passivity,
Leo had said to me on the day he told me about the death of Filiberto. My oath is to come out from the shadows.”

“It is September, early in the month, when I go one day to Piazza Venezia, to the Benedictine convent to buy the nuns’ good cannoli for my lunch. I’d learned about the pastry-making nuns by listening to tales told about them in the
caffès.

“ ‘The best cannoli in all of Palermo.’

“ ‘Exquisite.’

“ ‘The delicate shells fried to crispness while one waits. Barely cooled, they are filled with that morning’s ricotta whipped with sugar—not too much—slivers of candied orange peel, scrapings of black chocolate.’

“ ‘Rum.’

“I stand in the stark vestibule with many others. I am next in line to approach the Catherine wheel. I say,
tre per piacere,
place my coins in the little box, push the wheel. A few minutes later, the wheel is spun back my way. I take the small paper box and turn to go. Two or three paces behind me stands one of the Maqueda ladies. I nod to her as I pass by but she does not acknowledge me. I go outside to the steps, find a splash of shade about halfway down, and sit there. I eat the cannoli, one after another. I realize that I am waiting for the Maqueda lady to exit. When she does, she carries a very large box. Brushing crumbs from my thighs, my lips, I stand, say, ‘I see you often at the bar on the Maqueda. I just wanted to say, hello. My name is Tosca.’

“I hold out my hand, but perhaps for the large box or her own disinterest in the strange, tall woman in the old-fashioned dress, she does not offer me hers; she manages a smile, keeps to her path down the steps. I want to run after her and I think I might have had she not stopped then, turned, and called back to me,
‘Ci vediamo, allora. Più tardi. Mi chiama Nuruzzu.
Well then, we’ll see you. Later. My name is Nuruzzu.’

“
‘Ciao,
Nuruzzu.
’
I wave to her. I notice that it is I who waves. Not the ghost.”

“With that brief exchange on the steps of the convent, everything changed. Began to change, if very slowly. It was only Nurruzu among the Maqueda ladies who was prepared to befriend me. Some of the others believed I was looking for a way to join them, to be recruited into their ranks by the man who came to take their money.
Our designated territory is already too crowded. Too many girls. Not enough clients. Get away.
Others thought me a spy. An innocently dressed, bare-faced girl from a rival territory. Closer to the waterfront. They were the ladies who would pucker their mouths ’round their cigarettes and, with smoke fuming up from their nostrils, motion to the others with rolling eyes to beware of me. Nuruzzu tried to defend me, told them some of the abbreviated, selective biography I’d given her. I was new in Palermo. Had lived all my life in the mountains. I wanted neither to join them nor was I in any way connected to their métier.

“ ‘Besides, she’s too damned tall and she has no breasts,’ Nuruzzu said once when I was sitting with them and some of the ladies were speaking badly of me in the dialect that they thought I could not comprehend. They all laughed then and I laughed with them, thinking how Leo had so loved the long narrowness of me. My small, hard breasts.

“But no matter how I looked or what I told them, the Maqueda ladies remained aloof. Protective of themselves and their work. Only Nuruzzu risked a friendship with me.

“Like stealthy lovers, we would meet in places and at times when Nuruzzu knew we would be unseen by her sisters. And by the man who came to take their money. Our rendezvous were mostly in the mornings, in a small, unclean
caffè
behind the Vucciria. Without her uniform—the too-small dress, the too-high heels—her face unpainted, Nuruzzu looked no more than fifteen years old. Not recognizing her at all as she came toward me the first time in a white shirt and wide black pants, tiny feet shod in round-toed, beaded velvet slippers, just-washed hair slicked back in a ponytail, I was startled by her leaning down to kiss me on both cheeks.

“ ‘Nuruzzu.’

“ ‘Yes, the real Nuruzzu.’

“For months, we met like that. Twice a week. Sometimes only once. There were weeks when she didn’t come at all. From that time, though, I never again went to the bar on the Maqueda where she met with her friends before their evening’s work began. I was content to wait for Nuruzzu.

“She was a talker. I guess sitting with her, I was reminded of how Agata and I used to go on and on. Cosettina, too. In the schoolhouse in the
borghetto.
In any case, she told me that she lived in a
monolocale,
a one-room apartment in a
palazzo
near the train station. She lived alone. She was nineteen. She said that her dream was to leave her métier, to work in a shop or even to find a position as a maid. She’d once been a maid. Or a maid’s helper. She’d worn a black dress and a white apron and a black crocheted net over her chignon and she’d spent her days polishing silver and tidying things that never seemed in the least untidy, passing small goblets of marsala to her mistress’s afternoon guests. She said she’d saved most of her earnings, shared a fine bedroom with a woman called Assunta, dined, at 6:30 every evening, with all the servants at a table covered in white linen in a room papered with maroon and green stripes. She’d had Thursdays free. It was on a Thursday when she’d met Piero.

“ ‘Like all the villains in this business, he was seductive,’ she said. ‘At first, he was. They know how to court a girl. Tell her what she longs to hear. He’d said he would find me a better job. More money. Far more money. More time, so we could be together for more than just Thursdays. He said it was a very special sort of work that only beautiful girls like me could do. I was sixteen. A virgin. He took the net from my chignon, spread my hair over the pillow. He fed me cherries. It was a beautiful apartment. I thought it was his.’

“ ‘Your parents.’ The words I did not form as a question.

“ ‘My father was killed in the war, or I might say that he used the chaos of the war in which to disappear. Many men did that. Women, too, I guess. My mother hadn’t waited for the war before she ran away. I haven’t seen her, except once when she came to ask my father for money, since I was nine.’

“Nuruzzu spoke of Piero’s promises, his patient instruction in what was to be her new work. He brought her to the
caffè
in the Maqueda, introduced her to the others. They assumed her education, her grooming for the streets. They called her
piciò,
the littlest one. Nuruzzu insisted to the others that she and Piero were
fidanzati,
that they would be married as soon as he’d sorted out a few things. She didn’t mind their laughing. She never saw Piero again. The Maqueda ladies said he’d just been passing through. That he, too, had gone on to better work.

“She says she’s run away twice. Once to Trapani, another time to Messina. Found, beaten, brought back to Palermo on the bare floor of a van. Rocking on her stomach, arms and legs trussed behind her. She says sometimes it’s difficult to say who is more brutal, the villains or the clients. They are men made of the same stuff. A cross is the shape of a man, she says. She says this over and over again.

“ ‘Until they’re through with me, until they stop making money on me, I can’t leave,’ she’d said. ‘I’m not a bad girl, Tosca. Most of us are not bad. I don’t think any of us sat down one day and decided that this was the work we desired. Ours is the life we think we deserve. And if we didn’t deserve it when we began, surely we’ve earned it by now. None of us has all her teeth, our bodies have been burned and beaten, our throats twisted. They let us keep only enough to live this side of starvation. That day you saw me buying all those pastries from the nuns, I’d stolen that money. It was my birthday. I made a party for myself. Do you know why we go to the bar on the Maqueda every day? We want to be together, but, as much, we go because we can eat and the villains will pay our bills. For most of us, it’s the only food we have in a day.’