The Great Sicilian Cat Rescue (12 page)

The following day the ambulance and van were packed
up ready to leave. In those few days the intensity and accomplishments of our work had drawn us close together; we hugged and kissed and a few tears were shed.

Before I left for England once again I discovered the identity of the figure I’d watched strolling in Piazza Durante. His name is Mario and he has acted and directed in the theatre for many years of his life. I was talking to the man in Letojanni’s Internet shop when Mario came over to join us. He seemed delighted to find someone who spoke English and we went for a coffee.

‘I’m sorry, it’s time to leave,’ I said.

Mario smiled. ‘You’ll be back.’

And 2005 had scarcely begun before I was indeed back in Taormina. I really should have learned by now that proposals by Sicilian authorities are delusive as will o’ the wisp, offering false hope, which is never fulfilled. Nevertheless, there I was in chilly January, staying in a damp apartment and awaiting summons to the city of Messina for a meeting with Sicilian vets. And waiting; I called Mario and caught the bus to Letojanni. We met for tea at Il Gabbiano cafe. I was curious to know why he continued to live in this small village where he obviously didn’t belong spiritually, among people who didn’t understand him.

‘You understand, dear Jenny? It seems I might be an agent of the British Secret Service!’ He noticed my quizzical expression. ‘I mean it, that is how they see me here in Letojanni.’

But I didn’t know whether he was joking or not. I glanced down at the black and white photographs scattered over the cafe table: Mario’s theatrical history, the plays he’d acted in all
over Europe, taking him further and further from his Sicilian roots into the world of Brecht, Theatre of Cruelty, Theatre of the Absurd. There were some reviews written in English spanning the nine years he lived in London.

As he had explained to me during this short winter’s afternoon, that was his most serious false step. He went against his better judgement to move from Rome to Norwood, where there was nothing to do in the evenings but go to the pub – his reason: a summer affair with an Englishwoman, which was prolonged because she found herself pregnant.

‘The moment she was back in England, she changed. She went back to her work as a lecturer and I was left floundering, a fish out of water. I stayed for the sake of my daughter – until she was old enough to understand. Then we separated but, you understand, I’d lost all my theatrical contacts.’

Now he was ‘exiled’ in Sicily, in what he called a miserable trap. It was nearly a year since I’d met him in the Internet shop, checking his emails as if it were a lifeline.

I thought of the figure I saw striding towards me as I sat waiting outside Il Gabbiano, enjoying the winter sunshine. He had swept along the street, his long, dark overcoat flapping, dark glasses, film-star good looks. Mario was tall and handsome in a slightly sinister way. His eyes were dark and intent, his smile wry. He had the most wonderful gravelly voice and spoke Italian beautifully. More indefinably he had the elegance of another age; his manners were delightful. You could imagine Mario belonging to some Mittle-europe cafe society seated in one of those Grande Caffes you see in Turin, his constant companions wickedly dark coffee and a smouldering cigarette. Come to think of it…

‘Well, you do look rather like a secret agent,’ I said.

Mario laughed and shook his head. He refilled our cups. I stared at the translucent liquid with a momentary longing for a comforting English brew, something to warm me. The conversation on the bus as I rode to and from Taormina for these teatime rendezvous with Mario centred on the normally Anglo-Saxon subject of weather. No one had ever known Sicily to be as cold as it was this January. The elderly woman muffled from head to toe in coat and scarves leaned over to offer the driver a sweet, speaking in a high keening voice about ‘
il freddo
’. And he – taking one hand off the wheel to accept it – commiserated: ‘
Da fa morire
.’ (I smiled to myself. Enough to kill you. Hardly!)

‘Come on!’ I wanted to say. ‘It’s not
that
bad. Look out the window, see the sun on the sea, you’re not snow-bound like North Italy.’ We were swinging down the curving roads towards Letojanni, past stone walls covered with bougainvillea. ‘Cold? What kind of blood have you got in your veins?’

The driver’s mobile phone rang and he answered. A friend, it seemed, who wanted to meet up that evening. ‘
Dependere del tempo
(It depends on the weather),’ he sighed.

I knew about the truly freezing weather in northern Italy because I’d been watching the RAI news every night, sitting in my damp apartment with a glass of red wine. I was grateful I’d brought warm pyjamas and a hot water bottle with me.

Taormina was dead at this time of year; the bars closed at 20.30, a few people scuttling along the empty streets like crabs on the bottom of the ocean. There was nothing to do but go back to the apartment, eat and watch television until it was time for bed.

I can’t see you doing this fifteen years ago
, I told myself.
If you were tucked up cosily in bed then, it would be a matrimoniale, a huge double bed, with a Sicilian lover.
Certainly not cuddling a hot water bottle in my narrow, not very comfortable bed, which must stand away from the wall because of the damp. Surreal.

Several times over these last two weeks I’d asked myself,
What am I doing here?
although I knew the answer. I was awaiting a meeting with the head of veterinary services in Messina – a meeting that should have happened the week I arrived.

‘Pazienza,’ Sergio, president of the National Canine Defence League (Taormina branch), told me. ‘The boss is very busy, he has people coming to see him every day.’

‘Doesn’t he know that I’ve come all the way from England to see him?’ I complained.

Sergio gave an expressive Sicilian shrug: ‘
Muh
!’

I was trying to be patient because there was so much at stake. The meeting was to discuss the necessity for a permanent clinic for feral cats in Taormina. If I succeeded with this, the next part of my plan, it would be an enormous breakthrough in what had otherwise become a gridlock situation. But on nights like these, watching people in Milan and Turin struggling through snow, hearing a kidnapped Italian journalist pleading for her life, I lost heart. That’s why I escaped to Letojanni to have tea with Mario, when we could at least commiserate together.

Every time we entered Il Gabbiano, heads turned. I knew they were trying to work out whether we slept together – indeed, why we were together at all. Already they’d found
this lengthy stay of Mario’s mysterious and then he turns up with a foreign woman – just what was going on? I imagined them asking each other as they turned back to their tables and leaned their heads together.

What they didn’t know was that we were linked by a common sense of exile, a kind of existential waiting. I, the meeting in Messina; Mario, confirmation of a drama workshop he had proposed at nearby Roccalumera. If he didn’t do something concrete, he said, he would go mad.

But with Mario there was a mutual reticence, a tacit understanding that our conspiracy should remain at this cerebral level. Hard to explain, a sense I didn’t understand myself: taboo. Of course, I had had my initial fantasies – I wouldn’t be Jenny if I hadn’t. But there was an actor’s narcissism about him, which warned me that any involvement would be a disaster. A complicity of
attente
then but we were both aware that it was probable nothing might occur. This was Sicilianita as the author of
The Leopard
, Tomasi di Lampedusa, confirmed in the voice of the Prince of Salina:

Mario passed me the plate of
dolce
and I took a
cannoli
– a kind of cream horn. Then I regretted it because they are squishy things to eat.

‘Here you are watched and checked every day, whom you frequent, where you take your coffee, with what linguistic vocabulary you express yourself, who you are, politically based on country and tribal; politics and so on. It’s tragic and grotesque.’

And I was right – a
cannoli
is not something you eat in public. I wiped my fingers, took a sip of tea.

‘And that’s without mentioning their penchant for destruction and self-destruction, their gratuitous slander,’ Mario commented.

It was all too much. We could not stay here, he said. We must move on somewhere else. I stood at the counter waiting while he paid, conscious of the eyes boring into my back, following us as we left the cafe. Outside, I zipped up my jacket. A chilly wind blew through the deserted Piazza Durante. The leaves of the palm trees rustled mournfully. We crossed swiftly and pushed open the door to the Pegasus bar (sadly no more). It was the haunt of the intelligentsia or what passes for intelligentsia in Letojanni. I’d had some heated discussions on the meaning of life in here, sitting round a table and eating their special
bruschetta
, which are nothing like the ubiquitous toast with a bit of chopped tomato and onion on top. The Pegasus
bruschetta
were chunky laden affairs and the red wine to wash them down not the often watery variety, which I suspected came from the cartons you can buy in the supermarket for seventy pence.

Tonight Fabrizio was here, just arrived from Florence, where he now lived. ‘It’s good to come back to Sicily,’ he told me, ‘but only for two or three weeks.’ You got the impression that, if, by mistake, he stayed longer, his re-entry into Florence
would somehow be mysteriously refused. Now and again, Mario disappeared outside to stand in the cold night air and smoke. He was an inveterate smoker, although some days he told me he had given up. I understood. There was a time when I couldn’t write a word without a cup of coffee and a cigarette. What I found extraordinary was that somehow the smoking ban was observed. Since the beginning of that year it had become forbidden to smoke in restaurants, bars and cafes, forbidden with draconian force – alien to the usual laissez-faire attitude of this country.

Mario returned to take up where he had left off.

‘So I am a British secret agent, huh! The only thing you can do with people like these is to have a good laugh. That’s if you don’t shudder at how it’s linked with serious psychological problems mixed with ignorance, lack of common sense and petty provincial imaginings…’

Peppe behind the counter caught my eye and shrugged.

‘…The deadly boredom of a subculture, of suspicion, frustration and mortal apathy.’

He was right, of course
, I thought, remembering the time when I lived briefly with Amadeo. By the end of the day ‘someone’ would have told him my precise movements: that I’d taken a stroll in the Public Gardens, where I’d been spotted talking to an old man. In the market I had again spoken to an elderly stallholder for what seemed like a suspiciously long time and then I’d sat in the Oranges Bar with a glass of wine in the middle of the day!

Every Sicilian is an island within the family or group of those who directly surround him. He can be courageous, generous and fearless. On the dark side he is also capable of
dealing death in a real or metaphorical way if he thinks it is necessary. His intelligence is often interpreted as
furbizia
or cunning. ‘
Fatti furbo
,’ you will hear a father call after his son as he leaves the house. (‘Don’t let anyone get one over you.’) It is no insult to call someone ‘
furbo
’. It means that, whereas most people accomplish a simple project with a chat over a drink, or a letter, to a Sicilian it becomes an undertaking of Promethean proportions. Each side will be involved in cooking up a wicked scheme to get the better of the other while trying to foresee the schemes the other might invent; in fact, being even more
furbo
. The result is very often stalemate, the paralysis of two equally talented chess players, the ‘feeling of death’ described by Lampedusa.

It was that kind of stalemate I was facing now: every move I made was checked by the authorities as ‘not legal’, coupled by the vice of ‘
domani, domani
’ – always tomorrow.

As I remarked to Mario: ‘I think they make up laws to suit the occasion.’

‘
Muh
!’ he said.

By the time he was eighteen he had turned his back on Sicily as any Sicilian who ‘makes it’ has to do. He cited Pirandello and Verga: ‘People are surprised when you tell them these artists were Sicilian.’

‘Any news?’ we asked each other on yet another of these wintry afternoons at Il Gabbiano.

‘This enforced stay will push me to write a book sooner or later. But no one can live in this place when they feel so alienated and disenchanted. These people believe they know me, but the truth is they have absolutely no idea! By the
autumn I have to make my choice – but it isn’t much of a choice, somehow I’ve got to get out of here.’

I looked at him and remembered something he had said to me last year when I was upset about having to leave.

‘Remember,
cara
Jenny, life is beautiful because it is varied.’

But his was stoicism akin to despair.

A scarlet sun glared down at the grey sea. It was cold tonight, I had to agree, and everyone on the bus appeared dressed for the Arctic. My apartment looked like a Turkish bath, so much humidity, the windows were all steamed up. I settled with my supper and a glass of red wine, feeling nostalgic for the past, for the life that other Jenny used to live. I thought of Art and the long letter he wrote, saying he would never forget the day we spent together. Neither would I: a chance meeting at a beach trattoria, a snorkelling expedition when the current swept me out to sea and this charming American rescued me. It was a day that went on and on and extended into evening.