That Summer in Sicily (15 page)

“It’s I who am caught off guard with his parry. His openness. I like it, and yet it frightens me. A rite of passage.

“ ‘You know it was your father who
offered
you to me. He found you incorrigible even at nine. He called you a scowling vixen. Said your sister was as meek as your mother was. When he came to me to propose your becoming my ward, I could barely hear him out. I’ve always found it painful to listen to one father or another—more, to a mother—who has decided to surrender a child. Whatever the reason. Often they are babies, newborn bastards whom the nuns have refused because all the cribs in the convents are full. Since the rich don’t seem to breed as easily as the poor hereabouts, sometimes the bastards are sold to a barren couple who will often pass off the child as its own miracle. And, in my position, there are always the children of one’s own succumbed peasants. Influenza, consumption, a tired heart that explodes one afternoon in the fields. A slip, a fall, a cry for help unheard over the noise of the thresher. Often there is neither sufficient space nor food among the other families to permit any one of them to take in another little soul. Said little soul is then bathed and dressed and combed and brought to the servants’ entry. With apologies. With gratitude. From time to time my parents had as many as ten or twelve of these orphans in our home.’

“ ‘Has it happened to you? Did people leave babies in your care?’

“ ‘Of course it’s happened. But Simona is not a woman like my mother was. I pushed fat white envelopes through the Catherine wheel of one convent or another. Waited by the gate for some shrouded nun to take the swaddled bundle from my arms. I have always done this myself. Thinking that somehow my personal passing over of the baby would assure care and safety. Even affection. I have a book that records each child’s placement. And the yearly envelopes that I continue to send in their names. Still I am plagued. The
giumpe
is often not sacred.’ Elbows on the table, head in his hands, Leo is quiet. After a while, ‘But what your father did was rare, at least in my experience or my memory. I’d never before been faced by a young, able-bodied man who enjoyed what was, for those times, a relatively thriving business and yet who sought to ‘turn over’ to me his perfectly healthy, perfectly bright, perfectly lovely nine-year-old daughter.’

“ ‘I’ve never thought about what your first encounter with my father must have been like. I mean, how the two of you arrived at your
agreement.
I’m certain my father made no such thing as a sentimental appeal. A straight-forward business discussion it must have been, for I was neither a bastard nor an orphan. I was chattel. An excess of goods that could be turned into cash. Or was it horses? Rather than my father beseeching you to take me because he couldn’t care for me, he sold me to you, didn’t he? I knew it back then as I know it now.’ I am shocked at my own words.

“The spilling of bitterness was not deliberate and yet I have launched it. Leo comes to where I sit, bends to take me in his arms. A paternal embrace. I push him away. I stand up before him in a coquettish pose.

“ ‘Look at me. Am I a pitiful creature? Am I broken, cowering because my father didn’t want me? I think not. I won’t tell you that I have never felt sadness because of his treatment, his eventual liquidation of me. I won’t tell you that. But whatever pain there was had begun to dissolve before you came to fetch me. You didn’t save me, sir. I saved myself.’

“How ungrateful I am. What devil do I channel? I sit back down. Leo sits next to me. Without looking at him, I dare to touch the back of his hand that rests on his thigh. I touch his hand with the tips of my fingers. Penitence.

“ ‘Tell me about your father. Some of what you remember about him,’ Leo says, shifting my hand to lie inside his.

“ ‘Early on even my instinctual love for my father began to feel wrong to me. At first, when my mother died, I would reach out to him. Mimic her, I suppose. After all it was my turn to be
Mamà,
wasn’t it? I’d put an extra biscuit beside his coffee in the morning, which, because they were all counted out and had to last for a certain number of days, he must have known meant one less for me. He always ate the biscuit but he never said
thank you.
He hardly spoke to me at all.

“ ‘He never came home until late in the evening. I would put The Tiny Mafalda to bed, tell her the story of the princess who had three beautiful dresses and who bathed in warm milk and ate cakes with violet icing every morning at eleven and whose mother promised she would never, ever die. I would kiss her, hold her hand until she fell asleep, and would go then to sit on the step outside our house, the cat in my lap, to wait for my father. Sometimes I would fall asleep like that, awakening only when the cat started at my father’s approach.

“ ‘Papà, I was waiting for you. Are you hungry? I left an egg for you and some bread.

“ ‘He’d sit and eat the egg, tear at the bread with his teeth the way Mama told us only animals did. I’d stand beside the table babbling on about how long it took for The Tiny Mafalda to fall asleep, or about how her arm still hurt and her shoulder in the place where she’d fallen on it last week. And if there wasn’t any, I’d always invent some good news for him. Mama used to do that, too. About the hay looking as though it would last another week or about the mushrooms I’d found under the big pine that morning on the way to school and that I’d already set to dry on the roof. I’d stand there talking and talking, not daring to stop for fear of the silence I’d hear instead of his voice responding to me. I didn’t like the silence between him and me. He’d open the spigot on the barrel and hold his glass under it, all the while looking at me. Drink down the wine in one or two long swallows. Unbuckle his belt, step out of his pants, and lie down on his bed, which I’d made up with the sheets that Anna Lavanderia had left all clean and folded that afternoon or, if it wasn’t her day, the ones I’d smoothed and tucked tight under the mattress just the way he liked them.’

“ ‘Who was Anna Lavanderia?’

“Does it really matter who Anna Lavanderia was? I ask myself. I understand that my story makes Leo feel sad, that he searches for an excuse to distract me from it, and I oblige.

“ ‘Anna Lavanderia. That was what everyone called
la lavandaia,
the washerwoman, who went from house to house—each one on a certain day—to do the washing and the hanging out to dry in the sun. She’d come back in the afternoon after her rest for the folding and the ironing. Mostly rich people used her, but since The Tiny Mafalda and I were just too small to handle the weight of the sheets, my father began bartering with Anna when my mother died. A sack of tomatoes and two cabbages one week. Artichokes or rice or sometimes things from the
dispensa
that I’d thought I’d hidden from him. Like sugar and real butter to make a cake for Mafalda.’

I return to my story.

“ ‘So, still saying nothing, my father would lie down on his bed, fold his arms under his head, and stare at me. I never could tell whether he was waiting for me to bend to kiss him the way Mama had taught us to do. But I never did. I never once bent to kiss him after Mama died. I’d take up the cat, climb the ladder with the fat beast in my arms, and settle us both down beside The Tiny Mafalda. I’d stay awake for a while, at least until I heard the even rumbling of his sleeping breath. I was the
vigilessa,
the guardian. The cat and I. Together we would keep The Tiny Mafalda safe.

“ ‘But it wasn’t long before I stopped being the next mama and started being just plain Tosca. It wasn’t right that I try to be mama. It felt like I had to go to confession every time I’d flash him my big, sweet mama smile and tell him I’d saved an egg for him. The mama smile felt like a lie. It felt better when I just went about my business, not even considering what might or might not make him happy. I began to think only about The Tiny Mafalada and me. And about my friends and my teacher and the people who were so happy to see Mafalda and me in the market every morning.

“ ‘I’d put my mother’s brown purse across my proud flat chest, and even though it hung down below my knees, I thought it made me look fancy. How I loved that purse! How I loved brushing my sister’s hair, braiding it tight and neat, using my own spit to smooth it ’round the parts and tying the ends with red ribbons, sometimes pink, buckling her sandals, taking her by the hand.
Sei pronta?
She was always ready, as though we were going to a fair or a
festa.
The market was like having relatives to visit. Like it must be having a grandmother. Anyway, I loved that it was my sister and me off to buy the cabbage or the potatoes or two hundred grams of
maccheroncini
or whatever it was I’d cook that day for our supper. Every merchant gave us something extra. Sometimes a fistful of parsley or an apple cut in two, a handful of golden
zibbibi
that we’d never eat on the spot but that I’d put in my bag so The Tiny Mafalda and I could have a tea party later. One of the shepherds almost always took his knife from his belt and chiseled out a nice, big crumble of his oldest pecorino. One part into the bag, the other divided into two pieces. With the same reverence I’d show for a communion wafer, I’d tell Mafalda to stick out her tongue and I would place it directly into the tiny open waiting mouth. A hungry little bird. The other into mine.
Now don’t chew,
I’d tell her.
Let it melt. Let it fill your mouth, your nostrils,
I’d say, and I knew that she loved that burst of big, harsh flavor the way I loved it. Even when it didn’t, we would tell each other that the flavor lasted all the way back home.

“ ‘I was supposed to go to school and leave my sister with her doll and the bread that was her lunch, and sometimes I would. Sometimes I would take her with me, let her sit on my knees or in the back of the schoolroom, where she could play with the other children who were left in the care of their older siblings. But often I didn’t go to school at all in those months right after Mama died. As soon as we came home from the market, I’d start right in cooking the supper. As though I had ten children and six starving shepherds to feed, I would chop and boil and fret over the cabbage or the potatoes, set the table, make things look nice. I found that I could be perfectly happy even without my father’s love. You see, I’d figured it out. With the help of Francesco Brasini.’

“ ‘What did you figure out? And who was Francesco Brasini?’

“This time Leo is not trying to distract me but is genuinely rapt and wanting to follow my story.

“ ‘It doesn’t matter who he was. It only matters what he did. If you’ll listen, you’ll understand. I figured it out like this: My father was never kind to my mother, and so why in the world would he be kind to me? And why would I expect him to be kind to me? I figured out that he wasn’t kind because he
couldn’t
be kind.
He wasn’t a kind man.
Like he wasn’t a
tall
man or a
blond
man or a man with big feet. Understanding that made me feel better. Some people are born empty, sir. All manner of good deeds and patience and loving kindness can’t even begin to fill them up. My father didn’t smile at me or talk to me not because
I
wasn’t a good person or a worthy person but because smiling and talking and being kind were not things he had the capacity to do. He couldn’t grow blond hair and he couldn’t smile. That’s how my eight-year-old mind began to comprehend things. And once I’d got all that clear and straight in my mind, I was able to get other things clear and straight. Like how one part of a puzzle put in place helps you to see where the other pieces fit. What I learned about my father helped me to be ready for Signor Brasini.’

“ ‘Tosca, who in hell is this
Brasini
?’

“ ‘Your interruptions force me to repeat myself. My father didn’t smile at my mother or talk nicely to her or hold her face in his hands and kiss her lips the way I’d seen Signor Brasini do to his wife one day in the market. I never forgot that. The way Signor Brasini just stopped and turned to his wife, put his big farmer’s hands out and caressed her face, pulled her close to him and kissed her just like in the films. He kissed her for a long time and then he looked at her and smiled. I watched Signor Brasini and his wife. I watched them putting onions in a sack from the pile in the back of lo Mastro’s truck. They even smiled while they were choosing onions, sir. And when I saw all that, I knew that their way would be my way. Their way, not my father’s and my mother’s way—their way was how I wanted my life to be. I knew that someday I would be loved by a man like Brasini. Or was it that I knew that I couldn’t love a man if he wasn’t like Brasini? All of which led me to the truth that there are two types of men in the world. Those like Brasini and those who are not like Brasini. Those who would take your face in their hands and kiss you like in the films and those who would never in ten million years take your face in their hands and kiss you like in the films. But the sort of man who wouldn’t do it, well, it wasn’t his fault. He just
couldn’t
do it. Just like my father couldn’t be kind. Some men were never going to grow blond hair and were never going to hold a woman’s face in their hands and smile at her as though she was an angel. And no matter what that woman did or said or looked like or was, she couldn’t make him take her face in his hands and kiss her like in the films. Now, as I said, I was about eight that morning in the market when this epiphany struck me. I might have been seven. But that’s what helped me to not feel hurt even knowing that my father didn’t want me. And it also helped me to recognize you. You are definitely a Brasini, sir. I knew that by the time I was ten, maybe eleven. But what I’m trying to say is that once I’d understood the Brasini theory, I slipped myself off the hook about my father not wanting me. The emptiness, the conflict, the guilt that I might have carried ’round my neck for my whole life, I just put down right where I stood. I threw it all down and walked away from it.
I understood how things worked and how they didn’t work.
And if it’s not true, if this is not the way things work and don’t work for everyone else, well, then let me just say it’s how things work for me.’