The Four Corners of Palermo (6 page)

I asked her about Rosalba’s family.

“Her
mamma
used to come meet with her teachers every now and then. A very polite lady. My mother told me that Rosalba’s
papà
works for the city, or at AMAP … I don’t remember which.”

Filippo sat in silence. He stretched right in front of me, his pectorals expanding his T-shirt: I was afraid it was about to rip open.

I thanked them, they got back in their Boxer, and they drove off down Via Sciuti. I summed up the situation in my head: Rosalba came from a good family, she’d met a
malacarne
, a bad egg, and her life had changed.

Riding my Vespa back home, where Fabrizio and Cicova were awaiting my return, I thought about Francesca’s harshness. That unappealable
no
of hers had taken me by surprise. I believed that life was made up of surrenders, that pleasure wasn’t clinging stubbornly by your fingernails to a wall made of certainties, but rather letting yourself slide, with the reckless joy of a child rolling down a sand dune. I was twenty-three years old, and I was looking for higher dunes to throw myself off of.

Marinello was on his feet. He was zipping up his jeans and grimacing. Rosalba was rummaging through her purse in search of something.

“Heart of my heart, you put the keys on the coffee table.”

“It’s true.”

She was beautiful, somehow Asian-looking, thought Marinello. Her yellow tank top was stretched tight over her angular breasts. Her eyes, after that almost sleepless night, had become even more elongated. And her gaze was fierce; the girl who had grown up in the bourgeoisie was learning one of the lessons of this city that was a slaughterhouse writ large: never look down; lowering your eyes is something only victims do.

“I’ll go get the car, I’ll honk the horn twice, you come out, and we can go.”

“Let’s go to Ciaculli.”

“No, please, don’t.”

“I want to wait for him and tear him limb from limb.”

“You swore you wouldn’t kill.”

“Yes, I swore it to you. But killing Totuccio isn’t murder: it’s house cleaning.”

“Blood of my life, you can’t do it. You’re different from them. You have me, we have to go live somewhere far away from here, you don’t want other people’s deaths on your conscience.”

Other people: his family, the death sentence against him. Marinello looked at her with all the love that was permissible in Palermo. He knew that she was right, that taking vengeance would mean accepting a life sentence: an eye for an eye, Mafia for Mafia. No, he was no Mafioso.

He held her to him, caressing her back. His big hand climbed up until it stopped under her ponytail. He exerted a light pressure with his forefinger and thumb on her soft shoulders, which made her close her eyes. The air around them was dense.

“All right, my darling. Let’s go away.”

In an auto repair shop in Brancaccio, Totuccio was trying to start and stop an Alfetta. The four-cylinder engine made itself heard.

“They’re in the Fiat 126. We pull up next to them, while Tano swerves in front of them with the Honda.”

Tano nodded yes. He was short, muscular, and he wore a black crewneck T-shirt over a pair of khaki riding trousers.
On his feet he wore a pair of leather sandals. Leaning against the tool counter, two other
picciotti
were spinning the cartridge drums of their Smith & Wesson .357 Magnums.

“We’ll do it tomorrow afternoon, around nightfall,” said Totuccio. “They go every Thursday to do their shopping at the Standa. He drives, she’s in the passenger seat.”

Tano nodded: he liked the idea of killing someone who was going grocery shopping.

“But you’d better bring your compact submachine gun with you, the Uzi. You never know. They’re certainly not going to shoot back, but if we don’t finish them off immediately, the best thing is to spray them with a nice hail of lead.”

Tano smiled. He liked the Uzi submachine gun, too: short as a celery stalk, light as a celery stalk, but far more dangerous than a celery stalk.

One of the two
picciotti
broke in. He was wearing a camo T-shirt and he kept his cigarettes under his rolled-up short sleeve.

“Totuccio, you don’t have to worry about a thing. Where do you think those two dickheads, those
minchia
, are going to go? They’re going to let themselves be killed, docile and obedient.”

The two
minchia
in question were Dottor Arcangelo Corona and his wife, Signora Mariapia Cuzzupane Corona. The message had been mailed. Now all they had to do was deliver it.

“Francesca, I’ve figured you out.”

“What?”

“You wish you could live here in Sicily.”

“You’re crazy.”

“No, it’s that girls like you break my heart: I understand everything they say and, especially, what they don’t say.”

“What didn’t I say?”

“The most important things.”

“Like what?”

“That Milan isn’t right for you, that gray isn’t really your color, that you’d like to have the sea right before you, but as seen from dry land. We can make that happen. Plus you’re looking for someone to get you out of your relationship with that lawyer.”

“You’re truly out of your mind.”

“Listen here: Have you broken the law? Are you wanted on some charge or other? No. So why would you need a lawyer?”

She laughed. A friend, back in high school, told me that if you can get a woman to laugh you’re well over halfway there. I never knew how to seduce anyone. It just happened, that was all.

“You need to stop yammering about the lawyer,” she said, forcing herself to be serious again.

“Okay. I’ve made up my mind …”

“You scare me when you say that you’ve made up your mind.”

“I’ve made up my mind to give you a chance. You and Sicily: eye to eye.”

“Meaning?”

“You come stay at my house, a guest for a long weekend. It’s summertime. You’re not going to tell me that you have to take pictures dressed in nightgowns and pajamas all of July and August, are you?”

“You’re crazy, but still, I like the challenge.”

I couldn’t believe that she was taking it seriously.

“You mean you’ll catch a plane and come down here?”

“Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Don’t toy with me, Francesca. I’m a romantic young man.”

She laughed: to someone like her, the word “romantic” must have sounded like a joke.

“No, I’m deadly serious. A project I’ve been working on was canceled, so I’m free from tomorrow till Sunday: four days in Palermo. But on one condition.”

“Name it.”

“That you don’t even try to touch me.”

“What, are you joking? I wouldn’t dream of it.”

I’m not sure how much she appreciated the lie.

The next morning at eleven o’clock I was at Punta Raisi airport, waiting for the most beautiful and the toughest girl I’d ever met in my life.

We exchanged a pair of kisses on the cheek, and I picked up her suitcase and loaded it into the back of the orange Renault 4 that I’d asked Fabrizio to lend me. Riding around the coast of the Gulf of Capaci, on one of the most luminous days I’ve ever seen in my life, we headed for home.

“This is your bedroom; over there on the right is the bathroom. Fabrizio, my best friend, sleeps in the loft, and I sleep in the room down the hall. You want to see it?”

“No,
grazie
.”

“You take your time, I have to go over to the newspaper, but I’ll be back soon. Today’s half a holiday for me. I told them I had visitors from up north.”

She smiled, and a spark appeared in her Martorana marzipan-green eyes.

At seven o’clock I was back home. Francesca had wandered around the neighborhood, discovering that
panelle
, or chickpea fritters, are better than
cazzilli
, that is, potato croquettes, and that cannoli filled while you wait are something they invented in Milan, just to make themselves feel important. If a cannolo is good, it’s good from morning, when it’s first made, till nightfall. And she’d found one that was truly delicious at the Pasticceria Macrì.

She had met Fabrizio, but he’d had to leave early to go meet his girlfriend, and she’d fed Cicova, immediately enslaving him for life. There was something special about Francesca. Damn that Milanese lawyer.

Now she was ready for our first night out on the town of Palermo: white miniskirt, off-white linen shirt, lace-up espadrilles.

The telephone rang.

“Hello, handsome, it’s the switchboard speaking: the news editor is trying to get in touch with you.”

The Fiat 126 had turned onto Viale Lazio, heading for the Passo di Rigano district, where the largest Standa store in Palermo was located. Thursday afternoon was the best time of the week to go shopping. No crowds, and easy to park in the roundabout out front.

Arcangelo Corona was driving the subcompact, and his wife was in the passenger seat, holding the fishnet shopping bags with woven-cord handles. She had four of them. She was pleased with the practical good sense and frugality that she devoted to her family.

Arcangelo had left the office early, the way he did every Thursday, to take his wife grocery shopping. He thought about what he’d left behind him: not exactly a mess, but still, now he wished he’d made that phone call to the aqueduct of Termini Imerese.

“Oh well, I’ll do it tomorrow morning,” he murmured.

“What did you say, Arcangelo?”

“No, nothing. I was just thinking aloud.”

Mariapia looked at the man sitting next to her: the lightweight gray jacket, the glasses with the black plastic frames, the well-shaped nose, the vertical creases that marked his face. They’d been children together. She saw herself, for an instant, from the outside: a middle-aged woman, unattractive, in a dress made of synthetic fibers, low-heeled shoes, and hair done up in a bun. She loved this man who loved her for who she was, for how she had always been. She forgot that twenty-two years ago Arcangelo had fallen head over heels in love with her for her eyes, elongated like the eyes she’d later give Rosalba, for her intense gaze and the tenderness that she managed to instill in everything she did. A Sicilian woman, kneaded and shaped from living material, with the character of the sea on a summer morning: still and warm.