Vango (5 page)

In everyone’s eyes, he was Father Jean’s murderer.

He was being hunted down for this crime, which must have been committed the previous night, just before the ordination.

Vango collapsed on his knees in front of his friend’s bed. He took the dead man’s frozen hand and pressed it against his forehead.

The worst. The worst had just happened. A spiky ball of nails was spinning around in the pit of his stomach. He could feel his heart and his skin being turned inside out, the way the hunters of his childhood skinned rabbits in Sicily.

But by the time he stood up, a moment later, he was convinced that the two words written by Father Jean weren’t an accusation.

They were an alarm cry, an order telling Vango what to do.

Flee.

Salina, Aeolian Islands, Sicily, sixteen years earlier, October 1918

They pushed open the door, and the storm entered too.

There were four of them. Four men carrying a lifeless-looking woman wrapped in the red sail of a boat. Everybody stood up. Tonino the innkeeper cleared a table in front of the bread oven and called to his daughters. They put the body down on the wooden tabletop.

“Is she still alive?” asked Tonino.

His oldest daughter unwrapped the red cloth, ripped open the soaking-wet dress, and put her ear to the woman’s heart. The customers at the inn, the owner, the fisherman who had brought the body in — the whole room held its breath.

Carla listened for a long time.

“Well? Carlotta!” Tonino shouted impatiently.

“Shhhh,” came her reply.

She couldn’t be sure. The wind was whistling outside. A bougainvillea branch was knocking against the shutters. Nothing is quieter than a heartbeat. And when it’s up against a storm, it’s like the tinkling of a tiny bell against a brass band.

Carla finally drew herself up to her full height and smiled.

“She’s alive.”

Her little sister was already bringing over sheets to dry the body off. She took two large stones that were warming up near the fire, wrapped them in a piece of fabric, and slid them like hot-water bottles against the woman’s damp skin. The girls waved their arms to shoo away the men, who were entranced by the pair of naked shoulders.

“Ciao, signori! Ciao!”

They held up a sheet as a partition so they could undress her. Tonino declared that the drinks were on the house. There were twenty people at his inn here at the small port of Malfa.

Bad weather’s good for business
, the innkeeper had thought earlier in the day as the sky turned black. And sure enough, that morning the inn at Malfa was full.

Not that there were many inhabitants left on the island. In just a few decades, the population had been decimated. People had set off in boatloads to seek their fortunes in America or Australia. They left ghost villages in their wake.

“Where did she come from?” he asked.

“We found her on the stone path above Scario Beach.”

So spoke Pippo Troisi. He wasn’t a fisherman. He grew capers and had a vineyard, but he was a plump man who was hired to help make the boats heavier on days when the wind was up.

Pippo had been the first to see the woman and he felt personally responsible. This was a very proud moment in his life. From time to time he would glance proprietarily at the shadow-play being acted out behind the sheet.

“But where does she come from?” Tonino asked again.

“Nobody knows her,” Pippo replied.

This news resulted in a lengthy silence. Everybody knows everybody on an island. And although a few foreign sailors turned up occasionally in the ports, no one had ever brought back an unknown and extremely beautiful woman from a cliff-top path.

“She was soaked to the bone,” added Pippo. “She must have been out there in the rain for a long time.”

“But where does she come from?” the innkeeper repeated, staring into his glass.

The wind was now playing notes down the chimney as if it were a flute.

“She comes from the sea,” answered a voice from behind the sheet.

It was Carla. She stuck her head out to say, “This woman is as salty as a barrel of your capers, Pippo Troisi!”

They all stared at one another in silence. The sea had given them everything. They lived by it, and sometimes they died by it. The Tyrrhenian Sea delivered surprises to them: a washed-up whale calf, pieces of wreckage, and even seven crates of bananas that had fallen off a boat the previous summer. But it had never flung out a woman like a flying fish, halfway up the cliff on Scario Beach.

“She’s opening her eyes!”

They rushed over. But Carla and her sister kept everyone at a respectful distance, and they didn’t dare come any closer.

The woman was now covered in a thick layer of shawls and blankets. The girls had done a good job. She was more decent than a nun. Even her hair was covered with a piece of cloth. All you could see was her face, and her neck leaning against a cushion.

She wasn’t nearly as young as they’d initially thought. But it was as if the cold had applied makeup to her face: pale complexion, dark lips, eye shadow. As she warmed up, her cheeks became powdered with pink. She kept her eyes open for a long time before uttering a single word:

“Vango.”

They found the little boy an hour later, between two rocks on the beach. He was two or three years old. His name was Vango. He was wearing blue silk pajamas. His curls fell over his eyes. He didn’t seem to be afraid. In his hand he held an embroidered handkerchief scrunched into a ball. He stared at everybody around him.

Vango.

The woman had described the exact place where he was hidden. They had brought in the doctor to translate her instructions. He leaned over and listened to her as she whispered a few words.

“She speaks French,” he said, sounding very serious, as if diagnosing tonsillitis.

There was a ripple of satisfaction. Everybody knew that the doctor, who liked to recount his past travels, could talk forever about France.

“What’s she saying?”

Dr. Basilio seemed a bit embarrassed. The truth was, he had never been farther than Naples. His knowledge of the French language was rather hazy, even if he always walked around with an old copy of
L’Aurore
newspaper and liked to sigh, “Ah! Paris, Paris!” while staring at fashion photos.

He was trying to piece together everything he knew in a bid to understand her.

“She speaks other languages as well. It’s all mixed up like the Tower of Babel.”

This time, he wasn’t lying. In her state of extreme fatigue, the woman kept switching languages.

“That’s Greek,” said the doctor.

“But what does it mean?”

“It means that she speaks Greek.”

His logic was met with general admiration.

Eventually they found out that she spoke Italian too. Feeling relieved, the doctor led the interrogation. He repeated in Sicilian everything she mumbled in near perfect Italian, which everybody understood anyway.

The woman and child had been washed up onto the pebble beach along with a makeshift raft of planks and beams. She had put the little one in a sheltered place before setting off in search of help, climbing the path to the left of the stream. She had collapsed along the way.

She was sitting in an armchair now, and Vango was burying his face in her chest.

“Is he your child?” asked the doctor, deliberately overpronouncing his words.

She attempted a smile. She was too old to have a three-year-old son.

The doctor nodded, rather ashamed of his question. He had always been a bachelor, but given his line of work, he should have known about biological clocks.

As a diversion, and because they were getting to the end of what she could remember, Dr. Basilio started repeating the only two French words he knew:
“Souvenez-vous, souvenez-vous . . .”

He said these words imploringly, leaning over her.

Other people’s languages sound like strange songs, whose music we can hum long before we can understand the lyrics. On hearing French being spoken, the audience in the inn was amused. They didn’t know what these words meant, but everyone turned to one another and said,
“Souvenez-vous,”
like old chatterboxes.

From these two words, everyone set off on a flight of fantasy.

“Souvenez-vous,”
said a woman to her husband as she batted her eyelids.

“Souvenez-vous!”

The brouhaha got louder.

“Souvenez-vous!”
shouted Pippo Troisi as he raised his glass.

The doctor sharply interrupted this game:

“Be quiet!”

A classroom silence settled on the inn.

Once again the doctor translated into Sicilian what everybody had already understood.

“She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know where she’s come from or where she’s going. She says she’s called Mademoiselle. All she knows is that the child is called Vango. That’s it. She’s the little boy’s nurse.”

“What’s she going to do?” asked one of the innkeeper’s daughters.

The rescued woman answered with a few words, and tears in her eyes.

“She doesn’t know,” the doctor repeated. “She wants to stay here. She’s frightened.”

“But what’s she going to do here? The little one’s parents must be somewhere. She should catch a boat back to her own country!”

“What country?” asked the doctor, getting angry now.

“You say that she speaks French.”

“She also speaks English. And she said something in Greek. So where is her country?”

As if to confuse things further, the woman made a few noises.

“And that’s German,” the doctor pointed out.

She said something else again.

“And that’s Russian.”

The little boy clutched his handkerchief between his fingers. Against the midnight-blue background, a large
V
embroidered in gold was visible.
V
for
Vango
.

Gently taking that little hand in his, the doctor managed to borrow the precious handkerchief for a few seconds. Above the golden
V
, the letters of what was presumably the little boy’s family name could be made out:
ROMANO
.

“That’s a local surname,” declared Carla.

“Vango Romano,” said her sister.

And, higher up, on the edge of the handkerchief, the doctor spotted the following mysterious French words, embroidered in small red letters, although he couldn’t understand them:

He read them again as slowly as a child learning the alphabet:
“Combien . . . de royaumes . . . nous ignorent.”

Nobody at the inn said a word.

Like a miniature bird of prey, Vango’s hand dived for the tiny square of handkerchief and made it vanish.

“My God,” a woman sighed.

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” concluded Tonino.

A man had just walked in. He tucked himself into a corner and took off his leather jacket, which was soaked through, before ordering a glass of fortified wine and some biscuits. His long hair, which he wore in a ponytail, had been slicked back by the rain.

“You’ve got to pay first,” the innkeeper insisted suspiciously.

The man was named Mazzetta. Everybody knew him. He lived with his donkey and didn’t have the means to buy wine and biscuits for himself except at Christmas and Easter. Tonino didn’t trust him.

“You’ve got to pay first!”

The man looked at him. He slid a brand-new coin onto the bar. The innkeeper picked it up and looked at it.

“Have you sold your donkey, Mazzetta?”

Mazzetta was tempted to smash the counter. He wanted to string Tonino up from the beam in his kitchen, along with the garlic and the hams.

But he saw the little boy in the blue pajamas.

The little boy was watching him. His cheek was squashed against his nurse’s shoulder, and he was watching Mazzetta as if he knew him.

Mazzetta let the innkeeper carry on with his business. He couldn’t hold Vango’s stare for long. He looked down, then stood up again slowly. That was when he saw Mademoiselle.

When Mazzetta saw the nurse, and his bloodshot eyes met her blue eyes, he froze.

He turned into a block of stone.

It was like the lava of Stromboli making contact with the sea.