He worked through the windy spring and into the summer on the long first gesture of his novel, hardly daring to breathe, dreading each day’s work, fearing it would not come. The strangeness of the experience alarmed him, astounded him, made him feel, perplexingly, both frail and alive. He had thought to write a novel in the manner of Joyce, a single twenty-four-hour account of his astronomer great-grandfather during the landings of Garibaldi’s soldiers in May of 1860. His prince, Don Fabrizio, would observe uneasily the passing of his world, and his class, and the coming of the new Italy. A nephew, Tancredi, handsome, charming, changeable, would see his opportunity and fight alongside the redshirts. At first he had imagined the novel’s tension would arise between these two but when he sat down to write them he wrote instead with the love and baffled admiration he himself felt towards Giò and Orlando. Already by April Giuseppe had understood that it would not be a novel of easy conflict, that the story wanted something else. It flickered and shifted through a haze of time and memory like the early moving pictures he had seen as a boy, in the private theatre at Santa Margherita. By the end of May he had finished the first twenty-four hours, had traced his prince from his morning prayers in the family’s oratory through his day at the palazzo, had witnessed Tancredi leaving to enlist with Garibaldi, had followed the aging prince down to an assignation in Palermo, and already returned to the next morning’s prayers, and what he had imagined for twenty-five years to be an entire novel had proved, in fact, only a beginning. After he understood this he was uncertain how to continue. Something was missing. He worked and reworked his only chapter.
By the deep still fiery close of July there was a wholeness, a completion, to the chapter which he had not expected. Some evenings before sleep he would go to his small library and turn on the desk lamp and read over the pages as if they had been written by another. He told no one of the novel but his wife, although he would not read her anything from it, and when he spoke of it he did so derisively, calling it his scribbling, shaking his head wryly at his foolishness. The days lengthened, the heat thickened. In the red dust of high summer he would walk to the Mazzara and sit with his notebook and write for hours, seeing himself as others must have, a shabby mild old man writing, perhaps, a letter to a distant friend. He felt his mood darken, and would rise some mornings disgusted at the inferiority of the work, only to read over the preceding night’s pages and find himself surprised, admonished by a beauty he had not realized lay in the sentences themselves.
As the weeks passed he felt, somehow, a second bloom coming up inside him. He could not think how else to describe it. He did not know if it had to do with his diagnosis, or with the novel he had set out to write, or some natural consequence of his age. But it seemed to him the world was brighter, more intense, more alive than he had remembered. Colours were more vibrant, shimmering; the scents of ordinary things, wet pavement, bricks in sunlight, unripe peaches, felt layered and dizzyingly complex. He would stare at the silver ribbon of tap water in the kitchen sink, listening to it bang and rattle off the porcelain, agape. Some mornings on his walk to the Mazzara he would glimpse an old man at the corner of Piazza Marina, eating a bowl of coarse pasta and oil, and he would linger at the smell, amazed. How long had he walked past that man, unseeing? When the public gardens came into bloom in the spring he sat for hours on the benches, his eyes closed, remembering the huge wet flowers of his childhood. He smiled more easily with Gioacchino and Orlando in the evenings, caught himself longing for their company after a day of writing.
It was true, he still had not told Licy of the emphysema; he found it increasingly difficult to raise the subject. At first it had been a matter of the right moment; then, as the weeks passed, he came to fear her anger at not having been told, and so more time had passed, and the telling became more difficult. In his mind these two—the world erupting into beauty around him, and his withholding of the truth to Licy—became one, intertwined, as if the former was sweeter and made the more delicate by his shame at the latter. Now in the already bright mornings, before the sun’s heat baked the palazzo, Giuseppe would awake and at once muffle his coughing with his sleeve. Nor did he let on about his difficulties ascending the stairs, or the way he would sometimes falter at the landing, losing his balance. When he walked out with Licy on sun-drenched evenings to the confectioner’s he kept his breathing unlaboured, his steps on the pavement steady, finding reasons to linger at shop windows and street corners, catching his breath as he did so.
In this way what had been, at first, merely a piece of troubling news that he had not yet shared, grew gradually into a more sinister thing, until his emphysema had developed, almost of its own volition, into a genuine and painful secret.
His evening lectures with Giò and Orlando, and even sometimes Giò’s fiancée, Mirella, went on. His young friends would arrive at half-six, never late, the men in black tie, Mirella with her light brown hair up, and he would wait for them in the historical library with a bottle of wine breathing on the desk and the low drone of Licy at her consultations just audible elsewhere in the palazzo. He spoke about the history of English literature, discussed Chaucer, and Shakespeare, but also Sir Walter Scott and the Cavalier poets and Dickens and Meredith. He would walk to the courtyard window, stand smoking, turn to his young guests, continue. He spoke about vanished authors and their characters as if some part of them lived yet, as if they were almost present in the shuttered halls of the palazzo. The purpose originally had been to offer the youths a supplement to their education, a supplement that could not be obtained elsewhere on the island, but this had soon altered for Giuseppe until each lecture became an opportunity for him to live again inside familiar books, to allow unexpected comparisons to emerge, sensitivities to the current that was in the literature of his great and beloved English authors. He told his young friends that Tennyson was the finest writer of punctuation in English in part because he used punctuation as if the language were afraid of it. He said to them: If you wish to understand Edward Gibbon’s sentences, you must read Montaigne’s sentences in the French. He insisted that among the English only Donne and Eliot were true religious poets, although neither in his opinion was a Christian. Once while the sunlight slowly faded in the shutters he confessed he would sacrifice ten years of his life for the privilege of meeting Sir John Falstaff in the flesh and as soon as he had said this he realized it was true. I envy you, he said to the boys, turning away. You have so much yet to read.
One evening at the end of the summer he was discussing Graham Greene and religion, and how, in his strongest novels, Greene had gone back to the roots of Christianity; he felt Greene’s attraction to all that is repugnant in the world was, in part, a reflection of original Christian charity. Horror for the unredeemed human being was mitigated, in Greene, by every person’s resemblance to God. Though it was also true, Giuseppe conceded, that Greene’s attraction to evil seemed sometimes a little too intimate, as if he enjoyed it, as if what he really wanted was simply to get closer to it.
Giuseppe had not said all he wished to say about it. But he heard a dissatisfied rustling from his listeners, and turned, and saw Orlando picking unhappily at the threads of his trousers.
Giò, eyebrows raised, had noticed also. He withdrew his arm from Mirella’s shoulders, sat forward. Orlando is not happy with all this talk of religion, he said. It is the socialist in him.
Ah, said Giuseppe.
I am not a socialist, said Orlando. Please go on, Don Giuseppe.
He is without faith, said Giò.
Do not tease him, Giò, said Mirella quietly. She put a hand on his arm. He is never serious with me either, she called across to Orlando. You must not mind him.
He does not mind. Do you mind, Orlando? What do socialists mind?
Giò—
They mind only lack of progress, said Orlando. He pushed his spectacles into place with one finger. Progress is their church. There is always a church. Here in Sicily we would not know what to do if there were no church. It is not about faith. The purpose of any church is to keep power in the hands of its clergy.
Agnello would be appalled, said Giò.
No. Agnello would agree. But with one hand on the rosary in his pocket.
Giò laughed.
Giuseppe tapped his cigarette into an ashtray on the windowsill, listening. He could remember being twenty and thinking such thoughts after he returned from the prisoner camps at Szombathely, shocked at how small and petty Sicily had become in his absence. But he could not remember a time when anyone would have expressed such criticisms so directly. The world was changing. He thought of tall Francesco Agnello, who made up the third of that triumvirate of youths—along with Gioacchino and Orlando—which Giuseppe had come to think of as his students. Agnello had retreated from the heat of Palermo to his family’s villa outside Agrigento for the summer. A baron, soft, heavy-set, he was a few years older than Giò and Orlando, and in person the boys treated him with the deference due an elder brother.
As the youths talked, Giuseppe watched Mirella, smoking quietly. Graham Greene had been quite forgotten. She was wearing a red dress with a plunging back and a bodice that widened out into layers of tulle at her hips, and her light brown hair was carved into curls and drawn away from her neck so that she looked, Giuseppe thought, like the new century itself. Girls had not been so self-possessed, had not contained such a clear sense of lives still to be lived, when he was young.
The conversation had shifted again.
The wind is blowing from the north, Orlando was saying. Workers are leaving the land all over. Entire villages are moving to Genoa, to Milan.
They are even taking the cows, teased Giò.
Orlando ignored him. Sicily is emptying. The south is dying.
I think it is a shame, said Mirella.
Giuseppe crushed out his cigarette. He felt a sudden pain in his chest and put a hand out to steady himself and the youths went quiet.
The pain passed.
He looked away, embarrassed; and to hide his embarrassment he started to speak. He said: The south has been dying for centuries. He clasped his hands in the small of his back, feeling the warm summer light on his face, his eyelids. He said: In my grandfather’s day, the people were leaving the villages for Palermo and Messina. In my father’s day, they were leaving for America. Now they leave for the north. How is it different?
Giò got to his feet, catlike, and padded over to the desk and began to open a second bottle of wine. There was, thought Giuseppe, a sort of crooked kindness in him; it did not come out straight.
There have been too many changes, too quickly, said Orlando. Italy is not the same as it was, Don Giuseppe. Sicily cannot keep up.
Italy, yes, said Giò from the desk. But not Sicily. Sicily never changes, not really. Here in Palermo we are still living in a monarchy.
Oh, there will never again be a king, protested Mirella. Not here.
You are right, said Orlando. And yet there will always be a king in Sicily. We did not have even one district that voted against the monarchy.
Palermo did, said Giuseppe softly.
Orlando leaned forward, the evening sunlight catching in his spectacles. But Palermo is not Sicily, Don Giuseppe.
Giuseppe lit another cigarette.
Giò had returned to the sofa with the opened wine cradled in his two hands and now he set it down on the round table so that Mirella and Orlando could see the label. So the republic is a lie, he said pleasantly, and behind closed doors Sicily goes on as it always has. What of it? The referendum was ten years ago. It is done. You did not vote in it, I did not vote in it.
And I did not vote in it, said Mirella pointedly.
Giò gestured wryly at the ceiling. That is true. We are all of us products of the new republic. A republic where we are free to discuss the wonderful influence of the church, and which fascists we have locked in our attics, and what women who have a voice in our elections will say next.
Why is that funny to you? asked Mirella. She was sitting very still, her wine glass held by the stem.
Giò, catching something in her tone, paused. It is not funny, he said, suddenly serious.
Why should women not have the vote? she said.
They should, said Giò. I am glad they do. That you do.
Hm.
Giuseppe observed a delighted expression flicker across Orlando’s face. There was in Mirella something that was in Licy also, he saw. Giò, being young, did not understand that Mirella’s strength and stubbornness would demand he make space for her, and he wanted to tell him but he knew it was important to say nothing, that it was not something that could be learned through telling. Giò was just twenty-one; in many ways, Mirella, though younger in years, was much the older of the two.
Giò’s cheeks had coloured slightly and Giuseppe understood from the hesitant way he half turned in her direction that he knew she was displeased and that their conversation would continue, later, when they were alone.
Orlando, amused, waited to see if more would come and when nothing did he said, almost reluctantly: It is not all in the past, Giò. Not really. The Fascists are still in power. They still hold positions of authority. You think just because we are a republic that anything has changed? Azzariti sits on the Constitutional Court. So does Manca.
Manca was a Fascist? asked Mirella.
Is, corrected Orlando. It is not something you put on and take off, like a shirt.
Giò smiled at that but in his smile Giuseppe saw that he was still thinking of Mirella, trying to gauge her mood.
Azzariti sat on the Tribunal of Race, Orlando went on. So did Antonio Manca. They were the ones who decided who was Aryan and who would be given over to the Nazis.
Giuseppe cleared his throat. It seemed almost in bad taste to him, going on about the war. All at once he felt very tired. Well and what is to be done about it, Orlando? he said. Who would be left, if we persecuted everyone who collaborated with the Fascists?
You would be left, said Orlando.
Giuseppe inclined his head in acknowledgement. I did not collaborate, he said, only because I did not do anything. That is not courage. A nation of Lampedusas would be a poor nation indeed.
I do not agree, said Mirella. She gave him a sweet smile.
These men were not collaborators, Don Giuseppe. They were in power. And they are still in power.
Giò poured Orlando a second glass of wine. He said, They’ll all be dead soon enough anyhow. They belong to the past, Orlando.
As do we all, Giuseppe thought, the red evening sunlight filling the shutters, and then immediately he wondered if that was true.
The following evening, in the heat, as they walked Licy’s black spaniel Crab down to the confectioner’s, he tried to explain the feeling of irrelevance that came over him whenever his young friends talked politics. There was guitar music playing in the streets, crowds, the setting sun illuminating the red dust stirred up from the trucks and slow-moving carts. He spoke self-deprecatingly, amused at his own foolishness. It seemed to him, he said, they were describing an island he had read about once, a place and time long since vanished.
Oh, Giuseppe, his wife replied. It is not they who inhabit the past.
This was said with such unexpected regret that Giuseppe fell silent, trying to understand her meaning. Sometimes he thought she looked at him with the knowledge already in her eyes of his emphysema and at such moments he felt a complicated relief, believing he might let it go unsaid between them; but then a comment or query from her would betray the truth, that she did not know, did not even suspect, and he would feel all over again a sudden wash of guilt. Often now when he watched her he tried to imagine her without him, walking the same dusty pavements of Palermo but alone, or writing up her case studies on the terrace at Via Butera, with no one to interrupt her or to come out with a carafe of water and glasses, no one to bid her goodnight, no one to take her hand in his and tell her it was time to come inside, the light was going, it would be dark soon.
He had written her a letter. In it, he had tried to explain the diagnosis and his hesitancy in speaking to her about it. He would not get better; but he did not need to get worse. That is what Coniglio had told him. But he had torn the letter up, dissatisfied. It was not what he wanted to say. He could feel his breathing growing more laboured, and now when he smoked he felt a pricking in his lungs, in his back. Sometimes as he lay in his bed, struggling to sleep, he would decide he must tell Licy at once, but always in the mornings when he awoke he saw again how it was not the right moment, how easily it could be misconstrued.
Now Licy kneeled and collected Crab into her arms, his paws overhanging her wrist, and Giuseppe followed behind her, slowly, as she crossed Via Roma through the traffic.
Signor Aridon telephoned for you this afternoon, she said to him when he had reached the far pavement. That is twice now. You must telephone him back.
Giuseppe nodded, breathing hard. Her eyes were severe and very beautiful, he thought.
He wishes to go over the account ledgers with you. Giuseppe? Are you listening?
Yes.
She gave him a curious look, put a gloved hand to her hat, as if all at once self-conscious. Aridon says there are problems with the rents, Giuseppe. He says he has a collector in mind that he believes will be more effective, a man from Messina. The estates are in quite a predicament, it seems. He says some of the properties may need to be sold off.
Giuseppe smiled. He has been saying that for thirty years, my love.
So it is not true?
On the contrary. It has been true for thirty years.
He was still out of breath and he paused now to very slowly withdraw and light a cigarette. Licy watched him, lifting her clutch to one hip. It was of soft black leather and matched her gloves and hat and the piping at her jacket pockets and he considered again, as he often had, how strange and complicated were the rules women dressed by.
The confectioner’s was only two buildings away but Licy lingered. You know I am expected in Rome, she said. For the conference.
Yes. Your psychoanalytics.
She smiled a little at the tone in his voice but he could see there was something she wished to convey to him, something that would not wait. She said: Orlando will be in Syracuse, Mirella is already in Naples with her family. What will you do while I am gone? Who will you see?
Giò will be here.
I have not seen you writing your novel of late.
Ah.
You have not given it up?
My Histoire sans nom, Giuseppe said grandly, mockingly. No. But it seems it does not wish to be written.
Nonsense, she said. She handed him the leash and took off her gloves and held them together with her clutch and took the leash back from him. Your writing has brought some nostalgia forward from your subconscious and it must be resolved, my love. That is why you do not know how to proceed. It is to be expected.
I shall have to study myself more deeply, said Giuseppe.
That will be of little use, Licy replied briskly. I have been thinking. The Lampedusa estate in Palma, the castle there. What is its condition?
He crushed his cigarette under his shoe. It is a ruin, I believe. I have not seen it. Why do you ask?
I am told the Ventino castle outside Enna is being converted into apartments. There are buyers down from Milan, from Genoa.
I could not sell Palma di Montechiaro, he said quietly. I could not, Licy.
Not all of it. But perhaps a part of it.
He shook his head, feeling a sudden weight on his heart. I do not think anything is left but walls, my love.
He put a hand on the small of her back then, and nodded gently, and she allowed herself to be guided into the confectioner’s. They were greeted with deference by the owner, and a long glass case with ice under its trays was lit up, its little cakes and cannoli and pastries all gleaming.
They did not speak again until they were seated in the window, with their small coffees and their plates of sugared pistachio marzipans. Two ladies across from them nodded formally and Licy dipped her chin, Giuseppe touched his hat.
I will be in Rome in two weeks’ time, Licy said in a low voice, so as not to be overheard. It is my opinion that you must go to Palma. Go with Giò, he is doing nothing. He will be pleased to accompany you. Examine the castle at Montechiaro. Something will need to be done, Giuseppe, according to Signor Aridon. If nothing is decided by you, it will be decided by creditors and courts.
Giuseppe put the little spoon down on his plate. He did not look up. We cannot afford it, he said quietly.
Nonsense, she said. The train is not expensive. You can stay with young Agnello. It will cost no more than a trip to your cousins.
Which we cannot afford.
And yet you see them often, she said. She studied him for a long moment.
It is my opinion, she said with finality, that a journey to Palma will help you to neutralize your nostalgia. You have been unable to write further into your novel. This is because the losses in your life continue to overwhelm you.
My losses, he murmured.
He wanted to tell her he was not overwhelmed; he wanted to say he had written no further in his novel only because he had not known what came next. He raised his face, but did not speak.
Go, Licy said gravely. She rested her fingertips on the backs of his knuckles. Go confront the seat of your ancestors. And then, my love, come back to me.
In the days that followed, his distaste for the idea only grew.
Though he was not used to resisting his wife’s instructions, this he did resist. He would, he told himself, refuse to go. Simply to make such a journey might be to agree, implicitly, to the sale of his family’s castle at Montechiaro. He told himself the good Dr. Coniglio would disapprove, given the delicate state of his lungs. He observed Licy as she telephoned Rome in the historical library and arranged her accommodations, as she began to lay out on a recamier her various outfits for her trip, and he thought of the long quiet days when she would be away, and how much he liked the quiet, and how little he liked the discomforts of travel.
Then, one week before her departure, Licy went looking for him between patients and told him, as he prepared a spiced tea to help him sleep, that she had noticed a change in him, a new dissatisfaction. She said this gently, calmly. He had interrupted his novel earlier that summer, at her suggestion, in order to record his impressions of his early childhood. Like the novel, it had not gone easily; like the novel, it remained unfinished. If his project of memory, his attempt to resurrect the houses he had lost, had failed to lead him back into his novel, Licy asked now, why was he resisting the trip to Palma?
It cannot do you any harm, she said. It is my experience that breakthroughs often happen in new surroundings.
He said nothing to her in response. In truth, he had been thinking much the same thing. He had spent the previous week reading through the memoir, the many pages about his mother’s beloved house at Santa Margherita di Belice. Something had stirred inside him, a discovery, and he had felt his thoughts drifting back to his stalled novel. He did not admit this to Licy then. But what had been missing, he saw now, was a place of stillness and beauty for his prince that would, over the course of the novel, be lost, made irrecoverable, the way a childhood is lost.
What was missing was a journey to a great estate.
And so, on the third of September, he and Gioacchino set out by train across Sicily to visit the ancient Lampedusa estate in Palma.
The particulars, like the trip itself, came from his wife. They would journey as far as Agrigento and there meet young Francesco Agnello who would drive them to his country villa at Siculiana for the night. Giuseppe had not travelled the island by rail since he was a child and he was surprised to find how much had changed and how little. The train was still slow, and in the oppressive flat heat it swayed and clattered noisily along its ancient tracks. But the windows could be wrested, squeaking, open, and the seats though split at their seams were softer. He felt grateful for the private carriages and for the dark boy with cowlike eyes who carried a tray of refreshments looped around his neck and came staggering down the corridors every thirty minutes. Each time the boy knocked at their door, crying out in his high voice, Giuseppe would laboriously close the upper buttons of his shirt and wrestle back into his linen suit jacket before nodding to Giò. The youth thought him absurd, would tease him lightly by unfastening several buttons on his own shirt and mussing his own hair before admitting the boy, who would then stare stolidly at the floor, avoiding the strange half-dressed young man and his stiff sweating elderly companion.
When he was a boy, in the sweltering fury of July, his mother would shift the household each year from Palermo to Santa Margherita di Belice. He would rise dutifully at three in the morning at his governess’s urgings and let himself be dressed, then stumble down to the courtyard, to the closed landaus looming there. He could remember the horses snorting softly in the warmth, the smell of the night flowers along the stone wall. He and his parents and Anna would clamber into the rocking enclosure and the second landau would follow with the staff and they would set off sleepily through the grey deserted streets for the Lolli station and the shabby overland train to Trapani. He had not told Gioacchino of those journeys. He watched the youth rubbing a knuckle along his moist upper lip, wondering at the world as it was. The trains in those first years of the new century had no corridors and he could remember the ticket collector clambering in his gloves and tasselled uniform along the outsides of the compartments, his hand reaching through the windows, he could remember the tracks running in the sand alongside the surf and the slow baking fire of the iron boxes they lay sweating in, trapped. He had loved those trips, the languid happiness on his mother’s face, her eyes closed and the swishing of the fan in her hand.
Those journeys had taken them across the western coast but here the rails led south, inland, along and up and over the arid hilly vastness of the true Sicily. They would slow for flocks of sheep ragged and clouded with flies and hear the lazy cries of the shepherds scattering them from the tracks and watch the men in their dark clothes with their shotguns slung over one shoulder walking almost at speed alongside the train and staring black-eyed and baleful in. Those men were old. But then the unpleasantness would pass, and they would wind languidly around another stony outcropping, and the dazzling blue sky would overwhelm. There was a sad beauty to the hills, the rock-strewn defiles, and then the sudden bursts of yellow wheat or the pillars of olive trees staggering along a ridge would leave Giuseppe unsettled. Tangles of myrtle and broom and wild thyme were visible in the distance. They passed mountain villages, their streets empty in the high sun, and he thought with interest of Orlando’s words, how the island was emptying, entire villages drifting north.
As the train clattered slowly inland Giò sank into a desultory silence. At last the youth began, as Giuseppe knew he would, to speak of Mirella.
She has cut her hair, he said unhappily. She has cut it all off, Uncle, into an American bob. Have you seen it yet? She looks very fashionable and fast.
Ah, he said. No.
She insists it is due to the hot weather, Giò continued. She says many girls have cut their hair and haven’t I noticed them at the cafés with Orlando? It is true. But she has also taken to wearing shorter skirts, and I saw her two weeks ago with a new bracelet. I asked her where she got it and she pretended it was nothing, that she did not remember. But Mirella is not like other girls, she remembers everything. It is that student in her history class, that American. I am certain of it.
Giuseppe wiped his handkerchief across his mouth and was careful to say nothing.
Giò said: I telephoned her last weekend and her mother said she had gone to the cinema. But she had not. Where was I? Oh, just out with some friends. An innocent night. Where was she?
Giuseppe thought to say that Mirella Radice had a kind and loyal heart but he knew enough of love to realize the foolishness of it. The heart is neither kind nor loyal.
I think she has been angry with me, Uncle. I think she feels neglected. Do you think it is possible? Giò glanced at him and he saw now in the boy’s thin face, his soft lips and dark liquid eyes, the face of an innocent. I sometimes feel like she wants to make me angry, Uncle, and then I get angry, and then she gets angry that I am angry. We are like an old married couple. He did not seem to notice Giuseppe’s smile and he continued without embarrassment: I will have to speak to her, I will have to tell her that I will not allow her to meet with this American. I will be firm. Yes.
At Agrigento they descended into the roaring of the central railway station amid clouds of white steam and Giuseppe waited while Giò engaged a porter for their luggage and then the three of them walked through the cool building, the little wheels of the baggage trolley squeaking. The porter unloaded their cases and tipped his hat and left them standing outside in the heat soothing the creases from their clothes with the flat of their palms and squinting. In the open piazza there were slow dusty motorcars turning around but none were Francesco’s.
Giò grimaced, squinting, as if looking for the sea.
Now this, the youth said. This, Mirella would not understand. This journey we are taking into your past.
Giuseppe did not know that it was true. He had watched the girl grow over the last two years into a creature of delicacy and understanding.
The piazza had emptied. The clocks stilled. Giuseppe watched a slow horse-drawn cart move like a shadow of death along the whitewashed walls of a church.
It was in Agrigento that the playwright Luigi Pirandello had been born, and also, under an ancient sun, the Greek philosopher Empedocles. Empedocles might have walked this very earth, he thought, might have drifted among the temples now in ruins above the city. He had become one of the vanished in an island of the vanished, had clambered up to the crater of Etna and hurled himself in, hoping to make his followers think he had ascended, living, to dwell among the gods. Poor foolish Empedocles. His sandal came off his foot as he jumped and was found halfway into the crater by his followers and because of this they had understood he had perished.
What do I care if she wants another? Giò was saying. Let him have her.
Giuseppe set his hat down on his heavy suitcase where it stood in the white gravel and he walked slowly the length of the concrete wall and shielded his eyes in the late sun.
I will not be made a fool of, Giò muttered.
Giuseppe regarded the buildings surrounding, their brown shutters closed, the streets sinister and still. He was thinking of his novel, how his youthful Tancredi would peel back such talk with malice. He looked at the boy.
You must beware of the hardening of the heart, Gioitto, he said softly.
My heart is like honey, Giò protested.
But miserable and scratching at his yellow knuckles as he said it.
It had been a very different journey fourteen months earlier when Giuseppe Tomasi had accompanied his cousin to the Kursaal salon at San Pellegrino Terme, in Lombardy. That expedition north in July was for Lucio to receive an honour from the poet Montale: a public introduction to his poetry and a publishing contract with the prestigious Edizioni Mondadori in Milan. They had travelled by rail with Lucio’s manservant Paolo seated in third class, and Lucio in his first-class cabin had been unable to sit still. Everywhere north of Rome they had passed factories and crowded roads and hordes of workers coming out of the shantytowns. At Milan they transferred to Bergamo and in Bergamo they got off for a day waiting for the connection to San Pellegrino. It was outside Bergamo, in Scanzorosciate, that they saw Ftalital’s anhydride manufacturing plant, its green plumes of smoke darkening the sun, a yellow ash settling lightly over their hair and sleeves. And in Bergamo itself they stood outside the gates of the Agnelli aluminum factory, each holding a handkerchief to his mouth, watching a filthy reddish-brown smoke pour from the huge chimneys. It seemed to Giuseppe he had entered a strange dreamscape, an Italy of power and wealth. It was the world to come.
He was relieved when they continued north, into Lombardy.
At San Pellegrino Terme they had reserved adjoining rooms at the Grand Hotel but were surprised when they arrived to see no novelists or poets in attendance, only what appeared to be journalists up from Rome. They were not early; it was the very day of the awards presentation. Then Giuseppe, embarrassed, understood.
These rooms are too expensive, Cousin, he said as they slowly ascended the curving staircase. The writers will not be sleeping here.
The writers will not be sleeping at all, Lucio said with a high nervous laugh. I have heard about the habits of writers.
They ate a late lunch in the restaurant overlooking the Brembo River and Giuseppe eyed the whitewater cataracts of its wide expanse as they ate and neither cousin said much. The wine came from a cold northern grape and was excellent and strange. When they returned to their rooms each set about dressing for the evening and although the weather was ferociously hot Giuseppe found he had brought his fine camel-hair coat but only his second-best suit, a slightly threadbare pinstripe. He was therefore careful to button his coat to his chin despite the heat, out of embarrassment. When the two cousins descended to the boulevard that ran alongside the river they were followed by Paolo, who carried an umbrella, and they studied the directions from the hotel porter and made their way past the public baths to the auditorium where the presentations were to take place. They walked slowly, a strange trio of Sicilian manners, under a very blue sky, the river dazzling and loud and mineral green.
The presentations had begun without them. They were led through a hushed foyer and down to their seats and Giuseppe sat himself down next to a man in tinted glasses, so as to give Lucio the aisle. At the front of the hall the story writer Bassani was standing at a lectern, speaking with passion about a national publishing program. Giuseppe mumbled some politeness to the man beside him. That man he would later learn was the novelist and journalist Enzo Bettiza. Bettiza only scowled and curled a hand over his eyes and leaned away. Giuseppe, his camel-hair coat still buttoned fast, spread his knees and set his walking stick upright between them and interlaced his fingers on its crest, and then he smiled awkwardly into the near distance. In the hall surrounding would be many of the important novelists and poets of this strange new postwar Italy. He, lifelong reader and devourer of books, wondered to find himself in such company. He had known writers before, had spoken at length with Pirandello in London, but had not measured himself against the mass of ordinary living Italian writers. It struck him as both unlikely and not entirely correct that it was his cousin Lucio who was to be feted and laureled. Lucio had for decades studied music and performed on the piano with delicacy but had worked and reworked his poems almost as an entertainment, as if to remind Giuseppe that he was not the only one of their shared bloodline to live inside language.
Now Bassani had stepped down to much applause and a slow succession of middle-aged novelists and poets stood up to introduce their sharp hawkish young protégés. Giuseppe found his mind drifting and he would close his eyes and stifle his yawns. At last he watched a girl in a green dress escort a soft dark-haired man to the podium. This was Montale, the poet. Giuseppe felt his cousin stiffen beside him and he reached across and patted Lucio’s hand gently, wryly.
They had hoped to speak with the great poet before this moment but the lateness of their arrival and the rigorous clockwork of the day’s events had transpired against them. The poet was talking now, in a rough Ligurian accent, about a young writer whose verses had arrived in the mail with insufficient postage. He described how he had had to make up the difference, and then began to read the poems out of a duty to the liras he had paid out of pocket.
You will understand, ladies and gentlemen, said Montale, that I receive many packages from aspiring poets. Most of these poems are earnest, heartfelt, but of no real worth. These particular poems were accompanied by an unusual letter introducing them as chronicles of a vanishing way of life, of an aristocratic world of a Palermo that is no longer. After such a letter, you will understand, I did not expect very much from them, and least of all did I expect to find in such poems anything resembling poetry.
A brief ripple of laughter in the hall.
Giuseppe shifted in his chair, feeling a heat rise to his face. He had written that letter himself.
The young poet I wish to introduce to you today, Montale continued, is a poet whose lines are marked by the intensity and musicality of the true lyric gift. His verses are rich in imagery, dense with language, but there is no struggle required to understand their meanings. This is perhaps due to their young author’s study of music and Continental philosophy. I have not had the pleasure to meet young Lucio Piccolo, but if he is present today, I hope he will join me now and read to you some of his dazzling poems.
The hall filled with applause, the faces dialing palely in their seats to scan the auditorium. Lucio rose shyly from his seat and shuffled down the aisle, looking to Giuseppe impossibly dignified and aged among such a youthful crowd. He noted how the sheaf of poems under his cousin’s arm trembled and how Montale stared, as if amazed, before stepping smoothly forward and taking Lucio’s hand and turning him for the flare of the flashbulbs.
You gave us quite a shock, Don Lucio, said Montale later, smiling. I had thought you were a young poet. Instead I find you more accomplished than I. It is you who should have introduced me.
Accomplished, Giuseppe whispered in his cousin’s ear, is a euphemism.
Lucio ignored him, flushing at the compliment. They were standing in the crowded banquet hall of the Grand Hotel.
I liked especially the poem about the sundial, said the girl in the green dress. She closed her eyes and quoted: Regard water the undecipherable: at its touch the universe wavers.
Lucio smiled and studied the wine glass in his hands. Thank you, he said.
Giuseppe studied this girl sidelong. He did not know if she was Montale’s guest, or daughter, or lover, or if she was a writer herself. He noted her oddly accented Italian, the light brown streaks in her hair, the golden eyes. She did not even look in his direction. The talk had shifted now, Montale holding forth on some problem in contemporary English poetry, and when a pause opened he watched his unworldly cousin dare to interject some observation on Yeats. He confessed he had corresponded with the Irishman for years. He conceded some suspicion that his poems owed their muscular strangeness to his faith in the spirits. It is the unseen, Lucio said now, what lies between the stanzas, that helps to create an illusion of purpose in his poems. Or so it seems to me.
Montale took a sip of his wine, nodded. I would not have thought it, he said. But it is nevertheless true that what we believe does work upon us and force our hand. I travelled to Rapallo to meet with Pound in 1923 and Yeats was there, but, alas, we could not understand each other. You did not have that problem?
Lucio inclined his head. I did not meet with him, not face to face, he said.
A pity, I think.
We wrote each other in English.
Ah.
We wrote each other almost to the month of his death, Lucio said regretfully. He gave an embarrassed shrug as if he had spoken too much. May I introduce my cousin, Professore, Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa. Lucio’s eyes flickered across to Giuseppe where he stood leaning on his cane. He added: Giuseppe wrote an essay about Yeats’s poetry which was published in 1926. Perhaps you came across it?
Montale’s pale blue eyes regarded Giuseppe and he felt himself beginning to blush. You are a critic, Excellency?
Giuseppe smiled shyly. Ah, no, he mumbled. Only a reader with some time on his hands.
That is no small thing, Montale said politely. We should all wish for such readers.
My good cousin is my own first reader, said Lucio. There is nothing he has not read.
Giuseppe bowed in acknowledgement.
You will excuse me, he said.
And he turned and shuffled heavily for the stairs, his expression carefully preoccupied, as if his presence were needed elsewhere. It was true, he conceded as he paused on the landing, his fingers gripping the balustrade, he had indeed published an article on the Irish Renaissance all those years ago, and Yeats had figured prominently in it, at a time when the poet was mostly unknown in Italy. It had seemed to him then that perhaps he might find his way into a life of writing. How young he had been. Only just thirty, adrift in the cities of Europe, still struggling to find a path forward in those blurred years after the war. He had submitted the article with some dread to an old friend in Genoa whose father-in-law edited a literary magazine, telling himself that it was of no consequence. An amusement only. Yet he still recalled with great clarity the pain and anxiety he had felt, waiting for word back, hearing nothing, month after month. That magazine, Le Opere e i Giorni, had published early work by Montale, he knew. He had felt such pride at seeing his article in print, when at last it did come. He could not now remember why he had not continued writing for the magazine, what had prevented him from publishing further. Though his mother had disapproved, that was not the reason. Some part of him had shied away, always, from the difficult possibility of exposure. He lacked Lucio’s certain faith in his own genius; instead he had, in its place, made himself adept at the avoidance of failure.
He let his eyes drift across the figures below but he did not see his cousin, nor Montale. A memory came to him, then, of Lucio leaning on a stone wall in the winter garden at Villa Vina, holding Giuseppe’s copy of Le Opere in his hands, an expression of unhappiness flickering across his face in the cold light.
And he remembered how, all those years ago, Lucio had submitted a suite of poems to the same magazine, at Giuseppe’s urging: poems which his friend’s father-in-law had promptly sent back.
At twenty past five Francesco Agnello came roaring down into the Agrigento piazza in a two-plus-two silver coupe, its chrome gleaming in the late sunlight, and he wore sunglasses and a white sportsman’s cap and was chewing an unlit American cigarette. The coupe was a brand-new Giulietta Sprint, just built in the Alfa Romeo factories up in Milan and driven south by Francesco himself along the new coastal highways. All this he told them with pride. It looked to Giuseppe like something out of a science fiction movie.
A young woman with yellow hair was crouched in the seat beside Francesco, barefoot.
You will forgive my sister Teresa, he said. He folded his long arms over the door, rested his chin on the polished chrome. She insisted on coming.
The famous sister, Giò said gallantly.
Francesco blew out his cheeks. Notorious, more like.
Your Excellency, she said with a flash of a smile. And this must be Gioacchino.
Francesco slid his sunglasses down his nose. My sister volunteered to help stow your luggage, Lanza.
Giò started to blush.
If Francesco was stone then Teresa was fire. Giuseppe felt a sudden sensual sorrow to see her, a regret at his own advancing age. She was smooth and olive-skinned and green-eyed like a creature from the forests and was all boldness and sly beauty. She was dressed in polka-dotted cigarette pants and a loose white blouse and her lipstick was very red. Giuseppe had seen such girls only in American magazines.
Francesco, big-boned, amused and amusing, had said nothing to him of a sister. Giuseppe sat squeezed in the tiny front seat of the coupe, his suitcase on his knees, listening over the roar of the wind to a fury of laughter from the girl behind him. Her soft fingers curled over the seat at his shoulder, she leaned forward, shouted something into his ear he did not catch, and when he turned he saw Giò with eyebrows raised, face red, eyes fixed on the girl’s face. Francesco drove fast.
She was the daughter of his mother’s second marriage and seven years younger than Francesco and bore no resemblance. They slowed and turned onto a narrow dirt lane and when they reached the house Giuseppe watched Giò fold Francesco’s seat forward and squeeze out and hurry around to hold the door for Teresa. Teresa took his hand, her blouse dipping at her neckline.
Uncle, Giò said with a grin. What are you staring at?
Francesco’s mother had passed away several years before but her second husband was standing in the open door of their country house in a blue linen suit, his arms at his sides, spectacles dangling on a thread around his neck. He had a broad forehead and a small receding chin and the smooth roundness of his head made him look like a tortoise. He came down to greet them and spoke respectfully to the prince and he clasped Giò’s hand and pressed his other hand on top as if in blessing. He was short, soft in the middle, with a long nose and dark rings under his eyes.
They were offered baths and a stroll among the roses and dahlias and grapevines in the garden beyond the house as the sun sank slowly towards the hills. The bedroom given to Giuseppe was large and beautiful, set above the courtyard at the side of the villa. His suitcase had been left on a divan under the window. He stood a moment studying the curtains where they glowed in soft yellow slashes, the sunlight seeping through the slats of the wooden shutters. The bed itself was old and gilded and made him long for his childhood.
Later on the terrace Giuseppe sat drinking a glass of cold water and brooding over the emptied villages they had passed that day when he glimpsed Gioacchino and Teresa under the wisteria in the garden below. Giò, pretending to drive away flies, more than once brushed the girl’s blonde hair. Giuseppe had been thinking about his novel, about Tancredi slipping easily from the old world of his birth into the new forged Sicily of the Risorgimento and he saw now what was missing. Tancredi must fall out of love with Don Fabrizio’s daughter. His attentions would be seized by the beauty of a rough, unlettered girl, a creature of the new breed. She would be ravenous, greedy for pleasure, a survivor, everything the old aristocracy was not. And Don Fabrizio too would desire her and that very desire would provide the measure by which he would understand his own decline.
At dinner Francesco’s stepfather laughed to see Giuseppe’s eyes bulge.
Steaming platters of swordfish carved shuddering into slabs and delicate wobbles of eggplant and dishes of Sicilian macaroni thick with peppers and tomatoes and pork under a golden crust. Twists of bread still hot and soft. Calamari wrapped in brown sugar.
Plato said, of Agrigento, that we build as if we expect to live forever and we eat as if we expect to die tomorrow.
If we eat even half of this, Giuseppe said dryly, we likely shall.
After they had eaten and the dishes were cleared Giò and Francesco excused themselves and Teresa followed and the two older men picked cigars from a wooden box and smoked quietly as the evening in the tall windows deepened.
Francesco’s stepfather explained that he had come to Agrigento after a career as a newspaperman in Messina and had married the countess in disbelief. She wanted her second marriage to be newsworthy, he said in the manner of a man who had made this joke before. He said the coastline here still left him short of breath in the winter and that he had always found its rugged beauty more to his taste than the stillness of high summer. He said Giuseppe would be much moved by his visit to Palma. Alas, you will not be able to see Lampedusa from there, I am afraid. Not even on the clearest of days. Is it true you have never been to the island, Excellency?
He confessed it was true.
Ah. They say it has its own monster.
Giuseppe raised his eyebrows in a smile. One that lives in Palermo, perhaps?
Francesco’s stepfather gave him a quick surprised look and then after a moment he returned the smile. No. No, it is said in antiquity the Arab sailors would give Lampedusa a wide birth. No trader would stop there for safe harbour, even in a storm.
Tell me about the monster.
What would you like to know?
Giuseppe held out his empty hands. Everything.
His host studied the end of his cigar, he licked his lips. An Arab geographer, Ibn al’Assad, wrote about it in the tenth century, he said. Al’Assad did not give it a name. The creature was rumoured to live in a cave under the southern part of the island and stirred only when boats set anchor. Many-tentacled and sharp of tooth, no doubt.
Giuseppe followed the old newspaperman out to the kitchen garden where a large terracotta pot stood balanced on the low stone wall. In it were the small leaves of a Sicilian basil. He smoked and studied the stars while his host, in the peasant fashion, night-watered the basil’s roots.
Now that I am old, said his host, I see that there is a sharp line drawn between youth and age. And that there can be no true understanding between the two. I have no complaints, you understand. Francesco is a good son.
He is.
Teresa I do not understand. She is very modern. She intends to go to Milan to work in a fashion house there. She broke off an engagement earlier this year. The boy, I understand, was not to blame.
Giuseppe, without children himself, was careful to say nothing.
I do believe Teresa will be a success if she can sort out what it is she wishes to do. His host paused. She seems rather fond of you.
Giuseppe glanced across. Of me?
That is what she said.
But I have hardly spoken to her.
His host appeared to consider this in the darkness. Perhaps that is what she appreciates, Don Giuseppe. I do not know. She has become a mystery to me.
Well.
I look at her and at Francesco now and I do not know anything of their lives, what they are thinking. Did our parents feel this way? Were we so inscrutable also? His host laughed. I sound old.
Giuseppe smiled.
Everything here is old, his host added. I am becoming a part of the scenery. In Palermo, Excellency, it is 1955. But there is no date in Agrigento, there is no year in Palma di Montechiaro. You will see. It is a world that has already passed elsewhere.
That is what I wish to see, said Giuseppe.
Later on the way to his room a shadow detached and came towards him and he saw it was the girl Teresa. She was dressed in an old-fashioned nightgown, high-necked, like something out of his own childhood. Giuseppe blushed. The girl’s apartments were not in this wing of the villa; nor were anyone’s but his own; and he could not imagine what she was doing in that hallway.
He stepped to one side to allow her to pass.
As she neared, she raised her face. Her bare feet were soundless on the flagstones. There was something in the way she tilted her chin, the way the shadows played against her skin, that confused him. He had experienced only two women in his life, both girls, both during his long youth before he had met his wife, one of them a prostitute. That encounter had been in a hotel in Brussels and had left him confused in the same way, had intensified his natural shyness so that he almost could not speak. He felt now, and not for the first time that evening, as if he had stepped out of his life, into an older and stranger Sicily.
Excellency, Teresa said softly.
He swallowed. She was still, he saw, wearing her makeup. She herself did not appear embarrassed. There was in her face, rather, something that looked like a question. Her blonde hair was loose at her shoulders and under her long lashes her dark eyes were liquid. She was very unlike Mirella, he thought. And then he imagined suddenly this girl’s father coming upon them unannounced, that good man, and the awkward English comedy of it. Some unhappy expression must have played across his face, for Teresa only nodded and continued past, down the hall.
He watched her go. Because of the lights in the stairwell in front of her, the silhouette of her body was visible through her thin nightdress.
Sometime after midnight he woke with a heaviness at his chest, a tightening so that he gasped and could not breathe, and he swung his feet out onto the floor with the unmistakable feeling that he had forgotten something of importance. He waited for the pain to ease. He was suddenly afraid of his emphysema, which felt more real and close to him here, in this place. In the silver light he could smell the jasmine and lavender in the villa’s gardens through the open window. The past seemed a great flowing passage through which his bloodline passed, back through the wastrel grandfathers and great-grandfathers, to the saints and holy men of the eighteenth century, to the legendary civic figures of the seventeenth and the royal granting of Lampedusa in 1667 and the first Tomasi’s wedding to the heiress of Palma, and deeper, back up the coast to Naples, to Capua, and further back to Siena, and then into the fog of an almost time, to Lepanto or Cyprus or the age of Tiberius in Rome. And he understood his great regret: after him would come nothing. He had produced neither son nor daughter. He had failed them all.
He woke with the sun in his eyes. He breakfasted on the terrace in the sunlight, working quietly on the notes for his novel, writing down as clearly as he could what he had found the day before, Tancredi’s desire for a new creature, Angelica he would call her, while Francesco’s stepfather read the morning paper across from him. Neither man spoke and the near silence of pages turning and the nib scratching in the lattice shade seemed to Giuseppe both peaceful and fine. The night’s pain receded. He allowed himself to forget his fear and his determination to follow Coniglio’s advice and instead he lit a cigarette and left it smouldering at the edge of the ashtray. He ate only a roll of bread with butter. There were flies on the tablecloth. Francesco, Giò, and Teresa did not appear.
Ah, but they have already eaten, the stepfather said with a rueful smile. At least young Gioacchino and Teresita have. They are in the garden, waiting on you. I have not seen Francesco.
Giuseppe shrugged his shoulders as if to say, youth must always wait on age.
Perhaps mistaking his silence as an invitation, Francesco’s stepfather cleared his throat and offered, I understand you have not been to Palma before, Excellency?
Giuseppe inclined his head. I do not often come south, no.
Ah. Well the archpriest will be very pleased to welcome you. I trust you have written ahead and let him know you will be coming?
He had not. It had not occurred to him. He wondered now if his arrival would cause much consternation in the cathedral where he was still, legally, patron and prince. But Francesco’s stepfather assured him he would be well treated regardless and then he took off his spectacles and said, with a laugh, You are their prince, after all. It is not for you to put them at ease.
The morning brightened cloudless and very blue. The sun blazed down out of the ether as they drove along the coast, Giò again scrunched into the rear seats, Giuseppe again clutching his hat against the open window. Francesco drove with one knee propped high against his door and his right hand loose on the gearbox. Teresa had begged off despite Giò’s urgings and said she could not, absolutely could not, take the day to go to Palma. A flash of her sharp white teeth, blonde hair drawn behind the shell of an ear, Francesco rubbing the headlights of his Sprint with a soft cloth in the courtyard beyond. What is in Palma, Giuseppe had heard her whisper as he passed them, except ruins? Everything there is so old.
Lanza, Francesco had been calling. Adventure awaits!
Ruins, yes, Giuseppe thought broodingly. They drove without speaking for a long while and then the castle of Montechiaro appeared, vanished, appeared again around the rocky hills. It had been erected by the Tomasi at the end of the seventeenth century high on a craggy outcropping above the sea, the town clustered five miles beyond. Francesco took his hand from the wheel to point and the car drifted onto the shoulder, corrected. Then they slowed and turned up a steep rocky drive, the tires crunching in the hot gravel. Giuseppe had brought his old-fashioned camera purchased in a small shop in London in 1927 and he got out of the low-slung automobile with its strap looped over his neck, its hard case heavy at his stomach.
Welcome home, Uncle, grinned Giò.
Even from the car he could see, feeling an unexpected relief, that the inside of the castle had long since fallen into ruin. It could not be salvaged; there would be no selling it off, piece by piece, to be made into apartments, as Licy had suggested. He left his jacket in the car. The stone was pale and they followed what seemed a thin sheep track up through the rocks to the tall angular walls. The sun was hot now. Giò and Francesco walked a few feet ahead, laughing softly, but Giuseppe paused at the lower wall and set a hand on its warm stones. He felt old. He turned and stared back at the silver coupe gleaming below, its driver-side door standing carelessly open. Then Francesco called for the camera and Giuseppe posed in his shirtsleeves with Giò under an arched doorway, squinting in the sunlight, while Francesco struggled to focus the lens and then he peered up at them and took their photograph.
Excellent, Francesco said, fiddling some more. We shall call it The Return of the Tomasi.
Like a novel by Thomas Hardy, Giò laughed.
Giuseppe looked at his young companion, smiled.
And just then Francesco took a second photograph.
Giuseppe left them then to wander the cliffside and he shuffled through the broken stones, looking for shade in the castle’s interior.
Away from the youths, all was quiet. He found himself in a roofless passage open to the sky where the stone walls loomed high and narrow and ended in a set of carved steps that led to a terrace. He went back down and turned right into the crumbled rooms of the tower. Outside he could hear the slow roll of the surf far below but inside in the shade all was still, muffled, silent. A melancholy was rising in him and he was suddenly grateful to have lost sight of Francesco and Giò. Here his ancestors—saints and visionaries, sons and daughters—had renounced the world and scourged their flesh in the service of greatness. Three times in their known history the Tomasi had nearly died of extinction, had relied on the survival of a single child. Giuseppe shuffled slowly forward, sat heavily on a stone block inside the ruined gatehouse. The fourth wall was fallen in, the wooden beams of the ceiling sun-bleached and scattered like the bones of some strange beast. Three hundred years ago his family had become dukes of Palma. The second duke renounced the title for a life in the church; his brother converted their palace into a Benedictine convent and ordered the building of the town’s cathedral. That duke’s daughter, a visionary who suffered visitations from the devil, was venerated a century after her death. It did not matter that Giuseppe thought their faith misguided. He admired the scope of what they had achieved, the intensity of their relinquishing. The world in its vanity was as nothing. These names had been seared into his memory by his father and he thought now of him, of his mother, of that slow unhappy marriage. A grey lizard flickered under the sun-heated rocks and Giuseppe rose, made his way up through the ruins, walking carefully, looking for Giò. Above in the white sunlight half the roof had collapsed but a narrow crenellated walk remained and he paused there, thinking that perhaps here his ancient forefather might have paused too, considered the emptiness of sky and sea beyond. He pressed a palm to the warm stones and closed his eyes.
A soft wind was slicing through the long grasses among the rocks far below. A gull was crying over the drop. He could not see Giò or Francesco and he supposed they had returned to the car. Through the crumbling arch of a window the coins of the sea glittered. He squinted, shielded a hand at his eyes. Somewhere beyond in the blue haze of the horizon lay a blue island, an island of nothingness.
Lampedusa.
It was during those three days in San Pellegrino Terme that Giuseppe came to understand his cousin’s ambition. They would drift from cocktail parties to luncheons to private forays in the steam baths among the literati where Lucio would tighten the towel at his waist and grin shyly then walk out among the others, his pale sagging torso embarrassing to behold, his tiny shoulders hunched up, his wrists and hands sun-browned as if they had been stained with tea. Did the younger writers smile to observe him? Giuseppe would watch his cousin lean in to speak with Montale in the late-afternoon light and when he could no longer bear it he would turn away with a worried air and seek some balcony or window unobstructed. Literature for him had always been charged with its own self-doubt, one novel inexorably questioning a predecessor, one writer’s faith scraping away at another’s. This was its truth. He had learned over a lifetime of reading that no word could be the only word and that art held value precisely because it answered nothing. All it could do was ask the old questions, over and over. What Virgil had feared, Eliot had feared. Homer’s longing had been suffered by Stendhal. No book made any other less necessary. Yet the novelists he met or listened to at San Pellegrino Terme asked nothing and seemed to believe the modern novel superior to what had come before. And what had come before? he would silently ask their assembled backs. He was surprised to find himself neither impressed nor intimidated by such writers and he felt a melancholic anger come up in him at the thought of their books. He would listen as they discussed their successes or spoke bitingly of the successes of others but few condescended to meet the eye of a dilettante such as himself and none asked after him.
In the evenings as the northern sun slid beneath the mountains and the river was cast into darkness the weird quick bop of modern jazz would start up somewhere near and Lucio would emerge in his fussy suits, his privately printed collection of poems poking from one pocket. Yet each night he seemed more alive, more passionate, more confident in his own convictions than the last. Giuseppe watched his cousin’s transformation and slowly came to see that writing would not be a way of knowing for Lucio but rather a way of being known and when he realized this he realized he did not want any part of it. What all of the writers at San Pellegrino craved was not the self-abnegation of true literature but the admiration of those who would read it. The crowds gathered, gesturing, smoking, they dissipated into the night. Giuseppe concealed his disgust under his shyness, and mumbled his regrets, and all the while a bitterness ate away at his heart.
Had there been unkindness in this, he wondered now. Perhaps his cousin had not deserved such censure, perhaps the modern writers at San Pellegrino Terme were not to be faulted. Had it been envy, nothing more? He did not like to think so but all summer as he had set down his pen and screwed the lid back onto his jar of ink and studied his hands he had seen the flesh of an old man, a failed man. Perhaps, he thought, art could not be created without the failings of its maker. Perhaps it was the very weakness of the writer that made the writing human, and therefore moving, and therefore worth preserving. He had understood for a long time that the world was greater by far than anything he could offer it, and that what he most longed for, the creation of something to outlive him, a testament in his own hand, would most likely fail in the end. But what he had not understood before was how the strain of the attempt constituted the greater labour.
Which, he supposed, as the evenings had lightened in the shutters of his study, was not so very different from the labour of living itself.
They left the castle driving slowly under a blue-black sky and stopped for a modest lunch on a hill below Palma. Francesco had packed a hamper of sausages and cold macaroni and bread but Giuseppe had little appetite and his thoughts strayed back to the crumbling castle behind them. After eating they made their way up towards the ancient piazza of Palma but the cobblestones were bad and the winding streets very narrow and Francesco had to park some distance away. Then out of the silence they heard the clicking of horseshoes and a solitary cart came around the corner, drawn by a skeletal nag. The driver, an old peasant in a grey hat, offered them a ride. And so they passed into the deserted streets of old Palma in the heat, seeming to Giuseppe as if they had entered, at last, the world of his grandfathers. As they made their way he glimpsed, between the houses and as they creaked through the little squares, the blue sea far below. He stared down from the bench of the cart at the crescent of a beach and a lone bather walking in the surf wearing a yellow hat and after a time they reached the piazza and the vast steps that led up to the cathedral. The driver bid them farewell with a raised hand and continued out of the dream.
Although the doors of the cathedral stood open onto the white heat of the afternoon the air hung thick and hazy around the lintel and when they walked beneath it the air turned cool and sombre and strange. Giuseppe set out a hand and held himself for a moment leaning into the stone wall below an ancient torch bracket and it seemed to him that the years were seeping away into the shadows and that he stood as a Tomasi among the foundations of the Tomasi. Here his line had distinguished itself. Here the Tomasi name had been forged in blood and faith and suffering.
Inside all was brightness and calm and hues of white and pale blue and green. The pillars had been painted to look like red marble. The cathedral was not large by Palermitan standards but handsomely proportioned all the same and they made their way up through the central aisle in silence admiring the workmanship of the stucco above. There were scenes from the life of Christ painted into the vaulted ceiling. An iron railing separated the altar and he peered through. In an enclosure to one side he could see the Tomasi family box, the seats individuated and ornate and ancient. Above the altar hung a painting of the infant Christ on Mary’s knee, Giuseppe’s ancestor the saint-duke kneeling in holy robes at her feet, his eyes upturned in ecstasy. The altar was covered in a white sheet and an empty silver platter shone at its centre where light from the clerestory windows fell. Their footsteps were loud in the silence, echoing up off the choir and into the brilliance. No one spoke.
Only gradually did Giuseppe become aware of being observed. He turned in place and raised his eyes to the organist’s balcony but could see no one. He glanced behind him, and still he saw no one. But the feeling did not leave him.
Then he saw, standing in shadow in a side-chapel, two men, both wearing suits buttoned fast against the heat and both watching Giuseppe in silence.
When their eyes met his they stepped fluidly forth, as one, and approached. They were the archpriest, a tall thin man, white-haired, spectacled, with enormous ears standing out like saucers, and his companion, a notary, dressed in a black suit and wearing menacing black leather gloves. The notary’s eyes were shadowed by thick black eyebrows and his wispy hair was combed across the pink of his scalp.
How can I help you? the archpriest asked. The notary at his side watched.
Forgive us for intruding, Giuseppe began.
It is no intrusion, the archpriest replied with a grim promptness. You are visitors to Palma di Montechiaro?
Giò came up to join them. This is Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Father, he said. He has come to visit the Tomasi patronages.
The transformation in the two men was instantaneous. The archpriest raised his face and studied Giuseppe’s features intensely, colour rising to his cheeks, and then he took off his spectacles and bowed. You are most welcome, Excellency, he said. Forgive me for not recognizing you. You bear a resemblance.
Giuseppe glanced across at Francesco, puzzled.
To the portraits, the archpriest added, seeing his confusion. Please, won’t you come through? And he reached down and unlocked a small hinge in the iron gate and a piece of the wooden railing swung inward. Can I offer you and your companions some refreshment?
It was here, at last, and with an embarrassed frown, that the archpriest introduced himself and his companion. The notary, by contrast, had said nothing and he did not move. He studied Giuseppe in silence, his pale lips drawn thin. Giuseppe did not mind; he was accustomed to men pausing and reconsidering him after learning of his station in life. For many years it had seemed natural and right, and although he had come to distrust it in the years since the war and since his mother’s death, a very old and deep recess in his heart also recognized it as his due.
But the notary did not linger. He excused himself with a bow to Giuseppe and a murmured word to the archpriest and then he strode darkly down the aisle of the cathedral and out into the sunlight, his black gloved hands hanging at his sides as he went.
The archpriest led them past the altar and through a cloaked doorway, inquiring politely as to their purpose and discussing some of the worthier sights within a day’s drive. He was a man older than his energies allowed and spoke with a Neapolitan accent but he seemed utterly of this place. He pointed out the fine architectural underpinnings of the cathedral and spoke at length of its construction and told of a fire that broke out in the very month of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and how it had seemed, to the congregation, a sign. When Giò and Francesco stopped before a curious fresco of Saint Ignatius reading from a closed book the archpriest turned to Giuseppe and said, quietly, I hope you will forgive my companion. He suffered a terrible accident as a boy. That is why he wears the gloves. He has a hole in each hand from when a building collapsed on him during an earthquake. His parents were killed, his brothers. When he was dug out of the rubble they found him pierced by iron rods through each hand, his arms outspread, as if he had been crucified. The archpriest glanced at Giuseppe’s face to gauge the effect of his words.
I see, said Giuseppe softly.
The people of this town have a simple faith, Excellency. They see his wounds and wish to be near them, they wish to touch them. They see a miracle.
But he does not.
For him, it is a mark of his suffering, nothing more. He does not accept that all suffering is holy.
In the sacristy they were offered iced lemon juice and sat and drank and wiped their dusty hands on their trousers. The archpriest spoke about the American movies he had seen and soon he and Giò and Francesco were quoting lines back and forth. Giuseppe crossed his legs, he let his gaze drift around the room at the oiled bookcases and the portraits of his Tomasi ancestors on the walls. The largest portrait, above the archpriest’s black desk, was of Giulio, the saint-duke, founder of Palma and of the cathedral. Giuseppe studied his forefather in his ancient dignity, the angry eyes, the elaborate martial dress. He had been a great man and a man with a fiery purpose and one who had lived in the full light of a savage god. It was to this he had devoted his fortune and retired from the world, exhausted. His daughter Isabella, brilliant, implacable, learned, had enclosed herself in her father’s convent when she came of age and was declared a saint within three generations. What was he, Giuseppe Tomasi, last of the Lampedusa princes, in comparison? No madness moved in him. He rose to his feet, feeling all at once drained.
Gentlemen, he said.
As they were leaving, the archpriest asked if they had yet stopped in at the convent.
Giuseppe searched the ancient priest’s face. I beg your pardon?
Of course, you might have pressing business elsewhere, the priest continued. But I am certain the blessed Lady Abbess Maria will be most disappointed to have missed you, Excellency.
It is a Benedictine convent, Father, Giò interjected. Surely men are not allowed inside?
The archpriest did not take his eyes from Giuseppe’s face when he replied, It is a strict enclosure, yes. But you are our prince and patron, Excellency. You are permitted to enter, along with two gentlemen from your suite, should you so wish. It has always been so. For you, and for the King of Naples.
The King of Naples, Francesco said, grinning at Giò.
The archpriest did not seem to hear the amusement in Francesco’s tone, at the privileges of a king who had ceased to exist, and again Giuseppe had the eerie sensation of having stepped through into an earlier century, an era before the roar and smoke of the modern. Above him the cathedral loomed, deep and shadowy and vast. Giuseppe bowed.
Then I cannot refuse, he said simply.
That day, as he stepped back out into the white afternoon heat, and all through the weeks that were to follow, he thought of that notary with his soft black gloves, and an unsettling silence seemed to trail behind the memory, like a wisp in the air. That notary had reminded him of something he had imagined gone, had brought it back to him with a sudden clarity. As a boy the notary had been dug out of the earth, the archpriest had said, one of the lost ones reclaimed. He does not accept that all suffering is holy, the archpriest had explained in satisfaction, as if composing a sermon. It was not the possibility of the priest’s truth that troubled Giuseppe, not the knowledge of the martyred and the saved. What he had not said in reply was that he too had known people swallowed by the earth, and there had been no design in it, no glimpse of God’s hand at work, only sorrow.
Of his mother’s three momentous griefs, her sister Lina’s death, in the earthquake at Messina, was the first, and marked the beginning of the change that came over her. That was in December of 1908. Giuseppe had only just turned twelve. After Messina, his mother drew back into herself, and the wildness that was in her turned inward and began to eat away at itself, like a sickness. She would lie for days in the green drawing room, the curtains closed and still, a damp cloth draped over her face. His father would sigh and shake his head and drift from room to room like a man with a purpose but even as a boy Giuseppe had understood there was no purpose, the restlessness was its own reason. Some mornings he would find his mother seated in the little upstairs library, staring at the old leather volumes, wearing the clothes she had been wearing the night before. Because he was a child still, and did not understand what was happening inside her, what he remembered most vividly was the deep strangling fear that started to come over him in the night, so that he would cry out, and his French governess would come running in her nightgown with a candle. His mother had always been one who seemed to live above the turmoil and confusion that he himself, a plump shy silent child, felt whenever they went out into the world. Her name was Beatrice, like Dante’s angel: Beatrice Mastrogiovanni Tasca Filangeri di Cutò.
All his childhood, Giuseppe had repeated that name like a magical ward, feeling dizzy at the thought that she had made him, that he was a part of her. He would watch her move with the grace and magnificence of a lynx, padding through the sunlit halls of the palazzo, her long pale throat extended, her dark hair up, a creature admired, adored in the light that he, her son, would shine upon her. She would lift the little songbirds out of their elaborate cages and hold them on her outstretched fingers and they would sing for her.
She was the eldest of the five beautiful and unconventional Cutò daughters, and throughout her youth she had welcomed controversy and rumour, had provoked it with her fashionable clothes and French opinions and Continental conversation. She could be bitterly sarcastic, domineering, stubborn, charming. Her dance card was always full. As a boy he had not understood that powerful men desired her, and were frightened by her, and that their very fear fascinated them. All his childhood he would lean sleepily against the balcony railings at midnight balls watching her glide across the polished floors below, seeing the other couples part and bend like long grasses as she passed. He liked to remember her seated in the soft red felt seats of the new Excelsior cinema in the Palazzo Rudinì, at the beginning of the century, how the wide folds of her dresses overflowed the seats. And sometimes still at night when he passed a brightly lit gelateria, he would see in his mind’s eye his mother, leaning out of a carriage laughing, a small ice cream spoon in her gloved fingers.
But the death of Lina ended all of that. A watchfulness came over her, a slow undercurrent of sadness, so that even when laughing or dancing with some prince or another there was always a stillness at her centre, like a kind of strength, but it was not strength, he knew. The grief of her sister’s death lined her eyes like kohl, shadowed her lips, and did not fade with time.
That grey winter morning when word of the tragedy reached Palermo, he had gone downstairs at his usual hour and found the grandfather clock on the landing stopped. His uncle Ferdinando, his father’s younger brother, was seated in the breakfast room with the city newspaper pulled apart into sections and the sheets laid carefully around him. There had been an earthquake in Messina in the night, his uncle explained.
Your aunt and uncle, and your little cousin, Ferdinando said. We have not heard anything yet.
All that day he lurked at the windows watching the winter rains but he did not see his mother or father. He was told his mother was at the Florios’ villa, seeking news, he was told his father was at the post office. The house was gloomy in the afternoon shadows, and cold, and the servants had forgotten to light the lamps. Seventy-seven thousand people died in the destruction. The grand churches held vigils, the city papers interviewed politicians, professors, survivors. Word of his aunt’s death did not reach Palermo for eleven days. By then his aunt Teresa had arrived from Capo d’Orlando in despair and gone back again, and his aunt Giulia had telephoned the Florios twice from Rome for news.
Lina had died under the rubble of her magnificent villa, with her husband at her side. The walls and roof had collapsed like a hand closing upon itself. Their bodies were recovered whole, unbroken, and from this it was understood they had not been crushed in the collapse but rather had starved slowly in the days that followed.
Giuseppe’s mother started to shake when his father brought her into his study and told her the news. She had demanded the details in their entirety. Then, white-faced, stiff, she had walked very deliberately towards a chair in the corner and sat down and closed her eyes and started to scream.
All week a cold rain fell. She did not speak, did not look at Giuseppe, did not touch him. He would go to her where she sat, listless, silhouetted against the rainswept windows, or he would peer at her from the doorway, afraid to interrupt but wanting to be near. Only once during those days did she glance up, and see him. Something passed across her face then, a kind of recognition, and she held out her arms, and he went to her, feeling somehow forgiven, as if he had done something, and he felt her start to cry and he cried too.
That was the day there came a knock at their door, and his governess led into the drawing room a dark-eyed boy whom Giuseppe almost recognized. Water dripped from his oiled cloak, his hair was matted and wet, he stood with a small suitcase at his feet, and Giuseppe and his mother and his father stared at him. The house felt very quiet. His father got to his feet. Giuseppe looked at his mother and saw she had gone stiff in her black dress, and was staring with a hostile expression on her face, her fingers interlaced whitely at her lips. Then she rose from her seat and left the room.
That bedraggled creature was his six-year-old cousin, Filippo.
Lina’s boy.
He was only just twelve, he would remind himself years later, a sheltered child, shy. But he could not imagine the destruction of his own house and so he wondered what Filippo Cianciafara had done to deserve it. His mother would not look at his little cousin, would not speak to him, angry and withdrawn as if his presence in her house were an affront. Filippo himself hardly spoke, and then only in a whisper, and his calm face never betrayed any sadness. It is the shock, said his father. I expect the poor boy will feel it soon enough, said his uncle. Giuseppe heard all this and watched his mother’s moods and he resolved to close the lid of his heart.
Filippo had been dug out of the rubble on the third day, white with dust, shaking with the chill, thirsty, like one of the dead brought back to life. This Giuseppe was told by his governess in a hushed voice, her French accent colouring the words. He peered at his cousin suspiciously after that. It was as if he observed a ghost. But some part of him understood that nothing was more living than Filippo’s silences, and that the breath in the little boy’s lungs was the true affront.
Because his mother was cruel towards Filippo, he too was cruel. It saddened him now, forty years later, to think of the kindnesses he did not extend. His cousin’s presence seemed to embarrass his father and uncle. Only his governess, Anna, was moved to pity the boy, who would sit alone for long periods of the day, silent, or be called sharply into the gold drawing room to accept condolences from some visitor or relation he had surely never met. Anna insisted Giuseppe join him, play with him, draw him out of his loneliness.
But he is so little, Giuseppe complained.
So are you, she replied.
He doesn’t even speak, he said. He just sits there. He doesn’t want to do anything.
One afternoon he came across his cousin in the upstairs library with a book open in his lap. When Giuseppe came in the boy wiped his eyes quickly with the sleeve of his shirt, stared intently down at the book.
Giuseppe frowned. You are just pretending to read, he said.
I am not, said Filippo.
He took the book from his cousin, which was upside down, and turned it, and gave it back. Liar, he said.
On another occasion Anna saw Filippo in the courtyard below, his coat buttoned up against the cold, his red knuckles bare, staring at the white gravel near his boots. She opened the window. Filippo! she called. You will catch your death! Come inside, Giuseppe has something to show you.
The little boy stared up at them in the window as if he did not know them, and then slowly he trudged inside.
But I don’t have anything to show him, said Giuseppe.
Anna smoothed her dress with both hands, her small freckled nose wrinkled. She did this, he knew, when she was irritated. She said, Take him to the nursery. Show him your old toys.
In the nursery Giuseppe glared at his cousin resentfully, opened the lid of his old toy chest and rummaged through it. He took out only the broken toys. He handed across a painted white horse on a string, a toy soldier without a head.
This is broken, said Filippo.
So? said Giuseppe.
And so is this one.
You have to play with it. Anna says you have to.
And he folded his arms and watched as his little cousin turned the headless soldier in his fingers and then, slowly, sadly, he began to make the three-legged horse gallop across the carpet.
A month passed. One morning he came down to breakfast to find Filippo’s chair empty, his place not set. The carriage had been taken out in the pouring rain and had not returned: Filippo had been sent to his little cousins Lucio and Casimiro at Capo d’Orlando.
It was strange, he reflected now, forty years later. He had treated Filippo with such contempt. And yet all that month when his cousin had been living with them at Casa Lampedusa he had felt no particular dislike or anger towards the boy. And after he was sent away, Giuseppe had felt no shame. He had thought only of his mother’s sadness; Filippo disappeared from his thoughts completely, as if he had never come to stay with them at all. At the very end of his life, what he would recall most vividly of that time was, instead, his mother’s uncontrolled grief in that first week in December, her beautiful unbrushed hair wild at her shoulders, her great breathless racking sobs, and how she had sat crumpled in a big armchair in the green drawing room where no one ever went.
He descended the ancient steps of the cathedral in Palma, starting his slow way downhill towards the convent. He was worried Giò and Francesco would lack the necessary respectfulness inside. But a quick glance at their faces showed both of them lost in thought, Giò’s eyes studying without seeing the wide dusty steps back down to the piazza. Francesco adjusted his collar, took off his hat, ran a hand through his black hair. Neither spoke. He was satisfied.
They turned left along the street and walked slowly, Giuseppe keeping to the line of shadow under the crumbling buildings. When at last they reached the piazza and the convent looming over it and climbed its steps, the immaculate white stone shining in the sunlight, they encountered again a sudden gloom that blinded them and made them pause at the threshold and peer in.
They found themselves in a small spare reception chamber. A raftered ceiling was centred on the ancient Tomasi crest of the leopard and there were wooden benches along the two empty walls. The third wall was built of varnished wood and a thick door stood fast and beside this were two double gratings for interviews. A little wooden wheel built into the wall allowed, Giuseppe imagined, messages to be exchanged. He stood leaning into his walking stick, uncertain, shy, as Giò stepped forward and smoothly approached the grate closest to the door and pulled a bell rope. A deep clangour rose up from somewhere beyond and they waited a long time until at last a silhouette appeared behind the grating. Giuseppe could not make out a face. An old woman’s voice asked, reedily, How can we help you, young man?
After Giò had explained their purpose the nun excused herself and they waited again, longer. A fly had come in through the open door and was buzzing the still air. Francesco peered uneasily at the walls and then he leaned in and whispered, They are watching us, Don Giuseppe. Do not think we are unobserved here.
Giuseppe was silent. He was beginning to fear it had been unwise, uncivil, to stop in unannounced. The fly swooped and buzzed.
Shortly they could hear the heavy inner door unlocking, and then with a tremendous weight it swung inward. A tiny woman—the abbess, he supposed—stood with her hands clasped before her, regarding them quietly. All three visitors got to their feet. And then, to Giuseppe’s amazement, she smiled a smile of extraordinary gentle joy.
She was pretty. Giuseppe had not been expecting that. It seemed a strange quality to notice in a nun and he observed it without passion but then he thought perhaps the serenity and dignity in her distinguished her beyond it. Her eyes were green and catlike and her eyebrows were so pale as to look hairless. Her habit was an inky black, the linen wimple starched to a startling white. She looked, he thought, like a Byzantine saint. A small black mole was visible on her upper lip.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, at your service, he said softly. It is a privilege to be admitted here, Lady Abbess. We are grateful.
She held out her hand. It was small, and cool, its skin unusually smooth for her age. He held it a moment too long, and then flushed.
She said, happily, I am Maria Enrichetta Fanara, your Excellency. And the privilege is our own.
He stepped back. My young companion, Gioacchino Lanza. And this is Baron Francesco Agnello, of Siculiana.
She smiled but did not offer her hand again.
You must come inside, please, she said, and gestured them through into the adjacent courtyard. A statue of the virgin holding the infant Christ, a fountain dripping water, green shrubs in terracotta pots and the blue sky dizzying overhead. The door closed and locked behind them.
We have not been graced with a Tomasi for many, many years, the abbess went on. Not in all my time here.
But that cannot have been so very long, said Giò.
At that the lady abbess arched her hairless eyebrows. It is no great flattery, young Lanza, to suggest I am younger than I am. We are not vain here. Our years mark our devotion. We do not desire youth.
Giò, to Giuseppe’s relief, nodded at her rebuke and said only, Forgive me, Abbess Maria. I did not mean to offend.
She was already smiling again. She led them to the right into a small office, the wooden rafters again centring on the Tomasi crest above, the whitewashed walls sparse but for a small crucifix next to a window. Through a curtain a long flagstoned corridor stretched away. There were several chairs arranged around a low table and on the table was an ancient silver tray, polished to a shine, and arrayed on a plate Giuseppe saw a pillar of almond cakes surrounded by sprigs of jasmine. A pitcher of cold water gleamed. It all looked carefully assembled despite its haste and he imagined the room must usually have stood vacant.
I hope you have gone to no trouble, Lady Abbess, he began.
But she would have none of it. It is exactly right that we do so, your Excellency. Please, I hope you will taste the cakes. They are baked by the acolytes. It would honour our house.
They are delicious, Giò said, his mouth half-full.
Giuseppe took one, hesitantly. A soft rich scent of almonds and sugar filled his nostrils and he was taken for a moment back to the childhood gardens of Santa Margherita di Belice, the shady palm trees, the white gravel pathways, the elegant wrought-iron chairs and the pastries arranged on a white tablecloth. He felt himself overwhelmed and made as if to study the crucifix on the wall with his hands clasped at his back.
After a time they were invited to tour the cloisters. They passed through a door crowned with ancient mouldings into a wide room, lined with windows, that must once have been the palace reception room. It stood now with a tidy desk in each corner, and potted ferns along the walls under the windows, and a tall elaborate wire birdcage in the shape of the Parliament in Rome. All was light, the floor a polished gold parquet. At its centre lay the Tomasi crest.
The lady abbess withdrew from her habit a tiny silver bell and she rang it before leading them through the far doors.
It is to warn the nuns that men approach, she said. Some of them are strictly isolated.
I hope we are not causing you much inconvenience, Giuseppe offered again.
She reached up and this time touched his arm, gently, but did not stop walking.
They proceeded down a long corridor, lined with small cells, and stopped at one that the lady abbess explained was not presently in use. She told them that there were fewer novices now after the war and that the convent was aging gradually but definitively. Soon there will be few of us left, she said. After that there will be only one. I am glad I shall not be the last.
They admired the sparseness of the cell, its austerity, the clean small cot, its stripped mattress turned sideways and leaned against the wall, the narrow wardrobe standing with its wings open.
Then they proceeded on. The lady abbess rang her bell and led them through the empty kitchens, a pot of tomatoes sitting half-washed in a sink, an eggplant half-sliced and the knife set down, all of it eerie and abandoned and the doors at the far end half-open as if the novices huddled beyond, peering out. They were led through the dining room with its long slabbed tables in rows of three and down a second corridor of cells, the doors closed on each. As they went the lady abbess spoke to Giuseppe about the Tomasi, about Giulio who had granted the Benedictines his palace long centuries before, about his daughter who entered the convent at the age of seventeen and who fought the devil with a fury worthy of her faith. Giuseppe had been raised on stories of Isabella Tomasi, his father relating them with a wryness that betrayed his genuine pride. She inspires us even yet, the lady abbess was saying. When I came here as a girl, there was an older sister in residence who dreamed of Prince Giulio’s daughter sometimes. Some of the novices believed her mad. But the abbess at the time warned us that the spirit in the flesh can look like madness. That chastened us. She reminded us to withhold our judgment. It is not our place, she said. The good Tomasi understood that, if nothing else.
Giuseppe cleared his throat. You honour us, he said politely.
The Tomasi were intrinsically different, Excellency, she said. Like very great artists. I do not think they wished to be so, but they accepted their nature with courage. How can one not admire that?
He met her eye. I fear they would weep to see what has become of us, he replied.
The lady abbess regarded him quizzically but did not ask and he did not elaborate and instead he looked away.
And the good Isabella’s cell? he said. Has it been preserved?
Isabella? Ah, Isabella. Yes. She is Isabella only to outsiders, Excellency. Here she is our Venerable Maria Crocifissa. Please, this way. Gentlemen, please. She glided silently forward and explained to them as they went that the saint’s cell was used even today by acolytes. But she knew for a fact that the nun who occupied it was presently in the garden weeding and that they would not be disturbing anyone. As they went down the long corridor she rang the silver bell and Giuseppe heard the quiet clicking of doors shutting ahead of them. They saw no one but he felt eyes upon him at each step and yet there seemed nothing uneasy in it, nothing to make him anxious.
Isabella’s cell was no different than the first cell the lady abbess had showed them. Narrow, bare, a single immaculate cot against one wall, a wooden dresser, the ancient wardrobe closed. Through the small window Giuseppe watched high wisps of cloud scud past in the blue. When Francesco and Giò pressed in, the space felt cramped and impossibly small.
There was one difference. Framed on the wall to the side of the door were two yellowed letters, in different spidery scripts. Giuseppe leaned in, he fumbled for his spectacles. He could not read the writing in one. Some sort of strange Cyrillic. The first paper, the abbess explained, was a letter from Isabella to the devil, exhorting him to give up his ungodly ways and come to her and walk in the light of the true faith.
And the second? Francesco asked.
That is the devil’s reply, she said. No one has been able to read it. It is not written in a language known to man.
Giuseppe paused, studying the abbess, trying to determine how much she believed in such relics. She regarded the three of them serenely and betrayed nothing.
It was in the convent garden, she said, that the Venerable Maria Crocifissa was attacked by the devil. He hurled a large stone at her, hoping to strike her down. Her simplicity and faith offended him. But the stone was suspended in the air by Saint Michael and she stood her ground, unharmed.
I understand she was afflicted with visions from a young age, Giuseppe said.
Yes.
My grandfather would speak of her. He said, according to the family stories, the only game she would play as a child was pretending to be a nun.
She was touched by God at a young age, yes.
Touched?
Blessed.
Blessed, Giuseppe murmured. He removed his spectacles, blinked.
The blessings of the Lord are not to be envied, Excellency, she said and nodded as if recognizing something in him. It is a painful and lonely existence, here on earth, surrounded by all that is mortal, having felt something far greater. It is a deprivation.
In a small corner of the cell, under a glass, lay a fury’s-head whip, its seven knotted lashes looking vicious even now. Francesco and Giò were studying it in silence.
As I said, the lady abbess said. A painful and lonely existence.
The poor girl, said Giò.
You do not still use such instruments? Francesco asked.
Not as you mean it.
Francesco raised his eyebrows in a question, waited.
All of living is a mortification of the flesh, she said simply. That is what it is to be alive. Our bodies are slowly giving way to the spirit. We are on earth only a short time. It is different for each of us. But that is how long we have to come to an understanding.
I fear, Giuseppe said, feeling a heaviness at his heart, that there can be no understanding for some of us.
She looked at him with great pity and he saw in it, to his surprise, a kind of love. You must have faith, Excellency, she said gently, and it might have been only the two of them in that cell, only the two of them in the convent entire. All else gradually gave way. He had almost forgotten his emphysema but it returned to him now forcefully and he wanted very much to sit down but he did not do so. He thought of his mother and how she would have been interested in these women, in this ancient seat. His mother with her stern shoulders and graceful swan’s neck, whose passion for living had frightened him into shyness as a child, who had fought bitterly against her own death, hating the ugliness of growing old. Giuseppe stared now at the small surprised beauty of the lady abbess and he swallowed painfully. There was in her something absolutely unlike himself. Seeing her, he thought it might almost be possible to live unafraid of death, to live even now ready for change, whenever it should come, in whatever form, as he knew it must.
The sunlight filtered in, illuminating his grey knuckles, his grey wrists. He could hear the four of them breathing in the stillness, like ghosts.