He was fourteen years old, a child still, when the telegram with its black border arrived at the palazzo. He would remember standing on the grand staircase in the afternoon sunlight, listening as his father read out its contents in a shaking voice. His aunt Giulia, his mother’s favourite sister, had been stabbed in the spine and then twice in the throat by a cavalry officer in Rome. She was dead. Her seducer, a baron, had then calmly drawn the hotel curtains against the grey light and sat at a dressing table and taken out his revolver and shot himself through the head.
All this had happened, it seemed, in a shabby neighbourhood near Roma Termini station on a morning of rain. In Palermo, Giulia’s husband collapsed in the street at the news. The murderer’s name was Vincenzo Paternò del Cugno, and Giuseppe, hearing it said, whispered the sinister syllables over and over, like an incantation. His aunt had met with the baron that day, it was given to understand, in order to break relations.
The seduction had begun at a summer ball in Palermo two years earlier. Giulia, pretty, almond-eyed, with delicate wrists and a slow sad smile, had been sent an unsigned letter that season warning that her husband was conducting an affair with an actress from the Scarpetta company. That letter, his mother had come to believe, was sent by Paternò del Cugno himself. Giulia was a friend of the young Queen Elena in Rome and a lady-in-waiting at court and had no one to ask for advice in affairs of the heart, and when she next saw the baron he sat with her half the night with his white gloves in his lap, drawing out her sorrows, blue-eyed, a gentleman. All this Giuseppe heard as he haunted the palazzo in those first days. He learned that he could sit quietly with a book open in his hands, the pages creaking as he turned them, and his governess would forget his presence, the servants would whisper openly, his parents would not see him at all. For his mother did not lower her voice nor care who might overhear her in her grief.
Oh reckless, reckless, his mother would weep. How could you not have known what he was, Giulia? We knew it. All of Palermo knew it. Oh Giulia, Giulia.
While Giuseppe, soft, pale, his eyes bulging, sat quietly on the second stair, and breathed.
His aunt was thirty-three years old, the baron thirty-one. Paternò del Cugno’s passion had frightened her. How many times did they meet? What had entered her heart and passed from it? The baron hunted her through the spa towns of the Hapsburg Empire, begging first for one more night alone, then pleading for his gambling debts, then demanding money, threatening her with exposure. A violent man by nature, a man drawn to fast horses and fashionable salons, when his behaviour turned erratic Giulia understood he would not relent. Upon her return to Sicily, weeping, she told her sister the details and Beatrice went that very night to Giuseppe’s father to beg him to intervene but the baron merely challenged the aging prince to a duel. Giuseppe’s father had laughed angrily, telling it in front of the drawing room fire. The next day Beatrice had begged Ignazio Florio to confront the baron but even that man’s power and wealth could not turn the baron from his course.
In the end, delicately, through connections at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a transfer had been arranged. The baron had, simply, been sent away. His letters from his new posting in Naples were returned unopened. His requests for leave were denied. Winter descended, like a shame, and with it came silence.
Then, two months later, the baron left his barracks in Naples for an overnight express to Rome. He carried no luggage, only a packet of Giulia’s letters tied with a red ribbon in one pocket, and a loaded revolver in the other.
All of Sicily, it seemed, was outraged by the killing. The corruption of Giulia Trigona was the talk of the spring. When her body was returned to Palermo, the train stopped, in Messina, in Cefalù, at Bagheria, and was met always at the stations by weeping crowds and city mayors and ancient councilmen beribboned in black shaking their fists into microphones. His mother could not ride out in her carriage without onlookers staring in the street, removing their hats. One rainy afternoon Giuseppe discovered, in an unlocked drawer in his father’s study, a drawing of the baron from the newspapers. Handsome, black-haired, black-eyed, with a sharp nose and cruel eyebrows and a full sensuous mouth. He looked, Giuseppe had thought then, like a man ruled by his passions.
His mother changed then, after Giulia’s killing. A light had been extinguished in her, though it would take him a lifetime to see it. It had been two years since the loss of his aunt Lina and his mother had carried that grief with difficulty. They had been five sisters; then, grieving monstrously, four. Now, still beautiful, somehow they were only three, and the shock of this new death tore through his mother, left her reeling, overwhelmed by a fury she had not thought would rise up in her again.
She raged at first, wept, stalked the rooms of the palazzo. But gradually all that faded as she retreated into herself. She declined invitations, refused visiting cards. Drew the curtains and sat in dim seclusion, brooding. She would not allow herself to be seen, even by her sister Teresa, even by Don Florio, who called her Beatrice when he thought they were alone. Then, in the late spring, when cholera erupted in Palermo, she fled. She took Giuseppe north, into Tuscany, and later, without informing anyone, she left Italy with her son in tow to visit a sculptor she had known in her youth. That man was Spanish but he lived in those days in the south of France, in a crumbling villa in Languedoc, above a river stocked with eels and a stone windmill and sloping fields of yellow and blue flowers.
Giuseppe’s father did not write. Giuseppe did not know if his parents had loved each other but he supposed it must have been so, once.
The sculptor, whose name was Ferri, drove a straw-filled mule cart into town to greet them at the platform. He was in shirtsleeves and a corduroy waistcoat, chewing at a pipe like a peasant.
Ferri’s grandfather fought with Napoleon in Spain, his mother whispered. But his mother was a countess.
What do I call him? asked Giuseppe.
You call him Ferri, she said. Like everyone else.
Ferri was a giant of a man, with a thick white beard and green eyes and huge hands red with brickdust and heavy as stones. He was much older than Giuseppe had imagined him to be. Ah, Princess, he said, and his voice was like the rumble of a wagon on flagstones. So you have come to Languedoc at last.
Ferri, she replied.
He knotted his eyebrows together, suddenly overcome. And then he stepped forward and bent down and folded her into his arms and he held her a long impossible moment as if she were a child and Giuseppe stood by, his travelling case at his feet, the porter with their luggage peering slyly from the side of one eye.
And this will be Giuseppe, Ferri said at last, releasing his mother. What a handsome boy. You have both been through so much.
She shook her head. I did not think you would have heard.
The whole world weeps for her, said Ferri gravely. And then he took Giuseppe’s case in his big hand and steered the boy towards the cart. We will not talk of it, he said. Not this day. Here, is life. Come, he said in a booming voice to the porter. And then, to Giuseppe: I will show you my trifles and you will tell me if they are worthless or not, yes?
They rode slowly through the countryside while the shadows grew long around them. Ferri spoke softly and slowly and his mother rode beside him with her head leaning into his shoulder and Giuseppe, unhappy, looked away.
In a barn below the villa he walked among Ferri’s sculptures, as if among strange iron trees, studying the twisted figures where they kneeled or leaned impossibly as if into a strong wind, faceless, oversized. There were small angular faces carved out of stone, also, scattered on the floor, and a long plank desk under a window covered with drawings and sketches. In the mornings Giuseppe walked the rocky soil thinking of the Cathars and the crusader knights who had fought there centuries ago. He had not known the south of France before and he found its sun in June milder than Sicily’s. Sometimes he would lie in the tall grasses reading while the insects clicked and buzzed around him. Mostly he waited, watching his mother. Her sadness seemed to settle around her shoulders like a shawl, and this she wore through the rooms of Ferri’s villa and out onto his patio in the evenings with a new kind of grace. She seemed, for the first time in Giuseppe’s young life, older. Each morning Ferri himself would vanish into his studio below the villa and there hammer away at his sculptures through the middle of the day and emerge calmly, rumpled, his beard streaked with dust, into the late-afternoon heat.
You are happy here, his mother said to her old friend one night as they sat out under the stars. The waxing moon a thin crescent high in the west, a warm still air around them.
Giuseppe raised his face, sleepy.
I am happy in my work, said Ferri. I lose myself in it. That is enough.
Nothing is enough for me, she said softly.
It is true, said Ferri.
Giuseppe closed his eyes where he lay on the granite bench, the day’s heat still in the stone.
I do not think I will know happiness again, his mother said. Then she laughed sharply. Listen to me. I sound ridiculous.
You do not.
I do. I have become a figure of ridicule.
Ferri was quiet in the darkness.
But I have missed your friendship, she said. I do not have many friends in Palermo.
You are admired by everyone, Beatrice.
It is not the same. You know it is not.
You have Teresa. She will be suffering too.
Yes. And Maria.
How is she?
Still unmarried.
Ferri gave a low laugh, then stopped. We must be quieter. Your boy is sleeping.
That is not sleeping, said his mother. He heard a rustle of clothes and then felt her sit beside him on the bench, run her fingers through his hair. She said: Giuseppe listens to everything we say. Don’t you, my sweet?
While he crushed his eyes shut and lay very still with the force of his pretending.
One morning in July Ferri took them high into the dry mountains to the east, to a cliff overlooking his villa, where there loomed the black ruins of a Cathar fortress. It had been besieged in the fourteenth century and put to the torch and all of its heretics slaughtered and now nothing stood but tumbled blocks of stone in the long grass, a curved half-wall of a turret at the edge of the drop. He lay out a blanket in the shade and a basket of little sandwiches and a bottle of wine.
There used to be names chiselled into the rock face here, said Ferri. The names of those trapped in the castle. But they’re gone now.
After lunch in the baking heat they lay languid and half sleeping and later Ferri walked them some way through the yellow grass to a stony trail above a defile. They continued to climb. They passed a collapsed well and came to another ruin. The remains of several buildings, close together. Giuseppe stared at the three highest walls that stood yet, their roof gone, charred timbers rotting slowly in the grass, green lizards flickering away in the sunlight.
What was this place? asked his mother, picking her way through the white flowers.
A priory, smiled Ferri. It burned to the ground twenty years ago. It is said this is where the miracle happened. Others say it was witchcraft. I come here sometimes because no one else does.
It is very quiet here, said Giuseppe.
She was called Cleo of Carcassonne, said Ferri. A saint, to some.
His mother shook her head, slowly. The girl who suffered the stigmata?
You have heard of her.
She shrugged. It was talked about in the sermons, at the time. We were warned against, what was the phrase? She turned her wrists, as if to reveal her empty hands. Oh. Inappropriate enthusiasms.
Mm. The church does not like holiness that it is not responsible for.
Giuseppe felt the slow heat on his face and he ran his sleeve over his forehead. It came away damp. High up in the currents he saw a hawk turning and wheeling, unsteady in the sunlight.
She was a fifteen-year-old girl, added Ferri. A postulant. She could neither read nor write. On Good Friday her palms and the soles of her feet started to itch, then turned red. She was found face down in front of the altar with her arms outstretched, her hands and feet bleeding. There was a wound in her side.
She did it to herself? said Giuseppe quietly.
No.
But you cannot believe it, said his mother. Surely not.
Giuseppe drifted back through the rubble and the weeds. He could see behind the sculptor the valley below and the silver river with its trees and the little white villa and barn.
I do not know that it matters, said Ferri. Something happened here, something that could not be denied. The invisible world was made real. That is what interests me.
It is in your art, said his mother softly.
How did the fire start? Giuseppe interrupted. He did not like the way his mother looked at the sculptor.
Ah. Ferri stepped clinking through the charred rooftiles and stood beside him and kneeled down and sifted with his huge hands in the dirt. He said, Three days after the girl was discovered, on Easter Monday, the priory burned to the ground. The nuns all escaped with their lives. The villagers claim the flames were green and died out as soon as the roof of the chapel collapsed. It was said by some that the prioress did not believe the miracle, that the fire was her punishment. Others claimed the entire priory fell under the child’s spell and a holy fire was sent to cleanse it.
Or perhaps somebody overturned a lantern while they slept, said his mother.
Ferri combed his knuckles through his beard and smiled. That is also possible.
Later, Giuseppe would take long walks along the river and through the dry fields, thinking about that day in the mountains, and the priory that was somehow both blessed and cursed in the minds of the living. The villa was often empty during the days. His mother would spend hours in the barn watching Ferri at his labours and later she began to emerge in a robe with her hair loose at her shoulders and he understood, even then, that she was modelling for the artist and that he was not to intrude nor speak of it ever.
It had not occurred to him to wonder at the nature of his mother’s friendship with Ferri. He was still very young, in many ways. All his life he had drifted in carriages and trains from villa to palazzo to hotel to villa, a silent child with bulging eyes clutching a book in his lap, while his mother adjusted her hair and the ribbons at her throat, and he had never wondered at the gentlemen who greeted them at their palace gates, walking alongside the carriage with a hand on the open window. But that summer some part of him started to wonder. He looked at Ferri, standing in the door of the barn, he watched his mother gliding down towards him in the sunlight, and he thought of his aunt murdered by her lover in Rome and he was afraid.
Oh my sweet, his mother said, laughing, when he glared suspiciously at her one evening. Oh do not look at me like that, it is not like that.
But she had laughed too easily, he thought, and the laughter had not touched her eyes.
As the summer deepened into August, he became sensitive to the fact that he was living through important events, events that would affect his mother’s life to come, and so affect his own. He could not have expressed it in this way, not then. But he had learned in some vague manner already, even then, that he was capable of disregarding his own griefs and that by doing so they could be diminished. It had something to do with his shyness, he would come to believe, but also the conceit of a person too comfortable with his own likes and dislikes and who saw no reason to change. He had known for a long time that he was one who could stand in a crowded room and, by artfully arranging his expression, and fixing his gaze on the middle distance, discourage anyone from approaching, and he liked to imagine he could do this with his griefs also. But he could not disregard the grief that burned in his mother.
In the last week of August the heat changed, it flattened and lost its edge and seemed to bake up out of the soil itself. He came down to the barn one afternoon in search of his mother and found the tall doors locked. He could hear low voices within. He stepped back and then, his heart beating very fast, he walked carefully around to the long window.
His mother was seated on a chaise longue that Ferri had carried down from the villa. The sculptor himself sat in a dirty undershirt on a little wooden chair turned backwards, his enormous shoulders hunched, his face slick and red, his forearms crossed loosely over the chair’s back.
His mother was weeping, holding a handkerchief to her nose. I did not warn her, she said. I could have done more.
What could you have done? Ferri said in his low rumbling voice. You know Giulia would not have listened. She was like you, she followed her heart.
It was not her heart she was following.
Well.
He was a worthless man, Ferri. My god. She could not have chosen more unwisely. It is true.
Our little sister begged her to stop. Maria told me the gossip was terrible for her. She said no one would wish to marry her, not after the way Giulia was carrying on.
Ferri cleared his throat. It was an affair, Beatrice. Giulia is hardly the first married sister to carry on. Even in Palermo.
Ah.
I do not mean it that way.
But you are right. I am to blame for that, too.
Giulia is the victim. Paternò del Cugno is to blame. That is all I am saying. Do not let your sister forget that.
Through the dusty glass Giuseppe saw his mother lift her face. It looked naked and wet and raw. She stared at a spot on the far wall.
We conducted a campaign in the press, she said. We tried to make it clear that Giulia was the innocent, that the baron had preyed on her.
And there is truth in that, said Ferri.
Is there?
I know how Giulia was. I remember.
But she wanted him, Ferri. It was indecent. You did not see her.
She did not deserve her death.
His mother glared at her fingers knotting the handkerchief in her lap.
Ferri’s voice was low and pained when he added: Giulia was a light in the world, Beatrice. And that light should not have been extinguished.
I am so angry at her, his mother whispered. I do not know what to do with it.
I know.
Some days I hate her, she hissed, her expression twisting suddenly. I hate her and I am glad she is dead.
Many years later, while brooding in a public garden outside Paris, under a blue autumn sky, Giuseppe remembered those days in Languedoc and the fierce grief that had led his mother there, and in his memories he found something, something he did not know what to do with. His aunt Giulia’s affair had begun, he saw, the very year her sister had starved to death in the ruins of their childhood home. He had not considered before whether loss had impelled her into the baron’s arms. All his life he had believed she envied his mother her own discreet passions, and he had for many years presumed this envy the greater part of her straying. Giulia had wanted, he had thought, some part of what her elder sister had. He wondered now if that were true. Had she known love, with the baron, before darkness infected his heart? Giuseppe’s cane crunched in the gravel where he walked under the bare trees. He wrapped his scarf tighter.
He saw, too, how completely he had tried to avoid a similar fate. All his life he had resisted the kind of consuming passion the Cutò sisters had longed for, had been ruled by, and he wondered now if the events of that spring in 1911 were the reason. The deep feeling he imagined his mother had lived by remained mysterious to him, and without it, he could not know her. He would peer helplessly at her, as if she stood in a mist and he could not quite make out the shape of her within.
He liked to imagine his mother and her four sisters as they were, in their childhood, in Bagheria. The sounds of their laughter in the gardens. The clatter of dishes and the interrupted talk at supper around the table as the girls told breathlessly their day’s adventures. They were children of culture and independent thought and they learned to paint and to play the piano in the ballroom and to sit elegantly for hours in their family balcony at the theatre as the travelling players performed. But later, he imagined, after the lamps had been extinguished, they would whisper and climb into each other’s beds, and act out the strange modern stories they had glimpsed in books printed a world away in Vienna and Paris and London. Together they learned to dance in each other’s arms, to quarrel over the love poems of Petrarch and Dante, to hate the opera as one. In the salons of Paris they stood with their French governesses seeing the bizarre new paintings the critics were calling Impressionism, amazed, and moved. Everywhere the rooms of the world opened around them. They were famously beautiful, sharp-tongued, amusing, very much in love with their own cleverness, his mother the shining beauty of them all. He liked to imagine her, at eleven, perhaps, sitting with her four-year-old sister Giulia at the pianoforte, showing her the keys, laughing as she laughed, the crowns of their two heads leaning in and just touching. That. And Lina, eight years old, with her strong fingers, turning the pages of the score with exaggerated grace as if they were in concert and all the world strained to hear them while Teresa on a divan lifted her face from a book and little Maria, the baby, cried and cried in her bassinet in the sunlight.
But what he liked to imagine most of all was the villa itself, after the sisters had gone into the gardens and a winter light tangled in the empty curtains and the tall doors of the rooms creaked. He would close his eyes and try to imagine the spaces the girls had just been, the hollows in the air.
Their dresses and hats left strewn across their beds, the slow dap of rain starting against the windows of an upper gallery.
The long floors, gleaming in the quiet.
That.
They stayed with Ferri in his villa in Languedoc through the fall and did not return south to Sicily until November.
When they passed through Rome they found a stack of unopened letters curling from the heat, tied with twine, each awaiting reply. These Giuseppe’s mother slit open and slid from their envelopes and read silently on the train as they continued south, her beautiful hands shaking. The news was disturbing. It seemed Vincenzo Paternò del Cugno had not died. He had been in a private hospital recovering from his bullet wound for nine months and had at last been declared fit to stand trial for the murder of Giulia Trigona. The trial would take place in Rome, in the new year, and Beatrice would be required to testify as a witness. Giuseppe folded his knees up onto the velvet seat and lay his head crosswise in her lap and watched the clouds scroll past the rattling windows, feeling the rumble of the tracks coming up from under his mother. He made no sound. His mother’s horror was like a small bell striking in his heart and sound enough for the two of them. He felt her smooth his hair and he turned his face and studied her studying the hills south of Rome, and as they roared into a tunnel the slats of shadow and light flickered over her features and he realized, all at once, that she had forgotten him entirely.
Her calmness surprised him. Ashen, stately, she descended at last from the hired carriage into the courtyard at Via di Lampedusa and put a hand to her hair as if momentarily uncertain of herself, and then she glided past the assembled staff and allowed her husband an embrace and then she went inside. The sky was black, cold. Giuseppe could hear the dogs in the kennel, crying. Languedoc and the sun-browned face of Ferri seemed very far away. What Giuseppe felt was relief. He saw in that moment that some part of his heart had expected his mother to cause a scene, to rail against the baron, to swear and storm that she would not go to the trial, and it occurred to him that he disapproved of his mother’s moods, and this disapproval felt to him like a kind of betrayal. He had already come to the end of his childhood, he would understand later, and those days would mark the end of his first happiness.
The trial in Rome was an ordeal. His mother was required to sit in the courtroom and listen as her sister’s love letters were read out loud. These letters were later published in the newspapers. Paternò del Cugno’s defence painted Giulia Trigona as a woman of poor character, uninhibited, a younger sibling in a family whose beautiful daughters had all suffered from their liberal upbringing and Continental education. It became clear just how passionate Giulia had felt, at one time, about the baron. And his mother’s own marriage came into question; Giulia had written obliquely about her sister’s affections, and these were speculated upon freely by the Sicilian press.
More grievous, for his mother, were the letters between Giulia and the baron after their relationship had soured. She had not known just how threatening Paternò del Cugno had become, how frightening. And she had not realized the deep dread and desperation in her sister. Hearing this read out loud in front of a crowded courtroom, thinking of the private nature of her sister, she wept. Her weeping was illustrated in the newspapers the following morning.
Late in the trial the prosecution walked through the murder as it was understood to have taken place. They did not hesitate to describe in lurid detail the lovemaking between Paternò del Cugno and Giulia. They suggested the fear she must have felt, the impossibility of refusing her angry ex-lover, the implication of rape. They showed the force and strength of the first knifing, how it had fallen on Giulia’s body, when her back was turned, how she had twisted as she fell onto the tangled bed, exposing her throat. How the baron must have climbed atop her to cut her throat. How long she would have taken to die.
His mother did not stay in Rome for the sentencing. She returned to Palermo to meet yet another tragedy. Her youngest sister, Maria, in the shame and grief of their sister’s murder and the horrifying details that had come out during the trial, had killed herself. The funeral was held in a small church in Bagheria, attended only by Giuseppe and his parents. Because she was a suicide, the priest would not permit her body to be buried in consecrated ground, and this cruelty seemed to Giuseppe, because of its pettiness, the most appalling of all.
In the last week of June, 1912, Baron Vincenzo Paternò del Cugno was found guilty of Giulia Trigona’s murder. He was given life in prison, beginning with five years in solitary confinement.
It was finished; it was not finished; there could be no end.
A lifetime later, when his wife had read through his still-unfinished novel she noticed, she hinted to him gently, his fine precision in displaying a complicated person of privilege filled with sadness and hesitation in the face of tragedy. This surprised him. But reading back through the pages he saw that it was true. That his wife, who had fought so bitterly with his mother in life, would recognize any semblance of her in his dignified and sorrowful prince, moved him deeply. He remembered the sweltering station at Palermo when he was fourteen, the crowds of weeping onlookers, and his aunt’s polished coffin, littered with flowers, as it was lifted gently down to the platform. The ripple of winter light in the windows of the railway carriages was strangely beautiful. His father and mother had stood apart, not touching, and he had stared at his mother’s profile thinking she looked magnificent in her sorrow.
None of them could have imagined their lives to come. For her, the long slow return of her sister’s body south to Sicily was, he thought now, like a candle flame going out in a window across the street. Afterwards the darkness within was new and strange and the rooms made darker for the light that had just burned there. But the greater darkness, the darkness without, was no different from before.