Storytelling

Sicilian Lessons

 
Via Montecastro c.1980 – a street with an ancient castle on one end, a medieval church on the other, and once the neighbourhood of Milazzo’s marginalised

If you're a good listener, people tell you things. Travelling gives you a good chance to develop the art of listening, and then store the story in your imagination to transform into something else. 

Running a restaurant in a small seaside town in Sicily made me privy to all sorts of stories and secrets, some of which found their way into Sicilian Lessons, but the biggest trigger for this book was Aurora Sissini, an amazing woman who lived most of her life on Via Montecastro. "Ha visto di tutti colori" is the local expression, or in other words, she went through a lot in her long life, from experiencing the Allied Invasion during the second world war to surviving relationships (with her mother, and her husband) steeped in ancestral jealousy. 

Sicilian Lessons is also a loveletter to Sicily: despite the frustrations and contradictions of daily life, it never ceases to inspire me.

What it's about:

Milazzo,1978: 

Sixteen year old Vincenzo, an outsider struggling to get over his mother’s murder, dreams of leaving his town where unspoken codes of practice still rule. But having no contacts means no university, no writing career, and being forced to take over his alcoholic father’s carpentry business on Via Montecastro.

When gutsy Rosa arrives in Sicily from the USA for her grandmother's funeral, she discovers that she has unexpectedly inherited her house. Determined to know more about her father's homeland and the grandmother she never met, Rosa will have to overcome a series of challenges to the life she has always taken for granted if she really wants to get to know Sicily.

Agata grew up on Via Montecastro. Desperate to overcome a cycle of childhood abandonments and escape her mother’s possessiveness, she married aged 17, as Italy entered WW2, only to discover that her passionate but jealous husband had his own ideas about his wife's role. Now in her 60s, and with unsettling insights into wartime Sicily involving US collusion with the mafia, Agata is the key to Rosa’s inheritance and Vincenzo's future.

A compelling tale of jealousy and abandonment, family bonds and loss, Sicilian Lessons takes us from pre-war Sicily to the turbulent summer of 1978, offering a thought-provoking portrait of twentieth century Sicily.

SICILIAN LESSONS

Chapter 1

VINCENZO

Sicilian lesson Nunero Uno: Never trust the official version.

July 1978

People come out of their houses to stare after her. Old Menico sets down the straw seat of the chair he’s weaving, tells his brother there’s an event on the street. Out of his pocket comes the marranzanu, its heralding mouth harp twang. The three Wise Men, the elderly spinster sisters who live at number 20, exit their hovel as fast as their six short legs can carry them. The best thing of all: the girl seems completely unaware of her admirers.

Out of the blue she calls to me, asks if I knew the people who lived at number 21. Me, Vincenzo Tesoriero! Doesn’t she know that no one talks to me anymore? It’s been four years since anyone addressed me with that kind of spontaneity, since I’ve wanted to talk to anyone about anything. But it’s not every day you find a beautiful tourist on your street, at least not in a town like Milazzo. And certainly not on Via Montecastro, a potholed ruin of a street inhabited by undesirables like my pa.

“I’m sure I just saw il nonno,” I told him at lunchtime.

As soon as I spotted the stocky figure of my grandfather at the fishing port I jumped on my bike and cycled home as fast as my legs could pedal.

Pa froze for an instant – but not because of what I’d said. The fact that I was actually speaking to him at all will have floored the old bastard.

He grunted, without turning round from the sink. “Where’d you see him?”

“So it was him.”

Pa put down the fish he was scaling, wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

“What’s he doing out?” I persisted.

The hunched, hairy shoulders stretched the once-white vest upwards in one of pa’s habitual modes of communication: the shrug.

“Good behaviour. Contacts. Dunno, haven’t seen him yet.”

He still hadn’t met my eye.

“Good behaviour? Contacts?” I hissed. “How is it possible?”

Pa flinched at the fury on my breath. I stood closer to him than I had in years, close enough to smell the stale alcohol and cigarettes.

“How the hell is it possible?” I repeated, challenging him to meet my eye, acknowledge the unacknowledgeable.

As usual, silence. He picked up the seabass and – slick-slick – scraped the scales away.

I slammed the door behind me and grabbed my bike.

Her eyes are blue as the sky. American. She is so innocent, so out-of-place, here, on Via Montecastro. What made her ask me, the reassuring familiarity of the bike? Pa gave it to me four years ago, for my twelfth birthday. It was not so much a gift for me, as for himself. He told me to stay as far away from him as possible, to speak to him as little as possible and to fend for myself.

I forget to answer so the girl rephrases her question, asks if I live nearby.

“This is my street,” I find myself saying. Suddenly words are hard to come by.

“Your street? Are you the owner of Via Montecastro?” she jokes, wiping beads of sweat from her forehead. “Do you know anything about a certain Giovanna Maio who lived at number 21?” 

The old ruin at 21: where I used to play hideout with mamma when I was little.

A month before I turn twelve, mamma is hanging out the washing in the yard while I drink milk she warmed for me for breakfast. Pa isn’t at home, he’s probably snoring in a drunken stupor at grandfather’s house.

A rocket sounds, and the cotton sheets cutting white pages out of the summer sky are suddenly splashed with blood. Mamma falls, pulling rose-spattered sheets to the ground. The air echoes with the shot while heavy footsteps hurry away.  

A look of doubt spreads across the American’s fine features. “You are too young to remember.” Her old Sicilian dialect sounds funny.

“I think this house used to be a brothel,” I reply, just to show her I’m not too young.

The girl looks aghast. “A brothel? Are you sure?”

“Well, let’s ask someone who is old enough to remember.” Menico is still hanging around, having offered her a glass of water. He knows everything. 

“No, the house next door was a brothel,” he says. “The Argentinian’s wife lived here.”

“Was she called Giovanna Maio?” asks the American.

“Maio?” Menico screws up his eyes at the ruins as if the name might be inscribed in the foundations. “A muglier du argentinu,” he repeats, with a shrug.

“Shall we ask those old ladies?” The girl points to the three Wise Men hovering outside their house in descending height order – small, smaller and smallest.

Menico spits on the ground. “They won’t know any more than me. Everyone on the street is known by their nickname. So I can’t say if the woman’s name was Maio. This is where the Argentinian’s wife lived,” he repeats, doggedly. “But she’s been dead, what’s it, about five years.” He clears his throat and spits on the ground again.

The American girl flinches as if the spittle struck her face. She has a defeated look now, pink cheeks, tired eyes.

Menico walks off with his short little duck steps. But halfway across the cobbles he turns. “Come to think of it, her daughter lives in that house.” He points towards number 8, further down the road. The shutters are closed and covered with a layer of brown sirocco dust.

“Do you know her name?” asks the girl.

Menico stares at her as though she were stupid. “A figghia du Argentinu,” he says, slowly – the Argentinian’s daughter. Satisfied at his recollection, he adds, “But she won’t be back until the end of August. She’s in Turin with her children. Goes every year to get away from the heat.”

The American looks like she’s had the wind taken out of her sails. I’m pleased I proved my point: Menico told her all she needed to know.

“She’s Signora Amato,” I find myself saying. “I can introduce you to her, if you like. How long are you staying?”

Since when did I become so urbane?

“I’ll still be here,” she says. “I’ll be here until early September. I just thought we were going to solve this little mystery.”

She shakes her head, as if banishing a thought. “Right then. That’s that.”

 

Pa reeled in and out of my days reeking of drink. Then one day he was nowhere to be found. Grandfather too, disappeared. My uncle Ciccio and his wife Nuccia looked after me for a while. They had a small house down at the fishing port, Vacarella, where all the fishermen lived. They also had four children under the age of eight and I knew I was another mouth to feed. Bed was a mattress on the kitchen floor. Aunt Nuccia tucked me in every night muttering prayers over my head in the darkness. When she and zio Ciccio went to bed she’d tell him in loud whispers what the fishermen’s wives were saying. I learned that they had no idea where pa was. I also heard how he used to go round to grandfather’s house shouting that his wife was a puttana, a whore, out gallivanting from dawn until dusk.

I knew for a fact that was untrue. Mamma was the Italian teacher at the Classical Lyceum until she got married, when the law obliged her to give up her job. Pa’s once successful joinery business suffered during his drunken bouts. So mamma found ways to earn money. She gave private lessons to kids who were behind at school. She went out every afternoon with her bicycle, cycling from lesson to lesson. There is no way she was a whore. She was more like a saint, to put up with a man like my pa. Every son thinks his mother is beautiful, but in my town, everyone thought Francesca Zirilli was beautiful. That got to a jealous man like my pa.

Vacarella was a hotbed of gossiping fishwives, a picturesque slum of homes tumbled one on top of the other. Men mended nets and played cards under the shade of magnolia trees. Women gathered on doorsteps to pick up cuttigghia: pregnancies outside wedlock, affairs and elopements. I couldn’t stand the pity in the dark eyes that followed me down the street. The scandal scorched their breath before I’d turned the corner.

Who to trust?

Silence became the refuge from the storm in my heart.

 

Americana scuffs the ground with her toes and looks around, shading her face with her hands.

“I don’t suppose you know anything about the castle?” She jerks her head towards the huge bastion blocking the sky at the end of road.

I nod.

“Well, what about a guided tour?”

 It takes me a split-second to decide: “Ammonini – Let’s go.”

For the first time in years I feel curious enough to talk to someone. Unused to stimulation, my brain is slow to find words. Where are you from, what are you doing here, where are you staying? The American girl doesn’t help, staring ahead at the citadel.

“This is the Spanish fortress wall,” I say, in the end.

“Wowwww.” She hangs on to the vowels for what seems like forever. “And this big tower?”

“The bastion of Santa Maria.” I push aside the iron barricade. “Built by the Spanish in the sixteenth century.”

“So it had a Spanish king?”

“Domination.” No princes and princesses here, Americana. “Norman, Aragonese and Spanish dominations, among others. It’s always been a fortress because of its position on the cliff top.”

“Don’t we have to pay?” She hesitates, looking for a ticket office, before we enter the gloom of the tunnel in the fort walls.

“Pay? It’s not open to the public – for tourism, if that’s what you mean. It’s just – here, like it’s always been.”

“So we can just stroll into this ancient castle,” she murmurs. Passing through the archway to the bastion’s entrance chamber, she examines the wall, the vaulted ceiling, an unhinged trapdoor at the back.

“Where does it go?” She peers through the opening.

Without a torch it’s hard to see, but I know this place like the back of my hand. Mamma and I used to come here exploring. It was my den after she was killed. I spent entire days here – long black days – until one morning Signora Amato showed up at my house with a journal.

“Hmm?” Americana looks at me enquiringly. I must have spoken aloud.

“Locals hid here during air raids in World War Two.” I don’t mention that it was the Americans who did the bombing. “Signora Amato, the lady you need to speak to, could tell you about that, she was here in the war.”

“Wow,” she murmurs, looking serious.

Outside, the sunlight is blinding. The full force of the midday sun beats down on our heads. We walk uphill to the Duomo Vecchio, the seventeenth century cathedral, but it’s locked.

The American girl sinks down on the cathedral steps in the only square metre of shade in sight. “Fa caldo – it’s hot,” she sighs, wiping perspiration from her brow.

I’m sweating too, but in panic. The tour can’t end like this: she’ll go home, I’ll never meet her again. There’s so much more to see. The oldest part of the castle, the Arab-Norman tower, lies within the Aragonese fortification at the top, but we aren’t going to make it there now. I need to impress her enough to make her come back.

“You want to know a secret?”

“I’m listening,” she says, propping up her chin with her hands, elbow on her knees. Her eyes brighten. I’ve regained her attention.

“OK. The official version is that prisoners were excavating the ground outside that wall.” I point to the Aragonese boundary wall towering over a thicket of olive trees and cacti. “Twenty centimetres deep, they found a rusty man-sized cage.”

“An iron maiden?” The American’s eyes are huge.

I nod. “Inside the cage there was the skeleton of a soldier. His lower legs and his hands were missing.”

“Awesome,” breathes the American. “How come his limbs were missing?”

“My maternal grandfather knew what really happened, he was the one who discovered the skeleton first.”

She watches me, one eyebrow raised, a half-smile hovering on her lips as if she doesn’t quite believe me.

“He and his friends used to hang out here because they lived nearby at the cape. One day they were playing in the undergrowth, when my grandfather fell over a rusty bar poking out of the earth. They dug and pulled at it until the whole cage came free – and the skeleton was intact. But the cage rolled down the slope – and the limbs broke off. They were afraid of getting into trouble with their parents, or the authorities. So they hid it right back where they’d found it, and never said a word when it was discovered.”

Americana whistles. “Really? Did they get found out?”

“No; the funny thing is, historians and archeologists come here regularly to ponder the question of the severed limbs. They suggest it was punishment for desertion.”

“You might be making it all up.” She frowns at me, gone all serious.

“Not me, Americana. I’ve got my facts straight. It’s the official version you can’t always trust.”

Her eyes narrow, as if she doubts what I’m saying. She’s probably a model US citizen who never questions anything about her country. That’s Sicilian lesson number one: Never trust the official version.

She changes tack. “Imagine: his ghost must walk the castle.” Her eyes light up with a spark of adventure. Perhaps I’ve underestimated her.

“He’s not the only one,” I say. “Next time I’ll tell you more.”

“Next time,” says Americana, half to herself, “I’m not going out in midday heat. Fa caldo assai.” She puts one hand to her forehead.

I smile at assai, so Sicilian in the mouth of this blond foreigner. It is hot, I never go out at this time of day in August.

“I’ve got to go,” she says. “The train leaves soon. I’m staying in Baccialona,” she adds, by way of explanation.

 “OK, but first you have to tell me something,” I say, leading the way back through the cool tunnel in the fort walls. “What does awesome mean?”

“It means fantastico. We say it a lot.”

I smile. She’s used assai again, for a lot. “And you’re going to have to update your Italian. Your dialect is stuck back in the ‘40s.”

“So that’s why people keep laughing at me. It’s the way my uncles and my dad speak back home.” She chuckles to herself, then gives me a direct look. “Are you going to be my teacher as well as my tour guide?”

Is she serious? So we’re going to meet again? I feel like I’ve passed a test.

“I’ll pay you, of course.” She looks worried, misinterpreting my silence.

“I don’t want your dollars,” I reassure her. “But I could do with some English lessons.”

Mamma used to teach me English. She said it was the key to getting out of here. And there is nothing I want more, than to get out of this place. There’s no way I’m hanging around to take over pa’s joinery.

“It’s a deal,” says the American girl, shaking my hand with a firm grip. “By the way, my name’s Rosa.”

“Vincenzo.” With the touch of her long American fingers, sticky with sweat, the full importance of meeting her hits me. For a start, she’s got me talking again. Even telling stories.

“So, what else do you want to know?” 

“How much time have you got, Vincenzo?” She smiles.

“All the time in the world.”

As if anyone’s expecting me home. When she smiles, her blue eyes shine like stars in her tanned face.

“And don’t forget Sicilian lesson numero uno,” I call to her as she walks off down the hill.

“What’s that?”

“You must never trust the official version.”

“Right, got it,” she grins, parroting back to me: “I must never trust the official version.”

She’s going to be here all summer. She’ll learn.

 

One sunny August day, pa reappeared. I was shelling borlotti beans at my aunt’s kitchen table, their red and white pods splayed across the table.

Deliberate footfall paused outside the door. Pa. Through the half-open shutters I saw the midday sun cast his shadow dark on the ground next to my uncle, who was mending a fishing net. A few seconds passed without either of them exchanging a word. Then Zio Ciccio nodded towards the door.

Pa lurched in without looking at Zia Nuccia, whose face had turned sad.

“Ammonini, let’s go.” His clothes were dishevelled, his hair wild, there was a faltering quality to his speech. I was reminded of a floundering ship.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked.

He didn’t meet my eye, just waited for me to collect my books then accompanied me up the hill to our house in silence. He must have been back a few days. The air was stale and smelt of alcohol. Bottles of cheap wine lay on the floor near, but not in, the bin. A toolkit from the joinery was on the table, half-open.

I heard that grandfather was convicted of manslaughter. When I asked pa about it, I met a void. I stopped asking about mamma’s murder because I got silence in return. No point in asking questions – no one ever told you the truth anyway. The bike was my freedom. Who knows where he got it, all his money went on drink. I cycled to school in the morning and stayed out of the house till dark. It wasn’t home anymore. Mamma was gone. And pa, if he was around, was drunk.

Zia Nuccia visited when she knew he wasn’t in, took a broom to the floor and washed it. She cooked up what food she could find so I would have a meal that would last a few days. Mamma’s friends looked out for me too. Every day the bread man left a loaf in a brown paper bag, the milkman, a bottle with a stone over the top to keep pigeons off. Once a week, I found a crate of vegetables from the grocer. I’m sure they weren’t paid for. Fish appeared on the doorstep, sea bass or mackerel I’d trip over when I left for school. I knew it was zio Ciccio.

 

The only person who spoke about it all directly – who dared mention my mamma, was Signora Amato. Mamma used to visit her when pa was out on one of his drinking binges. She said that kind lady kept her sane.

One morning Signora Amato appeared at the kitchen window with a book in her hand. She asked if she could join me at the table.

“Your mother,” she said, smoothing her grey hair back from her face, “was beyond your pa; he couldn’t understand her. But you mustn’t blame him, you know. He misses her terribly even though it doesn’t seem so.”

She looked me squarely in the eyes. “You're like her, Vincenzo, you have the same spirit.” A pause, and then: “Some people are just not meant to be with us very long in this world. I had an aunt like that.”

She pushed the book across the kitchen table. It was a journal of blank sheets the colour of sand.

“Thank you,” I murmured, feeding the rough grain of the pages through my fingers. Despite my best efforts not to cry, a tear dropped onto the page and made a big, wet blotch on the paper. Signora Amato had the delicacy not to notice.

“Stay in touch with your mother, mi raccomando,” she said. “Write to her a little every day.” 

I followed that good lady’s advice. Every night when the moon appears to beat a silvery path to my window across Milazzo bay, I record my thoughts for mamma, thoughts borne out of the huge injustice of her death. When I finish writing I feel like she is saying, Va bene, Vincenzo, with her cool hand on my forehead. And then I believe things will work out one day.

Mamma left me too soon, but I know she would want to know what is going on. Especially now that the American girl has appeared on Via Montecastro, long blond hair swinging down her back.

Manna fallen from the skies on my sixteenth birthday. The same day that grandfather is released from prison. There has to be something in that.

 

 

My first novel, Water Will Find its Way, is available on Amazon