The Four Corners of Palermo

by Giuseppe Di Piazza

  The months she’d spent in Brussels with Béjart had left Elena a legacy: aside from her first bitter aftertaste, she’d made a new friend. One of those friendships that form between shipwrecked survivors, as they cling to the cobbled-together rafts of chance, on the rough swells of growing up; friendships that, if life is generous, can become formative friendships, friendships of passage, friendships for a lifetime. Gifts of fate destined to change us, to make our lives more complete, or, in most cases, experiences of a summer, destined to amount to nothing. That gift with an uncertain future, the night of the tonnara, was holding Elena by the hand.

  “Bonjour, je m’appelle Sophie,” she said in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

  It was night, and the speakers were pumping out impressive bass lines, possibly Greg Lake. It occurred to me that when French people are introduced, they say bonjour even in the dark.

  “This is my friend Sophie, she’s French,” said Elena.

  “Ciao, Sophie, my name is Paolo. They told me that you were Belgian.”

  She had the largest, most expressive eyes I’d ever seen in my life. In the dark, I thought they were a light hazel, or else some color invented especially for her. The proportions of her face emanated a sense of perfection, confirmed by her full, glistening lips, a natural pink, that opened into a smile aimed at Paolo.

  “Je ne comprends pas bien l’italien, excusez-moi.”

  She ran a hand through her short, wavy hair; she turned to look at me, her smile widening as she adjusted her miniskirt with her right hand.

  “Enchanté,” I said, in agony. Then I added my name.

  That girl had immediately taken me to an uncomfortable place, had pushed me into a sense of malaise that, after a day of torment like the one I had just been through, I couldn’t tolerate for long. Back then, I had decided that I had only one technique available to me to fight that sense of malaise within myself, and it was unmistakably derived from Zen Buddhism: I would balance my weight, shifting it back and forth, two or three or ten times, from one leg to the other, until the anxiety went away. I did it, imperceptibly. No good. I tried another approach, saying over and over to myself: she’s another girl on another night in Palermo, she’s another girl on another night in Palermo. Again, no good. Sophie held her eyes on me for three seconds, perhaps because her curiosity had been aroused by my courteous phrase. I found her beauty frightening.

  “Sophie went to dance school with me in Brussels,” Elena explained. “She’s from Paris, she’s a model, and now she’d like a cigarette.”

  I handed her a Camel. She took it and thanked me. She tore off the filter and put what was left between her lips.

  Paolo and Elena went off to get a gin and tonic, while I stayed behind with Sophie to exchange our first few words. The soundtrack was Pink Floyd—Dave Gilmour’s guitar. Behind us was a view of the marina of Vergine Maria, the little wooden launches moored like herringbones, each of them given a name that hearkened back to the Catholic tradition of suffering: Madonna del Dolore, Madre dei Peccati, San Giovanni Decollato—Mother of Pain, Mother of Sins, St. John Beheaded.

  “Why are you in Sicily?” I asked her in the best French I could muster.

  “This summer I didn’t want to do anything, just spend a little time at the beach. Elena told me about her house, her family, the blue of the Aeolian Islands.”

  “So you’re on vacation. Everyone comes here on vacation; I’ve never met anybody who’s come to Sicily for work. Foreigners, forget about it.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I write, and I also present the news on a Sicilian television station. I’m a journalist.”

  I asked if she wanted something to eat, something to drink, or if she wanted to take a little aimless stroll. She smiled for the second time. She said yes to a glass of wine, which I brought her. She asked for another Camel. Then she suggested wandering toward the boundaries of the garden, where the view of the marina was clearer and all-encompassing. Elena and Paolo were behind us, a few dozen yards.

  Sophie had a graceful loveliness that I’d never before encountered in any woman I’d met. Every move she made was the quiet flow of a body on the earth’s crust, frictionless, without wasted energy; every gesture corresponded to a small prayer of perfection, of elegance. I watched her walk before me. Following her was the easiest thing on earth.

  We came to the parapet. Down below us was the marina with its waterfront and its tiny breakwater. I asked her about Paris, where she lived and with whom, imagining her with an array of spectacularly handsome boyfriends, or else perhaps boyfriends who were skinny, angry, and maudit, an assortment of latter-day Pierre Clémentis, unbeatable rivals for people like me, like us—so Mediterranean, so sentimental, so emotional; in any case, boyfriends who were up to her level, who spoke better French than me because, after all, they were French and I wasn’t. In other words, I was curious and, at the same time, I didn’t want to know. She answered.

  “Nineteenth arrondissement, toward the Avenue Jean Jaurès. I live with my mother, just her and me, no papa, no sisters, no brothers. We’re a Norman family, we come from Deauville. No, I don’t have a special love for horses. My mother is a shop clerk. My father abandoned us both when I was six months old, so Maman brought me to Paris. I heard that my father was killed two years ago, in Canada, hit by a truck.”

  I wanted to ask her how there could be so much beauty in her. Luckily, I realized that it was a really stupid question. Beauty is assigned randomly, assembled like the atoms of primordial elements, and it creates miracles or disasters; or else something average, like most of the world, the commonsense middle, average beauty that is like average ugliness, a non-virtue destined to leave traces of itself only in the memories of those who are closest: wives, husbands, sons, parents. Sophie had been favored by chance, and she abounded in beauty. Beauty is the only virtue, as Oscar Wilde said, that needs no explanation.

  There was a sharp contrast between the death around us and the beauty inside us. We were attractive young people, our hair was tousled, we were cheerful, and we were forced to employ our talents in a theater of horror.

  Judge Rocco Chinnici was killed on the morning of July 29, 1983. The Corleonese, under the leadership of Totò Riina, filled a Fiat 126 with TNT, using a remote control to set off the explosive the minute the magistrate walked out the front door of his apartment building, with his police security detail. A Lebanese informant, a narcotics trafficker, had called police headquarters a few days earlier to warn that the Mafia was about to unleash an attack with a car bomb. He said that the target might be Judge Falcone. The police increased the security around Falcone. The Mafia killed Falcone’s boss.

  It was terrible to live in that city; it was terrible, and tragically normal, to die there. We understood nothing of what was going on. We were swept along by a black inertia, which took us around the city, from one of Death’s soundstages to another. In those years, I started to believe that beauty was an antidote to the venom of life: I ingested stronger and stronger doses; I loved beautiful women, and I kept my memories of them, which comfort me in the night when my heart skips a beat. I find, when I think back to all of us back then, that we had a shared sensibility for beauty. There’s an injustice in this thought, I’m well aware of it, just as there was that night at the marina, with Sophie, who was the magnetic north of my existential compass. I was attracted to her because I was attracted to life without death. And Palermo was for the most part murderous, a massacre of bodies, ideas, and hopes. I’d like to say that we were taking high doses of love and sex to conquer our fears. It was the first mass anti-Mafia operation in history.

  We descended toward the stone wharf, leaving behind us the strains of psychedelic rock. Elena and Paolo were talking about hash, how much better Moroccan hash was than Lebanese hash, finally coming to an agreement on the unequaled black Eden of Afghan and Pakistani hash. Sophie cautiously went down the steps, not because of high heels, which she didn’t wear, but because of the da
rkness into which we were descending. Dim lights illuminated the nets hung out to dry near the bollards.

  “È il mare di notte, senti che odore di calma?” I asked her in Italian. “It’s the sea by night, can you smell the calm?”

  She turned around and entrusted me with a sweet glance, and I never knew whether that was out of pure kindness or because she’d inhaled the air and stored up a helping of serenity. The slight sound of the water slapping against the side of the wooden fishing boats added a dose of the surreal to an already surreal setting. It seemed incredible that the little nocturnal paradise that lay before our eyes could be in the same city, the same nation, the same hemisphere where a group of murderers had pressed a button twelve hours ago, unleashing the devastation of people, things, and hopes.

  When we reached the far end of the wharf, we looked out at the line of lights ringing the Gulf of Palermo, the reflection of the sliver of moon on the sea, the faint gleam of the lighthouse that marked the entrance to the marina. The spectacle that stretched out before us was reassuring, and inside of me an electric play was being staged. It was the portrayal of a battle: that morning of death versus the evening’s emotions; the hard edges of reality against the soft soul of another girl on another night in Palermo. I begged myself for a truce and I got it. I no longer felt my weariness, only the desire to be there, safely offshore, gazing back at that young man in red jeans as he wandered through the rubble and the corpses.

  Paolo suggested we lie down and look up at the stars. The stone and cement of the wharf were inexplicably clean, perhaps due to the seawater, which, on the islands, takes the place of absolution and occasionally cleanses things and souls. Elena and Paolo lay down, belly up, making a V with their bodies. Sophie and I imitated them, and we wound up composing an imaginary star; four heads touching: Paolo’s dark, bristly head, Elena’s neat and glistening black hair, Sophie’s blonde locks, and then me, with my tousled dark hair, my tangled beard, my look somewhere between Che Guevara and the Italian actor Massimo Ciavarro.

  A starry silence fell over us. I pointed out Ursa Minor to her, sketched it out in the air; she appreciated the gesture even if I didn’t know how to say “Ursa Minor” in her language. I tried with various complicated loops of words, which made her laugh. The atmosphere was charged with trust and faith. We were in our twenties and Death, that night, at the exact moment when Sophie turned toward me, had decided to forget about me. She looked straight into my eyes: my memory, my five senses were suddenly recalibrated. It was as if a cat abandoned by the side of a road built only for dogs had suddenly come straight toward me in search of protection.

  I once read about Lancelot syndrome, which drives men of all ages to rush to the rescue of any Guinevere who seems to be in danger, whether real or imagined. I didn’t know what kind of Guinevere Sophie might be, and I never even had time to ask: we’d been stretched out on that wharf for less than fifteen minutes, and I knew I had to rush to her rescue. Immediately and for the rest of our lives.

  Elena and Paolo destroyed our star.

  “Let’s go smoke a joint on the Madonna del Lume.”

  It was a fifty-foot boat hauled up on the beach, its hull painted by craftsmen who’d cunningly combined the dark-blue enamels with the yellows, the reds, the greens, the whites, and the blacks. The Madonna del Lume seemed like a piece of avant-garde art. And it was the highest point around, if you left out the villa of the tonnara, where you could smoke a joint.

  “Are you coming? On y va?” asked Elena, straightening her blouse.

  Paolo pulled a pack of blue Rizla rolling papers out of his jeans pockets. My senses were still switched to off.

  I shook my head imperceptibly; only Sophie noticed that movement, and she, like me, had said nothing. We were staring up at the sky.

  “Well?”

  “We’ll stay here,” I said, with that “we” constituting an enormous risk.

  “Yes, we’ll stay here,” said Sophie.

  She smiled sweetly at Elena, seeking understanding, and moved her body closer to mine, transforming our star into a pair of chopsticks—she and I, parallel, two pieces of the same wood, bound together on that wharf by a connection that couldn’t be broken by the simple force of a pair of hands. We stayed there, watching the other stars. I explained to her that in late July you can see the constellation of Leo, a shape that is impossible to recognize unless you have a book with a star chart within reach, a sort of guidebook to the sky in which, along with the shapes of the stars and planets, you could find the best restaurants on Neptune, the better addresses on Mars, the monuments not to miss on Andromeda—in short, all the best places in the cosmos to spend a romantic weekend.

  “Of course, every address is rated, depending on the quality of the service, with a variable number of stars,” I added.

  Sophie smiled, gave me a light slap on the arm with the back of her hand, and then let it rest there, in a contact that became the light switch governing my senses. They had all just flipped to on.

  I brushed my fingers, intentionally, shamelessly, against her tapered hand, the hand of a Russian pianist. I felt the elastic consistency of her skin, the long bones, the delicacy of a palm that I could imagine pressed against my chest, in a caress that I was yearning for but that instead was only a dream. Time stopped and took a rest. She shifted her hips to get closer still: the wait was over. I intertwined my fingers with hers, and she turned over on her side to look at me, looking me in the eye with that gaze of hers, a gaze of lake, sea, and ocean. She slowly moved her face closer to mine, I closed my eyes. And she asked me for a cigarette.

  I decided to inflict some stupid form of death on myself then and there: like eating twenty pounds of U pani ca meusa, or going into an infinite free dive, off Ustica, down down deep, where the brain stops thinking, so that my lungs would pop.

  I gave her a Camel and she raised it to her lips without tearing off the filter. I lit it for her; she took two shallow drags and handed it to me: our fingers never separated.

  She asked me about my work.

  “It’s the kind of work you can only do in Sicily,” I told her. Then it occurred to me that, actually, I was living in a novel by Dashiell Hammett, and that this city wasn’t called Palermo, but Poisonville: a place where everyone died. Always.

  She twisted her fingers in mine. She’d heard about the massacre. She couldn’t understand it.

  “Neither can I.”

  Then I told her about my friend Fabrizio, my roommate. I told her about how our lives were out of sync: how I woke up at dawn and he got up at ten, how I tried to sleep in the afternoon while he studied, how I stayed out late at night and he went to bed early with his girlfriend, at her place or ours, and in any case in one of two nice middle-class apartments.

  My accent was impeccable. I glossed over all the Livias who had passed through our apartment, and through my very comfortable bed, in recent years.

  Sophie had never been tense the whole time I’d known her, more than an hour now. She often smiled at my stories, and her laughter was quick and sharp.

  She crushed out the Camel on the cement of the wharf. She ran a hand through my hair, and my spine responded. I embraced her, and she crushed her body against mine. She was skinny, and she had small breasts that I could feel pressing naked against my chest. The kiss was long and slow; our tongues met in a single conversation, they shared everything, making delicate gestures of approval, admitting that until that moment they’d never heard anything that made more sense.

  We didn’t know much about each other. All we knew was that that evening was the start of something.

  We left together, Sophie and I. She wasn’t used to riding on a Vespa, she didn’t know where we were going, but she entrusted herself to my care, and this filled me with joy. The warm night air tousled her short hair; we forgot about Paolo, Elena, and Totino’s rock music, we forgot about all the constellations that now seemed to glitter in our eyes, in our hands. She had her arms wrapped around me, clutc
hing me in a way that was at once instinctive and asphyxiating, on the first scooter ride of her life.

  “Where I come from we take the metro,” she whispered in my ear.

  “Luckily we don’t have a subway here: you’ll have to keep your arms wrapped around me until we get to my house, which is just on the other side of London. It’ll take us, oh, two years.”

  Sophie liked my mix of French and Sicilian, and I was improving in my comprehension of her Norman French. We sailed past Piazza Politeama, which had not yet been defiled by its yellow anti-fog streetlights, designed to fight a fog that Palermo will never see. I slowed down and told her that the perfume she was wearing was a foretaste of paradise. She replied that she never wore perfume.

  “Disappointed?”

  “I don’t know anything about women.”

  “That’s not how it looks to me: you’re driving me all over Palermo just two hours after we met.”