The Four Corners of Palermo

by Giuseppe Di Piazza

  “Sophie, you’re the one who’s driving me into the future. We’re going to do things together, we’re going to talk and talk, we’re going to be in love. Do you want a chauffeur?”

  “I already have one.”

  “No, I mean a chauffeur that you can drink. It’s a cocktail that’s called the autista: it’s a strange brew, and they make them right around the corner, behind Piazza Politeama.”

  We wanted to explore each other’s bodies on my super-bourgeois bed; it was something we both wanted, and urgently, but it was two in the morning, I’d been on my feet for eighteen hours, and we decided to wait. The bar was called Al Pinguino—the Café Penguin—a name chosen with an unintentional frisson of situationist provocation, considering that it was in a city where the temperature had never dropped below fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, even during the first Ice Age.

  “Two autisti, if you please.”

  The neon lights illuminated the exhausted faces of two men in their forties, unshaven, with sweaty gazes. They were leaning against the counter, drinking beer and soda pop.

  The barman squeezed lemon juice into two frosted glasses, added some water and two spoonfuls of bicarbonate, and didn’t even need to mix: the foam generated by that mixture overflowed frothily.

  “Two autisti. I hope you enjoy them.”

  Sophie shot me a dubious look. I nodded my head yes. We both threw back our drinks, and I understood from the trust she showed as she drank the concoction that this really showed the possibility of becoming a true love affair. Ten minutes later, we were home. Fabrizio was asleep. We made the noises that two people make when they kiss furiously, with the door still open, undressing each other at random, in the front hall, in the living room, and finally in my bedroom, where Maria, the guardian angel who cleaned and tidied the apartment twice a week, had made the bed. The note from Livia was on the nightstand, folded, impossible to read.

  Sophie had an elastic body, with a curveless silhouette that was reminiscent of the models in paintings by Schiele. Her natural blonde hair color was highlighted with copper, and she almost had the breasts of an adolescent, with light-colored nipples and areolas. It filled me with tenderness to hold her in my arms, her naked essence.

  We made love sweetly, gently, unhurriedly, without any of the urgency we’d displayed as we tore each other’s clothes off, victims of that sense of emergency that two human beings experience in the presence of a dangerous fire. Our early adulthood was burning in that embrace, in that demented feverish quest of the other, and then, in contrast, in that slow, rhythmic movement that joined our bodies in the way we whispered, in the way we arched our backs, offering our belly to the world: that is, she offered her belly to me, who, before her, beneath her, and on top of her, became her world, and in that world we recited the eternal prayer of bodies in search of peace.

  Sophie’s peace came quickly. She cried out something in her language. I right after her, in strangled silence. We lay there motionless, satiated with excitement and deeply moved. I kissed her eyes, I caressed her delicate shoulder blades, her neck—a neck as long as her eyelashes, which only now I was able to see, with our bodies so close to each other, illuminated by the light that filtered through the slats of the shutters. We abandoned ourselves to naked sleep.

  The next morning, when we woke up, Sophie asked if she could bring her suitcase, now parked temporarily at Elena’s house, to my apartment. I told her yes; I loved that gentle girl. I loved her the way you do when you fall in love with someone instantly, enamored in the most refined form of happiness, direct and without mediation.

  I went into the newsroom, and I worked while my mind kept going out to her and wandering back. Her suitcase. What did she have in her suitcase? What does a fashion model take with her when she travels? I didn’t have the slightest idea; she seemed like an alien who concentrated in her body all the beauty and all the loveliness of all the universes of Asimov. I supposed that a fashion model must be detached from all earthly concerns, as distant as a strand of silver tinsel carried off by a gust of wind. I hadn’t understood a thing.

  At work that morning, my boss obliged me to reestablish contact with the control tower on two separate occasions. I was traveling along completely unfamiliar air corridors, I was writing about the Mafia, useless investigations into the car bomb, and the whole time I was thinking about her lips, her taste, the kiss that sex gives and finds, wrapped up in her pelvic thrusts. Sophie controlled her muscles as she pleased; she was an athlete: she danced, she was experienced in runway presentations, and she knew how to master a five-inch stiletto heel. I couldn’t wait to get back to her.

  At three that afternoon I unlocked the front door to the apartment. The place was dark; no one was home.

  I found a note from Fabrizio: “I met Sophie, I made her breakfast. She’s very pretty, especially when she’s drinking coffee, partially naked. You really are a miserable loser. P.S. She says she’s coming back tonight.”

  I called Elena. She didn’t know anything; all she’d heard was that Sophie would swing by sometime that day to pick up her suitcase. Then I tried to get in touch with Paolo. Without luck. I put a record on the turntable: The Wall, disc 2, side A, track number 1.

  Hey you, would you help me to carry the stone?

  Open your heart, I’m coming home.

  I was home. Sophie still hadn’t opened her heart to me, but I wanted her help.

  The afternoon went by quickly, amid a fog of sleepiness with a chemical flavor, heavy as Rohypnol, and a couple of phone interviews that a magazine from up north had asked me to do. I was working from home, in the hope that she’d be there early.

  The doorbell rang a little after seven. Palermo was reddened by a summer sunset, with a clear sky, and a thermometer that read ninety degrees. I opened the door for her. She was wearing loose cotton Bermuda shorts and a knit tank top that covered her small breasts. She smiled at me with glowing eyes, dropped her bag, and kissed me on the lips. I hugged her close.

  “Come on in, Sophie. You want some juice? A ciggie?”

  I helped her stow her suitcase in the bedroom, and she told me that, with Elena’s help, she’d gone looking for work, and that she needed a cold shower.

  “Room temperature,” I corrected her, reminding her that here the temperature was special, feverish.

  She smiled, stripped off everything she was wearing, slipped off her panties, strode naked through the living room and the outer bathroom, went into the kitchen, popped open a beer, and told me a little something about the shop where she’d spent her day: in the four minutes that preceded her shower, I learned that the word “modesty” and the word “model” aren’t to be found in the same dictionary.

  I detected a certain joy in her at being allowed to stay in our apartment, browse through my books and records, with one of Fabrizio’s bath towels wrapped around her hips, naked from the waist up, still wet from her shower.

  “You have some nice music. Have you ever heard of Francis Cabrel?”

  Sure, I’d heard of him. I’d discovered him in Paris four years ago. I had been a student on probation at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, when I was still fantasizing about a future as a linguist. Cabrel is one of those singer-songwriters who in the eighties toyed with women’s hearts. He had a gentle, hoarse voice, he belonged to the purest chansonnier tradition, and he wrote songs for romantic souls.

  Tout ce que j’ai pu écrire

  Je l’ai puisé à l’encre de tes yeux.

  Everything I’ve been able to write

  Was because I dipped my pen in the ink of your eyes.

  I had his first album, purchased in a record shop on the Rive Droite that sold used LPs as well as new ones. I put on track 1, side A. Sophie moved closer to me.

  “Not my eyes, the ink of your eyes, Sicilian.”

  She dropped her towel and we made love in the living room.

  She smelled cool and clean.

  We went out to dinner. On Piazza Marina, in the darkness of the qua
rter known as the Mandamento Tribunali, we found a bistro that a few old comrades from the protest movement had started, people with whom six years earlier I’d founded the first “free radio” in Palermo—and when I say free, I mean free. In just six years, the trajectory from revolutionary to restaurateur had been completed. And to judge from the quality of the eggplant caponata that they were serving, it had ended exceedingly well.

  Sophie ate happily, and we both had beers. She told me all about the oily shop owner Elena had introduced her to. The man had suggested she pose for a clothing catalog he was going to distribute to his regional representatives for all of Sicily. She had shown him her portfolio and he had lingered over the photos in which she was closest to nude.

  “They don’t pay much, but at least …” She never finished her sentence, because I took her hand and kissed it. She repaid the gesture by opening her eyes wide in a look of flattered surprise at finding my lips on her fingers.

  “Let’s go,” she implored.

  We paid a reasonable amount for an open-air bistro with paper tablecloths and waiters who asked you: “What’ll it be for dessert, comrade?”

  It wasn’t easy to explain to her, as we left, that for some people it would always be 1968.

  The newspaper was buzzing with activity. It was 7:30 in the morning, I had no coffee in my bloodstream, and I’d left Sophie still sleeping in the sheets, damp from the night before. It had finally cooled down just before dawn, when my alarm clock had already begun its countdown. I chose to let her sleep, moving as quietly as a cat that wants something; I threw on any old clothes, that is, the same clothes I usually wore, jeans and a light-colored shirt. I put on my Ray-Bans, grabbed cigarettes, watch, and Vespa keys, and went out the door, leaving the most interesting part of me in that bed next to a girl who, with every square inch of her body, asked me, in her sleep, to stay.

  “Sleepy eyes,” Saro ribbed me as he usually did when he saw me arrive at the paper. The smile on my face and my wobbly drunkard’s gait were both glaring admissions of the facts. I replied: “That’s right, my friend, sexy eyes. Worse: the eyes of someone who’s in love.”

  My emotional hangover evaporated on the spot when I stepped into the city newsroom. My boss gave me a scathing glance that lasted three or four thousandths of a second: the longest glance I’d ever received in my life. What had happened? What did he want from me? I could hear three fellow journalists on the phone asking various contacts questions. “Where? The ring road?”

  “When, exactly?”

  “Just who found the armory?”

  “Have you seen the serial numbers?”

  My boss waved me over. I hadn’t even reached my desk.

  “Explosives,” he exclaimed, as if he were saying Buon giorno.

  “Weapons! Get going! As fast as you can! A Mafia arms dump, a veritable armory; there are rifles and submachine guns, half a metric ton of TNT, packets of C4 just like the ones used for the car bomb, semi-automatic pistols. It’s the Mafia’s entire arsenal. Fuck, get moving!”

  He forgot to tell me where; an insignificant detail, an oversight that should never discourage a competent beat reporter. “Where” is something you can always find out; it’s the “why” that’s harder to track down.

  “I’m on my way. When I get there I’ll give you a call. I’ve got plenty of phone tokens; I just hope there’s a phone booth.”

  He shot me one last glance of pity as he tried to calm his nerves by sipping his third triple espresso of the morning, so strong that the sugar wouldn’t even sink to the bottom. I galloped down the stairs two steps at a time, and then went back to the doorman’s enclosure, where Saro informed me: “Ring road, near the exit for Ciaculli.”

  I got back on my Vespa. I buzzed out into a Palermo August in the hot year of 1983, already filled to the brim with adrenaline at 7:30 in the morning.

  Over the next two hours, Sophie shrank in importance to the level of a character out of a book, a literary figure light-years away from the narrative of things that were happening around me, the creation of another author’s pen, in another era, in another novel.

  I handled the emotions of policemen with cocaine-crazed eyes, I saw the thirst for vengeance in the eyes of their chiefs and superior officers, I held an Uzi submachine gun in my hands, I learned the difference between a Thompson submachine gun with a standard barrel and a double-barreled over-under sawed-off shotgun. Truth be told, I didn’t really understand anything much; I limited myself to drafting a journalistic account of a major find. That’s what those years were like: we kept spreadsheets of death, weapons, and none of us were really expected to uncover anything. Investigative journalism was a figure of speech in Sicily in the early eighties. It was a place where Hammett’s red harvest really was a bumper crop of blood.

  That afternoon I got home, exhausted.

  The boiserie was deserted. Sophie had left me a note in French, telling me that she was going back to work for that retailer, at a photo shoot for a catalog.

  She showed up at eight o’clock, with a faraway look in her eyes. She gave me a kiss, accompanied by a limp hug, and told me that she was exhausted. All she wanted was a “room temperature” bath. Her skin was luminous, in spite of the fact that Palermo’s heat had melted her makeup. She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever had eight inches from my heart.

  I waited on her hand and foot for fifteen minutes, helping her to put away the clothes and makeup that she’d brought with her for test shots, then I left her alone in the bathtub, immersed in her weariness, in this new, unfamiliar mood.

  She emerged half an hour later. She asked me about Fabrizio, did I really want to go out to dinner? I told her no, we could listen to music at home.

  “Then help me to relax for real.”

  She begged me to read her French poetry, saying that she found my Italian accent sexy. She chose the poems of Verlaine, the same poems that her mother used to read to her, in Paris, in their apartment in the nineteenth arrondissement.

  She pulled a book out of her bag. I opened it at random. Spleen. I began to read.

  Le ciel était trop bleu, trop tendre

  La mer trop verte et l’air trop doux.

  Je crains toujours,—ce qu’est d’attendre!

  Quelque fuite atroce de vous.

  The sky was over-sweet and blue

  Too melting green the sea did show.

  I always fear,—if you but knew!—

  From your dear hand some killing blow.

  The enchantment of the first day, the first night, the senseless magic of a shared, starry sky: a phantom that materialized then and there, in Verlaine’s poetry, sending a shiver down my spine. I, too, feared some killing blow.

  Sophie fell asleep a short while later. I listened to her breathing: I could spend the rest of my life inside of her.

  The days that followed were a time of nerve-racking routine for me and for her, of spleen à la façon de Verlaine. She went out with Elena, who called me afterward to ask me how things were going with Sophie.

  “I don’t know, we’re still making love, but there are moments when she’s just not there. That girl …”

  “I know; that girl has some black upholstery.”

  She used a metaphor from the world of car interiors, and I silently shared her point. We said goodbye, promising to get together soon, the four of us, including Paolo, who was fighting day by day his senseless war against adulthood.

  We were growing up; we were strong and weak, each to different degrees. Probably Sophie had the highest scores in both rankings.

  Handguns and rifles have always played an important role in my life. My grandfather had a gun shop in the historic district of Palermo, just a short walk from the Borsa, or stock exchange, one of the most magnificent and venerable gun shops in the city. When I was a child, every November 2, on the Day of the Dead, he’d give me an air pistol or an air rifle. I’ve never had a taboo about weapons: I look at them, I caress them, but I don’t own them. I grew
up with the convictions of a pacifist ready to pull the trigger. I believe that many policemen and carabinieri feel the same way.

  In that Mafia armory, where my news editor at the time sent me, I was greeted by the sense of excitement of the officers under the leadership of Commissario Beppe Montana, a young man, intelligent and impassioned. Montana had a feverish gaze, crouching in that culvert that ran under the Palermo-Messina highway, as he was helping his men to pull out the arsenal. We filmed the process with television cameras, and he was happy to let us: in fact, he was a happy man that day. It was a harsh blow to Cosa Nostra; weapons were uncovered that had been used to murder mob bosses and picciotti, but also policemen and judges.

  Commissario Montana then went on to lead the Squadra Catturandi, a select team of Mafia-hunters operating inside the mobile squad. He didn’t lead it long: on July 28, 1985, on a muggy summer afternoon, he was cut down by two killers sent by the Corleonese outside a shipyard in Porticello, a dozen miles from Palermo. He’d gone for a drive with his fiancée and a couple of friends. He was thirty-four years old.

  “I ran away from Paris. There was a boy who was making my life a living hell … Yes, it’s true, I studied under Béjart in Brussels, I paid for the course with a year’s worth of savings: I had worked on two major campaigns, for Jean Patou and Kenzo. My mother told me that I just had to watch out for men, they all think that models are human beings in a display case, souls for sale … she hates the people you encounter in my line of work, especially the ones who buzz around the outskirts. There was one I remember, the assistant to a renowned photographer, an incredibly handsome young man from Lyons, who had just moved to Paris. You know the kind of guy I mean, with dark curly hair and a perpetual scowl? I liked him, he courted me the whole time we were shooting for Jean Patou, he asked me out to dinner, I accepted the invitation, and I accepted the consequences.”