The Four Corners of Palermo

by Giuseppe Di Piazza

  “The police are investigating. I’m just a journalist.”

  “They’ll never find out anything. They don’t care enough. But I need to know.”

  “I understand: the pain a daughter would feel …”

  “You don’t understand. It’s not just the pain. My mother says that this is an enormous disgrace. But I want to understand what was such a big disgrace. A person has to know why. It’s the only way that I can ask forgiveness.”

  She picked up her purse. She opened it and pulled out a handkerchief: her eyes were dry, but she’d gotten it out just in case.

  “Why do you have to ask forgiveness?”

  “I don’t know. But taking a father’s head off takes the children’s dignity with it.”

  I was starting to understand.

  Then she added: “And I want it back, my dignity. I’m eighteen years old; one day, perhaps, who knows when, I want to get married myself. Who’s going to marry the daughter of the guy whose head they cut off?”

  I looked at her fondly. A girl dressed in mourning, nicely made up, had come to me in search of the dignity that a headsman’s ax had robbed from her. I thought of the despair inhabiting a city where lives ripened like this, the pain of a daughter who couldn’t simply mourn her murdered father, but was also forced to worry about the need for social redemption that such an atrocious death imposed upon her. I hated those mean streets, those cruel codes of behavior, that violence.

  I walked over to her. I’d been silent, and the absence of words had defused the dramatic nature of the situation. Her mouth was quavering faintly. She might have felt like crying, but she didn’t.

  My fingers brushed hers.

  “All right, Rosalia: I’ll help you. Even if the police won’t do anything, I’ll give it a try.”

  It was she who took my hand. She squeezed it until it hurt; she bit her lower lip until it turned pinker still. Then she let me go. She put her overcoat back on and headed down the stairs.

  “Come to my apartment in half an hour,” she said as she was leaving. “My mother’s gone out with my sister: there’s something I want to show you.”

  At the front desk we ran into the news editor. He looked us up and down.

  “Life is good, eh?”

  The stupidity of that wisecrack crashed helplessly against the gaze of her black eyes. She wasn’t a pretty girl paying a call: Rosalia was the victim of several millennia of Sicilian ideas. But then, how could he know that?

  She refused to come with me on the Vespa.

  “I’ll see you there; I’ll take the bus.”

  Of course, I got there before she did. I waited a few doors down the street, leaning against the wall. Via Perpignano was a main thoroughfare channeled, rushing, through a narrow alley, an artery choked by the city’s massive cholesterol. The cars were inching forward in single file, bumper to bumper, from both directions. A Fiat 128 tried to get through ahead of an Alfa Romeo 1750 that was turning off Palermo’s ring road, the Circonvallazione. The two cars faced off, radiator to radiator. The two drivers shot each other frosty glares: neither of them said a word. They sat there in silence, both gripping the steering wheel white-knuckled, as if fighting telepathically. Neither wanted to fight: each just wanted to win. I pondered the fact that in the streets of Palermo, no one started a fight, for the simple reason that if a fight were to break out, someone would inevitably be killed. And no one was really willing to commit murder over a traffic jam. Back then, there were so many other more respectable opportunities, such as heroin smuggling, the arms racket, robberies, the gang war for Mafia supremacy, crimes of passion, exemplary punishments. Cars were like dumb, useful mules, and nobody was willing to kill for a mule’s sake.

  From Piazza Principe di Camporeale I saw the silhouette of an oncoming bus, the same one Rosalia had boarded. It stopped fifty feet away. She got out, tightening the belt around her gray overcoat, opened the door to her building, and, as she closed it behind her, shot me a glance. I was going to have to wait a few minutes before going upstairs. I saw the bus speed away, rocking wildly, narrowly missing a balcony.

  The door clicked open.

  I found her framed in the doorway, her eyes blacker than the darkness.

  “Come here and I’ll show you.”

  I followed her into her bedroom. Two beds, side by side. She sat down on the bed by the window; I heard the noise of cars going by on Via Perpignano.

  “How can you sleep with this racket?”

  “It’s the noise of my whole life. We’ve always been here.”

  From a drawer in the nightstand that separated the two beds, she pulled out something small, wrapped in a rag.

  “My father gave this to me a month ago.”

  She pulled open the rag and I saw a gold chain, marine link, heavy, glistening: it looked new.

  “I cleaned it myself; it’s my dowry.”

  The chain had an oval pendant, also gold. I turned it over: it was a reproduction of a woman’s leg, in low relief.

  An ex-voto.

  “Rosalia, do you know what this is?”

  “A leg, what else would it be? My father gave it to me because he used to say that I had the most beautiful legs on earth.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  “One morning, he came home from work with two watches and this necklace. He never told us where he’d been. He always said the same thing: just don’t worry, I’ve been careful. One time he brought Mamma a blender with a big glass jar. It needed cleaning. The night before, someone had made fava bean soup in it, and once the beans are dry they’re almost impossible to get off.”

  I examined the pendant more closely. I’d seen something similar once at the sanctuary on Monte Pellegrino. Actually, hundreds of similar things. Lots of people left phrases of gratitude next to their ex-votos—for grace received—so that anyone who wanted to know could read about the family’s devotion to the Santuzza.

  Saint Rosalia.

  “This is a copy of an ex-voto.”

  She twisted her full lips in a quizzical grimace: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That the night he gave you this necklace, he took it from someone who may have left an ex-voto to Saint Rosalia. An ex-voto for a grace received. Someone who might have also written their name on it. That’s the only hope we have of finding the rightful owner of this necklace; this is our one chance of understanding why what happened happened.”

  The girl nodded. She wrapped the necklace in the rag, put it in her gray purse, and said to me: “Let’s go there now.”

  It was almost dark.

  “No, Rosalia. At this hour, the sanctuary is already closed. I have to go home, and your mother and sister are probably on their way home, too. Let’s do it tomorrow. I’ll come pick you up in the morning on my Vespa at Piazza Principe di Camporeale: eight o’clock, at the bus stop.”

  She put down her purse. She said: “All right.” Her eyes were midnight black, her pink lips illuminated that beautiful face of hers in the dim light.

  She saw me to the door. We didn’t touch; our two ciaos hung in the air.

  When I got home, the apartment was cold. The aromas that came from the kitchen seemed like a spicy breeze wafting toward me. Oregano.

  “Ciao, amore mio,” Lilli whispered, placing her lips on mine. “I’m making a breaded roast, the arrosto panato.”

  She was wearing an apron with a tuxedo print that made her look both funny and sexy at the same time.

  “Where’s everyone else?”

  “They went to get a glass of wine from Di Martino. They’ll be back soon. I told them I was making a roast.”

  She went back into the kitchen. I tagged along behind her, embracing her from behind, hugging her tight.

  “You know there’s meat in the pan,” she warned me.

  “Turn the flame down low, you can turn it off if you want. I need you now.”

  She turned off the stove and turned around. Our fingers knit together down low, our hands on her
hips, our mouths came together completely breaded, like tender, juicy roasts. A kiss that tasted of oregano and sweetness. A kiss long enough to study the way we were, to tell each other about our days. A kiss that we’d all like to give and receive, every day, when the lights go down low.

  Lilli rested her head in the hollow of my shoulder. I smelled the perfume of her hair. I kissed her gently, the way you might kiss a newborn baby.

  “Amore mio,” I whispered to her.

  She smiled at me and pulled away.

  “I have to finish the roast: the others will be back soon.”

  She turned the flame back on under the skillet, to low, and resumed cooking the four veal chops that she’d dipped in oil and then in a breading flavored with salt, pepper, and oregano. It had to cook excruciatingly slowly, to keep from burning the breadcrumbs.

  I changed into a blue crewneck sweater. I looked for some wine and found only a bottle of “black” Pachino without a label. I’d bought it with Fabrizio at a winery near Ragusa, on a road trip the previous summer.

  “Lilli, you want a glass?”

  I heard her say yes just as Serena and Fabrizio came in.

  “Ciao, journalist,” Serena said, shaking out her dark hair, which had been flattened by the motorcycle helmet. The two of them were the only people in Palermo who wore helmets. “Fabri, look what’s happened to my hair,” she pretended to cry.

  He tousled her ridiculously flat hair, which looked as if it had been licked by a large cow.

  “You’re beautiful all the same.”

  It was the truth.

  “Lilli told us that she was making arrosto panato, and she kept her promise,” said Fabrizio, sniffing the air in an exaggerated fashion.

  It was a simple evening. I just wanted to avoid thinking about Rosalia’s fears. Serena pulled out Scrabble; I put a Paolo Conte record on: we tried playing with nothing but words from his lyrics. Fabrizio won with a stunning laydown of “barbarica.” Nine letters. So long that it wasn’t even covered by the rules.

  Cicova was on the sofa, in a drifting dream state, purring. I thought of a phrase that a classmate of mine in high school, a young woman, had copied into my desk diary. She told me that this was something I should learn by heart: “I want in my own home: a wife of sound reason, a cat among the books, friends in every season, without whom I cannot live.” It was a French poem. That night I understood its meaning.

  Later, in bed, Lilli told me about a comic book that she was carrying in her toy store. A monstrous and invincible superhero called Goldrake—known in English as Grendizer. He rocketed through space, fired rays from his body, and wore a mask that struck fear into villains throughout the universe. She told me that the kids only wanted his books, his action figures. She had to stock Goldrake in her shop, but she found those products repellent.

  I tried to comfort her: “The whole world is changing. Don’t you go changing, too, please.” She kissed me lightly. I wrapped my arms around her; her feet were cold. She turned around and we spooned together, her legs pulled up so the bottoms of her feet pressed against my thighs: I quickly warmed her up. She fell asleep with my hands wrapped around her chest like a bra.

  I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept seeing Rosalia’s face at the paper that day, her stifled sobbing. She was asking me for justice and that was something I couldn’t give her. I felt Lilli’s warmth beside me as she breathed quietly, fast asleep. The two women were opposite extremes. Two young women at the antipodes of life in Palermo, alternate faces of a city that was splitting me in two. One and the other. Dark Rosalia, fair Lilli. The complexity of a life based on honor, balanced against the simplicity of a quiet existence, simple sentiments, tenderness, and cold feet.

  I lived in that chaotic equilibrium that comes from being around two women very different from each other. I could easily have loved them both, if I’d only had a second life to live. But then and there I knew I couldn’t do it; I knew that my place was in that perfect fit that Lilli’s body created with mine. Rosalia was the mirror in darkness, the reflection of another life, the need to be a man.

  I fell asleep imagining myself in a fitting room at the shop of my father’s tailor. I was looking at myself in the triple mirrors. In the central mirror I saw myself, in a navy-blue jacket; in the left-hand mirror I saw Lilli, nude; in the right-hand mirror, Rosalia, dressed in mourning.

  The sky was streaked with dark clouds; this promised to be a tough morning. The cold winter air weighed down upon the city, as if it had been unloaded by a gantry crane from a container ship. I shivered during the short Vespa ride from my house to the newspaper. It was seven in the morning. I knew that right then Lilli and Cicova were both stretching and yawning; soon they would both fall asleep again.

  Saro welcomed me with his usual greeting: “Sleepy eyes, sleepy eyes.” I said nothing. “Chilly eyes, or eyes of love,” I would have liked to say to him. I just smiled: I was shivering with cold and in a wintry mood.

  I went to my desk and saw my boss lighting an MS cigarette. I tried to guess how many espressos he’d already thrown back, how many cigarettes he’d already sucked down. I waved my hand deferentially in his direction: in the morning at the paper, chitchat really was cut to the bone.

  He let me take off my dark-blue jacket, get comfortable, open the morning paper—the large-format daily that had five times our circulation. Then he said: “Come here, let’s talk about that head.”

  “Today I ought to find out something more. I’m going up to Monte Pellegrino.”

  “Bravo, maybe the Santuzza will grant you a grace and provide you with a scoop.”

  “There’s something important I need to check out …”

  “Something important you can’t tell me.”

  “That’s right. Let’s just say I’m superstitious. But I promise, the minute I know something for sure, I’ll look for a phone …”

  I ran to my desk, grabbed cigarettes, ballpoint pen, lighter, and notepad, shoved everything into the pockets of my jacket, and headed straight for Piazza Principe di Camporeale. I had time for a cup of coffee and a cigarette under the portico. Fifteen minutes of peace.

  At 8:00 a.m. I parked my Vespa thirty feet from the bus stop and settled down to wait for Rosalia. She came toward me, wrapped in her gray overcoat, her hair pulled back, wearing a pair of dark pants and low-heeled shoes. Her face was free of makeup, and she looked around her, hard-eyed, though her gaze softened when she spotted me.

  “Ciao, Rosalia.”

  She responded to my greeting, and then looked around.

  “We’ll go on my Vespa, is that all right?”

  “Yes,” she replied. She touched her hips, as if to adjust her overcoat, which didn’t need any adjusting.

  “Have you ever ridden on a Vespa?”

  “Of course.”

  I started the motor; she climbed on behind me and wrapped her arms around my chest while we were still standing still. I felt her body pressed against my back; I sensed the shapes that I’d imagined in that knit dress of hers.

  “I won’t go too fast, I promise.”

  “Grazie.”

  She loosened her grip, and I was almost sorry she did.

  Twenty minutes later, we were climbing the slopes of Monte Pellegrino. The road to the sanctuary turned off the Via della Favorita, the main thoroughfare that led to Mondello. The road was popular with young couples in search of seclusion as well as speed demons putting their customized Fiat 500 Abarths through uphill time trials, a sequence of hairpin turns and tunnels that went all the way to the summit of the mountain overlooking Palermo. Parked cars lined the tunnels, their windows lined with newspapers: there was lovemaking going on behind the newsprint, on reclinable car seats, with the thrill of the forbidden.

  High atop Monte Pellegrino stood the Castello Utveggio, a castle made of red stone. Just beneath was the grotto where Rosalia Sinibaldi met her death in 1165: she was a Norman noblewoman, a descendant of Charlemagne who refused to be taken as the wife of a loca
l count. She chose instead to cut her hair, run away, and live as a hermit in that grotto, where she died a virgin. The rocky cavern where her corpse was found by a group of intrepid pilgrims was eventually transformed, over the centuries, into a place of worship, the site of a saint cult that verged on paganism. We were heading for the Grotto of Santa Rosalia, fondly known as La Santuzza, the beloved patron saint of Palermo, where she was celebrated every year in a festino that lasted almost a week, as she had been for the past eight hundred years.

  It was 8:30 when we pulled up to the sanctuary. We were alone there except for a small knot of Germans, the only people on earth who take the job of tourism seriously, eschewing the frivolous pleasures other nations seem to find in it. As the guide lectured them, we ventured inside as if to pray to the saintly relics.

  The walls of the grotto glittered with silver and gold: thousands of ex-votos had been hung up for grace received, transforming the grotto into a metallic cavern, exquisite and glittering. The caretakers of the sanctuary, displaying a love for tidiness and order, had arranged the ex-votos according to categories: at the top right were those depicting brains and heads; on the left were internal organs: heart, liver, kidneys, stomach, and gall bladder; last of all, arms and legs. Hundreds of limbs depicted in ovals and rectangles of precious metals. Many of them featured an engraving on the nameplate: “The Di Liberto family placed this, in gratitude, for grace received”; “The Spampinato family made this, for grace received”… Each ex-voto had its own style of engraving.

  Rosalia pulled the necklace wrapped in a rag out of her purse. We examined it carefully, looking for similarities with any of the ex-votos in the area dedicated to legs.

  “Let’s focus on the bigger ones,” I said. “If the copy was attached to a gold necklace, the family that had it made was probably well-to-do, so they might well have chosen an expensive ex-voto.”

  The biggest plaques of gold and silver were on our left, low down. The Germans kept asking their guide questions. One of them pointed his finger at a boat in a storm engraved on a silver plaque: there were even ex-votos expressing gratitude for surviving a shipwreck.