Ontreto

by Peter Crawley

  “Moment, I come,” the spokesman says in stilted English and they motor away towards the beach.

  As they near it, Ric sees the woman from the cottage watching them from her customary position on top of the retaining wall.

  They greet each other with much smiling and polite recognition. A familiar, but respectful banter passes between the boys and the woman. The exchange lasts but a few minutes and ends with a happy salutation from both sides.

  As the Rib passes by the Mara, the spokesman calls, “Is okay. Grazie. Thank you.” And they are gone, speeding off towards the old port.

  The woman waves at Ric, then walks back to the cottage and reappears a moment later with a pair of oars. She walks down to the slipway and turns along the gravel beach to where a small inflatable dinghy is lying tied up to the retaining wall. She unhitches the dinghy, drags it into the sea and sets the oars in their locks. Then she slips elegantly on board and rows in the direction of the Mara.

  Ric hurries to finish shaving, looking round every so often to gauge her progress. He cleans up as she pulls alongside.

  “Good morning to you in the Mara,” she hails, shipping her oars.

  Ric bends down through the rail to grab hold of the dinghy. “Good morning to you,” he replies, straining a little. “Please, come aboard.” He steadies the boat while the woman reaches up and places the plastic bag containing his clothes and shoes on the deck.

  She is as tall and willowy, as he had at first thought; not as tall as him, but tall for a woman nonetheless. Her hair is long and wavy, like the ripples created when a stone is dropped into a pond from a bridge, and she wears a white linen chemise with the sleeves rolled back and similarly coloured shorts which extend over her knees.

  “I am Valeria,” she says, holding out her slender hand for him to shake.

  “Ric,” he replies. Her hand is warm, sinewy and slightly calloused, as though she rows often. And he notices the grey of her eyes once more; that grey he has seen so many times, the cold grey of first light. He tries to guess her age, but cannot arrive at a conclusion; she may be in her seventies or even her eighties, but, then again he thinks, she may be younger if life has been unkind to her. “Thank you for looking after my kit.”

  “It was my pleasure,” she says, smiling easily.

  “Welcome aboard. I don’t have much except for coffee and tea. Which would you prefer?” He stands back to allow the woman to step down into the cockpit.

  “Coffee,” she decides, “will be very acceptable, thank you; black, without sugar, as you will make it. I believe there are two kinds in this world: the coffee that the Italian cafés make and the coffee that we make ourselves, but I am not fussy.”

  Even though her English is good, Ric notices a slight Italian cadence in her pronunciation. “Well,” he replies, “I can’t compete with the average Italian café, so I am grateful.” He inches past her and climbs down into the cabin to fill the kettle from a large plastic water bottle and, having done so, sets it on the small gas stove.

  “You are grateful?” she asks.

  “Yes,” he calls up, “for your not being fussy. The Mara doesn’t extend to anything as grand as a coffee-maker, but I do have a cafetiere and some freshly ground coffee. Well, ground anyway. I’m not so sure how fresh it is; I don’t enjoy the luxury of a fridge.”

  “Oh, yes, of course, I know.”

  What she has said doesn’t strike him as odd to begin with. His initial reaction is to think it is merely her use of English which has confused him and that she has probably meant him to know she would take it for granted his amenities are limited. But then he realises she must be Valeria Vaccariello, the woman Camille has mentioned in his letter.

  Once the kettle has boiled and he’s filled the cafetiere, he picks out a mug. “You know the Mara,” he says.

  Valeria smiles again, a warm reassuring smile which suggests she is pleased with him: “Yes, I know Mara. And because I know Mara, so I must know her owner, Camille. Last autumn was the first for many years he has not visited. I hope he is well.”

  “He is,” Ric replies, “or rather he was when I last saw him in the back end of last summer.” And, though he is reluctant to tell her what happened in Corsica and, particularly the sequence of events that led up to his leaving, he understands he must explain how he has come by the Mara, otherwise she will be suspicious of him.

  “Camille has,” he begins slowly, “decided to call time on the Mara. His years have finally caught up with him and he told me he no longer has the energy to look after her. He thought the Mara would be better off in younger hands. He asked me to give you a letter.”

  Ric retrieves the letter from the drawer of the chart table and passes it to Valeria. He expects her to open it, but instead, she hesitates and examines it briefly, her brow furrowing in concern as though the letter might contain bad news.

  She realises Ric is watching her closely: “And not a day too soon. I was always pleased to see him. Two winters before, when he was last here, I was taken with the feeling that I would not see him again. I did not know it for sure; I just felt it in my heart.” She pauses and smiles a little wistfully, before putting the letter in the pocket of her shorts. “Age is a blessing granted only to the fortunate few. But, like all blessings, it comes with conditions.” She falls silent for a moment.

  “You’ve seen Camille often… over the years, I mean?”

  Valeria hesitates and studies her long, elegant feet, the toenails of which are painted a bright red. “Usually in late autumn he would come. And if he did not come in the autumn, he would come in the spring on his way home.”

  “So the Mara is known here?”

  “Naturally, the Mara is well known throughout the Mare Siculum; from here to the Calabrian coast, down to Messina and along to Palermo. Mara and Camille; they are one and the same.” She raises her head and studies him for a few seconds, as though she is placing him beside Camille.

  Ric wonders whether the woman has enjoyed a casual liaison with the old boy. “The two young lads in the Rib, what were they after?”

  “Oh,” she wakes from her imaginings, “they wanted to know if you had reserved the mooring.”

  “And?”

  “I told them you had only arrived last night and that it would be sorted out later.”

  “So, where do I go to do that: to sort it out, I mean?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry,” she dismisses, and adds with a confident dose of certainty, “they will not ask again.”

  Ric pours her coffee, passes her the mug and wonders what she said to the boys that it might incline them not to bother him again.

  She examines the mug, giggles and sips; clearly she has drunk from it before. “Your coffee is good,” she proclaims, “much better than Mosca’s.”

  Now that she has referred to the old fox by his nickname, Ric is more certain that he is in the company of a friend.

  Valeria is watching him again, watching and reading his thoughts, and studying the small, red birthmark above his right eye. “Mara is sick?” she asks.

  He likes the way she refers to the old sloop as though she were an acquaintance rather than a rudimentary construction of wood, metal and sheet. “Yes,” he replies, nodding. “It is as you said: the blessing of age, but with conditions. I’ll need to get her out of the water. Is there some place I can do that?”

  “Of course,” she replies, but she doesn’t go so far as to tell him where or how he is supposed to go about finding out where.

  “Thank you, that is good coffee,” she repeats as she hands him back the mug. “And now I must be going. Perhaps if you would like to take me to the beach, you can return using my small boat. You are welcome to use it while you are here.”

  Ric raises his eyebrows in pleasant surprise, “Thank you. That will make life a lot easier. You must have got to know Mosca pretty well if he stopped off here so many times, though I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve such kindness.”

  She stands up an
d looks down at him: “Oh yes. I know Mosca well enough.” Her smile glows warm: “And, as to deserving kindness? Don’t worry, Ric. This is Lipari. This is how it is here.”

  10

  Early evening, once the sun has lowered and the heat has drained from the air, Ric checks the stern tube; it is no longer leaking. He takes the dinghy ashore and tethers it to the retaining wall. The tall Valeria is not at the cottage, so he strolls into town through the narrow Maddalena.

  Sandro, the escurzionista, is absent from the Marina Corta and that makes way for others similarly keen to promote their cause. Doe-eyed daughters and sharp-eyed sons of café owners are dusting down, adjusting parasols and laying up tables. Old men congregate beneath the statue of San Bartolo; they lean on their walking sticks, gesticulate and chatter in urgent and sincere tones. Rock music filters from cafés and the waitress who had taken a shine to him the day before, smiles and waves.

  The town rises back a hundred feet or so from the old harbour and the Via Garibaldi winds up out of the Marina Corta between restaurants and pavement cafés, rising over a shallow saddle which separates the main part of the town from the walled citadel above. The narrow streets are cobbled and crowned, with high pavements and grated drains.

  Ric turns into the Via Maurolico in search of the supermarket, which he has learned is to be found some way towards the bottom of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele.

  Caught up in the sights and sounds of the busy street, Ric strolls past the supermarket and lingers at a stall to admire the colourful array of fruit. A short, round-faced, gravel-voiced old woman calls her boy to the front. She weighs Ric up, wondering whether he is nothing more than just another tourist out to waste her time with banal queries concerning the pale complexion of her apricots or the extraordinary lustre of her tomatoes.

  He picks up a lemon the size and shape of a hand grenade, and examines it. The skin is lumpy, rumpled and pockmarked like the face of an old soak. Ric has not seen its like before.

  “Cedro,” says a woman behind him.

  He turns: it is Valeria.

  “Cedro?” Ric repeats, trying his best to mimic her pronunciation.

  “No, Cedro,” she repeats, “with a C like cheese, a D like dame and an R that rolls. Cedro,” she says again slowly. “It is like a lemon and a little like a grapefruit, but not so tart, you would say. The pith is very thick. Some people make a conserve with them, some candy the peel and others flavour drinks and make a salad with them. But most simply slice them very thin and eat the fruit of the centre.”

  “I’ve not seen one before,” Ric says and asks the old lady, “Quanto costa?”

  The old woman nods in Ric’s direction, scoffs and barks a scathing remark at her boy.

  He ambles over and says, “One,” and then, “Euro.”

  “They are from the island,” Valeria says.

  Ric’s attention is drawn by a young woman wearing a broad straw hat and oversize sunglasses walking by. She smiles back at him; a slightly deprecating smile, but not so deprecating that it suggests she disapproves of his attention.

  “You’ve been in your own company too long,” Valeria observes. “And you look like you could do with a decent meal.”

  But before Ric can reply to her vague offer, she adds, “And, I think, perhaps a shower?”

  Ric steps back.

  She recognises the distress in his reaction, “No,” she says, shaking her head, “that wasn’t what I meant.” She tut-tuts mischievously. “It is what Camille always wanted when he arrived: a cold beer and a shower, amongst other things, but always those two before he turned his mind to food. Come, this evening. You are not allergic to fish?”

  “No,” he replies, “thank you, a shower and a meal would be very welcome.”

  “Some time around eight-thirty then,” Valeria says, glancing at his wrist, and adds, “around sundown,” in case the clock on the Mara is not working.

  “Thank you, Valeria. I look forward to it,” he replies, and then realises the right course would be for him to contribute towards the meal. “Would you like me to bring wine?”

  She smiles and says, “Yes, that would be good of you.”

  Ric raises an eyebrow in question.

  “The Caravaglio, a white wine, is good,” Valeria replies, “it is from Salina. You will find Caravaglio in the supermarket.”

  She turns and strolls gracefully up the Corso Vittorio. Valeria walks slightly head down, as though carefully studying the cobbles before her, but now and again she acknowledges the greetings of the café owners with a smile and a slight inclination of her head.

  Ric watches until she disappears round the corner into the Maurolico, then turns and continues his stroll down to the municipal port.

  The Corso empties its gaggle of lazy strollers into the Marina Lunga; a colourful crowd amidst a warmth of gentle chaos. Eager escurzionisti petition tourists freshly arrived off the Aliscafo. Enormous, pin-clean coaches, seemingly too sophisticated for such a plain island with so many narrow roads, lurk menacingly on the corner. And older, smaller minibuses stand idle as stooped pensioners file out for their day’s shopping. Antique Fiats and Lancias appear from the colosseum of winding lanes, bearing all the hallmarks of combat. A tinker, hunched over the back of his three-wheeled Ape, sharpens knives and works metal on request. The garbage ship is leaving and the loud speakers atop the small ticket gazebo proclaim the onward destinations of the Aliscafo: “Salina, Panarea, e Stromboli.” In the middle of all the organised confusion, a policeman stands chatting to a pretty girl.

  But it is the walled cemetery, stretching up the hill behind the Marina Lunga, which catches Ric’s eye. It reminds him of his first time in the citadel of Bonifacio on the southern tip of Corsica.

  Even though he’d located the arched entrance into the long-deserted Foreign Legion garrison – the location of the black and white photograph of his great-grandfather – it was the Cimetière Marins in the Bosco that drew him. It was as though the rows of mausolea exerted some gravitational influence over him, beckoning him to the narrow walkways between the whitewashed tombs as though the dead knew he would be fascinated to hear their histories. Curiously, although he doesn’t understand why, it is the same now.

  Tall, grey iron gates are flanked by four even taller columns, the outer two topped by white pillars supporting stone urns which throw out petrified eternal flames; the inner, shorter pair support two conical vessels draped with sculpted cloaks. And in between the columns stand ornate gates crowned by a delicate iron cross, the centre of which is ringed with a crown of thorns, the words Omnia Traham inscribed beneath.

  Ric strolls up the long avenue of cypress trees between the modest headstones and the simple graves. In crowded beds the young sleep beside the old. A marble headstone adorned with an anchor notes the year of passing, but there is often no note of the year of birth.

  Geckos skitter in and out of the shade, and ants trail to and fro like supply vehicles on a busy mountain road.

  The further he strolls, so the modest headstones are replaced by elaborate, raised sarcophagi, presided over by Jesus on his cross, miniature angels with mournful faces and the bust of a noble patriarch. And, nearer the back where the hill rises more steeply, substantial neoclassical mausolea, some art deco, others plain, some black granite, others white, grace the terrace and bear witness to the comings and goings in the port below. The deceased wait patiently for the return of their children, children who long ago left in search of greater opportunity.

  One of the grander mausolea belongs to the La Cava family and Ric recalls the name written in large-but-faded letters on the façade of the run-down warehouse by the tangled steel pontoon to which he’d moored. That, in turn, reminds him of the argument he heard through the fog and he wonders whether he managed to get away from the place without being seen.

  As Ric walks out of the cemetery, he hesitates. Though it is still warm and sultry, he shivers and turns, for some reason expecting to see the ghosts of the departed
following him. But there is no one behind him except for an old man, who leans against his witches broom and watches him, waiting to see which way he will turn out of the gate.

  He wanders through the milling crowd to the Corso Vittorio, stops off at the supermarket to pick up a couple of bottles of wine and climbs the narrow, winding steps between the houses of the Salina Meligunis up to the cool of the Piazza Mazzini in the citadel. Ric pauses to read the commemorative plaques on the walls of the municipal offices.

  He checks his stride as he walks down out of the cool piazza, turning, expecting to see a line of Soldati and Militari stalking him. But again, there is no one.

  11

  After his shower, they sit out on the patio and watch the shadows lengthen over the water. Valeria serves him a plate of fettuccine garnished with small, sweet tomatoes, feta and basil, and follows it up with thin slivers of rapier fish, minced herring and capers.

  Ric has neither showered nor eaten so well since leaving Sardinia and now he’s scrubbed off the layers of sea salt, he feels clean and full, and pleasantly rested. The wine dances through him with light feet: peach, lemon, delicate minerals.

  Valeria sits and smokes long, thin white cigarettes. She seems comfortable in his company in just the same way Camille had been easy with him; neither of them driven to unnecessary conversation and neither of them offended by silence.

  Later, she serves him a small glass of limoncello. “You had trouble in Corsica? Camille writes this in his letter. He says it is better for you to keep away from the police.” She frowns, as if he is her pupil just returned from an hour on the naughty chair. But her frown soon melts into a reassuring yet vaguely amused smile. “You can relax here; they will not bother you. My god, it is not as though we don’t have enough police: Port Police, Carabinieri, Finanza, Urbani and Forestale. Most of them I know, including the chief of the Carabinieri. It is La Polizia from Milazzo you will have to be careful of; they play by different rules. And remember, if Camille says you are a friend then what trouble you have had is not important.”