Chapter 3
Twenty-four hours have passed since when we left Paris, and until the moment in which I set foot in the Charles de Gaulle I couldn’t imagine myself on vacation. Indeed I hadn’t had a true vacation, a true break, for so much time. One of those in which the phone isn’t continually ringing, the e-mail doesn't require urgent answers, which happened at times, no urgent early return for not-deferrable business reasons is necessary. Generally I just need some reading and some rest to feel on vacation, but the rest of the time is useful for me to study and always keep the pace. I am a paediatric heart surgeon even during vacations; I can’t draw a line between my job and myself. I spend more time at the hospital than at home, because, aside from being a surgeon, I am also a university teacher, as well as perpetually in training myself. This devotion of mine to paediatric surgery has been one of the most frequent reason for arguments with Teresa in the first years of our marriage, until she resigned to the fact that there are people whose life is marked by a mission, that is the point of convergence of all their existence. For me it is more than a job; it’s what I am, it’s the substance without which I wouldn’t know what meaning to give to my life. And it is not an easy life; the simplest case is just a little less desperate than the others. I see sick children of parents undone by pain, by the sense of impotence, by tiredness. From me they want hope, salvation, even miracles. Often I succeed, but not always. And when a child dies, I grow a bit older. However I have learned to shield myself. It’s an ability that I learned from one of my best teachers.
People mistakes the lucidity of the surgeon for coldness. But in my work being emotional is a risk. The hand is firm if the mind is.
Outside of the operating room I know how to smile to my little patients, to give them that trust in me that will make them collaborative at the right moment and will help them face their challenge. And I also know how to shake the hand of a mother, to give her courage, or pat the shoulder of a father to give him the strength that is expected from him in an extremely difficult situation. It is important that they trust me. They entrust me with the most precious thing they have. I don't skip anything, I am precise, even maniacal; for this I enjoy the respect and trust of colleagues and patients.
I operated children coming from every part of Europe. Most of them are fine, enjoying the last remnants of their infancy. They will live for a long time, they will die at the right moment. Their parents revere me as if I were a holy man, but I only feel like a skilled mechanic, curious to overcome boundaries and experiment new techniques to dominate nature, to repair its breakdowns. I studied in America for years, where I learned most of what I know, then I returned to Europe, in various hospitals, until I landed in Paris, where I set roots. Now I supervise my own department. It was a difficult route, but not a solitary one. Close to me there were always my parents, who invested on me without reservations. They are the first in my personal thank-you list, because they believed in my abilities from the start. Then there is Teresa, who always supported me, encouraged me, and waited for me with patience.
Come to think of it, I have to give a part of credit also to history, the one with a capital H. The History of which I speak is that of an island in the heart of the Mediterranean sea, for centuries object of attentions and arguments, of dominions and subjugations, of different masters who partly enriched, and partly violated it, depriving it of its own independent identity. The History of which I speak is that of an island that, since Italy was united, apparently entered it but in reality remained always to the borders, a piece detached by the whole as it is inherent in the nature of an island. A bag from which to take without ever giving, a treasure chest to plunder to the bottom and then throw away, or even better sell, to earn something to the last bit.
Without its troubled history, until that upsetting epilogue that has turned it into merchandise, my parents maybe would never have moved from Torre, maybe I would never have gone to study abroad, maybe today I would be doctor Manfredi, pharmacist of Torre, like my father was. Maybe.
But History wanted otherwise.
«Here’s the junction», Teresa calls me back from the places of the mind in which I am used to lose myself when I am driving. Today we go to Torre, and the road I am about to take is the one that leads to my past.
Two rows of palm trees border a road once quite anonymous and dirty, that now seems a remarkable boulevard. The cars drive on it at moderate speed, they seem to enjoy the reception of this sumptuous entrance. A sign points at the ramp going toward the sea. I take it immediately to make a panoramic trip. We are going to meet Anna Marino right here, at the highway junction, at half past noon. We have time for an early exploration.
The boys are enraptured by the sight. With his arms crossed on the car door and his head leaning slightly out the window, Marco silently swallows every detail, with his eyes able to draw the world in. Giuliana, glued to him to look in the same direction, keeps repeating "Wow" like a broken record. Actually we are all taken by the beauty extending around us. It’s a new landscape, even for Teresa and I, who have lived in these places.
Marco, who apparently has studied the subject through, enlightens us about the reconstruction techniques adopted after Sicily was sold.
«The first target was the total requalification of the coasts: reclamation of the shores, redefinition of the sewers, and implementation of the depuration plants to re-launch maritime tourism, that had completely frozen. The coasts were devastated by unbridled abusiveness and pollution. Various foreign building companies were called to realize architectural works that unequivocally gave an Arab imprint to the urban landscape, not only in the biggest cities of the island, but in all of the inhabited centres, even the smallest. Sicily had to become the privileged residence of the richest Arabs, as well as a reservoir of natural and landscape wealth to be exploited for an elite tourism at international level. It went from being the tail lamp of an impoverished Italy to becoming a pearl of the Reunited Arab Emirates. It was the grandest project realized in these last decades, and it completely revolutionized the face of a land that had been abandoned to itself.»
From the small rearview mirror I look at my son and it seems to me not to recognize him any longer. How much he has grown while I was not realizing it! Chestnut curls, honey-coloured eyes, a strong neck planted on a beautiful athletic body. He is a bit underweight lately, but he’s well and he’s beautiful to look at. I don't often have time to be his father, and Teresa reproaches me for this. She says that Marco suffered a lot for this, especially since it became impossible for me to attend his sporting exhibitions. He has been practising swimming since when he was eight, and at eleven he started springboard diving. Last year, just fourteen-years old, he won a synchronized diving competition, together with his inseparable friend Pierre. They performed in absolute synchronism an apparently simple dive before disappearing in the water with great elegance. They classified first in the competitions of the Ile de France department. Next target, the national ones. My wife filmed everything, I saw it the next day. I lavished in praises and congratulations, that left my son completely indifferent, as if he didn't care he had won.
"It is his way to punish your absence. He wanted so much for us to be all there", my wife blamed me. "Do you know how many sacrifices he has faced to be ready for this competition? Hours and hours of weary training, and then school and home works... sometimes I found him asleep on the books."
Teresa’s voice trembled, excited.
"After the awarding, Pierre raced to hug his parents, Marco came to me. We wept together for joy. Giuliana hugged us both and she too wept like a child. It was a one-in-a-million thing, and you missed it. Then Pierre took a picture with his father, and the face of our son darkened."
My wife is very tolerant with me, she stands my lacks as a husband, but she doesn't easily forgive those as a father. I try to defend, to justify myself, but as a knowing loser.
Apart from the disappointments caused by me, that was a golden period in M
arco’s life. Winning gave him great self-assurance, a certainty about his potentialities and a big desire to keep competing. I liked his determination a lot. I felt he was really like me when I was his age. But then things changed. After a brief summer break, trainings had restarted with more enthusiasm. The qualification to the national competitions was at stake. As my wife said, Marco and Pierre were synchronized in thoughts even before than in moves. Teresa still calls them "the missed twins", to underline that mental – even before than physical – synchronization.
But since we live on very fragile balances, it takes nothing to delete forever what was built with great effort. The nothing that broke the tuning of our young champions is called Martin Bernard, a very young man who had just got a driving license and who, launched at full speed in rue Saint Denis, overran and killed on the spot poor Pierre Durand. This happened last December, a few days before Christmas.
Marco was at the pool, training. Some chat with monsieur Vignon, the coach, waiting for the arrival of his partner, both of them amazed by his unusual delay. After the first half a hour, Marco started the routine warm-up, and then made a few dives not to waste the whole lesson. I can imagine the scene. On the springboard, Marco stretches his arms up, as much as possible, then he bends to touch his toes with his fingers. He leans his head left and right a few times, then forward and back. He looks at the empty springboard close to his and wonders what happened to Pierre, who is generally always the first to arrive. Before diving, he looks at monsieur Vignon for the green light. He gives him some indication to correct his starting position. They have been trying a new dive recently, a more complex one, and Marco has so much desire to learn. The coach signals that now it’s all right, the posture is perfect. Marco performs his spin and disappears in the water while the coach takes his phone that is persistently ringing. When Marco resurfaces, the face of monsieur Vignon is not like it was a few instants before. It is livid, it almost seems about to catch fire, then an arm covers his eyes. Marco sees that body trembling convulsively, it seems to him that he’s crying. With both arms covering his face, monsieur Vignon sobs like a child.
At the funeral there was everyone. Marco carried the coffin together with his schoolmates and Pierre’s brother. Monsieur Vignon walked close to the boy’s parents, and during the whole religious function he kept a hand on the shoulder of the dad of his young deceased student, the other one tightened around the arm of my son who, barricaded behind a pair of dark sunglasses, seemed petrified. Around his neck Marco wore the medal they had won together. After the funeral speech, some of the boy’s relatives wanted to commemorate Pierre, to remember his life of good boy. Marco too, gathering his strength, stepped forward to speak. He did it immediately after the intervention of a really emotional monsieur Vignon, who had the participants relive the instants of great happiness that Pierre had shared with him after the victory. He didn’t remove the glasses to speak, he could never look up to the people gathered there, my boy. Tormenting the medal that hung from his neck, he spoke about the great love that Pierre had for sport, a passion that had united them and had made a winning team of them. With his voice broken by emotion, Marco succeeded in turning directly to his friend, hoping that he could hear his thanks for all that they had shared in those three years that he defined magic.
"... and that won't come back", he added in a sad but dry tone.
Then, leaving the pulpit, he bent in front of the coffin and left his medal on it. With that gesture my son put an end to his sporting commitment that, according to him, was dead with Pierre. Even his will to live seems to have been left there, on that candid coffin of an early-broken life. From that day he has been seeming resigned to drag himself along, silent and patient, with no destination left to reach.
Even now that he is here with us, sitting in this large car dazzled by the sun, with his sister's chin sunk in his right shoulder and his khaki shirt as faded as his emotions, he illustrates us all of what he studied like a model student, always there with his head, but never with his heart.
A restored painting. This the first picture that comes to my mind while I am driving and observing Torre. The second is the one of the two-faced clock, suspended in the infirmary of my department, between the calendar and the blackboard plastered of yellow post-it notes. A patient drawn it, a little nine-years-old boy, who spent more of his years taking care of himself than living. Each face of the clock represents a different measure of time. On one side, in fact, the day passes in just one turn of the hands on the twelve-hours path. On the other it takes three full turns before the day is concluded. They correspond to the two different ways in which time flows inside a hospital, pressing and frantic for medics and paramedics, with routine and emergency endlessly interwoven, running after one another. On the other side of the coin, instead, the vision of the patient, who feels that in the hospital time swells beyond measure, even beyond his very ability to wait, to be, in fact, patient. But the hospital, after all, is nothing but a scaled-down representation. Beyond its gates, things go approximately the same way.
Frantic rhythms, a hour that runs after another and unseats it, and everybody trying to race faster than time, always remaining several steps back. A modern frenzy that orchestrates us, saturating daily spaces and times, leaving in us that desire of a slower time to taste, to live in a different way, but of which, in reality, probably we would not know what to do. And then there are the places where time dilates, leaving the hope that it is possible to live at human rhythms. One of these places is Torre, where time goes by slow and calm. It can be perceived in the slow motion, in the casual meetings for which you find time to stop by, to communicate, to establish contacts. No transformation will ever cancel such predominance; it is a genetic and cultural imprint. Cars move slowly, although there aren’t jams nor queues. It is a way of seeing life, and facing it. It is hard to resist the temptation to solicit a faster pace, for one like me who is used to the other face of the clock.
Here too you run, at times, but it is a slow run, a crawl.
A lot of white has been used to restore this painting; it is the white of plasters, candid as if just painted, it is the white of the few huts on the waterfront, of the drink kiosk, of the beach umbrella over the tables of the several cafes already crowded like in high season. It tastes of freshness, cleanliness, it tastes of order and light, it tastes of candid Torre, where the traces of rust and the cracks have been cancelled.
«It’s unbelievable!» Teresa exclaims, she too wrapped in the candid white of a flax dress, «an amazing transformation. Everything was different! It’s like we dreamed it to be.»
She turns around, capturing every detail not to lose anything of such a magnificence.
«I remember the state in which this shore was. It was desolating; it would have taken so little to change things.»
«It took willing, and that is not a little thing!» I retort.
«A people is like a child; it must be raised with care, it must be loved and taught, and sooner or later it returns what was given to it, by becoming an adult able to care lovingly for what surrounds it. Love and care for a people mean legality, respect, justice. There is neither present nor future if those are missing.»
«You sound like my history teacher», Giuliana adds, taking yet another photo.
«A lot of people who believed in these principles died here», I reproach her.
«Who knows what they would think if they knew that Sicily is no longer Italian», Teresa sighs, stopping in front of the window of a bar, «let’s go in, I want a brioche with ice cream», and before we can answer she disappears inside.
Gaetana managed a haberdashery in via Palermo, the road – compressed in a maze of falling buildings – that lead from the suburbs to the centre of Torre. She was an expressionless woman, the grey skin of her face hardened like dry cement. Buried under stacks of boxes of buttons, wool balls, ribbons in every size and colour, dusty rolls of cloth, precariously stacked on the old wood shelves that covered the walls of
the little shop, she served her customers with distrust, looking at them with her small and vigilant little eyes, careful to check her goods, as if every customer were a potential thief. She distrusted children even more, convinced that they entered her shop only to make mischief and then laugh behind her back. She spoke rarely and badly, in a language difficult to understand, emitting a sort of whistle because of an open space between her upper teeth, too expensive to close according to her point of view. She spent the whole day in that minuscule store, sat on a chair of frayed straw, as ancient as her. It was her true house, and I couldn't imagine another environment fit for her. She was always there, until late in the evening, and come morning she was there again, so that everybody doubted that she ever left. I imagine that she wasn’t even fifty when I used to accompany my mother to buy spools of thread and sewing needles. Yet I always thought that she was old. I was perhaps the only child to whom, although with reserve, she granted a speck of trust, because of my father, who was a guarantee of reliability in her eyes. She spoke to me strident, close words, in an incomprehensible dialect; her toothless smile and wrinkled hands – that she plunged on my hair with a quick and heavy gesture, an awkward expression of unlikely gentleness – frightened me. My mother, when we left the shop, reproached me for my attempts to shun those heavy hands. She said that it was an impolite gesture, and that people had to be treated with respect without distinction. But I was six and at that age one doesn't feel the obligation to surrender to those laws of the hypocrisy that as adults we call good manners.
A few more meters forward, on the opposite side of the sidewalks, there was Antonio’s tobacco shop. In front of the only shop window on the main road I stood watching at Burago models, orderly stacked in their red boxes close to the accessories for smokers. On the two sides of the entrance there were two vending machines, one of chewing-gums in the shape of coloured little balls, the other one of small plastic key rings with the most fashionable cartoon characters of the time. The inside was less narrow than the haberdashery and Antonio didn't have the same faded appearance of Gaetana, but the place was equally unpleasant, because of an unbearable stench of stale smoke and cigarette stubs crushed on the filthy floor. Vito and I went in to purchase some chips or to complain about the coin swallowed by the ungenerous balls vending machine. But ours were fast raids; we slipped among the several customers who crowded the narrow place, mostly teams of workers on lunch break who bought from Antonio stocks of cigarettes and dreams. And the dreams, in that malodorous mouse hole that was also a bleak policy shop, where made of ink printed on the numbered circles of several types of lotto cards. Most of them ended soon, just like the ink of the pen that dangled from the counter, tied to a string to prevent anyone from putting it in their pocket. They ended up crumbled into a ball and thrown to the ground, close to the already scratched Scratch&Win cards, other short-lasting dreams.
Teresa listens to my memories as we walk at a slow step along the Via Palermo of thirty years later. She is clinging to my left arm with both hands, I feel her sure grip, as if she wanted to make sure that I am here just for her, at least for this brief walk, kilometres of distance from our life. Our children have gone to the beach, leaving us to our memories.
She remarks that Torre has changed at least as much as us in this long period, but with an inverse process. Time wrote on our faces as many furrows and wrinkles as it cancelled from here. The crumbling buildings of that time have been totally re-modernized, according to a coherent and uniform aesthetical principle, without random alternations of colours and styles, reunited in an embarrassing clown effect. I tell her of when my mother sent me alone to buy some bread at a small bakery that I no longer see now. A delicatessen took its place.
Teresa makes me notice that I only associate childhood memories to Torre.
«Actually, a different place matches every age of my life. Torre is my childhood, while when I was a boy, between school, sport, friends... and you, my benchmark was Palermo. Boston is my young adult stage, and Paris the adult one. I wonder where my old age will be?»
«My life too is divided among so many places», Teresa sighs. She has a list of moves longer than mine. «When I was a child it weighed on me, then I started to think that the world is so large and full of beautiful places where to live, that it would be a pity to spend all of our time only in one of them. Don't you think so?»
«I think it is only a chain of events to determine it. In some cases they always lead to the same place, in others they don’t. Our way of living life obeys to the same principle of casual as much as decisive intersections from which our genetic and somatic characteristics derive. There are myriads of possible combinations but, in the end, only one will unequivocally identify us».
«And will? You don’t leave it any room in this so fatalistic vision of the things. I think that we always contribute in defining our path. It’s not only random intersections.»
«I don't know.»
«Your old age will be where you want, like all of your life was. You haven't have been a victim of the upheavals that struck Sicily, don’t forget this. You already had plans.»
The haberdashery is still there. In place of the old sign, illuminated by the cold light of a neon, there is a wood panel framing the entrance, on which black writings in stylized characters stand out. Beyond the window, the inside of the shop appears dark and overloaded with goods, just like I remembered it. Behind the counter a brown girl, with flabby cheeks and strong wrists, is showing some cloths to a customer, who compares them passing them between her fingers, again and again. I don't see Gaetana, but I wasn't expecting to. As I recall her, she would be a hundred years old if she were still alive. I imagine her resting in the dark of a grave, not laying in a coffin but sitting on a caned, frayed and filthy chair. She won't even have realized her passing out and her new settlement, she who already lived buried in this narrow and dusty store, with her skin marked by wrinkles and mould.
Instead, from behind the curtain of the back office, curve and withered, she really comes out, with the same old glasses of that time and two rolls of cloth to be shown to the customer. She is old, very old, but now properly. Teresa joins me to snoop around. She wants to peer at the living mausoleum of Torre. «The emblem of immortality», she says in a low voice, laughing.
The customer touches the cloths brought by Gaetana and smiles happily. She finally made her choice. Gaetana gives her assistant a triumphant look. She doesn't know the world beyond the threshold of her haberdashery, she just realizes its existence because of the coming and going of people entering her planet of cloths and accessories, but she understands the demands of her customers like no one else. She made of her haberdashery her crib, her house, and even her grave.
With the meters of cloth wrapped in a thin white plastic bag, the customer crosses the threshold of the shop. From the chain around her neck dangle a pair of sight glasses with which she scrutinized the goods from up close. She squints as if to repel the shine of light that, like a lightning, heightens the contrast with the darkness of the shop, then she disperses in the world.
«Let’s go in», Teresa says. She is already inside, announcing herself with a ringing "Good morning" that vibrates in the still air.
Some steps behind her, I look at Gaetana who scrutinizes me in turn, with the same suspicious eyes she had when she was younger.
Teresa is introducing herself, Gaetana amorphously listens to her, without interest, because she has already understood that she hasn’t entered the shop to buy, but only to steal her some time.
«This is my husband. Do you recognize him?» she asks, reaching out with her hand toward me.
I make two steps forward, while Gaetana pierces me with a fast as much as indifferent look. She throws her head back with a slow movement accompanied by some kind of metallic snap of her tongue. It’s a Sicilian “no”.
«Cu sì?» she asks me, while putting back in place three rolls of cloth on a shelf behind her.
«I am Paolo M
anfredi. Do you remember me?»
Without turning, she keeps pushing with her whole body to insert the last roll in that unlikely stack.
«Maybe you remember my father, Antonio Manfredi, the pharmacist.»
She stops pushing, she rubs a hand on her forehead, as if to make space or to tidy up the disorder. Then she turn and look at me from behind her thick glasses.
«U figghiu ru pharmacist? Un ti canuscivu cchiù.»
She sketches a grimace, which is almost a smile in her rough mimicry, and with this she has already ended the conversation. I reciprocate the smile and keep looking at her, knowing that I don't have anything to ask her, and there is nothing that she wants to know about me, if I am not there to buy her goods.
Teresa points at the young assistant of Gaetana, who introduces herself as Ina, the woman’s niece. She immediately appears to us very different from her aunt, available to come into contact with humankind. Without difficulty the two start to chat cordially. Teresa asks her how is life in this new context and how the current situation was achieved. The girl shows a big desire to tell all this. I imagine how few occasions she has to speak, holed up in this inhospitable shop together with her aunt, who for sure is not the emblem of loquacity. When Gaetana disappears in the back office, Ina tells us, in a well-understandable Italian, that many opposed the advent of the new administration. And this, fundamentally, because citizens had been imposed to invest on their assets. Grants were given to everyone to finance restructuring, but with severe monitoring on the use of the money, that was provided as reimbursement and never in advance. Besides, restructuring had to follow rigid criterions of uniformity, even for what concerned the choice of building materials and finish.
«Nobody could do to their own way», she remarks, letting slip a certain satisfaction for the fact that her aunt too had, despite herself, to fix the facade of the building, if nothing else.
For people like Gaetana it wasn’t easy to adapt effortlessly to this type of peremptory requirements, that also sank their hands even in her ungenerous pockets. She believed that it was useless to spend money for the house or to improve the shop, as much as to fix her teeth or to buy a dress.
«Not everything has changed, it seems,» I tell Teresa once we are out of the shop, we too dazzled by the contrast between dark and light, «although it’s improved on the outside, the shop is still the bleak shop it was once. There is no way to change people like Gaetana».
«Cultural transformations are the fruit of a slow process to which some are impenetrable. But this is the true challenge of the change», Teresa says, hovering a closed fist, «even if she didn’t change her way of thinking, Gaetana at least had to conform to the laws of a country that demanded order and uniformity. She could not escape the new rules and this is already a step forward».
I go toward the tobacco shop, to see what happened to the filthy mouse hole of Antonio, and with an inexplicable relief I find out that it left its place to one nicely-smelling boutique of perfumes and French cosmetics.
The oranges of Dubai Page 4
