The woman and child had been washed up onto the pebble beach along with a makeshift raft of planks and beams. She had put the little one in a sheltered place before setting off in search of help, climbing the path to the left of the stream. She had collapsed along the way.
She was sitting in an armchair now, and Vango was burying his face in her chest.
“Is he your child?” asked the doctor, deliberately overpronouncing his words.
She attempted a smile. She was too old to have a three-year-old son.
The doctor nodded, rather ashamed of his question. He had always been a bachelor, but given his line of work, he should have known about biological clocks.
As a diversion, and because they were getting to the end of what she could remember, Dr. Basilio started repeating the only two French words he knew: “Souvenez-vous, souvenez-vous . . .”
He said these words imploringly, leaning over her.
Other people’s languages sound like strange songs, whose music we can hum long before we can understand the lyrics. On hearing French being spoken, the audience in the inn was amused. They didn’t know what these words meant, but everyone turned to one another and said, “Souvenez-vous,” like old chatterboxes.
From these two words, everyone set off on a flight of fantasy.
“Souvenez-vous,” said a woman to her husband as she batted her eyelids.
“Souvenez-vous!”
The brouhaha got louder.
“Souvenez-vous!” shouted Pippo Troisi as he raised his glass.
The doctor sharply interrupted this game:
“Be quiet!”
A classroom silence settled on the inn.
Once again the doctor translated into Sicilian what everybody had already understood.
“She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know where she’s come from or where she’s going. She says she’s called Mademoiselle. All she knows is that the child is called Vango. That’s it. She’s the little boy’s nurse.”
“What’s she going to do?” asked one of the innkeeper’s daughters.
The rescued woman answered with a few words, and tears in her eyes.
“She doesn’t know,” the doctor repeated. “She wants to stay here. She’s frightened.”
“But what’s she going to do here? The little one’s parents must be somewhere. She should catch a boat back to her own country!”
“What country?” asked the doctor, getting angry now.
“You say that she speaks French.”
“She also speaks English. And she said something in Greek. So where is her country?”
As if to confuse things further, the woman made a few noises.
“And that’s German,” the doctor pointed out.
She said something else again.
“And that’s Russian.”
The little boy clutched his handkerchief between his fingers. Against the midnight-blue background, a large V embroidered in gold was visible. V for Vango.
Gently taking that little hand in his, the doctor managed to borrow the precious handkerchief for a few seconds. Above the golden V, the letters of what was presumably the little boy’s family name could be made out: ROMANO.
“That’s a local surname,” declared Carla.
“Vango Romano,” said her sister.
And, higher up, on the edge of the handkerchief, the doctor spotted the following mysterious French words, embroidered in small red letters, although he couldn’t understand them:
He read them again as slowly as a child learning the alphabet: “Combien . . . de royaumes . . . nous ignorent.”
Nobody at the inn said a word.
Like a miniature bird of prey, Vango’s hand dived for the tiny square of handkerchief and made it vanish.
“My God,” a woman sighed.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” concluded Tonino.
A man had just walked in. He tucked himself into a corner and took off his leather jacket, which was soaked through, before ordering a glass of fortified wine and some biscuits. His long hair, which he wore in a ponytail, had been slicked back by the rain.
“You’ve got to pay first,” the innkeeper insisted suspiciously.
The man was named Mazzetta. Everybody knew him. He lived with his donkey and didn’t have the means to buy wine and biscuits for himself except at Christmas and Easter. Tonino didn’t trust him.
“You’ve got to pay first!”
The man looked at him. He slid a brand-new coin onto the bar. The innkeeper picked it up and looked at it.
“Have you sold your donkey, Mazzetta?”
Mazzetta was tempted to smash the counter. He wanted to string Tonino up from the beam in his kitchen, along with the garlic and the hams.
But he saw the little boy in the blue pajamas.
The little boy was watching him. His cheek was squashed against his nurse’s shoulder, and he was watching Mazzetta as if he knew him.
Mazzetta let the innkeeper carry on with his business. He couldn’t hold Vango’s stare for long. He looked down, then stood up again slowly. That was when he saw Mademoiselle.
When Mazzetta saw the nurse, and his bloodshot eyes met her blue eyes, he froze.
He turned into a block of stone.
It was like the lava of Stromboli making contact with the sea.
For the first time since she had been carried there, Mademoiselle started crying.
Mazzetta pushed his chair away and turned to face the wall.
Apart from Vango, nobody had noticed this odd exchange of looks. All they could see were the tears on Mademoiselle’s cheeks. What were they going to do with this woman and this child? It was the only question that mattered.
“Can you take them to your place, Pippo Troisi?”
Pippo was busy eating a large piece of fried ravioli, as thick as his hand, which he had removed from a napkin. He nearly choked.
“My place?”
“Until we have a better idea . . .”
Pippo would have loved to say yes. It should have been his role, since he was the one who had spotted them first. A glimmer of pride shone for a moment in his eye. But then he remembered how things really were. Pippo Troisi was not the master of his own home.
“The trouble is . . .”
Giuseppina. He didn’t need to finish his sentence. Everybody knew what the trouble was. It was his wife.
Giuseppina watched over her husband to the point of squeezing the lifeblood out of him. When it came to other people, she was about as welcoming as a goose defending her egg. She would never let a stray woman and a child near her nest.
Perhaps it was because of his wife that Pippo the farmer dreamed of becoming a sailor. There are certain people on this earth who make you want to sail very far away, and above all for a very long time.
Nobody could remember exactly how Vango and Mademoiselle ended up going to live in Mazzetta’s gloomy house.
But when Mazzetta got up to say, “I can take them,” everybody looked surprised. Mademoiselle had clutched the little boy tightly in her arms. She had shaken her head without being able to utter a word.
Mazzetta’s house consisted of two white cubes located in the crater at Pollara, which was crumbling into the sea. An olive tree grew up between the two cubes. The other houses in the hamlet of Pollara had long since been abandoned.
Vango and Mademoiselle set up home there.
Mazzetta and his donkey had moved into a hut a hundred meters away. It was more like a hole in the rock, carpeted with straw and closed off by a stone wall. As if to thank his donkey for accommodating their guests, Mazzetta made him a beautiful collar out of wood and leather that was so heavy the beast had to hang his head.
From that day on, until his death, Mazzetta never once set foot again in his former home. From that day on, miserable Mazzetta managed to support his two wards by placing a silver coin on the threshold of their door every new moon. From that day on, violent Mazzetta became more gentle than his donkey, whom he
renamed Tesoro, and several people were surprised to find him weeping as he looked out to the sea.
In all the years that followed, he never once got a word or a glance out of Mademoiselle.
An incomprehensible pact linked these two beings. But it was a pact that no word had sealed. A pact of silence.
Vango grew up on the slopes of the extinct volcano. There he found all he needed.
He was raised by three nurses: freedom, solitude, and Mademoiselle. Together, the three of them provided him with an education. From them, he learned everything he believed it was possible to learn.
At the age of five, he understood five languages, but he didn’t speak to anybody. At seven, he could scale the cliffs without needing to use his feet. At nine, he could feed the falcons that swooped down to eat out of his hand. He slept bare-chested on the rocks with a lizard lying on his heart. He called to the swallows by whistling to them. He read the French novels that his nurse bought him in Lipari. He climbed to the top of the volcano to wet his hair in the clouds. He sang Russian lullabies to the beetles. He watched Mademoiselle chopping vegetables until they were perfect diamonds. And then he hungrily devoured all her fairy-tale cooking.
For seven years, Vango didn’t think he needed anything other than Mademoiselle’s tenderness, the wilderness of the island, the sun and shadow of his volcano.
But what happened when he was ten would transform his life forever. Because of this discovery, his fragment of an island suddenly seemed tiny in his eyes. What was taking place in him was like a fire beneath the sea.
The world changed color before his eyes.
And when he set foot on his little paradise again, he couldn’t help looking beyond the cliffs and the last rock, toward the horizon and the sky.
Aeolian Islands, September 1925
The adventure began at night.
He heard the cries before he heard the sea.
And yet the sea was strongest of all. Violent as thunder, it was hurling itself against the foot of the cliff. Then tucking in again, turning on itself, attacking from different angles to explode all over again. Vango opened his eyes and realized that he had fallen asleep in a hole. He was just ten years old. He couldn’t even remember why he’d gone up to the top of the cliff that evening.
It was the middle of the night.
He strained his ears and heard another cry. You had to be very familiar with the sea to detect that feeble call in the middle of the storm.
Vango got up and leaned over the edge of his shelter. There was still a glimmer in the sky despite the darkness. Perhaps the evening wasn’t so long past or else the dawn wasn’t so far off. The crests of the waves were like an army of bayonets attacking the island. In the crashing of the storm, Vango sometimes thought he could make out the sound of bells. And there was the wind too, above it all, making the spray fly up.
Vango remembered now that he had come to see the falcons hovering at dusk. And, as he often did, he had fallen asleep there. There was no pressure to go home. Mademoiselle wouldn’t be fretting. They had an arrangement that she shouldn’t worry unless he was away for a second night.
For someone barely ten years old, this was an unimaginable freedom, irresponsible even, but for Vango his island was like a child’s bedroom. He felt as safe and at home there as another little boy would have been playing between his bed, the chest of drawers, and the toy box.
The shouting had stopped now. Vango hesitated for a moment, then decided to go and investigate. He slid out of his hole, his belly against the cliff.
He began his descent.
He had to lower himself a little less than one meter of sheer slippery cliff face jutting out above the raging sea, but the boy moved confidently with his arms and legs in a star shape. By living like this, Vango had gradually altered the relationship between his own weight and strength. He could support himself for several minutes with just two or three fingers clinging on to a hole, the rest of his body dangling in the void until he managed to touch, with the other hand, the downy feathers of a nest in the rock.
Only the flatness of the sea gave him vertigo these days. He had never been on board a boat, and he would never dip a toe in the sea.
From autumn onward, when the rain was generous, the cliff started to be shot through with green. But for now, it was completely bare and seemed to light up the sea with its whiteness. Vango stopped five meters above the waves. He listened.
This time, the cries had cut out altogether. He tried to reassure himself that it was just a passing bird. He recognized all the cries of the birds on the island, but sometimes a few migrating birds would take a detour and come to sound their strange songs at nighttime.
Nothing surprised Vango anymore: Sicily was on the way to Africa, and if elephants could fly, he might have seen squadrons of them overhead.
As long as he was holding on to the rock, his body swinging in thin air, the gusts of wind didn’t frighten Vango. But as he got closer to the water, he stopped. The movement of the sea did scare him.
He started climbing up the cliff, and already the thought of Mademoiselle’s white bread was enticing him home, sucking him back toward the top. If he hurried, he would be at the kitchen table in less than an hour.
A little lower down, at the bottom of his boat, big Pippo Troisi was crying.
Pippo Troisi, the caper farmer, the man who, several years earlier, had found Vango and his nurse on the pebbles of Scario Beach.
Now he was holding on to his suitcase as if it were a life preserver. He clung to it a bit more tightly with each crack of the hull.
The little boat was caught between two black rocks above the waves. He had called out three or four times but without much hope. This was the deserted side of the island. Nobody would be able to hear him on this stretch of wild coast. He had left everything for the adventure of a lifetime, and it was all over already.
Pippo Troisi had just had time to toss his entire existence into this boat and push out for the open sea.
His sail had ripped immediately. An oar had broken. His bag of provisions had fallen into the water. He had drifted for a few hours along the coast before getting pushed against the rocks. In the end, his hand had been crushed between the hull and the rock as he tried to push the boat off again. He couldn’t feel anything from his elbow down, and his fingers were hanging limply, like the shreds of a bloody handkerchief.
It was all over before it had even begun.
To escape his life, to sail away . . . in fifteen minutes the dream of escape, which he’d been harboring for ten years, was in tatters.
Pippo Troisi was waiting for the final wave now. He was begging for it to come.
And, if his hand hadn’t been injured, he would have turned his thumb downward, demanding that he be put to death. But nothing happened. The waves coldly rolled around the boat and looked the other way, like passersby before a dying person.
It was Pippo’s frustration that saved him. All he asked for was a quick ending. Nothing more. Couldn’t he at least be granted that? A wave! A single wave that would turn the last foamy page on his life!
So he let out a final cry.
A few seconds later, the boy appeared just above him in the darkness. Vango stared at the boat for a long time, and at this man who couldn’t see him.
“Signor . . .”
Hearing the voice, Pippo Troisi clung to his suitcase even more tightly.
“Signor Troisi . . .”
The man rolled over and saw the child against the cliff face. He immediately recognized Vango, the wild boy from Pollara.
“I can’t feel my hand anymore,” said Troisi.
That was when Vango realized he was going to have to do something he didn’t want to. Jump into the boat. Help Pippo Troisi to save his skin.
“Go and find someone, little one.”
Vango knew there was no time to go in search of help. He had to free the boat, which each wave risked smashing to pieces. Pippo was staring up at the bat-boy who was ha
nging off a deserted cliff top in the storm. How had he come to be there at this exact moment?
Vango relaxed the grip that was maintaining his position on the rock. This single gesture determined his destiny. By allowing himself to fall into Pippo Troisi’s hull, Vango was embarking on a stormy life ahead.
When Pippo Troisi woke up, he could feel that the sea had calmed. He saw Vango standing at the stern of the boat with the single oar. The wind had given way to fog. The water was as flat as a lake. The day was refusing to rise under the thick layer of mist.
“Thank you,” he said to Vango.
The dark-eyed boy stared at him. The boat was heading nowhere. They couldn’t see beyond the oval shape of the hull as it sliced through the water. The end of the oar disappeared before coming into contact with the sea.
It was cold. But Vango wasn’t shivering. He had been doing battle all night.
It had taken two hours to bail out the water, using the only remaining oar, and to set the boat free. Another hour to leave the coast behind them in the middle of the eddying waves. The fine line of the beach had been eaten up by the storm. There was no suitable place for them to rejoin land.
Then the mist lifted.
“I wanted to leave. I’d got everything ready,” said Pippo Troisi. “I know about the sea.”
Pippo knew the sea from a distance, but he loved it with all his heart. Up until then, he had only served as a ballast for the fishermen of Salina when the weather was bad, but his natural habitat was his vineyard and his field full of stones and caper bushes. He lived on his land, childless, under the empire of his wife.
It took him a while to admit to his rescuer what he had tried to do. Vango hadn’t asked any questions. And he listened without looking at the old man.
Pippo Troisi had spent a long time preparing his escape. He wanted to get to Lipari, from where he planned to take the boat to Milazzo in order to reach Palermo. He knew that in Palermo there were ships leaving for Egypt and that he would be able to make it to Port Said, the Suez Canal, and then the Red Sea. His dream could be spelled out in three syllables: Zanzibar. He had heard this name being sung by a sailor in a tavern in Rinella.
Vango Page 4
