My destination would be, as always, the Straits of Messina and the mainland, but now I had an added objective. During some one-sided conversation the don had mentioned his participation in the war. What better and easier way to escape Sicily and Italy entirely, to disappear? Sign up with a new name, allow myself to be shipped off to some mysterious new country, and vanish. A new life on foreign soil. Perfection itself.
Once I had climbed down the brick and latticework of the side of the great mansion no one was around and there were no dogs to bark and snap at my heels. I kept to the shadows and found shelter in a grove of olive trees. My soles were as hard as they’d ever been, sores all healed, but something to protect them would have been useful. I’d worry about that later. What I really needed was better orientation so that I’d know which direction to take. My head was swimming but I pushed myself to move on until the half-moon revealed a trail and then a field of corn.
Away from the overhanging branches I looked around and saw the great dominating glow in the sky. I was closer to the volcano than I’d realised.
The mountain filled me with confidence; a breeze rose up and it was sweet with flowering scents. I took a deep breath and filled my lungs, and that was my mistake.
Don Domenico stood at a nurse’s shoulder as she fed me a clear soup. ‘That’s chicken broth,’ he said, ‘don’t let it go to waste.’ I’d resisted at first, but the taste was too good and my body was crying out for sustenance. Watching me he went on, ‘If you weren’t so used to being a slave I’d put an iron collar around your neck myself. Where did you think you were going and how far did you expect to get?’
His voice was reasonable, even quite playful, totally devoid of anger. He took the bowl and spoon from the nurse and gave them to me.
‘You do know how to feed yourself?’
‘Yes.’ My voice was still hoarse, the effort to speak even greater than to walk.
He sent the nurse away. After she closed the bedroom door behind her he went on. ‘Then it’s time we stopped mollycoddling you. This is a civilised house so don’t slurp like a pig. You’re going to need an education.’
I went at it even more noisily, ignoring him, then belched as I insolently pushed the empty bowl away. He threw a napkin toward me.
‘You’re not a captive,’ he said, ‘but you’re too young and ignorant to know that if you escape from here you’ll simply be caught and sent to some new version of the place you ran away from. So try to understand something. If you trust me, I think things can be all right. There hasn’t been any word about missing men or a boy on the run. No one’s going to look for the likes of Salvatore and Gino very long. There’ll be searches, that’s certain, but the police will know that anything could have befallen those two. People disappear around here, it’s just the way it is. Now that means that if I can live with what I did, life can go on. Same for you. If you can refrain from being stupid you can have a new life, the sort a boy should always have.’
I shifted in the bed, feeling better and with a little more strength in my voice.
‘You – own me now?’
‘Look around you,’ he said, clicking his tongue in exasperation. ‘You’re in a comfortable warm bed and I’m bringing you food and medicine. Who owns who?’
I didn’t see the humour in it. ‘Once I’m better – you’ll make me work for you.’
‘What do you want to do, fly kites and play chess?’
‘What’s chess?’
He frowned then. A thought seemed to cross his mind. He went to a set of drawers and rummaged around personal apparel that didn’t seem to be his, then found what he wanted. He handed me a large book.
‘That’s the Holy Bible of the Amati grandparents.’
He said the words ‘Holy Bible’ as if they were amusing in themselves, but what was curious was the way he’d said ‘the’ Amati grandparents, not ‘my’.
‘Find a nice page. Read a paragraph for me.’
As he suspected I would, I stumbled over a single sentence and gave up. At Gozzi’s tiling plant I’d managed to learn to read a few words, but not many.
‘So we have a first objective. Your education starts today. We’ll also consider mathematics, the sciences, the humanities in general. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do and a lot of lessons to learn.’
‘I don’t – need to learn – anything.’
‘The first lesson is this one, so listen,’ he said, choosing to disregard my impudence. ‘No one owns anyone. The Amati family thought they owned all those people out there. That was a mirage. But this island of ours continues to believe the church and the rich are entitled to their dominion over the poor. Well, those sorts of days are coming to an end. Whatever happens, I don’t want to be involved. By the end of the year a sale will be complete and I’ll be leaving this situation I inherited. Let me tell you, that will be my happiest day.’
He reached his hand out to smooth my hair but I twisted my head away.
‘I’m lucky enough to be the last legal branch in the Amati family tree. That means I’m free to get rid of this infernal estate. When I do I’ll have the sort of freedom very few men experience.’
‘And what – what will you do with that freedom?’
‘Nothing. Just a place in the country away from prying eyes and other people’s interests. It’s a nice plan, isn’t it?’
‘Sounds boring.’
‘That will be its best attribute.’
‘You’re going – to sell all those people outside?’
‘They can stay or go, that’ll be a matter of contracts and choice.’
‘And I’ll be sold too?’
‘You’ll also have a choice.’
‘Between what?’
‘Staying here with good honest work, or hitting the road. Though there could be a third option.’
I kept my eyes on that odd-looking face.
‘Learn to be better than a brute and come with me.’ He knocked my woolly skull with his knuckles and I flinched away. ‘In here is chaos. So far you don’t know up from down.’
‘I know enough. I know you want . . . unnatural things.’
‘Do I?’ he smiled. ‘I wouldn’t think so. Listen. I’m not ignorant of what must go on in those mines. You can put any of those sorts of worries out of your head. There are better things to deal with. Now, I can guarantee that the acquisition of knowledge can be quite painful, but I’ll never hurt you. That’s my promise.’
‘Then what – do you want from me?’
He didn’t have to think about it. ‘You’re already giving it to me.’
From there on Domenico read to me almost every day that he was at the property, introducing me to books taken from his voluminous library, titles such as the The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Count of Monte Cristo and Robinson Crusoe. As he read, the enjoyment and pleasure in his face changed his satan’s mask into something softer. It was as if a light came into him. For the hour that a story possessed his soul, his ugliness fell away, an extraordinary thing to observe. I came to hate those long stretches when he was away, interrupting our immersion in his books, but then he’d return and the tale would be taken up once more, each of us as eager as the other to answer the glorious question: What happens next?
Within twelve months I was reading these books myself, either on the veranda, in the shade of some trees, or in my bed late at night and early into the morning. And we were all still here; the great sale hadn’t eventuated.
My days with Domenico were the happiest but I was also pleased whenever Signora Rosa returned. She’d stay for a week at a time and give me the benefit of her own teaching. For reasons I couldn’t yet understand she didn’t like to be away from this mansion too long, but I could also see how torn she was: in Catania she had her own family to attend to.
Rosa’s gifts were fo
r more concrete matters than storybooks. Though it was a struggle at the start soon I could recite the multiplication, division, addition and subtraction tables she gave me, and in all directions.
The difference between her type of learning and the don’s was that I found the former confusing and virtually impenetrable, and one day when Rosa was trying to drill the rigours and the pleasures of pi into me I stood up from the table with my head throbbing and left the room, and because it felt so good I ran down the staircase, and then the true pleasures of life hit me so I ran out of the house whooping, and took a trail past the homes of the workers into the green fields. First some dogs came yapping and barking at my heels, and some of the younger children followed – little boys in cut-off trousers and no shirts, and tiny girls wearing dirty peasant dresses but with pretty ribbons among their curls – then came all the boys, the ones my age and older, and they whooped and screeched even more loudly than me, running as if on a hunt and leaving their fathers or their masters to watch with dumbfounded eyes, and everyone was so much faster than me, what with my cursed limp, that they all overtook me and ran off like banshees.
I collapsed and two puppies were with me and wanted to be my friends. As I let them tumble over my belly and legs, Don Domenico rode across the plain on one of his mares.
‘So this is what my young foundling, Sette, makes of his education?’
I peered up at him, saying nothing. He rarely used that name with me, usually calling me, in his ironic way, ‘boy’ or ‘young man’ or ‘learned student’. One of the puppies licked the corner of my mouth and I held it away, small legs kicking. The other whined.
‘Pi, I’d run too,’ Domenico laughed, dismounting. ‘I haven’t got a head for figures either. Arithmetic, math, scientific equations . . . let’s be thankful there are people in the world who can worry about these things for us.’ He sat next to me in the grass and took the second puppy in his hands, cradling it and giving it his finger to suck. ‘I was watching the way you run. Does it hurt very much?’
‘No, it’s just . . . slow.’
His mare snorted and chafed at the bit, wanting to take to the plain again. Don Domenico looked into the distance and thought a while.
‘You shouldn’t have limits. At least not the kind that can be avoided.’ He put the puppy down and it joined its brother, the two tumbling like little clowns. The don found his feet, then expertly whipped himself up into the saddle. He jerked the reins, keeping his horse in control. ‘Want to learn how to ride, boy?’
‘Can I?’
‘Why not? I’ll talk to Leo. Now let’s get you back to Rosa before she thinks she’s a bad teacher.’
Don Domenico put out his hand and pulled me up. We rode to the house and he whistled a quiet melody. I recognised it as something he’d been playing on the piano in the downstairs parlour, late at night. If this man was mad, then it was the type of madness the world could use a little more of.
So I thought then, friend, and still do.
When I was stronger I spent my days outdoors, playing with Leo the foreman’s children, mostly because it was expected of me – even though I couldn’t find the purpose, much less the joy, in kicking and chasing a ball from one side of the green expanse of grass behind the great house to the other.
My limp had managed to get me across country in my unlikely escape, but I was at a disadvantage at this game they called palluni. Some days the boys Maurizio and Pietro took pity on me and moved slow and other days they ran rings around me just for the fun of it. Whenever we were tired from the game we would fall into some patch of shaded green grass, and the boys would like to tell me tales about how mad our master was, comically grim histories of the way he had used to light fires as a child and sometimes go running naked and screaming into the fields, pursued by maids and servants, but never, they would laugh, his mother or father. Piercing screams would puncture the night and all the workers in their homes would wonder what sort of devil lived inside the masculine Amati offspring. According to Maurizio and Pietro, the boy Domenico Amati only changed for the better after he started to become a young man, and most especially so upon his return from the war after the death of his parents – at which time, they said, his demeanour became almost totally dissimilar to the person he used to be.
He withdrew into the mansion at that time, and refashioned himself into a benevolent but distant overseer of this vast property he’d inherited. Don Domenico became a steady hand to write the necessary cheques. And little else. He had no wife or children, and the place almost ran itself; whatever authority was needed was now invested in managers and foremen. Even the house was captained by someone else, a great-aunt with a mannish voice who didn’t like her great-nephew one bit, and who never stopped telling the house staff what to do or how to do it better. Despite Domenico’s altered temperament and disposition, no one quite trusted him, and certainly no one thought he’d been cured of the ills in his head.
I learned to ride, and for the majority of the next year I worked in the fields, mixing in studies and reading, sometimes being a labourer, sometimes a fruit picker, sometimes even taking a gelding out to ride beside the horses of the overseers and learning the ebb and flow of farming life. These were good days, and they went fast, but when the turning point finally came, the one Don Domenico said he’d dreamed of for years, all our lives changed completely.
Our master finally managed to sell the great estate and with it the last remaining tendrils of the Amati family’s business dealings on the mainland. These, he told me, had had to do with munitions, in the application of that earthbound horror once called brimstone, now called sulphur, the integral part of almost every armament manufactured in this world.
I couldn’t believe it; this family and this place, now my home, had in fact all been built on the suffering of boys like me.
‘So is that why you took me in, out of guilt, because of everyone and everything you’ve profited from?’
‘The Amatis, true, they had no reservations about how they earned their money . . .’
‘You keep talking as if you’re not even one of them!’
‘I —’ he started. ‘I —’
Don Domenico stammered some more and didn’t finish the sentence. There was something important about the Amatis that he wasn’t telling me. Still, he managed to calm me down and eventually found the words to tell me a story.
Deep down I knew it wasn’t the full story but I took in every word, relieved to finally hear the tale of this peculiar world I’d fallen into.
From as far back as he could remember, the young Domenico despised everything his family did and stood for. This rebellion was solidified by his participation in the war. His father, Vincenzo Amati, a giant of the Italian industrial and agrarian sectors, had purchased his boy’s immunity from the draft, but Domenico had gone anyway – as much to spite his family as to protect the homeland which, despite its vicissitudes and inconsistencies, he cared for.
The war had proven a bonanza for his family, as it did for any family with interests in the sulphur fields of Sicily. There was a world need, a hunger, a desperation for sulphur, and the subsequent increase in demand upon the world’s centre of sulphur extraction, the tiny island of Sicily, led to unimaginable profits – and of course, to unimaginable practices in the urgency of its mining and supply.
Traditional supplies of sulphur around the world, though, were dwindling, and this was as true for the island of Sicily as anywhere else. No resource is infinite. The old fields were being mined out of existence and favourable seams and sites were becoming harder and harder to find.
And then further disaster. No one knew how it happened exactly, but there was a fire that led to an explosion, which created other explosions, which led to blasts destroying entire warehouses and plants in an almost unthinkable chain reaction.
In all, the blaze was to last two full months.
The small city that was the Amati manufacturing and distribution plant outside the mainland town of Milan ceased to exist but for ashes, twisted metal and melted rock. Vincenzo Amati, his wife and small daughter Stella, eight years of age, gone, along with countless workers and their families. Domenico, the last Amati – saved, ironically enough, by being busy fighting in the war – was found somewhere on the Western Front and rushed back to Rome, where he was hauled in front of a hostile senate inquiry that seemed to hold him partially responsible for the debacle, for this great loss to the nation.
He was informed that, as a precious and dwindling a commodity, Sicilian sulphur could no longer be left in the hands of one family, much less one sole-surviving family member. The Italian government was seizing control and proprietorship of the Amati mines plus whatever remaining distribution and production channels still existed. The sum offered in recompense was a fraction of the true value. Domenico told the senators, scientists, military strategists and economists they could take everything gratis. Not for a second had he ever thought there was anything worthwhile about his family’s business.
On his less than triumphal return to Sicily he spent months behind locked doors, communing only with himself and whatever ghosts floated from room to room in the Amati mansion. He said there were many, but only one that meant anything to him: little Stella. When her soul or spirit finally chose to leave the house forever, Domenico opened its doors and windows and all the servants and field hands, the day workers, foremen, managers and staff, breathed a sigh of relief. Domenico signed cheques and honoured labour contracts. The banks honoured those cheques, and the Amati estate didn’t collapse the way it had been expected to.
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