Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

  —

  I swam to shore and dried on the black rocks. My uncle appeared, water dripping from his chest, holding a swim mask filled with sea urchins. He opened them against a stone and removed eggs from inside with his finger, offering me part of the beheaded creature. I let the urchin spikes prickle my palm and nudged the eggs with my fingertips. Antonio looked back up at the wild goats battling the birds, and pointed to a row of chewed-off prickly pear cacti that looked like apocalyptic wishbones.

  “Everyone’s either hungry or dying here. No more fish. The fishermen from the other islands use underwater explosives in the winter. By summer there’s nothing left.”

  He threw out the empty urchin shells and pointed to a small recess in the mountain.

  “Alma and I lived there for six months. We filtered our water and ate fish and prickly pear fruit. I think I didn’t go to the bathroom for months.” He laughed.

  He sprawled out and rolled a bundle of lavic stones on his body, arranging them like a black cross over his torso. I saw traces of my father’s pioneering spirit in him, but wilder. His lean, tapered fingers placed stones up his chest all the way to the center of his forehead.

  “The cross is for Tindara. In case she’s watching,” he explained, glancing up at the mountain. “She lives up there. She was our neighbor at the time.”

  I had heard stories about Tindara since I was a kid. She was the island’s evil-eye remover. I knew she lived alone off the eastern flank of the island in a cliff dwelling inside a canyon, and hardly ever came down to the shores. She grew her own vegetables and performed rituals in a round cement court she built with her own hands. She didn’t need men. She didn’t like them and didn’t like the sun. A nocturnal creature, with frozen blue eyes. The fishermen anchored their boats below her cave at night for good luck. Some said she had the power to filter moonlight and change sea tides, some had seen her reflection beam under the stars. They believed she magnetized fish to nets with only a gesture of her hands.

  “One day we had a squabble with her and a rock tumbled down the mountain close to where Alma was swimming. We knew it was time to leave.”

  My uncle cackled and made another cross with his hands to ward off Tindara’s evil eye.

  “She’s a powerful one,” he explained, and grabbed his testicles three times—a superstitious Italian ritual I had forgotten about.

  —

  I walked to the dump next to Santino’s farm with a dripping trash bag over my shoulders. The dumpster was so tall I couldn’t manage to swing the bag over the top. Donkeys and ostriches stared blankly at my maneuvers. Angelina, the older donkey, was pregnant. I left the bag on the ground and crept into the farm to take a closer look at her belly. She was swollen. It was impossible to make out where nipples began and breasts ended. I put my hands over her belly to feel if anything was moving inside her. She blinked, swatting flies out of her doey eyes. I fell in love with that look right away. I kissed her forehead and petted her crimped mane and snout.

  “You’re getting there.”

  The ostrich sisters stood next to each other, perfectly still on their two-toed feet in a corner of the muddy farm. They’d lost most of their feathers in the sun and seemed confused—but that was the thing about the animals of the island. They all looked confused and I felt pity for them—the ones in the sky, on the rocks, and inside the sea—sparse and ugly as they were, with their missing paws, their dirty dens, and the patchy body hair that burned under the sun. I was drawn to their cries. It’s too hot, it’s too hard, it’s too rocky, we’re too hungry, they all seemed to say. Even the mice, squeaking through our kitchen drawers at night, sounded desperate.

  I heard a thud from the dumpster. When I turned around I noticed my trash bag was gone. Santino stood next to the big metal container, barefoot on the dirty ground. He didn’t say hello, didn’t even look at my face.

  “Too heavy for you,” he muttered. “I threw it out.”

  He approached me, locking eyes with mine.

  “You’ve grown, Eugenia. You were a kid the last time I saw you. You like my farm?” He chuckled. “All Americans like animals, right?”

  “I like animals. I’m not American.” I smiled.

  “Yes, sure.”

  I glanced over to his house behind him. Rosalia was leaning over the small balcony—suspicious eyes staring at me below wild graying curls. As far back as I could remember I had never seen her communicate anything warm toward a living being. Even with her daughters she was distant. The most affectionate gesture I’d seen from her was tying their shoelaces or feeding them a sausage sandwich. When they were too loud she hit them over the head and told them to shut up.

  “You like staying up at Antonio and Alma’s house?” Santino asked with smiley eyes.

  “It’s nice…”

  “Does Alma still walk around naked?”

  I blushed.

  “All those Germans do. They think we can’t see them.” He cackled. “You do that too?”

  “Do what?”

  “Go around naked?”

  I glanced up toward his wife and blushed again. She was still on the balcony, staring.

  “No. I don’t…”

  He was a wild, beautiful thing. Now that I saw him up close, I remembered his green eyes from childhood. His whole story suddenly came back to me: Santino the crossbreed, Santino the orphan, Santino the Egyptian. He was the son of a pale fisherman, but his mother had an affair with a migrant worker from Egypt one summer, and he was born nine months later with dark skin, green eyes, and curly black hair. His father rejected him and after his mother died, when the boy was five, he stopped taking care of him. Santino grew up without parents like a savage creature climbing barefoot on the island rocks. He never went to school, couldn’t even sign his name. Islanders took him in when they could. They fed him until he was old enough and strong enough to tough it out on his own. I remembered as a little girl noticing his solitary tours. He hiked to the top of the crater, screaming at bulls and mules. Animals were his life. Owning beasts on the island was more convenient than owning a house.

  “Why do you keep ostriches? Don’t they need to run? They have nowhere to run to here. There are just stairs,” I asked.

  “They need to run? I decide what they need,” he told me with a smug look.

  —

  It was the end of July and there was no more air. The sea was still like a lake at dusk. The first fishermen were beginning to go out for squid. When the sun disappeared, their boat lights turned on. They looked like suspended Florence Nightingale lamps, caring for the wounded waters, looking after exploded aquatic animals with missing body parts. No donkey screams, no mice squeaks. It was so still I could hear the Mediterranean lapping gently and the fishermen’s voices chatting in dialect as if we were all inside the same blue room. I was on the island’s second plateau, taking a break from carrying groceries up the stairs. The thin plastic handles had sawed through my fingers, but I insisted on bringing up the bags on my own because I didn’t want to overload the donkeys. I sat down on a cement bench and noticed a shadow move across the heather bushes. I recognized her from the shape of her hair—a frizzy mass pinned down by three aquamarine plastic clasps. Rosalia.

  She hovered toward me awkwardly, like a troll.

  “Is it true you’re prominent overseas?” she asked without looking up.

  It was the first time I’d heard her speak.

  “No,” I replied, confused by her use of the word prominent.

  She looked disappointed and sat down next to me on the bench.

  “You’re not famous?” She sighed. “But everyone says you’re famous. You do commercials.”

  “I did one commercial, a year ago.”

  “But it was for canned meat! You were on RAI 3. We saw you. I’m sorry, but you’re famous.”

  I let her win.

  “Look,” she said obstinately, “there’s a weight on my chest. No matter what I do, I can’t get rid of it. It comes down on me t
he minute I close the blinds to put the girls to sleep and stays there until early morning. I can’t breathe. I can’t sleep. Tindara says you can make it go away. ‘The woman who will help you is a prominent person who comes from a country overseas.’ That’s what she said. Exact words. She read the olive oil in my water and the coffee in my cup.”

  She was rushing and fueled with adrenaline, eating up her words in strict Sicilian dialect. I barely understood anything, but I gathered she was convinced I was the one person who could help her. She stared at me with focused, transfixed eyes.

  “I’m not leaving,” she said.

  She looked wrinkled, tired, and ugly and that was all I could think—how ugly she was, with her small mouth and hairy chin, her rough skin covered in scars and freckles, wild hair graying prematurely, not caring about any of it. I searched for glimpses of the person she might have been before isolation and roughness, before the husband and the kids and the dumpster smell outside the window—and I saw a way out.

  “I can make you beautiful,” I offered tentatively.

  It was the first time America had come to my rescue. I was thinking about the Niki Taylor Cover Girl commercials I’d been watching in LA. “Beautiful is fresh, beautiful is alive” was the tagline and I repeated it with flair. I don’t know why I said it. I didn’t mean it like that, but when I uttered the words, she parted her lips with an imperceptible, feline smile. Everything in her body said yes.

  “Do you think that will take the evil eye away?” she asked.

  “I’m sure of it.”

  Lay low, even out. Lay low, even out, my uncle’s motorboat had warned me, but there I was proclaiming cures for evil eyes, promising remedies, announcing makeovers.

  —

  Rosalia and Santino’s house was excavated out of the mountain. The rock walls sheltered the family from the dumpster’s stench. I walked up the creaking wooden stairs and stepped inside: a kitchen and living-room area with two mattresses on the floor for the girls, a small bedroom with a queen bed, and a bathroom. No doors, just strings of plastic beads hanging across doorframes. A faded pescheria calendar from the previous year hung over the fridge next to a crucifix with a dried-out olive branch from the past Palm Sunday. Rosalia grunted hello. She gave me water and showed me to the bathroom.

  I’d filled my backpack with used beauty products I found in Alma’s bathroom: rusty tweezers, blunt scissors, an old electronic hair-pulling machine that made a mean sound, melted waxing strips, expired highlighting shampoo and conditioner. I bought a hair straightener from the “beauty” section of the alimentari. It was next to the nail files, between the hairpins and glittery jelly sandals—the whole of the beauty accessories available to islanders.

  Rosalia sat on a stool inside her broken shower. Her crisp curls sizzled under the straightener, and when I pulled it away, they came off her head in clumps and I panicked. I did not know what I was doing. What if Tindara had misread the coffee cup and olive oil? I pictured her directing many evil eyes my way. I imagined altars of Italian Spam covered in pine needles as she howled at the winds and the gods from her cement terrace, agitating goats and pterodactyls, proclaiming revenge against the American impostor.

  Santino’s bare feet dragged up the wood stairs. Rosalia shifted in her seat and covered her cleavage with a towel, defensively.

  He peeked his head into the bathroom and snickered at his wife.

  “You look like a crazy person. What’s for lunch?”

  Rosalia got up from her stool and walked to the kitchen area—her fried hair flopping to one side. She threw an old bread bun on a plastic plate, opened the fridge, took out a shriveled sausage, and slapped it on the bread. She handed the plate to her husband. Santino glared at me and walked out.

  —

  The next morning Rosalia was waiting for me, leaning on the back porch door with burned hair—exhilarated.

  “Something is happening. Last night before going to bed the pounding rocks on my chest only lasted a few minutes. We’re on our way.”

  I thought about Niki Taylor’s hair blowing over the rooftops of the small Greek island village in the Cover Girl commercial. “Cover Girl: Redefining Beautiful.” I would turn our crumbling Sicilian island into a clean Greek Cyclades. I’d introduce Rosalia to the concept they told us about in health and PE classes: Looking good is feeling good.

  We started over.

  I sat her on the stool in the shower and patted her hair with conditioner. Now that it was moisturized it didn’t break under the hair straightener. Her frizzy curls began to unfurl on her shoulders in delicate waves. When the hair was straight we moved to the porch and she dried off in a sliver of sunlight that filtered through a crack in the mountain. Her usual mouse hue faded. The colors of the mountain began to blend into her hair and eyes. It was the first time she was letting the island into her body.

  I shaved her and waxed her, focused like a scientist in a lab—the lab of infinite dark follicles. I pressed olive oil over her legs and thighs and tweezed her eyebrows in perfect arches. Her face transformed. I watched the angles of her eyes soften as she looked at her reflection in the mirror.

  “Nobody has ever touched me with the intention of making me beautiful,” she said.

  Her daughters came home, fishing rods dangling with hooked worms at their sides. They ran over to touch their mother’s face.

  “Mamma, sembri una principessa!” they screamed. “You look like a princess!”

  —

  A small revolution broke out around town. Rosalia wore new clothes and walked with her chin up. The older women sat on stoops, dressed in black, hissing at her when she passed with her hips swaying. She used to walk straight like a piece of wood, but now there was this waving thing she did and everyone was suspicious of it.

  “Era beddu u putrusinu. Arrivò u iattu e ci pisciò,” they whispered in strict Sicilian dialect, meaning she was ugly from the start and the makeover only made it worse. “And with those legs! Who does she think she is, showing so much skin?”

  It wasn’t just physically that Rosalia changed, her whole attitude had new potency, and Santino could not stand it. He started criticizing her lightly at first, telling her she could not sleep in his bed because he didn’t recognize her. Then he got heavy-handed, at times even physical, and Rosalia began detouring him. The island women dressed in black crossed their hearts when they saw her pass by. They thought she was possessed by “u spiritu du Donna Nzula,” the spirit of Lady Nunzia, the island’s only professional prostitute who had taunted married women until her death. They thought Tindara had invoked Nunzia and placed her inside Rosalia’s body. Santino was right if he chose to disown her. Rosalia was offending his honor. It didn’t matter that nobody on the island had cared enough about him to send him to school or give him decent clothes. Now he was suddenly one of them—a fellow islander ranged against his immoral, dissolute wife.

  “The whole island is talking about it,” Alma announced with a tinge of excited local gossip at dinner.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “What you did to Rosalia.” My uncle spoke with a grave expression. “Why did you do it?”

  He got up and cleared the table, annoyed.

  “You’ve become so American,” he groaned. “All this stuff about self-improvement and looking pretty and making the best out of what you have. It’s silly. Like those stupid American commercials. We never had that kind of business on this island. People here don’t even know how to read and write. Why should they care about straightening their hair when they barely have food to eat?”

  Suddenly I felt stupid, as if I’d toyed with a pillar of society, a fixed ancient law that had been there before I landed on the island and would be there when I left. A law not worth questioning.

  Lay low, even out. Lay low, even out. I thought about the motorboat warning. Why did I ignore it? Why couldn’t I stay put? Where did that restlessness come from? I knew the answer, but kept tiptoeing around it. I tiptoed around the me
mory of Arash’s doey eyes, so similar to the ones of the island donkeys. I looked away when the porous lava rocks reminded me of the little dimple on his chin. I avoided men in white T-shirts and despised the darker Sicilians who looked Middle Eastern because they reminded me of him. My grief for Arash was a brick I’d safely packed in a box, something tangible I had to carry with me. The box was heavy but sealed, the contents perfectly isolated. As long as I didn’t open the packaging I’d be fine. I shifted the load from one side of my head to the other, never finding the courage to throw it off. I knew I couldn’t change Rosalia’s life, but I could help a new person emerge from her armature because it was the same thing I was trying to do with myself.

  “She’s not your experiment, you know,” Alma asserted dryly.

  “But she’s happy. She’s happier. She smiles now. What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

  Nobody answered.

  —

  Rosalia started spending more time in nature to avoid her husband. After twenty-three years living life indoors she was curious and alive. The pangs in her chest had diminished. Sometimes they were barely noticeable, she told me. Tindara said it was because she was on the right track. There were moments when I looked at her on the rocks by the sea, and she seemed beautiful, like a new being.

  Her daughters were inspired by their mother’s new freedom. They all hiked to the top of the island to look at wild goats and chase the rabbits that lived in the crater’s shrubs. During winter, islanders hunted them with rifles. The girls were used to eating them off the grill, but now all they wanted was to hold them in their arms.

  “Are we allowed to pet them?” the younger one asked as she ran after a bunny.

  “Are we allowed to love them?”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Rosalia replied in the grip of newfound mirth. What she felt in her chest for the first time in years was the feeling of love, an expanse of possibilities, a lightheartedness. It made her jump out of bed at dawn and go to sleep with a smile on her face. No pangs. She was in love, she said. Not with her husband or with anyone. Just in love: a fluttering heart and air in her legs. The island beasts sang to her. She sat on the stairs and spoke to lizards. She started to take care of Angelina and Maradona and the ostriches, cleaning them, curing their sores. Everything on the island seemed interconnected in her eyes, unified and divine—people and prickly pears and prehistoric canyons, the wild and tame animals, the disappearing fish in the sea—all bound together under the same wide moon, the same relentless sun.