The Sicilian Woman's Daughter

by Linda Lo Scuro

  “I do now. Look, sorry, Sarah, but I need to get lunch ready, otherwise it won’t be ready by the time Humphrey arrives. Must run along. Bye for now.”

  “Bye. I’ll pop round. I want to talk to you about the barbecue,” she shouts after me.

  SEVEN

  Wednesday 23rd August – lunchtime

  Humps is coming home for lunch today because he is going to work from home in the afternoon. Concentration is not easy in a chaotic office. And he needs to do some preparation for his talk at the British Bankers’ Association about the effects of Brexit on banking.

  “What did you do this morning, darling?” Humps asks, as he is about to plough into his spaghetti bolognese. “You don’t look very happy, Mary. Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine, don’t worry. Sarah, downstairs, was all in awe of Brexit. She got on my nerves, if truth be told.”

  “Oh, just forget about her. She doesn’t understand Brexit. She spouts off what she reads in the right-wing press. Danger is that even a small recession can trigger a serious depression...”

  “It’s not only Sarah, you know? Most people here in Riverside View are Leavers.”

  “Not surprised.”

  “No, I suppose not, darling. Sarah also said that it was Richard, you know, second floor, who scribbled the obscenity in the bike-store.”

  “Richard! What? A middle-aged Banksy. Started graffiti a bit late in life, didn’t he? Thinks he’s a teenager...” Humps laughs.

  He finds it amusing and couldn’t care less about the insult. Typical of Humps, he lets things wash over him. I’m livid. As I’ve grown older, I don’t feel as tolerant as before. I wonder if, rather than ignoring the issue, doing something about it would make me feel less cross.

  “Humps, do you see me as more English or Italian?”

  “Mary, you’re a lovely mixture. I see you as English with a dash of Italian that makes you so attractive. You wouldn’t be you without the combination of the two cultures.”

  “Thanks, darling. You’re totally biased in my favour, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Oh, nearly forgot to tell you. The annual Riverside View BBQ is on Sunday. Always last Sunday of August. Good job Sarah reminded me, I would have forgotten otherwise.”

  “Didn’t we get the usual card in our letter box?” he asks.

  It is Barbara, Richard’s wife, who usually stuffs the invitations in our letter boxes. They’ve left us out!

  “Well, I haven’t seen it,” I reply. “I’ll suggest to Sarah that we’ll take the dessert. I was thinking of getting Zia to make something.”

  “Excellent choice,” he says, “nothing like Zia’s home-made cakes. You’ll make an impact with those.”

  “Yes, I certainly will. A big impact.”

  Richard won’t forget it for a while, I thought.

  Humps loads the dishwasher. That is his territory. Only he can pack it properly, so he says. I leave him to it, ring Sarah’s bell on the way down and ask if I may bring the dessert for Sunday. “Yes, that’s excellent,” she says, “Barbara’s bringing the spare ribs, I’m doing sausages and jacket potatoes. I’ll get the others to bring drinks and salads. We’re catering for about fifteen.”

  And off I go to Zia’s. Zia doesn’t welcome visits in the morning, she has to do her housework, she says. So I want to make sure that I’ll be the first to get there and hope any other visitors arrive later, after I’ve spoken to her.

  Another sunny day. The Thames is busy. A boat named ‘The Kid’s Inheritance’ passes me. Amusing. A few implications there, methinks. I did inherit a good deal of money when my mother died – money she’d hidden in an old, brown, faux-leather bag at the bottom of her wardrobe. All cash. She told me where to find it. But I already knew it was there.

  Not that she wanted me to have it, more that she didn’t want my father to get his hands on it. She knew he’d spend it on some other woman. He’d already raided their building society account. The building society wanted my mother’s presence and signature to withdraw all the money and close the account. My father took my mother’s passport, and he and his sister, Gloria, took every last penny out. Aunt Gloria pretended she was my mother and must have practised her signature. The two women did look vaguely alike, they had black hair and wore it in a similar shortish-permed hairstyle, typical of the 1970s. My mother herself found out about this fraud and told me. They emptied the account. Though it wasn’t much money, she was upset.

  She still had a lot of money. She had worked all her life and had been frugal. When my mother went out she took the bag with her. I knew she was hiding something in there because she kept the bag locked up in her wardrobe at all times when she was at home. And she kept the key on herself at all times. But I discovered that the key to my wardrobe also opened hers. One day when she was gardening, I ransacked the wardrobe, opened the bag and, to my disbelief, it was full of banknotes. Jam packed. Tenners, twenties, and fifties. Tied in wads with elastic bands. Couldn’t imagine how much was in there. As if it burned my fingers, I quickly put it back, locked the wardrobe door again. Dazed and confused I hurried to my room. Sat on my bed in a trance trying to figure it all out. Where had the money come from? How much was it? This wasn’t the kind of money you could put by as a factory worker. No matter how much you penny pinched.

  Shortly before she died, she said to me in Sicilian dialect: “Un ci fare arrivare dru bastardo di tu padri. Manco un penny,” meaning: don’t let that bastard of your father lay his hands on even a penny of it. The day after she died, I did a quick round trip and took the bag to my bedsit. I was living on my own by then. I had no qualms about taking that money.

  In fact, not long after her death, my father was married again. He kept the marriage a secret from me. That was in November, I was at university. They got married in Sicily. I didn’t find out until it was all done and dusted. I was gob-smacked. How could he do this? He’d had no consideration for me or my recently dead mother. His new wife, Elena, was Aunt Gloria’s sister-in-law. Sicilian, of course. Blonde.

  The consequence of the marriage was devastating. Elena forbade my father to have anything to do with me. At first, they lived in Sicily for a spell, where she had been all her life, then they decided to live in England. When I went home, my key wouldn’t open the front door. The lock had been changed. She opened the door to me. I didn’t know who she was. Put on the spot, I thought my father had sold the house and new people had moved in. He had taken her to live in our family home. Shocked. In disbelief. The house my mother had died in! I rushed into the house past this Elena shouting “Dad, Dad.”

  “Un ce tu padri. Si ni yi a circari travagliu. Vattini. Vattini” she said in Sicilian, meaning: your father’s not in. He’s gone to look for work. Go away. Go away.

  I left. Tears down my face as I walked along the road towards the underground. My instinct told me to go back, confront her. But I was in a state. My heart was beating fast. I was confused. Instead, I made my way to my bedsit then cried all night. Feelings of loneliness overwhelmed me. I didn’t want to lose my father. Not to her. Not to anyone. But he was gone.

  To think that he had suffered as a child when his mother died at only thirty-five with stillborn twins. He must have gone through similar heartache. The difference was that my father had a big brother he looked up to, and they were both close, too. They could share their burden with each other. Grief is compounded if you carry it alone. The three siblings only separated in their twenties when they emigrated. My father came to England, his brother, Giuseppe, went to another city in Italy. Giuseppe was already married by then and his new wife refused to go and live abroad. While my father’s sister Gloria, ultimately moved to London, too.

  The two brothers had to leave The Village for good, whether they liked it or not. It became too dangerous for them there. Uncle Giuseppe was five years older than my father and because of this age gap between them, my father was easily influenced by him and copied everything his older brother did. As t
eenagers they became atheist socialists and, as such, arch-enemies of the local right-wing, fascist clans, which sided with the mafia. Post Second World War, the mafia quickly reorganised itself after Mussolini’s repression. It infiltrated the right-wing Christian Democrat party. Uncle Giuseppe was the most fervid communist, both anti-mafia and anti-Christian Democrats, speaking up, not only in his own village, but in far-flung neighbouring villages, too. A big protest was organised in The Village with the brothers at the helm waving their red flags. They received warnings, threats. It got so dangerous for them that, eventually, they had to leave. It was either that, or be strung up on a tree in the barren countryside.

  I needed to go back to my family house again the next day, to get some of my belongings. Those things I hadn’t managed to get last time, when I rushed out in despair. This time my father was in, and she wasn’t. I was happy to see him, he wasn’t happy to see me. It was as if I was nothing to him. Maybe he had never loved me. “Get your things and go. She’ll be back soon.” He had a sponge in his hand. He went to the kitchen and started cleaning the draining board.

  Following him, I said, “You didn’t tell me you were getting married. I didn’t even know you had found another woman. How can you just push me out of your life like this?” He was impassive. The mask had fallen. For the first time, I saw him for what he was. A man without an ounce of empathy. Selfish. Cold. Unmoveable. It was no use trying to reason with him. I went upstairs to get my stuff. As I came back down, a big bag over my shoulder, with tears blurring my vision, he turned to look at me. The sponge in his hand dripping water onto the floor, he said: “Go and don’t come back.”

  Although Susi is on my mother’s side of the family, she knew the right people in our Sicilian circle to get all the gossip available. At that time, my father’s behaviour was the talk of the community. My mother’s family cut off ties with him, but that was water off a duck’s back to him. What did he care?

  Susi kept me up to date. My father and his wife argued all the time. Elena wanted to return to Sicily. She hated England, missed the sun, her family and friends. She was expecting a baby and wanted it to be born in Sicily. After I heard that, I phoned my father at work. I told the secretary it was urgent. I had to speak to him. He’d gone back to the same factory he’d worked for previously. It took ages to get him from the shop floor to the office. He said “Hello.” Right after I answered “Hello,” he said, “Why are you calling? Do you know how long it took me to get here from the other side of the factory?” He didn’t give me a chance to answer. He put the phone down. I sobbed.

  Susi later told me that my father had sold our house, they’d gone back to Sicily to live, where she had a house, and their baby was born – a boy called Carmine. The money they’d received from our house in London, they’d spent on doing up her house in The Village. At the age of fifty-two, my father went back to the work he’d done before he ever emigrated to England at the age of twenty-five. Farming.

  He never gave me any money to help with my studies. He didn’t know about the bag my mother had left me. Didn’t he ask himself if I needed help? I never heard from him again.

  When I returned to my bedsit, after accompanying my mother’s body to Sicily, I finally had time to count exactly how much money was in the bag. Emptying it on my bed it built up a good pile. I checked if I’d locked my entrance door, drew the curtains. In all honesty, I was frightened of that money. Was it jinxed? I sat on my bed and counted it, putting it into little piles of a hundred, and then, when I had ten of those piles, I’d make a wad of one thousand. So absorbed was I, that I didn’t have dinner that evening neither did I sleep that night. It came to nearly £27,000. That was a tidy sum in 1976 when the average house price was £12,700.

  All night I thought about what to do with the money. Move into a better flat? How would I justify that? The authorities would want to know where the money came from if I had a big rent. I worked part-time in Sainsbury’s – three hours late-opening night on Fridays, and a full day on Saturdays. I couldn’t give up the job because it’s what appeared to be keeping me – and had actually kept me, in dire conditions, up to that point. Conclusion was I’d change as little as possible in my everyday life. So as to not draw attention. I would spend the money on ‘luxuries.’ Items bought in cash in big shops, no loyalty schemes, no invoices in my name, no Green Shield stamps. Nothing that could be traced back to me.

  Worry stopped me from going to university the next day. I took a day off. Went shopping instead. The first item I bought was a black patent leather Gucci handbag and an entwined G leather belt to match. Then followed a nice pair of Clark’s boots. New rucksack. Max Mara coat. Gone were the charity shop jeans and jumpers. With hindsight, I must have seemed an unlikely customer, when I first entered those top-of-the-range shops. And I felt self-conscious especially when the shop assistants looked me up and down. Others might have walked out at that stage; however, all the blows to my dignity throughout my life, made me impervious to their disdain.

  And food shopping became a delight. Up till then, I’d mostly survived on pasta and sandwiches. I bought food I had never bought before: prawns, salmon, T-bone steak, mangoes, kiwi, strawberries out of season, good wine. Even caviar, I had to try it. To me it tasted foul. I must have been the champion of posh-nosh at our university – that included the badly paid lecturers. Gone, too, were the second-hand books – best hardbacks only. I even went to the bookshops in Charing Cross Road to look for first editions. I still have some on my bookshelves.

  Of course, the money came from some dodgy source. I did eventually find out what that source was. Maybe if I’d known then, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it so much. What should I have done with it? Thrown it in the Thames? Would it have sunk?

  My father had fought the mafia as a youngster waving the red communist flag. He’d had his life disrupted by having to leave his native village, separated from his brother, only to end up married to my mother, a woman steeped up to her neck in organised crime. And he never knew. The women on my mother’s side of the family were close-knit, inseparable, tight-lipped. No, he never found out. I’m sure of that.

  EIGHT

  Wednesday 23rd August – afternoon

  Next day I go back to see Zia. The curtain twitches and Zia’s face appears. After all the unlocking, I go through to her living room. A most delicious smell wafts through the house. “Lasagne,” she says. She leads me to the kitchen and shows me two huge baking trays full of the most mouth-watering tomato and cheese topping. Closing the oven door, she says she’ll give me some to take home. “You have lasagne for dinner,” she tells me.

  I am relieved to see she has no other guests yet. Someone would come and ring the bell soon, no doubt.

  “Zia, I found out who called Humps an arsehole.”

  “Ah, you find the man. You good girl.”

  “Yes, a man called Richard. He hates foreigners. And his wife, Barbara didn’t put an invitation to the barbecue in our letter box this year.”

  “What big bastardo and big bagascia. They need slap in the face.”

  “I’m so angry, I could strangle them.”

  “You no strangle any person. This not so serious for strangle.”

  “No, I didn’t mean it, Zia. Let’s go down the diarrhoea route.”

  “I make you cake. No problem. What day?

  “I need them for Sunday.”

  “That’s alright. What cake you want?”

  “I don’t know, Zia, I thought you might advise me on that.”

  “How many people?”

  “Erm, there’ll be about fifteen at the barbecue... What about eclairs?”

  “Eclairs no good – you Englishwoman. I think ice-cream better for outside in summer.”

  “Ice-cream? Do you make ice-cream?”

  “No, Silvio make for you. Best Italian.”

  Zia sits and thinks for a moment. Then she says:

  “Cassata Siciliana gelato!” That is Zia’s eureka moment.

&nbs
p; “Beautiful,” I say, “Zia, you’re a genius. Yes, yes! Almond ice-cream, with marsala soaked nuts and candied oranges and lemons, all covered in pistachio ice-cream!”

  “Yes,” Zia says, “I tell Silvio make for Sunday. Saturday you come get. Silvio put in nice wrapping for you.”

  The door bell rings.

  “OK, Zia, I’ll come back Saturday afternoon to get the ice-creams.”

  “You come Saturday. But now you stay,” she says. “I want you meet young woman.”

  I follow Zia to the living room window to see who is at the door. She turns, looks me straight in the eyes and says: “She big tart. She futtiri with married man.”

  If only Zia knew what her daughter, Susi, got up to. That was big-time serial tarting with lots of married men. I don’t think Zia has the foggiest idea about that.

  “Hello, Giusy!” Zia says, as if Giusy were her long-lost best friend she hasn’t seen for years.

  “Hello, Zia!”

  And they proceed to kiss each other on the cheeks.

  “This my poor sister daughter. She marry Englishman. Good man. Best house near river,” Zia introduces me.

  “This Giusy. She cousin of friend. She come to me. She have man problem. She have no-good man,” Zia says.

  Giusy tries to argue that Alberto is a good man.

  “He good when he sleep,” Zia says. “He make lot of problem for you.”

  Giusy looks at me as if to say: ‘Can I speak in front of her?’

  “You speak, Maria good woman. She tell nobody. She Sicilian blood.”

  Zia’s eyes dart from one to the other of us and says: “Cuppa tea?” Without waiting for a reply she goes to the kitchen, puts the kettle on and comes out with some jam tarts – strawberry. “I go back, get tea, you tell all,” she says looking at Giusy. When Zia comes back again tea is poured and Giusy starts.

  “Alberto ain’t left his wife, Zia. You know, he said he was gonna leave her but he ain’t. Me mate told me he was still with his wife. Alberto’s making a packet with the amusement arcade. He pays the rent of the flat I live in. He’s with me three or four nights a week, and when he ain’t there he says he’s on business. But he ain’t on business. Me mate follows him. He goes back home. I’m expecting his baby, I’m three months gone. I told him about it. He says he’s happy. He wants a son. Me mate found out his wife’s pregnant and all. They’ve already got a little girl. He was sleeping with his wife, when he was sleeping with me. I want him to come and live with me.”