A redeeming feature came in the form of a couple of girls my age in the neighbourhood who’d been to high school. Luckily some youngsters were chafing against the older generation and were planning to leave The Village. These girls, though, would not be going to university. The mindset still hadn’t progressed enough to allow women to gain academic qualifications. The two girls were at the crossroads of their lives wondering what to do with themselves. Franca wanted to find a husband while Patrizia wanted to join her father who’d gone to Rome.
Patrizia was my kindred spirit. She hated everyone in The Village, including her mother, said she wouldn’t get involved with anyone. She would leave as soon as she found out exactly where her father was. He left the family home without giving a forwarding address. Patrizia said she’d go to Rome and investigate her father’s whereabouts. That was ridiculous because Patrizia didn’t have a penny to her name. She could hardly afford an ice-cream when we went out for our evening strolls. If she couldn’t find her father, she said she’d turn up at her aunt’s house in Palermo and beg her to let her live there in exchange for housework. Peppina didn’t like me talking to Patrizia saying she was an evil influence. Whenever she saw us together she’d call me up to the house and give me an ‘urgent’ task to do.
Franca was more submissive and more content with life. She had the most beautiful blue eyes. And there in Sicily, where most people were dark, those eyes looked even more dramatic. Sometimes the three of us would go out walking together. That was as far as our adventures took us and, when we bought ice-creams we thought we were in heaven. Silvio was there with some friends of his one evening and came over to see who these two girls were. As soon as Franca caught his eye, it was clear he was smitten. Love at first sight does exist, I saw it strike the moment Franca and Silvio set eyes on each other.
Soon, the engagement party followed. Franca looked gorgeous and, of course, so did Silvio. They were truly a beautiful pair. Franca wore a glittery, pastel multi-coloured maxi dress – patchwork motif – her hair done up with a couple of ringlets cascading each side. I had lost my favourite cousin, no more car expeditions in his two-seater Triumph. My slice of him had gone, slipped out of my fingers. I pretended I was happy: clapped and smiled when everyone else did. Guests gawped. Tickled because she was a virgin, and he a big-time Don Giovanni quite a few years older. Patrizia and I sat in a corner moaning about everything: the heat, the noise, our weight, The Village, the loud women, the sleazy men... Life and soul of the party, we were not.
While I was in Sicily, Patrizia didn’t have a boyfriend – and neither did she leave for Rome or Palermo. We spent our evenings getting dressed up and strutted slowly around The Village like peacocks, as we complained about our lot. In all honesty, it was done to parade ourselves in front of the boys – only to tell them to take a running jump if any of them as much as showed interest in us, which most of them did. When I used to go to her house to call for Patrizia, she was nearly always ready. She’d engage in a shouting match with her mother about having a few lira for an ice-cream. I sincerely think that her mother simply didn’t have any money. Patrizia seemed to think she did. But as a last rite, before leaving home, Patrizia would take a white, enamelled bowl with a chipped blue rim, fill it with water, wash her feet, dry them, then put her shoes on. There in their only room which served as kitchen, living room, and bedroom, for both her and her mother, and bathroom. Their toilets were chamberpots. And in the mornings, Patrizia’s mother and other women would throw the contents into the middle of the courtyard. It smelt to high heaven when the sun shone on that urine.
The days passed and not much happened. I’d read the books I’d brought with me from England. Of course there were no bookshops in The Village, no library either. One of the two food shops also sold magazines. I was then reduced to reading romantic magazines, called foto-romanzi, showing photographs of men and women falling in love with each other and talking in speech bubbles. The endings were pretty predictable. Boredom even led me to do more housework than usual.
I came to love washing my clothes. By hand, of course. My grandmother had a huge stone sink in her garden, built up against the side of her house. It had a built-in, corrugated washboard. In the Sicilian heat, it was a joy to plunge my hands into the cool water and splash about. We used an orange jelly-like soap called Sole, which you scooped out from a big plastic container with your hand. Peppina would sometimes comment that I was ruining my clothes by rubbing them so harshly. She said that if I wanted my clothes to last, I should wash them as little as possible. My frustration and anger was taken out on my clothes.
I had to do something. And it had to be something at home. When you put your nose out of the front door, you had to be careful not to put a foot wrong. The villagers would always find something to criticise. And it made me feel uncomfortable. Some would ask direct questions like Where are you going? What’s wrong with your mother? Have you got a boyfriend? Is there a boy in the village you like? I can act as go-between.
On one of those rare occasions when I was home alone, I got a bucketful of water and a mop and cleaned the kitchen floor. My thoughts went back to when I was twelve and saw the horrific killing of that lamb. After the kitchen, I started on the living room-cum-bedroom next door. The room doubled up as Peppina’s bedroom, the single bed in the corner had cushions placed against the wall during the day to, unconvincingly, make it look like a sofa.
When I cleaned under the bed, the mop hit against something hard. I lifted the bedspread and saw a small metallic suitcase. What would Peppina do with a suitcase? She never went anywhere. I pulled it out. It had a lock on it. I realised straight away that I would be in trouble if I as much as let on that I knew about the case. I put it back and stopped mopping. Threw the dirty water away and hoped neither Peppina or my grandmother noticed the mop was wet. I even went in and out of the house and garden several times, so that the floor didn’t look too clean. I hunted around for the key. I rifled through drawers. Nowhere to be found.
A few days later, Peppina whipped out a handkerchief from her dress pocket. A key tinkled to the floor. I pretended not to notice. Asked her what we were having for dinner that evening, ‘Mangi chiddru chi trovi’ meaning: ‘You eat what you get.’ I poked out my tongue when she wasn’t looking. That key. I must get it. See what’s in the case. Another afternoon, my grandmother sent Peppina out to get some shopping. My grandmother went to lie down in her bedroom for her daily siesta. The old dress Peppina wore around the house was over a chair in the living room. Yes, the key was there. I fiddled about with the lock a little. Rusty. At last, it clicked open. There was an old sheet or two, in there. Yellowish. Why would someone lock up old sheets? I unfolded the sheets carefully and the reason soon became clear – wrapped up in them were two guns. Imagine my dismay when I saw them. I’d never seen a gun before. Quickly, I locked the case, kicked it back under the bed, and placed the key back in the pocket.
One day my path crossed with a young soldier along a dusty street. He said ciao to me as we passed. It so happened that he was my mother’s cousin – the son of one of another of my grandmother’s sisters – but I didn’t know him. He was a few years older than me. I thought no more of it, until a few days later, his father came to my grandmother’s house asking to speak to my mother. He asked if his son, Luca, could have my hand in marriage. The father would come back the following week for an answer.
When my mother told me, I felt a mixture of horror, incredulity and disgust. ”No. I’m not marrying him or anyone. I want to go home.” I felt despair, like I had done when I was twelve and threatened to be left in The Village. We started arguing, and it transpired my mother hadn’t booked a flight back to England for us. It was all so ridiculous. How could I marry a man I didn’t even know? He spoke Sicilian, I spoke English. My knowledge of the Sicilian dialect was not good enough for complicated conversations.
Peppina cornered me the following day when I was coming down from the attic. She stood in my way. She f
lashed a mean look at me and began by saying that I knew full well my mother didn’t have long to live, and what a wretched girl I was not to please my mother. “No. No. And no. I won’t,” I said. “Yes, you will because if you don’t get engaged to him, you are not leaving The Village. That is guaranteed,” she said in Sicilian. “There is no way out. They are watching you.” Whoever ‘they’ were. She proceeded in saying what a nice man Luca was and what an ungrateful wretch I was.
“You think you’re beautiful, don’t you? You’re nothing compared to your mother’s beauty when she was young,” she said, repeating what she had said to me when I was twelve.
“I can’t go through with it,” I said, trembling.
She got hold of my neck and slammed my head against the wall behind me, the thump reverberated in my skull. Squeezing my throat she growled “There’s no such thing as can’t.” As much as I tried, not a sound came out of my mouth, she was still clutching my throat. “Teach you to wear mini-skirts, what did you expect? You want to go back and tart about with those Englishmen, don’t you?” My mother came in, sat down and watched as Peppina knocked me over and tried to kick the living-daylight out of me. I turned on my side in agony, and she stamped on me repeatedly at the height of my waist.
Added to that, one day when I was getting my underwear out of a drawer, I noticed a small plastic bag. I didn’t remember putting it there. As I started opening it to look inside a most foul stench reached my nose. When I opened the bag I was greeted by the most horrendous sight. Bloodied animal innards. Probably chicken: slimy liver, lungs, kidneys, heart... what organs were they exactly? Without thinking, I took the bag to the bottom of the garden and threw it down the slope over the fence. I knew enough about my family to realise this was a threat. It meant, if you don’t marry Luca, your innards will be extracted from you. Though, I don’t think they would have done this to me. As usual, I absorbed the blow. Didn’t mention it. Pretended it never happened. To this day, I still don’t know if it was Peppina, my mother, my grandmother, or someone else.
This was one of the most terrible moments in my life. The realisation, when it dawned on me, I was going to marry a man I hardly knew. That I couldn’t go to university. That I would never get out of this place unless I accepted. Maybe I could talk to him in my broken Sicilian. Put him off, see if he’d have pity on me, if he’d understand.
It seemed to be a Catch-22 situation. If Luca was called over to the house to speak to me, it meant I had accepted. There was no way I could go to his house. That was unheard of. Unknown to me, Peppina and my mother had accepted the marriage proposal. Luca turned up one evening at my grandmother’s. I still distinctly remember him coming up the long flight of stone stairs leading up from the ground-floor stables.
He sat there on one of my grandmother’s sunken raffia chairs. We others were seated on mismatching chairs and nobody spoke. My mother got out a bottle of Marsala from the glass-doored cabinet, put five little glasses on a plastic-flowered tray and poured out the liquor. She went round offering us a glass each, starting with Luca and finishing with me – I refused mine. Luca looked at me and smiled. My mother would have loved to slap me in the face, but couldn’t in the circumstances. Instead she threw me an evil look.
My mother asked Luca about his mother, father and two sisters. One sister was married so she asked about her children as well. Peppina and my grandmother joined in and they chatted for a while in Sicilian, complimenting his beautiful and intelligent nieces. I simply sat there looking at my shoes. Then he spoke to me. He asked if I liked Sicily. I said I didn’t. I wanted to go back to England. It seemed that he was thinking of emigrating and England sounded nice. He’d have to find a job, he said. My mother declared that we didn’t know when we’d be going back. It all depended on ‘circumstances.’
After that episode, the scene was repeated, more or less to the letter every evening. I had nothing in common with him. The only thing I figured out he liked was football. Something I knew absolutely nothing about, and neither did I want to. After the umpteenth time of sitting there getting frustrated, I turned to him and said: “When are we getting married?” He was taken aback by the suddenness of it, my mother was surprised because of my ‘change of heart.’ I’d realised that I was in a stalemate, these evening sessions could simply go on and on for months, so I had to do something to move things forward. He was actually not bad looking and physically attractive, slim and tall. My plan was to marry him, take him back to England with me, then dump him.
The next afternoon his clapped-out car came along the narrow street that led up to the dark courtyard where my grandmother’s house stood in the corner. Luca drove my mother, Peppina, and me to a bigger village about thirty minutes away where we bought rings. I asked about the prices and chose the cheapest for myself: an engagement (dress) ring and a simple gold band. Peppina shot me a wicked glance, and I stroked Luca’s arm in response.
Next we went to buy my wedding dress. My mother and Peppina were with me. Luca waited in the car. Again, I chose the cheapest one. High neck, long sleeves, and quite loose. I didn’t want the wedding guests gawping at my body. By then, I was quite thin. I had practically stopped eating. Luckily, I wasn’t as curvy as before. Hopefully, I wasn’t as appealing. When I tried the dress on, my head started spinning, I broke out into a cold sweat. I nearly fainted. My knees turned to jelly, so I sat down on the chair in the claustrophobic cubicle. As I sat there in my wedding dress I thought about how everything had contrived against me, and how lonely I felt. How I had always been on the wrong end of everything. But, I managed to pick myself up, get myself together, and go through with it. I had to. I had to get back to London.
The wedding was at the end of October, after which the newly-weds, accompanied by my mother, went to England for their honeymoon and stayed there. The wedding reception preparations began. I was nice to Luca realising he was my ticket back to England. I did feel a little sorry for him but thought that, on the other hand, I was going to help him settle in England and he’d have a job and future. He was none too bright, though he was fit and sporty, and he’d make a life for himself without me. Moreover, he wasn’t aggressive, he was besotted, and I could twist him around my little finger.
Before getting married, we were required to meet the village priest, just the future bride and bridegroom. The priest was some cousin of ours, a few times removed. He ended his inquisition by asking us why we wanted to get married. Note that I was only eighteen. Luca said that he had fallen in love, wanted to spend the rest of his days with me, and have lots of children. That answer provoked a sickening feeling in my stomach working its way up to my throat. A long deep breath stopped me from vomiting. The priest then gaped at me, with a sort of lascivious expression, and said: “Maria, why do you wish to embark into matrimony with Luca?” I couldn’t answer, I sat there, stared at him, opened my mouth slightly but no sound came out. “You are too modest to answer. You want to marry him because you love him, don’t you?” I was still speechless. The priest got up and showed us the door.
Everything went according to my mother’s plan, we were married in late October. It was all organised fast in case I changed my mind. Like in that film, the reception was big, fat and greasy. My father came over to give me away – which at least got him out of his torpor. I hardly knew anyone there. They were all my mother’s, father’s, and Luca’s family and friends. The bride played her part because she was glad to be going back home: smiling at guests, thanking them for presents, dancing, clapping, though inside she was shattered, and feeling faint. I am his property now. I will have to rely on his clemency.
In the evening, the day after the wedding reception, Luca’s mother and sister came to Peppina’s house, where my family and I were staying. Including Luca. Peppina kindly gave us newly-weds the attic. We, actually, didn’t have sex until we got to London. I spurned him because I felt rotten. At the moment of my new in-laws arrival, neither my father nor Luca were in. They’d gone to the bar to meet wit
h Luca’s father and offer drinks to all the men there as a celebration of our marriage. Maybe a custom, I don’t know, and I’m not bothered, either.
Already wailing on their way up the stairs, my new in-laws reckoned that my family had swindled them. They had counted the number of bottles of alcoholic drinks – worked it out – and found that their share of financing the drinks had come to way too much. Which was perfectly possible. My mother sustained that so many bottles of drink had been consumed, Luca’s highly-strung sister got so worked up that she insulted my mother calling her a thief and a liar, and asking her to produce the empty bottles. Peppina pounced on my sister-in-law, slapped and kicked her, told the two women to get the hell out of her house, otherwise she’d make them regret the day they were born. Though Peppina was older and weaker than Luca’s sister, the latter knew it was for the best not to hit her back. Going down the stairs, Luca’s sister started insulting me, saying I was far inferior to her brother, and I was a slut to boot. They didn’t get any money back. Not a lira. Their protests were all in vain.
So, on that happy note, after another two days, the time finally came when we left Sicily. We went to say goodbye to his family, where the minibus that would take us to the airport was waiting. As Luca got in the bus his mother had a fit of active sadness. She kept hitting her own legs to the beat of “Figliu mio unni va?” meaning: “Son of mine where are you going?” The sister answered “Se ne va co’ sta zoccula,” meaning: “He’s going off with this slut.” There are many words for slut in Sicilian. Lucky for her, Peppina wasn’t there, otherwise she’d have given the sister what-for. At last, the bus moved off. I smiled at Luca and said: “You’ll love England” in Sicilian.
The Sicilian Woman's Daughter Page 13
