Chapter 17
Paris is not my birthplace, yet for me it is home. I walk along the three-lined avenue that leads me from the parking lot of the hospital to the six-story pavilion that contains the paediatric heart-surgery division. For too long I felt separated among a thousand belongings, each of them borrowed, none definitive. I wonder what has to be meant with ‘home’? Is it the place in which we were born? The one in which we live? The one in which we feel free to be ourselves, even if it were a street corner, an hospital ward, a desk and a monitor, the smile of someone we love?
The air is lukewarm and the sky so bright that for a second I delude myself of being still in Torre. Yet one month has already passed from that as brief as extraordinary vacation.
Sicily is not the same anymore, and only those who lived there before the sale can really understand the measure of the change. For some it lost the taste it had once, bastardized by the mixing. I used to think so, too, but now I know that this is only the commonplace of those who didn’t want to look carefully. I found everything again. I felt like a sort of refugee before going back there, now I am no longer uncertain about my belonging. I am a Sicilian who lives in Paris. I finally understood that my home has always been with me, this is why I will no longer feel like a foreigner in whatever place to which life will bring me. Like Teresa says, home is every place in which you spend your life. That's all. Torre was my first home, the ground floor on which I built the whole skyscraper of my existence. Denying the basement means taking away stability from the whole building. I am sated for having known and lived the authentic Sicily, rich of traditions, of colours and veracious tastes, of many resources and so many limits. Who thinks that we could have made it on our own is right. We certainly should have. Changing is a process that must start from inside, it should never be forced by others.
There is already a lot of movement at this time in the morning along the avenue. Night-shift nurses walk quickly to their cars, to finally go back home. Assistants prepare for their duties. There are new admittances, so much suffering, and the routine of a small world that never stops, hoping every day to give a new course to some lives.
There is an intense smell of vegetation announcing the incoming summer, and variegated colours in the bushes lining the stairway that leads to pavilion number twelve, mine.
At the ward nobody was expecting to see me before half past eight. I see mixed looks of curiosity and surprise among the nurses on duty. I walk the long corridor, where there is already a big coming and going. I instinctively stop in front of room number six. That’s where I saw for the last time little Jule. Here we exchanged a timid goodbye. In his place there is Marie now, a beautiful little girl with long blonde hair. She calmly sleeps while her mother affectionately holds her hand and caresses her forehead. Another story of hope and pain that will happen within these boundaries, but with good chances of having a happy ending.
I reach my study. I open the curtains, to let as much sunlight as possible in, in this world where pain makes everything dark. I turn the PC on. There is a new report waiting for me.
I haven’t been reading my e-mails for days. I had no time for it, but not only because of the job. I spend more time with Marco these days. I bring him at the trainings at the swimming pool since when he decided to try again. Monsieur Vignon welcomed him with open arms. He’d never stopped hoping for his return.
There are more than twenty unread messages. I quickly glance at the senders. Only one creates in me a curiosity that cannot be deferred. It’s Vito.
"Hi Paolo, how are you? Teresa? The children? Here everything is all right except for the fact that, since you left, Anna hammers me in saying that we cannot let another thirty years pass before seeing you again. She wants to find a way to convince you to come back to Torre as soon as possible. I haven’t yet told her of your intention to come down in August, she would torment me with her organizational mania. I forgot, Giorgio sends you his regards and a poetry. He has discovered an Arabic author with an impressive as well as unpronounceable name, Abd al Jabbar ibn Muhammad ibn Hamdis, who, if you listen to Giorgio, was the maximum exponent of Arabic poetry in Sicily between XI and XII century. He wandered for a long time and died away from his homeland, to which he dedicated verses of nostalgia and regret. It’s all for you, brotherly friend."
Dear homeland! If the air of her is lost
your affections will be lost for the land
the countries of others are not your country
whose proximity alone fed your spirit.
Can another people's land hold the place of ours?
Friend, who I connected to me with close affection
like the second spring rain is connected to the first
hold your homeland tight, your beloved country
And beware from ever taste the taste of exile.
Acknowledgements
First of all I wish to thank 0111 Edizioni for investing in my novel. Until some time ago, all this was just a remote desire with an uncertain result.
A special thanks also goes to Giuseppe, my husband, for the walks in certain enchanting places humiliated by the carelessness of man, from which the reflections that gave life to this novel were born. I thank him, also, for the support he gave me while I was writing, for having believed in it even before I did, for the inexpressible emotion we have shared, for the suggestions and the research, for the dinners prepared while I was giving a voice to my dream.
I thank in advance those who will read "The oranges of Dubai". I hope they will be able to share with me the dream of a rebirth, of an improvement not imposed but built with the efforts of those who love Sicily and fight every day to make it better.
Finally, I thank my mother because, from some remote place, invisible to fragile mortals, after almost twenty years from her demise, she always finds the way to make me feel that she is still walking at my side.
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