Chapter 2
The absolute lack of vitality of the teenagers irritates me quite a lot, especially if the subjects in matter are my children. I am used to deal with young patients who fight to exploit the most a spoiled pump that beats in their chests, therefore I hardly can bear those clinically healthy youth who drag on heavily, as if they were sickly, and with so much boldness make of any support a camp. Unfortunately, Giuliana and Marco are no comforting exception. About a hour and half of flight seems to have consumed their lifeblood. They are two fuel tanks on red. So, as soon as they leave the airport, they seem to engage a competition for the first who will sink, undone, in the back seat of the car that we rented. "Comfortable and with air conditioning", was their request when it was time to choose it. "Perhaps we should make them face difficulties more often!" Teresa – the mother hen who always did her best to make their life as comfortable and problem-free as possible – says.
Marco looks out with his usual somehow absent expression, lost in who knows what thoughts. His ruffled hair are flattened by the weight of his head, completely abandoned on the headrest.
Giuliana is the one with a thousand weary questions; tired in the body, but always active in the mind. She’s seventeen, even though she looks a bit older because of her beauty that already makes her look like a woman. She’s as bright as her mother, same chestnut shells giving colour to her eyes, same honest smile, same ability to disarm with a look. Her mother acquired this dowry in time, she was born with it. She seduced me since when she just took the space of a crib.
Today, suddenly, it seems like she wants to know everything about that past of mine which we almost never had time to talk about, each of us busy with their own daily tasks. I find myself recalling my childhood, as I was growing in this now foreign land. I tell her about the house of my parents in the heart of the country, an independent two-stories villa with a beautiful terrace where, in summer, a white long resin table was the place of our suppers, comforted by the fresh breeze of the sea even in the sultriest days. The orderly line of lamp-posts along the dock, the sparkling of the moon on the dark surface of the sea at night, the twinkling of the lampare, the candles in the middle of our table, these are the illuminations of my memory. I have jealously guarded so many details, even if my mind doesn’t go back to them often. I perceive something unique in my memories, something that words can’t seize. I find that I am nostalgic. Giuliana listens to me with a humoured curiosity. Her father child is almost unimaginable to her, used as she is to know me as the serious and stainless professional.
I tell her of her grandparents, my parents. She barely knew them, poor child. They went too soon, before they could love her as much as they would have wanted to. As much as they did with me.
None of them had roots in Torre, although they were both born and grown in that town. The parents of my father were from Palermo, but they had moved to the suburbs escaping the chaos of the city. My maternal grandparents were from Marsala instead, but they worked in Palermo, before my mother was born.
Antonio, my father, was a pharmacist. Together with my mother he managed the only chemist in our small town. There was no one in Torre who didn't know doctor Manfredi. When I was a child, walking with him made me feel important; greeted and respected by everybody, he almost seemed to be a celebrity. I lived of his reflected light. Which had some advantages, because anywhere I went I felt that being his son guaranteed me a special respect. At school, for instance, I noticed that teachers always had a benevolent eye for me, and they would never dare complaining about my behaviour with my parents. From my side, I have never been a troublesome boy.
Not to mention when I entered a shop of any kind; the baker gave me a biscuit or a bit of bread just taken from the oven, and she complimented my mother on her "so well-bred" son. The ice cream maker filled my cones with more ice cream than they could hold, the butcher gave me handfuls of candy, and so on.
It was their way of repaying the availability of my father who, more than a few times, was called even at night or during holidays to urgently administer some medicine to a countryman. In a small town, where everyone knows everyone else, everything is almost family-run.
The disadvantage for me, anyway, was notoriety as well, because nothing of what I did could go unnoticed. I was never able to buzz an intercom and escape in a hurry, or to throw water or clothes peg from the balcony, like my friends living in the city did.
Antonella, my mother, was younger than Dad by about ten years. Her parents had moved to Torre when she was very young. She was asthmatic and the sea air would benefit her health more than the city pollution. When I was a child I thought that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She had always been, when she was young as well as in her brief life as grandmother. She was the light of my house.
Her jet-black hair gathered in a chignon, her elegant posture – that distinguished her among many others – her thin figure, chiselled in the white dress of her wedding day. This was the photo that dominated the cupboard of the living room, in the house of my parents, for years. It’s the same one that I keep on the desk of my study at home, close to that of Teresa and our children.
She worked with Dad in the chemist, but it was not her true vocation. Graduated in foreign languages, she translated texts and specialised magazines into English for young people of Torre and neighbouring towns who were preparing for a degree. Sometimes she was called to act as interpreter in conferences, and this was the part of her job that she liked the most. In the afternoon, while I was studying in the kitchen, she often sat at the table, right in front of me, and started quickly tapping the keys of her laptop for hours. She just stopped to answer some help request from me, then she returned to hammer on the keyboard. I still see her tapered and strong fingers beating at a sustained pace on the black and thin keys of a piano without melody, that produced a fast and precise ticking of well-rounded fingernails impressing characters.
When my father asked her for help at the chemist, she unwillingly started to skip a lot of the tasks she received, until she ended up refusing them all, because, after a whole day in the shop, in the evening she didn’t have enough energy left to devote to another job. In the periods in which Dad found a reliable assistant for the chemist, she returned to teach privately French and English to the high school students of the town. She too was well known in that small world of ours, first of all as the wife of the doctor.
I had neither brothers nor sisters and, even if I would never admit it to my children, for me it was always a blessing to be the only child, because I was the undisputed king of my house. Being the only child in the whole widened family, I was the centre of the attentions of parents, grandparents and uncles. Thinking back to it now, I don't know if it was indeed a good thing, but back then it had its indisputable advantages.
Giuliana remarks that for me it must have been beautiful to enjoy some privileges of my family’s notoriety in the town. She could never stand that my fame as surgeon has not brought her any advantage, especially at school. She attends a high school where the greatest part of the pupils belong to prestigious professionals families, child of managing-class people or even artists. Therefore there is nothing, from this point of view, that makes her special in comparison to the others. Besides, we live in Paris, a metropolis where everyone is just one of many. This cannot be compared to the little town in which I grew, where the social and professional position of my parents conferred a particular prestige to the whole family.
Teresa interrupts the conversation calling my attention on the landscape around us.
«Everything is so different», she says, «I can hardly find any familiar benchmark. It’s like I’ve never been here before!»
Actually, nothing of what I see, at the moment, seems to belong to my memories. The highway connecting the airport of Punta Raisi to Palermo is flanked for a long stretch by the sea, and this seems to be the only element consistent with the past. Everything is different, just like my wife says. There is
no trace anymore of that building abusiveness that defaced the coast for years, obstructing the view from the shore and causing pollution and decline. Now the whole waterfront is lined by a thick expanse of green: well-cared lawns, wharfs made of clear wood, bicycle paths, panoramic terraces. As far as the eye can see, the landscape is lush and luxuriant; there is uniformity in buildings, a clear intent to create harmonious structures, that pleasantly melt with one another and with the natural environment, according to a rational, rather than arbitrary, criterion. It is the intensity of the colours of the sea and the sky that gives me the guarantee that I have returned to my land, that aside from that seems as if rewritten.
«It’s so beautiful!» Teresa and Giuliana keep repeating.
«C’est incroyable!» is Giuliana’s solo, «you didn’t tell me it was so beautiful, here!»
«It has changed a bit, actually», is the only thing that I am able to say. I feel confused, disorientated.
«Since when they sold Sicily,» Marco explains, «right Dad?»
He had seemed to me to be completely uninterested by our chatters, up to this moment. On the contrary, what he was about to say would show that he had been more attentive than it seemed, «Thirty-two years ago. Italy was in the deepest economic disarrangement. The national debt had reached the stars, there was no more money for any kind of financing, economy was paralyzed, even the salaries of government employees were at risk. Total chaos, in short. There weren’t many options left: either declaring bankruptcy or trying to save what could be saved. So the politicians of the time, who were by the way responsible of what was happening, got the idea of selling part of the State assets in order to recover capitals, getting rid of the least productive regions. Sicily and Sardinia were the first to be declared saleable patrimony».
I am amazed.
«Where did you learn all these things?»
«At school. The history teacher made us make a research on the political and geographical changes of Europe in the last years to deepen the theme of the effects of the economic crisis that ran over the planet at the beginning of the millennium. I had to deepen the subject of Italy. I made a speech in the auditorium in front of more than a thousand people.»
«You never mentioned it.»
«You were never there.»
And after these words he retreats in his silence.
Teresa looks at me from the corner on one eye to see how I took the hit. I pretend to be particularly absorbed by a surpass; I don't feel like exhibiting my wounds.
The highway ends a few hundred meters before the roundabout that leads to the first entry to the city. There is an intense traffic of cars going in every direction.
The signage is bilingual; there are the incomprehensible signs of Arab language and then, in smaller letters, the writings in Italian. The population, as far as I know, is by now fairly divided between Sicilians (or at least such they were once) and Arabs. I wonder which are to be considered foreigners. As far as I am concerned, both are.
The Siqillya, this is how it’s called now, has become a crucible of people, and, in a sense or another, nobody really belongs to it. Or maybe, like others sustain, everybody does. It was in our destiny, I believe, to return to the Arabs, that once conquered us with strength, and after centuries legitimately purchased us without shedding of blood.
The sky above the city is clear and intense; the rays of the sun overheat the air, they penetrate the skin, colour the already-uncovered parts of the body. There is a long queue of cars stopped at a red light, sparkling under the scorching rays of the sun; an instant after the appearance of the green light, the whole queue is furiously trumpeting the horn loudly at the car in front.
«Why are they all honking this way?» Giuliana asks me.
«They use to in Palermo. The horn has always had a meaning that goes well beyond signalling an incumbent danger. It is a real language, with myriads of tones, that every driver uses to adjust other people's pace, going from a friendly solicitation (come on, it’s green!), through a warning (step aside and let me pass), up to a real invective (go to Naples, son of a...) with a thousand hues. Getting honked at always makes a true Palermitano nervous, because that language is universal, therefore he immediately understands that it’s not a compliment.»
The queue slowly parts in the two main directions, and us with it. Those who turn left enter Viale Strasburgo, the street that I went to when I was a boy. At a crossroad not far from here, in fact, was our high school. We continue in the opposite direction, toward the centre of the city. Beyond the car window, frames of old memories overlaps to the vision of what surrounds us; the journey to reach the Galilei high, the cafe that acted as meeting place on Saturday afternoon, the people crowding the shops of Viale Strasburgo. Many of those shops probably are no longer the same, but the street seems to be substantially like I remember it. It is wide and trafficked, lined on both sides by tall buildings.
«I lived right there», Teresa says, pointing at a building that I see shrinking in the small rearview mirror. Our children turn, following the direction of her pointed finger.
Thirty years ago this was a remarkable residential area, where the prices of the apartments were high in spite of the general conditions of the buildings, in which most of the balconies wore a containing green diaper, needed to prevent chunks of plaster to fall on the passer-bys. It was the hasty way to remedy to a cheap house-building practice, controlled by mafia businesses, that collapsed miserably, revealing the true face of a decaying city. Yet those indecorous dresses were accepted by everybody, as well as the overloaded and stinking garbage bins, the perennial noise of the traffic and the air polluted by the exhaust gases. People were willing to pay hundreds of thousands of Euro to feel the owners of a piece of that degrade.
With enthusiasm, Teresa gestures crazily to show me all the changes that flow in front of her amazed eyes.
«Everything is so rigorously orderly and regular now, I like it!» she remarks with a certain wonder.
And so this new Palermo earns the first point in its favour. In the distance, behind the tops of some buildings, I see the points of a recent construction.
«What’s that?» I ask loudly.
«It should be a minaret», Marco says, «quite a lot of mosques have been built in the city».
And for his sister, who is looking at him, he adds pleased, «I documented further before leaving. The teacher wants a report about this trip».
«A mosque in Palermo? Things have really changed, then», Teresa remarks, «I wonder how the people took it?»
«It seems a great novelty, but in reality it is only a return to the past, because at the time of the Arabic domination, in Palermo as well as in the rest of the island, there were quite a lot.»
«I would like to visit one of them», Teresa adds.
«Wow, it’s really beautiful!» Giuliana remarks while with the car we are running along the imposing building with its light geometric volumes.
«If it is true that whoever goes back to a place after many years is destined to feel estranged from it because of the changes, in our case this feeling is utterly amplified», Teresa remarks, while she is looking out of the car window with an expression of enchantment on her face.
With that picture still in the eyes, we enter Via Libertà, where there is a luxuriant vegetation of tall and fair palm trees. They have taken the place of the bare and sickly plane trees there were once. The monotonous voice of the sat-nav drives us toward the hotel. Too many years have passed for me to orient myself on my own, also because at the time I didn't drive and my visits to the centre were limited to the inclusive road axle between the two greater city theatres, the Politeama and the Massimo. Besides, many streets have been renamed, especially those that made reference to the history of Italy.
The journey to the hotel is an alternation of surprises and old memories. The traffic is intense at this hour close to lunchtime, and the honking of the car horns makes my children laugh. At every "piiipiii" they play finding a
corresponding curse, of which they ask me for the correct Palermitan intonation.
We ride along the port, where there are two big cruise ships, one of which sails under a flag of the Emirates.
«I read that it is one of the most expensive and exclusive cruises of the Mediterranean. The inside of the ship is a dream; a floating city, with the more disparate and unthinkable luxury services», Teresa says. She is a faithful viewer of a television program that proposes dream trips in every part of the world.
Once we left the port behind, crossing the whole Via Crispi, we reach the Foro Italico, where the landscape is enchanting not only along the shore, but also from the opposite side, where ancient buildings arise, all restored and brought back to their ancient splendour. The car proceeds at a slow walk, to allow all of us to greedily record every detail, when a tall and ultramodern building appears right in front of us.
«That’s our hotel», Teresa says, leaving our children speechless.
It is an imposing tower of steel and blue glass, wound on itself like a spiral, with a long catwalk stretching over the road for several dozen meters from one of the first floors, like a long arm stretched out to reach the beach. In very distant times, this was a prestigious sea area for the city, in which famous bathing establishments rose, but at the time of my parents it had already been for a long time a polluted area, where bathing was forbidden.
A young African boy in the uniform of the hotel gestures for me to stop. He signals me where to park.
The car slips in an underground parking. The contrast between the natural, intense daylight, and the dark of the ramp that leads to the parking is acute, so much so as to pale the several neon tubes on the ceiling.
Two bellboys welcome us, pointing at our numbered place, then, taking our several cases, they lead us to the hall for the registration.
A few minutes later, a panoramic elevator projects us twenty-five floors above the city, in an imposing family suite. A luxurious living room where cream colour dominates on walls, tapestry and the whole furnishing, amplifying the light coming in from the large glass wall. Two open bedrooms, one opposite the other, each provided with TV, telephone line, wireless connection, mini-bar, relaxing armchair, private bathroom with Jacuzzi and a view of the sea extending as far as the eye can see.
«Each floor is sort of a big independent cube that revolves around a pivot», Giuliana summarizes from one of the leaflets fanned on the shiny white of the table.
«Revolves?» Mark echoes in amazement.
«Exactly», his sister confirms, plopping down on one of the soft couches in the middle of the great living room, «this way it allows a three-sixty panoramic view. We are in one of the richest cities in the world, guys!»
Teresa and I, in front of the large window, silently watch the horizon that, in this new Palermo, seems to have shifted far beyond it was possible.
A fast lunch in the panoramic restaurant of the hotel, at the twentieth floor, then we slip on Via Lincoln for the first raid in the city.
To our left Villa Giulia and the Botanical Garden, then the road goes straight to the central station, from which important city roads depart, first among them the whole old Via Roma.
While our children are captured by the charm of the incomprehensible writings on the signs of the shops and in the advertising posters, Teresa weaves her left arm around mine and walks beside me, commenting everything.
«I am so happy to be here with you that it doesn't seem true yet. It has a strange effect on me though. I lived in this city when it wasn’t exactly good as for quality of life, and actually, even though it was rich of beauty, too many things were wrong. Today it’s considered one of the more liveable cities, and it is so peculiar as to be considered unique in its kind. Does it have the same effect on you?»
«I am happy to be on vacation with you. I had been in need of a break for a long time. As for being here... it’s difficult to explain... I feel a little estranged. The impression is positive, mind you, but I have the feeling that I am in a totally different place. I feel like a tourist in an unknown city. It’s still too soon to say more, I have to see more to form an opinion.»