Chapter 4
It was May 13th 2016. A few days before my birthday, the eighteenth one. The day had started like many others; I would not have had such a clear memory of it if it hadn’t become a sadly historical date for Sicilians. At half past six, like every morning, my mother had come into my room to wake me up, and I had ignored her call as usual, keeping dozing for at least another ten minutes. At that point she had raised the tone of her voice, because it was getting late for the bus scheduled at twenty past seven. She said that she would be forced to dress me in a hurry to bring me to school. The same thing happens still today, though the screaming one is Teresa and the dozing teenagers Marco and Giuliana.
Daily miracle, I succeeded in racing to the bus stop just in time to get on the bus for Palermo and reach the school on time. There too it was a day like many others, in spite of the nervousness circulating among the teachers. You could feel it in their eyes and in their discourses during the break. They were all worried for the economic and politic crisis that was paralysing Italy. For days they had been waiting for the new manoeuvre of the government and there was great fear that it would require further sacrifices to the base of the population, already strongly struck by taxes, lack of services, and great instability. Professor Martino, teacher of Italian and Latin, prophesied catastrophes. I remember him in front of the door of our classroom, grizzled beard, thick and uncombed hair, black goggles on his nose. In the middle of a small group of colleagues he was minuscule, but his voice thundered in the corridors when he had to restore order and silence. He kept repeating, with a mixed tone of anger and discouragement, «You will see, colleagues. They will strike us, civil servants, once more. They will keep squeezing us until we are made totally poor... they even want to decrease that already ludicrous salary we have! But there is no doubt that they, our honest rulers, will not renounce to any of their privileges... obviously to our expenses.»
The others looked at him in dismay; someone shook their head with a resigned expression, someone pitched intentions of rebellion.
«We have to go down in the squares and protest once again», the young professor of maths – with which the masculine half of my class was in love – said.
Us pupils listened to them, but we didn't give too much importance to these discourses, considering them the usual paranoia of adults.
Apart from this parenthesis during the break, the day was filled by the usual interrogations and explanations, all regular.
It was the return home what marked the turn that made that day always vivid in my memory, as much as in that of all Sicilians, I believe.
I buzzed the intercom three times before my mother answered. She usually waited for me leaning out from the kitchen window. The door was opened just a small crack. Entering, when I threw my backpack in a corner of the hall as usual, I saw my mother’s outline, with her back turned. She didn’t even greet me and quickly went to the kitchen. I immediately knew that something unusual had happened, because my mother never welcomed me in that cold and detached way. She generally flooded me with questions, she listened to the report of my day at school with interest, then she went on to adjourn me about everything that she deemed important enough for me to know.
I found her in front of the television, one hand in front of her mouth, the other stuck in a gesture meant to tell me to wait. Her shoulders were hunched, her body trembling. For the first time she seemed to me small, inconsistent. She was crying.
«Mom, what happened?» I kept repeating, while she was getting more and more lost in her silent weeping. A terrible thought came to my mind.
«Where is Dad?»
He appeared behind me and leaned a hand on my shoulder, without a word. An endless second in which fear rose in me, in a spiral that wound from the point of my feet, around my legs, to my trunk and up to my throat, taking my breath away. I had never really felt terrorized, neither I had ever seen my parents in that state. My father, with his shoulders curved forward, seemed like an empty sack. At the time he was as old as I am now, but that day, for the first time, I saw an old man in his clothes. The pot boiled and boiled, filling the air of vapour, but nobody seemed to notice. The spaghetti were still on the scale, suspended in mid air like all the emotions that circulated in our American-style kitchen. I thought of an accident, relieved nevertheless by the fact that it hadn’t happened to my parents.
«Tell me something, come on! Why do you keep looking at the TV instead of explaining me what happened?»
It was my father to break the silence.
«They sold us, Paolo, we won't be Italian any longer.»
And then the smothered weeping of my mother became a cry of pain.
At half past noon we meet Anna in the agreed place. Teresa greets her from the car with a happy laughter, then, as soon as I stop on the border of the road, she races to meet her. Who knows if we look aged to her like she appears to my eyes. The time passed since our last meeting is marked on her face as well as in the heavy step of her body, in her soft forearms. She wears a large green dress, curling under her breast, that allows to imagine her soft but exaggerated volumes. She has never been beautiful but, unlike my memory of her, she seems less embarrassed in her large body, even able to exhibit it in a pleasant and polite way. Her red hair falls soft on her shoulders in orderly waves. A hand pushes back a lock, with a young girl mannerism. In spite of her wrinkles, it seems that her youth is blooming now.
As she greets us, I recognize her voice, kind and peaceful, with her marked accent of Palermo. The first hug is for Teresa, who looks minuscule next to her. I see her disappear in that hold, but she resurfaces from it radiant. Then it’s my turn. Her hold is soft and strong at the same time, she smells of good person, of the same candid freshness of the old times. She fills Teresa of compliments because she rejected time, she didn’t allow it to mark her. Then she turns to our children.
«I am happy to meet you, your mother told me so many things about you that it almost seems to me that I know you. However you are even prettier than how she described you.»
Giuliana shakes her hand with warmth; she has the same loquacity of her mother and she doesn't find any difficulty in relating with new people. Marco greets her with an impeccable but detached attitude.
«Today the heat is unbearable, it almost seems a day of August», Anna says, «I hope you brought swimsuits, because you don't have to lose the chance to go to the beach. Here the bathing season begins very early».
We chat for a few minutes in the trafficked crossroad, then, following Teresa schedule, we leave to have lunch at the "Torre Normanna", a magnificent resort leaning out on the sea, whose name evokes another chapter of the dominations which followed one another in Sicily. It is a historical hotel, built at the beginning of 1900, which became a symbol for our country. When we were young it was the most famous in the area. People came here from Palermo and from the neighbouring countries to celebrate weddings, baptisms, communions, ceremonies that in the Sicilian tradition must be celebrated in great style. Anna says that the hotel is considered still today the peak of the tourist area, and the most requested, even though many others blossomed when Torre saw an exponential increase of tourist flow. The outside of the building is comfortingly still familiar too. It maintained the same characteristic white masonry that stands out against the intense sky. It typically evokes all of those Mediterranean places where the sea is protagonist: from the dammusi of Pantelleria, to the abodes of the fishermen of Salina, to the candid houses of the Greek islands. And, with its immense structure, it keeps standing out even in the predominant white of the neighbouring buildings.
Anna and Teresa have resumed their conversation and keep breathlessly telling each other every possible thing. In the following hours, Marco, Giuliana and I will be spectators in the theatre of their memory. Each of them will speak and listen, will laugh and be moved, because they would never have thought until recently that they would be living this moment.
We follow them as they walk on, ar
m in arm and smiling, the three of us behind them to behold this teenage reunion of two old high school friends.
I knew well the restaurant hall because of the several celebrations to which my family was invited. It seems to me very different from how I remembered it, but maybe it’s the new distribution of the furniture to make it seem larger. Or it is my memory alone that compressed the spaces and times of my childhood. The style of the furnishing is completely new, definitely more intimate and refined. The classical party saloon of the town, full of lights and mirrors that amplified the sense of space, left room to a discreet environment in which you can enjoy an atmosphere of not noisy conviviality. It is the kind of place I prefer, of a more exquisitely Parisian inclination. I never liked overcrowded and noisy town restaurants, where the voices of the people at your table are lost in the off-key shouts of karaoke. That was the most diffused kind of place in this little sea town, example of a histrionic way of existence.
We choose a table next to the large window that dominates the sea. On the beach, a small group of guys, in tight oarsman tops from which compact muscles surface, throw one another a green Frisbee with fast and clean movements of their arms. They return me some of the thoughtlessness I left a long time ago on that same beach, when I was one of them.
The waiter approaches and suggests to us the dishes of the day. He speaks in English but it is clear that he is Arabic. Anna recommends us fish, that here is always fresh and still cooked our way. We trust her, leaving her faculty to choose for everybody. Surprising us, she turns to the waiter and starts to speak Arabic. She is as quick as incomprehensible. The man writes in a no less breezy way, following her dictation. Every now and then they exchange a few lines of which I can't even guess the meaning. Then he disappears toward the kitchen. Teresa, the children and I exchange an amused look, while Marco shrugs as if to say "Beats me!"
I ask Anna how does it work with language now.
«As it was inevitable; we all became bilingual. Everyone learns their own mother tongue in family, but then, going to school, they also study the other, and so they can communicate in both indifferently.»
«Yes, but what is the official language?» Giuliana asks.
«Arab is the official language, both written, in formal documents and spoken, but in everyday life Italian is still spoken quite a lot. It’s normal!»
«But how could you make another language yours?» I ask.
«The same way you did when you went to live in France doctor! Isn’t French the language you speak the whole day in the hospital, while at home you keep speaking Italian?»
I don't answer but I nod. I don't know why, but in their case it seems to me more complicated. Anna reads my thought and concludes it out loud.
«A lot of people, those observing this situation from the outside, keep wondering how it is possible that a whole people made his a language that wasn’t his, but it is only a detail in comparison to all the changes we have been called to face. Language, if you think about it, is only a matter of form; thought goes beyond the idiom. Historically it is known that many people left Sicily to go to work in Europe and America, and for sure language wasn’t a serious problem. They learned it simply by living in contact with local people, or studying it if necessary. Just like you, Paolo.»
She looks at me and smiles, and it makes me feel stupid.
«But we moved voluntarily, so it was inevitable and necessary to learn to live in the hosting country. Here the change happened locally instead, it was a constraint, not a choice.»
Anna smiles again, but a nervous quiver makes her hand tremble slightly as she tries to light up a cigarette.
«After all, change is a good thing, but I can say this after many years. At the beginning it was rather a shock, because we felt threatened as a people. We were afraid we would be deleted, lose everything. Considering how much we had to face, always affects me. Fortunately, there weren’t only renounces, but also great discoveries, for those of us who dared to look beyond.»
«Which ones?» Giuliana asks, «tell us everything».
«You see, dear Giuliana, maybe for you young people it is easier to understand such things than it is for us. You are more spontaneous, less rigid than adults, who the more they grow old, the more they harden, barricading behind their convictions. For example: think about when you meet new people. What is the first thing that you are interested in knowing about them?»
Giuliana makes the expression of someone who is meditating on an answer, which is actually ready without effort.
«We have to make a distinction: if we talk about boys, the first thing I am interested in is if they are handsome, and in that case if they already have a girlfriend, then if they are nice, amusing, if they have my same tastes in music. About girls I am interested in understanding whether I can trust them, whether we have the same tastes about clothes, boys, everything.»
«And if they are foreigners?»
«I never thought about it this way. I don't believe there is a big difference.»
«Just as I imagined. But for adults, my dear, it’s not the same. Luckily, in front of a foreigner, you young people can still see, first of all, a young like you. Adults, instead, make of their difference a barrier, that sometimes becomes insurmountable. A barrier soaked with cultural, ideological, moral, even political prejudices. And this barrier ends up preventing us to see what we have in front, that is simply another man or another woman.»
She pauses and looks at us all as if to be sure that the sense of her words isn’t lost on anyone. Meanwhile the waiter arrives with drinks and a tray of sea salad. He has a long and woody body, the skin of his cheeks is dug and wrinkled, and his great black eyes are disproportionate in comparison to his minuscule face. Anna waits for him to leave before resuming her explanation.
«You see, when this people started coming to Sicily, it was a very difficult moment. We lived it like an invasion, a sort of authorized – but nevertheless forced – occupation. Many couldn’t tolerate the loss of national identity to become an Arab colony. This second aspect was even more catastrophic than the first. "Not to the Arabs", many people said, "they could sell us to anyone else but not to them." Therefore so many left, leaving their land in the hands of foreigners, who came to occupy it with their head held high. Once, non-European people came here, poor people, without job, often illegal immigrants destined to black market labour or to repatriation. They weren’t given the dignity of human beings, their presence was lived with great impatience. Instead, after the sale of Sicily, it was rich Arabs who came, those coming to make investments to increase their wealth. We saw it that way, so naturally this fed our anger. We shouted, protested, fiercely quarrelled, sowing and gathering pain, despising and making ourselves despised. But the anger, fortunately, exhausted us, and all of us had to stop and catch our breath. And it was in that moment of truce that we stopped hating and restarted living. And got to know one another, finally!»
Anna smiles, in her eyes the images of an old nostalgic film seem to flow.
«How did you do?» Giuliana asks again.
«In the simplest way, speaking! That’s what languages are for! And speaking we discovered that we are all made of the same humanity. Everything started from women; mothers who met in front of the school of their children, or in the anteroom of a medical study, at the hairdresser saloon, at the grocery, anywhere. And discussing we started to understand that we had the same problems with husbands and children, that we shared the same emotions and worries aside from our cultural difference. Above all, suffering united us, because in front of illnesses, difficulties, death, we faced the same kind of pain. A pain without either nationality or religion, without either flags or languages, simply a human pain. Several associations were born where we met to know and confront with one another, and above all learn to cohabit without renouncing our own identities, even with the differences. Similar experiences happened on the whole territory, with different times and ways obviously, but it became an unstoppable process
. Today most of my friends are Arab... also because my school friends have gone away!»
She reaches out and touches the arm of Teresa who, meanwhile, is trying to chase back a compelling tear that doesn’t want to be suffocated. Sat next to Anna, she holds her hand. In the look they trade there is the same tuning of the best friends they were once. In addition, there is that intimate agreement among women from which us men always feel somehow excluded. The rest of the lunch flows in the awkward attempts of Giuliana at learning some Arabic words and the stories of ours last thirty years of life.
There is a great solarium from which the sight is enchanting.
Anna returned to Palermo, Giuliana and Teresa put on their swimsuits and are enjoying a postcard landscape from their beach chairs. They have perfectly entered the holiday climate, while I, plastered in a tobacco-coloured suit with a striped tie, seem a conference attendant at lunch break.
«Dad, you lived in a Earthly Paradise for eighteen years and never told us! It must have been fantastic!» Giuliana remarks, sprinkling herself with suntan oil.
Actually it was. I only have extraordinary memories of my life in the province. I remember the thoughtlessness, the freedom to play in the street, where you saw but a few cars in winter and you could breathe the good smell of the sea. Nothing to do with the noise, the confusion, the queues of cars, the grey and smoky air of the big cities.
But what Giuliana sees now is not the country of my childhood anymore.
Leaning on the parapet, looking at the islet emerging from the water in front of us, I tell her about other excerpts from my past.
«May was always a stupendous month in Torre dell’Isola. Summer heat was already here without the typical confusion of July and August, and you could fully enjoy the beach in all calm. We townspeople didn’t love too much the daily invasion of Palermo people during summer months. They came with cars overloaded with people, food, tables and beach umbrella, they turned the beaches into some kind of camping, they dirtied, and in the evening they went back home, leaving behind a sad show made of so much dirt. The next day it all restarted. Equipped beaches reduced more and more the free beaches areas and this made the situation slightly better, just because the beach workers were ready to clean where people were ready to dirty once more. But the expanses of free beach were a mortifying business card. For us townspeople it was easy to point at the people from Palermo as carriers of dirt and decline, forgetting the conditions in which the beach was in winter, when the town was entirely in our hands. My father used to repeat that we had turned a potential heaven into a true rubbish dump. And that carpet of carelessness that was the beach was an indelible stain in the marvellous show of the intense sea, a few meters from us. "Nature and culture", my father repeated again and again, pointing first at the sea, then at the beach, "nature has been very generous with us, but our culture offends it. We are incapable of taking care of and giving value to what we have. This golden land in our hands is miserably dying, buried under the miseries of our ignorance and backwardness. In the hands of others it would be one of the most splendid territories of the world". Unfortunately he wasn’t wrong. Look around you.»
With an ample gesture of the hand I encompass everything that surrounds us. The beach is an expanse of thin and gilded sand. A photo without either filters or retouches. There aren’t any waste papers nor cigarette stubs around, and the shore is a long pedestrian area, with a reserved passage only for ecological buses.
In my times all this was light years away. And the local politicians didn't do anything to improve the conditions of the territory. "So many promises during the electoral campaigns and then... once elected... everything forgotten", these are the words that many times I heard my grandfather say, and my father afterwards, in a sad rebound from generation to generation to testify the stalemate.
He couldn't resign, my father. The reality of a defaced, badly managed land, subdued to the business of few, was like a wound in the heart and in the personal pride. What possibility had the future of his son, mine, under those conditions? What could make that immovable reality change?
«The foreigners have been able to do what was up to us. But at what price? Now we are the foreigners and they are the landlords», I say with anger and regret, «it was our duty.»
In the street I see a man who is advancing and animatedly talking at the phone. He’s tall and thin, his chin framed by a beard, grizzled like the thick untidy hair; his face, after thirty years, is still the same. He’s Vito Strano, my best friend of those distant times. When he is in front of the hotel entrance, right under us, I call his name. He looks up, then hurriedly dismisses his interlocutor and makes the phone disappear in a pocket of his jeans. He too immediately recognizes me, and keeps repeating my name, waving both hands.
«Paolo, Paolo, I can’t believe it.»
And he laughs, loudly, with the same expression of the old times but with some new wrinkle. Teresa found him on Facebook too.
I reach him in the hall and we hug, exchanging pats on our shoulders as if to verify our solidity. We did so many things together! He was the most difficult person of Torre to leave for me. He was like a brother; we were five years old when we became schoolmates in nursery school, and from there we went on together until the diploma. Teresa reaches us, wound in a white and black sarong. The hug with her is full of joy and affection too.
«You are still beautiful», he tells her. At the time of high school he had a crush for her.
Some memory of the past, some updating on the present, then Teresa leaves us and goes back to sun tanning with our children. Vito proposes me a tour of the town.
«I’ll make you jump into the past, even though you will realize that a lot has changed.»
So here we are, together again, but with a less happy-go-lucky attitude.