Creative Writing by Ed Carchia: Sicily Dreaming

SICILY DREAMING

By Edward Carchia

From Pangolin Papers, Spring, 2004

(Nominated for the 2005 Pushcart Prize)

Reprinted in “Arba Sicula” a Sicilian-English bilingual publication of St. John’s University, dedicated to the preservation of Sicilian culture.

The café owner was intrigued by Nick because in 1955 few foreigners drove alone through Sicily’s mountainous interior. The man drew the coffee and chatted in the familiar dialect of Nick’s grandmother. Her village was nearby, sitting atop Mount Iato like a war helmet. Nick had gone there the day before and found civilizations lying on the mountain like geological strata. A temple to the Greek Goddess of Love consorted in promiscuity with a ménage of petrified shades and the past loitered even in the approach sign to the town: Italian Iato, Arab Jato and Greek Iatas.

The new road bypassed the café and Nick was the only customer. He drew unhurried sips, appreciative of the resuscitative caffeine jolt, and returned to the road. The man had said yes, it would eventually take him to Iato. The back way was more scenic.

He drove under a painfully blue sky: hungry for this countryside, this wellspring. The hills billowed past in a blur of browns, greens and gold: solitary farmhouses, the occasional hilltop village and the land, ploughed, wooded and fallow. Festive carpets of wild poppies assaulted him with jubilance. The road turned to dirt, winding and climbing; deceptively drawing him into the mountains with subtle seduction until he acknowledged that he was lost. He was high into Mediterranean pines now and had not seen a house for some time. He pulled off onto a shoulder and was surrounded by ancestral hills.

He began to retrace and shortly came to a fork. He took the right one, which descended. After about fifteen minutes on the deteriorating road, he realized his mistake when, rounding a hill, he saw that the way fell steeply into a far valley that was ringed on all sides by high mountains. He continued on, seeking a turnaround, when he came upon a grove of ancient olive trees. Two of the giants lay in wreckage along the hillside. Blowdowns. One, hollowed by age, fell to a high wind and brought down the other: a fall of arboreal archangels. The opening revealed distant cubes, human habitation. He went on, pulled by the remoteness.

The road disintegrated until it was not much more than a mule track and finally expired before a high rock wall, perhaps the side of an eroded caldera. Nick left the car, scrambled over a gap in the rock, and picked up a rebirth of the path. After a few hundred yards he came onto an antique cast iron sign. The raised letters told him that this place was called Vadala and a chill shocked his sun-heated spine. He soon entered the village and passed into a little square, fronted by a small but splendid church.

He was not surprised by the stares; few would come in by this route. But the folk quickly returned to their affairs, avoiding the appearance of probing.

Two men sat at a table on the square. As Nick approached them a third man materialized in the doorway of the adjacent café. Despite his resolve to remain composed, Nick was momentarily startled by the man’s instantaneous arrival and striking features. Ink black curls crowned a vertically scored, narrow, dark olive face, commanded by a majestic aquiline nose that sliced the air like a scimitar. Cobalt eyes questioned the stranger who was clearly not a man of the soil.

“Scusi,” Nick responded to the raised eyebrows. “I was lost and saw your sign with the name of your village. You see my own name is Nicolo Vadala. I am from America.”

The man pulled out a chair and opened his hand in invitation. “Please. Will you have some coffee?” He gave no sign of special importance to Nick’s declaration. But the eyes of the others met momentarily, and Nick noticed. The man brought the coffee and sat with him.

Nick continued. “When I came to visit this country, it occurred to me that I only knew the village of my grandmother, but not of my grandfather. I saw your sign and remembered that the immigration at Ellis Island sometimes gave people the name of their village.”

“Capischo.” The man nodded. “But you speak as the Italians do.” There was an edge of offense. Others began to pause in the square, not as discrete now.

“I studied Italian at my university and lost the speech of my parents. It is pleasant to hear the Sicilian language spoken again. I would like to search the records of the births, the marriages and such things. Would they be in this beautiful church?”

“My name is Carmine Russo,” the man said. “I am the owner of this store and café and also the Headman of the Village of Vadala. You don’t have to move. Cicci here will do everything for you.” He glanced quickly towards the overhead sun. “It is time for la pranza. Would you like something to eat?” Nick passed on to Cicci the little family history he knew while Carmine placed a jug of fruity young wine on the table. A huge bowl of steaming pasta followed and Nick asked his companions to join him.

The talk grew more relaxed, even jovial, as he answered the inevitable questions about Lamerica. Yet, Nick’s own curiosity was deflected by contrived misunderstandings and distractions. As the afternoon wore on, more villagers arrived, drawn into increasing festivity. The men were followed by wondering children and older women. Finally younger women, some veiled in the old manner, appeared with husbands and brothers. A man with sightless eyes and a mandolin plaintively rendered an impromptu ballad of the return of a lost son. A trumpet appeared and then an accordion. A Tarantella was danced as the village celebrated the return of its own. The revelry mingled with evening, when a bloated moon scattered gathering stars. Nick saw that Cicci had rejoined the celebrants. He called to him to hear what he had learned in the church records. Carmine stayed Cicci with a gesture and the warm murmur of the crowd quickly subsided. As a child Nick was initiated into the nuanced communication of the elder Sicilians, a subtle language spoken with the movement of a finger, the flicker of an eyelash, a small pause, sudden silence. The wordless idiom of the helot, slave and subjugated. Unintelligible to the foreign master.

Carmine Russo pulled a chair to face Nick. “There is no need to search the records. Your grandfather Salamone was of my own family and was the only one to ever emigrate from the village of Vadala. It is late, Capische? Please stay with us.”

Nick was not surprised by the precautionary deception. He knew he had penetrated a layer of suspicion. In these old mountain towns, local stories and histories were often enigmatic, sometimes kept to themselves. Revelation was a layered onion, peeled cautiously.

Two figures in black, Carmine’s wife and widowed daughter, silently led him to a stone building beyond the square. A ladder rose from an earthen floor to a loft where he found his luggage waiting. Nick collapsed into sleep in his clothing. Once—he could not know whether moments or hours later—he briefly opened his eyes to the moonlit stare of the young widow. Then he dreamed of a quest through the worn old mountains for a nameless immensity.

It was a year since Nick’s separation and he still mourned her departure as a kind of death. Often, the memory of her alien grace passed through him like a sorrowing wind. He shared the common lot of gaining and then losing time and again during his forty-two years. There were not only those who passed through his life, but past selves that came and went like remembered acquaintances. The street tough, the soldier, the wanderer, the scholar, the businessman. Their insistent ghosts crowded the cramped chamber of his persona, elbowing one another for space. He had never learned to accept the finality of loss. He sold his public relations business and began to wander, as he did when he was a young man just come from the war.

When Nick woke, the sun was already high. His clothes had been neatly folded and stacked onto a chair. Nick dressed and descended to the ground floor. Perhaps animals were once kept here, but it was now almost empty. The doorway framed a stone house a few yards away. Carmine’s wife was drawing a bucket from a well for Nick’s morning wash. He entered the kitchen, where a ball of steam hovered over a large bowl of black coffee on a massive oak table. There were also a small jug of warm creamy milk, aromatic rolls taken hot from the oven and an orange, the size of a grapefruit, that sprayed his mouth with sweet, provocative juices.

When he returned to his quarters, a basin and a massive stone trough of warm water awaited him on the ground floor. Most likely the tub once watered animals. In his bathing reverie he closed his eyes and passed his hands over undulating marble, a hoary relief smoothed by millennia into indecipherable tubercles. Perhaps a sarcophagus. A final home.

Carmine’s wife, Francesca, was of the Greek type, “Tipo Greco,” traced onto thousands of vases strewn from Agrigento to Siracusa. Her genial ovoid face did not completely mask an internal iron. Her daughter Gloria shared her mother’s regal beauty, though it was not yet tempered by time and duty. The young widow had her father’s cobalt eyes and her mother’s fair skin, which contrasted gloriously with raven hair. The effect was disturbingly spectacular.

Nick found it interesting that Sicilians sometimes described one another by ancestral racial type. Was a subtle caste distinction at work here? One could read the layers of invasions in the faces—Berbers, Phoenicians, Greeks, Italians, Arabs, Moors, Norsemen. A cocktail of bloods.

Carmine Russo told him that they would meet with others in the evening. The resplendent façade of the church beckoned, a jewel among rustic stones. Its exquisite Moorish arches were edged with fine tracery and a

slender campanile swept heavenward with Levantine grace. Inside, a dazzling profusion of mosaic danced about the vaulted ceiling and across the underfoot. Not an iota of the brilliant interior was ignored by the rhapsodic hand of the artist. That such a marvel should have been erected here, in this somnolent hamlet. By what gifted artisans? From what patrimony?

When he left the church he turned to appreciate again the façade. He thought he saw, for a moment, the face of the widow Gloria in the narrow open gap of the doorway. Hadn’t he closed it?

She was watching him without his knowing and saw that his eyes were beautiful for a man, though not overly large and not feminine. They were a fickle hazel that flashed green in the light. She flushed hotly at these transmutations: felt that his eyes opened directly onto subterranean pools where she might drown. Once, when she brought fresh linen to his room, she found him asleep. She watched him for a while, fought the impulse to run her hand through his silky-thick chestnut hair. There was gentility to him, a finer strain. His features were well ordered, harmonious. He was good looking but not extremely so, not classically so. Human, not a god.

Nick decided to recheck his car. He followed the path back to the spine of rock and scrambled to the top where he overlooked a two hundred foot drop. The car was visible below, where he had left it. Nick sat for some time atop the wall to consider his condition. Should he leave now or find sanctuary in this place apart? He was both comforted and repelled by Vadala: an ambiguity that had followed him throughout Sicily. A fair knowledge of the history did not prepare him for a past that was everywhere. In this place he recognized something of what slept in his bones. He had come here for that. But it was at the same time alien, vaguely destabilizing. His wife again invested his thoughts. There had been a gap that neither could bridge. For a time they soared above it on the fierce wings of passion. Then there was a sundering and they were severed halves. Parted tendrils searched a void. He waited for her return.

After dinner, Cicci and Orfeo, the mandolin player, joined them. Orfeo carried a strange old lute-like instrument. Carmine raised the flat of his hand vertically like an axehead.

“Orfeo, with this instrument, will sing the story of Vadala, as it has been passed down to us.” The musical style was unlike the contemporary peasant singsong tetrameter: it was instead more reminiscent of the Flamenco. The archaic polyglot was unintelligible. Cicci rendered a simultaneous prose translation.

There was a time without governance, with starvation and every misery. Then Morabit took the whole of western Sicily and the harvests resumed. But Federico returned to reclaim his lands. He was hereditary king over the Two Sicilys by his Norman mother and also Emperor of the German lands by his father. Morabit was killed and his daughter took his army and fought the Normans in the mountains around Jato. Afterwards they founded the village of Vadala and remained a people apart.

When the antique strains played out, Carmine continued. “Our people have long ceased to be of the Moslem faith, though the church is said to have once been a mosque. There is a village of Christian Albanians northeast of Iato in these same mountains, folk who fled the Turks long ago and remain to themselves like the Vadalanos.” I have heard that in America you also have places where people have settled apart, to go their own way in peace.”

Nick’s grandfather had once told him that Vadala meant Valley of Allah.

Carmine said that Nick could remain with them as long as he wished.

That night, Nick woke to the moon-silvered face of Gloria. She was standing at the foot of his bed and moved to his opened eyes.

“I have a wife,” Nick whispered.

“She has left your bed,” she replied. She sat by him, her face close to his. “You speak of it in your sleep.” She added, “I know you cannot stay.”

Nick was weary with loneliness and he rested from it among his kin. He sometimes helped in the fields or with other chores. Mostly though, he walked in the surrounding mountains or talked with the men in the square. Nothing was asked of him. On a high ridge the sun lit a tiny fire in the earth. He disinterred a metallic fragment, dirt encrusted, formless. A gemstone was embedded into it. Nick rubbed it with his spittle and a ruby returned from a sleep of a thousand years. There was writing also, Arabic. The heaven probing word for God. He returned it to its grave.

Gloria came to him in the discretion of night. She pressed to know him: his childhood, his coming of age, his marriage. Nick asked about her husband. He died five years before; they had been married less than a year. She loved him as a young girl loves a man who is her own choice. But it was not like what she had with Nick. There should be different words for love. Nick told her the Eskimos had many words for snow.

Her husband went to Iato to get guns. They went to the mother village from time to time for things they could not produce themselves. Sometimes they brought back someone whose craft was beyond them, or a teacher, such as Cicci. Sometimes young men and girls returned with them, husbands and wives for their children and siblings, so as not to marry only among themselves. On such a trip the men from Piana d’Albanese killed her husband.

“It was for blood revenge that began in the time of the war. Our relatives in Iato asked us to show the American general the way across our mountain pass to the coastal plain. The American general had a fire in him to reach Messina before the English general. He was struck by the lightning for Messina; to his strangeness she was his woman that the English general must not touch.

“A man from Piana d’Albanese told the Germans what we had done and they came to Vadala and killed whoever they found. We killed the informer. And so the vendetta began that killed my husband. The Albanians keep the vendetta for a long time, sometimes for a hundred years. It is the code they brought with them when they fled the Turks.”

Gloria had the old stringed instrument with her. She was entrusted with its preservation during her time. She played it now and sang a love song. He lay back on the hillside, blanketed by the ubiquitous blue of Sicilian sky. He thrilled to the sweet nasality of her voice and fell into a delicious sleep.

The next day she asked him about his wife. “Has she given you children?”

“No.”

“She is barren?”

“Yes.”

“Was she cold?”

“No, but different than you and I. Her center was not easy to touch. But when I least expected it, I would find her suddenly revealed to the innermost. A consummation other than the act of physical love.” Gloria said nothing but became thoughtful.

Then, another time, “Is it true that American women that have no children may do the work of any man, even doctors, and that they may become learned scholars?”

“Inga is a professor of Romance Languages.”

“Then does she speak Italian?”

“Some, not fluently. She teaches French and Spanish. Actually, we met in an Italian class in college. She was a visiting foreign student.”

And the day after, “ Did your wife leave so that you might have children by another woman?”

“I can’t imagine women behaving that way, so it never crossed my mind.”

Two carabinieri appeared in the square and Nick was hidden from them. After a while Cicci came to him and told him that Nick’s wife made an investigation into his disappearance, first through the American Embassy and then she ordered a private search. It had now been five months. They had picked up his trail bit by bit—a gas station attendant, the place where he took coffee and finally to his car outside the cliffs. Nick went himself to speak to the carabinieri. They were Italian and very uncomfortable in this remote place.

“Tell my wife that I am very sorry to have worried her. I didn’t think… Tell her that I am well and that I have found a place to rest for a time. In case she requires more financial access I will give you a letter to the bank.” The carabinieri said they must take the car, as Hertz wanted it back.

Gloria clung to him throughout each night, until the dawn. A week later Nick saw a crowd quickly gather in the square. As he passed through the knot, faces turned to him in wonder. He knew what he would find. In this place without tourism she was like an alien deposited from another planet.

“Inga.”

“Do you mind that I came?”

“Mind? I can’t begin to know how to answer that.”

“Can we speak?”

Nick said a few words and the crowd dispersed. A bottle of wine and two glasses had been left for them.

“You seem to have a great deal of influence here.”

“I am one of them. I found this place by accident. As you know, it bears my name. And yours by marriage.”

“Will you come home?”

“To what?”

“To me.”

“Yes, of course. Though after more than a year I have almost given up on that.” He paused. “We will have things to talk about. This cannot happen again.”

Inga saw a lone woman behind Nick at the edge of the square and Nick saw her too, through Inga’s eyes.

“Is she here then Inga?” he asked.

“ Yes. She is extraordinarily beautiful. Is there love between you?”

“On her part a great deal. On my part a profound gratitude. But love for her as man for woman was never an option for me.”

“How long will it take for us to leave?”

“A half hour at most. I haven’t many things to pack. And I must say goodbye to a few people.”

“Do you mind if I speak to her?”

Nick turned and finally looked into Gloria’s face.

“I think she very much wishes to speak to you too, Inga.”

After Nick went to his room, Gloria went to Inga and sat across from her.

“You speak some Italian?”

“Yes, a little. To understand.”

“It took you a long time to take him back.”

“I was angry.”

“We do not have much time left and there are matters between us. It is unnatural for a woman to pass on the man she loves, as a mother her son or a sister her brother.” She reached into a velvet sack that was saturated with old dust. “Please take this in token of my friendship.” Gloria handed Inga a small jewel-encrusted box. “It is from the tenth century, handed from generation to generation.”

“It is very beautiful. But you should give it to Nick.”

“That would not be proper. I have to tell you something that you must keep from Nick. It would only bring him confusion and help no one. Perhaps some time in the future.”

“I promise…” Inga felt a sudden release, as from a struggle. “…I promise, as to a sister.”

“I am with child by Nick. He does not know. He must not know.” Stunned, Inga moved to take Gloria’s hand. “No. Let no one suspect what we have between us,” Gloria cautioned. “I will send word when the time comes. I hope you will allow him to see the child some day.” Inga slowly pulled the diamond wedding ring from her finger and placed it in Gloria’s palm, squeezing Gloria’s hand onto the gift. “No, no! I can’t. Not that,” Gloria protested.

Nick returned, Cicci helping with his luggage, and

Inga rose to greet him. Nick began to embrace Gloria but she took his hand instead and left. Nick gave Cicci some money for Carmine. “Give it to him after I leave.”

Nick drove Inga’s jeep to the wide turnoff. He stopped once more and they looked together on the Sicilian mountains that waited as silently as an omerta. He took her to Iato, the village of his grandmother, and an endless meal was laid out for them with dishes Inga had learned to prepare from Nick’s mother. The family stood around them as they ate, asking after each of Nick’s aunts and uncles by name, though they had never seen them. Then they lingered in a second honeymoon for a week in the lovely sea-heights of Taormina. He noticed that she no longer wore her wedding ring but didn’t ask why: just went to a jeweler and bought her a new one.

Seven months after their return a letter arrived for Inga bearing the Italian postmark. It was from Carmine. Gloria died shortly after giving birth. There was a letter from her. She wanted Nick to have his son and offered him as a final gift to Inga.

Inga told Nick she had to go to Norway for a family matter but returned in only eight days. When he met her at the airport she held a baby in her arms and her eyes were fired with the light of motherhood. She didn’t tell Nick that Gloria was buried wearing the ring.