The Last Sicilian

 

by Michelle Alfano

 

“Dimmi com’era in Sicilia,” I’d say. Tell me how it was in Sicily. I knew my grandmother, Nonna, sometimes missed the simplicity of the old country and its ways. But when she returned several years ago she came back complaining about the hot, bare countryside, jealous relatives left behind, and bureaucracy thick as the sludge at the bottom of the espresso cup I made for her each morning.

I spent a great deal of time with Nonna, who lived in a small bungalow near St. Clair and Dufferin, not far from the bakery she started. My parents inherited the business from her. They fi­nally persuaded Nonna to buy the bakery and named it “La Tri­nacria” after the ancient Greek name for Sicily. She’d had a lim­ited education, her mathematical skills and spelling were poor she said. They sold cannoli, taralle, cookies twisted like rope and iced with a film of sugary water, confetti for weddings—sugar coated almonds of sky blue and tulip pink wrapped in taffeta. As a girl, I was enchanted by the piles of cookies, elab­orate multi-layered cakes and pastries. Cakes of pink and cream and chocolate brown. These pastries reminded me of the family, richly made in complex layers and often bad for you.

A portrait of Nonna’s husband, Calogero, also known as Lillo, the grandfather I never knew, hung in the living room above her plastic covered couch. He wore the somber black jacket and vest that all the men of his time wore. I saw no more of him in this, the only portrait we had of him. He was olive skinned, with wavy, slicked back hair and the large black eyes of a medieval saint in an oil painting. This was not because he appeared virtu­ous, but because he seemed as lonely and overwhelmed by some responsibility, as I presumed those saints to have been.

“Come morì il Nonno?” “How did Nonno die?” Why I contin­ued to ask this question was unclear. It always elicited the same evasive answer from my parents and Nonna. Perhaps I persisted because of the discomfort it spawned. Something was not quite right. They hunched their shoulders, jutted out their lower lips, an expression which meant either “I don’t know” or “What can you do?” or possibly both. But I was determined that I would find out .

My grandfather did not appear to be a nice man. I knew he was a reasonably prosperous farmer. He was said to have died of a heart attack but this seemed odd to me, for some inexplicable reason. Somehow I knew that men of his age and of his time, he was in his early forties when he died, would not have died of heart attacks in small Sicilian villages. They died in wars, of gun shot wounds, vendettas, rampaging horses or mysterious, un­treatable illnesses. But they did not die of heart attacks. Was he a villain or a hero? It remained unclear. Both fare better as time passes. For the villain, time eradicates the horror. For the hero, the blemishes disappear.

Nonna once told me: “Your grandfather was not a man who was liked. He was loud and sometimes unjust. He said what he thought. It got him in trouble. He made people uneasy, they said he bullied them.” She shoved the sleeves of her dress further up on her arms. It was black, the type of dress that she had worn for fifty years since Nonno died and would wear until she died.

“People say they despise men of this sort, but I think it’s a sort of envy of their power to control the people around them. They secretly crave that power for themselves. Sure . . .” and here she gestured widely with her dimpled, flour streaked arms. “If they see injustice their first instinct is to cry out. But isn’t there a sort of thrill in watching the cruelty performed? Don’t we secretly admire the power that is behind it even as we scream ‘Stop’!”

“In our country, we admired a strong man above all, in spite of, or because of, his cruelties. It holds a special fascination for us . . . after all we gave birth to fascism. We suckled Mussolini. Each of my countrymen carries a piece of this in their hearts.”

My grandmother was an unrepentant communist. She was there at the Portella della Ginestra when the bandit Giuliano's men massacred peasants who were leading a demonstration in support of the Reds. He had been a hero to her prior to that. She turned to another task and refused to speak further.

 

I went by the bakery once or twice a day, on my way to school, or if I ran an errand. I poured a cup of espresso for Nonna and me from a battered espresso pot she’d had since she first married in the ’20s. It fit in nicely with the dusty bakery machinery, scratched mixers, and rusting ovens. After they started the busi­ness, despite her misgivings, I often found Nonna in the back of the bakery hunched over a dozen cakes. Icing sugar had floated into her hair and on to her plump arms. Her round cheeks were lightly flecked. I glanced at the cakes. A dictionary lay open on her left side. She held an icing tube which she used to write on cakes. I read the cakes from left to right as they arched away from me: Happy Birthday Livia, Congratulations Charles!, Happy Mother’s Day, Good luck on your new job! On a pad which sat to the left of the cakes these phrases were written first in Italian, then English. They were carefully but somewhat shaki­ly reproduced on the chocolate and cream coloured tableaus. I re­alized, only then, how difficult the whole process of running the bakery had been for my grandmother.

 

My father’s sister arrived from Italy, Giuseppina Pane e Vino, so named because she loved to dip her bread in wine. She had a long face and nose with large soulful black eyes. While my fa­ther favoured the African in appearance she favoured the Ara­bic. They looked and acted nothing alike. But still I liked her very much.

She was considered somewhat of an intellectual because she was the only one of father’s siblings to go to university and was therefore somewhat suspect. Too much knowledge was a danger­ous thing because it alienated you from the family and your roots. She had books, leather bound books with faded gold gilt on their spines. To my mother it meant that she was lazy because she loved to read. To me it meant she was rich because she had the leisure to read. But it was neither of these things.

She also had scarves of every color which she draped around my head and neck, like a zingara. She wore a brilliant lipstick, like a red ribbon of color on her thin lips. She called me “goiello,” or jewel, and let me wear her gold necklaces which were of a duller, richer gold and heavier in feel than mine. They lay shimmering like golden snakes in my hands when I held them up to the sun.

She stayed with us one summer and spent many nights around the kitchen table gossiping and drinking homemade wine over piles of walnuts and cooked chestnuts. I made few inroads with Giuseppina about Nonno. She was as guarded as my parents, pos­sibly because she was young when her father died. Her memories were few but vivid and cruel—brief flashes which illuminated this small man who was still very much a part of our lives. She told me, in a soft low voice, the little that she did remember of him as we washed the dishes together in the evenings while my parents and Nonna worked in the bakery.

“Why do they call Nonno the last Sicilian?”

“Because he died and Sicilians venerate the dead.”

“But why the last?”

“He was the last of his type I suppose . . . I don’t really know.” I noticed that she shifted her eyes from me as she said this.

“Why are they always killing each other in Sicily?” I asked Giuseppina one evening. We had just watched yet another news program about a judge assassinated by the Mafia.

“You think they don’t kill each other here?”

“No . . . yes . . .” The words hung in my mouth, tangled and confused. I didn’t know the right answer.

“There is a theory that it takes two to cause a murder, the murderer who performs the act and the victim who somehow pre­cipitates the act. Their actions or words or mere presence can act as a stimulant.” She passed me a dish to rinse off. I took it timidly. She spoke like no one else. My father said she was “full of philosophy.”

“But then you are blaming the one who is murdered. . .”

“No, I don’t mean that . . . But sometimes murder is a conspir­acy of sorts instigated by the one who is murdered. It establishes a sort of intimacy. These two souls are eternally linked though they may not have met until the very moment of death. It exists between the murdered and the murderer and can never be broken. Their names will always be mentioned in the same breath. The one has claimed possession of the other’s spirit and it will never escape him.”

I persisted with my questions about Nonno. She never spoke of him in front of my father. When pushed she told me this:

“I have this memory of my father. Near our home there was a wild dog who roamed the fields. It sometimes attacked animals at night, not really from hunger but out of a kind of craziness. I’ll tell you why I say that, because we’d find the bird or animal ly­ing bleeding but uneaten many, many times in the fields. And it became a contest between my father and the dog to see if my fa­ther could outwit it. The dog would come and strut just outside the border of the fields, watching us working, almost tempting my father to chase after it. My father seemed to resent the animal its freedom.

But one night he set a trap for the dog outside the pen and caught it. The next morning, the animal’s body was crushed and broken in the jaws of the trap. It looked at us with a sort of glazed defiance, snapping at us when we tried to get it out of the trap. It lay there for hours and none of us could get near it. It howled low and long. I couldn’t stand it anymore, everywhere I went in the house I heard its wailing. Then suddenly it stopped. I didn’t realize it right away but when I did I rushed outside to see if it was dead. I saw that someone had smashed a large rock on its head over and over and it lay in a bloody pulp, completely un­recognizable. I just stood there staring at it. Then I heard someone whistling. I saw my father wiping his hands on a cloth. There was blood on his shirt sleeves and even a few specks on his face. I always think of him in this way, wiping his hands on the cloth and then thrusting it in his pocket and going back to work in the fields without so much as a glance at me.”

 

“Do you remember, fratello mio,” Giuseppina said to my father one night, “that vecchio that peddled eggs and butter in the piazza? The one that died in the marketplace in the spring of ’35?”

My father did not. He shook his head and ate his homegrown pear slowly, thoughtfully.

“Aaah yes,” she said, “that was the summer that you went into hiding after Papa died.”

Was my father a bandit like Giuliano, Sicily’s most infamous son? Is this what this strange wonderful woman from Sicily who talked too much (even by my family’s generous standards) was alluding to? For a moment I pictured my father on horseback ter­rorizing the rich, stealing from fat priests. But then I realized that he was only nine in 1935. My father’s hands shook so badly that I thought he would cut off a finger with the small paring knife.

Giuseppina chattered on but I was too distracted by the effect of her slip to listen closely. My father left the table and went into the garden to sit by the tomato plants. Each stake with its plump tomatoes was lovingly planted years before in the small garden he cultivated under a bower of green grapes. He sat on his small wooden chair and balanced a glass of red wine on his knee. My father, who thought it unmanly to complain, quietly watered his garden with half a century of tears. For once in his life he did not care if I saw.

“What happened, Papa?” I held his large, rough hand that refused to be comforted. A workman’s hand that had labored, grown callused but had most recently, made bread and delicate pastries for the families in the neighborhood.

Giuseppina and Nonna came into the yard and rested against a wooden pole which supported the vines. I heard my mother clearing the dishes. She did not come out. I saw Giuseppina in silhouette.

“A lamb was stolen . . .” My father passed his hands over his face. He didn’t look at me, he looked at the sky, the blue-purple of its twilight like grapes ready to be crushed for wine.

“My father knew who had taken it; they were two young men, distant relatives. When he went to the house he spoke to la vec­chia, their mother. She said, “No, the animal’s not here.” But the lamb heard my father’s voice and started to bleat. He went into the farm yard and took it. He started to brag that he would fix the two that stole it. Perhaps he told too many people what he would do . . . that March, it was 1935 . . .”

“March 11th,” said Nonna.

“Yes . . . your grandfather and I were shopping in the market. He saw the two men that had taken the lamb and a boy, younger than them. One said, ‘Send your son home’. My father asked why. They said they wanted to talk to him. He handed me the package of fish he had just bought and I ran home.”

“I knew something was wrong when he told me who he had left his father with,” I heard from a dark corner of the garden. It had so darkened that I could not longer see my grandmother’s face. She resumed speaking: “I asked my brother-in-law to go look for Lillo, I knew something was wrong. I found Lillo’s pistol and gave it to your father, and told him to slip the gun to Lillo. But they were both gone so long I took out a knife and started to go myself. I thought they would try to beat him . . . He always did speak too much . . .” Her voice trailed away.

My father said, “My mother told me to go back and see about your grandfather. He had been gone for some time and she had dinner ready. My brothers were in the fields. I went into the piazza and saw your grandfather arguing with the two men and the boy. He was a small man, but solidly built. I saw him yelling and shoving his fist in the face of the taller one. Then suddenly, I saw that the boy had a small pistol. He shot my father, once, twice, three times. He took the shots in his chest. My father leaned forward, grabbed the collar of the shorter man and fell. His blood smeared down the front of the man’s vest. I stood there, open mouthed. I could say nothing. I heard a groaning and thought it was my father but it must have been me because they looked up and saw me finally. I felt the gun in my pocket but could do nothing. So I ran through the fields, ducking low. I heard ‘That’s the bastard’s kid’. They were scared because they knew I had seen the whole thing. I ran and ran and found a place to hide behind a shack near my uncle’s farm. I waited until dark then I walked back. Some neighbors found me walking down the road. I don’t remember what happened after that.”

My grandmother spoke: “I heard shouting outside the door, the neighbor’s boy came running down the road and shouted “Lu sparraru! Lu sparraru!” They shot him. I ran down the road and saw Lillo lying in the street. I remember it was raining hard and his blood was being washed away into the road. I threw myself on the body to cover his wounds. He was saying something I couldn’t understand.” As Nonna said this she didn’t cry, she never cried.

“I had the men in the village bring the body home. The assas­sin confessed, he was eighteen and he told the carabinieri that he thought he was too young to be arrested. That’s what the other two men had told him.”

“What happened to the men?”

“The boy served 24 years and six months. The men served 13 years.”

My father continued: “When they laid your grandfather out, I couldn’t believe it was him, this grey lump of flesh. That look on his face seemed painted on. His hair plastered down. His hands clasped in front of him as if he was frozen in prayer. I felt noth­ing for him. No anger or desire for revenge. He had been laid out in the house. It was two days after the murder. I crept into the room where my father lay in the middle of the night. I knew where he was. He was laid out on a wooden table in the front room. I almost stumbled over him in the darkness.”

“But why was he in the house?”

“Because your Nonna was afraid the carabinieri would take his body away without her seeing it before he was buried.” Here he paused and raised himself from the old wooden chair. “The air was foul. I could make him out faintly, that lump of flesh, that was my father. I touched his hand, it was ice cold and hard. All the warmth was sucked out of him by death. I climbed on to the table and lay beside him, moving him so I could lie in the crook of his arm. I lay there all night. Sometimes I slept but mostly I just lay there, thinking. With the first light I left. No one knew I’d been there. I just wanted to say good-bye to him alone. I wasn’t there for the funeral. I finally came home and continued my life just as before. I cared for the farm with my un­cle and my brothers. I had no fear or hate. I felt nothing. My life did not change. I did not change. Nothing changed.”

For the first time Giuseppina spoke. “The first thing I felt when he died was hate. Not for the boy but for my father, for his leaving me. I blamed him and hated him. I felt as if he had dis­appointed me in some strange way when I needed him.” She looked my father’s way, he was slumped forward, his head in his hands. “It was as if all his life he was heading for this mo­ment, as if he knew that it would happen and had willed it to be so . . .”

“Giuseppina, please stop with this stupidity . . .” said Nonna. She used the word stupidaggine.

“It’s true, his whole way of life baited death. He challenged everyone with his will. It acted as a sort of magnet. Eventually he forced you within his sphere of control . . .”

“You and your fancy words! You speak such stupid things sometimes!” my grandmother shouted.

“That’s nonsense Giuseppina.” Here he turned to me. “But I will tell you something that is true. Your grandfather was the last Sicilian, l’ultimo,” said my father. My grandmother re­treated back in the shadows, her fine gray hair quivering in the bun on the nape of her neck.

“Ma perché?” I asked. Why?

“He was the last in this family to die the death of a man, to die for the family,” said my father. He didn’t look at me as he spoke. But I knew he was wrong, my grandfather was not the last Sicilian. He poured the remains of his wine into the garden. The wine glinted white in the moonlight then disappeared into the cold earth.