Anna went over to a small window. She picked up a chair and smashed the glass. Climbing over the windowsill, followed by her brother, she switched on the torch.
The bookshop was full of display cases containing postcards, painted dinner plates, human-head-shaped vases and ceramic suns with smiling faces. The tables were laden with stacks of coloured tiles and boxes of souvenirs. If Cefalù had a fault, it was that of being our enormous container of ceramic trash.
Continuing her inspection, Anna found some shelves in a corner with some books on them – manuals on Sicilian cookery, tourist guides and a small volume with a plasticised cover.
‘Here we are.’ She showed the book to Astor.
‘What is it?’
‘Read.’ She shone the torch on the title.
Astor scratched his nose. ‘Ap … ne … a … fi … shing. Apnea fishing.’
During these months they’d spent on the road she hadn’t been able to make him practise his reading. They must start doing it again.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Astor. ‘Is it like apple-picking?’
‘It means diving underwater to catch fish.’
Astor’s eyes lit up. ‘Including octopuses?’
‘Well, we’ll have to see about that.’
They went back out into the yard and Anna sat down at a table.
Her brother strutted over to her. ‘May I take your order, madam?’
After listening to all the stories about bars and restaurants, Astor had decided that if he grew up he was going to be a waiter, because waiters were involved with food all day long.
Anna couldn’t make up her mind. ‘What’s on the menu?’
‘Meat with tomatoes, and almond milk.’
‘I’ll have some almond milk.’
The little boy ran over into a corner and fiddled about with some imaginary glasses. ‘Here you are.’
Anna downed the non-existent drink. ‘Mmm! Delicious!’
The book devoted three pages to the octopus, king of the invertebrates. They learned that it had eight tentacles and was very intelligent, even being able to solve problems of geometry. And in particular that it was a solitary creature: it would choose a den and stay there. Anna showed the photograph to her brother, who shook his head in disbelief. He’d never seen such a strange animal.
‘It’s even stranger than the long-haired lizards.’
*
‘There you are at last! What took you so long?’ Pietro rushed out of a garage at the side of a narrow street. He was covered in white dust, like a baker who’s been busy kneading. ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve found …’
Astor didn’t let him finish. Speaking too fast, and mumbling his words, he told him about his adventure in the sea. Then he pulled him by the hand and made him sit down on a step to look at the photographs in the book.
Anna leaned against a wall, crossing her arms. Pietro raised his eyes and gazed at her.
She lowered her head at once, embarrassed. She waited a few seconds, but when she lifted it again he was still looking at her, with that smile like … Even she didn’t know like what. Then she bent her neck forward and silently mouthed: ‘Are you an idiot?’
9
Since leaving the Grand Spa Hotel, the three of them had never been apart.
After retrieving the exercise book and the thighbone from the restaurant, A Taste of Aphrodite, they’d decided to spend the night in a small terraced house in Torre Normanna. During the night the wind had picked up, rattling the houses’ shutters and making their gutters creak. The sight of Pietro wrapped in a blanket and the sound of Fluffy’s hoarse breathing hadn’t been enough to reassure Anna. Lying beside her brother on a battered sofa, she floated in a sleep disturbed by dreams and thoughts. Staring at the dark ceiling, she heard the wood and the mulberry cottage calling to her.
Stay with us, Anna. You’re the queen of the bones.
Then her mother’s footsteps upstairs, clicking rhythmically across the floor.
Are you leaving, Anna?
Yes, Mama.
Be careful, then.
I will, I promise.
How many of the promises she’d made to Mama on her deathbed had she kept? Maybe not even one. But she still had her brother with her. She’d succeeded in getting him back. And now she must keep the promise she’d made to herself, to take him to the mainland.
Pietro and Astor had woken up to find her standing there looking at them. ‘We’ve got to make an agreement,’ she’d said.
The two boys had yawned, their eyes swollen with sleep.
‘What agreement’s that?’ Astor had asked.
‘That we’ll go to the mainland, all three of us.’
‘And on the way there we’ll look for the shoes,’ Pietro had added, rubbing his eye.
Astor had picked his nose. ‘Can we go home first? I want to get my cuddly toys.’
‘We’ll find some new ones,’ Anna had replied.
So one cloudy morning, rucksacks on their backs, they’d set off eastwards along the autostrada, escorted by Fluffy.
*
They walked quickly, and if they came to a tunnel they went through it hand in hand, singing. They often made detours looking for shoe shops and shopping malls. They broke down doors, smashed shop windows, opened hundreds of boxes, but Pietro’s Adidas trainers were nowhere to be found. As the days passed, Anna became convinced that either those shoes didn’t exist or they’d never reached Sicily. But Pietro never lost heart.
‘Don’t you understand? It’s proof that they’re magic. We’ll find them in Palermo, you’ll see.’
She bit her tongue. She wanted to reach Calabria as soon as possible, and wasting time like this drove her crazy. But she’d made an agreement, and she was going to stick to it.
As they walked along the A29, the landscape changed.
With a wide sweeping bend, the autostrada approached the coast. To the right was a wall of tall rocks, with occasional patches of greenery. At sunset the top glowed bright orange and the veins of the rock were tinged with blue. The mountain chain followed the shoreline, which was indented with gulfs of varying sizes. Between the mountains and the sea was a strip of land scattered with roofs and terraces of small blocks of flats which stood out among the undergrowth like Lego bricks strewn on a green carpet. The villages merged into each other, and only the autostrada road signs broke them up into Terrasini, Cinisi, Capaci, Sferracavallo.
The few solitary travellers that they came across gave them a wide berth when they saw the great hound that was escorting them. If they met a gang, however, it was they who kept their distance, holding a growling Fluffy back by the scruff of his neck. The dog walked alongside them, but sometimes he’d vanish and not come back until dusk. During the night he’d curl up beside the three of them, with his ear cocked, ready to bark at the slightest noise.
It took them two weeks to reach Palermo.
The autostrada ran straight into a city choked with columns of trucks, tanks and jeeps with dirty windows. They came to what must once have been a road block. Concrete barriers and barbed-wire fences blocked the carriageway and ran on between the countryside and the houses. Everywhere notices riddled with bullet holes warned travellers to stop for health checks: ‘Infected area. The penalties for attempting to cross the barrier range from thirty years’ imprisonment to the death sentence.’
A long line of sheds which had housed the medical teams were full of computers, yellow protective suits and breathing equipment scattered all over the place and covered in mouse droppings.
They entered the silent city. Nothing had been spared by the fury of destruction. Not a shop, not a building, not a flat. All the locks on the doors had been forced. All the kitchens had been emptied. All the cupboard doors opened. Pictures thrown on the floor, windowpanes broken, crockery smashed to smithereens. Some areas appeared to have been bombed. Sections of wall were still standing, like sea stacks among heaps of rubble which filled the streets and buried cars. They pas
sed the burnt-out wrecks of two helicopters that had been shot down.
As they approached the sea they had to scale barricades of furniture and rubbish bins over which the tattered remnants of black flags were still flying. Nobody seemed to have survived. Or if they had, they’d left. There weren’t even any dogs or cats. The only living creatures were some green insects which formed wriggling balls of legs and got into your face and hair.
Pietro walked hand in hand with Astor, who had been struck dumb and was staring wide-eyed at the tangles of burnt bodies, with his thumb between his teeth. Anna felt as if the city didn’t want them. It was still steeped in its inhabitants’ suffering; all it wanted was to be forgotten. But nature was having trouble burying it. Only limp grass grew in cracks in the asphalt, pellitory was slow to creep between bricks, saplings were feeble and stunted, as if rooted in poisonous earth. Even the ivy, which usually proliferated everywhere, laying a green veil over the ruins of the Grown-ups’ world, here sent out feeble runners with yellowish, shrivelled leaves.
The sea front had been used as a refugee camp, which now, four years later, was an unbroken layer of plastic, canvas and stiff cardboard. It no longer held any interest even for seagulls and rats. There were heaps of bodies in the piazzas and lime-covered corpses lay in mass graves. The harbour had been consumed by a fire so fierce it had twisted the iron railings and reduced the quays to blackened expanses. The only things still standing were cranes and stacks of rusty containers. Two ships lay on their sides like beached whales.
When they stopped outside the Sports Shop, a huge store as dark as the entrance to hell, Anna couldn’t stop herself saying, ‘We won’t find your shoes here.’
Pietro stood for a moment in silence, then said, ‘Let’s go.’
They spent the night in the Politeama Theatre. The foyer was full of barrels, boxes of medical supplies, drip stands and camp beds. Someone had drawn a skull with purple eyes over the box office.
They pulled back the thick velvet curtains. The torch’s beam passed over red seats, shone on gilded columns of boxes, on dusty chandeliers and on frescos of rearing horses that emerged from the gloom. A flock of pigeons fluttered up in the darkness, banged into the big blue dome and fell down dead in the stalls.
Astor clung to his sister’s arm and asked: ‘What did they do here?’
Anna wasn’t entirely sure, but replied: ‘Elegant people used to come here. Mama came here too, with her smart skirt and her high-heeled shoes.’ She shone the light on the stage, where there were still some pieces of scenery. ‘And up there people used to dance and tell stories.’
They went to sleep hungry in one of the boxes.
Anna was the first to wake up. Pietro and Astor were stretched out stiffly on their seats like two young vampires. She left a note telling them to wait for her outside.
The sun was somewhere beyond the row of buildings. In the large Piazza Ruggero Settimo spirals of coloured plastic bags and paper whirled about among jeeps and tanks lined up around the marble monument. All that was left of the statue was its feet.
She started down a long straight road flanked by churches, looted shops and nineteenth-century palazzi with cloths and tattered flags hanging out of the windows. At the end, the black silhouette of a mountain stood out against the blue morning sky.
She recognised the remains of the gelateria, ‘Dreamland’, where her grandpa had often taken her, and of the shoe shop where her father had bought her some fur-lined boots. Then she turned down a side street and, proceeding partly at random and partly from memory, came to Via Ottavio D’Aragona.
The grey and pink palazzo where Papa used to live was there, its balconies looking out onto an underground garage and a burnt-out modern building. She pushed open the big dark wooden front door and entered the lobby. A toppled Christmas tree lay against the door of the lift among broken pieces of red glass. She switched on the torch and climbed the stairs.
On the second floor, the glass door of an insurance company was broken, revealing overturned desks and a carpet covered with sheets of paper, keyboards and monitors. The drinks machine had been smashed open and emptied. On the wall a poster featuring a blonde woman said: ‘Assure yourself of a trouble-free future with us.’
Anna stood staring up the flight that led to the third floor. The door of the flat was ajar, and the vase with the cactus was still beside the mat. She rubbed her eyes and walked up the steps. As if floating in a dream, she went down the long hall with its marble-chip floor and stuccoed walls. Light filtered in from the windows of the rooms, painting bright strips on the walls. The white cupboard was open and all the windcheaters were on the floor, together with shoes, hats and gloves. She recognised the belted black jacket her father used to wear when he drove his work Mercedes. She stopped in the doorway of her own room. The drawings still hung on the wall. One showed a ship with three figures standing on it, and their names written above: me, Mama, Papa. Grandpa and Grandma’s heads were sticking out of the sea. She smiled to herself. Why on earth had she put them in the water? Her pencil case containing her felt-tip pens was still on the red Ikea bedside table, along with the water colours and a drinking glass encrusted with limescale.
Every object in the room conjured up a recollection in her mind. Fragments of memory rose out of forgetfulness like broken pieces of glass, reassembling themselves into a prism of images. She was Annina, the little girl who came here twice a month.
Seeing the little room again now, she realised she’d never missed it. Never felt it was really hers. It was full of lovely things, but they only seemed to have been put there as decoration, like the plastic palm trees in the turtles’ tanks. And she hadn’t played with these toys and dolls often enough. They were her Palermo things; she wasn’t allowed to take them to Castellammare. They weren’t the products of tantrums, nor rewards for being good. Papa had simply stocked up in a shopping mall after splitting with Mama.
She looked out onto the street. There’d never been this silence in the old days. Back then, the traffic had flowed all day, and in the summer, with the windows open, you could hear what people said when they passed by. She went into the kitchen. The empty fridge was open, some dusty crockery piled up in the sink. Coffee powder was scattered over the worktop, and the wall above the sink was covered with patches of green mould. In a wall unit she found the box of alphabet-shaped cereal that she used to eat with milk. She opened it and moths flew out. She scooped out a handful of pieces and laid them on the Formica table. She put them in a row and managed to make ATOR; there was no S. She ate them one by one, crunching in silence.
Somebody must have slept in Papa’s room. It was strewn with dirty sheets and empty bottles of alcoholic drinks. The curtains and carpet had caught fire and the wall around the window was framed with soot. She opened the drawer of the bedside table. The nasal spray for sinusitis. A watch. Photographs. Anna as a little girl in the car with Papa. Mama holding the newborn Astor in her arms. Mama and Papa with an ancient Roman in front of the Colosseum.
There was also a crumpled, open envelope.
Darling,
How are things with you? It’s lovely here, and very cold. It snowed for three days, and this morning the car was like a white ball, but the sun was beautiful. I went skiing with Adriana, who keeps asking me about you. I think she’s scared of being left on the shelf. And she remembers how everyone thought I was the one in the family who was going to remain single. Skiing is always great, especially today with the fresh snow, and I was sorry you weren’t here too. I know you’re Sicilian and you feel uneasy about putting on tights, but promise me you’ll come one day so I can teach you how to do the snowplough. Adriana says I’ve got a Sicilian accent now, and you know what, I’m glad. I can’t stand the Veneto dialect any more. I think of you and I wish I could have you in bed to warm my cold feet.
Over the past few days I’ve often wondered why I love you, and I realise you make a enormous effort to accept me for what I am. To adapt to me. I’m sorry we q
uarrel. You’re a special person, and I want to try and see things through your eyes. Will you let me? We mustn’t lose each other. I can learn to make you happy. How about that? I’ve written you a letter with pen and paper! I’m sure it’ll give you more pleasure than an email when you find it in the box.
Annina is very well. My mother loves being a grandma and spoils her rotten. I’ve told her if she doesn’t come to Palermo this summer to meet you she’ll never see Annina again. What a nice girl I am, don’t you think?
Kiss you all over,
Maria Grazia
*
She took the letter and the photos, put them in the rucksack and went out.
Later that morning they left Palermo.
On reaching Cefalù, they decided to take a few days’ rest.
10
Anna snatched the book out of her brother’s hands. ‘Stop thinking about the octopus. Let’s go and see what Pietro’s found.’
Pietro took them into a garage with lime-plastered walls. Most of the space was occupied by a grey BMW covered by a tarpaulin. Among jars of food, big cardboard boxes and tools there was a light blue Vespa with a sidecar. The saddle was white, the handlebars fringed. The sidecar seat was made of woven plastic straw.
Pietro mounted the saddle and gripped the handlebars. ‘This will start, I’m sure of it. Even the tyres are pumped up. And there’s room for all of us.’
Anna, who had been expecting a new stock of Nutella at the very least, couldn’t hide her disappointment, but tried to compensate by saying, ‘It’s lovely.’
‘Don’t you see?’ Pietro pointed to the engine. ‘We could travel more quickly.’
She said nothing.
He lowered his head and looked at her, coughing. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. Where would we go?’
‘Where do you think? To Messina.’