No, Papa!
David Elvar
© David Elvar 2014
Cover image by Giuly Johannsen
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance given by
Anna Johannsen and Giuly Johannsen
in the form of detailed information about daily life in Sicily.
Author’s note
It is hoped that the opinions of Sicily expressed by the protagonist throughout this tale will not be taken as reality. Sicily is a beautiful country with some very warm and welcoming people. It is only through jaundiced eyes that some of the things Elisa sees can be seen. And given the situation in which she finds herself, this can, I am sure, be forgiven.
~oOo~
ONE
I will never forget that day.
There was the courtroom, cold and clinical, reeking of officialdom and procedure.
There was the judge’s voice, droning in flat monotone as he pronounced his judgement.
‘…in accordance with the provisions of the Hague Convention of 1982…finds that the mother…illegally abducted the daughter from her habitual residence of Sicily…denying the father his custodial rights…to be returned to the father’s care immediately.’
There was the faint moan that rippled round the courtroom, my mother’s cry as her last ray of hope flickered and died. I remember glancing across at her, seeing her hunched over herself, her lawyer trying to comfort her, her boyfriend trying to get to her. The lawyer, she’d done her best but the forces arrayed against her were too great, the law too rigid. So she’d lost. As a mother herself, she knew all too well what this judgement meant.
There was another sound and I snapped back to see my father bearing down on me, as short and fat and bald as ever I’d known him, his short and fat and bald arms thrown wide in blatant triumph and false welcome.
His mouth was moving, was dripping words heavy with meaning.
‘Now I take over. Now you are mine!’
TWO
Sicily sucks. I’d lived there most of my life so I should know.
Not many people know much about Sicily, and they’re probably better off that way. It’s a small island that belongs to Italy. I say belongs but you’d think it was maybe a reluctant ownership. If you look at a map of Italy, you’ll see it’s in the shape of a sort of boot that’s about to kick what looks like a football that someone’s sat on. That football is Sicily. And kicking is about all it’s good for.
There are reasons for that. It’s a kind of third-world country with fourth-world aspirations. Don’t look for any kind of government, there isn’t any, just the pretence of one, hiding in air-conditioned isolation behind plate glass windows and issuing garbled claptrap that somehow manages to pass for laws. Half of all business is conducted under the table—no contracts, no receipts, no questions asked. There’s a lot the government knows goes on but does nothing about, which is hardly surprising since most politicians are themselves on the make in some way or other; the two great Sicilian national sports—football and tax evasion. So yeah, it sucks. Big time. Like an industrial strength vacuum cleaner on an overload test.
It seemed to suck even more when my father finally got me down there. It had taken him eight months and a lot of money but he’d done it. Part of me was still wondering how he’d managed it, how he’d fought mum, her lawyer and me—especially me—and come away with a piece of justice that was so unjust that it made you wonder if fairness had taken an extended coffee break. And that same part of me was wondering about mum, wondering how she was coping, wondering if she was wondering if she’d ever see me again. I’d managed to blurt out a quick promise before being dragged away that I’d write, that I’d call. I got no answer, just the sight of her folding up again, just the sound of my father babbling something about having a plane to catch and that is enough goodbyes and it is time to get you back to where you belong and, as if to make a point, wrenching me away before I could answer back. And so I went. Away from mum, away from the only life I’d ever cared about. And I tried hard not to think about what was happening.
I don’t remember much of the journey down—I guess I was still pretty much shell-shocked—just the crowded airport, the crowded plane and him sitting too close to me all the way, his pudgy face locked in a smug grin. All the way, he kept telling me something, repeating over and over again that everything would be all right, I was with him now, I didn’t need to worry any more. I was too far out of it to wonder at the time but it seemed afterwards that he was trying to convince himself more than me.
I do remember we got stacked for half an hour waiting for a landing slot. The plane before ours had hit something on the runway and it had to be closed for a safety inspection or something but whatever the reason, we got stuck in this dizzy-making circle of the airport while they sorted things out. From what I knew of Sicilian officials, each and every uniform down there would be strutting around puffed up and self-important. Each one trying to look in charge. Each one barking orders that everyone else was ignoring. It’s a lot like that in Sicily. Like I say, nothing works.
But we finally touched down and I was dragged by the handcuffs out of the plane and into the airport terminal. I knew not to expect any Customs and Passport Control, just the wait for the luggage. His, that is, not mine. I didn’t even get time to pack a change of underwear so I was kind of travelling light. We stood there for maybe a quarter of an hour with no sign of suitcases appearing, and that was when my father decided to do things the Sicilian way. He caught the eye of an airport worker standing idly by the door and looking bored. He responded by strolling distractedly over, my father had a few low words in his ear then slipped something into his hand and he was off like a shot. Within minutes, he was back, my father’s two suitcases in hand, and we were free to leave. Yeah, it’s like I say: no contracts, no receipts, no questions asked.
The air outside the terminal building was stale and humid, reminding me of the Sicily I’d always known and hated. It reeked of car exhaust and blowing horns, of hot sweat and burning impatience. My father hailed a beat-up excuse for a taxi that looked as if it had been through the recycling plant twice already. It screeched to a stop in front of us, my father opening the door for me. Anxiously. Like he suspected I might not want to make this last part of this journey with him. I crawled in and was immediately hit by a wall of stench a mixture of stale clothes, cigarette smoke and garlic. I remember recoiling but forcing myself on, shuffling to the other side of the car so my father could follow. If he noticed anything, he didn’t say. Maybe he was just used to it.
‘Viale Africa,’ he spat instead. He likes to spit commands at people like taxi drivers, makes him feel he’s more important than them. And that driver, a greasy blob of lard with a drooping moustache, turned to look at us.
‘Viale Africa?’ he repeated, but he wasn’t looking at my father, he was looking at me, tracing his gaze down my legs. I shuffled my suddenly too-short skirt down a little. He grinned and turned back without waiting for an answer. My father didn’t say anything. Why should he? Taxi drivers don’t figure in his world-view. They’re unimportant, don’t matter. Not like him, a scientist of international standing with the Nobel Prize just within his grasp. That’s what he tells people, anyway.
We arrived all too soon. My father paid the driver who grabbed a last shot of naked thigh as I got out of the car and we were finally at some distant memory my father insisted was, always had been, my home.
I looked up at it. The memory may have been distant but the sight of it jolted it into horrible closeness. I knew this place. The dappled yellow walls cracked from the many earth tremors that are so much a part of the daily life of this part of the world. The chipped white paint of the railings on the balcony, sandblasted by the scirocco, the humid wind th
at scours the whole island without mercy. The brown roof tiles, cracked and worn, the resigned face of too many years in too much heat. Yeah, this was my home.
My father was beside me, looking up with me.
‘We will have dinner,’ he said, like it was some final decision I wasn’t to argue with. Then he was turning, dropping his gaze to look at me. He’s short, I’m tall for my age, so we were eye-to-eye. ‘It is good to have you back home, back where you belong,’ he added as if to make a point. He seemed to be waiting for an answer. He didn’t get one. There was nothing I wanted to say that he would have wanted to hear. He shrugged. We went in.
The inside was just as I remembered it, too, just a little shabbier than I remembered it. Not all of this was down to the furniture. In Sicily, the idea of furnished accommodation is something with a roof. Unfurnished, take your pick of the dustbins. No, there was something more. Somehow, in the nearly a year I’d been away, the whole place seemed to have grown a thick layer of dust. This didn’t surprise me: that was what my mother was there for, that was what my mother did. As with taxi drivers, wives are unimportant when compared with international careers and the Nobel Prize.
We sat down, eventually, to dinner. Dinner was pasta. Well, of course it was pasta. This was Sicily, remember? Part of Italy? A sort of disjointed afterthought, maybe, but still part of Italy. And they eat pasta in Italy. My father served it with a simple tomato-and-garlic sauce. No dessert.
‘Tomorrow’s dinner will be better,’ he said as he poured himself a glass of wine. ‘Coming straight from the airport, it was…ah, you know.’
I stabbed my fork into the plate. ‘Mum used to do a salad with the pasta she cooked,’ I said.
He laughed, spat derision and contempt in a single snort. ‘Salad! What does she know!’
‘When a marriage is over?’ I asked brightly.
It was the wrong thing to say. My father threw down his fork, sending droplets of sauce flying out onto the table, onto the floor, into his wine.
‘She told you this, of course!’ he snapped.
‘She didn’t need to!’ I snapped back. ‘I heard the rows you and she had, I saw how unhappy she was! You think I’m blind to the suffering of my own mother?’
‘Suffering! Pah! What would you know of suffering? You are fourteen years old, you know nothing of life, nothing of relationships.’
‘I know when my mother is crying inside,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s all I need.’
‘Your mother was always crying inside about something!’
I glanced up at him. ‘So you knew it? And you just let it go on? All the struggling on what little you gave her for food?—’
‘She was just inefficient with money.’
‘—The days on end when you were at your scientific conferences?—’
‘They were part of my work.’
‘—And the times you used her, let’s not forget the times you used her to help you get your way on some scientific project that someone was blocking!’
‘She was my wife! She was expected to support me in my career!’
‘And there was only one career in this family,’ I retorted sarcastically, ‘as you so often reminded us.’
‘Because it was true!’ he snapped, the irony lost on him. ‘She was nothing! A service to my needs, nothing more!’
‘And when you speak of her like that, do you wonder that she fell for another man?’
My father’s face twisted in fury. ‘That canaglia!’ he spat. ‘He broke our family!’
‘Maybe it needed to be broken!’ I screamed back. ‘Mum had nothing here! NOTHING! Just these bare walls, the heat, the constant threat of earthquakes and you crouched over your computer day and night!’
He said nothing. I knew what was coming next: he’d just change the subject, like he always did when confronted by a truth he couldn’t handle. It was always the way with him: run from the fight rather than stand and face it. Change sides, change tack—anything as long as he didn’t have to face up to something he might lose. He did not disappoint me.
‘I should never have allowed her to take you on that holiday,’ he snorted.
‘Like she needed your permission?’ I asked. ‘You make it sound as if you owned her. She had family in England and she needed a break from you. We both did!’
‘And look what happened!’ he snapped back. ‘This canaglia stepped into my place, a man she just picked up off the street.’
‘She did not! You know full well how she and John met, she told you! And he’s a good man, whatever you say about him. He treats her well, he looks after her and he makes her laugh!’
‘And I did not? And I did not?’
‘Oh, you did,’ I said. ‘You just didn’t know it at the time.’
Another silence. A new truth, one that hadn’t been presented to him before. And another change of subject.
‘The psychological damage is worse than I thought,’ he said. ‘This time with your mother and a stranger has brought you nothing but harm.’
‘And you would know psychological damage when you see it,’ I said dryly. ‘You’re a biologist—remember? Not a psychiatrist.’
‘Enough!’ The raised hand was a warning, a signal that this was finished. ‘You have had a tiring journey, you are not thinking as you should. Finish your dinner.’
I looked down at the tasteless food that was sticking in my throat even before it left the plate.
‘I’m not hungry,’ I said, getting up. ‘I’m going to bed.’
At that, his face seemed to brighten. ‘You will find your room just as you left it,’ he said. ‘Everything still in its place.’
I stopped at the door, threw black contempt over my shoulder. ‘Even the scarafaggi?’
The smile turned to thunder. A raw spot. Touching it felt good. I turned back for the stairs, bringing to mind two words of Italian I’d learned long before.
Bastardo grasso.
THREE
There were no scarafaggi. I checked the bed, checked under the pillow and in the corners of the room. I knew what to look for, you bet I did: large cockroach-like insects about 4cms long and 2cms wide, and very flat, allowing them to creep in through the gap under the door. And they like to come out at night.
I didn’t sleep well. Apart from the heat and having a lot to think about, there was the noise from the road outside. It’s wide. And busy. It’s the main road into the centre of Catania so it has to be both, and Sicilians like to drive. I think that’s what they call it, anyway. Imagine a long, thin bumper car track crammed full of cars that were never intended to be bumper cars but sure as hell get driven that way. Imagine fists being shaken, curses being screamed and the odd punch up when two cars bump each other a little too hard and you get the picture. I guess I must have drifted off a little after three, my last memory of the day a screeching of tyres and someone shouting ‘IMBECILLE! IMBECILLE!’ It registered only vaguely before I finally slipped into broken dreams of mum and John and our house in Dorset, our home in Dorset.
You’d think I would have slept late after such a night. No chance. By seven in Sicily, the sun’s heat is already taking hold, and the traffic, after a short lull to draw breath and refill petrol tanks, is already building to its usual day-long climax of revved engines, honked horns and round Italian curses.
I rolled over and blinked in some light I thought I recognised but didn’t want to. In Sicily, the sunlight isn’t crisp and fresh, it’s a kind of dirty yellow from fighting its way through several layers of pollution. It arrives at ground level faded, even exhausted, and you wonder why it bothered, even start to feel sorry for it when you realise that all it has to show for its efforts is the reluctant illumination of a parched cityscape only fit for the bulldozer. And as you look at it in its full daytime glory, you’d quickly come to realise that Sicily is a dump, and even more quickly come to realise that even that is probably too kind a word for it.
As if all that isn’t enough, Mount Etna is close by, a volcano th
at is still active from time to time. Once in a while, she’ll blow her stack and send a plume of hot ash high into the sky, just to remind the locals she’s still around. And of course, that ash has to come down somewhere. So it does. Over the town, over the houses. In through the windows and over the furniture. On such days, the ash competes with the pollution to block out the sun and usually wins. It’s the only time that Catania manages not to look like a dump. Not that that makes things any better because then it looks like an explosion in an ashtray. And the poor suckers down below reach for their brooms and struggle in the heat and the twilight and their facemasks while they try to get their little town back to what passes for normality. I was lying in bed and thinking all this and wishing for the gentle drizzle of England. At least that’s clean.
Eventually, reluctantly, I crawled out of bed and into my clothes, sweating already and hoping the water pressure would be up to letting me take a shower. From long experience, I knew I couldn’t count on it.
My father was in the kitchen, sitting as I’d always remembered him: at the table, hunched over his laptop computer, his breakfast to one side like some vague afterthought. He looked up as I entered, his face brightening, our less-than-family-love parting the night before apparently forgotten.
‘Lisettina!’
‘The name’s Elisa,’ I said, slumping down opposite him. ‘Use it.’
‘But it is what I have always called you!’
‘Yeah, along with Lisetta, Lisuccia, Lisettuccina and just about every syrupy hashtag you could think of.’
‘It is a term of affection, surely you have not forgotten!’ He sounded offended. ‘It is a way of saying you are my little Elisa and you are one who is loved.’
Loved? This from the man who’d dragged me away from my home and my mother because he could? Yeah, right. ‘What’s for breakfast?’ I asked instead.