Chiesa’s secretiveness, the jangling tension I witness between him and the mayor—I’m sure at first that it’s the mafia’s hand I’m seeing at work in Valparuta, setting these men against each other and holding the town hostage. I am wrong.
There are other secret sects resident here, far older than the mafia and its warring criminal clans. Their battles take place in dreams, their bodies lying like the dead in their beds. Yet these contests, these ancient hostilities are lethal as any vendetta . . .
I had gone quite still at my first glimpse of Valparuta. Its great upright bluff had marred the horizon from some distance as I travelled toward it; on closer approach the city seemed to hang against the empty noon sky, hidden behind its ancient fortifications. I had mistaken the city’s truncated campaniles first for ruins, then for irregular chimneys of natural rock. The bus I rode labored stinking up the cliff’s shadowed face on a series of narrow switchbacks with plunging views; at the city’s walls the driver had set my luggage out without apology, leaving me to pull my trunk and suitcase on their tiny jittery wheels through Porta Carmine, down a street paved like a riverbed, to my hotel. The bus remained standing on the road behind me, shaking like a spent ox, too big to negotiate the ancient porta or Valparuta’s steep, constricted streets.
I am not the reputable American academic Chiesa believes me to be.
I’ve left four teaching posts in eight years, one just ahead of disciplinary action; I know that I’m not suitable for academe. I’ve left classes in shambles, freshmen in tears; I can only watch myself do these things. This latest transgression of mine—knocking a student to the ground, the one my careless father has been bedding—surely marks the end of my academic career. It seems that I can only carry more and more down with me like a landslide anymore, tentative friendships, second and third chances, all offers of sympathy.
Why do I not see it, then, the subtle apprenticeship Chiesa presses upon me? Our mutual seduction, his curious tests of my abilities, that strange journey out into the countryside—I should have recognized purpose in his seeming casual alliances with me. I should have known that no secret, no buried history could ever escape the archivist’s powers of discovery . . .
The Palermitani followed my mother’s anti–Mafia activism like a soap opera. She made such passionate theatre of their sorry lives, let them think they were heroes just for wearing sloganed T-shirts and emoting in numbers in the street. And all the while prosecutors, judges, chief inspectors kept on dying. It was she who’d photograph them then—half-buried in bombed courtyards, sprawled in bullet-riddled cars—and see her photos published in the papers for another round of tardy, self-serving public outcry.
The bomb that killed my mother and the Palermitan prosecutor she was riding with had been planted in a sewer drain and detonated remotely, probably from the balcony of a high-rise apartment nearby . . .
