Chapter One: Page 1

The archives are what bring me to Valparuta.

I first meet Cosimo Chiesa there, among the books and manuscripts of Valparuta’s library.

It’s late June when I arrive, and I’ve forgotten what it’s like in Sicily at solstice, the thick air and white light, the pressing sun. I’m not ready for it. At Aidone in midsummer the harvested wheatfields were like drained lakes and the oleander blossoms had blown, but what comes back to me now is my mother’s darkened flat in Palermo on the Feast of St. John the Baptist, the neighbor girls peering into a basin of water set on the floor, a lit candle nearby. They are looking in the water for their future husbands’ faces. One girl sees instead a vast legion of men, she thinks they’re Muslims; some ride horses and others have no hands. She shrieks and scoots away. Breathless, giggling, the others dare to look. They cup their palms over their mouths, ready for wonders.

This is what I remember of the Sicilian solstice.

The ornate gloom of Palermo’s Biblioteca Comunale comes back to me, too, since I’ve returned to Sicily for archives. The Biblioteca stood behind the Jesuit church, an angry Baroque wedding-cake the priests had frosted on the inside rather than out. My mother and I could walk there from her condemned building in the Kalsa, and often did, my mother searching the old newspapers there for hours, hunting up Palermo’s secrets. She’d occupied that decayed apartment of hers to save it from the wrecking crews, a mad enterprise; she’d set herself and her photograph files down in the bulldozers’ path and dared the city to molest her. The librarians at the Biblioteca knew she was L’Ora’s crime scene photographer and an activist, a troublemaker of the worst sort, and would not assist her. I remember their shrugs and their blank faces, my mother’s raised voice. I would live in libraries now if I could, but my mother’s crumbling squat, Palermo’s decrepit mausoleum and it evil staff are not the reasons why.

I want to know if all that has been claimed of Valparuta’s archives is true.

But instead I’m hijacked. It’s June 23; I’ve been back in Sicily for less than sixteen hours. I left it twenty-five years ago, when my father finally took me away for good. Everything here is at once familiar to me and utterly strange. The heat is mythic, pervasive.

It’s the feast day of St. John the Baptist.

Mayor Giuseppe Agretta himself takes charge of my abduction, a grand welcoming tour of Valparuta’s città vecchia. He is a vastly enthusiastic guide, speeding up the steep cobbled streets in his gorgeous suit, trailing secretaries and minor officials like a comet. He shows me every ogee-arched doorway in the old Arab quarter, all the eroded Trees of Jesse in the old Jewish quarter; he runs us all gasping up to the Norman rocca. His Italian is torrential, its consonants melted down to fit a Sicilian mouth. I should be many foreign dignitaries, it seems, not one lone researcher; the mayor lectures me as if I were a delegation. He doesn’t know that I’ve seen all this before somewhere else, a long time ago. He doesn’t know that throughout his cascading talk I’m looking into a basin of water, seeing other bricked-up loggias and crumbling palazzi. I let two hours pass this way. I’m due at the library at one o’clock to meet Signor Chiesa but I don’t care, I’ll slight Valparuta’s archivist to repay those Palermitan librarians. I’m consulting my memories and they are oracular, open to interpretation. They may or may not have anything to say about the months I mean to spend here in Valparuta.

Mayor Agretta opens his arms to embrace the peeling Baroque facades around us. “Who else on this island can present so medieval an aspect, eh?” he cries. “Who else has retained their history wholesale, as we have? I tell you, Professoressa—we are honored that you are the first, the first of many who will surely come here for our treasures!”