Chapter One: Page 2
He outdistances us again, his midnight–colored suit black as soot against the sun. In my mind I have Palermo’s dressed pavements underfoot, not Valparuta’s irregular cobbles, and so I stumble once. A young woman with a mass of hair like ravelled rope leans close.
“Are you all right, Professoressa?” she whispers. She is fabulously alla moda, wrapped in a raw silk blouse and waistless delaine miniskirt that somehow fails to hinder her; she navigates the cobbled street effortlessly in high heels. But her painted mouth is set like one who has lost an argument—this long hot morning on the streets does not please her. She wishes me to put an end to it.
I tell her that I’m fine, grazie, the sun was in my eyes. I’m wearing Ray–Bans. She leaves me in disgust.
Mayor Agretta is welcome to his happy prophesies. We all see what we wish for on St. John’s Day if we’re lucky, and damn those who don’t keep their skepticism to themselves.
For the truth is that Valparuta is a bleak place, a small fortress city crammed atop a lone calcareous bluff—plagued by chill and fogs in winter, no doubt, and blasted dry in summer. No amount of optimism can save it from itself. Every defensible height in Sicily is built up in this way, Norman fort heaped upon Roman, Roman on Greek. Narrow houses are built one on the next of scavenged temple fragments and funerary tablets, the entire accretion cinched in by thick walls and the edges of cliffs. Russell—my careless father—still has an enviable contempt for hill towns like this one, and I’ll allow it; you can’t tell what the hell was going on in places like that, he told me once. Bluffs like Valparuta’s make magpies of people—they carry everything off to use again and again, it’s nothing but building material to them. Russell hated all the stacked–up living floors and superimposed horizons, found four millennia of continuous occupation a nuisance. But I’m here for excavations of another sort, the unearthing of written records. Valparuta is just an unremarkable hinterland as far as I’m concerned, a welter of diminished, vernacular architecture halfway between earth and sky. At the height we’ve reached the city seems built entirely of cobbles kicked up by ancient plows and hauled laboriously up the cliff. There’s a sense of impermanence here, as if the ill–made walls and stepped streets have lasted longer than anyone meant them to.
More odd dull piazzas, dim churches and truncated campaniles. We reach the windy, uppermost region of the city; Mayor Agretta pauses at last, casts about for something more to show me.
A young aide, a skinny determined boy in stylish clothes, speaks up from the edge of the group. “Signor Agretta—Your Honor—there isn’t any more,” he says, and gives me a killing look.
Mayor Agretta frowns at his watch like a man who’s slept too long, but his dismay is false.
“Eh, Holy Jesus and all the saints!” he cries, smacking a palm to his forehead. “It’s nearly one-thirty—Emedio, why didn’t you say something?”
Emedio, the skinny boy with the angry stare, only shrugs.
“I was to have the Professoressa at the library by one o’clock!” the mayor cries. “Signor Chiesa is missing his lunch—he’ll be furious with me!”
And so he leads us all back downhill in a terrible hurry, sometimes forgetting himself and hopping like a boy down the steps of the steepest streets.