 
### Cristina Costa

## The oranges of Dubai

#

Translation from Italian to English by   
Carmelo Massimo Tidona   
for Zed Lab  
http://www.quellidized.it/zedlab

www.quellidized.it

www.0111edizioni.com

www.quellidized.it

The oranges of Dubai

Copyright © 2012 Zerounoundici Edizioni  
ISBN: 978-88-6578-145-6  
Cover Image: Shutterstock.com

To Francesco Fausto, Claudia and Adriano

the most beautiful pages of my history

To Giuseppe

For all the road we have travelled together

and for that still to be travelled.

"Sicily and its scholars

lived in the shade of a fresh life of delights

safety had stretched there its veils,

and its fame

went for the world in caravans;

feared its warriors,

famous its men of the pen.

But they were not thankful to God

of the grace they were granted

and instead of sweet water

they got salt"

(Yahya Ibn Al-Katani)

#  Chapter 1

We are about to reach the Falcone Borsellino airport in Palermo. A metallic and monotonous voice announces this in French at first – because it is on a French airline that we're flying – then in Arab and eventually in Italian. An single long emission of breath; words, following one another without neither pauses nor inflexions, announce that the temperature is twenty-seven degrees, the sky is very clear, and in less than five minutes we will land. Instinctively I look out of the porthole looking for an edge of Sicilian coast. But there's just the sea stretching as far as the eye can see. I wait to catch on the horizon a glimpse of the rocky shore going from Punta Raisi toward Palermo, softly descending to leave room to long sandy shores. I was born and lived my teen years in this part of Sicily. But it was a long time ago.

We are suspended an inch from the water, a dark and immense expanse close under us, no trace of the runway. A certain restlessness quickly crosses my bowel, but it is an elusive feeling that disperses a few instants later in a reassuring memory: the landing in Palermo is always like that, when the impact with the sea seems inevitable and the fear insinuates the mind, shaping catastrophic ghosts, the solid asphalt runway timely appears, compact and marvellously vital.

I turn to look at my wife. On her face my same sighs, her memories intact as if just a few days had passed from our last flight above this sea. Marco and Giuliana, our children, two rows in front of us, seem excited at the sight of the nothingness under them. It is theirs first time in Sicily. With her hands around her mouth forming a megaphone, Giuliana keeps on repeating, snickering, «Someone should warn the commander that we are falling».

She says this in her perfect French, impeccable for the pronunciation, for the rounded and sweet r, for the delicate intonation. A purity that my French – a mixture of languages and intonations that I made mine in the years – lacks. Marco, holding tight the armrests with his hands, tells her, «Shut up stupid, don't you see there really is something wrong. It's flying too low, where is the runway?»

The flight attendant, who heard them talking, approaches and reassures them with a textbook smile.

«Everything is under control, you can rest assured. Is it the first time that you come to Palermo?»

His French is an airline French, like his uniform and everything else.

«Yes. It's the first time.»

With the same boldness of a native speaker, Giuliana is now speaking in Italian, in an equally delicate and fluid, but strongly French way. Then, starting over laughing, she adds, «Provided that we get there!»

Marco places an elbow in her side, and with a dry "now stop it" he puts an end to the brief conversation. The assistant, his airline smile still on his face, approaches me to address me a thanking. Shortly after the take-off, a passenger felt sick, and when the crew asked if there was a physician on board, I diligently stepped forward to handle the emergency. A sudden and acute pain in the arm and breast in a seventy-year-old man suffering of high-blood pressure. I am a heart surgeon and my job follows me in the air as well, it seems. A steward reaches us and informs me on the current conditions of my patient.

«There is an ambulance waiting for Mr. Catalano on the runway, fortunately his conditions have stabilized and now he's calmer.»

They both walk away, in their uniforms without wrinkles, to carry out the last procedures before the landing: checking the hatboxes, smiling here and there, reminding to fasten seat belts, have any device switched off and so forth. They eventually disappear behind the curtain separating us from the cockpit. At that point I am sure that we are landing even though, looking outside, you could not say that yet.

Teresa has closed her eyes and, with her head stuck to the back of the seat, she's waiting to feel the ground under her feet, so to speak. She hates landing, the hard impact with the runway, the screech of the brakes, the jolts, the feeling that the airplane is accelerating its run rather than slowing it down. She holds my hand without realizing the intensity of her grip, then, when the plane starts stopping and the tension dissolves, she loosens it and justifies herself.

«Sorry, it's uncontrollable.»

Then she fades away behind her large sunglasses with dark lenses that shelter her from embarrassment, because she doesn't like to appear weak.

Many years ago, when an airplane landed in Palermo, at the same moment when the cart grazed the asphalt, an applause of relief dissolved the anxiety of the passengers in a sort of collective ritual. I know this from the stories of my grandfather. Already when I was boy there was no more trace of this ritual. I never found it in any of the several stopovers in which I transited in my life. It was an instant of celebration, an aggregating ritual, a first taste of genuine Sicilian folklore, rejoicing, noisy. Everyone participated, some clapping their hands with strength, saying "good commander", others who instead, not to show that they had been afraid, just nodded, thanking who was in the sky and who had rested the airplane on the ground. Today there are no applauses for the commander after this landing, but a composed and multilingual chattering.

Here we are, finally; the crew disarms the slides and prepares for the final greeting. The commander is ready for the leaving ritual, the flight attendants distribute the last smiles for all. When it is my turn, the commander in person stops me and, like at least half of his crew has already one, renews the thanking for the help lent to that passenger.

«My duty», I hear myself say.

But I am distracted, I am already thinking about my sky waiting for me beyond the hatch and about my air that soon I will breathe, after thirty long years.

And here they are, appearing around me, catapulting me in my old world. The sky is of such an intense blue that it mortifies everything else. The sun welcomes me, wrapping me up in a warm embrace, and the same sea that just a few minutes ago awed me, now flutters in the air, transported by a light breeze that tastes of salt.

I am in Palermo again!

A stretcher-bearer, at the end of the ramp, helps Mr. Catalano to sit on a wheelchair that will bring him to the ambulance, parked under the left wing of the plane. Before the doors close again on him, I see my patient shake a hand toward me with a smile. There is suffering on his pale and wrinkled face. His elderly wife, at his side, joins in the greeting, waved with fingers full of cortisone like all of her body. She has a soft, olive face, framed by a too compact and dark wig that makes her ridiculous. It is a depressing mask. I imagine she's back from a trip in search of hope, looking for specialized cares for her cancer. I read worry and pain on the face of that poor man, the same one that compresses the face of the parents of my little patients. Encourage, pretend to be serene, unreasonably optimist, although you're carrying in your heart a truth without hope, that is the hard task of the family members. Most succeeds well enough. They become skilled in lying to protect, but then a sudden yielding, like the sickness of my passenger, make their unstable scaffolding stagger, revealing the awful weight of what can't be said. "The illness reached a terminal stage by now; unfortunately there is not a lot that can be done, except starting a pain therapy to ease the suffering of your wife." I am sure that this is what poor Mr. Catalano heard the oncologist say. And it is under the echo of these words that his precarious heart failed. In the same way, ten years ago, Parisian physicians talked to my father. In his case they were his legs to yield, making him fall down the stairs of the oncology wing and earning him some fractured ribs.

There is a big shouting of the flight mates around me, but those are indistinct voices that I perceive without listening to them. The only clear voice comes from inside.

"Welcome back home Paolo."

I stagger between the curiosity to discover the changes of this world to which I belonged and the desire to turn my back and go away, without getting tangled up in this uncertain adventure. A lot of things have changed since the last time I was here. Improvements, according to many, but not everybody agrees. I preferred to keep my memories intact, interposing thousands of kilometres between me and my past, cutting bridges, interrupting contacts. I sealed a door, believing that I would never open it again. I did that because I was a young man going to conquer the world, because I preferred my future to that of my country, because in order to go far I had to abandon the ship before it sank with all of its crew. I'm coming back today, fifty-years old by now, as a tourist, as a foreigner in my own country. I have been that since when, exactly thirty-two years ago, Sicily left politically and geographically the borders of the Italian State, sold to the best bidder.

I keep on following the orderly line of passengers leaving the aircraft, wishing that my thoughts were as orderly, instead they get confused at every step, oscillating between the desire to go on and that to go back to Paris fast.

What am I doing here after all this time? What am I expecting? What expects me?

The answer is all in a name, Teresa.

She struggled a lot to organize this trip. She started almost one year ago. Secretly, by the way. She wanted it to be a surprise for me. In a few days, in fact, I will be half a century old.

«As a present, since we haven't indulged in a nice holiday for some time, we could make a trip. The whole family together», my Teresa told me on a September evening.

We were in the study of our house, with me working on the opening speech of the annual conference on the treatment of the congenital heart diseases in premature babies. Even if I could not forget my planner, chock full of appointments, the idea really allured me. I often travel for business, rarely for leisure. Sometimes my wife comes with me. While I am at conferences, she is a tourist. We part in the morning, after a quick breakfast, and meet again almost at dusk, I exhausted, she full of stories, of exciting places to describe, of sweatshirts and t-shirts for our children. She knows all of the European capitals much better than me who, even though I have been there so many times, mostly visited airports, hotels and congress rooms.

I like her vitality; when we meet again at the hotel, she only grants me the time of a shower and then she brings me to have supper in a restaurant she eyed in the centre during her tour.

It's true, anyway. For too long we haven't travelled all together for a real vacation. The last time was when Marco was six years old, Giuliana two years older. Teresa had been dreaming for some time to go to Moscow.

«I would like to walk in the Red Plaza, to skate on the ice rink, breathe the icy cold of the Muscovite winter.»

Apart from this last aspect, which gave us serious trouble, it was a beautiful vacation for all of us. And so last September, acting in remarkable advance, my wife got busy organizing a trip to celebrate my fiftieth birthday.

«We could choose an organized trip in the main European capitals. It might also be useful for Giuliana, since she made up her mind a long time ago that she wants to go and live in Japan, who knows why. Maybe, getting to know Europe better, she would find out that here too there are quite remarkable cities where to get a proper education and spend satisfactorily one's existence.»

Here is my Teresa; she started with the idea of organizing something for me, but she couldn't resist the temptation to cut it out on the needs of our children. It always happens this way. When I point that out, she tries to amend, «It's just that I like to have everyone agree, you know how I am».

Of course I do; we have been married for too long for me not to realize it. I put my report aside and pitch a proposal, «We could go to the beach, neither stress nor schedules, visits or weary queues».

I thought that my idea would be dismisses in a hurry, instead my wife seemed to wait for these words, in order to detail a carefully prepared plan.

«I told you that I am on Facebook, didn't I?»

I nodded.

«Do you remember Anna Marino?»

It seemed to me that I had lost the thread of our conversation, but I would find it again a few sentences later.

«Anna who?»

The expression on my face must have communicated her a lot of uncertainty, because she started a detailed description in the hope of awakening some memory in me. And actually, while she was talking, red curls and freckles spread on a quite awkward body came to my mind. A seventeen-year-old girl. Timid, a bit embarrassed, with her eyes always down, rarely pointed at other eyes. But in class she was a legend, the best; along with me, modestly. Anna, I remember her! Scientific high school Galilei in Palermo, in the years from 2011 to 2016, first central line, always in pole position in front of the teachers.

«Well,» Teresa tells me in a crescendo of enthusiasm, «I found her on Facebook, with the help of Giuliana, because, as you know, I am not very good in moving in virtual networks. It was exciting. I got nostalgia of the old times, after all she sat next to me in school, we were great friends. And so the idea was born».

«Which idea?» I asked her with the most professional of tones.

I started listening with the maximum concentration, the same one I use when my colleagues come to submit some new case to my attention. When my wife says that she's got an idea, I know that it is better not to underestimate it.

«One day I told her that I would like to meet her, after all these years, and we started day-dreaming, you know how women are, and our idea took shape. At first we have thought about contacting all our classmates who, like us, don't live in Palermo anymore. You know that I don't love much Facebook, but I have to say that in this case it was an invaluable resource. A kind of chain started and in the end, although it wasn't easy, we found almost everyone. Many of them liked the idea of a sort of reunion, so we thought it was better to immediately decide an occasion, before the enthusiasm was lost. But as soon as it came to deciding when, the true problem were me and you, rather than the others, because with your business engagements it is difficult to program a departure.»

She made a pause, in which I perceive her intent to underline the perennial difficulty of my family to make whatever kind of plan because of my continuous absences.

«So, since in May you will be fifty, I thought that it might be the right occasion, and perhaps the only feasible one.»

She stopped and looked at me with an interrogative expression. Trailing dots rained on me in a silence that demanded some reaction from my side.

«Doctor, what do you think of it?»

It was her to break the silence, while I, eyes lowered on the monitor of my laptop, didn't know what to answer.

I was still not entirely satisfied of the layout of my report; for days I had had in mind a series of changes to make, but I never found the time to do that. That evening I had dined in a hurry in order to immediately start the job and I had not foreseen any interruption. We would be able to talk about that again tomorrow, I thought, but her eyes would not accept a delay. She couldn't always wait in queue. And I perfectly realized that.

«But the sea, the relax under the beach umbrella? It seems to me that we are speaking of a totally different thing.»

«Maybe you forgot that Sicily is surrounded by the sea, therefore it won't be difficult to find a beach, right, doctor? We can go to Torre. I know that the beach is more beautiful than you can remember it. Everything is different, now. You will like it.»

Everything is different, I knew that. And it was exactly the reason why I was afraid of this trip. I left my house, my people, the place in which I had grown, my nationality. My father thought that life is a one-way road, therefore you can't turn back. It would be like trying to put a clock back again. You can't live the same moment twice.

But my wife flooded me with information, convinced that I would not be disappointed. She overwhelmed me with stories, also involving Giuliana, who said she was curious to know more about the history of our family. Go figure! I felt compressed between their chatters and the report that waited for me to complete it in time for the now imminent conference.

So I found myself allowing her to organize everything. That she do as she pleased; I trust her proposals, they are what always gave structure and direction to our family.

And so here I am, eight months later, on this ramp, a few days before my birthday and a few kilometres from Torre dell'Isola, my native town, wondering whether, that evening in the end of September, I shouldn't have closed the file and assessed Teresa's proposal better.

#  Chapter 2

The absolute lack of vitality of the teenagers irritates me quite a lot, especially if the subjects in matter are my children. I am used to deal with young patients who fight to exploit the most a spoiled pump that beats in their chests, therefore I hardly can bear those clinically healthy youth who drag on heavily, as if they were sickly, and with so much boldness make of any support a camp. Unfortunately, Giuliana and Marco are no comforting exception. About a hour and half of flight seems to have consumed their lifeblood. They are two fuel tanks on red. So, as soon as they leave the airport, they seem to engage a competition for the first who will sink, undone, in the back seat of the car that we rented. "Comfortable and with air conditioning", was their request when it was time to choose it. "Perhaps we should make them face difficulties more often!" Teresa – the mother hen who always did her best to make their life as comfortable and problem-free as possible – says.

Marco looks out with his usual somehow absent expression, lost in who knows what thoughts. His ruffled hair are flattened by the weight of his head, completely abandoned on the headrest.

Giuliana is the one with a thousand weary questions; tired in the body, but always active in the mind. She's seventeen, even though she looks a bit older because of her beauty that already makes her look like a woman. She's as bright as her mother, same chestnut shells giving colour to her eyes, same honest smile, same ability to disarm with a look. Her mother acquired this dowry in time, she was born with it. She seduced me since when she just took the space of a crib.

Today, suddenly, it seems like she wants to know everything about that past of mine which we almost never had time to talk about, each of us busy with their own daily tasks. I find myself recalling my childhood, as I was growing in this now foreign land. I tell her about the house of my parents in the heart of the country, an independent two-stories villa with a beautiful terrace where, in summer, a white long resin table was the place of our suppers, comforted by the fresh breeze of the sea even in the sultriest days. The orderly line of lamp-posts along the dock, the sparkling of the moon on the dark surface of the sea at night, the twinkling of the lampare, the candles in the middle of our table, these are the illuminations of my memory. I have jealously guarded so many details, even if my mind doesn't go back to them often. I perceive something unique in my memories, something that words can't seize. I find that I am nostalgic. Giuliana listens to me with a humoured curiosity. Her father child is almost unimaginable to her, used as she is to know me as the serious and stainless professional.

I tell her of her grandparents, my parents. She barely knew them, poor child. They went too soon, before they could love her as much as they would have wanted to. As much as they did with me.

None of them had roots in Torre, although they were both born and grown in that town. The parents of my father were from Palermo, but they had moved to the suburbs escaping the chaos of the city. My maternal grandparents were from Marsala instead, but they worked in Palermo, before my mother was born.

Antonio, my father, was a pharmacist. Together with my mother he managed the only chemist in our small town. There was no one in Torre who didn't know doctor Manfredi. When I was a child, walking with him made me feel important; greeted and respected by everybody, he almost seemed to be a celebrity. I lived of his reflected light. Which had some advantages, because anywhere I went I felt that being his son guaranteed me a special respect. At school, for instance, I noticed that teachers always had a benevolent eye for me, and they would never dare complaining about my behaviour with my parents. From my side, I have never been a troublesome boy.

Not to mention when I entered a shop of any kind; the baker gave me a biscuit or a bit of bread just taken from the oven, and she complimented my mother on her "so well-bred" son. The ice cream maker filled my cones with more ice cream than they could hold, the butcher gave me handfuls of candy, and so on.

It was their way of repaying the availability of my father who, more than a few times, was called even at night or during holidays to urgently administer some medicine to a countryman. In a small town, where everyone knows everyone else, everything is almost family-run.

The disadvantage for me, anyway, was notoriety as well, because nothing of what I did could go unnoticed. I was never able to buzz an intercom and escape in a hurry, or to throw water or clothes peg from the balcony, like my friends living in the city did.

Antonella, my mother, was younger than Dad by about ten years. Her parents had moved to Torre when she was very young. She was asthmatic and the sea air would benefit her health more than the city pollution. When I was a child I thought that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She had always been, when she was young as well as in her brief life as grandmother. She was the light of my house.

Her jet-black hair gathered in a chignon, her elegant posture – that distinguished her among many others – her thin figure, chiselled in the white dress of her wedding day. This was the photo that dominated the cupboard of the living room, in the house of my parents, for years. It's the same one that I keep on the desk of my study at home, close to that of Teresa and our children.

She worked with Dad in the chemist, but it was not her true vocation. Graduated in foreign languages, she translated texts and specialised magazines into English for young people of Torre and neighbouring towns who were preparing for a degree. Sometimes she was called to act as interpreter in conferences, and this was the part of her job that she liked the most. In the afternoon, while I was studying in the kitchen, she often sat at the table, right in front of me, and started quickly tapping the keys of her laptop for hours. She just stopped to answer some help request from me, then she returned to hammer on the keyboard. I still see her tapered and strong fingers beating at a sustained pace on the black and thin keys of a piano without melody, that produced a fast and precise ticking of well-rounded fingernails impressing characters.

When my father asked her for help at the chemist, she unwillingly started to skip a lot of the tasks she received, until she ended up refusing them all, because, after a whole day in the shop, in the evening she didn't have enough energy left to devote to another job. In the periods in which Dad found a reliable assistant for the chemist, she returned to teach privately French and English to the high school students of the town. She too was well known in that small world of ours, first of all as the wife of the doctor.

I had neither brothers nor sisters and, even if I would never admit it to my children, for me it was always a blessing to be the only child, because I was the undisputed king of my house. Being the only child in the whole widened family, I was the centre of the attentions of parents, grandparents and uncles. Thinking back to it now, I don't know if it was indeed a good thing, but back then it had its indisputable advantages.

Giuliana remarks that for me it must have been beautiful to enjoy some privileges of my family's notoriety in the town. She could never stand that my fame as surgeon has not brought her any advantage, especially at school. She attends a high school where the greatest part of the pupils belong to prestigious professionals families, child of managing-class people or even artists. Therefore there is nothing, from this point of view, that makes her special in comparison to the others. Besides, we live in Paris, a metropolis where everyone is just one of many. This cannot be compared to the little town in which I grew, where the social and professional position of my parents conferred a particular prestige to the whole family.

Teresa interrupts the conversation calling my attention on the landscape around us.

«Everything is so different», she says, «I can hardly find any familiar benchmark. It's like I've never been here before!»

Actually, nothing of what I see, at the moment, seems to belong to my memories. The highway connecting the airport of Punta Raisi to Palermo is flanked for a long stretch by the sea, and this seems to be the only element consistent with the past. Everything is different, just like my wife says. There is no trace anymore of that building abusiveness that defaced the coast for years, obstructing the view from the shore and causing pollution and decline. Now the whole waterfront is lined by a thick expanse of green: well-cared lawns, wharfs made of clear wood, bicycle paths, panoramic terraces. As far as the eye can see, the landscape is lush and luxuriant; there is uniformity in buildings, a clear intent to create harmonious structures, that pleasantly melt with one another and with the natural environment, according to a rational, rather than arbitrary, criterion. It is the intensity of the colours of the sea and the sky that gives me the guarantee that I have returned to my land, that aside from that seems as if rewritten.

«It's so beautiful!» Teresa and Giuliana keep repeating.

«C'est incroyable!» is Giuliana's solo, «you didn't tell me it was so beautiful, here!»

«It has changed a bit, actually», is the only thing that I am able to say. I feel confused, disorientated.

«Since when they sold Sicily,» Marco explains, «right Dad?»

He had seemed to me to be completely uninterested by our chatters, up to this moment. On the contrary, what he was about to say would show that he had been more attentive than it seemed, «Thirty-two years ago. Italy was in the deepest economic disarrangement. The national debt had reached the stars, there was no more money for any kind of financing, economy was paralyzed, even the salaries of government employees were at risk. Total chaos, in short. There weren't many options left: either declaring bankruptcy or trying to save what could be saved. So the politicians of the time, who were by the way responsible of what was happening, got the idea of selling part of the State assets in order to recover capitals, getting rid of the least productive regions. Sicily and Sardinia were the first to be declared saleable patrimony».

I am amazed.

«Where did you learn all these things?»

«At school. The history teacher made us make a research on the political and geographical changes of Europe in the last years to deepen the theme of the effects of the economic crisis that ran over the planet at the beginning of the millennium. I had to deepen the subject of Italy. I made a speech in the auditorium in front of more than a thousand people.»

«You never mentioned it.»

«You were never there.»

And after these words he retreats in his silence.

Teresa looks at me from the corner on one eye to see how I took the hit. I pretend to be particularly absorbed by a surpass; I don't feel like exhibiting my wounds.

The highway ends a few hundred meters before the roundabout that leads to the first entry to the city. There is an intense traffic of cars going in every direction.

The signage is bilingual; there are the incomprehensible signs of Arab language and then, in smaller letters, the writings in Italian. The population, as far as I know, is by now fairly divided between Sicilians (or at least such they were once) and Arabs. I wonder which are to be considered foreigners. As far as I am concerned, both are.

The Siqillya, this is how it's called now, has become a crucible of people, and, in a sense or another, nobody really belongs to it. Or maybe, like others sustain, everybody does. It was in our destiny, I believe, to return to the Arabs, that once conquered us with strength, and after centuries legitimately purchased us without shedding of blood.

The sky above the city is clear and intense; the rays of the sun overheat the air, they penetrate the skin, colour the already-uncovered parts of the body. There is a long queue of cars stopped at a red light, sparkling under the scorching rays of the sun; an instant after the appearance of the green light, the whole queue is furiously trumpeting the horn loudly at the car in front.

«Why are they all honking this way?» Giuliana asks me.

«They use to in Palermo. The horn has always had a meaning that goes well beyond signalling an incumbent danger. It is a real language, with myriads of tones, that every driver uses to adjust other people's pace, going from a friendly solicitation (come on, it's green!), through a warning (step aside and let me pass), up to a real invective (go to Naples, son of a...) with a thousand hues. Getting honked at always makes a true Palermitano nervous, because that language is universal, therefore he immediately understands that it's not a compliment.»

The queue slowly parts in the two main directions, and us with it. Those who turn left enter Viale Strasburgo, the street that I went to when I was a boy. At a crossroad not far from here, in fact, was our high school. We continue in the opposite direction, toward the centre of the city. Beyond the car window, frames of old memories overlaps to the vision of what surrounds us; the journey to reach the Galilei high, the cafe that acted as meeting place on Saturday afternoon, the people crowding the shops of Viale Strasburgo. Many of those shops probably are no longer the same, but the street seems to be substantially like I remember it. It is wide and trafficked, lined on both sides by tall buildings.

«I lived right there», Teresa says, pointing at a building that I see shrinking in the small rearview mirror. Our children turn, following the direction of her pointed finger.

Thirty years ago this was a remarkable residential area, where the prices of the apartments were high in spite of the general conditions of the buildings, in which most of the balconies wore a containing green diaper, needed to prevent chunks of plaster to fall on the passer-bys. It was the hasty way to remedy to a cheap house-building practice, controlled by mafia businesses, that collapsed miserably, revealing the true face of a decaying city. Yet those indecorous dresses were accepted by everybody, as well as the overloaded and stinking garbage bins, the perennial noise of the traffic and the air polluted by the exhaust gases. People were willing to pay hundreds of thousands of Euro to feel the owners of a piece of that degrade.

With enthusiasm, Teresa gestures crazily to show me all the changes that flow in front of her amazed eyes.

«Everything is so rigorously orderly and regular now, I like it!» she remarks with a certain wonder.

And so this new Palermo earns the first point in its favour. In the distance, behind the tops of some buildings, I see the points of a recent construction.

«What's that?» I ask loudly.

«It should be a minaret», Marco says, «quite a lot of mosques have been built in the city».

And for his sister, who is looking at him, he adds pleased, «I documented further before leaving. The teacher wants a report about this trip».

«A mosque in Palermo? Things have really changed, then», Teresa remarks, «I wonder how the people took it?»

«It seems a great novelty, but in reality it is only a return to the past, because at the time of the Arabic domination, in Palermo as well as in the rest of the island, there were quite a lot.»

«I would like to visit one of them», Teresa adds.

«Wow, it's really beautiful!» Giuliana remarks while with the car we are running along the imposing building with its light geometric volumes.

«If it is true that whoever goes back to a place after many years is destined to feel estranged from it because of the changes, in our case this feeling is utterly amplified», Teresa remarks, while she is looking out of the car window with an expression of enchantment on her face.

With that picture still in the eyes, we enter Via Libertà, where there is a luxuriant vegetation of tall and fair palm trees. They have taken the place of the bare and sickly plane trees there were once. The monotonous voice of the sat-nav drives us toward the hotel. Too many years have passed for me to orient myself on my own, also because at the time I didn't drive and my visits to the centre were limited to the inclusive road axle between the two greater city theatres, the Politeama and the Massimo. Besides, many streets have been renamed, especially those that made reference to the history of Italy.

The journey to the hotel is an alternation of surprises and old memories. The traffic is intense at this hour close to lunchtime, and the honking of the car horns makes my children laugh. At every "piiipiii" they play finding a corresponding curse, of which they ask me for the correct Palermitan intonation.

We ride along the port, where there are two big cruise ships, one of which sails under a flag of the Emirates.

«I read that it is one of the most expensive and exclusive cruises of the Mediterranean. The inside of the ship is a dream; a floating city, with the more disparate and unthinkable luxury services», Teresa says. She is a faithful viewer of a television program that proposes dream trips in every part of the world.

Once we left the port behind, crossing the whole Via Crispi, we reach the Foro Italico, where the landscape is enchanting not only along the shore, but also from the opposite side, where ancient buildings arise, all restored and brought back to their ancient splendour. The car proceeds at a slow walk, to allow all of us to greedily record every detail, when a tall and ultramodern building appears right in front of us.

«That's our hotel», Teresa says, leaving our children speechless.

It is an imposing tower of steel and blue glass, wound on itself like a spiral, with a long catwalk stretching over the road for several dozen meters from one of the first floors, like a long arm stretched out to reach the beach. In very distant times, this was a prestigious sea area for the city, in which famous bathing establishments rose, but at the time of my parents it had already been for a long time a polluted area, where bathing was forbidden.

A young African boy in the uniform of the hotel gestures for me to stop. He signals me where to park.

The car slips in an underground parking. The contrast between the natural, intense daylight, and the dark of the ramp that leads to the parking is acute, so much so as to pale the several neon tubes on the ceiling.

Two bellboys welcome us, pointing at our numbered place, then, taking our several cases, they lead us to the hall for the registration.

A few minutes later, a panoramic elevator projects us twenty-five floors above the city, in an imposing family suite. A luxurious living room where cream colour dominates on walls, tapestry and the whole furnishing, amplifying the light coming in from the large glass wall. Two open bedrooms, one opposite the other, each provided with TV, telephone line, wireless connection, mini-bar, relaxing armchair, private bathroom with Jacuzzi and a view of the sea extending as far as the eye can see.

«Each floor is sort of a big independent cube that revolves around a pivot», Giuliana summarizes from one of the leaflets fanned on the shiny white of the table.

«Revolves?» Mark echoes in amazement.

«Exactly», his sister confirms, plopping down on one of the soft couches in the middle of the great living room, «this way it allows a three-sixty panoramic view. We are in one of the richest cities in the world, guys!»

Teresa and I, in front of the large window, silently watch the horizon that, in this new Palermo, seems to have shifted far beyond it was possible.

A fast lunch in the panoramic restaurant of the hotel, at the twentieth floor, then we slip on Via Lincoln for the first raid in the city.

To our left Villa Giulia and the Botanical Garden, then the road goes straight to the central station, from which important city roads depart, first among them the whole old Via Roma.

While our children are captured by the charm of the incomprehensible writings on the signs of the shops and in the advertising posters, Teresa weaves her left arm around mine and walks beside me, commenting everything.

«I am so happy to be here with you that it doesn't seem true yet. It has a strange effect on me though. I lived in this city when it wasn't exactly good as for quality of life, and actually, even though it was rich of beauty, too many things were wrong. Today it's considered one of the more liveable cities, and it is so peculiar as to be considered unique in its kind. Does it have the same effect on you?»

«I am happy to be on vacation with you. I had been in need of a break for a long time. As for being here... it's difficult to explain... I feel a little estranged. The impression is positive, mind you, but I have the feeling that I am in a totally different place. I feel like a tourist in an unknown city. It's still too soon to say more, I have to see more to form an opinion.»

Teresa has gone to buy bus tickets. Giuliana is glued to the showcase of a shop, admiring Gucci purses, as if she had never seen one before.

Teresa waves the tickets in the air from afar and hastens toward the bus that brakes at the stop, vomiting a human load to immediately swallow an even more substantial one.

«Maybe we could wait for the following», I say while the others are climbing in, but Giuliana freezes me with a "Come on Dad, let's not waste time" that leaves no room to answers.

In my family I am the only one who faces Paris in a car. Teresa and our children are subway people. I need to know that my car is parked a few minutes from where I am, wherever I am, because when I have to go somewhere, be it at the hospital, home or any other place, I want to be immediately able to. I hate the wastes of time, the rarefied air of the underground tunnels, the idea of being quite a lot of meters under the ground, the expressionless heads suspended to flabby bodies hanging and jolting to the rhythm of the movements of the train. So the bath of sweaty and compressed flesh to which I am not quite accustomed bothers me. I feel the eyes of my children on me, I perceive a certain amusement in their looks. They don't ask me anything, while I am trying to find myself some shelter from the unknown and foul-smelling bodies that crowd this orange pipe, loaded well above its possibilities.

«Palermo is a city rich in monuments. The area in which we are now is the historical core, and it is all a sequence of artistic jewels. It's interesting, isn't it?» Teresa says casually, looking beyond the glass door that opens on the landscape of churches and monuments of the city centre.

«NoussommesParisiens!» Giuliana says, looking up with her neck stretched, her eyes half shut, then she deflates and smiles, and goes back to looking out.

«Sure, for you Parisians grandeur is the norm», Teresa mocks them.

«Mom, come on, Paris is a beautiful city, it is refined and elegant as few others, it fears no comparisons. And sure it doesn't lack monuments. Nevertheless... this one doesn't seem bad at all to me.»

Cramped in the thin space between the ticket machine and the window, I look at the spellbound faces of a group of elderly American tourists, their ecstatic expressions, the satisfaction for a trip reserving them something good.

Farther on, I am captured by the look of a man my age, his forehead glued to the glass in a position of abandonment, of surrender. It doesn't seem that he's looking at anything, nor acknowledging what is happening around him. He's lost in who knows what thoughts, same as Marco. I wonder what man my child will be, self-confident and satisfied as I am now, or confused and depressed like that man down there. The answer, in both cases, scares me.

«Dad? Dad?» Giuliana saves me from my own thoughts. «Has it really changed so much from the past?»

«Quite a lot, so much so that even for me it is difficult to recognize some places. Everything is very... thought of. There is an obsessive care for details; nothing seems to have budded spontaneously in this deluxe living room», I remark laconically.

«This city is a showcase, by now. It's normal that there is so much attention, the same one with which you assemble a good business card», Teresa says.

«The emirs don't make throwaway investments. They spent quite a lot of money to buy the whole island and naturally they wanted to earn from it», Marco says.

«I would say that they have succeeded. Thanks to their investments, they made the value of everything rise. There is an unbelievable wealth, once unthinkable», Teresa adds.

Via Maqueda is the crossroad of internationality, a multiethnic crowd methodically walks on the sidewalks. It's hard to distinguish tourists from residents. Jewelleries follow one another at little distance, their windows overflowing with gold and precious stones; shiny silverware stands out on large candid draperies of embroidered flax. High fashion ateliers alternate to deluxe department stores. It seems that there is no room for normal standards of living.

People walk at sustained steps, like in the big European cities; even slowness, a typical philosophy of the southern lifestyle, maybe had to surrender its pace to the frantic rhythm of an international city. We stay in silence, our noses up to look, in the background, at the peaks of the ultramodern skyscrapers, competitions of power and wealth among emirs. Certainly this is not the first time we see any, but finding them here surprises both my wife and me. As she says, we still have to get used us to this Sicilian Dubai. What surprises me more than everything, however, is the wise miscellaneous of old and new, modernity and classicism melted in a game of approaches and contrasts with amazing results.

Giuliana and Marco would like to visit each of the department stores that we meet at each step. We end up finding a compromise; they will get off at the next stop, and from there they will go on alone. So we separate for a few hours, with the promise to meet again for supper. Teresa hands the map of the city to Giuliana and reminds her to keep the mobile phone at hand, to stay in contact. They greet while the bus moves on. Seeing them disappear among the crowd strikes Teresa dumb.

«Be calm», I tell her, «they are adults».

«In Paris they regularly go alone, but here...»

«But here it's easier. Palermo might have changed, but it's still smaller than the big Paris.»

Yet I too feel as if we let them go late at night in the heart of the jungle.

Some more stops later we decide to continue afoot too. Teresa makes her way moving in a slalom in the thick of backs and arms that interpose between us and the exit. Tightening my shoulders, I follow her, holding my breath.

We enter the pedestrian walk; we are in the heart of the city, an artistically rich zone where churches, ancient buildings and chapels follow one another in a quite small area. Wherever you look, you find charm and beauty. Once passed the Quattro Canti, we reach Piazza Pretoria, also known as Piazza della Vergogna – shame square – because of the marmoreal nude statues framing the monumental sixteenth-century fountain. Teresa, who loves to take pictures, seems to want to immortalize every detail of this part of the most authentic Palermo.

«Once that was the Town hall», I tell her when she points the lens to the southern slope of the square, where Palazzo delle Aquile stands.

«Today it is still the seat of the new city administration», she adds, consulting her inseparable guide.

A few more meters later, from the height of a terrace, two of the churches I remember more of Palermo dominate a second square. San Cataldo is a small cube overhung by three lined-up domes that shine red on the clear background of the sky. Cleaned from the dark stains of mould and smog, they seem to shine, and today, more than ever, they underline the familiarity of foreigners with our history. They furnished our city, leaving deep prints and suggestions, making our culture already soaked in orient. The last years are but yet another chapter of a novel that began many centuries ago.

On the same terrace, in a more rearward position, there is the Martorana, another monument symbol of the city. With Teresa's arm around mine, we climb the narrow and steep stairs that lead to the two churches. From above, leaning on the iron parapet, with the side of San Giuseppe dei Teatini in front of us, we stop to refresh our faded memories.

«Human will is a powerful weapon, it can create beauty or destruction as it wishes. And this city with a thousand faces, marked by such a deep change, is an extraordinary example of it.»

These are the words I ear spontaneously in my mind, where prejudice is starting to surrender to evidence.

«I didn't expect to see again the historical monuments and discover that everything is intact, everything is still alive, in this city that I thought irremediably violated.»

«Palermo is an enchanting city», the tourist guide of S. Cataldo – a woman with unnaturally red hair in harmony with the stripes on white background of her elegant suit – tells me. She is distributing leaflets to the visitors and narrating the story of the church, shifting boldly through a wide range of languages.

«The history of Palermo», she continues, «is that of a city that lived alternate events, moments of great shine alternated to dark periods, but that in these last years is living a new flourishing, exceeding every expectation. It is a very rich city, although many consider it enslaved to new masters. But there is a lot more dignity and respect in the current condition than we had when we felt free. This is the new Palermo».

We go up Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Here too there is a series of memories and new discoveries that accompany us up to the cathedral first, then to Palazzo dei Normanni.

«That woman was right», I tell Teresa, «everything is still here, it's just that now things have the significance they deserve. It's nice to see that the future we imagined difficult and declining is luxuriant instead. Sicily is better now, while Italy lost an immense wealth potential. But it's sad for me to think that it had to happen this way».

We decide to dine in one of the characteristic restaurants of the historical centre. I convince Teresa to get a taxi to reach the meeting place with our children. In the car there is a sour odour, a mix of sweat and environment deodorant, that nauseates me a bit. The taxi driver is a brawny man, with plump cheeks and fingers made even more swollen by the heat. He seems stuck in his seat, I wonder how he can leave it at the end of his shift. He has a slight Palermitan inflection and a happy and contagious laughter; he talks ceaselessly and he immediately guesses that I have roots in Palermo province, but I don't dare ask him how he did, in spite of my great curiosity to know which indelible mark I unconsciously bring on me.

«How was it living as a Sicilian abroad? Not easy, I think. Here we suffered too, but at least we were home. Arabs helped us, I am thankful for what they did. Now there are rules for so many things that once were completely unruly. But don't delude yourself, they have their anarchies too; we are more alike than you can imagine.»

«But how do you feel? I mean, you are no longer Italian, and you are not Arabic by birth, like...» but he doesn't let me finish.

«Free, not free. This is one of those things I have never understood. Maybe I am a little ignorant, I never wanted school too much, but I never understood this thing about liberty, really I don't understand it at all. But why? who prevents me from living my life my way every day? Were we free with mafia? Were we free with a state that always made so many promises and never kept them? Freedom is a word that can mean everything and its opposite. For me in fact it doesn't mean anything at all.»

Teresa quickly locks her eyes with mine before plunging them beyond the dark glass of the car window. I know her and I know that she would like to start a weary debate, to jolt a way of thinking that she cannot bear. But she also knows that in two minutes we will reach our destination, a time too short to meaningfully affect such a rooted way of thinking.

On the horizon our children appear, revitalized in spite of the tiredness. Giuliana convulsively tells us about an artificial heaven of luxury in which they immersed. In the rare instants in which she stops to breath and drink a sip of water, her brother takes advantage to add something of his to the story. He seems relaxed, less dark than usual. We order spaghetti alla carbonara and eat at will, while Giuliana keeps listing all of the marvellous things around us.

Taking turns, Teresa and I refresh old memories of our existence in Palermo, making comparisons between the two faces of this same city that we end up calling "Palermo pre- and post-sale".

#  Chapter 3

Twenty-four hours have passed since when we left Paris, and until the moment in which I set foot in the Charles de Gaulle I couldn't imagine myself on vacation. Indeed I hadn't had a true vacation, a true break, for so much time. One of those in which the phone isn't continually ringing, the e-mail doesn't require urgent answers, which happened at times, no urgent early return for not-deferrable business reasons is necessary. Generally I just need some reading and some rest to feel on vacation, but the rest of the time is useful for me to study and always keep the pace. I am a paediatric heart surgeon even during vacations; I can't draw a line between my job and myself. I spend more time at the hospital than at home, because, aside from being a surgeon, I am also a university teacher, as well as perpetually in training myself. This devotion of mine to paediatric surgery has been one of the most frequent reason for arguments with Teresa in the first years of our marriage, until she resigned to the fact that there are people whose life is marked by a mission, that is the point of convergence of all their existence. For me it is more than a job; it's what I am, it's the substance without which I wouldn't know what meaning to give to my life. And it is not an easy life; the simplest case is just a little less desperate than the others. I see sick children of parents undone by pain, by the sense of impotence, by tiredness. From me they want hope, salvation, even miracles. Often I succeed, but not always. And when a child dies, I grow a bit older. However I have learned to shield myself. It's an ability that I learned from one of my best teachers.

People mistakes the lucidity of the surgeon for coldness. But in my work being emotional is a risk. The hand is firm if the mind is.

Outside of the operating room I know how to smile to my little patients, to give them that trust in me that will make them collaborative at the right moment and will help them face their challenge. And I also know how to shake the hand of a mother, to give her courage, or pat the shoulder of a father to give him the strength that is expected from him in an extremely difficult situation. It is important that they trust me. They entrust me with the most precious thing they have. I don't skip anything, I am precise, even maniacal; for this I enjoy the respect and trust of colleagues and patients.

I operated children coming from every part of Europe. Most of them are fine, enjoying the last remnants of their infancy. They will live for a long time, they will die at the right moment. Their parents revere me as if I were a holy man, but I only feel like a skilled mechanic, curious to overcome boundaries and experiment new techniques to dominate nature, to repair its breakdowns. I studied in America for years, where I learned most of what I know, then I returned to Europe, in various hospitals, until I landed in Paris, where I set roots. Now I supervise my own department. It was a difficult route, but not a solitary one. Close to me there were always my parents, who invested on me without reservations. They are the first in my personal thank-you list, because they believed in my abilities from the start. Then there is Teresa, who always supported me, encouraged me, and waited for me with patience.

Come to think of it, I have to give a part of credit also to history, the one with a capital H. The History of which I speak is that of an island in the heart of the Mediterranean sea, for centuries object of attentions and arguments, of dominions and subjugations, of different masters who partly enriched, and partly violated it, depriving it of its own independent identity. The History of which I speak is that of an island that, since Italy was united, apparently entered it but in reality remained always to the borders, a piece detached by the whole as it is inherent in the nature of an island. A bag from which to take without ever giving, a treasure chest to plunder to the bottom and then throw away, or even better sell, to earn something to the last bit.

Without its troubled history, until that upsetting epilogue that has turned it into merchandise, my parents maybe would never have moved from Torre, maybe I would never have gone to study abroad, maybe today I would be doctor Manfredi, pharmacist of Torre, like my father was. Maybe.

But History wanted otherwise.

«Here's the junction», Teresa calls me back from the places of the mind in which I am used to lose myself when I am driving. Today we go to Torre, and the road I am about to take is the one that leads to my past.

Two rows of palm trees border a road once quite anonymous and dirty, that now seems a remarkable boulevard. The cars drive on it at moderate speed, they seem to enjoy the reception of this sumptuous entrance. A sign points at the ramp going toward the sea. I take it immediately to make a panoramic trip. We are going to meet Anna Marino right here, at the highway junction, at half past noon. We have time for an early exploration.

The boys are enraptured by the sight. With his arms crossed on the car door and his head leaning slightly out the window, Marco silently swallows every detail, with his eyes able to draw the world in. Giuliana, glued to him to look in the same direction, keeps repeating "Wow" like a broken record. Actually we are all taken by the beauty extending around us. It's a new landscape, even for Teresa and I, who have lived in these places.

Marco, who apparently has studied the subject through, enlightens us about the reconstruction techniques adopted after Sicily was sold.

«The first target was the total requalification of the coasts: reclamation of the shores, redefinition of the sewers, and implementation of the depuration plants to re-launch maritime tourism, that had completely frozen. The coasts were devastated by unbridled abusiveness and pollution. Various foreign building companies were called to realize architectural works that unequivocally gave an Arab imprint to the urban landscape, not only in the biggest cities of the island, but in all of the inhabited centres, even the smallest. Sicily had to become the privileged residence of the richest Arabs, as well as a reservoir of natural and landscape wealth to be exploited for an elite tourism at international level. It went from being the tail lamp of an impoverished Italy to becoming a pearl of the Reunited Arab Emirates. It was the grandest project realized in these last decades, and it completely revolutionized the face of a land that had been abandoned to itself.»

From the small rearview mirror I look at my son and it seems to me not to recognize him any longer. How much he has grown while I was not realizing it! Chestnut curls, honey-coloured eyes, a strong neck planted on a beautiful athletic body. He is a bit underweight lately, but he's well and he's beautiful to look at. I don't often have time to be his father, and Teresa reproaches me for this. She says that Marco suffered a lot for this, especially since it became impossible for me to attend his sporting exhibitions. He has been practising swimming since when he was eight, and at eleven he started springboard diving. Last year, just fourteen-years old, he won a synchronized diving competition, together with his inseparable friend Pierre. They performed in absolute synchronism an apparently simple dive before disappearing in the water with great elegance. They classified first in the competitions of the Ile de France department. Next target, the national ones. My wife filmed everything, I saw it the next day. I lavished in praises and congratulations, that left my son completely indifferent, as if he didn't care he had won.

"It is his way to punish your absence. He wanted so much for us to be all there", my wife blamed me. "Do you know how many sacrifices he has faced to be ready for this competition? Hours and hours of weary training, and then school and home works... sometimes I found him asleep on the books."

Teresa's voice trembled, excited.

"After the awarding, Pierre raced to hug his parents, Marco came to me. We wept together for joy. Giuliana hugged us both and she too wept like a child. It was a one-in-a-million thing, and you missed it. Then Pierre took a picture with his father, and the face of our son darkened."

My wife is very tolerant with me, she stands my lacks as a husband, but she doesn't easily forgive those as a father. I try to defend, to justify myself, but as a knowing loser.

Apart from the disappointments caused by me, that was a golden period in Marco's life. Winning gave him great self-assurance, a certainty about his potentialities and a big desire to keep competing. I liked his determination a lot. I felt he was really like me when I was his age. But then things changed. After a brief summer break, trainings had restarted with more enthusiasm. The qualification to the national competitions was at stake. As my wife said, Marco and Pierre were synchronized in thoughts even before than in moves. Teresa still calls them "the missed twins", to underline that mental – even before than physical – synchronization.

But since we live on very fragile balances, it takes nothing to delete forever what was built with great effort. The nothing that broke the tuning of our young champions is called Martin Bernard, a very young man who had just got a driving license and who, launched at full speed in rue Saint Denis, overran and killed on the spot poor Pierre Durand. This happened last December, a few days before Christmas.

Marco was at the pool, training. Some chat with monsieur Vignon, the coach, waiting for the arrival of his partner, both of them amazed by his unusual delay. After the first half a hour, Marco started the routine warm-up, and then made a few dives not to waste the whole lesson. I can imagine the scene. On the springboard, Marco stretches his arms up, as much as possible, then he bends to touch his toes with his fingers. He leans his head left and right a few times, then forward and back. He looks at the empty springboard close to his and wonders what happened to Pierre, who is generally always the first to arrive. Before diving, he looks at monsieur Vignon for the green light. He gives him some indication to correct his starting position. They have been trying a new dive recently, a more complex one, and Marco has so much desire to learn. The coach signals that now it's all right, the posture is perfect. Marco performs his spin and disappears in the water while the coach takes his phone that is persistently ringing. When Marco resurfaces, the face of monsieur Vignon is not like it was a few instants before. It is livid, it almost seems about to catch fire, then an arm covers his eyes. Marco sees that body trembling convulsively, it seems to him that he's crying. With both arms covering his face, monsieur Vignon sobs like a child.

At the funeral there was everyone. Marco carried the coffin together with his schoolmates and Pierre's brother. Monsieur Vignon walked close to the boy's parents, and during the whole religious function he kept a hand on the shoulder of the dad of his young deceased student, the other one tightened around the arm of my son who, barricaded behind a pair of dark sunglasses, seemed petrified. Around his neck Marco wore the medal they had won together. After the funeral speech, some of the boy's relatives wanted to commemorate Pierre, to remember his life of good boy. Marco too, gathering his strength, stepped forward to speak. He did it immediately after the intervention of a really emotional monsieur Vignon, who had the participants relive the instants of great happiness that Pierre had shared with him after the victory. He didn't remove the glasses to speak, he could never look up to the people gathered there, my boy. Tormenting the medal that hung from his neck, he spoke about the great love that Pierre had for sport, a passion that had united them and had made a winning team of them. With his voice broken by emotion, Marco succeeded in turning directly to his friend, hoping that he could hear his thanks for all that they had shared in those three years that he defined magic.

"... and that won't come back", he added in a sad but dry tone.

Then, leaving the pulpit, he bent in front of the coffin and left his medal on it. With that gesture my son put an end to his sporting commitment that, according to him, was dead with Pierre. Even his will to live seems to have been left there, on that candid coffin of an early-broken life. From that day he has been seeming resigned to drag himself along, silent and patient, with no destination left to reach.

Even now that he is here with us, sitting in this large car dazzled by the sun, with his sister's chin sunk in his right shoulder and his khaki shirt as faded as his emotions, he illustrates us all of what he studied like a model student, always there with his head, but never with his heart.

A restored painting. This the first picture that comes to my mind while I am driving and observing Torre. The second is the one of the two-faced clock, suspended in the infirmary of my department, between the calendar and the blackboard plastered of yellow post-it notes. A patient drawn it, a little nine-years-old boy, who spent more of his years taking care of himself than living. Each face of the clock represents a different measure of time. On one side, in fact, the day passes in just one turn of the hands on the twelve-hours path. On the other it takes three full turns before the day is concluded. They correspond to the two different ways in which time flows inside a hospital, pressing and frantic for medics and paramedics, with routine and emergency endlessly interwoven, running after one another. On the other side of the coin, instead, the vision of the patient, who feels that in the hospital time swells beyond measure, even beyond his very ability to wait, to be, in fact, patient. But the hospital, after all, is nothing but a scaled-down representation. Beyond its gates, things go approximately the same way.

Frantic rhythms, a hour that runs after another and unseats it, and everybody trying to race faster than time, always remaining several steps back. A modern frenzy that orchestrates us, saturating daily spaces and times, leaving in us that desire of a slower time to taste, to live in a different way, but of which, in reality, probably we would not know what to do. And then there are the places where time dilates, leaving the hope that it is possible to live at human rhythms. One of these places is Torre, where time goes by slow and calm. It can be perceived in the slow motion, in the casual meetings for which you find time to stop by, to communicate, to establish contacts. No transformation will ever cancel such predominance; it is a genetic and cultural imprint. Cars move slowly, although there aren't jams nor queues. It is a way of seeing life, and facing it. It is hard to resist the temptation to solicit a faster pace, for one like me who is used to the other face of the clock.

Here too you run, at times, but it is a slow run, a crawl.

A lot of white has been used to restore this painting; it is the white of plasters, candid as if just painted, it is the white of the few huts on the waterfront, of the drink kiosk, of the beach umbrella over the tables of the several cafes already crowded like in high season. It tastes of freshness, cleanliness, it tastes of order and light, it tastes of candid Torre, where the traces of rust and the cracks have been cancelled.

«It's unbelievable!» Teresa exclaims, she too wrapped in the candid white of a flax dress, «an amazing transformation. Everything was different! It's like we dreamed it to be.»

She turns around, capturing every detail not to lose anything of such a magnificence.

«I remember the state in which this shore was. It was desolating; it would have taken so little to change things.»

«It took willing, and that is not a little thing!» I retort.

«A people is like a child; it must be raised with care, it must be loved and taught, and sooner or later it returns what was given to it, by becoming an adult able to care lovingly for what surrounds it. Love and care for a people mean legality, respect, justice. There is neither present nor future if those are missing.»

«You sound like my history teacher», Giuliana adds, taking yet another photo.

«A lot of people who believed in these principles died here», I reproach her.

«Who knows what they would think if they knew that Sicily is no longer Italian», Teresa sighs, stopping in front of the window of a bar, «let's go in, I want a brioche with ice cream», and before we can answer she disappears inside.

Gaetana managed a haberdashery in via Palermo, the road – compressed in a maze of falling buildings – that lead from the suburbs to the centre of Torre. She was an expressionless woman, the grey skin of her face hardened like dry cement. Buried under stacks of boxes of buttons, wool balls, ribbons in every size and colour, dusty rolls of cloth, precariously stacked on the old wood shelves that covered the walls of the little shop, she served her customers with distrust, looking at them with her small and vigilant little eyes, careful to check her goods, as if every customer were a potential thief. She distrusted children even more, convinced that they entered her shop only to make mischief and then laugh behind her back. She spoke rarely and badly, in a language difficult to understand, emitting a sort of whistle because of an open space between her upper teeth, too expensive to close according to her point of view. She spent the whole day in that minuscule store, sat on a chair of frayed straw, as ancient as her. It was her true house, and I couldn't imagine another environment fit for her. She was always there, until late in the evening, and come morning she was there again, so that everybody doubted that she ever left. I imagine that she wasn't even fifty when I used to accompany my mother to buy spools of thread and sewing needles. Yet I always thought that she was old. I was perhaps the only child to whom, although with reserve, she granted a speck of trust, because of my father, who was a guarantee of reliability in her eyes. She spoke to me strident, close words, in an incomprehensible dialect; her toothless smile and wrinkled hands – that she plunged on my hair with a quick and heavy gesture, an awkward expression of unlikely gentleness – frightened me. My mother, when we left the shop, reproached me for my attempts to shun those heavy hands. She said that it was an impolite gesture, and that people had to be treated with respect without distinction. But I was six and at that age one doesn't feel the obligation to surrender to those laws of the hypocrisy that as adults we call good manners.

A few more meters forward, on the opposite side of the sidewalks, there was Antonio's tobacco shop. In front of the only shop window on the main road I stood watching at Burago models, orderly stacked in their red boxes close to the accessories for smokers. On the two sides of the entrance there were two vending machines, one of chewing-gums in the shape of coloured little balls, the other one of small plastic key rings with the most fashionable cartoon characters of the time. The inside was less narrow than the haberdashery and Antonio didn't have the same faded appearance of Gaetana, but the place was equally unpleasant, because of an unbearable stench of stale smoke and cigarette stubs crushed on the filthy floor. Vito and I went in to purchase some chips or to complain about the coin swallowed by the ungenerous balls vending machine. But ours were fast raids; we slipped among the several customers who crowded the narrow place, mostly teams of workers on lunch break who bought from Antonio stocks of cigarettes and dreams. And the dreams, in that malodorous mouse hole that was also a bleak policy shop, where made of ink printed on the numbered circles of several types of lotto cards. Most of them ended soon, just like the ink of the pen that dangled from the counter, tied to a string to prevent anyone from putting it in their pocket. They ended up crumbled into a ball and thrown to the ground, close to the already scratched Scratch&Win cards, other short-lasting dreams.

Teresa listens to my memories as we walk at a slow step along the Via Palermo of thirty years later. She is clinging to my left arm with both hands, I feel her sure grip, as if she wanted to make sure that I am here just for her, at least for this brief walk, kilometres of distance from our life. Our children have gone to the beach, leaving us to our memories.

She remarks that Torre has changed at least as much as us in this long period, but with an inverse process. Time wrote on our faces as many furrows and wrinkles as it cancelled from here. The crumbling buildings of that time have been totally re-modernized, according to a coherent and uniform aesthetical principle, without random alternations of colours and styles, reunited in an embarrassing clown effect. I tell her of when my mother sent me alone to buy some bread at a small bakery that I no longer see now. A delicatessen took its place.

Teresa makes me notice that I only associate childhood memories to Torre.

«Actually, a different place matches every age of my life. Torre is my childhood, while when I was a boy, between school, sport, friends... and you, my benchmark was Palermo. Boston is my young adult stage, and Paris the adult one. I wonder where my old age will be?»

«My life too is divided among so many places», Teresa sighs. She has a list of moves longer than mine. «When I was a child it weighed on me, then I started to think that the world is so large and full of beautiful places where to live, that it would be a pity to spend all of our time only in one of them. Don't you think so?»

«I think it is only a chain of events to determine it. In some cases they always lead to the same place, in others they don't. Our way of living life obeys to the same principle of casual as much as decisive intersections from which our genetic and somatic characteristics derive. There are myriads of possible combinations but, in the end, only one will unequivocally identify us».

«And will? You don't leave it any room in this so fatalistic vision of the things. I think that we always contribute in defining our path. It's not only random intersections.»

«I don't know.»

«Your old age will be where you want, like all of your life was. You haven't have been a victim of the upheavals that struck Sicily, don't forget this. You already had plans.»

The haberdashery is still there. In place of the old sign, illuminated by the cold light of a neon, there is a wood panel framing the entrance, on which black writings in stylized characters stand out. Beyond the window, the inside of the shop appears dark and overloaded with goods, just like I remembered it. Behind the counter a brown girl, with flabby cheeks and strong wrists, is showing some cloths to a customer, who compares them passing them between her fingers, again and again. I don't see Gaetana, but I wasn't expecting to. As I recall her, she would be a hundred years old if she were still alive. I imagine her resting in the dark of a grave, not laying in a coffin but sitting on a caned, frayed and filthy chair. She won't even have realized her passing out and her new settlement, she who already lived buried in this narrow and dusty store, with her skin marked by wrinkles and mould.

Instead, from behind the curtain of the back office, curve and withered, she really comes out, with the same old glasses of that time and two rolls of cloth to be shown to the customer. She is old, very old, but now properly. Teresa joins me to snoop around. She wants to peer at the living mausoleum of Torre. «The emblem of immortality», she says in a low voice, laughing.

The customer touches the cloths brought by Gaetana and smiles happily. She finally made her choice. Gaetana gives her assistant a triumphant look. She doesn't know the world beyond the threshold of her haberdashery, she just realizes its existence because of the coming and going of people entering her planet of cloths and accessories, but she understands the demands of her customers like no one else. She made of her haberdashery her crib, her house, and even her grave.

With the meters of cloth wrapped in a thin white plastic bag, the customer crosses the threshold of the shop. From the chain around her neck dangle a pair of sight glasses with which she scrutinized the goods from up close. She squints as if to repel the shine of light that, like a lightning, heightens the contrast with the darkness of the shop, then she disperses in the world.

«Let's go in», Teresa says. She is already inside, announcing herself with a ringing "Good morning" that vibrates in the still air.

Some steps behind her, I look at Gaetana who scrutinizes me in turn, with the same suspicious eyes she had when she was younger.

Teresa is introducing herself, Gaetana amorphously listens to her, without interest, because she has already understood that she hasn't entered the shop to buy, but only to steal her some time.

«This is my husband. Do you recognize him?» she asks, reaching out with her hand toward me.

I make two steps forward, while Gaetana pierces me with a fast as much as indifferent look. She throws her head back with a slow movement accompanied by some kind of metallic snap of her tongue. It's a Sicilian "no".

«Cu sì?» she asks me, while putting back in place three rolls of cloth on a shelf behind her.

«I am Paolo Manfredi. Do you remember me?»

Without turning, she keeps pushing with her whole body to insert the last roll in that unlikely stack.

«Maybe you remember my father, Antonio Manfredi, the pharmacist.»

She stops pushing, she rubs a hand on her forehead, as if to make space or to tidy up the disorder. Then she turn and look at me from behind her thick glasses.

«U figghiu ru pharmacist? Un ti canuscivu cchiù.»

She sketches a grimace, which is almost a smile in her rough mimicry, and with this she has already ended the conversation. I reciprocate the smile and keep looking at her, knowing that I don't have anything to ask her, and there is nothing that she wants to know about me, if I am not there to buy her goods.

Teresa points at the young assistant of Gaetana, who introduces herself as Ina, the woman's niece. She immediately appears to us very different from her aunt, available to come into contact with humankind. Without difficulty the two start to chat cordially. Teresa asks her how is life in this new context and how the current situation was achieved. The girl shows a big desire to tell all this. I imagine how few occasions she has to speak, holed up in this inhospitable shop together with her aunt, who for sure is not the emblem of loquacity. When Gaetana disappears in the back office, Ina tells us, in a well-understandable Italian, that many opposed the advent of the new administration. And this, fundamentally, because citizens had been imposed to invest on their assets. Grants were given to everyone to finance restructuring, but with severe monitoring on the use of the money, that was provided as reimbursement and never in advance. Besides, restructuring had to follow rigid criterions of uniformity, even for what concerned the choice of building materials and finish.

«Nobody could do to their own way», she remarks, letting slip a certain satisfaction for the fact that her aunt too had, despite herself, to fix the facade of the building, if nothing else.

For people like Gaetana it wasn't easy to adapt effortlessly to this type of peremptory requirements, that also sank their hands even in her ungenerous pockets. She believed that it was useless to spend money for the house or to improve the shop, as much as to fix her teeth or to buy a dress.

«Not everything has changed, it seems,» I tell Teresa once we are out of the shop, we too dazzled by the contrast between dark and light, «although it's improved on the outside, the shop is still the bleak shop it was once. There is no way to change people like Gaetana».

«Cultural transformations are the fruit of a slow process to which some are impenetrable. But this is the true challenge of the change», Teresa says, hovering a closed fist, «even if she didn't change her way of thinking, Gaetana at least had to conform to the laws of a country that demanded order and uniformity. She could not escape the new rules and this is already a step forward».

I go toward the tobacco shop, to see what happened to the filthy mouse hole of Antonio, and with an inexplicable relief I find out that it left its place to one nicely-smelling boutique of perfumes and French cosmetics.

#  Chapter 4

It was May 13th 2016. A few days before my birthday, the eighteenth one. The day had started like many others; I would not have had such a clear memory of it if it hadn't become a sadly historical date for Sicilians. At half past six, like every morning, my mother had come into my room to wake me up, and I had ignored her call as usual, keeping dozing for at least another ten minutes. At that point she had raised the tone of her voice, because it was getting late for the bus scheduled at twenty past seven. She said that she would be forced to dress me in a hurry to bring me to school. The same thing happens still today, though the screaming one is Teresa and the dozing teenagers Marco and Giuliana.

Daily miracle, I succeeded in racing to the bus stop just in time to get on the bus for Palermo and reach the school on time. There too it was a day like many others, in spite of the nervousness circulating among the teachers. You could feel it in their eyes and in their discourses during the break. They were all worried for the economic and politic crisis that was paralysing Italy. For days they had been waiting for the new manoeuvre of the government and there was great fear that it would require further sacrifices to the base of the population, already strongly struck by taxes, lack of services, and great instability. Professor Martino, teacher of Italian and Latin, prophesied catastrophes. I remember him in front of the door of our classroom, grizzled beard, thick and uncombed hair, black goggles on his nose. In the middle of a small group of colleagues he was minuscule, but his voice thundered in the corridors when he had to restore order and silence. He kept repeating, with a mixed tone of anger and discouragement, «You will see, colleagues. They will strike us, civil servants, once more. They will keep squeezing us until we are made totally poor... they even want to decrease that already ludicrous salary we have! But there is no doubt that they, our honest rulers, will not renounce to any of their privileges... obviously to our expenses.»

The others looked at him in dismay; someone shook their head with a resigned expression, someone pitched intentions of rebellion.

«We have to go down in the squares and protest once again», the young professor of maths – with which the masculine half of my class was in love – said.

Us pupils listened to them, but we didn't give too much importance to these discourses, considering them the usual paranoia of adults.

Apart from this parenthesis during the break, the day was filled by the usual interrogations and explanations, all regular.

It was the return home what marked the turn that made that day always vivid in my memory, as much as in that of all Sicilians, I believe.

I buzzed the intercom three times before my mother answered. She usually waited for me leaning out from the kitchen window. The door was opened just a small crack. Entering, when I threw my backpack in a corner of the hall as usual, I saw my mother's outline, with her back turned. She didn't even greet me and quickly went to the kitchen. I immediately knew that something unusual had happened, because my mother never welcomed me in that cold and detached way. She generally flooded me with questions, she listened to the report of my day at school with interest, then she went on to adjourn me about everything that she deemed important enough for me to know.

I found her in front of the television, one hand in front of her mouth, the other stuck in a gesture meant to tell me to wait. Her shoulders were hunched, her body trembling. For the first time she seemed to me small, inconsistent. She was crying.

«Mom, what happened?» I kept repeating, while she was getting more and more lost in her silent weeping. A terrible thought came to my mind.

«Where is Dad?»

He appeared behind me and leaned a hand on my shoulder, without a word. An endless second in which fear rose in me, in a spiral that wound from the point of my feet, around my legs, to my trunk and up to my throat, taking my breath away. I had never really felt terrorized, neither I had ever seen my parents in that state. My father, with his shoulders curved forward, seemed like an empty sack. At the time he was as old as I am now, but that day, for the first time, I saw an old man in his clothes. The pot boiled and boiled, filling the air of vapour, but nobody seemed to notice. The spaghetti were still on the scale, suspended in mid air like all the emotions that circulated in our American-style kitchen. I thought of an accident, relieved nevertheless by the fact that it hadn't happened to my parents.

«Tell me something, come on! Why do you keep looking at the TV instead of explaining me what happened?»

It was my father to break the silence.

«They sold us, Paolo, we won't be Italian any longer.»

And then the smothered weeping of my mother became a cry of pain.

At half past noon we meet Anna in the agreed place. Teresa greets her from the car with a happy laughter, then, as soon as I stop on the border of the road, she races to meet her. Who knows if we look aged to her like she appears to my eyes. The time passed since our last meeting is marked on her face as well as in the heavy step of her body, in her soft forearms. She wears a large green dress, curling under her breast, that allows to imagine her soft but exaggerated volumes. She has never been beautiful but, unlike my memory of her, she seems less embarrassed in her large body, even able to exhibit it in a pleasant and polite way. Her red hair falls soft on her shoulders in orderly waves. A hand pushes back a lock, with a young girl mannerism. In spite of her wrinkles, it seems that her youth is blooming now.

As she greets us, I recognize her voice, kind and peaceful, with her marked accent of Palermo. The first hug is for Teresa, who looks minuscule next to her. I see her disappear in that hold, but she resurfaces from it radiant. Then it's my turn. Her hold is soft and strong at the same time, she smells of good person, of the same candid freshness of the old times. She fills Teresa of compliments because she rejected time, she didn't allow it to mark her. Then she turns to our children.

«I am happy to meet you, your mother told me so many things about you that it almost seems to me that I know you. However you are even prettier than how she described you.»

Giuliana shakes her hand with warmth; she has the same loquacity of her mother and she doesn't find any difficulty in relating with new people. Marco greets her with an impeccable but detached attitude.

«Today the heat is unbearable, it almost seems a day of August», Anna says, «I hope you brought swimsuits, because you don't have to lose the chance to go to the beach. Here the bathing season begins very early».

We chat for a few minutes in the trafficked crossroad, then, following Teresa schedule, we leave to have lunch at the "Torre Normanna", a magnificent resort leaning out on the sea, whose name evokes another chapter of the dominations which followed one another in Sicily. It is a historical hotel, built at the beginning of 1900, which became a symbol for our country. When we were young it was the most famous in the area. People came here from Palermo and from the neighbouring countries to celebrate weddings, baptisms, communions, ceremonies that in the Sicilian tradition must be celebrated in great style. Anna says that the hotel is considered still today the peak of the tourist area, and the most requested, even though many others blossomed when Torre saw an exponential increase of tourist flow. The outside of the building is comfortingly still familiar too. It maintained the same characteristic white masonry that stands out against the intense sky. It typically evokes all of those Mediterranean places where the sea is protagonist: from the dammusi of Pantelleria, to the abodes of the fishermen of Salina, to the candid houses of the Greek islands. And, with its immense structure, it keeps standing out even in the predominant white of the neighbouring buildings.

Anna and Teresa have resumed their conversation and keep breathlessly telling each other every possible thing. In the following hours, Marco, Giuliana and I will be spectators in the theatre of their memory. Each of them will speak and listen, will laugh and be moved, because they would never have thought until recently that they would be living this moment.

We follow them as they walk on, arm in arm and smiling, the three of us behind them to behold this teenage reunion of two old high school friends.

I knew well the restaurant hall because of the several celebrations to which my family was invited. It seems to me very different from how I remembered it, but maybe it's the new distribution of the furniture to make it seem larger. Or it is my memory alone that compressed the spaces and times of my childhood. The style of the furnishing is completely new, definitely more intimate and refined. The classical party saloon of the town, full of lights and mirrors that amplified the sense of space, left room to a discreet environment in which you can enjoy an atmosphere of not noisy conviviality. It is the kind of place I prefer, of a more exquisitely Parisian inclination. I never liked overcrowded and noisy town restaurants, where the voices of the people at your table are lost in the off-key shouts of karaoke. That was the most diffused kind of place in this little sea town, example of a histrionic way of existence.

We choose a table next to the large window that dominates the sea. On the beach, a small group of guys, in tight oarsman tops from which compact muscles surface, throw one another a green Frisbee with fast and clean movements of their arms. They return me some of the thoughtlessness I left a long time ago on that same beach, when I was one of them.

The waiter approaches and suggests to us the dishes of the day. He speaks in English but it is clear that he is Arabic. Anna recommends us fish, that here is always fresh and still cooked our way. We trust her, leaving her faculty to choose for everybody. Surprising us, she turns to the waiter and starts to speak Arabic. She is as quick as incomprehensible. The man writes in a no less breezy way, following her dictation. Every now and then they exchange a few lines of which I can't even guess the meaning. Then he disappears toward the kitchen. Teresa, the children and I exchange an amused look, while Marco shrugs as if to say "Beats me!"

I ask Anna how does it work with language now.

«As it was inevitable; we all became bilingual. Everyone learns their own mother tongue in family, but then, going to school, they also study the other, and so they can communicate in both indifferently.»

«Yes, but what is the official language?» Giuliana asks.

«Arab is the official language, both written, in formal documents and spoken, but in everyday life Italian is still spoken quite a lot. It's normal!»

«But how could you make another language yours?» I ask.

«The same way you did when you went to live in France doctor! Isn't French the language you speak the whole day in the hospital, while at home you keep speaking Italian?»

I don't answer but I nod. I don't know why, but in their case it seems to me more complicated. Anna reads my thought and concludes it out loud.

«A lot of people, those observing this situation from the outside, keep wondering how it is possible that a whole people made his a language that wasn't his, but it is only a detail in comparison to all the changes we have been called to face. Language, if you think about it, is only a matter of form; thought goes beyond the idiom. Historically it is known that many people left Sicily to go to work in Europe and America, and for sure language wasn't a serious problem. They learned it simply by living in contact with local people, or studying it if necessary. Just like you, Paolo.»

She looks at me and smiles, and it makes me feel stupid.

«But we moved voluntarily, so it was inevitable and necessary to learn to live in the hosting country. Here the change happened locally instead, it was a constraint, not a choice.»

Anna smiles again, but a nervous quiver makes her hand tremble slightly as she tries to light up a cigarette.

«After all, change is a good thing, but I can say this after many years. At the beginning it was rather a shock, because we felt threatened as a people. We were afraid we would be deleted, lose everything. Considering how much we had to face, always affects me. Fortunately, there weren't only renounces, but also great discoveries, for those of us who dared to look beyond.»

«Which ones?» Giuliana asks, «tell us everything».

«You see, dear Giuliana, maybe for you young people it is easier to understand such things than it is for us. You are more spontaneous, less rigid than adults, who the more they grow old, the more they harden, barricading behind their convictions. For example: think about when you meet new people. What is the first thing that you are interested in knowing about them?»

Giuliana makes the expression of someone who is meditating on an answer, which is actually ready without effort.

«We have to make a distinction: if we talk about boys, the first thing I am interested in is if they are handsome, and in that case if they already have a girlfriend, then if they are nice, amusing, if they have my same tastes in music. About girls I am interested in understanding whether I can trust them, whether we have the same tastes about clothes, boys, everything.»

«And if they are foreigners?»

«I never thought about it this way. I don't believe there is a big difference.»

«Just as I imagined. But for adults, my dear, it's not the same. Luckily, in front of a foreigner, you young people can still see, first of all, a young like you. Adults, instead, make of their difference a barrier, that sometimes becomes insurmountable. A barrier soaked with cultural, ideological, moral, even political prejudices. And this barrier ends up preventing us to see what we have in front, that is simply another man or another woman.»

She pauses and looks at us all as if to be sure that the sense of her words isn't lost on anyone. Meanwhile the waiter arrives with drinks and a tray of sea salad. He has a long and woody body, the skin of his cheeks is dug and wrinkled, and his great black eyes are disproportionate in comparison to his minuscule face. Anna waits for him to leave before resuming her explanation.

«You see, when this people started coming to Sicily, it was a very difficult moment. We lived it like an invasion, a sort of authorized – but nevertheless forced – occupation. Many couldn't tolerate the loss of national identity to become an Arab colony. This second aspect was even more catastrophic than the first. "Not to the Arabs", many people said, "they could sell us to anyone else but not to them." Therefore so many left, leaving their land in the hands of foreigners, who came to occupy it with their head held high. Once, non-European people came here, poor people, without job, often illegal immigrants destined to black market labour or to repatriation. They weren't given the dignity of human beings, their presence was lived with great impatience. Instead, after the sale of Sicily, it was rich Arabs who came, those coming to make investments to increase their wealth. We saw it that way, so naturally this fed our anger. We shouted, protested, fiercely quarrelled, sowing and gathering pain, despising and making ourselves despised. But the anger, fortunately, exhausted us, and all of us had to stop and catch our breath. And it was in that moment of truce that we stopped hating and restarted living. And got to know one another, finally!»

Anna smiles, in her eyes the images of an old nostalgic film seem to flow.

«How did you do?» Giuliana asks again.

«In the simplest way, speaking! That's what languages are for! And speaking we discovered that we are all made of the same humanity. Everything started from women; mothers who met in front of the school of their children, or in the anteroom of a medical study, at the hairdresser saloon, at the grocery, anywhere. And discussing we started to understand that we had the same problems with husbands and children, that we shared the same emotions and worries aside from our cultural difference. Above all, suffering united us, because in front of illnesses, difficulties, death, we faced the same kind of pain. A pain without either nationality or religion, without either flags or languages, simply a human pain. Several associations were born where we met to know and confront with one another, and above all learn to cohabit without renouncing our own identities, even with the differences. Similar experiences happened on the whole territory, with different times and ways obviously, but it became an unstoppable process. Today most of my friends are Arab... also because my school friends have gone away!»

She reaches out and touches the arm of Teresa who, meanwhile, is trying to chase back a compelling tear that doesn't want to be suffocated. Sat next to Anna, she holds her hand. In the look they trade there is the same tuning of the best friends they were once. In addition, there is that intimate agreement among women from which us men always feel somehow excluded. The rest of the lunch flows in the awkward attempts of Giuliana at learning some Arabic words and the stories of ours last thirty years of life.

There is a great solarium from which the sight is enchanting.

Anna returned to Palermo, Giuliana and Teresa put on their swimsuits and are enjoying a postcard landscape from their beach chairs. They have perfectly entered the holiday climate, while I, plastered in a tobacco-coloured suit with a striped tie, seem a conference attendant at lunch break.

«Dad, you lived in a Earthly Paradise for eighteen years and never told us! It must have been fantastic!» Giuliana remarks, sprinkling herself with suntan oil.

Actually it was. I only have extraordinary memories of my life in the province. I remember the thoughtlessness, the freedom to play in the street, where you saw but a few cars in winter and you could breathe the good smell of the sea. Nothing to do with the noise, the confusion, the queues of cars, the grey and smoky air of the big cities.

But what Giuliana sees now is not the country of my childhood anymore.

Leaning on the parapet, looking at the islet emerging from the water in front of us, I tell her about other excerpts from my past.

«May was always a stupendous month in Torre dell'Isola. Summer heat was already here without the typical confusion of July and August, and you could fully enjoy the beach in all calm. We townspeople didn't love too much the daily invasion of Palermo people during summer months. They came with cars overloaded with people, food, tables and beach umbrella, they turned the beaches into some kind of camping, they dirtied, and in the evening they went back home, leaving behind a sad show made of so much dirt. The next day it all restarted. Equipped beaches reduced more and more the free beaches areas and this made the situation slightly better, just because the beach workers were ready to clean where people were ready to dirty once more. But the expanses of free beach were a mortifying business card. For us townspeople it was easy to point at the people from Palermo as carriers of dirt and decline, forgetting the conditions in which the beach was in winter, when the town was entirely in our hands. My father used to repeat that we had turned a potential heaven into a true rubbish dump. And that carpet of carelessness that was the beach was an indelible stain in the marvellous show of the intense sea, a few meters from us. "Nature and culture", my father repeated again and again, pointing first at the sea, then at the beach, "nature has been very generous with us, but our culture offends it. We are incapable of taking care of and giving value to what we have. This golden land in our hands is miserably dying, buried under the miseries of our ignorance and backwardness. In the hands of others it would be one of the most splendid territories of the world". Unfortunately he wasn't wrong. Look around you.»

With an ample gesture of the hand I encompass everything that surrounds us. The beach is an expanse of thin and gilded sand. A photo without either filters or retouches. There aren't any waste papers nor cigarette stubs around, and the shore is a long pedestrian area, with a reserved passage only for ecological buses.

In my times all this was light years away. And the local politicians didn't do anything to improve the conditions of the territory. "So many promises during the electoral campaigns and then... once elected... everything forgotten", these are the words that many times I heard my grandfather say, and my father afterwards, in a sad rebound from generation to generation to testify the stalemate.

He couldn't resign, my father. The reality of a defaced, badly managed land, subdued to the business of few, was like a wound in the heart and in the personal pride. What possibility had the future of his son, mine, under those conditions? What could make that immovable reality change?

«The foreigners have been able to do what was up to us. But at what price? Now we are the foreigners and they are the landlords», I say with anger and regret, «it was our duty.»

In the street I see a man who is advancing and animatedly talking at the phone. He's tall and thin, his chin framed by a beard, grizzled like the thick untidy hair; his face, after thirty years, is still the same. He's Vito Strano, my best friend of those distant times. When he is in front of the hotel entrance, right under us, I call his name. He looks up, then hurriedly dismisses his interlocutor and makes the phone disappear in a pocket of his jeans. He too immediately recognizes me, and keeps repeating my name, waving both hands.

«Paolo, Paolo, I can't believe it.»

And he laughs, loudly, with the same expression of the old times but with some new wrinkle. Teresa found him on Facebook too.

I reach him in the hall and we hug, exchanging pats on our shoulders as if to verify our solidity. We did so many things together! He was the most difficult person of Torre to leave for me. He was like a brother; we were five years old when we became schoolmates in nursery school, and from there we went on together until the diploma. Teresa reaches us, wound in a white and black sarong. The hug with her is full of joy and affection too.

«You are still beautiful», he tells her. At the time of high school he had a crush for her.

Some memory of the past, some updating on the present, then Teresa leaves us and goes back to sun tanning with our children. Vito proposes me a tour of the town.

«I'll make you jump into the past, even though you will realize that a lot has changed.»

So here we are, together again, but with a less happy-go-lucky attitude.

#  Chapter 5

On the 14th June of the year 827, a fleet including Arabs, Berbers, Spaniards and Persians, under the command of the jurist Asadibn al-Furat, landed on the coasts of western Sicily, in the zone of Mazara del Vallo, and from there it undertook a long and bloody military campaign with which it progressively put an end to the Byzantine dominion on the territory. Those were the years of the Arabic domination of the island, a domination that lasted a bit more than two centuries, until, starting in 1061, the advance of the Normans begun.

Twelve centuries later, Arabs have made their second raid in Sicily, once again in summer, but this time without any fleet or bloodshed.

A pacific aerial fleet brought a delegation of diplomats and ambassadors with the assignment of undertaking the negotiations on behalf of the emirs.

Since when Sicily had officially been put on sale, many possible buyers had stepped forward. They discussed the conditions of the sale, hypothesized the formalities of the passage of hands, the possible clauses that the interested parties committed to. And while in Palermo and in all of the Sicilian county seats people went down in the squares to protest, and in Sardinia the dawning protest movements extinguished because for them, at least for the time being, the danger was warded off, the north of Italy looked with indifference at the elimination of that pebble that for years had been annoyingly in the tip of the Boot. In Rome, meanwhile, buyers paraded. Among all possible buyers, the emirs immediately showed to be the most interesting, both for the sum they offered to pay – by far the closest to the one hypothesized by the Italian government – and for the advantageous conditions they committed to in terms of times and terms of the trade. Some clauses regarding the conservation of the cultural and religious identity, as well as the right of private property, had to constitute a sort of guarantee for the inhabitants of the island. After all, Arabs had already shown to be broad-minded at the times of their first domination, when the inhabitants of the island were recognized as ahladh-dhimma, that is people of the pact, "protected" as long as they paid a fee. Being protected guaranteed them the right to personal freedom, to profess their own religious belief and to keep their own customs and possessions. For modern emirs, the Sicilian territory lent itself to become a source of new wealth, both thanks to the mineable raw materials and for the potentialities of the natural, historical and artistic patrimony, until then poorly or badly used. Putting an end to the idea of exploiting the resources, and starting to make them produce wealth and comfort, was a rather new logic in the Sicilian reality. But this was not the idea that Sicilians had about the coming of the Arabs. The feelings of distrust and intolerance fed a climate of great contrasts, that made people forget that Arabs, from that distant time in which they dominated it, had already been lodging for quite a long time in the culture of the island.

The sense of humiliation due to the fact that the State – in a time of general difficulty – was turning its back on that comma in the middle of the sea, that for a long time it had considered more like a burden than a resource, prevailed strongly.

Us Sicilians lived it that way, and from that May 13th the situation plunged quickly. For days we found ourselves glued to the TV in an amazed silence. We followed all of the newscasts, the in-depth analysis and the special editions, in the hope to discover that our politicians had made a U-turn and that nothing of what had been said would happen. But it didn't go that way. The negotiations proceeded quickly, in a summer climate more red-hot than ever.

On TV, politicians sketched explanations built according to an exemplary as well as upsetting logic; economy had been paralyzed for too much time and there were no perspectives of recovery on the horizon. Selling part of the patrimony was the only concrete possibility. At the beginning they had spoken about auctioning single monuments, historical buildings, archaeological areas or natural reserves, but this would have dismembered the national territory without succeeding in covering the dreadful national debt. From there a more radical proposal had been born; selling a wider territory, even a whole region. A joke? No, a real possibility, actually the only one. And in an Italy in full economic crisis, driven by a corrupt and irresponsible political class, legitimated by the popular consent thanks also to the absence of reliable alternatives, it was not difficult to modify that part of the constitution that stated the unity and inviolability of the State borders. The choice immediately relapsed on the two largest islands. Even on this aspect politicians tried to sketch reasonable explanations aiming to hide the true meaning of their actions; the worst high treason to the unity of the nation, for which so many people in the past had fought and died.

"A painful but inevitable sacrifice", the head of the state recited, "an action that we are called to perform with courage and firmness, in the belief that it is our moral duty to guarantee to all citizens dignified conditions of life in the respect of the principles of our Constitution".

But why Sicily? The official motivations were the following,

"Because islands are territories geographically more fitting to the political separation, being already naturally separated from the rest of the national territory. Besides, the wealth of landscapes, natural and oil resources, the immense historical and cultural patrimony of Sicily in particular, as well as its strategic position in the heart of the Mediterranean sea, that already made of it an extremely politically interesting territory in the most remote history, make of it the most saleable goods for an extremely advantageous price".

The whole government pronounced itself worn out for the great sacrifice that the Sicilians would have had to make in name of the State, yet certain that from this separation Sicily itself would draw enormous benefits, because whoever purchased it would certainly put into effect "an action of economic restoration unprecedented in the history of a region that, for so much time, has been instead penalized in investments and development".

The opinion of my father was quite different, «We are the garbage of Italy, and what do you usually do with garbage? You throw it away or, at best, you recycle it. They are simply throwing us away, someone else will think about recycling. Hadn't they already took everything we had? Now they also take the last thing we had left, our belonging.»

Many thought the same, and not only in Torre but in the whole Sicilian territory. Impromptu reunions multiplied day after day; in the streets, in the shops, in the houses, any place was good to discuss, confront, try to understand what could be done.

Even what should have been my birthday party changed, in a totally natural way, into a political reunion. Nobody wanted celebrations. I had invited the whole class, but there was no need to cancel the invitation. My classmates themselves told me, one after the other, that they would not come.

"Considering the situation, my parents don't think that it would be fit", I heard each of them repeat.

The evening of the party my house was full of people anyway, but not for me. Relatives, friends, acquaintances, even some city councilmen, debated animatedly until late at night. A thing was clear to all, we had to make our voices heard, and we needed to be in large numbers. Sicilians had to act together to assert their right to be Italian citizens.

«For years our politicians have found right here in Sicily a faithful pool of votes. We voted and sustained them, now they cannot delete us, or even worse sell us as if we were a commodity.»

It was Santino, the square butcher, who made his booming voice heard. He had always been a convinced supporter of the government, even in the moments in which it had adopted clearly unfavourable policies for the regions of the south. He always succeeded in making their motivations his own, and kept granting trust to the managing class. But the new proposal was indecent even for him. Big worker hands, ruddy face, generous belly, he could change from a butcher into an executioner, such was his anger. Doctor Gentile, family physician of the majority of townsmen, stood up waving a fist in the air. He was a middle-aged man, very tall, always elegantly clothed. That evening he was wearing an impeccably starched white flax suit. But his usual affability had left room, for the first time, to a motion of anger.

«It is too easy to speak like this now, but you all thought differently until recently. Those who are betraying you are those same rulers that for years you kept defending and voting. And don't come telling me that the crisis appeared now, because we have been going on like this for years. Just one year ago we voted to renew the Parliament, and what did Sicilians do, instead of sending all of them back home with a nice kick in the...»

At that point he paused. His fist clenched in a gesture of anger, his mouth shut under the frame of his whitened moustaches. We all realized what he meant, and nobody would have been grossed out if for once the polite doctor had let himself loose. But his great politeness imposed him to behave.

«Doctor, let me interpret your thought; we had to send them away with a kick in the ass!»

A general laughter, followed by a liberating applause, broke the tension for an instant. To say those words had been Biagio Greco, the carpenter of the most ancient artisan shop of the town. A very modest man, so slender as to seem a twig at the mercy of the wind, but with two muscular arms that allowed to imagine the daily effort of working simple wood tables into small masterpieces of local art. His age was a mystery; people said that he had always been there and always with the same old face. He seemed never to have known youth. In reality he was identical to his father, and him to his grandfather Salvatore, whose father was founder of that cabinet-maker family vocation. He never made a secret of his "communist" ideas, those too learned by his grandfather, and he kept sustaining them with strength when, at the beginning of the century, the most radical left wing had stopped existing in the Italian Parliament, without ever being able to return, torn to pieces by fractures and inside inconsistencies. But for Biagio those ideas were still alive, without an affiliation, and he would still support them. He didn't read newspapers neither watched newscasts, but he was nevertheless informed on everything thanks to the chatters of those who gravitated around his shop to commission a job, or at times simply to watch him at work. The embarrassment that his outspokenness elicited in more prudent people earned him the fame of an ignorant man, out of his mind, and many looked at him with compassion. But believing in an idea in a hostile context is for brave men, and in Torre there were less and less of those.

Seeing him in that terrace, hailed and applauded by everyone, seemed impossible. That evening he could even have become their leader! His words shouted with strength and determination overwhelmed the participants, dragging them to a collective venting in which nobody felt anymore like having to defend at all costs what was clearly indefensible. After all, who doesn't really believe in anything easily marries the idea of those who cry louder.

«We have to make ourselves heard. We have to go to Rome with my wood planks and hit their heads, or stuff them in their...»

And there laughter and applauses drowned the rest.

Leaning out from the window of my room, I watched the informal group that had gathered under my house. People who, hearing the lively discussions coming from our terrace, had stopped to comment, creating a sort of spontaneous meeting. There were the usual faces you met every day in Torre, faces that exchanged regards and gossips, arms that dragged shopping bags, hands that held those of children at the exit of the school. For the first time they seemed to be a lot more than this, they seemed to be a people, a collective conscience.

«For years we sold our votes to mafia, each of us to safeguard their own little interests. Shame, shame.»

Those were the words that lawyer Spadina launched from the terrace to the participants, and not only to them. But he had dared to say too much, maybe, and many were not yet ready to talk about this. My mother tried to cool the red-hot minds offering fresh drinks and pastries, but it would have taken a frozen rain to dissolve the red-hot climate of that evening.

From the road someone shouted, «Shame on you, wasting time to give these useless speeches without understanding anything. Do you think that it is better to starve? Not to have a job anymore, not to be able to pay bills? I say that it is better to survive, and this choice, as much as it seems unpopular to you now, will help everyone».

It was easy for everyone to understand that who had spoken those words certainly wasn't a compatriot. Judging from his accent, he was a Piedmontese on vacation who, going for a walk with his wife and two twin daughters about three years old, had thought of saying his opinion without any modesty. He risked being lynched. Insults of every kind flew from my terrace, and not only from there. Someone would even have launched himself from up there if they hadn't been restrained. My father tried in vain to re-establish calm, but by then the limit had been passed. There was no more room for reflection; emotions, uncontrolled, had taken the upper hand. Fortunately for him, the provoker succeeded in running for it, and the crowd, who had gone down in the street to pursue him, slowly ended up dispersing and going back home.

It was May 19th 2016. That was the party for my eighteenth birthday.

In the following months in our town, as well as in the rest of the region, two opposite lines of thought arose. On one side, the most substantial, there were those who deemed necessary an action to prevent the sale. On the other those who were starting to appraise its advantages, as it was a possible engine of change. The tension increased until it flowed in a real social clash that my father defined "a war among poor."

We faced the high school exams in a surreal climate. Teachers were more confused and impatient than us, wondering what the meaning of all that was.

Even more surreal was the atmosphere in which the football world championships were played, with the embarrassing ritual of the national anthem, sung by the team in which there was also a player from Catania. But the team soon removed us from embarrassment, by failing to qualify for the quarterfinal.

Meanwhile the government went on. In spite of the several demonstrations of protest, strikes, collection of signatures to submit the matter to a referendum, the proposal was submitted to the Parliament and voted. Few abstainers, a certain numbers of contrary votes, an overwhelming majority standing up for the sale.

It was done, the map of Italy had to be redrawn, and with a hit of its tip, the Boot kicked Trinacria down to the south-east.

«At least you have not changed», I tell Vito who, apart from the grey threads among his hair, is the same boy he always was.

«They wanted to restructure me too, according to the canons of Arab architecture», he jokes, «but then they renounced. I am a desperate case!»

His family is one of those who stayed in Torre despite everything. His father would not have known how to live in any other place.

«Going away was hard; everything happened in such a hurry. We found ourselves abroad, with the awareness that there was only foreign land for us, no homeland in any place», I tell him.

I feel pity in the look he turns to me.

«Do you think that staying was easier? It was difficult and painful, but at least we could defend our history, what we are.»

We stay in silence for some time, while we leave the waterfront behind us to go toward the centre of Torre. Vito takes a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his faded jeans. He pulls one of them out and hands it to me. I push it away with a slight gesture of my hand.

«I haven't smoked in five years», I explain him. «I am a heart surgeon with heart problems».

I smile, and he smiles with me.

#  Chapter 6

We cross the road once walked by the fishermen who, returning to the port at the first lights of dawn, went to the fish market to auction boxes of fresh merchandise. On the road sign, the name of the street is written in Arab, and under it, in smaller letters, "Salita dei pescatori", Fishermen Rise.

«Not all streets have been renamed», Vito explains, «a lot of them kept their old name».

«How many times have we stepped together on this asphalt, Paolo, do you remember?»

I remember perfectly; on bikes we faced the descent toward the sea at full speed, especially in winter when the area was nearly deserted. Going uphill, usually it was him to forerun me, with his strong legs that boosted like mine couldn't.

Still today I cannot keep his pace, so I stay some steps behind, watching a not-at-all-familiar landscape, where the Islamic wave seems to have marked everything.

Torre was a seafaring village at the time of the sale, a town with enormous potentialities, that boasted a splendid sandy shore a few kilometres from the town, and a quiet and healthy pace of life. But, like many of the small Sicilian towns of that time, it agonized because of its maladministration, unable to understand and use for the best the potentialities of a small natural heaven. Mostly crumbling buildings, so much dirt, a forgotten shore, the heart of the country as old as the largest part of its inhabitants. This way Torre presented itself at the beginnings of the XXI century, this way it was delivered in the hands of its new owners. Looking at it thirty years later, it is difficult to keep sustaining that the passage to the best bidder has been a misfortune, like we said back then. Today in front of my eyes there is a perfectly realized dream. It is the dream of my parents and their friends, it is the hope of us boys who looked at so many other places of the world with envy, wondering why we had had the adversity to be born in that forgotten land, falsely consoling us with the sad thought that somewhere there were even worse things.

Vito shows me the recognizable traces of the past.

«The structure of buildings is the original one in most of the cases. Two-, no more than three-stories buildings, provided with large terraces leaning out on the sea. They played a lot, instead, on the style of the finishing touch, on the choice of colours, materials, decorative lines, clear signs of belonging to the typical Arab stylistic model.»

We stop in front of a low body that expresses well what Vito is illustrating. Blue and gold weave in the arabesques decorating the walls of the white building.

«It is a mahal», he explains, «that is a noble house. Many noble families moved to Sicily after the annexation to the Emirates. They speculated, buying buildings for ludicrous sums, then restructuring them, turning them into luxury houses to be resold for exorbitant prices. You have no idea how much demand they had! They hardly had the time to put them on sale, that already queues of wealthy buyers were at their door, contending for the bargain».

The intensity of the blue stands out in a depth and harmonious contrast on the white plaster of the buildings. The blue of the sky and the sea painted on the shutters of the houses, on the front doors, in some small internal courtyards visible through the cast-iron railings in elegantly rounded stylistic shapes. It is the blue of Essaouria, Vito explains, of its boats, the clothes of its fishermen, the decorated tiles in butcheries, of that Morocco that seems even closer.

«I imagine it wasn't locals who bought.»

«Especially Arabs; by now they are a large part of the population in the whole island. But there have also been many American and Japanese investors, as well as German and English ones. This became the summer residence of the rich people of the whole world.»

«At least Sicily is known for something that is not mafia.»

«Some things never pass!»

«What do you mean?»

«You think that mafia has nothing to do with all this? You make a big mistake. Once more it found the way to branch out, to enter the sales first, the contracts for reconstruction later. It kept becoming richer, modernizing itself like everything else. Sure, it suffered a remarkable blow, once the State abdicated. Would you like to drink something?»

Vito points at a cafe on the other side of the road. This too is new. Once in this area, that is now very commercial, there were only a few houses and a lot of uncultivated vegetation. We cross the street. There are a few small iron tables, white like the chairs and the two great beach umbrella that serves as hat for them. Big violet flowers dangle from a dark handrail, standing out on the white background of the raw mortar walls. Two huge ochre vases frame the entrance of the cafe. The inside is small but pleasant. The blue of the walls amplifies the sensation of darkness that you get coming in from the road dazzled by the sun. There is an intense aroma of coffee melting with that of the tobacco-scented candles that burn on the two minuscule tables attached to the wall opposite the counter. A woman, sitting alone on a stool, absently sips a cappuccino while skimming through the pages of a densely note-filled notebook.

We order our coffees; Vito proposes me a Baklawa, a layered pastry stuffed with walnuts and dipped in a syrup of honey and lemon.

«Maybe you would have preferred a Sicilian dessert, who knows from how long you haven't eaten one!» he tells me.

Actually it's a lifelong abstinence. Nothing of what I ate in these years, bearing the forged name of Sicilian pastry, is remotely comparable to the sweets of our tradition.

He lights up another cigarette while asking two glasses of water to the waiter.

While we are taking place at one of the tables on the road, I hazard a question.

«What happened to Calogero's pastry-shop?»

Calogero was the owner of the more frequented cafe of the country. In summer it was the sanctuary of Palermo people, who, before going back home, after a day at the sea, stood in line to taste its handcrafted ice cream. In winter, instead, it was the Sunday meeting place of the town, with the two long counters covered with every specialty; cannoli, cream puffs, almond biscuits, ricotta rolls, sphinx of S. Giuseppe, martorana fruit and much more. Every good Christian countryman, on Sundays, could not refrain from twos duties; mass before, Calogero's cafe after.

Vito drops his cigarette with care on the edge of the ashtray, removes his sunglasses and methodically puts them on the table, next to his phone. I smile and make him notice how messier he was when he was younger, and he left his things everywhere, despairing afterwards because he wasn't able to find them again.

«I learned, almost maniacally», he comments, scratching his uncombed nape.

He tells me that the cafe has stopped existing a long time ago. In its place there is now a jewellery.

«Rich people don't eat much, but their jewel caskets are always full!» he remarks with sarcasm.

«There are other pastry-shops I suppose, but surely few can be at the height of our best tradition, right? I remember the words that uncle Gino always repeated to me on the telephone, "everything changed, Paoluzzo, cannoli don't even have the same taste anymore, it's the ricotta that is not the same it was once!"»

«Yeah, your uncle Gino. He is one of those who paid a high price in this historical passage», he pauses and greedily inhales from his cigarette. «I thought you would come with your father when he died. But, on the other hand, you didn't even come for Enzo... yet you were like brothers.»

«I would have come for Enzo, but it was a particular period. I had to sustain three examinations, I could not skip that session, I would have stayed far behind schedule.»

«Nice justification.»

Vito stretches the angles of his lips, that flatten, conferring him a sceptical expression of pity.

«Don't think that I didn't care. I brought with me for so long the sense of guilt for not having been there», I justify myself.

«Crumbs of conscience, better than nothing.»

Vito lifts his shoulders, then looks at me and says, «Come on, I'm joking.»

But I'm not so certain about it.

«What happened to the chemist?» I change subject.

«At the beginning it passed to the management of that relative of your mother, but this you know. He continued the activity, leaving everything as it was. Then, after some years, he sold the license and left. But the chemist is still there, although it passed through two new owners. Medicines are always needed, and who owns a chemist is never without a job.»

There is an implicit accusation in these words.

«My father didn't see it this way. We would not have left otherwise.»

Vito grimaces. He grabs the glass of water and gulps it all in a single sip, then puts it down with a sharp gesture.

«Your father really loved you.»

«...»

«I mean that I don't believe he was really worried for the fate of the chemist, rather for yours.»

He lights up another cigarette, takes a puff, then lays it down on the ashtray with a slow gesture and starts a monologue. I think he has had it ready for an eternity, patiently waiting to be able to pour it slowly on me, without hurry.

«When you and I joined that resistance movement, your parents envisioned a much worse scenery than the one drawn by the sale of Sicily. They feared for your life. We were stuffed with wrong ideas, in that organization. Violent ideas aimed to produce hate, to sow terror. We might have ended badly, as happened to some of our friends after you left. Your mother and your father would not have left Torre; they fought to make it a better place, when they lived here, and I am convinced that, after the initial dismay, they would have rolled up their sleeves and done everything for their land, just like many others. everything, except putting you at risk. And when they understood what you had involved yourself in, they decided to leave everything and go away. You were risking to wreck your projects of studying, besides what was happening. They didn't want you to forfeit your dream. They expected so much from you.»

«They wanted to go away as much as I did.»

Vito tells me about an afternoon in which my mother, together with his, went to him in tears, imploring him to pull me out of the group we had joined. There had been violent clashes with the police and it was known that the resistance organization was planning a non-peaceful march on Rome. From their side, my father and her had decided that going away was the only way to prevent me from getting involved in violent actions.

Vito's words surprise me. I had really believed that my parents wanted to leave Sicily. I made their displayed refusal mine, to the point of breaking all bridges with my past and with the people that had been part of it and that, unlike us, had accepted the surrender to the foreigner. But had I really been mistaken, or had I just preferred not to understand, not to forfeit the dream of my life – becoming a heart surgeon – not to have to marry a cause that after all was not really mine but theirs?

Followed by these considerations, I start walking again in the streets of Torre, while Vito tells a series of anecdotes that I listen to intermittently.

«You are really informed about these matters. I don't remember you to be so good at the time of school», I remark at the end of one lectio brevis on cosmopolitanism and civil cohabitation between different cultures.

He became a local tourist guide. He escorts visitors around Torre, explaining its history from the origins to the upheavals we know well. He tells them who we were and what we have become. He prevents our past from going entirely lost, he tells me. At the beginning it was difficult, he explains, because he felt like a tourist himself. He was looking for some explanations himself, then he started to grow interested.

«The world grows continuously, and changes, and we have to be ready to change with it. We had two possibilities: keep feeling bad for ourselves or try to learn something from what happened. I chose the second.»

«Explain better.»

«Look around», he tells me.

His right hand moves the air all around us.

«What do you see?»

«Something I don't know», I answer with bitterness.

«Yes, but how is it?» he insists. Now he stopped walking and he's trying to lock my gaze.

«Beautiful, but... artificial. It doesn't belong to us. I feel like I am in a country that is not mine, as much as I find it beautiful.»

Vito becomes impatient. Who knows how many times he has already faced the same discussion with others who left like me and then, once they came back, felt my same dismay.

«You don't realize, but don't be afraid, you are not the only one. You feel estranged because you weren't here and you keep remembering Sicily like it was back then. It makes me angry to think that you would have been happier to come back here, after so much time, and find that everything was still the same. You would like to have your posh vacation in the best hotel, go to the beach, the best beaches of course, nostalgically breathe your past, your golden childhood, and then return to your evolved worlds. And us? We should keep living in the deepest backwardness in order not to make you feel estranged when you remember to come and visit us.»

«I didn't mean this.»

I keep looking at the tip of the light leather beige moccasins Teresa bought me before leaving. They are so comfortable that it seems like I am walking on soft ground. They would have been perfect for a cultural trip, one of those in which you walk for hours, with only short breaks between a visit and the following. Vito realizes that I am distracted and goes on.

«We remained, Paolo, to keep being Sicilian, but in a better way. Italy sold us, sure, but this was the rebirth we needed and of which we would never have been able on our own. This is the really sad aspect of the story. When would have we been able, alone, to transform our cities and our small towns like this?»

He pauses, as if to garner all of his ideas, while he lights up another cigarette.

«Look at Palermo. It became another city, but this is not a bad thing. What were we proud of, tell me? We were boys then, and we didn't realize what didn't work. Adults, those who had been born and grown in the culture of welfare dependency, of the decline risen to a form of art, in that backwardness proud of itself, they would have been able to go on like that forever, to them it was normal... it was simply the reality, and they didn't complain. Then there were those who complained, yes, sure, but they only went through the motions, without believing that they could do something themselves, demand themselves – before than others – to change things.»

While Vito talks with great fervour, the comments of the elders, the conversations between adults, the discourses of my relatives in which there was always a sort of resignation for an unsatisfactory but inevitable reality, come to my mind. The State was to blame, the politicians were to blame, the ignorance of other people was to blame... but nobody ever felt directly or indirectly responsible for what he was complaining about.

«Do you believe that the real reason for which people rebelled was patriotic pride, or the shame for the betrayal? They were just afraid of losing benefits and guarantees. Here they always reasoned this way; I give you a vote, but you have to favour me, you have to protect me, and who cares if this damages the overall good? The country can stay underdeveloped as long as a few people have great advantages.»

«And now is it no longer this way?»

«We are all much better. The general conditions of life have improved, many of the problems that limited the development of our territory have been resolved. Just think about the completely different way in which naturalistic resources are managed, things that made of this island, in the last ten years, the most demanded tourist attraction.»

Without me realizing it, we reached Piazza Vittoria, heart of Torre, as well as place where my house was. Vito, who sees me groping in search of a recognizable benchmark, grabs my shoulders and turns me in direction of my old abode. It is clutched between two buildings that weren't there back then, and this probably makes it seem smaller than I remembered it. All the rest, in spite of the turquoise colour of the tiles framing it and the more rounded geometry of the fixtures, is still the same. In the terrace I see two women who, with their backs to the street, are leaning on the parapet and discussing animatedly. They speak very quickly, accompanying their words with an exaggerated mimicry of face and hands. One of the two is very old; they are Arabic.

My father sold our house to an acquaintance who had no intention of leaving Sicily in spite of the great upheavals. He wanted to buy it for his only son, so to have him close. His son too, who had just married at the time of the sale, was deeply rooted to Torre and had no intention to leave. He wanted to restructure the house, thinking about moving there with his wife in a few months. The information I had ended there, Vito updates me about the rest.

«The young owner was involved in a clash in Palermo. He wasn't with the revolt. He had gone to the city to work, like he did every day. He had a clothes shop in the centre. He was overwhelmed in the fights; a club hit him on the head, by mistake, then the crowd was over him, again and again, but still by mistake, without intention. So ended his life, folly in the folly of a world that had completely lost direction.»

He looks down, shakes his head, because he still hasn't digested the anger for all those innocent lives lost.

«His wife sold the house to a Tunisian and left. The sale of Sicily had brought away in a single blow her homeland and her husband. There was nothing left holding her in Torre, as well as nothing attracting her elsewhere.»

Another pause, another shaking of the head, another ancient anger.

«The house changed hands many times before reaching those of its latest owner, who has been living there for about ten years, by now.»

«I am happy to not to have seen anything of all this. In that terrace I can see no other face than that of my mother, who smiles at me and greets me. It doesn't seem to me that our past happened here.»

«Excuse me if I say this, but yours is quite a cowardly attitude. Good that I wasn't there, good that I haven't seen... but things happened, Paolo, you cannot turn your head the other way and pretend that nothing happened. So many things are no longer like they were, but others are still intact. Our heart is still the same, my friend, nobody can change it. The ones who remained did that so that the better part of Sicilians wasn't lost.»

He raises a hand to his chest in a melodramatic gesture, that seems pathetic to me.

"Preserve and convey it, Vito, preserve and convey it." Many elders of the town told him these words when they entrusted him with their stories, before dying. Stories of people who never moved from here, who fought and won, because you can rebuild the façade of a town without depriving it of its identity. Of those stories he made a book, he tells me. "Really Sicilians."

We leave the square and go back to the Norman Tower, choosing a route that crosses the town.

I recognize Via delle Ortensie. Here, every Thursday morning, there was the town street market. My mother went there every week, and in periods in which there was no school it was my duty to help her carry the bags. In winter I didn't mind, but in summer the scorching sun and the crowd compressed in those airless tunnels, stinking of a mixture of sweat and food, were totally unbearable to me. Crossing my friends, they too forced to lend their arms to their mothers to carry the shopping, we looked at one another with sorrowful expressions, thinking about where we would have rather been at that time.

Dozens of stands, arranged in two long rows, filled the whole road, except for a narrow central corridor, overcrowded of people for the whole morning. Clothes hanging from the metallic arms of the big beach umbrellas fluttered in the wind, waiting for their buyer. A little farther, sellers of fruit and vegetables howled the occasions of the day. The moment I preferred was when we passed in front of the mobile delicatessen. It was a very tall truck, with a counter on which cheeses and cured meats of every kind were exposed. The perfume of the provole, of the slices of primosale, and of the smoked caciotte, attracted the customers in its direction. Mr. Mario, the owner of that itinerant shop, with his well-sharpened knife ready to sink in the white and tender paste of the fresh cheeses, welcomed every customer with a sanguine smile and a, "What can I give you today?" He regularly filled the tasting bowl with tuma, scamorza, pecorino. Everything was absolutely delicious, especially in that moment of the late morning in which the stomach began to demand lunch. But the jubilation of odours and colours was a little further, when we passed in front of the counter of Enzo and his appetizers. On a long wooden table covered by a waxed, white-and-blue chequered tablecloth, delights of every kind imposed on the senses of the passer-bys; green or black, big and smooth or small and wrinkled olives, natural or seasoned with oil and rosemary; dry tomatoes, salty sardines, smoked herrings, dried salty cod, «Ladies and gentlemen, here for you the perfume of Sicily».

«This is one of the many things that survived the change. The market exists in every part of the world, every country has one, and certainly for Arabs it is characteristic at least as much as it is for us», Vito says, inserting himself in my thoughts, «the most famous markets in Palermo were originally Arab suq. For example the suq al buhariyya, the vuccirìa, was the market of least noble meats and vegetables. You should see it now that it has been returned to its former splendour, like in the famous painting of Guttuso. And ballarò? it was the suq al balhara, where they sold fish and the noblest meats instead. And so also for the Capo, which takes its name from "caput seralcadi", but originally was the suq al badik, that is the market of gramaglie».

"It's maybe one of few true elements left of this artefact country", I would say, but maybe it's better not to. Vito, however, reads my thoughts.

«Everything seems false to you in this new Sicily, if you think at it like it was once. But when you walk in a market you still find us, like once, because we are not extinct. We donned new clothes, we refreshed our makeup and had some retouch, like an old wrinkled lady who finds a surgical and unnatural new youth with some cut of a scalpel, but our heart still beats in these roads and survives in the simplest traditions.»

Today that the market isn't there, the road is travelled by cars going toward the waterfront. It's a beautiful road, quite different from the memory I preserve of it. If, in fact, in the days of the market it seemed a rich place of many colours, in the others it was decidedly anonymous and bare, populated above all by all the garbage that the peddlers left, sad testimony of their passage.

«Today the market is richer and with more colours than ever, because their products joined ours», Vito keeps saying, «the spices counter is a clear example of how the fusion among the two people is not only possible, but actually happily happened, giving life to a new people, that unites all of those who fall asleep and wake up again every day under this part of the sky. Without either us or them anymore.»

When we part, Vito holds my hand for a few seconds.

«I am really happy to have seen you again. Maybe I have been a bit brusque in some things I said, and I hope you won't hold it against me. It's just that, after you left, I was angry with you because I would have liked you to stay here. I missed you, Paolo. I felt alone, when you left. But luckily it's always possible to move on.»

«Yeah.»

I look at him vanishing in the crowd, another cigarette in hand, walking slowly. "I missed you too", I would like to tell him, but he is already on the other side of the street.

I retrace the path to the Torre Normanna, finding again a certain familiarity with the places I just saw with Vito. I stop at a pastry-shop; I have a tray filled with typical sweets to bring to Teresa and our children and I don't resist the temptation to immediately taste a small cannoli. I walk pondering Vito's words. He's not wrong, there is so much improvement, so much wealth in this new version of Sicily. But, while chewing, I smile thinking about poor uncle Gino... neither he was wrong... not even cannoli have the same taste anymore.

#  Chapter 7

It was a typical winter night in Turin; cold cut the dark remote alleys as well as the bright central streets. I walked homeward, returning from an evening with university students. We were a group of young Sicilians in a part of Italy that welcomed us with distrust because we were no longer Italian, but a people with an indefinite identity, that even us hardly understood. With the lost expression of freshmen in a foreign land, we observed the new generation of the future Italian medical class who, looking like experienced doctors, formulated unlikely differential diagnoses in front of meagre glasses of beer on tap, in a smoky pub, impenetrably closed in their entourage, inaccessible to us. They were the mirror of a new Italy, more and more closed and intolerant, busy building at all cost the pretension of a rising future. But reality was that of a country for which throwing the ballast in the sea hadn't been enough to save it. The decline was far deeper, it crossed conscience, moral and civil sense, and recovering from that type of disarrangement was not only a financial issue. As for us ex – migrated to the north to guarantee ourselves an education, waiting to understand the direction to give to our history, as individuals and as a people, certain of our ambitions - we projected ourselves in the most brilliant of the possible futures, sure that we would meet again one day in some part of the world, at the peak of our careers, each of us in his selected branch of medicine. We sipped and we smoked, reading with serious expressions the case histories assigned to us by professor Minetti.

The diagnosis proposed by Roberto Falci still echoed in my mind when I walked along the road that lead me home from the bus stop. The rain patted insistently on my umbrella, heavy drops splashing everywhere around me. Head low, I moved quickly, breathing inside the damp scarf, badly wound around my neck. From the road I could see the light of the kitchen. My house was awake in the heat of the night.

The telephone had rung around midnight, interrupting the sleep of Antonio and Antonella, who in winter, after a long working day, went to bed early. It was our fourth year in Turin, but they still hadn't been able to get used to the rigidity of winter, to the night-time freezing, to the ice on the windscreen of the car every morning. Dad went out early, Mom sat in front of her PC at an early hour. She had reprised making translations and the job was never scarce.

A telephone ringing at night is most likely heralding bad news, therefore that night the heart rate of my parents started to get faster at every insistent trill, until Dad, mustering his courage, lifted the receiver.

A dry voice, heavily marked by a Sicilian lilt, avoided preambles, cut short pleasantries and went straight to the point, «Antonio? Gino I am, I wanted to tell you that Enzo, the son of Pina, iccò... threw himself from the balcony».

A short pause to chase emotion back in throat, the same emotion that quickly hardened in the throat of my father. Enzo was the son of Mario Mancino, a general servant to which dad sometimes entrusted some maintenance job for the house or the chemist. He was a humble person, with few means and a family to sustain. With the arrival of the first child, the economic demands of the family had increased, and Dad tried to help as he could, calling Mario for some little extra jobs, sometimes not really necessary. Thankful for the help received, Mario had asked Dad to be Enzo's godfather, and this had sealed among the two a bond to which Dad never escaped. So, when Mario lost his life because of a work accident, my father honoured his role of godfather helping his widow to take care of that son, only two years older than me.

«He's in serious conditions. Physicians don't even know if he is ever going to wake up. He's in a coma. His mother is completely broken, destroyed. She only has stu figghiu, mischinazza. I don't know if I did well to call at this time, but I thought that you wanted to know before...»

The room seemed suddenly penetrated by the same cold that was freezing the roads and the car windscreens. Mom tightened her night-gown around her, waiting to know. It was in this suspension that I found them when I entered the kitchen, that has been for a long time the meeting place of our family, the place where the most important decisions are taken and where joys and pains are shared.

From their faces I immediately understood. I didn't ask anything and I stood staring now at my father, now at my mother. I had already learned that ugly news can't be stopped, therefore it is not necessary to hurry and ask, since the answers will come anyway.

«Uncle Gino phoned, one hour ago», Dad begun. I picked up these first words in patient wait for the succession.

Uncle Gino was his only brother and the only Manfredi who had remained firmly anchored to his land in spite of the intervened upheavals. Dad didn't hear from him often, and when he called, generally it was to adjourn us on some unpleasantness.

Dad's eyes flew now on the clock hanging from the wall, now on the point of my wet shoes, carefully avoiding to reach mine. Feeling his weakness fed my dismay.

«A thing happened, Paolo. Enzuccio... we don't know well what happened, but it seems that... in short... he tried to commit suicide.»

I finally met my father's eyes in a stunned and fleeting look, that fell again to the black and grey marble scales of the floor.

«How did it happen? Is he alive? But for what reason...»

«He's in serious conditions. They operated him urgently at Civico, but he didn't wake up yet. His aunt Pina is always there, close to him, mischinazza. She doesn't want to leave him for a second. She speaks to him, calls him, but nothing, he just vegetates.»

My mother's word mixed in my mind, becoming indistinct and distant. They mixed to the chatters of the smoky pub where, up to half a hour earlier, my laughter and those of my colleagues, friends and rivals, had resounded, while Vicè – that was how I called him – was falling in the dark like a bird too heavy to fly. In my memory, the film of the first part of my life passed quickly. That part in which I didn't need to wonder who I was and where I was coming from. That part in which I played without worries, lived, and nothing else, away from the stage of the so many questions without answers. And in that kitchen in faint light, illuminated only by the light under the cowl and by a neon light in the street, the face of Enzo inscribed in the air. A little boy with curly and raven-black hair, legs always full of bruises, whom I considered a cousin although there was no kinship between us. A cousin whom my father had taken care of almost like a son, to honour a promise. I remembered the regret of Vicè when my father told him that we were leaving. He was strongly rooted to his land and couldn't understand how I might want to live elsewhere. To him it was inconceivable. He loved all of Torre, to him the world began and ended within those borders that fed all of his certainties.

Dad repeated to him the same sentences he had told me a thousand times.

«It's a land without a future, this one. You can't think about making a living here, because there is nothing. Torre was a very beautiful place once, and it could still be, but there is no will to make it grow. It is a slow and subterranean agony that is taking away this town as well as the whole Sicily. Leave, my son, if you want to do something with your life.»

But Enzo was himself a root of this country, one of those that, if eradicated, are doomed to die, because they don't root in any other place.

And in fact Enzo died, after a few days from the jump. My father was at his bedside, one hand holding his, one holding his aunt Pina's, who was lost in her personal ocean of tears. Uncle Gino, at the feet of the bed, shook his head, cursing Italy that had betrayed that child of his, that had delivered him to a destiny he could not accept, being exiled in his own country. He cursed Siqillya, this Arab land where they could no longer find the panelle fried in the cans of black oil of the itinerant lambrette, where they could no longer live in the spontaneity of the past, and where nothing, not even cannoli, had the same taste of veracious Sicily any more.

At that bedside there were also my mother, Vito and many other faces of my past. I was in Turin, filing another thirty in my model-student card.

When I get back to the Torre Saracena it's already half past six. Teresa has fallen asleep on the beach chair already. I hear her deep, regular breath. She is laying on her side, hands joined under her cheek like a thoughtless child. Her face is reddened by the sun and her features are relaxed. She seems pervaded by an aura of comfort. She strongly wanted this trip with us. With me. Seeing her like this now makes me think about all of the sunny days we missed, the happy laughter we didn't share, the being together that always seems to be last in the list of our everyday lives. Of mine, to say the truth. She is always silently wishing for it. I wonder how she could accept our so fragmented life as a couple in all these years? I sit down next to her to look at her. I brush her hair, perfumed of apple-scented shampoo.

We married about twenty years ago, when we were both thirty-year-old and ambitious, both determined to climb our own peak, to reset the finishing line. However fatiguing, my rise was a long straight line, without alternative paths. Hers instead led to a fork, and taking one road irremediably prevented her to access the other. She chose family, giving up the chance of following the profession of travelling reporter, to save our children from the absence of their mother in addition to that of their father.

Distant laughter of playing children echoes from the beach. Giuliana didn't waste time to make friends. She is sitting among a group of peers telling them who knows what. Her brother is walking alone along the water's edge. Sometimes he stops and sinks a foot in the wet sand, then pulls it out, shakes away the sand glued to it, then starts again his slow advance.

The rustle of the heavy cloth of the reclining chair announces me the awakening of Teresa. She turned to me and she's looking at me. She is relaxed and beautiful. She doesn't seem to be close to the fifty-years thresholds. She is my eternal high school fiancée.

«So, tell me everything.»

She sits, straightens the back of the chair, huddles up her legs against her chest, hugged in her arms. She questions me with her eyes.

«We made a tour. The town is really unrecognizable, and to think that once I knew every corner of this place by heart, while now I hardly recognized many streets, houses that I used to frequent, people's faces.»

«Your house?» she hazards.

«It's still there. It changed too, but it's recognizable. In the terrace there was a woman. For an instant it seemed to me to see my mother.»

A pause helps me to keep emotion in check.

«It's unbelievable how much she resembled her; same hair colour, same kind of hair-style, even her eyes.»

«See, in some strange way you always succeed in finding the way home.»

«Yeah.»

Teresa defended the theory according to which my mother had gotten sick for the pain of not having returned to Torre anymore, although she always wanted to, deep down.

«How does being here affect you?»

«I don't know.»

It's the truth, I don't know how I feel. Extraneousness and belonging fight inside me; now the former prevails, now the latter. I am just confused.

«And you?»

«I am fine, doctor, I'm fine.»

And she lays down again on the chair.

I have a refreshing shower. The walk under the warm sun of this advance of summer glued my clothes to my skin. I feel the need to wash away all of the sweat and to smell of aftershave. Luckily Teresa thought about everything; a change of clothes for all will spare us a return to the hotel.

She too prepares for the evening. She still has today's sun on her body and her relaxed face. She's wearing a beautiful yellow dress with large orange flowers and a neckline crisscrossing on her shoulders. A foulard matching the flowers on the dress lightly falls on her, around her arms. My wife is very Mediterranean tonight, different from the woman often dressed in grey or black suits of our Parisian winters. I look at her pleased, then I offer her my right arm to lead her out of the room. She smiles in turn and accepts it. This way, arm in arm like two carefree children, we start toward the beach to summon up our children.

Teresa goes to meet the new friends of Giuliana, and while she goes away she pushes me to spend some time with Marco. I reach him in his solitary place. He removed is shirt and laid it down on the sand to sit on it. He is reading a book. When I approach, he closes it and places it to his left with a sudden gesture, as if to prevent me from seeing what it is about. I pretend I didn't notice.

«At your age, I liked a lot to sit on the beach and look at the sea too. It really relaxed me and helped me to think about my teenager problems.»

«You had any?» He seems amazed.

«Like every boy. Does it seem strange?»

«It's just that I can't imagine you. I mean, you are always so confident, you always have the solution for everything.»

«A hateful "Mr. Know-It-All"», I interrupt him.

He looks at me, smiles together with me and nods.

«Will you make room for me?» I ask him, bending to sit next to him. He moves aside, leaving me some room on the shirt.

«And which were your problems?»

«School, for instance.»

«School? But you always said that you were very good, that you always had good marks.»

«Indeed, but at times it seemed to me that it wasn't enough for my parents, and this made me suffer. I always tried to do my best, but I was under the impression that something was still amiss. Being an only child had its advantages, but there were too much attentions and expectations on me.»

Now Marco is looking at me with a resentful expression. He has a sentence on the tip of his tongue and he seems undecided whether to let it go or not. Then he sets it free.

«It's what you do with us.»

I asked for it, and it's true.

«Often adults forget they have been young, and repeat with their children the same mistake of their parents.»

«I will keep it in mind for when I will be a father. I don't want to make my children hate me.»

Is this what my son feels for me? I am afraid to ask, I am not ready to know the answer.

«What did you do with your friend?» he asks me without looking at me.

«A tour in the town. He had so many things to show me and so much to tell.»

«I see.»

«And you?»

«So...»

«So what?»

«So, that's it. I have been here on the beach. Nothing special.»

«What did you want to do?»

«Maybe a tour of the town.»

«Why didn't you tell me?»

«Why didn't you ask?»

«Are you reproaching me of anything, Marco? What of, this time?»

«This time? Why, when did I ever do it?»

«Every time. Every time you look at me with the expression of a boy neglected by a selfish father who finds time for everyone except him. This attitude makes me go crazy.»

«I'm sorry if my looking at you makes you so uneasy.»

This time it is me to change subject.

«Is it a good reading?» I ask him, pointing at the book half-hidden under his left leg.

He picks it up and shows me its cover.

"Waiting for his return", I read.

«I don't know it. Is it a nice story?»

«I just bought it. I liked the title.»

He stands up and the reaches out with his hand to help me do the same. I would like to talk more, silence fell too soon. But he's already several steps ahead of me.

«Look, Mom and Giuliana are calling us», and he points at the two who are waving their hands as they advance towards us.

A canoe advances slowly along the shore. A man is rowing; in front of him a boy is talking to him. In the silent twilight of Torre, we can hear their laughter. The father points at something in the water, the son looks in the same direction and gesticulates in turn. I watch them for some time. They could have been Marco and I, in a different life.

#  Chapter 8

The last strip of sun dies on the horizon, leaving a sky striped of red and orange and a suggestion that slowly extinguishes.

There is an intense swarming of people, like in the fullest of the summer season. Foreigners of the most different origins fill the road of their polite joy, and already many of them are pouring in the several restaurants and fast-foods of Torre shore. The relative coolness of the evening is the good condition to indulge in a walk. Marco put on his wrinkled shirt again, as well as is usual silent attitude. He holds in his hand his new book, pretending to listen to the chatters of Giuliana.

I propose Teresa to dine at Terrasini. It's a tourist town a few kilometres from Torre. Her family used to spend the summer there.

In the car we make plans for the following days.

The vacation has just begun, yet the time already seems insufficient. The children would like to spend mornings at the sea and afternoons around the town.

Giuliana mostly wants to tan, go shopping and write e-mails to her friends.

«My schoolmates will die from envy for my tan.»

Her Mediterranean origins reveal themselves, on her skin, in the easiness with which she becomes darker after a few exposures to the sun. In this she is very different from the diaphanous Parisians she associates with.

Teresa wants to find her old friends again, skim through the pages of that Sicilian parenthesis of her nomadic life, spent in the many moves that life partly offered, partly imposed her.

Marco wants to breathe whatever air that is not that of Paris, hoping that it can be enough to chase bad thoughts away, to make him forget the plans set aside, to delete what is making him feel bad. I believe he's sadistically happy to think that, as long as we are here, I cannot escape staying with him, forced, in his opinion, to share my precious time with his nothingness.

On the other hand, I feel at once happy and embarrassed of this situation with him. I watch him from a distance, I try some approach, partly to expiate the guilt for my flaws, partly because I see in him a fragility that unbalances me, a fragility for which I feel incredibly responsible. My father was a fundamental figure to me. His principles drove my life, made me confident and determined to walk winding roads without being afraid. Apparently I haven't been able to do the same with my son, and this makes a very poor father of me. His fragility is my defeat. What I expects from this vacation is an occasion to start and remedy. And then I want to go hunting in the history – the one with a lowercase 'h' – of a life split into a before and an after that never found conciliation inside me. As if these two pieces belonged to a double Paolo Manfredi. Life, however, is not made of separate fragments, but of a long chain in which every link is just the point in which past and future touch. I hope that by finding the junctions I will also know how to genuinely approach my son.

I will let these days go by freely, without either impositions or predefined paths on a map. At the end, what happens in every trip will happen; we will say that we will be back, because there wasn't enough time, and in that moment we will really believe it. Then, kilometres away from here, back to our lives, when the answers we were looking for from this experience will be clear inside us, we will realize that, even if we never return, it still was an exhaustive experience, and we will be ready to make room for the thousand others that still await.

«But did you know the whole Sicily, Dad?» Giuliana questions me while she is skimming through the guide, attracted by pictures of the sea and of some monuments.

«Actually I know very little of it. When I lived here I suffered from the typical passion for foreign things of youth, that strikes particularly islanders, because they feel distant from everything. Then I dreamt of London and Paris as well as other lands overseas, I had no interest at all for the territory around me. So now I am fifty and I don't yet know the natural reserve of Vendicari, in Syracuse, where rare species of birds go to lay their eggs, and I haven't have seen, if not in a photo, the villa of the Hamlet of Piazza Armerina, known for the mosaics of the Roman age. Neither I ever witnessed an eruption of the Etna, our famous volcano.»

Giuliana finds the places in my story in the pages of the guide.

«It all seems very beautiful. I would like to go there, one day.»

Here is her intention to come back.

Yet these are not the lacks for which I seek compensation in this trip. The world is totally different and totally the same. What changes is our way of looking at it and attributing it a meaning, a value. As boys we quiver to know wider and wider portions of it, as if the reality surrounding us were only a small quota and the mystery of life was hidden elsewhere. It takes so many years, and they aren't always enough, to understand that that mystery has always accompanied us, residing close to us like the most faithful companion of life. So, even if I won't be able to see any of all the possible destinations in this renewed Sicily, I still feel that I am on the track of a deeper knowledge, like a pilgrim rather than a tourist.

Giuliana accompanies the last musical meme of the season with the same croaky voice that fills the car from the loudspeakers. Marco shakes his head, resigned, and looks at an indefinable point beyond the car window.

The evening lights project shadows on the blacktop and beam in an artificial atmosphere. The sea is an arcane darkness stain that flanks us at our right.

Giuliana stops singing, although she keeps following the music with her fingers and a see-saw movement of her shoulders.

«Dad, the guys I met at the beach told me extraordinary things about Palermo.»

«Palermo is a city with an enormous artistic patrimony, made interesting by the alternation of very different styles in time. There is Arab-Norman architecture, Baroque and even the oriental style of the Chinese Building», I tell her.

«Yes, certainly, but they told me about other things, Dad. It's not to see these things that guys gather here, or at least that is not their main interest.»

«I imagine», I answer laconically.

We let the highway behind and take a suburban road, preceded by an orderly queue of cars moving toward the heart of a seafaring suburb larger than Torre. Here too the welcome sign is bilingual, while advertising posters mostly bear sentences in Italian.

It was always a tourist destination, known for its beautiful cliff of reddish rock and its deep and clear water.

Giuliana keeps on giving me information about a Palermo I don't know, in line with the excesses we have started to discover.

«There is the reproduction in scale of the Buri al Arab.»

My interrogative look induces her to complete the explanation.

«It is a deluxe hotel in Dubai. The first one in the world to boast seven stars. It has the shape of an enormous sail, light and dynamic, but imposing at the same time. The one of Palermo is a kind of reproduction in a more modest size, but still effective.»

Teresa looks at me and bursts laughing.

«What is there to laugh about, Mom?»

«Well, once hotels were functional to the vacation. Now it seems they became a destination themselves. We used to visit churches, ancient buildings, gardens...»

«But this is modern architecture, Mom. This is an expression of culture too.» Marco breaks this way his meditative silence.

«But how long have you lived in Palermo, Mom?»

«About four years. I was fifteen when I came to Sicily...»

«... and you went to high school where you met Dad», Giuliana intervenes.

«My father had been appointed sanitary manager in a hospital in Palermo. We would have stayed longer if it hadn't been for the political distortions you know of. When Sicily was sold, the sanitary personnel working here was called back to the rest of the national territory. My father had the fortune to be able to return to Padua, our city.»

«Wasn't it terrible for you to have to renounce to the life you had made here, to your friends, to Dad?» Giuliana pursues, as if she hadn't already listened to this story so many times and again.

«Your father had already moved to Turin with his parents when we left. As for me, I had gotten used to my father's transfers. There are people who live their whole life in the same place and others who continually change. You get used to it, even if there is always a share of sorrow in every goodbye.»

«Yes, but with Dad it was just a see-you.»

«Yes, but back then we had no idea that life was an unpredictable crucible of deviations and convergences.»

I drive and listen to her. Actually life is really that way. At times it seems there are appointments already set for us, to which, without having the slightest idea, we will be punctual. Others we'll miss, this too according to an identical plan. But it is also likely that it is just chance.

When Teresa went back to Padua, I had been studying as a foreigner in Turin for one year already. She was a rightful Italian citizen, since she had been born this way of Messina channel. She graduated in journalism, started to write for a daily paper. A tangle of roads waited for her passage, roads that lead her closer and farther from the point in which, sooner or later, she would cross me for the second time. As for me, after the degree I moved to Boston, in Massachusetts, to specialize at the Children's Hospital. An ocean and several cities separated me from the pre-arranged point of our second meeting. But both, at the correct moment, didn't miss the appointment.

«How come you chose Boston?» Giuliana asks me. Her head emerges between Teresa's and mine.

«It was the most advanced research pole in the paediatric field at world level. It is there that innovative treatments and therapies are experimented. It is the temple of knowledge for paediatric heart surgery.»

«Look, Dad, what's that?» Giuliana asks me, her arm outstretched forward to point at a tall bright column that strongly comes into our field of vision, dominating the landscape.

«I don't know. I think it's one of the many things that once weren't there.»

Teresa pulls out the tourist guide from her bag, she skims its pages then stops on the illustration of a tower very similar to the one before us.

«It is a lighthouse», she tells us, «a modern one, obviously. There are many in the whole island. They were born as indications for ships, but in reality, like everything else, they are an example of modern architecture. It is a monument itself. You can climb to the top to watch the landscape.»

«When do we go up there?»

«Even after supper», I hazard while parking.

«Why not now, Dad? What do you say, Mom?»

Giuliana looks at Teresa with a supplicant expression and Marco follows in her wake. Naturally my wife surrenders immediately.

«Well yes, we go up there now and then we have dinner. What do you say?» and she looks at me winking.

The path leading to the lighthouse discloses the semblances of a town in which modernity melts to the night-time atmospheres of "One Thousand and One Night."

«The suggestions of the Arabic world are strong in the shades of the rust red, that paints the façades of many buildings, evoking the clay walls of Marrakech. Red is the flooring motive of a large part of the pedestrian tourist walk, red sunsets prevail in the paintings of the street painters, as well as in the carpets and the tapestries in the windows of many shops.»

Teresa passionately reads from the guide and comments. The children listen to her, following her finger that moves from the illustrated maps on the book to the surrounding space. I, a few steps behind, stop to observe the Arabic characters engraved on a dark marble plate recessed in the side of a building. I prefer to discover by looking. Arabesque with geometric or floral motives decorate the walls of the buildings with a variety of intense colours that harmonize in the whole. The roads are clean and there is a pleasant sensation of order. Tourists are here too. A modest queue of visitors waits for their turn to climb the tower. We join them. Behind us, thickening and closing the queue, there is a conspicuous group of French. The total number of their children abundantly surpasses that of parents. Two of them, two young girls dressed in tight white leggings and short shirts that let their navel emerge, right behind us, make appreciations on Marco counting on the fact that he, lost in his iPod, won't realize it. They don't take their eyes off him an instant, they exchange remarks and giggles, until the bravest of them knocks on his shoulder and tries a contact in an unlikely Italian to ask him until what time the lighthouse can be visited. Marco pulls out his earphones while the girl is speaking, her long blonde ponytail waving to the rhythm of her body, pushed by a crescendo of euphoria and embarrassment. He answers in a nonchalant French that the last visit is at a quarter to midnight. They listen to him in surprise, since they had heard him talk to his sister in an impeccable Italian, and exchange embarrassed smiles, hoping that he hasn't listened to their comments about him.

«You are from Paris too?»

«Yes, certainly.»

«I would like to have an equally certain answer to this question», I say, turning to Teresa, «instead I know where I was born and where I live, but I can't say where I am from. It's absurd, isn't it?»

She smiles, but she doesn't answer.

«Since when they rewrote the geographical map of Italy, I have stopped feeling that I have any roots. I am one who lives in the world, but who doesn't belong to any place. I feel like a passer-by wherever I go.»

«Isn't it so for everyone?» she says, midway between a question for me and a spoken thought.

«Our son has no doubts however, he has a precise answer to give.»

«Marco is French not only because he was born in Paris, but because he feels so. He has grown with this certainty, and speaking Italian never made him doubt about his belonging», she tells me, «I too have been passing in so many places but I don't have doubts about who I am or what world I belong to».

«Which one?» I ask, curious to know where a person that moved much more than me feels her roots to be.

«All of the places I touched in my life. Or rather they belong to me, they are part of my history. Whether you live your whole life in a place or in a thousand, this doesn't deprive you of continuity. You are the constant, Paolo, the rest is background and changes. Continuously.»

It is our turn, eventually. We enter one of the two elevators that climb the tower. Each of them can contain up to fifteen people. The glass cabin allows us to see the landscape during the climb. It is like travelling on a rocket, although very comfortable and silent; we barely feel the speed. The landscape, increasingly wider and more distant, involves us all in an amazed expression. The attractive blonde with the fluttering ponytail is still glued to my son. They chat, commenting the landscape. A child in the arms of her mother has his hands and mouth pressed on the glass, leaving a minuscule halo of vapour and saliva.

Teresa, who is reading the leaflet, says that this is one of the so-called smaller towers.

«Its height, in fact, can be considered modest in comparison to the ones that can be found in the Emirates.»

The doors of the elevator open on the first of the two panoramic terraces. We go out, making room for the visitors going down. At this height the air is cooler because of the wind. We scatter, each of us looking for a privileged point of view; each behind their own emotions. While I am watching the extension of the panorama, from the bright sparkling of the town to the darkness of the open sea, my study in the hospital comes to my mind. A great room with sanitary-white walls, mostly occupied by file cabinets and bookstores, a thick desk where clinical briefcases are methodically stacked, waiting for a happy ending. The space is saturated, as well as the air, made heavy by the odour of disinfectant and illness. In that closed and overcrowded place I spend a large part of my life. I visit, study, write, meet parents, confront with colleagues, phone. At times I have a fast meal, all in a sort of apnoea. I bathe in that abyss in the morning, I resurface when I can. The journey back home is my mouthful of oxygen. A mouthful of Parisian air, cold in the continental winter, impregnated of cars and fast-food frying.

On this terrace, suspended above true life, the air stuns for its purity. I greedily inhale it, as if to stock it for my daily apnoeas. Teresa, behind me, touches my shoulder.

«All fine?»

She tightens her foulard around her in the hope to find shelter from the wind.

«I was thinking about my job.»

She shelters under my right arm, making herself minuscule to save as much of her skin as possible from the cold.

«No, please, not here too.»

«I was reflecting about how much time I spend at the hospital; there's a whole world, cut out to the point that I forget its existence. In this moment I feel like I am moving in a too narrow space, too confined. We never think enough, when we are young, that the road that we choose to take will mark what comes later, influencing a whole lifestyle.»

«You never wondered about this before. What's wrong? Aren't you happy?»

«It's not a matter of happiness. My job is my life. It's just...»

«It's just fear, Dad, it's the dizziness for the height that stuns and confuses ideas», Giuliana tells me, passing next to us and continuing her tour.

«Yes, it is the dizziness», I repeat, leaving my thoughts suspended.

In the higher terrace the wind and the dizziness effect are doubled. We are higher in comparison to the top of our Parisian steel tower. Marco is absorbed in the sight of the landscape from a telescope. Juliette, the resourceful girl, is still close to him, she too absorbed by the music of the iPod of which they are sharing the earphones. Giuliana, one telescope farther, winks at us.

«Come on, it's time to go down.»

Teresa precedes us to the elevator and there she decompresses, returning to her usual volume. She skims through the guide and reads up. Always like that, in every trip.

The centre of the town seems quiet. Summer evenings are still distant. Then, roads swarm of teenagers until late at night. The general aspect hasn't changed much; back then it was already more tourist-oriented than Torre and other neighbouring settlement.

The clear-wood shape of a big arrow, aimed at an alley to our left, bears the name of a restaurant, engraved in Arabic letters. The writing is illegible for us, but Teresa is stricken by the floral motive framing it, making it attractive. We enter the alley and follow a second smaller arrow, that leads us in front of a baglio. The few tables in the open are already all taken. A woman tells us to follow her inside. The feeble light of a few floor lamps and many candles skims her face, revealing coal eyes sparkling in the frame of black pencil and mascara. She wears a long yellow dress going down to her feet, with a wide gilded hem, the same kind that runs around the wrists. We quickly glance at the menu suspended to one of the two shutters of the door, it too written in Arab but with an English translation. In single file, passing in the narrow space between a table and the other, we leave the small baglio and enter an intimate and relaxing dimension. The atmosphere is captivating, made of suffused lights, burning incenses, melodies in the style of One Thousand and One Nights in the background. On the walls, the intense shade of the sea and floral-motives tapestries. A few small tables are in the innermost area of the room. Aside from those there are only low small tables surrounded by large turquoise pillows with gilded embroideries, that fill the place without overstuffing it, leaving enough room for intimacy and privacy. Karima, the woman who led us here, asks what type of setup we prefer. We settle down on the large pillows, each of us on a different side of the table. In the middle of it, a lit candle spreads vanilla essence. In the meantime, Karima distributes menus, then asks my wife the usual question, the one that triggers a crisis in me.

«Where do you come from?»

«My husband and I are Italian, he is from Torre, I am from Padua, but we have been living for years in Paris. Our children were born and grown in Paris. And you?»

She smiles at us again and hands us the wine chart and the menu, then gives her explanation in turn.

«We are Moroccan; we have moved here about fifteen years ago. Our children were born here, they are Arabic.»

"Thirty years ago they would have been non-European", is my solitary thought.

Teresa asks her to recommend us the typical dishes of their cuisine.

«The tourist menu is rich in known dishes of our tradition. I'll bring you sauces and creams to be smeared on our Arabic bread, and dishes based on meat and vegetables. They are traditional recipes and all of them are good.»

Actually the scents coming from the kitchen are inviting, and driven by them and by our hunger we immediately let us be directed on this choice. Giuliana is enthusiastic for the setup.

«It's romantic! We never dined this way.»

In truth my fifty years would ask for a more comfortable posture, but I prefer to let my daughter believe that I am still the vigorous father who carried her on his shoulders when she was a little girl.

«Women seek romanticism in everything!» is the disdainful comment of Marco, who would rather sit on a chair. But I think that his athlete back will hold better than mine.

Due to the late hour, the place is emptying by now. Only two young couples are sitting like us on the pillows. The other patrons are comfortably sitting on soft cloth pillows placed on wrought-iron chairs. Four men discuss excitedly, sometimes alternating words with toasts and noisy laughter. Further on, a very silent family. The woman lowly chews some words every now and then, without expecting an answer from the others; the man watches attentively a film on TV. There is no sound, but he seems captured by the images nevertheless. Two of the four children, the youngest, sleep on the large turquoise pillows, put close to one another so to form a kind of mattress. The two females wait in silence for their father to declare that it's time to go back home, exchanging fleeting annoyed looks every now and then.

Karima returns with a tray on which small bowls of yellow terracotta are placed. She tells us that in this place they cook dishes of the Moroccan cuisine, but not only those. There are dishes from various parts of the Arabic world.

«It is a cuisine of strong tastes», she says, «rich of spicy spices; I hope that the children can appreciate it as well.»

Knelt between Teresa and Marco, Karima lays the bowls on the table with her thin hands, one after the other, accompanying them with an explanation.

«Garlic and chilli pepper are essential ingredients for a lot of recipes, especially sauces, excellent as gravies for meat, or to be smeared on the Khubzmarcook, the Arabic bread.»

With curiosity I approach my first Arabic supper.

«I know this one», says Teresa, «I already tasted it, but I don't remember its name.»

«It's Harissa», Karima explains, «it was born in Tunisia but it's prepared all over the Arab world. It is a mixture of fresh chilli pepper, garlic, coriander, mint and olive oil. The children maybe will appreciate more Hummus, that is a cream of chickpeas without chilli pepper».

«Luckily tonight I don't have to kiss anybody!» Giuliana remarks, «with all this garlic we'll even keep mosquitoes at bay! Marco should be careful, thought, maybe he might meet little Juliette.»

Marco looks at her with a hostile expression, his eyes pointed straight to those of his sister.

Karima meanwhile is listing by heart the spices mixed in the hulba.

The evening goes on pleasantly slowly. Several specialties follow one another, always accompanied by a smile and an explanation. We develop a passion for the tagine, a dish owing its name to the particular pot with a conic lid in which it is cooked. There are small tastes of three different versions; tagine of chicken with dried fruit, of meat with plums and of lamb shoulder with raisins. We decline the invitation to taste the fish version. This too will be part of the things we haven't done and for which we will propose ourselves to come back.

Karima serves us an Alì, a coconut pudding that immediately receives Teresa's approval. But it is me to surprise everyone when I ask for the baklawa.

«Since when you are also an expert of Arabic sweets?» Teresa asks me.

I tell her about the afternoon stop at the cafe with Vito. Karima comments that, being natives of Sicily, we probably don't have much to discover concerning sweets.

«Your confectionery is very rich.»

«Yes, but since we left it became just a memory.»

In the place now there's only us and the two young couples who chose our same setup. Two attendants are busying themselves tidying the place up.

«Maybe we should go», Teresa says.

But Karima, a few meters from us, tells us that there is no hurry. The family atmosphere of the place induces us to stay. It seems that we reached the after-dinner in the house of friends, when you still chat some more on the couch before leaving.

For tonight Karima has finished serving at the tables, so now she stays with us, now with the four young Germans, as if she had known us all for a long time. She alternates conversations in French and in Italian with us, in English with them, at ease with every language. She talks to us about the music we are listening to, and about how, in her house, it is traditional to dance it at parties. One of the two girls at the other table, who are listening intently, asks her to show us some dance steps. Karima makes a serious, focused expression. She moves away, leaving the girls and us perplexed about the meaning of that expression. In English, the young Germans ask us whether we think she was offended. The volume of the music now is slightly higher and the woman comes back, inviting the girls to stand next to her. Then, when both are near her, she starts moving gracefully, while they try to imitate her movements. With a gesture of her hand, Karima also calls Teresa and Giuliana to join them. At the beginning, Teresa tries to decline, but Giuliana, who is already standing up, takes her hand and tells her, «Come on, Mom, let's have some fun».

Us men stay sitting and watch the show from our places, nibbling the last crumbs of dessert still on the trays. I look at my women as if seeing them for the first time. I watch Giuliana blossoming in a woman. Her hair is the synthesis between those of her mother and mine, curly and a little tussled like Teresa's, jet-black like mine was when I was younger. The many years of swimming granted her a well-defined and proportionate body. She swings in her skirt and makes strange faces in the attempt to imitate the expression of Karima, who seems to be lost in her dance. Sometimes she looks at her mother, and in their glances words of agreement and silent complicity pass. I see them equal in their sunnyness, in their ability to laugh with their whole face and to charm others in their good humour. Maybe there is more complicity between them than there has ever been between Teresa and me, between me and any other person in the world.

When the music ends, the five women hug in an all-female fellowship, then another melody starts, and with it another dance. The fact of being women of different nationality, and different age, belief and culture, is only a detail at this time. They are simply women who are dancing.

Leaving the place we greet Karima. She has the tired face of who worked for hours without resting an instant. Tonight she will crash with swollen legs on her bed, but I imagine that she will do it with the same pleasant smile with which she served us for the whole evening. She stays on the door and keep waving her hand mechanically, the gilded hem of her dress fluttering around her thin wrist, her silhouette becoming increasingly smaller and more distant under the sign, now switched off, of the restaurant.

We look like the portrait of a happy family tonight, wrapped in our laughter, in the music we have listened and danced to. We smell of incense and food, we breathe wine and we feel light. Teresa walks in front of me, arm in arm with both our children; Marco to her left, Giuliana to her right. They laugh because she sways, she can't walk straight. And the more she laughs, the more she sways. She's not drunk, she's just euphoric. She keeps swaying between the two, who never saw her like this, and who seem happy to know this light side of their mother. It is almost one a.m., the road is empty. But the bright lighthouse is still there, with its grandiose light that I follow like a boat toward the harbour, on the tracks of our car. Even Marco is unusually relaxed. He seems light, without that backpack of dark thoughts burdening his head. He hums one of the many music we listened to, while Teresa and Giuliana start dancing again the steps of Karima. Giuliana says, «Mom, are you sure you are not too dizzy?»

Teresa dances and gestures that she is, and keeps laughing.

«Luckily there is no one in the street», Marco says, a little embarrassed by the boldness of the two, he who is always very reserved.

«Come on, dance with us.»

Giuliana pulls him from an arm to her left side. I, a step behind, look at that wild trio and breathe deeply. I want to store inside of me all of the air of this special evening.

Our car is at the opposite side of the road. We cross dancing, I too let their frenzy take me. In the street there is no one except for a moped in the distance, proceeding slowly.

What happens immediately after is an instant, one of the worst kind. At the crossroad a SUV, that wasn't there an instant before, emerges out of the blue, launched at an insane speed. Unaware punctuality; the impact is inevitable. The moped skids toward the sidewalks like a crazy splinter and slides for several meters, then stops against a lowered shutter. The driver, who immediately separated from the vehicle, whirls round and round, then stops on his back, arms wide, with his head reclined on a side, several meters away from the point of impact. The car keeps running in the crossroad. It didn't stop, it didn't even slow down. I ear Teresa and the children shouting, while I am instinctively racing toward the wounded. No helmet. His face is a mask of blood. He's a very young boy, more or less the same age as Marco. His clothes are torn in several parts, his knees are grazed, as well as the palms of his hands. I turn toward my family, who is looking at me in amazement. Giuliana cries with her face pressed against the shoulder of her brother, who seems astonished. Teresa, with a hand on her mouth, looks now at me, now at him. I tell her to call for help.

«The guide!» she says immediately.

In the pages that tremble in her hands, Teresa finds the emergency number for road accidents and convulsively dials it on the keyboard of her phone, striving to keep control. Meanwhile I administer first aid to the wounded. I grab his head with both hands and overextend him with prudence. I look at Teresa, looking for something to coarsely clean his mouth; she understands and, rummaging in her bag, she grabs a pack of Kleenex and compulsively hands them to me, one after the other. The boy is not conscious; his chest is motionless, he isn't breathing. I proceed with artificial respiration. After some attempts, his chest starts moving again; he's breathing. With my fingers I look for his carotid to assess his blood circulation. The rhythm is irregular, I feel a weak pulse. He is going in cardiac arrest. I begin then the cardiac massage; after ten compressions I ventilate twice, then again for three more cycles. I assess the signs of resumption; his pulse is weak, but it's there. He's alive.

From the balconies I hear the voices of meddlers. Someone comes down in the street to lend a hand. A man recognizes the boy.

«It's Hussuf, a schoolmate of my daughter. I will phone his parents.»

I tell the small crowd around me not to come too close, because the boy needs air. Now that I know his name I call him.

«Hussuf, can you understand me? Do you speak Italian?»

He makes a weak gesture with his eyes; he is disorientated. I hold his head in my hands. Marco approached and now he is kneeling behind me, looking at the boy over my shoulder. I feel the hold of his hand on my right arm.

«How is he?»

«He will get by, don't worry.»

Then, turned to Hussuf, I add, «Everything will be all right, son.»

The ambulance arrives a few minutes later. The crowd parts to let the stretcher bearers pass, and they load the boy on the stretcher. They immobilize him, give him oxygen. I say that I am a physician and inform them about the apparent conditions of the boy. There are probable multiple fractures and a CAT will be needed to determine possible cerebral damages. Hussuf looks at me while the stretcher moves away. It seems that he wants to tell me something, but he can't speak. Two tears roll down his cheeks. He imperceptibly moves his eyes, maybe looking for a familiar face before losing consciousness again. The man who knows him shouts, «Hussuf, boy, I informed your father, he is coming straight to the hospital.»

But the boy cannot hear him. Hussuf disappears behind the doors of the ambulance that departs at full speed. While meddlers keep commenting about what happened, I describe to a police officer the little that I know. I haven't seen the car well; I only noticed that it was black and high-powered. But a lady from a first-floor balcony saw the scene better and also jolted down part of the plate number.

We get in the car. Giuliana points at a spot of blood on the blacktop, unusually at a loss for words.

«Let's hope it ends well for him», Teresa sighs.

«Dad, is it serious?» my daughter asks me.

«He wasn't wearing the helmet.»

It is late night. Nobody speaks in the car, but they are all awake. The dark stain of the night-time sea is a threatening presence that escorts us to the hotel. It is frightful like the stain of Hussuf on the pavement. It drained our joy, our light thoughts. Marco is a statue of salt again. The ghost of Pierre is sitting again on his shoulder, compressing him.

With the eyes of Hussuf stuck in my mind, I slowly drive toward the hotel.

#  Chapter 9

I am suspended at the twenty-fifth floor of an imposing spiral of steel and glass, split in hundreds of boxes provided with every form of luxury and comfort, containing fragments of endless stories, as many as the customers who populate it. This point of observation changes the proportions of things, making the world appear infinitely small, unfocused in shapes and outlines, populated only by individuals and things that from this height shrink to indefinite, even meaningless dots. The height is so dizzying that even the walls around me and the floor under my feet seem unsubstantial. I am a boat with no mooring. But perhaps the cause of this suggestion is not the height as much as the feeling to be again in someone else's house, having believed to be coming back to mine. Once these very places where the walls and floor of a world that I considered home. Beyond the large glass wall of our hotel room there is Palermo, plunged in the quiet of the night. At a distance the lights of the tourist port, where boats rest, cradled by the generous arms of a quiet sea. I like to look at it like this, where every detail is lost in the lack of features and the transformation it is imperceptible.

The television is on. A show about the building of the mosques in Sicily, in the darkness of the night, is the only source of light in the room. It projects changing shadows on the walls, clear glares alternated to fractions of darkness. I look at the images without listening to the words; the volume is imperceptible and my mind is elsewhere. A thousand thoughts bring away the holiday atmosphere to which I was beginning to get accustomed.

My mind makes fun of me in the sleepless nights, dragging me along a corridor full of half-open doors, that I am careful not to open during the day. But in the heat of the night, one after the other, they draw me to unknown places, winning my reticence. They are the places of my faults, of the complicated relationships, of the unresolved arguments, of the incomprehensions, of the worries, of the dead patients, of the unhappy children... easy to understand my adversity to such patrols. And if in the daytime I am good at holding such disorder under lock and key, some nights a gust opens the doors wide... it puts everything in the open.

So I am wandering tonight, waiting for sleep to subtract me from so many forced reflections. In front of my eyes the images of a film, of which I am always the star. "The missed actions of doctor Manfredi" would be an appropriate title. Co-starring: once my wife, another time my children, my parents, my colleagues.

There is also young Hussuf who maybe is dying, while I am here tossing in the bed. To Marco I said that it wasn't serious, but I didn't really think that. The fact is that I don't want that every time an accident happens he makes of it an encore of Pierre's death. It seems like he looks for them. I find him glued to the TV watching the news about road accidents, or skimming through the newspaper to devour the crime news. When he feels exposed he feigns indifference and walks away in silence, with his usual absent expression. In the room of my faults he is the main character, my worst sense of guilt. He makes me feel a wrong, totally inadequate father, and every time I try to make up for this I just add worse to the worst.

Yet I had a great teacher in my father. He was the model from whom I would have liked to find inspiration... before something turned me into a selfish man. What I don't understand is when all this happened. When I was Marco's age my parents did a lot for me, putting me before everything else, even themselves. I ransacked this extreme generosity, growing in the absolute conviction that it was normal that their world rotated around my demands, that I was the only gravity centre of their lives. I drunk from an overfilled glass leaving nothing for others, without generosity.

The bed squeaks under the continuous dance of me turning from one side to the other, looking for a comfortable position that could defend me from the restlessness of this sleepless night. Teresa moved to the opposite part of the bed, in a niche sheltered from the storm that makes me whirl without pause. Tonight we are not alone; between us there are many shadows, changing like those the TV projects on the walls.

There is one patient of mine, Jule Martin, a ten-year-old boy, blond, with a diaphanous complexion and a congenital cardiac malformation. He died a few hours ago, worn out by yet another crisis. The head nurse, Vivienne, informed me with an SMS, after several unanswered calls, since I had forgotten my phone at the hotel. The first time that I visited him, he was just a newborn. A small thing wrapped in a cotton sheet, held close to the chest of his mother, a little more than thirty year old at the time. Back then I was stricken by her, a cover woman, a beauty without imperfections, impeccable despite the recent labour. A fall of chestnut, soft and voluminous hair, covered her shoulders, closing around that little creature badly bound to life. His dad was the emblem of the sculptural body, shaped in hours and hours of training in some body building gym. They had seemed shallow people to me, too egotist, unprepared to face the path that the illness of their son would force upon them. I expected that sooner or later the woman would come alone to the visits, trying to justify the absences of her husband, until one day she would confess that he had left her. So many times I have seen couples shatter in the corridors of an hospital, crushed by the pressure of the pain, by the sacrifices that a serious illness irremediably imposes. And I met many of these. In their case I expected that it would happen even earlier than in others, but I was wrong. In these ten long years I saw them always united in front of every difficulty, of every critical moment, of every hope and every disappointment, firm like his strong muscles and her orderly locks, fluorescent roots coming out of a head that is everything but evanescent. Mother Emilie is strong and smart, stubborn as few; a porcelain face, apparently so fragile that it could crumble at a puff, but actually strong as granite. I never saw it marked by a tear, yet I gave her quite a lot of reasons to cry in these years.

After a long ordeal, the situation recently became critical. Jule was hospitalized more than ten days ago. Without a new heart he would not get to enjoy the summer, and his family was aware of this. At the eve of my departure, before coming back home, I went there to greet him. To tell him goodbye, actually. His parents shook my hand without saying a word. Emilia could barely let it go, she almost wanted to hold me there. She always granted me blind trust. For a long time, when looking at the Martins, I have no longer seen cover faces, but human beings to whom the fate, after having granted them so much, presented too high a bill. The father fleetingly hugged me, his muscles shivering under the ice-coloured jacket.

I imagine Emilie's reaction to the death of Jule. She certainly was able to soldier on until she was home, and there, finally, drown in tears, porcelain dust dissolving in the rooms at every puff of her of pain, and her husband close to her, picking up with care that precious dust, reshaping it in the perfect features of his wife.

I think about my parents swallowed in that icy grave of pearly marble, on which I have not brought a flower for quite a long time... after what they have givento me.

Switch me off, I would just like to sleep.

We are going around Palermo again today, also known as Madinat asSigilliah, the capital of Sicily, at the times of the first Arabic domination, when the city became the principal settlement of the island. Under the Byzantines it had been only a secondary fortress, while Lilibaeum, Marsala, was the capital of the western province, and Syracuse of the whole island.

Today Vito is going to be our guide. He impressed our children because he still is the happy and ironic boy he was once, able to live in an easy-going way, which makes him more similar to a teenager that to a rigid fifty-year-old man like me. We have always been very different, and this united us because we completed each other. I was attracted by his way of seeing things, always at the antipodes of mine, original, nonconformist. He felt for me mixed feelings, the classical match of hate and love. He liked the air of family you breathed in my house, that had been lost in his since when his father had become depressed. He was a little more than a child when he had had to learn how to live with a faded family and without that serenity that is the lifeblood of a child. Armouring himself with irony and the ability to put a beautiful laughter like a comma between one thought and another, Vito succeeded in growing anyway, although with a big regret. At times he accused me of being too spoiled, dependent in everything and for everything from the judgment of my parents, eternally worried about gratifying them. We quarrelled, but we forgot in a hurry, because one could not renounce the dream that the life of the other offered him. I made him dream of a serene life with a father who loved him, he made me hope that one day I would also achieve his ability to face life on my own.

He reaches the hotel at nine o'clock with his shiny black minivan, judging from which I deduce that his economic condition has to be improved quite a bit in these years. He's wearing a pair of white pants, a blue polo and matching moccasins. We look each other up and down and we can't suffocate a laughter. It seems to be in front of a mirror. He shakes his hands up and down, joined like in prayer, as if he wanted to say "What are you doing?"

«Did you agree on that?» Giuliana stresses.

Vito tells to the children about all the times in which it already happened. We've always had similar tastes about clothes, therefore not rarely we got to school dressed the same. The difference was in the labels that made my clothes more prestigious than his, but none of us cared much about that.

«I hope that you can stand the heat, because they say that today the temperature will be well above the averages of the season. They forecast thirty-two degrees at lunchtime.»

«Encouraging words», Teresa laughs, taking place in the back seat of the car, close to the children.

At the radio, a nasal voice sings a depressing song; the words come out like sobs, in a slow, too stretched rhythm. It's an agony.

«Raise the volume», Giuliana says, «I love this song.»

«It's a moan», I say, raising the volume just a bit.

«Dad, do you knows who sings it?»

Obviously I don't know, I am not very up to date about contemporary music.

«It's Nat Howen, the most famous pop singer of all times. His CDs are at the top of the lists worldwide right now.»

In the expression of Giuliana I see some pity towards my musical ignorance. I would like to ask her if it's a Nat or a Nathalie, since from the voice it's not that clear, but the words get stuck in my throat, because they would worsen the consideration I have in the eyes of my children.

I just say that the last king of the pop I know of is Michael Jackson and I watch the interrogative look with which Giuliana and Marco confer. It is clear that they don't know who he was, and this makes me understand how much I am growing old. He died when I was only a little boy, but I knew his music well thanks to my mother, who loved it. I was five years old when we danced in front of the mirror and mom tried to teach me moonwalking, a step in which the feet slipped lightly on the floor creating a fast and fluid backward movement, that in my embarrassed feet lost its lightness and turned into a heavy crawl.

"It seems that you're cleaning the sole of your shoes, Paolo", my mother used to say, shaking her head, then she added that hardly in life I would become a ballet dancer.

I smile thinking about the cyclical path of life, the eternal resurfacing of the conversations between parents and children, each standing for their own generation, their own music, their own ephemeral certainties, mistrustful toward what comes later.

As a passenger I bathe in the sight of the landscape without other distractions. To our right the sea of the Foro Italico, the long expanse of lawn on which children run cheerfully after one another while their mothers watch them sitting on iron benches as green as the fresh grass that extends on a large area. To our left Palazzo Butera and the splendid panoramic terrace known as Walk of the Captive Women.

«Why does it have this curious name? Who were the captive women?» Giuliana asks.

«The term comes from the Latin word for imprisoned», Vito says, «the prisoners that once walked on that terrace were the widows, to which participation to normal social life was not granted because of their mourning. So during the day they were closed in their houses, but after sunset, when the city was empty, they could indulge in a solitary walk, distant from other people's eyes».

«How terrible», Teresa sighs, «we are lucky not to have known such barbaric customs».

In several places along our journey we cross groups of tourists carefully immortalizing the splendour of the old and new city. In the air, the lukewarm scent of the spring flutters.

The Palermo I remember was smothered by a level of pollution inexplicably higher than that of the much more industrialized and populous cities of the north of Italy, in the hands of a population forgetful of an acceptable civic culture. Yet it was the pride of its people, who loved to lie to themselves, basking in the exaltation of an ancient splendour.

«My mother compared the people of Palermo to the characters of a Neapolitan comedian of the post-war period», Teresa says. «He enacted poor characters who knew how to camouflage their indigence with cunning. A sort of emblem of an impoverished nobility that knew how to live of expedients and memories of better times, camouflaging the present with shrewdness. But it just took a little more careful glance to reveal the trick... What was that comedian name again, darn... do you remember?»

Although we understood who she's referring to, neither Vito nor I remember his name, agreeing upon the fact that time is an unmerciful duster.

«Obviously we were careful not to move such a critic to someone of Palermo at the time», my wife goes on. «Shame on who made them face the sheer truth. It was a city very proud of itself, of its own way of living and being, able to celebrate itself beyond all evidence.»

The words of Teresa sound too hard for Vito, who on this matter, today as before, is on the other side of the barricade.

«Palermo has always been a marvellous city, my dear. We boast a unique artistic patrimony, not to speak of the climate, the sea, the good kitchen, the generous and hospitable heart of the people.»

Teresa doesn't let him continue.

«Please! Don't list the usual obviousness, Vito! I heard such talks thirty years ago and if you propose them again now it means that after all the city hasn't changed as much as they say», she presses on.

«How wrong you are my friend. When you left, the situation was not the best, but this, if you think about it, was true for every other Italian city. Italy was crumbling, not Palermo or Sicily. And what happened afterward? While Italy kept living dark years, the sale of Sicily allowed us to finally take our deserved revenge. Here everything blossomed again, transforming a forgotten bud into the most beautiful flower of the garden. Until that moment what possibilities had ever been granted to us? Ignorant and subdued, so they wanted Sicily to stay for their benefit, for sure not for that of the people. Never any investment, never a modernization plan. How do you think that any place on Earth can grow if no project is made let it? If a culture oriented to welfare rather than the autonomy is cultivated? But don't tell me that Sicilians wanted this, because I will never accept this. It is obvious that if you grow in a place where this way of thinking is rooted, you unconsciously start thinking like this too. But if only you are given a possibility... We all did a lot when investments arrived.»

«I don't want to judge what happened after the sale. I am certain that there was an unbelievable improvement; I wonder however whether the price paid wasn't too high.»

«We paid the price before, and without having anything in return. We have been part of a State that never really wanted us. We were no-man's land right when we thought we belonged to something bigger. Have you forgotten how the people of the north considered us? We are Mediterranean, this has always been our belonging. You cannot deny that we have a way of living life, of feeling things, that was always closer to southern countries than to the cold lands of the north of Italy. It's history that proves this, and also geography. It's an intrinsic fact, and denying it damaged us for too long a time. Now put prejudices aside, and enjoy the new Palermo. Later we will talk about it again.»

And with the smile of who is preparing to win a challenge, Vito raises the volume of the radio, and humming he drives toward Mondello.

#  Chapter 10

In origin it had been a swamp, and it had carried on this characteristic, like a genetic imprint, even in subsequent times, when sumptuous villas were built turning it into a deluxe seaside resort. Stage of the contradictions of a people, the waterfront of Mondello was the example of a city thousand faces. Residence of the city elite on one side, meeting place of the so-called tasciume of Palermo on the other.

«What does "tasciume" mean?» Giuliana, who is attentively listening to Vito's explanations, wants to know.

«Tascio, in Palermo, means various things; tascia is a person with a vulgar attitude, one who speaks a vulgar dialect, a person of the so-called hoi polloi. Tascio is an ugly piece of clothes, and in general all that is out of fashion. In English you would say "it's out", in Palermo you say "it's tascio".»

In Mondello, in the summer, the tascio was a well defined physical type. It was the man in sea slippers, walking bare-chested, exhibiting without modesty the gigantic roundness of his feeble abdomen falling on a swimsuit disproportionately small in comparison with the volume of his body, with a side bulging because of the wallet boxed between the lycra and the soft flesh. Tascio was the head of the household in a low-necked top, knee-high shorts and clogs on his feet, who held in his hand a "coppo di scaccio" and walked chewing and sputtering peels of seed, leaving behind him a wake of shells of peanuts and pistachios here and there. At his side, his wife, tascia herself, with the picked remains of red enamel on the uncared fingers of hands and feet, hair tied with a cheap rubber band, a too generous body contained by cheap clothes, shouting without grace slurred words in a thick dialect to their children.

They were those people that the elite looked upon with disgust from behind the liberty-style glass walls of their villas; the same that crowded the beach, using the changing rooms of the beach like studio apartments with every comfort. They settled chairs and tables and stayed at the beach until late in the evening, eating and playing briscola or scopa, equipped with music, lights and field stoves. At a little distance from them, warm-light spotlights aimed at a yucca or a giant bird-of-paradise flower created dreamy atmospheres in the ornamental gardens of the villas of the rich people. And the owners, sitting until late at night around a table, surrounded by a thick cloud of smoke, their ashtray overfilled of cigarette butts, played a hand of poker or bridge after another, nibbling pastries or tasting minuscule portions of lemon or melon slush in refined crystal cups. The most solitary, pulling a face for the vulgar confusion coming from the beach, spent meditative evenings in their terrace, a few meter above the people, sipping cold limoncino in the company of a good reading.

When the beach was converted in a furnished area, the number of changing rooms decreased, and the high price of the daily lease of bunks and beach umbrellas introduced a selective mechanism of economic type. The tasciume decreased accordingly, leaving the area to the bourgeois of Palermo.

«Do you think it was right to deprive the people of a place where to go to the beach?» Vito asks me while we walk on the wood gangway that goes along the shore from an extremity to the other, «does it seem a democratic solution to you?»

«Vito, those changing rooms were a botch. They defaced the landscape, covering the sight of the sea, and also, people used them improperly», I say, resurfacing from the mountain of ice cream that drips from every part of my cone.

«What you say is true, but they could have tried to educate people, instead of sending them away by increasing prices. The few free stretches left proposed the same decline, compressed in a very small surface. A treatment like those reserved to beasts, that for sure doesn't help to evolve.»

We stop to look at the sea in a silent pause that favours reflections. The warm but intense wind coming from the sea ripples the waves, that form white shapes folding on themselves, similar to big fishes swimming at the surface. The beach is a composed and multicoloured carpet of cloths and beach backpacks. The access to the beach is still free in this period of the year. From June, bunks and beach umbrellas will occupy a large part of the beach, leaving only a narrow stretch of water's edge for free bathing. The wind carries an intense scent of coconut that mixes with the essences of the several bottles of suntan lotion that go from hand to hand between bathers. Few risk a hasty bath, the girls come out of the water teeth-chattering, their arms close to their chests and their skin wrinkled. They run to envelope themselves in their towels, covered in sand but hot.

Dads race after their children who, wearing shirt and diaper, pursue balls close to the shore. Mothers, sitting backer, offer their faces to the sun with their eyes closed, and enjoy a moment of relax.

The gaze is lost along the gulf of Mondello, unchanged naturalistic enchantment, to which now the attention of the man that exalts and completes the enchantment – like the frame does for a picture – is added. There is no trace of carelessness.

«At the end of the day you can be sure that there won't be any evidence of the passage of us all», Vito says, fighting against the wind to light his third cigarette.

«How did it happen?» I ask him while he keeps turning one way and the other to shelter the flame from the most intense gusts.

«What?» he asks, now giving the back to the sea and greedily inhaling as if it were his first nicotine of the day.

«How did they learn to care?»

Vito puffs two fast mouthfuls, then slowly breathes, letting the smoke vanish straight in front of him.

«Like with everything else. Sanctions, sanctions, more sanctions. A strong inspection action, true inspection. No eyes closed in front of irregularities. Who was wrong had to pay. The imposition is not very democratic, but it's pretty effective to defeat certain rooted behaviours.»

Teresa is telling our children that Mondello was a benchmark for us when we were young.

«We met at the beach, to play volleyball, or more often to do nothing.»

«In Palermo», Vito intervenes, «we say _cazzeggiare_ ».

«What does it mean?» Marco asks.

«It means doing nothing in particular, meeting, wasting time, chatting a bit, smoking a cigarette, things like these.»

«The things you always do with your friends», Marco intervenes, turned to his sister, who feigns a kick in his direction.

«Mind your business, idiot.»

«Don't feel embarrassed, Giuliana. All young people do that, it belongs to adolescence. It is physiological. The difference is that in Palermo this adolescent stage and the consequent cazzeggio can go on for a longer time than everywhere else. We are like this, and nobody could ever impose us changes in this.»

We slowly go toward the main square of Mondello. The eyes find comfort anywhere they rest. For those who live where greyness and cold are dominant elements of a lot of winter days, and the sea is but a distant memory, bathing in the intensity of nature is like entering the truth of life. It is rediscovering to be part of nature itself, regulated by rhythms and principles that often contrast with the laws of civil society, where the time granted to our more primitive essence is more and more limited. It is the same enchantment felt in front of a waterfall, of the limitless panorama of a green valley, or of a little river that disappears in the thick of a wood... it's rediscovering the deepest belonging, a moment in which you feel in peace with yourself and with the others.

«I know that you are a good diver», Vito says, putting an arm around the shoulders of Marco who, as usual, stayed a few steps behind the group.

«Well, I get by», he replies, looking at his feet, then toward the horizon, never at Vito's face.

«I see that you have a sportsman physique. Beautiful wide shoulders, narrow waist, you are a nice boy. Your father has never been the athletic kind. How did this passion come to you?»

«I started with swimming, then a friend of mine proposed me diving, he had been training for a while. I went to see him and I liked it... I decided to try and then... it went fine.»

«I know that you also won some important competitions. But how much training does it take to reach such levels? I imagine it is also a sacrifice.»

«For me it wasn't. I mean... if you like it, if you do it with passion, even if it is fatiguing you still want to do your best. The goal you set drives you.»

«This boy is clever», Vito says to Teresa, who is next to them.

Their conversation is natural, something that is missing between my son and me. I struggle to find the questions, and he struggles to give me the answers, we mumble words trying to get away in a hurry from the mutual embarrassment.

When does it happen that a part of you becomes a stranger? When does it happen that a stranger becomes a part of you? I miss naturalness. I know how to relate with my patients, but I don't know how to establish a relationship with my son. He's right, though. It is the goal you set that drives you.

«What is your next goal then?» Vito goes on, «I imagine you will reach the national competitions.»

«No more, by now.... no, no more.»

There is regret in his voice, no trace of the hostility or the annoyance that emerge when I try to talk to him about it.

«Why not? Let's not surrender without trying. You don't seem a yielding boy to me.»

«It's not that, it's that...» a brief hesitation, then the words come out calm, controlled, in a low voice, and I can no longer hear them. The rest of the conversation becomes intimate.

Teresa and Giuliana are close to me. Teresa is talking about the warmth, about the people, she fills the air of nonstop words. Giuliana is at the phone; she laughs and updates her friend.

Marco and Vito pass us when we stop at a newspaper booth to buy postcards. They are discussing intensely. Vito talks with his whole body, his hands move masses of air. Marco talks excitedly too. He seems to have started a fast comparison to defend his ideas, or maybe to barricade himself behind walls that Vito, in turn, is trying to dismantle with those hands of his that break the air.

«It seems that Vito succeeded in making our son loosen up», Teresa remarks while, with the bunch of postcards in her hand, she is rummaging in her bag in search of a pen.

«It seems so», I repeat without enthusiasm.

«So, any end-of-the-day comment?» Vito requests before dismissing us, when the sun is set by now and the light is slowly diminishing, leaving room to a clear evening sky.

«Very satisfied... and worn-out», Teresa says.

The children have already gone up to our room. Giuliana had several SMS to answer to, and e-mails to check. Marco wanted to make some research on internet with his iPad.

«I have to agree with you, you know», I tell Vito, who looks at me with a triumphant expression, «a change was necessary».

«You know what I love the most of this city?» Vito asks us while we are sipping the last coffee of the day at the cafe at the sixteenth floor, «the avant-garde».

«The avant-garde?» my wife repeats.

«We have always been a step beyond, without even realizing it, naturally. At school they taught us that Sicily in time has always been an object of interest for her favourable geographical position and blah blah blah. Its history is a composition of all the histories of the peoples who inhabited, lived, dominated it over time. Each of them left something, and the general history of this land would be incomplete if we didn't keep that into account. You would say that this made a no-man's land of it, I say instead that it is an everybody's land. And this is what I mean when I speak of avant-garde. It anticipated cosmopolitanism, the multiculturalism, heterogeneity. It's not its defect but its very essence.»

I wonder why I can't see the facts in the same way that Vito does. He has always been in love with his land, brave defender in front of any irrationality, any shameful evidence. He always believed in this, and time seems to have rewarded such unconditioned faithfulness. I look at him: his dignified face is turned to the heavens, his chest is large, proud to inhale all of the air of the city, his eyes are bright, his hair shines under the artificial lights of Palermo. I see my picture reflected in the glass wall behind him and see myself opaque. I miss the shine of his eyes, his own proud luminescence.

I live in a marvellous city, but as a guest. My feet are not sunk in Parisian ground to provide me with roots. They are just touching the hard asphalt. I am a half-withered plant without roots that survives in a protected environment, my hospital. Vito's feet are deeply sunk into Sicilian ground, his body fully sprayed by its sap, kissed by the sun, fed by the proud belonging. I think about when we raced barefooted on the beach; our feet sinking in the warm sand that wedged between toe and toe. I've had roots too.

I find again a memory of quite a long time ago. One Saturday in January, a temperature everything but winter-like in the eternal spring of Torre, interrupted only by some rare and brief incursions of winter. There was no school that day and dad didn't need any help in the chemist, therefore mom had decided to bring me at the beach to play. I was a rather delicate child, easily affected by bronchial infections. Influence had brought Christmas holidays away, leaving my already slender face shrunken, my eyes dug by deep dark bags. The paediatrician had recommended sea air. The exposure to the sun, besides, would have attenuated my pallor, and altogether revived my sickly expression.

With us there were Vito and his mother Lina. We had brought the ball to play football on the sand. The shore was nearly deserted; only a couple of elderly people walking arm in arm, and a solitary mother pushing a baby carriage. Near the shore four fishing reeds, well lined up and distanced from one another, the fishermen gathered in a knot, chatting and waiting to check the baits. Us children raced to the beach, with our pants rolled up to the knees, our hands holding our caps over our heads so they didn't fly away.

We plunged into the sand with a leap, and it immediately insinuated in our shoes, even in our socks. We were already kicking penalties in a virtual goal drawn on thin air – whose borders varied depending on our convenience – while our mothers, several meters behind, chatted and watched over us from afar.

Vito contested my third goal, sustaining that I had hit the intersection of the goal posts, but I was very stubborn and I didn't want to listen to reason. While we were animatedly discussing, we heard the voices of our mothers calling us. We thought that it was because of the quarrel, so we reassured them that all was fine, but they insisted. We started toward them. My mother had pulled out her camera. She had brought it to take some photos of us, but it was not toward us that the lens was aimed when she started taking them. I asked her for explanations. She called our attention on what surrounded us. When you're six you don't notice some things, you just care about your desire to play. Only then, driven by her words, I acknowledged the desolating spectacle. We had been playing in the middle of an open-air dump. Plastic bottles, glass shards, torn pouches from which garbage and an endless number of cigarette stubs came out, scattered everywhere. Mom cursed against the boys who held parties on the beach in the evening, but she didn't even save the fishermen. Neither they showed any respect for that shore that served as the background of their pastime.

Us children insisted for keeping playing, it seemed unfair to us having to stop for something that wasn't our fault. But our mothers insisted that it was dangerous, because we could cut ourselves with some glass shard, or worse sting us with an infected syringe. Vito and I wondered why ill people went to make themselves injections right on the beach.

Vito raced high and low with open arms, slaloming among the plastic bottles shed here and there. Lina kept telling him to come back to the sidewalk, already with a small bottle of hand-disinfectant gel in hand; but he kept running and touching. He came back toward us waving a coloured cardboard sheet. It was a Scratch&Win card, one of those that promise to improve your life in a few minutes and never actually do that. With the difficult lilt of who is just learning to read, Vito spelled the words written in block letters on the back of the ticket: «Li-te, no, li-ve, live br... br... Mom, how do you read this?»

«Bril, you read it bril», Lina helped him patiently.

«Bril-ian-tly. Live brilliantly, live brilliantly», Vito kept repeating triumphantly, like someone who just succeeded in an extraordinary enterprise.

Back home, my mother wrote an open letter to the citizens to report the state of decline reached. She sent it to the Mayor and to the local newspaper, attaching the photo. It was published. My father hung the clipping of the newspaper in the chemist, in a place where it would be visible to everyone. It contained the hard comments of my mother about a citizenry without dignity and civic sense. In the photo, in the foreground, a conspicuous heap of garbage stood out, behind which, timidly, a strip of sea appeared. On that heap of indecency, Vito and I, smiling, were holding the edges of the Scratch&Win card, with the "Live brilliantly" clearly visible.

That newspaper clipping remained for a long time on the wall of the chemist, just like the garbage in the beach.

#  Chapter 11

This morning we visit the largest masjid of the city.

It's our first time in a mosque. It strikes me for its majesty, the solidity of an imposing volume surmounted by clear domes, laying elegantly on a white square. It is the time of the noon prayer, and from the minaret a recorded voice calls forth the believers, while white cloths lightly wave to inform the most distant ones as well, that the call of the muezzin can't reach. An orderly and silent crowd prepares for the solemnity of the prayer, all set in front of the mirahb, the niche that marks the direction toward the Mecca. Teresa tells me in a low voice that believers are called to prayer five times a day, no less, that they have to follow a precise ritual, and that no good Moslem can back out of such everyday ritual. I find fascinating that the scheduling of the prayer follows the path of the sun, inserting in a natural, almost cosmic rhythm. I think about how tight the relationship between nature and religion is, about the mysterious laws that unavoidably tie the one to the other.

Vito has told me of when the first great mosque was built in Palermo. His words resound in my mind, bouncing among the walls of this sacred place where the air is soaked by the pleasant feeling of beauty. He said wise words, right words.

«I am not bothered at all by the fact that there is a mosque a few steps from a church», he said, «it is beautiful to think that everyone has a place where to go, a place where they can feel at peace with themselves and with others, or where they can find peace, if they lost it. It makes me believe in the idea of freedom. It's an example of it.»

He is right. Everyone has the right to have a gym for the soul. A place where to feed it, where to uplift it together with other people, whatever the place is, provided that it is shared. According to him there are universal values that belong to the deeper human essence. Each religion tries to inscribe them in its own patrimony, marking its belonging, but they belong to humankind, not to this or that creed. It's up to everyone of us to find the place where we will cultivate them, always together with others.

Every time that I visited a church I have done that watching it with the eyes of a tourist or an estimator of art, looking at the architecture, the details, the artistic refinements. Yet today I feel for the first time a different kind of interest. Because, beyond beauty, that is still the first aspect of this place that captures me, my attention is all for those men and those women gathered in prayer, for the strength of the sharing, but also of subordination. There is an extraordinary power in every form of cult, able to upholster obedience in devotion, and however, like Vito says, it is right that everyone has the chance to freely partake of it.

After the mosque, a tour among the ultramodern architectures of which the city is rich awaits us. The big investors indulged themselves in realizing fanciful constructions, pushed to the extreme of experimentalism. Some frankly appear useless to me, but nevertheless interesting to see. The thing I deem more unbelievable than the constructions themselves is the fact that no one thinks about defacing them. I remember buildings and monuments dirtied or damaged immediately after they had been restructured, sign of a deep disrespect, as well as a lack of interest for the patrimony of the city. As Vito said, sanctions and rigid inspections educated the people, but I wonder why we have to reduce ourselves to be tamed by punitive and repressive methods rather than growing in a free culture characterized by conscious respect and care.

Even this morning the world seems to have arranged a meeting here, where people of the most disparate nationalities walk, looking amazed at the grandeur of a progress that almost feels miraculous. And us in the middle of them, losing ourselves among skyscrapers, bright towers, floating museums and artificial islets a few meters from the coast, entirely artificial reconstructions of small floating heavens of the distant oceans.

When we go back to the hotel we are exhausted, but the images of this avant-garde Palermo, like Vito would say, shine in our eyes, illuminating inexpressible emotions.

Giuliana is enraptured. Who knows how many telephone top-up she will use for the daily report to her friends. She fills the elevator with her words, her enthusiastic comments in a convulsive bilingualism of which she is not even aware. She praises the Fantastic Palermo, and her contagious enthusiasm illuminates the faces of the four elderly Germans who are sharing with us the climb to the nineteenth floor. They unwillingly leave us, as if they wanted to make the overflowing emotion that the words of my daughter – although incomprehensible for them – spread in the air, involving the bystanders, to persist. It's a ray of sun in their daily greyness, the freshness of a too distant, unreachable adolescence. But she doesn't know. Teresa listens to her story and nods, adding details to the details. As usual theirs is a perfect agreement of which everyone else is but a spectator. Marco, on the other hand, is hermetic but grants himself small openings of enthusiasm. The day cast over him a controlled good mood, without excesses. I tried to watch him discreetly, knowing well that he can't stand unauthorized intrusions beyond his surrounding walls. He seemed to me unreadable as usual, yet less compressed, less airtight. But there is so much distance between him and me, and my point of observation is still very distant.

Giuliana warns her brother that she will occupy the bathroom for at least a hour.

«I have to take a shower and wash my hair. So you'd better find yourself something to do.»

Marco shrugs, resigning to the long wait without replying. I already know that I will undergo the same fate with Teresa, therefore I propose him to share with me the hours of antechamber that are waiting for us.

«What if we went for a walk, just me and you?»

He looks at me questioningly, certainly surprised by my unusual outburst.

«Sounds like a good idea to me», Teresa urges us, «after all we'll be busy for some time. You know what we'll do? Giuliana and I want to go shopping after lunch, so if you want to sneak off...»

He hesitates.

«Come on», his mother pushes him, «I believe that you would get bored with us».

Marco shrugs. An "OK" mumbled with gritted teeth comes out by a faint crack of his mouth. Unreadable. Maybe it's what he wants, he simply wasn't able to say no.

Teresa looks at me with approval, she stamps us a kiss on the forehead, then disappears behind the door, leaving us alone in the long, silent corridor.

The twenty-five floors down, as fast as the elevator is, seem very long this time. Only a few minutes ago we were in this same place, but in a totally different atmosphere. I miss the loud voice of Giuliana that booms saturating the space, accelerating the time.

We get in the car and depart without a destination. I feel tired and I want to take a shower. But the list of priorities imposes other choices.

«Is it fine if we listen to some music?» I ask him.

«Sure.»

«Where you would like to go?

«I don't know. You decide.»

«OK.»

Side by side, without words, maybe due to the tiredness, or more likely to embarrassment. Lost in the sight of the landscape, we bounce to the other the burden of breaking the silence. When you have been silent too long, where do you start from?

Teresa's reproaches, her admonitory eyes, come back to my mind. "When do you think it will be the right time to start talking with your son?"

For me it never was. I imagined that he should be the one to make a signal to me. But then I was too distracted to notice it every time that it came.

The car goes fast beyond an intersection, leaving behind a semaphore that is turning to red and a queue of cars.

«I would like you to come to a place with me», I say, turning to look for his eyes.

He looks at me in the eyes, he slips beyond, even more inside. But it's a second, no one of us is accustomed, no one is ready.

He looks at his right, toward the sea. I lost him again. Why did I never hug him when I could?

On the radio there is another of those promiscuous voices that the children like so much, not even this time I will ask whether it is a man or a woman.

«Do you want to listen to this song?»

«Fine.»

I raise the volume. I don't like it, but it will entertain us. For some minutes we don't have to make any effort. The voice of the sat-nav enters the music, mixing without false notes in an unintentional and pathetic duet.

Marco fell asleep. His head hangs to the rhythm of the irregularities of the asphalt, in a movement that also seems amalgamated to the music. When he wakes up again we are in a peripheral area.

«Sorry, I dozed off.»

«Never mind. Sleep some more if you want, there is some way to go.»

«Where is it that we're going?»

«Back to Torre.»

Marco closes his eyes; after a few minutes his breath is deep again.

He wakes up while I am parking, his eyes still full of sleep, his hair without order, his green and blue striped shirt glued to his sweaty back. We start without a word. Have we ever walked together, before today?

I feel more embarrassed than at a first date. There are no filters between us, neither his mother nor Giuliana, nor an algebraic equation to be resolved. There's us and our cowardly silences. In a sense I count on his cowardice, hope that he will lack the courage to accuse me, to rub my face in my mistakes.

Is it too late to justify myself, to make up? I know about his life mostly through the stories of my wife. I lived it second-hand, always a few hours or a few days later. I feel that he is expecting something from me now, but I, cowardly, keep walking in silence, hoping that for him it's enough. Coming back here, where I've been a boy his same age, a beloved child, a child who had a father, as well as a mother, makes me feel guilty. I would like to apologize, but I don't know how to do it.

Unexpectedly it is him to break the ice.

«Have you already seen your house?»

«Yes, I have seen it. It is a little different, but recognizable.»

«What effect did it have on you?»

«It's strange, you know. In all these years I thought about it so many times, yet, now that I'm here, I feel a great distance. It doesn't have on me the effect I imagined.»

«That is, you don't care?»

«That's not what I mean. Perhaps I spent so much time trying to forget my past life in this place, that I ended up freezing emotions.»

«I thought you had a good life in Torre.»

«Maybe that's exactly why, when I left, I tried to turn the page.»

«Not to feel nostalgia?»

«I believe so. I loved this place so much, in spite of its contradictions, in spite of the so many wrong things that were there. I was only a little boy and this was my home. I lived a happy life here, yet I felt the need to deny that it had been so.»

«And this made you feel better? I mean, is denying enough?»

«It was what I believed before setting foot again in Palermo.»

Marco's face darkens.

«But, you said it, this is no longer the world in which you grew up, you are a stranger now, it doesn't belong to you anymore.»

«Sure, I live well in Paris, but it was stupid to try and deny this part of my life. It's like trying to delete a piece of myself. It's wrong.»

«But doing that prevented you from feeling bad all this time.»

«Because I had a goal to reach, and at that time it had priority over everything.»

I would like to tell him not to freeze his passion for diving for fear of suffering.

To our left, the cries of a group of girls capture Marco's attention. Beyond the hedges surrounding the garden of a luxurious villa, a slender little boy, standing on the tip of a springboard, enjoys the cheers of his friends on the edge of the swimming pool, who are inciting him to execute a dive. Even though we don't understand their words, the situation is clear enough. The girls clap their hands, he shows ribs and little muscles while the other boys, a little aside, are waiting for their turn for exhibiting.

Marco shakes his head and walks on, right when the guy disappears in the water in the applauses and laughter of his friends.

«Idiots», he comments between clenched teeth.

«You should show them what a dive is!»

«I am not an exhibitionist, Dad.»

«You want to make me believe that you never dived only to make a girl admire you?»

«You do your job to exhibit, Dad?»

I had been wondering how much time it would take before he launched the first attack. It finally arrived.

«I only wanted to say that...»

«That you can exploit what you can do to show off. I know that you think like this.»

«What do you mean?»

We cross the road, we enter a pedestrian alley where shops for tourist follow one another, alternating with cafes and restaurants. Marco stops in front of the shop windows, but it's as if his eyes don't stop on anything of what is in front of him. I simply believe he's trying to distance them from mine. I insist on the question.

«What does it mean that I think like this?»

«I was just saying for the sake of it. Why you take it so wrong, Dad?»

«Because I believe that you meant to tell me more than that, so do it without beating about the bush.»

«Can we drink something? I am dying of thirst.»

We stop at the first cafe. In front of a fresh coke and a red cocktail we keep moving embarrassedly around our minefield. We are sitting on two metal stools in front of the counter. The irregularities of the floor make the stool unstable under the weight of my body.

«You believe that in life you must become someone, because otherwise it is as if you never existed.»

He turns the glass around in his hands while he is pronouncing these words, he never looks up once.

«We were just talking about a dive, Marco, that's all, just a dive.»

«Yes, but I know how you think. You believe that I was wrong leaving competitions, because I lost my occasion to become someone... and you... you have lost yours to say that you have a son who wins medals.»

«But what are you saying?»

Arms folded around his stomach, eyes pointed anywhere except on me, Marco tries in any way to increase the distance between us.

«I'm saying that you love to be a protagonist. And you think that us too, being your children, must reason like that. With Giuliana you partly succeeded, because she is an ambitious person and she wants to gratify you. Instead I am a disappointment, because I abandoned the sport that, probably, was the only thing in which I could have been able to rise from the ranks. That's why you hold it against me.»

Now it's my turn to turn the glass in my hands while I am attacking the salted biscuits one after another.

«But I don't hold anything against you. Why do you think so?»

«Maybe you expected me to want to follow in your footsteps and study medicine. But I'm not interested in it, and I don't believe that I will ever be. This what disappoints you.»

«Everyone has his road, Marco.»

«This is right for everyone else, Dad, but not for the children of doctor Manfredi, who is in turn son of a doctor. For us the road is already decided.»

«I demanded none of this.»

«There are so many ways to convey some messages, also without expressly telling them, Dad. You never had time for me, but you found the way to make me understand that I must not disappoint you.»

«And isn't it what all parents want from their children?»

«Sure. A son must not disappoint his father, but the contrary is not true as well, is it?»

His eyes are hard and impenetrable. It's a mask of ancient hate, patiently preserved, and at the same time of satisfaction, because he knows that he succeeded in hitting my self-respect, rubbing my face in my faults as a father.

«I have been a son too, before being a father. An inadequate father. Oh, and I was skilled too in making my parents feel guilty for some fault. I tried to say or do something that would provoke in them that same sense of disappointment that they had elicited in me.»

I let the words float for some instant between us before continuing.

«When someone makes you feel bad, hurting them in turn is the way to return your suffering to them. But it's not a true consolation, especially when you need closeness, not to create further distance. I have been wrong with you, Marco, I admit it. I have made so many mistakes in the most important relationships of my life. I haven't given you enough, but I never taught you to be an exhibitionist, neither I think I am one. Hurt me if it makes you feel better, but do it for the mistakes I really made.»

Marco's face is all red. From the pocket of his blue Bermuda shorts, he pulls out a pair of sunglasses. Another barrier between us, but I understand him, we are too unprotected, too vulnerable now.

Trying to keep in check his voice, broken by the emotion, he tells me, «I spent so much time being angry with you, envying my friends who have normal fathers, who spend some time together with them. You didn't exist for me. I felt like an orphan, Dad.»

He keeps his fists clenched on his thighs. I don't know if he is angrier because of my behaviour or for the fact that he let out so much emotion. He is as proud as me, he doesn't love to show his vulnerability.

I would like to jump down from the unsteady stool and hug my son, get emotional with him, postponing to another time the rationality of words. But we are in a cafe, he is fifteen years old, I am almost fifty, and it is not so that it works between us. It would only be an embarrassing sentimentalism. The time for actions like this is long gone. So I take my wallet, I calmly pull out a banknote, I leave it on the table and I stand up.

«Let's go.»

He follows me. We hide in the crowd, one next to the other, busy making our way among people in a narrower and more crowded part of the alley, sheltered one from the other. The cries of three little boys running after one another cover the gasping breath of my son, full of emotion and anger. While the crowd hides me, I try to rearrange my thoughts, to insert them in the correct words.

«I lived all my life studying and working. It's my passion, but now I start thinking that it was also a hideaway. I sheltered there, I still do. But in these last days, away from the life that I built myself in all these years, it seems to me that I can see things from another perspective. I am trying to call myself into question... I would like to make up for many mistakes, but for some it's too late... I won't have a second chance. For others, instead, there is still a chance. I hope to have one with you too.»

«...»

«I am happy of the time we are spending together. Even though I gave you but a little, you felt like giving your time to me, coming to this trip. I haven't deserved it. I would have liked to be a father like mine, but I haven't been able to. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry... I haven't been up to my father.»

Marco's breath becomes more regular. He has a sanguine complexion. but there is less tension on his face. He sniffles two or three times, rubs his nose with the back of his right hand, then clears his throat.

«I'm not so sure anymore of what I said before, you know.»

«...»

I look at him with an interrogative expression, waiting for him to explain.

«Do you remember the evening when they run over that boy?»

I nod. The bloodied and petrified face of Hussuf peers out between us.

«I felt so stupid. I always thought that your main goal was showing off at every occasion. Even in the airplane, you immediately jumped up when they were looking for a doctor on board. It seemed to me that you were taking advantage of yet one more occasion to make everybody know who you are and how good you are. But when I saw that boy on the ground... I mean, I was paralyzed by fear, I didn't know what to do. My brain squirted out of my head, I completely lost control. You, instead, were there, clear headed, and you knew how to act to help him, not to show yourself off. You didn't hesitate to touch him, dirty, full of blood... I saw how he looked at you. He was terrorized, but he trusted you. As if he understood you at first sight, while I, your son, haven't understood anything. Maybe I judged you too hurriedly.»

I stop, I look for his eyes behind the dark lenses.

«With him I was a physician, Marco, and that's what I do better. With you I would have had to do more. If till now you saw in me a cynic exhibitionist, it means I gave you some reason to.»

I no longer find anger in his eyes, but a depth regret, the same that he is reading in me now. We look at each other again, and this time we do that without masks, with bare faces, and what we see is the desolation of failure, because whatever will happen from now on cannot fill what already went lost.

We start walking again. My house is a few meters from here. Words shortened the distance between us, but the open crack let down an avalanche. It is never pleasant to admit one's own mistakes. There would be thousand more things to say, situations to analyze, but not everything at once. So it is me to change subject.

«Here we are. This is Piazza Vittoria, and that is my house, the crib of my happy childhood.»

I tell him anecdotes of my life within those walls, episodes in which perhaps I describe myself more awkward and clumsy than I really was. But to hell the too heavy image of a model individual since childhood. We laugh like father and son, in a great agreement, sheltering from the hits we blew just a few minutes ago. We sit on a bench and from there we look at the square, almost empty at three p.m..

«What about a sandwich? We haven't even eaten.»

«Fine. I have a bit of an headache.»

He looks at me.

«So do I. But we will be better soon.»

I smile and I pat his naked thigh. It is the maximum of intimacy remaining to a would-be father with a son who is by now a teenager.

«Wait here.»

I slip in the cafe in front of my old house. A girl takes my order and disappears behind the counter.

After a few minutes I go back to Marco with two grilled sandwiches, a coke and a bottle of fresh water. Marco greedily bites his sandwich, a bit after another like a dog with a bone. With his mouth full, he looks up at the terrace of my old house, where the younger of the two women I had already seen is peering out. Her raven-black hair gathered in a chignon, a sleeveless shirt, naked arms folded up with the elbows laying on the windowsill, her head in her hands in a dreamy expression.

Marco looks at her for a long time. He swallows the last bit of bread, then gulps down a long sip of coke from the can. A convulsive gobble accompanies the drink along his oesophagus.

«She looks like granny.»

I nod.

«Do you ever think about her?»

«Sure. And you?»

«I no longer remember her well, you know. At times I try to focus on her face, but I can't. It's the face in photos, not a real memory, to me.»

«She loved you. She would have been a happy grandmother.»

«I remember a thing, about her, you know? It's a vague memory. She's at our house, handing me a gift, but I don't see her face. I open the package and inside there is a radio-controlled red car. It's still in my room, Mom told me that it was granny to give it to me, the last time she visited us, before the illness...»

«Yes, I remember that too.»

#  Chapter 12

«You were away quite a lot! How was it?» Teresa welcomes me when I get back to the room.

Giuliana and her are in front of the mirror. Teresa, with a brush, is trying to straighten some of the locks of our daughter. I like to find our features on the happy face of Giuliana.

«Dad, tell us everything. Did you talk or did you act like mummies?»

«In the beginning, indeed, we were tense, then we loosened up a bit.»

«And then?»

«And then what?», they both seem on a string.

«Did you clear things up?»

«It was a beginning.»

«I understand», Giuliana says, turning to her mother, «they must have grunted three or four times, and he calls this "talking." Practically they didn't say anything».

Teresa nods and looks at me with a reproachful expression.

«Hey, what do you want? Do you think that with a few minutes talk everything can be fixed? I wish it were so simple.»

They look in each other's eyes and start laughing. «Between me and Mom it works exactly like that. OK, see you later.»

Giuliana leaves the room under the pleased eyes of her mother.

«So», Teresa insists, «what did he tell you?»

Now her tone is more serious.

«My son always considered me an egotist sick of success, so engrossed by himself as to using the illness of others as a mean to reach notoriety.»

While I am speaking I join my wife in front of the mirror. I look at my reflection. Generally I only do that to shave, a mechanical operation in which I look at my skin, rubbing it with my fingertips to verify the accuracy of the shave. Details prevail, the overall image has a minor importance. But now I am looking at myself, not my chin, not my profile, just me. I scrutinize myself, I question myself. I look for the identikit of the man described by my son. I see the cheeks, slightly dug, two thick grizzled strips – once dark like my hair – above my small black eyes. My face surprises me. It's pleasant without excesses, as usual, but greyed like a plant that rarely saw sunlight. Teresa, who looks at me every day and knows me more than I do, anticipates me. Her hand slips slowly down from my cheekbone to the hollow of the cheek, then carefully caresses my neatly shaved chin. She looks at me in the eyes and beyond, she slips inside me as only she can, leaving me completely unarmed and without hideaways. And there she reads my discouragement, my sense of guilt for a belated awareness of the so many mistakes I made.

«Paolo, listen to me. Marco is a teenager who is living a difficult period. For a boy his dad is an important reference point. He always considered you a perfect man, but an absent father. Telling you unpleasant things is his way to make you pay for this absence, but I believe that he doesn't judge you as severely as he wants you to believe. He always felt a great admiration for you, but he is angered because he can never have a part of your time for him.»

«Maybe he sees better than you and me.»

«You are not at all that kind of person, and you know it well. Being a physician is what you have believed in for all your life. He doesn't know about the sacrifices you have made. He sees things from the perspective of a child, who is naturally partial, and also a little selfish. Perhaps it's time that you say something more about you, to help him understand.»

I crawl under the shower. I open the cold water and I stay under it, freezing myself. I will finally cancel the traces of a long warm day.

The air doesn't cool down even after sunset. The absence of the sun leaves in us the vain hope that the temperature is lower, but the skin drenched in dampness and sweat returns us the certainty that we will still have to wait for the coolness. For dinner we choose a bakery in the historical centre, where they serve sandwiches and cold dishes. We are all tired enough by the long march of today, and we just want a fast meal and a bed in which to crash. None of us imagines that this will be a special evening. We sit at a table outside; a small room refreshed by air-conditioners isn't worth a third of an enchanting sight on the quiet evening of Palermo alleys.

A man draws near to distribute the menus. I absently take one of them and immediately start reading, but in an amazing day like the one that is going to end, something more had to happen.

I explain my children that you can't leave Palermo before eating at least once a sandwich with panelle and crocchè. They make sort of a stand, which prompts even the waiter to intervene. At which I look up and I see him.

«Antonio Palazzolo?» the words come out by themselves from my mouth before my thought puts them together.

He looks at me for a second, as if looking for something, then his face widens in an expression of cheerful incredulity.

«Paolo Manfredi? I can't believe it! Where are you cropping out of, my friend?»

As I am standing up to greet him, he pulls me to him with a hold that almost breaks me in two.

Keeping shaking his head, he tells me, «The last news I had on you said you were in America, then I knew nothing else.»

«Those are many-year-old news. After the specialization I returned to Europe. I have been living for a long time in Paris with my family.»

I make introductions and explain Teresa and the children that Antonio was the son of some of my parent's friends. We spent many evenings together, having a good time until late at night while the adults chatted or played cards. His family too had left Torre to move to Spain, where they had some relatives.

«You work here now?» I ask him.

Antonio takes a chair from the next table and sits down between me and Giuliana. Then he begins telling his story.

«I am the owner of this place. Actually we lived in Madrid a short while. The sister of my mother had remained here in Tower; she suffered a lot for this forced separation. My father, you know, was attached to his roots too, and he couldn't come to terms with what had happened. After the dismay of the first five years, comforting news started to arrive from Sicily about the intentions of the new "owners", so to speak. So we returned and tried to start anew. My parents, in time, were even able to repurchase their old house and they have been living there for some years. They will be happy when I tell them that I saw you again. Tell me of your parents. How is our pharmacist?»

My eyes immediately allow him to understand that my parents didn't have the same happy ending. I briefly tell him of the painful ordeal that brought away first my mother, ten years ago, then my father, shortly afterward.

«How did they live away from here?»

«They felt a lot of nostalgia, especially my mother.»

«But why haven't you come back, at least them?» my long-time friend asks me.

«I think that they didn't for me. They would not have been able to pay for my studies if they had stayed here, with the uncertain situation that was arising in Sicily. And also my father didn't accept the fact that Italy had betrayed us, and he hoped that at least I could set roots somewhere else. He regretted it when the tumour was diagnosed to my mother. He felt guilty for all the suffering she had brooded inside, as if that illness were the tangible aspect of it. He died seven years ago. After the death of my mother he seemed to lose the desire to carry on.»

Antonio shrugs. He has the same ruddy complexion he had when he was twelve, and the same imposing obesity with which he dominated me when we wrestled.

«Obviously you will be my guests tonight. I'll immediately have some of our specialties prepared for you.»

Then, turning to the children, «Because, as your father says, you cannot leave Palermo without knowing the taste of the panelle. But if you won't like them, you can always ask for the classic grilled sandwiches.»

He doesn't let me time to add anything and goes back inside the bakery to give directives.

«Dad, is it true that those who prepare them spit in the oil to see if it is hot, before frying them?» Giuliana asks me in a low, disgusted tone.

«Who told you?»

«Vito, when we were in Mondello.»

«Once we said so of the peddlers who fried them in the street, in the three-wheeled lambretta, in front of schools or along the shore. There was a big cauldron full of oil, so exhausted as to be black, where panelle fried instantly. And there was people who said that, in order to check the temperature of the oil, they did what Vito explained you.»

«Legends Giuliana, just legends», Teresa laughs, «and by now you don't see the lambrette of the panellari anymore. They were forbidden because they were not decent and they didn't guarantee the respect of hygienic regulations. You no longer eat panelle in the streets like once. A pity, because it was a very characteristic thing and they had a special taste», my wife adds with a sigh, «we often ate them as half-morning snacks at school, although they were not the healthiest thing».

«But it was a disgusting thing», my daughter insists.

«Boiling oil disinfects everything, don't be afraid», I laugh too.

«Dad, you are not witty.»

From that moment, everything that follows is a lot of pleasant things. The table fills of appetizers that we devour quickly. There is a pleasantly relaxed atmosphere. I would say party-like. Antonio sits at our table with a jug of cold beer, trickling on stories and memories of our past life. Marco and Giuliana are enticed by the histories of when we were teenagers. They have a good time finding out that I was embarrassed with girls and not really adept at physically confronting my peers. Marco, in particular, seems almost encouraged by my imperfections. Teresa smiles. Often she leaves her left hand on my arm, sometimes on my thigh, I feel her close. Drops of complicity that allowed us to survive as a couple all this time.

The table is soon filled of much more food than we will be able to eat. When the sandwiches stuffed of steamy panelle arrive on the table, I open one of them and spray it with lemon juice and salt. Tasting it, I feel drawn back by thirty-five years, buying an identical one from the peddler who stood every day in front of the school in his battered lambretta. I fear that even tonight I won't sleep serenely, but maybe this time it won't be because of ill thoughts, but for the struggle that will take place in my stomach.

Without us realizing it, it's midnight. Teresa is the first to realize and to exclaim, «Happy birthday, doctor!»

The children follow in her wake.

Antonio asks me, «How old are you?»

«More than I would like. I just left the club of the forty and joined that of the fifty.»

«Welcome then. You get used to it, don't worry. And it's not even that bad. But they must be celebrated properly.»

He goes inside and comes out after a short while with a bottle in his hands.

«I am sorry it, this is not the champagne kind of place, however I have a bottle of passito of Pantelleria. We will toast with this.»

A bony and pale boy brings us five glasses. Antonio uncorks the bottle and pours the wine while my family applauds and sing the happy birthday tune. The few people still at nearby tables raise their glasses and hint a smile at me. Giuliana throws herself at my neck with a "I love You, Daddy." Marco squeezes my shoulder with one hand and simply says "happy birthday." It's OK. It's still something.

And so, with kisses and toasts, I officially become a fifty-year-old man.

#  Chapter 13

When I wake up, Teresa is not in the room. On the pillow, in her place, a note. Her and the children are in the restaurant hall, having breakfast. She proposes to spend the morning at the beach. From the large glass wall of the living room, the sun invades, illuminating the clear furniture and the dust that fluctuates lightly. In the sea, several boats become smaller on the horizon, leaving foamy wakes that dissolve slowly. On the bridge that goes from the second floor of the hotel to the beach there is a great ferment of little dots marching toward the sea.

In front of the bathroom mirror, a face scrutinizes me with great attention. A face that I know by heart, in its usual unnatural expression of observations from the mirror. It's a face with which I work, eat, sleep, quarrel, reassure, which has a different shade for each of these actions, yet in the mirror there is always and only this suspended expression, without inclinations, without determination. I try to hop and run on the spot for a few minutes, the parquet fluctuates under my bony feet. My breath is that of a fifty-year-old man who never competed against his body. Less than ten minutes and the athletic man parenthesis is closed. Through the glass I examine the sun, already high. The air-conditioning of the room doesn't allow me to assess the external temperature. I look at my inactive hands of surgeon on vacation. My fingers drum on the windowsill, pacing the slowness of these hours, and I bask in the idea to laze around for the whole day, as I haven't done in a while. But I am certain that I won't be granted that.

When I reach the lunch room, they are still there. Teresa is on the phone, she is talking to someone about a meeting at noon at the tourist dock. I turn an interrogative look to the children, but they gesture for me to wait for her.

When Teresa ends the conversation, she welcomes me with the first of the "happy birthdays" of a day that promises to be a long celebration.

«Yesterday afternoon I took this leaflet in the hotel hall. It's about a boat trip to Little Palm Island. I wanted it to be a surprise, so I phoned to book. They wait for us at noon.»

She hands me the leaflet. Little Palm Island is a totally artificial island built at little distance from the coast. It is a scrub of thick vegetation in the middle of the sea, that offers deluxe relax on beaches with a very thin white sand, artificial as well. Another taste of fictitious exoticism in this auctioned portion of the world. As boys we played Monopoly, where you buy and sell plots, build houses, then demolish them and replace them with deluxe hotels. I wasn't a great strategist, so I always ended up accumulating debts, mortgaging and losing. At some point we became ourselves one of those playing cards, a plot to be purchased for a good price. And, like in the game, since we didn't belong to anybody we have been auctioned. Come on, make an offer gentlemen!

I point to Teresa the price of the trip, printed on the bottom of the leaflet. She smiles and tells me that today is a special day, and it must be celebrated in the most beautiful way, without minding expenses. I insist to know if only I consider it excessive.

«I would never imagine that even in Palermo we could come to pay astronomic figures for anything. It is too much!»

I believe I pronounced these words quite loudly, because I feel eyes and ears around me capturing me in their curiosity. I instinctively lower my head, as if this were enough to escape attention. Teresa reminds me that we are in a tourist heaven for rich people only, and that the same figures never impressed me anywhere else.

My phone rings. "Anna M." Is flashing on the display.

«Hey, happy birthday, doctor. By now it's official.»

«Thanks», I tell her, becoming aware that my face will be rubbed for the whole day in the fact that now I am fifty years old.

«The meeting is at eight o'clock», she continues, «there will be everyone except Matteo Messina. The conditions of his mother have gotten worse, it seems. She was discharged from the hospital two days ago, but the situation is critical. He and his sister watch over her together every evening».

There is a silent pause before Anna starts speaking again. In that pause I think about Matteo, a rebellious teenager who smoked joints, paid for sex, got drunk every Saturday evening and at times didn't go back home, leaving his mother in the deepest dismay, praying for her son to return, badly off but alive. A picture that strongly overlaps that of the sober seller of musical instruments, father of two children, faithful husband, that, according to Anna, he has become in the last ten years.

«I'm sorry that he won't be with us. I will pay him a visit as soon as possible», she restarts with a sigh, then her low tone dissolves, replaced by a feverish organizational mania, «However I was calling you for another reason. Tonight I couldn't sleep. I felt that something was still missing for this so special occasion in which we will be all together again to be perfect. Then an idea came to my mind. We need a theme for the evening.»

Life tries people. It changes some of them completely, for better or for worse, depending on the way in which events mix with their predispositions. Others it doesn't even brush, just stressing more their features. While probably Matteo belongs to the first category, Anna is for sure part of the second. After thirty years, she is still the same class leader she was once, a volcanic and determined planner. So, it seems, besides my birthday and the reunion of old schoolmates, according to our friend the evening needs a theme.

«What do you think of something like... nostalgia?»

«I believe it's implied in a reunion of more-than-mature high school students, isn't it?»

«Yes, but I would like it to be more explicit... I mean... that every one of us tried to express it as he pleases.»

«And what should we do?» I ask her, sipping a good ristretto.

This morning the lunch room is more crowded. The weekend favours the flow of new groups of tourists.

«Easy, all it takes is bringing something concerning the theme, anything. A photo, a memory of the past, a song, a poetry. Everything is allowed, provided that it speaks of nostalgia.»

She pronounces the last word with such an emphasis that it makes even her laugh. I imagine her with her face stretched, looking at the ceiling, a raised eyebrow, with a mature woman frown and a self-assurance quite different from the embarrassed shyness of when she was seventeen years old. Teresa laughs, amused by my expression that is a mixture of perplexity and disgust.

«And if I don't think about anything? Also because where am I supposed to find a photo or some old heirloom now, a thousand kilometres from my house?» I hazard.

«You pay supper for everyone... but consider that we will be quite a lot.»

«Can I offer you a sandwich?!»

«Sorry, I already booked the restaurant, and I assure you that it's not a cheap sandwich store.»

«I imagine that you still have to inform the others. Let's see what they think of it.»

«Sorry again, I already sent an SMS to everybody, and I only received positive answers. Therefore, doctor, start to rack your brain. See you tomorrow.»

Without allowing me to reply, she ends the conversation.

Teresa finds the idea more amusing than it is to me. I would have been surprised otherwise.

We join the procession of ants moving toward the beach. It is a catwalk of multicoloured sarongs, of caps with rigid visors, fashionable sunglasses, cloth bags and rubber flip-flops. Under us, cars dart in the two opposite directions.

Giuliana counts the white hairs on my head.

«One, two, three, one hundred, one hundred and thirty, two hundred and fifty, three hundred and six. They almost doubled in just one night, Dad. But fear not, you are always charming. Middle-aged men have other weapons than comeliness. You could talk about the nostalgia of when your hair was all dark.»

And between a wink and an affectionate shove with her shoulder, my daughter drags me to the beach to plunge in a clear and calm sea.

Punctual, at noon we are on the dock of the small tourist port where the Elios – the boat that offers the trip to Little Palm Island and a lunch of local fish below deck – is moored. We get in methodically. A crew member, on top of the ladder, helps the ladies, repeatedly offering his hand with a respectful gesture. In a few minutes the deck is full of excited tourists looking around to admire the gilded reflexes of the sun rays on the crystal-clear surface of the sea. We gradually get used to the fluctuating surface under our feet. Marco holds to the parapet and makes grimaces of disgust that make Giuliana laugh.

«I hate sea sickness», he comments, laconically.

«Breathe deeply, and if the nausea worsens try to chew something solid, but avoid to drink», his mother suggests, passing one hand in his hair, tussled by a weak wind.

He always accepts docilely the contact with his mother, he's not a finicky teenager with her.

A few minutes of wait and the Elios makes route toward the small island.

The trip in the sea is worth a lot more than the price we paid, and not only because we will visit the artificial islet to discover its wonder, neither only because the sea floor is splendid, the sea crystal-clear, the sun warm just right. I smell saltiness, that scent I don't happen to smell often. I see the coast become more distant, the old and new buildings in Palermo, the tall masts of the sailing boats in the tourist dock.

I think about Paris, a city right for me, for my need of order, of classical, of centrality. I know it very well. I like to dine in the Latin district, to sip an espresso in a literary cafe, to look at the paintings of the street painters in MonMartre. After Torre, it is the place in which I lived for the longest part of my life. I feel it familiar. But a few days in Palermo have been enough to remember the meaning of the word belonging. I am looking for those roots sunk in the sand and cut so long ago. The wind whips my face, compresses my hair on my wrinkled forehead, on my half-shut eyes. The other passengers go below deck, from where they will admire the landscape, sheltered against the wind. Only a few stay unprotected. I squeeze in my blue jacket, I put on my anthracite-grey sunglasses. I enjoy the return from the long exile. In my ears, Anna's words about nostalgia.

I think about what my mother must have felt in the long years of exile. Even though we lived in splendid cities, places where a lot of people would like to spend their lives, she was enveloped in a thin veil of melancholy. Boston offered her beautiful job experiences, she liked Paris a lot, but in each of these cities she lived like a passer-by, waiting for the very desired return to the base. She missed Sundays in Torre, when the square under our house was filled with people at the end of the mass. It was like a picture with multiple copies; same people, same pleasantries, the smell of household kitchen that flooded the alleys, inebriating the passer-bys. That was her world, her people, her very life. To me, then, all of this didn't mean much. I was a young ambitious graduate. Torre was only a cage too narrow for my aspirations, a crib for my golden childhood but nothing more. The upheavals of that years, besides, made every future prospect even more difficult, from my point of view. I couldn't stay.

Seagulls fly low on the sea looking for fish. Their chirps are the voice of nature, together with the hiss of the wind, to the waves that break in the distance. Being part of it in this moment is a state of grace.

The disembarkation at Little Palm Island is accompanied by a happy chatter. Like the leaflet promised, the shore is made of thin white sand, and thin palms stretch up toward the sky. The hiss of the wind is weaker. The group timidly scatters in every direction while the guide gathers on one side those who are interested to a guided tour of the islet.

Even my family divides. Giuliana and Marco join the other children for a free exploration. Teresa and I follow the guide.

But immediately after our young guide – a slender figure with thick round glasses framing large blue eyes – starts to narrate the history of the building of this artificial floating heaven, instinctively, without reasoning too much, I pull Teresa away from an arm, inviting her to sneak discreetly away from the group. She looks at me with an expression of amazed condescension and furtively leaves the orderly line.

«What happens?» she asks me, making a visor with both her hands on her forehead to protect her eyes from the sun.

«Did you really feel like knowing the whole history of this islet? I don't. I would like to find a calm corner and stay there to think together with you. There are so many things on which to reflect, don't you think?»

«For example?»

«Memories, first of all. Memories of the past that resurface one after another. They are loaded of strong and conflicting emotions. They confuse me.»

«Why?»

«They make me call so many things into question.»

«Which things?»

«The choices I made in my life. I am afraid to realize what I become. I have had all that I wanted, but maybe without consideration for the others. I can't stop asking myself whether I have been unfair and selfish.»

Teresa listens silently. She sighs a long sigh; the wind pushes her hair forward, covering her cheeks, violently getting into her mouth. Calmly she takes from her bag a rubber band and gathers her tussled hair, that keeps escaping on every side, then surrender to her tight hold. She sits down, her legs folded up, the points of her feet stretched on the sand, her red enamel speckled by thin grains of sand. I sit close to her, my left side against hers, the reassuring feeling of not being alone.

Often the most beautiful moments are without words, without either subtitles or voice-overs. The simple presence is enough, and every explanation is superfluous. Teresa's head slips on my chest and stays there, abandoned, moving to the constant rhythm of my breathing. Then, as if thinking out loud, she says, «I don't regret any of my choices. Neither you should».

«You don't have anything to reproach to yourself. You have been even too generous with everyone.»

«I have been faithful to myself, just as you have been. Why should the past be really incompatible with the rest? This was your world up to a certain moment of your life. Then there were other roads for you. You didn't deny anything, in my opinion. This was the springboard that cradled you, that made of you a capable and determined individual. There is a lot of this place that you have been bringing with you for a long time, without even realizing.»

Then her head slips again on my chest and stays there, because in this moment she doesn't need anything else. And neither do I.

«Dad, this is our present», Giuliana tells me.

While she is speaking, she hands me a cube wrapped in an elegant golden paper, on which the name of a famous jewellery of Paris is printed. Marco, a few steps behind her, looks at me and hints at a smile. I sit down on the bed, next to Teresa, who is looking at me excitedly. Giuliana takes place next to me, Marco with his mother. I pull a flap of the blue velvet ribbon that ties the package. They are all waiting for my reaction. I remove the golden paper, and finally open the casket, which smells like brand-new leather. It's a wrist watch, the one of a famous advertisement. From up close, it seems a little smaller than on TV, where the shot distorts the sense of proportions.

I look at their faces one by one. They seem to me illuminated by euphoria, and for an instant this strikes me like a fist to the stomach, because once more I don't feel I have deserved this.

«Come here», I just say, allowing myself to sink in their engulfing embrace.

I would like never to resurface from it, to hide a beginning of human weakness. I feel their hold, their breaths, Marco's curls in my neck. He seized me more than everyone else, as if taking advantage of the fray to enjoy that intimate contact without nobody realizing.

«So, what do you think of it?» Teresa asks, coming out first from the fray, reddened and uncombed.

«Sober and elegant, as I like it.»

I wear it and I turn my wrist several times, so they all can admire it. It's since my old watch disappeared at the hospital that I haven't been wearing one.

«This way», Giuliana adds with a warning, «you can count better the passing hours, and maybe you will even be able to find more time for us».

Teresa nods with an eloquent expression.

"But is my presence really so important for you?" I would like to ask, but I know that it is not the right time, that the atmosphere is that of a family party, and that I will have to find the time for explanations in some other occasion.

«I believe you'll cut a great figure tomorrow with your new watch, and not only for that. You are a charming man», Giuliana says. «I wish I could see how many of your old friends are stainless fifty-year-old people like you. Mom, you will have to tell me everything».

«Have I lost anything? Won't you be with us at the dinner?»

«I believed that Mom had already told you. If you don't mind, Marco and I would like to stay at the hotel tomorrow evening. There is a disco. They are organizing an evening for young people.»

«I don't know. I thought you would come with us. It will be a beautiful evening.»

«Surely it will be for you, Dad. But we don't know anyone, and you are all adults, we would certainly get bored there.»

«Actually...» my wife takes her side.

Obviously I can't do anything other than agree. Too many times I missed appointments that were important for them. And Giuliana is right, I don't know what could be tempting for them in finding themselves at the same table of elderly schoolmates like us.

#  Chapter 14

Lina Alessi was the best friend of Antonella Marchese. They had grown up together, just like their children, Vito and I, would do some years later. They were each others' secret diary. For Antonella, only child, after the death of her parents Lina had become more than a long-time friend. She was a real family reference point, because she had little confidence with her relatives, the actual one. They were almost strangers.

The last time I saw her was the day when my family said goodbye to Torre. She was the one who accompanied us to the airport, to nibble on the last crumbs of the company of my mother, who was taking away an important slice of Lina's world, leaving her in a confused and uncertain reality. A reality twisted by the unstoppable exodus of those who couldn't bear to raise a new flag in their native land, rather resigned to cling to other flags, distant from that shameful reality.

A grey sweater, even darker than her pants, her long curly hair gathered in a limp ponytail, and dark lenses to hide her eyes, swollen for the night-time weeping. This is my last memory of her, but it doesn't do her justice. The best picture is that of a wide-shouldered woman, on which to hold up the weight of a difficult familiar reality, capable of wide smiles even in discouragement, sober and dignified in every situation.

In front of the ribbon that acted as division between companions and leaving passengers, surrounded by other stories of separations and tears, they held each other's hands, transmitting all the strength that each of them could offer to the other. One to find the courage to leave, the other to stay.

"Come on, we'll see again soon", they repeated to each other, striving to believe it, both silently conscious that their following meetings, if any, would have the nature of fleeting moments, entirely insufficient to fill the distance.

While I am walking in the quiet roads of Torre, memories resurface effortlessly. The external change of these places doesn't distract me anymore. On the contrary, under the patina of novelty, the tracks of my steps, indelibly engraved in this land in spite of every attempt of forgetting, resurface spontaneously. The continuity of the life in Torre strikes me. Even though on new legs and new faces, even though on young asphalt and fresh plaster, it proceeds with the same relaxed cadence it always had, in a substantial identity without time and without masters. Moving toward the childhood house of Vito is a trip backward in my days. The change of the people worries me more than the architectural variations, that after all are only façades. I am afraid to see the children of the past, now turned into men, and the adults, or even elders. Some I won't even see at all. I try to imagine the old face of Lina, and her older one – new for me – smiling for my wordplay because in reality the old face was young and the new one will be old. I try to guess the bending of her body, the yielding of her skin, the ruined profile. She has had the fortune to see an age that my mother doesn't know. She, sole survivor of that stainless duo.

Teresa is at the sea with our children. She didn't mind that I left them for this visit. She thinks that it does me good to put the pieces of my past together.

I don't know if I am doing this for myself, for my mother, or just out of politeness towards Vito. I just know that suddenly seeing Lina became a necessity, then an urgency. With irrational relief I have learned that she still lives in her old house, two side streets behind mine. An element of continuity in this country where so many things have changed. Vito didn't seem amazed of this initiative of mine. He probably understood my need even better than me. And neither this surprises me.

He is on a tour with a group of tourists. It will take him the whole day, it seems.

«Did you do your homework, doctor?» he asked me at the phone.

«...»

«The theme of the evening, nostalgia, you don't want to pay dinner to everyone, do you?»

«I have a few ideas, maybe... And you?»

«I am prepared. Now I have to leave you, see you later.»

On the background of the short conversation, muttering and giggles of his clients, but above all noises of car horns and traffic. The latter return to me the familiar chaos of my old Palermo, as well as of my Paris and of any large city in the world.

The road enjoys a quiet interrupted only by the chatter of two children running after each other around a small fountain. They are happy, their eyes sparkle with innocent euphoria. One of them suddenly stop in front of the uninterrupted stream of water, and sprinkles it on his friend, who kicks the air as if to sweep away the drops raining on him. Without realizing it, I slow down, I stop to look at them some more. I enjoy their innocent game. The word "nostalgia" rings again in my mind, and the images of when I cheerfully raced in those calm little streets start flowing. Now around the fountain there are Vito, Francesco, Enzo and I, the children of Torre. Images of the past perfectly overlap to the present, immortalizing the same unchanged childhood. The difference is that the two children of today are Arabic, but this is only a detail. Two children like many others in a remarkably improved scenery. A scenery that has become cosmopolitan, with an initial forcing that, after thirty years, has become authentic integration.

I lived in the big cities where the mixture is the norm, nobody notices it. Paris is a metropolis for everyone, but nobody is allowed to take it from its legitimate owners. It is still Paris, it is still France. The same happened here. It's no longer Italy, that's true, but it is still Sicily. It will always be. And the more the days go by, the more I get its meaning and accept it, even though with the regret of having to call it Siqillya now.

Lina's house is like I remember it, a low structure with a small courtyard in front, remarkably improved, like everything else. Here too the intense blue of the shutters strongly stands out on the white plaster of the perimeter wall, a brushstroke of sky in an expanse of clouds. Behind an open window, I see the silhouette of an elderly woman who invites me to go in. The door is ajar. I enter with cautious respect, tiptoeing not to invade the space with my unusual presence. The air is dense of heat and dust, the environment looks bigger than I remember, but perhaps is the scarce presence of furniture that alters my memory of its size. From the open window, a light wind gently parts the white flax curtain. Sunk in a blue-and-green velvet armchair, right next to the window, there is the aged copy of Lina. Her shoulders are bent, her bust slightly tilted forward, her skin feeble on her bare arms, the features of her face collapsed unmercifully on themselves. Yet her smile is the same, as well as the fold of her mouth that curls up on one side to smile at me. She reaches out with both arms toward me, and I approach her to welcome her in mine, to stop with my hold her light but incessant trembling.

«Paoletto», she repeats, enchanted. Her hands go along my arms up to my face, tracing its contours.

Time wasn't generous with Lina, but she tries to face it proudly. She's wearing a dress of thin black jersey, going down to her feet held in comfortable Scottish slippers. A long amber necklace and an elegant touch of red on her well-cared fingernails give her the appearance of a noblewoman, like the thin grey hair gathered on her nape. A smile widens her shrunken face, her eyes are hidden behind thick and dark eyeglasses that make them infinitely small.

«When Vito informed me of your visit, I got up to open the door... we old decrepit people have rather slow paces.»

She smiles.

«Don't say that, madam», I say, hoping to pronounce those words without letting even a crumb of the sadness I am feeling slip out.

«Some time passed, and I am an old lady, but you can still call me by first name, Paolo. I am still Lina for you, if it pleases you.»

«It makes me happy. And I find you well.»

I hug her sad trembling husk, that smells of old age, of deodorant for clothes and of nostalgia.

«I feel well enough after all, in spite of that», she points at an oxygen tank under the window; the small tube with the nozzle hangs from the back of the armchair, «by now my lungs can't make it on their own. But it compensates.»

She pauses to breath, then goes on.

«You haven't changed at all, you had the face of a good boy, who wanted to conquer a beautiful slice of the world. Now you have the face of a man who perfectly succeeded.»

Next to her there is a lopsided chair with a rather threadbare upholstery. I try to sit there.

«No, not here. Take one from the parlour. This one is just to rest my feet by now.»

I walk the room by memory. Once this was my second house. The dark flowery wallpaper has been replaced by white plaster that confers more brightness to the environment. I recognize a dull-coloured still-life hung in the centre of an ancient mahogany chest of drawers, on which, in plain sight, smiling faces of children unknown to me talk about the life that moved on even in this house. Nearby and behind the photos, stacks of medicine boxes and an aerosol device. There is a shopping list written in an unlikely handwriting and with some gross mistakes. I suppose that someone regularly takes care of Lina, judging from the general sense of tidiness and cleanliness. I go to the parlour in which Vito and I used to study, distracted by the smell of homemade food prepared for our afternoon snack. Everything is perfectly tidy, but on the table there are the leftovers from lunch. Lina's voice reaches me from the other room to apologize for that.

«Selva will be here in one hour.»

Selva is the Peruvian woman who takes care of her, she tells me when I go back to the living room.

She shows me the exact point where to place the chair, so that she can see me well without losing the hold of my hand.

«You have some beautiful surgeon hands. They infuse confidence». She inspects them with her trembling fingers, moving them back and forth on my palms. «I have undergone surgery twice and I would always have liked to touch the hands of the doctor. There is charisma in the hands of a surgeon; it is a mystery for the sick, a strong charm.»

I look at my hands under hers, trying to see them with her eyes, looking for that mystery. I see smooth palms, well-cared fingernails and nothing more, but Lina's eyes seem to have found what they were looking for.

«I know that you are well-known in your field. I never doubted that you would make it, because you have always been intelligent and very determined.»

Then, as if she knew what I hope to ear her say, she adds, «You did very well when you left.»

Perhaps it's the first person since I arrived that doesn't reproach me for having left.

«Tell me everything, please. Talk to me about your children.»

I tell her of my children and of Teresa, she makes my words alive with her facial mimicry. The chain of her glasses waves to the rhythm of her movements. She widens her eyes, she nods, her lips mimic the movements of mine, as if to give strength to my words.

She asks me if I am happy. I smile.

«You know, it's unbelievable. When I arrived, some days ago, I believed I felt a sense of extraneousness from everything and everybody. But coming into contact with the people I knew, walking again the places of once, it seemed to me as if my life in Torre were a sort of paused recording, restarted from the exact point of the last interruption. I felt it with Vito, now I feel it with you. I know I can tell you naturally things that I wouldn't tell to people I associated with much more in the last thirty years.»

She smiles, and she nods also.

«To answer your question», I start talking again, «I feel very satisfied. I have the job that I love, I reached important goals... besides, I have a wonderful family. I don't know if this is happiness or only safety. What I know is that it is a precarious condition, that often leaves room to a great restlessness».

«We all have some disturbances, life is not easy for anyone.»

«I know. I had so many ambitions and I fulfilled them, but at times mistakes weigh on me more than successes. I think I was selfish.»

«You believed in yourself, this is not wrong. I, too, at some point of my life worried more about myself and... today I live better.»

«...»

«It seems strange to you that I say so, because I am an old lady suspended to an oxygen tank, but I assure you that before I lacked air much more than I do now.»

It was not a mystery that Lina's life had not been easy since when her husband had sunk into a serious form of depression. He was a fragile man, so thin that it took little to break him. But what had shattered his existence hadn't been little.

Santo managed a small commercial activity, created with a few savings and a lot of efforts. Working on his own was the dream he had been cultivating since he was a boy, when, orphaned, he had had to endure an humiliating life, earning little money working for shady people. But then he had inherited the warehouse of an uncle without either children or other relatives, and that had become the place where to make his dream come true. But in certain realities, you brusquely awake from dreams. You go to bed after a long day of work, and when you get up everything you had has literally went up in smoke because you didn't accept to pay protection... because you finally wanted to feel free.

Santo never rose again from the ashes of his shop, and with his natural fragility he became the shadow of a man, crushed by a devastating sense of impotence, disheartened about the possibility to start anew.

He shut himself in his house, sinking into depression, and he pulled down with him those who surrounded him as well. With his greyness he made his wife fade. With his torpor he fed the anger of his son, who couldn't stand that shrunken and incapable father.

«Did Vito tell you the rest?»

«Something, he has been always of few words when it came to his father.»

«It's not his fault, it's not easy for a boy to grow with such a mortifying image of his father. He saw the other boys, especially you, and he felt humiliated to the point that he hated him with all his might. Now he's a man who thinks that life must always be faced head on, without discounts, without wide turns.»

«This is why he criticises so much all those who emigrated from Sicily. He considers us cowards because we chose the easiest way. But it's not been easy even for us.»

«I know, and I believe he knows too. But he needs to feel heroic for having fought for our civil and cultural survival. This is his ransom from the cowardice of his father, and gives him the certainty to be different from Santo.»

She breaths deeply with her eyes closed. When she opens them again, I ask her whether she needs oxygen, but she declines with a sharp gesture of her hand.

«As for you», she starts again, «you have no reason to nurture any regret. Each of us has only one life, Paolo... there's no second chance to get even. We gamble all we have in the time we are granted. I loved my husband, but the illness turned him into another man, a man with whom I didn't fulfil the life I desired. Depression brought his life away, and a large part of mine too. Nobody will give back to me the years I sacrificed for him. I haven't been so selfish as to desert him, but when he died I didn't shed a tear, because I had already used them all. At that point, however, I didn't want to waste any more precious time. I immediately did all I could to take back what I deserved, my last chance to think about myself and find again the pleasantries of normality... cinema, trips, new friends. I even had a new affair, short-lived but marvellous.»

Her words are warm and full of passion, they seem spoken by a young woman at the first stages of her adult life.

«They spoke badly of me for this, but I didn't sacrifice a single minute of the time I had left to gratify gossipers. Would you call this selfishness?»

«But it is a different situation.»

«Not at all. Should you have sacrificed your life just because others thought that your place was here, fighting for your land? Well, here's news for you. Sicily, my darling, made it even without you. Everyone has a task to fulfil in the world. Being a paladin patriot wasn't yours.»

She winks at me, and for an instant I see a childish shine in her eyes, in which I read her joy for having broken the rules. It seems to say "we dared to think with our own heads."

«You, however, didn't subtract anything to anyone, while I...» I tell her.

«Neither you did.»

«...»

«I know that you're thinking about your mother. But she was happy. She loved Torre, sure, but she loved you much more. Staying meant forcing you to a too great renouncement.»

«I could have left alone, though. After the years spent in Turin they could have come back to Torre, there was no reason to drag them with me to America.»

«In fact you wouldn't have done that in a normal situation, and in that case they would have let you go without problems. But we both know well that you wouldn't have left knowing that they were in a revolting country. You were a tight-knit family, each ready to great sacrifices for the others. Don't feel selfish, your parents did what they thought more right. Your mother spoke well of Boston to me.»

«At the beginning they too integrated well. In Boston Dad found an employment at a pharmaceutics multinational, Mom instead taught Italian. They hoped that upon completion of my studies we would come back. But things went otherwise. So many unexpected occasions presented themselves, some that was unthinkable to decline at that point. So years passed, until the definitive move to Paris. I thought they would be fine there. Paris, in short...»

«I have never seen Paris», Lina sighs in an imperceptible breath.

«It's there that Mom became ill, and I can't stop thinking that when she realized that we would never come back to Sicily... she laid down her arms, becoming vulnerable to such a devastating disease.»

«This is what you believe, my darling.»

A malicious shine colours her up, makes her eyes bright. She tilts her tired but composed body toward me, with the attitude of someone who is looking for more intimacy to make a great revelation.

«Your mother, Paolo, had been planning for a long time to come back to Torre.»

She leaves her words suspended in mid-air, spreading around us together with the heat. In that suspension she tries to read in me the surprise, she who knows about my mother more than her son who lived next to her until the end.

«She didn't think of following you forever. In Paris you had a very good job and a beautiful family, of which Antonella was happy. There was no reason for her to stay any longer, so she had decided that the moment had come to return here and take her life back.»

«But she never told me.»

«Do you talk about all of your projects with your children?»

«This was an important matter. She would have mentioned something to me. My mother and I always talked easily.»

«Children are all the same. As soon as you grow up you start to exclude us from your thoughts, from your choices, but you believe you have to have full control on us, you accept no omissions from us.»

She closes her eyes and reclines on the headrest, asking for a brief pause with a lifted finger. She sips some water, that waves in the glass to the rhythm of her trembling hand. This time she accepts the oxygen.

«She wanted me to look for a new house for your father and her. She thought of purchasing it. Your mother would have come back to Torre, to grow old and die in her house. It wasn't you who prevented her to, Paolo. It was cancer. She was happy of every single choice, she didn't renounce to anything. She couldn't imagine that at some point her life would be out of her hands.»

I stay suspended from the story of this fable without happy ending, imagining my mother, euphoric, making hidden plans, satisfied for having ended a chapter of her story, ready to write yet another, always beside my father.

Lina narrates like a storyteller, her words play in the air like an intense and vibrating song.

«The day when I told her that I had found a beautiful house, there wasn't the reaction of joy I was expecting. I don't know why, but that silence immediately spoke to me. I understood even before she said it. I felt death in that uncertainty. Nothing else could have been able to stop her.»

With a firm gesture I grab her wrist, as if to brake the avalanche and prevent her limbs from crumbling like fragile rock. I would like to say something but my voice is as broken as hers and only makes a hoarse sound. The rest of my thoughts dies in my throat.

Then we forfeit words and let looks continue the story. They describe how much we loved her, how much we miss her smile, her warm hand, her delicate voice, details we kept looking for in vain over time. I would like to tell her that sometimes she peers for an instant in the eyes of Giuliana, in the pout of Marco. Maybe she's coming through me in this moment, to wink to her old friend who is looking at me with the acumen of those who can see beyond the obvious.

The rest of our meeting is marked by all sorts of stories, but also by so many silences dense of words. She talks to me about the Friday evenings in which she regularly meets four time-honoured friends, "more decrepit than me", she says winking. They play poker, they have a good time, they drink the last remnants of life. I talk to her about Paris, the immense avenues of the Champs Elysees with their many shops and restaurants, the Christmas illuminations. We fantasize of meeting in a cafe, to continue our conversation there, to walk arm in arm for hours, two free souls walking in the splendid Paris.

We talk about the present, without any more references to the past, because what counts is here. It's us, now. I ask her what she thinks about this new Torre, how she lived the change.

«It was like restructuring an old precarious house. The result comments itself. As per the cohabitation with foreigners, the biggest danger to humanity is not to mix, but to get lost. It's not what happened to us. Ignorance makes us fear the unknown, while the desire to know makes us overcome barriers and prejudices. This, in summary, is what happened to Torre.»

I leave her house feeling different from when I entered it. On the door I walk into Selva, a big all-body woman, with a noisy laughter and a fleshy mouth in her dark face. She smells of freshness in spite of the heat and she tastes of courtesy, of generosity. She gets rid in a hurry of the shopping bags to help Lina rise from the armchair, because she wants to walk me to the door and postpone, this time too, the moment of the separation.

I feel all of the brittleness of her body being lost in my hold. I try to return her with a hug the same trust that once, in the same way, she gave to me.

From the road I look one last time toward that life suspended to a breathe of oxygen. She weakly raises her hand in a last unsteady greeting. We both know that this is our last goodbye.

#  Chapter 15

In the school year 2016, the fifth E of the Galileo Galilei high in Palermo was composed by eighteen young people about to graduate, crushed by the folly of the events of historical importance that were ripening together with them. In the classroom, Vito and I occupied the exact centre of the three by three line up of desks, right behind Teresa and Anna. They sat at the first desk, central row, the proper place for those who didn't fear the confrontation with the teachers. To their right there were Maria and Carlotta, personifications of Perfidy and Falsehood, generous dispensers of fake compliments and smiles, behind which they concealed a depth contempt for the whole world. Vito and I, who lent ourselves to their miserable theatricality, reciprocated their blandishments with likewise simpering attitudes that fed their disgust. They didn't spare anyone, especially not teachers, to whom they reserved smiles soaked with fake flattery and true compassion. Mario and Giovanni, from the desk behind, launched on their long dark hair little paper balls, moistened with spit, creating blowpipes with their chewed pens. Mario, the perfectionist, adorned their heads with the pointillism technique, while Giovanni, who was coarser, threw blindly bursts of little balls, sometimes shooting with two or more pens at the same time. To them, that was that the moment of the greatest participation to school life. They spent the rest sleeping with their head on the desk, warming up their seats, as the math teacher always said.

Behind them, at the last desk, Matteo and Giorgio, the absolutely less ordinary subjects of the class. The former lived in a dimension more hallucinated than real, made of a ghostly night-time world smelling of drug and violence, rivers of alcohol and cars launched at full speed to break the silence of the city outskirts. He told us of his night-time bravados without emotion, throwing on those who listened a restlessness from which he instead seemed to be sheltered. If for us his world was difficult to understand, it was entirely inaccessible for adults. His parents pretended not to notice anything, in order to spare themselves from the embarrassment and the horror deriving from the dissoluteness of their son. In the classroom, his only role was that of paper supplier for the blowpipes of Mario and Giovanni. Sometimes however he enjoyed making embarrassing raids during lessons with ambiguous and inopportune questions, to which the teachers answered with scowls of reproach and pity.

Giorgio's face is one of those I remember less well than others, because in the classroom he was a transparent figure of the kind that leave no traces in other people's memory. Yet I recognize him immediately as soon as Teresa and I set foot in the "Garden of the orange trees", the restaurant that Anna has chosen for the school reunion. He has the same low hairline on his forehead, the same thick eyebrows, almost about to form a single strip of grizzled carpet above two small mouse-like eyes. He still wears thick eyeglasses – disproportionate in comparison to his small and dug face – that confer him the appearance of a horrendous caricature. He is hesitating at the door of the restaurant, where a maid is taking his jacket. He was an obsessive teenager, full of tics and strange rituals. He didn't allow anybody to touch his things. His hands were continually bedewed of disinfectant gel in order to neutralize potential viruses and bacteria after every contact with other people. A coughing or a sneeze were all it took to stiffen him for a whole day, tormented by the thought that he would be the victim of a contamination. "This way you infect me, this way you contaminate me", he kept repeating nervously, staring at the guilty with two small black dots like the eyes of a malevolent and suspicious ghost.

He keeps his right arm extended forward, his jacket suspended between thumb and forefinger to avoid any possible hand contact during the delivery. Nevertheless, the fact that he accepted to leave one of his pieces of clothing in a common wardrobe is a sign of improvement.

«Giorgio.»

The sound slips out of my lips more like an incredulous exclamation than a real call. But he hears it and turns to look at me. Instinctively I reach out to shake his hand, but I interrupt my gesture halfway, embarrassed, not knowing how far I can push it. He looks at my palm extended toward him. I feel that I am all contained there, in that potentially threatening hand, ready to engulf his, to attach the worst on it. He hesitates, maybe he is prepared to the fact that tonight some contact will be inevitable. He hints at a smile and allows his hand to slip on mine with a fleeting, inconsistent touch. I feel like I brushed a soap bubble.

«Paolo Manfredi!»

He is almost smiling, then he looks up over my shoulder, he intercepts Teresa, to whom he grants a wider smile but without contacts.

«You two are still together! What a pleasure to see you again!»

He half-bows, displaying an exaggeratedly respectful and formal attitude. Teresa asks him a few question to which he answers with a rigid smile, his eyes fixed on the room full of people to be faced, of hands to be shaken, hugs to be shunned. Who knows if the others still remember the coordinates to move in his minefield.

A tall and thin woman in a dark uniform, with an oval face on which a bright lipstick stands out, anticipates my words asking us whether we belong to the group of Mrs. Marino. I nod while she looks for our surnames on her list and checks them with a firm stroke of a red biro. She invites us to follow her in the room booked by our group, from which I hear the voice of Anna come. I walk beside the spindle shank, Teresa behind me, Giorgio at a certain distance from her, with his head lowered in a reverent pose. Beyond the arc that leads to the area reserved to us, Anna is moving in the middle of the gathering like a perfect guest in her welcoming lunch room. She intercepts our arrival and calls the general attention on us.

«Guys, look who has arrived. Paolo and Teresa are here.»

Giorgio is behind the spindle shank and he stays there, invisible by the rest.

The room is cosy and pleasant. A long table goes from one extremity to the other. It seems decorated for a ceremony, with bouquets of fresh flowers methodically placed at a mathematical distance from one another. The walls, upholstered in clear stone to which showy pieces of unmistakable Caltagirone artisanship are suspended, make the place intimate.

Several eyes are aimed on our side of the room. Eyes from my remote past, dug in their contours but still recognizable. They widen in double smiles for me and for my wife, relieving Giorgio from the impact with the crowd, leaving him the possibility, mimetic animal that he is, to meld with the background.

A multiplication of kisses, hugs, smiles and pleasantries, in which we pleasantly lose for several minutes, and at every recognition a piece of an old dusty puzzle clicks back into its place, completed again by memory without effort. Mario almost lost his hair completely, but in exchange for it he now sports two thick moustaches over his flat lips and his teeth ruined by smoke. His hug engulfs me in the smell of just-smoked tobacco.

Claudia and Giulia, from the desk on my left, look like they just came out from an old school photo. They greet me with their spontaneous joy, coordinated in gestures and in words.

«We never lost sight of each other in all these years», they say to Teresa. «We got married in the same period, our daughters have a few months difference, and naturally they are close friends, just like us».

I would never have been able to imagine a different destiny for them, who always believed in their indivisibility and showed that in life you can choose a dress and keep it on without getting tired of it, wearing it every day with the same freshness and elegance of the first time.

A face that I can hardly recognize appears strongly in front of me, taking the thunder from the two inseparable. A blazing red mouth on a face heavily coloured with rouge and eye shadow, framed by a modern and juvenile French bob.

«Do you recognize me?» she asks me, winking with malice, quivering in the certainty of surprising me.

If for some the key of happiness consists in being true to themselves for their whole life, for others it's the exact opposite, and jumping from one dress to the other is the spring that pushes them toward their personal goals. The woman I have in front of me was a fragile and insecure girl, a timid who resisted to any and all solicitations. She had only one friend in the class, Daniela, who sat at her same desk, with whom she lived as if in a protected niche. She liked to look at the world from afar, behind the glass of a window, inside the television screen, in the novels and in poetries, never live, never in the front line. But even though her external wrap is not recognizable at all, her sweet voice survived, trapped in an aggressive wrapping.

«Serenella, you really are a little girl», I tell her.

«Serenella!» she puffs in a forced smile. «I haven't been called like that in a lifetime. It's a memory that belongs to the past, now I am just Serena», she tells me while disentangling an earring – with an ostentatiously twee gesture – from the straightened lock that repeatedly slips on her face.

«But how is it possible? I would never have recognized you, I mean, you are so, so...» Teresa storms in, repeatedly looking at her from head to toe with incredulity and hidden amusement.

«I have adapted to the times, dear. Timidity is not suitable for an international city like this, where you meet people from the whole world.»

«What is your job?» we ask her almost in a chorus.

With her hand she keeps tormenting the earring, but now it is just a mannerism.

«I am the manager of the principal Gallery of Modern art of Palermo. I manage a Foundation that collaborates with international organizations for the promotion and the diffusion of local figurative arts. Practically, besides shows of great art masterpieces, I deal with emergent artists, I find talents, I organize artistic demonstrations of import.»

She says all this in a single breath without looking at us in the eyes, looking up, with a half-mouth smile like in the interpretation of a seasoned actress.

While we are amusedly listening to her, Vito storms in the room and, today like in the past, grabs the spotlight. To say the truth, his never was really grabbing; rather we always pointed the spotlight on him because of his natural and inimitable charisma. Like a star, he enjoys his triumphal entry, among kisses and pleasantries, winks and blinks. What surprises me more is the naturalness with which he also hugs Giorgio, who had succeeded in camouflaging himself in the crowd until now, closed in a niche on the background. I expect to see him wriggle out of that hug, petrified and terrorized, and for an instant the others exchange incredulous worried glances. Instead Giorgio comes out of it unharmed, even softened for a fraction of a second, almost humanized by that contact. Then I can't help but wonder whether he has willingly chosen to remain for his whole life petrified, waiting for someone braver than the others to thaw him with a warm touch of genuine humanity while us, who believed to be healthier than him, were satisfied by whatever gesture, every contact, even the meaningless ones – that are always much more than true ones – without expecting for them to mean anything. We took what was there without selectivity, without giving the right importance to things.

The presence of Vito loosened every reserve on the evening and put in circle an uninhibited and pleasant atmosphere.

There are damp eyes and running noses around me. Teresa is one of them. Closed in her white sheath dress, her hair unusually gathered on her nape, she has a refined and minimalist look, and still today she is the most beautiful, just like she was at school. She looks at me, shaking her head in resignation, and tells me, «You know I get carried away.»

I smile and I don't say anything, while looking at her with a teasing expression, even if inside of me I envy her ability to feel and to express, to be inside everything she does. Without hiding herself.

Daniela, who wasn't a beautiful girl, now is a mature woman with an intriguing look. She too seems to have lost Serena's reservation, but not the sense of measure. She rather seems a dark lady cast into an austere black suit on which a thread of pearls stands out. I ear Teresa repeat several times the story of our unexpected meeting in Paris, at a medicine conference, me as a chairman, her as a reporter. She likes to tell this story, especially to see the amazement on other people's face for that precise plan of the destiny that wanted us at all cost together. And she generally says not to be prone to fatalism.

Vito is impeccably dressed in a blue suit similar to mine. Seeing him elegantly dressed for the first time in my life gives me a sense of the time that passed, and with it of the passages that I missed.

«You weren't expecting this?» he tells me, turning around to make me look at him from every angle.

«You said that you would never become a suit and tie guy», I mock him.

«Yeah, then life put its hand in it.»

He lays a hand on my left shoulder and leaves it there to anchor me to this room, to this moment, as if to dispel the possibility that I decide all of a sudden to levitate and disappear for who knows how long. I am here my friend, and there is no other place in which I would rather be tonight.

«You made my mother happy», he tells me fleetingly, between a greeting and another, and his vibrating voice allows his melancholy for that old bird who is about to fly away to unreachable places to slip. Before I can tell him anything, he's already in the middle of another group, exchanging pleasantries.

Perfidy and Falsehood are exactly like they were once, they're just no longer a couple, and walk each on her own. I perceive a certain acrimony between them, obviously hidden under layers of fake benevolence and gratification. From what they tell me, I understand that life gave them what they had been looking for. High-ranked husbands with prestigious jobs who introduced them to the most yearned social gatherings of the city, where only those who possess their weapons and their designer clothes are able to manoeuvre without embarrassment.

«We are almost all here», Anna announces with a triumphal tone, «we are waiting only for Salvatore. As I already anticipated to some of you, tonight there won't be Matteo – because of the serious conditions of his mother – Chiara, whom I wasn't able to find, and Vincenzo – who lives in Dublino and told me without any embarrassment that he couldn't care less of this pathetic reunion, but wished for us to enjoy it a lot!»

«The usual impudent», the former Serenella remarks.

«What about Antonella? Antonella di Bartolo isn't here either, what happened to her?»

They all turn to look at me, including my wife, who shakes her head because she is sure that she informed me.

«She died five years ago», Giorgio says, resurfaced from the mimetic wall but with the usual rigid posture «... a tumour in the pancreas. I saw her. She was rigid and cold, so cold...» and he shrugs as if to find shelter from the cold that the memory alone evokes in him deeply under his skin.

Vito tries to break the sadness that wavers over our heads and, with one of his gimmicks, shelters us from the thought that death has already insinuated our generation.

«I propose a toast to the two girls without which this evening would never have happened, Anna and Teresa.»

He lifts a glass of aperitif in the middle of the room, waiting for the noisy tinkling of our glasses.

«I am really happy to meet my old class again, except for the teachers obviously! As you see, in spite of the changes, and so many things have changed in these years, there is always the chance to recover our past, if we keep looking for it... if we don't want to forget it!»

He looks at me, reaching out with his glass. Mine reaches it, and with it all of my participation.

We finally sit at the table, between chatters, laughter and chairs heavily dragged on the floor. Noises that combine into a noisy mixture that tastes so much like an ordinary day at school. Although almost elderly, together we still produce the same adolescent-like symphony.

Anna is sitting at the head of the table, Teresa to her right, I immediately after. Vito is right in front of me, between Giorgio and Claudia. Anna tells us of how thrilling was the whole job of searching for our schoolmates, and especially to discover that the desire to meet was shared by most of them. While the chatters multiply, the last repatriate storms in the room. In my memory he is a sturdy boy, with a ruddy face and smooth chestnut hair, glued on his head like Marco's silicon swimming caps. He was extremely timid and embarrassed, both with classmates and with the teachers, because of his heavy rustic accent and his rather poor and coarse speech capabilities. He was a typical country boy, born and grown in a small town of the hinterland of Palermo. His father, a farmer son of farmers, had prepared him for agricultural life since he was a child, and so he deemed useless to educate him more than what was needed to read and count. His mother, instead, believed that her son had the abilities to deserve something better than the fatiguing agricultural life, therefore she pushed him to commit to study, also comforted by the favourable judgments expressed by his teachers. They thought that Salvatore was a very capable boy, although strongly inhibited by the pressing aspirations of his father. So, crushed between opposite expectations, Salvatore came to school every day, with his shoulder down and an uncertain walk, afraid to disappoint both his mother, who had done so much to send him to high school, and his father, who saw in him the heir of the small firm founded with so much sacrifice and hard job. None of his parents ever asked what their son wanted for himself, and probably even he avoided wondering about it. For one like me who, on the contrary, was even exceedingly favoured, the condition of Salvatore was unbearable. I was bothered rather than pitied by him.

The fifty-year-old man who enters the room is not even the shade of Salvatore. He is a solid body, well-standing on the floor, straight-backed in his grey suit with a garish yellow tie that goes down along his showy chest. He has a cordial and uninhibited attitude. He widens his short arms in a virtual hug to everyone, almost as if he wanted to hold all of us at the same time. He smiles with his eyes, with his mouth, with his nose and his ears and with every single facial muscle, in an expression that tastes of sincerity. We find ourselves all standing again to welcome him.

«Sorry for being late», he says to Anna, kissing her hand with a reverent gesture, an old gallantry out of fashion for centuries by now.

Vito hugs him first, they pat each other's back.

«I was afraid I would not make it. I travelled from Catania at full speed to arrive on time», Salvatore says, sitting in the only seat left, between the perfidious and the false. Those who were free to choose avoided it.

Salvatore sits down, looking up with an expression that says "Thanks everybody, you really are good friends", while the two look at him up and down as if he were an unknown animal. He lets their sharp eyes run over him, and turns now to one of them now to the other, smiling and saying, «Am I all right? I washed myself and shaved. I don't know why, but I knew that, being the last to arrive, I would get an uncomfortable chair!»

Both answer with a perfectly synchronized smile of self-importance, and with the same simultaneity they turn to look at other tablemates.

«You know that I would personally come to pick you up if you hadn't come», Vito tells him from the other side of the table.

Unlike me, he always felt liking and compassion for Salvatore. At school he protected him from those who made fun of him, as if he were his big brother. He felt close to him in their unfair destiny of having a wrong father, in Salvatore's case for his excessive dominance, in Vito's for his total absence. He believed that it was up to Salvatore's classmates to help him gain awareness of his absurd situation. Rather than picking on him, in his opinion, we should have helped him to get his life back. He always incited him to think with his own mind, not to be satisfied to marry other people's opinions. He encouraged him to trust his own abilities, so that his life could be the result of his own choices and not of plans imposed by his father. Salvatore listened to him in silence, his already ruddy cheeks becoming red and hot, his eyes didn't dare go up to much. He nodded and shook his head at the same time, because even though he wanted to follow Vito's advices, he didn't believe he could be capable of so much audacity. I wonder to what degree his transformation is due to Vito's tenacity?

«You know that we would not begin without you, you are the half-secret ingredient of the evening», Anna whispers to him.

Teresa and I exchange an interrogative glance, because we perceive that many others, besides Vito and Anna, share a special gratification for the presence of Salvatore, which reason, that escapes us completely, is certainly not connected to his popularity at school.

But things are clarified during the evening, while the waiters parade carrying trays of appetizers of the purest Sicilian tradition, immersed in a scenic design obtained with eccentric and sophisticated cuts of orange peels and slices.

«Maybe not everyone knows that this restaurant owes a lot of its popularity not only to the ability of the chef of proposing in the best way the tastes of the old Sicilian gastronomic tradition, but also to the inimitable creativeness with which he has been able to embellish many of such dishes with an equally typical Mediterranean ingredient, orange. And not everybody knows that it's Salvatore who supplies oranges to this place, as well as many other of the best restaurants in the city. He became a big entrepreneur in the agricultural field.»

«Come on, come on, don't exaggerate», he downsizes himself.

«Don't be shy», Anna retorts, «many of you remember Salvatore like the timid good-natured boy who hardly spoke for fear of being wrong, who stood always a step behind others, thinking that that was his place. But he was a boy full of qualities, and life, fortunately, sometimes rewards those who deserve it. In his case, there was a happy match of ability and fortune, and the result leaves no doubts.»

«It's true, I have been really lucky. Let's say that I, or rather my oranges, were in the right place at the right time.»

Pushed by Vito, Salvatore tells a story that sounds unbelievable.

«In the general chaos that fell on us when Sicily was sold, not knowing what would happen in the years to come, I clung to the only thing I knew more than everything else, the country. The unbelievable fact was that my father, who had always insisted that I followed his footsteps, instead started pushing me to leave Sicily, fearing that the Arabs intended to turn Sicilians into subjects. He wanted to protect me, as after all he had done when he pushed me in spite of myself toward country life, because that was the only way he knew to guarantee a future to me. But that time, for the first time, I took my decision and refused to go. I thought that under whatever form of government, Italian, Arab or of who knows what, people would keep eating, so agriculture would always be needed. My father's firm was small, because he had always been satisfied with the bare necessities for the survival of the family, but I wanted to do more. My mother let me sell a small plot she had inherited from her parents. I didn't get much because it was the period in which the Arabs came and bought for next to nothing a large quantity of ruins to turn them into prestigious abodes, but it was enough for a good investment.»

«Get to the outstanding part, tell us about the sheikh», Perfidy-Maria, sat to his right, interrupts him. She is at the same time a mask of curiosity and disgust, but also of so much envy.

«Calm down girl», Vito interrupts, «this story deserves to be listened to in its entirety, it's not boring... like ours...» and he winks irreverently.

«But no, Vito, actually she's right. There's only a part of this story that everyone wants to know about, nobody otherwise would listen to the anonymous story of Salvatore the peasant. It's absolutely normal... and it's fine to me.»

He smiles with the strength of who is no longer afraid of the judgment of others, because today he is proud of himself.

«So, to make a long story short, I increased the production of vegetables and expanded the citrus grove, and since I had some contacts in Palermo with restaurant owners, I started to supply some of the restaurants of the city. Then the unimaginable happened...»

The silence of the room is broken only by the tinkling of the dishes, while everyone's curious eyes are glued to the bright face of the unusual narrator, who never, at the times of high school, succeeded in arousing so much interest in this same audience speaking about himself.

«A yacht moored for a few days in Palermo harbour. It was one of the many ultra-multimillionaires sheikhs who came to buy houses and cheap plots, to build the dreamlike attractions that you can see around here now. He landed with all of his entourage to visit the city. It was a very warm day and suddenly one of the old rich men felt about to faint. Chance made it happen right in front of a kiosk I supply with oranges and lemons, for Palermo-style fresh juices. They had him drink a freshly-made orange juice. The sheikh liked it, he wanted more. You know how these extra-multimillionaires are! They don't limit themselves to buying a glass of juice. If they like it, they buy the whole kiosk, if not the whole district where the kiosk is and all the plots where the oranges with which the juice is made are grown. Approximately it went like this. He wanted fresh oranges for every day in which he would stay in Palermo. When the manager of the kiosk contacted me, I almost had a stroke. I personally went to deliver the load every morning, selecting with my hands the best fruits. When would I have again a chance to go on a boat like that? But these rich people not only have refined tastes, above all they have a good sense of smell, and they know how to smell business. He got this idea of assuring for himself the production of this special quality of oranges. Because the emirates are known all over the world for their inestimable wealth, for their artificial luxury, for thousand other things, but certainly not for genuine products. He wanted to speak to me about his offer. He wanted to produce juices of Sicilian oranges to be exported to foreign countries. In no time he had bought a lot of land for a small price, taking advantage of the exodus of the Sicilians, terrorized by the Arabic invasion. I don't how what it was, but the sheikh must have liked me, or trusted me, because in my field I know what to do. So he entrusted me with the direct management of the whole production. In short, from a simple farmer I became a manager. Today I am the biggest oranges producer of the whole Sicily, on behalf of the sheikh, of course. He owns a boundless expanse of land on the whole Sicilian territory, and I am the direct responsible of the whole production. I earn well and I feel like a little sheikh myself! We export in the whole Europe. I bet that those of you who live abroad put my oranges on their table. It's the most demanded quality on all markets. It became a D.O.C. brand.»

«In Paris it never happened to me to find fruit of Sicilian origin», Teresa says. «I would have certainly bought it.»

«On the contrary, I am sure that right in Paris you have eaten more than everyone else... but you don't know.»

«But it's not possible!» Serena says, «it's mandatory to specify the origin of the products».

«Calm down, calm own. What if I say "oranges of Dubai"?»

Teresa's eyes widen.

«You? You produce the oranges of Dubai? They are practically everywhere in our markets. They are fabulous but... why of Dubai, if you cultivate them here?»

«This, dear Teresa, is the black mark of the story.»

In a story narrated by many voices, like in an orchestra in perfect harmony, Salvatore, Vito, the inseparable Claudia and Giulia, and finally even Giorgio, who have lived all stages of the Arabic conquest, tell us the rest.

«All of us always said that Sicily was a land rich in resources. Those were the commonplaces of our grandparents and our parents. Growing up we made them our crescendo... we could make a living from tourism, fishing, agriculture, Sicily is a rich land with a thousand resources... all potentialities that were never fully developed, but always sketched in a context that was substantially immovable. Whose was the guilt?»

«The factors were many, and complex», Giorgio adds, «from the most obvious ones, like mafia, to the underground ones like the political manoeuvres aimed to avoid creating conditions of growth.»

«Sure!» Vito exclaims, «because growing you learn to think with your mind, to see things with your own eyes, while staying small you are dependent on other people's decisions».

«The Arabs», Giulia adds, «bought things, not people. They purchased houses and lands, historical and artistic assets, but they didn't want to subdue the population to a regime. For them it was important that we too grew, so that the improvement project for Sicily didn't remain a mere external action. They were interested in educating us, to make us able to produce wealth that would give profit to them and comfort to us.»

«Naturally all of this had a price, and us Sicilians are still divided about the assessment of such cost», Salvatore says, «for some it was equitable, for others excessive. The oranges of Dubai are an example of it, or better they are the perfect synthesis of what the arrival of the Arabs involved for Sicily. They are entirely produced here, but all over the world they are known under the brand of an Arabic company. No one, abroad, knows that they are a Sicilian product. To increase their value adequately, we have lost their paternity, as happened after all for many other assets of our land».

Vito interrupts the words of Salvatore to say that this aspect shouldn't frighten us. He believes that what is happening now belongs to the cycles of history, and that nothing is immutable. Arabs have already been in Sicily for around two hundred years, but then they went away and another phase, that is another domination, started.

«In my opinion», Vito says, «this chapter too is destined to end at some point, but we should hope that this will not happen for the arrival of a new owner, but because we will have been able to take back what belongs to us, and returned to be the only legitimate owners of our Sicily. But this time we will have to be able to make it work on our own, and the oranges of Dubai will finally be known all over the world as Sicilian oranges».

«But we won't be Italian again!» Giovanni says. Until now he has been silent behind his moustaches, listening.

«And who thinks of doing that? I don't believe that any of us would want to», Vito remarks with conviction. Many of us nod.

«Italy doesn't exist anymore by now. It's a ghost, a reality that nobody notices. The sale of Sicily wasn't a big trauma only for us. The whole Country was affected, perhaps more than us, because while here, even though with a thousand difficulties, a phase of slow rebirth started, the rest of the Italian territory suffered a progressive crumbling, both in the political and administrative, but especially civic, sense. The south was completely forgotten», Claudia comments.

«It went exactly this way. After the sale, even though many debts of the Country were repaid, the relative economic stability didn't do anything for the strong instability that was created in the fabric of society. The North brought its separatist push – that had already been fervent for years in the project of the creation of an independent Padania – to the extreme. Today they talk about the possibility of selling Sardinia, and from Rome down it's all a forgotten territory, while all the political and economic interests have been rerouted to the north. Italy wasn't able to regain credibility on the international front even after the partial economic improvement, also because it wasn't able of investments and innovations that put it again on the run on the European racetrack. The political world, deeply marked by the corruption, by the prevalence of the personal interest of a few people over the collective good, lost consistence and credibility in front of the electors, especially, as well as the external observers. Of the historical Italy, the one of the great literates, of the men of art and talent, of the heroes of the unification, there's nothing left but a weak memory. Corruption brought the Country to disrepair», Vito concludes bitterly.

«I believe that there will be better times, but this will happen when the honest people will stop waiting for the solutions to fall from heaven and will start searching for them», Salvatore says.

«Guys, you know what I say?» This time is Anna to lighten the conversation. «I think that, however things have gone, in the end we all succeeded, and this is what matters. For someone it was harder or more painful than for others, but nobody came out of it defeated, because anyway Sicilians always know how to get by... we know the expedient to go on. I toast to all of us who, anywhere and in any situation, are and will always be true Sicilians.»

A swarm of glasses flies up from the table, together with a chorus of more or less convinced voices singing the praises of the everlasting Sicilians.

The conversation breaks in many small ramifications. Everyone has something to say about themselves, there isn't enough time for all. The nero d'Avola quaffs the discussions, accompanying the dishes of our best tradition. To find again the forgotten origins there is nothing more immediate than a trip in the heart of one's own gastronomic tradition. It's a privileged access to home.

«Homemade maccheroncini with swordfish and mint», says the waiter, serving the still steamy pasta from a tray of white porcelain.

The scent already brings me far away... it's Sunday morning and there's my mother in the kitchen at an early time, frying eggplants and zucchini and sprinkling white wine on diced swordfish meat. With experienced hands she governs several recipes at once, so there she is stuffing boned sardines – known in the Sicilian cuisine as "sarde a beccafico" – with small quantities of bread crumbs flavoured with oil, tomato, raisins and pine nuts. I smell the scent of frying batter that envelopes in a bark crisp broccolis and thistles with anchovies, and I see my father sipping coffee, perfectly at ease in the room saturated with odours and frying food, foretasting the satisfaction that awaits him at lunch. There is also the little boy that I was who is taking advantage of a distraction of mom to taste the seasoning of the steamy pasta in the saucepan.

Now, while I am tasting the happy combination of fish, vegetables and mint that goes down with difficulty in my throat tightened by emotion, I feel that I have definitely understood, like never before, what remembering the past means. The memory is not only in the mind, it is a global experience of every single part of the body. It's engraved on the skin, in the eyes, in the oesophagus, even in my partying stomach that finds again tastes buried in its personal gastric memory. As a child I loved caponata, the strong taste of green olives and capers in the bittersweet of eggplants. My mother cooked it in Boston too, even in Paris, but who knows why, it never seemed to have the same taste. "It is the quality of the olives", my father used to say. To him there was always something missing for that dish to be perfect as it had been in the past. But I think that it was only homesickness.

After the parade of the second dishes, when we are all gastronomically satisfied, Anna announces that there will be a pause before the dessert.

«We have a theme to develop, as you all know.»

In turn, everyone shows their contributions. Claudia and Giulia go first. They brought a notebook that belonged to both, a kind of secret diary written by two people, full of photos and friendly confidences they told to each other. Giulia reads an excerpt. She pronounces the words of a fifteen-year-old girl full of dreams, genuinely impassioned, yet sufficiently insecure, convinced of the strength of friendship, determined never to betray the pact of loyalty shared with her dreams mate. Words that move for their simplicity as well as for the bitterness they leave behind every time that life proves them wrong. Luckily Giulia and Claudia haven't felt too many disappointments, because a large part of their expectations have been realized, in particular those concerning the duration of their bond.

Serena shows to everyone a small puppet that she kept attached to her backpack.

«It's the only object survived from my past of timid girl. Everything else ended in the bin. In truth I don't feel any nostalgia of the way I was, neither of the way in which I lived my teenager life. Nostalgia for me consists in wishing to relive that period in a completely different way, but unfortunately this can't be done!»

In turn, other nostalgic memories parade. Most people show the classic school photo, the one with the classmates on two rows, one down on the ground and the other behind standing, with the teachers on the external sides, closing the group. Faces immortalized forever in unnatural smiles, signatures and dedications on the back of the photo, with the promises to be friends forever, to remember, to love, then... see you.

Carlotta "the falsehood" brought her collection of essays and smugly displays them in front of everyone, because for her nostalgia is a soliloquy concerning herself rather than a sharing of memories. The same goes for Maria "the perfidy", who waves a report card full of high marks and a lot of presumption.

«I kept this», Anna says in her turn, showing a parchment we had given her for the last birthday celebrated together. It was a praise to her qualities as friend and classmate, as well as untiring organizer, official comforter, trusted confidante and heart of gold of the year... a real tribute to a special person that was impossible not to love.

She shows it with pride, knowing that she has been our reference point in the years of high school, satisfied that she confirmed this role over time, succeeding in gathering us once more after so many years.

«I am a classic nostalgic, I miss practically everything of the past. I missed you, even the ones with which I had a less meaningful relationship, because you were all part of my life for a long period. Guys, we shared so much that it is impossible to set you aside in a remote corner of memory. The more time passes, the more I feel nostalgia for that period. I loved you so much, and from you I received so much affection. I am already thinking about how much I will miss you tomorrow, now that I have seen you again. I hope that this evening will not be the only occasion, and that there may be more like this.»

Teresa, sat between me and her, hugs her and picks up the nostalgic thread we are all pursuing. She says that she doesn't have any object to show, neither photos nor old notebooks, because Anna is the object of her nostalgia. It is her that she missed more than everything in these years.

«Despite the promise of not losing sight of each other, and even though we both believed it with all our hearts, life reserved us too many solicitations to which we had to answer with absolute priority, not leaving us the chance to turn and look back. Nevertheless, the unbelievable thing for me was that, even though we didn't hear, neither we had news one of the other, I always felt her comforting presence close to me. Because if a person is really inside you, she is there even when you don't see her, when you don't hear her voice and you don't touch her hand. She is there and that's it, those are feelings you feel deep within.»

Then, to Anna, «Meeting you again confirmed this certainty of mine, because it was like starting from where we had been interrupted. Looking around I see faces I recognize, eyes, voices, smiles, but they are the faces of an old photo that doesn't belong to what I am now. They are a chapter of my most ancient history. You have not remained trapped in that photo, you have silently walked close to me and I thank you for having been there».

Anna is as purple as Teresa, so excited as not to be able to say anything. She can only look at her with gratitude. Two brave women able to tell each other words of affection and to feel emotions without shame in a world in which women no longer blush.

Vito teases me.

«Doctor, what have you brought us?»

All eyes converge on me, and I can no longer hope to postpone my moment. I don't have anything physical to show, which would have allowed me to get rid of my solo more easily. But, in lack of anything else, I will have to use words, I, who am like my son when it comes to expressing feelings.

«When Anna told me about the theme of the evening, I immediately started making calculations to understand how much paying the supper to all of you was going to cost me. But then I understood that maybe the price was too high and that I'd better do my homework.»

Too many eyes aimed at me smile and wait.

«I am used to speak to different audiences, where I don't feel embarrassment like now, simply because there I don't have to talk about myself.»

I make a pause, I garner my thoughts.

«If you had asked me a few days ago, before this trip, I would not have known what I felt nostalgia for, because I am the kind of person who is very rooted to his present, who doesn't often stop to look behind. Once I left Sicily, I closed a chapter of my life, or rather I did worse than that... I completely deleted it, as if it were a shame to remember that I belonged to a reality that had suffered the shame of denial. In doing this, I tried to deeply cut my roots, striving to feel myself rooted somewhere else... without ever really succeeding. I built myself certainties that allowed me to live leaving no room for doubts or afterthoughts, and I got by well enough. And then... then Teresa brought me here and my whole picture fell head over heels», they laugh again, «because as soon as I got on the flight to Palermo, I felt swept off my feet in every way. Each step I took since I arrived was an indescribable upsetting. All of a sudden I found again what I had striven for a long time to delete, having to deal with the fact that, in the meantime, a lot of things have been deleted for real by the events. Seeing again the places and the people, rediscovering them in spite of changes, comparing myself with the reality I had contributed to deny with my sense of shame... it was hard... beautifully hard... really beautifully. I felt relieved, because when you try to delete something that deeply belongs to you, it clings onto you like a boulder until you accept to store it in its right place and in the right way inside you. Now I know what my nostalgia is... I feel nostalgia not only of the past in itself, but especially of not having felt it for all the years I was away. It would be beautiful to be able to go back to live the separation in a different way, allowing myself to feel, rather than striving to forget. Maybe this would have given me more in life as man, as a doctor and as a father».

I feel Teresa's hand on my leg and the eyes of everybody still on me. I sustain them with the strength of awareness. Vito looks at me with the gratification of who knew that I would have reached these conclusions.

«For someone who didn't want to speak, I'd say you dwelled long enough, doctor», he tells me smiling, letting a general smile break the emotion, sheltering me from my weakness, «I believe it is the right time for my nostalgic corner that, no offense meant, is less tedious than yours, Paolo».

He leaves the room to come back after a few instants with a guitar in hand.

«Who remembers the song of Gianna Nannini that I always played?»

«Of course!» Claudia exclaims, «it was the only one you could play decently. Aside from it, you scratched the guitar!»

Everybody laughs as she looks at him with benevolence, because she remembers well, like everyone else here, the extraordinary predisposition of our old classmate for music.

Vito's eyes meet ours before resting on the instrument. His fingers brush the strings, his face is concentrated and focused on the first chords that wave in the wood box and from there bounce in the room. Breathing slowly, he blows the first words on us, who begin to run after them as they go into a myriad of memories.

Sometimes I surprise myself, a little I invent you, a little you give yourself...

It was the first song he had learned how to play and he repeated it endlessly.

... Sometimes I lose the thread. Maybe you're not there...

While the present stays trapped in the chairs, under the weight of our carcasses, we are lightly lifted above ourselves, greeting from above those tired bodies that don't belong to us in this moment, running after our old semblances, when we were light and elusive, like these notes in the air.

... flower of water lily, you last but an instant...

I see Mario and Giovanni pricking with their well-sharpened pencils the shoulders of Maria and Carlotta – who jump from their chairs as if they had been stung by a bee – and a beardless Vito without wrinkles who enjoys composing embarrassing rhymes on them and recites them in the middle of a knot of classmates, who composedly laugh when they pass by. There is the ruddy and embarrassed Salvatore who sweats beyond measure while the English teacher tries in vain to sweeten his pronunciation. I see Giorgio standing close to the clothes-stand, his arms rigidly along his sides, his face paralyzed in an expression that seems like a sadistic giggle toward nothingness, while Matteo engraves skulls and crossbones and crosses with a penknife on the smooth surface of his desk. Anna and Teresa are there too, of course, competing to answer the questions of the teachers, polite and zealous. Antonella di Bartolo is there too, and fancies about a happy destiny like the ones she reads about in the love romances together with a timid but authentic Serenella, softly impassioned to her dream world.

And above all there's all of us on the beach, around Vito who is playing just like now, but thirty years younger, while we sing, in a rough draft of the strong and scratchy voice of the legendary Gianna.

... Love who gave nothing to the world When your look comes It will be the pain of a crescendo It will be like looking inside myself...

Teresa holds my hand and sings passionately, striving to reach those too high notes. Bandaged in her white dress, in her eyes shining with emotion, her skin propped by the movie of our life together.

... Love who gave nothing to the world When this dawn explodes It will be the end of every star It will be like falling down...

There's an incomprehensible expression on Giorgio's face. For once I would like to see the world through the filter of his representation of it. He inhales the music without singing, but something tells me that he too is pervaded by something that warms up the cold.

... Sometimes I suspend myself Leaf to the wind I come to you Sometimes I think about you You move all of my borders...

We shared experiences that slowly led us toward what we are now. It is on the same limbs that we walked to arrive here, on the same ones we will proceed further in our trip.

... Love, how beautiful is it to give yourself to the world When this dawn explodes I will live in the fire of a star. To leave the Earth with you...

When the music ends, the room is saturated of all our memories.

«Keep playing, Vito», Salvatore exhorts him, and he, as if he had been waiting just for this, crosses a repertoire of memories going as far as the more ancient Sicilian tradition, to that ciuriciuri that was a common baggage in which our ancestors sunk their roots.

With the arrival on the table of the best of Sicilian confectionery, the happy company exhausts its baggage of old melodies.

«I believe that the time of nostalgia is finished, and that that of gluttony has begun», Anna announces. She has gone back sitting at the head of the table, from where she had directed the organization, perfect to the last detail, for the whole evening.

«I bet that you missed these!», she says to me and to Teresa, who is already tasting a portion of chocolate setteveli.

«You don't know how much! But in these days I believe I have overcompensated. A long diet waits for me back home!»

Salvatore prompts me to taste a cannoli. I accept with reticence, because I already ate beyond measure and because I already expect the disappointment for a taste that is not the same anymore, like old uncle Gino said. But I am wrong.

Some hours have passed from when we entered the restaurant, yet I don't feel like ending this evening yet. There is a pleasantly relaxed atmosphere to which I don't want to renounce yet. While the first people leave, for some of us a spontaneous understanding is born, a tacit accord to stay, to prolong this evening endlessly, or at least until we will feel ready to go back each to their own present. Perfidy and Falsehood have been the first to go, quickly followed by Giovanni, who has been a shadow all through the dinner.

«He's living a difficult period with his older son. It seems he's on drugs. Of course he wasn't him to tell me, but a common acquaintance who is also a gossip lover», Anna explains.

One after the other we hugged and greeted human shells who quickly disappeared in the night, we promised not to lose sight of one another, to set a sort of yearly meeting, although we knew that we will hardly be able to keep faith with such intention. We patiently waited for the group to thin out, until it allowed the survival of a narrower company with which to share the last hours of this endless evening. To my surprise, at one a.m. we are more than I would have imagined. There are, of course, Vito and Anna, with whom passing the time has never been difficult, there is Salvatore, inexhaustible reserve of jokes and anecdotes about the Arabs in Sicily, but what surprises me more is the perseverance of Giorgio. His small eyes sparkle in the faint light while we are walking through a quiet alley, not far from the "Garden of the orange trees". It is a different twinkling from that of school times.

«He's not the person he seems», Vito says. Like me, he can hardly walk straight along the pedestrian route.

From the windows of a famous jewellery, precious jewels sparkle to the warm light of the lampposts. Anna and Teresa stand there to look at a pair of earrings adorned with rubies and diamonds, laughing at the time passed since the last time they went shopping together in Palermo, when they stopped to look at jeans and sport shoes. It seems that they wants to recover tonight all the missed meetings, satisfying themselves with peering at shop windows in a faint light in the warm and fascinating atmosphere of a Palermo immersed in the silence and the quiet that it misses in the day, when the roads swarm of people and cars dart at full speed. Us men follow them a few meter behind, leaving them to their intimate complicity, looking for such a reserved space for us. Vito is next to Giorgio; they talk in a low voice. Giorgio seems very animated. Salvatore asks me about Paris.

«I have been there once», he says, «I would like to bring my wife there.»

I tell him that I wait for him as soon as possible and that a trip with your family is oxygen for those who, like us, work too much.

The group gathers again in front of the glimmering windows of Swarovsky.

«Guys, maybe it's time to go home», Salvatore says. Even though unwillingly, Anna and Teresa nod, letting tiredness take the upper hand.

«It was a marvellous evening», my wife says to her friend, «I can't yet believe that we succeeded. I think that it was a beautiful occasion to tidy up things that were still hanging for some of us. It was necessary, as well as pleasant».

Unexpectedly Giorgio steps forward, bringing himself in the middle of the group.

«There is still a thing.»

We all look at him, curiously.

«I haven't developed my theme about nostalgia yet.»

Anna looks at him in amazement, excusing herself for such forgetfulness.

«I am sorry I didn't notice, but why didn't you say immediately? It was my fault, Giorgio, I should have made sure that everyone had had their chance to speak.»

«No, you are not responsible at all, Anna. Earlier I didn't feel like saying anything, and it was a relief for me that nobody noticed. However I have something to say to you, and according to Vito this is the right time. Nevertheless... I made up my mind too late, and it's time to go to bed. Maybe next time, if there will be another time...»

Vito interrupts him, «I think that no one will mind staying to listen to you. Isn't it so guys?» and he looks at us, expecting an unanimous answer.

One by one we take back in our hands the thread of nostalgic memories, ready to follow it wherever it will lead us. Giorgio's small eyes look at us from behind the thick glasses with an expression of relief.

«I know what everybody always thought of me. They said that I was mentally ill or a kind of retard because I behaved in strange ways. Actually I never felt entirely normal, because I didn't really like many of the things that are generally fine to others. So I relaxed in the image that all had of me. It was my justification for everything. Even today I can't do without it, because there aren't just disadvantages in being considered different. I don't regret being as I am, I don't think, like Serenella, that I would like to go back and relive a part of my life, or even all of it, in a different way. Everyone has his peculiarities and we should never be ashamed of what we are, because we betray ourselves by forcing us to be different. What I would like to do is letting you know the reasons for my weirdness.»

He pauses and swallows with effort. There are tension and embarrassment on his face. Vito is next to him, I see suffering in the look he turns on him.

«I haven't always been like you have known me. I was a child like many others for some time, but then... something happened that changed everything.»

He pauses again, and again his throat bobbles up and down with difficulty. He looks down, his right hand tormentingly searches the pocket of his jacket, perhaps looking for courage.

«When I was nine, my fatherly grandfather hurt me. Do you understand what I mean...? It was terrible, I was just a child, but the worse thing was that my parents didn't believe me. My father harshly beat me because I had offended his father. My mother, who knew the heavy hand of my father, told me to let it go not to enrage him again. They hurt me even more than my grandfather. It happened two more times, then luckily he suffered a heart attack and died, the bastard. While my father was crying, my face petrified in the same mocking grin I had seen on the face of my grandfather when nobody had wanted to believe my accusations.»

Giorgio passes his hand in his hair, then brings it to his mouth, and for the first time he looks up at us who, speechless, seem hardened inside and out, wearing the same appearance that has been his for a lifetime.

«I felt relief for his death, and anger at the same time, because he had gotten away with it and I would never have the occasion to make him pay for what he had done to me. I wanted to talk about it with my mother, hoping that at least she would believe me, that she could help me to put that monster to shame. But she said that by then he was dead and that I had to forget, that it was up to God to punish him, if what I said was true. Do you realize the absurdity? If you can't even trust your parents, who can you trust then? I started to distrust everybody, I closed in myself and only that way I felt safe, because holding people at distance sheltered me from more sufferings. Growing up, I started to feel ashamed of what had happened to me. I feared that the other boys could discover it and make fun of me. Also because my mother, once, had told me that grandfather was a good person, and that maybe I had provoked him.»

Anna puffs, rising both hands to her face.

«Your mother should have protected you, that's the job of a mother. It must have been terrible, you were just a child.»

«It took one lifetime, and the help of a therapist, to fix things inside me and start making distinctions between people. Because we aren't all equal, fortunately. I am telling you all this because my therapist says that I have to start to recover my good relationships. For too long I kept everyone at a safe distance, condemning myself to loneliness. In truth, I didn't feel entirely isolated, because I was satisfied with fantasized relationships that gave me the illusion to be in company. What I am trying to say is that, although I never let you realize it, you were the company in my mind. I imagined to be friend with Vito and Paolo, playing football with you, to be the desk-mate of Salvatore, who seemed to me absolutely the most sincere and harmless person that could be imagined. And then I liked the way in which Anna and Teresa related with everybody. You were polite, sincere, ready to take the defences of your classmates, to help who was in need. Of those years, I miss Vito's spontaneous congeniality, Anna's generosity, Teresa's purity, Paolo's intelligence and the genuineness of Salvatore, your ability to be honest, of not being able to betray. I would have liked to be able to accept the hand that you sometimes tried to extend to me. I silently rejected you, making myself impenetrable, but only because I didn't find the courage to let you enter my world, neither to follow you in yours. This evening I came in the hope to be able to tell you all this, and I am happy I succeeded.»

We separate with long, silent hugs. No word would measure up to the emotion between us. We don't know if we will meet again, but in this moment we all want to believe we will. Giorgio demolished many barriers, but he's not yet ready to lose himself, even for an instant, in a hug. He reaches out and shakes our hands one by one. This time I don't have the feeling of closing mine on a puff of air, but I feel fingers and bones, blood and warmth. Giorgio is in that hand, with all of the humanity he can grant himself, and I am there too, finally feeling ready to go back home.

#  Chapter 16

I extend my hand toward the nightstand to read the time on my new watch. It's half past nine, I have slept my usual six hours. Laying on the bed, arms crossed under my nape, I look at the ceiling and think again about the long night that just passed and the last five days, that seem almost unreal now. A week ago, at the same time, I was in my study, revising a degree thesis, worried about all the job I was going to skip in this period of absence, about the inopportunity of not being there right when the conditions of Jule had become desperate.

Teresa is next to me, laying on her left side, dressed in a white silk nightgown. It gently lays on her harmonious body, accentuating its curves. It confers her a light, ethereal appearance. I linger, looking at her. I would like to hug her to give her the greatest of all the thanks that I owe her. But I don't want to interrupt her blessed sleep.

I don't know how she can always anticipate my needs, but it has been working like that for a long time. I lived in a cage, she opened the door and waited until I was ready to come out. For some time, living under lock and key was more reassuring than being free. But not anymore. I found my world again. I discovered that it kept existing with a new breath and new yearnings. No prisoners, neither subjugation, nor struggle between slavery and freedom. Once it had a chance, Sicily knew how to exploit it, thanks to the industriousness of all that people who believed in it. And today people live well in Sicily, without dreaming distant heavens.

Here different people have met and started to cohabit dignifiedly, in the mutual respect. And it has been clear to everyone that absoluteness doesn't exist in the world, that everything can go well if it is fine to everyone. That different cultures cohabit when nobody believes to be the judge of others and everyone simply starts to consider themselves part of a whole. That borders are not necessarily insurmountable barriers, but points where differences touch.

Who chose to emigrate surrendered to fear, so not to have to face their own difficulty in changing. Some did that out of selfishness, because they preferred their own dreams to the wisdom that would have suggested to stay. I am one of those. Even though I spent my life building myself reasonable justifications.

A ristretto and a warm croissant eaten in bed pleasantly introduce the Sunday quiet.

Teresa bears a happy and nostalgic expression at the same time. She remembers the evening, telling our children all the anecdotes they haven't heard, in an avalanche of comments about the strangeness of Serenella, the terrible history of Giorgio, the human poverty of Giulia and Maria, the unbelievable story of Salvatore.

«I will never forget this moment. Of the many cities in which I grew up, this one lingered in my heart, because of the people I had the fortune to meet. And after so many years I have felt welcomed by the same warm embrace of the first time. I am really happy today, and you?»

I never asked myself this question in my life, yet it is the second time that it is asked to me in the last few days. Questions fit women way of living, because they question everything and they think they have to do that with men too. They can't resist the temptation to put a question mark at the end of every thought, sometimes looking for impossible answers. We, on the other hand, just live.

I tell her that I feel relaxed as I hadn't been in a long time, and that I am thankful that she brought me here. I feel that I have recovered something that goes well beyond the mere rest after too much work.

«How did you know how much I needed to come back to Torre?» I ask her, pulling out from my suitcase a pair of jeans I didn't even know I owned.

Teresa reads my perplexed look and reminds me that we purchased them together a few months ago. Yet another lapse of memory, minor as it is.

«In my opinion, you always needed to. I waited for you to realize on your own, but since it took you too long, I decided to push you a little. That's all.»

She raises, laying her back against the headboard of the bed, her legs huddled up, hugged by her naked arms. She smiles with the expression of who is proud of having done the right thing, of having found an answer to yet another question.

«We go to Torre again this morning?» I ask her while she admires me in my unusually casual attire.

She doesn't let me say it twice and she flies in the bathroom to get ready, fair butterfly in her white silk mantle.

«These days are flying by in a hurry, don't you think?» my wife asks me while I am driving along Via Palermo.

On the sidewalk, an orderly coming and going of passer-bys. Most of the shops respect Sunday closing, others stay open, taking advantage of the tourist season. The rolling shutter of the haberdashery is raised; beyond the glass wall there is Gaetana, busy.

«In two days we'll go back to Paris», Teresa sighs with melancholy.

«Yes.»

I join her sigh, in the sad realization that the present is already calling us back unmercifully. It's time to retrace our steps.

«I was thinking...» she starts quietly, as if she was reflecting about it now, but I know well that she has already planned all that follows «... that, if you want, we could cancel the trip to Messina and stay around here. It's so nice, we could relax, visit again the city with tranquillity, meet our friends once more... what do you think about it?»

«What about the booking for Taormina? And we would have to change the return tickets, because then we would no longer take the plane from Catania, and we don't even know if the suite is available for the next days.»

I don't know why I am putting all these obstacles to my desire of simply saying yes. But obviously she does.

«Come on, what is the problem? We just stay. We don't know when we will have another chance.»

Another question mark on her face, as if to ask whether she can hope that there will be one.

«I think that we will be back before my seconds fifty years.»

We laugh, but I read some bitterness on Teresa's face. I know that she is afraid that, once back in Paris, I will disappear again in the corridors of my hospital. I put my right arm around her shoulders, I pull her close to me. She send me a questioning look, she wants to know the reason of this unusual rush. I tell her that I got a great desire to live, to breathe, to travel. That I feel like staying, but also like going back home, to take back some of that familiar everyday life I lost. I feel like seeing her in the kitchen, busy preparing supper, hearing the complaints of our children, their quarrels, the laughter that reach the door of the study where, generally, they stop. I will let them in this time, I will let them break down the door.

«I hope it's not too late», I tell her.

«Everyone has his time», she comments.

«We will be back here soon, or we will go somewhere else, anywhere you want.»

«Don't make promises you are not sure you can keep. We are here now, then we'll see.»

We hold each other's hand, teenagers that a long time ago already walked this same asphalt, dreaming the life to come, here or elsewhere. Now that we have part of that life behind, we walk slower, with more confident but heavier steps, deprived of that freshness that is the wake of every action of young people. We dreamt, and many of our dreams have come true, yet there is no soundtrack to accompany them. Instead of notes, the dry thuds of shutting doors, of altered voices, of nervous gastritis. Reality knows no soundtrack.

We reach Piazza Vittoria. The cafes are already crowded with tourists sipping coffees. We sit at the only table available of the same cafe where I have been with Marco. Even today Marco and Giuliana didn't want to renounce to the sea, so we left them on the beach. After the evening at the disco, they desire neither walks nor excursions, but only to doze under the sun.

We order two cappuccinos. The waiter recognizes me and greets me. She's a young girl, less than twenty years old. She has deep black eyes, a dark complexion, slender legs and arms coming out from a black and blue suit that stresses her skinniness. She asks us if we are enjoying the visit to Torre. My wife precedes me in answering, saying that she is very happy. I nod.

«You chose a very good period to come around here», she tells us when she comes back with our second breakfast.

«I know», I answer, «we are not exactly tourists. I grew up here, right in the house in front».

I point it out to her. The girl follows the direction of my finger and locates the house. A smile widens on her face.

«A pharmacist lived there, a long time ago.»

«My father. But you are too young to have known him.»

«In fact I don't know him», she replies, «I heard of him, though. I live in that house with my family. My parents are the owners of this cafe. My father is Egyptian and my mother Tunisian. She came to live here with her family when her father invested in the reconstruction. A lot of the houses of this country have been restructured and resold by my grandfather. This one, however, he liked particularly, so he kept it to give it to my mother as a wedding gift. There she is.»

She points at the terrace of our house. I see the woman I have already seen before, her raven-black hair loose on her shoulders. She is sipping something. She drinks and dominates the square from up there, like my mother used to do once.

«Many of the elderly people in Torre tell her that she looks a lot like the old owner... your mother, therefore», the girl says.

«It's true», Teresa says with surprise, «for an instant I had the feeling to see Antonella».

She looks at me, incredulous.

«Yes», I just answer, without adding anything else.

Yasmina says that the house hasn't changed much in the inside. The disposition of the rooms has been left unchanged, but the furnishing and the finishing touch are of clear Arabic inspiration.

«I can ask my mother to let you make a tour, if you want. She is a helpful woman and she will understand your desire.»

I think that her proposal is kind, but I decline the offer, with some bland excuse. When Yasmina walks away, Teresa scrutinizes me. She wants explanations, she won't let this slowly sink inside of me.

«You really wouldn't like to see it?»

«I am not sure that it would be a good idea. It is the only thing of which I would like to keep the memory intact. I prefer to keep dreaming of it like it was then, with Mom in the kitchen and Dad in the living room, our furniture, our voices in the air. Nothing else.»

We sip the hot cappuccinos. We solitary pursue our thoughts. Teresa's phone rings, the only soundtrack of an era deprived of melody. Giuliana wants to know where we are. My wife gives her indications to reach us. She tells her that I am favourable to stay in Palermo for two more days. From the way she talks, I have the feeling that they already talked about that. I imagine the complicity with which they organized everything, me none the wiser of their projects. But it's fine this way. And then I want to walk in Palermo with Marco, to let him launch his attacks. I don't want to hide from him, I am ready to take his blows.

The church bells announce the end of the mass. A crowd methodically pours in the square. Handshakes, hugs, pats on the shoulders, Sunday chatters, now like thirty years ago, like it will still be thirty years from now and even more. People changed, but not habits, and looking better I even recognize in the face of mature men my playmates of the past.

The owner of the cafe isn't leaning out my old terrace anymore. She went down to join the party of the country Sunday. Her cafe will get crowded, her daughter and her husband aren't enough to manage so much confusion. As a good wife, she is prepared to help her husband in his job, just like, before her, in those same places, a woman who looked a lot like her did.

#  Chapter 17

Paris is not my birthplace, yet for me it is home. I walk along the three-lined avenue that leads me from the parking lot of the hospital to the six-story pavilion that contains the paediatric heart-surgery division. For too long I felt separated among a thousand belongings, each of them borrowed, none definitive. I wonder what has to be meant with 'home'? Is it the place in which we were born? The one in which we live? The one in which we feel free to be ourselves, even if it were a street corner, an hospital ward, a desk and a monitor, the smile of someone we love?

The air is lukewarm and the sky so bright that for a second I delude myself of being still in Torre. Yet one month has already passed from that as brief as extraordinary vacation.

Sicily is not the same anymore, and only those who lived there before the sale can really understand the measure of the change. For some it lost the taste it had once, bastardized by the mixing. I used to think so, too, but now I know that this is only the commonplace of those who didn't want to look carefully. I found everything again. I felt like a sort of refugee before going back there, now I am no longer uncertain about my belonging. I am a Sicilian who lives in Paris. I finally understood that my home has always been with me, this is why I will no longer feel like a foreigner in whatever place to which life will bring me. Like Teresa says, home is every place in which you spend your life. That's all. Torre was my first home, the ground floor on which I built the whole skyscraper of my existence. Denying the basement means taking away stability from the whole building. I am sated for having known and lived the authentic Sicily, rich of traditions, of colours and veracious tastes, of many resources and so many limits. Who thinks that we could have made it on our own is right. We certainly should have. Changing is a process that must start from inside, it should never be forced by others.

There is already a lot of movement at this time in the morning along the avenue. Night-shift nurses walk quickly to their cars, to finally go back home. Assistants prepare for their duties. There are new admittances, so much suffering, and the routine of a small world that never stops, hoping every day to give a new course to some lives.

There is an intense smell of vegetation announcing the incoming summer, and variegated colours in the bushes lining the stairway that leads to pavilion number twelve, mine.

At the ward nobody was expecting to see me before half past eight. I see mixed looks of curiosity and surprise among the nurses on duty. I walk the long corridor, where there is already a big coming and going. I instinctively stop in front of room number six. That's where I saw for the last time little Jule. Here we exchanged a timid goodbye. In his place there is Marie now, a beautiful little girl with long blonde hair. She calmly sleeps while her mother affectionately holds her hand and caresses her forehead. Another story of hope and pain that will happen within these boundaries, but with good chances of having a happy ending.

I reach my study. I open the curtains, to let as much sunlight as possible in, in this world where pain makes everything dark. I turn the PC on. There is a new report waiting for me.

I haven't been reading my e-mails for days. I had no time for it, but not only because of the job. I spend more time with Marco these days. I bring him at the trainings at the swimming pool since when he decided to try again. Monsieur Vignon welcomed him with open arms. He'd never stopped hoping for his return.

There are more than twenty unread messages. I quickly glance at the senders. Only one creates in me a curiosity that cannot be deferred. It's Vito.

"Hi Paolo, how are you? Teresa? The children? Here everything is all right except for the fact that, since you left, Anna hammers me in saying that we cannot let another thirty years pass before seeing you again. She wants to find a way to convince you to come back to Torre as soon as possible. I haven't yet told her of your intention to come down in August, she would torment me with her organizational mania. I forgot, Giorgio sends you his regards and a poetry. He has discovered an Arabic author with an impressive as well as unpronounceable name, Abd al Jabbar ibn Muhammad ibn Hamdis, who, if you listen to Giorgio, was the maximum exponent of Arabic poetry in Sicily between XI and XII century. He wandered for a long time and died away from his homeland, to which he dedicated verses of nostalgia and regret. It's all for you, brotherly friend."

Dear homeland! If the air of her is lost

your affections will be lost for the land

the countries of others are not your country

whose proximity alone fed your spirit.

Can another people's land hold the place of ours?

Friend, who I connected to me with close affection

like the second spring rain is connected to the first

hold your homeland tight, your beloved country

And beware from ever taste the taste of exile.

#  Acknowledgements

First of all I wish to thank 0111 Edizioni for investing in my novel. Until some time ago, all this was just a remote desire with an uncertain result.

A special thanks also goes to Giuseppe, my husband, for the walks in certain enchanting places humiliated by the carelessness of man, from which the reflections that gave life to this novel were born. I thank him, also, for the support he gave me while I was writing, for having believed in it even before I did, for the inexpressible emotion we have shared, for the suggestions and the research, for the dinners prepared while I was giving a voice to my dream.

I thank in advance those who will read "The oranges of Dubai". I hope they will be able to share with me the dream of a rebirth, of an improvement not imposed but built with the efforts of those who love Sicily and fight every day to make it better.

Finally, I thank my mother because, from some remote place, invisible to fragile mortals, after almost twenty years from her demise, she always finds the way to make me feel that she is still walking at my side.

