The Four Corners of Palermo (10 page)

“Of course, every address is rated, depending on the quality of the service, with a variable number of stars,” I added.

Sophie smiled, gave me a light slap on the arm with the back of her hand, and then let it rest there, in a contact that became the light switch governing my senses. They had all just flipped to
on
.

I brushed my fingers, intentionally, shamelessly, against her tapered hand, the hand of a Russian pianist. I felt the elastic consistency of her skin, the long bones, the delicacy of a palm that I could imagine pressed against my chest, in a caress that I was yearning for but that instead was only a dream. Time stopped and took a rest. She shifted her hips to get closer still: the wait was over. I intertwined my fingers with hers, and she turned over on her side to look at me, looking me in the eye with that gaze of hers, a gaze of lake, sea, and ocean. She slowly moved her face closer to mine, I closed my eyes. And she asked me for a cigarette.

I decided to inflict some stupid form of death on myself then and there: like eating twenty pounds of
U pani ca meusa
, or going into an infinite free dive, off Ustica, down down deep, where the brain stops thinking, so that my lungs would pop.

I gave her a Camel and she raised it to her lips without tearing off the filter. I lit it for her; she took two shallow drags and handed it to me: our fingers never separated.

She asked me about my work.

“It’s the kind of work you can only do in Sicily,” I told her. Then it occurred to me that, actually, I was living in a novel by Dashiell Hammett, and that this city wasn’t called Palermo, but Poisonville: a place where everyone died. Always.

She twisted her fingers in mine. She’d heard about the massacre. She couldn’t understand it.

“Neither can I.”

Then I told her about my friend Fabrizio, my roommate. I told her about how our lives were out of sync: how I woke up at dawn and he got up at ten, how I tried to sleep in the afternoon while he studied, how I stayed out late at night and he went to bed early with his girlfriend, at her place or ours, and in any case in one of two nice middle-class apartments.

My accent was impeccable. I glossed over all the Livias who had passed through our apartment, and through my very comfortable bed, in recent years.

Sophie had never been tense the whole time I’d known her, more than an hour now. She often smiled at my stories, and her laughter was quick and sharp.

She crushed out the Camel on the cement of the wharf. She ran a hand through my hair, and my spine responded. I embraced her, and she crushed her body against mine. She was skinny, and she had small breasts that I could feel pressing naked against my chest. The kiss was long and slow; our tongues met in a single conversation, they shared everything, making delicate gestures of approval, admitting that
until that moment they’d never heard anything that made more sense.

We didn’t know much about each other. All we knew was that that evening was the start of something.

We left together, Sophie and I. She wasn’t used to riding on a Vespa, she didn’t know where we were going, but she entrusted herself to my care, and this filled me with joy. The warm night air tousled her short hair; we forgot about Paolo, Elena, and Totino’s rock music, we forgot about all the constellations that now seemed to glitter in our eyes, in our hands. She had her arms wrapped around me, clutching me in a way that was at once instinctive and asphyxiating, on the first scooter ride of her life.

“Where I come from we take the metro,” she whispered in my ear.

“Luckily we don’t have a subway here: you’ll have to keep your arms wrapped around me until we get to my house, which is just on the other side of London. It’ll take us, oh, two years.”

Sophie liked my mix of French and Sicilian, and I was improving in my comprehension of her Norman French. We sailed past Piazza Politeama, which had not yet been defiled by its yellow anti-fog streetlights, designed to fight a fog that Palermo will never see. I slowed down and told her that the perfume she was wearing was a foretaste of paradise. She replied that she never wore perfume.

“Disappointed?”

“I don’t know anything about women.”

“That’s not how it looks to me: you’re driving me all over Palermo just two hours after we met.”

“Sophie, you’re the one who’s driving me into the future. We’re going to do things together, we’re going to talk and talk, we’re going to be in love. Do you want a chauffeur?”

“I already have one.”

“No, I mean a chauffeur that you can drink. It’s a cocktail that’s called the
autista
: it’s a strange brew, and they make them right around the corner, behind Piazza Politeama.”

We wanted to explore each other’s bodies on my super-bourgeois bed; it was something we both wanted, and urgently, but it was two in the morning, I’d been on my feet for eighteen hours, and we decided to wait. The bar was called Al Pinguino—the Café Penguin—a name chosen with an unintentional frisson of situationist provocation, considering that it was in a city where the temperature had never dropped below fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, even during the first Ice Age.

“Two
autisti
, if you please.”

The neon lights illuminated the exhausted faces of two men in their forties, unshaven, with sweaty gazes. They were leaning against the counter, drinking beer and soda pop.

The barman squeezed lemon juice into two frosted glasses, added some water and two spoonfuls of bicarbonate, and didn’t even need to mix: the foam generated by that mixture overflowed frothily.

“Two
autisti
. I hope you enjoy them.”

Sophie shot me a dubious look. I nodded my head yes. We both threw back our drinks, and I understood from the trust she showed as she drank the concoction that this really showed the possibility of becoming a true love affair. Ten
minutes later, we were home. Fabrizio was asleep. We made the noises that two people make when they kiss furiously, with the door still open, undressing each other at random, in the front hall, in the living room, and finally in my bedroom, where Maria, the guardian angel who cleaned and tidied the apartment twice a week, had made the bed. The note from Livia was on the nightstand, folded, impossible to read.

Sophie had an elastic body, with a curveless silhouette that was reminiscent of the models in paintings by Schiele. Her natural blonde hair color was highlighted with copper, and she almost had the breasts of an adolescent, with light-colored nipples and areolas. It filled me with tenderness to hold her in my arms, her naked essence.

We made love sweetly, gently, unhurriedly, without any of the urgency we’d displayed as we tore each other’s clothes off, victims of that sense of emergency that two human beings experience in the presence of a dangerous fire. Our early adulthood was burning in that embrace, in that demented feverish quest of the other, and then, in contrast, in that slow, rhythmic movement that joined our bodies in the way we whispered, in the way we arched our backs, offering our belly to the world: that is, she offered her belly to me, who, before her, beneath her, and on top of her, became her world, and in that world we recited the eternal prayer of bodies in search of peace.

Sophie’s peace came quickly. She cried out something in her language. I right after her, in strangled silence. We lay there motionless, satiated with excitement and deeply moved. I kissed her eyes, I caressed her delicate shoulder blades, her neck—a neck as long as her eyelashes, which only now I was able to see, with our bodies so close to each other,
illuminated by the light that filtered through the slats of the shutters. We abandoned ourselves to naked sleep.

The next morning, when we woke up, Sophie asked if she could bring her suitcase, now parked temporarily at Elena’s house, to my apartment. I told her yes; I loved that gentle girl. I loved her the way you do when you fall in love with someone instantly, enamored in the most refined form of happiness, direct and without mediation.

I went into the newsroom, and I worked while my mind kept going out to her and wandering back. Her suitcase. What did she have in her suitcase? What does a fashion model take with her when she travels? I didn’t have the slightest idea; she seemed like an alien who concentrated in her body all the beauty and all the loveliness of all the universes of Asimov. I supposed that a fashion model must be detached from all earthly concerns, as distant as a strand of silver tinsel carried off by a gust of wind. I hadn’t understood a thing.

At work that morning, my boss obliged me to reestablish contact with the control tower on two separate occasions. I was traveling along completely unfamiliar air corridors, I was writing about the Mafia, useless investigations into the car bomb, and the whole time I was thinking about her lips, her taste, the kiss that sex gives and finds, wrapped up in her pelvic thrusts. Sophie controlled her muscles as she pleased; she was an athlete: she danced, she was experienced in runway presentations, and she knew how to master a five-inch stiletto heel. I couldn’t wait to get back to her.

At three that afternoon I unlocked the front door to the apartment. The place was dark; no one was home.

I found a note from Fabrizio: “I met Sophie, I made her breakfast. She’s very pretty, especially when she’s drinking coffee, partially naked. You really are a miserable loser. P.S. She says she’s coming back tonight.”

I called Elena. She didn’t know anything; all she’d heard was that Sophie would swing by sometime that day to pick up her suitcase. Then I tried to get in touch with Paolo. Without luck. I put a record on the turntable:
The Wall
, disc 2, side A, track number 1.

I was home. Sophie still hadn’t opened her heart to me, but I wanted her help.

The afternoon went by quickly, amid a fog of sleepiness with a chemical flavor, heavy as Rohypnol, and a couple of phone interviews that a magazine from up north had asked me to do. I was working from home, in the hope that she’d be there early.

The doorbell rang a little after seven. Palermo was reddened by a summer sunset, with a clear sky, and a thermometer that read ninety degrees. I opened the door for her. She was wearing loose cotton Bermuda shorts and a knit tank top that covered her small breasts. She smiled at me with glowing eyes, dropped her bag, and kissed me on the lips. I hugged her close.

“Come on in, Sophie. You want some juice? A ciggie?”

I helped her stow her suitcase in the bedroom, and she told me that, with Elena’s help, she’d gone looking for work, and that she needed a cold shower.

“Room temperature,” I corrected her, reminding her that here the temperature was special, feverish.

She smiled, stripped off everything she was wearing, slipped off her panties, strode naked through the living room and the outer bathroom, went into the kitchen, popped open a beer, and told me a little something about the shop where she’d spent her day: in the four minutes that preceded her shower, I learned that the word “modesty” and the word “model” aren’t to be found in the same dictionary.

I detected a certain joy in her at being allowed to stay in our apartment, browse through my books and records, with one of Fabrizio’s bath towels wrapped around her hips, naked from the waist up, still wet from her shower.

“You have some nice music. Have you ever heard of Francis Cabrel?”

Sure, I’d heard of him. I’d discovered him in Paris four years ago. I had been a student on probation at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, when I was still fantasizing about a future as a linguist. Cabrel is one of those singer-songwriters who in the eighties toyed with women’s hearts. He had a gentle, hoarse voice, he belonged to the purest
chansonnier
tradition, and he wrote songs for romantic souls.

I had his first album, purchased in a record shop on the Rive Droite that sold used LPs as well as new ones. I put on track 1, side A. Sophie moved closer to me.

“Not my eyes, the ink of
your
eyes, Sicilian.”

She dropped her towel and we made love in the living room.

She smelled cool and clean.

We went out to dinner. On Piazza Marina, in the darkness of the quarter known as the Mandamento Tribunali, we found a bistro that a few old comrades from the protest movement had started, people with whom six years earlier I’d founded the first “free radio” in Palermo—and when I say free, I mean free. In just six years, the trajectory from revolutionary to restaurateur had been completed. And to judge from the quality of the eggplant caponata that they were serving, it had ended exceedingly well.

Sophie ate happily, and we both had beers. She told me all about the oily shop owner Elena had introduced her to. The man had suggested she pose for a clothing catalog he was going to distribute to his regional representatives for all of Sicily. She had shown him her portfolio and he had lingered over the photos in which she was closest to nude.