AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Indeed.” I tipped an invisible brim of an invisible hat to him.
He chuckled at this. “Sit, sit, sit.” He cast a nervous glance in Giusy’s direction and then pointed a finger at her. “Are you sure you want her to be here, or would you prefer to talk alone?”
Giusy’s chest puffed out as she sighed with irritation. “I am helping Sara with this process. I told you that on the phone.”
Raguzzo rolled his eyes before he addressed me again. “With situations like this you need to make sure to surround yourself with people you can trust.”
I didn’t totally trust Giusy, but I needed her help.
“Giusy stays.”
Raguzzo accepted my answer and moved on. “It is up to you. I have reviewed your deed.”
Clearly Giusy had obtained a copy of the document at some point and had given it to this man. For all I knew Rose had sent her a copy months ago. Raguzzo pulled out a crisp pile of papers from the drawer in the middle of his desk and donned a pair of clear-framed glasses, the kind hipsters in America took to wearing a few years ago but that I imagined never went out of style here.
“This land was absolutely deeded to a Serafina Forte, who I have been told is your great-grandmother. Her name and her name alone was put on the documents... no husband’s name on the paper... which was rare for the time. It’s rare now.” He snorted like it was still completely absurd for a woman to own property on her own.
“Why wouldn’t my great-grandfather’s name be on the lease?”
“It was never his land,” Raguzzo said. “Here is what I could find. Giovanni Marsala owned a house here in town. His wife sold that in 1925. She sent the money to her husband in America shortly before she...” He paused. “Before she died.” It was obvious he knew how she died.
“This land was deeded to her by Marco Domenico. He was then the mayor of the town. There is a note in the transfer that says it was given to her in gratitude for her service to the village and that it was intended to be used as a place of care for the infirm. A clinic.”
I pressed Raguzzo for more. “And this land. It’s been vacant all this time? For a hundred years?”
“Not vacant. It has been in use by the neighboring farm. This is not unusual. There was no one here to claim it for themselves after Serafina died. You know that her children went to America. They would have been the ones to inherit it, but they never returned. Her own parents had passed. Her siblings left. So for all intents and purposes this land was abandoned even though it appears that the estate of Marco Domenico left money for the payment of property taxes.” The sunlight from the large window in front of his desk glinted off his mouth full of metal as he spoke. “And there are unspoken rules here about land abandonment. Why should a parcel of land go unused when it can be used for growing and grazing? The neighbors of the land tended to it and cared for it, so they do have some claim to it. We call it usucapione here, adverse possession. I think you call it squatter’s rights in America. The land next to the plot is owned by the Puglisi family.”
He paused and looked pointedly at Giusy, who just made a gesture for him to continue. Raguzzo rolled his eyes as he did. “The Puglisis have an olive grove and a sheep farm next to it.”
And recently there has been some interest from a foreign buyer in purchasing the land. The owners of the farm next door have been in negotiations with a developer, the same people who built that fancy resort and spa and golf center over in Mazara del Vallo, the Giardino, the one that uses a helicopter to get the people from Palermo. Five-star deluxe. He leaned forward. “And, well I really shouldn’t be telling you all this.”
There was no doubt he was going to tell me all this.
“But the potential buyers have allegedly already done tests on the land. Your family land is set up for access to the kind of water that they will need to keep something like a golf course in the condition that it needs to be kept in. So I expect they, all parties involved, do not want you to come and claim this land.”
“I’ll sell it to them,” I said too quickly. “What is it worth?”
He pulled out an old-school calculator, the kind that my sister and I used to play with when we were younger. We’d punch in numbers and flip it over so that it read boobies on the screen, the most hilarious joke I knew at age six. Raguzzo tapped in number after number, consulting the papers in front of him several times.
“Maybe $300,000 from the right buyer.”
It was life-changing money for me, enough to put a down payment on a new restaurant and pay off my old investors so I wouldn’t be beholden to anyone. The idea excited and terrified me in equal measure. For as much as I loved my restaurant, I hated what it had turned me into. I’d become careless, sometimes selfish. I’d been overworked and burnt out. But the money was also more than enough to hire a lawyer to get me primary custody of Sophie and pay for her preschool, a prospect that mattered so much more. I was grossly eager in my response.
“And these resort people? They are the right kind of buyer?”
Giusy grunted. “They’re Arab princes. They have more money than God.”
“You’re screwing with me,” I said back to her. “They’re not Arab princes.”
Signor Raguzzo gave Giusy another one of his looks. “We don’t know much about them. They may be connected to the royal family of one of the Emirates. There has been a lot of interest in Sicily from the Gulf States.”
Giusy chimed in. “And we need the tourists. We will never get the kinds of tourist money the mainland gets. Sicily is still the sad forgotten stepbrother of Italian tourism. Americans all want to see the canals in Venice even though I have heard they smell like a pig’s ass. They want the Colosseum and that stupid tower that is not straight.”
I barely heard her at all because I couldn’t stop thinking about the money. It suddenly felt like it could be easy. Like something could finally be easy. “OK. OK. I think I want to move forward. What do I need to do?”
Raguzzo took a very long breath. “The owners of the land next door do not want to admit that the land is yours. This is a small village. Word travels fast. They are not happy about you showing up here the way that you have. And there are many things working against you. First there is the fact that the land has been abandoned for a hundred years. The people next door think they have a right to it. Second there is the problem of a woman owning the land back then in the first place. Was it even legal for Serafina to own it? And third there is the issue of why Marco Domenico gave Serafina that land. What did she do to him that forced him to give it to her?”
“Do to him? You just said he gave it to her as a clinic. A place to treat sick people.” I was finally coming around to the idea that Serafina might have been some kind of healer, probably because of its benefits for me. “Also, who cares what she did?”
