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“It is not safe for us to talk about things here,” Fina had insisted, and I was at their mercy if I wanted more information.
Before I knew it we were driving alongside the stunning ruins of what looked like a Greek temple.
“Selinunte,” Fina said, waving her hand at the massive columns that reached high into the sky in front of the cerulean sea. It was as impressive as pictures I’d seen of the Greek Parthenon back in my grade school history books.
I took out my phone to snap a picture and got stuck on the lock screen before I pushed the button. My eyes stung looking at a family photo. Jack and Sophie and I all dressed up as planets two Halloweens ago. Sophie was Saturn. I was Jupiter. Jack was Earth. In this picture, which I couldn’t bear to change, we were smiling like idiots with our arms wrapped around one another, a functioning solar system all our own.
The photo unsettled me, and I quickly wiped the moisture from my eyes before anyone could see. I unlocked the phone and toggled to the camera app to snap the photo.
“Are those Greek ruins?” I asked.
“Sicily was Greece and Greece was Sicily and all the good stories come from here and have been bastardized around the globe. You know the story of Persephone, yes? A maiden who lived in the fertile fields close to Enna in the center of the island,” Fina explained. “This is where Hades, the king of the underworld, found her and abducted her, bringing her to be his queen down in hell. Persephone did not go quietly, a Sicilian woman never would. She went on a hunger strike and finally he had to relent and allow her to return for half of the year.”
“Right, I remember reading the myth in lit class,” I said, feeling slightly schooled.
“But you thought she was Greek. Persephone, the grain mother, is the reason we have such a fertile growing season followed by such a miserable drought. She was a rebel. She was a queen. She was a Sicilian woman!”
We didn’t stop at the ruins, merely slowed. Soon enough, the olive groves and pastures gave way to squat concrete apartment buildings on the edge of the city. Strings of wet laundry flapped outside every window. Urban sheep nibbled at the detritus that collected in the gutters on the side of the road.
“Trash-eating sheep,” I remarked.
“Sheep will eat anything,” Giusy yelled above the wind. “They’re like pigs. I saw one eat a condom last time I was here. A used condom. Filthy beasts.”
Some of the buildings we passed were gorgeous, intricate beaux arts relics in various shades of faded yellows, oranges, and pinks. They were interspersed with brutalist monsters, concrete blocks with tiny windows. Even worse were the lots where it looked like something had gone terribly wrong, burned-out husks of former structures, some still black with smoke stains battered by the sea air.
It was siesta time, and like in Caltabellessa, most businesses in this city were shuttered, lending everything an abandoned and menacing air.
“Merda!” Fina cursed at herself and did a U-turn in the middle of the road, hardly checking for oncoming traffic. “Missed it.”
Within minutes we were on the coastal road, the sea so close it felt like one deep pothole in the concrete could careen us straight into the water. Ancient-looking wooden rowboats were tied to thick metal stakes pounded into the concrete lining the shore.
We drove up a low hill and finally parked in a field across the road from the ocean.
“Mangiamo,” Giusy shouted as she slammed the car door shut. She transformed into a different person outside the walls of her village. There was new color in her cheeks, and she had this fiendish smile. It clearly had something to do with the presence of Fina, who giggled easily with her friend despite her ominous warning to me back in the police station.
The two women rushed across the street ahead of me holding hands. Suddenly they began to walk down the hill and out of sight. I scurried to catch up and saw stone steps built into the cliff hugging the shore, leading precariously down to a white stone building with an orange roof.
Closer to the structure I could practically taste lemon and garlic in the air. I was starving. As dilapidated and abandoned as the place appeared from the outside, it was stunning once I passed through the entrance. An expansive teak floor stretched out toward the edge of the hillside. Below us the sea was a calm pool of aquamarine. Gold and silver lanterns hung from exposed beams on the ceiling. The interior was much more solidly built than the exterior, which now seemed like a trick, a facade to discourage those unwilling to see beyond the ruins. A massive and gleaming wooden table took up the center of the room, made of a single piece of wood with live edges and surrounded by at least twenty chairs. It was set for a feast, but only Giusy and the cop were sitting there, smiling strangely at me. I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, confronting a pair of Cheshire cats, eager to screw with my head. Why were we on this strange little field trip? I’d have to sit to find out.
A grilled slab of bread was in the center of the table, surrounded by bowls filled with honey-covered figs and glistening artichoke hearts, crumbly white cheeses and roasted eggplants smothered in bright green olives and fiery red peppers. Before I could take a seat Fina stood. She’d taken off the top of her uniform to reveal a bright yellow halter beneath that showed off her smooth olive skin and her tattoos. The first one I noticed was the Medusa from the Sicilian flag etched into her left shoulder. In this design Medusa’s thin lips from the flag cracked into a massive and gorgeous smirk, like she’s in on the joke and you’re not and that will not end well for you. On her right shoulder there was a second woman with the wings of an eagle sprouting from her back. Her face was entirely blank, no features at all. In her hand a curved blade dripped with blood.
“What’s the name of this place?” I asked.
“Sicania,” Giusy mumbled through a mouth full of bread. “The earliest recorded name of the island.”
“Since we are talking of records, we should show the American what we brought her here to see,” Fina said, reaching into a massive backpack she’d brought from the police station. She pulled out the largest book I’d ever seen, at least twice the size of the kind of books fancy people have on their coffee tables back home.
The pages were thin as parchment, the ink faded. “What is this?” I asked.
“Ecclesiastical records,” Fina said. “Church records of births, weddings, baptisms, deaths.”
The big book that had boiled the priest’s blood back in the church. “Why do you have it?”
Giusy answered for her. “Fina has been given the task of matching the church records with the civil records, marriage certificates, death certificates. And she is putting it all in the computers. In a database. They let her borrow the books to get it done.”
“It is exhausting,” Fina said. “The work makes me want to set a car on fire.”
“But it is lucky for you, American, because Father Silvano never would have let you see this book and there is interesting information about Serafina Marsala we can show you. Sicilians keep some of the best records in the world, you know,” Giusy interjected as she opened the book, a thin layer of dust fluttering up from the pages and resettling on the table. It was all organized by year. Handwritten entries for every single event.
