That Summer in Sicily by Marlena de Blasi Read Free Book Online

young selves? I wish they could have seen us in all our clumsiness and selfishness, which is so like their own clumsiness and selfishness right now. There’s another echo for you.”
    “We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it. We were children loving our children. And that’s who we are still.”

    Rather than meeting in the pergola, one evening all the women gather in and near the door to the birthing room. Though I don’t understand the reason for the change of venue, I follow along, walking more or less alone. The birthing room is positioned in a first-floor wing of the villa that I’ve not yet seen. Not at all the clinical space I’d imagined, the room seems more a chapel, save the hospital beds and a few practical accessories. Long, wide windows with heavy silk curtains are open to the soft night. A gently lit
Tiziano
Saint Anne—Roman saint of expectant mothers—hangs on one ochre wall and a reproduction
Raffaello
Madonna who cradles her sleeping son against her red-robed breast hangs next to it. A small, ruined marble Demeter, Greek goddess of fertility and motherhood, stands on a pedestal in front of the two paintings. Passive against contrast or contradiction, the widows’ reverence of and familiarity with these three images is equally fervent. They chant and pray and bless one another. “We are all women,” Nuruzzu says to me, saying everything.
    In the far and darkened corner of the room, two beds, side by side, are occupied. In groups of two or three, the widows go to the beds and speak softly to the women who lie in them. Once again, they chant and pray and then quietly move on so the next group of widows can make their visit. I wait for Nuruzzu to come back to the place where I stand in front of the paintings and the statue and then walk out of the birthing room with her. Without my asking her to, she tells me the story of the two women in the beds.
    One is a widow called Cosettina, she begins. Already I am confused that a widow lies in the birthing room, but I say nothing.
    Cosettina has lived at the villa for ten years or more and, along with her kitchen duties, she held informal classes for those other widows who had never learned to read or write. And for those who enjoyed sitting of an evening while Cosettina read aloud. Cosettina had been a schoolteacher in Enna for much of her life. And a friend of Tosca’s for longer than that. If not her desire for it, her capacity to work had been steadily decreasing over the past year. Fainting spells. Mild heart attacks. One attack that was not so mild.
Dottoressa
Rosa, the young
Palermitana
who’d come to practice general medicine in the mountains, diagnosed, medicated, watched over Cosettina with hope until a few weeks earlier when, after other episodes and complications, she told Tosca it was time for Cosettina to be transferred to the hospital in Enna. Cosettina refused to leave the villa. And Tosca agreed. It was “at home” where Cosettina would wait for death. A room was arranged for her close to the dining hall so, with her door open, she would feel almost as though she were dining with the household. Tosca and the other widows lavished Cosettina with love. She became their collective child, each of them spoon-feeding her, surprising her with a sweet. With a flower. Each evening, by candlelight, they bathed her shrunken limbs with soft cloths and warm olive oil. Dressed her like a doll in embroidered shifts and tied her braids up with ribbons cut from someone’s old pink nightdress.
    On the day we’d arrived at the villa, Cosettina was very near the end of her life. I understood that it was Cosettina for whom Carlotta had cried that first day. Nuruzzu explained that the widows took turns keeping vigil over her through each night. And that
Dottoressa
Rosa continued her daily visits. When Tosca took her turn by Cosettina’s bed, Cosettina used the occasion to