That Summer in Sicily by Marlena de Blasi Page B

a chemise. A pair of culottes. A silk undershirt with a pink ribbon woven ’round the neck. Sometimes from my own things, sometimes from the pile left in the wash basket outside Charlotte and Yolande’s rooms, I’d steal the best I could find. Sweaters and shawls and lap robes, I’d steal from the salons and from the schoolroom and even from the chapel. I never ransacked private quarters, but rather pinched things that were left behind or forgotten or misplaced from the rooms where we all spent time together. The pickings were wonderful. The Tiny Mafalda and I hid the silken, woolen, feminine treasures from our father in the little room where the washing tubs and mops and brooms were kept. Where he’d never set foot.
    “And by the time my sister was seven and I was just past ten, we’d put by a veritable trousseau for her. At least in our own wondering eyes. She had food, she had clothes and blankets and books and trinkets enough to keep a rustic breed of princess in good stead, and that’s when the Arab in me began to urge The Tiny Mafalda to sell the surplus in the markets. Practicing the same restraint as I had used in acquiring the goods, she would offer a single item at a time. And only once in a while. Women began to seek her out, enquire if she had, perhaps, a nightdress. Another shawl with long silk fringe. Of course if word had reached our father, if the truth had been revealed that his daughter was unloading stolen goods in the markets and stashing lire in the hems of her petticoat, I don’t know what grim justice he would have meted out to her; and not because of what she’d done but because she hadn’t brought her earnings home to him. Yet we hardly worried about someone telling our father. A wonderful thing about being Sicilian. One of the wonderful things. The silence, I mean. My father never found the food stashes or the clothes or the secret pocket in the petticoat hem. Or, if he did, he neither confronted The Tiny Mafalda nor disturbed her treasures.
    “I arranged my visits so that I would not see my father; the high point of my cleverness, I’d thought. Week after week, month after month. A sober Jeanne d’Arc riding fast over the white road, potatoes and sugar and lacy culottes were my arms against Mafalda’s hungers. Such a vainglorious little girl I was that I’d never noticed the scent of the yellow-haired devil everywhere about my undertakings. It was Leo. Long afterward I learned it was he who’d made the path from me to Mafalda. It was he who’d understood that we were lonely for each other. He who had given Agata and the stableman and others the word to facilitate my missions. To hide the doll with the blond braids woven with tiny ears of corn and dressed in a long white gown in the wooden box in the
dispensa.
To strew the chapel and the salons with shawls and sweaters. It was Leo.

CHAPTER II
    “A ND IT WAS L EO WHO, AFTER A WHILE, BEGAN INVITING T HE Tiny Mafalda to the palace for Sunday lunch with—it was easy to understand—the intention of her eventual residence there. He would send a driver to fetch her in the morning and she would be enfolded into the rituals of the palace’s
Buona Domenica,
Good Sunday. Soon she became a pet among the staff, and even Yolande seemed enchanted with her. A rosy mignon,
una pupetta,
as they called her. A little dolly. Yet my sister, terrorized by the sheer numbers of people moving about the palace, by the way they spoke, the way they looked, by all those faces bending down to her, the unfamiliar hands pulling at her curls, did not return the affection. Whereas I thrived upon the immoderate proportions of the palace, The Tiny Mafalda cringed, cowered. Clinging to me, speaking only to me, barely whimpering a word to anyone else, The Tiny Mafalda was shy, sullen. At Mass, she wept. At table she wept, the tears spilling through the plump, babyish hands she held tight over her eyes.
    “ ‘
Amore mio, cos’ hai?
What is it, my love?’ ” I