One Honest Sicilian

Chapter One: The Weight of the Loaf

The rope is new. It is the only mercy anyone has arranged for the brothers from Termini, and no one will thank the man who arranged it.

Vincenzo Amato stands with his back to the sea wall at the Piano della Marina, hands folded inside his sleeves, and watches two men climb a ladder in the grey light of a November morning. Their names are Giacomo and Onofrio Pintaldo. Between them, in April, they moved forty salme of wheat out of a loading port on the south coast without a licence, in a leaky felucca, and sold it in Malta. That is the whole crime. He has read the file eleven times and there is nothing in it but forty salme, a felucca, and a wife in Termini who will now beg.

The older brother says something to the executioner. The executioner nods and adjusts the knot. Then the ladders turn and the two men go out of the world with the sound of a door closing on a windy day.

The crowd, which is not large, does not shout. Hunger has made the city quiet in a way that Vincenzo does not like. A shouting Palermo is a Palermo that still believes shouting works.

"Fiscal advocate."

Captain Vito Oliveri comes along the wall, helmet under his arm, his face the colour of wet brick. He has the flattened, patient look of a man who was born pulling on a rope and now pulls on other things.

"They died well," Oliveri says.

"They died quickly. Well is for saints."

"The younger one asked me to tell his mother he confessed."

"Did he?"

"He did." Oliveri looks out at the water, where three Genoese hulls sit at anchor with their yards squared, waiting for something. "He also asked me who bought the wheat that came in last month under seal. I told him I carry keys, not answers."

Vincenzo says nothing. Behind them the two bodies turn slowly, and the gulls start their arguing.

He is forty-six years old. He was born in a tuna village at Solanto, east along the coast, in a house that smelled of tar and fish and the salt on drying nets. His father mended nets. His father's hands were split across the palms every winter and he rubbed them with oil and never once complained where a child could hear. Vincenzo would have mended nets too, except that a canon of the cathedral, Michele Aiello, came out to the tonnara one May for the killing of the tuna and heard a boy of eight reciting the Latin of the blessing back to the priest, word-perfect, having heard it twice.

The canon took him. Fed him, beat him, taught him, sent him to Catania for law, died before he could see the result. The result is a man in good black cloth with a seal on his finger and no friends in the world.

The Spaniards who govern Sicily think Vincenzo Amato a clever Sicilian, which in their mouths is a warning. The barons of Sicily think him a peasant who has been given a seal, which is worse, because they are right, and because a peasant with a seal is the one creature in the kingdom that can look into their accounts.

He is the man the Crown uses when something must be proved. Not accused: proved. There is a difference, and Vincenzo has built twenty-two years of life on it.

He walks back up toward the Cassaro with Oliveri beside him. The city is dressed for the feast of Santa Ninfa. Banners hang across the narrow streets, damp and drooping. Someone has put fresh myrtle around a shrine of the Virgin at a corner, and the myrtle is the greenest thing Vincenzo has seen in a month.

The third harvest in a row has failed. Two summers of drought, then a spring of rain that came at exactly the wrong time and laid the ears flat and rotted them where they stood. There has been no rain worth the name since August. Out beyond the mountains the fields lie the colour of old bone.

At the corner where the street of the coppersmiths runs down toward the Vucciria, there is a public oven, and a line at it, and the line is not moving because the woman at the head of it is arguing.

Vincenzo stops. He has a habit, which he does not examine, of stopping wherever people are arguing about money.

The woman is perhaps fifty, in a brown skirt patched at the knee with a different brown, and she has a loaf in her hand and is holding it up the way a priest holds up the Host.

"Same price," she says. "Same coin. Look at it. Look at it, all of you."

"It's the flour," says the baker's boy at the window. "The flour is short."

"The flour is short because the mill is short. And the mill is short because somebody eats the difference." She turns the loaf over. "Three weeks ago this loaf filled my two hands. Now my thumb sticks out past it."

The line murmurs. Not loudly. Not yet.

Vincenzo takes out a coin and buys a loaf himself, which surprises the baker's boy so much that he nearly drops it. He steps aside and weighs the thing in his hand, and it is a shameful little weight. Bread should have heft, should pull on the wrist. This does not. He tears a corner and eats it. Bran, chestnut flour, something that is neither, and a grit of stone dust from a millstone dressed too fine and turned too fast.

"It is short by three ounces," he says, mostly to himself.

The woman with the patched skirt hears him and looks at him properly for the first time: at the black cloth, at the ring.

"Then write it down, signore," she says. "You look like a man who writes things down."

"What is your name?"

"Lucia Bianchi. Everyone at this oven knows it. Write that down too."

Her eyes are dry and steady and completely without hope, and that is the thing Vincenzo will remember afterward, when the winter has done what the winter does. Not anger. Anger is loud and short. This is the other thing, the thing that has been settling over Palermo since August like dust in a shut room.

Beside her, a girl of eleven or twelve stands holding the corner of her skirt, watching him with her mother's flat gaze.

"Three ounces a loaf," Vincenzo says. "How many loaves does this city eat in a day?"

Lucia Bianchi shrugs. "A hundred thousand. More."

"Then somebody is stealing a mountain," he says, "one thumb's width at a time."

He means it as agreement. He hears, too late, how it sounds: like a clever remark made by a fed man.

He goes on up the Cassaro. Behind him he hears the line start to talk, properly now, the way a pot talks before it boils.

At the top of the street the procession is forming for Santa Ninfa. The confraternities are getting their candles lit under the awnings, out of the drizzle, and the Senate of the city is assembling in its scarlet, and the great silver reliquary of the saint has been carried out on its litter and is throwing back what light there is.

Vincenzo stands at the edge of it with the short loaf still in his hand and thinks: three ounces.

It is the last hour of the old order in Palermo, and he spends it doing arithmetic.