Her Sugar Mask

Chapter Five — The Village

The church bell rang at eight and the square filled up. Giulia was standing in front of the notice pinned to the church door with four drawing pins.

It was a photocopy of a photocopy, bleached by the sun. The header read:

REGIONE SICILIANA · PSR 2023–2027 · MISURA 19

Rural development, co-operatives and cultural heritage

Closing date for applications: 15 December

Below it somebody had written, in biro, three lines:

REJECTED — second time

ask BELLINI

we are running out of summers

She took a picture of it. Fifteenth of December. Three months.

She stood there after the photograph with the phone in her hand.

Three months. He had said within three months.

It was not proof of anything. It was the kind of coincidence that was either everything or nothing, and she had built three years of her life on telling the difference. She put the phone in her pocket and went into the bar.

· · ·

The bar was one room with a television nobody watched and four tables. A man sat at the counter with a coffee and a wooden leg propped on the next stool.

He was about sixty. His right trouser leg was folded and pinned halfway down the thigh.

He looked at her left hand when she came in. He looked at it for a long moment, and then he looked at her face, and then he went back to his coffee. He did not say anything at all.

"Coffee," Giulia said.

The woman behind the counter said, "You're the one staying in Nunzia's house."

"I'm working for her."

"Everybody works for Nunzia."

The man with the wooden leg turned on his stool.

"Peppe," he said.

"Rosa."

"I know." Peppe drank. "You want to know about the town. Nine hundred people in the winter. One thousand four hundred in August. The young ones are in Germany, Milan, Turin. Two of them are in Rotterdam, which nobody in this town can find on a map."

"That's not what I wanted to ask."

"No," Peppe said. "Go on."

"Is there a number seven here?"

Peppe put his cup down.

"Seven?"

"A door. A house."

"Houses here have names, not numbers. There's the widow's, there's the one with the fig tree, there's where the Carabinieri came in '94." He thought. "There's no seven."

He stopped.

"Except the old mill."

Giulia waited.

"Down in the valley, past the second bend. Somebody painted a seven on the lintel years ago when the catasto numbered the parcels. It's been empty since 1987. The roof went in 2003." Peppe looked at her. "Why do you want a seven."

"I don't," Giulia said. "I had a number in my head."

"Everybody has a number in their head."

Peppe turned his coffee round on the counter.

"You're going to ask about the co-operative next, so I'll save you the walk. Twelve families signed in 2019. We applied for the regional money in 2021 and they said the statutes were wrong. We fixed the statutes. We applied again in 2023 and they said the bookkeeping was not in the required format. Same file. Different page."

"Who reads it."

"Nobody reads it." Peppe drank. "Somebody writes one line on it and sends it back."

"Who."

Peppe put the cup down and looked at her properly for the first time since she had come in.

"You ask questions like you intend to do something about it."

"No," Giulia said. "I ask questions like somebody who expects to be here in March."

· · ·

The door opened and a girl came in with a ring light under one arm and a phone in the other hand.

She was nineteen, with dark hair cut short at the back and long at the front, and she was filming the room before she had finished coming through the door.

"Buongiorno, San Vitale," she said to the phone. "It's eight forty in the morning and we are in the bar, where Peppe is already drinking."

"I'm not drinking," Peppe said. "It's coffee."

"It's eight forty."

"I've been up since five."

Chiara lowered the phone. She looked at Giulia.

"Who are you."

"Rosa."

"Rosa who."

"Rosa."

Chiara looked at her for two seconds and then started laughing. "Perfect. Absolutely perfect." She held the phone up again. "Say something."

"No."

"You have to say something, otherwise I'll have to cut you out and then there's just a hole."

Giulia turned back to the counter.

Chiara did not move the phone. "You should let me film your hands."

"No."

"People love scars."

Giulia picked up her coffee. Her left hand was in her pocket. She had learned to do it without deciding.

"Think about it," Chiara said. She went out, still filming, and the light from the ring followed her across the square.

· · ·

The church door opened and the priest came out with a keyring in one hand.

He was sixty-eight, with a face like a walnut and one shoulder set lower than the other. Don Mimmo. He locked the door, put the keys in his pocket, turned round, and saw her.

He stopped.

Giulia did not move. She had been in this village since Sunday afternoon. She had been looked at by a barmaid, a fisherman, a girl with a ring light, and a seventy-three-year-old woman who had given her a bed and told her she lied like a dead man. None of it had mattered.

This mattered.

"Buongiorno," the priest said.

"Buongiorno."

He looked at her hands. He looked at her face. He looked at her hands again, and then he said, "You have your mother's hands."

Giulia's throat closed.

"I don't think —"

"— that I knew your mother. No." Don Mimmo moved the keyring from one hand to the other. "It is only a thing priests say. We see a great many hands at the end of a life, and after forty years we start talking about them as though they belonged to families. It is a bad habit."

He did not wait for an answer. He went down the steps into the square, and halfway across it he stopped and turned round.

"The lemon festival is on Saturday," he said. "If it rains they will hold it anyway. They always do. It is the only thing in this village that anybody finishes."

Then he went on.

· · ·

At the tabaccaio she bought a newspaper.

She did not want to. She stood outside for a full minute first. Then she went in and bought it and took it back to the square and sat on the well with the paper folded to the inside pages.

Page nine. A short piece at the bottom of the column, four paragraphs, no photograph.

Vitali, nine days on.

The investigation had no new line of enquiry. The public prosecutor's office had made no comment. The villa outside Palermo had been sealed.

And in the third paragraph:

The only survivor of the m******e, four-month-old Carlo Vitali, remains in the care of his great-uncle, the businessman Salvatore Vitali, who has applied for guardianship.

Giulia read the line three times.

Carlo was alive. Four months old the last time she had held him, in a white gown from 1958 that her father had worn and she had worn and her brother had worn. Four months and nine days old now.

Carlo was alive, and Carlo was in that house.

She folded the newspaper twice, very precisely, and put it under her arm. Her right hand had started to shake again.

It had been doing that since the night on the mountain.

She went to the fountain at the corner of the square and put her hands under the water. It was cold. She held them there until the shaking stopped, and then she splashed her face and straightened up.

Across the square, a man was standing beside the well.

He was perhaps forty. Grey jacket, dark trousers, the short haircut men from Palermo have. He was looking at her.

Giulia's hand went to her pocket.

The man looked away. He took out a cigarette, put it in his mouth, did not light it, and walked off down the street toward the church.

Nobody else in the square had looked at him once.