The Book of Sofia

Sicily, 1973In the heat of the day, the old man walked through the bead curtain in the doorway of Vittorio Rizzo’s small bar, paused for a moment to accustom his eyes to the incongruous darkness of the place, went up to the bar, ordered a café ’ristretto’, drank it, paid and left to go the few metres down the narrow street to Ciccio Guglielmo’s general supply store, where, since this worthy was in Rizzo’s along with most of the adult male population of our village, it was his wife, Mirella, who sold the stranger two 25-kilo sacks of cement, which he picked up, one in each hand, much as if they were filled with feathers, thanked her and walked back, past the bar, out of the village, into the baking countryside. In a silk shirt. Nothing caused more comment. Over the ten-odd years before the murders, once or twice a week, we would see the old man in his silk shirt, his long hair sun-bleached white, held in place by a bandana, walking into the village, having a coffee, picking up building supplies, walking out. Always on foot, his boots covered in dust, never a sign of sweat staining the perfection of the floating silk which most obviously covered a very strong body to carry what he did with so little effort. We speculated who he was and where he could possibly live, but since he never spoke, other than the few words necessary to order his coffee and such things as he needed from Guglielmo’s, we were left to wonder. It wasn’t until the shepherd, Pietro Paoli, in for a drink and gossip, as was his seasonal habit, his sheep and goats filling the street with their stench and droppings, told us he regularly saw the old man walking far out in the hills, occasionally stopping at the spring on Batistero’s farm, heading for the coast. But there was nothing there. Just cliffs. Not even access to the sea, which is why the developers and speculators had left that part of the island alone. And it was at least fifteen kilometres away; a thirty kilometre round-trip on foot - in our heat! It made you think. To most people an island in the Mediterranean is a small place inhabited by a few locals who are overwhelmed by hoards of summer tourists whom they righteously exploit. But an island as big as Switzerland? With the population of Finland or Norway? Sicily is that - and more. Much more. For a start we are older. Our civilization predates the Scandinavians by thousands of years and the Helvetians by -! What does it matter? We have a saying that when the Swiss are civilised the Mafia will speak. Well, that is not quite fair. We refer to them, the foreigners, as the people from the north - ’dal nord’ - and to the older generation of Sicilians, enfolding in their genetic makeup centuries of conquests layered one on top of another, who remember that Italy as a unified country is scarcely 100 years old, this would include anywhere north of Rome. So the old man was always ’il vecchio venuto dal nord’. It was reckoned to his credit that he kept his mouth shut, particularly about himself. We are close, you see, a tight-mouthed race even when we are curious. So this man, who was not really old when we first saw him, became old over the years, but to us he was ’il vecchio’ from the beginning, which gave him substance somehow, a gravitas not normally accorded a stranger, leave alone ’un forestiero’. Then, of course, he saw what he should not have seen, which changed everything between us. Forever.