“Well, why didn’t you?” asked Mom, settling back in her seat. Strangely enough, she didn’t seem at all angry anymore.
At the airport I made a depressing discovery: the plastic bottle full of hermit crabs I’d collected on Favignana was a plastic bottle full of dead hermit crabs. Of course my mother and Federico had been telling me that for two days, but I’d ignored them. Now it was clear, because the crabs really stank. I didn’t want to show the bottle to Mom, because I knew what she’d say, but I showed it to Fede and he whispered: “Shall I throw it out?” “Yeah,” I said, so he strolled away when Mom wasn’t looking and stashed the bottle in a trash bin. I felt gloomy until he went off to the souvenir shop and came back with a bag of marzipan fruit; then I cheered up as I bit into a pomegranate and tasted the familiar sickening flavor of sweet almonds. Mom grabbed a piece of marzipan too—a prickly pear—and as she did, Federico shot me a wink. We were in the plane by then, racing through the night away from Palermo over the Strait of Messina toward Rome and the known world, and as I leaned against my reflection in the window and imagined the dark sea below, it seemed like great luck to be flying home with a mouth full of sugar.
Winter Barley
1. T
HE
S
TORM
Night; a house in northern Scotland. When October gales blow in off the Atlantic, one thinks of sodden sheep huddled downwind and of oil cowboys on bucking North Sea rigs. Even a large, solid house like this one feels temporary tonight, like a hand cupped around a match. Flourishes of hail, like bird shot against the windows; a wuthering in the chimneys, the sound of an army of giants charging over the hilltops in the dark.
In the kitchen a man and a woman sit eating a pig’s foot. Edo and Elizabeth. Together their years add up to ninety, of which his make up two-thirds. Edo slightly astonished Elizabeth by working out this schoolboy arithmetic when they first met, six months ago. He loves acrostics and brainteasers, which he solves with the fanatical absorption common to sportsmen and soldiers—men used to long, mute waits between bursts of violence. Edo has been both mercenary and white hunter in the course of an unquiet life passed mainly between Italy and Africa, between privilege and catastrophe. He is a prince, one of a swarm exiled from an Eastern European kingdom now extinct, and this house, his last, is a repository of fragments from ceremonial lives and the web of cousinships that link him to most of the history of Europe.
The house is full of things that seem to need as much care as children: pieces of Boulle and Caffiéri scattered among the Scottish furniture bought at auction, a big IBM computer programmed to trace wildfowl migrations worldwide, gold flatware knobby with crests, an array of setters with pernickety stomachs in the dog run outside, red Venetian goblets that for washing require the same intense concentration one might use in restoring a Caravaggio. In the afternoons Edo likes to sit down with a glass—a supermarket glass—of vermouth and watch reruns of Fame magically sucked from the wild Scottish air by the satellite dish down the hill. With typical thoroughness he has memorized the names and dispositions of the characters from Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts and has his favorites: the curly-haired musical genius, the beautiful dance instructor he calls la mulâtresse. The television stands in a thicket of silver frames that hold photographs of men who all resemble Edward VII, and women with the oddly anonymous look of royalty. Often they pose with guns and bearers on swards blanketed with dead animals, and their expressions, like Edo’s, are invariably mild.
To Elizabeth, Edo’s kitchen looks unfairly like a men’s club: brown, cavernous, furnished with tattered armchairs, steel restaurant appliances, charts of herbs, dogs in corners, Brobdingnagian pots for feeding hungry grouse shooters, and green baize curtains, which, as they eat tonight, swell and collapse slowly with the breath of the storm. The pig’s foot is glutinous and spicy, cooked with lentils, the way Romans do it at Christmastime. Edo cooked it, as he cooks everything. When Elizabeth visits, he doesn’t let her touch things in the kitchen—even the washing up is done in a ritual fashion by the housekeeper, a thin Scottish vestal.
“These lentils are seven years old,” he announces, taking another helping.
“Aren’t you embarrassed to be so stingy?”
Dried legumes never go bad, he tells her, and it’s a vulgar trait to disdain stinginess. His mother fed her children on rice and coffee during the war, even though they crossed some borders wearing vests so weighted with hidden gold pieces that he and his sisters walked with bent knees. Edo grew up with bad teeth and an incurable hunger, like the man in the fairy tale who could eat a mountain of bread. He has a weakness for trimmings and innards, the food of the poor.
Elizabeth knows she adopts an expression of intense comprehension whenever Edo reminisces; it pinches her features, as if they were strung on tightening wires. Still, she doesn’t want to be one of those young women befuddled by lives lived before
