Rupert Thomson: Secrecy

‘No, not really.’

‘Why? Is your work popular ?’ He gave the last word a scathing twist.

‘I’m interested in corruption and decay.’

‘Oh, that’s all right, then,’ he said bitterly. ‘You’ll probably go far.’

I looked around. He had two rooms, both of which were narrow, with scabby, mouse-grey walls. The room I was standing in was bare except for a strip of matting. On a shelf near the window were half a dozen books that leaned haphazardly against each other like men who had been drinking for a long time and were now very tired.

Without any warning, the small and seemingly ageless Frenchman sprang into the centre of the room. ‘Would you like to see a somersault?’

‘By all means.’

He stood before me, feet together, hands pressed against the outside of his thighs. His face was drained of all expression. He took a quick breath, his birdcage of a chest expanding. Suddenly his head was inches from the floor, and his legs, bent at the knee, were on a level with my face. This was so unexpected that I laughed out loud. Somehow, he managed to hold the position for a moment. Upside-down. In mid-air. When he landed, puffs of dust swirled around his ankles, as if he had been performing underwater, on the seabed, and had disturbed the sediment. He threw his arms out sideways, and his mouth split open in a theatrical grin, revealing teeth that were long and ridged, like a donkey’s.

While I was still applauding, his grin faded. ‘I didn’t get that quite right,’ he muttered.

‘It was wonderful.’

He shook his head, then winced. ‘I think I hurt myself.’ He sat down on the floor and rubbed his right knee. In the window, the sky was beginning to change colour.

‘I should go,’ I said.

He climbed slowly to his feet. ‘Don’t tell anyone you were here.’

‘All right, I won’t.’

I moved across the room. At the door, though, I turned back. ‘You’re Cuif,’ I said.

‘Correct.’

‘I’m Zummo.’

‘You live here?’

‘For now.’

‘You may visit me again.’

I closed the door behind me. The light spilling through the scuttle where the landing ended was a sticky cobweb-grey. As I walked back to the head of the stairs, I was struck by the grandness of the Frenchman’s words, and the plea lying just beneath.

I hadn’t been entirely honest with the Grand Duke. In fact, I hadn’t been honest at all. Though it was true that Siracusa was idyllic, my childhood and adolescence had been anything but, and in the end, only a few weeks before my twentieth birthday, I had made my escape. With every mile I travelled, my heart seemed to diminish, as if it were not blood or muscle but a ball of scarlet wool unravelling. I had been driven from the place I loved, the people I most cared for. I kept thinking I heard footsteps behind me. Voices. My neck ached from looking over my shoulder. I was frightened, but I was also furious. Furious because my life was about to change for ever. Furious because no one had defended me. Furious most of all because I was innocent.

My brother, Jacopo, had taken against me from the very beginning. Seven years older than me, he was tall, fair-haired, and athletic — less like a brother than a reverse image. With my olive complexion and my dark-brown curls, I was always told I resembled my father’s father, who had been a cloth merchant in the south of Spain — like most surnames that begin with Z, Zummo was probably Arabic in origin — but Jacopo had inherited my mother’s looks. Her parents, both light-skinned, had been born in the Piedmont.

One of my earliest memories was being woken by Jacopo in the middle of the night. I couldn’t have been more than four at the time. Come on, Gaetano, he said. We’re going for a walk. He made it sound like an adventure. As soon as we were out of sight of the house, though, he began to call me names. I was a shrimp and a weevil. I was a darkie. I was the bastard son of a servant, and Jacopo’s parents — his stupid, soft-hearted parents — had taken me in and given me their name. When we reached the Maniace fortress, where the sea wall was at its highest, he hoisted me on to the parapet, then gripped my ankles and lowered me over the edge. I was upside-down, the black waves lurching below. You’re heavier than I thought, he said. I’m not sure I can hold on any longer. The clouds hung between my feet like chunks of dented metal. Oh, no, he said. I think I’m going to drop you. The urine ran up my body and into my hair. Jacopo just laughed. Saves me pissing on you, I suppose, he said.

Two years later, our father died suddenly. An accident in the shipyard, we were told. By then, Jacopo’s voice had broken, and he had fuzz on his upper lip; he was already a man — to me, at least. You killed my father, he would tell me when I was on my own with him. He would throw a blanket over my head and hit me, and his fists were hard as horses’ hooves. Once, he buried me up to my neck in sand and left me there all day. When he dug me out, my face was burnt. Darkie , he said. I was so numb I couldn’t stand. He watched me cry out as the feeling crept back into my body. You killed him, he said. It was you. Our mother didn’t notice. She was too busy grieving.

One December evening, not long after my fifteenth birthday, Jacopo came and sat beside my bed, his head lowered, his hands dangling between his thighs. It was during the annual festival that marked the decapitation of our patron saint, Lucia. Ill at the time, I hadn’t joined the procession that moved in silence through the city to the sepulchre beyond the gates. If I stared at Jacopo that night, it was because I had never seen him look vulnerable before. All he could talk about was the girl who had walked next to the statue of the murdered saint, and how her yellow hair had gleamed, and how her lips had parted, as if in expectation of a kiss. Her name was Ornella Camilleri, and her father was a barber-surgeon from Valletta. What skin she had! Like moonlight. No, moonlight wasn’t rare enough. His hands clenched. In any case, he hoped he had caught her eye. Being Jacopo, he was accustomed to getting what he wanted. Imagine his astonishment, then — imagine his outrage — when Ornella failed to reciprocate his feelings. He began to rail against her stuck-up ways. Who did she think she was?

That year, I would often row across the shallow bay to the Embarcadero, then climb the hill to the ancient limestone quarries where I would sit at the cool mouth of a cave and lose myself in Vesalius or Baltasar Gracián or whoever I happened to be reading at the time. One afternoon, as I walked back down to the harbour, I sensed something behind me. I whirled round. A man in rags. Bloodshot eyes, fist raised. There was a burst of light in my brain, and then a smell of burning.

A woman’s face was slowly tipped out of the dark bowl of the sky. She seemed placid, capable; I didn’t know her. Above her, and far smaller, far more pale, was another face, that of a girl. She was staring down, her hair the colour of the pears that grew in our courtyard at home, and I felt I was one of the strangers who had gathered, and a stab of envy went through me because I wanted to be the object of her gaze. Then the whole scene shifted or revolved. When I realized I was the person on the ground, I was filled with relief and gratitude, and all I could think of was to close my eyes and drift away.

‘No, don’t go to sleep,’ the woman said.

Only after they had dropped me at my house did it occur to me that the girl with the pear-blond hair must have been Ornella.

That night, Jacopo looked in on me.

‘A tramp ?’ he said when I told him what had happened. ‘I would have flattened him.’