It Happened at the Sicilian Table

No need to wait until things warm up to read the book of the summer. The last time we checked in with Jo Piazza, she was telling us How to Be Married. Her latest, The Sicilian Inheritance, is a twisty-turny adventure and murder mystery inspired by her many trips to Sicily over the years. (Minus the murder.) (Well, we hope.) It's a story filled with delicious food and wine, gorgeous scenery, and intriguing characters. (Not a bad summary of Sicily.) And if this excerpt makes you hungry, this is the restaurant it's based on. Add it to your travel wish list.

We wove through labyrinthian alleys and archways so low they touched the top of my head. The difference in the town after siesta was striking. Even the stone walls vibrated with a newly awakened energy. A trio of little girls chased after us with sparkly fairy wands as we emerged into a raucous square filled with tables and chairs, all of them crowded with smartly dressed people eating and drinking.  Each door and window overlooking the piazza was flung open. Waiters in crisp white shirts and black ties scurried around with trays of orange cocktails and maroon wine.

“This can’t be real,”I murmured.

“It isn’t,” Giusy scoffed. “They set it all up because they knew you were coming. Ha! Come.”

In the middle of the piazza a large fountain gurgled around a statue of a woman holding a child. Giusy flicked a coin into it and then leapt up to walk around its edge, holding her cane horizontally for balance. Suddenly I was surrounded by a pack of beautiful teenagers dancing to ABBA’s “Waterloo” on a portable speaker, singing all of the wrong words in English. A boy, no older than thirteen or fourteen grabbed my hand and twirled me into the melee.

We took a left on the other side of the piazza and finally stopped in front of a rough wooden door with a bold brass knocker in the shape of a dragon’s head.

An Italian tri-colored flag shuddered in the breeze from a pole above the door, but a much larger Sicilian flag eclipsed it. I gazed up at the billowing yellow fabric; Giusy smirked. “I love that the head of Medusa is on our flag. Don’t you?”

“She was a monster.”

“Was she? Or was she a brilliant woman with the ability to turn men to stone when they abused her or tried to take everything away from her.”

“I never thought about it like that.”

“Life is all about perspective, American.”

The island of Sicily is “God’s kitchen,” she insisted, but I should only eat in the restaurants that write their menus on the chalkboard on the wall each day. A printed menu meant they were buying frozen food from the supermarket to cut costs. 

Giusy placed both palms flat on the door and pushed. The host or the server waited just beyond the entryway. He was so handsome I stumbled a little as I followed him through the crowded room to the one empty table. Giusy caught me and pinched my hip.

“I get it. It is hard to look at him,” she whispered. “He is a beautiful, sexy man. You’d think he’d leave this town already, but he has a sick mamma and a slutty sister and nieces and nephews with no papas. They need the money and a man to stay with them.”

The beautiful, sexy man pulled out both of our chairs and whisked away the centerpiece, a bowl holding absurdly large plastic fruit.

“There is no menu. He’ll bring things,” Giusy explained and placed her elbows on the wood in front of her so she could lean closer to me. “You are from Philadelphia. Home of Rocky. I love that movie. I have also watched the TV show about your city. Is it really always sunny there?”

Her sarcasm made me like her right away. Giusy was the town gossip and travel guide you always wanted to meet on a trip. With her everything was either insanely beautiful or a terrible disaster. Sicily’s beaches were the most gorgeous in all the world, but too crowded with fat tourists and trash washing down from the filthy mainland. They also had the most magnificent beach clubs if you didn’t mind dancing with a bunch of coked up Brits. I absolutely had to visit the cursed village just ten miles to the north. A priest recently performed an exorcism by helicopter to save all 10,000 souls who lived there from their utter depravity. She claimed that the ruins at Agrigento were better than the ones at Segesta because there were less stray dogs and therefore less dog shit in the temples. Her transitions were sudden and unexpected and I struggled to keep up. She went from shit to food in an instant. The island of Sicily is “God’s kitchen,” she insisted, but I should only eat in the restaurants that write their menus on the chalkboard on the wall each day. A printed menu meant they were buying frozen food from the supermarket to cut costs. I should also always ask where a restaurant got their tomatoes. If they came from Naples they were probably poisonous because the Camorra, the Napolitano mafia, got a government contract to bury waste in the foothills of Mt. Vesuvius, which made the produce grown there toxic, but not too toxic to export. She told me their own small village was the most gorgeous village in all of Sicily, but also rotting from within like a neglected corpse. Then she got up to go to the bathroom.

While she was gone the lights dimmed and the restaurant went silent. Suddenly the beautiful sexy man was illuminated by what looked like a large flashlight being held by a child. He began to sing. Opera?

Before I knew it, Giusy had returned. She stepped on top of our table with the same ease she’d used to leap on the edge of the fountain, carefully planting her feet between the dishes. She finished his aria with a great flourish. The room exploded in applause.

“Wow. That was incredible,” I told her when she was back in her seat. “Was that Verdi?”

“Pah. No. Bellini. Vincenzo Bellini, the Swan of Catania. A genius. Sang his first solo at 18 months old, composed an opera art six. A real Sicilian. Verdi was a second-rate Italian bastard from the North.”

“Don’t mince words.”

“I never do.” She snapped her fingers in the air and a carafe of house wine appeared. The beautiful sexy waiter winked at Giusy when he poured it into her glass.

“He likes you.”

“I am very finished with men,” Giusy declared. “I was married once to one once. That was enough.”

“Are you divorced now?” I couldn’t help asking. I enjoy women who have more problems than I do. I was also enjoying our easy rapport, how quickly we seemed to have fallen into an amiable rhythm. I’d been terrible at cultivating many female friendships in my adult life. My two best friends were my sister and my dead aunt.

“Might as well be divorced. My husband is gone. Who knows where. What about you?” she asked me.

“I’m not married.” Not entirely true. Not legally, at least, but that was just semantics.

Giusy didn’t press me. Instead she shifted the conversation to why I was in Sicily in the first place.

“My aunt wanted her ashes to be scattered here when she died.” I opted for the simplest explanation.

With her everything was either insanely beautiful or a terrible disaster. Sicily’s beaches were the most gorgeous in all the world, but too crowded with fat tourists and trash washing down from the filthy mainland. They also had the most magnificent beach clubs if you didn’t mind dancing with a bunch of coked up Brits.

As Giusy promised, the food began to just appear. No one asked if we had preferences or nut allergies or gluten-free diets. I loved it. The beautiful, sexy boy brought platters of anything he wanted from inside the kitchen, eggplants prepared seven different ways, stuffed cuttlefish and anchovies fried in crispy bread crumbs. The second course looked like chicken, but I knew it wasn’t.

“Pigeon stuffed with liver pate,” Giusy said as I flipped it over on my plate and inspected it.

By the third carafe of house wine Giusy revealed that sometimes she steals little things from guest rooms, never anything valuable, just items that will be annoying for their owner when they go missing, earring backs, a tube of concealer, once a diaphragm. She sort of blushed when she said it but she also looked proud of herself.

“Why are you telling me this? I’m a guest, aren’t I? Now I know what happens if my birth control goes missing.”

“I thought you’d appreciate the story.”

She was right. I did.

“My favorite was a fancy face lotion that claimed to be the fountain of youth in a bottle. 

It had real flakes of gold in it. Made my cheeks as soft as a baby’s ass.” She reached out a hand to stroke my cheek. “You have beautiful skin. What do you use?”

I blushed and admitted I never use anything. I usually forgot to even wash my face before bed. “It’s from my work. I used to run a steakhouse. I’m a chef and a butcher. The fat and lanolin from slicing up the meat ends up all over any piece of my exposed skin when I’m breaking it down. Butchers tend to have glowy skin. I once apprenticed under a ninety-year-old Brazilian who was as well-preserved as a Kardashian.”

A platter of what looked like a deconstructed cannoli, a pyramid of cannoli shells separated by thin layers of amaretto cream and smothered in a dark chocolate sauce, had barely graced our table when a new guest pushed his way through the beaded entryway. He had to duck as he entered and shift his body sideways because his torso was as wide as two men. The man didn’t just fill the doorway, he filled the entire room.

The waiter led him to a table in the corner on the opposite side of the room from Giusy’s criminal cousin.

“Now, that’s who you need to talk to,” Giusy nodded in the man’s direction.

“Huh? About what?”

“He’s the detective in charge of the local police.”

Her words startled me. I glanced nervously over at him.

“Why would I need to talk to the police?”

“Non solcare la fronte. Stringerai il tuo buco del culo.” Don’t furrow your brow. You’ll clench your asshole. No one wants to walk around with a clenched asshole.

I’d had too much wine and it was scrambling my thoughts. But when Giusy looked at me her gaze was sharp, like something inside her brain had just decided to wake up and I grasped that I was much, much drunker than my host. I was a woman alone in a strange country without a full grip on all my faculties. I cursed myself for making such bad decisions, for always making bad decisions, while Giusy kept talking.

“You go over there and talk to that man.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

When she spoke again, I realized Giusy knew much more about me and why I’d come to Sicily than she’d previously let on.

“Who else are you going to ask about Serafina Marsala’s murder?”

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