residential village Torre Normanna appeared in the distance. Two long straight roads like landing strips, lined with small terraced houses, formed a cross in the middle of the lowland area behind Castellammare.
There was a sports club with two tennis courts and a swimming pool, plus a restaurant and a small supermarket. Most of her schoolmates had lived in this village.
Now, after the looting and the fires, the pretty little Mediterranean-style houses were reduced to shells of concrete columns, heaps of roof tiles, rubble and rusty gates. In those that had escaped the fire, doors had been ripped off hinges, windows smashed, walls covered with graffiti. The roads were littered with glass from smashed car windows. The asphalt of Piazzetta dei Venti had melted and thickened, forming humps and bubbles, but the swings and slide of the children’s playground, and the big sign of the restaurant, ‘A Taste of Aphrodite’, featuring a purple lobster, were intact.
She walked quickly through the village. She didn’t like the place. Her mother had always said it was inhabited by nouveau-riche bastards who polluted the soil with their illegal sewers. She’d written to a newspaper to complain about it. Now the nouveau-riche bastards were no longer there, but their ghosts peered out at her from the windows, whispering: ‘Look! Look! It’s the daughter of that woman who called us nouveau-riche bastards.’
Outside the village she took a road which followed the bed of a dried-up stream at the foot of some round, bare hills that looked like pin-cushions, pierced as they were by vineyard props. Reeds grew thickly on both sides of the road, their plumes rising up against the blue sky.
A hundred metres further on, she entered the cool shade of an oak wood. Anna thought this wood must be magical; the fire hadn’t succeeded in burning it, but had merely licked at its edges before giving up. Between the thick trunks the sun painted golden patches on the covering of ivy and on the dog roses that swamped a rickety fence. A gate opened onto a path overgrown by long-untrimmed box hedges.
Just visible on a concrete post was a sign: ‘Mulberry Farm’.
2
Anna Salemi had been born in Palermo on 12 March 2007, the daughter of Maria Grazia Zanchetta and Franco Salemi.
The couple had met in the summer of 2005. He was twenty-one and worked as a driver for Elite Cars, his father’s private taxi firm. She was twenty-three and studying Italian literature at the University of Palermo.
They noticed each other on the ferry to the Aeolian Islands, exchanging glances among the crowd of tourists crammed on the deck. They disembarked on Lipari, with their separate groups.
The next day they met again on Papisca beach.
Maria Grazia’s friends rolled joints, read books and discussed politics.
Franco’s friends, all male, played football, challenged each other to games of beach tennis and showed off the muscles they’d built up in the gym during the winter.
Franco’s approach was pretty clumsy. He kept pretending to miskick the ball, moving it closer and closer to the beautiful girl sunbathing naked.
Finally Maria Grazia said: ‘Stop kicking that ball around me. You want to talk to me? Come over here and introduce yourself, then.’
He asked her out for a pizza. She got drunk and pushed him into the pizzeria toilets, where they made love.
‘I know we’re very different. But it’s through their differences that people complete each other,’ Maria Grazia confessed to a friend who was amazed she liked such a vulgar lout.
Back in Palermo they continued to see each other and the next year she got pregnant.
Franco was still living with his parents. Maria Grazia shared a room in a student flat and had an evening job at a wine bar in Piazza Sant’Oliva.
The Zanchetta family lived in Bassano del Grappa, in northern Italy. Her father had a small business that manufactured hi-fi equipment and her mother taught in a primary school. Their daughter loved warm weather, the seaside, Sicily and the character of its inhabitants. After finishing school she decided to move to the island, against her parents’ wishes.
Maria Grazia didn’t even consider abortion. She explained to Franco that he was free to choose: either he could recognise the child, or she’d become a single mother, and that would be fine with her.
Franco asked her to marry him, feeling that it was his duty.
Six months later the wedding took place in the village hall of Castellammare, the Salemi family’s place of origin. The Zanchettas thought their daughter deserved better than this southern taxi driver and didn’t attend the ceremony.
There was no honeymoon. The couple moved to the centre of Palermo, where they lived in a flat on the third floor of an old palazzo near the Politeama Theatre.
Signor Salemi discovered that he had heart problems and retired, leaving the running of Elite Cars to his son.
Two months later, in an inflatable birthing pool full of warm water, Anna was born, dark-skinned like her father, with her mother’s features.
‘I brought Anna into the world by accepting pain. Because women can give birth in the peace of their own homes.’ So Maria Grazia would say to anyone who asked her about her unusual choice.
The Salemi family couldn’t stand their daughter-in-law. They called her ‘the madwoman’. What other word was there for a woman who gave birth like a monkey and smoked pot?
Over the next two years Maria Grazia, as well as looking after the baby, graduated and got a temporary job teaching Italian and Latin at a high school. Franco, meanwhile, had expanded Elite Cars, buying more taxis and hiring new drivers.
They didn’t see much of each other. He would come home exhausted in the evening, bringing boxes of food from the takeaway, and collapse on the bed. She taught during the day, and in the evening, in her book-filled study, cuddled the baby and read about psychology, the environment and women’s liberation. And she started writing stories, which she hoped to publish.
Sometimes they quarrelled, but on the whole they respected each other’s interests, even if they didn’t understand them.
And gradually the same differences that had brought them together became a source of division which drove them further and further apart. Without ever saying as much, they allowed the gap to widen, in the awareness that neither of them would be able to close it.
When Franco’s old grandmother died, she left him a cottage in the countryside near Castellammare. He wanted to sell it, but Maria Grazia was tired of living in the city, with all the pollution and noise. Anna would have a healthier upbringing in the countryside. Franco, however, couldn’t move; his work was in Palermo.
‘What’s the problem? You can come over at weekends, and I promise you I’ll learn to cook better than your mother,’ she said.
They took out a bank loan and renovated the cottage, putting in double glazing, a new central heating system and an attractive new roof. Maria Grazia sowed a large organic vegetable garden, declaring that her daughter needed to eat vegetables free of any chemical pollutants. She started teaching at a high school in Castellamare.
After a year of shuttling back and forth between the city and the country, Franco fell
