Blood Washes Blood A True Story of Love, Murder, and Redemption Under the Sicilian Sun

Chapter One: A Stranger in the VillageTerrasini, SicilyApril 1995The birthplace of my grandparents, of the bandit Francesco "the Monk" and the blur of generations before him, is a fishing village on the Gulf of Castellammare, twenty-five miles west of Palermo. In the blinding Mediterranean noon, four elderly men play cards under a makeshift canvas awning as I drive slowly through the port. Their eyes closely follow my car, but nobody speaks. In the rearview mirror, after I pass, they are still watching. The harborcaffesare deserted at this hour. A trawler rocks gently on a northern swell. The spring air is ripe with the odors of saltwater, lemon blossom, and wild fennel.Two years have passed since my grandfather's death when I arrive in Terrasini, almost three since his enigmatic words in a Detroit kitchen. I have a story to sort out, a riddle to unlock. Beyond that, I can't really explain why I've come here, to a village where I know no one and have no past of my own. There is only that riddle with my name on it, a dead man and his killer.In the mirror, the card players have returned to their game. I park the car and walk out along a concrete wharf, carrying a tourist brochure. From the sea, Terrasini is a cubist jumble of pastel houses set on a cliff above the harbor.The wharf rests on blocks of amber limestone cut from Monte Palmeto, a bare ridge two miles inland that rises nineteen hundred feet into a jagged mosaic of peak and canyon. Quarrymen, I read, have been sculpting the brow of Palmeto for thirty centuries, since a Bronze Age tribe built their chief city on the outskirts of present-day Terrasini. The limestone blocks in the harbor may be the vestiges of that city, or of the antique Roman settlement Terrasinus, the "land on the Gulf." The village fishermen, who moor their boats to the enormous old stones, insist that they are the ruins of Atlantis.My grandfather passed his childhood on the Terrasini harborside. The Monk must have watched the shadows flee Monte Palmeto under a noonday sun. I recognize that a setting is unfolding, that the plot and characters of my story are hidden in this landscape.The rectangular grid of streets immediately above the harbor is the fishermen's quarter, a dozen blocks of net-draped cottages tightly packed onto a knoll behind the chapel of Maria Santissima della Provvidenza, protectoress of seafarers. On a map posted in front of the chapel, the quarter is identified as Contrada Marina, the maritime district, but its residents have always called it "Favarotta," as did my grandparents.It is an allusion to the secret language that murmurs under the visible surface of Sicilian life, a vocabulary of coded words and symbols riven from a tortured history. The island of Sicily has been sacked by nearly every conqueror to pass through the Mediterranean basin for three thousand years. Ten centuries ago, when the most recent invaders were North African, Arab galleys were moored to the amber harbor stones. "Favarotta" is derived fromfawar,Arabic for "fountain"; it refers to a spring of cool water that gushes up from slabs of rose shale where Our Lady of Providence surveys the tuna fleet.Favarotta occupies the narrow end of an elongated wedge that encloses the village. Its dimensions have barely changed since my grandfather's birth. Twenty-two streets climb the slope toward the base of Monte Palmeto, cut by ten that parallel the gulf shore. The map's focal point, stretching along an east-west axis for a full block between the fishermen's cottages and the rest of the village, is the broad Piazza Duomo, lined by shady ficus trees and the crumblingpalazziof minor nobles. Maria Santissima delle Grazie, the principal church of Terrasini, anchors the piazza's upper end with two bell towers.Officially, eleven thousand people reside in Terrasini and its outlying countryside in 1995. At noon on the day of my arrival, the faceViviano, Frank is the author of 'Blood Washes Blood A True Story of Love, Murder, and Redemption Under the Sicilian Sun' with ISBN 9780671041595 and ISBN 0671041592.