Tears of the Salamander

IWILL LIFT UP MINE EYES UNTO THE HILLS, FROM whence cometh my help. …”

The choir was singing with a new gusto. Behind and above them on the right-hand side of the church the two Signori di Sala stood in the ancient stalls of their family and sang with the choir. Such behavior was by any standards eccentric, but the oddities of the di Salas had always been tolerated on the excuse that they were generous patrons of the church. An excuse was needed, of course, since nobody cared to mention the unwisdom of offending the Master of the Mountain. So the antics of the two Signori were watched with more or less benignity (according to how many marriageable daughters the watcher had) by the other gentry, all of them now also occupying the ancient stalls of their families on either side of the church.

Signor Antonio’s immense wealth would have excused almost anything, but in spite of his curious upbringing and dubious parentage he was beginning to be well regarded for his own sake. He was a handsome young man who carried himself without any swagger or vanity, and was so strangely assured that despite his still awkward manner of speech—and even that was steadily improving—one rapidly forgot his previous life. Indeed the story of his long pretense at idiocy had a certain romantic allure.

And, in a nutshell, from the very first he had done all the right things. Letting it be known that unlike his uncle he would welcome the return of the gentry to their own stalls was just a minor example. The whole town still spoke of the great party he had given to celebrate his coming of age, held down at the harbor since the new Casa di Sala had not yet begun to be built, with three dance floors and three separate bands, two of them imported from Palermo, and not only a full-scale banquet for the gentry but generous feasting for everyone and colossal fireworks from barges in the harbor to end it all, while the mountain drowsed benignly above.

Memories in such places as this were very long, going back many generations in some families. All Uncle Giorgio’s books and records were buried with the rest of his secrets beneath the lava flow that covered Casa di Sala, but once people had decided that it was safe to talk to Alfredo they had told him enough for him to be able to piece together the history of the Mastership for over three hundred years. There had been good Masters and bad, though all had been held in awe for what they were and what they could do. Some had been easygoing and kept open house, some had been remote scholars, some—Uncle Giorgio was not the first—had been seduced by their strange power to acquire even more dangerous powers, which had turned them wicked. These, in the end, the mountain had rejected and destroyed. Almost as disastrously, Alfredo’s great-grandfather had been a drunkard, neglecting his duties and reducing his own estate to ruinous poverty. This no doubt was why Uncle Giorgio had set out to repair his fortunes by accomplishing the First Great Work.

No wonder, then, that those who lived at the foot of the mountain looked forward to Toni’s Mastership with hope.

Alfredo was aware of all this, but just now was wholly absorbed in the music—not, like Toni, rapt and oblivious in his singing, because his own voice was in the process of breaking and he was singing almost sotto voce, glad of the confident baritone beside him. Instead he was listening critically to the sounds from the choir. It was now four months since he and Toni and Signor Pozzarelli had traveled to Palermo to look for a professional choirmaster. Toni had offered a suitable salary to compensate for the move to a small provincial town, so they’d interviewed several applicants and chosen the youngest, himself a one-time choirboy, now at the start of his career. His effect was already noticeable. The setting of the psalm was ambitious for a country church, but the choir were making a go of it. The new tenor held things together, and both old basses were improving Sunday by Sunday. Best of all, everyone, even the most recalcitrant treble, was beginning to sound interested.

Yes, Alfredo thought, he could live with this. There was no need to break his ties with the mountain, as Father had been forced to do. The new house, when it was built, up among the vineyards, would not be a copy of the old one. He and Annetta and Toni had discussed it in detail. It would in fact be two houses to start with, one for Annetta and Toni and himself to live in like ordinary people, with Annetta still doing most of the cooking, and a girl, perhaps, to do the cleaning. But that would be screened behind a much grander-seeming main house, with space for a sensible level of entertaining, including, of course, a music room. One day, probably, Toni would marry—though it was no use the two Signorinas Ricardi competing with each other in cuteness and coyness from across the aisle. He would choose a girl who wanted to live the kind of life he liked—the innkeeper’s younger daughter seemed a good bet, and Annetta approved of her. But even when a third house had to be built for them the new Casa di Sala would still be smaller than Uncle Giorgio’s. And it would feel like somebody’s home.

But that wasn’t a matter of bricks and tiles and beams and furniture and so on. A home is a place where a few people feel at home with each other, and Toni and Annetta and Alfredo already felt at home in the farmhouse they’d moved into—one of Toni’s that happened to be empty. Alfredo didn’t think much about his own future beyond the next few years. One day, presumably, he, too, might marry and have children—not just to ensure that the mountain would always have a di Sala to be its Master—but it was still hard for him to imagine it. Rather less vaguely he hoped to travel, and listen to the great choirs of Rome and Venice, and farther afield—there was said to be wonderful music in Vienna, and even in far-off London. But however far he went and for however many years, one thing was certain—he would in the end come back. He had given himself to the mountain, and the mountain had saved him. These fields and vineyards and olive groves, these woods, this single, harsh, barren peak with the undying fire beneath it, this was where he belonged, and nowhere else.