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corner of the dining hall, Tosca conducts much of the house business with Mafalda, her sister, who is the land overseer, and with the two widows who perform as account supervisor and general house manager. There are always others who join them, those who have been to the village or to Enna or even farther afield and thus have gossip and reportage to offer. They discuss the more efficient production of cheese, the rebuilding of a barn, the reconstruction of yet another unused space within the villa into bedrooms, the wholesaling of the orange crops, the harvesting of
neroli—
the fragile blossoms of the orange tree, for which perfume makers are willing to pay extravagant sums. Always there is talk of food. With delegates from the cooking and baking widows, Tosca writes menus, speaks of what’s coming into ripeness in the garden, wonders how to serve the tomatoes that evening, agrees to the collective desire for a Saturday lunch of spit-roasted baby goat pierced with cloves and turned over a fruitwood fire. All ’round them—as it is all ’round every visible, discernable corner of the villa—there is no truce in the mayhem. It’s not until the evening hours, after the household has dined, after everyone’s work is finished, that the villa settles into a pearly kind of quiescence. It’s then that Tosca hosts a sort of open house.
    Villagers climb the hill to the villa to join the householders. Hair neatly tucked under kerchiefs, fresh aprons over their work clothes, the women come up to sit under the pergola with Tosca and the widows while their men, Sunday-best wool vests buttoned against the sultry night, come to play cards down in the wine cellar with the farmers. “Just like cream, women always rise to the top,” Tosca repeats each evening as the men separate from their consorts.
    Most all the women take one of Tosca’s long, thin cigars from the proffered box, each one lighting another’s, the way the faithful light one another’s candles in a procession. The women choose their poison from the bottles lined up on a table on the far side of the pergola. Mostly they pour out whiskey or a potion brewed from honey and lemon verbena into thimble-sized cups, just enough to wet their lips. Sometimes they just sit there in the hot, wet perfume of the sun-crushed jasmine, smoking and sipping, not wanting or needing to talk. When they do speak, it’s nearly always about men. About falling in love and making love and professing love, about the difference between infidelity and disloyalty. Sometimes they sing the same song I’d heard the widows singing on the first morning we arrived. The one about grief and rapture. When they’re finished—for the moment—with talking about men, they speak of their children.
    A woman called Nuruzzu speaks of her worries for her just-married daughter.
    “She’s a woman. Like a chameleon does, a woman quietly blends into all the parts of her life. Sometimes you can hardly tell she’s there, she’s so quiet going on about her business. Feed the baby. Muck the stables. Make soup from stones. Make a sheet into a dress. She doesn’t count on destiny for anything. She knows it’s her own hands, her own arms, her own thighs and breasts that have to do the work. Destiny is bigger in men’s lives. Destiny is a welcome guest in a man’s house. She barely knocks and he’s there to open the door.
Yes, yes. You do it,
he says to destiny and lumbers back to his chair.”
    As each woman ends her story or her thoughts, they all take up their chants for a few moments. Then another woman begins.
    “Our babies cried when we left them and we cry when they leave us. Echoes. Proud almost to arrogance then, we pushed them about in their carriages. Dutifully, wearily now, they push us about in our chairs.”
    “Our children don’t know us as we are now. Less do they know us as we were. Oh, how I wish they could have known us as we were. Do you think they would recognize their young selves in our