by Andrea Lee
The rest, as they say, is history: your history, darling. After all, without that splintery crash on the blacktop, the tale would not have existed and you might never have been born. Now that you have reached the age of the White Boys, I am passing the story on to you as a kind of heirloom, unencumbering, but also undefined. There are so many questions that come with it. Why, for example, does it stick? Why, though your father and I are now long divorced, and divided by a carefully groomed terrain of indifference, do I still feel that it is important? And what is the actual story—just the tale of the pulpit, or my listening to the tale of the pulpit? Is it a story about black people and white people, or men and women? And, behind all these words, what is the flickering presence I keep glimpsing, insubstantial as the shadow of a fly? Is it something funny, or something sad, or something completely different?
Your father remembered the misery he felt on the country road outside Barreville when he had almost forgotten what the election meant for Tenlow County. The accident became the definition of that Alabama summer, and the image stayed sharp and clear through his senior year in high school, through the waning of the sixties, and the perfectly natural death of his friendship with McGinty. It stayed with him as he set aside his raw idealism, and grew slowly into tolerating the knowledge that the world, the real world, wanted nothing more than to put White Boys like him into power. It remained vivid until one evening when he was in law school he found himself telling the tale to another black girl he had a crush on. A minister’s daughter like Nicolette Basnight. A girl who, as the story progressed, laid aside her rudeness and indifference; and at the end suddenly laughed and raised her eyes to meet his across the table.
What’s that? Did he ever write to Nicolette? You know, that’s something that in all these years I never found out. My dear, that’s one more question you’ll have to ask your father.
Sicily
The first thing I knew about Sicily was marzipan. It’s a specialty there, and whenever my stepfather goes down to visit his Palermo relatives he brings it back to us in Rome. Marzipan is candy made from almonds and is so sweet that as you eat it you feel slightly nauseous. Federico, my stepfather, says that Arabs brought it to Sicily a thousand years ago. The reason I love it is that they make it in every shape and color; they even copy things like asparagus or salami. It’s a weird feeling, biting into a marzipan pork chop, because even if your brain knows that it’s candy your tongue still expects something else. When we went off to spend four days in Sicily over the May twenty-fifth school holiday, Federico bought me a little basket of marzipan clams and mussels at the Palermo airport. Mom was annoyed, as she always is when Fede buys me candy, which is often, because he has a sweet tooth himself. But I was happy, because the streaky brown-and-black shells looked completely real. Later, on the beach, I even fooled my stepcousin Ginevra by pretending to dig up a marzipan clam and then taking a big bite out of it. She screamed. It was all jealousy: she can’t stand anyone showing off any more than she does.
Ginevra was part of the group of Federico’s friends and family who had come from all over Italy to meet up with us for the holiday in a very tiny hotel on an island called Favignana. It takes a long ferry ride to get to Favignana, which is far out in the sea between Sicily and Tunisia. It’s an island covered with the kind of white pumice stone you use in the bath, and also with prickly pear cactus. It gets unbelievably hot, so you can’t stay out on the beach in the middle of the day or else you end up fried. Luckily Ginevra and I had brought our Game Boys, and Saturday after lunch we perched on the steps of the hotel terrace and played Tetris, Frogger, and Super Mario. Meanwhile Federico and the rest of the men sat at a big table and smoked and laughed and occasionally shouted over a card game called scopone. The women were all in their rooms taking siestas, except for my mother, who was reading in a hammock, with a sulky look on her face. Mom was sulking a lot on this trip, because she doesn’t like to do anything in big groups, which she always says is the worst of many obnoxious Italian habits. But I knew she was peeved most of all because Fede was spending time with his brothers and his cousins: playing cards, drinking wine, strolling to the store to buy cigarettes, and not paying much attention to her at all. Mom is great, but one of the first things anybody notices about her is that she likes a lot of attention. She kept yanking me aside and hissing complaints in my ear: “He’s reverted. It’s a tribal gathering. I knew we shouldn’t have come.”
* * *
We were there on Favignana to watch them kill tuna. This is a Sicilian custom called la Mattanza that happens every year in May, when the tuna migrate. Mattanza means “slaughter,” Federico told us, and what happens is that the fishermen from the islands guide schools of tuna into a special trap and then spear them, and there is a whole ceremony they perform as they do this, with prayers and songs. Fede said that it is a way of fishing that was already ancient when the Normans ruled Sicily in the Middle Ages, that probably it dates back to the Stone Age. Once it was a sort of festival, but nowadays hardly anyone is allowed to go out with the fishermen in the boats. But Federico’s cousin knows someone in charge, so we all had permission. Mom and I love animals—in Rome we have three guinea pigs, two Maine Coon cats, a Jack Russell terrier, and five goldfish—and so at first both of us just flat out refused to go. We’d been to Sicily before, for beach holidays, but this was completely different. But Federico laughed and said he’d be lost without the two of us, and that it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It would be an introduction to the sanguinary depths of the Sicilian character. “My character,” he said. “You foreign girls only know the civilized side of me.”
“Ignorance is bliss,” said Mom. But she had the absentminded look she gets when something intrigues her.
We’re American, my mother and I, though I was born in Rome and get teased because I speak Italian with a Roman accent. Mom is from Kenwood, California, which is where I spend summer vacations with my grandparents. She’s tall, with long hair the color of brown leaves, and every Italian who sees her says the same thing: “la classica Americana.” She says that means being beautiful and not very bright. When she was in college she did some modeling, and I have a scrapbook of yellowing magazine pictures showing her in plaid skirts and woolly sweaters, peering out of covered bridges or pretending to chat with bearded old lobstermen. Now she and her friend Elsa run an English-language bookshop in Trastevere, where I work sometimes on Saturdays. My dad is American too: he’s with Reuters. When I was a baby, before my parents got divorced, they lived together in Rome; now Dad’s in Manila, and I only see him a couple times a year. I’ve lived with my mom and with Federico for five years, since I was six. Fede is a law professor at the University of Rome, and was born in Palermo, and is a lot older than Mom. He’s short, with a funny rubbery face, and he can speak perfect American English, and if I beg him, he’ll do a hilarious Mafioso imitation in Sicilian dialect. He can be terribly bossy, but we get along. We’re both addicted to peanut M&M’s, Harry Potter, and video games; he’s the only person I know who has made it to a higher level of Tetris than me. And he loves my mom a lot, although they have huge fights at times, and she says she can’t bear this short-legged Latin male. But all in all we’re pretty happy. In Rome, we live on the Cassia, which is where a lot of foreign families live. We’re not really a foreign family—we’re a mixed family.
Anyway, after siesta time on Favignana, everyone rode bikes to the beach. I was stuck riding with Ginevra, who lives near me in Rome and who was showing off her temporary tattoos and boasting about what a great gymnast she is. I could see Mom up ahead, pedaling quickly past Federico, who was riding with Ginevra’s father, Uncle Massimo. The beach had pumice stones instead of sand, and the water was like dark green glass, and though the sun was boiling, the sea was like ice. Ginevra and I swam anyway, while the grown-ups spread out straw mats and lay down. There were millions of hermit crabs on the rocks, and we got the idea of collecting them and putting them into two big plastic mineral water
bottles. Mom said they’d never survive, but Ginevra and I thought that if we just kept filling the bottles with seawater they’d be fine, and we could even take some home and keep them in an aquarium. Federico went snorkeling along the rocks and came back shivering, with about fifty sea urchins in a bucket. Somebody took out a knife and a lemon, and pretty soon all the stepcousins and aunts and uncles were opening them up and eating them raw. Yech—you couldn’t get me to touch them: spiny on the outside and red and slimy on the inside. Mom ate one, but you could tell it was just out of politeness. She’s not a beach person. She sat in the sun with her hat and long-sleeved shirt, chatting with Aunt Saveria and Aunt Gabriella and the other ladies who had taken off their bikini tops and lay there covered with gold jewelry and oil, cooking themselves, as she calls it. Beside them she looked so pale and different that I felt a little embarrassed for her. She says that most of what Italians call beauty is simple vulgarity, but I always like the way Italian ladies look at the beach: brown and glittering in the sun like Egyptian queens.
Before sunset we walked along the rocks to see a cave that was famous for having amethyst light inside; when we got there, Federico and the other men fooled around, shouting to make echoes, and jumping in the water. And on the way back, Fede told Ginevra and me a story about a young man in Sicily who’d spent a summer on a wild seacoast like this, and had met a mermaid and fallen in love with her. The story was by Tomasi di Lampedusa, a famous Sicilian writer, and had an ending that Fede couldn’t remember exactly—a sad ending, he thought, or perhaps it was that the story was never finished. The writer probably got stuck, Ginevra whispered to me, because how do you describe sex with a mermaid?
That night we all ate dinner at a long table in a room full of oil paintings of fat naked women, fruit, and jumping tuna fish. The primo was spaghetti Sicilian style, with fresh sardines. I didn’t think it tasted like anything but fish, but everybody else seemed to think it was fantastic. “The real taste of Sicily,” Federico kept saying. “The taste of all my summers at the seaside when I was a dirty-minded little boy dreaming of little girls’ bottoms.” He gave some to my mother, insisted on her eating lots, and she kept protesting, and he said to her, wiggling his eyebrows, “Ma è un afrodisiaco,” and she looked at him and laughed, the unhappy kind of laugh she has when she’s feeling sorry for herself and mad at the rest of the world. “Why have you been ignoring me?” he asked her in English, lowering his voice. “You’ve been ignoring me,” she answered. “All day, just playing cards and hanging out with the men as if this were some kind of village.” For a minute I was afraid they were going to have one of their awful arguments, but Fede just turned down the corners of his mouth and said: “I’m not asking you to live here—just to observe and to be a bit patient and to try to understand things from a different point of view.” “You know me,” said Mom. “I’m a great understander.”
The next day was the Mattanza, and we had to get up early to go out with the fishermen. It was dark and cold when Mom and Aunt Gabriella came and woke me and Ginevra, and though I put on jeans and a windbreaker my legs went numb as we bicycled out to the harbor. There we left the bikes and walked inside a stone building as big as a cathedral with huge arched doorways that opened right out onto the water, and ceilings so high they were invisible in the darkness. Federico told me that the building was a tonnara, a place where they bring the freshly caught tuna to be chopped up and probably also put into cans. About a hundred years ago this was the main business on this island—these big echoing places that looked like churches were all full of fishermen and fish. The islanders caught thousands of tuna, but left many to breed so that every year there were more and so there was, he said, a good understanding between men and the sea. But now there were too many big ships fishing with ultrasound and nets that took everything, and the tuna were dying out, and it was possible that this was one of the last old-style mattanze.
We waited at the dock for a while in the cold morning air while the sky got lighter, and the grown-ups drank coffee from a little bar that was open, and Ginevra and I drank hot milk with a little coffee. And we all gobbled down giant sugar-covered pastries called bombolone. Then we climbed into four open boats attached to each other by a thick rope. We were in the next to the last boat, Mom and Federico and I, and Ginevra with Uncle Massimo and Aunt Gabriella. And they towed us out into the middle of the bay, where we got out of our boat and into another, a big flat one that had been set up to form part of a square with other flat boats. Federico pointed out to Mom and me the nets under the boats that were also laid out in a square. Uncle Massimo told us that this was called la camera della morte—the death chamber. We were all talking in low voices, even Ginevra, because it was eerie waiting out there in the middle of the water with the island like a dark streak behind us and everybody’s face the color of cardboard in the gray dawn light. I leaned back against Mom, who had on a thick wool sweater, and she gave me a squeeze. “Talk about camera della morte,” she whispered. “We all look like corpses!” She hugged me tighter and added: “I don’t know what we’re doing here, sweetheart, but we chose to come, so if you can’t take it, close your eyes.”
The sky turned pink, and two boatloads of fishermen showed up. They looked like pirates: tanned brown as shoe leather, and one with a black ponytail down to his waist and tattoos on the sides of his neck, and another with peroxide blond hair frizzing out of a striped wool cap and a big gold ring in each ear. Federico said that the blond guy was the rais: the head of all the fishermen, and that by tradition the men had to obey his every command. All the day before, they’d been tracking the movements of a big school of tuna, and now the fish were about to swim into their trap. The fishermen shouted back and forth in a language that didn’t even sound like Italian, and Mom told me it was Favignana dialect, with a lot of Arabic words in it. They all began to pull on yellow waterproof jackets and pants, and then they moved to the edges of two big flat boats and stood in two lines facing each other over the water.
We all waited, and I felt my stomach clenching with suspense. As we waited the sun came up and a lot of other boats, full of families from the island, and other visitors, and even a television crew from Germany, joined us. After sunrise everyone, weirdly, began behaving like they were at a party. The grown-ups drank wine from paper cups, and we all ate sandwiches they call pane condito down in Sicily because they put oil and vinegar on the bread before adding tomato and prosciutto and cheese. Everyone laughed and talked and shouted jokes to the fishermen. The rais turned around to answer once or twice, laughing so that you could see all his big white teeth, but the rest of the men just stood like statues, staring out over the water. In the middle of the fishermen stood a small Japanese man in a warm-up suit. Federico said a Japanese company had bought the whole catch, and that in twenty-four hours the tuna would be sushi in Tokyo.
All of a sudden the tuna arrived. We saw one huge silver body inside of the square and then another and another, and then it seemed that there was hardly enough room for water; there were just dozens of silver bodies bigger than any fish I’d ever seen, churning around and around, and the fishermen began to pull on the ropes of the net. They pulled all together, and as they pulled they began to sing in strange words that Federico told me were Arabic. They sang and they pulled the net further and further up until we could see the fish clearly. And the tuna began to move faster and faster until you could feel how panicky they were. The water looked like it was boiling. Just then Mom asked if I’d like to go to another boat further back so I didn’t have to watch, because they were going to kill the fish. I said I’d stay where I was.
What the fishermen did was take long poles with spikes on the end and stab them into the tuna and then with a quick, almost mechanical movement, hoist them flopping and struggling out of the water. It was hard to believe that single men could be strong enough to lift such giant fish. The tuna were covered with blood, and the water began to fill with blood until it turned dark red, the color of wine.
I thought how strange it must look from an airplane: the water red and boiling in that square between boats, but the sea around a normal color. As they pulled out more and more fish, the fishermen kept on singing, and their voices sounded sad and monotonous. The air smelled of fish and seawater and something raw and wild that must have been blood. People in the crowd were quiet, and a lady in black glasses from the German TV crew told Ginevra and me in English that they were filming this for people back in Germany so they would understand how cruel it was. The Japanese man stood with his back very straight and his arms crossed, his eyes following every movement of the fishermen. Mom gripped my shoulder, and I looked back and saw that her cheeks looked shiny with tears and that Federico had put his arm around her.
They caught three hundred sixty-seven tuna. The number passed in whispers through the crowd. When the last fish was pulled out of the water, the rais made a signal and the fishermen began to sing a song that sounded like a prayer. It was a prayer, Federico told me: They were thanking God, or Allah, for a good catch. That was the way they had done it for a thousand years. The big silver heaps of fish didn’t move anymore except for a few flips of the tail, and the blood slowly dissolved into the water. The party feeling had dissolved, too, and as they towed our boats back to the dock of the tonnara, people sat and thought their own thoughts. Though it felt as if a whole day had passed, it was only ten o’clock in the morning. Ginevra leaned against her father and slept with her mouth open. I didn’t feel sad, just dead tired and hollow inside; I put my head in Mom’s lap, and she stroked my hair and we sat in silence. The only thing Mom said during the boat ride was “I want to go home.”