Sicilian Odyssey (13 page)

Goethe hated Messina, at least at first. He complained bitterly about the “accursed” city that had been leveled by an earthquake four years before his visit and blamed its total devastation on shoddy construction; wishing their homes to resemble the palazzi of the rich, people had concealed their old houses behind grand, new facades that collapsed—bringing the entire structures down with them—during the quake. “Messina,” he wrote, “is a very disagreeable sight and reminded me of that primitive age when Sicels and Siculians quitted this unquiet soil to settle on the west coast of the island.”

In the centuries that followed Goethe’s Italian journey, Messina’s luck got, if possible, even worse. A cholera epidemic devastated the population in 1854. Forty years later, there was another earthquake and, in 1908, yet another, which killed 84,000 people. More recently, in 1943, the city was firebombed by the Allies, reversing, in just a few hours, the city’s long and tortuous efforts to rebuild itself.

Though Messina is often a traveler’s first experience of Sicily—trains and regular ferries connect it to the mainland—few would claim it as their favorite spot on the island. Little remains of the old town except for a few houses that have survived in the gaps between characterless modern buildings. The mazelike streets of the medieval town have been replaced by a grid of wide avenues that seems to encourage the most reckless and suicidal aspects of Sicilian driving technique. It’s been said that parts of Trapani, also bombed during the war, resemble a de Chirico painting, but in fact it’s Messina that seems most truly surreal.

A few days before we’re scheduled to fly from Catania to Rome, we drive up to Messina to see the Caravaggios in the Museo Regionale. We decide to arrive on a Sunday, when the city will be quiet, easier to navigate. And though that’s certainly true—the traffic is relatively civilized and relaxed—we realize at once that we’ve made a mistake. Of all the cities that we’ve seen go dormant or dead on Sundays, Messina is the most desolate. Everything is shut, the streets have a spooky, slightly dangerous feel—as if it were the middle of the night instead of a sunny Sunday morning. Our hotel insists on taking a credit card imprint before they’ll let us check in; it’s the only place where this has happened in Sicily. Our room is comfortable, but slightly forlorn, as if it’s absorbed the collective loneliness of too many traveling businessmen.

And the Caravaggios turn out to be a major disappointment. The museum is airy and well designed, but the Caravaggios could hardly be more infelicitously displayed. The space is cramped, the lighting poor, the restoration peculiar. The composition of “The Raising of Lazarus” is much like that of “The Burial of St. Lucy”—here, too, the figures are pressed into the bottom section of painting, beneath a simultaneously soaring and oppressive expanse of darkness—but the effect that the work produces (at least in its present surroundings) is nowhere near as powerful. Puzzled, we look at it for awhile, then move on to contemplate “The Adoration of the Shepherds.” And then we just stand there, as if we’re waiting for something to change, for the light to come up, for the partitions to move back, for the restorers’ handiwork to undo itself. Of course, none of that happens, and we leave the museum, vaguely depressed.

But why should we have expected anything else? Though he was generously paid for “The Adoration,” Caravaggio had a tough time in Messina. While he worked on “The Raising of Lazarus,” he insisted that he be given as a studio a room in the local hospital and a fresh corpse to serve as a model for the dead Lazarus. It was here that he assaulted his living models, local workmen, when they complained about the cadaver’s smell. It was also in Messina that he slashed his first version of the painting after it was criticized by some prominent citizens, provincials who were merely overeager to have an opinion, to seem au courant and informed. And it was here—according to Francesco Susinno’s 1724
Lives of the Messinese Painters
—that, on holy days, Caravaggio would follow a teacher named Don Carlo Pepe to watch Don Carlo’s male students at play in the city arsenal, observing them with such transfixed attention that the teacher became suspicious enough to inquire what, precisely, the painter thought he was doing. Insulted, Caravaggio struck Don Carlo on the head and wounded him—and was consequently obliged to leave Messina. “In short,” concludes Susinno, “wherever he went he would leave the mark of his madness.”

After our trip to the museum, we have lunch in the only open restaurant we can find. I spend the rest of the afternoon in our hotel room, rereading guidebooks to see if there’s anything we might be missing, something in Messina that might be open, or worth doing, on a chilly, drizzly Sunday. There isn’t. And the banks of fog that keep rolling in discourage us from driving up to catch the scenic view of the city from the Via Panoramica.

On Monday morning, we’re glad to leave, to head back down the coast to warm, sunny Acireale, where we’ll stay until our flight to Rome. But soon it turns out that perhaps we should have taken a lesson from Goethe, whose opinion of Messina was reversed when he met the city’s governor and the German consul, with whom he had such an agreeable time that he wished he had ignored his unfavorable first impression of Messina and decided to stay longer.

One afternoon—in fact the afternoon before we’re scheduled to leave Sicily—I’m watching
CNN
in our hotel room in Acireale. They’re featuring a disturbing report from the Afghan war, a press conference in which government officials announce the deaths of several American servicemen, as well as Afghan soldiers and civilians, and describe the powerful new weapons being used to blow up the enemy fighters still hiding in caves. Meanwhile, beneath the image of the military commander and the press secretary, the “crawl” bannering across the screen announces that, in the Sicilian city of Messina, a bronze statue of Padre Pio is reported to have begun weeping tears of blood.

Messina! We were just there! We left too early, just as Goethe left too early, just as we’re leaving Sicily entirely too early! Why are we going to Rome when we should be driving back up north to witness a miracle?

All over Sicily—by the cash registers in tobacco stores, under the blaring televisions in family
trattorie,
on the dashboards of taxis and buses—we’ve seen images of Padre Pio, the simple farmer’s son from southern Italy who became a Capuchin monk and, in 1918, first exhibited the stigmata, the five wounds of Jesus, on his frail body. After performing many miracles and healings and becoming the center of a large, devoted following, Padre Pio died in 1968. Fifteen years after his death, the beatification process began; in 1999, he was declared Blessed by Pope John Paul II.

And now, in the late winter of 2002, his statue has begun to weep. The tears have been sent to police laboratories for analysis, but the masses of people arriving daily at the site of the miracle aren’t waiting for the results, nor is the girl who reported touching the foot of the statue and feeling a great heat, nor is the wheelchair-bound woman in Sant’ Agata di Militello, who, it is said, has been cured of multiple sclerosis.

In fact, we can’t stay any longer, we can’t return to Messina. We have obligations, commitments, we have to get on to Rome. And yet the reports from Messina make me feel suddenly, unreasonably happy—not merely consoled, but optimistic. Perhaps what cheers me so much is the fact that, at lunch this afternoon in the port of Aci Trezza, I listened to a group of sleek Catanians discuss some computer-related business opportunity in language so technical I could hardly understand a word. And then, after my
fritto misto,
my
tiramisù,
and coffee, I have come back to my hotel room to read the news from Messina: A statue of Padre Pio is weeping even as the technocrats are buying and selling their state-of-the-art electronics.

It all seems exquisitely Sicilian: the seamlessness and grace with which the present layers itself over past, with which the ancient coincides with the modern, with which the stigmatist coexists with the scientist. The news about Padre Pio does not erase or obliterate or lie about the dispatches from the war in Asia. But it does makes you wonder what, exactly, is causing the saint to weep—to shed tears in a country, on an island that has seen countless cycles of violence and peace, of poverty and prosperity, of horror and beauty.

Perhaps I should end where I began, with Odysseus’s accidental, adventurous, and ultimately pleasurable sojourn in Sicily. After Nausicaa saved the half-drowned sailor and brought him to her father’s court, after Odysseus enthralled the Phaeacians with the stories of his exploits—his escape from the Cyclops and from Circe’s island, his journey to the underworld, his voyage past the Sirens and though the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis—King Alcinous announced that he was sending his honored guest off with a boatload of treasure: beaten gold and bronze, food and wine, clothing, rugs and sheets to sleep on. And so, after all his perils, after the twenty years of wandering, Odysseus—with his memories of the Island of the Sun, with his hard-won wisdom, his hard and glorious experience, his precious and priceless gifts—at long last set sail for home.

What, then, have I brought home with me? The gifts range from modest to large. A kitschy scrolled painting on velvet that features the word ‘Sicilia’ in glittery letters surrounded by representations of the cathedrals of Palermo and Monreale, a peasant cart, a palm tree, the ruins at Agrigento. A tinted vintage postcard of the smoldering cone of Mount Etna. Recipes, some new ideas about food; the inspiration and the will to keep searching for a fish store in which they will slice the swordfish thin enough for
pesce spada alla palermitana.

And then there are the intangibles. Not long after my return, I was talking on the phone with a friend about the world situation, which, of course, had gotten no less perilous and alarming in the time since I’d left for Italy. We were discussing the folly and absolute necessity of conducting business as usual in the face of uncertainty and fear. On the surface, we focused on my friend’s pressing need to call the exterminator (water bugs!) even though she was nearly paralyzed with worry about the conflict in the Middle East, and between India and Pakistan. Beneath the surface, we were really discussing the folly and absolute necessity of continuing to write (my friend is also a writer) and of trying to make art despite our concerns about the continuing survival of the planet and of civilization.

And then, as it happened, I found myself thinking of the “Ephebus of Mozia,” the statue of the young man that I saw in the Whitaker Museum, on the nearly deserted island off the coast between Trapani and Marsala. I pictured it with utter clarity—its grace, its beauty, the way it seems lighted from within—and it struck me that whoever had carved it in the fifth century
B.C
. had done so either during a period of strife or unrest, or in a brief spell of peace between two outbreaks of violence. And yet the statue had been made, and war had indeed broken out, and the sculpture had been buried, and saved, and unearthed, and recognized as the masterpiece that it is. As I imagined it, radiant and tranquil, in its room in the museum, the very fact of its existence seemed like evidence, like a sign of what Sicily has to tell us if we are willing to listen: that it is necessary to operate on faith and to believe that what we do will, like the beautiful “Young Man of Mozia,” survive and endure.

OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES

JAN MORRIS
A Writer’s House in Wales

OLIVER SACKS
Oaxaca Journal

W. S. MERWIN
The Mays of Ventadorn

WILLIAM KITTREDGE
Southwestern Homelands

DAVID MAMET
South of the Northeast Kingdom

GARRY WILLS
Mr. Jefferson’s University

A. M. HOMES
Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
The Island: Martinique

UPCOMING AUTHORS

JAMAICA KINCAID
on Nepal

ROBERT HUGHES
on Barcelona

SUSANNA MOORE
on Hawaii

LOUISE ERDRICH
on Ontario

PETER CAREY
on Japan

KATHRYN HARRISON
on Santiago de Compostela

ANNA QUINDLEN
on London

HOWARD NORMAN
on Nova Scotia

BARRY UNSWORTH
on Crete

GEOFFREY WOLFF
on Maine

PAUL WATKINS
on Norway

JON LEE ANDERSON
on Andalucia

DIANE JOHNSON
on Paris

WILLAM LEAST HEAT-MOON
on Western Ireland