Sicilian Odyssey (8 page)

Fortunately, my anxiety dissipates as we head toward the museum up the walkway, lined on both sides with plants sending up shoots topped with giant scarlet flowers. Stopping in the tidy villa-museum to orient ourselves, and to reassure ourselves that there is indeed another living human on the island, I find myself grinning with loony gratitude at the young man who takes our money and gives us tickets.

He suggests that we tour the museum before we explore the island, and as we walk into the first of the few small rooms that compose the Museo Whitaker, we stop short in front of the “Ephebus of Mozia,” the fifth-century
B.C
. statue so arresting and shockingly beautiful that it occurs to me that, two hours from now, the ferry could return and find us still standing here, staring at the sculpture.

The marble statue of the young man, the ephebus, was discovered in the northern part of the island, near the temple area. It had been buried, lying on its back, covered with stones—hidden, it is thought, during the ghastly siege of Dionysius, in the hopes that someone would remember to dig it up after the war was over. But no one was left, or anyway no one who knew or remembered, and the “Young Man of Mozia” remained in his untimely grave until the late nineteenth century, when he was exhumed, first his torso, and then, years later, his head.

For weeks, we have been looking at Greek statuary. In fact it’s often seemed as if Sicily has as many archaeological museums as it has orange groves, that every small town has its own brown (denoting a cultural attraction) sign featuring the logo of a temple and an arrow pointing to the local repository of coins and pottery sherds. What’s surprising is how many of these modest, unpromising museums contain a minor masterpiece. Less surprisingly, the larger and richer institutions are fascinating. To browse among their collections of vases figured with masked actors, flute players, dancing girls, centaurs and satyrs, maenads and Amazons is the closest we can hope to come to watching an animated film of the daily existence and imaginative lives of the Greek colonists in Sicily. Always, there are funerary artifacts—a basket of figs carved from stone to insure that the dead would eat well in their afterlife—and sculptures of young men with exquisitely rendered musculature and shapely bodies

In Syracuse’s Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi is a magnificent headless kouros—a statue of a nude young man; in the archaeological museum at Agrigento is the celebrated “Ephebus of Agrigento,” the figure of a young male athlete believed to have been a star of the Olympic Games. But compared to the “Young Man of Mozia,” those other pieces now seem lifeless, abstract, devoid of personality and spirit. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that the “Young Man of Mozia” and the “Ephebus of Agrigento” could have been sculpted in the same century.

There is nothing anywhere like the “Young Man of Mozia.” For not until Michelangelo would a sculptor again prove able to breathe so much life into marble, to make stone so exactly mimic flesh, and to celebrate the sensuality of the young male body with such control and such impassioned admiration. The “Ephebus of Mozia” is at once fully male and completely androgynous, like some representative of an earlier, mythic race—before humans were divided into males and females. Clothed in a tight-fitting tunic that closely follows the lines of his thighs and buttocks, his head turned to one side, his features caught in an expression partway between strength and submission, his hand resting lightly on his outthrust hip, the “Young Man” is so frankly sensual, the effect of the work is so unmistakably erotic that I’m glad there’s no one else in the museum, no other tourists on the island. It would be…embarrassing to look at the statue with strangers around; it’s something you want to do in private.

At last, we manage to free ourselves from the statue’s spell and head out across the island, along the sandy pathways lined with scrub pines and dwarf palms, the dirt tracks through the vineyards, the fields of poppies and wildflowers that cover much of the flat, open land. We pass the remains of a black-and-white mosaic floor, the so-called domestic quarters, the sacred and “industrial areas” where the Phoenicians tanned leather, dyed textiles, and baked pottery. And finally we reach the necropolis, a collection of tombs—the horrifyingly miniature sarcophagi that were used to bury the children killed in the Phoenician religious rituals and later (when the custom of infant sacrifice was no longer practiced) the small animals that were substituted as sacrificial victims.

Seagulls shriek overhead and dive toward the white beach. We can hear and smell and see the steely ocean. The grape arbors and wildflowers surround us. The prettiness of the scenery contrasts so sharply with the loneliness, the melancholy, and the sheer creepiness of the necropolis that I begin to shiver in the warm morning sun. And, once more, I find myself praying that the boatman will remember we’re out here.

Mozia

Which, of course, he does. At precisely the appointed time, we watch his neat white boat putter up the dock. On the way back to the mainland—a trip that, naturally, seems even shorter than the voyage out—he stops to pick up a friend from another boat, who’s been fixing his nets and baiting traps. Then our boatman turns to me and asks where we’re from. When I tell him we live in New York, he asks (as so many Sicilians do) about the twin towers and (like so many Sicilians) expresses his sympathy and his conviction that life must go on. He tells me that his son lives in the United States, he’s opened five restaurants in Boston and is about to start one in Miami. After a while, I think to ask him what kind of wine is made from the grapes on the island.

Marsala, he says. Always. They still make Marsala.

The next day, in Sciacca, we go into a fancy wine store to buy a bottle of Marsala. We ask the proprietor what’s the best, the driest…and he tells us: This is dry, this is good, the best. But maybe he misunderstood us, or maybe we got something wrong, because in fact it’s not very good. It’s too sweet, cloying, with a harsh after-bite. We think: This can’t be right. It can’t be the wine from Mozia. We’d expected something more, something special and sublime—something finer to have grown up from the bones and dust of the dead Phoenicians.

Probably, to be honest, the main reason why I want to be reborn as an Italian in general and a Sicilian man in particular has to do with my envy of a certain kind of conversation. The exchange takes place in a restaurant, it unfolds in its own time, it has an unhurried ritualistic quality, it transpires between the waiter or the restaurant owner and the customer, it begins with the words
che consiglia,
what do you suggest, or, more coloquially,
consigliamo,
advise us. Then the conversation starts, the slow, pleasurable recital of the possibilities, the choices to be selected from the day’s menu, the antipasti, the
primi
and
secondi,
the
contorni,
the consideration and discussion, the back and forth: What’s best, what’s freshest, what’s just come in from the market, the sea, the farm, the woods, how it is prepared, the ingredients, the seasonings—it’s almost as if the meal is being eaten before it is even ordered.

In theory, I could have that conversation. I know enough Italian and, as it happens, my vocabulary is particularly strong on words having to do with food, the kitchen, the menu. There is probable nothing, or very little, I couldn’t understand, none of those slow pleasurable decisions I wouldn’t feel qualified to make. And yet I never have it. I look at the menu, I decide, I order, the food comes. We eat.

In fact, I’ve had something approaching the conversation a few times during our stay in Sicily. In a trattoria in Syracuse, I asked the waiter about the specialties of the house, and what he replied seemed so improbable—fusilli with tiny shrimp and fresh pumpkin—that I ordered it partly to see if he’d said what I thought he’d said. He
had,
and the dish
was
improbable—and delicious. In an
osteria,
also in Syracuse, but one which specializes in the inland cooking of Ragusa, the owner recited the list of what was available (there was no printed menu), then went through it again and again. Each time the list grew shorter, and I knew he was editing as he went along, making the selections for us, based on something he was gathering from our responses, or perhaps he was just telling us what he liked best: an antipasti plate composed of slices of different sorts of
tortas
—little pies baked with ricotta and vegetables—followed by a risotto with squash blossoms and cream, and tagliatelle with homemade sausage and ricotta.

In a restaurant in Cefalù—perhaps my favorite of all the places at which we ate in Sicily—the problem was solved for me. An extra page had been added to the menu, a list of specials entitled, “
Il chef consiglia.”
The chef advises! Without my even having to ask, and with everything printed out, so I could read it at my leisure, with time to understand, and even to look up the few words I didn’t recognize. And what delights the chef advised in this seaside paradise that had managed to broker a happy marriage of innovation and tradition, to retain the
sapori di Sicilia,
the flavors of Sicily, the particularly Sicilian mix of sweet and sour and salty, to serve them in the large, traditional-sized portions (no stingy nouvelle cuisine presentation-is-everything theater here) and at the same time refine and readjust the recipes according to the most up-to-the-minute notions of
la cucina stagionale,
seasonal cooking.

Many of the dishes contained in their titles the word
invernali,
winter, which in this case (it was mid-February) meant artichokes, prepared in every imaginable fashion. The antipasti plate included freshly cooked and marinated artichoke hearts, arranged among leaves of wild greens and radicchio and huge shrimp,
gamberoni,
boiled red. Shrimp and artichokes reappeared atop the homemade tagliatelle, black with cuttlefish ink, and in ravioli—the pasta stuffed with artichokes and sauced with shrimp and fresh tomatoes. But the standout, the menu’s most inspired creation, was a new take on
involtini di pesce spada,
rolled swordfish, a Sicilian standard, cooked, in this case,
all’ arancia,
with wedges of orange and an orange sauce, stuffed with breadcrumbs and parsley, and seasoned with capers, raisins, anchovies, pine nuts, and orange zest.

In the absence of such cross-cultural culinary thoughtfulness (il chef consiglia!), another approach to ordering without the preliminary conversation is to linger over the bread and wine long enough to see what other people are eating—and then just point. This works particularly well in a neighborhood restaurant, during a leisurely weekend lunch.

On a Sunday afternoon, in Syracuse, we watched large families ordering one dish at a time: first a plate of fried shrimp, then bowls of fat mussels steamed with garlic and parsley, then a portion of grilled calamari. We did more or less as they did, all the time longing for a big Sicilian family of our own, or at least enough people to expand the range and scope of what we could sensibly order. What makes this method possible is that, in Sicily as in most of Italy, no one cares much if you order everything at once, or in stages; if the swordfish in the pasta with eggplant and pesce spada is particularly good, go ahead and order swordfish for your second course, sliced thin and grilled, or lightly breaded and fried,
alla palermitana.

Still, the learn-by-watching-your-neighbors approach requires a certain amount of attention and vigilance, however relaxed. It took a few tries to figure out that the plates of shellfish were not appearing automatically, by magic, on the tables of the patrons at the restaurants in the little harbor of Capo di Molino. As they’d walked in, they’d made their choices from the displays of seafood on ice outside on the sidewalk: oysters, shrimp, and fresh sea urchins waiting to be sliced open and scooped out. We watched and learned, and did the same.

But it’s not precisely the same as having that long, sustained consideration, that relaxed introduction to the joys of the meal before us. Partly, our problem is simply that we aren’t from the neighborhood; many of the waiters and customers know each other, they’re friends, they went to school together, they exchange warm handshakes, local gossip, or even hugs as they walk into the restaurant and ask after the health of one another’s families. This is especially true of those solitary men—a widower who lives nearby, or someone who works in the neighborhood—who come in alone. The prelunch conversation lasts longer than it takes to eat the meal, which is slapped down, consumed at breakneck speed, and the diner leaves as quickly as he arrived.

Another thing that keeps us from having that preprandial conversation is, obviously, cultural. Americans aren’t used to it; at home, we just don’t do it. At good restaurants, waiters recite the list of specials and then, more often than not, take a deep breath of relief at having successfully got through their personal mini-ordeal. The especially daring or altruistic waiter may suggest that this or that dish is particularly good tonight, but in general that’s the end of it—not the beginning, as it would be in Sicily.

And who can blame American waiters for their hesitation? Americans make fun of servers who are perceived to be excessively outgoing or chatty. Their personalities are considered too big for their jobs, their friendliness inappropriate, intrusive, an invasion of the diners’ privacy, an abrogation of our God-given individual American freedom to choose for ourselves. It’s almost as if the waiter had followed us into the election booth and was telling us how to vote. And though I have heard the waiters in my neighborhood coffee shop in New York say that that day’s chicken noodle or pea soup is particularly good, it rarely happens that your counter person at the roadside diner or local lunch joint will be asked about, or spontaneously begin to praise, the virtues of the grilled cheese or the hamburger deluxe.

And so it’s only natural, or in any case, cultural, that something of that reticence and anxiety should persist among Americans abroad. We think of ourselves as decisive people, we’re wary of uncertainty, of seeming not to know what we want, of taking up a waiter’s time, of seeking and taking advice. Suppose he suggests some delicacy we can’t afford, or some ingredient we don’t like, or are allergic to? (One thing that does seem to make this easier for the Sicilians is the fact that their food tastes are, in general, so much broader, so much less picky than ours, and also that their menus list so little that hasn’t been familiar to them since childhood.) We Americans can’t help but worry: Will the waiter be insulted if we ignore his suggestions and shake our heads and return to our strained perusals of the menu? Will the whole conversation turn out to have been a mistake, a source of misunderstanding and embarrassment that will linger throughout the meal?

In any case, I gradually come to realize that my difficulty in having the conversation is not entirely a matter of culture but also of gender. For in Sicily the waiters are nearly always male, and though you do see women working in the kitchen and managing restaurants, it’s mostly in places run by entire families. Female chefs certainly exist, but—just as in the United States—they’re much more rare than their male counterparts. And while women may be dining alone in restaurants in Milan, or ordering the wine for their entire party in Rome, or chatting up the waiters in Venice, the fact is I’ve rarely seen this even in northern Italian cities (except when the customer is a female foreign tourist) and almost never in Sicily.

Anyone who doubts that Sicily is still a patriarchal society should note how rarely women are entrusted with the job of preparing and serving food, or encouraged to work outside the home in such an intimate relation with strangers. Because the fact is, it is intimate: Two men talking about the food about to be served resemble, in more than casual ways, two men talking about women, or sex. There’s that same sense of appreciation, of remembered or anticipated enjoyment, that shared knowledge of pleasure.

Which all contributes to the reason why I find the conversation so difficult. As flawed as my Italian is, I’m more comfortable speaking it than Howie is. And though any waiter can quickly figure out why I’m the one doing the talking, it still seems to unnerve him to be having the conversation with me when there’s a perfectly intelligent man sitting right there at the table. Will my husband be affronted, will his honor be insulted as he witnesses this intense, focused exchange between his wife and another man? No doubt there
were
men, in the Sicily of just a few generations ago, who were killed for less.

One consequence is that I’m always extremely happy on those rare occasions when I find myself being cooked for, and brought food by, women—with whom, in theory, it might be possible for me to have the conversation. And so perhaps the most gratifying and enjoyable—if not exactly the most exquisite or refined—meal of our stay takes place in Scopello, a tiny fishing village on the northern coast, an hour or so from Trapani.

With its bleached craggy boulders and palm trees, its deserted white beaches bordering an ocean striated into bands of green and blue, Scopello looks, in photographs, almost like a Caribbean resort. But the day we arrive is freezing. A light drizzle had begun to mist the windshield on our drive from Palermo. And by the time we pull into town—a single cobbled street lined with quaint shops and fishermen’s houses, all closed for the season, shuttered to keep out the winter cold—a driving rain is lashing the village, and the wind is blowing so fiercely that our umbrellas keep folding up and turning in on themselves.

Howard Michels and Francine Prose, Scopello

Fortunately, I’ve called ahead, to a place called Torre Bennistra, where a sweet-voiced woman has informed me that she has no bread, she’s closed, but…how many people are we? Two? All right, come on.
Va bene.

When I ask directions at the local bar, a woman tells us that Torre Bennistra is definitely closed for the season. But we persevere and find it, and knock on the door of the obviously deserted restaurant. Through the window, we watch a small, stocky, old woman with curly hair and glasses, wearing an apron, get up from her chair in front of the fireplace where she has been sitting, weaving a basket. She opens the door. Ah yes, we’re the ones who called, she’s apologizing for something, we’re apologizing, the wind is blowing so loudly we can hardly hear, yes, she’ll cook us lunch but it will be very simple.
Naturale.
Fine, we say, simple is good, naturale is fine.

She waves at the empty restaurant and laughs. Have a seat, it’s our choice, we can take any table we want. When Howie goes off to the bathroom, the Signora sits down at the table with me, takes out a pencil and a pad of paper. The conversation is about to begin.

She asks if Howie is my husband, if we have children, if my parents are Sicilian. She says that the weather is awful,
una giornata brutta,
a nasty day, just yesterday it was beautiful. Then she asks what we want to eat. Antipasti? Yes, I say, and she writes down, two antipasti. Pasta? Yes, I say. It’s the ideal conversation, because there are no choices, she knows what we want, she knows what she can make—it’s what she might make for family lunch if we weren’t there. It’s what she has in the house. The only choice is between more and less. So fine, let’s have more. Meat or fish? Fish. Fried fish? That will be fine. Tomato salad? She writes it all down and disappears into the kitchen.