ferryboat to Messina (a scary and suspicious Sicilian port town that seems to howl from
behind barricaded doors, "It's not my fault I'm ugly! I've been earthquaked and
carpet-bombed and raped by the Mafia, too!") Once I've arrived in Messina, I have to find
a bus station (grimy as a smoker's lung) and find the man whose job it is to sit there in the
ticket booth, mourning his life, and see if he will please sell me a ticket to the coastal
town of Taormina. Then I rattle along the cliffs and beaches of Sicily's stupendous and
hard-edged east coast until I get to Taormina, and then I have to find a taxi and then Ihave to find a hotel. Then I have to find the right person of whom to ask my favorite
question in Italian: "Where is the best food in this town?" In Taormina, that person turns
out to be a sleepy policeman. He gives me one of the greatest things anyone can ever give
me in life--a tiny piece of paper with the name of an obscure restaurant written on it, a
hand-drawn map of how to find the place.
Which turns out to be a little trattoria where the friendly elderly proprietress is getting
ready for her evening's customers by standing on a table in her stocking feet, trying not to
knock over the Christmas creche as she polishes the restaurant windows. I tell her that I
don't need to see the menu but could she just bring me the best food possible because this
is my first night in Sicily. She rubs her hands together in pleasure and yells something in
Sicilian dialect to her even-more-elderly mother in the kitchen, and within the space of
twenty minutes I am busily eating the hands-down most amazing meal I've eaten yet in
all of Italy. It's pasta, but a shape of pasta I've never before seen--big, fresh, sheets of
pasta folded ravioli-like into the shape (if not exactly the size) of the pope's hat, stuffed
with a hot, aromatic puree of crustaceans and octopus and squid, served tossed like a hot
salad with fresh cockles and strips of julienned vegetables, all swimming in an olivey,
oceany broth. Followed by the rabbit, stewed in thyme.
But Syracuse, the next day, is even better. The bus coughs me up on a street corner here
in the cold rain, late in the day. I love this town immediately. There are three thousand
years of history under my feet in Syracuse. It's a place of such ancient civilization that it
makes Rome look like Dallas. Myth says that Daedalus flew here from Crete and that
Hercules once slept here. Syracuse was a Greek colony that Thucydides called "a city not
in the least inferior to Athens itself." Syracuse is the link between ancient Greece and
ancient Rome. Many great playwrights and scientists of antiquity lived here. Plato
thought it would be the ideal location for a utopian experiment where perhaps "by some
divine fate" rulers might become philosophers, and philosophers might become rulers.
Historians say that rhetoric was invented in Syracuse, and also (and this is just a minor
thing) plot.
I walk through the markets of this crumbly town and my heart tumbles with a love I can't
answer or explain as I watch an old guy in a black wool hat gut a fish for a customer (he
has stuck his cigarette in his lips for safekeeping the way a seamstress keeps her pins in
her mouth as she sews; his knife works with devotional perfection on the fillets). Shyly, I
ask this fisherman where I should eat tonight, and I leave our conversation clutching yet
another little piece of paper, directing me to a little restaurant with no name, where--as
soon as I sit down that night--the waiter brings me airy clouds of ricotta sprinkled with
pistachio, bread chunks floating in aromatic oils, tiny plates of sliced meats and olives, a
salad of chilled oranges tossed in a dressing of raw onion and parsley. This is before I
even hear about the calamari house specialty.
"No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws," Plato wrote, "when its citizens . . . do
nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love."
But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of
one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the
next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it
pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of
the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?
Of course, one can't live like this forever. Real life and wars and traumas and mortalitywill interfere eventually. Here in Sicily with its dreadful poverty, real life is never far
from anyone's mind. The Mafia has been the only successful business in Sicily for
centuries (running the business of protecting citizens from itself), and it still keeps its
hand down everybody's pants. Palermo--a city Goethe once claimed was possessed of an
impossible-to-describe beauty--may now be the only city in Western Europe where you
can still find yourself picking your steps through World War II rubble, just to give a
sense of development here. The town has been systematically uglified beyond description
by the hideous and unsafe apartment blocks the Mafia constructed in the 1980s as
money-laundering operations. I asked one Sicilian if those buildings were made from
cheap concrete and he said, "Oh, no--this is very expensive concrete. In each batch, there
are a few bodies of people who were killed by the Mafia, and that costs money. But it
does make the concrete stronger to be reinforced with all those bones and teeth."
In such an environment, is it maybe a little shallow to be thinking only about your next
wonderful meal? Or is it perhaps the best you can do, given the harder realities? Luigi
Barzini, in his 1964 masterwork The Italians (written when he'd finally grown tired of
foreigners writing about Italy and either loving it or hating it too much) tried to set the
record straight on his own culture. He tried to answer the question of why the Italians
have produced the greatest artistic, political and scientific minds of the ages, but have still
never become a major world power. Why are they the planet's masters of verbal
diplomacy, but still so inept at home government? Why are they so individually valiant,
yet so collectively unsuccessful as an army? How can they be such shrewd merchants on
the personal level, yet such inefficient capitalists as a nation?
His answers to these questions are more complex than I can fairly encapsulate here, but
have much to do with a sad Italian history of corruption by local leaders and exploitation
by foreign dominators, all of which has generally led Italians to draw the seemingly
accurate conclusion that nobody and nothing in this world can be trusted. Because the
world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only
what one can experience with one's own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in
Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously
incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains
of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent "opera singers, conductors, ballerinas,
courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors . . ." In a world of disorder and disaster
and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible.
Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is
real.
To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious
business--not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of
holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into . . . rhetoric and plot. Not
too long ago, authorities arrested a brotherhood of Catholic monks in Sicily who were in
tight conspiracy with the Mafia, so who can you trust? What can you believe? The world
is unkind and unfair. Speak up against this unfairness and in Sicily, at least, you'll end up
as the foundation of an ugly new building. What can you do in such an environment to
hold a sense of your individual human dignity? Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing except,
perhaps, to pride yourself on the fact that you always fillet your fish with perfection, or
that you make the lightest ricotta in the whole town?
I don't want to insult anyone by drawing too much of a comparison between myself andthe long-suffering Sicilian people. The tragedies in my life have been of a personal and
largely self-created nature, not epically oppressive. I went through a divorce and a
depression, not a few centuries of murderous tyranny. I had a crisis of identity, but I also
had the resources (financial, artistic and emotional) with which to try to work it out. Still,
I will say that the same thing which has helped generations of Sicilians hold their dignity
has helped me begin to recover mine--namely, the idea that the appreciation of pleasure
can be an anchor of one's humanity. I believe this is what Goethe meant by saying that
you have to come here, to Sicily, in order to understand Italy. And I suppose this is what I
instinctively felt when I decided that I needed to come here, to Italy, in order to
understand myself.
It was in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that
I first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to
myself that I probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup. But I felt a
glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint
potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that
happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt--this is not selfishness,
but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human
being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.
I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don't
fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late--through
the enjoyment of harmless pleasures--into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most
fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I
did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I
will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person--the magnification of one
life--is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens
to be nobody's but my own.
37373737
When I was growing up, my family kept chickens. We always had about a dozen of them
at any given time and whenever one died off--taken away by hawk or fox or by some
obscure chicken illness--my father would replace the lost hen. He'd drive to a nearby
poultry farm and return with a new chicken in a sack. The thing is, you must be very
careful when introducing a new chicken to the general flock. You can't just toss it in therewith the old chickens, or they will see it as an invader. What you must do instead is to
slip the new bird into the chicken coop in the middle of the night while the others are
asleep. Place her on a roost beside the flock and tiptoe away. In the morning, when the
chickens wake up, they don't notice the newcomer, thinking only, "She must have been
here all the time since I didn't see her arrive." The clincher of it is, awaking within this
flock, the newcomer herself doesn't even remember that she's a newcomer, thinking only,
"I must have been here the whole time . . ."
This is exactly how I arrive in India.
My plane lands in Mumbai around 1:30 AM. It is December 30. I find my luggage, then
find the taxi that will take me hours and hours out of the city to the Ashram, located in a
remote rural village. I doze on the drive through nighttime India, sometimes waking to
look out the window, where I can see strange haunted shapes of thin women in saris
walking alongside the road with bundles of firewood on their heads. At this hour? Buses
with no headlights pass us, and we pass oxcarts. The banyan trees spread their elegant
roots throughout the ditches.
We pull up to the front gate of the Ashram at 3:30 AM, right in front of the temple. As
I'm getting out of the taxi, a young man in Western clothes and a wool hat steps out of the
shadows and introduces himself--he is Arturo, a twenty-four-year-old journalist from
Mexico and a devotee of my Guru, and he's here to welcome me. As we're exchanging
whispered introductions, I can hear the first familiar bars of my favorite Sanskrit hymn
coming from inside. It's the morning arati, the first morning prayer, sung every day at
3:30 AM as the Ashram wakes. I point to the temple, asking Arturo, "May I . . .?" and he
makes a be-my-guest gesture. So I pay my taxi driver, tuck my backpack behind a tree,
slip off my shoes, kneel and touch my forehead to the temple step and then ease myself
inside, joining the small gathering of mostly Indian women who are singing this beautiful
hymn.
This is the hymn I call "The Amazing Grace of Sanskrit," filled with devotional longing.
It is the one devotional song I have memorized, not so much from effort as from love. I
begin to sing the familiar words in Sanskrit, from the simple introduction about the
sacred teachings of Yoga to the rising tones of worship ("I adore the cause of the
universe . . . I adore the one whose eyes are the sun, the moon and fire . . . you are
everything to me, O god of gods . . .") to the last gemlike summation of all faith ("This is
perfect, that is perfect, if you take the perfect from the perfect, the perfect remains").
The women finish singing. They bow in silence, then move out a side door across a dark
courtyard and into a smaller temple, barely lit by one oil lamp and perfumed with incense.
I follow them. The room is filled with devotees--Indian and Western--wrapped in woolen
shawls against the predawn cold. Everyone is seated in meditation, roosted there, you
might say, and I slip in beside them, the new bird in the flock, completely unnoticed. I sit
