Sicilian Odyssey by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online

play no music at all but have been assigned the task of clowning, running around among the rows of musicians with animated gadgets strapped to their backs.
    One of these mechanisms features a girl doll and a boy doll attached to a string that makes the boy doll appear to periodically hike up the girl doll’s skirt. My favorite performer is a kid of maybe fourteen or fifteen, wearing glasses and, attached to his back, a toilet with a sign that says OCCUPATO. At regular intervals—in time to the music, in fact—the lids on the bowl and the tank lift simultaneously, and two costumed dolls pop out. The kid—you’ve seen his type before, he’s the class clown, the joker, the funny kid from a Fellini movie—is having such a marvelous time he’s nearly demented with joy. The other musicians and the spectators love him; whatever he’s doing is working, he and his animated toilet are a huge success.
    Over the loudspeaker, the voice of the master of ceremonies redirects our attention to a different part of the square, where another brass band strikes up still more folk tunes. These musicians, all wearing bright wigs and clown costumes, follow somewhat dutifully behind a group of high school girls dancing in formation and waving pom-poms. The girls’ short, striped satin costumes—outfits that seem modeled on some murky memory or fantasy of Carmen Miranda—gleam in the afternoon sun. The announcer explains that the dancers have adopted a Brazilian theme in honor of Carnival and in solidarity with the Brazilian group that has been invited to perform for the festival and that will soon be appearing in the square.
    But the girls don’t look Brazilian at all, they look like Sicilian high school kids, modest and excruciatingly self-conscious, alternately shaking their hips and stopping to pull their blouses down over the gaps that reveal bare midriffs and rolls of baby fat. When they’re obliged to cede the spotlight to another band, the girls seem relieved, though later in the evening, when I again see them performing, they’ve gotten looser, more relaxed. Perhaps the gathering darkness has given them some cover under which they feel freer to express the Brazilian abandon that seems at once expected of and forbidden them.
    Meanwhile, other bands of masked revelers have begun moving slowly down the corso. Harry Potter and his student wizards are back, waving their straw brooms and twirling in their heavy academic robes and pointed witches’ hats. The Norman knights engage in casual, balletic sword fights with little boys in the crowd, who are also wearing medieval costumes and brandishing swords of their own. An old man dressed as Geppetto the shoemaker performs a strange mini-drama of adoration and heartbreak in front of a human-size marionette of Pinocchio.
    Yet another group acts out the story of Acis and Galatea, with the title roles played by two costumed teens who appear to be lovers in real life; I saw them kissing before the parade began. The ill-starred shepherd and his nymph are followed by a hulking cave man with a club and a single eye in the middle of his forehead, clearly meant to represent the jealous, vengeful Cyclops but looking more like Fred Flintstone on steroids. Ahead of this goofy trio march some girls dressed in blue, rippling streamers of azure satin symbolizing the sea, and behind them some boys in kelly green, whose symbolic function is less clear (are they earth spirits, maybe?) and who, in any case, are less interested in getting with the mythological program than they are in bopping along to the music and punching each other in the back.
    Suddenly, the mood of the crowd shifts; you can feel it in the air. And the announcer introduces the real Brazilians, a samba group from Rio who have been performing at Carnivals up and down the Ionian coast and are now appearing in our own Acireale. A brace of drummers play a thrumming African beat that cuts like a knife through the bouncy rhythms of the