Sicilian Odyssey by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page B

versions of “geniuses”: Picasso, Mahatma Gandhi, Chairman Mao, Laurel and Hardy, Einstein, Lenin, Charlie Chaplin, and Yasir Arafat.
    But it’s the last float—the smallest, the only one covered by flowers, by maroon and yellow carnations—that’s the most amazing.
    Rearing up from the center of the float is a dragon with wild, rolling eyes, a jaw that clamps open and shut revealing curved pointed teeth, and huge claws with curved pointed nails. In front of the monster is a heart in which a young girl perches, dressed in white and wearing a spiked crown. She’s meant to represent Lady Liberty, but she looks more as if she’s taking her first Communion or playing the Virgin in a grade-school Christmas pageant.
    On either side of the dragon is a demon, with a rocket engine on its back, wearing an old-fashioned aviator’s helmet, and with its dark pink tongue protruding. And behind the monster are the giant, unmistakable representations of the World Trade towers, tilted at giddy angles, like the antic, anthropomorphic, loony-tune structures with which Red Grooms used to decorate his installations, his homages to New York.
    Two airplanes, fuchsia-colored, plow into the towers. Lights shine from the skyscrapers’ windows, and, at intervals, the top of one of the buildings collapses down onto itself, reducing the structure to half its size. Between the towers, also covered in yellow flowers, is a gigantic representation of the head of the Statue of Liberty. The dove of peace flies off to one side, while, near the front of the float, an American flag hangs from a beam until it becomes so covered in the shaving cream and party foam the onlookers are spraying that someone thoughtfully takes it down. Meanwhile, two young women dressed as New York City firefighters (in helmets and protective gear, dark heavy jackets and trousers banded with stripes of glow-in-the-dark yellow) dance distractedly to the loud, repetitive techno music that blares from the speakers.

    Carnival float, Acireale

    Carnival, Acireale
    It’s all so beautiful and so incredibly tasteless, so misguided and so heartfelt. It represents such a deep outpouring of sympathy and such a profound expression of the belief that life must go on (which is what the Sicilians have been saying to me as soon as they learn where we come from and that our house is only a short distance from the World Trade Center) and of the profound conviction that some humor and brightness, vitality and even joy must be found even in the most terrible tragedy. It reminds me of the comical skeleton figures with which Mexicans mark the Day of the Dead: There’s that same acknowledgment of the fact that death is so powerful, so unspeakably cruel that, at times, tears seem somehow beside the point, there’s nothing to do but laugh. The Sicilians know how to celebrate, and they know how to mourn, and they know how to do both at nearly the same time.
    Still, it’s clear that most of the Sicilians around me have no idea what to make of the float, not a clue as to how they should be reacting. And like them, I feel overwhelmed by the float’s grandeur, its scale, and above all by its (to say the least) problematic approach to its disturbing subject matter. Yet if the crowd seems a little uncertain about the correct response, I seem to be the only one who reacts without thinking, the only one with tears welling up in my eyes.
    It’s chilly in the piazza, night’s come—somehow I hadn’t noticed how dark and cold it was till now. And it strikes me: I want a drink. Howie and I duck into a nearby café and, surrounded by Sicilian families, we sit across from a little girl dressed as a pussycat and slowly working over her ice cream, eating every last drop with rapt, transfixed fascination. We order grappas and drink them, too fast, the moment they arrive.

CHAPTER FIVE

I Mosaici
    In the Villa Romana del Casale, the fourth-century Roman mansion decorated with the most extensive mosaics to have