Sicily at the end of the nineteenth century, or anyplace at anytime
“Hunger,” she said, “is very personal. At first, it even tricks you into feeling guilty over your own misery, guilty for your human lack of grace. It holds your wrists tightly in its bony fingers, and as you sleep, it breathes its foul breath into your gaping mouth.”
“But wait,” we said, “doesn’t this happen in a story Ovid tells about Erysicthon’s hunger? What does it have to do with now? It’s an old story.”
“True, true,” she said, “but why do you insist on being literal to time? You see time might change the details but the story of greed and retribution, or as you moderns insist of ‘cause and effect,’ is essentially the same. Erysicthon starves in his soul as well as his stomach. Why do you believe hunger could never happen to you, not where you are, and not now among your people? You think you are too well off for hunger to find you? Ah, my friend, we thought exactly the same.”
Now and Then (So much begins and ends with longing)
Because this land is flat and uninteresting it is barely noticeable, except in spring when a variety of wild greens appear in the fields. Some people around here think the Aunt and I are ‘innocents and idiots’ to have opened the Inn where there are few roads and the possibility of even fewer guests. “Well, we’re off the main road and altogether beside the point,” says the Aunt. It is true that hardly anyone comes here on purpose. Having gotten off the highway, most of our guests arrive hopelessly lost so they are happy with a clean room and a hot meal. The Aunt likes ‘cooking by surprise’ and I enjoy the company. We cook whatever is in the pantry and it all works out.
‘Arriving lost is a good way to come,’ the Aunt says, and because she especially loves chance meetings, (calls them ‘fortuitous digressions’) she wants nothing to do with the clever person who comes for a purpose, doesn’t trust anyone with even a small bur of a purpose at all. ‘Those clever people can’t fool me,’ she says. ‘I can spot a purpose from a hundred meters.’ Usually she is not given to extremes in thinking but on this point she is adamant even when I tell her that I, too, first came here with a purpose. ‘No, no, my boy, that isn’t the same. You came on the shabby heels of necessity. Necessity does not constitute a purpose.’
But then what do we know of each other’s lives? Even the most familiar shapes cast deep shadows. The Aunt calls the Inn ‘four cactus bushes and a falling down stable.’ Sometimes when the moon plays games with the old place, it shows only a luminous and distinguished cabbage patch while the huge buildings fall into unrecognizable darkness. During the day, under the great sun of Sicily, which shines constantly on saint and thief alike, our shabby Inn looks like any other old farm building around here. Recently, we were told by the officials in the Ministry, who know these things, that the Inn has been judged `not suitable for profit.’ ‘Just like us,’ says the Aunt, ‘just like us.’ Since the best things can’t be shown and the next best are often mistaken ...we don’t lament. Some say it’s actually hard to find ‘a genuine place’ anymore, and yet you will not find us in any of the new guides which threaten to expose with detailed maps the name and exact location of every small inn on the island; for this and every other graceful omission, the Aunt and I thank God.
I loved this land from the first time I chanced on it twenty or more years ago when I was a hungry boy searching the countryside for food to bring back to my family. Any abandoned place where I could filch a few greens and not get chased was a good place. That day I was mostly looking for cardoon, and it was at the edges of these fields that I found a good sized plant. I cut some stalks and continued looking around until I found nice, young ones. I knew all the work it took to get tough, old stalks ready to cook so I was careful in my gathering. When I stopped I felt happy, not just because I had found the carduna but because I felt the fields themselves had welcomed me. Ah, you might not have liked the word ‘welcome.’ You might have just thought, ‘fields can’t welcome you.’ It’s too romantic, pathetic fallacy and all that, yet places can and do welcome you. Of course, the opposite is true as well. I have been to fields that were ominous. Maybe terrible things happened there; I don’t know. And then, of course, a hungry boy, a lonely donkey, a love sick goat, a family of displaced mice, or a cunning weasel, might each have different standards for this reception. On that day after I had a full bag, I stretched out (an unusual thing for me to do) and immediately I felt my body had found a perfect niche. I loved knowing that like every creature I too carried my bed with me and all I needed to do was to lie down and it was made. I already had everything I needed; perhaps an exaggeration, but closer to the truth than its opposite. From that moment I knew that my life from beginning to end would be like that. All that I needed was to bring back what was already in my hands and I had my work and my bed.
This is the beginning of Gioia’s forthcoming novel, What Makes a Child Lucky, printed with the permission of the author.
Gioia Timpanelli and John Terlazzo will be leading a workshop together, February 27-March 1. Click for more info.
To want nothing save to open to the aching and the longing – that’s a gift. To take a life, or harm another – that is the most vile, the most shameful act. It is an honor to willingly die for the Truth, to live for the Truth even more so. So don’t mistake some prayer for the energy that rolls through your veins.
Some people spend their whole life in a cage, counting on the jailer to bring them sustenance. Then they act surprised when no liberation comes. Only a few turn their backs on the warden, become smoke and curl effortlessly, in spires, through the bars.
Others dare to parade about, as if their puny and insipid sense of “authority” holds some water, as if their flags and banners are not an arrogant obscenity against that great swirling mass of Consciousness, the white clouds of the sky. Don’t mistake any nation for the World.
And you – you who’ve sewn your labels into the angel’s wings, who own the patent on holy water, who claim the real estate of one Jerusalem or another – you look good on paper, but you are no less than thieves, steeped in deep denial. And the eyes of the wise see beyond that paper …
So here’s some advice: Don’t mistake the chalice for the wine.
Gioia Timpanelli and John Terlazzo will be leading a workshop together, February 27-March 1. Click for more info.
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