The Annals of Pace

Joel Silverstein

Playwright Eugene Oneil saw, after the first shots of World War II, what I see today. He saw the United States Government ignore history, and wage war. They “sank back listlessly on the cold manure piles of the dead,” he said. On March 20, on a hotel room TV in Taormina, Sicily, I saw the mindless shots of battle unleashed again, this time, on a city that once served as an oasis for the arts, Baghdad. Outside, through the balcony door, the off-white moon line crept from the Mediterranean onto my bed. I said grace.

Ingresse Catacombe, Palermo. Aristocrats of old found honor in being displayed dead together, in open rooms their bodies decompose.

The outside fit the in, brisk and white, sad and comfortable. The bodies hung, some with giant grins, smiling down from behind rusting silver cages, wiser in their tombs than in life.

A small corpse, a little bambina, smiled at me. Her decay and knowledge flowed through me with a pulse, I smiled back, and looked into her eyes. They were a dark and inviting charcoal gray. She told me not to be afraid, not like the others. The little aristocrat, Reni Mori, wanted me to know death.

The Cimetero Cappuccini next door exposed the vanity of modern dead. As their ancestors decompose in open air with honor, next to one another, they separate themselves in marble tombs. Cassandra cried. I think she has more soul.

In Palermo, the dead are not strangers. The people there do not forget. Scores of apartments, on seventh and tenth, and first floors donned rainbow flags that read “PACE”, unity and peace. The rainbow glowed against the deep orange of the buildings.

“I love this orange,” said student Whitney Warren, “It is the Mediterranean.”

Days before the catacombe, we’d seen Palermo for the first time. We stopped at a park in the center of a traffic circle. A group of schoolboys gathered in the dirt clearing next to the concrete to play futbol. We stopped to take their picture. Several of us, a group of visibly young students, stood and watched their game. An older boy with a blue and white Fila soccer jersey approached Bill Gallagher.

“Coca-ine?” he asked.

“No thanks,” Bill said. Maybe the boy pushed cocaine. Maybe he was referring to the Coca-Cola Bill had in his left hand. I’d had enough anyhow. The city breathed behind me.

From the plane, on descent into Palermo, shadows of clouds rested on the water. It felt like the San Francisco bay. Gold shell cliffs flanked the runways of the airport, vast and pretty, not like Rome. Rome’s Fiumicino Airport catered to our ignorance. It felt like a slice of upscale Americana, with free Internet and ten-foot billboards to dull our ignorance. With stomachs over-full from the food court’s bargain buffet, we forgot about Iraq.

On the side streets in Palermo, I felt far from Fiumicino’s leather handbag boutiques. Old broken parking lots became moped shortcuts. T-shirts hung from twisted metal balconies. Mopeds buzzed from all directions, towards the main piazza, an art-deco masterpiece, with a tunneled gateway on each of its four sides. As we passed through the piazza’s center, the tunnels framed the compass rose. I spun quickly, Palermo’s north, south, east and west were all so close. I wanted to stay there. I’d find a modest third floor walk-up with beige stucco walls. I’d hang a “Pace” flag on my wrought iron balcony, and fall asleep at 1 p.m. The lull during siesta in Palermo was a cultural world away from our tic-toc rush of duties in Amherst. It was hard for the group to break free from the cold grasp of time, all victims of “ the way it is when you’re in college.” Or, “what you do to get by”.

There, a buzzing moped thoroughfare, among the stones, I let go.

I was late to catch the bus.

On the bus to Cefalu, Rosa Rizza, 47, talked about Sicily’s independence. Sicilians don’t want a bridge that connects them to mainland Italy, Rosa said.

“ We need new roads,” she said, “we don’t care about the bridge.” To Rosa, the benefits of Sicilian life did not include a vast implication of secular values. She basked in the diversity of the island, and the rawness of the towns and open markets. Peace, to her, was Sicily.

That night, after siesta, students Josh and Bill played futbol with the children in the piazza del duomo in Cefalu. I walked back to through the yellow light of the streets, staring about and breathing heavily. These streets have seen life, I thought.

The next morning, I took a post-cannoli walk to town. The orange glow Duomo, the church at the center of Cefalu, had 12th century mosaics of Jesus and Joseph on the ceiling. Outside, the piazza was scattered with children and young adults prepared for a road-race tour of Cefalu.

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The back allies rest on a grade that dives into the Arean Sea, shark toothed cliffs along the side. Five men congregate on a cobblestone corner in front of the “Tobaccheria” on via Conde Floro. Another motors to a stop on his black Vespa moped. I ask to take their photo with best Italian tongue ( I wanted not the stigma “di America”).

“ Posso fare una photo, per favore?”

“ Si, Si,” they said, “Ay!”

“ Grazie.”

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A tunnel in one of the allies led to a half oval portal to the sea. The waves spit up and back. I sat, and breathed the salt thick “Aria di Sicilia.”

Rey smiles at Segesta. The flowers were a screaming orange, and yellow, and blue, clustered together under the skeleton trees. A hike up the stone staircase, five paces equal for each step, took me, breathless, into the dinosaur structure of Greece. A temple, a relic, and a money maker.

After Segesta, we rode the mammoth tourist’s bus to Erice, “City of Love.” City of la touriste, city of zeppole.

I watched a middle aged native smoke his MS cigarette as he climbed the hill into the town. His face was tough, his eyes crooked. But he had a quiet grace, and slick black lacquered shoes.

It calmed the group to eat cannoli in a city that sits among the milk-froth clouds. Erice was like the cinnamon in our cappucino.

Thus was the first leg of our trip. Days spent surveying the hills, stopping the bus to snap our shutters, and graze like cows in Sicily’s hills. Days stopping in mid sized coast towns like Mondelo.

Roxy Panineria has a door that frames the inlet of Mondelo, a sun-kissed city of tourism, pizza, and rowboats with orange and green trim, and black stray dogs with the mange. Kristin fed one fish and chips.

Afternoons spent scoping rich old mountain towns that tickled the clouds, like Monreale, with its cloister laden duomo, with stone carvings that shine in the sun, and Polizzi Generoso, whose citizens are the shining ruby.

In Polizzi generoso, the police smile and play jokes with their whistles, and converse with the townspeople. A pick-up truck rides slowly down each street, it’s driver calling attention to fresh produce, artichokes and spinach, in the back. The cappucinno costs “Due Euro” and comes with cookies overed in pink and white chocolate. My eyes are open in Polizzi, bearing teeth, and wishing happy old men “Bonjourno”. At one end of the piazza, I see a rainbow “PACE” flag in a garment dealer’s window. I approach the shopkeeper.

“ Quanto costa?” I ask, pointing to the flag.

“ Is no for sale,” said the woman.

“ Ok, Grazie, e Pace!” I said, and raised my two fingers. She smiled, and returned the peace.

In the middle of our week, President Bush’s exile ultimatum was nearing end. I donned my “No Blood for Oil” peace pin. It felt surreal, trucking through mint green valleys with snow and white stone capped crests, while people at home in the states took to the streets of cities like New York, D.C., and San Francisco. Diplomacy lay weak and hollowed, target practice on a board ten yards away. It’s turned into a means of waging war.

That Wednesday, the day before war started, we were in Gangivecchio, at an old abby two sisters had transformed into a gourmet restaurant.

At the chicken wire end of a trail leading from the abby, I found a cobblestone grave. The marble face read “Dizzi Verticinosa. Morta 25-3-1969. A loyal friend , a woman of love.”

Behind Dizzi, lies Pepe. “Morta 21-8-1989. “A docile companion, a handsome poodle.”

Back on the bus, en route to Siracusa, Rosa directed our tired attention towards an imminent bevy of flourescent and yellow lights. An industrial park stretched for 18 kilometers along the Mediterranean south of Siracusa. Esso, American Exxon, set its oil refineries among the white stone hills.

In the morning, we sauntered to the heart of Siracusa. We listened to Rosa give a tourist’s history of the “ghetto”. She said the balconies were different, floor to floor. The allies, thin, caused feuds between classical and neopolitan musics.

She did her best to entertain the pale-faced tourists.

She never lived there. I could not hear her “radio wars.”

David, a journalism classmate of mine, wrote of his experience seeing beneath the tourist’s realm of Amsterdam. He commented on the American Amsterdam, the one that pivots on the red light district, the Van Gogh Museum and hash bars. Americans don’t see the junkies, or the postman, he said.

I heard his pained voice as Rosa told her half history of gargoyles and gorgans. The streets spoke louder than she.

At the fountain in the piazza Archimedes, the artists had a better view. They studied the cracks of the of cement horses and fish with a paper and pen, and blue eyes under darkened lenses.

A temple for Apollo still stands erect, not far from the limp, raw architecture of downtown Siracusa. The Greeks gave him three lasting columns, as pittance for his woes.

Tourists scream, as prisoners did, in the ear of Dionysus. Dionysus would evesdrop, stealing secrets from their cries. The sunlight trickled down from a three foot whole in the aft of the ceiling.

Vibrations in the inner ear sent waves of music to my throat. Ave Maria.

A farmer

That night, in Taormina, I waited for Caleb, a bony art student, to make a phone call. Two regazzo walked past, tight blue jeans and short greeced hair.

“ Bush” they shouted. “George Bush.”

Hours later, CNN reported the American invasion in Iraq. I sat still, in a paradigm of events. Outside, the moon was half full, shining on the trembles of the sea, my view— the stucco balcony of a hotel offset on the cliffs. In the room, the TV barked with red. By 3 a.m., the streets at home, in Boston and New York, were full with dejected youth. A tall brunette held the right side of a rainbow. The gold was in the center. It read, “PACE”.

At breakfast, chatter held to low and constant mutters. We talked about the eggs, the thick blood-orange juice, and the war.

“ They’re gonna hate us at the market today,” said Bill. We were heading to the tent thick open market in Catania. And we were the aggressors.

But fresh strawberries gave me hope. The market had piles. And behind each shining cherry mountain, was a smile of teeth. The fisherman crammed the opening, screaming “shrimp” and “tuna”. The butchers in the back stood with big-block knives on their waists, like rangers in the American west. A younger, olive-skinned man approached me as I took a photo of his cut. He took two bullhorns from the table, and held them on the crown of my head.

“ Now,” he said, “You take a picture.”

Rosa bought fresh rolls and soft gouda cheese for us to nibble, as we waited for our group to assemble under the stone incarnate of a cow. Tony, a mop-haired painter from Hartford, spoke with a local reading the Europa newspaper. The front page showed tanks and fallen children.

On the bus, the group was stiff with motion sickness. As we wound up the broken pathway to Mount Etna, We looked back at Catania. Etna erupted once, sending ash and glowing embers down into the city.

At 2,000 feet, the ground turned brown to white. Charred black lava rocks peaked out of the snow. On a curve near the stopping point, a house sat half in earth. It’s inhabitants fought Etna, they claimed a plot above her shoulder. Etna won.

Though it was not in their control, the people there, on Etna, knew disaster. They escaped the mountain’s seeping drool, leaving pomp and kitchenware behind.

At the top, twisted metal showed the power of the earth. We walked on top of smoking lava rocks like children in a pit of plastic balls. The mountains curves made me warm. Etna was a woman.

Back in Taormina, crowds of Spanish tourists mobbed the ruins of the theater on the hill. Bill and I bought Senegalese drums form a vender near the gates. We played them in an alley with a thousand years of echoes. We traded drums, Bill liked the high tones.

We carried the drums under arm through the Taormina afternoon. Near the hotel, A twenty-something, stick-tall Czech man approached us with a laugh.

“ Will you be here on Saturday?” he asked, “We have big circle in the gardens, 10 o’clock.”

“ Yes.”

I woke early on my last day in Sicily. Etna shared the eastern sky with the rising sun. Sitting on the browned cement of the hotel patio, I closed my eyes. Etna came to stay inside my conscience. I couldn’t help but feel radiant and pure. I saw a light in front, with darkness on the sides. The blue light danced with me in meditation, feeding me with love, like the yellow lilacs on the porch, I photosynthesized my peace of mind.

As Ecclessiastes said, looking under the sun: “that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

And the favour of love and sun and trees and white stone cliffs does not pick favorites. White men and black men, Italians, Iraqis and Americans, none receive more love than any other. The light in Taormina came in time to save my last hours there. I heard the voices of the kind, fulfilled Sicilians at Siesta. I saw a gardener in Savoca, bending down to separate onion weeds from his tomatoes. He looked up.

“ War, no good for anyone,” he said.

I know.

And with his smile, I bought three PACE flags in town, two to bring the feeling home.

Five of us wore the spectrum colors on our shoulders as we left Catania the next day. People stared, and pointed. A girl around our age shouted “Si” in our direction. We took a love from Sicily onto the plane in Rome.

I left my anger to evaporate on the beach in Nuxos, Sicily. Bill and Tony beat their drums, and it evaporated into night.

Now on the plane, the rainbow hugged my shoulders tight. “I must keep moving. I’ll take the love back home.”

The Annals of Pace

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