To be a tourist, for me at least, is often a surreal and
uncomfortable experience. When I
travel, I’m the same person that I am at home in Texas. And we’re really not so adventurous; the
places we travel to are “safe”, by any reasonable standard. So why the discomfiture abroad? A lot of reasons….
At the most obvious level, one feels vulnerable without the
familiarity and certainties of home. You
don’t know where the toilet is, where or how to get the train tickets, the
proper way to order lunch. You’re
dependent on other people whom you don’t know and whose livelihood depends on
extracting cash from you. This vulnerability makes you feel conspicuous, like a
walking target with a dollar sign painted on your back. To be honest, you feel like a fool.
If you don’t know the local language, this anxiety is
multiplied. Even if you are able to
approximate the local costume (jeans, say, and a leather jacket, instead of
shorts and a college T-shirt), you know that you will be exposed as a witless
intruder the moment you open your mouth.
The sordid truth is that this fear originally motivated my effort to
learn Italian. It was not in order to read Dante in the original or enjoy La Dolce Vita without the
subtitles. It was in order not to seem
like (or more accurately, not to feel like) that idiot, The American Tourist,
in front of the café waiter. (Of course
it’s a futile effort. The waiter spots
the tourist a kilometer away, and doesn’t care anyway.)
Tourists of all nations have these anxieties and deal with
them in different ways. Some are pushy
and obnoxious towards anyone they need assistance from. Some hide in expensive “all-inclusive” type
resorts that are basically American hotels in a different latitude. (At least you can say you “went” to “Mexico”
or “Jamaica”.) Some bury their noses in
guidebooks. Some put effort into
learning the local language and culture (the latter a slippery and Hydra-headed
thing at best). Some join tour
groups. I have done all of these things
(except, I hope, for being obnoxious).
And there are some, particularly Europeans, who are truly
multicultural and often multi-lingual, who breeze across borders and through
nations without evident anxiety. I am
quite jealous of these types.
But there is a deeper problem with being a tourist than the
feelings of conspicuousness and vulnerability.
It’s the feeling that what you’re getting is not at all the real
experience of the place, but rather a sugar-coated, Disneyfied version of
it. You came to Rome for the Colosseum,
the Vatican, gelato, and pizza, and that is what you are going to get. And most of the Romans you meet will
collaborate with you to ensure your pleasant, sanitized experience. There is a real Rome somewhere but that is
likely to be dirty, uncomfortable, and a little dangerous, and is to be avoided
except perhaps for tiny, safe glimpses that make good stories back home. And why would you want to experience reality,
anyway? For that, you could have stayed
home.
And you, in your turn, are playing your part in erasing the
“real” Rome, or Venice, or Florence, by spending your Yankee dollars on
diesel-fume-spouting tour buses, and those hotels that have been elbowing out
affordable housing from the historic city centers ever since the war. Maybe
you try to buy your way deeper into authenticity by staying at a renovated
farmhouse in Tuscany instead of a hotel in the city. But whose authenticity are you experiencing
now? Not that of the peasant (god
forbid), nor the prosperous farmer, nor the aristocrat at his summer
villa. You’re getting the experience of
a well-to-do tourist staying at a renovated farmhouse.
These thoughts recurred to me recently as I made my way through Dacia Maraini’s delightful little book Bagheria, a memoir and meditation on her childhood in Sicily, among other things. And I’m convinced that the best way to really get to know a place, to get psychologically prepared to visit it, is to read a good book about it. It’s like having an intelligent adult sit down with you for a few hours and explain to you what’s really going on, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.
And Maraini has all
the equipment, in experience, expressiveness and courage, to tell you the story,
and a fascinating story to tell. On her
mother’s side she comes from a long line of once powerful and wealthy Sicilian
nobility (the Alliata family); her father was a Florentine ethnologist,
photographer and mountain climber. During
the war she and the rest of her family were interned in a Japanese concentration
camp when her father refused to declare allegiance to the Nazi puppet
government in northern Italy; after the war her family was taken back to Sicily
on an American transport ship, to live in cramped rooms fashioned out of former
stalls of a once-grand family villa in her home town of Bagheria – a promotion
from the near-starvation of Japan to mere poverty.
Bagheria is
anything but a travel guide. You certainly won’t find out where to eat or when
the ferries run. And many of the things
you find out about will be shocking, enraging, and disappointing. But if you really want to know “what it’s
like” to live there, to have grown up there, to leave your home there, even,
and then come back to it in later life and to view it and the remains of your
extended family through a wiser, sadder, more knowing lens, I don’t think you
could do better.
Maraini’s scope in this slender book of less than 170 pages
is wide. She exposes the destruction of
the beautiful baroque villas and gardens of Bagheria due to illegal,
greed-driven construction projects, abetted by her own ancestors’ careless
descent into debt; and to those same ancestors’ collaboration with the hated
Bourbon oppressors in the violent suppression of the Italian independence
movement, and in the critical role of the Sicilian aristocracy in general in
nurturing the rise of the Mafia (by using them as middlemen in the management
of their estates, turning a blind eye to their brutal treatment of tenant
farmers). On a more personal level, she
writes about her own experience as a child in suffering sex abuse, first at the
hands of a U.S. Marine on the troop ship taking her family back to Sicily, and
then by a male relative, and goes on to describe a culture that treats sexual
assault, even of children, as the victim’s fault.
Her portraits of her extended family members both present
and past are the most enjoyable passages of the work for me. One of these relatives is her maternal
grandmother, in her youth a talented Chilean beauty whose dreams of becoming an
opera singer were stifled first by her father and then by her husband, as being
improper for a lady. By the time her
granddaughter came to know her, she was a histrionic, paranoid old woman,
suspicious of everyone. Maraini’s mother
describes her on her deathbed:
“At the end she gave out a horrible odor because of the
bedsores. But she didn’t realize it…she
would sleep with the key to the safe attached to her wrist by a cord. She trusted no one, not even me. I would have liked to tell her, mama, I don’t
care anything about your money, I am here to make peace with you, who are
dying… My mother never understood anything, she was wild, faithful only to
herself, like a jungle animal. Her
trouble was that of having to live the life of a lady, when she was born to
show off in a theater. But they had
prohibited her from doing that. From
that prohibition was born her stupid little domestic theatricality that we, her
children, never forgave her for. But I
didn’t want her to die like a dog. When
I finally saw her reduced by illness, her face devastated, the eyes lost, I
felt such a strong pity for her that I would have liked to take her in my arms
like a little girl, because such had been her life, and to softly sing to her
one of those Chilean songs she liked so much.” [Translation my own; but the
book is available in English as well as Italian.]
I may be representing Maraini’s portrayal of Bagheria as
more grim than it is. She conveys a
sense of love for her family and for her community, but it is a love that is
unsentimental and determined to call a spade a spade.
I have been to Sicily, and I will be returning. But reading a book like Bagheria makes me feel as though a friend has taken me by the hand
and given me a sharper understanding of the place than any guidebook or even
package tour could ever provide. It’s
like learning about the whaling industry by reading Moby Dick, as opposed to
the Wikipedia article. It’s deeper and
more personal.
And it’s led me to ask myself: if someone were to visit Texas (where the
Garden of Eaton is located), what would I advise them to read, to get a sense
of the “real” Texas? Well, that’s a good
question, and one I will address here in the near future. In the meantime, if you plan on being a
tourist in Texas anytime soon, we advise you to begin by renting Peter
Bogdanovich’s 1971 film adaptation of the Larry McMurtry novel, The Last Picture Show.
The Garden of Eaton 