(0)Teatro di Pupi, Palermo
Sicily: A Cultural Landscape of the Imagination
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Christopher Wood, Director, Australians Studying Abroad
Sicily is located where the Mediterranean narrows mid-way between
the Strait of Gibraltar and the Levant. The Sicilian Channel,separating
it from North Africa, acts equally as a watery bridge between two
continents
and cultures. Sicily's location has made it a prize for countless
invaders who have all left their mark on its cultural landscapes. Some
invaders, like the Muslims, benefited the island. Others, like the
Spaniards, exploited it with burdensome taxes. Sicily's poor were also
exploited by the island aristocracy, whose need of wealth to maintain a
life-style like that described by Giuseppe di Tommassi di Lampedusa in
The Leopard, wrought social and ecological
disaster. Sicily is also a colourful, atmospheric place. Its landscapes
and fascinating polyglot culture have inspired a number of Italy's
greatest writers, many of them islanders. It has therefore generated
many cultural landscapes of the imagination, such as the one I am about
to describe, which plays upon the themes of invasion and oppression. It
is a modern fable, and reflects some darker aspects of western cultural
memory.
We turn left at Via del Corso opposite Palermo cathedral to enter a tiny alley. Soft, isolated lamps shine in the dimness - it is 6.00 pm in early December. A large door opens to reveal a smallish, brightly-lit room whose walls are hung with riotously coloured pictures of knights and dragons. Signora Argento offers us a glass of sweet Sicilian wine and we seat ourselves. Her husband Vincenzo appears and tells his family history. He owes his craft to his great-grandfather who established the family company. He then retreats behind a curtain with his sons and daughter.
Cunning Rainaldo and cross-eyed Orlando - comrades-in-arms - have lost their hearts, their friendship, and their purpose to Angelica, who for reasons best known to her creator, often wears the feather head-dress of an American Indian. She is actually a princess of Cathay, with magical powers, and has come to France on the pretext of finding a husband, but with the hidden intention of killing knights. On their way to Paris to be married, Orlando and Angelica, who kiss with smacking lips in the Sicilian mode, encounter Rainaldo. He challenges Orlando for Angelica's affections. In a glade of unconvincing trees, our two knights trade threats and insults whose inflated meanings and strident, assertive tones accent their knightly status. At last, haughty altercation exhausted, they resort to combat. Iron swords crash furiously yet somewhat ineffectually against tin armour. The long plumes on their helmets whip wildly as the swing of their slicing swords transmits rhythms through their arms and shoulders to their heads. Evenly matched, they will undoubtedly exhaust themselves.
Enter Malagigi, cousin of Orlando and Rainaldo, whose name was Onofrio before he was adopted by Merlin. This great magician taught Malagigi his trade (he still carries Merlin's wand). Malagigi is now the most powerful of magicians, having defeated the Muslim magus, Tuttofuoco. Malagigi realises that Orlando and Rainaldo will bring disaster upon themselves, so he summons Nacalone, one of the many devils he commands. Nacalone is livid red, his hair singed by the fires of hell. He has horns and so resembles Pan, except that he also has wings which sound like great winds when they flap.
Malagigi instructs Nacalone to scare Angelica so she will flee to Charlemagne in Paris. The great king sits in his fairy-tale court whose trappings are stolen from the comedie française. His fury is regal. How can his two champions lose sight of their quest - to kill as many Muslims as possible? Charlemagne threatens to throw Angelica into prison if she will not tell him where her suitors are fighting. When she tells him, he incarcerates her anyway for diverting their attention. Charlemagne, who knows how to manipulate his none-too-intelligent warriors, summons the love-sick pair and offers the hand of Angelica to he who can kill and maim the most infidel. Purpose remembered, the protagonists join battle with a motley crew of growling giants, hissing dragons and squealing janissaries. Orlando and Rainaldo, of course, do not understand Islam. They just hack their way through the enemy in a battle made uneven by the manipulations of their Christian creator. He pulls invisible strings and Orlando's cleaving sword cuts neatly across a Muslim, slicing him in two. The 'bastard' wails and his guts role out on the ground. They are actually multi-coloured streamers.
Victory comes as broken Moors pile up around our heroes. Each retires to court to claim Angelica's hand. She is there, a somewhat facile creature whose dolly-bird demeanour underlines the idiocy of their misplaced passion. An argument ensues about who has butchered most infidel. Their scores are even. And anyway, the whole thing is a sham because, as Charlemagne reminds them, they are both already married and their obsession is inappropriate. The imperious king throws Angelica back into prison (he also seems to have an eye for the princess). She later escapes and eventually marries a lowly page of king Dardanello, called Medoro.
This episode is only one in a vast, predictable cycle played out each year by Charlemagne's court. Each incident, until recently at least, was entirely credible to those who witnessed it. So real were its protagonists that every now and then someone would get too wound up in the tragi-comedy of it. Once, a worker who had smuggled in a sawn-off shot-gun blew a traitor to bits in front of the court. He was so infuriated when the traitor reappeared next evening that he rioted and broke up proceedings.
The characters are also obviously real people to their creator.
After the show, Signor Vincenzo introduces us to them as if they are
his children. Everyone is related to everyone, like a huge Sicilian
extended family. He explains their virtues with pride and their faults
with indulgence. They are 'he' or 'she', never 'it'.
Puppetry seems to have been imported to Sicily from Naples in the early nineteenth century, and with it the garish colours of French popular theatre. In Catania, Sicilian marionettes are up to a metre in height. They are slightly smaller and lighter in Palermo, and have articulated legs. Catanese puppets need straight legs as they are too heavy for the puppeteer to support: in Catania, therefore, people call Palermitans crawlers. Some body parts are guided by strings, but heads and sword arms are steered by iron bars. This allows the knights to draw their swords and swing them in battle. The puppeteer twists the puppet's head bar to make it walk by setting up a rhythm through its body which swings its legs. As its head turns left its right leg steps out, which has led to cruel mainland jokes about the way Sicilians walk. This method of making puppets walk, Vincenzo boasts, was invented by his great-grandfather.
In Naples, the puppeteers' stories were about mafiosi. The Sicilian epic of Charlemagne is possibly a mix of half-remembered sections of the Song of Roland (Orlando in Italian) and a tradition of public story-telling which some believe derives in Sicily from the time of the crusading Normans. Peripatetic story-tellers would wander the island's small villages telling the stories of Medieval knights. Story-telling died out but the tales were preserved in the exploits of tin-armoured puppets in tiny back-street theatres.
This was once people's theatre, and although protagonists
were real to the naïve and credulous, innocence masked an undercurrent of incisive derision. Peppered through the narrative were scurrilous off-the-cuff asides about the corruption of the government and the peccadilloes of the princelings who controlled and exploited the audience.
Memory has always played an important part in the history of Sicily. Greek colonists, Roman governors and slave-masters, Vandals, Byzantines, Muslims - and the Norman, Valois, Habsburg and Bourbon royal houses - have left diverse imprints. Some are palpable, such as the lovely eclectic Norman churches and palaces whose Byzantine mosaics, Arab inlay, and French masonry coalesce in an inimitable harmony. Others are broader yet less tangible. There are the Odyssey and Greek myths like that of Persephone - deep memories which have given a grand unity and continuity to Mediterranean history and cultural geography.
It would be impossible to document precisely the cultural contributions of each invader to its successors and to the present in a linear, continuous narrative. It is more the presence of memory - sometimes of heroism, usually of exploitation - which has flavoured Sicilian life. Memory is vague and often plays tricks, but this does not matter. For in Sicily, a traveller may ponder the nature of memory without worrying too much about the truthfulness of any one 'truth'.
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