A Wedding of Jackals
my father’s garden
The way of saying I cannot help you being sometimes, in Italian, This does not serve me, I offer a small bribe to the clerk at the Treviso cadastral office in exchange for my father’s address. I’m told he lives in the municipality of Asolo, only an hour north by car. Arriving in the nearby village of Possagno at dinner, I eat on the Temple of Canova’s stairs what my stomach allows from a Ziploc of salted sardines. The moon is ringed, the Grappa Massif overtaken by low clouds: snow. I wait in the fusty rental car—licorice, maybe, and old luggage leather—until I assume my father is sleeping, and then I make my way up his narrow farming road. My father’s villa is unlit and larger than I’d thought, and I climb the gate, boosting myself from the lip of an empty fountain whose lion’s head, the mouth obstructed, spills nothing. Inside the gate, no cars. No one home, nothing shifting in the manicured juniper hedges wrapping the drive. Snow all around me in my father’s garden—Tomorrow, I promise myself, I’ll find his workplace and call, pretending to be someone I am not, to see when he’ll arrive home.
after a night at sea
Each year, before his birthday in the late summer, my father would fly in, either from Venice or Munich, to stay a week in an inn on Lake Hartwell. He would visit most afternoons, typically after doctors’ appointments or meetings at the university, and he would endure American movies playing in one of Seneca’s handful of stadium theaters. We would eat food he missed most—hamburgers, generally, and steaks. He always seemed to have a lingering smell of black pepper, which he ate with everything—it wasn’t from eating pepper, the smell, but something innate, something in the blood maybe; I smell it on myself, sometimes, and leave it to my undershirts and bed. My father and I once rented a pontoon boat from a local marina surrounded by farms of Carolina Reapers, and we spent the day on Hartwell. We took off our shirts in the sun. I slept sweating on the plastic benches while my father followed other boats through the maze of identical inlets. He pronounced us lost by sundown, and in the black he spotlighted docks in case there was someone there to help. It took until the early morning to arrive home after what seemed like a night adventuring, a night at sea, surrounded by black hills, black water.
segestana
The small bay beside my father’s hotel in Bonagia is crowded with fishing boats and faded dories. Despite the cold, old crewmen stand shirtless in the unusual winter sun. The Via Lungomare is empty except for a few cars, and I find a space in front of the Hotel Saverino, park, and wait. Maybe two guests leave the hotel in the span of an hour, and the manager of the hotel restaurant eventually comes to ask me what my business is on the Lungomare. I park again on the provincial road east of Bonagia, my car pointed toward the village center. I study the face of each man who passes by. I never see my father. Halfway into the next morning, I sit alone in the car, humming along to American songs as they play on a local Trapani station. I grow restless, and so for the remainder of the day I choose certain men, men who most resemble my father, and I follow them. For practice, I promise myself. One man I follow to a laundromat in the village of Crocefissello; another drives to a large apartment complex in the west of Trapani; a final man—I am sure for a long time that he is my father—drives with a woman and a small girl all the way to Calatafimi-Segesta. A sister, I keep saying, but when they pull into the parking lot of a trattoria, I see the man’s face clearly, and I curse myself for having said it at all. I wait for them to finish their lunch and then follow them to the Elymian city of Segesta. It begins to rain softly, almost pleasantly. I track the family—six little legs under a large, red umbrella—as they wander through Segesta’s roofless Doric temple. And then they’re gone: following a path up its mild slope toward the forest, the family disappears in the mist. They’d been moving in the direction of an amphitheater built, a sign in the parking lot says, after an invasion of treacherous Greeks.
urchins
The next afternoon is clear enough that the shallows near the coastline are illuminated, precise urchins shimmering from the undersides of the coastal stones. East of Bonagia, I follow a path to find gloved, barefoot children collecting urchins and carrying them back to a chum bucket filled with seawater. An elderly Sicilian woman sits there, a cutting board on her lap stained bright orange, turning the spiny hulls in her hand and cleaning them. She asks me if I’d like three or four, to take home, but I tell her I wouldn’t know what to do with them. She has me sit with her, and she teaches me to shuck urchins. After dusk, I drive to my post on the provincial road. A rainstorm from the mainland makes any sighting of my father impossible, so I put on a raincoat and walk Via Lungomare. I stand across from the Saverino, its restaurant the only lit building on the coastal strip. The same manager is inside now, carrying wine bottles from one corner of the restaurant to the other. Cleanly dressed men often emerge from the kitchen delivering whole fish cooked under mounds of salt, and the patrons laugh while breaking the encasements with souvenir picks. Sitting next to an old, portable television that plays the news, a man with a white napkin tucked into his dress shirt turns to hail a passing waiter. I remove my hood to better see the face of my illuminated father and then flee up the narrow road toward my rented car.
over a drink at the otto e mezzo lounge bar
It was early in the summer when my father last visited. Each afternoon small windstorms stirred the parking lot with scraps from white-flowering rows of myrtles. My mother having shown him, at last, the porn I’d printed out to keep, my father pushed past me in the narrow foyer to sit alone in the rented car he’d parked on the road. I watched from the den’s window. Maybe twenty minutes passed, and he drove off. I called the inn the next day and was told he’d gone. There’s little else to say. In gay bars the size of double-wides, men would tell me their brutal stories, and I’d tell them my father bunched the papers into a wad and stuffed them in my mouth. I’d say he dragged me by the legs through the parking lot, my hair sweeping up flowers. But nothing happened, really. My father came and left, and I called over a group of friends to go swimming. We rowed out to the top of an old timber truss bridge exposed in the low of the lake. We played at touching rooftops from the drowned city, but only ever found the bell tower. Then we sank, touching it with our feet. Not even the boy who surfaced squealing, splinters caught in his toes, was me.
a dog in the wheel
An exultation of passion and strength, the sign says of the Mountain of Salt, but the mountain is hardly a mountain, and the salt is not salt. The mountain is a hill small enough to fit on the stage of a theater, and it is made of cement, and trapped in the cement are thirty stiff-legged, wooden horses. The Mountain of Salt sits on the slope of a ridge along the border of Gibellina Nuova. From this vantage, I see my father limping through empty streets of the abandoned town, stopping along the way to take in the art cemented into the walls of its buildings. A matted dog tracks him and the woman holding onto him. She hisses at the dog when it comes close, and the dog skitters away only to close the distance again after enough time passes. A series of stray showers comes in from the west, sending me back to the rental car to pick at a loaf of bread and wait. When the rains pass, I drive through the city looking again for my father. Rounding the corner of the central piazza, I brake suddenly as the dog, rain-slicked now, darts beneath my wheel. Meters to my right, my father’s wife comes running from under an archway, spitting strong, hateful words, and I tear away, dragging the dog along the cobbled road. Gibellina Vecchia is nearly twelve kilometers east of the new city. Only ruins—less than ruins: slabs of poured concrete indicating the leveled city’s street plans. A gang of bustards, as I watch them, picks insects from the concrete’s thistles and moss. Above me, birds I cannot see to name call out to one another in their barren language.
temple of venus
The Sicilian coast darkens, shrinks away each year from the sea’s beatings and gall, and each day the seaboard fog brought on by the morning shreds, displaced, with the passing through of rock pigeons. By midafternoon the sun burns fog and everything else, it seems, away—but me, I think there are words, at least, yet to distill and swallow. Sunday, my father at Mass in the Parrocchia Maria, I stand at a food cart in white, seemingly unretractable light and wait to place my order of poached fish on rice. I will be his. I say this again and again. I say it to the small, outlying winds the Sirocco sheds and forgets over Favignana and Levanzo. I tell it to the cactuses of Bonagia and the grapes of Mozia and the stilled windmills overlooking the salt pans east of Trapani. I drink bathtub fragolino in the back seat of my rented car and say it to my pinkish visions. Touched as if by the donas de fuera, I use the words to lure urchins’ spines from my feet, and the black calcium melts away like wax. My last day in Sicily, I say it to the morning, and the morning chides me with sunlight and rain, which to some Sicilians means a nearby wedding of jackals, though there are no jackals in Sicily. In the afternoon, I follow my father up the mountain road to Erice. He curves back, again and again, against the violent switches, and I follow him. He overtakes a black platform truck loaded with crated chickens on the straight, ancient road where the last Mediterranean vantage before the summit is blackened by frayed salt cedars, and I follow him. Above us, a cloud swallows the mountain. My father moves on, and around him the cloud splits, my father a word in the mouth, and then the cloud closes back on itself, and I follow him.
The way of saying I cannot help you being sometimes, in Italian, This does not serve me, I offer a small bribe to the clerk at the Treviso cadastral office in exchange for my father’s address. I’m told he lives in the municipality of Asolo, only an hour north by car. Arriving in the nearby village of Possagno at dinner, I eat on the Temple of Canova’s stairs what my stomach allows from a Ziploc of salted sardines. The moon is ringed, the Grappa Massif overtaken by low clouds: snow. I wait in the fusty rental car—licorice, maybe, and old luggage leather—until I assume my father is sleeping, and then I make my way up his narrow farming road. My father’s villa is unlit and larger than I’d thought, and I climb the gate, boosting myself from the lip of an empty fountain whose lion’s head, the mouth obstructed, spills nothing. Inside the gate, no cars. No one home, nothing shifting in the manicured juniper hedges wrapping the drive. Snow all around me in my father’s garden—Tomorrow, I promise myself, I’ll find his workplace and call, pretending to be someone I am not, to see when he’ll arrive home.
after a night at sea
Each year, before his birthday in the late summer, my father would fly in, either from Venice or Munich, to stay a week in an inn on Lake Hartwell. He would visit most afternoons, typically after doctors’ appointments or meetings at the university, and he would endure American movies playing in one of Seneca’s handful of stadium theaters. We would eat food he missed most—hamburgers, generally, and steaks. He always seemed to have a lingering smell of black pepper, which he ate with everything—it wasn’t from eating pepper, the smell, but something innate, something in the blood maybe; I smell it on myself, sometimes, and leave it to my undershirts and bed. My father and I once rented a pontoon boat from a local marina surrounded by farms of Carolina Reapers, and we spent the day on Hartwell. We took off our shirts in the sun. I slept sweating on the plastic benches while my father followed other boats through the maze of identical inlets. He pronounced us lost by sundown, and in the black he spotlighted docks in case there was someone there to help. It took until the early morning to arrive home after what seemed like a night adventuring, a night at sea, surrounded by black hills, black water.
segestana
The small bay beside my father’s hotel in Bonagia is crowded with fishing boats and faded dories. Despite the cold, old crewmen stand shirtless in the unusual winter sun. The Via Lungomare is empty except for a few cars, and I find a space in front of the Hotel Saverino, park, and wait. Maybe two guests leave the hotel in the span of an hour, and the manager of the hotel restaurant eventually comes to ask me what my business is on the Lungomare. I park again on the provincial road east of Bonagia, my car pointed toward the village center. I study the face of each man who passes by. I never see my father. Halfway into the next morning, I sit alone in the car, humming along to American songs as they play on a local Trapani station. I grow restless, and so for the remainder of the day I choose certain men, men who most resemble my father, and I follow them. For practice, I promise myself. One man I follow to a laundromat in the village of Crocefissello; another drives to a large apartment complex in the west of Trapani; a final man—I am sure for a long time that he is my father—drives with a woman and a small girl all the way to Calatafimi-Segesta. A sister, I keep saying, but when they pull into the parking lot of a trattoria, I see the man’s face clearly, and I curse myself for having said it at all. I wait for them to finish their lunch and then follow them to the Elymian city of Segesta. It begins to rain softly, almost pleasantly. I track the family—six little legs under a large, red umbrella—as they wander through Segesta’s roofless Doric temple. And then they’re gone: following a path up its mild slope toward the forest, the family disappears in the mist. They’d been moving in the direction of an amphitheater built, a sign in the parking lot says, after an invasion of treacherous Greeks.
urchins
The next afternoon is clear enough that the shallows near the coastline are illuminated, precise urchins shimmering from the undersides of the coastal stones. East of Bonagia, I follow a path to find gloved, barefoot children collecting urchins and carrying them back to a chum bucket filled with seawater. An elderly Sicilian woman sits there, a cutting board on her lap stained bright orange, turning the spiny hulls in her hand and cleaning them. She asks me if I’d like three or four, to take home, but I tell her I wouldn’t know what to do with them. She has me sit with her, and she teaches me to shuck urchins. After dusk, I drive to my post on the provincial road. A rainstorm from the mainland makes any sighting of my father impossible, so I put on a raincoat and walk Via Lungomare. I stand across from the Saverino, its restaurant the only lit building on the coastal strip. The same manager is inside now, carrying wine bottles from one corner of the restaurant to the other. Cleanly dressed men often emerge from the kitchen delivering whole fish cooked under mounds of salt, and the patrons laugh while breaking the encasements with souvenir picks. Sitting next to an old, portable television that plays the news, a man with a white napkin tucked into his dress shirt turns to hail a passing waiter. I remove my hood to better see the face of my illuminated father and then flee up the narrow road toward my rented car.
over a drink at the otto e mezzo lounge bar
It was early in the summer when my father last visited. Each afternoon small windstorms stirred the parking lot with scraps from white-flowering rows of myrtles. My mother having shown him, at last, the porn I’d printed out to keep, my father pushed past me in the narrow foyer to sit alone in the rented car he’d parked on the road. I watched from the den’s window. Maybe twenty minutes passed, and he drove off. I called the inn the next day and was told he’d gone. There’s little else to say. In gay bars the size of double-wides, men would tell me their brutal stories, and I’d tell them my father bunched the papers into a wad and stuffed them in my mouth. I’d say he dragged me by the legs through the parking lot, my hair sweeping up flowers. But nothing happened, really. My father came and left, and I called over a group of friends to go swimming. We rowed out to the top of an old timber truss bridge exposed in the low of the lake. We played at touching rooftops from the drowned city, but only ever found the bell tower. Then we sank, touching it with our feet. Not even the boy who surfaced squealing, splinters caught in his toes, was me.
a dog in the wheel
An exultation of passion and strength, the sign says of the Mountain of Salt, but the mountain is hardly a mountain, and the salt is not salt. The mountain is a hill small enough to fit on the stage of a theater, and it is made of cement, and trapped in the cement are thirty stiff-legged, wooden horses. The Mountain of Salt sits on the slope of a ridge along the border of Gibellina Nuova. From this vantage, I see my father limping through empty streets of the abandoned town, stopping along the way to take in the art cemented into the walls of its buildings. A matted dog tracks him and the woman holding onto him. She hisses at the dog when it comes close, and the dog skitters away only to close the distance again after enough time passes. A series of stray showers comes in from the west, sending me back to the rental car to pick at a loaf of bread and wait. When the rains pass, I drive through the city looking again for my father. Rounding the corner of the central piazza, I brake suddenly as the dog, rain-slicked now, darts beneath my wheel. Meters to my right, my father’s wife comes running from under an archway, spitting strong, hateful words, and I tear away, dragging the dog along the cobbled road. Gibellina Vecchia is nearly twelve kilometers east of the new city. Only ruins—less than ruins: slabs of poured concrete indicating the leveled city’s street plans. A gang of bustards, as I watch them, picks insects from the concrete’s thistles and moss. Above me, birds I cannot see to name call out to one another in their barren language.
temple of venus
The Sicilian coast darkens, shrinks away each year from the sea’s beatings and gall, and each day the seaboard fog brought on by the morning shreds, displaced, with the passing through of rock pigeons. By midafternoon the sun burns fog and everything else, it seems, away—but me, I think there are words, at least, yet to distill and swallow. Sunday, my father at Mass in the Parrocchia Maria, I stand at a food cart in white, seemingly unretractable light and wait to place my order of poached fish on rice. I will be his. I say this again and again. I say it to the small, outlying winds the Sirocco sheds and forgets over Favignana and Levanzo. I tell it to the cactuses of Bonagia and the grapes of Mozia and the stilled windmills overlooking the salt pans east of Trapani. I drink bathtub fragolino in the back seat of my rented car and say it to my pinkish visions. Touched as if by the donas de fuera, I use the words to lure urchins’ spines from my feet, and the black calcium melts away like wax. My last day in Sicily, I say it to the morning, and the morning chides me with sunlight and rain, which to some Sicilians means a nearby wedding of jackals, though there are no jackals in Sicily. In the afternoon, I follow my father up the mountain road to Erice. He curves back, again and again, against the violent switches, and I follow him. He overtakes a black platform truck loaded with crated chickens on the straight, ancient road where the last Mediterranean vantage before the summit is blackened by frayed salt cedars, and I follow him. Above us, a cloud swallows the mountain. My father moves on, and around him the cloud splits, my father a word in the mouth, and then the cloud closes back on itself, and I follow him.
Source: Poetry (May 2020)