The Past is a Foreign Country

A Digression... Or Is It?

Below I’m sharing a piece of writing that feels like a digression, in some ways, from my stated purpose here on Refuge with Wolves—but one that ties in to my enduring, career-long obsession with people who attempt to save or salvage things that are disappearing, whether that be a species on the brink of extinction or a cultural treasure in danger of fading into obscurity. So, in a sense, it’s also about survival. Recovery. Endurance. Resilience. How to keep going in the face of grave challenges. A reminder that, if we’re lucky, life is long and a lot happens. All of these things are also preoccupations of Refuge with Wolves.

Here it is—a long one this week. I welcome comments/questions/ideas!

The Past is a Foreign Country*

*title inspired by Robin Ekiss’s poem “The Past is Another Country”

In March of 2016 I board a flight to Sicily, five months pregnant and traveling alone. After making connections in New York and Rome I land in Palermo, then take a bus to the city center, and from there walk several blocks through the raucous backstreets, lugging my roller bag over uneven paving stones, past roadside vendors hawking chickpea fritters and boiled spleen sandwiches, until I find the decrepit-looking palazzo in which I’ve rented a room for the week. I expected it to look decrepit, at least from the outside; I once lived in an apartment in a similar-looking palazzo, in a similarly historic neighborhood not far from here. I’ve returned to Palermo to answer questions that have arisen while working on a novel I came here to research ten years ago—a novel that still isn’t done. I chose this rental because it’s cheap, within walking distance of most things, and because the students I’ll be staying with seem nice and responsible enough, according to their Airbnb reviews. I don’t plan to be around much, and don’t need anything fancy—just a conveniently located room of my own in which to sleep.

At 3 a.m. that night I find myself creeping down a dark hallway filled with cigarette smoke toward a bedroom in which a dozen drunken college kids are shouting along to “Hey, Jude.” Against my most conflict-averse instincts, I’m sneaking up on them to covertly record this late-night disruption on my phone, since the Airbnb associate I’ve been chatting with on my laptop said I’ll need “documentation” of the disturbance if I want any chance of getting a refund for this reservation.

In the future, perhaps, the idea of a pregnant woman in her late thirties sneaking up on a bunch of kids to document their merrymaking will strike me as hilarious. Ten years ago, I would surely have preferred to join the fun; who needed sleep, back then—or oxygen to promote healthy fetal development, for that matter? But right now I’m delirious with jetlag, already feeling desperate to find better lodging and anxious about the time I’ll have to waste, doing so. Most of all, I’m embarrassed at the situation I’ve gotten myself into. This is not the triumphant return to Sicily I’d once envisioned, on book tour for the Italian translation of my novel. This is a last-ditch effort to revive the manuscript. After selling a short story for a decent sum, I’ve decided to use the money on this long-overdue visit, and I’ve given myself a week to have a breakthrough. I see now it’s going to be even harder than I thought. As Lampedusa describes in The Leopard, Sicily “knows no mean between sensuous slackness and hellish drought; [it’s] never pretty, never ordinary, never relaxed, as a country made for rational beings to live in should be.” Beloved as it is to me, this island has always been a challenging place. I should have anticipated as much, but in my decade away, I’d somehow let myself forget.

Ten years earlier, on a sweltering afternoon in June 2006, I was flying through the labyrinth of Palermo’s centro storico on the back of Salvo Bumbello’s motorcycle, gripping his waist as we veered down narrow stone corridors and beneath crumbling archways. The backstreets of Il Capo quarter are said to be deliberately confusing—made that way to deter invaders from reaching the Palazzo dei Normanni, the massive medieval fortress overlooking Palermo’s harbor from the top of the hill.

Trying to orient myself, I glanced around for landmarks and glimpsed the 17^th Century church of Santa Maruzza, beneath which the mysterious Blessed Pauls were rumored to have met in subterranean crypts to plot acts of political resistance. Over a doorway nearby, barely legible in faded paint, was some Mussolini-era propaganda: Ubbedire, combattere, credere. Obey, fight, believe. This seemed a fitting slogan for the world Salvo was born into—not the hardscrabble neighborhood, but the traditional Sicilian marionette theater, with its raucous staged swordfights and secrets of craftsmanship passed down through generations, even as ever-more-enticing modern diversions were always waiting in the wings. Salvo was a second generation puparo, and we were headed to his workshop that day to commence my first lesson in puppet-making.

I never expected to fall in love with the Sicilian marionette theater, which I’d stumbled upon while working for National Geographic a few years earlier. Asked to write a caption for a vintage photo of a man fixing a marionette, I began learning about the opera dei pupi, once the most popular form of entertainment for the poor and working classes of Sicily, and became enthralled not only with the plays, which were based on Italianized versions of chivalrous epic poems, but the small, family-run theaters that performed them. The overall atmosphere of duty, honor and clannish allegiance surrounding them seemed so quintessentially Sicilian. I started learning Italian, won a fellowship and moved to the island to immerse myself in that world as research for a novel.

Over the past several months, I’d begun to make inroads with the few traditional puppeteers who remained in Palermo. I was hardly the first scholar or journalist who had approached them to learn more about the opera dei pupi, but I was perhaps the first who stuck around so long—an entire year. All three built and performed using techniques passed down from their fathers or grandfathers. All lamented the decline of the marionette theater, now largely seen as a relic from the past—something akin to the painted donkey carts one might buy in miniature at a souvenir shop. They likewise lamented how hard it was to persevere with this craft in the face of ever-dwindling audiences and minimal funding, and they were devoted to carrying the tradition forward. How closely one should adhere to tradition, however, was a matter of debate.

As with Tolstoy’s unhappy families, every puppeteer seemed to define authenticity differently, and each approached the problem of survival in his own way. There was Enzo Mancuso, self-proclaimed “youngest puparo of Palermo,” who though just in his thirties was perhaps the fiercest about sticking with traditional plots and techniques; Mimmo Cuticchio, internationally renowned both for his prowess and his innovations—incorporating things like live orchestras and new storylines into his shows; and lastly, Vincenzo Argento, who had adapted his family’s vast repertoire to perform more or less the same episode every night for audiences of foreign tourists who would visit his theater once and never return.

Salvo Bumbello was better known then as a constructor of marionettes than a performer, though he sometimes assisted Mancuso with shows. We pulled up outside his workshop in an alley hardly wide enough for the motorcycle. On a corner nearby, a man was selling watermelons from a wheeled cart, shouting about their freshness, their sweetness. Some boys were going door-to-door collecting donations in a coffee can for a local men’s club, the Brotherhood of Maria della Grazia. Funds would go toward decorating the neighborhood for the upcoming festival of Palermo’s patron saint, Rosalia, who had miraculously rid the city of a plague centuries ago.

Aside from the boys and the watermelon man, the neighborhood looked deserted—the ground-floor metal security shutters all pulled down for siesta, everybody sleeping off the afternoon heat. Salvo hoisted up his own shutters, unlocked a battered wooden door beneath, and switched on an overhead fluorescent to reveal a cluttered, windowless room. The walls were covered with old performance posters, flyers and yellowing family photographs. Ink doodles marred the chipping surface of his workbench, and paint splatters covered the concrete floor. Along one wall, boxes were filled with tools and spare parts. Hanging from racks were several exquisitely detailed marionettes, each the size of a small child.

I might have gone back in time, surrounded by these ancient, crumbling walls, the antique marionettes and rustic tools. Then the strains of an Eminem track reached us from a nearby window.

“No respect.” Salvo clucked his tongue, ushering me toward a folding chair. In the old days, he said, considerate neighbors would have recognized that he had a guest and kept the noise down.

I wondered what “old days” Salvo was referring to; he was only twenty-eight. He wore his typical uniform that day of a tee shirt and track pants, black with pink stripes, the colors of Forza Palermo. His dark hair was neatly gelled. He was too young to remember when men had filled local marionette theaters each night, cheering and shouting during the frequent battles like fans at a heavyweight title match—sometimes breaking into fistfights, arguing over which knight was bravest, other times breaking into tears as beloved heroes succumbed to treachery or death. According to pupari lore, one spectator was so overcome with rage for a particularly loathsome villain that he shot the marionette with his pistol, mid-performance. Another story tells of a man so distraught about his favorite character remaining imprisoned at the end of an episode that he roused the puppeteer from sleep that night, desperate for reassurance that the hero would be all right. Salvo had surely heard stories of those days from his father, who’d chiseled and carved with the same tools he was now lifting from the worktable, in the room where we now stood.

Women typically aren’t included in such stories, perhaps because the opera dei pupi was long considered a man’s domain. Women weren’t even allowed to watch performances, back in the day, as the brutality on stage was deemed unsuitable for them. The sole exception was occasional special episodes of Lives of the Saints. Women contributed to the theater in countless ways, of course—sewing costumes, painting backdrops, collecting admission—but men did the building and maneuvering, and men voiced all the characters, from wizards to witches to cherubic angels who carried slain Christians to heaven while singing in breathy falsetto.

Today, Salvo said, we would focus on making hands. First he held a block of beech wood against a power saw (one of the room’s few concessions to modernity), dust breezing into the air as he cut it into smaller pieces. While he worked, sounds floated in from the alley, where things were livening up post-siesta—kids’ shouts, revving motors, the whine of a drill from a nearby construction site. Half of Palermo seemed to be under construction, every other building upheld with scaffolding—some undergoing renovation, others simply about to collapse, damaged in World War II and never repaired. For a while, Salvo said, the neighborhood had been in dire straits—drugs, violence, general malavita—but lawyers and doctors and other persone per bene were starting to move back, fixing up dilapidated buildings all across the historic center. Now satellite dishes sprouted like mushrooms from the red-tiled rooftops, and electric wires crisscrossed the alleys along with the ubiquitous laundry lines.

Even with the near-constant interruptions, the noise and the heat and the juicy gossip shared by neighbors who stopped in to chat or have a smoke, Salvo never stopped working. I tried to emulate his level of focus, watching as he carved finger-notches with a small blade, periodically stopping to sand the edges smooth. The ability to make and maneuver the Sicilian marionettes was said to be “in your fingers even before you were born,” passed down from your ancestors. Salvo’s skill at carving seemed innate, almost effortless. He was remarkably unfazed by the activity around him, pausing only to command his eight-year-old son, Luciano, who was peppering us with questions, bouncing balls and generally causing a ruckus, to “Vai via!” in no uncertain terms.

At some point, Salvo’s heavily pregnant wife Maria stopped in to say hello. They were expecting a boy—or so they thought; the doctor wasn’t 100% certain, because during the ultrasound the umbilical cord was sticking out between its legs. Hearing this, a male neighbor couldn’t resist riffing on the impressive length and girth of said “cord.” Then he told a joke: a Sicilian man bought some cigarettes at the tobacconist’s, but upon seeing the state-issued warning printed on the package—Smoking May Cause Impotence—he went back in, demanding to exchange it for one bearing the less catastrophic message of Smoking Kills.

June, 2006. A couple of months earlier, Bernardo Provenzano, the Mafia’s capo di tutti i capi, had been apprehended by Italian police after eluding capture for forty years, causing some to speculate about the end of the criminal organization’s long-standing stranglehold on the island. In a few more weeks, Italy would win the World Cup. The global financial crash was still two years distant, the global upheaval of 2020 inconceivable, at least to me. It was a glorious time to be young and in Sicily, captivated by this strange and beautiful tradition which a passionate few seemed determined to keep from dying.

The morning after the late-night party, I leave a note for my Airbnb hosts: Arrivederci, no hard feelings. I’d tell them in person, but they’re still asleep. Then I drag my bags to a bed & breakfast on Via Roma where I’ll have a clean, private room and where, the proprietor has assured me with a wink, there will be no smoking and no singing. Then I set out for the marionette museum, determined to make up for lost time.

This trip is supposed to help me put the finishing touches on the manuscript I’ve been perfecting for years—at least, that’s what I’ve been telling people. I want to see also what’s changed and what’s endured, not only in the marionette theater but on this ancient, sirocco-swept island that shaped it. To see the damage that was done/ and the treasures that prevail; I keep thinking of lines like this from Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” and in a sense, this is what I’m really doing: returning to the source to try and discover where I went astray, and if the book meant to launch my literary career—the book I’ve been clinging to during these years of seemingly inexplicable stasis—can be salvaged.

Goethe called Sicily “the key to everything,” and I’m counting on this—that my return will help to unlock something vital. Over the past few years, I’ve been making painstaking, sentence-level edits to the book, no substantial changes. I’ve also been battling depression and increasingly debilitating physical illnesses—bouts of vomiting and vertigo that leave me bedridden for days (the result of buried trauma from a past sexual assault, though I don’t realize that yet). I’m determinedly ignoring the stories I hear from successful authors about their terrible first novels, left to molder in desk drawers as mere practice for better books to come. There is too much riding on this project—too much time spent—for me to abandon it now. But I’ve been haunted lately by the feeling that in my failure to finish the book I’ve squandered my chances for success, along with whatever artistic promise I once possessed.

When I enter the airy upstairs ballroom of the marionette museum, I find the Battle of Orlando and Rinaldo for the Love of Princess Angelica is already underway—but no one is battling, yet. On stage the buffoons Nofrio and Virticchio are yelling at each other, but it’s just pre-show comic relief. Standing in front of the curtain, speaking in dialect, they alternate between cracking jokes and bopping each other on the head with oversized fists.

The platform they’re standing on is framed by a brightly colored frontispiece, a nearly wall-sized canvas façade painted to resemble the folds of a proper red curtain. Both sides of the stage opening are also adorned with painted cherubs, dragons and knights on horseback. The wooden benches facing it are filled this morning with high school students, here on a field trip. Anything more disruptive than the occasional fidget or whisper is abruptly quashed by hawk-eyed chaperones, but the teens appear to be genuinely captivated by the show, nonetheless. Nofrio goes through the motions of lighting a cigarette, and when he exhales, real smoke wafts from a hole in his painted mouth. The students seem as delighted by this trick as I am.

The curtain soon lifts to reveal a forest, where the knight Orlando is rescuing Princess Angelica from a giant. As soon as she’s safe, the princess disappears; Angelica’s most defining characteristic is without question her evasiveness. Orlando sets off in pursuit, and soon comes upon his cousin, Rinaldo, who as it happens is chasing Angelica, too. Their duel marks the episode’s titular battle, and is accompanied by the tinny, jubilant music of a player piano, cranked in front of the stage by an apprentice I don’t recognize. Whenever the young man’s arm tires, the music slows, then speeds up again as he resumes cranking with renewed gusto. Hereditary pupari usually start this way as children, helping with the pianola’s musical accompaniment, before they graduate to assisting backstage.

Hard as it might be for contemporary audiences to imagine, it’s possible to be not just amused, but engrossed by a Sicilian marionette show—to forget even, in certain moments, that you are watching inanimate objects being manipulated to represent human experience. Certain maneuvers—like Nofrio’s smoking trick, or the cartoonish decapitations that occur during battle scenes—are familiar, go-to crowd-pleasers. Others, like the subtle rise and fall of Ruggero’s chest as he lies sleeping, or the famed Pazzia di Orlando sequence in which the knight goes crazy and strips his suit of armor off piece by piece, are more seldomly used and, when executed by master puppeteers who have been living and breathing this craft for their entire lives, can be downright breathtaking.

The combination of its long, brutal history and the general suspicion of outsiders resulting from centuries of invasion is perhaps what made the marionette theater so irresistible to so many here, once upon a time. Scholars have described it as a “theater of revolt” in which underlying themes of rebellion, vengeance and justice were depicted in seemingly innocuous stories about old-fashioned heroes from a bygone era. In addition to providing a fantastical escape for the poor who were struggling just to get by, the plays were also a sort of underground rallying cry, fostering a spirit of pride, resourcefulness and resistance.

This show ends as they all do, with an extended fight scene. I find myself tapping my foot to the pianola’s cheerful, old-timey accompaniment as warriors are slaughtered, one after the other—faces sawed off, bodies chopped in two like something out of Looney Tunes, the upper half hovering in the air for a few moments with sword-bearing-arm still swinging before it collapses onto the ground. I’m reminded of a Cuticchio show I watched once, in which a young boy started crying during a particularly ferocious battle, and his mother carried him out. At the show’s conclusion, Cuticchio knelt in the stage opening and spoke earnestly to the children that remained. “See here: every night the Paladins die, but the next day they live again. Men die, yes. But the marionettes never die.”

When the final curtain lifts again, I’m surprised to see Salvo Bumbello squat into view in the stage opening, revealing himself as the puppeteer. I’d assumed I was watching Enzo Mancuso, whom I’d shadowed at countless performances in this same ballroom. Salvo had occasionally helped him onstage, but back then he wasn’t the oprante—the showrunner: the one who does all the characters’ voices and gives all the cues, conducting the music and working the lights, signaling every scene change with a stomp of his traditional wooden clog.

I ask Salvo about this backstage. He tells me he has his own company now. He performs and builds puppets for himself, not Enzo. They don’t talk anymore. He doesn’t go into detail about the rift, which I’d heard hints about already from mutual acquaintances, and I don’t press. Rifts are commonplace amongst pupari, even blood relatives; they are by necessity rivals, competing for audiences and arts funding. When I lived in Palermo I knew two men, an uncle and nephew, both of whom ran successful, independent theaters in the same city, who hadn’t spoken to each other in decades. More than once during my time on the island, I heard the phrase “he is dead to me,” uttered as casually as if one were discussing a recent job promotion, or a mild case of the flu.

Salvo is as I remember—tall and gently lumbering, quick to smile. He has a habit of widening his pale blue eyes in reaction to something, or to emphasize a point. Soft-spoken, he often punctuates statements with a self-deprecating chuckle. In ten years, we’ve both gained a little weight, mine partly due to being pregnant. I’m reminded of how matter-of-factly Sicilian acquaintances once told me I’d plumped up, after a year of eating pasta and gelato daily. “Ma sei ingrassata,” they’d say, turning to each other, smiling approvingly. “Hasn’t she gotten fatter?” Sicilians have no problem telling it like it is, in my experience. After some adjustment I came to find this candor, absent of malice, to be thoroughly refreshing.

I ask Salvo about his son, Luciano, who remains in my memory the precocious eight-year-old they teasingly called “Lucifero.” He was always underfoot in the workshop, littering the floor with his candy wrappers. Lucio is eighteen now, Salvo tells me. He has facial hair, and rides a motorcycle. He works fulltime, and he’s not involved with the theater.

When everyone else is gone, I walk alone through the museum exhibits. In the new silence, the marionettes are eerie as ever, gazing off in their private reveries or standing posed on platforms in scenes of frozen mayhem. Their lifeless eyes look past me, the only sound the echo of my footsteps. “With puppets, one is always conscious of their closeness to made things,” says Kenneth Gross in his beautiful extended meditation, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. “Yet these creatures take up this made-ness in a way that goes against the grain. They are dead things that belong to a different kind of life.”

I wonder if maybe I’ve been frozen, all these years. Here I am in Palermo again, feeling instant kinship with old friends, not as rusty at Italian-speaking as I feared I would be, and also not much closer to achieving my dream. In this same ballroom, I once heard the Director of the marionette museum tell a roomful of scholars and artists, Umberto Eco among them, that she hoped my forthcoming novel would “do for the opera dei pupi what The Da Vinci Code did for the museums of Europe.” Regardless of my feelings about Dan Brown, these were great expectations—and I fear now the book has collapsed under their weight. I’m embarrassed not to have finished, but none of my Sicilian friends seem to care; they’re simply glad to see me. It takes as long as it takes, Maria from the museum says with a shrug, and that’s that.

On my way out, I can’t help but think of the ambivalent mutterings I’ve heard from some puppeteers about this place, though it’s ostensibly dedicated to preserving their legacy. They have similar views about UNESCO’s 2001 proclamation declaring the opera dei pupi “a treasure of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity” (try to tell the guys hoisting these thirty-pound knights in armor, then smashing them repeatedly against each other, that they’re intangible!). Marionettes need to be active, they say—in performance, not hanging motionless like brooms in a closet, or corpses in a tomb.

I haven’t been frozen, really; my life has changed a great deal over the past decade. In addition to being pregnant, I have a three-year-old back home. Motherhood has changed everything, from the reduced time I have in which to write to my artistic preoccupations—I’m most interested now in exploring topics that most compel or frighten me as a parent: violence, environmental devastation, the hazards of neglect.

I hope seeing the pupari again might help me to determine if this novel can be resurrected. Perhaps I should rewrite it completely; perhaps I should abandon it for good and move on, start something new. I wonder if I’ve been trying so hard to salvage the book because I want to, or because I think I should—because I’m afraid of what it means if I don’t. I can’t help but think of what Maestro Mimmo Cuticchio once told me, about the need for marionettes to be kept in use: that preserving something is not the same thing as keeping it alive.

I’d read about Cuticchio—perhaps the one puppeteer whom people outside the small circle of Sicilian folklorists, artisans and die-hard opera dei pupi fans might have heard of—even before my initial arrival in Sicily. He had a small role in the Godfather Part III, and more recently has starred in a couple of well-received Italian films. As a puppeteer and storyteller he has traveled the world, and is described in the World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts as “the most important figure in the preservation and renewal of the tradition of the opera dei pupi in Italy.”

In a New York Times interview from 2001, he spoke of tweaking his performances to examine old-fashioned ideals, modifying his new plays to focus on justice rather than vengeance. People should be “exchanging culture rather than blows,” he said. I was curious how this man who had already witnessed such drastic changes to his tradition might feel about its ongoing transformation, and the best way to carry it forward.

At seventy-one, Cuticchio is striking—tall, bushy-bearded, with shoulder-length silvery hair. In performance, he bellows and roars as the voice of kings, giants and demons, but when speaking one-on-one his tone is surprisingly measured and gentle. “In the old days, we never called ourselves artists,” he told me when we first met back in 2005. “The opera dei pupi was a trade. Not a common trade, of course. Real work meant breaking your back in the fields or laying brick. The work of the puppeteer was a trade in a broader sense; I mean it was a job respected by the people. They knew it was honest work, that it made you sweat through your shirt. You had to give your heart and soul to it.”

Despite these claims, Cuticchio is the puparo I would most readily call artist. Watching him perform alongside his grown son, Giacomo—a gifted composer and musician, as well as a talented puparo in his own right—it’s obvious you are witnessing a maestro at work. Cuticchio has devoted his life to not only carrying on his legacy but expanding and improving on it, incorporating other theatrical traditions, even experimenting with things like bringing the puppeteer out from the shadows during shows, the ultimate taboo. He has done all of this out of a desire to carry the tradition forward in an authentic way; even a century ago, he says, the opera dei pupi was constantly reinventing itself, doing so out of necessity in order to stay relevant.

Cuticchio was born into the marionette theater quite literally: his mother went into labor before a show in the coastal town of Gela, and a midwife delivered him in the same room where they performed each night for crowds of local fishermen. His father, out running errands at the time, was said to have had mixed emotions upon his return: pleased to learn of the arrival of his firstborn son, annoyed they would have to cancel the show that evening. Though based in Palermo, the family spent much of the post-World War II years of reconstruction circling the island, stopping in coastal villages or mountain hamlets where modern diversions like the cinema had been slower to take hold, and where locals would still pay to see their shows. Back in Palermo, other pupari were shuttering their theaters, selling off their marionettes to foreigners.

The 1970’s were a turning point not only for the teatro dei pupi, but for Cuticchio himself. While Palermitans hardly came to shows anymore, foreigners and continental Italian tourists saw them as an amusing bit of local color and paid three times as much for tickets. For this reason, the theaters that stayed open began catering to them, shortening typical episodes, repeating more popular stories over and over. If the audience was going to be different every evening, it wasn’t necessary to perform serialized stories in chronological order, or in any order at all.

In spite of this, Cuticchio urged his father to put on Lo Dico’s cycle of the History of the Paladins of France as they once had, with consecutive episodes staged each night.

“No one will come,” his father replied.

“But if we don’t do it,” Cuticchio says, “it’s even worse, because then we will forget the stories ourselves. It will all be lost.” He recalls, “My father said he had spent his life performing the traditional plays, and now he wanted to work less and earn more money. Be more comfortable. He gave me a challenge: if you want to do this, do it yourself. Build the marionettes with your own hands, open your own theater.”

Cuticchio accepted the challenge. After apprenticing for two more years with another Maestro, in 1977 he opened his own theater on Via Bara all’Olivella across from the opera house. It’s still there today, the longest-running stable teatro dei pupi in Palermo—tucked down a quaint cobblestoned lane lined with trattorie and upscale boutiques, in what is now a lively shopping district. Around the corner, the thoroughfare of Via Maqueda bustles with pubs, cafes and department stores; there’s a Sephora, a Rinascente, an H&M. None of that was here when he opened; even the opera house was closed, declared “under construction” for nearly two decades, a sad testament to the city’s mismanagement and corruption.

At first the only people who ventured to Cuticchio’s theater were neighborhood children and a few intrepid tourists. He didn’t care much for the tourists, but the kids gave him hope. “I thought, perhaps the children are the public of tomorrow. And then I had the idea to bring my shows to schools.”

He bought a Fiat van, into which he loaded some marionettes and backdrops. He built a traveling stage, which he attached to a makeshift luggage rack. Then he set out, visiting schools around the island. The children he performed for knew nothing of the opera dei pupi—but unlike their parents, who had willfully shunned it as the outdated amusement of the previous generation, these kids were simply oblivious. Upon seeing the shows for the first time, learning about the craft as part of their own heritage, they found it exciting—cheering for the heroes during battle scenes and booing the villains, just as neighborhood fans had done during Cuticchio’s childhood.

He credits his decision to perform in schools as a main reason he’s been able to help build a new generation of opera dei pupi supporters, perhaps the closest thing a present-day puparo can get to a devoted following. By going back to schools year after year, Cuticchio created a rapport with children who had no preconceived notions about what the opera dei pupi was, or what it should be—they came to it with open hearts, open minds. He began a conversation, in hopes that in doing so his tradition might live on even after his own voice had fallen silent.

Vincenzo Argento’s teatro is a rented space in a palazzo across from the cathedral, a desirable location near a major tourist attraction with ample pedestrian traffic. He lives nearby, above a hole-in-the-wall storefront on Corso Vittorio Emanuele where he both makes and sells marionettes.

It’s in this tiny shop that I find him in the spring of 2016, soldering copper suns and moons to the shield of a Saracen warrior, just as he might have been doing when I left ten years ago. Indeed, aside from the bike lane the city has since put in on the Corso and a few more vacant storefronts than I remember, it might have been only ten minutes since I last saw him. He greets me with the same amicable tranquility. He looks the same, too—bald, ample-bellied, peering over small wire-framed glasses at the tip of the soldering torch as I enter. After some initial pleasantries, we walk up the hill together to have an espresso before the evening show.

Argento has apparently made peace with doing abridged, “lite” versions of the traditional plays, relying more on special effects than storylines, in which innovation and variety are largely unnecessary. This could perhaps be seen as selling out, if it weren’t obvious how hard the man works, and how ceaselessly. In the stillness of his empty theater, he echoes what the other pupari have told me: times are tough. Challenges are nothing new for him, of course; Argento lived through the Allied bombardment and subsequent years of privation, and the so-called Mafia Wars of the 1980’s, in which blood was spilled daily on Palermo’s streets and people were scared to go out for fear of seeing something they shouldn’t. In the 1970’s, his family’s hand-made marionettes were stolen, likely to be sold as black-market antiques. Argento moved forward, as always—but he admits now that in the years following the 2008 crash, a drop in tourism along with his son’s departure for the mainland to find work have made things especially difficult. He’s more tired these days, he says. It’s feast or famine. In winter, he might get only one or two tour groups per week, while in summer, he might do up to two shows per day for groups of up to 50 people.

I mention the period in the 1960’s which I’ve long heard referred to as “the crisis,” when most of the puppet theaters in Palermo were closing and it seemed the tradition was doomed. “The crisis never ended,” Argento replies with a shrug. “It never ended.”

The day after I meet with Argento, my friend Raffaello leans across a café table and says in a low voice, glancing over his shoulder: “I fear the name Argento may die when he does.” He shakes his head, clucking his tongue. He worries the old man’s sons won’t carry on his legacy as they should.

Clean-cut, with a lean face, high cheekbones, and trim dark hair, Raffaello looks the part of consummate dapper Italian: today he is wearing a spotless Lacoste shirt, pastel sweater tied over his shoulders, slim-fitting jeans, and mirrored sunglasses. Before heading to a Mancuso spettacolo together on what is to be my last night in Palermo, we are discussing the fate of the pupari over cannoli at my favorite pasticceria, Massaro—wedged beside a petrol station, near a highway offramp, across from the University gates, its unremarkable exterior offering no hint of the abundant sweetness within.

Raffaello and I are both outsiders who’ve become enamored with the opera dei pupi. Unlike me, though, he is thoroughly Sicilian, and while not born to a family of puppeteers, his passion has manifested in his apprenticing as an oprante, and now occasionally putting on marionette shows of his own. His obvious devotion to the craft seems to have won him the respect of all pupari families, and he has the unique perspective of being able to move fluidly amongst them as friend to all—even the ones who no longer speak to each other.

On this dark and drizzly evening, Mancuso has still managed to draw a small crowd at his theater in Borgo Vecchio. We enter after the show has started and sit in the back, our eyes drawn at once to the lit stage. Tonight is The Death of Ruggero, an episode I’ve seen several times before, in which the protagonist is betrayed by a jealous rival and murdered in his bed.

As we settle in, poor clueless Ruggero is preparing for sleep; he goes offstage to remove his armor to much banging and clanking, and reappears in his underwear, to the crowd’s laughter. I think of all the time I used to spend here with Mancuso, who after an initial period of standoffishness had in a sense taken me under his wing. Feisty and wisecracking one moment, adamantly serious the next, occasionally losing patience with me when I failed to grasp something he was explaining, he was a fundamentally kind person, but I sensed most of all that he felt a duty to his heritage, to help me get the particulars right. After performances in this same little theater, we would go next door to the workshop, where over espresso boiled on a tiny stovetop and countless cigarettes I would listen alongside dozens of rapt marionettes as he told us about his ancestors, his own apprenticeship, and the general history of the theater. He was in his early thirties then, about to be married. His fiancée, Amelia, had worked as a prison guard, and they joked that this experience would serve her well in their relationship.

Ruggero has now climbed into bed, and for a few moments there is quiet in the theater as we watch him sleep, his chest rising and falling in the maneuver that always holds me in thrall. It’s so subtle, yet so affecting—one of the rare moments of gentleness in the opera dei pupi, perhaps the only time we ever see one of the Paladins so unguarded, so vulnerable. But the moment is brief—Ruggero soon awakens in convulsions, realizing he has been poisoned, and thus weakened is stabbed to death by a waiting assassin.

It’s a chilling scene. I’m reminded of what Raffaello once told me—how Princess Angelica meets her ultimate demise: captured by the Spaniard Ferrau and knowing what he will likely do to her, she stabs herself, but he still manages to rape her before she dies. I blink back tears. It’s hard to imagine such a horrific tale being reenacted on a puppet stage—but there are certainly similar themes of cruelty, ruthlessness and violence running through most of the opera dei pupi shows. I can see how a person might have wept, in the old days, after following the arcs of characters for months on end, as devotedly as some might the actors on a TV soap opera.

On stage, the sun and moon travel across the sky, indicating the passage of time. I think about Palermo and about progress—the idea of betterment it connotes. Since my last visit, the once traffic-clogged streets of the Corso Vittorio and Via Maqueda have been made into pedestrian promenades on certain days of the week. The economy is in the toilet—I hear this from everyone, the lingering recession evident in the numerous empty storefronts, the stalled renovations of the historic center, the noticeably rundown Botanical Gardens. After Provenzano’s capture and subsequent busts, hopes that the Mafia would dissolve were short-lived: per more cynical predictions, new bosses simply arose to replace the old ones. Refugees from Africa are arriving daily by the boatload, most often landing at the tiny offshore island of Lampedusa, prompting the Italian government to declare an immigration crisis. Through it all Palermo endures, past building on past, embodying Tancredi’s famous line from The Leopard, that “for everything to stay the same, everything must change.”

My unborn daughter kicks inside me and I remember her then, my constant companion on this journey. I think of how anguished I’ve been in recent years, opining all I failed to accomplish before becoming a mother. I think of my son waiting back home, still a small child, and of Salvo’s son, Luciano, who will never be a child again.

While I’m lost in reverie, Mancuso’s show ends. He and his aiutante bend into the stage opening now and wave at the crowd. I’m not sure he can see me, sitting in the shadows in the back. When the house lights come up and he descends, I will go to greet him. We will move to his workshop next-door, to drink espresso from the same disposable plastic cups I remember; no more cigarettes, though—he quit when his first son was born. He will show me pictures of his boys, and a video of one putting on an impromptu puppet show with forks and spoons, and tell me they are crazy about the marionettes, they can’t get enough of them.

He will compliment me on pictures of my own son, and even put me on the phone with his wife so she can congratulate me on my pregnancy. When he hears I’m leaving tomorrow, he will chide me in his usual gruff way for not coming to see him sooner, and then with customary Sicilian generosity load me with gifts—a miniature Orlando and Rinaldo for my son; a toy donkey cart; a recently-published book about his family’s cultural legacy; and an autographed performance poster. Later, after I’m gone, he will hammer dents out of a Paladin’s shield that was damaged during the performance, before heading home to kiss his boys goodnight. I’ll tell myself nothing has been squandered during this, my long and ongoing apprenticeship. It takes as long as it takes.

When I return to America, the usual anxieties and insecurities will come flooding back—the feeling that I’m either racing against time or wasting it. In a few more years, the pandemic will hit. I’ll see photos in the newspaper of trucks filled with corpses; desolate piazzas; a Catholic Mass broadcast from an empty cathedral. Sicilian friends will send text messages to tell me that they’re alive, they’re okay. Before the months of my own illness—an illness that will linger on and on—they’ll warn me that things could get bad in America, too. My children and theirs, quarantined in our respective homes, will be introduced to each other via video message, and together start to learn new words. Ciao, come stai? Fine, thank you. Questo è il mio libro, this is my book. Mine will realize for the first time that their mother speaks another language, that she had a life before them. They will begin to grasp, too, the scope of this virus: how it touches everything, how we are all in the same boat. Before long, we will all speak wistfully of the time before—even my four-year-old daughter, who despite her relatively short time on earth can call up memories of a very different world.

For the moment, though, I sit in Mancuso’s theater, transfixed as the others file from benches around me, heading back out to the Palermo evening. I watch as my friend the puppeteer stoops on his little stage, gathering the bodies of the slain and putting them back together again, piece by piece.