Many tales of modern life, such as the stuff one comes across in middlebrow newspapers, read like brazen inventions. The reader never feels that he is actually inside the freak show, where the Swiss bearded lady, the microcephalic dwarf Zip the Pinhead, and the giantess Anna Swan are vying for his attention.
If a Russian priest can do anything, it’s to find himself a wife. We stayed in Father Vadim’s house for several days, before and after little Vasily’s christening, and I was able to observe firsthand what a force of nature a good popadya, or matushka, or priest’s wife, becomes when pushed to extremes.
“Not those eat caviar who can afford it,” goes a Serbian proverb of what I have always thought is great perspicacity, “but those who are accustomed to eating it.” In some roundabout way, this saying explains why the less money I have in the bank, the more unanimous the general opinion that I am and have always been rich.
“People spend their lives collecting documents to prove their identity,” my wife says grimly. “And when they die, it all goes in the bin.” That’s just what we’ve doing for the past few weeks, collecting documents.
Socially, Palermo is divided into classes, the lower and the middle. The aristocracy, which has a presence and a political voice in Venice or Rome, has no influence in Sicily, and neither does the great business wealth that has all but displaced nobility throughout Europe.
For me a walk through Palermo, with or without the baby in his pram, would be incomplete without greeting Tony. I knew his late father, who died of cancer some years ago, but then who didn’t?
Italian is a language not averse to populism, apparently, because the word palazzo means both a nobleman’s palace, such as the one where Cinderella crashed the party, and an apartment building inhabited by lowly plebes, such as the one where I live.
As I walk the streets with the baby in his pram, I scrutinize the faces of passing women and note how few distinct types there are in Palermo. The streets here are a kind of itinerant art museum, where in a single day one sees quite a few Parmigianinos, Pollaiuolos, and Ghirlanaios. How else? Their ancestors, bakers’ daughters or admirals’ wives, probably sat for all those portraits.
Last week, as young Vasily and I walked the Via Maqueda, the gentle reader may recall the sharp turn we made on reaching the railway station. This brought us to the Chinese quarter, and to urban blight of a different kind.
Via Maqueda is a Spanish name, which the street takes from a viceroy of Sicily who was called – rather fetchingly, if you ask me – Bernardino de Cárdenas y Portugal, Duke of Maqueda. So originally the “que” was pronounced as “k,” but the Sicilians pronounce it the way an English speaker would read it.
