Franky in New York
   The Beautiful Life  

Until 1943, in the night that passed between the first and the second day of November, every Sicilian house where there was a picciliddro (a little boy, translator's note) was populated with dead familiar to him. Not ghosts with white linzòlo (bedsheet) and with the scrunch of chains, mind you, not those that are frightening, but such and such as you could see in the photographs exhibited in the living room, worn, the occasional half smile printed on the face, the good ironed dress in a workmanlike manner, they made no difference with the living. We nicareddri (kids), before going to bed, put a wicker basket under the bed (the size varied according to the money there was in the family) that the dead loved ones would fill at night with sweets and gifts that we would find on the 2nd morning, upon awakening.

 

Excited, sweaty, we struggled to fall asleep: we wanted to see them, our dead, while with a light step they came to the bed, caressed us, lowered themselves to take the basket. After a restless sleep we woke up at dawn to go looking. Because the dead wanted to play with us, to give us fun, and therefore they didn't put the basket back where they had found it, but went to hide it carefully, we had to look for it all around home. Never again will I feel the heartbeat of finding it when I discovered the overflowing basket above a wardrobe or by a door. The toys were tin trains, wooden toy cars, rag dolls, wooden cubes that formed landscapes. I was 8 years old when grandfather Giuseppe, begged for a long time in my prayers, brought me the legendary Meccano from the afterlife and a few lines of fever broke out for my happiness.

 

The sweets were the ritual ones, called "of the dead": marzipan shaped and painted to look like fruit, "apple branches" made of flour and honey, mustazzola of cooked wine and other delights such as viscotti regina, tetù, carcagnette. There was never a lack of the "sugar baby" which generally depicted a bersagliere with a trumpet in his mouth or a colorful dancer in a dance step. At a certain moment in the morning, combed and dressed in order, we went with the family to the cemetery to greet and thank the dead. For us little ones it was a party, we swarmed along the paths to meet with friends, schoolmates: "What did the dead bring you this year?". A question that we did not ask Tatuzzo Prestìa, who was our exact age, on that November 2 when we saw him standing and composed in front of the tomb of his father, who passed away the year before, while holding the handlebars of a glittering tricycle.

 

In short, on November 2nd we returned the visit that the dead had paid us the day before: it was not a ritual, but an affectionate custom. Then, in 1943, the Christmas tree arrived with the American soldiers and slowly, year after year, the dead lost their way to the houses where they were waiting for them, happy and awake until the end of the day, the children or the children of the children. Too bad. We had lost the possibility of touching, materially, that thread that binds our personal history to that of those who had preceded us and "printed" us, as scientists have explained to us in recent years. While today that thread can only be guessed through a science fiction microscope. And so we become poorer: Montaigne wrote that meditation on death is meditation on freedom, because whoever has learned to die has unlearned to serve.