Take the Cannoli (6 page)

I loved Clemenza's command because of its total lack of ambiguity. I yearned for certainty. I'd been born into rock-solid Christianity, and every year that went by, my faith eroded a little more, so that by the time I got to college I was a recent, and therefore shaky, atheist. Like a lot of once devout people who have lost religion, I had holes the size of heaven and hell in my head and my heart. Once, I had had a god, commandments, faith, the promise of redemption, and a bible, The Bible, which offered an explanation of everything from creation on through to the end of the world. I had slowly but surely replaced the old-fashioned exclamation points of hallelujahs with the question marks of modern life. God was dead and I had whacked him.

Don Corleone, the Godfather, was not unlike God the father—loving and indulgent one minute, wrathful and judgmental the next. But the only “thou shalt” in the don's dogma was to honor thy family. He dances with his wife, weeps over his son's corpse, dies playing in the garden with his grandson, and preaches that “a man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.”

Don Corleone would not have paid actual money to sit in fluorescent-lit rooms listening to frat boys from Spokane babble on about Descartes, boys in baseball caps whose most sacred philosophical motto could be summarized as “I drink therefore I am.” Don Corleone had no time for mind games and conjecture. I, on the other hand, had nothing but time for such things, probably because I'm a frivolous female: “I spend my life trying not to be careless,” the don tells his son Michael. “Women and children can be careless but not men.”

The Godfather
is a film crammed with rules for living. Don't bow down to big shots. It's good when people owe you. This drug business is dangerous. Is vengeance going to bring your son back to you or my boy to me? And then there is the grandeur, the finality, the conviction of the mantra “Never tell anybody outside the family what you're thinking again.”

That last one was a rule I myself could follow. Not only did I not tell anyone outside my family what I was thinking, I was pretty tight-lipped with family too. If I was confused about the books I was reading in school, I was equally tormented by my seemingly tranquil life. At twenty-one, I was squandering my youth on hard work and contentment. I had two jobs, got straight A's. I lived with my boyfriend of three years, a perfectly nice person. We were well suited to the point of boredom, enjoying the same movies, the same music, the same friends. We didn't argue, which meant we didn't flirt. I'd always dreamed of
The Taming of the Shrew
and I was living in—well, they don't write dramas about young girls who settle for the adventure that
is mutual respect, unless you count
thirtysomething,
and I already had the same haircut as the wifely actress who smiled politely waiting for her husband to come home to their comfortable house. Thanks largely to the boyfriend's decency and patience, my parents and I were getting along better than ever. My sister was my best friend. We all lived within ten blocks of each other, one big happy family, frequently convening for get-togethers and meals. Friends clamored for dinner invitations to my parents' home, acquaintances told the boyfriend and me that we renewed their faith in love, and every time I turned in an essay exam my professors' eyes lit up. I was a good daughter, a good sister, a good girlfriend, a good student, a good citizen, a responsible employee. I was also antsy, resentful, overworked, and hemmed in.

Just as I did not divulge my secret rendezvous with
The Godfather,
I didn't talk about my claustrophobia. I didn't tell anyone that maybe I didn't want to be known only as my sister's sister or my parents' daughter or my boyfriend's girlfriend, that maybe I'd lived in that town too long and I wanted to go someplace where I could leave the house for ten minutes without running into my seventh-grade math teacher. So I told them all I wanted to study abroad to better my chances of getting into graduate school, which sounds a lot better than telling the people who love you that you'd love to get away from them.

I have a few weeks after Christmas before I have to report to Holland for a semester of art history. I fly to Vienna. I get on a train there and another one in Berlin, and another after that, and one thing leads to
another and I find myself in Italy. How did that happen? Oh well, as long as I'm in Florence, perhaps I should pop down and give Sicily a look-see.

The fact is, my little freedom flight isn't working out as well as I'd hoped. I swing between the giddiness of my newfound solitude and the loneliness of same. I make a lot of panicked phone calls to my boyfriend from museums that begin with descriptions of Brueghel paintings and end with me sobbing, “What am I going to do?” I am homesick, and since I can't go home, I might as well go to the next closest thing—Sicily. I
know
Sicily. And I love the part of
The Godfather
when Michael's hiding out, traipsing around his ancestral hills, walking the streets of his father's birthplace, Corleone.

I take a night train from Rome down the boot and wake up in the Sicilian capital, Palermo. I feel ridiculous. I thought of myself as a serious person and it didn't seem like serious people travel hundreds of miles out of their way to walk in the footsteps of Al Pacino.

I don't feel so silly, however, that I'm above tracking down a bakery and buying a cannoli, my first. I walk down to the sea and eat it. It's sweeter than I thought it would be, more dense. The filling is flecked with chocolate and candied orange. Clemenza was right: Leave that gun! Take that cannoli!

The town of Corleone really exists and can be reached by bus. I checked. Every day I go to the travel office in Palermo to buy a ticket to the Godfather's hometown. And every morning, when I stand before the ticket agent, I can never quite bring myself to say the word “Corleone”
out loud to a real live Sicilian. Because you know they know. Idiot Americans and their idiot films. I have my dignity.

So each morning when the ticket agent asks, “Where to?”, one of two things happens: I say nothing and just walk off and spend the day in Palermo reading John Irving novels on a bench by the sea, or I utter the name of a proper, art-historically significant town instead. As if the clerk will hear me say, “Agrigento,” and say to himself, “Oh, she's going to see the Doric temple. Impressive. Wonder if she's free for a cannoli later?”

On my final day in Sicily—my last chance at Corleone—I walk to the ticket counter, look the clerk in the eye, and ask for a round-trip ticket to Corle— . . . Cefalù. Yeah, Cefalù, that's it, to see a Byzantine mosaic I remember liking in one of my schoolbooks.

Cefalù might as well have been Corleone. It had the same steep cobblestone streets and blanched little buildings that I remembered from the movie.
Lovely,
I thought, as I started walking up the hill to its tiny, twelfth-century cathedral.
Freak,
everyone in the town apparently thought as I marched past them. An entire class of schoolchildren stopped cold to gawk at me. Six-year-old girls pointed at my shoes and laughed. Hunched old men glared, as if the sight of me was a vicious insult. I felt like a living, breathing faux pas.

At least no one was inside the church. The only gaze upon me there came from the looming, sad-eyed Messiah. The Jesus in this mosaic is huge, three times larger than any other figure inside the church. And there's something menacing in the way he holds that tablet with the
word of God on it. But his face is compassionate. With that contradictory mix of stern judgment and heart, he may as well have been wearing a tuxedo and stroking a cat and saying something like “What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?”

I leave the church and go for lunch. I am the only patron in a tiny family restaurant operated by Mama, Papa, Son 1, and Son 2. They glare at me as if I glow in the dark. Soon they'll wish I glowed in the dark. The power keeps going on and off because of a thunderstorm. The sky outside is nearly black. The Muzak version of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is playing and it flickers, too, so that every few seconds it's dark and silent. Which is a relief, considering that the rest of the time it's loud and the entire family have seated themselves across from me and gape without smiling. The eggplant on my plate is wonderful, but such is my desire to escape their stares that I have never chewed so fast in my life.

How had it never hit me before? The whole point of
The Godfather
is not to trust anyone outside your family. And whatever I may have thought while sitting in front of my VCR, I am not actually Sicilian. I bear no resemblance to Clemenza, Tessio, or any of the heads of the Five Families. If I were a character in the film at all, I'd be one of those pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders in the restaurant where Michael murders Sollozzo. I'm the tuba player in Moe Green's casino. I'm that kid who rides his bike past Michael and Kay on Kay's street in New Hampshire who yells hello and neither Michael nor Kay says hello back.

I got sucked in by
The Godfather
's moral certainty, never quite recognizing that the other side of moral certainty is staying at home and keeping your mouth shut. Given the choice, I prefer chaos and confusion. Why live by those old-world rules? I was enamored of the movie's family ethos without realizing that in order to make a life for myself, I needed to go off on my own. Why not tell people outside the family what you're thinking? As I would later find out, it's a living.

Personally, I am too vindictively American, too full of hate for the hateful aspects of this country, and too possessed by the things I love here to be too long away.

—R
ALPH
E
LLISON

MY
FRIEND
E
STHER
B
LAAUW AND
I were watching the
Acht Uur Journaal
—Holland's eight o'clock television news. Emphasis on “watching.” After three months at the University of Leiden, in April 1992, my Dutch vocabulary hadn't progressed much past
koffie, bier,
and “My name is Sarah how are you,” words and phrases which didn't get much broadcast journalism airplay. The screen flashed pictures of buildings on fire. The newscaster said, “Dutch Dutch Dutch Dutch Dutch Los Angeles Dutch Dutch.” I absentmindedly sighed, “Fires in southern California, what else is new?” But Esther turned her gaze from the TV set to stare at me. “What?” I asked, just as the newscaster said, “Dutch Dutch Dutch Rodney King.”

Esther explained that a jury in Los Angeles had acquitted the four
police officers accused of beating Rodney King. That surprised me, having seen the video. “Now,” she said, “the whole city is on fire.” That did not surprise me, having seen the video. Four people were dead from the mayhem. I stared at the smoky pictures. But Esther watched me, glaring at my hands accusingly, as if I could throw a brick through a shop window ten thousand miles away. She told me, only half joking, “Of course you're not going back there.”

“Back where?” I asked.

“America.” It sounded like a dirty word.

“I don't live in America,” I said. “I live in Montana.” I smirked a little, thinking of my hometown, in which the police report tends to consist of cute items like somebody walking past The Paint Pot on Main Street called in to say they noticed through the window that a coffeemaker had been left on. Not exactly Florence and Normandie.

Still, Esther wouldn't drop it. “Why would you ever want to go back
there
?” she scowled, waving at the TV, where a palm tree was in flames.

“Because it's huge” was the only thing I could come up with.

I wished that I could describe the hugeness. That it wasn't just a huge mess. I wanted to tell Esther about the Montana sky and how it's so gigantic that Montana is called Big Sky Country and how I missed it so much I pretended that behind the constant Dutch ceiling of clouds there was a big range of mountains with snow way up top. I wanted to tell her that even though I liked being twenty minutes away from Amsterdam, I was the kind of person who will sit in a car for the thirteen-hour
drive to Seattle—for Esther the equivalent of driving to Greece—just to see a band I like. I wanted to tell her that every time I meet her for some dinky thimbleful of coffee in the student union I daydream about big steaming diner cups and so many free refills you can't help but talk real fast.

I wanted to tell her that looking at those riots on TV was digging a hole inside me and could she try and understand. But I ran out of there. I didn't have the heart to try and explain why my lunatic home-land was going up in smoke to a resident of that sane little country whose craziest cultural brouhaha had been the great tulip mania of 1636. I jumped on my little bike and rode through the little town past a couple of little windmills. I went up to my little room and fell to pieces.

I finally fell asleep after listening to a Beach Boys song about twenty-nine times on my Walkman—“Wouldn't It Be Nice.” Wouldn't it be nice if four people weren't dead because four other people mauled their fellow citizen with billy clubs, over and over and over again? Wouldn't it be nice if all those men and women weren't running onto freeways and shooting guns in the air and shooting guns at each other and looting TV sets out of stores and being teargassed and terrorized and slain? Wouldn't it be nice if that truck driver wasn't lying in some hospital bed barely hanging on because a mob tore him out of his truck and attacked him en masse? Justice, wouldn't that be nice? I guess I needed to hear towheaded California boys singing something
so beautiful and so sappy as “Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true.” The song ends “Sleep tight my baby.” I kept rewinding that part.