Andrea Camilleri, with his usual mastery of blending memory and poetry, takes us back to a Sicily of other times, when the night between 1st and 2nd November was an affectionate bridge between the living and the dead. “The day the dead lost their way home” tells of a tradition that has almost disappeared today, made up of expectations, gifts and sweet rituals that transformed death into a familiar and reassuring presence. A tender and melancholic memory of a deep bond, now lost, between generations.
“Until 1943, on the night between the first and second of November, every Sicilian house where there was a little boy was filled with deaths familiar to him. Not ghosts with the white sheet and the rustle of chains, mind you, not the scary ones, but just as they were seen in the photographs displayed in the living room, worn out, the occasional half-smile printed on the face, the good suit ironed to perfection, they made no difference to the living. Before going to bed, we Nicareddri people would put a wicker basket under the bed (the size varied depending on how much money there was in the family) which the dearly departed would fill with sweets and gifts at night that we would find on the 2nd morning when we woke up.
Excited, sweaty, we struggled to sleep: we wanted to see our dead, as they came with light steps to the bed, caressed us, lowered themselves to pick up the basket. After a restless sleep we woke up at dawn to go searching. Because the dead wanted to play with us, to have fun with us, and therefore they didn’t put the basket back where they had found it, but went to hide it carefully, they had to look for it house to house. Never again will I feel the heartbeat of the discovery when I discovered the overflowing basket on a wardrobe or door. The toys were tin trains, wooden cars, rag dolls, wooden cubes that formed landscapes. I was 8 years old when grandfather Giuseppe, long entreated in my prayers, brought me the legendary Meccano from the afterlife and out of happiness I broke out with a few lines of fever.
The desserts were 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 shortage of the “sugar doll” 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, with our hair combed and dressed in order, we went with the family to the cemetery to greet and thank the dead. For us children it was a party, we swarmed along the paths to meet up with friends, schoolmates: “What did the dead bring you this year?”. A question that we didn’t ask Tatuzzo Prestìa, who was exactly our age, that November 2nd when we saw him standing and composed in front of the tomb of his father, who had passed away the year before, while holding the handlebars of a shiny 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, with the American soldiers the Christmas tree arrived and slowly, year after year, the dead lost the road that took them to the homes where their children or their children’s children were waiting for them, happy and awake to the point of dying. Sin. We had lost the possibility of touching, physically, that thread that links our personal history to that of those who preceded 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 those who have learned to die have forgotten how to serve”.
From: “The Day the Dead Lost Their Way Home” from Daily stories by Andrea Camilleri (Mondadori, 2008, pp. 103, €9.00.)
