💙 The Blue-Eyed Sicilian 💙

Part One: I, Claudia

Pietro Parlante spent seven months searching for a precious green ore in a little-known region of Tajikistan, digging and blasting around the sites of the famous geologist Paulo Lazuli. By chance, Pietro hit upon an enormous strata of ceramic shards and stone artefacts. These turned out to be remnants of a small town on the Silk Road. The town, translated Monkey Business, began trading around 2800 BC and was destroyed by the Mongols in 1227 AD. The artifacts contained proof of continuous trade between the Middle East and China for 4000 years. This lead to the revelation that everything the Chinese were supposed to have invented had in fact come from the Persians and Mesopotamians. Paper, the compass, the printing press, gunpowder, noodles, the abacus — the greatest inventions of China were in fact cheap knocks-offs.

Chinese historians could barely suppress their anger. Only with great reluctance did they allude to Pietro’s discovery — and even then, only in coded notes at the bottom of their annotated bibliographies. They were careful to place his name in the middle of long final entries, under headings such as Xenolithic Obscurities and ZrSiO4 & Four Other Old Ideas.

Two meters below Monkey Business, Pietro rejoined a slim trail of bright green flecks, interspersed with silver and crystal striations. The slim trail widened, plunging deep into the ground. Pietro had discovered the richest vein of mystocryptic ore the world has ever seen: 75,000 metric tonnes of the stuff. One week later Pietro returned to Palermo with a monthly stipend of 50 million euros.

Prior to Pietro’s discovery, only two small deposits of mystocryptic ore were known to exist within the mineral-rich crust of Planet Earth. Both deposits were trapped beneath a petroleum sea in northern Alberta. This subterranean sea was 1.2 kilometres deep and 1.8 thousand kilometres wide. To make matters even more difficult for the Albertans, this petroleum sea was itself trapped beneath a thick belt of tar-like sand which contained about as much oil as Saudi Arabia. Initially, the executives at Black Alberta Gold barely gave the bright green ore a second thought. Upon testing, however, they found that it was composed of a unique multidimensional latticework. Upon further experimentation, they discovered that this latticework could process 256 million algebraic curves simultaneously.

The calculations made possible with silicon and germanium processors started to look more and more like the calculations made on an abacus — which, Pietro pointed out was invented in Sumer five thousand years ago, and was only manufactured in Chang’an sweatshops for the last two thousand years. He added, And donta talka to mee abouta za pasta! 

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The first thing Pietro did with the money was rescue Grillo, his crotchety father, from his meaningless job at Geppetto Corp. According to Grillo, working conditions at the woodworking factory were far worse than in a Wushan sweatshop. Grillo forbade his son to even make a comparison in that direction. Raising his index finger and clenching in the other hand a monthly report, Grillo shouted that managers like him were continually pressured by upper level managers, who knew nothing about the laziness of the Sicilian factory worker. The upper level managers were themselves pressured to increase production by talking corporate heads in Palermo. These, in turn, bobbed and jerked at the behest of mafia dons in Naples and Rome. Somewhere at the very top was Mangiafuoco, the Fire-Eater himself.

The hierarchy of the corporate structure looked something like this: 

Grillo's dull blue eyes bulged from his face (and took slightly different trajectories) every time he looked into the eyes of the cross-eyed lackey named Stupendo, who had the same blue eyes, a mass of frothy orange hair (mostly on his eyebrows), and a luminescent lime forehead. Stupendo had lost both his arms in two different lathe accidents — both times because he couldn't tell the difference between the on and the off switch. To Grillo's disbelief, not only did the union defend Stupendo; they made him Grillo's co-manager. This meant that Grillo had to explain every decision he made to Stupendo, who couldn't understand basic things like twenty-minute breaks, two-hour lunches, or not looping electrical wires over bandsaws. 

When Grillo left for work Monday morning, he looked calm, almost philosophical. When he came home from work Friday evening, he looked like a bird ready to fly into another dimension, his disordered beak-face right out of a painting by Picasso.

His left eye twirled into places so demented that only the tight red scarf around his neck could rescue him by cutting off the blood. 

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Pietro’s quest for mystocryptic ore was part of a larger obsession with finding things that other people couldn’t find. This obsession was in turn part of an even larger obsession: he had to know more than anyone else. Especially more than his father, who professed to know everything.

Pietro was certain that he knew more than anyone in Palermo. He also felt that he knew more than anyone in the entire Mezzogiorno, from the dimwitted professors at the University of Naples to the lazy philosophers in the Greek cafés of Syracuse. Beyond the Mezzogiorno were idiots who couldn’t speak Italian properly. What they did or didn’t know was of little consequence. In any case, he knew more about what they pretended to know than they would ever know. Donald Rumsfeld once argued that in addition to known unknowns there were also unknown unknowns. Pietro didn’t believe that for an instant. He was smarter than Donald Rumsfeld any day.

His sister Francesca complained that Italians think they know everything, and that they always manage to find the words to say what they think. She said, They can't shut up, even for one minute! Especially her boyfriend, who couldn’t stop talking about his new motorcycle. She yelled, Why doesn’t he just shut up about it? You think you can find anything, Pietrino? Well, try to find even one Sicilian in this hellhole of a town who can't find the words to say exactly what he wants. I dare you!

At first he thought she was joking. But she wasn’t. So he decided to prove her wrong. He knew more than she would ever know.

Francesca had one condition: he couldn't count Italians who couldn't find the words they needed on grounds of political ideology. In this category she included train ticket sellers, bus drivers, government workers, and everyone else associated with a union. Pietro was undaunted. He was sure that out of sixty million Italians, he could find at least one (outside the unionized service sector) who couldn’t find the words to say what was on his mind.

Francesca told him that it was ridiculous to even try. She then started talking, again, about how her boyfriend refused to listen to her. She said he never stopped talking about his big yellow Ducati, the one with the enormous engine and smooth clutch. He keeps telling me that I’d love it, if I just let him put it between my legs. I tried to tell him that I’d — but at this point Pietro saw the magnitude of his task. He abruptly excused himself, and, while Francesca added a further complication — He said he was even willing to stick a muffler on his exhaust pipe — Pietro slipped out the door. He said good day to the doorman and stepped out onto Via della Libertà.

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It wasn’t as easy as he imagined. Everywhere he looked, people were talking, articulating exactly what was on their mind. Try as he might, he was unable to find a single Italian who was at a loss for words. So he decided to attack the problem with the methodological rigour he reserved for geological exploration. He first canvassed the neighbourhood, accumulating facts and figures. To ensure accuracy, he conducted induced polarization surveys: he hammered iron stakes into the corners of cafés and measured the ratio of electrical charge to resistance in each room.

After making numerous calculations, he was despondent. It was a near statistical certainty that any given Italian would be capable of saying exactly what was on their mind. He once heard a goatish, grey-bearded tourist complain to a pretty waitress, They just blab on and on, and it all sounds like gibberish! Pietro resented the charge of gibberish, yet the old goat was right about the on and on.

Yet it was only a near statistical certainty, not an absolute statistical certainty. He was damned if he couldn't find that one crucial exception. He could see it now: Francesca and the old goat commiserating arm in arm, tears dripping down their faces. The old goat would then try to speak to her in Italian, listing off brand names and menu items, as if the average Italian woman could be even half as dim-witted as he was.

Pietro was determined to find, somewhere in Palermo, something even more rare than a vein of mystocryptic ore beneath the rugged hills of Tajikistan. 

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Pietro soon realized that his mistake had been in his selection of sample group. It was useless to gather data from cafés and bars: the layers of sound were so dense that his sensors couldn’t detect aberrant rifts or fissures among the jagged strata of people talking over other people. He thought to himself, It would be easier to tell the remains of a Shang Dynasty warehouse from a Zhou Dynasty noodle house!

So he decided to set up a research station in the nearby Giardino Inglese. He reasoned that the tranquility of an English garden and the spectre of a foreign culture might provide the calm laboratory-like environment where he could measure the gap between the intention to think something and the ability to say that thing.

Entering the park, he followed a wide path that lead toward a large pond with a statue of two children playing in the middle. 

He saw a young woman of exceptional beauty sitting with a laptop on a bench. She was staring into the misty latticework of water, greenery, and light. Her green eyes shone like mystocryptic ore, bright with a million thoughts. 

Pietro stepped across her line of vision and set down his electrodes, iron stakes, wires, hammer, and voltage monitor. Trying to be discreet, he sat down at a 45 degree angle. But he couldn’t stop staring at her. He turned his head left and right so that she would think he was just looking around the park. 

After five minute of his head see-sawing back and forth, he began to feel seasick. Yet he couldn't stop himself from glancing starboard at her sea-green eyes, with their dark teal depths circling in swells the black whirlpools of her pupils. Her blonde hair swirled above his shipwrecked soul like a shredded white flag. 100% blonde. Roots and all. He grabbed a stake and hammered it into the ground to steady himself.

Encouraged by the fact that she wasn’t clutching a cellphone, Pietro wondered if he had found his Quiet Italian. She simply looked around her — at the statue of a boy and a girl playing in the mid-April sun.  

She looked up into the bright blue sky. Pietro entertained the possibility that she was in fact the blonde angel of his dreams. Pietro was a man of science, and didn’t believe in angels. But there she was. She was beyond beautiful. She was a modern-day Beatrice Portinari! The purity of her face, the clarity of her eyes, could not be read by any meter.

In this one moment Pietro’s life changed forever. Like when Dante saw Beatrice at the water fountain, or on the banks of the Arno. Each vision deeper than the first. 

He surrendered. It was fated to be. He realized that science was for dolts. Only poetry mattered. He would live to praise her, and she would guide him through the world to come. He would be her Dante, and sing her praises here in the world below.

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In Palermo, a woman with aquamarine eyes is uncommon. A woman with aquamarine eyes and truly blonde hair is almost a miracle. In most cases, it warrants a consultation with the local priest.

Yet for Claudia these attributes were a source of tribulation. Because of them she was both hated and loved. The women hated her because the men loved her. The women were quick to add that the men loved her not because of any virtue or talent she possessed. Rather, they loved her because her hair was unnaturally blonde. Drained of all rich, natural colour. Because she was a freak of nature. Something the Normans must have done.

The men’s version was different. Leaning back in their caffé chairs, they resurrected the old Greek notion, the old Mezzogiorno notion, that beauty and goodness are one. They quoted passages from Homer in which the most beautiful goddesses had fair locks and light-coloured eyes. White-armed Nausicaa. Grey-eyed Athena. They concluded that a beautiful blue-eyed blonde was a gift even greater than the gold-studded mosaics that covered the inside of the Norman church in Monreale, just up the hill from Palermo.

Claudia had nothing to say about all that. Years ago she had turned her thoughts elsewhere — to poetry and psychology, to geography and history, and to philosophies that explored the meaning of life. As soon as she finished her scuola superiore, she enrolled at the University of Palermo, taking courses in English language and literature, Human Geography, and International Politics.

Claudia’s biggest interest was the relation between doubt and belief. She was on the side of doubt, yet felt a deep need to know why so many people believed that they'd found the Truth. With a capital T. Catholics had the One Truth. Protestants had the One Truth. Muslims had the One Truth. Atheists knew with absolute certainty that all the believers were wrong. Claudia, on the other hand, had no faith whatsoever. In anything. Nor in nothing.

One day she felt like there must be a Divine Scheme of Things that made everything come together. Yet the next day she felt that the world was a mess of hatred, prejudice, tyranny, and absurdity. Whenever she looked around her, she saw life from a different angle. In the morning her eyes seemed bluish green, and in the afternoon they seemed greenish blue. A world of seems. Her skin was honey-coloured at dawn, amber at dusk.

She opened her laptop and wrote a poem, which she dedicated to grey-eyed Athena:

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Grey

A Trick of the Light

The morning glistens and there has to be a God,

because the air itself is a prism of many colours.

Then the day wanes, and there can’t be a God,

because everything is swallowed up in darkness.

A Trick of the Night

The day wanes, and there can’t be a God,

because everything is swallowed up in darkness.

Then the morning glistens and there has to be a God,

because the air itself is a prism of many colours.

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She shut her screen and looked up at the children, frozen in childhood in the mist. How innocent it all seemed! Yet she knew she wasn't like the girl in the fountain, made of bronze, forever stretching her arm out gently through the spray, forever lifting up the boy she cared for. Her life wasn't a Grecian Urn. The words of Keats skipped through her mind — Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair! — and disappeared in the mist.

She knew that the boy would grow up, grow out of love, go off on his separate path. She knew that she too would grow old, put on Shakespeare’s lean and slippered pantaloon, and die. The park itself would succumb, in time, to space. The great globe itself — / Yea, all which it inherit — shall dissolve, / And like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.

She opened her Mac Air. Looking up to the blue sky and then down to the luminous white square beneath, she started her philosophy term paper:

Questions

Can we not affirm, with geometric precision, that we all see the world from our own unique angles? Do these angles not change every time we turn our heads, every time we walk into another room? Do they not change every minute we breathe, as the neuron currents of thought and feeling reinvent the world outside?

We float in a sea of indeterminacies, yet most people like to talk about platonic notions of certainty. Even atheists cling to Science, as if it were the Sun and all the religious people in the world were worshipping candle-lit shadows in a cave. How can so many people be so completely convinced that they see reality as it is? As it is. What on Nature’s green earth does reality mean?  

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Claudia looked up into the sky, the blue sky peopled with fantastical beings … this majestic roof fretted with golden fire ... nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende fu’ io … in the Heaven that receives more of His light was I … . How, she wondered, do people go from giving airy spaces a habitation and a name to believing that their fabrications are real? How can anyone profess to know the truth about this life or the next? If there is a next...

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine it: one moment she's lying on her deathbed and the next moment she's in some other where, some other when, all of which pops up in front of her the moment she dies.

She opened her eyes. The sky was still blue.

She knew there were other skies beyond the sky she knew. There had to be life somewhere else in the universe. She hoped that there would also be another life for her. But did hoping make it so? If only there was some nexus of meaning and she could plug into the universe. But all she saw were fabrications, excuses, dreams, and hopes.

As a girl she had been frustrated with adults and their explanations. When her parents told her, Gesù è morto perché abbiamo peccato, Jesus died because we sinned, she would ask, Ma perché? They thought she wanted to know the cause behind the cause they had just given her. Her mother seemed to think that everything was one big chain of Cause and Effect, going back to the Primum Mobile, the ninth heaven where everything was spun into motion. This is what she’d been told in church. But it all went over her head, sort of like the Primum Mobile. 

Her father put it more bluntly: Because the Bible says so. Yet he wasn’t anywhere near the Primum Mobile and the Bible seemed to her like a collection of old stories. She wanted real reasons, not the circular arguments they were passing off as reasons. 

Was she really supposed to believe what the priests were telling her? She had watched the way the priests watched her. By fourteen she’d decided that you couldn’t trust a thing they said. Or did. Or said they did.

She found some escape from her endless questioning in her third and final year at university. She found this escape in the oddest place: a course called Defining Politics in North America. It was taught in English by a visiting instructor from Canada, a bald, straggly-bearded man in his early forties. The focus of the course was on the way political definitions affected foreign policy.

Professor Kent had a jovial air, yet he also had the Devil in his eye. He was always joking, yet his jokes always lead to some point, uncomfortably lodged between the respect students had for traditional ideas and the urge they had to burn these ideas in a bonfire in the middle of a forest at midnight.

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Next: 💙 Part Two: Il Giardino Inglese

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