Something for the Dead
In a pastry shop in Palermo, in the last week of October, the window fills up with bones. They are sugar bones, and marzipan fruit, and little almond-paste skulls, and biscuits shaped and named, without the slightest squeamishness, ossa dei morti — the bones of the dead. Children press their faces to the glass. This is not a horror display. It is the most normal thing in the world. In a few days it will be the Day of the Dead, and in Sicily that means, above all, sweets — sweets made to be given to children in the name of dead relatives, sweets shaped like the very bones in the ground, eaten with relish and no apparent contradiction by the living and dedicated to the departed. I remember standing in front of one of these windows, some years ago, with the particular unease of a northern European confronting a culture entirely at ease with something his own culture handles by not mentioning it. Where I come from, death and food keep a careful distance from one another. ...
