Piero, who loved me very much, first took me to Favignana. He was
thirty-eight, a fisherman of Mondello, near Palermo. He was a good man in a
dying trade, a fisherman to the core of his soul. His boat, his nets, and
the sea were his life....Piero paid for my Italian lessons with a sack of
mackerel. I learned quickly and after just three months was writing for the
local monthly newspaper. But as soon as I could speak his language Piero and
I began to fight. All he could think of or talk about was fish. But I loved
Sicily, so I stayed.
In May, without a telephone call, through some ethereal link between
fishermen, Piero learned that the Favignana tuna trap had been set. I never
believed Piero would leave Mondello and his nets, but we packed two small
bags and left the next morning. We took a city bus into Palermo, then a
coach two hours west to Trąpani, spent a night in a pensione, and boarded
the first ferry the next morning. At seven-thirty we landed at Favignana and
took a room. Piero had brought me here to see a killing, and that was all I
knew.
We waited days. Half a century before Piero's father had killed tuna in
Mondello, so he knew what was going on. "They are waiting for their trap to
fill," he said.
So on the second day of June 1986 I found myself standing in a
seventy-five-foot open wooden boat with no motor. "It never had a motor,"
Piero said. The boat was black and shiny with pitch, and we were being towed
to sea. A couple hundred people were crowded on its deck. The sun was yellow
and hot, the sea smooth as oil. A castle on a mountaintop seemed to watch
us. The island's cliffs slid by slowly as we glided out of port.
After ten minutes we were a mile and a half out to sea. The boats formed
three sides of a square on the perimeter of the trap somewhere in the water
below us. Some fishermen lifted one edge of a net and secured it along the
gunwale of our boat. The cords that held it up were twisted fiber ropes,
frizzled, golden, thick as a man's arm. Palm fronds waved on a pole to the
east, three hundred yards distant. We waited for hours.
More fishermen in another longboat like ours a hundred yards east closed
the square. The men on it stood silhouetted against the sun, pulling up the
other end of the net. As they pulled, the sea inside the square turned from
navy blue to lapis lazuli to luminescent turquoise.
After a while huge black shapes rose up into the back-lit square. Their
slow rising was mystical, like a birth. They rose higher. Dorsal fins
swirled, wild animals drawn up from a silent abyss.
They were giants, eight feet long, some bigger, and there were hundreds
of them. The net was drawn taut, and they skittered in front of us, half out
of the water. I looked into their glassy black eyes. The fish were as big as
men, some bigger than four men. When their tails slapped the water it rose
in columns above our heads. I remember the din, the thunder of falling
water, and their frantic thrashing. They darted to the corners of the net,
but there was no way out.
The crowd went wild. People were soaked, screaming and cheering. Piero
was delirious with joy. These fishermen were his heroes; their net was full
of fighting giant bluefins. It was a scene he saw in his dreams, but he was
awake and this was real. Piero tried to pull me back from the edge, but I
was riveted. The fish were churning the sea into a white froth, and then the
froth turned pink.
When the thrashing calmed they were battered, bleeding and floating on
their sides, but they were still alive. The men leaned over the side of
their longboat and reached out with barbed gaffs to snag the tuna nearest
them. A group of men worked one giant tuna into an upright position against
the side of the boat, with the fish's head out of the water. This took ten
minutes. Once they gaffed it they held it vertical, half out of the water,
and rested a moment.
When the dying tuna quivered it shook the eight men who held it. Its form
was a perfect giant pointed egg. Its skin was polished marble, blue as the
earth from space. It changed colors as it died. Shimmering veils of
opalescent pink and green washed over it. Red blood streamed from a gash in
its flank. The men got ready to lift.
They counted to two and heaved the fish to the gunwale, balanced it there
on the fulcrum, and rested. One man grabbed a dorsal fin and one a ventral,
so when the fish raised its tail again, they used its own impetus to heave
it head first into the hold, falling forward to avoid the blow. The fish
thumped out its life like thunder.
This killing went on for an hour; the blue square turned red. When the
last fish was taken, the currents cleared the square of the blood and milky
water that clouded it. After five minutes the fishermen lowered the net
again into limpid blue water. The dead tuna, in their long black boat, were
towed away to another shore, and the tourists, in ours, were towed back to
port. No one spoke for a long time. What had I just seen? An eruption, a
paroxysm. A font of primal energy, beauty, and suffering, all in a tiny
square of sea. It was shocking, and most beautiful.
We packed, caught the ferry to Trąpani, the bus to Palermo, another to
Mondello, and went home.
Piero and I eventually split up. But I kept going back to Favignana in
the spring. At first I just wanted to see this strange, primitive spectacle,
to feel again the strange mix of emotions it stirred in me. Then I had to
find out what it took to set up such an enormous trap, and how it came to
be, and I went back year after year to learn.
The mattanza was Piero's finest gift, a fisherman's dream, and he gave it
to me. He brought me to that slaughter as an act of love, so I saw it as a
thing of beauty.
From
Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily, by Theresa Maggio.
© Theresa Maggio and Perseus
Books. Used by permission.
Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily is available
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