Pulling My Strings

A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.

His buff, black-trimmed overcoat has seen better days. So has he.

A gaunt, elderly, hollowed-out face, frozen in place like the face of a carved wooden puppet, stares at the landscape from a train moving at 185 mph from Rome to Napoli. His deep-set, brown eyes sparkle.

His concentration—or maybe his detachment or maybe his disinterest in life—is disrupted when espressos and biscotti are served. In the way of travelers, an occasion to acknowledge each other. In an interval between sips of coffee, when he learns that I am eventually heading to Sicily, he launches into a revelry about puppetry. His cheek and forehead muscles come alive.

“The marionettes are Sicily’s voice,” he says. “You must go.” Puppetry, he tells me, is called “opera dei pupi’ or opera of the puppets.

Sicilian puppetry dates to ancient Greece. At one point, the Catholic Church engaged marionettes to perform morality plays. The word comes from Mary doll, or Virgin Mary. When the art form evolved to include comedy, Church killjoys banned it. Irrepressible, liberated and uncensored, in the streets outside the cathedral walls the puppeteers produced ever more bawdy themes and stories—and attracted ever larger audiences.

The Antonio Pasqualino International Museum of Marionettes in Palermo is a glimpse into the workings of a world unto itself—a subculture within the Sicilian culture which is a subculture within the larger Italian culture. Four thousand puppets—mostly Crusaders, knights and nobles, but also Vietnamese water puppets, Indonesian shadow puppets, African stage masks, children’s finger puppets—are on display.

On the main stage, inanimate, four-foot wooden figures, dressed in elaborate costumes, are given voice and brought to life by unseen actors. The little people on stage gesture, walk, talk, dance, fight, die.

For an expressionless, chiseled block of wood, each puppet has first-rate communication skills. Better than some of the blockhead faculty members where I teach high-school history.

The puppets, if nothing else, are enthusiastic. Despite troubled plot lines—love and death, war and peace, honor and dishonor—the puppets are a portrait of straightforward innocence. The heroes believe in themselves. Nothing in the known world can stop them.

At the height of the action, I am enchanted, enthralled, lost in their world. They are pulling my strings, tugging at my heart. In the moment, I forget that the puppets are puppets without souls. In the moment, they have borrowed mine.

As I watch the dolls strut across the stage, their hands flailing, their struggles and triumphs revealed, their round, innocent eyes watching me, they have made their stories my story. My mouth is dry. My palms sweaty.

Who or what am I willing to die for? the puppet-heroes ask and answer with conviction.

Who or what are you willing to die for? they want to know of me. For my wife’s honor, would I slay a dragon? To rescue my family, would I prove myself against armies?

The park outside the museum-theater is reverentially quiet, the trees silent, the wind resting at the end of the day. My adrenaline rush recedes, fading to a restless hunger. Beer and pizza sound good.

The crusades will wait.

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