The next day was the Mattanza, and we had to get up early to go out with the fishermen. It was dark and cold when Mom and Aunt Gabriella came and woke me and Ginevra, and though I put on jeans and a windbreaker my legs went numb as we bicycled out to the harbor. There we left the bikes and walked inside a stone building as big as a cathedral with huge arched doorways that opened right out onto the water, and ceilings so high they were invisible in the darkness. Federico told me that the building was a tonnara, a place where they bring the freshly caught tuna to be chopped up and probably also put into cans. About a hundred years ago this was the main business on this island—these big echoing places that looked like churches were all full of fishermen and fish. The islanders caught thousands of tuna, but left many to breed so that every year there were more and so there was, he said, a good understanding between men and the sea. But now there were too many big ships fishing with ultrasound and nets that took everything, and the tuna were dying out, and it was possible that this was one of the last old-style mattanze.
We waited at the dock for a while in the cold morning air while the sky got lighter, and the grown-ups drank coffee from a little bar that was open, and Ginevra and I drank hot milk with a little coffee. And we all gobbled down giant sugar-covered pastries called bombolone. Then we climbed into four open boats attached to each other by a thick rope. We were in the next to the last boat, Mom and Federico and I, and Ginevra with Uncle Massimo and Aunt Gabriella. And they towed us out into the middle of the bay, where we got out of our boat and into another, a big flat one that had been set up to form part of a square with other flat boats. Federico pointed out to Mom and me the nets under the boats that were also laid out in a square. Uncle Massimo told us that this was called la camera della morte—the death chamber. We were all talking in low voices, even Ginevra, because it was eerie waiting out there in the middle of the water with the island like a dark streak behind us and everybody’s face the color of cardboard in the gray dawn light. I leaned back against Mom, who had on a thick wool sweater, and she gave me a squeeze. “Talk about camera della morte,” she whispered. “We all look like corpses!” She hugged me tighter and added: “I don’t know what we’re doing here, sweetheart, but we chose to come, so if you can’t take it, close your eyes.”
The sky turned pink, and two boatloads of fishermen showed up. They looked like pirates: tanned brown as shoe leather, and one with a black ponytail down to his waist and tattoos on the sides of his neck, and another with peroxide blond hair frizzing out of a striped wool cap and a big gold ring in each ear. Federico said that the blond guy was the rais: the head of all the fishermen, and that by tradition the men had to obey his every command. All the day before, they’d been tracking the movements of a big school of tuna, and now the fish were about to swim into their trap. The fishermen shouted back and forth in a language that didn’t even sound like Italian, and Mom told me it was Favignana dialect, with a lot of Arabic words in it. They all began to pull on yellow waterproof jackets and pants, and then they moved to the edges of two big flat boats and stood in two lines facing each other over the water.
We all waited, and I felt my stomach clenching with suspense. As we waited the sun came up and a lot of other boats, full of families from the island, and other visitors, and even a television crew from Germany, joined us. After sunrise everyone, weirdly, began behaving like they were at a party. The grown-ups drank wine from paper cups, and we all ate sandwiches they call pane condito down in Sicily because they put oil and vinegar on the bread before adding tomato and prosciutto and cheese. Everyone laughed and talked and shouted jokes to the fishermen. The rais turned around to answer once or twice, laughing so that you could see all his big white teeth, but the rest of the men just stood like statues, staring out over the water. In the middle of the fishermen stood a small Japanese man in a warm-up suit. Federico said a Japanese company had bought the whole catch, and that in twenty-four hours the tuna would be sushi in Tokyo.
All of a sudden the tuna arrived. We saw one huge silver body inside of the square and then
