The Goddess in Love with a Horse. New York: Spring Harbor Press, 2008. by Eugene Mirabelli
Magic is the word that comes to mind when I think of the novels of Eugene Mirabelli. In many of his earlier novels, he does follow the social realism that we associate with the conventional social novel. But in ‘The Goddess in Love with a Horse’, he has returned to the fertile ground he cultivated in The World at Noon. In The Goddess he does not just go back to the same subject matter; rather, he takes flight in an altogether more imaginative version of the genealogical descent of the Cavallù/di Mare family.
Mirabelli does not merely use myth in the conventional manner, as background to his narrative. Rather, he is a mythmaker. He begins The Goddess with a scene taken from The World at Noon, that night just before Ava was about to enter her nuptial bed with Angelo. To her great surprise, she discovers that below the waist he has the hindquarters of a horse. She has married a centaur.
He is a man who represents the unrestrained passion of a millennium of Sicilians. If Mirabelli has a predecessor in the form of the novel, it is Gabriel Garcia Marques’s One Hundred years of Solitude. Such writing has justifiably earned the description of “magical realism.” Mirabelli’s Goddess is grounded in the long and storied history of Sicily. Mirabelli weaves the tortured strands of Sicilian history with the events and people who make up the Cavallù/di Mare families, from nineteenth century Sicily and Calabria to mid century America.
In the course of his fictional narrative, Garibaldi appears, bent upon revolution and freeing the Sicilians from their historical yoke of foreign domination and colonization. As Mirabelli writes, “the agony that is Sicilian history is too terrible to write.” Yes, Ava is shocked by Angelo’s hindquarters. But there is a payoff, as Angelo explains to her that fateful night before their nuptial bed. Anyone who makes love with Angelo will inherit three gifts: “child birth will be easy, her milk will be sweet,” and “she will be beautiful forever.”
Most important of all, these gifts will be passed on to their daughters, for generations to come, but only if they make love often enough. We don’t know what exactly happened that night. Mirabelli is not long on the details. But he does tell us that all of Ava’s births were easy, all their daughters were exceptionally beautiful, and all the sons were born with the hindquarters of a horse.
There is also Franco Morelli, a rationalist and mathematician, who one day betrays his own nature and becomes quite irrational. One day he meets Stella di Mare, who in 1860 works in the bordello Conca d’Oro in Reggio Calabria. When Franco first meets Stella in that bordello, she is to him a goddess. In spite of Stella’s lowly condition as a common whore, he is smitten beyond all reason.
He tells her “you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” Stella admits that not only is she beautiful but that she is also a goddess. In the history of that land they inhabit, like Angelo, she also represents its mythical past. She is a sea nymph, siren, or perhaps a descendant of Lesbos, where Sappho was born and the birthplace of the most beautiful women in the Mediterranean world. Her fisherman father once told her that she had no mortal parents. He found her at sea one day.
Franco abandons all reason. He falls madly in love with Stella right there on the spot that night, in spite of her profession. Stella says, yes, she will marry Franco, but to be sure that he is sincere, she requires a test: he must surreptitiously observe her at work for one night. Mercifully, Mirabelli spares us the details.
This is myth, after all, not realism. But he does tell us that Stella and Franco were married soon after, and they had more children than anyone can possibly remember. In spite of Franco’s great knowledge of mathematics, with such beauty and passion, what do the numbers matter? What Mirabelli does in the course of his novel, as he follows the genealogical descent of the Cavallù/di Mare family, is to intertwine the history and the myth of those two mythological lands, Calabria and Sicily, with the lives of his characters.\
Both are lands overwritten with ancient myth. The passion that Angelo and Ava share reminds us of Leda and the Swan, Daphne and Apollo, Hades’ rape of Proserpine, the Rape of the Sabine Women, and even Michelangelo’s erotic Garden of Eden joke, to the pope’s great chagrin, that he painted into the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
What is more, Calabria and Sicily were once the homes of Herodotus, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Icarus and Daedalus, as well as thousands of other mythical and historical figures. Hercules herded the cattle of Geryon through Calabria. If I mix my metaphors, mythical and historical, it’s because Mirabelli does not see much distinction between the two. His men are centaurs, his women goddesses. Garibaldi is a hero, who in the imagination inhabits the borderland between god and historical figure.
But what else is new in mythology, where gods mingle among mere mortals? The realism in Mirabelli’s narrative is that this is a story of success in that other mythical land, known among Italian immigrants as ‘La Merica’. It is a narrative about how the various branches of the family go on to heights never dreamed of by their ancestors. From Sicilian history Mirabelli goes to the history of his two families, leading all the way to modern-day, freeway-clogged Los Angeles in 1960.
The descendants of the Cavallù/di Mare clans endure the hardships of Southern Italian life, survive revolution, live through earthquakes, fight in world wars, and immigrate to America. But the great myths underlying their legendary pasts are never forgotten. This is a familiar narrative to millions of Italian Americans. The wings of Icarus and Daedalus become the carefully engineered wings of Aldo Vela’s airplanes. Aldo is the descendant of the Cavallù clan. He, too, like Franco, is a man of reason, but, like Angelo, a man of passion, of imagination.
Things change in America, but somehow they always remain the same, if you know just where to look in Mirabelli’s story. When Aldo meets Molly with her milk-white complexion, his future wife in Boston at the turn of the century, she tells him, “You’re an Eye-talian.” “Yes,” Aldo responds, “In this country I’m an Italian.” But “in Italy I would be a Sicilian.” When a perplexed Molly asks, “What is a Sicilian,” Aldo can’t answer: “That would be a long story,” he tells her. The Sicilian immigrant story is implicit in his quest to make airplanes and fly. Aldo is to his planes what Daedalus and Icarus were to flight and imagination.
All Sicilian immigrants took flight from their historical bondage, that terrible Sicilian past, to that mythical land, La Merica. Aldo is simultaneously the craftsman, Daedalus, and the imaginative and daring Icarus. These are traits he will pass on to his sons. It is the dream of flight, from that very complex Sicilian past that Aldo pursues, whether he knows it or not. He is the marriage of the rationality and passion of Franco Morelli. He soars with the imagination of a Stella di Mare and Aldo Cavallù.
In the end it is the beauty of flying that he is after, the mechanics are only, again, those unspoken details, the mere means to that imaginative end. Daedalus, the craftsman, provided the means, though his son soared too high. Aldo never makes that mistake. His son shares his passion for flying, goes to war, and survives World War II as a fighter pilot in the famous P-38. He like Icarus, in his foolishness to join the war, was shot down in Sicily, like Icarus, but he survived.
Mirabelli’s mythical narrative ends, somewhere near Lexington after World War II, with the decedents of the Cavallù clan, Pacifico and his wife Marianna, who had nine children. That is certainly more descendants that anyone can reasonably be expected to remember. They had a big home in Lexington and a villa in Sicily. Pacifico died one day in 1948 after a good dinner of melanzana con mozzarella. In 1955, Marianna died one morning, but not before she saw “her grandmother, the goddess, standing tiptoe on a big scallop shell that floated on the waters off the beach at Mondello, standing and beckoning as if she weighed nothing at all.”
Kenneth Scambray is the author of A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller (U. of Pittsburgh P., 1987), and The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada (Guernica, 2000), and Surface Roots: Stories (Guernica, 2004). His most recent book is entitled Queen Calafía’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). He has been book critic for L’Italo-Americano since 1978. In 2007 he won the Editor’s Choice Award for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize for his poem “Piece Work” awarded each year by the Paterson Literary Review. He is currently at work on a project on Italians in the West.
