Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  On a wall near a window hung a black and white photograph in a frame. Pasquale took it down and held it to the light. It showed three young men standing by some big rocks. They looked Sicilian, and so did the rocks. The men were smartly dressed in country gear and the one in the middle was grinning. It was Salvatore Giuliano the bandit, with his cousin Gaspare Pisciotta and his brother-in-law Pasquale Sciorino. The photo was taken outside the mill fifty years ago. We went downstairs and Pasquale showed me a door that Giuliano’s men had hacked into the back wall of the mill. If they saw carabinieri coming up from Partinico, they had quick and unseen access to the hills. Giuliano photographed well. He was goodlooking, dark and not yet twenty-one when he’d shot the first carabiniere and taken to the hills behind us. He posed willingly with his guns and his gold belt buckles for the Italian and foreign journalists. The glamour of the Giuliano myth was such that when Francesco Rosi made his starkly late neorealist film Salvatore Giuliano in the early sixties, the people of Montelepre threw eggs at the screen in protest during its brief season in that town, or so the composer Stravinsky was told when he visited Sicily just after the film’s release. Leonardo Sciascia saw the film among an audience of Sicilian peasants who shouted with laughter during the most harrowing death scene, because they’d never seen themselves in a film before.

  The mill was a maze of discontinuous rooms, alcoves, passages, landings on different levels. There were iron beds in some of the rooms and little other furniture, apart from roughly fashioned bookshelves everywhere. He’d made it liveable piecemeal over the years. There were books and papers everywhere. They seemed to be in total disorder, but every time he wanted to check some obscure detail, he found it instantly. Pasquale was a person of eclectic interests. He’d published a bibliography of Italian fascist writings and an extremely learned history of the fork and its use at the dining table, its evolution from the ancient Greeks, almost but not quite down to modern wielders of plastic forks and eaters of junk food. In Pasquale’s hands, the fork became an index of civilization.

  * * *

  TABLE FORKS, he reminded me, hadn’t always been with us. The instrument used daily by billions was a fairly recent invention and not at all inevitable. The Chinese had created a plurimillennial civilization that bypassed the fork entirely. There were no forks used at the Homeric beach barbecues with which the epos of western dining began. They put their hands on the food, said Homer again and again, when a banquet began in the Odyssey. And so people ate for many centuries. The knife had been the fork’s ancestor, as its use extended from cutting meat or cheese or fruit at table to spearing portions. The appearance of the fork, specifically designed for spearing food and delivering it to the mouth, was hard to pin down in time. When did this separate instrument appear, to be held in the other hand and used in conjunction with the cutting knife? The moment would have marked a qualitative leap in refinement and luxury, not to say personal hygiene. At Plato’s Symposium, guests were eating with their hands and most people went on doing so for the next millennium.

  Ovid, in his Art of Love, implied an absence of cutlery in Roman high society by advising women, in Peter Green’s translation, Take your food with dainty fingers … Don’t besmear your whole face with a greasy paw. Protoforks however were very much in use by Nero’s time at Trimalchio’s lavish and hugely vulgar dinner party in the Satyricon, though cutlery still hadn’t made the great split of spearing from cutting functions. Arbiter elegantiae, Petronius would have remarked on it. What happened to the fork after that was inseparable from the decline and fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity. As the Goths and Huns and Ostrogoths descended on Rome, Roman civilization had decamped to the new capital in the east, and the proto-table fork and table manners had gone sailing to Byzantium with it. The Huns, when they ate their raw meat after tenderizing it under their saddles for a few days, ate it with their hands.

  The first person in recorded history to use what was indisputably a modern table fork was, Pasquale said, a Byzantine princess called Maria who arrived in Venice toward the end of the tenth century to marry the doge. Saint Pier Damiani, who probably didn’t himself get to see her do it, because Princess Maria died of the plague in 1005 when the future saint was seventeen, wrote that she didn’t touch her food with her own hands, but had it cut up into bite-sized pieces by her eunuchs. The princess then raised these morsels to her mouth fuscinulis aureis bidentibus, with little gold two-pronged forks. The detail would’ve been noticed because the church regarded the use of the fork as sinful. Pier Damiani was making a point. He was himself more given to fasting and flagellation than to eating and drinking. Dante noted his abstinence in the Comedy. The table fork was a sign of that oriental decadence the fathers of the western church were casting their anathemas against, and the saint was convinced the Byzantine princess’s use of the table fork had been one of the luxurious habits which caused the outbreak of plague that killed her and her husband the doge.

  In Sicily the Arab courts were as opulent as Byzantium, and when the Normans arrived at the beginning of the eleventh century, Palermo and Naples became the centre of civilized Europe. The crusades, said Pasquale, which started as a convulsion of religious fanaticism, ended up as a civilizing experience of cultural exchange for the Mediterranean area. The table fork made great inroads at this time around its western shores, in all those cities that were in touch with Byzantium and the east. By this time life had improved in the west, and the church of Rome was now busy denouncing the luxury at home. In the Abbess of Hohenbur’s twelfth-century codex Hortus Deliciarium, a miniature showed a dinner table in the garden of delights laid with very conspicuous forks. Saint Bernard stormed out of the convent at Cluny around this time, in protest against its cuisine gourmet, and in the following century Saint Bonaventura wrote a treatise De Disciplina Circa Comestionem, on discipline in eating, which condemned luxury and greed and harped back monotonously to the just punishment suffered by the unfortunate Byzantine princess and her husband the doge to whom she introduced the table fork.

  All the theologians of the day agreed that the table fork was a tool of the devil and anathematized the instrumentum diaboli as a sinful luxury. By now, however, the tide was beginning to turn in favour of the fork, and pointed remarks began to be heard from the laity that it was about time the clergy learnt some table manners. Some of them evidently did. In 1298, an archpriest in Pisa made a will leaving to various relatives his silver knives with coral handles, two silver spoons, four table knives with ivory and jade handles and four silver table forks. And yet, and yet. Did Dante eat with a table fork? Pasquale insisted. Or Boccaccio? There was no sign any of their characters knew of it. Twelfth-century notes on etiquette by a Milanese, Bonvesin de la Riva, offered advice on gracious eating that strongly implied an absence of forks.

  Do not upset the common eating dish when fishing with the fingers for a large morsel. Do not spit. Do not touch cats and dogs while eating. Do not lick your fingers or stick them up your nose. Do not comment when you find dead flies or live cockroaches in the eating dish.

  A counsellor on seduction techniques, Francesco Barberino, was advising at the same time in his Documents of Love that men at table should avoid staring into a woman’s face when she was eating, or looking at her hands, as it tended to cause embarrassment.

  Pasquale took off his half-moon reading glasses. He pushed his papers back and got up from the kitchen table. He poured us each a tumbler of yellow wine and led me out into the courtyard. The fire was blazing now. Rain the night before had wet the wood, and some of the branches were green, and dense smoke twisted around the space enclosed by the three sides of the mill. The kittens had their eye on a gridiron packed with tigerstriped mackerel. Pippo was wrestling with the fire and the dogs were watching the length of sausage Nabil was coiling on another gridiron. Pasquale led me across the paved yard to the low parapet that ran along the fourth side. From the parapet we looked down the green valley of citrus trees on to Partinico and
the sea. The Arabs, said Pasquale, did all that.

  A thousand years ago they cultivated the rich land along the coast. The Conca d’Oro—behind the hills over there—and all this fertile coastal land below us, down to Marsala. It was the Arabs made it the flourishing garden it still is, really. They made dykes against the sea, they built navigable canals, they irrigated with further waterways, they planted the palms and citrus crops and sugar cane and cereals.

  There were a lot of old fruit trees just below the mill and a lot more on the hill around the side. They were bedraggled now, sagging and covered with lichen. Peaches were rotting on the ground. Pasquale flung his arm in a triumphant arc, sloshing his wine on the wall. A dog moved smartly out of reach. After two centuries of Arab rule, the Normans had driven out the emirs by 1061. But there was no ethnic cleansing when the Normans arrived. There was synthesis and continuity, the best of both worlds. Under the liberal Norman regime the Arab settlers stayed on in Sicily, mixing and living with Greeks and Latins and Sicilians. And the great growth of Sicilian agriculture was the work of these Arabs. All round the western edge of Sicily, from Marsala to Palermo and further still toward the Italian peninsula, skilled farmers from Mesopotamia had settled.

  An Arab writer called Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Idris wrote a great work of geography at this time for the Norman emperor Roger II, who wore Arab dress in his court, spoke Arabic and cultivated Arabic arts and sciences. It was entitled The Delight of One who Loves Travelling Around the World, also known as King Roger’s Book. It was a remarkable confluence of Christian and Islamic cultures. Idris wrote of Sicily in the twelfth century as

  the pearl of the century for abundance and beauty, the first country in the world for its nature, its buildings and its antiquity. Travellers come from everywhere, merchants and dealers from every city and metropolis, and all agree in praising it, and praise its splendid beauty, speak of its happy circumstances, its various advantages and the good things Sicily attracts from every other country of the world.

  Palermo was described in detail,

  the huge and beautiful city, the greatest and most splendid place to stay, the vastest and finest city in the world … It lies on the sea in the western part of the island. High mountains surround it, and yet its shore is joyous, sunny, smiling. Palermo has such beautiful buildings that travellers come to admire the architecture, the exquisite workmanship, the art … All around the city are streams and perpetual springs. Inside the town are many gardens, beautiful houses and canals of fresh running water, brought from the mountains that surround its plain. Outside the southern side runs the ever-flowing Abbas [Oreto] river, which has enough mills built along it to fully satisfy all the city’s needs.

  Sicily’s beauty and plenty were in the Arab poetry too, I thought. Years earlier in Naples I’d bought a book of verse by the Arab poets of Sicily, done into Italian and Sicilian in versions by modern poets. Much of it was about the beauty of Sicily, some of it aching with nostalgia from poets forced into exile. Around 1100, ’Abd ar-Rahman of Trapani, a little further down the coast to the south, had written

  Oranges ripening in the island are fire on chrysolite branches

  Lemons are like a lover’s pallor after painful nights away

  Palms are like loyal lovers on guard against their enemies …

  O palms of Palermo’s two seas, be watered by rains of abundance …

  In your shade may love be inviolate …

  Pasquale broke in, bored with poetry. They didn’t just produce, he said. They processed food too. The Arabs invented spaghetti. I looked around for the demijohn. Vincenzo poured us more wine. Being without preservatives, it was delicious. Was I going to hear some new version of the old story about Marco Polo bringing pasta back from China? No, no, said Pasquale the bibliographer eagerly.

  That came from a bad translation. Remember that the original manuscript’s been lost. The one Marco Polo dictated in prison in Genoa in 1298. What we’ve got are manuscript copies and translations into Latin, French, Tuscan, Venetian and so on. There are at least a hundred and thirty of them and some are far from reliable.

  The story of Marco Polo’s Chinese pasta had come from a late and wildly inaccurate Latin version. The best versions, such as the Tuscan, had Marco Polo describing the kingdom of Fansur in Chapter 166, and saying that the people there had no grain but ate plenty of rice. He noted a great wonder, which was that in Fansur they have big thin-barked trees that are full of a kind of flour inside. They made much pasta from it, which Marco Polo said he’d often eaten. The Latin version had elaborated this freely into lasagna and other dishes eaten with sauce, whence the story of Marco Polo’s discovering spaghetti in China. Later I looked this up. From the notes to a critical edition of the thirteenth-century Tuscan version I found that the kingdom of Fansur was in the region of Baros on the south-eastern coast of Sumatra and that Fansur was the Arab transcription of the Malay toponym Pancur. This seemed to be the largish island of Bangka, separated from south-east Sumatra by the Bangka Strait. Marco Polo said it had the best camphor in the world, which is sold there for its weight in gold. The Arabic for camphor transcribes as al-kafur al-fansuri. The pasta that legend transformed via lasagna into spaghetti was sago. Marco Polo had been describing sago and the sago palm.

  In any case, resumed Pasquale, every version of Marco Polo makes it clear the Chinese had no grain or any cereal crops other than rice. This was the point about Sicily, the type of cereal. Before the Arabs invented spaghetti, pasta in Italy was mostly eaten in the form of gnocchi-like dumplings. Whatever form the pasta was worked into, it was pasta fresca and was eaten straight after it was prepared. Pasta fresca, often with egg added to become pasta all’uovo, has to be eaten fresh. It’s made with tender grain flour and doesn’t keep. Pasta asciutta, dry pasta, which kept for months and even years before being cooked and eaten, and so could be stockpiled and exported anywhere, was the Arabs’ innovation in food technology. Pasta asciutta can only be made from a paste that contains mostly the hard-seeded, gluten-rich durum wheat, triticum durum, and in those days durum wheat was grown only in Sicily and other hot countries around the Mediterranean. The Arabs developed a way of working the paste made from this grain into forms thin enough to dry out completely, by working it into little strings, spaghetti, or into even thinner little worms, vermicelli, or into any of the hollow tube-like forms of macaroni that let the pasta dry out on both sides. It was the geographer Idris who left the first recorded mention of spaghetti in his Delight, proof that in the first part of the twelfth century Sicilians knew not only how to work pasta but how to dry it, preserving it for long sea voyages to cities on the European and north African coasts of the Mediterranean, as well as across the strait of Messina to Calabria.

  The technique soon spread, but for centuries dry macaroni were still known as maccaroni siciliani. A cookery book published around 1450, Maestro Martino’s Libro de Arte Coquinaria called both macaroni and vermicelli siciliani. Another recipe of a few years later for minestra siciliana, in Platina’s Honest Pleasure, De honesta voluptate, explained how to prepare hollow macaroni. Dry them in the sun and they’ll last you two or three years, especially if made by the August moon. For even longer, when regional insults were being exchanged, Sicilians were called macaroni eaters by other Italians. Neapolitans were leaf eaters. What it all had to do with the invention of the fork was that you couldn’t eat spaghetti with a knife or a spoon. You could eat it with your bare hands, holding a bunch above your face and lowering the strands into your mouth as you chewed and swallowed. The street people of Naples ate like this, and tourists and smart Neapolitans gathered to watch the lazzaroni eat. They’d never have stared if they’d eaten like that at home, Pasquale argued, so they must have had forks.

  * * *

  AN OBJECT from the days of 1943 and 1944 was a large shallow oblong wooden case about two square feet in area. Vincenzo brought it out after lunch. It was a plain varnished case with hinges at the back and a clasp at the front
, of peasant manufacture: not finely finished but solid and strong. Covering most of the lid’s surface, carved elaborately into it, was a fierce American eagle, wings outspread, eye glaring and beak hooked. Near the clasp the letters USA were carved in big capitals into the wood, among the painstakingly rendered wing feathers. When it was made the wooden box had represented food. It was something to sell an American soldier. Something for him to take home to the States. Something that might get its Sicilian carver some of the allied currency then circulating, the notes with Roosevelt’s four freedoms printed in English on the back. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear. It was a paleotourist souvenir, whose maker hadn’t thought, hadn’t been able to think, of what token of Sicily a stranger might’ve wanted to take away. The maker’s mind was filled with the imagery of the invading power, the symbol of the liberating wealth he too desired. As a crude reminder of that time of need, the box was desperately touching. The saddest thing about it was that it must have remained unsold, and never left the place where it was carved. The box was a knife case. When Vincenzo opened it I saw a collection of rusting peasant knives, they too largely homemade, with wooden handles and blades of various shapes, determined as much by what was available in the way of iron and steel as by any specific job they were designed to do. This was the Sicilian component. These knives were the real souvenir. They looked murderous. Some of them had curved blades, almost hooked. I thought of their probable uses. Sheep and goats and pigs. Cutting throats. Docking tails. Gutting. Skinning. Castrating.

  The writer Dacia Maraini recently published a memoir of going back to Bagheria as a girl at the end of the war. Bagheria was once a beautiful town on the sea a few miles east of Palermo, now a cluster of crumbling noble villas overwhelmed by a cancerous mafia-built slum. Maraini’s memoir made much, in the manner of such memoirs, of the aristocratic eccentricity in the author’s forebears, and its tone was rigorously bittersweet. Except, that is, when she recalled a woman who’d worked for the family and the stories she’d told. Innocenza was the child’s one link with the surrounding peasant world, and for an instant the memoir opened a door on a different life.