Proust wrote in “On Art and Literature”: “What intellect restores to us under the name of the past is not the past. In reality as soon as each hour of one’s life has died, it embodies itself in some material object . . . and hides there. There it remains captive, captive forever, unless we should happen on the object, recognize what lies within, call it by its name, and so set it free.” There—Proust recognizes the liberation of the image, as Michelangelo recognized his figures wanting to be freed from the blocks of marble he carved, just as Lampedusa and Sciascia chose images so truly that they shine as icons.
In my “walking notebook”: tile rooftops, a handmade ladder propped in a fig tree, olive trees beside a stone wall, a man outlined in a doorway—these images are contemporary or medieval or Roman and so partake of the timeless. A stone wall glinting in the wet light—what stone does to light speaks emblematically to a sense of time that floats from one era to the next. In a nimbus of gold, a little dirt-colored donkey stands against a whitewashed wall, a stony path winds into a smoky aura of light; a man with a birthmark covering half his face tips his chair against the wall under the arbor and laughs; a distant tower seems to exist through a long telescope into time.
I travel for images. I read for images, too, because the choice cumulatively creates the style of an author. Why does Lampedusa lavish words over what food was served at a ball? Because he is showing us what the people expect and how they perceive. The powerful imagistic language of Lampedusa and Sciascia conveys more in a few pages than chapters and chapters of history. I must admit to a gratitude because histories of Sicily are hopelessly dense. This island has been tossed and criss-crossed and stomped on and razed beyond counting. That these two writers take on Sicily’s daunting history and subsume it within the lives of their characters gives you, finally, a grasp of the sequence of takeovers and makeovers. And more.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, the older of the two, was born in 1896 into one of the oldest aristocratic Sicilian families. He was Duke of Palma and, eventually, Prince of Lampedusa. The tiny boy was named Giuseppe Maria Fabrizio Salvatore Stefano Vittorio Tomasi di Lampedusa. He was very attached to his mother, had a playboy youth, studied law, and then was folded into World War I, where he fought and was captured in Hungary. He walked back to Italy and suffered a breakdown. During the fascist years he travelled, lived abroad a great deal, and married a Latvian baroness.
During his life he published nothing except three articles on French literature in a small periodical. His grand family palazzo on via Lampedusa, 17, in Palermo was bombed in 1943. Il Gattopardo, The Leopard, which he labored over for years, was rejected for publication, but in one of those cruel twists of fate, the year after his death in 1957 from lung cancer the book was published and became an international megasuccess. E. M. Forster called it “one of the great lonely books.” Visconti made an ambitious, sensuous movie version starring Burt Lancaster in 1963. Posthumously, a book of stories and two volumes of essays were published.
The Leopard rose from his intimate knowledge of the Sicilian aristocracy. Family members inspired some of the characters, and we can be sure they were not pleased. The book begins in 1860 and ends in 1910, the formative years when the Italian nation went from a squabbling group of duchies, papal states, and foreign possessions to a unified (more or less) country. The book starts during the years of Garibaldi’s foray into Sicily—a torch to the Sicilian time warp. Lampedusa shows the rings of effects on the family of the Prince of Salina, Don Fabrizio.
First and last, we have the influence of the brutal, munificent Mediterranean sun. The narrator says, early in the book: “The sun, which was still far from its blazing zenith on that morning of the thirteenth of May, showed itself to be the true ruler of Sicily; the crude, brash sun, the drugging sun, which annulled every will, kept all things in servile immobility, cradled in violence as arbitrary as dreams.”
Lampedusa associates the sun with the annulling of the will, with immobility, and random violence. These characteristics also flow relentlessly through the lives of his characters. The sun over Sicily never is passive in The Leopard. Here the family is about to have lunch outside: “All around quivered the funereal countryside, yellow with stubble, black with burned patches, the lament of cicadas filled the sky. It was like a death rattle of parched Sicily at the end of August vainly awaiting rain.”
Even in October, the sun reigns: “The rains had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch . . . The heat braced without burning, the light domineered but let colors live; from the soil cautiously sprouted clover and mint, and on faces appeared diffident hopes.”
Near the end of the book, the sun is described again: “It was midday on a Monday at the end of July, and away in front of him spread the sea of Palermo, compact, oily, inert, improbably motionless, crouching like a dog trying to make itself invisible at its master’s threats; but up there the static perpendicular sun was straddling it and lashing at it pitilessly. The silence was absolute.”
The sun is god and mirror. And still is. I’m reading outside on a chaise longue beside the hotel pool. The sun has driven me to the shade of the hedge, and every half hour I have to move because it has invaded again. A small, finely made Sicilian man near me is reading, I’m shocked to see, Sciascia’s The Wine-Dark Sea. Three screaming and crying French children with a nanny should be taken to their naps. Waiters dressed in dinner jackets circulate with pitchers of lemonade. And there’s the pride of the EU, a bronzed couple with impeccable bodies; he toned and slender, his wavy black hair slicked back, his sensual molded lips almost pouting, and she a nymph in pink thong, breasts the shape of oranges popping from the inadequate-to-the-task triangles that almost cover her nipples. I cover my face with The Leopard and doze.
The prince is a fabulous, unforgettable character. He’s very tall. The leopard insignia, appearing on pillows and in crumbling stone above doorways, symbolizes his noble family—and it becomes him. His big hand is often called a paw. He’s like a lethargic leopard, who may turn predator at any moment. He has rapacious appetites toward women and goes out stalking at night, but toward morning, back in the marriage bed, he can still make his wife cry out to Mary and the saints. He rules his properties with bored attention. We see him as the last of his type. The feudal expanse of his properties will be lost in a generation. But something larger is at stake; the whole way of life, decadent and beautiful (and of course, hideously unfair), is disappearing. His own numerous children are too much under his influence to remark on this, but his favorite nephew, the impudent and fun Tancredi, has joined the forces of Garibaldi. The nephew throws his energy into the life of the prince, who is smart enough to see the changes coming but too long enervated by the centuries of other victors to join in or to try to stop them.
The prince’s daughter, Concetta, loves Tancredi, but he falls hard for Angelica, a juicy daughter of the new-money, crude, Snopes-type character, Don Calogero, who is a rising force in the new order. Already Don Calogero owns more land than the prince. Now, through this marriage of Angelica to Tancredi, he is about to be absorbed into the family. He’s a boor but a smart one. The prince is humiliated when, wearing afternoon dress himself, he has to greet Don Calogero in evening clothes at dinner. He is consoled somewhat to observe that the tailoring on Don Calogero’s tails is a disastrous failure, the tails pointing up, the cut appalling, the buttoned shoes. Each of these characters comes to represent an historical quality at work in the fabric of society.
Lampedusa reveals the accommodations of the prince to inevitable change through his own thoughts and actions, rarely through the over-voice of the narrator. As he meets Don Calogero frequently over the marriage contract of Angelica and Tancredi, he finds an admiration growing on him:
He became used to the ill-shaven cheeks, the plebeian accent, the odd clothes, and the persistent odor of stale sweat, and he began to realize the man’s rare intelligence. Many problems that had seemed insoluble to the Prin
ce were resolved in a trice by Don Calogero; free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency, and plain good manners, he moved through the jungle of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans of the crushed.
Like other big cats, the prince toys with his prey.
Fortunately, Lampedusa is such a powerful writer that I never feel I am reading a historical novel; by the end of the book not only have I read a magnificent piece of imaginative writing but I understand the scaffolding holding up contemporary Sicily. When the prince is approached about becoming a senator in the new Italy, I get the impression that he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In his long no, the Prince gives Chevalley, the representative of the Turin government, an earful. And the reader absorbs the deep background of the Sicilian character.
In Sicily it doesn’t matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of “doing” at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We’re as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault. But even so we’re worn out and exhausted.
For the prince, Garibaldi’s changes come way too late. He sees Sicily in its new role as:
a centenarian being dragged in a Bath chair around the Great Exhibition in London, understanding nothing and caring about nothing . . . Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts; and I must say, between ourselves, I have strong doubts whether the new Kingdom will have many gifts for us in its luggage.
Then he downshifts to first gear:
All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfillment; our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana . . . novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents; that is what gives rise to the extraordinary phenomenon of the constant formation of myths which would be venerable if they were really ancient, but which are really nothing but sinister attempts to plunge us back into a past that attracts us only because it is dead.
Chevalley does not understand all this but rises to the occasion and speaks idealistically of Sicily’s future. But the prince continues in his voice-of-the-ages mode:
Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders . . . upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing; having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they consider they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral.
Lampedusa’s knife-twist comes at the end of the meeting, when the prince recommends, instead of himself, the badly dressed upstart Calogero as just the man for the new order. This bell-tolling is not only the witty and deeply exhausted voice of the many-times-conquered aristocrat, who has made accommodations all along the bumpy road of history; it’s a breathtaking, dark cultural analysis of Sicily at the historical juncture of unification. The indictment and the finesse of Lampedusa’s prose sends me out into the streets—perhaps for one of those spiced sherbets he mentioned, or his favorite rum jelly.
Pasticceria Minotauro displays no rum jellies, but the prince might indulge in a finger-size cannolo filled with chocolate cream and dipped in chopped pistachios. Or one of the pastry boats mounded with cream and strawberries. Ed and I split a cannolo, then make our way down the street for cups of hazelnut and melon gelato.
What is that fragrance? A white datura, most decadent of flowers, seems to drip its narcotizing perfume over a stone wall. To walk through Taormina is to traverse layers of scents—oleander and roses, the nutmeg spiciness of creamy stock, weedy nasturtiums, all these mixed with the wafting aromas of good sauces cooking. A blue Cinque Cento filled with flats of red geraniums parks beside a stand selling blood orange juice. Moonvine and morning glories sprawl over hibiscus hedges and twine around satellite dishes and electrical wires. A delivery truck has run over a flowerpot. People emerge from shops and houses. Much discussion ensues. A loudspeaker announces another truck laden with tomatoes and onions. He runs over the remains of the pot, and the crowd’s interest shifts to the gorgeous ripe tomatoes grown on the fertile slopes of Etna.
We stop to gaze at a window arranged with trays of candied fruits, gleaming like jewels. The prince perhaps partook of cedro candito, those huge gnarly lemons, almost all peel, as well as the whole candied oranges and lemons, and the array of marzipan fruits, and piles of torrone bianco con fighi secchi, white candy with nuts and dried figs.
Even inside the duomo, lilies drench the gray air with their sweet deathly scent. They’re enlivened by glass jars of pagan birds of paradise on several altars, and arrangements of white and yellow roses and lemons. Those praying inhale these sanctious odors of flowers, along with the final whiffs of incense left behind by the priests.
It is enlightening to read, right after The Leopard, the works of Leonardo Sciascia.
He was born in 1921 in the small town of Racalmuto, a quarter of a century after Lampedusa and at the opposite end of the class spectrum. His father worked in the sulfur mines. He was a bookish boy and rose above his beginnings to become a schoolteacher. In the prince’s time he probably would have been a priest. Also a late starter, he did not publish his first book until the age of forty. Astonishingly, The Leopard, which seems from another century, had been published only three years previously.
These two writers, so disparate in birth circumstances, are nevertheless brothers. Sciascia, like Lampedusa, is funny and deeply fatalistic—two intrinsically Sicilian qualities that emerge from both writers’ characters. Sciascia sometimes reminds me of Pirandello, the writer from Agrigento, but then I remember that they both wrote out of a similar aptitude for taking core samples from the layers of reality. The literature of the South, my American South too, always verges on the absurd. Sciascia, who grew up under fascism, was the first to write directly about the Cosa Nostra. He later became a member of the European Parliament, abandoning fiction for pamphlets, essays, and speeches. Lampedusa and Sciascia both wrote about the mindset of Sicilians. Although Sciascia’s subject is often the Mafia, his fiction delves more into the perspective of the national character that makes the Mafia possible rather than into the surface reality of the mob. As one reviewer noted, the Mafia was “both the cancer eating away at his society and a spark of rebellion kept alive in the hearts of a conquered people.”
Conquered. That word again. A key. “I don’t have a great creative imagination,” Sciascia remarked to an interviewer. “All my books are the story of a series of historical delusions seen in the light of the present.” Sicilian Uncles, four long short stories, shows a different uncle-type character at four points of hope: in and after World War II, during the rise of Communism, during the Garibaldi years, and during the Spanish Civil War. Always there’s that sun, “scorching down enough to flay you alive.”
At each crux, the hope turns to disillusionment. “This is a country,” a character says, “where the left hand doesn’t trust the right hand, even if they both belong to the same man.” The soldier fighting in Spain gradually realizes he’s fighting against the poor, his own kind. The feudal empires of the Spanish rich are as frightening as those in Sicily. The worshiper of Stalin begins to hear that he’s not the idealist he thought but instead is a horrid lout. Th
e so-called “little man” will always be duped by the powerful. On a train a man meets a man who works in oil. He doesn’t even believe there is oil in Sicily, but the man assures him that there is. “Oil?” the character Miccichè says:
“They’ll soon grab it . . . One long pipe-line from Gela to Milan and they can just drain it off. The devotees, those who have the interests of Sicily at heart, will be left wringing their hands . . . I’d rather not talk about it.”
“But if this happens . . . won’t Sicilians, too, be to blame?”
“Certainly: it’s a Sicilian failing to stand around and wait for the ripe fruit to fall off the tree straight into our mouths.”
“We’re not like that,” chimed in the girl. “The fact is, that we like to make others believe the worst about us, like people who imagine that they are suffering from every illness under the sun.”
That’s where Miccichè agrees, brightens up at the sight of the sea off Taormina, and says, “What a sea! Where else would you see anything like this?”
Sicily and the sea, two in one, impossible to separate. In “The Long Crossing” a boatload of Sicilians sets off from a deserted beach. They are immigrating to America. They listen to the sea, which to them sounds like “the wild-animal breath of the world itself,” gasping and dying. They are the typical “huddled masses.” After eleven days of squalid living, they’re dumped on the shore, they think near Trenton, New Jersey. They disperse and soon hear singing. Must be Italians living nearby. Then a Fiat passes, then another. They have landed in Sicily. Duped again.
A Year in the World Page 16