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On Persephone's Island

Page 4

by Mary Taylor Simeti


  Despite brief intervals of furious rainfall, Saint Martin’s summer holds for the whole month: the morning crispness wilts in the sun, Francesco bundles up only to return at noon in a T-shirt, his discarded sweaters stuffed into his book bag. On the farm the end of November brings a moment of respite, with nothing to be harvested, fermented, or cured, so I propose a different weekend to end the month: Saturday in Palermo for the pleasure of the kids, old enough now to prefer the company of their peers to the pastoral delights of Bosco, and on Sunday a trip to the city of Enna.

  Tonino has often been to Enna for professional reasons, but the rest of us have seen it only from the autostrada to Catania, perched high on a mountain that marks the very center of the island, the “navel of Sicily.” So strategic a location has naturally been a temptation to the many succeeding waves of conquerors that have swept over the island, and Enna has been besieged and stormed many times, yet surprisingly enough its thirteenth-century castle has managed to survive being such a bone of contention and remains one of the biggest and best-preserved fortresses in Sicily.

  If it is the castle and the drive through the sweeping wheat fields of the interior, so different from the vineyards and orchards of the coastal plain around Bosco, that I use as bait for the family, for me this trip is something of a pilgrimage. Enna is the ancient seat of the cult of Demeter, the corn goddess, patroness of agriculture and the good harvest, bestower of fertility, the Mother. Together with her daughter Persephone she held all Sicily, the most fertile of the Mediterranean islands, in her protection, and her shrine stood on the top of the mountain on Enna, overlooking the wheat fields and the flowering plain where Hades (or Dis) galloped his black horses as he bore off Persephone, known to the Romans as Proserpine, to be his queen in the Underworld.

  Near Enna walls there stands a Lake Pergusa is the name

  Cayster heareth not more songs of Swans than doth the same.

  A wood environs every side the water round about,

  And with his leaves as with a veil doth keep the Sun heat out.

  The boughs do yield a cool fresh Air: the moistness of the ground

  Yields sundry flowers: continual spring is all the year there found.

  While in this garden Proserpine was taking her pastime,

  In gathering either Violets blue, or Lillies white as Lime,

  And while of Maidenly desire she filled her Maund and Lap,

  Endeavoring to outgather her companions there. By hap

  Dis spied her: loved her: caught her up: and all at once well near:

  So hasty, hot, and swift a thing is Love, as may appear.

  The Lady with a wailing voice afright did often call

  Her Mother and her waiting Maids, but Mother most of all

  And as she from the upper part her garment would have rent,

  By chance she let her lap slip down, and out the flowers went.

  And such a silly simpleness her childish age yet bears,

  That even the very loss of them did move her more to tears.

  Ovid,The Metamorphoses

  Of all my early schooling I best remember the many happy hours spent drawing scenes from the Greek myths as our teacher read them aloud to us, and I still visualize the gods as they appeared in the drawings pinned up on my classroom walls. Given this felicitous introduction to Greek civilization, it is odd that during my subsequent career as a history major I should have avoided any course in classical history. Indeed, I felt a distinct aversion to all things Greek, which only now I see might be related to the truly horrendous view that Olympian mythology takes of women. What was a young girl to make of such a bevy of first-class bitches? However expurgated a version we were given, there was little there to reconcile us to the role of wife and mother for which the 1950s were so assiduously preparing us. Aphrodite was a slut, Hera was a jealous shrew, and if Athena and Artemis, despite a rather nasty taste for revenge, came out middling well, the price to pay was eternal virginity. Last came Pandora, to heap all the world’s ills on shoulders already bent under Eve’s contribution. No wonder I developed a distaste for the Greeks.

  One cannot, however, live twelve miles from the temple of Segesta and remain immune to the power of the Greek world. From finding passive pleasure in the contemplation of a classical landscape, I have slowly progressed to searching out the Greek sites and learning to listen to what they have to say to me. Sicily is studded with classical sites: the solitary perfection of the temple at Segesta; the overrestored and overcrowded temples at Agrigento strung out along a crest of land against the sea; the tumbled ruins of Selinunte; the giant altars and theaters of Syracuse. But I have most often found myself drawn to the lesser, more ancient sanctuaries that lie in the shadows of the magnificent monuments to Olympian deities, to the altars where the archaic cult of the Great Mother melded with the worship of the Olympian Demeter and her daughter, the Maiden, Kore, to become that of Persephone, Queen of the Dead, who holds in her hand the pomegranate as a promise of resurrection and rebirth. These underground, chthonic goddesses were worshiped in caves and at springs, at the Santuario Rupestre at Agrigento, where the fissures in the cliff behind the tiny temple gave up thousands of terracotta votive statues of Demeter and her daughter, and the floor of the temple precinct turns purple in April when tiny wild flags sprout between the stones, or in the lonely sanctuary of the Malaphorus, the Bearer of Fruits, across the river from the acropolis of Selinunte, where a cluster of poppies still dedicates the inner temple to the goddess.

  At the same time, although I cannot point to any one initial moment of awareness, Persephone has begun to make herself felt in my life. Perhaps it was when I first read that she had been carried off from Sicily, or my pleasure in the old pomegranate tree that grows outside the gate at Bosco. Perhaps it was my growing interest in calendars: the story of Persephone’s descent into the Underworld each winter and her return four months later with the spring was perhaps the earliest attempt to divide the year into seasons and to explain its rhythms.

  At first I only joked about the seasonal pattern of my own life, Palermo the Hades from which I emerge each spring for a brief summer in the sun of Bosco; mythical affinities seemed more than slightly ridiculous in the prosaic context of my daily life. It was a chance encounter with the review of a children’s book, a retelling of Greek myths with the intent of restoring to the Greek goddesses their archaic, pre-Hellenic dignity, that started me on a serious search for more and different information and led me to realize, as I hunted among the shelves of a feminist bookstore in New York last summer, that many American women are engaged in the same voyage of discovery on which I, independently, have embarked by mere geographical accident.

  But I still have trouble taking myself seriously, especially when I look at the tall and graying forty-year-old in the mirror, of whom Junoesque is the very most I can say. Mindful of childhood drawings, of delicate nymphs in diaphanous garments, I am tempted to abandon the whole idea. At least it makes a good story, I tell myself, and, putting my tongue firmly in my cheek, I start off with the family for Enna to begin my search for Persephone.

  The autostrada from Palermo to Catania runs east along the coast for about fifty miles before dipping south to cut through the center of the island. On this sunny Sunday morning we look out on a landscape remarkably different from our usual weekend fare on the western route to Bosco: the mountains are higher and more dramatic in their outlines, the transition from mountain to coastal plain is more abrupt, the river valleys cut more frequently and more deeply into the landscape. The soft mutations of green and yellow in the vineyards and olive orchards of the west here give way to the dark emerald of the lemon trees that blanket the plain, climb up and down the terraced valley walls, varying in hue only with the play of light and shade. The sun sparkles on the glossy lemon leaves just as it sparkles on the waves of a sea that is also darker here and more intense in color, while the roadsides are carpeted with deep-green acanthus plants. In the spring these will sprout
tall spikes of pink-and-white flowers, similar to giant snapdragons, but now the spiky, curling leaves, as perfectly symmetrical on the plant as they are on a Corinthian capital, imitate only the green of the lemon trees.

  The landscape changes abruptly as the highway turns south along the valley of the Hymera River and follows the base of the Madonie Mountains, which pose a formidable barrier between the wealthy coast and the barren interior. For a while yet the valley floor preserves the fertility of the coastal plain, its fields the soft blue-green of artichokes and cauliflower plants, but these soon give way to the wheat fields, the famous stands of grain that made Sicily the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. In an endless march they struggle up and down the hillsides, skirting the scarred troughs where erosion has raked away entire pieces of hill, skipping over the slopes too steep to plow, to the north climbing up to the cliffs of the Madonie, to the south disappearing over the crest and on to the next wave of hills. The concrete pillars of the highway viaduct striding along the rocky riverbed echo the infinite progression of the fields and are for long stretches the only sign, together with the careful contour plowing, of human passage. The arrows at the highway exits seem to point nowhere; only occasionally can one see a town crouched on a distant hilltop or a flock of sheep implying the presence of someone to herd and milk them.

  In summertime the sun bleaches the stubble left after June’s harvest to a blinding white-gold and grinds the earth to powder, but now this desolate landscape is softened by the rain and the plow, upholstered in a green velvet worn thin or even threadbare: the fallow fields are thick with grass; others, plowed early, are pale with the green tips of newly sprouted wheat; and in the most recently worked fields the fresh brown earth shows through completely. Here and there a tuft of orange or yellow where a tree begins to turn belies the green suggestion of spring.

  Our destination, hovering high above the road, is entirely wrapped in cloud, and nothing is visible to indicate that we are nearing a large town. Enna is built on a narrow plateau that runs along the crest of a solitary mountain; the sides of the mountain drop away sharply, too steep for building, and the road that switchbacks up from the mountain runs through woods brilliant with autumn colors and carpeted with ferns, where only scattered rosemary bushes recall the Mediterranean.

  The car enters the cloud, some walls appear, and we find ourselves in the town. The change from the sunny warmth of Palermo is hard to believe: a bitter wind shreds and agitates the mist that appeared compact when seen from below, and it buffets the car as we drive around the castle at the easternmost extremity of Enna’s mountain, to where the Rock of Demeter is poised like an enormous boulder at the very edge of the cliff, over a drop of more than twelve hundred feet down to the plain below.

  A narrow footpath brings us up and out onto the flat surface of the rock. This was the site of the shrine in which, according to Cicero, stood giant statues of Demeter and of Triptolemus, son of the king of Eleusis and only witness to Persephone’s rape. Grateful for his revealing what had happened to her daughter, Demeter “supplied Triptolemus with seed-corn, a wooden plow, and a chariot drawn by serpents and sent him all over the world to teach mankind the art of agriculture.” No sign of the temple remains, but the mist that blots out all evidence of later centuries, save the iron railings to which we cling, re-creates its numinous bulk, repopulates the fields below with white-draped figures, and suggests the tangible and welcome presence of the great goddess, surveying the crops from on high and bringing them to a safe harvest.

  Only a few yards but more than a millennium away, the arched portal of the castle awaits us. It is an enormous structure, the outer walls of which were once girded by twenty towers. We pass through two vast courtyards, each large enough to camp an army, before gaining the smaller inner courtyard of the citadel, which gives access to the only remaining tower, the Torre Pisano.

  The walls of this square tower, made of the same gray stone as the rest of the castle, rise up in sharp, clean lines for about three stories before ending in very simple crenellations. The austerity of the outline is softened by the ivy growing up the walls, as elsewhere in the courtyard the occasional shrub or rosebush suggests what medieval gardens once flourished here. The tower is fully restored, and we are able (and, in obedience to the law of ascending motion that governs travel with children, required) to climb up the narrow inner staircase and stand on the top for as long as we can resist the bite of the wind, staring out from between the crenellations and waiting for the wind to blow holes in the curtain of mist that hangs all around us. Occasionally the folds draw back and we can look down for a moment to the sunlit plain below, sec Lake Pergusa sparkling in the distance, glimpse Etna, the great volcano that dominates eastern Sicily.

  Perhaps it is the overly thorough restoration that has obliterated the character of this building, suitable for toy soldiers or for someone who has only read about castles. Whatever charm it may retain for us cannot compete with the discomfort inflicted by the wind, and although we are in better shape after a dish of pasta and a couple of glasses of wine, there is still no question of doing any leisurely exploration on foot, so we make our way toward Enna’s southern gate, driving slowly through piazzas deserted during the Sunday siesta and peering down curving streets and ancient alleyways that would be inviting on a summer day.

  As we drive down the southwestern flank of the mountain, the clouds lift and the island is spread out before us, wave on wave of hills flowing through the mists toward the sun, already low in the sky, a troubled sea of gold and lavender that stretches out to the horizon where the real sea, invisible, begins.

  Lake Pergusa proves to be a bitter disappointment, a brilliant example of the Sicilians’ best efforts to ruin their landscape. As is true of all the island’s interior, the wooded hills and flowering meadows that once attracted Persephone have long since been sacrificed to Sicily’s need to produce more and more grain, but here the subsequent erosion has given way to a more contemporary blight. The lake itself, hardly more than a large and stagnant pond with neither inlet nor outlet, lies in a gentle and recently reforested valley, which has been invaded by myriad summer villas in the same hideous architectural style—modern misallied to Mediterranean and generating flights of fancy—that desecrates the Sicilian coasts. All around the marshy shore runs a fancy track for car racing. It is a landscape neither Greek nor Sicilian, totally without character, and although we feel obliged, having come all this way, to make the drive around the lake, we are glad to be done with it.

  The road leading back to the highway skirts the eastern end of the mountain. Demeter’s rock hangs over us, golden against the finally blue sky, and to the east broods the dark purple cone of Etna, rising high above the intervening mountains and smoking leisurely in the setting sun. This is a moment such as I had hoped for, when the spine-tingling echo of the goddess’s footsteps rings softly across the centuries.

  The children doze as we drive back toward Palermo, and Tonino’s thoughts have returned to his work. I am content to sit in silence, watching the changes that the waning light works on the countryside, at present pink, lavender, and russet where the morning showed green and yellow and brown. Sifting through the day now ending, I feel slightly cheated: for all that I had put tongue in cheek, I expected something more from this pilgrimage, some greater indulgence than a brief lifting of the clouds at the end of the day. I had imagined myself standing on Demeter’s rock and looking down onto the shores of the lake, watching Persephone, sharing Demeter’s moment of distraction and the horrible clutching of her bowels as she turns her gaze back and Persephone is no longer there.

  That was not how it happened. There was no moment of distraction. Lake Pergusa is too far away for Demeter to have watched Persephone from her rock in any mortal fashion. Although the goddess does not seem overly generous of herself today, perhaps this fact of geography conveys a first message. Perhaps a mother cannot be present at her child’s rite of passage, or offer her own wisdom and experie
nce to ease the journey, and it is useless to resent one’s own mother or to expect to succeed where she had failed.

  And perhaps the weather that has so blighted the day is a reprimand. The cold winds and rain of Demeter’s grief will darken Sicily as long as her daughter dwells below the earth. Go back to Palermo, then, attend to winter business, seek Persephone in the spring, when, attended by rites of propitiation and welcome, she returns to the land.

  It is dark by the time we reach Palermo, and the city lights, man’s most felicitous addition to the natural landscape, string a web between the high mountains to the south and the startling black forms of Monte Pellegrino and Aspra, the two promontories that rise straight from the sea to guard the port. The lights catch us and draw us back into the city.

  Chapter Two

  December is like an Italian fireworks show, a long string of minor festivities leading up to the batteria grande, the grand finale of Christmas and New Year’s.

  The first of these falls on the sixth, when San Nicola opens the procession of generous visitors from the Other World whose gifts, according to the Florentine historian Franco Cardini, represent the tie between autumn and winter, between death and fecundity, a procession that will culminate in January with the Epiphany. Feast but not vacation, Saint Nicholas is quite déclassé in Sicily, where from Santa Claus he has been reduced to tooth fairy. I was amused to meet this old friend in a new guise but had given little thought to the significance of his role until Francesco’s first baby tooth became loose. The first in his kindergarten class to undergo this experience, he was totally unprepared for the alarming idea of losing a piece of himself and quite unconvinced by my assurances that a new tooth would grow to replace the loose one, whose every wiggle reduced him, barely five years old, to tears.

 

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