On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  The original owners are still keeping an eye on the cook, two brothers smiling down from the sepia-tinted photograph that hangs on the back wall, their bowler hats pushed back jauntily, their waxed mustachios curling gaily, and their gold watch chains sparkling across their well-rounded bellies. The old lady presiding over the cash register—a daughter? a granddaughter?—is no period piece, however; her sharp eye reflects good business sense as well as pride in her family tradition.

  The Focacceria is crowded tonight, and we are lucky to get ours before the focacce run out. Outside the piazza is filling up with people and we suddenly realize why: the Madonna, who has been trotting around Palermo all afternoon in procession, is coming home to rest in the church across the way. The church of Saint Francis is a lovely thirteenth-century building that was restored to its medieval simplicity after the bombing of the Second World War. Its stark, unadorned facade is broken only by a beautiful rose window and a simply carved doorway reached by a short flight of steps that runs the breadth of the facade. A wooden ramp leading over the steps has been erected for the occasion.

  All the clientele of the Focacceria, licking their fingers and wiping their chins with the inadequate squares of tissue paper that pass as napkins in most Italian bars, push out to join the crowd that is pouring into the piazza and gathering around the statue of the Madonna that has halted in front of the church door. The great wooden doors open wide, revealing ribbed columns that rise in the flickering candlelight, their arches lost in the shadows. A hush settles on the piazza, the blue-smocked workers who have wheeled the Madonna round the town tense to the ready.

  “Uno, due, tre—VIA!” The workmen give a great heave and charge up the ramp, pushing the statue before them, urged on by the crowd. The Madonna sways perilously on the rise, appears to genuflect as she dips over the top, and glides smoothly down the nave. The piazza cheers and claps. Palermo has fulfilled its vow once again.

  The Palermitani have no sooner recovered from the Immacolata than they have to prepare for Saint Lucy, whose feast falls on the thirteenth of December. It was a surprise to discover not only that the Saint Lucy who appears crow ned with a wreath of candles in Scandinavian households and the Santa Lucia whose Neapolitan praises I had sung with great gusto in my grade school years were one and the same—the patroness of light and sight whose feast day was celebrated, according to the Gregorian calendar, on the longest night of the year—but that Saint Lucy was in fact a Sicilian, an early Christian martyr from Syracuse.

  Legend has it that Lucy was assiduously courted by a pagan for the beauty of her eyes, and so she plucked her eyes out and sent them to her suitor. She is always depicted holding her eyes on a plate, and she is much beloved of the Sicilians, both because she was a fellow islander and because they, like most Mediterranean peoples, have always been afflicted with eye diseases. The beaten silver ovals with lacy edges and a pair of eyes cut out of the middle, so that they look like a fancy carnival mask, are still among the votive offerings most commonly encountered in Sicilian shrines.

  As far as I know, there is only one place left in Palermo where these offerings are still manufactured, and it is one of the most intriguing shops I have ever visited, a tiny place on the Via dei Bambinai, just behind Piazza San Domenico. The top half of the door is opened to display on the left a glass case in which the silver ex-votos hang, thin sheets of metal that have been hammered over molds into the shape of the part of the body that has been cured by saintly intervention: besides eyes there are noses, hands, breasts, buttocks, bellies, feet, and then X-ray views showing lungs, kidneys, intestines. For less specific ills, one can have the whole human figure, man, woman, or child. Then there are the animals that have been cured: cows, horses, donkeys, pigs, and sheep. Only animals of a certain economic importance are portrayed, perhaps because the saints cannot afford to waste miracles on mere pets.

  On the other side of the door, dismembered dolls sway in the breeze, pink plastic legs or chubby torsos with gaping holes at the neck and shoulders. They are a new and cheaper version of the old pink wax ex-votos that were sometimes parts of the body, more often whole dolls dressed carefully as the Christ Child.

  The shop itself is very small, the back cut off by a curtain and a ladder leading to the wooden loft, and it is crammed with ancient pedal-operated sewing machines and cartons full of doll parts. It smells of mold and mice and worse, and every so often there is a startling burst of noise and motion, as a pigeon flaps up from underfoot to perch on the edge of the loft and glare at the intruders.

  The presiding gnome is a woman of uncertain age, less than five feet tall, whose pasty skin and shrunken figure speak of a childhood spent in the damp dark alleys of the Cala, of too much pasta and too little protein. She and her brother have inherited this business: she learned the art of making wax statues from her mother, while the brother carries on the molding of the silver exvotos, with a sideline in repairs bequeathed by their father, who was a repairman for the Singer Sewing Machine Company. They love to chat, and their life history comes tumbling out amidst the flapping of pigeon wings and the cries of children scrapping in the street outside. It takes no great urging for the brother to open a drawer full of doll legs, bits and pieces of velvet, and other flotsam and fish out a plastic photograph album filled with pictures of the statues they have made and of others that have been brought to them for restoration from as far away as London. It turns out that this odd pair are among the only people in the world who know how to restore wax votives, and they proudly show off the “before and after” photographs: an exquisite scene of the Last Supper belonging to an aristocratic Palermo family, a Holy Family signed by the wife of Serpotta, the famous Sicilian stuccoist who worked at the end of the eighteenth century. They assure the visitor, perhaps in answer to a look of puzzlement, that they have a laboratorio down the street where they do the restoring. Certainly it is hard to imagine such fragile treasures surviving a stay in the shop itself.

  Aside from offering ex-votos to Saint Lucy in return for her help, the Palermitani also honor her feast day by abstaining from eating anything made from wheat flour, which means no pasta and no bread, the two mainstays of the normal Sicilian diet. They replace these with rice, cooked either in a risotto or as arancine, “little oranges,” rice croquettes stuffed with chopped meat and chicken giblets stewed with peas and tomato sauce and fried to a deep golden orange, or they eat panelli, seasoned chick-pea flour that is boiled to a paste, cooled, sliced, and fried. Panelli are, as far as I know, the only dish in all of Italian cooking that requires chick-pea flour, and they are made only in Sicily, no doubt a legacy from the Arabs. The Sicilians normally cat the hot panelli in a roll, which they buy on the street corner from vendors who do their frying over bottled gas in the back of their Vespa vans or even in donkey-drawn carts. But on Saint Lucy’s Day, of course, the panelli are eaten without the rolls.

  Dinner ends with a dish of cuccia, a sweet pudding made of whole-wheat berries that have been soaked and boiled, then mixed with a sort of blancmange and seasoned with cinnamon, sugar, and chocolate shavings. There are many different explanations for the custom of eating cuccia and barring the use of wheat flour on Saint Lucy’s Day. Most commonly it is said that Palermo was once suffering from a terrible famine (not an unusual occurrence across the centuries); the granaries were all empty and the population starving. Delivery came on Saint Lucy’s Day with the arrival of grain-laden ships in the harbor, and the famished people cooked up the grain without waiting to see it go through the mills.

  I have been interested to read that the Greeks made something similar, a dish called panspermìa that was prepared for the feasts of the Thargelion and the Pyanepsia, the coming and the going of the summer sun. It was a mixture of all different seeds that were boiled over a slow fire, a method of cooking that symbolized the proper balance between heat and humidity, between sun and rain, needed to ripen the fruits of the earth. I don’t know that there is any real tie between panspermìa and cucc
ìa, other than the fact that, like many ritual dishes including cuccia, panspermìa is probably nicer to read about than to eat.

  The time has come to celebrate a private feast, a sunny weekend after ten days of rain. On Saturday we drive out to Bosco, hurrying to catch the last of the sun, as the afternoons are very short now and by five it is dark. The rain will surely have rendered the lower road impassable, so we circle around to the upper road, much longer and bumpier, and stop to admire the last of the wild cyclamen blooming thick where the road dips down into a little valley and is muddied even in summer by some underground spring. The pale pink flowers uncurl like tongues of faint fire against the dark, shiny, white-veined leaves and glow beneath the shadow of the wild honeysuckle, whose branches are heavy with berries, arranged symmetrically on the leaves like a tiered centerpiece of persimmons grown specially for the table of a dolls’ house.

  Tonino drives on ahead, eager to check on his casks and cisterns, to make sure that all is well with the wine and that no untimely fermentation has taken place. The children and I decide to walk the last half mile and take a census of the possible Christmas decorations growing along the banks of the road, an ever-changing corridor of shrubs and wildflowers, sometimes high enough to cut off all view on either side, at times thinning out to show us the magnificent backdrop of the Gulf of Castellammare.

  The gulf is a deep bay, closed in on either side by mountains and bordered to the south by gentle hills that run down perpendicularly toward the sea until they flatten into a narrow coastal plain. The dirt road we are walking on follows the crest of one of these hills: to the west we can see Alcamo lying at the foot of its solitary mountain, a small afterthought, mantled with pine woods and crowned with an Arab watchtower, next a gap where soon the sun will set, and then the barren, eroded mountains of Castellammare, leading out to Capo San Vito, the northwestern-most tip of Sicily, marked by a lighthouse that will presently begin to twinkle in the distance. We are walking toward the sea, which glitters in the clear air, free of the heat haze that in the summer months smudges sea and sky horizonless. To the east is Partinico, my first Sicilian home, and beyond it Montelepre and the mountain hideouts of Salvatore Giuliano and his bandits, and then the high and lunar landscape of the mountains that separate us from Palermo.

  We have arrived at the olive grove that marks the beginning of our property. The trees are old ones, with marvelously gnarled trunks, and the children stop to stroke the moss that grows up the northern side, shriveled in summer, luxuriant now after the rains. Fascinated by this suggestion of more northern climates, of lush green lawns she sees only in pictures, Natalia is always bringing home pieces of moss to raise in plates.

  The road winds through to the other side of the olive grove and the house comes into view, two hundred yards away across a field that slopes down to the valley to the west where the bulk of our vineyards lie. To the right of the road a thin strip of vineyard marks the limit of our property: the eastern valley, more abrupt and mysterious somehow in its shaded olive groves, was sold to pay the inheritance taxes when Tonino’s grandfather died, together with a wing of the house that backs onto the cantina where our wine casks are kept. This sale remains a great thorn in our flank, even though the farmers who bought it, the Blunda family, come here rarely, and then show a tact and discretion unusual in a land whose language lacks a word for privacy.

  This is the best view of Bosco—one is far enough away to have some feel of the size and to see the play of the different roofs as they slip and slide their way around the courtyard, and now that the mulberry trees are bare of leaves, there is a clear view of the big arched window at the end of the living room, a converted wine cellar that once housed double rows of huge wooden casks, and of the high stone arch with its semicircle of wrought-iron rays above the wooden gate leading into the courtyard. Beyond the gate, on the far side of the courtyard, the windows are dark and shuttered still, but the white walls and the red tile roofs glow in the late-afternoon sun. The land dips suddenly behind the house, so that seen from here the sea and the sky are its only backdrop.

  I am told that Bosco is beautiful to any eye, but to mine it is much more. When my husband’s eldest brother died, just eighteen months after we were married, all our dreams of a nomadic life of development work in the Third World faded, for we found ourselves responsible for two elderly and semi-invalid parents whose only means of support was a farm that turned out to be unproductive and debt-ridden. Somehow it never occurred to us that there might be any alternative to accepting these responsibilities as they fell, but for me they were passive responsibilities, emptying rather than filling up my life and aggravating a chronic state of aimlessness. In America great things had always been expected of me: I came from a distinguished family, I had had a distinguished academic record in my own right (as a freshman in college I had even been given an honorary scholarship to reward the promise I had shown), but somehow I had never discovered where all this promise was supposed to carry me. In Sicily I sought the space in which to sort out my own expectations from all the others, and I found myself with almost more space than I could cope with: alone for most of the day with nothing to do, no place to go, no relevant qualifications, I was unable to lay my hands on any of the famous “inner resources” that I had been led to believe would take the drudgery and the boredom out of housewifery, and I was terrified of being forced to admit there might be even a shred of truth in the dire prophecies my mother had made about married life in Sicily.

  On weekends the obligations of farm and family called us to Alcamo, where, while Tonino stalked the piazza in search of the people he needed to talk to, I sat in my in-laws’ house, cold and bored and childishly resentful of the moth-eaten dreariness of my surroundings, of the uncomfortable chairs and inadequate lighting, of the atmosphere heavy with age, ill health, and mourning. Tonino’s parents were anxious to do their duty toward their daughter-in-law, even though she was an unknown foreigner with neither property nor profession, and they received me with an uncomprehending yet affectionate generosity that I did my best to reciprocate. The disparity between their lives, which had begun at the end of the nineteenth century in the same small Sicilian town where they were now drawing slowly and painfully to a close, and my youth in metropolitan, mid-twentieth-century America, was enormous: I was an enigma to my in-laws, and inasmuch as they embodied Tonino’s background, too different from my own—or so I had been warned—for our marriage ever to be successful, my in-laws were a threat to me. Building a bridge of kindness and comprehension was slow and difficult work.

  It was a bleak period of which I remember very little. If I had picked unpromising terrain on which to find myself, I was very lucky in my choice of a companion. Easygoing and tolerant to an extreme, Tonino has never shown the slightest need to visit his own insecurities on other people, or the slightest inclination to take over anyone else’s helm—not even in the rare but sticky moments when I would almost have welcomed a little paternalistic intervention. He always seemed entirely confident that I knew who I was and what I was doing, and this fiction buoyed me up for as long as it took for me to grow some confidence of my own.

  The turning point came in 1968. An earthquake knocked the farmhouse at Bosco down and permitted us to rebuild it with government help, and two months later the first of our children was born. The house grew side by side with the children, first on paper and finally, in 1975, in stone and cement. Just as having children here has made me more than a mere expatriate and given me a stake in the future of Sicilian society, so the work I put into Bosco has won me, I feel, the right to put down roots. What began as a burden became a blessing as I scraped and varnished and dug and planted, a visible, tangible explanation of my life here—both for the Sicilians, for whom all the usual labels, such as name, accent, clothes, or college degree, are in my case illegible, and for the Americans, myself at times included, who wonder what on earth someone like me is doing in Sicily.

  Right now the house is set in
a wintry landscape: the mulberries, the pomegranate, the pears and plums have mostly shed their leaves, although the almond trees seem to be keeping theirs much longer than is usual, perhaps to enjoy the rain after such a terribly dry summer. The oleander bushes, tall as trees, are scraggly and lifeless. And then there is the palm, growing in all directions, intent on sprouting as many tufts of fronds as it can possibly squeeze onto its circumference, instead of concentrating on just one as proper palms do. This tiresome rarity is, as always, a mess, a green and living symbol of the eternal chaos that attends people like us who try to do too many things at once. And I never did get around to pruning it this summer—I could do it this weekend, before the birds start to nest again.

  Pruning the palm is a tricky job; I still haven’t discovered the best tools for the task and invariably end up so full of scratches that I am embarrassed to return to city life. The first time I ever tackled it I found a belt of machine-gun bullets hidden in the tangle of dead branches and new sprouts: after World War II Tonino’s second brother, Turi, discovered an abandoned German munitions depot and would bring home all sorts of cartridges and bullets to play with and explode, much to the horror of the family. This belt had no doubt been confiscated and hidden in the palm. I presume that what I prune these days is all newer, postwar growth, but nonetheless I proceed gingerly.

  Across the last half of the field a row of cypresses accompanies the road, planted about five years ago as a windbreak for the land where someday I plan to have a flourishing vegetable garden, today represented by a dozen artichoke plants, some scattered clumps of Swiss chard, and the canes, tilting at crazy angles, that held up last summer’s string beans. I suppose Tonino and I had Tuscan landscapes in mind when we planted the cypresses, but the extremes of the Sicilian climate have wrought their usual havoc on our ordered imagining; each cypress has grown to a different pattern, some tall and thin, some fat and squat, some curled over at the top like a candle in the summer sun. And then there is the gap: it was just a year ago that we arrived for the Christmas vacation to discover that the biggest and most shapely of the cypresses was gone; all that was left of it was a large hole in the ground.