Tonino always becomes just a little bit more “Sicilian” as soon as he sets foot at Bosco, assuming an air of suspicious surveillance that takes the form of frequent binocular or telescopic inspections of the surroundings and a critical, pessimistic interest in what each neighbor or passerby is up to. In this instance there was a marked squaring of the shoulders, and the next day he set off “to have a look around.” He found the cypress on his first try, planted in front of the local shepherd’s house and garlanded with tinsel and colored lights. After extremely delicate negotiations, both parties accepted the convention that this was a boyish prank on the part of the shepherd’s youngest son, and it was agreed that the tree would come home in the new year. And so it did, accompanied by a large fresh pecorino cheese and a basket of ricotta, but two transplantings in an unusually dry winter were too much for the cypress, and this summer we sawed it up for firewood.
The sight of Bosco fills me with peace and the sense of my great good fortune in having been granted such a place to put down roots, but I often wonder if I will ever be able to savor this feeling unalloyed by the anxiety of having so much to plant, prune, harvest, sew, paint, sand, restore, wash, clean. Will I ever catch up enough to be able to slow down to a gentle hum of activity, to enjoy sitting and looking, or walking for the sake of walking, without the excuse of something to pick? Surely not until we live here all year round, and probably not even then; perhaps this frantic pace is an attempt to assuage my guilt at having so much in a land where so many still have so little.
As I pass the first of the flower beds I pause without thinking to pull up a handful of weeds: the crocuses are showing their tips and the nasturtiums are in flower. In two weeks the weeds have gotten a dangerous head start, totally undiscouraged by six inches of mulch, and I must get cracking on that palm, the cobbled pavement will have disappeared under the grass that is covering everything with a thick green quilt, the last of the olives must be wiped off and put under oil. My pace quickens, the moment of contemplation passes, and I am home.
We are well into December now, and Palermo is seized by the Christmas spirit, a fever that in truth comes both tardily and uneasily here. There is little left of the old rituals, of the blind singers who used to wander about the streets of the old city at night singing novenas, or of the families who would pack their Christmas supper into a basket and take it to church with them, turning the long vigil before midnight mass into a gay and boisterous picnic. (The ecclesiastical authorities took a dim view of this custom, and the first of the many edicts unsuccessfully prohibiting it dates from 1399.)
The wax figures of the Christ Child that were once produced in vast numbers in Via dei Bambinai, tiny babies cradled inside a waxen fruit, a lemon, a prickly pear, or a pine cone, have disappeared, and although it is still possible to find mustazzòla, flat brown cookies with lighter-colored dough molded in the form of the Baby Jesus lying on top, or the buccellato, ring-shaped pastries filled with figs and almonds, the bars and pastry shops give the place of honor to the panettone manufactured by Messrs. Motta and Alemagna to the north, acclaimed by endless TV commercials as the most sacred of Italian Christmas traditions.
Christmas in Sicily has been limited both by tradition and by poverty to a family feast, observed by going to midnight mass, by eating copious meals and spending evenings at bingo and card games, and has always ranked well below I Morti or the feast day of the local patron saint. Newfound prosperity and the consumer society have combined to erect a fancy superstructure on this archaic foundation, but although most families now have a Christmas tree next to, or even in place of, the old presepio or crèche (and in Palermo the middle class gamble furiously from the Immacolata to Epiphany), still the rituals to support these novelties are lacking. Even the exchange of presents has been adapted to maintain that most delicate and intricate balance of favors, prestige, and string pulling that governs every aspect of Sicilian life. Christmas has become the occasion for capturing the attention of a doctor or a lawyer, repaying a local politician for a favor, insuring a good grade at school or the chance of a job for one’s son.
The merchants do their best, of course. Christmas music is piped through the department stores, lights are strung across the big shopping streets, sidewalk stands glitter with tinsel and plastic ornaments, creating an atmosphere similar to that of Christmas in an American city, if in a lower key. Palermo traffic, ever a chaotic race in which only the fittest survive, gives up any pretense of order or reason, and the streetlights serve only to indicate the densest concentrations of honking cars and swearing motorists, piled up against each other in the middle of the intersection, gridlock in fact and on principle.
To save my nerves I take the bus downtown to do some Christmas shopping, and I get off at the Quattro Canti. My route takes me down the Via Maqueda and past Piazza Pretoria, a handsome square in front of the city hall that is filled by an out-sized baroque fountain alive and wriggling with nymphs, tritons, river gods, and other such aquatic fancies, including a naked lady lying alongside a beast half horse and half sea serpent. The Palermitani claim she represents a Neapolitan queen whose sexual tastes were said to run to horses, and they call this the fountain of shame. The city hall next to it is a lovely building, with a palm-filled courtyard and a handsome stone stairway leading up to the mayor’s office, an enormous gilt, brocaded, and chandeliered room with tall windows overlooking the piazza. At one end of all this magnificence, the mayor sits behind a huge marble-topped table, reigning over incredible inefficiency and rampant corruption. I have spent so much time in the piazza with delegations from my children’s schools, waiting to be admitted to the august presence in order to petition for chairs or water or janitors or whatever other basic necessity was lacking, that I can no longer pass by here without a sense of disgust and discouragement. Shame indeed!
This is the very heart of the Palermo Baroque, so it is a shock to the eye to turn the corner behind city hall and come upon the red domes and cubic form of San Cataldo and the graceful columns of the belltower of the Martorana behind it, an island of Norman gaiety and restraint in a heavy sea of gray stone.
San Cataldo, a small chapel belonging to the Order of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher, has been restored to its original Norman simplicity, while the church behind it has suffered the opposite fate and is much altered by baroque additions. Known as the Martorana because it was donated in the fifteenth century to the nearby convent of marzipan fame, its true name is Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio, for it was built in 1143 by Admiral George of Antioch, principal adviser of King Roger II.
There is a brilliant and moving description of this church, its history and its mosaics, in John Julius Norwich’s Kingdom in the Sun, but the description to which I most often return is in the diary of Ibn Jubayr, a Spanish Moor who visited the church eight hundred Christmases ago when he was shipwrecked off Sicily on his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca:
Of the things belonging to the infidels, one of the most remarkable which we encountered was that called the Church of the Antiochite. We visited it on the Day of the Nativity, which is a solemn feast day for the Christians, and found it filled with a great gathering of men and women. This is a building to which no description can do justice, beyond question the most beautiful monument in the world. Its inner walls are all golden, lined with colored marbles the likes of which have never been seen before, inlaid with mosaics in gold and bordered with green mosaic garlands. Above this a row of windows with golden panes blind one with their light and arouse in one’s soul sentiments from which we pray that Allah may protect us. We were told that the founder of this church, from whom it takes its name, spent many hundredweights of gold on it. He was the vizier of the grandfather of the present polytheistic king. This church has a belltower with columns of different-colored marbles; each story is supported by a colonnade, hence it is known as the Belltower of the Columns, and is one of the most marvelous constructions one could hope to see—may Allah by his favor and his genero
us handiwork soon nobilitate it with the call of the muezzin.
The Christian women of this city seem Muslim in appearance: they speak Arabic fluently and wear capes and veils like our women. On the feast day they appeared dressed in silken robes embroidered in gold, and wrapped themselves in splendid mandes and colored veils, and walked in golden slippers. They proceeded toward their churches, or better still their dens, adorned with all the ornaments of Muslim women, with jewels, with paints, and with perfumes. And, to make a literary joke, we remembered the verse of the poet:
“He who one day enters a church, will come upon antelopes and gazelles.”
Ibn Jubayr, “Viaggio in Sicilia,” in Delle cose di Sicilia
I decide to allow myself a moment’s distraction from my shopping, but the only beasts I encounter upon entering the church are a small crowd of wedding guests awaiting the arrival of the bride. Like all the Norman churches, the Martorana is a very popular place to be married in, and it is rare to visit it without butting in on a wedding. As I take a rapid tour of the mosaics above the altar, I find myself listening to the conversation of a group of women, relatives perhaps, who are checking that all is in order before the ceremony begins. It is an amazing sequence of horror stories—brides struck dead on the wedding night, honeymooning couples killed in car accidents, betrayal and revenge—quite similar in tone to what women used to tell me about endless labor and difficult deliveries when I was pregnant for the first time. Their voices rise and fall in the dim light like a litany, and I suddenly wonder if such conversations are not in themselves a ceremony, a ritual of aversion meant to placate the Kindly Ones.
The last stop on my shopping list brings me back to Piazza Venezia: the cannoli we ate there last week and the excuse of Christmas presents have inspired me to order one of the masterpieces of the nuns’ pastry production, about which I have read the most enticing descriptions. I must choose between two. The first, known as II Trionfo della Gola, the “Triumph of Greed,” is a cone-shaped cake, made of layers of almond paste, sponge, blancmange, and zuccata—the preserves made of a zucchinilike squash that fill the center of many Sicilian pastries—all enveloped in a coating of pistachio paste, highly colored and decorated and so sweet that a spoonful or two must be all that anyone not born in Sicily can manage. If it is the name that appeals to me above all in this cake, the other confection promises to hide behind its more prosaic title of Grappola d’Uva a treat for the eye as well as the tongue. I decide to order this, the “Bunch of Grapes,” and negotiate through the grill for a two-kilo bunch to be picked up the next day. It will not be cheap, but I have been thinking about this bunch of grapes for three years, and I fear that if I lose any more time, it will end up like the sugar statues I arrived too late to buy. At the end of the eighteenth century there were many convents in Palermo producing pastries, but in 1866, after the advent of Garibaldi and the unification of Italy, when the vast terrains belonging to the religious orders were confiscated and many groups dispersed, the number slowly began to shrink, and now only these Benedictine nuns in Piazza Venezia still support themselves in this manner. Indeed, the younger nuns apparently have chosen more socially committed activities, and the tradition is carried on by only eight of the older sisters and will, I suppose, die with them.
The Bunch of Grapes, when I go to pick it up the next day, will be all and more than I imagined, a life-size cluster, perhaps twelve inches long, eight inches wide and five high, each grape fashioned individually from pale green paste, with two veined and curling leaves of darker green paste resting at the top, where a green paste branch pokes out; small green tendrils curl about the fruit, which is dusted with a silver bloom. It has all the rococo opulence of eighteenth-century Palermo, a dish straight out of The Leopard, well worth the princely sum I am paying for it.
Fortunately it is destined for friends with whom we always exchange presents over supper, so I will get a taste of it too. (Otherwise, I fear, they wouldn’t be getting it—greed triumphs easily where I’m concerned.) As the grapes, made of an almond and pistachio paste just sweet enough that you can eat many more than you ever intended to, are plucked away one by one they reveal the base, a thin layer of paste wrapped about the most delicate zuccata preserves mixed with chopped pistachio nuts and flavored with cinnamon. The sugar and spice are dosed with such exquisite restraint as to suggest celestial intervention: surely this is nothing less than a Christian rendering of ambrosia!
The bus trip home from the center is endless, and as I look out on hundreds of drivers snared in an enormous trap of their own making, I am visited by a flash of fellow feeling. Pre-Christmas panic grips me, I feel overwhelmed by the elaborate traditions I have imported from America. In the early years of my marriage, the tree, the presepio, the gala Christmas Eve dinner were a statement of identity, an attempt to expatriate the Christmases of my childhood, in which each act, each moment, and each mouthful repeated themselves year after year, and a dam against the desolation of Christmas Day spent with my in-laws, whose only concession to the feast day was an unusually elaborate dish of pasta, and cannoli for dessert.
Then Christmas became an antidote to the boredom and isolation of bringing up small children in a strange city: by making all my presents by hand and baking triple batches of gingerbread men, toll house cookies, and sesame cakes I could occupy a good three months. As the children have grown older and I have made more sense out of my life here, an inverse process has begun, and we are now down to one batch of gingerbread men, made together with the children, and mostly purchased presents. The Christmas Eve dinner perseveres: I first made it for myself and for my two English friends who, like me, most felt their rootlessness at Christmastime, then for our children, and for a few Sicilian friends who have become addicted to this Anglo-Saxon celebration. The group varies a bit from year to year, but the kernel struggles faithfully through the mud to Bosco each Christmas Eve.
Around about the twentieth of December this responsibility becomes a terrible weight on my shoulders, and 1 begin to resent living in a world where rite and tradition are becoming ever more a private affair that has fallen squarely into the woman’s lap. I have been reading about the Greek Pyanepsia, the autumn festival dedicated to Apollo, departing god of summer, which included a sort of public Christmas tree, an olive or bay branch decorated with purple and white wool, hung about with all sorts of autumn fruits, with cakes and small jars of honey, wine, and oil. How grand to be a Greek and have it all taken care of for me, or even to be enough of a Palermitana to leave it all to the dead, or to get my kicks in July from the Festino, the big festival in honor of Saint Rosalia.
Vacation starts late this year, which means I must be extraorganized, dedicating the preceding weekend to removing three months’ accumulation of dust and cobwebs, and remembering everything that has to go out to Bosco with us, for there will be no time for afterthoughts. The inside of my head is papered with lists.
Thursday the twenty-third finally arrives, school is over, Christmas greetings have been delivered to teachers and to the friends we won’t see until our return in the New Year, and we load the car and the van with suitcases and packages, with cartons of food and bags of carefully wrapped presents that the kids can’t keep from pinching and poking, trying to see labels and guess contents.
Our tree also gets loaded on the van: a branch from an umbrella pine, six-foot and bushy, a peculiar lopsided Sicilian version of a proper fir, but very ecological. The Regional Forestry Service does its annual pruning in mid-December and distributes the best branches for use as Christmas trees, so whatever we lack in aesthetics is more than compensated for by the knowledge that we have not further damaged this already too treeless land. Tucked in around the tree are Francesco’s violin, Natalia’s hamster (thank heavens Francesco has given up on raising escargots), the dog, the cat (in a different vehicle from the hamster), book bags for vacation homework, the Christmas cards I haven’t finished writing, an eccentric assortment of beasts and bundles that the p
iazza finds very amusing.
A final stop at the nursing home to pick up my mother-in-law, and we are off. The last ten days before Christmas are always anxiety-ridden: will it rain so much that our guests won’t be able to get through? They now come equipped with galoshes, and there was a year when it was necessary for them to leave their cars down at the bottom of the hill and stagger up on foot. Since this year the lower road is still out of commission, we have passed out maps of the upper road, but even that will be chancy in the last stretch, as we discover when we skid and slither across the field from the olive trees to the house.
This will be our seventh Christmas at Bosco; each year a little changed, with a detail added and another abolished, our ritual has assumed a new, more rustic character. In Palermo it was my one elegant production of the year: an adult meal eaten late on Christmas Eve with the best china and silverware dusted off for the occasion, requiring frenzied cooking, cleaning, and decorating, during which I became almost catatonic and the children were “kept out from under” until the last possible moment. Bosco has changed all that, and even if the burden of the cooking and cleaning still falls on me, everyone participates in the preparations, which have become part of the festivities.
On Persephone's Island Page 7