Being at Bosco has also introduced us to what in seven years has become one of our favorite tasks: the search for Christmas greenery to decorate the house. We must choose a moment when the house is already clean, not so long before Christmas that the leaves will wilt or dry, but before the twenty-fourth, when all my efforts go toward food. This year leaves us no choice: we must unload the cars in haste as soon as we arrive in order to accomplish our mission before dark. Armed with gardening gloves—so much of Sicilian vegetation is thorny or prickly that to bring it home in armfuls presents problems—and heavy jackets, warm hats, and pruning shears, the children and I start back up the road.
Tradition requires us to go as far as the third fork, the better part of a mile, without picking, just scouting, and then to turn and come back down, gathering as we go. Our greenery is not that with which my ancestors decked their halls: holly grows only in the mountains in Sicily, and the umbrella pines are too rare and too precious, not to mention too tall, to think of cutting off any boughs. But we do very well, for our hedgerows are full of pungitopo, “mousepricklers,” a member of the asparagus family with sharp gray-green leaves and big red berries that the Italians use for Christmas decorating, and then there are great tangles of smilax, with bunches of small scarlet berries that keep their color for weeks, if only one has the patience to extricate them from the tearing, grasping tendrils. Smilax is a lovely vine, and in Sicily it keeps its shiny heart-shaped leaves all winter so that the berry clusters stand out against dark green. Each year I promise myself to return in the spring to dig up some shoots to plant near the house, and each year I forget.
On the hawthorn trees, spring’s small bouquets of white flowers give way to big berries, the size of small crab apples, which turn bright crimson in September and cling cheerfully to the bare branches all winter long. Another plant, a vine whose name I do not know, produces large clusters of juicy red berries spilling down one leafless tendril. It seems to prefer the most overgrown and inaccessible spots in which it is almost impossible to unwind the stem from the dry branch it has chosen as support without knocking off all the berries, but the final prize is a brilliant garland of fruit.
We hunt for variety in the texture and the color of the foliage: wispy branches of asparagus fern; dark spears of tuvàro, a form of heather with tiny needlelike leaves and clusters of flowers that have dried from their September purple to a wintry brown; the gray-greens of the lentisk, the rockrose, and the false rosemary. Our burdens are becoming unwieldy, Natalia begins to complain about the thorns, and even Happy, our Dalmatian, has tired of chasing up and down the track and is trotting on ahead. The children have decided that enough is enough and march homeward, while I linger to pick a few wild iris, a small offering for the kitchen shelf (to keep the Eumenides kindly tomorrow), and then to stop at the lemon tree outside the gate. The beautiful glossy lemon leaves, pea green when they are new, dark emerald when mature, give breadth and generosity to the austerity of the wild plants. Tangerines and oranges are often sold here with a few leaves attached, a living gauge of how fresh they are, and a greater temptation to the buyer than anything a Madison Avenue packaging expert could devise.
Tonino, long since returned from his expedition to the citrus grove with two baskets filled with oranges, grapefruit, and tangerines, has tea waiting for us and a fire burning brightly. Warmed inside and out, we start to decorate the house. The major decisions have long since been made: the presepio goes in the palmento, a raised platform about ten feet by six in the corner of the kitchen, where once the grapes were trodden. It has a low stone wall at the front pierced by a carved marble spout from which the must once flowed, a massive pillar on its outmost corner, and a wall on the side where we have cut a doorway and steps so we can use it as a pantry. Its shelves are filled with bottles of wine and tomato sauce, jars of jam and olives, canned tomatoes, pickles, chutneys, relishes, the fruit of my summer’s labor, which make a multicolored backdrop for the presepio. This in itself is a miniature melting pot: the central figures, brought by my mother from Portugal, are set up on the bottom shelf of a Florentine ceppo, a three-tiered wooden pyramid topped by a gilt pine cone and lit by candles. We place the ceppo on a large cloth-covered crate, level with the front wall of the palmento, and wreath it with green leaves, berries, and pine cones, while oranges and lemons nestle in more leaves on the upper shelves. French santons, a Portuguese brass band, some Italian presepio figures that belonged to Tonino’s family—one selling oranges, another sharpening knives, still another making ricotta—all throng through branches and berry clusters along the top of the wall in joyful if motley procession.
When the presepio is finished we combine leafy branches with berried ones in enormous bunches for the living room, whose raftered wooden roof, two stories high, dwarfs anything but the most massive furniture, the most voluminous compositions. Green garlands go along the top of the tiled kitchen fireplace, and on the shelf near the door little branches from the lemon tree make a gleaming green forest for the Portuguese “Flight into Egypt” figures.
Fresh candles are placed in the candle holders and a few branches set in water to keep fresh for tomorrow’s dinner table. Each step is discussed to verify that everything is as it was last year. The possibility of changing, a new place to hang the Swedish straw wreath or a different position for the tree, is suggested just for the pleasure of flirting with danger, then rejected in that total respect for rite and continuity that my children demand of Christmas.
Finally we bring in the tree and set it in a bucket weighted with stones and filled with water. When the children were small I did the tree myself, an oeuvre of symmetry and balance. As they grew and wanted to participate, it was a struggle for me to relinquish my monopoly, to accept their help without trying to control it, to sacrifice symmetry for Christmas spirit, and what should have been an act of love risked becoming a war of nerves. It was the moving of Christmas to Bosco that brought me to my senses: now we prepare the tree, put on the lights, add the shiny garlands, and then put out on a table all the boxes of ornaments—balls and wooden snowflakes, Indian fish and Swedish Santas, Thai dragons and glass mushrooms from Germany. The decorating is done by everyone on Christmas Eve: the lower boughs, which the youngest can reach, are always groaning under the weight of ornaments while the upper branches go bare, the wooden snowflakes create a small blizzard on the lower left side, and Swedish Santas congregate to the right. But I shall repress the urge to indulge in a little surreptitious redistribution as I go in and out between living room drinks and kitchen pans and shall say how beautiful it is. And so it will be.
By now I know exactly when I have to cook what: the menu for Christmas Eve has been the same since 1965. Cheese biscuits with our aperativo, then roast turkey stuffed with apples, raisins, and rice, giblet gravy, whipped sweet potatoes, peas and mushrooms, cranberry sauce. Plum pudding and hard sauce polish us off. A more un-Sicilian meal it would be difficult to devise, but what was originally a nostalgia kick for expatriates has become balm for the Sicilian souls as well. The plum pudding comes out from England every summer in Jane’s suitcase, so the only difficult item is cranberry sauce: friends and foresight must be enlisted to make sure that we have some each Christmas. I have contemplated trying to grow cranberries at Bosco but am forced to admit that a Sicilian hilltop is a long way from a New Jersey cranberry bog.
By the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, everything that can be cooked ahead is ready, the turkey is stuffed and sewn and awaits its appointment with the oven, which has been determined after long consultations with Joy of Cooking and complicated conversions from pounds to kilos and Fahrenheit to Centigrade. This is the only part of the preparations that I cannot remember from year to year, perhaps because it is the lightning rod for all my anxieties. Having the turkey done at the right moment belongs to the same category as catching airplanes and is invariably rendered more tricky by the cylinder of bottled gas running out in the midst of it all, thus throwing all my elaborate cal
culations askew.
When we have gone to look out the window at least two dozen times, and twilight has darkened the road outside the kitchen door, we see at last the twinkle of headlights on the bare branches of the quince bushes, and the first car arrives, soon followed by the others. We are seventeen in all this year, and range in age from four to eighty-three. I was delighted when the youngest guest made his entry a few years ago to restore that sense of unblemished wonder that the older children have outgrown. The eldest, my mother-in-law, contributes another sort of wonder: she has been present at this Christmas Eve dinner for twelve years now, ever since her husband died, and she still thinks that I am absolutely out of my mind—all this work and buying of food and presents to spend Christmas with people who aren’t even distantly related is more than her Sicilian upbringing can encompass.
Tree decorating, table setting, last-minute gravy making—a three-ring circus is under way, and the confusion borders on chaos. I send up a silent prayer that there are no balls among the presents heaped under the tree: the wide open spaces of the living room are an irresistible invitation to a soccer game, and past years have taught me that it is very hard to refrain from trying out a new ball.
It is always amazing, if flattering, that a meal that takes so long to prepare can be over so soon, but it is, and the children are eager to get at the presents and impatient with the grown-ups who linger over coffee. Lassitude and the love of teasing conspire to draw out the coffee until it is clear that no one can survive any longer, and we leave the kitchen and its brightly blazing fireplace to pass through the big arch into the living room, which this year is finally warm and welcoming, thanks to the newly installed cast-iron stove.
I too have been waiting for this moment: my part is finished, Christmas can carry on under its own steam from here on out. Tomorrow’s rites are family ones, the children’s stockings, panettone for breakfast, and the opening of family presents. The following day my brother-in-law and niece will arrive from Milan, and a friend will come from Rome with her small son. Before I know it the vacation will be over, and it will be time to load the cars again. But right now it is all before me, and I savor the moment as I savor the first sip from the bottle of Grand Marnier that Pam brings me every year.
Chapter Three
“Everybody in Italy eats zampone and lentils on New Year’s Eve—why can’t we?”
Francesco suddenly declared that he wanted the traditions of his Italian blood respected too, so before leaving Palermo I bought a zampone, a large sausage of chopped pork stuffed into a hollowed-out pig’s foot.
It’s no sacrifice on my part, for I have no New Year’s traditions of my own to perpetuate. As I grew older, my childhood resentment at being excluded from an adult celebration evolved, through adolescent anxiety about how and with whom I would be invited to spend the evening, into distaste for gaiety on command. My beginnings have always been autumnal; the return to the city and to school with new books and new faces when I was a student, then new rhythms and new freedoms with the children out all morning when I became a mother. The grape harvest culminates our year of work and hope, the October rains mark a new cycle in the agricultural round. The longer I stay at Bosco, the more I am attuned to this calendar and the less I care about January first.
For the moment, at least, everyone is content to make New Year’s a family affair. We eat our lentils, their coinlike shape a promise of affluence in the year to come, and pick at the zampone, which is not destined to become a tradition (we are all rather revolted by the cloven hoof lying on the platter in a pool of grease), play tombola, and at midnight open a bottle of champagne and a chocolate-covered panettone, imported food for an imported feast.
The tombola, Italian bingo, is at least an authentic tradition, the favorite Sicilian pastime during the Christmas holidays. The evenings spent at tombola with cousins, uncles, and aunts are possibly Tonino’s only real Christmas memories, and we use the old family set, the number cards with their Art Deco borders torn and faded from years of play. Each number has its own name—“Nineteen, San Giuseppuzzo!”—in a complicated iconography of pagan and Christian symbolism, and between my requests for information about this, the shouting required by my mother-in-law’s deafness, and the excitement of the youngest generation, we manage to produce the requisite noise and cheer. Muted gaiety at midnight, the cork pops satisfactorily, and we are happily off to bed. As we close the outer door for the night, everyone piles out despite the cold to admire the full moon piercing the crystalline sky with a promise of frost.
New Year’s Day is glorious, as good an omen for 1983 as one could hope for. A cloudless and unbelievably blue sky has allowed the sun to heat the air, even while the gray veil of frost still lingers on the grass and the flower beds. Tonino and I are unable to stay in bed on what is the first really beautiful day of the vacation, and with sun warming our backs we set to cleaning up the courtyard.
Some ten yards square, the courtyard is bordered to the north and west by the main house. To the east and south are low, one-story buildings that once housed the stable, the chapel, and the sharecropper’s quarters; after the ’68 earthquake they had to be completely rebuilt, together with most of the main house, and they now contain a small apartment for guests and an all-purpose laundry, carpentry, and storage room. We were careful not to disturb the original paving of the courtyard, a grid of cobblestoned squares crisscrossed by rows of rectangular stone slabs worn smooth by at least a century’s worth of boots and hoofs. But this, the courtyard’s most distinctive feature, is hidden now by a thick growth of dandelions, nettles, clover, and crabgrass. There are even two clumps of chives: for years I have been trying unsuccessfully to grow chives from seed, and my only luck has been this spill, accidental and inconvenient.
Tonino resumes hostilities in his war on crabgrass while I arm myself with pruning shears. I love to prune, although it is instinct and impulse rather than scientific knowledge that guide me in this affectionate aggression, akin to peeling sunburned backs or squeezing blackheads. I start to the right of the gate and gradually work my way around the courtyard, stooping over the vases to cut back the geraniums, which grow to enormous bushes in this climate and flower all year round, then reaching up to tame the vines with which we are trying to subdue the summer glare of sunlight on stucco. There are all sorts: jasmine, bougainvillea, wisteria, Virginia creeper, clematis, and still other vines whose names I have never discovered. Around the big carved stone washtub in the center grow more geraniums, two small pines, and a tiny kumquat tree, a present from Gabriella, its miniature oranges just turning yellow.
Along the western side of the courtyard runs a covered porch where we eat or swing in a hammock in the summertime, now filled with firewood and the dwindling pile of winter melons, and strewn with mud-encrusted rubber boots. Two massive columns hold up the porch roof, and at the foot of each sits a carved stone tub, once used to catch the must as it was pressed out of the grapes in the palmento, now spilling over with foliage.
Watching the courtyard’s slow metamorphosis from the chalky desert of our first summer at Bosco, when the builders were still at work, to the soothing and leafy haven it is now, has given me much satisfaction, but if I am proud of my own handiwork in bringing this about, my greatest delight is in three plants that are none of my own doing, but gifts from the gods.
Opposite the porch, in front of the guesthouse door, a grapevine has emerged, growing unnoticed until its trunk had hardened into wood, curling up and over the faucet and reaching to the roof, blessing of Dionysus on our vineyards and our wine making. In front of the stone tub at the left-hand column of the porch, a wild olive has sprouted, sacred to Athena, goddess of wisdom, of order, and of creativity. Next to the other tub a pomegranate tree, shooting up from ancient roots, is now a good four feet tall and will soon add its shade against the summer sun and, in time, bear the red fruit of Persephone.
It is colder inside than out, and Tonino has put a large log of olive wood
on the kitchen fire. It is not at all unusual for us to burn olive wood, since our trees were given a major pruning a year ago, but today it is particularly satisfying to watch this thick trunk blazing, a point of conjunction between two calendars. During the vacation I have been browsing through The Greek Myths of Robert Graves and have just discovered a different Greek calendar, based on thirteen lunar months, a calendar of very ancient and very sacred origins, in which each month was represented by a tree. Twigs, each standing for the first letter of its tree’s name, could be used as a secret alphabet for conveying sacred messages. The vowels were represented by twigs from the trees sacred to the solstices and the equinoxes; the winter solstice, for example, was the fir or the palm (depending on the climate, I suppose—perhaps next year we should use a palm for our Christmas tree!). Originally reserved to the priestesses of the moon in archaic Greece, this alphabet was later used by Druids and spread as far as Ireland.
The first month of the tree calendar, which began on December 24, two days after the winter solstice, has as its symbol the oleaster, the same wild olive that is growing in the courtyard, which the Greeks believed would drive away the evil spirits. The cultivated olive does not breed true but must be grafted onto the oleaster with cuttings that were originally brought from Libya to Greece, and from there to Sicily. Here the Greek colonists set out their olive groves and built shrines to Aristaeus, son of Apollo and Cyrene, who spread the arts of beekeeping, cheese making, and olive grafting as he wandered around the Mediterranean.
Olives no longer have a place in the contemporary New Year. Modern Italy appears to run on a fiscal calendar, divided into twelve months plus the tredicesima, the “thirteenth,” an extra month’s salary guaranteed to all Italian workers as a sort of Christmas bonus and a good filler for the newspapers, which get a lot of copy each year out of speculation as to how the Italians will spend their tredicesima. Each month ends with il ventisette, the twenty-seventh day of the month, when the monthly salaries are paid. To have il ventisette is the greatest aspiration, the symbol of a person who is sistemato, “settled” into a stable job with a guaranteed monthly wage. Major observances fall in November, when an advance payment on income tax is due, and at the end of May with the final accounting. Other minor taxes on cars, driving licenses, etc., punctuate the year, which comes to a standstill in August, the vacation month, when factories close, business activities cease, and the cities empty.
On Persephone's Island Page 8