On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  A calendar based on the seasons, on sowing and harvesting, on death and rebirth, is irrelevant to us now, its recurrent cycles out of step with the linear conception of time and progress that urges us forward. But I am glad to know that the oleaster in the courtyard might drive away evil spirits and that on the first day of 1983 my hearth is warmed by wood from the olive, the tree of the first month.

  In the days that follow, Bosco buzzes with activity. It hasn’t rained since the twenty-second, and the soil has dried out enough to be worked. Early the morning of the second, even though it is a Sunday, we are awakened by the sound of a truck. Mr. Amato has arrived, the novararo who has rented all our fallow land for the year in order to grow tomatoes and melons.

  For all that it is very sketchily applied, crop rotation on unirrigated land in Sicily means alternating three main crops: durum wheat and fava beans, which grow in winter, and novara, tomatoes and watermelons that miraculously manage to survive summers without water and bear sweet and succulent fruit despite the dryness. For the last few years we have planted wheat, sown in October and harvested in June, and it is time for a change. Mr. Amato is new to us, presented by a contadino who worked for us in the past, and we are favorably impressed by the spit and polish on the tractor he unloads from the truck and, as the day wears on, by the precision of his plowing.

  The deep plowing through the stubble of last year’s wheat was done in September by the huge tractor belonging to the government extension agency. Mr. Amato makes a finer furrow, passing back and forth until the big clods of red clay soil are broken down to a fine grain. Our fields have never looked better. At the end of the week he makes the final furrows, a piece of metal piping tied across the front of the tractor, extending five feet on either side and dragging a length of chain from either extremity, so that he can plow perfectly parallel rows without wasting any land.

  At the same time the vineyards spring to life, as Turiddu Vivona starts the annual pruning and plowing of the vines, untouched since September. Beneath the rows the thick carpet of sorrel and mustard is yellow with flowers and with the shriveled leaves that have fallen in the wind, leaving a brown haze of bare branches twining along the support wires. From the hilltop we can see Turiddu, a small gray figure against the yellow, working his way along the row, deciding how many buds to leave on each vine, choosing between a “fat” pruning and a “thin” pruning on the basis of last year’s harvest and the health of the plant. Where he has passed, the empty wires glitter in the sun and the tangle of branches has fallen to the ground, waiting to be collected into a pyre and burned for charcoal.

  Training the grapevines along wire fences or on overhead trellises is new to Sicily, where the production of low-proof table wine has only recently taken over from the traditional dark and strong Sicilian wine destined to make vermouth and to strengthen the thin wines of the north. The older vineyards are either pruned in the alberello style, low close-cut plants that do indeed resemble “little trees,” or trained in the Alcamese fashion in which the branches of each vine are tied for support to a bunch of canes. The canes, replaced each year at pruning time, add new designs to the patchwork of the countryside: in some fields they are laid out in long gray stripes along the vine rows, ready to hand for the tying up, while other vineyards are tufted with stooks of canes leaning up against each other and awaiting distribution.

  As each vineyard is completed, Turiddu gathers up the prunings and does the first plowing. The motors of the two tractors roar in counterpoint, first near, then far, echoing off the hillsides until it is difficult to tell who is where.

  We move back to Palermo on Epiphany, the day in which the Befana fills the shoes and stockings of Italian children with candy and toys, or coals if they have been naughty. The Befana is an old woman; it is said that when the Three Kings stopped by her cottage to ask directions, they invited her to join them in bringing presents to the newborn King, but she said she was too busy with her housework. After they left she was seized by remorse and started off by herself with a bag full of presents. She is still searching, and she leaves presents as she passes at every hearth where there are children, just in case.

  Never able to compete with the dead in Sicily anyway, the Befana has been further diminished by the government’s efficiency campaign, a move that has been much criticized as unfair to children and disrespectful of all the most ancient Italian traditions. This year the Italian genius for compromise has triumphed: although the Befana has not been restored to the privileged ranks of the national holidays, the Minister of Public Education decreed that the schools would reopen on the seventh, thus saving both the goat and the cabbages, as the Italian proverb says.

  According to another proverb, the Befana carries away all the holidays, and San Giuseppe brings them back again. Saint Joseph’s Day on March 19 isn’t a national holiday anymore either, but at least its arrival means that Easter is drawing near, bringing the incredible explosion of the Sicilian spring. For the moment, however, despite the swelling buds on the almond trees and the tips of the daffodils already fending the mulch in the garden, the Befana carries us back to the city and to the two most wintry months, in which rain and mud and flu epidemics will keep us prisoners for two or three weekends in a row, until we all feel stir crazy and even the cat races around our small apartment in fits of demonic possession most becoming to his black fur and green eyes.

  This time our return to the city is more reluctant than ever. The newspapers are full of what they have baptized as the strage di Santo Stefano, the “Saint Stephen’s Day Massacre.” On the day after Christmas five people were shot down by the Mafia, and more in the days that followed, bringing the total for 1982 to 150 murdered and again as many fallen to the lupara bianca, the “white shotgun” victims who disappear without leaving any trace, their bodies never to be found.

  The twenty years that I have been in Sicily have witnessed two successive revolutions in the map of Mafia power. Originally a rural phenomenon, the influence of which was much curtailed though never extinguished under Mussolini, the Mafia entered new fields of endeavor in the wake of the Allied invasion in 1943. The American government released Lucky Luciano from prison to prepare the way for the landing, and the huge business of provisioning the American troops with its concomitant black market fell to the “friends of the friends.”

  The great expansion of Palermo in the postwar period, when it was designated the capital of the newly created Sicilian regional government, provided fertile ground for this new generation of mafiosi, who had replaced the old shotgun with the machine gun and adopted other innovations as well from their American cousins. Huge fortunes were made overnight as real estate speculation changed the face of Palermo, and at the end of the fifties a violent war broke out between the various cosche, or families, who were vying for control of the city. The last battle in this war backfired: a bomb in the luggage compartment of a car intended for a mafioso killed seven carabinieri instead, public indignation was ignited, and a parliamentary commission was instituted to investigate the Mafia.

  The political influence of the Mafia outweighed the influence of the commission, and the special law passed to allow the police to place suspected mafiosi under house arrest far from their native territory only facilitated Sicilian organized crime in penetrating northern Italy, but the cosche thought it advisable to make peace among themselves and keep a low profile during the investigations, so the late sixties and seventies were years of relative peace.

  The huge profits deriving from their increasing control of the drug market (Sicily is the channel through which a large part of the world’s opium production is refined and distributed throughout Europe and the U.S.) created new problems, however. The need to recycle these profits, mainly through public works contracts, into respectability, made the Mafia more vulnerable to investigation and less hesitant about stepping into the limelight in order to remove obstacles to its progress. I can well remember how shocked Palermo was in 1971 when the top man in
the local branch of the national prosecutor’s office was shot down. It was the first time the Mapa had aimed so high, something that was to be repeated often during the next decade: top police officers, judges, even the president of the regional government were eliminated when they threatened the smooth functioning of this enormous machine. Yet still more blood has been shed in internecine quarrels among the families themselves. Entire clans have been wiped out during the last couple of years as a new power struggle has broken the precarious peace of the seventies and has seen skirmishes on both sides of the Atlantic: the body of one murdered mafioso came back in a coffin from New York decapitated, a macabre indication that his clan was now leaderless. The Saint. Stephen’s Day Massacre is only the most recent episode in all this.

  The massacre took place in a pizza parlor and in a small glass factory, both belonging to the family of the boss Tommaso Buscetta. Neither site is far from our apartment, but it is less the fear of stray bullets that makes it difficult to return to Palermo than the sense of total impotence, the seeming impossibility of taking an effective stand, of braking the slow decay of this beautiful city.

  Palermo is a splendid slavegirl, whom her masters—Muslim masters, Christians, emirs, Norman kings, and Spanish viceroys—have adorned, one after another. Weighted down by all her jewels, she sleeps in the sun.

  Anatole France, “Lettera dalla Sicilia,” in Delle cose di Sicilia

  If he were writing this letter today instead of in 1896, Anatole France would perhaps concede that Palermo’s sleep has become a comatose stupor, produced by infection and decay. I can bear to return only if I force myself to ignore this side of it and concentrate on the vestiges of former splendor. I have had in mind for a long time a children’s book on the Norman period: now is the time to explore Palermo for this purpose, to trace the course of the Norman walls and search for the pleasure palaces that lay beyond them, surrounding the city “like golden coins hung about the neck of a full-breasted girl.” Ibn Jubayr obviously had a one-track metaphor, but his is no doubt an apt description of the sensual beauty of Palermo in the twelfth century.

  The Italian Middle Ages are so anomalous with respect to the feudalism versus growth of the nation-state pattern that evolved in northern Europe that most college history courses don’t even attempt to cope with them. At the most a brief résumé of the evolution of the Italian city-state serves to explain the Renaissance. Southern Italy, which knew neither city-state nor any indigenous form of Renaissance, has a story that rarely gets told, and it is therefore startling to realize that Palermo at the beginning of the eleventh century had a population that is conservatively estimated at one hundred thousand inhabitants, second only to that of Constantinople among all the European cities, and that a century later, when the city had passed from Arab to Norman hands, King Roger II received an income from the city of Palermo alone that was greater than that which his Norman cousins to the north received from all of England.

  When the Arabs arrived in Sicily in the course of the ninth century, they came to colonize; they brought with them highly sophisticated irrigation techniques and introduced many new crops: lemons and oranges, date palms and melons, mulberry trees and silkworms, sugarcane and rice, all of which flourished in the fertile Sicilian soil. Small villages grew up throughout the island, and the languishing economy awoke to extraordinary vigor. Fifty years after the first landing, Syracuse, the western capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell into Arab hands. It required another hundred years to break down the last resistance, but by 965 the occupation of the island was complete, and in the last hundred years of Islamic domination, much of the local population, which had been almost entirely Greek speaking and belonged to the Greek church, converted to Islam and to the Arabic tongue.

  In the meantime the capital of the Fatimite Empire had shifted from neighboring Tunisia to distant Egypt, and the Sicilian emirs, left to their own devices, fell to quarreling among themselves. Still fabulously wealthy but relatively unprotected, Sicily was a tempting morsel for any appetite. And there were plenty of takers in the neighborhood: Norman knights on their way home from the Crusades had discovered that southern Italy, torn between Lombard, papal, and Byzantine ambitions, offered good opportunities for those younger sons who sought to carve out by a bit of swordwork a piece of land for themselves. Among these, the sons of Tancred d’Hauteville had distinguished themselves as particularly ambitious and, led by the eldest, Robert Guiscard, had established control over much of southern Italy. In 1061 Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger embarked on a campaign to conquer Sicily, an endeavor that took them thirteen years: Palermo fell in 1078, and the last important Saracen stronghold, at Noto, was taken in 1091. Roger assumed the title of Great Count of Sicily, and in 1105 he was succeeded by his ten-year-old son, Roger, who in 1130 crowned himself king of Sicily.

  The extraordinary tolerance and open-mindedness that the Normans demonstrated toward their Saracen and Greek Christian subjects were probably dictated in the case of Count Roger by considerations of strategy: a handful of Norman knights could not hope to rule the entire island unless they made use of the extant and highly developed Arab bureaucracy. With Roger II, however, preference was joined to pragmatism. Thanks to his mother, Adelaide of Savona, he was Mediterranean both in blood and in upbringing; his mother’s choice of Palermo as the capital for her regency meant that Roger grew up in a city that was cosmopolitan, cultivated, and luxury loving, a striking contrast to the rough-and-tumble life his father must have led when growing up in the Hauteville castle in Normandy. The peaceful coexistence among Norman, Arab, and Byzantine created a most favorable environment in which science, learning, and art, encouraged by the curiosity and generosity of Roger and his successors, flourished beyond anything that Europe had seen since the Dark Ages began.

  It was as short-lived as it was magnificent: Roger’s grandson William II assured disaster when he married off his aunt Constance to the son of Barbarossa. When William died without a direct heir in 1189, Henry arrived to claim his wife’s dowry. Swept into the struggle between pope and emperor, the Norman kingdom was doomed, despite the brief respite it was to know under Frederick II.

  No doubt we must thank the piety of the French and Spanish conquerors who followed for the fact that the religious monuments built by the Norman kings, the Palatine Chape! and the cathedrals of Monreale and Cefalù, have survived relatively intact. No such respect has been shown to the pleasure palaces; we have inherited only bits and pieces that must be patched by contemporary descriptions and mortared with the imagination if one is to re-create any sense of the life they once knew.

  I decide to begin with the earliest palace; on the first sunny day I ask my friend Maria Vica to accompany me to the eastern outskirts of Palermo to see Favara, much beloved of Roger II.

  In order that none of the joys of land or water should be lacking to him, he caused a great sanctuary for birds and beasts to be built at a place called Favara, which was full of caves and dells; its waters he stocked with every kind of fish from divers regions; nearby he built a beautiful palace. And certain hills and forests around Palermo he likewise enclosed with walls, and there he made the Parco—a pleasant and delightful spot, shaded with various trees and abounding with deer and goats and wild boar. And here also he raised a palace, to which the water was led in underground pipes from springs whence it flowed ever sweet and clear. And thus the King, being a wise and prudent man, took his pleasure from these places according to the season. In the winter and in Lent he would reside at the Favara, by reason of the great quantity of fish that were to be had there; while in the heat of the summer he would find solace at the Parco where, with a little hunting, he would relieve his mind from the cares and worries of state.

  Chronicles of Archbishop Romuald of Salerno, quoted in John Julius Norwich, The Kingdom in the Sun

  Actually, Romuald gives Roger a little more credit than is his due: the palace of Favara (which comes from the Arabic word farawah, meaning “fountain”
or “spring”) was built earlier, by Emir Jafar, and Roger only amplified it, adding a chapel and creating the artificial lake that surrounded it on three sides.

  A great part of Favara’s charm must have lain in its position on the narrow plain at the eastern rim of the Conca d’Oro; in sight of the sea, it is shadowed to the south by Monte Grifone, which rises rapidly and raggedly from the plain, its green hulk the first in the ring of mountains surrounding Palermo. The area, now called Brancaccio, has been designated as a zone for industrial development and is a squalid jumble of hovels and high-rises interspersed with small factories struggling to survive despite the fact that most of their profits go to paying protection money to the Mafia, which rules the neighborhood with such violence that the press sometimes refers to Brancaccio as the South Bronx of Palermo.

  Without Maria Vica to guide me, I might easily have missed the narrow alley leading to the western facade of the castle. The blind arches, a constant decorative element in all the Arab-Norman buildings, are hardly recognizable for the bright green wooden shutters barring the windows cut into the ancient walls, while low sheds hide from view the small cupola marking the chapel, its round dome ringed by a cornice that gives it a curious, lidded effect. A young woman living in the alleyway opens the chapel for us so we can peer up inside the cupola, tall and narrow, the stones of its arches so weathered by the salt winds blowing off the sea that all sense of human artifice has been eroded.