On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  Following the custodian through an iron gate we skirt the eastern wall of the castle and walk in what was once the lake, bordered on two sides by orange trees. The ancient stone banks have been brought to light, and to the north a row of small houses has borrowed the massive stones for its foundations. The lake itself is a vast and beautifully tended market garden, a variegated sea of green tossed by wave on wave of lettuces, radishes, and onions, and enviably free of weeds.

  We retrace our steps, and the custodian shows us how to circle around behind the chapel to see the castle courtyard, which she warns us is inhabited. She has put it mildly: at least fifteen families have burrowed their way into the ruins, squeezing into niches and wrapping themselves about the columns, cutting a window, adding a balcony or a shed in an ingenious, almost fungal growth that has a certain sordid charm. In one corner the remaining half of a vault, quicklimed a brilliant blue, provides shade for a balcony, to the right one of the original arched windows sports pale green paint and a broom hung out to dry over flowerpots propped up on bricks to keep them from sliding down the tin roof of the shed below. A swarm of tiny children have interrupted their games to stare at us. A mother sweeps a little girl into her arms and kisses her in a series of loud smacks: “Sangue mio—my own blood!”

  “You know,” says Maria Vica as we walk out, “you don’t hear that expression in Catania—it comes straight from the Arabic.”

  Favara of the two lakes, you are the sum of all desires; pleasing sight, most marvelous spectacle.

  Your waters divide into nine rivulets; O most beautiful and branching currents!

  Where your two lakes meet, there love had made its camp, and along your canal has passion pitched its tents.

  O splendid lake of the two palms, O royal hostel which this embraces!

  The limpid waters of your springs resemble lustrous pearls, and the surrounding meadows are the sea.

  From a poem by Abd ar-Rahmàn al Itrabanishi,

  Roger’s secretary, in Delle cose di Sicilia

  The good weather that accompanied us to Favara doesn’t last long: the temperature drops suddenly, and we have two days of storms that leave the mountains around Palermo white with snow. In the city, sleet and snow alternate in brief flurries, but nothing sticks despite the ardent prayers of the young. Although nowadays it seems to snow much more frequently in the mountains than it did when I first arrived in Sicily, the Palermitani still treat a snowfall as something quite exceptional, and in January of 1981, when we awoke one morning to find the streets buried under six inches of snow, the city went mad.

  In our part of the city the snow melted quickly, but farther inland traffic was difficult, and the town of Monreale at the foot of the nearest mountain was cut off except for the small elite of ski enthusiasts who had chains for their tires. The storm had knocked out much of Sicily’s high-tension network, so we were without light, and therefore heat and water, for several days, and a couple of weeks of periodic blackouts followed in which we went about with candles and flashlights in our pockets and trudged up the stairs rather than risk getting caught in the elevator.

  At the start, however, everyone was delighted: children skipped school, drivers had big grins on their faces despite the hazards of unfamiliar driving conditions, and the blackout was a joke as long as outside there was a whiteout. On the Saturday we went out to Bosco, arriving at sunset to find the roofs still white and a foot of snow under the olive trees and between the rows of grapevines. It was melting fast, but the children managed a small snowman before it became too dark to see. The next morning we took a walk, sloshing down the hill behind the house into our neighbor’s olive grove, where the little valley, protected by its steep slopes and ancient trees, still held snow deep enough for a furious snowball fight.

  From the other side of the valley we could see the whole plain: the snow stopped just a little below Bosco, and from there to the sea it was green, but the ring of mountains was completely white and glistening in the sun, the peaks of Monte Iato and Rocca Busambra to the south looking more like some Alpine scene than our familiar Sicilian panorama, and illuminating for me the Greeks’ enthusiasm for the snows of Mount Parnassus.

  In a nearby vineyard the children found enough snow to make a proper snowman, but they needed a lesson in the basic techniques. The snow was thin and wet enough to roll up like a carpet, leaving its muddy underside outward, so our snowman had an olive complexion, and we gave him a purely Sicilian face: camomile flowers for eyes, an upside-down jack-in-the-pulpit for a nose, and a wild iris for a mouth.

  In the early afternoon we headed back to Palermo along the mountain route, up over the pass behind Partinico and down into the Conca d’Oro and Monreale on the other side. The gas station attendant outside Partinico told us that the road had just been plowed open, and it felt very adventurous to be the first ones through. The thaw had barely begun up here, the snow was virgin on either side of the narrow lane created by the plows, and we stopped up at the top so that the children could have their first experience of plunging knee-deep into snow.

  Once we were over the pass, the traffic became intense: all Palermo had come up to the snow, and well-equipped, down-padded families cavorted side by side with ladies in high heels and mink coats, fathers in business suits, and children in their Sunday best, all slipping and slopping about in the wet snow, slinging inexpert handfuls at each other and roaring with delight.

  Custom dictates that those who go up into the mountains to see the snow must pile some up on the roof of their cars, preferably building it into a snowman, although even a mere heap will do. People who have baggage racks are lucky, as there is less danger that it will all slide off as one descends carefully into the city. For the point is this, the slow descent and triumphal entry, honking and laughing and showing off one’s enterprise and bravura in conquering such a foreign element. At the traffic lights the cars are assaulted by gangs of street urchins who nip out and grab handfuls of snow off the cars to throw at each other, stealing snowballs just as they steal most of their other pleasures.

  In the days that followed, Palermo’s sports equipment dealers made a fortune. The Palermitani were quick to discover that they could consume the snow as conspicuously as they do everything else, and outfitted themselves with beautifully designed and hideously expensive padded jackets and pants and snowboots, just in case it should happen again.

  January 14: today is the fifteenth anniversary of the earthquake that devastated western Sicily in 1968. While most of the towns from Palermo west and south trembled, the fifteen that lie along the valley of the Belice River were severely damaged and several of them completely destroyed. The valley’s population, already much reduced by emigration, which was still at that time the only viable alternative to the subsistence level farming of the Sicilian interior, lost what little they had to lose: their homes, their meager belongings, all the tangible expressions of a peasant culture that was already under siege. And many lost their lives.

  The jackals were quick to scent an opportunity, and millions of lire have disappeared in the “reconstruction,” first in the construction of temporary barracks to house the sixty thousand homeless (after fifteen years there are still twenty thousand people living in these uninsulated buildings, baking in the summer sun and freezing in the winter), and then in the mammoth autostrada, the same superhighway that speeds our weekend trips to Bosco, which has embroidered the Belice Valley with cloverleaf exits worthy of Los Angeles, leading to deserted heaps of toppled houses or forlorn rows of barracks.

  This morning the people of the Belice will gather once again to present their requests to the government, to ask that the permanent housing be completed and the work of economic reconstruction commence, but one wonders with what heart they march. They have won one Pyrrhic victory: they have entered the Italian language as a synonym for abandonment and desperation. After each new disaster, each earthquake or major flood, with the first relief a Minister comes, jumping down from his helicopte
r and declaring: “This will not become another Belice!”

  The other evening at the movies I was telling some English friends who were with me an anecdote that ended, almost parenthetically, with “But of course it wasn’t really an earthquake, it was just—”

  “Oh, my God!” said Pam. “How is it possible that I have ended up in a place where someone can talk so calmly about earthquakes!” We have indeed had time to familiarize ourselves: in 1968 the tremors continued on and off for about four months and they have returned periodically ever since. An earthquake is interminable: I freeze, listening with my feet to this geological music, waiting to hear if it will fade out to stillness or build to a crescendo of falling masonry. It seems to go on for hours, although most tremors last only about twenty seconds. Fear comes over me afterward, as I see the hanging lamp, infallible seismograph, still swinging, and must decide whether to stay put, trusting in the reinforced concrete that is supposed to render our apartment building safe (although to judge by the rest of it, the pilasters are probably hollow), or to take the children out to join the crowd that is rapidly forming in the piazza. It is difficult to resist the pull of the running footsteps on the stairs; to succumb to it means to stand around for an hour in the piazza, everyone wedged between the school and the church, both low buildings that won’t go far if they fall, awaiting some all-clear signal that will never sound. It is boredom that overcomes fear in the end; feet tire, the cold seeps in, and the crowd begins to dwindle as one by one the families return to their homes, children seeking once more the maternal bosom now that all anger is past.

  It continues to be cold, but as always in Sicily the sun is hot, and turning the corner from shade to sunlight can mean a jump of ten degrees in temperature. We get three days of sun in a row, and I decide to take advantage of the warmth to go ahead with my quest for the pleasure palaces, this time those that lay in the Genoard, the huge park that stretched from the walls of the Royal Palace south into the Conca d’Oro. Started by Roger’s son William I and continued by his son William II, this park covered many acres and was dotted with lakes and fountains and gardens, with summerhouses, pavilions, and palaces. Of all this splendor only traces remain, the Zisa, the Cuba, and the Cubula.

  I don’t know how much I shall be able to see. The palace of the Zisa has been subject alternately to restoration and to collapse since 1950, and although the basic work of consolidation has just recently been terminated, the restoration of the interior is still in progress. The Cuba and the Cubula are much smaller, little pavilions to provide shade and repose, but one is in a private garden and the other in a military barracks. So I take care to wear my most un-Italian clothes and to brush up my foreign accent, and with guidebooks in full sight, I start out to see what I can wangle my way into.

  I leave the house in sunshine and park in front of the Zisa in pouring rain. It is immediately obvious that I shall not get to see the inside: since I last passed by here, the area around the palace has been fenced off with a very businesslike iron railing, cement mixers are churning, a workman is sandblasting an archway, a truck is being loaded with dismembered scaffolding, and more scaffolding is visible under the arches. But what I can see through the fence is glorious! The balconied windows of a later age have been removed, the big central arch leading into the interior has been reopened, and the warm rosy beige of the newly cleaned stone softens the austere geometry of the facade, three stories high, which is barely animated by two rows of blind arches and, on the ground floor, by three arched portals leading into the antechambers. Two lions rampant bearing a coat of arms are the only intricate note.

  To the right of the palace lies a low line of buildings, once probably a cloistered walk leading to the chapel. Of this only the apse and the red Moorish cupola have survived, around which a baroque church has grown up and then fallen down, a marriage of opposites that have come to resemble each other through the centuries.

  A carob tree and some twisted cedars are all that is left to remind one that the Zisa was once immersed in a park, but the outline of the reflecting pool that once lay in front of it is visible, together with the foundations of the little pavilion that stood on an island in the center. Although the city has grown up around it, there are still considerable open spaces both in front of and behind the Zisa, and the regional government intends to use the Zisa as a museum for temporary exhibits and to re-create the park and rebuild the pool, so that once more gardens will embrace the palace and still waters shimmer with the reflection of al-Aziz, “the Glorious.”

  For the moment, however, I shall have to be content with this view of the outside: for the interior I must turn to an account published in 1550 by a Dominican friar from Bologna, Leandro Alberti, in a book ambitiously titled Descrittione di tutta Italia, “A Description of All Italy.” The most fascinating part is the description of the central hall, with its honeycomb vaults and mosaic friezes, and its fountain:

  From an ingenious spigot a great abundance of water issues forth. And to the delight of the spectator, these limpid waters fall with great splashings onto stones of striped marble, and murmuring they descend the stones.… Above the spigot from which issues the water, one can see a most beautiful eagle in finest mosaic, and above this two delightful peacocks, one on each side, and between them two archers aiming their bows at birds perched on the branches of a tree.… The pavement is all of squares of white marble; in the middle the waters of the aforesaid fountain pass along a small canal and enter a beautiful and harmonious pool, four and a half feet square; this too is of the finest marble wrought with some curious mosaics. The bottom of the pool is divided into six sections, and beneath its limpid and transparent waters can be seen different kinds of fish, worked most ably in mosaic, the which, with the movements of the water, appear themselves to move. As they flow out, the waters are gathered once more into a canal similar to the first, and enter into another pool, … and then again into a third.… Near the center pool is a graceful table of candid marble, three feet on each side, raised not far off the ground upon four cleverly worked columns, where one can most enjoyably dine. And in this most pleasant spot and with no lesser delight one can sip of cooled wine, borne in jars upon the current along the aforesaid canals as far as this pool. Wherein, as they are borne along, the wine jars appear to seek battle among themselves, so agitated are they by the waters, more, or less, according to the impetus of the currents that carry them.

  Leandro Alberti, Descrittione di tutta Italia, in Delie cose di Sicilia

  Many of the little streets around the Zisa have been closed off because of the restoration work, and I have a hard time hunting out a route that will take me around to see the back. I finally find an excellent view across a wide stretch of fields and market gardens that have somehow resisted the low-cost public housing that has flooded the area. From this distance I can see three pavilions that were built onto the roof in the seventeenth century, their pink and yellow stucco and their curlicued outlines peeping over the crenellations in playful contrast to the severity of the palace below. It is exciting to witness the rebirth of this monument, proof that not all of Palermo’s decay is irreversible, and to think that we owe the accuracy of the reconstruction in great measure to Fra Leandro, who justified the detail of his account with remarkable foresight:

  I have dwelt at length on the description of these buildings, going beyond our original intention; yet it has seemed fit to me to describe this building for the satisfaction of all curious minds in order that, when much of the building is no longer, which impends in as much as there is no generous soul who will preserve it, and when it can no longer be seen in stone, its memory may at least remain in writing.

  From the Zisa it is not far to Corso Calatafimi, the main road leading from Palermo to Monreale, flanked with seventeenth-century villas, nineteenth-century townhouses, and twentieth-century high-rise condominiums, tossed together in the grab bag of the city’s chaotic growth. I have little difficulty in locating the barracks that hide the Cu
ba from view, but the soldier on duty outside the gate has no intention of letting me in.

  “You need permission. You have to go to get permission somewhere and it really isn’t worth it. I mean, you can’t go inside or anything, only look at it from outside, and it’s just a few old walls.”

  I am provoked but not really surprised: last summer the Red Brigades attacked a couple of munitions depots near Naples, and the military has tightened surveillance.

  “Where do I get permission?”

  “Well … maybe from the Comiliter.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Well … maybe at the Caserma Garibaldi.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Well … you go down this street and then there’s a church, and next to that there’s the Caserma Garibaldi.”

  From the Caserma Garibaldi I go to Piazza Bonanno, where the sentinel at the carabinieri barracks directs me to the Comiliter, which in turn sends me to the Ufficio Presidio, which is in a handsome eighteenth-century building across from the Royal Palace. The huge old wooden doors have a smaller door cut into them for foot traffic: when I ring the bell, this door opens on a chain and a soldier peers out like a suspicious housewife. Inside, behind bulletproof glass, two soldiers, their waists thick with daggers, hand grenades, and other sinister-looking gear, are watching Betty Boop cartoons on television, while a third takes possession of my driving license, issues me a visitor’s pass, and then accompanies me to the offices, where he knocks on doors saying, “This lady here wants to see some cupola,” until we find a major to whom I am allowed to make a written request for permission to visit the Cuba for “motivi di studio.” The next morning I go to pick up my letter of permission and present it to the soldier who is on duty today.