On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  “Why, you didn’t need permission, not unless you wanted to take photographs or something; we always let people in.”

  It’s not worth the energy to get upset, and in any case I am grateful that my visit to the Cuba has been postponed for twenty-four hours, enabling me to see it in today’s brilliant sunlight. It is much bigger than I expected, only slightly smaller in dimension than the Zisa and very similar in its facade. The arched windows give onto blue sky: the cupola from which it probably derived its name has long since collapsed. Through the doorway, six feet off the ground at the water level of the lake that once completely surrounded the palace, I can see the bare branches of a tree growing in the courtyard, and some last remnants of arabesqued stuccowork clinging to a vault. Like the Zisa, the color of the stone, warm in the sun, softens the harsh lines, and the play of light and reflection between stone and water must have been delightful, the shadowy interior an invitation to cross the little bridge, long gone, and escape from the hot Sicilian sun. It is still inviting despite its dismal surroundings, and I would like to linger, but the bored soldier is breathing down my neck.

  Reluctantly I take my leave and continue on up Corso Calatafimi in search of the small lane that leads between apartment buildings to the gate of a lovely but very decayed villa, typically Sicilian in its baroque facade and double staircase curving up to the front door. Three tall palms and an enormous magnolia rise up behind the villa while orchards stretch out on either side, a sunken pool of green amidst the high-rises. A custodian opens the padlock on an iron gate and tells me to follow the path.

  This leads me between two ancient stone walls bordered by orange and lemon trees, heavy with fruit that gleams in the bright sunlight. After a bit the path curves and opens into an orchard where citrus trees are interspersed and shaded by medlars, taller and duller in color, their fruit still tiny and dark green. The trees are close together, barely allowing the sunlight through to dapple the dense undergrowth of ivy, angelica, and acanthus. The path narrows—I have walked some two hundred yards—and I can see at the end some palm branches. As I draw closer I realize that I am looking at them through the Cubula itself, a small stone cube topped by a cheerful red dome, each of its four walls pierced by a tall pointed archway opening onto the single vaulted room. It is thought that there was once a whole series of these pavilions forming an intermittent portico of shady spots wherein to stop and rest while strolling through the park. The Cubula is the only one left, and this of itself seems quite miraculous: one emerges from the shady orchard to see it silhouetted against the beige stucco of an unfinished apartment building less than fifty yards away, and only three yards to the right a barbed-wire fence skirts a huge pile of metal scaffolding. A crane turns overhead, and the whine of an electric saw drowns out the singing of the birds in the orchard.

  I hasten to retreat along the path so that I can look back again through the branches of the medlar trees that blot out the construction work, wreathing the Cubula in its original frame of foliage. The slightest of breezes shifts the leaves and their shadows, a birdsong is interrupted abruptly, and only my presence impedes the arrival of king and concubine to restore themselves in the shade of the Cubula with wine that has been cooling in the fountains of the Genoard.

  It is too easy for me to consider Bosco the repository of all that I love in Sicily, and Palermo the incarnation of all that is worst. I stand rebuked by this morning’s newspaper, which bears a reminder that pastoral settings are not reserved for idylls. Two sons of our local shepherd have been arrested, together with some twenty-five other people of the area, on charges of belonging to a criminal organization and of attempted extortion. During the night the carabinieri cordoned off the area between Partinico, Balestrate, and Alcamo and arrested the whole gang, mostly shepherds, who they claim have been exerting pressure on local landowners to rent or even sell land for pasturage at very low prices.

  Tonino had heard no rumors of anything like this, and we speculate as to whether it is generational turnover or indicative of the power void at the top. All the local “pezzi di novanta” the big shots, are in hiding because of the drug war, and a lot of petty criminals are making amateurish attempts to carve out a space for themselves in the absence of the bosses.

  I have long been a champion of shepherds, albeit for ridiculous reasons: just about the best thing one can eat in Sicily is a bowl of hot curds and whey ladled from the cauldron in which the shepherds are making ricotta, and I bitterly resent the fact that we are seldom on visiting terms with the shepherds who live nearby. Perhaps it was basically greed that prompted me to consider Tonino’s profound distrust of shepherds as an inherited and unreasonable prejudice, something out of Oklahoma. “Oh, the cowboys and the farmers should be friends” would run through my head whenever he embarked on the subject.

  When we first began to spend time at Bosco, the shepherd whose house and sheep pens are just up the road sent his son to ask permission to pasture the sheep in the stubble after our wheat had been harvested. It seemed that this might mark the onset of a thaw in our relations with shepherds, and the following Easter I took Natalia and her cousin Martina to get some ricotta, as we had been invited to do. Following Tonino’s instructions we walked up the road, forked left and left again onto a track that led up over a little rise and into a muddy yard blackened with sheep droppings and pockmarked by the passage of tiny hooves. In front of us was the traditional whitewashed one-room farmhouse with a sloping tile roof, to the left a shed and a modern, flat-roofed house stuccoed in a pattern of brown and green, to the right the railings of the sheep pens and a small vegetable garden.

  Smoke was coming out of the shed, and it was there that we found the shepherd’s wife, a gray-haired woman perhaps in her early fifties, and her teen-aged daughters, hard at work on the ricotta from the morning’s milking. In the summer they have to make the cheese twice a day, but in April the nights were still cold enough to keep the evening’s milk from spoiling so that the two batches could be processed together. The first lot of milk had already been boiled and separated, and the curds, destined to become pecorino, had been packed into rush baskets and were draining on wooden trays in one room of the shed. In the other room the women were taking turns at stirring the whey that was heating together with more milk in an enormous copper cauldron, big enough to take a bath in, propped up on stones in one corner of the shed over a blazing fire fed by four- or five-foot-long logs that were shoved farther and farther into the flames rapidly consuming them. The smoke circled the rafters and went out the door; the women seemed accustomed to it, but the little girls and I couldn’t manage to stay in the room for more than a few minutes at a time.

  As she pushed the long-handled twig brush round and round to keep the milk from scorching and sticking to the bottom of the cauldron, the wife talked to me about her life: the hard work involved in making cheese twice a day (as welcome as the open fire was, in the damp chill of an April morning, it wasn’t difficult to imagine what it would mean in the Sicilian summer), the difficulties and the loneliness of bringing up seven children out in the Sicilian countryside, without electric light or running water until eight years ago, her worry that her sons would be unable to find wives willing to put up with the hardships of a shepherd’s life. They managed to get a good price for their cheese, she said, because instead of selling it to a middleman she herself took it in the car to Partinico every day and delivered it direct to her customers. I remarked on how unusual it was to find people living full time on the land. Her husband had always needed her help, and although they had had a house in Alcamo “with all the proper furniture,” somehow she had never managed to live there, and finally they had saved up enough money to build a house with all the modern comforts here in the country.

  “Come, let me show you.” Turning the brush over to one of her daughters, she led us to the brown and green house we had seen as we came in. “There wasn’t any point in letting my furniture just rot there in Alcamo where nobody could see
it.”

  With great pride she showed us through a shiny, tiled and marble-floored house full of brand-new furniture that looked as if it had never been sat on. It was all what the Italians call “in stile,” modern replicas approximating styles from the past, as opposed to moderna. (But then there is also what an architect I know calls “stile moderna”—built by someone who has heard of modern furniture but never seen any.) A sofa and armchairs upholstered in velvet and fringed in silk sat about a dining room suite that was vaguely French in inspiration, heavy with gilt and pink marble. The kitchen had the matching cabinets known as “all’americana”; the master bedroom was, she proudly announced, “stile veneziana” and was very handy when her married daughters came to spend the night. Of the other two bedrooms, only the one where her son slept showed any sign of human passage, and I couldn’t figure out if the gleaming ceramic tiles of the bathroom got polished up every morning after the men had washed or whether that too was off limits for daily use.

  When I asked her if she had learned the art of cheese making from her mother, she seemed almost offended. “Oh, no, signora, I wasn’t born to this. I grew up in Balestrate, my father was a bottaio, a cooper.” The craft of making and maintaining wine casks is many rungs above shepherding, so she saw her life as one of disappointment and decline.

  When we returned to the cheese shed, the milk had boiled and curdled and she pronounced it ready. Her daughter lifted up the brush, shook off the drops of whey clinging to the twigs, and passed it over the cauldron in the sign of the cross before carrying what was left of the logs outside to plunge in a bucket of water.

  The shepherd’s wife filled up my plastic container with ricotta from the cauldron and then insisted that we eat some while it was still hot. Natalia and Martina could not manage the soup plates full of steaming whey while standing up, so one of the daughters ushered us into the old farmhouse and sat us down at a table. One look showed me that this was where the real business of living was conducted. The room that occupied the front half of the house was at once kitchen and living and dining room; to the back were two alcoves, closed off by curtains, where presumably the parents and the two daughters still living at home slept. The flaking whitewashed walls were dotted with pots, coat hooks, and pictures of saints, and the furniture was old and lopsided, whatever stile it once had had blurred by many coats of paint.

  As we sat at the table mopping up the ricotta with fat slices of fresh bread, a voice, high and wavering with age, suddenly spoke up from behind one of the curtains. I couldn’t make out anything it was saying, until I realized to my astonishment that it was declining a Latin noun.

  “Buon giorno,” I answered, at a loss for any more adequate response.

  The answer came in Italian, quite correct and without a trace of dialect: “You aren’t Sicilian, are you, signora? By your accent I would say you were either English or American.”

  “You’re quite right, I’m an American,” I replied, still having no idea to whom I was talking, or even if it was a he or a she.

  “English is a very beautiful language.” This time the voice was speaking in English. The daughter who was attending to us must have noticed my growing perplexity, for she intervened.

  “My father has very bad legs, and ever since his gallstone operation last fall he hasn’t been able to get out of bed.” She drew back the curtain just enough so we could see an elderly man in a woolen nightcap propped up in a large double bed under many layers of blankets. I bowed, he nodded, and we continued our conversation, this time in Italian.

  The old shepherd was greatly saddened that age, sickness, and the harsh adversities of the pastoral life to which fate had so unjustly delivered him were such that they prevented him from rising from his bed of pain to greet me properly, honored as he was to welcome to his humble dwelling someone who not only belonged to a family with which he had long had the honor to be acquainted and of which he held particularly sacred the memory of the buon’anima (“the good soul,” the Sicilian way of saying “the late”) of Don Turiddu, in whose footsteps his grandson (Tonino) was following, a man of honor the Cavaliere Simeti, respected throughout the neighborhood for his honesty and beloved for his generosity, of which he, the shepherd, was not the only beneficiary, for Don Turiddu had ever been ready to lend money to some poor unfortunate without ever asking as much as a soldo of interest, but also he was honored to welcome someone who spoke English, which was music to his ears, bringing back to him as it did the time when he had been in the service of the British crown, for he had studied English in school, since he had not been intended for the miserable life of a shepherd but would have been an accountant had not the war intervened, sending him to fight in Africa, where he was taken prisoner by the British and sent to Ceylon, where he was interned in a prison camp in which he was able, by virtue of his knowledge of the English language, to serve as an interpreter, but this was the last stroke of fortune in a long and luckless life, for upon his return to Alcamo at the end of the war he was to discover that his widowed father had first remarried and then expired, and that all that was to have been his had finished in the pockets of a son by a previous marriage of his wily stepmother, save for the small piece of land on which this house where we were was built and some few sheep, and if it hadn’t been for the buon’anima of Don Turiddu, who had lent him the money to enlarge his flock, he didn’t know where he would be, but as it was, thanks be to God and ever struggling against the bestiality and the suffering of a shepherd’s life, which is certainly the most desperate and disgraziata occupation that God ever created for man, he and his family had managed well enough, although after all he had endured he was now still further tried by the pains in his legs, but he and his family did their best to maintain their dignity and furthermore he was in frequent correspondence with Queen Elizabeth II!

  That visit marked the high point in our relations with this family. The warm weather allowed the old shepherd to hobble about with the help of canes, and he and his wife returned the visit, but it soon became clear that we would have to look sharp. Things borrowed took a very long time to come back, the sheep wandered too often out of the stubble to nibble on the grapevines, the flock took shortcuts over freshly plowed fields (even though their hooves are tiny, when a flock of sheep passes through a vineyard, it packs the earth down solidly, suffocating the vine roots), and then the youngest son took a fancy to Christmas trees.

  One day some carabinieri in a patrol car jolted down the road and stopped to ask me directions to the shepherd’s house. With my usual naïveté I thought they probably wanted to buy some ricotta. That evening we heard that the elder son was being held for questioning in connection with a murder. (The case was never solved, and the boy was released after a few months.) When he came over once with his father to protest the fact that another shepherd (quite uninvited) had brought his flock to graze in our stubble, which they considered to be their own monopoly, he said, by way of recommending himself to me: “We treat your things as if they were our own!”

  Tonino, not in the least surprised by the news in this morning’s paper, explains to me that violence is almost inevitable where shepherds are concerned: very few of them own their pasturage, their margin of profit is too low to allow them to pay much rent—especially in an area like ours, where land values are high—and they are therefore hard put to keep their flocks alive without resorting to prevarication, poaching, and deceit.

  We are so vulnerable at Bosco. The house is empty so much of the time, the comings and going of Turiddu Vivona are easily predictable. I am alone there very often, with only the company of a dog who is all bark (when she can be bothered) and no bite whatsoever. There are no guns of any sort in the house, my private and perhaps irrational statement in a land where violence is too often the first resort, and I feel myself totally unequipped to deal with the devious, read-between-the-lines negotiations that are necessary with people like the shepherd and his sons. Yet I feel much less threatened by them than I do by the
impersonal, random violence of the city, the purse snatchings, the holdups, and the Mafia massacres that have proliferated in the last ten years, as if I think that some principle of order and civil coexistence, long since vanished from the urban setting, still survives in the countryside, making Bosco a safe haven from all that I cannot accept in Palermo.

  II

  SPRING

  The symbol of Spring is the flower,

  the protagonist of the feast day, which

  it resembles in that it augurs a long

  and fruitful life. Like the feast day the

  flower is ephemeral, and finds its only

  strength in the possibility of perpetual

  rebirth. And yet, if it is a cut flower

  that is being offered—a flower gathered,

  that is, before it has had time to

  transform itself into fruit—it recalls

  the idea of sacrifice, the very sacrifice

  most dear to the gods, that of the

  young and virgin victims who have yet

  to reach maturity.

  And it is just this fate—either

  to ripen into fruit or to be gathered

  before its time—that explains why …

  the flower has often been taken as the

  symbol of human destiny.

  Franco Cardini,

  I giorni del sacro: il libro delle feste

  VILLA DE CORDOVA, PALERMO

  Chapter Four

  The winter has been as punctual as I had feared in delivering influenza and bad weather, so ever since the end of the vacation our visits to Bosco have been limited to wine pickups, lasting the time necessary for rinsing out twenty or thirty ten-liter demijohns, round glass bottles in plastic baskets, and filling them up again with red or white wine to be delivered to our customers in Palermo. This service, started for the benefit of friends and neighbors, has expanded to absorb almost a third of our production, and although Francesco and Natalia, who often manage the whole bottling operation by themselves, grumble frequently about what a pain in the neck it is, we can get more than twice the wholesale bulk price this way, and, equally important, the satisfaction of knowing that all the effort we put into making the wine is appreciated.