It has been tantalizing for me to come and go so rapidly, and I am delighted when the presence of the bottaio obliges us to spend the whole of February’s first weekend at Bosco. Tonino goes out on Friday, Francesco is staying behind in Palermo, so Natalia and the animals and I are the only ones who drive out on Saturday as soon as school is dismissed. The rain has gone but the cold lingers, and the snow on the mountains has not yet melted despite the bright sunlight. The almond trees are in bloom, puffs of palest pink blossom that echo the dance of the cloud shadows across the snow-covered mountaintops. First of all the trees to flower, the almond was a symbol of hope to the Greeks; Virgil was even more specific:
Observe, too,
When the almond tree that grows so thick in the forests
Puts on her blossoms, curves her fragrant boughs:
If the fruit abounds, abundant crops ensue,
And heavy threshing comes, intense with heat;
If shade predominates, with wealth of leaf,
Your floor will thresh stalks only rich in chaff.
Virgil, The Georgics
Today the almond’s fragrant branches curving out to the blue sky do at least seem a promise that Persephone’s return is not far off.
On closer inspection the countryside bears many harbingers of spring. The roadsides are thick with tiny flowers, much smaller and less ostentatious than those of April and May. The wild calendula speckle with orange the snowfall of camomile that spreads its miniature daisies throughout the vineyards, while great swathes of brilliant lemon yellow mark the advance of the wood sorrel. I would like to have a word or two with whoever it was who brought wood sorrel from South Africa to Europe. The delight of my eye yet the bane of my gardening, it grows everywhere; the single stems, each bearing a round bouquet of trefoil leaves and yellow flowers, pop up in any terrain, hugging close to arid soil but stretching out where it is damp as much as thirty centimeters to poke their heads through mulch, underbrush, woodpiles, and any other discouragement. At least 70 percent of the weeds that I pull out each winter are wood sorrel, and each root leaves behind a tiny bulb, ready to proliferate again the next year.
Yet the cushiony green leaves and the acid-yellow flowers are so beautiful and so much a part of the Sicilian winter scene that it is difficult to remember that wood sorrel is a relative newcomer. In fact, many of what one would consider the most characteristic elements of the Sicilian landscape were missing from Magna Graecia: the palms and the citrus trees that arrived with the Arabs, the agave and the prickly pear that the Spanish brought back with them from the New World. Almonds were already there and thick oak forests covering the now barren mountains; the olives were young and slender trunked, brought by the Greeks themselves.
We arrive at Bosco to find the road blocked by the bottaio’s huge filter, which is parked in front of the wine cellar. Tonino, Turiddu, and the bottaio himself are all at work, and cane markers stuck into the furrows at regular intervals testify that Mr. Amato has been getting ready to sow his tomatoes and melons.
The bottaio’s contribution to the process of wine making is twofold: he builds and maintains the great casks for fermenting and aging the wine, first cutting and bending the long strips of hickory or chestnut wood and binding them together with bands of wrought iron, and then scraping and cleaning the casks each summer to prepare them for the new must, checking to make sure that the wood has neither mildewed nor absorbed acid residues that would cause the wine to turn to vinegar. Then he returns in the winter to open the casks at the moment of the travaso, the decanting, when the fermentation is over and all the sediments have settled to the bottom of the casks, leaving the wine clear and sparkling. One cask, left empty at harvest time, receives the wine of its neighbor, which is then emptied of sediment and cleaned to receive in turn the wine of the next cask, and so on all the way around the wine cellar until all the wine has been decanted and all the sediment scraped out and run through the bottaio’s filter, once a hand press, now a complicated electrical machine. The wine that is filtered out is pumped back into the casks, the solid residue packed into sacks. This the bottaio takes in partial payment for his labor and sells to a distillery for the production of rubbing alcohol. He also gets to take away the tartar that has accumulated on the walls of the casks, which will go to making cream of tartar, for medicine and meringues.
The number of bottai still practicing their craft is dwindling rapidly: by far the majority of grape producers now take their grapes to the big cooperative wineries that store the must in gigantic steel tanks and have their own equipment for filtering the dregs. Even people like us who still make the wine at home have mostly converted to reinforced concrete or stainless-steel cisterns, which can neither mold nor absorb vinegar. We keep a few wooden casks in operation for seasoning the red wine, since wine matured in wood has a different, fuller taste, but the greater part of our production is stored in steel cylinders about twelve feet high and eight feet in diameter, which also have the great advantage of being easily cleaned, since each one has an oval door in the side through which a thin person can squeeze. Tonino and Francesco spend many wet and noisy hours with bathing suits and hoses inside the cisterns, scraping and singing. A steel wine cistern far outdoes a bathtub in resonance, and even tone-deaf Tonino sounds like Luciano Pavarotti as he scrubs away. I have always been tempted to try, but the door is small and I see myself stuck halfway like Winnie-the-Pooh, and desist.
Natalia helps me unload the car, eager to begin our ritual round of inspection in the garden. Not quite twelve yet, she still enjoys our weekends at Bosco, happiest when we bring one of her school friends with us, but perfectly content to be here by herself, to go for walks with just the dog and her imagination for company, or to curl up and tell herself stories in the crook of the mulberry tree.
Natalia gets her looks from her father, but her character is her own, powers of self-discipline and concentration that leave us all agape, dissolving into thunderstorms of emotional release. Timid and reserved until she feels at ease with people, she has had ever since she was tiny a very clear sense of what she did not feel ready to face, together with the courage and determination to go after what she really wanted.
This is a year of passage for Natalia as well, although she has not quite decided yet whether or not she feels ready for adolescence, and finds little help in the lurid stories about his contemporaries with which her fourteen-year-old brother hopes to shock us. Square and stocky as a little girl’s, Natalia’s body is rapidly catching up with her hands, which have always been remarkably long-fingered and graceful, and sometimes I can detect a seed of self-confidence in her shy smile. I too am changing in her regard: her “otherness” no longer disconcerts me, nor do I mistake strength for stubbornness, or feel anything but proud delight to note the difference between my own adolescent self, overweight and awkward, and the willowy nymph that Natalia now seems destined to become.
She is like me, however, in her love of flowers, and she rushes about the garden with the eagerness of Persephone, crooning over the cautious flowering of the crocus and reveling in the heavy, honeyed perfume of the blossoms on the almond trees. The daffodils are showing their buds as well, and it is only a question of days before their yellow competes with that of the wood sorrel. We find some newcomers to the garden: Tonino has asked Turiddu to dig up some suckers from the sorb apple tree down the road and plant them in front of the house. Sorb apple trees are very pretty with their tiny bouquets of white flowers in spring followed by bunches of little yellow fruit that grow rosy patches by October. The fruit is very astringent and puckery—it ties up the mouth, as the Italians say—unless you wait until it is overripe and looks almost rotten. People here string bunches of ripe sorb apples, surrounded by their leaves, onto wires to mature; hanging against the whitewashed walls they look like little Della Robbia plaques.
I often regret that I know nothing at all about the principles of landscape gardening and that I have never succeeded in imposing a scheme
of development on that part of the land around the house that I call “the garden,” which lives in uneasy coexistence and occasional rivalry with “the farm,” its boundary line ebbing and flowing according to my supply of energy and the demands of the agricultural calendar. I hoe and plant on impulse, my point of departure the vestiges of the old garden—the clumps of oleanders and the hedges of asparagus that were planted by Tonino’s grandfather—and my only guideline the pleasure that a plant gives me both in its aspect and its associations. So the sorb apples, even if they have been plunked down wherever Turiddu’s fancy dictated, are welcome on both accounts: they will be lovely to look at, and it is fitting that they come now, to celebrate the second month of the tree calendar, a month consecrated to the rowan tree, or mountain ash, a most magic-laden tree that does not grow in Sicily, except perhaps in the high mountains. If I cannot have the rowan, the sorbus aucuparia, at least I now have its domestic cousin in the garden.
Despite the sharp wind it is warmer outside in the sun than it is in the house, which is damp and cold after a month’s abandonment. Tonino has already lit the fireplace, but as soon as dark falls we turn on the central heating for the upstairs and start to fill the big brass braziers with coals from the fire. The brazier has always been the principal method of heating in Sicily, and what it lacks in effectiveness is compensated for by its beauty. The brazier itself is a round brass tray, about two feet across, with a wide, double-handled rim that curves down and out to accommodate toes in need of warming. It sits in a tripod whose brass feet end in leonine paws, and in a proper Sicilian household, which mine unfortunately isn’t, it has an enormous and highly polished lid of pierced brass that rises in sinuous curves for about three feet and ends in a spire on which a cupid balances on tiptoe. A brazier doesn’t give very much heat, and the coals tend to smell (that can be counteracted by adding a little tangerine peel), but it does have one singular and marvelous advantage over almost any other form of heat—you can take it to bed with you. The tray, well stoked with coals glowing red in their nest of ashes, is carried upstairs and tucked into bed, under a dome of woven willow branches (still known in the mountain towns by its Arabic name, cuba) to keep the covers from catching fire. Of course you can’t sleep safely with the brazier, and the question of who is to get up out of the warm bed at the very threshold of sleep and scamper across the cold floor to close the brazier in the bathroom may cause some slight marital friction, but that is a small price to pay for the incomparable luxury of nestling into such well-toasted sheets.
On my return to Palermo Sunday evening I receive a telephone call inviting me to a screening and discussion of the movie Il giorno della civetta at Natalia’s old elementary school, as part of a seminar preparing the teachers for anti-Mafia education. The very existence of such a program is an indication of how much Sicily has changed in the twenty years since Leonardo Sciascia wrote the novel on which the film was based. In those days a good portion of the Sicilian population would never have admitted the existence of the Mafia, and Palermo’s morning newspaper never printed the word. A pastoral letter from the late Cardinal Ruffini, then the archbishop of Palermo, which was read in all the churches one Easter just after I came here, claimed that the Mafia was a calumnious invention and that the three great impediments to Sicily’s peace and prosperity were Danilo Dolci, Tomaso di Lampedusa, and the foreign press, all of whom had slandered Sicily in their publications.
The change in the Mafia itself, a change that Sciascia recently defined as a “transformation into a ‘multinational of crime,’ … which no longer observes the rules for coexisting and conniving with the power of the state and with the morals, the traditions, and the way of life of the Sicilian people,” a change that has ruptured the equilibrium between bosses and politicians and left a long list of “excellent cadavers” in its wake, is in turn slowly altering both the official commitment to combating the Mafia and the approval, acquiescence, or at best indifference with which a great many Sicilians have traditionally considered the phenomenon.
This slow metamorphosis was abruptly accelerated last September with the murder of Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, a general of the carabinieri, who had begun his campaign against the Mafia early in the sixties, when he commanded the carabiniere forces in Sicily, and who was later one of the leaders of a successful campaign against the Red Brigades and the other terrorist groups operating in the north of Italy. In March of last year he was appointed prefect of Palermo and was promised legislative support and special powers in what was announced as a full-scale offensive against the Mafia. Having made the gesture, the government began, in the opinion of many, to drag its feet. Dalla Chiesa’s official installation took place only and precipitately the day after Pio La Torre, the regional secretary of the Communist party, was murdered by the Mafia, and the promised powers never came, while the law that would allow the police to investigate the bank accounts of presumed mafiosi languished in Parliament.
During the four months he was in office, however, dalla Chiesa did much to correct the traditional Sicilian view of the policeman as sbirro, or spy. He visited schools, factories, civic groups, and drug-rehabilitation centers in an attempt to drum up popular support for his battle and to convince the people of Palermo to abandon the omertà, the code of fear-inspired honor that imposes silence and prevents the police from ever finding a witness to any Mafia crime.
On the evening of September 2, 1982, as he was being driven home from the office by the young woman he had only recently married after years of being a widower, his car was ambushed in a narrow Palermo street, and a spray of machine-gun bullets killed dalla Chiesa, his wife, and the two men in the escort car behind them. The next morning the sidewalk where they had died was heaped with flowers, and a crudely lettered sign stuck to the wall read, “Here died the hope of all honest Palermitani.”
The funeral was impressive and deeply moving: an enormous crowd followed the coffins from the prefecture to the church of San Domenico, where the archbishop of Palermo, Cardinal Pappalardo, officiated at the requiem mass. It was an unprecedented assemblage, come from the new middle-class neighborhoods and from the slums of the old city, all outraged that the Mafia should have broken with tradition in having killed the wife as well, all cheering the coffins and hooting at the arrival of political dignitaries. The cardinal’s sermon, an outspoken denunciation of the local connivance and the national neglect that had allowed the Mafia’s power to proliferate, was delivered to absolute silence and followed by an ovation of spine-tingling dimensions. For the first time in Sicilian history a policeman had been admitted to the ranks of the popular heroes that had heretofore been reserved for rebels and outlaws such as the bandit Salvatore Giuliano.
Amidst the conventions, publications, exhibitions, and commemorations that have expressed honest commitment or paid mere lip service to the crusade against the Mafia, the Sicilian regional government has financed seminars on the Mafia for both teachers and students at every level of the school system, thus allowing the schools to buy books and to rent films and exhibits on the subject. It is in this context that I have been invited back to Natalia’s old elementary school, where I served several years as president of the local elementary school board. I decide, somewhat reluctantly, to go, if only to show what support I can for the program and for the woman who has organized it as part of her almost single-handed battle to shake her fellow teachers from their complacency.
The film itself is the story of a carabiniere captain from the north who, in the course of unraveling a murder case in the small Sicilian town where he is stationed, finds himself on the track of high-level corruption and graft and dares to arrest the local boss. False testimony destroys his case, and he is transferred away from Sicily, somewhat to the regret of the boss, Don Mariano, who, in a world that he himself describes as populated mostly by “half-men,” “manlets,” and “quackers,” has almost enjoyed engaging arms with a true man.
The original novel, commonly believed to have been i
nspired by the figure of dalla Chiesa although Sciascia has denied this, is a beautifully drawn portrait of the Mafia twenty years ago, and phrases from it have become part of the standard lexicon used in handling the subject. The movie makes some sacrifice to the spectacular, but it is nonetheless a good piece of work, and I am not sorry to be seeing it again.
The screening was to begin at five o’clock, to be followed by a debate. Unable to shed my American training, I arrive punctually to find only about five others; a gradual trickle fills the room with about twenty-five teachers (out of the fifty plus invited) and three of the nine parents now serving on the board. At a quarter to six the projection finally starts, but no one has bothered to find out how long the film lasts, and by the time the last reel flaps out of the projector it is seven-thirty, and the audience, with supper to prepare, is perched on the edge of its seats ready for flight. It takes twenty minutes of animated if shapeless discussion to decide upon postponing the debate until the following week.
When the debate finally does take place, in the presence of little more than a dozen teachers, the headmistress, and myself, it is a compendium of all that has made me flee from civic commitments in Sicily: it starts at least half an hour late; there is neither agenda nor chair to impress form or order on the discussion; all talk at once, heedless of relevancy, narrating at length and at the top of their voices their own personal experiences and problems.
On Persephone's Island Page 12