On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  It is, however, a golden opportunity for rhetoric: about the person of dalla Chiesa, about the need for commitment to human values, about the courage required to do one’s duty. I try to bring the discussion down to earth and into the classroom with a criticism: to my mind the film has turned Sciascia’s subtle portraits of the Mafia into grotesque caricatures, and this may tempt us into considering the Mafia as something foreign to our everyday experience, whereas I believe it important for students to discover just how much their lives are affected by the Mafia, in the cost of living, in the form that the city’s growth has taken, etc., etc. But no, I am a foreigner, I don’t know what the mafiosi in the small towns were like twenty years ago. I can’t be bothered to explain that twenty years ago I was living in the very town where the movie was filmed and that when mafiosi were pointed out to me I was always surprised at how ordinary they looked. As usual, as soon as I ask people to look at things in a different light, I am reminded that I am not a Sicilian and therefore do not understand.

  This is the first winter in almost ten years in which I have no civic commitment other than a very minor and undemanding role as class representative at Natalia’s junior high school. As I have tested the waters or swum with militant stroke through the most disparate seas, from neighborhood improvement campaigns to feminist encounter groups, from a radical cooperative bookstore and documentation center to the middle-class and middle-of-the-road parent-teacher associations of the local schools, I have encountered more similarities than differences: endless and unproductive debating abounds everywhere, together with all-invasive ideology and an initial and unrealistic enthusiasm that is unaccompanied by the dogged plodding necessary to effect change in a bureaucratic world. And nowhere has the impact been more frustrating to me than in the schools.

  Parent-teacher associations are a very new phenomenon in Italy, where the schools have always been controlled directly by the central government. Teachers are assigned to their posts according to their scores on a provincial point scale, and only the most self-confident and dedicated overstep or alter the nationwide programs of the Ministry of Public Education that dictate what material must be covered each year. It was only ten years ago that the Italian government passed a law instituting the election of school boards representing both parents and teachers within the school administration. Francesco was just starting school at the time, and I was eager to participate, my share in the general enthusiasm fanned by my desire to find a niche for myself in Sicilian society and by my conviction that, coming from America, I had much to contribute.

  It rapidly became apparent that these newly instituted boards, with no tradition behind them, very little experience in direct democracy at the local level, and very limited powers, were for the most part quite unable to cope with the resentment of a fair share of the administrators and the teachers, who identified interest with interference. They were crippled by often irrelevant ideological divisions bequeathed them by the political parties whose initial interest waned as soon as they saw that there was no real power up for grabs, and they were stymied by the immobility of the bureaucracy.

  If my own particular condition inflated my enthusiasm, it also aggravated my frustration. My children’s schooling seemed in so many ways inferior to that which I had received in America (admittedly as part of a privileged elite) and to that which the children of my sister and my college classmates are receiving today. I regard this as the single irreparable ill consequence of my choice to expatriate, a source of anguish and guilt that no amount of parent participation has been able to assuage.

  This ambivalence of mine may also be tinged with unconscious rivalry. The mother is said to be responsible for transmitting cultural values, a dilemma for the expatriate, who often behaves as if she were besieged, patrolling the perimeters of her offspring’s consciousness, ready to repel the onslaughts of an alien culture in favor of her own. Mistakenly believing that I could command the spaces of my children’s minds, I have perhaps looked on the schools here as the enemy.

  Natalia, who has always been in love with the process of learning, seems to have emerged miraculously unscathed from all this conflict, which may even have given a salutary sharpening to her critical sense. Not so my firstborn, who closely resembles me in looks and in temperament: Francesco absorbs my ambivalence and uses it, together with his own desire to know everything without effort and his objective bad luck with teachers, as an excuse to limp his way through school, trusting to fortune and to native intelligence to save him from disaster each June.

  But all this is hindsight. I come home depressed by the debate at school and wearied by my own internal debate, the endlessly regurgitating struggle between an acquired Sicilian fatalism and an inherited American belief in civic commitment. The guilt generated by this year’s withdrawal from any form of involvement has been reawakened by the one small seed of optimism I carry away from this evening’s meeting, an anecdote told by a woman who teaches at Cruillas, a rural village that has been swallowed up in Palermo’s expansion and is permeated by the Mafia value system. When she assigned her class a composition on “What I would like to read in the newspapers,” one child wrote that he would like to read that Sicilians no longer called policemen sbirri.

  Returning from our next weekend at Bosco, we decorate our usual load of lemons, wild greens, and demijohns with some seasonal additions, a few flowering almond branches and a bag stuffed with costume jewelry, a dress from Tunisia, a Spanish mantilla, and an old felt hat. February is Carnival time, and Francesco and Natalia are planning their costumes. For weeks now the stores have been doing a steady business in streamers and confetti, in practical jokes, false noses, and plastic horns, and their windows glitter with elegant costumes—Arlecchino and Pulcinello next to Zorro and Chief Sitting Bull, ladies with hoop skirts and powdered wigs mingled with dairy maids and odalisques. Each year a few newcomers reflect the latest successes of television and cinema: Marco Polo and E.T. are said to be this season’s hits. Italians are willing to spend conspicuous sums on their children’s costumes, and by the last week in January the streets are full of proud parents strolling along with their children on display, while the parks buzz with tiny musketeers dueling miniature cowboys and with fairy princesses hiking up their skirts to run after pygmy Primaveras in a cloud of hoops, ruffles, flounces, and artificial flowers.

  For years Carnival in Italy was reduced to a children’s holiday, and while one heard of the occasional costume party or masked ball for adults, the old sense of liberation from the restrictions and oppressions of every day, of overturning the social order for a week or so and admitting any sort of licentious behavior, lived on only in the fervid attachment of small children to this one occasion in which their wildest dreams could be acted out. Recently, however, Carnival has come back into fashion, washed in on the wave of the riflusso, of reaction to the puritanical, revolutionary fervor of the years following 1968, when all that was personal became political and all that was frivolous or extraneous to the ideals of the student movement was ignored. The disappointments of that era and of the revolution that never materialized have swept the survivors into one of two directions, either into the Red Brigades or into the “reflux,” the ashrams of India, the dreamworld of drugs, the rediscovery of the personal, the physical, the emotional, etc.—and into costume for Carnival.

  In the week before Ash Wednesday the evening streets are busy with cars shuttling masked students from one stereo-rocked apartment to another, and firecrackers punctuate the night with their sinister explosions. At noon Natalia comes home from school with stories of stink bombs and peppery chewing gum, while Francesco arrives aged fifty years, his hair and clothes white from the flour with which he and his classmates have battled, two to a motor scooter, one driving and one throwing. The newspapers announce that ancient traditions are being revived in many of the smaller towns, to delight the inhabitants and attract the tourists, the quadrille danced in the main square at Regalbuto and San Marco d’Alunzi
o, sausage festivals at Sciacca and Chiaramonte Gulfi, while the list of towns that are planning a parade of allegorical floats has doubled.

  Most scholars tend to see the origins of Carnival as a compendium of various classical festivals: the Saturnalia, in which great license and revelry were permitted to the slaves and a young slave was crowned king of the festival, only to be put to death at the end; the rites in honor of the goddess Isis, in which a boat-shaped cart (the currum navalis, from which the word Carnival is thought to come) was drawn through the streets in procession; the Lupercalia, when youths dressed in animal pelts would run about the Palatine slapping the women they met with leather straps to make them fertile (the throwing of streamers and confetti supposedly started here); and the Bacchanalia or Anthesteria, rites of Greek origin that were very popular in southern Italy. In their later, Olympian form, these three days were dedicated to Dionysus: the casks of new wine were opened on the Day of the Casks, the Day of the Cups was devoted to drunken revelry, and the festival ended with dramatic contests held on the Day of the Pots. In the archaic period, however, this may have been a festival of all souls, in which the casks were grave jars and the cups signified the pouring out of libations to the souls of the dead, who, once feasted, were bidden to depart on the third day through the natural, chthonic potholes of the earth. Seen in this light the Anthesteria becomes a feast of revocation, a closing of the tempus terribile, a purification of the gates of Hell before the last resurrected One passes through.

  In its heyday Carnival went on for over a month, starting in mid-January and continuing until Ash Wednesday in the second half of February, although the fervor and extravagance of its celebration varied, curtailed by famine and plague or encouraged by authorities eager to distract the masses from their discontent, an essential ingredient in the recipe for government by the three Fs, Feste, Farina, e Forche—Festivals, Flour, and the Gallows. The streets were filled with people in costume, with masques, tableaux, processions, and pageants, while violent battles were waged with bran (the use of flour is a sign of our modern affluence) or with bitter oranges.

  In the old days the gardens and the parks belonging to the nobility and the peasantry were filled with groves of common oranges, those good only for making juice or polishing copper. During the Carnival period the populace would battle with these oranges, grouping themselves into companies that had no real military rank. The size of the companies was such that the battle would swell and become heated, and would attract a prodigious number of spectators. The many carriages which arrived would draw up in a circle, thus delineating unwittingly the battlefield. This sort of game was most satisfying, the amusement which more than any other gave pleasure to the populace.

  Diary of the Marchese di Villabianca, quoted in Giuseppe Pitre,

  Usi e costumi, credenze e pregiudizi del popolo siciliano

  In the descriptions the Marchese di Villabianca and other Palermo diarists have left us of Carnival behavior, and in the laws and decrees with which the governments attempted its regulation—for instance a proclamation of 1499 prohibiting “any person, either citizen, or foreigner, from presuming to play at Carnival with oranges or water or in any like manner”—three traditions are particularly recurrent.

  Two of these have very ancient roots, the first being a transformation of Isis’s currum navalis into a boat made of cardboard and slats that was propelled about town by fishermen pretending to row, while in fact walking with their feet stuck through holes in the hull. As the boat stopped in front of stalls and shops, one of the crew would reach out with a boathook and pull in a length of sausage, a bunch of onions, or some other delicacy.

  The Nannu, or “Grandfather,” modern descendant of the King of the Saturnalia, was the most important figure of the traditional Palermo Carnival. Impersonated by a straw-stuffed effigy or by a live person, the old man was carried about the streets seated on a chair, before a great throng of servants and merrymakers who alternated shouts of joy with laments bewailing the Nannu’s imminent demise. At the end the public notary was called to draw up and read out the Nannu’s last will and testament, a long poem in Sicilian dialect in which each profession and social category got its due, to the general satisfaction and hilarity of the crowd.

  The last of these traditions, known as the “Castle” or as the “Master of the Field,” is relatively modern in comparison, since it was inspired by an incident that took place at the beginning of the fifteenth century, in the early years of the Spanish domination, when the Kingdom of Sicily was still separate from the Kingdom of Aragon and was ruled by a regent, the young Queen Bianca of Navarre. The king of Aragon’s principal spokesman on the island, Bernardo Cabrera, Count of Modica, decided to force the queen to marry him, thus satisfying in one move both his elderly lust and his desire to control the whole island. Escorted by an armed band, he left his castle in Alcamo in the dead of night and stormed the Palace of the Steri in Palermo, where the beautiful young queen lay sleeping. In the confusion she and her ladies-in-waiting managed to escape by boat and take refuge in the Castle of Solanto, thus defeating Cabrera’s plans. Legend has it that when Cabrera burst into the queen’s bedroom and found it empty, he shouted out, “If I have lost the partridge, I have gained the nest!” and threw himself into the still-warm bedclothes, “snuffling like a bloodhound.”

  Cabrera’s assault on the Steri was reenacted every year at Carnival, first in elaborate pageants with wooden castles built for the occasion, where a king and queen held court with dances and games until the arrival of the Mastro di Campo, the “Master of the Field,” with his army. The assault would last as long as possible, with the Mastro di Campo attempting to climb up a siege ladder and falling off repeatedly in a great display of frustrated rage and acrobatic ability. This was the high point of the show, so much so that by the middle of the nineteenth century the elaborate setting had disappeared and what remained was:

  A man dressed in the Spanish fashion with an orange mask and an enormous moustache climbs up on a ladder which is supported by other men in costume, while on the ladder a schiavottino, a young boy in Moorish costume, brandishes a sword and prevents him from reaching the top. The Pappiribella, as the Mastro di Campo is also called, attempts in all manners to reach the top, but when the threatening gestures of the little Moor at the top of the ladder defeat him, he bites his hands and twists himself about in a monstrous fashion, to the indescribable delight of the people watching.

  Carnival ends on Shrove Tuesday, traditionally celebrated with a big family feast in which everyone stuffs himself with pasta and tomato-and-pork sauce, with sausages, and with cannoli. “Every pig meets his Carnival,” the saying goes, and in fact for the very poor this would have been the one day in the whole year when meat would grace their table. The feasting was naturally accompanied by laughter, music, and practical jokes, a last ribaldry before the rigors of Lent. “Divertèmmuni, cà dumani acchiana lu furfanti ò pùrpitu!—Let’s enjoy ourselves, for tomorrow the old knave climbs into the pulpit!”

  In pursuit of calendars I have discovered that according to the official calendar in use in Athens, as opposed to the sacred and secret tree calendar, we are now in the month of Gamelione, in which the Gamelie was held, a festival celebrating the marriage of Hera. This was therefore considered the most propitious month for weddings, which, come to think of it, means that we have merely switched our allegiance from the Greek to the Roman tradition: all our June brides must be the handmaidens of Juno. But how tenuous our connections with our calendar are, in comparison with the Greeks, for whom the name of each month was a direct reminder of the festivities that would be celebrated. Even where such connections still exist, few of us are aware of them. It is only the writing of this that prods me to look up February in the dictionary to discover that it comes from februa, “purification,” a vestige of the classical rites that gave birth to Christian Carnival and Lent.

  Either ancestral forces or coincidence is at work. We must find time between one C
arnival party and another to go to Alcamo and deliver a house plant, a present for Turiddu Vivona and his wife, who are celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. We arrive just before noon, an awkward hour since they are getting ready for church, where during the service they will reconfirm their marriage vows. But there is time for them to offer us vermouth and chocolate candies, to show us the presents they have received, displayed on the dining room table in readiness for this afternoon’s party, and to give us our bonboniera, the beautifully wrapped souvenir packet containing a silver-plated ashtray and a little tulle bag tied with ribbons and flowers in which there is a card printed with their names and some sugar-coated Jordan almonds, four white ones and one silver.

  Try as I may, it is impossible for me to have any idea of what might be going on in Turiddu’s mind today as he contemplates the last twenty-five years. If I were to ask him whether he had dreamed as a bridegroom of obtaining so much, he would no doubt answer, “Eh, no, signora, purtroppo!”—purtroppo being an Italian word for “unfortunately” that Turiddu has adapted into a generic but by no means adverse comment on life. In 1958 Sicily was just beginning to pull itself out of the extreme poverty of the postwar period, thanks to the great flow of emigrants leaving to work in the factories of the north. Turiddu was one of many children in a family of agricultural day laborers and sharecroppers; four years of schooling—after three years in first grade he was promoted “for reasons of age” into second grade, which he abandoned after one try—and he was sent to work in the fields, where he was treated by his padrone in ways he once told me he does not like to remember. But he is in turn the “old-stone savage armed” of the Frost poem about mending walls, or worse: suspicious, quarrelsome, and violent in his reactions, he nurses a running dispute with every single one of our neighbors, which we always fear may flare up into outright battle. At work he is honest and loyal but easily offended, and some sort of record has been achieved in his remaining with us for almost ten years now; at home he appears to oscillate between childish good humor and tyrannizing.