Another Lenten flower stands sentinel along the roadsides: the asphodel, gray-green stalks supporting a spear of pallid flowers, white barely tinged with pink, pale flesh, the flowers that covered the meadows of Hades. I remember—and am touched by how telling a memory it is—that my mother was bitterly disappointed by her first sight of the asphodel, for the poets had led her to expect something far more magnificent.
Except in Arcadia, where acorns were plentiful, the roots and seeds of the asphodel were probably the basis of the Greek diet before the introduction of grain, and Pythagoras thought this, the spontaneous production of nature, to be the perfect food. Chased to the Netherworld by the introduction of agriculture, the asphodel has now returned, together with the poppy, to invade the fields abandoned in the exodus from the countryside, a white flag marking capitulation to poor soil and inadequate cultivation.
But Lent is also a time of preparation, to which nature contributes by adding new colors to her palette. The hedgerows, still yellow and orange from February’s flowering, are now awash with the watery blue of the borage flowers and streaked bright pink by the campion. In the garden the daffodils herald the change in season, the big gold trumpets that multiply each year towering over the miniatures I put in last December, while round them the grape hyacinths run a ribbon of purple-blue. Each day brings some new flower, some new sign that spring is coming, though not in the sense of a New England spring, as tenuous promise, veiled allusions of green over gray, pastel colors and faint perfumes. The Sicilian spring is building up to a vivid and violent explosion of bloom and heat and color and smell, of pagan rite and Christian procession, in which nature, agriculture, and cultural tradition meet in perfect synchronization.
In the city March begins with another sort of explosion, literal and tragic. On the afternoon of the first, a bomb goes off in the courtyard of the new police commissariat in Brancaccio, the “South Bronx” neighborhood where the Favara Palace lies. Nine people are injured; one of them, a young policeman, is on the critical list.
This storm has been brewing for some time, ever since the Minister of the Interior and the prefect of Palermo announced their intention to introduce a commissariat into this neighborhood as a response to the Mafia violence that has been steadily increasing there over the past two years. The only available site was a pair of adjoining apartments, the property of the municipal government, in a new building in the heart of Brancaccio, just down the road from the Favara. The building’s residents rebelled, protesting that the commissariat would constitute a danger for them and their families and that the coming and going of patrol cars would prevent the children of the building from using the courtyard as a playground. But after several meetings with police representatives they seemed to have accepted the government’s decision.
And then this afternoon a car drove into the courtyard, and a young man leapt out and threw a bomb under the patrol car parked there. Attracted by the cries of a man who was sitting at a window, one of the policemen doing guard duty at the still-unopened office ran out to see what was happening. As he neared the car the bomb went off, tearing the patrol car in two and smashing the car next to it against the wall. The policeman lost both legs, and flying glass slightly injured other people. Fortunately the weather was not good; otherwise the courtyard would have been filled with children.
After a moment of shocked silence a crowd formed rapidly in the courtyard, on one side the building’s residents, some wounded, some in shock, all terrified and angry; on the other, the police, distressed by the fate of their colleague, dismayed and embittered to find themselves under attack from the people they believe themselves to be defending.
In Alcamo, our friend has made a formal complaint to the police, and as of yesterday morning his phone has been tapped. In the afternoon a phone call comes, but to his father’s house:
“Tell your son we are waiting for an answer.”
Apparently it is not uncommon in Alcamo for professionals to pay protection; one of Tonino’s friends says that several people have come to the bank where he works, desperate to raise the money.
“You’re lucky,” this man has told Tonino, “to live in the anonymity of a big city.”
I have seldom felt such a stranger to Sicily as in the past month. 1 keep remembering the occasion, shortly after Tonino and I first met, when we were chatting, apropos of traffic or some other noise, about how soundly we had slept as children, and in reply to some banal anecdote on my part, Tonino said, “Yes, me too: when the Mafia threw a bomb in the window I didn’t even hear it go off.” His grandfather had been threatened for refusing to sell a piece of land, and the family had taken the precaution of moving their beds to a room without windows onto the street. The crack in the marble balcony is still visible.
I laughed and laughed: it was such exotic one-upmanship. But it was a tale of childhood, as remote and unreal to him as dancing classes in the Colony Club ballroom are to me. I can’t believe that this is real either, or that it is possible to be so defenseless. And I am surprised and frightened, yet somehow relieved, to see that Tonino doesn’t feel any more equipped than I do. We debate endlessly.
“If you pay once, then you’ve subscribed,” Tonino says. I think I believe that the only thing to do would be to go to the police and make as much noise about it as possible, write to the press, capitalize on all that has been said recently about the Mafia, about omertà and having the courage to cooperate with the police. It wouldn’t have worked in the past, but right now it just might. But I do not want my courage and my conscience put to such a test.
I have always tried, in my conscious attitudes at least, to be equitable, so that my children might take pride in each side of their double heritage and might choose freely and serenely, when the time came, whether to make their future here, or elsewhere in Italy, or in the United States. This has not been mere devotion to an abstract ideal of justice, since I have found much to criticize in the United States and much to care deeply for in Sicily, but it has been posited on the belief that one could draw one’s own boundaries. For all that Sicily does indeed have what Sciascia once called a “low moral latitude,” where moral absolutes tend to wilt, and for all that I, like every other person living here, have had to make my own accommodation to the climate, choosing when to stand upon my principles and when to nudge them to the side a bit, I have always thought the choice was mine. I believed that barring the unlucky but unlikely event of witnessing a Maña execution, it was possible to live a normal and honest life in Sicily, without fear. But if our phone rings and our turn comes, if this is what living here involves, then perhaps I should begin to encourage the children to make their future elsewhere. Perhaps I should weed out those most un-American sentiments of tradition and stability that have germinated in twenty years here and accept that whatever we make of Bosco, whatever tree we plant or wall we build, is for us, but not for them or for their children.
At the wedding last month the father of the groom asked another guest, a Polish woman who had also married here, and me what we thought of Sicilians. This is typical Sicilian masochism, which can be satisfied only by a negative opinion couched in such terms as to become a compliment. I made my standard reply about liking them very much except when they are behind the wheel or disposing of their garbage, which I always cap with the story about the doctor living downstairs from us, who drives off to the hospital each morning with his plastic bag of garbage on the hood of his car. At the corner he brakes suddenly in front of the collection bin, and momentum carries the bag onto the heap. Of course the bag doesn’t always go into the bin, and sometimes it breaks on impact and the orange peels and empty bottles roll about the street, but what is a little litter in the face of such style! As I bantered on, this time I thought to myself that it was becoming difficult to cope with the idea that “Sicilians” include both the elegant and distinguished people around me and those who are telephoning to our friend, and I wondered whether, if a bomb were to blow up Bosco, I would h
ave the strength and the objectivity to maintain my distinctions.
The clouds disperse as Saint Joseph ushers in the spring and brings the feast days back again as promised, just two days before the equinox. San Giuseppuzzu, as he is familiarly known on the island, is much beloved by the Sicilians, for whom he is the advocate of lost causes, taking the side of mercy in the debate with divine justice; the patron of the poor, the orphaned, and the needy. And in honoring Saint Joseph, the Sicilians celebrate the change of season and invoke celestial protection for the new crops that are sprouting in the fields. The forms of the celebration vary from town to town but always include the preparation of special bread, and the menu always centers about dried beans or lentils, so all the last remnants of the previous harvest are consumed in a collective banquet of such vast proportions as to call forth a similar generosity on the part of the saint and of the new harvest.
In the past I have always gone to Alcamo for San Giuseppe, where the celebrations are private votive offerings. The family that has made a vow to Saint Joseph prepares an altar in their living room, decorated with flowers, candles, and elaborate forms of bread and swagged with the best tablecloths or, if family finances will allow it, staged in a rented setting of spiraling baroque columns and garlanded putti. In front of the altar a dinner is laid out, dish after dish of pasta, meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, and pastries, running to as many as thirty different courses at the very fancy altars.
A small table holds three places set with the best china and silver. This is where the virgineddi will eat, the “little virgins,” an old man, a young girl, and a little boy recruited from the town poor and dressed up to represent the Holy Family. The head of the household waits on them, setting plate after plate in front of them until they can’t eat any more (they get to take the leftovers home).
Here as elsewhere in Sicily on Saint Joseph’s Day the central element is the bread. Mainstay of the peasant diet and fruit of the island’s principal crop, bread is always sacred, so much so that according to an old superstition he who allows a crumb to fall on the floor will be condemned in the afterworld to gathering it up with his eyelashes. In its simpler manifestations the bread baked for San Giuseppe is either a long loaf that is supposed to represent the saint’s beard, or a ring-shaped loaf, of which Pitré describes a particular version:
Now, since it is an offering to the “Father of Providence,” as Saint Joseph is called, everything must be big and spectacular. The bread gives the measure of the providence of the day: and a ritual bread which, if it were lacking, would mean some sort of sacred duty betrayed, is the cucciddatu, bread baked of semola flour in the shape of a doughnut, but so big that in order to put it in the brick oven it is necessary to enlarge the door. The cucciddatu at Chiusa Sclafani weighs twelve kilos and measures a meter and a half in diameter.
Giuseppe Pitrè, La famiglia, la casa, la vita del popolo siciliano
This was at the turn of the century; I don’t know if time has diminished such munificence at Chiusa Sclafani. In Alcamo the art of ritual bread making lives on, although it is questionable for how much longer, in the hands of a few elderly ladies who direct the female members of the household in preparing the bread for their altar. The forms here are considerably smaller but much more elaborate, and their symbolism and how they are placed on the altar follow the rigid dictates of tradition. Vases of flowers, baskets of fruit, and angels bearing seven-branched candlesticks garlanded with roses flank the central forms: the monstrance bearing the Host; the initials of the Virgin Mary intertwined with fruit and flowers; and Saint Joseph himself, complete with cowl, crook, and black currant eyes, leading the Christ Child through an intricate baroque bower of flowers and angels. A myriad of smaller pieces, the pani di cena, in the shape of fruit, flowers, fish, and birds, are tucked into the empty spaces and will be distributed to the people who come to admire the altar and watch the banqueting.
The degree of intricacy that the Alcamese bread achieves and the elegance of its decorations, which look as if someone had broken off a piece of Serpotta stuccowork and baked it in the oven to a deep golden brown, are as far as I know unequaled in any other town in Sicily. It reflects the taste for the showy, excessively elaborate and luxurious decoration the Sicilians themselves describe as spagnuoleggiante, as if to imply that this were a taste imported from Spain, foreign, nothing to do with that love of vulgar display that the Athenian Greeks derided in the Greeks of Sicily. But in this case, the difficulties of a leavened medium and the simplicity of the souls who shape it are such that even this elegant elaboration of the tradition shares the particular naïve charm of the plainer designs and cruder execution found elsewhere on the island.
This year I am traveling in the opposite direction from Alcamo. Maria Vica has invited me to accompany her to see the virgineddi at Làscari, the little hill town near Cefalù where she teaches an adult education course. We have an appointment to meet one of her students in front of the school at eleven-thirty. The nineteenth falls on a Saturday, which makes it easier for everyone to take a holiday, and it is warm and sunny, perhaps a present from the saint for me: I am forty-two years old today.
As we drive east along the coast, Maria Vica tells me what she knows about the ritual we are to witness. Local tradition requires the Lascaroti to fulfill their vows to Saint Joseph by offering dinner to all comers on the nineteenth. Today’s dinner is a revival, as this is the first time in fifteen years that someone in Làscari has “done the virgineddi” as they call it, much to the excitement and interest of the younger generation, who will be participating in a rite they have heard about but never seen. We are to note that this hiatus confers a special authenticity on the day: the young have not had the opportunity to become blasé, and the ancient simplicity has as yet no modern overlay.
Our host is a mason, who is fulfilling a vow made to Saint Joseph last spring, when his son was driving in the Targa Florio, one of the oldest automobile races in Italy, run on the twisting mountain roads nearby. During the race rumor reached the town that the son had been killed in a crash. The mason prayed to Saint Joseph to make it not be true, promising him in return to do the virgineddi.
We leave the autostrada at Bonfornello and drive a few miles into the foothills of the Madonie Mountains, whose peaks high above us are white with the last spring snows, l’ultima varva di San Giuseppe—“Saint Joseph’s last beard,” as they were once called. The hills themselves are brilliant green and yellow, terrace upon terrace of lemon groves. Làscari is tucked into the side of one of these hills, and for the Lascaroti the lemons are gold indeed: almost every family owns some groves and this, plus the echoes of nearby Cefalù’s booming tourist trade, has made Làscari a wealthy town by Sicilian standards.
Maria Vica’s student, a young housewife named Maria Teresa, is waiting for us outside the school, which lies on the outskirts of the town at the lower level. Following her directions we drive up through the town to a square on the upper edge, along narrow cobbled streets that rise at unbelievable angles, as if whoever built them was trying to find out just where the breaking point between the force of friction and the force of gravity lay. Having never had much faith in the force of friction anyway, I have no time at all to look at the town as I will the car upward in first gear with a devout prayer to Saint Joseph that we not meet anyone coming down.
At last we pull up onto a large open space looking out over a ravine to the lemon terraces, with newly built three- and four-story houses on the hillside that the town is slowly climbing, and behind us the steep drop of the road we drove up on and the rooftops of Làscari descending below. The mason lives in a house he built himself, one of the many similar unfinished and unstuccoed houses that ring the towns throughout Sicily, where the growth of the house follows the growth of the family resources, each added or completed story marking a successful harvest or the return of an emigrant with a pocketful of Swiss francs or German marks.
The garage that occupies the whole of the mason’s groun
d floor has been given over to the saint, who surveys the room from the back wall where his portrait hangs above a very simple altar, a sheet pinned against the wall and decorated with columns and flowers cut out of colored tinfoil, ringed with candles and flowers. Two enormous trestle tables, surrounded by a motley collection of chairs and benches and covered with tablecloths, with bottles of wine and water, baskets of bread, and plates filled with quartered oranges, are set to accommodate at least sixty people. Clustered around a makeshift stove under the stairs are some thirty giant pots and pans, which Mimma, another housewife-student and one of the dozen women who are responsible for serving the meal, uncovers one by one to show us the contents: pasta and beans, rice and beans, pasta with green cauliflower, and ’gliotta, salt cod cooked with broccoli and fresh sprigs of wild fennel. Hidden away on the stairs are more loaves of homemade bread and baskets of cassateddi di San Giuseppe, small crescent-shaped cases of fried pastry that for this occasion have a filling of boiled chickpeas mashed up together with sugar, cinnamon, and chocolate.
Everything is ready to go; we await only the blessing of the priest, who will be along as soon as the twelve o’clock mass is over. A small crowd is slowly accumulating in the square, knots of people perching on the benches and leaning on the railings to enjoy the sun easing slowly down into their bones. It will be a while yet before the sun is strong enough to chase away the winter’s damp: tufa, the porous local stone with which most houses in western Sicily are built, is a sponge that soaks up the winter rains and squeezes them out again into creeping mold and dark damp patches that ooze a fine white foam, into chilblains and rheumatism. It is almost always colder inside than out in Sicily, and although the Sicilians claim to be very much afraid of the unsalubrious effects of sunshine in wintertime, few of them can resist baking in the first rays strong enough to reach the marrow and knead out the knots in their hunched-up shoulders.
On Persephone's Island Page 15