Music swells from below, and, with the purple plumes of their caps swaying in time to the music, the town band marches over the crest of the hill and into the square. They must have very special practice sessions in Làscari, for it is no mean feat to blow a trumpet while marching up that slope. The musicians are, perhaps necessarily, a youthful bunch, with lots of young girls, a recent conquest for Sicilian womanhood. After a pause for a gay brass polka in front of the mason’s house they march off again, and presently a car draws up, an elderly priest clutching a stole in one hand hops out with as much agility as his cassock permits, disappears within, and in no time flat is out again and away.
It turns out that we will eat in shifts; the first to be served are the children, an enormous flock all under twelve and highly polished and combed. Maria Vica and I push through the crowd at the door to watch them as they eat, long rows of gleaming black eyes and broad smiles, their behavior just ever so slightly subdued by the occasion. How exciting it must be for a child to find himself suddenly living the memories of his grandparents, to have his mother’s stories about “when I was a little girl” come alive. The aproned women squeeze back and forth between the tables, balancing full plates and brandishing ladles. We are in the way, so we move out into the sun again.
A small group gathers around us, all Maria Vica’s students, almost all related to each other, all here at least to watch if not to eat at Saint Joseph’s table. We press them for information and find that they are very clear about the rules that govern this celebration but have never given any thought to their significance. Each dish is crucial and unalterable: you must have both pasta with beans and rice with beans; the pasta with cauliflower must be followed by the ’gliotta. The oranges are always served cut into quarters—no, someone says, sometimes they were cut into thirds, for Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The bread must be baked at home and the pastries filled with chick-peas.
“Do you remember when Mrs. What’s-her-name did the virgineddi and served pasta with tomato sauce?” asks someone, adding with disgust, “It was just like going out to dinner at a restaurant!”
We continue to ask why, urging them to consider, but none of them is aware of any connection between the menu for the virgineddi and harvest concerns, nor can they enlighten us further as to the significance of the orange quarters. The best they can do is to elaborate their own mythology, based on poverty and quite unconvincing in a town of such relative wealth. The beans and the chick-peas are the food of the poor, and Saint Joseph was poor; the oranges had to come from Palermo and were served cut up in quarters to make them stretch farther.
A minor explosion shakes the crowd as the children burst out from between the legs of the grown-ups, clutching their cassateddi and chasing each other about, most literally full of beans. It is the teen-agers’ turn now, and there are enough of them too to fill up the long tables, this combination of tradition and novelty being attractive enough to compete successfully with jukebox and motor scooter.
One of the students tells us that there will be another altar next year; no sooner had the son been miraculously saved than the mason himself fell from the scaffolding of a house he was working on. The scaffolding was evidently high enough to allow him time to invoke the saint while falling, and he found himself at the bottom with no bones broken and another dinner for two hundred plus on his hands.
And, someone else adds, this very morning the police visited his present construction site and took down a statement “five kilometers long” about all the building regulations that were being broken. So if San Giuseppe has any pull at town hall, the mason may be good for a third round.
At last it is the turn of the adults, and we squeeze in together with young men in their twenties and gray-haired grandmothers. The women who are serving eat at this shift too, jumping up and down between one mouthful and another to press upon us more pasta, more beans, more rice from the seemingly bottomless pots and pans. The food is very simply cooked and, except for the fennel in the ’gliotta, has very little seasoning, but it is amazingly good, particularly in view of the quantity and the long wait in the pots. But, then, this is one of the great merits of Sicilian cooking: the basic ingredients are usually so good, the oil so pure, the vegetables so fresh and so intense in flavor, that they can stand on their own merits.
Mindful of the long drive home I am going slowly, but ladle after ladle of food disappears from the plates around me amidst much hilarity and complacent teasing directed at the size of the young men’s appetites. The dialect here is very different from the Alcamese dialect I am accustomed to, and the jokes are mostly allusions that Maria Vica and I can’t catch, but we find ourselves laughing with the others nonetheless, caught up in the embrace of the group’s affectionate good humor. It is, I later realize, a unique moment in my Sicilian experience, a pure and uncontaminated expression of peasant society, outside of and indifferent to the institutions, for the perfunctory blessing of the priest and the participation of the band are mere services, individually contracted for. Except for the distant patronage of the saint looking down from his altar on the back wall, there are no protagonists; I never manage to determine which of the faces surrounding me belong to the mason and his immediate family. It is a rite consumed in the moment of its happening and for the benefit of the participants: no pro loco committee orchestrates the ritual, no tourists observe it (for Maria Vica and I are there as participants by virtue of her role in the community), and, most amazing of all, no photographer immortalizes the various moments for an album to lie in the salotto next to the family wedding and First Communion pictures. Tomorrow it will exist only in the collective memory of this neighborhood.
When everyone has had his fill and beyond, the baskets of cassateddi are brought out. Full as I am, I cannot resist trying the chick-pea filling, which has an earthy, spicy taste akin in spirit, if not in actual flavor or texture, to pumpkin pie filling, and is less dry and clogging than one might expect. We are given large paper plates towering with cassateddi to take home with us, and I will have fun when I get there challenging the family to guess what the basic ingredient is (no one succeeds). As we take our leave the women are again at work, clearing and resetting the table for the next shift, the last, which is reserved for the band. I can’t imagine how there can be anything left for them to eat, a worrying thought, as they must have worked up quite an appetite tootling up and down these steep streets all morning.
A pensive silence accompanies us for the first part of the drive home, until a few remarks reveal that we are both following, from our different standpoints, the same line of thought. Maria Vica, a new sort of Sicilian woman, living alone and supporting herself (her family now lives in Rome), and I, expatriate wife and mother, are both fascinated by the close-knit community whose ritual we have shared, where everyone is related or at least acquainted, and the boundaries between nuclear family, extended family, and neighborhood overlap and entwine. Despite the lack of privacy and the tyranny of rigid norms of behavior over which the whole community vigils, we cannot forget the faces of the children and the obvious ease with which they navigate the early years of life, cradled by so many benevolent but variegated attentions. I am fascinated by the logistics too: the ease with which Maria Vica’s student-housewives have disencumbered themselves of their family duties for the day seems an unbelievable luxury to me.
The organization of Sicilian society postulates the infinite availability of the family. Women can work—and often must work, since a single salary is rarely adequate to support a family—because a grandmother is there to take care of the babies. Elementary schools can malfunction in double or triple shifts for a maximum of four hours a day, because there is always someone at home to make lunch, to help out with the homework the teacher hasn’t had time to explain, and, among the middle class, to invest the money and the chauffeuring effort necessary for providing the sports, the music, the art, etc., that the schools don’t supply. Hospitals can get by with token nursing because there is
always some relative available to sit up nights, to handle bedpans, and spoon-feed the incapacitated. The very rhythm of the day, in which all the stores and offices close from one to four and everybody goes home for a three-course meal, requires someone to be in the kitchen practically all day long.
My in-laws have always been too far away or too ill to be of more than marginal assistance, so until my children grew into some degree of independence I had to negotiate for every minute of time alone, for the briefest leave of absence, to a degree quite incomprehensible to my American friends, who have no doubt wondered why I have not managed to become more liberated. This is not without its advantages. The tangle of Sicilian family relationships and duties, however reassuring it may be as a safety net in time of emergency, is also a snare that can cripple the more fragile members of the family. Excluded by circumstance from all but the most limited participation, I am an ambivalent spectator of the Sicilian family, most often critical, as when I watch my friends struggling to free themselves of its constrictions, but sometimes wistful, as when, today, seen in a certain light, the grass at Làscari looks very green indeed.
Lu jorno di la Nunziata
Nesci lu scursuni sutta la balata.
On the day of the Annunciation
The lizard comes out from under the stone.
It is hot enough to bring out all the hibernating beasts: three days of scirocco have warmed the air, and the young girls have blossomed in the pinks and greens and yellows of this spring’s fashions. Except for lizards, however, the Annunciation doesn’t seem to be a very important day, although in the past Sicily’s year began on March 25, and it wasn’t until 1603 that the Spanish viceroy ordered that New Year’s Day be moved to January 1. Another Spanish overlay—how much more coherent it would be to have the year begin with the Annunciation and the spring equinox.
The Annunciation comes exactly nine months to the day before Christmas, something I had never given any thought to until I was expecting Natalia. It was almost time for the baby to be born, and I was speculating together with Giuseppina, the cleaning woman who worked for me then, as to whether or not it would be a good idea to go away for the weekend.
“When’s your time up?” she asked.
“It will be exactly nine months on Sunday.”
“Oh, you can go, then. Only the Madonna gives birth at exactly nine months.”
Giuseppina was a true daughter of old Palermo: she had run off at thirteen with a sailor in a fuitina, the “little flight” or elopement with which Sicilian couples overcome parental opposition by creating a situation in which honor can be repaired only by marriage. Her first baby was born two days after her fourteenth birthday, and as she went into labor she still believed that the midwife would have to cut a hole in her side to get the baby out. Now, after some thirteen pregnancies, she had nine children and twenty-three grandchildren, and she laughed to confess that she couldn’t remember all their names.
Giuseppina had her own particular calendar. By about mid-February she would start putting things off: no use cleaning that now, we’ll just have to do it all over again for Easter. A token flurry of activity at Eastertime, and then: no use scouring those pans now; fresh tomatoes will be coming on the market soon; there’s nothing for shining up an aluminum pan like making tomato sauce in it!
Unfortunately Giuseppina also stole, an irresistible urge that had nothing to do with need or class envy; by chance I later learned that she even stole from the other members of the cleaning squad at the town hall where she worked in the afternoons. I turned a blind eye as long as I could and then had to fire her, a very melodramatic scene in which she creaked down onto her knees, clasped her hands over her very ample bosom, and declared her innocence in ringing tones.
“I swear to you by … by … Porca miseria, there aren’t even any saints to swear by in this household!”
Natalia has been wrestling with flu again, and we decide to stay in Palermo over Saturday and just drive out to Bosco for the day on Palm Sunday. On Saturday evening Tonino reports unusual activity in front of the church that stands in the middle of our piazza. An enterprising flower seller is trying to steal a march on the competition by wiring his palm branches onto the church railings. All week the flower sellers have been busy preparing these branches; you could see them sitting by their stalls on the street corners, patiently plaiting the leaves of each frond into intricate shapes. A big group of men have been occupying a part of Piazza San Domenico, sitting in a circle and chatting as they work, their finished products displayed for sale on the railings around the statue of the Immaculate Conception. The flower stalls themselves have been breathtaking this week, every street corner a landscape of color stretching from the pink clouds of peach blossoms down through mountains of tulips and iris and carnations to a great pool of yellow and purple freesias flowing over onto the street.
Palm Sunday dawns hot and sunny. The church railing has miraculously flowered in the night, the white iron bars bearing yellow-green palm fronds, each one at least a yard high, with its leaves carefully braided into loops and frills, triangles and circles, and sporting a large pompom bow of satiny ribbon, colorful if slightly off-key. The competition is undaunted by such industry, however, and the street in front of the church is filled with Vespa pickups that bristle with palm fronds and olive branches, the latter tied with red ribbons or dipped into gold and silver paint.
The countryside through which we drive on our way to Bosco is dressed for spring as well: soft green now clothes the almond groves on the mountainsides above Terrasini, but the peach orchards are pink with flowers. The yellow daffodils have left the garden to the narcissus, small clusters tucked in here and there to surprise me each spring with their delicacy.
I begin to sing of lovely-haired Demeter, the goddess august,
of her and her slender-ankled daughter whom Zeus,
far-seeing and loud-thundering, gave to Aidoneus to abduct.
Away from her mother of the golden sword and the splendid fruit
she played with the full-bosomed daughters of Okeanos,
gathering flowers, roses, crocuses, and beautiful violets
all over a soft meadow; irises, too, and hyacinths she picked,
and narcissus, which Gaia, pleasing the All-receiver,
made blossom there, by the will of Zeus, for a girl with a flower’s beauty.
A lure it was, wondrous and radiant, and a marvel to be seen by immortal gods and mortal men.
A hundred stems of sweet-smelling blossoms
grew from its roots. The wide sky above
and the whole earth and the briny swell of the sea laughed.
She was dazzled and reached out with both hands at once
to take the pretty bauble; Earth with its wide roads gaped
and then over the Nysian field the lord and All-receiver,
the many-named son of Kronos, sprang out upon her with his immortal horses.
Against her will he seized her and on his golden chariot
carried her away as she wailed; and she raised a shrill cry,
calling upon father Kronides, the highest and the best.
None of the immortals or of mortal men heard
her voice, not even the olive trees bearing splendid fruit.
From “To Demeter,” in The Homeric Hymns
In The Golden Honeycomb, which is in most respects a lovely book about Sicily, Vincent Cronin says that “Persephone’s wish to pluck the fantastic flower is every man’s search for illicit or excessive happiness.” I strongly disagree with his interpretation, which seems to me to reflect a very male-chauvinist view of female sexuality, and I fail to understand how anyone could find anything excessive or illicit in the pale precision of a narcissus.
The temperature drops again in the night, and Holy Week is cold and penitential, with clouds dampening the bright colors of the flower stalls. The Communist city councilor from Brancaccio is beaten up on his way home one night. After the bomb went off in the co
mmissariat, the city council decided to hold a symbolic session there, the first one in history to take place outside of city hall, during which this man, elected in the Brancaccio district, made a courageous speech denouncing the Mafia in very explicit terms. He is now wearing a plaster cast for his pains.
From the other side of the island the radio reports a different sort of violence: Etna is erupting. A new crater less than a mile down from the peak on the southern flank is spewing forth gases and lava in a roiling red river that crunches and burns everything that lies in its path. Etna is considered a good-natured volcano, since her eruptions are seldom precipitate or explosive; the lava that boils up and over with considerable frequency often exhausts itself on the barren upper slopes, and even when it does reach the lower regions, destroying houses and vineyards, it is inexorable but slow, allowing the inhabitants to stand and watch as the smoking red tide devours home and harvest. The television news programs show spectacular nighttime shots of the incandescent lava pouring through the darkness as from some celestial crucible.
With the autostrada finally completed, Catania is only two and a half hours away by car, and we could go, as many will over the Easter holidays, to see the volcano erupting. Yet somehow it still seems as distant as it did when only winding, ill-kept roads gutted with potholes meandered across the center of the island, another world quite foreign to western Sicily. The eastern Sicilians themselves are very insistent on distinguishing between the two halves of the island; they feel themselves to be Greek as opposed to Arab, commercially enterprising as opposed to parasitic, honest as opposed to mafioso—although recent events seem to deny this last distinction, since it is now thought that the order to kill dalla Chiesa came from Catania.
On Persephone's Island Page 16