I have been too little to the east to judge these finer points; for me it is Etna that makes the difference.
… Etna, that wicked witch, resting her thick white snow under heaven, and slowly, slowly rolling her orange-colored smoke. They called her the Pillar of Heaven, the Greeks. It seems wrong at first, for she trails up in a long, magical, flexible line from the sea’s edge to her blunt cone, and does not seem tall. She seems rather low, under heaven. But as one knows her better, oh, awe and wizardry! Remote under heaven, aloof, so near, yet never with us. The painters try to paint her, and the photographers to photograph her, in vain. Because why? Because the near ridges, with their olives and white houses, these are with us. Because the river-bed, and Naxos under the lemon groves, Greek Naxos deep under dark-leaved, many-fruited lemon groves, Etna’s skirts and skirt-bottoms, these are still our world, our own world. Even the high villages among the oaks on Etna. But Etna herself, Etna of the snow and secret changing winds, witch-like under heaven, slowly rolling her orange smoke and giving sometimes a breath of rose-red flame, then I must look away from the earth, into the ether, into the low empyrean. And there, in that remote region, Etna is alone.
D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia
Etna as a world apart embraces more than Lawrence perhaps could see from Taormina: even the lower slopes are unique, the vineyards and fruit orchards lush in the rich volcanic soil, strung together by narrow roads that wind through the small towns and underneath high walls, past gates offering a glimpse of aging villas, the brightly colored and unpretentious villas of the Catanese nobility, nestled in luxuriant gardens, shaded by tall chestnuts and spreading magnolias and perfumed by magnificent gardenias and camelias, which will have no part of western Sicily’s lime-heavy soil. And then the woods, the tall pine forest of Linguaglossa singing in the wind on the northern slope, the chestnut and oak forests that turn golden in the late spring when the robinia trees let down their cascades of bloom and the Etnean gorse, grown to the height of small trees, threads its long and wiry branches with yellow blossoms. As it climbs the vegetation changes latitude, from Mediterranean to Nordic, and forms an ecosystem apart, with flowers and butterflies found nowhere else in the world. But the green is slashed by ribbons of purple-black lava: ever shorter and sparser, the plants creep up toward the upper slopes, fighting to win back the land that has been coated and burned by the lava of past centuries. The first to colonize are the mosses and the lichens, gray-green blotches on the barren slopes like mold on blackberry jam. Beyond that nothing but the long reaches of lava, menacing and lifeless. Or so they seem. I once picked up a piece of lava, up near the Tower of the Philosopher, where the Greek Empedocles is said to have dwelt as a hermit while he studied the volcano. There the big masses have started to crumble, beginning the slow return to soil, but nothing grows, not so much as a thread of green is to be found. Yet there were at least five ladybugs on the piece of lava that I held in my hand, and bending nearer to the ground I saw that there were hundreds of them, struggling over and around the black rocks, tiny red embers of life among the dead coals, infinitesimal animation of a wasteland.
The crater itself smokes incessantly, belching gas and ashes that float down over the mountainside, coating and insulating the snow that has settled in the crevices so that it does not melt even in the heat of the Sicilian summer. This snow was formerly a very profitable monopoly reserved for the archbishop of Catania, who exported it to Italy or sold it for making the ices and sherbets for which Sicily has been famous ever since the Arab occupation. It is snowing now on Etna, and the volcano is hung with mists that glow ominously where the lava is flowing down toward the ski lift and the observatory. Etna’s magma comes from very deep in the bowels of the earth, and there is no way of telling how long it will continue to flow or how much damage it will do.
On Wednesday school closes for the short Easter vacation, and that afternoon I put Natalia on the plane for Milan, where she will spend Easter with her cousin Martina. Natalia is exploiting her last month of paying half fare before she turns twelve at the beginning of May, and the rest of us are spending Easter at Bosco. Late Thursday morning Francesco and I drive out, much discouraged by the weather, which is gray and sepulchral. All morning a strange cloud hangs low over the city, a thick brown murk such as Zeus might whip up to hide some extramarital escapade. Suddenly it dissolves into big, muddy drops of rain that fall for only a few minutes but leave a fine brown film everywhere, thick enough to render the windshield opaque. We cannot decide whether this is dust blown up from the Sahara—the scirocco often bears us gifts of this nature—or volcanic ash that has wafted across the island from Etna.
Easter vacation is always somewhat of a battle for me: I must attempt to reconcile the exquisite pleasures of being in Bosco in the spring with the temptation of the innumerable processions and strange rites that fill the Sicilian Holy Week. And then attempt to reconcile my choices with the desires of the rest of the family. Even as we head for Bosco today I deplore that still another year is passing without my being able to watch the women of Palermo “doing the sepulchers,” making the rounds of the churches on Maundy Thursday carrying their lavureddi, the pots of wheat and lentils that have been sprouted in the dark. These pots, decorated with ribbons and flowers and filled with dark soil against which the colorless sprouts gleam pale and funereal, are descendants of the Gardens of Adonis, which the Greek women prepared to cast upon the sea during the annual festival marking the death and rebirth of the youth beloved of Aphrodite.
Good Friday is still gray and cold, but a sharp wind moves the clouds along before they can become a menace to the processions that will be winding their way about the towns throughout the island. The most famous of these is the procession of the Misteri at Tràpani, which is nearing its four-hundredth birthday. Tràpani is the westernmost port of Sicily, and at the end of the sixteenth century, at the height of the Spanish domination, it was a very wealthy city, deriving its income not only from the trade with Spain but also from the production of sea salt, from tuna fishing, and above all from the coral that was fished from the offshore reefs and wrought by artisans and goldsmiths of consummate craftsmanship. The guilds were rich and flourishing and welcomed the Good Friday procession decreed by the Spanish authorities as a chance to display both their devotion and their wealth. Through the centuries the various guilds, orders, and confraternities have vied for the privilege of carrying through the streets the twenty huge set pieces that represent the scenes of the Passion, contending the best bands, the most spectacular floral decorations, the heftiest porters.
The procession starts at three in the afternoon and continues, with a brief pause for mass at eight in the evening, until eight the next morning, threading endlessly through the broad avenues and the narrow alleyways of the city, changing in character and growing in emotional intensity as the day wears on. In the afternoon, rays of sunlight breaking through the clouds dance on the street vendors and their gaily decorated stalls, sparkle on the polished instruments of the bands—twelve in all—that are interspersed along the procession, and bounce off the baby carriages, the cones of ice cream, and the cones of pumpkin seeds, as each family strolls along in an air of spring finery and festivity that is out of step with the slow swaying and the sorrowful faces of the statues.
At the end of the day, darkness obscures these extraneous elements. The children are sent off, tardily and reluctantly, to bed, the traffic noises die out, the big-windowed tourist buses carry away the swarms of French- and German-chattering tourists whose pastel-colored summer clothes stand out against the dark wools the Sicilians are still wearing. In the daylight the clustering spectators betrayed the whereabouts of the procession; now, in the night, the ear can follow its passage. The tableaux pass slowly; the wailing strains of one funeral dirge have not yet died out before the muffled drums and mourning brass of the next band come into hearing, echoing along the close-packed houses of the old town, whose whitewashed walls gleam in the distant int
ervals of the streetlights. Every few minutes a wooden clapper cuts through the music with sharp tones, the procession halts, another rattle and the porters crouch down until the platform on which Christ is stumbling under the weight of the cross rests on its own legs. On the platform, banked in flowers and surrounded by candles, the life-size Christ of polychromed wood, whose linen and plaster robes were swelling and breathing as the platform advanced, falls lifeless, a mere statue holding up a piece of wood again, as it surrenders all animation to the porters, who flex their shoulders under their blue smocks and stretch their necks, making the red pompoms on their blue berets wobble. Cracking a quiet joke or two, they down a quick glass of wine at the tavern on the opposite sidewalk, and then the clapper sounds again and the porters move back to take their places by the two long and hefty poles that stick out in front and in back of the platform, adjusting the little cushions they wear on the shoulder that carries the heavy weight of the pole. There are five men to each corner, crouched and waiting until the sound of the clapper, when as one man they straighten up and launch themselves into the annaccata, the “rocking,” a synchronized lurching shuffle. Each group has its own clapper, sounded by the leader; their harsh clacking ricochets down the narrow streets as the statues come to life again, wracked by pain and contorted by suffering, and take up their stately progress, swaying from side to side and gathering solemnity from the wavering candlelight and the lonely sounds of the bands in the half-empty streets. The Crucifixion passes, and the Deposition. Another band, another halt to rest. The flowers that carpet the platforms are beginning to wilt, their heads bending and shaking more and more as the tiredness and the wine combine to exasperate the porters’ dance. The great coffin with the body of the dead Christ passes. Then a slow ripple of gathering emotion breaks over the onlookers, drowning their chatter and bringing the women to their knees, fingers fluttering across their breast and to their lips in the sign of the cross, as they see the last and solitary figure, the Addolorata, the sorrowing Mother. The black velvet of the enormous cloak that enfolds her emerges from the darkness, embroidered by the flickering light of dozens of candles that reflect in the crystal teardrops on her pale cheeks and in the dim pool of white carnations about her feet.
… the street and the squares [have become] the theater for that great drama, whose elements are betrayal, murder, the sorrow of a mother.
But is it truly the sorrow of the Son of God made Man that is relived, in the towns of Sicily, on Good Friday? Or is it not instead the drama of man, simply man; betrayed by his neighbor, assassinated by the law? Or, in the end, is it even this? Is it not simply the drama of a mother, the drama of the Addolorata?
Beyond any doubt, in these representations one can feel that, more than the Christ himself, it is the figure of Maria Addolorata that touches and moves. Christ, from the moment of his capture, is already in death. And the dead are dead, as all the proverbs say, counseling peace, resignation, omertà. But the mother is alive: sorrowing, closed in the black mantle of her pain, transfixed, moaning; image and symbol of all mothers. The true drama is hers: earthly and of this flesh. Thus it is not the drama of sacrifice and human redemption; but that of the pain of being alive, of our obscure visceral dismay when confronted with death, of the closed and perennial mourning of the living.
Leonardo Sciascia, “Feste religiose in Sicilia,”
in La corda pazza: scrittori e cose della Sicilia
Chapter Six
Nothing of my childhood Easters has survived the passage across the Atlantic to my present state of agnosticism, into an age when hats are a matter of fashion rather than breeding, and a land where Easter egg dyes and jelly beans are not available. Thus unencumbered, I have fallen very easily into the pattern established my very first year here, when Tonino and I cut short a trip to Tràpani and Selinunte in order to return to Alcamo early Easter morning, to be with his family. And for twenty years our Easters have been that, first at Alcamo and then at Bosco: the heavy dinner at noon; chocolate Easter eggs with a cheap surprise inside until I desecrated even this small ritual, discovering that for the same amount of money I could get twice the weight in chocolate bars and a nice and welcome present as well; the marzipan lambs with tinfoil halos and red paper banners that my mother-in-law produces annually in the hopes, I think, that they might exercise some miraculous power of conversion over her heathen grandchildren. (The first time, when Francesco was just two, Tonino and Turi managed to hollow out the lamb completely before Francesco caught them picking at it from the back and realized that it was edible.)
That first year, however, leafing through the guidebook as we hurried back to Alcamo, I read about an Easter procession in Castelvetrano that I have yearned to see ever since. My chance has now come: a heavy cold has confined my mother-in-law to her Palermo nursing home, so two bars of Swiss chocolate and some drawing pens wrapped up in an egg-shaped package suffice to take care of family custom, and early on Easter morning we are off to see the Aurora.
This name is misleading, according to Claudia, a friend whose family comes from Castelvetrano, since dawn comes and goes long before the action begins, but Castelvetrano is on the southern coast, directly below Alcamo, and it will take us about three-quarters of an hour to cross the island.
Nature has orchestrated the feast day to perfection. The wind has gone elsewhere, taking the clouds with it, and as we drive down the hill toward the highway, the early-morning sun rises on a world of soft new green and lemon yellow, on pink peach blossoms and the clustering white of the late-blooming, green-leafed pear trees. We enter the autostrada at Alcamo and drive south, swooping above the valleys and skimming the hilltops on long, curving viaducts, twentieth-century colonnades that look out over vineyards that around Alcamo have just sparato, as the Sicilians say, just shot into leaf in the sudden, explosive Sicilian spring, and then on to the lusher green of the wheat fields in the interior. Here and there as we go farther south a field of sulla, a leguminous plant cultivated for fodder, is in bloom, a blanket of rich carmine blossoms spread out on the green wheat. We are driving down the Belice Valley, through the heart of the earthquake zone: morning mists, rising in the morning sun, reveal crumbled towns and shoddy barracks.
Soon the smell of salt indicates that we are nearing the sea again. The southern coast is low, sweeping, open to the sea that penetrates inland in an intermingling of dunes and fields and low bluffs quite different from what we are used to in the north, where the sea is a backdrop for the dramatic contours of the land, but remains quite distinct from it. There are no tides to speak of in the Mediterranean, and somehow on the northern coast one knows this at a glance, while to the south such an ebb and flow remains a possibility.
It is barely half past eight when we park the car in a small side street of Castelvetrano and continue by foot to the main square. The sun is not yet high enough to find its way into the streets and warm the air, and the bars are just opening. We are hungry after our drive, and when a young boy passes, balancing on his head a huge tray covered with a white cloth, we immediately swing round like the needle on a compass and follow him to the bar where, it turns out, he is delivering freshly fried arancine, the rice croquettes.
By the time we have wiped the last grains of rice from our chins, the square is beginning to fill up with people. It isn’t really a square at all, but a long, narrow rectangle, slightly bent at the halfway point, where Claudia has advised us to take up our stand. There are a fair number of tourists, brought here by guidebooks or guided tours, but the bulk of the crowd is local, all dressed up and very excited. Next to us a family of emigrants home for the holiday is particularly resplendent, the husband’s black and white brocade jacket and matching tie an unmistakable symptom of the way the somber good taste of the Sicilian peasant goes berserk in a foreign climate. The emigrant returns from abroad in loud checks and phosphorescent socks that are immediately labeled americanate no matter where they have been purchased.
The banditori, the town crier
s, arrive, the likes of which I have not seen for years. When I lived in Partinico there was still a town crier there, who would stroll through the streets announcing his arrival with a long roll on his drum and then shouting out his messages in thick, garbled dialect and long, drawn-out groans, of which I never understood a single word. These three limit themselves to their instruments, large drums slung from bands around their necks and balanced on their bellies; taking up a position a short distance from the others, as if in solitary command of the piazza, each one beats out in turn a passionate call for attention, vying with his rivals in the velocity of the rolls, the fury of the crescendos, the sharpness of the final rat-a-tats.
In white gloves and white pith helmets, the town police begin to carve a central path through the crowd for the length of the piazza. As soon as the way is clear, a group of majorettes step out, followed by the town banners and then the band, which strikes up a sprightly Sousa sort of tune. Gone are the funeral marches, the dirges, and the requiems; today is for resurrection and rejoicing. The crowd is excited, necks crane, peering to see what is happening at either end of the piazza, which is by now completely filled with people. Small children, piggyback, float above the sea of heads, while the privileged look down upon us from the surrounding balconies.
On Persephone's Island Page 17