“Look, there she is! There she is! She’s coming!” Everyone is pointing to the northern end of the piazza, where the statue of the Madonna has suddenly appeared, wrapped up in a black cloak and carried on the shoulders of a dozen men. Immediately all heads swing southward to discover in the distance the risen Christ just entering the piazza at the other end. The two statues halt just out of sight of each other, separated by some three hundred feet of curving square and excited onlookers. The Madonna is accompanied by an angel, half the size and weight of the larger statues and mounted on a much smaller platform. The crowd tenses and swells forward; the policemen spread their arms to keep open the path. A shout, and the angel charges down the piazza on the shoulders of a dozen young boys, bobbing and swaying precariously in his agitation. He arrives at the feet of the risen Christ, pauses to catch his breath, and in a few minutes races back again with the glad tidings. Tidings that are not believed: three times this polychromed plaster ambassador is hurtled back and forth across the piazza, faster and faster as the delighted crowd urges the runners on to greater and greater effort.
A roll of drums, some new music, and the big statues begin to move. The crowd falls silent. Mary and Jesus draw toward each other, their slow, shuffling progress full of doubt and hesitation. Might it be? Could it be true? The pace quickens. When they have come halfway, they catch sight of each other, the bearers break into a run, the two statues sweep together and pull up sharply just in time to avoid collision, the momentum bringing their heads together in a brief embrace. Mary’s black cloak drops away to reveal a mantle of flowered brocade, and the falling folds release a flight of snow-white doves that wheel and circle over the scene of such rejoicing.
Tonino and I sheepishly discover tears in each other’s eyes. It was so real. The emotion that was released together with the doves was so intense, the longing for just such an encounter so palpable. Mary and Jesus, Demeter and Persephone, black-veiled mother and murdered child, release from mourning.
Beyond the vague intention of ending up at Prizzi to see the devils dance on Easter afternoon, we have no set itinerary for the rest of the day and decide to drive east along the southern coast, turning or stopping at whim. And whim soon declares itself: only a short distance from Castelvetrano there are road signs indicating the turnoff for Selinunte, and it seems sinful not to make a stop when we have all the time in the world.
Selinunte is to me the least accessible of the Greek sites I have seen in Sicily. The bare bones of a city sacked by man and toppled by earthquake lie in careless heaps on low cliffs overlooking the sea, building blocks abandoned by some infant Titan who has centuries since outgrown them. They are illegible in their very size, with the tourists clambering over the enormous fluted drums of fallen columns like tiny, multicolored ants. Today it is very crowded; parking is difficult and the air rings with a many-tongued babble and with the nagging claxons of the tourist buses gathering their various broods. We mingle with the crowds, wander through the eastern temples, and stroll along the road that leads down into the river valley and up to the acropolis on the opposite cliff until the heat and the confusion persuade us to turn back.
Selinunte was a revelation the first time I came, exactly twenty years ago yesterday. Apart from Tonino and me there were no more than a dozen people here, and even these disappeared, swallowed up by the vast sweep of sea and plain and the immoderate proportions of the ruins. We sat for hours on some stones and stared out across sea and centuries, the sea of flowers in the foreground no less brilliant than the Mediterranean that sparkled in the distance. The selinon, the wild celery that gave the ancient city its name, was submerged by the red of the sulla, the yellow of mayflowers and mustard, the blue of bugloss and borage, bobbing and trembling under the insistent and noisy prodding of thousands of bees. It was my first immersion in the Sicilian spring, in its colors and its perfumes and its heat, a baptism that caught and held me convert. Today the flowers are still as beautiful, the sun perhaps even hotter, but the crowd and the confusion drown out the bees, and the ruins are silent, unable despite their size to cope with this Lilliputian invasion.
We continue eastward and then turn north on the road for Caltabellotta, which winds up over the ridge of low mountains that separates the southern coastal plain east of Selinunte from the rolling hills of the interior. These mountains are quite barren, with patches of vineyard or wheat exploiting the rare flat spaces, an occasional olive or almond tree clinging to the steep and rocky slopes, and, as closer inspection reveals, a sparse carpeting of the crouching, grasping plants of arid soil and high altitudes: purple squill, delicate white clusters of star-of-Bethlehem, the single tiny yellow-and-brown orchids of the lutea family, and the many-flowered stalks of the orchis italica, bristling with minute pink tentacles.
The village of Caltabellotta lies at the summit of the highest mountain in this southern ridge, topped only by two great spurs of rock that thrust up behind it like giant tusks. The streets are narrow and zigzag steeply up the hillside; a policeman directing all five cars’ worth of traffic instructs us to park the car and continue on foot if we want to see the procession. Of course we do, so we quickly park and follow the main street up to a point where it splits, one fork leading farther up a very steep slope, the other curving down to the right into a tiny piazza. The “procession” is here—townspeople and bandsmen, their instruments tucked forgotten under their elbows, have gathered in a circle to cheer and applaud a dancing saint, a life-size plaster statue of the Archangel Michael, the town’s patron. Michael, dressed in the armor of a Roman legionary, is leaning against a column that has been completely wrapped in purple phlox, with a young laurel tree tied next to it so that the purple flowers glow against the dark leaves. As in Tràpani and Castelvetrano, the flower-decked platform that bears the statue is mounted on two poles—in this case very long, thick wooden beams that of themselves must weigh an enormous amount—and requires some thirty hefty young men to carry it. But “carry” is not the right word: they rock and jostle and bounce the statue in the most extraordinary manner, accompanied and encouraged by a crescendo of cheering and clapping from the crowd that presses in around them. Sweat pouring off their faces, the young men push and pull still harder on their poles, and the Archangel rocks and sways and reels in a frenzied dance, until his porters can bear it no longer, the movement subsides into a faint bobbing, and the statue itself seems to pant as the men fight to catch their breath, still holding all the weight on their shoulders.
Bottles of water and beer are passed around, the band recovers its role and starts to play again, and considerable maneuvering is necessary to effect the passage of the statue around the curve and into the main street, where it pauses at the foot of the rise, gathering strength. Meanwhile another statue arrives, a little winged cherub about two feet high, with platform, poles, and porters in proportion: a handful of boys about twelve years old bounce the baby statue about in great excitement, egged on by an amused crowd.
The music dies out, and, at a sign from one of the porters, the drummer sounds a roll. On the final snap of the drumsticks the men charge up the street, running and stumbling with their heavy burden up a slope so steep that the statue seems almost horizontal. The cheers of the onlookers assist them over the top and around the corner, quickly followed by the angel, who bobs gaily and effortlessly up the rise in the wake of his big brother.
We too turn and climb. We have lost the statues, but echoes of their progress parallel to ours reach us at the street corners. A final hike up a street so sheer that the sidewalk is a flight of stairs brings us out onto the Piano della Matrice, the open square of the mother church, unexpectedly spectacular. In front of us a wide checkerboard of cobble and grass slopes gently up to the steps of the Matrice, built by Count Roger after he took Caltabellotta from the Saracens in 1090. The weathered gray stone of the Norman church blends into the sharp-toothed rock that rises abruptly behind it. On the left-hand side of the square stands the chapel of San Michele,
its Gothic portal garlanded in laurel branches, and next to it a gate and a stairway carved into the live rock lead off toward the second, bigger pinnacle, ringed by the trees of the town park where the ruins of the Norman castle lie.
Commotion rising from below tells us that Saint Michael is about to make his final assault on the mountain. The last steep rise is rendered more problematical by telephone wires and shop signs, and considerable measuring accompanied by animated discussion is necessary before a strategy can be agreed upon. At last somebody climbs out on a balcony and unties a laundry line, final directions are shouted out, and the group braces itself. Up they come, the initial momentum waning as they scramble up the cobbled street, their boots slipping and straining to find a grip on the polished stones. A final push and they burst into the square, where they bring up sharply, the statue swaying back and forth, evidently in some confusion as to where to go next.
One of the townsmen who has followed the progress of the statue explains to us that the municipal pro loco committee has decided that Caltabellotta should cash in on the “Easter in Sicily” tourist boom and has organized a new procession for the afternoon, a version of the Castelvetrano Aurora, but the details have not been thought out all that well, and no one knows whether Michael should spend his lunch hour in the Matrice or in the chapel of San Michele, where the garlands declare a readiness to receive him sooner or later.
After a few false starts and some rather languishing discussion, Michael is carried up the steps and into the dark interior of the Matrice. We start to follow it, but a priest, heretofore absent from the scene, closes the door firmly in our faces. Lunchtime. The Matrice is closed, the chapel is closed, the gate to the castle is closed. The best we can do is climb up some stone steps that lead around behind the Matrice, to discover that the rock is sheltering a miniature Alpine meadow, shaded by pine trees whose sun-warmed resin fills the air and dotted with tiny daisies, the kind whose white petals have had their tips dipped in red. I remember the flowers from a French children’s book I had when I was little, and it is surprising yet suitable to find their smiling faces here in the shadow of the Norman walls. The view from the meadow is spectacular: we can look north toward the mountains of Palermo across the whole of Sicily, the hills and valleys flattened from this height into a gentle pool of green, flecked with the white foam of the blossoming fruit trees.
The priest had something, however. Our stomachs call us to more prosaic questions. We discover that Caltabellotta offers a choice of two restaurants, one in the town itself and one just outside, around the back of the peak that rises above the castle ruins. Walking down toward the car we pass the first, which is occupied by a baptismal party and has no free tables. A winding road takes us out of town, past vegetable plots and tiny vineyards, to a huge baroque monastery, this too flanked by a cliff and by a charming restaurant with a trellised terrace. The proprietor is polite and extremely apologetic: a wedding reception is in progress, and there isn’t a free chair in the place. Tonino, undaunted or perhaps desperate, asks if they couldn’t fix us a little antipasto to go. After a brief wait the obliging host produces three foil-covered plates, a bottle of mineral water, and a round kilo loaf of fragrant, crusty bread. We drive back along the road a little way to a curve that offers space to park and some rocks to sit on. Our plates turn out to hold spicy olives, some slices of prosciutto crudo and of a peppery local salame, and two kinds of pecorino cheese, one fresh and mild, the other aged and sharper. With a bag of oranges from the car, the sun warm on our backs, the mountains rolling down at our feet to the southern coast and the sea beyond, where the heat haze clouds the horizon and hides Africa from view, we have as fine an Easter dinner as I have ever eaten.
The drive north to Prizzi, a rapid descent switchbacking down the north side of the mountain to the green valleys we had seen from above, takes us along luxuriant riverbeds, over hills of green wheat, past isolated pear and apple trees in bloom. The hedgerows are overflowing with flowers, unable to contain such a riot of color, such an exuberance of form and texture. It is difficult to believe that in the space of a few months the velvet softness of the wheat fields, shifting from emerald to chartreuse with the wind, will give way to bristling, colorless stubble; these are the hills that the Lampedusa family cross in the Visconti film of The Leopard, in blinding light and smothering dust, their carriages creaking to the shrill song of the locusts.
But the extravagant hand of spring is less and less successful in concealing the poverty of the agriculture the farther north we go. Our destination, the village of Prizzi, is quite high, slapped down on a hill of rocky soil and stunted vegetation with none of the cozy shifting and filling with which most Sicilian towns have accommodated themselves to the bones of the island. The outskirts of the town are ringed with the usual half-finished houses, fruit of the emigrants’ remittances, but once past them the streets are small and close and we are hard put to find a parking space and then to fight our way through the crowds that are thronging toward the center of town, the ranks of the Prizzitani being very much swollen by both foreign and Sicilian tourists. Tonino greets several of his students from the university, then most unexpectedly a hand claps down on my shoulder. It is Nicolò, a man who served on the school board with me. He is a native of Prizzi, a linesman for the telephone company, and after a period of technical schooling in Milan now lives in Palermo, where, fortified by his northern experience, he has become very active in the local section of the Communist party, in the neighborhood council, the trade union, and the school board. He proved a most unusual and valuable addition to the school board, able and willing to work on two levels in a way that is rare among Sicilians, ready to debate the ideological or educational implications of a policy decision and at the same time to fix a light plug or repair a busted slide projector himself rather than trusting to the lengthy meanderings of the school bureaucracy. But today he is here in Prizzi to be with his family and to see the devils dance.
We are lucky to run into him. We have arrived too late for the distribution of the cannateddi, Prizzi’s special Easter cakes, but Nicolò carries us off to the Circolo della Caccia, the Hunters’ Club, which the Chamber of Commerce has been using as its headquarters for the occasion, and there he sets various cousins scurrying around to unearth some last undistributed cannateddi for us, oval cakes of biscuit dough braided about an egg.
Cannateddi in hand, we follow Nicolò out again and push our way along the main street, which dips sharply down, then rises again in the distance. Nicolò guides us to the lowest point in the street, where he tells us to stay put, this being a grandstand seat for watching the triumph of Good over Evil. The street is filled with people, strolling, talking, and shouting across from one crowded balcony to another. Here at the bottom we can look up in either direction at a sea of faces. A small and hornèd vortex is descending upon us from the eastern end: the devils are coming, accompanied by the clanking of their chains and the squealing and shouting of a swarm of little boys. There are three masked figures, two devils escorting Death. Death is dressed in yellow, a big, loose-fitting yellow jump suit and a yellow mask of soldered tin covering his whole head in the shape of a skull, in which have been cut eyeholes, a black dent for the nose, and a mouth grinning around a few long and crooked teeth. Under his arm is a crossbow with which he menaces the crowd. The devils have rust-colored jump suits, ample enough to accommodate a variety of figures over the years, and their masks are large, flat tin ovals, painted brown, with curved horns, long noses, and tongues sticking out from leering mouths. The backs of their heads and shoulders are covered by heavy, long-haired goat pelts, black for one, white for the other, a touch of the genuine that is somehow much more menacing than the masks themselves. The multicolored stripes of Adidas sneakers show underneath the baggy trouser legs.
Comfortable shoes are a must for the devils, whose loping, lolloping dance betrays considerable weariness. Well it may, says Nicolò: they have been dancing ever since the hour of the Crucifi
xion on Friday, chasing about the town making mischief and teasing all they encounter. Nicolò was a devil one year and assures us that the costumes are unbearably hot and heavy, especially on a sunny day like today—the only thing that keeps you going is the wine. Anyone whom Death manages to hit with his crossbow is obliged to stand the devils a round at the nearest tavern, and if Death is a good shot, they all have quite a bit under their jump suits by the end of the day.
There is movement up at either end of the street, and for the second time today we are shoved back against the buildings by white-gloved policemen. The street is long and I can barely make out the Madonna to the east, Christ to the west, and just hear the loudest notes of the band. Down the hill come the forces of Good, two angels in armor, with cardboard wings, red capes, ropes of beads and gilt chains across their breasts, swords in hand, and strange flat-topped helmets that Francesco is quick to notice have been cut out from Alemagna panettone boxes. The devils at first have the best of these bizarre apparitions; a brief skirmish leads to a hasty retreat, and then a counterattack. Back and forth they run and clash and feint as the statues continue their slow but steady descent. The battlefield shrinks as the statues draw nearer, the dance and the swordwork grow more and more frenzied as the devils find themselves hemmed in between the advancing figures, until a last and desperate leap marks the meeting between the risen Christ and the rejoicing Madonna, and Death and the devils fall to earth, vanquished and immobile.
This scene will be repeated four more times this evening, the last time in the dark in the big piazza in front of the Matrice, at the top of the hill. Nicolò urges us to stay, but it is a long way back to Bosco and it is already half past five, so we say good-bye. Drunk with all that we have seen, my cheeks burning from the sun and wind, and my eyes watering, I can hardly take in the landscape we drive through, nor do I notice where we are when Tonino turns his attention from the road to give me a reproachful glance.
On Persephone's Island Page 18