“When I was a boy, I spent all my time avoiding processions!”
The next day is Pasquetta, “Little Easter,” a day on which the family picnic in the country is as sacred a ritual as the procession is on Easter. This is a tradition that goes back for centuries; the famous “Sicilian Vespers,” the revolt that shifted the power structure of the Mediterranean and brought Sicily under Spanish domination, was supposedly touched off on Pasquetta in 1282 when a French soldier insulted a Sicilian girl who was coming out from the Vesper service at the then rural church of Santo Spirito, after having spent the day in the country with her young man and his family.
Until quite recently, Easter Monday morning found the country roads around Alcamo and Partinico full of cart-borne families heading out to the fields for their picnics. The horses were strapped into holiday harness, with bells jingling, brightly colored plumes and woolen pompoms nodding, and the sun flashing on tiny round mirrors. Behind them, balanced on two high wheels and beautifully carved and painted, with gay primary colors depicting the triumphs of Count Roger over the Saracens or of Garibaldi over the Bourbons, the carts themselves were bursting with people: the grandmother in black, sitting stiffly in a straight chair and holding a large black umbrella over her head to keep off the sun, a flock of grandchildren tucked in around her feet, the adults squeezed onto the driver’s seat; the family dog, tied to the axle of the cart, ran briskly along behind. (One of the great chestnuts of Sicilian humor is the touring Englishman who stops one of these carts and makes the peasant untie the dog, to the considerable bewilderment of both man and beast.)
This is a rare sight nowadays, since most families have a car to travel in, and many peasants even have a summer house, albeit tiny, by the sea that they prefer on holidays to the scene of their daily labors. But some still choose the countryside: I am out early in the morning, pruning the lavender bushes that border my herb garden, and as I work I can hear the landscape come alive with laughter, with shouting children and calling mothers, the voices traveling a long way in the quiet air. Some cheerful traditionalist has brought a record player that vibrates with the nasal twanging of the marranzanu, the iron mouth harp, over and over in a tireless tarantella. Before long I will see thin columns of smoke begin to rise here and there on the hillsides: you need a lot of embers for roasted artichokes, which are obligatory today and marvelous anytime. To achieve this apotheosis of the artichoke, you must grasp it firmly by the stem end and pound it vigorously on a stone until the leaves flatten and open out enough to allow you to poke in toward the heart a large pinch of garlic chopped up fine together with mint, salt, and pepper. Olive oil in generous quantity follows upon the garlic, and the artichoke is then placed on ash-covered coals to roast gently for about forty-five minutes until the tough outer leaves have charred and the tender heart has steamed in its own juice and absorbed the oil and the seasonings in one of the world’s happiest marriages.
The whining of the chain saw drowns out the distant music: Tonino and Francesco have decided to tackle the palm and give it the definitive pruning. They cut and saw and chop all morning, carving out with surgical delicacy at least ten large clumps of fronds and almost twice as many little shoots. The final effect is very peculiar: the trunk goes up for about ten feet and ends in a large tuft, just like any proper palm, but halfway up four big branches curve up and out, their scratchy plumes waving to the four points of the compass like a badly smoking candelabrum. I cannot come out and say that I don’t like the fruit of so much hard and prickly labor and can only hope that this is a good omen, that having reduced this heraldic device from chaos to mere eccentricity, we will now proceed to operate in like fashion upon ourselves.
I must start early for Palermo, leaving Tonino and Francesco to finish putting the severed palm shoots to root and to close the house, because I have to go via the airport to meet Natalia, who is arriving from Milan. The trip from the airport to Palermo, usually only twenty minutes, is very slow tonight: all Palermo is returning from its Pasquetta picnic in a triple line of slow-moving cars whose red taillights flicker like last embers from the picnic fires. Natalia tells me about her Milanese Easter, rainy and urban, full of movies and nonstop confiding with her cousin. I describe to her our parade of processions and tell her how much I missed having her to share my delight in the wildflowers. After a while we fall silent, tired from our different experiences and mesmerized by the red lights that stop and start in a tedious crawl in front of us. I remember earlier evenings when I came upon the carts creaking back to town, grandmother’s umbrella folded, a woolen rug over her shoulders against the night air and sleepy heads propped up against her knees, the oil lantern that swung from the axle throwing a swaying circle of dim light on the asphalt below.
The darkness outside the car windows conceals an endless row of little villas, summer houses that have checkered with red tile and white stucco the empty beaches, stony fields, and olive groves that lay along this piece of coastline when I first came to Sicily. So much has changed, so much is being lost, so much altered in the attempt to conserve it. The quintessential message of the Tràpani and the Castelvetrano processions has allowed them to survive intact their inclusion in the tourist itinerary, but the pagan exuberance of Caltabellotta is surely doomed to succumb to self-consciousness. Prizzi seems neither here nor there; we had the impression that repeating the ritual now serves more to accommodate tardy tourists than to satisfy different neighborhoods, but perhaps we were suffering from a surfeit of pageantry by the time we got to Prizzi, and watched the devils dance with jaded eyes.
My doubts about the survival of the authentic spirit of the Easter processions are in part quelled the next day when I read the following article in the morning newspaper:
There is Passion and passion!
The traditional Good Friday procession that, even at Leonforte, represents the high point of the Easter ceremonies, was transformed this year into a gigantic free-for-all, which the police and the carabinieri were hard put to control. The coffin of the crucified Christ and the Madonna Addolorata were surrounded by a sea of punches, slaps, and shoves, of shouts and swear words, which paralyzed the long cortege of the faithful. The cause of it all was the dispute that for several years now has divided the senior priest of Leonforte, Father Ragusa, from the confraternities of the “Christo morto” and of the “Addolorata.”
The bone of contention is the organization of the Easter week celebrations and in particular of the Friday night procession, which is a very old tradition at Leonforte and attracts a big crowd of tourists and people from the neighboring towns. A further source of tension comes from the new statue of the Madonna Addolorata, made in Malta and shipped to Leonforte, a novelty that has divided the town.
It was clear right from the beginning of the rite that feelings in the church were running high. The priests began to detach the statue of the dead Christ from the cross in order to lay it in the coffin, and this ceremony, which should be carried out in devout silence, was instead accompanied by noisy bickering. The discussion revolved around the statue of the Madonna: which one was to go out of the church, the new one from Malta or the old one? The senior priest tried to cut short the argument and harshly scolded the representatives of the confraternities, but these gave tit for tat, and the shouts could be heard over the singing of the congregation. Finally the procession got under way, but not for long. Some say it was the fault of the priests, who were urging the faithful to step lively and get the procession over wíth. Some say that the confraternities were responsible because they didn’t like how the procession was organized and wouldn’t lump it. In any case it ended in a free-for-all: the air around the statues rang with “words that shouldn’t be repeated” and the two factions lit into each other.
Conclusions: the police and the carabinieri are preparing their reports, and the opposing factions are organizing a town meeting to determine how the people of Leonforte want their Easter week celebrations. Meanwhile, the traditional Sunday proces
sion, the “Encounter,” has been canceled.
Article by Melo Pontorno in Il Giornale di Sicilia, April 4, 1983
Sicily continues to make the headlines in the national newspapers as well as the local ones: right after Easter the Christian Democratic party announces the nomination of a woman as mayor of Palermo. If she is elected, Elda Pucci, the head of the newborn division of the Children’s Hospital and preferred pediatrician to the upper-middle-class children of Palermo, will be the first woman to be mayor of a major Italian city.
The news is greeted with equal doses of interest and skepticism. Everyone is startled to see the dam of male supremacy crumbling at what was supposed to be one of its strongest points, but few people believe that Dr. Pucci, whose political experience is limited to three years as a city councilor, can ever be much more than a puppet of the Demochristian bosses who are trying to create for their party a new image, free from the suspicion of collusion with the Mafia. Dr. Pucci has a record of rigorous and courageous behavior at the hospital but is profuse in her expressions of admiration and respect for some of her more dubious, if not infamous, predecessors and fellow party members: either she is much more naïve than she seems or she is a great deal less sincere. Time will tell—to a delighted audience: nothing constitutes a more pleasing pastime for the Palermitani than cortiggbiu, “court gossip,” be it the chattering of the women in a crumbling courtyard of the old city or the sycophantic back scratching that goes on in the courts of power. One of Palermo’s least attractive characteristics is the pleasure it derives from destructive criticism of anyone who takes an initiative, and in the coming months the city will be watching avidly for the hair in the egg—the Italian version of the fly in the ointment—and waiting with ill-concealed amusement for the defeat of its new mayor, who has already been described by one Palermo intellectual as “a butterfly immobilized upon a pin.”
But the attention for Mayor Pucci is short-lived, brushed aside by a spray of bullets. “Massacre in Sicily” reads the headline of a national paper today. Twelve dead and five wounded in twenty-four hours. The body count is evenly divided: six here in Palermo and six in the east between Catania and Gela. Special correspondents arrive from all over Italy to paint a lurid picture of a city rotting in its structures and its morals, permeated by the stench of uncollected garbage and by the arrogance and violence of an economy and a power structure based on heroin and bullets. The authorities and the journalists discover that a woman and her eight children have been sleeping in a car parked outside the one-room house of a married daughter ever since her husband was murdered more than a year ago. Local politicians are arrested on charges of graft and corruption and then released in time to be included in the list of candidates for the coming national elections.
The newspaper articles and the debates on the radio are full of quotes and telephone calls from Palermitani bewailing the horrors of life in this city, as if all its inhabitants felt flattened by the steamroller of Mafia power. Yet in most cases it is hard not to entertain the suspicion that these protests are part of a recital of anguished impotence that requires far less effort than would be necessary to search for an alternative, viable, and constructive way of living in Palermo. Closing an eye here, turning a deaf ear there, most Palermitani have learned to navigate quite comfortably in these foul marshes, or to convince themselves at least that they live on an island within an island. “As long as they are shooting it out between themselves, the more dead the better!”
At the bottom of the front page, day after day, in a basso continuo of rumbling and belching, the news of Etna’s eruption continues, keeping pace with the slow but steady descent of the three branches of lava. The ski lift and the observatory have long since been swallowed up, the people who worked there and elsewhere in the tourist industry are jobless, and it is the lower slopes, the scattered villas and summer camps, the vineyards and the fruit orchards, that now constitute the daily sacrifice to the great three-headed red dragon slithering down the mountainside. Three towns lie in the projected path—Nicolosi, Belpasso, and Regalne—and although at its present speed it will be a long time before the lava could reach the first houses, the inhabitants are justifiably uneasy and demand to know what the government intends to do. The government has no idea; among other things, it is against the law to deviate the lava flow in any way, and no one wants the responsibility of deciding where it is to end up. We have the ultimate waste disposal problem.
The debate over Etna offers a peculiar counterpoint to the discussions in the west. If some prefer to see the Mafia as a force of nature, the inevitable expression of human aggressiveness aggravated by historical circumstance, there can be no doubt about Etna. The amoral and impartial violence of the volcano is somehow fascinating and almost refreshing after the morass of moral responsibilities in Palermo. The conservationists are looking on with glee as Etna takes her revenge on the villas and tourist establishments that have violated both nature and the zoning laws. The authorities wring their hands, caught between the lava’s descent and the rising anger and impatience of the local population. Meanwhile the latter has decided to put the question into more competent hands. Repeating a ritual that has successfully stopped the flow of past eruptions, they will this afternoon carry the veil of Saint Agatha, virgin, martyr, and protectress of Catania, in procession before the advancing tide of destruction.
This is another procession I am loath to miss, but my presence is required at Bosco. The heat has come, right after Easter, an early and unwelcome accomplice to the drought, and I can no longer put off in anticipation of rain the planting of the corn seed that has arrived from the United States.
Very little corn is grown in Sicily, but strangely enough pedlars hawk corn on the cob on the beach at Mondello, Palermo’s fashionable watering spot. It is, however, horrid stuff, cold and clammy cobs of tough boiled orange beads that an American would be ashamed to offer to a pig, so I have hybrid seed flown over from the States—Butter and Cream, Silver Queen, Golden Bantam—paying twice as much for the airmail postage as I do for the seeds themselves. Every year I struggle to explain to Turiddu how to plant it, since he has no experience with corn, but the fact that I am a woman, an American, and a padrona far outweighs his lack of experience. So last year I told him to do exactly the opposite of what I wanted and had somewhat more success than in previous years. But wages have gone up and we can no longer afford to pay Turiddu for our caprices; this year I intend to do the planting myself.
If winter works miracles along the upper road to Bosco, spring is the season to take the lower track, tunneling between high green banks that close out the view on either side. In summer this is an avenue of bleached, dust-covered brambles and canes, shady except at noon, the dirt smooth as talcum powder under bare feet, the air humming with insects and heavy with the resinous perfumes of the Mediterranean underbrush. Startled turtle doves and lizards flit in front of the car in the daylight, toads and wild rabbits leap from the headlights at night. But now, in April, we drive between walls of color. Each leg of the road has its own vegetation, and each turn produces a new variation on spring’s basic scheme of purple and yellow.
The first stretch cuts in straight from the highway, closed in on either side by a steep hedgerow of blackberries that are just preparing to flower, the first of the pale lavender blossoms overpowered by the white-flecked purple brilliance of the vetch. A bigger, more colorful cousin of the tares that were sown with the wheat in the Biblical parable, the vetch clings to the other plants in the hedgerow, hoisting itself up until the time comes to unfurl its buds, so many tiny purple flowers so perfectly arranged to catch the sun and the passing insects’ attention that they glow like royal banners let down for some triumphant passage.
At the end of this first stretch the road runs into the reggio trazzera, a royal cart track originally financed and built by Sabaudian good intentions after the unification of Italy, now a muddy morass in winter and a succession of stony ruts and sandy skids in summer. Theore
tically, all the farmers who use this road could unite in a consortium and obtain a government contribution to improve and surface it, but in order to make the road wide enough to qualify for state help it would be necessary to persuade the landowners whose fields border on the track to relinquish and donate a strip of land about two feet wide, a task so hopeless that I fear Tonino will never even try, although an improved road is essential if we are ever to live here all year round.
The royal track marks the edge of the plain; through the years a river of traffic and rainwater has dug a bed whose high banks hide from view the flat fields to the north and the gentle slopes leading to the southern hills. Here the germander is in bloom, low bushes of gray-green leaves and gray-blue flowers, and purple star anemones, and rockroses, their crumpled white petals and yellow centers easily confused with those of the true white roses that grow here too. Farther on the wild garlic is bursting into bloom. A cluster of delicate white bells strung from a single stem, wild garlic is a terrible temptation: so lovely to look at, so long-lived once cut, but so overwhelmingly garlic-scented as to make the best-aired room uninhabitable. The street vendors in Palermo pass them off on the unwary; I once heard them being sold as lilies of the valley to an elderly lady, much to the disgust of her chauffeur, who was holding them at arm’s length while his mistress paid the bill.
At the foot of the hill we leave the royal track and climb south between low banks and vineyards, where full sunlight brings out vivid colors again: crimson sulla that has escaped from some past planting to sow itself each year along the roadside, more rockroses, fuchsia-colored here, and the strange crook of the honeywort with its dangling yellow-and-purple bells, the intense blue of the bugloss, erba viperina, used by the Greeks to cure viper bite, and the purple-blue of the pitch trefoil.
On Persephone's Island Page 19