On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  Actually, Erice was never Greek: it belonged to the Elymians, who together with the Sicels and the Sicans inhabited Sicily when the Greeks began to colonize the island in the eighth century B.C. Very little is known about these peoples, neither when nor from where they came to Sicily, but the Elymians are the most mysterious of all; the one distinct trait that can be ascribed to them is a remarkable capacity to absorb more complex cultures, whether it be the Greek, as in the Elymian city of Segesta, or the Carthaginian, as in Erice.

  The lack of factual information about the origins of Erice is compensated for by a great abundance of myth, which traces its founding back to the very beginning of creation, when the Titans revolted against their father, Uranus. Cronus castrated his father with a sickle and threw both sickle (hence the name Sicily) and genitals into the sea off Cape Drepanum (Tràpani). To mark the spot where her ancestor’s genitals fell, Aphrodite rose from the waves in a cockleshell chariot and created the mountain of Erice, claiming it as her own. It was here that the goddess brought Butes, the Argonaut, when he succumbed to the sirens’ song and threw himself into the sea, and here that she bore him a son, Eryx, who gave the mountain its name.

  The Carthaginians worshiped Aphrodite here in the guise of Astarte: each spring a flock of white doves was released toward North Africa and the sister shrine of Sicca Veneria. After nine days the flock would return with a red dove in the lead, Astarte, symbol of fertility, whose return signaled the reawakening of nature. The Greeks arriving in Sicily also took up the worship of Aphrodite at Erice. When Daedalus, unlike his unfortunate son, Icarus, managed to escape successfully from Crete by means of the wax-and-feather wings and fly safely to Sicily, he entered the service of Kokalos, king of the Sicans, and is said to have forged a magnificent golden honeycomb as an offering to her shrine there.

  The Romans maintained the cult and the shrine, especially after the Sibyl advised seeking the help of Venus Erycina during the Second Punic War, but the Elymian town appears to have been abandoned until the advent of the Saracens, who built a fortress on an outcropping connected to the bulk of the mountain by a narrow bridge of rock. This practically invincible citadel was besieged by Count Roger in 1077 and only fell thanks to the intervention of Saint Julian, who loosed a pack of hounds on the unfortunate infidels. (From then on the mountain was known as Monte San Giuliano until Mussolini restored its classical name.) After this Erice became a medieval town, and nothing of its classical heritage remains today, except for a length of Punic wall and perhaps something in the faces of its women, to whom Ibn Jubayr, true to character even in the very last entry in his diary before he set sail from Tràpani to Spain, attributes “the fame of being the most beautiful on the island—may Allah soon deliver them as slaves to the Muslims.”

  The feast of Aphrodite Erycina was celebrated on the twenty-third of April: I have come as close as I can, and she is showing us her appreciation by giving us an absolutely perfect day. We speed across western Sicily under a cloudless sky, and the red carpet of sulla flowers is out to welcome us as we drive along an avenue of golden fireworks, the bright flowering of the acacia trees that line the autostrada. As we take the turnoff west, the temple of Segesta floats briefly above us before we are sucked into the dark of a long tunnel and spewed forth onto the plain of Tràpani, gently rolling hills of green wheat and red sulla, the chartreuse of the burgeoning vineyards and the warm rust of bare fields waiting to break out in a rash of bright yellow melons.

  Erice beckons us all the way with its dark green slopes and its ragged crest of castle towers. Just before Tràpani we circle round to take the road up the northern flank, around switchbacks and hairpin turns that swing us back and forth, like a slide projector gone haywire, now a dazzling view straight down to the bay of Bonagìa, sparkling azure and turquoise before the distant purple mountains of the Cape, and then back to the slope we are climbing, cool shady pine forests carpeted with swatches of color, with borage and calendula, with thick pink clusters of Fedia cornucopiae, and solitary scarlet dots of asparagus pea. Here and there the dark green of the pines is interrupted by the brilliant fuchsia blush of the flowering Judas tree. There is no room to park the car, fortunately, or I should forsake Aphrodite and be off like a truffle hound, snuffling through the underbrush in pursuit of Flora.

  At the end of its climb, the road circles round to the south of the summit and finishes in a broad piazza filled with cars and tourist buses, which with the town at its back looks out over an almost vertical drop to the plain twenty-four hundred feet below. If it were an absolutely clear day we could see Africa, but as usual the horizon is veiled over by haze and we have to be content with the nearer checkerboard of brown and green fields edged by the uneven line of the Sicilian coast skirting the Stagnone, the lagoon of Marsala where the small island of Mothya, once a thriving Phoenician port, is just visible. Land fades gradually and geometrically to water across the grid of the saline, the ancient salt flats with their windmills, tiny from this distance. To the west the Egadi Islands float in the haze, the dark, humpbacked turtles of Levanzo, Marittimo, and Favignana, and at our feet the city of Tràpani stretches the long arms of its breakwaters into the blue.

  Beneath the low stone parapet that borders the piazza, the mountain has hung out all its banners to welcome back Astarte, to celebrate Aphrodite: yellow, orange, celeste, and midnight blue; mayflowers, calendulas, borage, and purple vetch; great bolts of silk unrolling as they fall.

  It is almost noon when we head into the warren of narrow streets, but we have no fixed itinerary to respect other than a visit to the fourteenth-century Matrice with its carved portal and intricate rose window, the purchase of Erice’s special almond cakes in a pastry shop just off the main square, and then, after lunch, the castle. Erice is a town to wander in; its charm is one of scale and contrast. Tiny streets patterned with gray cobbles wind among low houses, stark peasant dwellings, or little palaces with baby baroque facades that testify to former wealth, and innumerable abandoned churches, boarded up and crumbling. The streets themselves are silent and empty; low voices and the ring of a child’s laughter come through the gates that allow a glimpse of sheltered courtyards, short flights of stairs, fruit trees, and carefully tended flowerpots. The life of the town is hidden from the public eye, played out behind the walls of these green and flowering courtyards, seemingly isolated yet linked one to another by a sense of community that shows itself in the absolute cleanliness of the streets, the neatly clipped box hedges and well-pruned trees in the public gardens, the well-kept appearance of the houses, even those a much-diminished population has left empty.

  The cool gray stones, half hidden by thick mantles of dark and polished ivy, are the outward armor of reserve and civic pride, shadowy and impenetrable, unlike the yellow limestone and the whitewashed plaster of the plains below that seethe and overflow, spilling out people and garbage and laundry and passions and noise into hot and dusty streets.

  We walk along the western edge, where the flowers have crept up from the pine forests to attack the old Punic walls, huge blocks of stone that are all that remains of Erice’s Carthaginian era. They drip with green, the colored tide advances, tunneling between the stones and dancing triumphantly along the top of the wall. We squeeze sideways through a narrow arched passage that likes to think itself the narrowest street in Europe and peer into the courtyards, each of us picking the house we would most like to live in, the play-house scale of so much of the town an invitation to such games. And finally, prompted by the growlings of our stomachs, we chart a zigzag course back to the southern side and the Taverna Re Aceste.

  Each time I come back to this restaurant I’m afraid it won’t be as good as I remember, and each time I am relieved to find it unchanged, neither the famous luxury restaurant that in any case would lie beyond our means and interest nor the rustic Sicilian cooking, excellent ingredients in simple combinations, that I would seek elsewhere. This is food for Erice, subtle, mysterious seasoning, intimations of fla
voring prepared with pride and restraint.

  Replete with risotto alla marinara, rigatoni all’Ericina, and grilled shrimp, we roll gently down the path that leads to the castle, not the Castello Pepoli, which is nineteenth-century neo-Gothic, but the real Castello di Venere, the Saracen and then Norman fortress, built at the very edge of the rock. Its walls supposedly enclose the site of Aphrodite’s temple, but there is nothing left of that to see. In fact the castle itself has rather little to offer, and its appeal lies in leaning over the walls and parapets to enjoy the spectacular view.

  I prefer to focus closer, however, to stick my nose right up to the castle walls and discover the world of tiny plants that cling to the stones and fill the crevices, a dwarf vegetation growing in a thimbleful of earth: camomile, grape hyacinths, feathery tufts of fennel, and an infinite variety of stonecrop, the succulent plants that appear to live on nothing, their fat-leaved branches bursting into miniature stars of pink, lavender, and white. And then, most appropriate here, a slightly bigger succulent whose smooth circular leaves dented in the middle have earned it the name Venus’s-navelwort—ombelico di Venere in Italian. A square foot of these walls in spring equals an entire field in the richness and the variety of color and texture, and I am perfectly happy to peer close, forgetting the larger setting.

  On our way home we stop at the farm. Bosco too is doing its best: the iris are magnificent, the clematis in the courtyard has its first flowers, and the air around the gate is heavy with the scent of the zàgara, the waxy white flowers of the lemon tree. Natalia picks an armful of wild gladiola, the elongated and intensely pink blossoms smaller and much more elegant than their cultivated cousins, while I pick artichokes and spinach.

  Despite the beauty of the day and the abundance of blossom, I feel discouraged. Bosco looks neglected; the grass that was so green and lovely a few weeks ago is out of control, while the nasturtiums under the rosebush are stunted and spindly for want of watering. A truck clanks and clatters up the hill, and Mr. Amato climbs down to say hello. He has a load of oil drums filled with water: he and his cousin are setting out melon seedlings, and the soil is so dry they have to truck in water and ladle it out around each plant. He has had luck with the melons planted from seed here, almost all of which have germinated, but none of his tomatoes has come up.

  A curled leaf, a withered flower, a yellowed spear of grass—these are the first intimations that we are already, prematurely, past the peak, that the sun so pleasant on our bare arms today has set to its long slow task of leaching out all color and coolness from the earth, that Sicily is exhausting its riches in the exuberance of a spendthrift spring, a brave front of color that will soon give way to the bare-bones economy of summer, the husbanding of moisture and the tilling of dust.

  Chapter Seven

  That we should speak about the “merry” month of May, set our kindergarten classes to making May baskets, and entertain innocent images of village lads and lasses courting around the Maypole is evidence of very selective transmission. We have forgotten that May, the month of the hawthorn tree, was sacred to Artemis, the Virgin Huntress, the Lady of the Wild Things. It was a month of enforced chastity, during which no weddings were allowed in either Athens or Rome, and even when it was over the goddess was propitiated by carrying hawthorn torches in the wedding processions and by putting hawthorn leaves in the cradles of newborn babies.

  The hawthorn itself shares in May’s ambivalence. Because of its perfume, suggestive of female sexuality, the Turks consider the hawthorn flower an erotic symbol, but in northern Europe the hawthorn belongs to witches (which says quite a bit about different cultural attitudes toward women), and it was thought that if hawthorn branches were brought into a house, someone in the household would die. As for Sicily, in this matter at least the Levantine appears to neutralize the Norman, which is fortunate, considering how much we depend upon the red-berried hawthorn branches to decorate the house at Christmas.

  The Church has encompassed these traditions by dedicating the month of May to the Virgin Mary and preaching the observance of chastity in her honor, just as it has tried to appropriate May Day as Labor Day by making it the feast of Saint Joseph the Laborer, so that now, throughout the towns of Italy, the trade unions parade in the morning behind tractors and red banners, and in the afternoon the ACLI, the Catholic Workers’ Association, carry out the statue of San Giuseppe.

  Although the Maypole can be found in northern Italy, according to the Sicilian ethnographer Giuseppe Pitré, there is no evidence that it has ever been used in Sicily. In many parts of the island, however, it was customary for the women to decorate themselves and their houses with fiori di maggio, mayflowers, the gaudy crown daisies that invade the roadsides and the fallow lands in shoulder-high stands of cadmium yellow. These flowers were also useful for an appealingly restful form of spring cleaning; on May Day the housewives would throw a bunch under the bed while reciting what can be loosely translated as:

  Flowers of May, flowers of May,

  Make the bedbugs go away!

  These older traditions would seem to have been replaced by a new one, intermittent and sinister, reflecting the darker side of the month of May. For Sicily, May Day is now above all the commemoration of the massacre of Portella della Ginestra in 1947, when the famous bandit Salvatore Giuliano, popular hero become tool of the allied reactionary and Mafia forces, opened fire with an automatic rifle on a group of peasants and workers and their families who were holding a May Day picnic. And last year on the eve of the holiday, Pio La Torre, the regional secretary of the Communist party, and his driver were gunned down in the street on their way to the party offices.

  At the various commemorative services that are being held this year, everyone is talking about the latest manifestation of the arrogance and power of the Mafia, the just-released newspaper story about Cardinal Pappalardo’s Easter visit to the Ucciardone, the old Bourbon fortress that serves Palermo as a jail. As at Christmas, the cardinal had intended to say mass in the main courtyard and then visit with the prisoners. But the mafiosi do not appreciate the position the cardinal has been taking in his sermons, and they have decided to make this known. Not one of the 1,025 Prisoners left his cell to attend the service; after an hour’s wait the cardinal returned to the Curia without having performed the rite. In case the message was not clear enough, the next day all the bosses and their henchmen turned out to hear the jail chaplain say the regular Sunday mass.

  Last year we paid our respects to May’s double nature by interrupting the long weekend in the country to come back into Palermo for Pio La Torre’s funeral, since we wished to be present at the close of a long history of courageous battles, in which La Torre had frequently risked his life and now finally lost. He began his career in postwar Sicily as a trade union organizer and a leader in the land reform movement, marching at the head of the peasants who went out to occupy the great feudal latifondi. Unlike some fifty or more colleagues who were shot down in those terrible years, La Torre survived the opposition of the landowning classes and of the Mafia and was called north to work in Rome. He returned to Sicily only a few years ago as regional secretary of his party, and became a leader in the anti-Mafia battle and a promoter of the Sicilian peace movement.

  The Italian government has chosen to install its allotment of 112 Cruise missiles at Comiso, a small town on the coastal plain of southeastern Sicily, in an area that has evolved remarkably over the past twenty years thanks to the creation of agricultural cooperatives specializing in greenhouse production of early fruit and vegetables. For the most part this has been a collective conquest, and the resulting wealth has been distributed fairly equitably, without causing drastic disruptions in the traditional fabric of life there. But now Comiso faces a triple invasion: the several thousand American soldiers who have begun to arrive, bringing their dollar economy with them; the European peace movement that is camped out there with its rainbow flags and often startling customs; and the Mafia, which is buying up land in the
area as fast as it can, recycling its illicit earnings in the rich local agriculture and preparing to conquer the 300 billion lire’s worth of building contracts and the market for drugs and prostitution the military base represents. Within the movement to block the installation of the Cruise at Comiso, La Torre was the first to call attention to this potential marriage between missiles and Mafia, an insight that is thought to have cost him his life.

  The funeral procession assembled outside the Porta Nuova, behind the Royal Palace, and by the time the last red flags had filed under the gate, the hearse had gone down the Corso, turned at the Quattro Canti, followed the Via Maqueda past the opera, and was approaching Piazza Politeama, where the speeches were to take place. La Torre was accompanied on his last march by those who had marched with him in Sicily, gone on strike in the north, demonstrated at Comiso. A ribbon of red banners stretched as far as the eye could see, linking together the most disparate groups in a pageant of contemporary Italian history: subdued and dignified delegations from the left-wing administrations of Milan, Florence, and Bologna; blue-overalled workers from the factories and steel mills of Turin, Taranto, and Bagnoli, weary from a night’s train ride, occasionally breaking into a hoarse rendering of the “Internazionale”; the flamboyant youth of the left and of the peace movement, promising with clenched fist and chanted slogan to carry on the fight. Dark islands in the current, the delegations from the towns of Sicily marched, black-suited policemen carrying the municipal standards and contadini, La Torre’s companions in the march on the land, old now, shoulders bent, the napes of their necks creased and brown above their starched white shirt collars, weeping silently.