On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  This year May Day falls on a Sunday, depriving us of a holiday but giving us a good occasion for a private spring rite, a feast we hold every year at Bosco for a few of Tonino’s friends and colleagues. I call it a feast for want of a better word: picnic, cook-out, or barbecue would sound too urban, or at best suburban, if used in such an agrarian context, and there is more than a little of the spring propitiary orgy in the amount of food and wine that is consumed.

  The five men—a teacher, a farmer, a government inspector, and two technicians—who come with their respective families are all involved in some way in agriculture, and all of them have their roots in the land as well. With the exception of the farmer, they are the first generation to have reached higher education in families belonging mostly to the burgisi, the intermediate class of small farmers owning and working their own land, who in the complicated hierarchy of rural Sicily were neither peasants nor yet quite middle class. Each one, even those who live in Palermo, has at least a small piece of land in his hometown, some olives, the odd fruit tree, the little vegetable plot worked by an obliging uncle, monument to that Italian dedication to the homegrown and the genuine, which has supplied much of today’s menu, from the boiled fava beans to the artichokes we are about to roast.

  Enzo and Nicola set the children to shelling fava beans, Giuseppina and Vita pound open the artichokes to receive the mint and garlic I am chopping up. Considerable controversy accompanies the preparation of the meat—castrato, castrated goat, for which the Sicilians have an inexplicable passion. It must be atavistic, a hangover from some ancient age in which the sacrifice of a castrated goat was a rare and festive opportunity to eat meat, since nothing less could explain this taste for gamy mouthfuls that are difficult to chew and impossible to digest.

  Should we make the classic ammogghiu marinade—abundant garlic pounded up with ripe peeled tomatoes, salt, and olive oil—or use lemon juice with oregano? Should we put it on before the slices go on the fire or spoon it over the already roasted meat? Alcamo, Tràpani, Partinico, Prizzi, and Chiusa Sclafani are represented (New York has nothing to contribute), and their various customs are compared and weighed before we decide, as we always have, on a side dish of ammogghiu for those who want it. As Pina pounds up the garlic, she informs me that my mortar and pestle of hand-blown French glass is very inefficient, and I remind her laughingly that for two years now she has promised to bring me a better one.

  Our feast does, however, resemble an American barbecue in the way that men who hardly ever put hand to pot become expert cooks at the mere sight of an open fire, which in this case they are lighting out at the edge of the garden, igniting a huge tangle of vine branches put aside from the winter’s pruning for just such an occasion. It roars up in a rapid blaze, then subsides into the ash-covered coals necessary for the artichokes’ slow roasting. Tonino and Nicola are cleaning off the discarded bedsprings that have proved to be the perfect grill for large quantities of meat (we baptized them with sausages for sixty—linkless three-foot Sicilian sausages in skewered coils), and Enzo and Tommaso carry out the courtyard table and set it in the shade of the mulberry trees. By this time the fava beans are cooked, and we slide unawares into eating, popping bean after irresistible bean into our mouths and washing them down with wine as we stand around waiting for the meat to cook.

  There is as always much more food than we can possibly eat, but everyone makes a valiant effort, and the strong white Bosco wine does much to extend the advisable limits. The trays of pastry that Pina and Anna bring out at the end, fancy store-bought cakes and homemade cassateddi filled with sweet ricotta, are greeted by groans of despair.

  “Ah,” says Andrea, “my uncle always used to say that pastries are like the cardinal at Easter. The cathedral is so packed with people come for High Mass there isn’t a spare centimeter to move in, but as soon as the cardinal appears, a pathway opens miraculously to make room for him to pass.”

  Under the influence of the wine, the conversation takes a May Day turn, a bawdy Fellinian recollection of postwar provincial boyhood, the world of Amarcord, of making do, of getting by on big ambitions and no cash, or, as someone succinctly puts it, of jerking off on soda pop while dreaming of women and champagne.

  Maudlin from a surfeit of wine, food, and memories, the men stagger as far as the almond trees, where they collapse in the grass to bewail the disappointments of age and the weight of family responsibilities, or so Francesco, a sober but very amused initiate, later reports; while the women—the real ones, the chains and fetters, with not a Gradisca among us—putter around cleaning up.

  In northern Italy Sunday lunch in a country tavern has become a ritual search for an antidote to a week of fast foods and industrial menus:

  The Sunday drive outside the city becomes a voyage in time in search of roots, of irremediably lost origins; an attempt to recuperate through the mediation of the dinner table (talisman and magic object) slices of the past by techniques of cooking that are impossible in the city; to recuperate with the magic help of soups and stews by now mythical in urban households, a universe of lost smells and flavors that restores—in an illusory fashion, as with all drugged liturgies inevitably destined to alter the relationship of time and space—the ghost of a lost culture: a striking mass phenomenon solicited by a sharp hunger, cultural rather than physiological, a valuable testimony for investigating society’s unconscious mechanisms.

  A double nutritional track has by now become diffuse, a culinary double helix, in which to the quick, light modern cooking, frozen and even precooked … is contrasted Sunday’s gastronomic flight to the most intransigent country traditions, rustic and aboriginal.

  Piero Camporesi, Alimentazione, folclore, società

  But in Sicily we are still one stage earlier. The people who come to Bosco today are still holding on to the substance as well as the memory of an earlier culture, which they struggle daily and at great cost to accommodate to modern urban life, attempting to reconcile slow cooking to office hours, rushing through city traffic to shell their homegrown peas, dedicating their afternoon off to a trip back to the paese to stock up on wine, oil, and fresh vegetables. Bosco is an artificial setting, perhaps, restored by a nostalgic professor and an American expatriate, but today it has offered the opportunity for a collective return, grass roots to sink back into under the shade of an almond tree.

  And, for at least some of our guests, an opportunity to forget most pressing worries: with us today is the man from Alcamo who received the threatening phone calls. He and his wife have just begun to go out again, and rumor has it that “the question is settled,” although we do not know how. In the meantime bombs have gone off in three different beach houses at Alcamo Marina, and other people we know are being threatened. But it appears that one can learn to live with this possibility too, to remove it to the category of random and senseless dangers like mugging, cancer, or nuclear war that for Western man have come to replace the fear of famine or plague or barbarian invasions.

  We have hardly had time to digest this first dose of castrato before we must tuck into another one. One of Tonino’s colleagues at the university has invited the entire Institute of Agrarian Economics and its assorted families for a mangiata of ricotta and castrato at his family sheep farm outside of Tràpani.

  The Italian language and its various dialects are rich in words for eating one’s bellyful—mangiata, abbuffata, scorpacciata, panzata—for which I am hard put to find an English equivalent. “Blow out” and “splurge” are not specific enough: the Italian words have behind them the weight of centuries of hunger interrupted only by famine. To eat all one wants and more, in one glorious and wasteful feed, is to consecrate the feast day by distinguishing it from the careful measuring out of the daily bread.

  This Saturday’s banquet does not honor any recurrent feast but is a simple act of hospitality. The guests range from the senior professors and their wives, of a generation in which only the upper classes aspired to university teaching, through
the junior professors, some from middle-class families like Tonino’s, others having made enormous jumps (for instance, his colleague from a small town who as a boy was often asked by his teachers what he thought he, the son of a barber, was doing at the classical lyceum), and then to the technicians and secretaries and the janitor, a Palermitano from the San Pietro mandamento, irremediably urban in this rural setting.

  Our host is the younger son of an aristocratic family whose sheep farm is housed in buildings that, to judge by their architecture, must have been part of a rural resettlement scheme launched in the fifties, an attempt to avoid the confiscation of undercultivated lands under the land reform law. Like almost all attempts to promote such resettlement, the scheme was unsuccessful, because most of western Sicily’s peasant population, accustomed to urban life after centuries of being driven to the towns by Saracens, bandits, pirates, and malaria mosquitoes, has steadfastly refused to live on their farms. The long-empty buildings are now being slowly transformed into a modern sheep farm, with milking machines, refrigerated storage tanks, and rooms for cheese processing.

  The count and countess are there to greet us on our arrival, which has been timed to coincide with the curdling of the ricotta from the morning’s milking. We are immediately ushered in to watch the head shepherd stirring and ladling out platefuls of hot ricotta floating in its whey. He is using a big copper cauldron like that of the shepherds at Bosco, and the smell of the ricotta is the same, but all likeness ends there. The fire comes from an enormous gas burner, and the walls and floor of the room are covered with gleaming white tiles.

  The farm is at the center of a shallow bowl between soft hills covered with pasturage, green grass and red sulla stretching out in all directions to the horizon, where, to the west, the dark crest of Erice rises over the rim. We walk out to see the artificial lake and to admire the flocks of Maltese goats. A far cry from Sicily’s usual grubby, Roman-nosed beasts, these have long, silky white wool, black faces streaked with white on the nose, and long and languid black ears that curve down below their cheekbones and curl up at the tips, giving them the air of a 1930s movie star. We wade knee-deep through flowers, sulla, bugloss, lavender thistles, and the yellow-throated, blue-rimmed convolvulus siculus, to watch the harvest combine mowing the sulla, its great blades cutting through the stand of flowers like a paddle steamer on a red sea.

  Dinner arrives by car, prepared elsewhere by the peasant couple who runs the family’s estates. The countess apologizes over and over again for the preparations, which are necessarily makeshift here where only the shepherd and his flock are in permanent residence and no one has ever served a meal for thirty before, but we find them charming: on the cement platform under a high tin roof where the sheep gather for shelter from the winter rains, an enormous table has been hammered together from two-by-fours expressly for the occasion. Gay checkered tablecloths cover its length, and big baskets of yellow daisies are placed at intervals. Bowls of olives, slabs of fresh sheep cheese, and slices of freshly baked bread flavored with fennel seeds keep us going until the car comes, laden with pizza arianata, a specialty of the Tràpani region made with pecorino, oil, onions, and abundant oregano, then huge pans of castrato roasted together with tomatoes, potatoes, and onions in the same wood-fired oven that cooked the pizzas; sausages of chopped castrato mixed with pork and seasoned with rosemary; big bowls of tomato salad; and finally, enormous trays of cassateddi, their sweet ricotta filling deliciously sharpened by a little grated lemon rind.

  Abundant wine quickly washes away any awkwardness, and laughter drowns out the remote tinkling of sheep’s bells and the buzz of the insects in the wildflowers. The farmer and his wife jump up and down from their seats near the other peasants at one end of the great table in order to press a little more of this and just one more of that on us. The farmer is a thin, weathered man, perhaps in his late forties, with brilliant blue eyes and a smile of seraphic gentleness. The count’s eldest son has much to say in praise of his abilities, both as a farmer and in keeping the accounts, in helping him out in his law office and drawing up deeds and wills as if he had had legal training. The young aristocrat speaks of the peasant with the greatest admiration and just a hint of surprise.

  The head shepherd is also much admired by the company, a caricature of the omo di panza, the “man with a belly” who knows how to defend his honor and hold his tongue. He is indeed a man with a belly, an amazing tight drum that balances immobile over his belt, and his eyes slant slightly, impassive and observant in the shadow of his cap, giving him the air of a Sicilian buddha. Someone comments on his economy of motion, and the farmer, passing at that moment with a platter in his hand, laughs.

  “He’s a real shepherd, that one. If he wants to eat snails for his supper, he just props himself up in the middle of the field and waits for the snails to crawl up his crook!”

  We are undone by the quantities of food we have put away, and by the news of a minor tragedy: they have forgotten to bring the coffee. Abject apologies from the farmer and the countess are still being brushed aside when a large Mercedes pulls into the farmyard. An equally large gray-haired man well laden with gold rings and gold ID bracelets gets out. It is the village baker in whose oven all this has come to pass, and he is brandishing aloft an enormous thermos jug.

  “Look,” he says proudly, “perfect timing! Piping hot coffee just when you are ready for it.” Refusing an invitation to join us, he gives a courteous bow and drives off.

  Intending to stop off at Bosco on our way back to Palermo, Tonino and I avoid the autostrada and follow the old road that climbs over a ridge, leaving the flat lands of Tràpani behind it, and drops suddenly into the valley—lush, tree-shaded, and unexpected—that leads to Segesta. I will be coming back here tomorrow, but right now I hardly notice the temple’s triangular pediment hovering in the dip of a hill as we drive by. I am busy wondering about class, words, and collective guilt.

  “Do you really want to use the word ‘peasant’?” my friend Claudia asked when she read the first chapters of this journal. Claudia is a first-generation American who swam against the current, coming back to visit Sicily on a Fulbright scholarship and staying to marry a distant cousin. While she shares none of my historical guilt about blacks and Indians in America (“we were on the receiving end too”), I seem to approach the European peasantry with greater ease than Claudia or many of my middle-class Sicilian friends.

  It’s true that “peasant” is a loaded word in English, much more so than the Italian contadino, which is very matter-of-fact, even anthropological, as in cultura contadina, peasant society. The disparaging sense that “peasant” can have in English is more often reserved to villano, the worker of the Roman villa, which implies the uncouth and the oafish.

  “Turiddu is a proper villano!” Tonino exclaims with annoyance. “Having raged and fumed and carried on yesterday about how lousy our sulphur pump was, this morning he discovered that it does work after all and now he’s taken it home with him!”

  Or maybe it’s just Americans who have trouble with the word “peasant,” apologetic as they often are when forced to speak in terms of class. An eight-year-old American who was visiting us once asked me what the word meant, and it was difficult for me to explain it in terms that a little boy from southern California could understand. In any case it is a problem that is rapidly resolving itself: Turiddu Vivona and the Pirrello brothers grew up in a peasant society, in a subsistence-level struggle for survival, of which the next generation, their sons and daughters, does not possess even the memory.

  It is a pleasant relief the next day to start out on an expedition that is neither anthropological nor gastronomical, but a feast for the eyes alone; I have promised to accompany a visiting American professor to Segesta. I am always delighted when someone gives me an excuse to go to Segesta, since close as it is, I never get there under my own steam, and yet I love it almost above any other place in Sicily.

  The remains of the ancient city straddle the low
ridge of hills that separates the plain of Castellammare from the flat lands of Tràpani. We must take exactly the same route out along the autostrada that Tonino and I followed yesterday, but the weather has changed, altering the landscape as well. The scirocco is blowing, spreading a veil of dusty yellow light, fading out the colors of the wildflowers that were so gay in yesterday’s sun and whipping the acacia blossoms, now withered to a dull mustard. On the viaducts the car trembles and shudders as I struggle to keep us on course, and the rooks hovering about the ruins of the castle of Calatubo swoop and surf on the sudden gusts.

  The theater comes into view first, clinging to the brow of its hill, the semicircle of walls that embrace the cavea breaking the skyline like a laurel crown. The eye runs down the slope to the west, caught by the play of this rugged, stony ridge and the smooth flow of the grassy plain that cradles the temple. The autostrada sweeps around a curve, rises, falls, always in sight of the temple, and then dives underground, bringing us out just a few short turns from the parking lot, so full of tour buses that it is not easy to find room for our car.

  Like Erice, the city of Segesta belonged to the Elymians, but here the predominating influence was Greek rather than Carthaginian. The Segestans adopted the Greek alphabet to inscribe their pottery and were so successful at absorbing the Greek culture that they were allowed the unusual privilege of contracting marriage with Greek citizens. The vulnerability of their city’s position forced them to rely on diplomacy for their defense, playing off Carthaginians against Greeks and Athenians against Syracusans in a quest for allies to support them in their continual border controversies with the city of Selinunte to the south. In 416, when Selinunte turned to Syracuse for aid, Segesta called upon Athens. In order to impress the Athenian delegation come to negotiate an alliance, the Segestans borrowed all the gold and silver plates and goblets that Erice could lend them and set them out in turn, together with their own, in each house in which the delegation was entertained. The Athenians were very impressed by the immense wealth of a city where every family ate off gold, and they voted to support the Segestan cause.