On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  Even if we had no other record, the temple alone would be ample testimony to how the Elymian culture fused with the Greek, for it is a splendid example of Greek Doric architecture. It represents one more of the many mysteries surrounding the Elymian people, in that it is not a complete structure but consists simply in a flat base ringed by a peristasis of thirty columns. For a long time archeologists believed that the temple was complete as it now stands, a simple garland of columns to honor some more ancient altar or sanctuary, with no roof or inner cella ever planned, but recent studies indicate that further building was contemplated. It has even been suggested that its construction was hurriedly undertaken to impress the Athenian delegation and abandoned once it had served its purpose.

  It is inconceivable to me that such base circumstances could ever give birth to the perfection of Segesta, or hasty planning bring about such a felicitous marriage of building to landscape. Whatever the reason, I like to think that it was left unfinished, that the warm gold of its stone never knew the gaudy paint and plaster so difficult to reconcile with the classical Greece I have imagined since childhood.

  We climb up toward the temple along a path lined with giant agave plants, out of place in these surroundings, and with much more appropriate myrtle trees. As we draw closer, the temple, perfect from afar, gives up its imperfections: the weathering of centuries of rain and wind upon stone has honed and riddled the columns, carving the vein of the limestone into the rough bark of an organic, living structure. And indeed it breathes with life, as big tufts of white flowers reach out from the metope in a wind-tossed dance, and the swallows nesting between the capitals clutter gaily among themselves.

  It is not known to whom the temple was dedicated. If flowers were any clue, they would say Aphrodite: I find Venus’s navel and love-in-the-mist in profusion about its steps. On the other hand, Cicero tells us that the Segestans had a famous statue of Artemis, which was carried off first by the Carthaginians and then again by the hated Roman governor, Verres.

  The figure, draped in a long robe, was of great size and height, but in spite of its dimensions, it well suggested the youthful grace of the maiden, with quiver hung from one shoulder, bow in the left hand, and the right hand holding forth a blazing torch.… No story is better known throughout Sicily than that of how, when Diana was being borne out of the town, all the matrons and maidens of Segesta flocked to the spot, anointed her with perfumes, covered her with garlands and flowers, and burning incense and spices escorted her to the frontier of her land.

  Cicero, The Verrine Orations

  And it is Artemis’ tree that grows on the other hill, a hawthorn that sticks up from the low scrub, its flowering over now. We pass it on our way to look down over the semicircular steps of the amphitheater to the stage, with its splendid backdrop of mountains, sky, and sea. The theater is beautifully preserved, even to the backrests on the highest row of seats, an arc of armchairs waiting for the chorus to file onstage. In the summer the theater is still used, and we have seen Aristophanes here and Pirandello, and even the National Ballet Company of Senegal, whose leaping black dancers were more at home in this dramatic landscape than one might have thought. An elderly shepherd is now wandering through the theater gathering herbs to sell to the tourists, little bunches of wild oregano, the healing herb that Heracles discovered when he descended to Hades. Wild oregano culled from the steps of the Greek theater at Segesta would be a charming souvenir, but to get it past the U.S. Customs would be a labor equal to that of outwitting Cerberus.

  We drive back down the narrow road to the temple through fields of stones and thistles where once the city of Segesta stood, now empty except for low stone sheds and stone-walled sheep pens that seem to grow out of the bedrock itself. As we ease our way around the hairpin turns, the constantly shifting perspective on the temple across the narrow valley underlines the essential, exceptional equilibrium of this structure, so solid, so deeply rooted to its hill, yet so close to the ideal of harmony that it almost seems to levitate, otherworldly, poised just above the earth on some divine and invisible hand.

  An aberration of my inquiring mind prompts me to stay up all the following Friday night to watch the dynamiting of Etna on television. All the world has turned its eyes toward Sicily tonight, and at 4:00 a.m. I uncharitably wonder if the continual postponing hasn’t something to do with hitting prime time in America. The actual explosion, when the dynamite charges break down the petrified banks of the lava flow and the incandescent magma spills into the artificial channel created by two weeks of furious bulldozing, is an anticlimax. The accompanying uproar has been much more entertaining, a proper cautionary tale about how things get done in Italy, with the bandying about of legal and political responsibilities, the ecological outrage, and the romantic blond Viking, a Swedish explosives expert, called in much to the resentment of the local technicians.

  After this all-night stand, I am ready for a restful Sunday, puttering among my plants and tending my own oregano. The herb garden is a piece of Bosco for which I feel a particular affection, perhaps because it is all my own creation. When the house was rebuilt, the masons raised a retaining wall along the path that leads from the road to the gate and filled the space behind it with some earth and a lot of rubble. By dint of much mulching and composting I have made this into an herb garden, and it has responded gratefully, forgiving me the ignorance that comes of being both city slicker and amateur scholar, and the errors this combination has bred, not the least of which are the shadows of the trees that grow there, the oleander, the lemon, and the pomegranate. Fortunately Sicily can compensate for my ignorance, since partial shade here is tantamount to full sun in a more temperate climate.

  The wild fennel was there to begin with, its tall stems growing up six feet or more each summer, bearing the umbrella-shaped clusters of seeds that were used by the Egyptians as an aid in fasting and chewed on by the Roman legionaries to quell their hunger pangs as they marched across the empire. The stems dry to a brittle gray, forming the hollow stalk inside which Prometheus hid the embers of fire he had stolen from the gods to bring to man. Fennel is a symbol of success: it wishes my garden well, as do the camomile (for patience) and the borage (bringer of courage), which grow wild about its edges.

  I have a much-traveled assortment of herbs. The oregano—“joy of the mountain” in Greek—was a present from the Pirrello brothers. Many of the others we acquired by raiding the house at Finocchio: the silvery sage, for example, and the laurel bushes that will shield us from lightning and witches.

  Rosemary, ros marinus, “dew of the sea,” will not grow in the gardens of the wicked, but it grows in mine, a cutting from the enormous bush that grows seven feet tall at Finocchio, belying the English legend that rosemary grows to the height of Christ in thirty-three years and then will grow thicker but no higher. Rosemary is for remembrance: Greek students would wear it in garlands to help their memory while studying for exams. I have offered to make one for Francesco, but he will have none of his mother’s whimsy.

  The mint, from my mother-in-law’s garden by the sea, is an ambivalent herb, both aphrodisiac and abortive. Minthe was Hades’ mistress before Persephone arrived, and she made such a fuss about having her bed usurped that Hades got fed up and turned her into a mint plant and condemned her to sterility. Chastity, on the other hand, can be encouraged by the lavender, grown from prunings gathered on the university campus in Palermo, and the thyme comes from farther still, two wild plants, one from the woods around Caltanisseta and one that grew on a bank of pine trees, looking out from the shores of Puglia toward Greece.

  Still other herbs have flown the ocean in seed packets ordered from America: coriander and marjoram because I couldn’t find them here, despite the fact that the Greeks knew and loved them well, especially marjoram, whose sweet smell came from the touch of Aphrodite, the first to cultivate this herb; and then tansy, hyssop, and pennyroyal because I loved the Shakespearean ring of their names, little suspecting that “tansy” co
mes from atbanatos, “immortality,” the quality it conferred on Ganymede, or that a potion of water, barley meal, and pennyroyal was the first food tasted by Demeter when she took refuge at Eleusis after the rape of her daughter. It became the ritual food at the Eleusinian Mysteries, symbolizing “the transition from sorrow and fasting to joy and festivity.” Or that hyssop grows wild in Sicily and was strewn before the statue of Demeter in the spring processions at Enna.

  I must confess that in the ignorant enthusiasm of my first year at Bosco I even ordered a packet of borage seeds. Tonino, puzzled by what was sprouting in the carefully tended flats on our balcony in Palermo, kept mumbling that it looked like burrania to him!

  The herb garden is at its most beautiful now; the lavender is just lengthening into bud, and its tall spears do not yet hide the smaller plants, the thyme and the hyssop, the mint and the sage, all flowering in varied hues of pale purple, mixed with the white of the rosemary. Spiky flower stalks thrust up from the Venus’s navel tucked in between the stones of the wall, and the trailing ivy geranium pours down effusions of pink. Spread above all this are the first pink buds of the oleander and the yellow fruit of the lemon and the bright scarlet of the long-lasting pomegranate flowers, which glow among the leaves. Even the pomegranate in the courtyard has two flowers—its first—this year, and the quinces near the kitchen door are full of delicate pink-and-white blossoms that rest their porcelain petals on the mossy green leaves. The quince, like the pomegranate, prefers to wait for foliage to frame its flowers, but these are as fragile as their colors and will shortly blow away, while the pomegranates go on for weeks, new buds still opening when the first flowers have already swollen into fruit.

  The needs of industrial production that beat out the measure of our days have moved Ascension Day to Sunday, reducing to little more than a picnic in the country what was once the night of universal benediction, when field and crops, man and beast received the divine blessing, the grain descended into the wheat stems, and incurable illness miraculously disappeared.

  If we pass from the fields to the seashore, we will find even more curious spectacles. It is a dogma of popular faith that at midnight on Ascension the salt water of the sea becomes fresh, and as fresh water becomes holy; and from this a series of prodigies derives. People afflicted by all types of skin disease run to the sea and full of enthusiasm and faith they throw themselves in, almost certain of being cured.…

  Nor is this only for man, or for the sick. The owners of sheep, cows, goats, mules, and horses, in order to preserve them in good health or to cure any disease they might have, are accustomed to bathe them at that very hour, or during the night. It is a beautiful sight to behold each shepherd or cowherd or goatherd or muleteer drive down from the mountains, from the fields and the stables whatever he has of oxen and cows, sheep and goats, and beasts of burden, with their horns and heads decorated with multicolored silk scarves and all manner of bells hanging from their necks, which with the irregular gait of the various animals give out a confused and clamorous sound. More often than not in Palermo these ablutions are accompanied by the joyful sounds of the musical band, by the songs and dances of the herdsmen, who for joy give great leaps and abandon themselves to unaccustomed frolics. As they come out of the blessed bath, every ill has disappeared and the udders of the female beasts are swollen with milk.

  Giuseppe Pitrè, Spettacoli e feste popolari siciliani

  Despite the lack of rain, which is drying the wild grasses and gilding the wheat so soon, the signs of universal benediction are all about us. At either side of the fork in the lower road the wheat fields have been invaded by poppies, hundreds of daubs of pure color, so red they hurt the eye and dance like spots on the retina, making me wonder how people saw poppies before the French Impressionists painted them. The Greeks saw in their blood-red color a promise of resurrection: these too, like the pomegranates, are sacred to Persephone.

  Farther along the road the wild roses are in bloom, more of them than I remember from other years, their white petals so close one to another as to hide the foliage underneath. In the garden I have so far limited myself to the roses I have inherited, the fragile white musk rose that sprawls over a piece of the garden near the quinces, shedding its petals quickly, then slowly maturing bright red rose hips, and the tea rose in shades of yellow and pale pink, which has been here for close to a century if the thickness of the trunk is any clue, and blossoms all year round in turgid, manypetaled buds that often rot before they open. Roses represent too much of a challenge, something to be tackled when everything else is accomplished and I have won my stripes, and I have taken warning from what happened to Prince Fabrizio:

  The Paul Neyron roses, whose cuttings he had himself bought in Paris, had degenerated; first stimulated, then enfeebled by the strong and languid pull of the Sicilian earth, burned by apocalyptic Julys, they had changed into things like flesh-colored cabbages, obscene and distilling a dense, almost indecent scent which no French horticulturist would have dared for. The Prince put one under his nose and seemed to be sniffing the thigh of a dancer from the Opéra.

  G. Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

  Above all the benediction has fallen on the fruit trees: no April storm has torn the flowers prematurely from their stems, and the plum and the pear, the peach and the apricot trees are heavy with ripening fruit. Even the citruses are studded with tiny dark green balls. The olives are in flower, microscopic white blossoms that are almost invisible from a distance, but so abundant this year that the white stands out against the silver-gray, and hundreds of bunches of yellowish fuzz drip from the grapevines. The irony of such an abundance when there is no water to swell and mature the fruit is more than one can bear to contemplate.

  We take heart from the medlar trees that are covered with orange-yellow fruit waiting to be taken back to Palermo by the basketful. Eating a medlar entails a long run for a short slide: there is only a thin layer of sweet, tangy flesh between the skin and the shiny brown seeds the size of a slightly flattened marble, so that small mountains of skin and seeds accumulate on our plates at the end of dinner. The Everest that Tonino’s grandfather would produce in his passion for medlars is legendary in the Simeti household, while Tonino has passed on to Francesco his own childhood taste for shooting the smooth-skinned seeds across the room with thumb and forefinger. At least once each spring, dinner degenerates into outright warfare, with Natalia and me pretending to be above such nonsense while taking surreptitious aim at the men who circle the table carrying their munitions in a glass of water to make them squirt better. The rule is that they must sweep up afterward, but now and then throughout the summer and into fall the odd medlar pit will roll out from under the furniture.

  The white mulberries are plentiful too, and ripe in time for Ascension Day. The Sicilian dialect has the same word for mulberry (gelso in Italian) and for Ascension—scénsa—a coincidence commemorated by the Palermitani, who always made a point of stopping under a mulberry tree on their Ascension Day outings. The mulberry is one of the rare fruits in Sicily that have no owner: anyone has the right to pick and eat as many as he wants.

  The cultivation of the white mulberry and the raising of its attendant silkworms spread from China to Europe around about 700 B.C. and was particularly encouraged in Sicily by the Arabs and the Normans, but nowadays the black mulberry is more common, since its dark red fruits, which the Greeks thought had acquired their color only after Pyramus and Thisbe bled to death under a white mulberry, have much more juice and flavor than the white ones. The two grow side by side in front of the house at Bosco, a shady place to park the car in summertime, and the fruit of the white mulberry ripens first, darkening from white to pale mauve and tasting, for all that it is insipid and too sweet, like summer.

  The balance between the lush and the parched tips a little further each week as we slide slowly toward the summer solstice. The wheat is pale gold, rippled with waves of dark shadows and topped with the bleached foam of the wild oats, wh
ich reach above the wheat and circle its shores, shedding their spikelets on all who pass: at the end of the day our shoes and socks and pant legs are full of the bristling heads. The children love to do battle with them, since they cling obstinately wherever they land, but I find them slightly sinister. As I ease them out of my stockings, I can’t help remembering that they were found in the trouser cuffs of Aldo Moro after the Red Brigades abandoned his body, an unlikely clue to the whereabouts of the murdered statesman’s prison that somehow brings home to me with great immediacy the horror and the brutality of that whole affair.

  The wild grasses growing about the house, a luxuriant if shaggy lawn just a few weeks ago, have gone to seed as well, bleached and unkempt despite our Sunday scything, and the plants in the courtyard are suffering from their once-a-week-only watering. This is the time of year when it is hardest to reconcile myself to our split life: the harsher light discloses the extent to which the dust and cobwebs have accumulated over the winter; spring garden projects wither for lack of care and water, like the corn on which Demeter has just plain turned her back; ideas and plans for the four short summer months flower in my head with the same hopeless, foredoomed abundance that burdens the olive trees.

  Despite the accumulation of chores and despite the flats of pepper, tomato, and eggplant seedlings that have come with us from Palermo, we take off the last Sunday morning in May to go to Gibellina. Summer is getting an extra shove from the scirocco, which has sent the temperature up to 104 degrees in the shade, an irritable, petulant wind that rattles the windowpanes and slams the doors behind it, leaving us restless and headachy, glad to get in the car and go, but so distracted that we miss the proper exit from the autostrada and have to double back along a winding country road. This is earthquake country; you feel it subconsciously before you can put a name to what is wrong with the landscape: all the old farmhouses are missing. Here and there a jagged shard of stonework points a reminder that a world was shattered here, but the only buildings intact are new. We drive by the outskirts of Montevago, all recent and still-shiny stucco, low apartment houses and fancy villas. The oldest houses are the barracks, their regimentation barely discernible under the patina of fifteen years, time enough to acquire individuality with a lean-to, a picket fence, a rambling rose.