On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  We are headed toward Gibellina Nuova, the new town across the valley from the ruins of the old, destined to total destruction by its faulty subsoil. Apart from the geological necessity of complete relocation, the reconstruction of Gibellina has followed an unusual course thanks to the town’s mayor, Ludovico Corrao, a wealthy lawyer from Alcamo, ex-senator and patron of the arts. One feature of this has been the establishment of a small museum housed in a traditional farmhouse, a rare survivor. According to a brochure available in three languages, the museum has as its aims

  those of collecting and preserving material evidence of the rustic history and culture of the inhabitants of the Valley, as well as that of making possible the widest and most correct utilization of this heritage.

  In a territorial entity that has experienced, as a result of the violent earthquake of 1968, a sudden and total annihilation of its urban structures and thus the rapid and inevitable transformation of living conditions and traditional productive activities, the collection and the safeguarding of this material assumes for the entire community the precise meaning of the recovery of its historical and cultural identity, which is either threatened or swept away.

  Today we are not going to the museum itself but to a special show at the local high school. Dedicated to “Crafts and Trades in the Belice Valley,” it is an exhibition of tools belonging to the ancient crafts sustaining peasant agriculture that are fast disappearing.

  The tools are immensely evocative, worn with use, their wooden handles black and shiny from what the cook of my childhood used to call “elbow grease,” but the iron is often rusty and the wood riddled with dry rot. Among the many handmade tools for making other tools by hand, there is the proper instrument for every cut, for every blow or stitch, differing just in the thickness or curve of the blade, in the size of the last, in the weight of the mallet.

  They are grouped according to the craftsmen who used them, each one labeled with the fine, rugged names of the Sicilian dialect and accompanied by explanations and photographs that show how the tool was used. The very names of the trades themselves have a strong, sweaty taste to them: the conzapeddi (tanner); the scarparu (cobbler); the crivaru, who made sieves, wooden rings of different sizes, like tambourines, on which meshes of wire or pierced metal or woven leather cords in varying textures were stretched taut to winnow and grade wheat, olives, beans, and other crops. The vardaru made the harnesses and the packsaddles for the mules and horses, and the blacksmith, or firraru, shod them and forged the blades for hoe and plow.

  The woodworkers—mastru d’ascia means literally “master of the ax”—were divided into two categories, d’òpira rossa and d’òpira fina. The carpenter “of large works” built the carts and wooden plows and presses, while the cabinetmaker created the “fine works,” the tables and chests and wardrobes that furnished the peasant dwellings. Lastly the vuttaru, the bottaio, made the wine casks; and the stagnimu, or tinsmith, hammered out the pots, pans, funnels, and measuring vessels for us in kitchen and wine cellar.

  The simple arrangements of wood and metal, of tool and end product, evoke the texture and weave of the rural economy, just as the exhibition of bread and pastries, put on two years ago, illustrated the liturgical calendar that had occasioned them. Last year’s show, dedicated to weaving, traced the life cycle of the peasants in the embroidered baptismal dresses, the nuptial bedspreads, the tightly woven sheets destined, in the end, to become shrouds. In keeping with its content, the current show has been put together with a straightforward, pragmatic approach, refreshingly free of the semiotic embellishments that cluttered up the other two.

  It’s the same problem again, how to look at the peasant world. A certain part of Palermo has rediscovered its roots and crowds the openings of these shows at Gibellina or flocks to the new Museum of Marionettes to see the traditional Opera dei Pupi (now that many of the old puppeteers have closed down for want of an audience and sold off their puppets to antique dealers). We ourselves have carefully preserved at Bosco all the old tools and farm implements that were stashed away there, and if these were actually part of Tonino’s childhood, I don’t know what to make of the two outsize wooden bellows that he scavenged from an abandoned blacksmith’s forge. Figuratively, that is; literally they serve to fill up one end of the cavernous living room that we cannot yet afford to furnish properly.

  The museum, in its flyer, claims to take “a definite stand against possible representations and exploitations of the romantic-aesthetic type that have been proposed of the popular world and rustic civilization and are still widespread.” I try to too, by following the advice of a Sicilian friend of mine who is quite fierce on the subject: every time I look admiringly at the zappa da gramigna, the short-handled hoe for digging out crabgrass, I force myself to visualize the old contadini who walk around the streets of Alcamo with their chins at waist height, permanently bent double by a lifetime of wielding it.

  And when I read about the newly discovered wonders of the Mediterranean diet, I remember the annual food budget for the family of a day laborer from Marsala that I once copied out of the report of a parliamentary commission that investigated the condition of the southern peasantry in 1910:

  When you consider that in 1910 a lira could buy what an American can buy today with $1.17 and therefore that $472 had to feed a family of seven for a year, you realize that the main ingredient in the original Mediterranean diet was hunger.

  Today the Sicilian contadini chew their way through a leathery bistecca almost every evening, the daily consumption of meat being the most important symbol of their newly acquired prosperity. (In the city, to say that something has no substance or foundation in fact, you say that it is “all smoke and no roast”: the poor but pretentious Palermitani used to beg a scrap of fat from the butcher to put on the fire, in the hopes that the smell of roasting meat would linger outside their door, making them seem more prosperous.) This change in diet, which has taken place during the time that I have been in Sicily, implies a general improvement in the standard of living that is, of course, entirely praiseworthy, and if the destruction of the coherent and close-knit culture that is on exhibit at the Gibellina high school is the price of such an improvement, surely no one can object. There was probably never any possibility that peasant culture could survive in Western Europe side by side with modern industrial culture, and it was probably not so much the inherent attractions of the modern that decreed its death as it was the distortions that centuries of exploitation and suffering had produced in the peasant culture itself. Yet it seems sad to me that our contemporary society has so little in the way of a viable alternative to offer to this transitional generation, who often can find no more valid investment for their new prosperity than elaborate kitchens and fancy furniture that they cannot bring themselves to use.

  When we leave the exhibit it is almost one, Sunday dinner time, the only hour I have ever driven through Gibellina Nuova, although each time I come I promise myself to return on a weekday, during business hours, to see if the town comes alive. The bulk of the town is well planned, with double rows of two-storied houses, each with a garden and a garage facing the street side, and a tree-shaded pedestrian mall in the middle, where the inhabitants are supposed to re-create the street life of the old village, the children playing, the women sitting in front of their doors, backs turned to the street for propriety’s sake, and chatting as they shell their beans or bend over their embroidery hoops, the men gathered about the gaping hood of a car, young boys playing soccer or tinkering with bicycles, a cobbler straddling his narrow bench and hammering on his last. But the streets and malls of Gibellina are always deserted when I drive through, save for a few men clustered in front of the bar for a last aperitif before going home to dinner. The strange humpbacked and glass-walled bus station designed by the sculptor Consagra always seems at the same stage of incompletion, weeds grow about the base of the sculptures that Corrao has persuaded various Italian artists, my brother-in-law among them, to donate tow
ard the reconstruction. As we leave the town we drive under an enormous concrete star that arches over the road, this too designed by Consagra, a gateway to the town intended, I suppose, to indicate some transition from empty field to empty street that otherwise would escape our notice. But maybe I am being unfair, and twenty years in Palermo have made a disfattista out of me, an “undoer” who only likes to indulge in destructive criticism. Maybe Gibellina is merely out to lunch right now, and there is a thread of continuity I cannot see between the worn and cared-for tools in the exhibit and the abstract sculptures in the piazzas.

  We hurry home to our lunch and to the seedlings waiting to be planted. Ever since a power failure forced me to throw out fifteen trays of eggplant Parmesan, I have given up trying to grow enough vegetables to freeze for the winter, but each year we try to have enough eggplants, peppers, and string beans for the summer, and Mr. Amato has had such bad luck with his tomatoes that I am hastily putting in a few of my own. His melons are coming along beautifully, though; the rows of little green tufts march down the hill and across the valley floor with martial regularity.

  Unexpectedly the wind stops. Bent over to hoe and dig I haven’t been noticing the weather, but I realize now that the scirocco is no longer breathing hotly down my neck. The air, dried out by the desert wind, hangs still and listless like a dusty curtain, then, with a sudden rustle, it is riven by a cold damp current from the north. The change in temperature is abrupt and the dark clouds that have been piling up silently on the horizon come scudding across the sea in great dark shadows. The seagulls follow them inland, wheeling and wailing high above us in an unfamiliar clamor, and just as he did in Virgil’s time, “the raven calls for rain, that wretched bird.”

  As we head back to Palermo, a few large drops gather the dust and splash it onto our windshield.

  “Perhaps we’ll get a really good rain,” I say, thinking wistfully of my thirsty garden.

  “It’ll do a lot of damage.”

  “Why?”

  “The olive and grape flowers are setting into fruit right now; a good storm could knock them all off.”

  It’s always like that for a farmer: the rain never comes at the right moment or in the right quantity, the sun is either too hot or too weak, the wind ill timed or ill measured. Each meteorological event, each change in the weather or in the marketplace must be exorcised and disarmed by gloomy forecasts: beware of entertaining even the suspicion of a good harvest fetching a good price. But perhaps such relentless pessimism is the necessary counterweight to the profound faith and optimism required of one who hangs his livelihood on something as small and perishable as a seed.

  III

  SUMMER

  The summer solstice coincides, in

  the Mediterranean world, with a fervor

  of activity: it is the time of the wheat

  harvest, the time to gather the fruit of

  one’s labor, the time of serene navigation

  upon an ordinarily tranquil sea.

  Franco Cardini,

  I giorni del sacro: il libro delle feste

  BOSCO

  Chapter Eight

  A half day of rain, a brief interlude of cool weather, then June arrives, hot and heavy with summer, pregnant with the tastes and smells of pleasures to come. The children drag themselves through the last tormenting days of school, the textbook pages dancing before their eyes unabsorbed, and teachers and students alike complain of the absurdity of making Sicily adhere to a national academic calendar ending in mid-June, when nothing can be achieved after the end of May in this climate. Francesco goes off in the morning, his book bag bulging with towel and bathing suit, ready to head for the beach at Mondello as soon as classes are out, while Natalia, young yet for such an adolescent gathering, languishes about the apartment licking ice cream cones.

  From the moment we enter the autostrada and see the lanes of flowering oleander bushes stretching pink, white, and red ahead of us, the weekend is a summer in microcosm: long hours of watering, Sunday morning at the beach, a trip with basket in hand to gather fruit, even the first canning of the season, since the sour cherries are ripe enough to make the cherry syrup that, diluted with ice water, will cool us off when the heat comes in earnest.

  Natalia and I set out to pick the cherries, which grow down in the lowest part of the farm. We walk down between Mr. Amato’s melons, whose single tufts have shot out long feelers toward one another, and swollen into broad stripes dotted with yellow flowers that hide tiny melons under the canopy of their leaves. We pass the citrus grove, where next year’s grapefruit hang like dark green golf balls from the trees, and stop to give a gentle squeeze to the peaches, not quite ripe yet. Beyond the fallow field where the drought has killed all but four or five of the trees that were our attempt to start an avocado plantation, the red grapes run along a ridge. We turn here, skirting the rim of a bank that is thick with brambles and hawthorn trees, with bushy heather and ’ddisa, the tough ampelodisa grass with long plumes that is used to tie up the grapevines.

  Turiddu has been at work this past week, a big bunch of ’ddisa, first dried and then soaked in water to make it pliable, tucked into his belt. Embracing each vine in turn, he gently gathers up the long branches that wave curly-fingered tendrils at the sun, pulls them carefully together to form a protective blanket about the newborn bunches of grapes, and with one deft motion extracts two or three blades of ’ddisa from his belt, wraps them around the vine, twists and tucks in the ends. His hands are so horny and callused that they hardly feel the sharp edges of the grass that tear and scratch at our bare legs as Natalia and I brush by.

  At the bottom of the path we enter another world, an island lifted from another climate, where even on the hottest day the air is cool and damp, and the light filters down pale green and gentle. Here, where four adjoining farms meet, an underground spring feeds three wells and a miniature marsh. Two of the wells are on our land, the new one with a concrete wellhead built a few years ago to replace the old one that caved in during the earthquake and now sits in the shade of the cherry trees, a ring of mossy stones and a few feet of water housing a family of enormous toads.

  Behind them the canes grow seven or eight feet high, clustering about a few alder trees and stitched together by brambles, wild grapevines, and morning glories into an almost impenetrable wall that hides the third well, of old stone, dark green and mysterious, and shields the little swamp with the bulrushes and then circles the big pit of long-forgotten origin, this year barely covered with slimy green water, where Francesco and Natalia used to hunt tadpoles in the spring. Huge saucers of white sway among the canes, Queen Anne’s lace grown to giant proportions in the damp soil.

  “Speaking with all modesty,” Natalia reminds me proudly each year, “I was the one to teach you that these are really wild carrots.”

  There is no cave that I know of, yet Pan never seems far off. Whether it is the witches’ hawthorn, or the alders—the tree of the fourth month, the tree of Orpheus, which grew in a ring around the island of Circe—or the reeds that belong to the twelfth month, when they whisper that the year is ending and death approaching, I do not know, but there is often some other presence near the wells. It is not always just my imagination: one afternoon I felt someone looking at me, and glancing around and up I discovered a marsh rat, crouched in the crook of a cane leaf, swaying back and forth in the wind like a sailor in a crow’s nest as he stared down at me, black eyes sharp and wary over quivering whiskers.

  Today the presence is withdrawn. The reeds and canes are still and silent in the late-afternoon calm, and the slanting sunlight illumines the red translucence of the ripe cherries. We stoop to slide beneath the low-hanging branches until we are standing inside a tent of dark green glossy leaves, lacy against a brilliant azure sky and lit by a thousand little lanterns glowing red, and we laugh for the pure pleasure of such a harvest.

  Our neighbors’ fields of grain are ripe and rustling, and the wild oats have dried to a white haze th
at floats above the wheat like smoke in the sunlight. An artichoke, unharvested from the plant that Turiddu was moved to put in the middle of the herb garden, has opened to a flower, the leaves a purple spiky crown around the choke, which has grown long and silky and turned a brilliant cornflower blue. The first harvest of oregano, hanging from the rafters in the palmento, perfumes the kitchen with its pungent aroma, and at suppertime a young mantis, no more than an inch and a half long, flies into the kitchen and kneels on the rim of Tonino’s wineglass. Summer’s troops are on the move: the daddy longlegs know no seasons, but now the mosquitoes are gathering to attack, and the mercurial centipedelike horrors that we have baptized “ugly bedfellows,” the moths that tap on the kitchen door in the evenings, and the tiny, foolish dragonflies that end up in the salad bowl, to be fished out gingerly by my tenderhearted children and have their oily wings blotted dry with paper napkins. Least welcome of all, the first flies have come to hover and dive, their loops and spins spelling out a warning of the swarms to come.