On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  But the countryside slips into summer much more easily than I do: her winter clothes dry up or rot where they fall, whereas mine have to be put away in mothballs, and new ones bought, and dentists and medical certificates seen to, and the apartment closed for the summer, and the materials assembled for all my summer projects. The rites of passage are unusually complicated this year, as I must accompany the children to Rome, to put Francesco on a plane for America, and then to take Natalia to a three-week camp near Paestum. The idea of going to camp in the shadow of a Greek temple seems strange to someone accustomed to associate camp with the Adirondacks, but even more mind-boggling is the flood tide of forms and instructions that arrive from the American hosteling group with which Francesco will be doing a bike tour: after all these years of Italian improvisation, such superorganization staggers me.

  It is not only the complicated preparations that cost me so much sleep, however, or the fact that this is the first time one of my children is going away so far and for so long. As I weed the courtyard the morning before we leave, my fingers occupied but my thoughts free to poke and pry, I suddenly realize that it is Francesco’s destination that weighs upon me. For all that I thought I had made definitive and lasting peace with myself about having left America, I have been unconsciously investing Francesco with a terrible ambassadorship: to like America (and therefore me), to be liked there (and thereby justify my choice).

  Francesco is uneasy too—loath to leave his friends and worried that his English is not good enough to get him through the summer. More or less bilingual when he was learning to talk, he discovered at age two and a half that all the children around him spoke Italian, and he became very angry with me, standing up in his crib and glowering when I came in to get him up in the morning.

  “Non si dice good morning, si dice CIAO!”

  In the long intervals between our rare visits to America he would lose his English, remembering only what he needed to squeak by in school without studying, and only in the past two years has he been making a serious effort to regain his fluency.

  Francesco is almost five foot eleven, and despite his leanness looks a lot like me, even to the shape of his head. (A Palermo neurologist, called in to examine the children at the pretentious private school where Francesco went to kindergarten, exclaimed at first sight: “Look at that narrow skull! Either this child is mentally deficient or he has Anglo-Saxon blood!”) His height and his intellectual curiosity are misleading, however; at fifteen he is less sure of himself than he seems, and like his mother is plagued by ambivalence. Being different from his friends, finding a part of the American image abroad that he can identify with, reconciling the conflicting indications of home and society, and at the same time charting his own path in the enormous space allowed him by his father, whose only expectations are that his children develop a sense of responsibility and respect for other people—these are all problems for Francesco in a way that they will never be, I suspect, for Natalia. And in a few days’ time, when I kiss him good-bye in front of the passport control desk at Fiumicino and watch him stride off without hesitation, I will be full of pride for this good-looking and seemingly self-possessed young man, and full of admiration too, as I remember another morning ten years earlier, when we accompanied Francesco to have his tonsils removed. He had seemed quite tranquil and convinced by our explanations, but as we got out of the car in front of the hospital entrance, he suddenly took off down the street, his short legs pumping up and down as fast as they could. I am sure that Francesco is controlling at fifteen much the same urge that he gave in to at five.

  We leave Palermo on the thirteenth, Saint Anthony’s Day, and I punctually forget to wish Tonino Happy Onomastica—the Italian custom of celebrating the day of the saint one is named after is one custom I just can’t fit my mind around. Saint Anthony is the patron of the wheat harvest and, I have just discovered, of Palermo drivers. Faced with the impossible task of parking anywhere near the center of town, one has only to say:

  Sant’Antoninu, vestutu di velluto,

  Fammi trovare un posto fotuto!

  Little Saint Anthony, all dressed in velvet,

  Help me to find some damned parking spot!

  Today the children and I leave harvest and car and Tonino in Saint Anthony’s care and board the train for Rome. We are well supplied with reading material for the twelve-hour trip, but the majority of the travelers come equipped only with bananas and bottles of mineral water and settle down to sleep in their seats or strike up a conversation with their neighbors. My Anglo-Saxon reserve, or shyness, usually keeps me from joining in, but I often eavesdrop behind the protective shield of newspaper or paperback and occasionally learn some startling information, such as the explanation I once overheard of how the balance of nature was threatened.

  “Now, the earth turns on an axis, see, and this axis isn’t quite straight, it’s a little tilted, like so.” The speaker was illustrating his story with gestures, as any proper Sicilian would, one hand held up with palm and fingers slightly inclined, while the other hand began to dart back and forth from one side of the upright hand to the other.

  “Now, you take all this construction, digging out quarries here and building up these great heavy skyscrapers there, it’s ruining the balance, it is. If we aren’t careful, the earth’s going to start tilting more and more, and all of a sudden—bang! The whole thing’s going to fall right over.”

  This time we have the compartment to ourselves, and as the train, a rapido, rushes northward, I give Francesco a last English lesson on sprockets and chain rings, inner tubes and handlebars, and try to remember for his benefit how the pay telephones in America work. It gets cooler and cooler as we go north. In the fields of Calabria the poppies are still in full bloom, much to the children’s surprise.

  “The season comes later here.”

  “Backwards, these Calabresi!” Tongue in cheek, but only up to a point, Francesco is tinged with the Sicilian conviction that the Calabrians are far more underdeveloped and ignorant than the islanders, just as a Calabrian woman I travel with on the return journey will explain the rowdy behavior of some young men in the next compartment by saying that they must be Sicilians.

  The trip back is very different. I have to deliver Natalia at eight on Sunday morning to Agropoli, a small railway station near the camp, where she is to join up with the main contingent of campers, including her cousin Martina, as they arrive on the sleeper from Milan. An hour or so later the Treno del Sole is due to stop here and will take me directly to Palermo. I have been welcoming the chance to ride the “Train of the Sun,” the daily express between Turin and Palermo, which in the fifties and sixties carried tens of thousands of Sicilian emigrants southward, on vacation from the assembly lines of the Fiat and its related industries. Books and songs have been written about this particular train, about the families that boarded it in Turin, wrapped in woolen shawls against the Alpine climate, their belongings strapped into cardboard suitcases and bulging paper parcels, and about their arrival at the southern stations where their entire village was waiting, come to welcome them home from their great adventure and reenfold them in its web. I used to be amused at the melodramatic scenes that accompanied such departures and returns, the crowds, the weeping and the waving of damp handkerchiefs, the fainting lady, invariably stout, being propped up and vigorously fanned, until Claudia reprimanded me.

  “I get so damn mad when I see people laugh!” she said fiercely. “They have no idea of the pain involved, the tearing out of roots and the rending of hearts. Family is all most of these people have ever had, and to see it split apart is dreadful!”

  But it appears that there has been a strike near Turin, and the Treno del Sole is three hours behind schedule, so I board a local that will take me to a big station farther south where I can catch the rapido coming down from Rome.

  All of one carriage long, the local train has hardly time to gather speed before it must slow down again at the next tiny station, and so by fi
ts and starts it bears me down along the Campanian and the Lucanian coast to Maratea, like a leaf propelled by a breeze across a stagnant pond. These jerking, halting windows open on a world other than that glimpsed from the hurrying, indifferent rapido.

  Half of the passengers are railway men, hoping to get home for Sunday dinner, boarding, jumping off, leaning out to exchange a crack or a bit of gossip at each station. The other passengers either know each other or discover after ten minutes of conversation that there is some mutual connection. I board together with an elderly woman, long since emigrated to Val d’Aosta, who has brought her little granddaughter south for a seaside vacation. We enter a compartment occupied by a young student, who turns out to be the nephew of the brother-in-law of a woman to whose second cousin this grandmother from Val d’Aosta was engaged for six years.

  Each station looks like the last and like the next; SALA D’ATTESA Ia CLASSE written in marble letters from the Fascist era, RITIRATA and USCITA all stamped in tin at some central headquarters, even the same carefully tended zinnias and marigolds growing in the flower beds and the same bougainvillea vine growing on the fence. No doubt the seeds are traded up and down the line. The student yells out the window to a friend climbing down from the other end of the carriage, hails someone else boarding at the next station, finally shakes hands with the grandmother and with me, wishes us a good journey, and gets off himself.

  An express roars past us headed north, and our solitary carriage shudders and sways in the wind, then resumes its own rhythm, its wheels clicking and clacketing like steel needles knitting up the rent, stitching up the holes that speed, emigration, and the passage of the modern world have torn in the fabric of the South.

  A little boy, playing ball in front of a house stuccoed in the faded wine color the Italian government has deemed appropriate to station masters and road menders, looks up as we pull in and waves to the blue-suited, black-satcheled conductor who jumps down. I wonder what this delicate equilibrium between the restless, open-horizoned speed of the rapido and the shabby familiarity of the local will produce in him, where the eddy and tug of this current moving through the still waters of the South will pull him. In Sicily these same wine-red houses have produced writers like Elio Vittorini, Salvatore Quasimodo, Danilo Dolci.

  I am almost sorry to leave the local at Maratea, and I enjoy the hour’s wait in the sun on the little platform. It is hard to orient oneself out of sight of the sea; someone has hung up an old shutter on the other side of the tracks and stenciled on it “Battipaglia” with an arrow pointing north. I noticed the other half of the shutter doing the same service at the last station.

  Once aboard the rapido I am swept into another dimension of time, restless and eager to get home, lowering my book at frequent intervals to check on our progress and catch the first familiar glimpse of the dark hills of Messina beyond the Straits and peering through the haze in vain for a look at Etna, still tiredly drooling lava after almost three months. It is all familiar now, the fried arancine eaten at the bar on the ferryboat, the long wait at Messina, leaning out the window to buy a lemon ice from the little boy in the white jacket at the station of Sant’Agata Militello, the new cars lined up outside the Fiat assembly plant at Termini, the proud villas of Bagheria that appear in the opening shots of The Leopard, cleverly isolated by the movie camera from their surrounding slums, and then the wooded slope of Monte Grifone soaring up from the squalid outskirts of Palermo.

  Even too familiar. While I was in Rome, the captain of the carabinieri at Monreale was shot down, together with the two men in his escort, as he was getting out of the car in front of his fiancée’s house. He had come down from the north to replace Captain Basile, who was killed a few years ago as he was walking hand in hand with his wife and small daughters down Monreale’s main street on the evening of the local festa.

  When I call Maria Vica to tell her that I am back, she has just come from paying a visit to the captain’s fiancée, who is a friend of hers, a girl from northern Italy who had followed her young man south when he was posted to Sicily.

  “I felt so ashamed for Sicily. I’m thinking of leaving Palermo. There is no hope for Sicily—she told me that during the funeral the children in the street outside the church were playing at being mafiosi and shooting down the policemen. You’re lucky, Mary, at least you have Bosco to go to.”

  Maria Vica is holding up to me the mirror of my own illusions, and today I am happy to believe in them, anxious to assemble the last bits and pieces of packing and shopping and be gone. I have missed so much in the ten short days I have been away. The fields around Bosco have been drained of their golden sea of grain and dredged by the harvesting machines into spiraling rings of yellow stubble and pale blond chaff. As I drive up the hill, the dog trotting happily behind the overloaded car and the cat balancing on my shoulder to peer eagerly through the windshield, I can see a big combine circling the crest of the next hill over, the driver standing high up on his platform like a captain on the bridge, the machine spewing out a wake of straw bales behind it and pausing to pour into the waiting truck a cascade of wheat that glistens and sparkles in the sunlight.

  I am sorry not to have heard the whining and clacking of its careful navigation around the nearer fields, not to have watched the spears of wheat falling to the wide blades, or to have climbed up on the truck to plunge my hands down into the warm and powdery smoothness of the grains slithering against my skin. But I am sorrier still never to have seen the old harvest, with the long line of reapers strung out across the hillside, their sickles rising and falling in unison. For every seven reapers there was a gatherer, who followed behind them, gathering the severed stalks into the fork of a stick by means of a blunt-edged sickle and then tying them into a sheaf with a blade of ’ddisa from the bunch hanging at his belt. The arms of the reapers moved to the rhythm of the songs, always sacred at harvest time, that they sang, each verse ending in:

  Praise be and thanks

  To the Holy Sacrament!

  Praise be and thanks

  Every hour and every moment!

  Or they followed the playing of drummers and bagpipes hired by the landowner to step up the pace with lively music.

  Five times in the course of the day, which went from dawn to dusk, the line would break up to eat, and still more often it would halt “to pass the saint,” to hand from reaper to reaper the barrel of wine that would quench their thirst and replenish their flagging energy.

  Then the flattest part of the field was smoothed into a threshing floor where a pair of mules were driven round and round to trample the ears of wheat with their hooves and break off the grains as the peasants stirred and tossed the wheat with pitchforks. More hymns accompanied this endless circling, cries of encouragement to the mules alternating with prayers to all the saints to invoke their blessing on an abundant harvest. Later still a different sort of chant, droning and solitary, urged forward the long string of pack mules, eight mules to each driver, that carried the harvest back to town.

  The Romans too had music at their harvest:

  See that your country folk adore the goddess:

  For her let milk and honey flow, and wine,

  And lead the sacrificial victims round the crops

  Three times, to bring good fortune, let a chorus

  Follow the procession, singing hymns

  To Ceres, ask her blessings on their homes;

  Let no one lay his sickle to the grain

  Until, with festive oak wreath of his brow,

  He honors Ceres’ name in dance and song.

  Virgil, The Georgics

  Alcamo, however, has long since abandoned Ceres for Santa Maria dei Miracoli, its patroness, whose worship goes back to June of 1547, when the Madonna appeared to some women who were washing their clothes in the millstream that ran along the northern edge of town. As the Blessed Virgin disappeared into the bushes, some stones rolled down into the water with a splash. One drop of water fell on the lips of a mute, who in
stantly found her voice, while another woman recovered the use of an arm that had long been paralyzed. When a crowd gathered the next day, more stones fell, causing more miraculous cures, and when the men cut down the brambles from where the stones had come, they found an image of the Madonna attached to the wall of the mill. A church was built around the image, and each year its discovery is celebrated in a three-day feast culminating in the procession of the twenty-first of June in which a statue of the saint is carried about the town.

  Like many Sicilian festivals, Santa Maria dei Miracoli has had its ups and downs. In the early nineteenth century it was a very extravagant affair, and the procession was preceded on the second day by the exhibition of the triumphal cart, a small-scale version of the famous wagon of Saint Rosalia used for the Festino in Palermo, and on the first day by horse races, the so-called corse dei barbari.

  The triumphal cart went out of use in the 1860s, swept away by the wave of anticlericalism that followed in Garibaldi’s wake, but the horse races, dangerous hell-for-leather rides up the Corso, continued into the twentieth century. Pitré describes an ex-voto painting hanging in the sanctuary of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, dated 1883, which shows the racing horses galloping out of control into the middle of the town band. Miraculously not one of the musicians was injured, and the band repaired forthwith to the sanctuary to give thanks.

  The races were revived some years ago, with wooden transepts erected all along the Corso and a thick layer of sand spread underfoot, which would then blow back and forth with the scirocco for the rest of the summer. All through the spring one could see beautiful, nervy, and well-groomed horses being exercised on country roads—the modern miracle of the festa being how certain people acquired the money to indulge in such an expensive hobby—and on the day of the races an enormous crowd would gather from all the towns around.