The horses ran four at a time, the whole length of the Corso, from Porta Palermo to Porta Tràpani, and only a small percentage of the crowd got to see the finish. The rest of the people, like the Simeti family hanging over their balcony railings halfway up the Corso, would watch the horses gallop past but would know who had won only when the triumphant jockey rode back down the Corso in the back of a truck, brandishing his prize, a wooden eagle glistening with silver paint.
It was more fun to watch the crowd itself. Those who had no access to a balcony would begin to gather hours before the races began: old grandfathers bent double scuttling out from the side streets and dragging little chairs, which they would set up on the curb right behind the transepts so as to be sure of a good view; little boys staking out the lampposts they would shinny up as soon as the action started; families purchasing a generous supply of semenza before occupying their piece of sidewalk.
In my mother-in-law’s house both the salotto and the master bedroom open onto the Corso, so we had two large balconies on which to offer hospitality, and on race and procession days they were always alarmingly crowded, my mother-in-law carefully piloting her various nieces and cousins onto the bedroom balcony, while reserving the less intimate salotto for the Pirrellos, the Vivonas, and for Genoveffa, a maid who had long since retired but reappeared once a year to hug and kiss everyone and watch the races, wrapped in an enormous black shawl and surrounded by an even larger flock of grandchildren.
This year, however, Alcamo has been deprived of its races once more. It appears that this custom, which is not limited to Alcamo, has come to involve the prestige of rival Mafia clans, and the races held a few months ago for the festa of Monreale ended in knifings and bloodshed, causing the prefect of Palermo to ban them throughout western Sicily. There is much discontent among the horse owners, and the townspeople have had to make do with the procession, the fireworks, the traveling fun fair, and the usual influx of torrone and toy sellers.
All this is over by the time that I arrive at Bosco on the twenty-third, and the Alcamesi, exhausted by three days of festivities, hardly notice that Midsummer’s Night has come. Midsummer is the middle age, the moment of greatest vigor, and if the days begin to shorten we will nonetheless have light enough and more to spare in the blazing months to come, before the waning of the year and the onset of old age and decay begin to weigh on us. We have forgotten the death of the sacred king, who was chosen at midwinter to be the consort of the Great Goddess and put to death at the summer solstice in the shadow of the oak, most sacred of all the trees, Which rules this month. All the oracular powers of the oak have been transferred to Saint John the Baptist, whose feast day falls on the twenty-fourth, when young girls throughout the island used to question the saint about the husband that the future held in store for them: either by throwing an apple into the street and waiting to see who would pick it up or by throwing molten wax or lead into water and observing the shape into which it solidified. (A T-shaped piece could mean a hammer or a hoe, conveniently allowing one’s fancy room to choose among a cobbler, a carpenter, and a contadino!)
This melting pot of traditions is nowhere stronger than at Marsala, where the church of Saint John the Baptist was built over a well that marked the seat of the Sibyl of the Roman city of Lilybaeum. Pitrè quotes the Marchese di Villabianca’s description of an odd medieval custom that was observed on the saint’s day:
… a superstitious abuse that was practiced in the underground crypt, where people were leached by barbers; and the bleedings were of such great numbers that at times they could be counted at more than four hundred.
Giuseppi Pitrè, Spettacoli e feste popolari siciliani
and elsewhere Pitrè speaks of
the cara Sibilla, who to the simple people of Marsala has become a beneficent genie, a sort of fairy who brings fortune to whom she chooses … [and] is to be invoked at noon on the 24th of June …
Giuseppe Pitrè, Feste patronali in Sicilia
There is none of all this at Alcamo—or so I thought. On the twenty-fifth Tonino and I must telephone to my sister’s in New York to wish Francesco well on the eve of his departure for the bicycle tour, and we decide to make the call from Alcamo Marina, the long strip of beach where the Alcamesi have their summer houses. They were late in discovering the sea: the Simetis’ villa, one of the first to be built, dates only from 1936. According to Sciascia, Sicilian towns turn their backs on the sea, “capable only of carrying away the emigrants and disembarking the invaders,” and this is almost true, despite its name, of Alcamo Marina. When I first spent summers there, before Bosco was rebuilt, it still had the air of a tentative approach, a knot of houses around the old tuna fishery, and then beach running for several miles beside the railroad tracks and the provincial highway. Beyond these, the houses dotting the narrow strip of flat land were still spaced out by pieces of vineyard. Now row upon row of villas and small apartment buildings sit cheek by jowl, nudging and elbowing each other in an attempt to get whatever view of the sea the house in front allows, or clamber up the ridge behind, clinging perilously to the sandy slope, where the better view comes at the price of a longer walk to the beach. Having banished all danger of solitary converse with the sea, the Alcamesi can now take up their normal life, noisy and crowded, the afternoon visits followed by the evening passeggiata either on foot with the baby carriage or by car, up and down the main road in such force that on weekend afternoons all traffic comes to a standstill, except for the swarm of Vespas and motorcycles that weave in and out of the stationary lanes of cars.
In June and September it is pleasant here, however, with the bulk of the houses closed and shuttered and the festoons of shells and seaweed still stretched out along the beach where the winter storms have thrown them. Here and there an open window, a thread of smoke from a barbecue, a beach towel hung out to dry indicate the early arrival of an enthusiast, and elsewhere workmen are hurrying to finish a new house or repair an old one before the season starts. As we drive along, Tonino points out to me a black smudge on the wall of one house, the twisted metal shutters of another, where the wear and tear of winter weather have given way to the ravages of the Mafia.
We have left time for a quick swim before the call must go through, and we head toward the beach, which is hidden from view until we cross the last row of houses. At two-thirty in the afternoon there is no human presence to break the long white line of sand that stretches from Castellammare in the west more than ten kilometers east to Balestrate. But the beach is not empty. Standing up some seven feet high against the sea and sky is a cross of green canes, decorated with pink oleander flowers and yellow euphorbia, a garland of flowering oleander branches hanging from each arm. It sticks up out of the sand, a solitary priest stretching its arms northward. Robed in Mediterranean vegetation, its origins are otherworldly: in fact a small crayoned Swedish flag is fastened to the top.
Back at Bosco, I rush to Sir James Frazer, and sure enough, in a quote from a source unidentified in the abridged edition, The Golden Bough tells me that I have seen a Maypole, which in Sweden is set up on the Eve of Saint John.
This consists of a straight and tall spruce-pine tree, stripped of its branches. “At times hoops and at others pieces of wood, placed crosswise, are attached to it at intervals; whilst at others it is provided with bows, representing, so to say, a man with his arms akimbo. From top to bottom not only the ‘Maj Stang’ (Maypole) itself, but the hoops, bows, etc., are ornamented with leaves, flowers, slips of various cloth, gilt egg-shells, etc.; and on top of it is a large vane, or it may be a flag.”
I later learn that this expatriate Maj Stang was the work of a Swedish family who have rented a house on the beach for the month of June, who even brought with them cans of pickled herrings and boiled potatoes, the traditional fare for the Eve of Saint John. But this rational explanation does not remove the memory of how my blood ran cold to see the Maypole standing there, or shake my conviction that I have received some private oracle.
This first swim in the shadow of the Maypole brings a desire for more, and the next week Tonino takes a morning off to drive with me along the coast west of Castellammare, where the mountains fall abruptly into the sea, and a small road picks its way along the steep slope, suspended halfway between the little village of Scopello, hidden from view by a rock outcropping and a Spanish watchtower, and the Scopello tonnara, the tuna fishery that crouches below on the water’s edge. As we descend the dirt path from the road, we can see the tonnara spread out below us at the apex of a tiny cove, shut off to the east by an arm of low cliffs and to the west by the Faraglioni, tall and jagged masses of stone that thrust up from the sea, their crests bristling with prickly pears and agave plants. One of the Faraglioni is topped by another watchtower, which some lucky person has restored to use as the world’s most beautiful beachhouse.
Directly below are the ancient buildings of the tonnara, the cobble and cement slide that leads down to the water from the low boat sheds with their wide-arched doors, the narrow-windowed barracks where the tonnaroti, the fishermen, sleep while the tuna are running, and to the west the flaking chalky-pink stucco of the complex that houses the owner’s apartments, the chapel, and the storerooms, all disposed about a courtyard shaded by an overgrown fig tree. The buildings nestle in the arc of the bay, exploiting with great economy the thin margin of flat land before the mountainside begins to climb, and appearing to grow out of the rock rather than to be built over it.
The waters of Scopello are cool, deep, and limpid, shifting from turquoise to azure as the sea bottom changes from sand to eel-grass, blending slowly into the intense blue of the distance, where we can see the black boats of the tonnara dismantling the nets. The season is ending now. The tuna come in May and June to lay their eggs in the warm waters off the northern coast of Sicily, and the catching of them is supposed to be, for the strong-stomached, one of the most fascinating spectacles that Sicily has to offer, repeating with unfaltering fidelity the rites and rules that were brought here by the Arabs more than a thousand years ago.
Nets mended and boats caulked, the crew begins its work in April when the long, low wooden boats are brought down to the water’s edge and the fishermen fold in the huge nets with care so that they will feed out smoothly and quickly when they are being set. Following the orders of the head fisherman, who is still addressed by the Arabic title of raìs, the crew works to the rhythm of a chant which at the end of each net becomes a prayer to the Virgin that the net may be filled with a good catch.
The tonnara proper is an enormous rectangle formed by huge cords that are floated by corks and stretched taut by forged iron anchors eight feet tall. Nets drop down vertically from the cords to the sea bottom to form a long corridor, the shore end of which is open to admit the fish. More nets, placed crosswise along the length of this corridor, can be raised or lowered to create a series of chambers through which the tonnaroti force the fish toward the closed end of the corridor, known as the “death chamber.”
Once this elaborate mechanism is set up, the long wait begins (it was not rare in the past for the statues of the tonnara’s patron saint to get a dunking if the fish were slow in coming). When at last the lookouts announce the arrival of a school of tuna, the boats drive the fish into the mouth of the trap and then gather round the “death chamber.” The rats waits till the nets are full to order the closing of the doors, and then the tonnaroti begin the slow pulling in on the ropes, leaning and heaving to the beat of the cialoma. Each verse of this ancient chantey begins and ends with the cry “Aimola! Aimola!” which some say derives from “Allah! Che muoia!—Allah! May it die!”
The pace of the chant quickens as the great fish come to the surface, crazed by the tightening nets, thrashing their powerful tails in an attempt to clear a space for themselves with blows that maim their neighbors and send sprays of bloody water fifteen feet into the air. The boats close in around the mass of heaving, shining, bleeding, thrashing dark gray bodies, and at a command from the raìs, the mattanza, the slaughter, begins, as the fishermen spear the frenzied fish with long-handled harpoons and drag their dying bodies into the boats. The sea churns with foam and blood and the air throbs with the splashing and the shouting and the relentless, quickening beat of the cialoma.
I have never quite been able to decide whether I really want to see the mattanza or not and am not displeased today to find that the sea has washed away all traces of blood. Nor have the summer crowds arrived: we float lazily in the cool water in solitary peace, interrupted only by bits and snatches of song and laughter that waft in from the distant boats and by the cries of the seagulls searching for the last remnants of the slaughter.
“Halcyon” is a word that belongs to the winter solstice, “a bird fabled by the ancients to breed in a floating nest on the sea at the winter solstice, and to charm the wind and the waves into calm for that purpose,” but there is no better word that I can borrow to describe the days that follow on the solstice of summer. Tonino goes off to Palermo each morning early, and I am alone in the house till dark, with only the dog and the cat, the chattering sparrows, and the buzzing insects for company. I put away my watch and arrange my day at whim, reading, writing, and cleaning the house for the friends and family that July will bring. Even cleaning is almost pleasant when there is no telephone to ring while I wage war on spiders from the top of a ladder, and no one for whom I must interrupt everything to prepare a meal. There are moments, while washing the endless stretches of terracotta tiling or dusting the plows and the bellows, when I wonder why we didn’t decide to build something small, modern, and practical after the earthquake, instead of resurrecting this beloved but unwieldy behemoth, but like the daddy longlegs before my broom, discouragement is routed by the satisfaction of awakening the gleam of copper, old wood, and tile.
If I am hot, I cool off in the garden, hose in hand, watering and watching the sunlight ring its changes of the landscape. Forthright and industrious in the morning, it freshens the olives and the vineyards, a good housewife plumping up her pillows, only to flatten them out again at noon and deprive them of their color. An element of drama creeps across the hillsides toward six o’clock, as the slanting rays pencil lines of black shadow behind the grapevines, add inches onto the melon plants, intensify the red of the soil and the emerald of the fruit trees. All this art is erased when the sun drops into the sea near Capo San Vito, leaving only the lighthouse to twinkle on the horizon, and a lavender haze falls, a giant cobweb strung from the gray-blue mountains in the west to the reddish purple peaks of the east, resting on the hilltops and sagging into the valleys.
If I am hungry, ten paces to the right of the kitchen door will take me to the perazzoli, tiny pears an inch in diameter, a concentrate of flavor that grows in bright yellow bunches on a young tree near the quinces. Or I can turn left to the mulberry trees. The black mulberries are ripe now and bursting with crimson juice that trickles down your arm when you reach up to pick them, delight of children who feign mortal accidents and flourish bloodstained fingers before their mother’s horrified eyes. If I want something more substantial, the figs are waiting for me down in the valley, the early ones, dark purple sacks of honey dangling from the branches, and the peaches yield in ripeness beneath my touch. If I feel industrious, I can slither down the steep hill to the casette di Zu Natale, two little stone huts that nestle into the hillside as if inhabited by hobbits, part of a piece of adjoining land that we bought from a contadino who had grown too old to work it. In front of the bigger hut a rich orange carpet is spread out, apricots that at the least breath of wind drop gently onto a soft bed of dried grass and lie there, waiting for me to gather them and turn them into jam.
If I am lonely I stick my head out and greet Mr. Amato in his comings and goings or hail Turiddu as he comes into the cantina for another load of copper sulphate to spray on the grape vines, to fight off the fungi that heavy dew has encouraged. Mr. Amato is pleased with his novara, although he tells me he has given u
p on one piece of land:
“I’ve seeded it with tomatoes four times, but nothing has come up. You need a little shove from the soil too.”
Calm and careful, Mr. Amato offers a contrast to Turiddu’s volatile nature. He is also very generous: each time I proudly gather a first meager handful of string beans from my vines, he appears with a plastic bag bulging with beans from his vines.
“Per Lei, signora.”
And yesterday he arrived with two fine cucuzze. The cucuzza, the same from which the cucuzzata used to fill pastries is made, is a particularly Sicilian squash. A long, smooth, pale green cylinder, it grows in a comma or a curlicue if the vine is left on the ground, or straight as a ruler and as much as five feet long when trained on a trellis. In the absence of any flavor of its own, it has an amazing capacity for absorbing and neutralizing any other taste. Hence the proverb “Consatala come vuoi, sempre cucuzza è—Flavor it as you will, it’s always cucuzza,” which applies to anything intrinsically insipid or uninteresting. A person who answers this description is said to have a cucuzza head.
Cucuzza is nonetheless held in high esteem, A mainstay of the summer diet, it occupies a very high slot in the hierarchy the Sicilians have devised in their endless preoccupation with the workings of their innards, a topic that, far from being banished from polite conversation, is preferred for the dinner table.
Cucuzza is fresca, the ultimate in “cool” food. This has nothing to do with the temperature at which it is served but indicates its effect on the bowels. Like lettuce, chicory, dandelion greens, and endive, cucuzza refreshes, while cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and artichokes are “hot” and irritate. Spinach and chard are in between, not quite condemned but suspect enough to make them rare visitors to my mother-in-law’s table. A friend of my brother-in-law’s tried to seminate panic at Alcamo Marina one summer by spreading the rumor that cucuzza has been found to be bad for the liver. Tradition won out, but not before one dreadful quake of doubt had menaced the very foundations of the local domestic economy.
On Persephone's Island Page 26