In return for the cucuzze I have promised to give Mr. Amato some of my parsley seed as soon as it has ripened enough to be harvested and put away for resowing on Saint Francis’ Day at the beginning of October. It was indeed enviable parsley, not at all like the parsley in my favorite Sicilian proverb, which is used, with a resigned shrug of the shoulders, to indicate something or someone who has seen better times: “Cera beddu lu pitrusinu, c’iì lu ‘attu e ci piscio—It wasn’t such beautiful parsley in the first place, and then the cat went and peed on it.” But I wish it would hurry up and finish going to seed; having grown to staggering heights it hides from sight the flower beds beyond it.
The herb garden is hidden too, by a sea of flowering lavender, the long spears bobbing and dancing under a multicolored regatta, the white jibs of the cabbage moths, the striped spinnakers of the swallowtails, the bumblebees, and the huge and furry purple wasps. I have decided to leave the flowers on the plants for all to enjoy; last year’s harvest still hangs from the rafters of the palmento waiting for someone to make it into sachets, and often there is another flowering in the fall.
For the better part of the day I am happy to be a hermit. I have spread my books and file cards on the table in the guesthouse while it is still free of tenants, and I work there or pace the courtyard with lined pad in hand, pausing to breathe in the sweet smell of the wild mint that I have trodden underfoot or to admire the grapevine that sags under the weight of a thousand rock-hard grapelets (“And at zero cost!” says Tonino wistfully. “What did you do, some two minutes’ worth of pruning?”) or the pomegranate tree on which each of the two flowers has set to fruit. When inspiration comes, I stretch out with it on a deck chair in the sun, or swing with my sources in the hammock under the porch roof.
Although the courtyard at Bosco is closed to the world beyond, it is of itself a microcosm. One has only to tune one’s senses down to its proportions, to adjust one’s focus: the grasshopper sitting next to my foot flexes his powerful hind legs for flight; three ants drag a worm across the stubble left by my diligent weeding, their route, filled with useless detours and unnecessary climbs, revealing the lack of intelligence behind a seemingly rational endeavor. The erratic flight of a yellow-winged butterfly, thus confined, becomes a careful exploration of possibilities, beginning with the scarlet bougainvillea, then the orange and crimson of the geraniums, then the last of the purple clematis lingering among the leaves of the Virginia creeper, while discarding the mere green of the succulents, the spiky yuccas, the potted kumquat tree. On the sun-warmed cobblestones lizards keep their immobile watch, heads raised to spit out a tongue and gather in a fly, and as dusk falls the geckos creep out to take up their posts beside the wall lamps.
Sounds, too, wash over the courtyard walls: the waxing and waning hum of a tractor, the pitiful cry of a sparrow fallen prey to the cat’s patrols, occasionally the motor of a passing car that obliges me to peer out the gate to see who is using our road. One morning I hear fire, a greedy, sinister sound like the snapping and cracking of a thousand tiny bones. Someone has fired the stubble in the Blundas’ wheat field, but I can see no one, and, alarmed, I call Tonino, who fortunately is working at home this morning.
“No, they’ll be down in the valley somewhere. It’s not hot enough for spontaneous combustion, and the Blundas aren’t the sort to start a fire and then go away and leave it.”
But I am not reassured. It is a windy day, a poor choice for firing stubble, and the flames dance and crackle, leaping in frenzy to reach the tall grass along the road. Cinders blow in the window onto the table where I am working, and the acrid smell of burning straw calls me back to the door again and again. The roar of the fire is so loud that I do not hear the knocking of Nino Di Giovanni, the elderly contadino who lives just down the road, come to call Tonino for help in putting out the flames that are threatening his olive trees.
In half an hour they manage to extinguish the blaze, working up the hill along the flickering orange line and beating on the flames with green branches. Two days later Mr. Blunda stops by to thank Tonino. He is convinced that the fire was set by a farmer of dubious repute who lives just a little north of us on the next hill over. Blunda had told this man that he intended to plow a firebreak around the field before firing it himself, but the man has a grudge against our local shepherds and wanted to prevent them from pasturing their sheep in the stubble, as Blunda had given them permission to do.
The smell of smoke comes often in the days that follow, and columns of gray pulse skyward from the valleys and the hillsides as one by one the harvested fields are fired in order to destroy the seeds of the wild oats and the other weeds that infest the grain. I am always quick to try to locate the source of the smoke or the crackle: the piles of firewood waiting to be sawn and the dried grass about the house make me uneasy, nor do I like sitting in the line of fire between the shepherds and their enemies.
Following on the heels of the fire come more reassuring sounds, the rattle, squeak, and roar of the giant tractors with their one monolithic plow blade, hastening to deep-plow the fields now, before the sun hardens the claylike soil to granite, so that they will be ready in October, as soon as the vendemmia is over and the grapes are in, to begin the cycle anew.
Chapter Nine
With wristwatch and appointment book put aside, I hardly notice that June has faded into July, bringing closer and closer the moment when Natalia’s return will catapult me back into time. I am reminded only in the evenings, when I climb into bed and see the clock radio I had the unfortunate idea of borrowing from Francesco during his absence, flashing out the passing minutes at me, its red digital numbers crazed by our uneven rural power supply. The digital clock is surely the quintessential symbol of our modern sense of time, announcing relentlessly the irrevocable end of each minute, abolishing the sense of cycle, death and rebirth, that is implicit in the rotating hands of the traditional timepiece, which mark the beginning in the very moment in which they indicate the end.
Natalia is due home on the seventh; Turi is driving down from Milan and picking the girls up on his way south. Our brief parenthesis of peace comes to a close that evening with the sound of a car coming up the hill, its motor barely audible under the excited blowing of the horn. When we open the door, summer bursts in on us like butterflies as two tanned and laughing young ladies in brightly colored bathing suits rush in and fling their arms about our necks, at least three inches taller and three years older than the little girls I left on the station platform at Agropoli.
It takes only a day or two for the usual pattern to establish itself, as I begin to shuttle the girls back and forth between Bosco and the beach. Ostensibly, Natalia resides with us at Bosco and Martina at Alcamo Marina with her father and her grandmother; in fact they will spend only two or three nights apart in the next two months. We spend most mornings on the beach, but I return thankfully to Bosco after lunch, glad to escape the confusion and the traffic that have overtaken Alcamo Marina now that the season is in full swing. The roaring of the motorcycles and the whistling of the trains at the level crossing flood the house despite the oleander bushes that Turi has planted along the front fence, a bone of generational contention, since they prevent my mother-in-law from seeing who is walking past, with whom, and in which direction. The round of visits has begun, cousins and nieces and nephews, dragging with them reluctant grandchildren, or bringing new fiancés to be presented, come to pay their respects to Mrs. Simeti, who is the only survivor of her generation in the family. She is too old now to scold us still for not returning all these visits, for being “Turks,” unsociable and ill mannered. I have always been delighted by this lingering if imprecise trace of the island’s history in its dialect, and great is my pleasure one day to hear my mother-in-law, disoriented by her transfer from the nursing home to the beach and startled to find pasta on the table when she was expecting breakfast, complain about her state of mental confusion.
“Mi sento pigghiata dai turchi!—I feel as
if I had been carried off by the Turks!”
The complement of this use of “Turk” is the Sicilian’s habit of using cristiano, “Christian,” as a generic word for human being.
I remember the Sicilian woman-servant of a gentleman of my acquaintance, coming into the room one day, and taking away the key to a back door. On being asked what she wanted with it, she replied that she was going to let out the Christians, meaning only two old women who were her visitors.
William Irvine, Letters on Sicily
The same traveler who wrote this home to London in the early nineteenth century reports another delightful instance of Sicilian categorizing, this time apropos of the English, whom the Sicilians have always admired greatly, their Protestant heresy notwithstanding.
I remember an old woman looking with the jealousy of poverty and age at a young English officer, who was passing by on horseback, handsomely accoutred. “Ah!” said she, “for all his lace he goes to hell.” A priest standing by reproved her presumption, by calling her a beast,—a favorite Italian phrase,—“Che siete bestia”—“as for the Turks,” continued he, “they certainly go to hell, but nobody knows where the English go.”
History has made the Sicilian dialect almost a language apart, so great is the legacy of the Greeks, the Arabs, the French, and the Spanish. The dialect is full of marvelous metaphors, strong and vivid and with a rude vitality that has long since been ironed out of Italian, for centuries a literary, official language more often than a spoken one. My mother-in-law, for example, an insomniac of many years’ standing, would complain enviously about how easily her husband slept: “Ha il sonno attaccato col laccio—He has sleep tied on with a string,” and in my mind would appear a soft, quilted cloud, like a balloon tied on by string to the bedpost, which at a gentle tug from my father-in-law would slowly descend to envelop him in sleep.
The dialect has a rich range of epithets as well, covering the spectrum from sworn enmity to momentary hostility in a traffic jam. My husband tends to disparage Palermo drivers as scricchiapanelli, “panelli-chompers,” reserving the true Sicilian offense, cornutu, for graver occasions. Cornutu means having horns, cuckold and therefore dishonored, and when said without a smile is about as much of an offense as one might need, but Tonino prefers to embroider, as in cornutu abbiveratu, an “irrigated cuckold,” who thanks to watering has grown particularly long and flourishing horns, or chiù cornutu di un panere di babaluci, “having more horns than a basket full of snails.”
Sicilians will usually laugh at my attempts to use their dialect: they proudly claim that no one who was born off the island can properly pronounce the double d that has taken the place of the Italian double I, as in bedda matre e beramente, “by the beautiful Mother and verily,” a phrase with which a Sicilian protests his sincerity, or in ’adduzzu, “little rooster,” the word Tonino makes me say to prove, to his perpetual amusement, that I am still unable to locate the particular spot between palate and throat from which the tongue must launch the double d.
Sicilian has a different grammar as well; it tends, like Latin, to put the verb at the end of the sentence, and it uses its tenses differently from the Italian. The future tense is lacking altogether, so contemplated actions are perforce tinged with an element of constriction—“I have to go” for “I shall go”—as if to underline how rarely the Sicilians have been masters of their own fate.
It is expressions of pity and disgust that we hear most often under the beach umbrellas and during the first visits of the season, pity for the old man, custodian of the big well at the edge of Alcamo Marina, who is murdered in the middle of the road two days after Natalia’s return, and disgust for the “scorched earth” policy the dominant Mafia clan is perpetrating. The well belonged to the Rimis, the family of mafiosi who for several generations were the unchallenged masters of Alcamo and have only recently been defeated and put to flight by a new clan. Several of the family’s closest associates have been murdered, anyone who attempts to buy or rent any Rimi property is warned off, and it appears that even the threatening telephone calls our friend received may be ascribed to his having performed some professional services for the Rimis, rather than to an exaggerated idea of his income. Now this old man lies in a pool of blood at Alcamo Marina, his only fault that of having administered the sale of water from the Rimis’ well and transmitting the proceeds to wherever they are hiding.
The dark stain that persists on the sandy pavement near the well—impossible not to glance at it as one drives by—is one more reason to feel relief as I get in the car after lunch and, turning away from the beach, head south toward Bosco. No cars come careening around the curves toward me now that it is siesta time, and Sicily lies still in the two o’clock heat, its faint shimmering the only movement other than my own. The rich red of the winter earth has dried to old brick, pale around the edges where the dust settles, and the dead grass at the roadside heaves and twitches at the car’s passage. The sun has burned off the superfluous and the merely decorative everywhere but in gardens artificially sustained. Elsewhere no grass grows, no flowers, and green is reserved for the productive: the olives, the vineyards, and the fruit orchards, the tomato and the melon vines. A bubble of heat and light in which we are suspended, July deceives us with its languor; it floats on the surface of a giant cauldron that throws up from its steady simmer harvest after harvest: mounds of dark purple eggplants and shiny green peppers, sweet red tomatoes, golden peaches and crimson-streaked nectarines, pears whose thin yellow skins are stretched taut with juice, fat watermelons by the truckload and monumental bunches of Cardinal grapes, the dark red table grapes that are the first to ripen.
Just below Alcamo I turn east onto the highway, passing Vaddinuccio, where we own a piece of land and a small house hidden from sight among fruit trees. Now consigned to the limbo of novara until Tonino and Turi decide what to do with this small property whose value lies more in its proximity to the town than in its fertility, Vaddinuccio was until recently our last feudal fetter, its vineyards cultivated in mezzadria by Peppino, the sharecropper who planted them.
Peppino’s father had worked for Tonino’s grandfather, and his eldest brother was the mezzadro at Bosco until he retired, shortly after I came to Sicily. Peppino himself tended the vines at Vaddinuccio when he was not working in Germany as a mason, and he repaired the little house to use as a summer cottage for his family, planting vegetables and fruit trees and raising chickens, ducks, and even the odd turkey.
The relationship between the later generations of Simetis and Peppino’s family, a most uneasy relationship based on distrust on the one hand and resentment on the other, had been reduced by my time to the unavoidable. The major and most unpleasant encounter came annually on the day in which the grapes were harvested, when my mother-in-law, my children, and I were deposited at Vaddinuccio (the Simeti men being busy elsewhere) to sit and knit and chat while Peppino and his entire tribe picked and toted grapes. Ostensibly we were there to share sociably in the pleasures and rewards of the vendemmia; everyone knew, however, that our presence was to insure that nothing untoward was added to or subtracted from the growing pile of grapes that waited, heaped on a heavy canvas tarp, for the truck to come and take them away to be weighed.
The discomfort of that day was somewhat alleviated by my secret delight in the other, in July, when Peppino and his son would appear at Alcamo Marina, their little Fiat 500 a veritable cornucopia on wheels, bursting with the fruits of Vaddinuccio brought in homage to the padrone: bushels of tomatoes; a crate of prickly pears; another of table grapes; a basket of sbirgi, a rare and delicious variety of pale green nectarines. And invariably, every year, much to my in-laws’ annoyance, this magnificent tribute of fruit was just a little too green to be edible.
The vineyards at Vaddinuccio grew old together with their mezzadri, and a few years ago they were torn out and the contract was terminated, thus ending an era whose passing no one mourned, except perhaps for a momentary twinge of regret when we remember t
he sbirgi.
Once off the highway the car bounces and skids along the dusty track, raising in its wake a thick brown cloud that hangs motionless awhile before settling on the hedgerows and turning the dark purple-black of the blackberries to beige. The first of the berries are ripe already and have attracted some children from a nearby farm, who scuffle their bare feet in the silky dust and leap up the bank like startled rabbits at the sound of my engine. At the top of the rise I pass Nino Di Giovanni and his nephew, hard at work in the shadow of their one-room house. The nephew, tall and as thin as a cane, is known to us as U Prufissuri from his habit of tiptoeing up the hill, sticking his toothless grin inside the kitchen curtain unannounced, and asking for Tonino—“U Prufissuri c’è?” At the moment he is busy with a pitchfork, tossing forkfuls of dried fava beans into the air in the hopes that some slight breeze will carry off the pieces of dried stalk and pod as the rust-brown beans fall heavily to earth, while his uncle is winnowing oats in an enormous sieve suspended horizontally under a tripod of branches.
Down in the valley a trail of dust marks Mr. Amato’s passage with the tractor along his melon rows. The first of the melons are already ripening, and in fact there are two fat watermelons sitting on the doormat outside the kitchen as I drive by. I should have thought that so much tilling would release moisture from the soil, but Tonino has explained to me that, on the contrary, each slice of the tiller blade breaks up the capillaries along which the humidity escapes and the fine cloak of dust that settles on the plants prevents the leaves from drying out.
The house itself is still, except for the cat, who drops silently from the mulberry tree to rub against my ankles, and for Happy barking in the courtyard. U Prufissuri’s breeze is an illusion: nothing stirs the pool of heat that submerges the house, and it is an effort to wade to the gate, find the key, pull back the iron bar, and push into the courtyard, hotter still, where the walls throb with the sun, and the listless, drooping leaves of the Virginia creeper do not even quiver as the dog does a perfunctory version of her welcoming dance. Constant watering has kept the potted plants and vines alive and green, but underfoot the cobbles are bare and sunbaked, all weeds gone except in the square onto which the hose leaks. The hammock hangs heavily, uninviting, and wasps drone around the faucet, waiting for a drop of water to accumulate.
On Persephone's Island Page 27