On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  the endless crowd pushed and shoved and elbowed so as not to remain suffocated, especially at the moment when the cart passed by. More than a few people fainted at that instant.… It was not uncommon to see an entire balcony railing carried away, when the cart itself got caught on it, and then, as if the sky had fallen, the shouts of the frightened bystanders became deafening, and the pushing a stampede.

  Giuseppe Pitrè, Feste patronali in Sicilia

  In all these years I have never been in Palermo for the Festino, nor have the accounts of what remains of it been very tempting. But now that I have read Brydone, I decide that I must have a look at the recently resurrected triumphal cart, which will follow its former route from the cathedral down the Corso to the Marina, the Palermo waterfront that was sadly reduced by the terrible Allied bombing of forty years ago from aristocratic playground to wasteland, now bordered by crumbling, bomb-split hovels and the shell-pocked facades of the few remaining palaces, carpeted with a thick layer of garbage and illuminated by the flashing lights and tarnished tinsel of a fun fair.

  The heat has nailed me to my bed longer than I intended, and it is late by the time I get to Palermo and fight my way through all the traffic jams and detours. The triumphal cart has almost reached the end of the Corso, which is transformed for the occasion into a tunnel of wooden arches curved into flowers and fountains, their painted colors gay even now in the daylight when their myriad light bulbs are spent. I too must push and shove and elbow to catch up with the cart, squeezing between soldiers on liberty for the holiday, baby carriages, semenza sellers, and hawkers holding down enormous bunches of balloons and strings of inflated Zorros and Spidermen. Palermo is out in force, laughing and yelling, spitting out semenza shells and aiming good-natured blows at the urchins dodging and swerving about its ankles. Bright-colored cottons and silks strain across ample bosoms, and fans beat steadily in the heat, while young girls in very long curls and very short skirts wiggle their bottoms at the lines of young police and carabinieri recruits who clear a passage through the crowd for the guard of honor, cavaliers on horseback and halberd-bearing pages in eighteenth-century dress, shades of lime and chartreuse edged with gold braid, which manages to suggest the hand of an upholsterer rather than a tailor.

  The search for oxen having been in vain this year, the cart itself, a scaled-down version only two and a half stories high, is drawn by a shiny new tractor, whose red paint is unsuccessfully disguised by large bunches of red and yellow gladiolas and, on the roof of the cabin, a cushion of yellow carnations in the shape of an eagle, Palermo’s symbol. The slightly funereal effect of the flowers is echoed in the cart itself, a vaguely boat-shaped affair of cornices and balustrades, fashioned of plaster (or plastic?) and painted dark gold, around whose stern are seated naked figures, a sort of Medici Chapel on wheels. High near the stern, the sides of the cart curve down toward the prow to encompass the tiered seats where the band is installed, outfitted in shades of lavender and mauve. Over all this towers Rosalia, the Santuzza, dark gold and Amazonesque, clutching in her right hand the red and yellow flag of the city.

  The cart creaks to a halt at the end of the Corso, under the baroque arch of the Porta Felice, where the mayor and other dignitaries are waiting. We are given a rousing rendition of the national anthem followed by a few Sicilian folk songs, after which the bandmaster, his rank and his paunch emphasized by a claret-colored cummerbund, eases himself down to shake Mayor Pucci’s hand. This appears to signal the end; there is some desultory consultation between police and dignitaries, as if they were not quite sure what to do next, but the crowd has had enough and splits up into many little rivulets that flow into the side streets and alleyways of the Kalsa in search of a plate of snails, of panelli, an ice cream cone, or pani cu’ la meusa with which to end the feast day.

  As I drive back out to Alcamo Marina to pick up Natalia, I wonder about the contrast between what I have seen today and the exquisite drawings of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century carts from which today’s has drawn its inspiration. And in all justice I am forced to admit that perhaps the contrast is not so much between past and present as between intention and realization, that probably the ephemeral substance of the Festino has always been more tawdry and distracted than the official plans and the visitors’ chronicles would lead us to think, its choreography plagued by mishap and disorder, its message distorted in the transmission and contested in the reception.

  Natalia must sleep at Bosco tonight so that we may leave early the next morning for the airport, where we are to meet my niece Hilary and her friend Lisa, who are flying in from New York for a week of Sicilian sun and sea. Two more friends, young men who have been singing at the Spoleto festival, arrive by train shortly afterward, turning Bosco into a house party.

  I am always delighted when any of my family comes to visit us. It is hard for me to believe when I look back on my decision to marry Tonino and live abroad permanently that the fact of leaving my family should have merited so little consideration. Youth and cultural bias, I suppose, combined with my own particular circumstances—my father had died before I started college, my mother was living in Italy, and my two sisters and my brother, all of them considerably older than I, were moving about a lot themselves at that point—made marrying in Sicily seem a not unnatural sequel to going away to college. I could so easily have spun off entirely after my mother’s death in 1970, yet somehow love, the comfort of a common humus, and the lines cast out to me by my sisters and brother have overcome the centrifuge of time and distance and infrequent visits, bridging the gap of age and experience and pulling me close to the family I so rarely see.

  So I rejoice to find my sister in my niece and to hear the quirks and expressions of our family lexicon filtered through her own special enthusiasms. We talk and talk: it startles me to find how Sicilian I have become in twenty years, how much my doubts and uncertainties, my hang-ups and my passions have shifted target, and to find how hard I must struggle to catch up with the English language. (Humor and slang are two merciless thermometers of estrangement; I hate not understanding why a cartoon in The New Yorker is funny and was once quite horrified when another niece of mine told me she had had her clothes ripped off in Morocco. I thought she meant they had been torn from her back and imagined her standing forlorn and naked in the Casbah.)

  It is also startling—and a relief—to find how easily conversation flows across our common history, even with these kids in their twenties who can’t remember the fifties I grew up in and take for granted or even as superfluous so many of the freedoms my generation rebelled for. Nothing, I have discovered, is as difficult to explain to the young as discarded prejudice: Francesco, watching the film Novecento on television, is bewildered by the virulence of the anticommunism, while Natalia is quite unable to comprehend why blue jeans might be considered inappropriate for school.

  Bosco is filled with life, its mammoth proportions justified at last by the voices and the laughter echoing across the living room, its spaces filled with card games, with sun worshipers stretched out in deck chairs, with long and boisterous meals. This is the image we had in mind when we drew up the plans to rebuild after the earthquake, and if in our youthful inexperience we didn’t realize what the underpinnings of such a scene would involve, like the Festino to the Palermitani, it is no less dear to us for being ephemeral and slightly unreal.

  Through it all I churn, cooking, chauffeuring, explaining, playing the role of Earth Mother to the hilt. In my desire, deep and heartfelt, that my niece’s vacation be a special one and that she share my love for things Sicilian, I can detect a slight and extraneous vein, something of the same anxiety that hit me before Francesco’s departure. It is not uncommon, I suspect, for those who are born, like me, much the youngest in a large family, to feel forever obliged to account for themselves, to justify the afterthought and measure up to the august siblings who came before. So perhaps I am overbearing in my eagerness to serve as an interpreter for these young Americans, t
iresome in my readiness to answer a casual question with a lecture or in my insistence that they look at this, try that, taste this other.

  I trot out Sicily’s culinary treats: fresh ricotta, sheep’s cheese and salame, olives and olive oil, sweet peppers roasted on the coals and eaten with slices of bread toasted on the fire and rubbed with garlic, oil, and salt. I make mounds of Sicily’s favorite summer dishes: spaghetti alla coppola, “with a cap on,” with fresh tomato sauce and basil topped with dark slices of fried eggplant, or caponata, which is eggplant, olives, onions, almonds, and capers stewed in a sweet-and-sour tomato sauce. The quantities of food that disappear, the frequent trips into the cantina to refill the wine bottles, the baskets of dark red grapes from the vineyard that empty as rapidly as the bowls of pere facce bedde, the little “pretty-faced pears” with bright red cheeks that have ripened near the houses of Zu Natale, the groans of satiated pleasure afterward—all are signs that in this at least I have not exaggerated.

  Long mornings at the beach followed by big lunches require ample siestas, so the week flies by with very little time for sightseeing. On our way into Palermo to take the boys to the train, I decide that our guests must at least see the cathedral at Monreale. Built by William II as an answer to Archbishop Walter of the Mill, the church is a monument to royal authority, a somber and magnificent statement of wealth and divinely granted power. The visitor who comes up from Palermo, his retina dancing with the exuberance of the baroque city and the confusion of the modern, loses some of this effect, perhaps, but for us today, coming from the hot white light, the rusty soil, whitewash, and bare stone of the countryside into the cool penumbra flickering with the million gold tesserae of the mosaics and the Cosmatique inlays that line the walls, the cathedral’s message is undiluted, almost overwhelming.

  The modern church has unwittingly found a novel antidote to King William’s ambitions. A sacristan lies in wait behind the door to cover the bare thighs and plunging necklines of tourists who might otherwise give involuntary offense to the Almighty. He pounces on our two boys, who are wearing shorts, and wraps each of them in a little red cloth like a sarong. But Johnson is six foot six, and his sarong barely reaches to his kneecaps. With his every step it flaps open and a sunburned thigh peeks out fetchingly, to subvert the sacristan’s intentions and send the girls and me into fits of giggles that quite dispel any initial sense of awe.

  On the last day of the visit, a friend takes us all out in his motorboat along the coast beyond Scopello to a wild and beautiful seascape that can be reached only from the sea, or by following a mule track. Developers had planned to build a road out here, linking Scopello to Capo San Vito and opening the area to the villas that have already contaminated the coves on either side of Scopello itself, but several years ago we marched, four thousand strong, out along the mule track in protest, and now the area is a nature reserve, safe from builders and hunters and scuba divers. The mountains fall down abruptly into the sea, leaving space for only a narrow border of tiny fields, vineyards that scramble up the slopes, clinging olives, plumed tufts of ampelodisa grass, and bristling clumps of Sicilian palmetto, the indigenous dwarf palm. High up in the mountain gorges eagles circle and the limpid waters teem with life.

  It is an extraordinary day, so hot and so still that the sun has baked a smooth glaze onto the sea, now azure, now turquoise, now ultramarine, and the water is so clear that we need hardly bother with the masks we brought. We skirt the coast, weaving around rocky spurs and into tiny coves and grottoes. As soon as the boat idles to a stop a heavy lid of heat closes over us, agitated only by the beating wings and the mewing cries of the sea swallows who flee their rocky crevices at our approach. The sun scorches the skin and pains the eye; the only relief is the dive into the clear, cool water, to slip along the walls of the grottoes where cushions of purple algae mark the waterline, dotted here and there by red sea tomatoes and broken by the pale beige swirls of a lichenlike weed, to tread water, staring down through crystalline fathoms, past legs bronzed against the turquoise and lazily kicking toes to sand and stones and dark purple sea urchins, where schools of small fish flicker and pause, change direction and glide hastily away as the suggestion of a bigger shadow sends us splashing back to the boat ladder, then up and on to the next cove, the next stop, the next swim.

  The girls leave just in time, for the heat that pinned us to the boat deck and drove us into the waters of Scopello becomes unbearable on the shore, scorching the already parched land, charring the forests, and consuming the crops. At night flickering red lines eat their way up the reforested mountainsides that by day are hidden by a dense soup of haze and smoke. At sundown Mr. Amato wanders mournfully among his melons, looking at the shriveled leaves and counting the scarred patches where the sun has branded the fruit, while Tonino patrols the vineyards, badly damaged as well. The grapes that have pushed out from under the leaves are daubed with brown, and gloomy forecasts estimate that 30 percent of the crop may have been lost.

  The laymen claim that it is not as bad as a year ago June, when the scirocco fanned the mercury up to 117 degrees in the shade, candles melted in their sconces, the elderly died, and the middleaged had nervous breakdowns, but the farmers know that this is worse. In June the newborn fruit was swaddled in foliage, while now, at the end of July, all the ample bounty of an abundant year is exposed and defenseless.

  Like the drooping, papery leaves of the vineyards, we wait, wilted and motionless under the taut white sky, for the heat to break, but no relief comes and the tension grows. On the morning of the twenty-ninth, the head judge of the investigations office of the court of Palermo, Rocco Chinnici, leaves his home to go to the courthouse. He has brought many mafiosi to trial and is said to be on the verge of unmasking the mysterious “third level,” the political and economic interests that instigated the dalla Chiesa murder. Like all the investigating judges in Palermo, he travels with an armed escort; police cars deter traffic at either end of the block, and two armed officers go into the apartment building, coming out a minute later with Chinnici, who greets the apartment house porter standing in the doorway. As the men cross the sidewalk and pass in front of a Fiat 500 parked at the curb, the little car lifts into the air, disintegrating under the force of a hundred kilograms of exploding TNT.

  Once again Palermo is shocked by the indiscriminate and disproportionate dimensions that the Mafia’s ferocity has assumed. The judge dies instantly, of course, as do his guards and the porter of the building, but it is remarkable that the victims are so few, in view of the violence of the explosion, which destroys the facade of the building, twists shutters and breaks windows up and down the block, and smashes the nearby cars to pulp.

  We end the month by taking Natalia and Martina to see Seneca’s Phaedra, put on by the National Institute for Antique Drama in the amphitheater at Segesta. The evening is hot and still, with no breeze to lift the actors’ veils or carry off their words, and from our seats halfway down the tier of curving stone steps we look out across the stage, empty except for a few gnarled gray branches and some scattered rocks, onto a scenery of mountains and sea. Behind the mountains hangs the sky, pale lavender shot with gold as the play opens, deepening and darkening as the light vanishes and the tragedy unfolds. Crimson and orange, congruent to the incestuous passion of the unhappy queen, coagulate to purple as the messenger recounts the atrocious death, then blacken to a pall for Phaedra’s suicide and Theseus’ despair.

  After the play, we pick our way in silence down the hillside, trusting to the feel of paving underfoot to guide us around the curves. An owl calls somewhere nearby, and a tinkling of bells sounds from the sheepfold. Our footsteps tread out perfume from the wild mint growing at the edge of the asphalt. In the valley below, the floodlit temple beckons, floating in a pool of pure, cool light and summoning us out of the darkness.

  Chapter Ten

  “Austu, riustu, capu d’invernu—August, twice burnt, the beginning of winter.” Alcamo’s proverb pays tribute to the less
obvious side of August, the slight cooling of the air that reawakens energies from their summer stupor and stirs the lymph to a final effort. The Greeks acknowledged August’s prophecy by the trees they chose to hold sacred: the nut, the apple, the sorb, and the quince, a harvest of autumn fruit. The Italians, on the other hand, ignore it; like lemmings moving toward the sea, all Italy goes on holiday simultaneously, the factories close down, the hospitals release all but their most serious cases, the cities empty. Long lines of cars wait to board the ferry for the islands, the beaches disappear under a dense cover of towels and umbrellas, and hordes of determined and perspiring hikers assault the mountain trails.

  Somewhere in the midst of all this agitation Francesco is making his way homeward. The heat is fierce still, and we wonder how the overcrowded train from Rome will seem after a month in the forests of Nova Scotia. Our worries prove unfounded, however; I see gray tufts floating in the sky one afternoon and search at length for the fire before I realize that they are not smoke but clouds, the first to grace our sky in almost a month. The tramontana comes to hurry them along, a brisk skysweeper who manages in a day to brush up a month’s accumulation of haze, leaving the horizon clean and new. As we drive in to meet Francesco’s train, the morning air is cool and clear and after many weeks’ absence from our landscape the mountains have moved close again, within—it seems—arm’s reach.