On Persephone's Island

by Mary Taylor Simeti

  Sidetracking and storytelling notwithstanding, we manage to empty out the two front rooms and make space for the masons and the painters before Ferragosto, the mid-August holiday, brings the next wave of visitors. Ferragosto, which falls on the fifteenth, began as a civil holiday, the feriae augusti proclaimed by Caesar Augustus in 18 B.C. to celebrate the beginning of “his” month, and was later adopted by the Church to honor the Assumption of the Virgin. As such it was in the past a very important feast day in Sicily, especially at Messina, where civic pride produced an attempt, apparently unsuccessful, to outdo the glories of the Palermo Festino.

  Our ubiquitous Englishmen have left us descriptions, the most complete being that of W. H. Smyth, who visited Messina in 1818.

  The most curious feature of the whole spectacle is the Barra itself, representing the supposed assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a miracle never thought of until nearly eight hundred years after her death. It is a species of car, about forty feet in height, supported by iron machinery and fancifully decorated. The base represents a sacred tomb, in which is a choir chanting over the body, while the twelve apostles, collected from all parts of the earth, are in attendance, personated by youths of good families, of from twelve to fifteen years of age; and above them is a circle that revolves horizontally with children attached to it representing angels, under a large sun and moon that turn vertically with six infants, as cherubim, suspended at the ends of the principal rays. In the centre is a mass of clouds supporting an azure globe with gilt stars, surrounded by other children, in white dresses decorated with various colored ribbons, as seraphim, and above the whole stands the Almighty, in a rich gold brocade, sustaining on his hand with an extended arm, the Virgin, personified by a beautiful little girl in white silk pantaloons studded with gold stars. It need scarcely be added that when this unwieldy machine, with its legion of living angels in rotary motion, is tottering along in procession, attended by nobles, senators, soldiers, priests and monks, in all their varied costumes, amid colors flying, bands playing, guns firing, and the whole populace praying, crying and shouting, a most novel and singular scene is presented.

  W. H. Smyth, Memoir descriptive of the resources,

  inhabitants and hydrography of Sicily and its Islands

  The pendulum of time has swung back again, and Ferragosto is once more a predominantly civil holiday, in which even those for whom a month of summer vacation is unthinkable—the farmers and the shipkeepers, the precariously or the self-employed—close up and go to the beach. Many of the contrasts have now been ironed out by Sicily’s sudden wealth, but ten or fifteen years ago one glance at the beach sufficed to distinguish the bronzed and relaxed middle-class habitués from the peasants who frolicked awkwardly in the water like seals disporting themselves on land, their tans stopping at their shirtsleeves or following the outline of an undershirt. In the years, not infrequent, in which the sea was rough and the inviting splash and tumble of the waves concealed an undertow, the holiday often ended in tragedy, as some young and inexperienced farmer, placing his faith in an inner tube, would be sucked out to sea to panic and drown.

  We prefer to avoid the crowded beach and enjoy the peace of Bosco with our guests from Palermo and with Martina’s mother, Carla, come down from Milan for a week; to wind large platefuls of pasta onto our forks and eat fruit straight from the tree, yellow-green figs oozing a drop of golden honey from their bottoms, red grapes and green, and above all prickly pears, bright ovals of fuchsia, chartreuse, and yellow, extracted from their spiny skins and heaped upon a platter. Dearly beloved part of the Sicilian summer, they are very delicate, difficult to gather and easy to bruise.

  Michele, his country roots unsevered by thirty years of doctoring in a city hospital, lectures us on how to pick and offer prickly pears. A grape leaf placed in the palm of the hand like a pot-holder is the best means of holding the fruit without bruising it or getting prickles in your fingers, while with your other hand you cut it from the cactus. If they are to be eaten right away, the pears should be brought to the kitchen in a bucket of water and then skinned, still using the grape leaf to roll back the thick and spiny skin split open by three (no more) cuts of the knife.

  If, on the other hand, you are going to make a present of the prickly pears, you must place them gently in a wicker basket lined with grape leaves and cover the top with another layer of leaves that are held in place by a crisscross of thin strips cut from green canes and stuck into the weave of the basket itself. Michele claims that all gifts of fruit should be presented in this way, and that if a peasant neglects to do so, it signifies a lack of respect for the recipient.

  Tonino and Turi take advantage of the deserted streets immediately following the holiday to park our van in the Corso outside the Simeti front door and carry down the various pieces of furniture and other odds and ends they have decided to adapt to current use. To Bosco comes my in-laws’ bedstead, bars of silvery (nickel-plated?) brass in a severe geometric pattern, six feet high at the head and only slightly lower at the foot. This imposing dinosaur, unable to survive in the cramped habitat of a modern apartment, is to find an adequate resting place in our enormous Bosco bedroom.

  The bed has stood unused for years in the big front bedroom at Alcamo, which is high ceilinged and has a balcony that gives onto the Corso and a door communicating directly with the salotto, so that visitors could be ushered from the salotto directly into the bedroom, where they were received with hushed, concerned appreciation if it was a time of sickness or death, and with proud pomp if the visit was occasioned by a birth. In the latter event, dutiful mother and newborn scion would receive homage ensconced in the matching embroidered linen sheets and the rose-colored, lace-encrusted bedspreads of heavy watered silk that are still carefully preserved in a trunk, one big set for the double bed, one tiny one for the little crib next to it.

  My in-laws had long since abandoned the front bedroom and its bed, their aged limbs unable to cope with the distance to the kitchen and the bathroom (black and white Art Deco tiling and massive lavender fixtures, installed just after the war by Don Turiddu for the monumental sum—we found the bill in the desk—of forty-eight lire), and I have been eyeing the bed for a long time. So I am as eager as Natalia and Martina to set it up, Tonino tightening the great bolts with a wrench while the girls and I attack the bars with rags and brass polish and then make the bed, smoothing out with exceptional care the old family bedspread of heavy white piqué edged with tatting. Carla comes upstairs just in time to join me in standing back to admire the final effect.

  “I feel as if I ought to lie down on it and die.”

  I suspect my sister-in-law, who is usually attuned to my reactions, to be rather put off by what she imagines to be a bit of black humor on my part. She has no clue to my sudden discovery that to possess such a bed is to become a matriarch, to take up one’s appointed place in the family history. This is a bed for the creating of life and for the leaving of it, and such inevitability weighs heavily on me, accustomed as I am to looking at such cycles from the outside.

  Once when Pam and Claudia and I were chatting, one of those long, meandering conversations in which we savor above all the taste of the English tongue, it suddenly came out, I can’t remember how, that each of us is secretly horrified by the idea of being buried in her husband’s family tomb. It is much the same chill that comes over me now, and this time I recognize it for what it is: it is not so much the Sicilian way of dying that I fear as the loss of my expatriate status. Perhaps being an expatriate is a state of mind before it becomes a choice of habitat, a preference for detachment, for leaving questions unresolved because the visit is too short or the difference in background and upbringing is too great. It would seem that I prefer to remain uncommitted, be it in my bedroom at Bosco or in my final resting place.

  The problem of the bed resolves itself a few evenings later, as I undress with sleepy laziness and toss my black lace bra onto the bedpost. With this one careless flick of the wrist I transf
orm the bed from catafalque to movie prop: Marcello Mastroianni stretches out to watch as Sophia Loren peels off her black net stockings, the only ghosts that will trouble my sleep tonight.

  At the end of the week Carla departs, taking Martina with her, my mother-in-law returns to her nursing home, and even Maria Vica and her mother leave, their month’s vacation over. We wander about the empty house, prey to that peculiar listlessness that comes toward the end of summer, when unaccomplished summer projects pile up against the anticipation of autumn, holding the scales immobile. The children dawdle over summer homework assignments, lost in speculation about new books and new classmates, while I contemplate lists of all that remains to be done before our return to Palermo, the canning, the painting, and the repairing that have been put off from guest to guest. My slips of paper are lifted and shuffled aimlessly by the scirocco that blows in, dust laden, from the south, canceling with one hot breath the two weeks of cool weather that have revived us. Just before the sun sets, bruising the sky an angry yellow, the wind drops and the air grows close and heavy, and as we go to bed the sky crackles and booms in a distant fireworks display. I lie in the dark, listening to the rolls of thunder and watching the lightning throw bars of light through the shutters and across the ceiling. The interval between flash and roll grows shorter and shorter as the voice of the thunder deepens; then the storm passes on, fades and distends, leaving a heavy silence. A wind, mysterious and voiceless, rustles the tired paper of the almond leaves, fanning them in a steady patter, gentle and soporific, which pushes me further and further toward sleep. Just before I sink over the edge, I recognize the sound, almost forgotten, of raindrops.

  The garden is quite literally sparkling clean the next morning, beaded with the rainwater that rests like drops of quicksilver in the furry centers of the geranium leaves and in the purple throats of the petunias. The smell of damp earth mingles with the perfume of the lavender, the thyme, and the rosemary, and the plants appear to quiver with new energy as the moisture courses up their stems and spreads out across their leaves. This is the precious water of August—Acqua d’austu, Ogghiu, meli e mustu—which will bring oil, apples, and must, swelling the olives and the grapes and, as far as Bosco is concerned, increasing the sorb apples.

  It reaches our subconscious roots as well, sending us out early and eagerly into the cool morning air that caresses the skin like a linen sheet, laundered and sun dried and smelling of lavender. If the air is clean, the ground is muddy: this gentle draught was nowhere a surfeit such as would leave puddles on the road, but the plowed earth clings in heavy lumps to our shoes as Natalia and I tramp along the rows of the tomato patch, picking the tomatoes for the sauce we are going to make today.

  Making the year’s supply of tomato sauce is the most important domestic ritual in the Sicilian summer, and each housewife believes in the efficacy of her favorite method with fervor equal to that with which she believes in the efficacy of her favorite saint. There are basically two rival schools of thought: the one favors passing the scalded tomatoes through the tomato mill, then sterilizing the filled and capped bottles in boiling water; the other prefers to heat up the empty bottles, fill them with boiling hot tornato sauce, and then lay them in a nest of woolen blankets, so well wrapped that they will take several days to cool off. Then of course there are many minor variations: some prefer to add a few onions to the cooking tomatoes, some don’t cook the tomatoes at all but pass them raw, still others disdain the widespread habit of putting a sprig of sweet basil in each bottle.

  Preparations begin early, in the spring actually, when cracked pots and old five-kilo salted sardine tins are seeded with the tiny-leafed basil that is preferred for sauce making; these are assiduously watered into big and brilliant balls of green. Then crate after crate of empty beer and soda bottles are lifted down from the lofts, rinsed out, and left upside down to drain in the July sun for at least two weeks, so as to eliminate the least bead of moisture. At the same time the Wednesday morning street market at Alcamo is crowded with outsize gas burners, huge aluminum and copper cauldrons, gigantic ladles and mammoth colanders.

  Sauce making is no small undertaking for the average peasant family, which in one day will put up anywhere from 50 to 150 bottles, or even more if there are married daughters to be supplied, or the padrone to be served. In fact, when I was first in Sicily, the little sauce that sufficed for my in-laws’ needs came from bottles prepared by the Pirrellos or by Peppino. (One year the bottles Peppino left in homage in the stairway behind the front door at Alcamo exploded, painting the entire staircase red, and I have often wondered whether it was chance or, like the green fruit, one more act of guerrilla warfare.)

  It was therefore not my mother-in-law who initiated me into the rites of sauce making, but Teresa Vivona, Turiddu’s wife. When we were first at Bosco, Turiddu had not yet inherited the piece of irrigated land where he now grows their family vegetables, and each summer he would plant tomatoes and other vegetables at Bosco, for their use and ours. As soon as Turiddu announced that a sufficient number of tomatoes had properly ripened, the whole family would arrive at dawn to do the picking and then, when ten or fifteen crates were filled, we would set up our assembly line in the shade of the almond trees. Teresa, Franca, and I hosed down the tomatoes in large plastic buckets and plucked out the star-shaped green stems, which have a bitter taste, while Turiddu ignited the fire under our big copper cauldron, its bottom black from years of smoke, and spread out on old iron bed trestles the enormous sieve he had made by wiring thin young canes together. Gino, Felice, and Francesco carried out tables and strung an extension cord from the kitchen for the electric tomato mill that a thoughtful friend had once given me.

  And there we worked, across the morning and on into the early afternoon, stirring and ladling and passing and capping. Teresa was in charge of the cauldron, filling it with tomatoes while she stirred until it was time to ladle them out onto the canes, so as to drain off the incredible amounts of watery juice that these plants had managed to suck up from the dry soil. Felice, still young enough then to be fascinated by any form of machine, operated the mill and sent the thick red sauce cascading into a plastic bucket, while I spooned it into the bottles into which Franca had first poked a sprig of basil. Turiddu and Gino capped the bottles and lowered them gently into the big oil drum, each layer covered with straw to keep them from cracking against each other in the boiling water. Francesco and Natalia ran errands for as long as their interest held out, then disappeared, not to show themselves again until all the bottles, filled with sauce and covered with heating water, lay in the oil drum and the last remaining sauce was being ladled out onto big plates of pasta. Our meal was interrupted by frequent trips out to shove the flame-consumed logs farther under the drum and to see if the boiling point had been reached and we could begin to keep an eye on our watches.

  After forty-five minutes of boiling the fire was scraped away and the Vivonas went home, leaving the drum and its contents to cool off in the night air. The next day Turiddu came back to lift out the bottles and wipe away the bits of wet straw that clung to them, separating the green glass of mine, formerly filled with my mother-in-law’s mineral water, from the sturdier brown of the beer and gassosa bottles that Teresa preferred, and I would carry mine into the house and set them in rows on the shelves of the palmento, where I could give them a proud glance each time I passed.

  I must confess that sauce making lost much of its appeal when the Vivonas no longer came to share it with me, and after two years of solitary efforts that left me flattened for three days afterward, I proceeded to put aside my cornucopia complex and make a hardhearted estimate of our real consumption. It is thus without too much grief that Natalia and I pick, cook, and pass three crates of tomatoes this morning, and when Tonino and Francesco return from commitments elsewhere to do their part, they find some twenty-five bottles of sauce, an adequate yet unostentatious supply, waiting to be loaded into the drum and boiled.

  Such self-contr
ol is fleeting, however, and the energy saved in cutting down on sauce is consumed in the days that follow in relishes and chutneys and jams and pickles. Figs must be opened like clams and put out to dry in the sun, or pickled in sugar and vinegar; the green tomatoes, whose skins, unaccustomed to all the water that the rain has brought, would split if left to ripen on the vine, must be chopped up in relish and chutney; the purple plums that are bending down the branches of the two young trees in the valley must be boiled into jam; and then there is the pickled watermelon rind, and the bread-and-butter pickles, and the India relish, and all the other American delights to which I rashly have introduced my family and which they now claim they cannot live without. And while one hand stirs the pot, the other must wield a paintbrush, since the winter rains and summer sun that have forged all this bounty have also wreaked havoc on the varnish of the shutters, the doors, and the windows. Tradition decrees that wood is my province, while Tonino must keep the rust at bay on anything—like the outer doors and the latticed grills on the downstairs windows—that is made of iron.

  And two hands are not enough, to judge by the neglected flower beds, the letters to be written, the mending untouched, the cartons of books that I might as well have left in Palermo. The list of summer tasks and projects is potentially endless, but one entry, still unaccomplished as the end of August approaches, threatens to discolor everything else with the murky shade of resentment—the trip we had planned to take. Each summer the roots we have put down at Bosco ensnare us further, as each innovation means an appointment with planting or harvesting that we cannot miss, and through the years our travels have shrunk from a month in Burgundy to two weeks in Puglia to five days in Syracuse, and last year none at all.