Why, I wonder as the pickles bubble on the stove, should I have settled on an image of myself as Earth Mother? Why not a tanned and blasé habitué of Sicilian beaches? Or better still, an amateur archeologist, assiduous visitor and chronicler of excavations throughout the island? How is it possible that in twenty years I have managed to go six times to America and only twice to Syracuse?
I think of Syracuse as I spoon the relish into sterilized jars, and of the trip we took two years ago with Gabriella and her family; I think of wandering about Ortygia, the tiny peninsula that has always been the kernel of the city, when it expanded under the Greeks for miles inland, and then when it shrank back again after the barbarian invasions. Until the last war Syracuse ended at the isthmus connecting Ortygia to the mainland, confined to a handful of palaces and churches and dominated by the cathedral, which hides a Doric temple behind its baroque facade. Now the city is expanding once more. Broad streets and modern residential neighborhoods fan out from the isthmus to embrace the early Christian catacombs and the classical monuments of the archeological park, the Greek theaters, the altars, the tombs and sanctuaries, and the Latomie, the quarries that served as prisons for the defeated Athenian army after their fleet was trapped and destroyed in the Syracuse harbor in 413 B.C.
Those who were in the stone quarries were treated badly by the Syracusans at first. There were many of them, and they were crowded together in a narrow pit, where, since there was no roof over their heads, they suffered first from the heat of the sun and the closeness of the air; and then, in contrast, came the cold autumnal nights, and the change in temperature brought disease among them. Lack of space made it necessary for them to do everything on the same spot; and besides there were the bodies all heaped together on top of one another of those who had died from their wounds or from the change of temperature or other such causes, so that the smell was insupportable. At the same time they suffered from hunger and from thirst. During eight months the daily allowance for each man was half a pint of water and a pint of corn. In fact they suffered everything which one could imagine might be suffered by men imprisoned in such a place. For about ten weeks they lived like this all together; then, with the exceptions of the Athenians and any Greeks from Italy or Sicily who had joined the expedition, the rest were sold as slaves. It is hard to give the exact figure, but the whole number of prisoners must have been at least 7,000.
This was the greatest Hellenic action that took place during this war, and, in my opinion, the greatest action that we know of in Hellenic history—to the victors the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished the most calamitous of defeats; for they were utterly and entirely defeated; their sufferings were on an enormous scale; their losses were, as they say, total; army, navy, everything was destroyed, and, out of many, only few returned. So ended the events in Sicily.
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
The Latomie are cool and mysterious now, even on an August afternoon, their sheer stone walls throwing shadows on the orange trees and bougainvillea vines that flourish where once the Athenian soldiers huddled in the dust.
The dirty pots and pans sing out my anger at such scanty acquaintance with these places, and as I plunge my hands into the dishwater, I remember diving into the icy pool at the source of the Ciane. Now a river that flows five kilometers to the sea through a dense thicket of yellow flags and wild papyrus, Ciane was once a handmaiden of Persephone who tried to save her mistress from the Lord of the Underworld, and was thus metamorphosed in punishment.
But foremost in my mind is the day we spent at Pantàlica, the prehistoric necropolis carved into the middle of the Ibleian Mountains that lie inland from Syracuse. Barren and stony, these hills are bleached and desolate under the August sun, and it is difficult to imagine what can grow in the fields carefully marked off by stone walls, so thick is the litter of remaining stones, so sparse the covering of thistles and dried grass. We drove past miles of these blistered, stone-ringed fields before reaching the narrow, winding valley that the second of Syracuse’s rivers, the Anapo, had cut deep into the hills. The sides of the valley that fall in steep cliffs from the barren crest down to the river bottom are honeycombed with tombs, low rectangular doorways leading into small, smooth-walled chambers carved out of the living rock. The precision with which the tombs have been cut and finished belies the difficulties inherent in their position and the crudeness of the stone tools that were employed.
The inestimable labour with which each and all of the thousands of graves were cut; the devotion which, through hundreds of years, was spent in providing the dead with durable abodes such as the living denied themselves; the severe beauty and power of the rock: invest the scene with an aura of sublime solemnity. Death resides in this immense stone; at the same time it is vibrating with the potency of unquenchable life. Enter any one of the graves; you feel, as nowhere else, that you are in the womb of the Great Mother, from which the dead will be reborn, mysteriously, for another span in the light above.
Günther Zuntz, Persephone: Three Essays
on Religion and Thought in Magna Graecia
More than five thousand of these tombs riddle the valley walls, the earliest going back to the thirteenth century B.C., when invaders from the mainland pushed the coast-dwellers inland. The corresponding city of the living on the plain above the cliffs underwent sporadic periods of growth as the invaders in turn fled the arrival of the Greek colonists, was abandoned for over a thousand years, then came to life again at the beginning of the fifth century A.D. when barbarian raids sent the citizens of Syracuse, then the western capital of the Byzantine Empire, inland toward Pantàlica, where they took refuge in the tombs of their forefathers. We follow the narrow paths that cling to the cliffside and wander through the Byzantine houses and chapels, carved from adjacent tombs that were enlarged and joined to form split-level homes, the large smooth-walled rooms abundantly equipped with niches and alcoves and built-in shelves, the doorways widened into picture windows offering a spectacular view across the valley, and at the threshold a sudden drop to the river below.
All around us is a desert of rock and thistle and dust; below us the floor of the valley is hidden under an inviting canopy of green. The roadbed of a narrow-gauge railway that once passed here still threads its way beside the river, and we can see it emerge from the trees in several places, the tracks and ties removed to leave a perfectly good dirt road that we have been told is well worth following in the car. It takes a good many false turns before we find the right track onto the railway bed, and our sense of adventure grows when we discover that the track tunnels through the rock at times, tiny tunnels for toy trains that barely allow the Simeti van to scrape through. Our friends go first in their car, and it is they who find the place to stop for lunch, a little path that descends to a clearing at the river’s edge.
The path leads us down into a different world and a different climate from that which hovers above us on the cliffs, shimmering white and straw-colored in the heat. Here the spring-fed waters of the Anapo, still icy and clear so near their source, refrigerate the air, which trills with birdsong and rustles as the breeze stirs the leaves of the Oriental plane trees that line the banks, brought here by the Greeks, no doubt, who in turn had learned their love of the shade-giving plane from the Persians (Xerxes hung the plane trees of Lydia with golden ornaments as a tribute to their beauty). Here their shade darkens the water as it runs from one shallow pool into the next, jumping down with a silvery splash across moss-covered stones and tugging at the twigs and the tufts of maidenhair fern that cling to the river’s edge. Capelvenere, the Italians call it, Venus’s hair as she arose from the sea, with a silver sheen underwater, but completely dry as it emerges. The surface of the pools breaks into faint ripples under the darting dance of the water skates, and tiny dragonflies hover, their double wings opaquely black in the shadow, shimmering with iridescence when they catch the light. Farther downstream from where we sit the trees pull back to reveal the sunbaked c
liffs, the thirsty mouths of the tombs, and the drone of the cicadas in the thistles, suspended like Tantalus over the liquid song of the river, which here flows gurgling and sparkling over a wide and cobbled bottom. Some cows pasture leisurely in the thick beds of wild mint that grow on the banks, each cropping of their jaws releasing a wave of mint’s sweet smell.
Upstream the trees grow closer and the shade is darker; the current swiftens in the narrow channel, and eels, carp, and trout lurk in the shadows of the rocks or flash over small waterfalls. The sound of laughter rings out above the music of the water, and the playing of a flute: possibly the young couple in the Citroën that passed just as we were parking?
O cicada, drunken with drops of dew, you sing your country music in solitary places; you sit on the topmost leaf beating out the sound of a lyre with your rough legs on your sun-darkened body.
Now sing some new gay song to the tree-nymphs, shrill out an answer to Pan, so that I may escape from love and sink into noontide sleep as I lie beneath this shady plane-tree.
Meleager, “The Cicada,” in The Poems of Meleager of Gadara
Up with Pan and down with Demeter! Despite such an imposing rallying cry, the most I obtain is one day off, a Saturday we spend with friends in Mazzara del Vallo, the biggest fishing port in Italy, which lies below Tràpani and Marsala. Despite its position on the western coast, this area has always been more Levantine, more Arab than Greek, ever since the Phoenicians set sail from Tyre to colonize the island of Mothya just off the coast of Marsala. In the sixth century B.C. Mothya became a military base for the Carthaginians and a thriving commercial center until it was destroyed by Dionysus of Syracuse, and it was at Mazzara itself that the Arab invasion of Sicily began. The waters around Marsala, and particularly the mud-bottomed lagoon surrounding Mothya, are giving up one treasure after another into the hands of the underwater archeologists: a Punic warship still bearing on its prow the olive branch placed there in vain to bring good fortune at its launching; the fifth-century Greek statue that some say represents an Auriga, others a Phoenician judge; and still more ships and more amphorae, located but yet to be recovered.
But Pan is not interested in the Levantine. Our patron for the day, he moves us, when we have finished swimming in waters chilled by Atlantic currents from Gibraltar and dining on Mazzara’s famous fish, into going eastward, to the very edge of Greek Sicily, to see the Cave di Cusa, the quarries from which the stonemasons of Selinunte cut the mammoth columns for their outsize temples. The quarries, dug no deeper than ten or twelve feet into the gray stone, were abandoned abruptly, probably during the siege with which the Carthaginian army responded in 409 B.C. to Segesta’s request for aid against her rival city.
It is not difficult to imagine the panic that the news of the Carthaginian landing brought to the quarries: the masons flinging down the compasses with which they traced a circle some twelve feet wide upon the bedrock; the slaves dropping the chisels and hammers with which they chipped away the surrounding stone; the drivers unharnessing the oxen from the sledges loaded with the finished drums ready for the slow trip to Selinunte. The sledges have long since rotted, toppling their burdens onto the ground where they lie askew, indicating the road along which the terrified slaves took flight, and no ladders lean against the drums that stand, a narrow chasm carved about them, still awaiting the final cut that should sever them from the earth. In the place of scaffolding the fig trees grow, and an enormous carob, split and flattened by lightning until its vast branches lie almost horizontal to the ground. Centuries of wind and rain have taken up the interrupted labor of the slaves, chiseling cracks and holes into the face of the stone, filling them with the seeds of the caper plants that trail long ropes of coin-shaped leaves and carving a refuge for the swallows that swoop and cry overhead.
All too short a day, it is as much distraction as we can now afford from our present concern, the grapes that hang in slowly ripening bunches on the vines. No greater hiatus is possible now; we too are suspended on a thin stem of tension, one eye on the weather, the other on the grapes, assessing the benefits of the recent rain, checking for signs of rot, estimating quantity and quality. Tonino comes home with a dreadful story about an acquaintance who has had fifteen acres of trellised vineyards sabotaged. The guy wires were cut so that the whole trellis collapsed, sagging down with all its burden of wire and post and vine, pressing the ripening grapes into the earth as the must trickled away in the dust.
Tonino is visibly shaken as he tells me, “I don’t think I could survive something like that.”
Chapter Eleven
That as the god inclines his noble head
In each direction, ripening vineyards grow,
Hollow vales and deepened glades fill out.
We shall, then, sing, in native songs, our debt
Of praise to Bacchus, bring on cakes and plates
And lead in by the horns a sacred goat
To stand beside the altar, and proceed
To roast his fertile flesh on hazel spits.
Virgil, The Georgics
The ripening grapes on September’s sacred vines are not the only sign, as the month begins, of autumn’s approach. The rain of ten days has given birth to grass, thin tentative blades poking up sparsely through the dried gray mat of last winter’s lawn. The rose hips are reddening now, together with the hawthorn berries and the yellow sorb apples. If I need Natalia, I must shout down the road, for chances are that she is making a sly visit to Nino Di Giovanni’s azzeruola. The azarole, also called the Mediterranean medlar, is a variety of hawthorn that bears fruit the size of crab apples, with waxy yellow skin and a sharp bittersweet taste that has the power to awaken memories. Sicilians who come to Bosco in September are always excited to find the azarole growing by the side of the road, recalling childhood feasts long since forgotten, while I, with no such memories of my own, am content to think that I am tasting fruit such as the Greeks must have eaten, intense and penetrating flavors undiluted by centuries of hybridizing.
The first days of September also bring us to Palermo for a foretaste of our imminent return to city life, when we participate in a torchlight procession in memory of General dalla Chiesa and his wife on the anniversary of their death. Tonino and Francesco abandon the cisterns they are scraping out just in time for us to drive over the mountains and join the crowd that is forming in the semidarkness of Via Carini, at the site of the ambush. This morning the authorities held the official commemoration, to which they neglected to invite the dalla Chiesa children, who have been very outspoken in claiming that the island’s politicians failed to support the general in his battle against the Mafia, thus allowing him to become an isolated and therefore easy target. This evening’s march is unofficial, promoted by a committee of concerned citizens, and it is moving to see the simple but dignified informality with which the long line, headed by the three young dalla Chiesas, takes shape and heads for Via Libertà, then along Via Ruggiero Settimo and down to the prefecture. This is a strange march for Palermo: silence instead of slogans, the only banners the flames of the wax torches wavering in the darkness. Bystanders join in, walk a little way, drop out. According to the newspaper, some five thousand people participate, but from where we are, near the rear, it is impossible to see how far ahead the river of smoking light flows. We must be satisfied with noting the participants nearby, the familiar faces of the politically active Palermitani with whom we have marched a dozen times before mingling with people from the neighborhood or passersby who may never have walked behind a banner or felt before the need to give visible expression to their opinions.
There are some people marching here tonight whose politics and public records would appear to move them in the opposite direction. But their presence, although irritating and even painful, is interesting, since it is in the heterogeneity of this crowd and in the breakdown of old equilibriums that hope, if there is any, lies. There is much in the news these days to indicate the turbulence below the surface: Chinnici, the
magistrate who was murdered at the end of July, left a diary that is rumored to contain grave accusations about corruption and Mafia influence in the Palace of Justice, and another article claims that since the La Torre law went into effect a year ago, allowing the police to investigate the bank records of suspected mafiosi, some eight trillion lire have been withdrawn from the island’s bank accounts.
The turbulence is tangible in the streets of the city: the arrogant roar of the motorcycles and the angry honking of the cars, Palermo’s customary music, are punctuated by the scream of sirens, as the magistrates rush from home to office and back, their escorts in bulletproof helmets poking their pistols from the squad car windows. For the first time in their history, the Palermitani are respecting No Parking signs, the ones that have appeared on both sides of the block in front of the buildings where these judges live. The siege will grow tighter before it lifts, but so far the city manages to take it in its stride. Pam asks the wife of one of the judges how she can stand a life in which her husband’s every move is accompanied by armed escorts.
“You get used to it,” she answers. “Appena sento le sirene, calo la pasta—As soon as I hear the sirens, I put the pasta on to boil.”
Francesco disappears ahead of us, glad for the chance to meet up with city friends; Tonino, Natalia, and I march together, find ourselves walking next to friends, falling behind in the midst of strangers, pointing out acquaintances and trying to put names to familiar faces. As I walk along I count upon my fingers: for the dam on the Belice River, for the nature reserve, for women’s lib, against the Mafia, for better schools, against the missiles at Comiso. The best I seem able to do in Sicily is stand up and be counted, remaining—despite the ephemeral solidarity of marching in a crowd—a foreigner, with a useless faggot of notions and skills over my shoulder, tonight incarnate in the box of candles I stuck in my purse as we left Bosco, knowing from past experience that the organizers of such processions never provide enough torches to go around. And in fact at least half of the marchers are torchless, but it appears unthinkable that one should bring one’s own. It occurs to me that if this were America as I remember it, the procession would be lit by torches and candles of every size and shape, and that this is a significant difference. Yet I am wrong, I realize, to think that with my candles and my Americanness I am set apart: possibly I can be no more Sicilian than I am when I march in one of these contemporary processions, these secularized and urbanized versions of the festa, since, as Sciascia says in La corda pazza, “it is only at the festa that the Sicilian emerges from his condition of man alone … to find himself part of an order, a class, a city.”
On Persephone's Island Page 32