“That load wasn’t full. You shouldn’t let yourself be confounded by a couple of buckets of grapes!”
We must wait for the Vivona family to finish harvesting their own grapes before continuing with ours, and just as well, since we ache in every muscle. Only the picking is suspended, however: Nino Di Giovanni has begun to harvest the vineyards that lie beyond the northern limit of our property and to bring the grapes to us for pressing. When Tonino first agreed, three or four years ago, to buy Zu Nino’s grapes, it didn’t occur to him to reflect that if this old contadino was the only person in the neighborhood who didn’t confer his grapes to a cooperative, it was probably because he was a very suspicious person. And in fact the weighing of Zu Nino’s grapes and the measuring of their sugar content has become a nightmare, a long and complicated ceremony of adjusting to a hairbreadth the brass counterweights on the big scales brought up from the olive press at Finocchio, of peering through, above, and without spectacles at the level of the must meter, of checking and rechecking the figures entered into the notebook. It was worse the first few years, when U Prufissuri delivered the grapes in four big canvas bags slung from the packsaddle of his mule, which meant a constant stream of small loads to be processed and argued over; things have speeded up since the mule retired, thanks to the hired services and tractor of Tanu, the next farmer down the hill. Tanu also lightens the atmosphere, since despite a firm and outspoken nostalgia for Mussolini, he is a red-cheeked, round-bellied, cheerful soul, who jollies Nino Di Giovanni along with good-natured chaffing, startles Francesco by shouting bits of Dante at him across the winepress, and informs me happily that with the help of the Encyclopedia of World History, which he is buying and reading in weekly installments, he has come to realize that “this damn democracy” is more the fault of the British than of the Americans. He smiles at me benignly, expecting me to be much relieved by this absolution.
At the end of the week the Vivonas arrive, driving out from Alcamo before dawn as the children and I are preparing to leave for Palermo. Turiddu at the wheel of our tractor will alternate with Tanu and his tractor as the grapes are poured into the mouth of the press and the foaming must flows into the big cement tank sunk into the cantina floor, ready to be measured and pumped into the casks and the cisterns. The vendemmia proper is under way.
When I call up the vendemmia in the mirror of my mind, all normal perspective is reversed: the must of the distant past flows in a colorful and turbulent river of vast proportions that dwindles and fades as it nears the present, shrunken by efficiency and machinery into a paltry trickle. Farthest in the background, but brightest, are vicarious images, the vendemmia of Tonino’s childhood, when his whole family came up from Alcamo Marina in cart and gig for a harvest that lasted more than a month. There were no cooperative wineries then, and Don Turiddu bought up most of the contrada’s grapes, which arrived in heavy, open-topped wooden casks, packed in along the dirt tracks on muleback, a steady stream of dark and long-legged Sicilian mules delivering their burden of grapes to the palmenti. There were seven of these pressing bins in all: two stood under the porch roof in the courtyard, two in the cantina that is now our living room, one that now belongs to the Blundas, one in the corner of the remaining cantina, and finally the palmento padronale, the biggest bin, with the beautifully carved stone spout, which still stands in our kitchen and was reserved for the Simeti grapes.
Each palmento was manned by three people, two to load and empty the bin and one to do the treading. When the mule came to a stop next to the palmento, the driver—a boy if the beast was steady and the track good—would lean down from his perch high on the wooden packsaddle, untie the ropes slung around the tall casks of grapes, and unhook their rope handles from the saddle as the two loaders, in concerted effort, hoisted them free and dumped the tightly packed grapes, their juices already flowing, into the palmento. With a few strokes of a wooden paddle the treader would heap the grapes into the center of the palmento and then, grasping the rope that hung from the ceiling, he began his dance, stomping the pile of grapes down into a thick, flat carpet, circling round to kick them toward the center again, then flattening them out once more with his heavy spiked boots. Over and over he stomped and kicked until the greater part of the must had run out the stone spout and into a large wooden vat that stood on the floor in front of the palmento. What remained of pulp and skins, seeds and stems, was shoveled into a corner to make room for a new load, and while the treader began his dance anew, the loaders would pack the skins into the presses. Each palmento had its own press, usually an iron torchio, a three-legged iron basin with a big iron screw standing in the middle, around which a cage of wooden slats fitted. When the cage was filled with grape skins, a heavy wooden cover was lowered, pressed down by an iron crosspiece that rotated down the screw until it could be tightened no further. Then the press was opened so that the compacted grape skins could be broken up and pressed all over again.
The iron torchio was modern compared with the stringitore that served the palmento in the cantina, an enormous wooden screw supported by a heavy wooden structure and turned by a beam more than ten inches in diameter. The must here ran down from tightly woven rush sacks filled with grapes and flowed along the narrow circular trough carved into the big stone base, the one that now serves us as a seat, surrounded by iris in the garden.
When the must spilling from the palmento and trickling from the presses had filled the vat, the measuring began. “In nome di Dio—in the name of God—one, two …,” the measurers filled the quartare, flat-bottomed, double-handed copper jugs in the shape of Greek amphorae and sealed with the king’s crest to prove their measure was exact, “three … four … five …,” the must was scooped up in the quartara and emptied into another vat. Eight quartare made a salma, five salme made a botte (about 580 liters). “Fifteen … sixteen … sixteen and one … eighteen …” The man who measured the must took care to avoid the unlucky number, and when he arrived at forty, shouted out the botte to the person who was keeping the records, a member of the family if not Don Turiddu himself. The farmer who had produced the grapes would run across from the vat to watch as a notch was cut across a piece of cane that had been split in half, then tied back together again. At the end, when the measuring was finished and the cane untied, the notches could be counted on both halves, the one that Don Turiddu kept and the half he gave to the producer, a receipt less perishable than paper, and easily legible even for the illiterate.
The must, once measured, was poured into a central vat from where it was pumped into the huge casks lining each side of the two cantine in double rows. Tonino, when he wasn’t carrying messages and running errands, loved to take a turn at pumping, pushing the heavy iron handle back and forth like a road mender on the railway. Everyone worked, even Mrs. Simeti, who supervised the cooking of meals for the harvesters in the Simeti vineyards, and waited, inflexible, at the end of a long day for the women to come in from the fields and join her in saying the rosary in the chapel.
For more than a month the mules came and went. When the casks were full and the first seething stage of fermentation had passed, the family moved back to Alcamo, leaving the young wine to mature quietly until it was ready for sale. Then the mules would come again, this time harnessed to carts that were loaded with big barrels. It took twenty carts to empty one cask and transport the contents to Balestrate to be loaded on ships and carried to the distilleries of the north.
Small wonder, then, that despite all the worry and exhaustion Tonino loves the vendemmia so, the present rewards of his own labor informed as they must be in his mind by all the excitement and animation of his childhood memories. Even I am haunted, come September, by the memory of my first vendemmia. It was the year of Stefano’s death, when we found ourselves unexpectedly running the farm. Tonino’s agricultural experience was limited to classroom theory and memories from his youth, while I, who had been to Bosco only once or twice and had never even seen the vendemmia, was suddenly floundering in th
e midst of it, lodged in a falling-down farmhouse with no light or running water where I was expected to cook for a crew of fifteen Sicilian peasants.
I soon learned that the basic rule of such a cuisine is to keep it runny. Whatever I cooked had to be swimming in the sauce or juice or dressing that was required to wash down the thirty kilo loaves of bread that disappeared every day. The tomato, onion, and tuna fish salad that made up the 10:00 a.m. breakfast (picking started at sunrise) floated in very watery vinegar and oil, and the stewed eggplant and potatoes or the egg fritters we ate about 2:00 p.m. were awash in tomato sauce. More sauce had to be prepared for the evening pasta, which was followed by grilled sardines or sausages, or by cheese and salame.
Turi drove in and out from Alcamo, bringing pillowcases bulging with bread and the meager rations with which the elder generation thought it fit to feed the peasants, plus whatever we decided he should buy on the sly. Tonino and I slept at Bosco on cots set up on the second floor, which even then, before the earthquake, trembled at every step. Our sleep was troubled by the hoots of a large beige owl that had flown through a broken window and built a nest in an attic, and we awoke each dawn to find the blankets covered with a light sprinkling of plaster dust.
I was out early, picking the tomatoes for the breakfast salad or for the sauce, peeling potatoes, or chopping onions. The grapes were brought up by muleback to the house and then trucked to a cooperative. The muledriver, who was new to our employ and thrilled me when he addressed Tonino as “Don Antonio,” would once a day exchange the grape casks for barrels that he took down to fill at the well, bringing back the water with which I was to cook and wash the dishes.
In my spare moments, which were not many, I would join the harvesters in the vineyards, to pick a grape or two inexpertly and listen to their cheerful banter. What little I then understood of the Sicilian dialect was still much more than they imagined, so my presence in no way inhibited them. Indeed, I was amazed and amused to find that the high price the Sicilians set on virginity was strictly a physical matter: however pure the honor of the young girls in the crew may have been, their chatter was as earthy and unrestricted as that of the men.
Although the setting often seemed unreal to me, the hard work was tangible enough. I was embarrassed to present the food my in-laws sent out and upset by the harvesters’ complaints. (I now realize that they probably felt obliged to complain, since they all belonged to Peppino’s family.) The stove, a rickety, three-burner affair attached to a canister of bottled gas, was balanced on planks set over two oil drums filled with dry fava beans, and I reached my nadir when Turi, in a hurry to get some beans for the mule, upset the stove: the eggplant stew ended upside down on the dirt floor, a total loss, just as fifteen famished harvesters were gathering. I nearly wept.
But I loved the evenings, when a long table and roughhewn benches were set up in the courtyard, and we ate in the warm glow of oil lanterns. I would look around at the creased and sunburned peasant faces, the women with kerchiefs still tied behind their heads, the men keeping their caps on against the evening damp, and I would listen to them teasing and laughing and making innumerable jokes that had to do with the shape of the sausages. I was so ignorant then that my only terms of reference were Italian movies, and I was proud to think that I had made, and even with a certain grace, the jump from Radcliffe to Bitter Rice.
Even that first vendemmia of mine has dwindled beyond any recognition: the old exhausted vineyards have been replaced by only half as many new ones, electricity powers the press and pumps the must into shiny steel cisterns, and the Vivonas have long since taken over from Peppino and his family. Their role, too, has shrunk: in the early years the whole Vivona family moved out to sleep in the guesthouse, and I cooked for everyone, whereas now they drive out with baskets of food each morning, and most days only Turiddu, Teresa, and Franca come. The boys participate only on Sundays, giving up their holiday reluctantly and only to spare their mother’s health, not, as in former times, because the family would have to live for months on what it could earn during the vendemmia. As Felice unloads the grapes from the tractor into the press, he announces to Francesco that he has entered a competition for a job as a municipal street sweeper—900,000 a month and you only work mornings!
My own part in the vendemmia has altered as well, reduced to a race to get the children to school, the meals on the table, the sticky, must-stained jeans and T-shirts into the washing machine and out onto the line, the books and clothes packed up for our reentry to city life. It seems ironic and unfair that at the very culmination of a year’s work and hopes, my part should be reduced to tertiary service, that I should be excluded from production and its satisfactions. Resentment feeds on my tiredness and mingles with the guilt I feel about the hours of respite I steal each morning, as if, my marriage to Bosco in crisis, I were allowing myself to be seduced into illicit trysts with the books and papers in my Palermo study.
Not that I am far from the country even there: as I sit at my desk I can hear from time to time the porter moving among the pyramids of demijohns in the next room, dispensing wine to our clients, and as my mind wanders or weighs a sentence, I look out the window to a thin wedge of earth, a paring of old agriculture left by the city’s advance, in which a few orange trees grow, a medlar, and one much taller almond, together with grass, weeds, and kittens. The almond leaves are limp, ready to let go, and I can just discern the tiny buds on the oranges and the medlar, which will blossom at the end of October. Behind the trees a thick mat of ivy, October’s plant, covers a high stone wall that cuts off my view of the city, delimits my place in it, confines my role in it to solitary activity of the mind.
I pass the hours that the children are in school in reading about the Eleusinia and the Thesmophoria, the great festivals with which the Greeks honored Demeter at the close of the agricultural year.
The Mysteries celebrated in late September at Eleusis, where Demeter first paused in her frantic search for her daughter, were so solemnly surrounded by secrecy that scholars today can only surmise what took place within the sacred precincts of the temple among the initiates who came in procession from Athens and from all over the Hellenic world. I find a dozen accounts, each different, of how Demeter, goddess of grain, her daughter Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, and Dionysus, god of wine, come together in what the Homeric Hymn calls “the awful mysteries,” which appear to have enacted the descent of Persephone into Hades and the holy marriage of Demeter (some say to Dionysus, some say to Zeus), and to have culminated in a moment of mystic contemplation as an ear of ripe wheat, promise of immortality, was held aloft before the celebrants.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were followed, in October, by the Thesmophoria, about which we have more detailed documents. In their original form, these were rites reserved to the legitimate wives of Athenian citizens who came together for three days of fasting and chastity, to mourn the departure of Persephone and the burial of the seed under the earth. A pig was sacrificed and the pieces thrown together with pine cones into the sacred vaults of Demeter, where the rotting flesh of the sacrifice fertilized the seed, thus insuring the fertility of the fields and of the family.
It is not merely fortuitous that the followers of Demeter Thesmophora take the ritual name of Melisse (Bees), of the insect that symbolizes the conjugal virtues. Emblematic of domesticity, faithful to her husband and mother to legitimate sons, the bee reigns sovereign over the intimate space of the hearth, attending to the conjugal patrimony and never failing to maintain an attitude of reserve and modesty: to her duties as a wife are thus added those of sober and hardworking supervisor, alien to the frivolous chatter in which her sex is wont to indulge.
Marcel Detienne, in M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant,
La cucina del sacrificio in terra greca
Is this where Demeter would lead me? Have I fled definition all these years only to end up as a bee? Revolted by the idea, yet threatened by my revulsion, I thrash about like an uneasy sleeper, tuggi
ng at the constrictions of the identity I have constructed for myself here, only to pull it tight at the least breath of change, as though my one great leap of twenty years ago had exhausted all my capacity for elasticity and adaptation.
The children burst in upon my musings and fill the drive back to Bosco with talk of school. Once more I am forced to ponder the ironic fact that the school system should have been at once the channel through which I have most actively participated in Sicilian society and the source of my most bitter regrets about living here. The decision to retire to Bosco and dabble in Demeter is mine to make if I will, but what freedom of choice will Francesco and Natalia have in the third millennium with five years of Latin and Greek and nary a glance at a computer?
We drive over the crest of the hill and draw up to the cantina to find Turiddu coming toward us in the tractor, his trailer load of grapes bouncing and jiggling behind him, and it occurs to me, a last thought before I turn my mind to more prosaic matters like pasta, that this year mine is a harvest of mixed blessings.
Epilogue—October 1983
The farmers’ work returns to them full circle—
Their year revolves, retracing its own steps.
Virgil, The Georgics
The last day of the vendemmia is mine. The children have gone off to Palermo with Tonino, whose presence is required at the university, leaving kitchen and cantina in my charge. It is my last day at Bosco as well, and the silence of the big house echoes with the comfortable sadness of endings, inventories, and preparations, for tomorrow we shall drive into Palermo to stay. Tonino wants to remain at Bosco for another day or two, to put the cantina to rights and to mother the fermenting must, but the children and I will cease our commuting, returning to Bosco only for the weekend. The city awaits us, winter clothes and wool blankets, early persimmons glowing orange amidst pyramids of bright green cauliflowers, smoking tripods of chestnuts roasting at the curbstones, bloodshed and decaying beauty. In the department stores September’s display of school supplies has already given way to toys for I Morti, and any day now the bar on the corner will set out the first trays of marzipan fruit and the pupi di cena glistening in their sugary colors. But despite the attempts of commerce to accelerate the seasons, the summer will die reluctantly, the heat will linger into autumn, and eager adolescents will wilt under the noonday sun, perspiring heavily in their newly purchased sweaters and boots.
On Persephone's Island Page 34