The seasons overlap at Bosco as well. Close to the ground summer is more lush than ever, a last, prolific, rain-encouraged flowering before the petunias and the marigolds disappear under the rising tide of grass and wood sorrel, but this morning the sky above the flower beds is wintry. The tramontana has chased summer southward for the moment at least, blowing dark clouds from the north and sending the mercury plummeting. Yesterday’s T-shirt is not enough, and I go back upstairs several times to search for additional layers, for stockings and a heavy sweater, and set split peas to cooking on the back of the stove, in answer to a first autumnal craving for hot soup.
Against the gray clouds, the quince bushes rock and sway with each gust of wind, their branches bent into giant wickets by the weight of the fuzzy-skinned fruit slowly ripening toward yellow, and the thicket of musk roses waves its bright red rose hips at me. I wave back lightheartedly: if the quinces are a reminder of work to come, two years of pricking my fingers to harvest the rose hips, of picking out their bristling centers and cooking them, only to end up with half a jar of jelly, was enough for me. “You are where I draw the line!” I answer to their greeting.
The wild roses on the upper road are also heavy with hips, I noticed yesterday as I drove along, and the season has been generous to the hawthorn, the smilax, and the lentisk, which are thick with all sizes and shades of red berries awaiting our last, late, Christmas harvest. The courtyard is lit by the numinous glow of pomegranates, the first two fruits of my gift from the goddess. Sprung from a single stem and swollen with seed, their skin is deep scarlet and ready to split, but I hesitate to pick them, aware that I have no adequate altar on which to offer them.
Heedless of this autumnal scene, the wild lilies have flowered for the first time since Turiddu dug up the bulbs from the Blundas’ valley and planted them in the middle of the footpath. These lilies are seductive, almost funereal in their perfume, yet chaste and delicate in dress, pale pink chalices that are borne aloft, six or eight clustered on one long and slender-ankled stem. Unable to find them in any of my wildflower books, I call them lilies as Turiddu does, but suspect them of being a form of amaryllis and harbor a still deeper doubt: were it not hubris to think that Homer could be wrong, I would say that these were Persephone’s narcissuses, blooming alone and irresistible at the end of summer, a pale torch to light her way to the Underworld.
I am very arbitrary about how I draw my lines. Having put the rose hips beyond the pale, I spend the morning experimenting with mostarda instead of getting on with my packing. Mostarda is an etymological curiosity as well as a culinary one, a condiment originally made from must, which lent the name “mustard” to the yellow sauce we spread on hot dogs, and then in turn to the family of plants from whose seeds the modern mustard is derived.
What I am trying to make is the original mustard, a chewy sweet paste made of must and cornstarch, boiled down into a sticky muck into which currants, pine nuts, and almonds are stirred just before it is poured into molds to dry and harden. My mother-in-law used to make it every year and always had a piece ready for the grandchildren when we went to visit her at Finocchio during the olive harvest. Natalia doesn’t know what I am talking about when I say I want to make mostarda, but as soon as she comes home today and sniffs at the boiling must she will remember her grandmother’s mostarda spread out to dry on chairs, nose level for her then, in the sun at Finocchio.
Mrs. Simeti’s memory has been so eaten away by age that she does not remember ever making mostarda. My search for a recipe was finally and unexpectedly rewarded when we were going through drawers at Alcamo this summer and turned up a little notebook filled with a girlish version of my mother-in-law’s hand-writing. In the front pages she had carefully copied out the lyrics of her favorite songs, “The Soldier’s Farewell” and “The Barber of Seville,” while the second part is filled with recipes for pastries and puddings and other sweets. Some are transcribed in full, perhaps from ladies’ magazines, others are simple lists of ingredients and their quantities, but all are expressed in strange measures that no longer have a place in the metric Italian kitchen: two soldi’s worth of butter or milk, a “roll” of ricotta or of maiorca, fine white flour milled from a variety of wheat that was once specially grown for pastry making, sugar onze uno e mezzo. The recipe for mostarda calls for a quarto of must, which I am at a loss to interpret until Tonino thinks to ask Nino Di Giovanni. A quarto equals 750 grams.
As a first try I don’t do too badly. The mostarda has a cloudy gray color I later learn could have been avoided by clarifying the must with wood ashes (before next September I must discover the proper measure for wood ashes), and it won’t be around long enough for me to find out whether it would have dried to the requisite hardness. But I am amused by what I am doing, and the sweet smell of the boiling must, the steady simmer of the split pea soup, and the hospitable converse of the flames in the fireplace keep me company.
I work in fits and starts, one ear attending the sound of the tractor that signals that it is time for me to pull on a windbreaker and go outside to throw the switch on the grape press and start its big brass screw turning. Ours is an old press, its red paint chipped and rusting, and it does a very inefficient job, but what we lose in quantity we gain in quality. The same delicate squeeze without bruise would cost us extra in a more modern machine, so each year we decide affectionately to cope with the eccentricities of this one for one more season.
The winepress is very physiological: a conical mouth on the top swallows the grapes and sends them down to the bowels of the machine, where the brass screw rotates within a brass cylinder that is perforated with slits that let the must run out. The screw pushes the grapes tighter and tighter against a weighted lid, which every few minutes eases up to emit a large cylindrical turd of dry skins, seeds, and stems. These heap up and are eventually trucked off to the distillery to provide rubbing alcohol, while the must drains down into a length of plastic hose and into the cantina.
Turiddu maneuvers the tractor so that the trailer is parallel to the press, and standing beside the two machines, he slowly empties the buckets of grapes into the mouth of the press. I climb up on a ladder propped against the other side and help to guide the grapes down into the maw of the beast, plucking out the leaves and stirring the sticky, slithery, sugary mass to break up the tangles that catch in its throat. Despite all Tonino’s pessimism, the tiny, fragile beads that embroidered the vines in June have survived the drought and the heat wave, the peronospera mildew and the oidium mold and have grown into small but perfect spheres, pale green burnished to brass by the sün and swollen to translucence by the August rains. The bunches are big and heavy and stiff, their stems held rigid in a corset of tightly clustered grapes.
Turiddu and I are undone by our admiration for the marvel of the grapes and interrupt our work continually to vent our excitement, pointing out a particularly generous bunch or a perfectly ripened load. The differences and difficulties of the past months forgotten, Turiddu glows with good will.
“Ah, signora, when it’s like this, you want the vendemmia to go on forever.”
When the last grape has been unloaded, Turiddu drives off again, the empty buckets clattering and bouncing in the trailer as he puts on speed, racing against the tramontana to finish before the rain comes, and I switch off the empty ruminating of the press and set to scrubbing out the big oil drum I used to boil my bottles of tomato sauce in. Tonino intends to press the unmarketable remains of the Italia grapes and boil their juice down into vino cotto, a thick, sweet syrup somewhat like molasses, which is used for cooking and also for raising the sugar content of must from poorly ripened grapes. When he told me of this plan a few days ago, I told him he was mad—one more unnecessary complication in an already chaotic and exhausting vendemmia—but now, as I crawl in on my hands and knees to reach the bottom of the drum where this afternoon the must will boil, I realize it is not madness that divides us, but a lack of synchronization. Satisfied by a whole summer of harvest
s, I have been fretting to reduce the vendemmia to a well-organized routine, something to be gotten over with so that I can concentrate on the next concern. My need to move on (the old frontier spirit?) clashes with Tonino’s need to improvise and experiment, to reinvent the vendemmia each year, so as to press out every drop of satisfaction and keep alive the sense of excitement he remembers from his childhood. I do believe he has exaggerated this year—but so have I. My preoccupation with distant decisions and future harvests has deafened me to the message that Demeter whispered to me at Enna last November and closed my mind to the archaic rhythms I profess to seek. I have yet to learn the lesson, to live—and let my children live—each season as it comes, without justification or apology.
Around me as I scrub, the cantina breathes and murmurs. The untold thousands of tiny vinegar gnats that move and settle in a dense cloud, blackening everything that has been touched by must, spin off a faint whispering drone, into which their predators, the wasps, weave a fugue of buzz and hum. Like giant muted kettle drums, the massive cylinders of fermenting must gurgle and rumble a soft basso continuo, accompanying the staccato that comes from the far end of the cantina, where the big casks, their wood shriveled from disuse slowly swelling in the damp heat of fermentation, ooze drops of must that fall in erratic syncopation into the mosaic of aluminum freezer trays arranged on the floor below.
These trays must be emptied from time to time, and a vigilant eye turned to the fermenting cisterns, which are prone to boiling over in their enthusiasm. No sooner have I set the oil drum upside down to drain than the chugging of the tractors announces Turiddu’s return. Once more I take up my station at the press. A weary but grinning Dionysus wreathed by a sweat-stained beret instead of grape leaves, Turiddu picks out an enormous, perfect cluster and holds it aloft before me in a dangling fall of golden grapes.
With this load the vat is full, and I must measure with a stick calibrated in salme the depth of the must, its muddy color already hidden by the thick scum of fermentation, then blow aside this froth and take a sample in a plastic tube, into which I drop a mercury-laden glass that measures the density and the sugar content. Once I have added the results of my measuring to the long columns written with a felt-tipped pen on the flank of a steel cistern, I switch on the pump and send the must coursing toward the cask where it will undergo the miraculous metamorphosis from its present murky state, yellow brown and scum covered, into the clear pale gold of wine.
The pulsing throb and suck of the pump adds its voice to the music of the cantina, a visceral, volcanic sound that echoes in the cool and chthonic darkness. Easy in my acquired skills, yet still surprised by them, I perform these simple rites with pride and pleasure. The must flows through the pipes, a libation to Demeter and Dionysus, and it is here, surrounded by a tall colonnade of steel cisterns, far from the sacred precincts of Eleusis or the flowering shores of Lake Pergusa, that in honoring the mother, the daughter is revealed to me: Persephone, the eternal expatriate, the goddess of unreconciled contrasts and alternate allegiances, who chose to eat the seeds of the pomegranate, that she might enjoy two roles, two worlds.
Author’s Note
I have approached the thorny issue of relating contemporary Sicilian folklore to classical Greek rites with the same blithe ignorance with which I approach my garden, putting in bits and pieces that appeal to me, with little regard for any theoretical framework. This journal has no scholarly pretensions and is not intended for those who debate the question professionally. I hope only to entertain those who know nothing of Sicily and to make their visit here more rewarding.
Sources
BRYDONE, PATRICK. A Tour Through Sicily and Malta. Edinburgh, 1840.
CAMPORESI, PIERO. Alimentazione, folclore, società. Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1980.
CARDINI, FRANCO. I giorni del sacro: il libro delle feste. Milan: Editoriale Nuove, 1983.
CICERO. The Verrine Orations. Volume 2. Translated by H. H. G. Greenwood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.
CRONIN, VINCENT. The Golden Honeycomb. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959.
Delle cose di Sicilia: testi inediti o rari. Volume 1. Edited by Leonardo Sciascia. Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 1080.
DETIENNE, MARCEL. The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology. Translated by Janet Lloyd. London: Harvester Press, 1977.
DETIENNE, M., AND VERNANT, J.-P. La cucina del sacrificio in terra greca. Turin: Editore Boringhieri, 1982.
FINLEY, M. I., AND DENIS MACK SMITH. A History of Sicily in Three Volumes. London: Chatto and Windus, 1968.
FRAZER, J. G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Abridged version. New York: Macmillan, 1957.
GOETHE, J. W. Italian Journey (1786–1788), Translated by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982.
GRAVES, ROBERT. The Greek Myths. London: Penguin Books, 1955.
HARRISON, JANE ELLEN. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. London: Merlin Press, 1980.
HOMER. The Homeric Hymns. Translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
IRVINE, WILLIAM. Letters on Sicily. London, 1813.
LAMPEDUSA, G. TOMASI DI. The Leopard. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. New York: Pantheon, 1960.
——. Two Stories and a Memory. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. New York: Pantheon, 1962.
LAWRENCE, D. H. Sea and Sardinia. London: Penguin Books, 1981.
MELEAGER. The Poems of Meleager of Gadara. Translated by Richard Aldington. London: Egoist Press, 1920.
NORWICH, JOHN JULIUS. The Kingdom in the Sun. London: Allen Lane, 1970.
OVID. The Metamorphoses. Translated by Arthur Golding. London: William Seres, 1967.
The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation. Edited by Higham and Bowra. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938.
PINDAR. The Odes of Pindar. Translated by R. Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
PITRE, GIUSEPPE. Biblioteca della tradizioni popolari siciliani. Palermo, 1870–1913. Facsimile edition, 1978. (La famiglia, la casa, la vita del popolo siciliano; Feste patronali in Sicilia; Spettacoli e feste popolari siciliani; Usi e constumi, credenze e pregiudizi del popolo siciliano)
PONTORNO, MELO. Article in Il Giornale di Sicilia. 4 April 1983.
SCIASCIA, LEONARDO. La corda pazza: scrittori e cose della Sicilia. Turin: Einaudi, 1982.
——. Il giorno della civetta. Turin: Einaudi, 1961.
SMYTH, W. H. Memoir descriptive of the resources, inhabitants and hydrography of Sicily and its Islands interspersed with antiquarian and other notices. London, 1820.
STRUTT, ARTHUR JOHN. A Pedestrian Tour in Calabria and Sicily. London: T. C. Newby, 1841.
THUCYDIDES. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner. London: Penguin Books, 1959.
VIRGIL. The Georgics. Books 1 and 2. Translated by S. P. Bovie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
ZUNTZ, GÜNTHER. Persephone: Three Essays on Religion and Thought in Magna Graecia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
Where I have quoted from texts in Italian, I have used my own translations.
Sicilian literature offers a particularly rich and rewarding introduction to the island, and besides the works of Lampedusa and Sciascia, those of Giovanni Verga, Elio Vittorini, Federico De Roberto, and Luigi Pirandello are available in English translation.
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