Those small things restored me and I felt ready to face Taormina. In the evening I went in search of some Sicilian music, climbing the steps off the Corso that led to the Grotta di Ulisse. Someone grabbed my hand and I was whizzed right across the restaurant and unceremoniously plonked down at the table of an American couple who didn’t seem to mind this intruder at all.
So we relaxed and talked. And my companions of this evening told me they had been all over Sicily to visit once again the Greek temples at Agrigento, the mosaics at Piazza Armerina. They had been to the island’s ‘navel’ Enna, marvelling they had forgotten how splendid are those billowing hills of golden durum wheat, spent a day on the beach at Acireale, gazing at the rock, which in Greek mythology was hurled by the one-eyed giant into the sea.
‘But the very best day,’ commented Anna-Maria, ‘was when we went back to “our” village. We drove into the country and watched my uncle’s shepherd make the ricotta cheese and drank wine from his vineyard. For me, that is the real Sicily.’
‘Does it make you want to come back here?’ I asked.
‘Maybe, one day, when we are old.’
In the meantime, there was America the wonderful, the bounteous to seduce them. They owned a hardware store, they told me, had loads of friends. The problem with coming back to Sicily, they added, was an ongoing family squabble over a piece of land.
‘We need our space.’
Gaetano reached for his wallet and handed me his card. ‘If ever you find yourself in Brooklyn, look us up.’
We joined in the general clapping to the music and I felt a wave of joy on hearing it again. The musicians might be playing for the tourists. They might, as one of the group told me, travel into Taormina from the surrounding villages because they needed to earn money to feed their families. One of them butted in to add that he had five children, think of how many mouths to feed. But there is something about the Sicilian when he plays and sings that is true to his nature. Reaping the corn, fishing by the light of sun or moon, riding a mule along the mountain path, his songs express emotions tinged with nostalgia and history. They come from the soul. There is ‘La Terra Amara’ (The Bitter Earth), the earth that has sent him all over the world to escape the tyranny of earning his crust in agriculture; the resentful earth of Sicily demanding back-breaking work under a scorching sun, unyielding of water as a revenge for its deforestation. It is hard to believe that the rivers, especially the Simeto, Salso and Belice, were once navigable. Now they are silted up, or dry riverbeds, which are often used as rubbish dumps.
There came the mournful tremble of the mandolin, but not all these songs are melancholic. One of the best loved has the singer imitating the braying of a donkey. It might be corny, it might be calculated, but I’m an easy target. ‘La Terra Amara’, which nevertheless draws back so many Sicilians to their land, to this bitter earth.
The boom of the terracotta jar, the quartara, as the player twirled it in his hands and blew into it and the fischietto, a simple, three-stopped cane pipe, which in the right hands can produce a virtuoso of sound.
When I first heard this music, years ago, I found it all ‘so romantic’. There were candles on the tables and painted jugs full of scarlet wine. Romantic! I could imagine that couple at the opposite table saying it in German, Dutch, Swedish: ‘So romantic’. And that is what my wise Sicilian friends trade on. They have a commodity: La Sicilia! Blue seas and skies, wine and an excellent cuisine, why not sell it for the best price you can get?
Tonight it amused me to watch the German tourists pay an inflated price for local wine, clapping their hands and shouting ‘Wunderbar!’
‘Jenny?’
I glanced up and saw the owner, Filippo, had come to our table.
‘There is something I have to tell you…’
His expression was grave. ‘The cat, the one in Castelmola you took to the vet…’
His voice was almost drowned out by a loud burst of applause and I tried to concentrate.
‘What is it?’
‘She and many others were poisoned.’
I had a vision of the last time I had seen Lizzie, lying so contently, blinking in the sunlight. I brought my hands to my face. ‘No!’
‘I’m sorry.’
Stricken, I was gazing at Filippo, trying to take in his words.
‘Don’t be sad,’ he told me.
Don’t be sad! When I felt the earth had shifted beneath me and I was falling into a black hole.
The music continued, people shouted and sang; they clapped their hands to its rhythms. I stayed on, there was nowhere else to go and I didn’t want to be alone in the apartment. Then I remembered what Antonella had told me about the people in Castelmola who disliked cats. It must have been one of those who rolled poison into balls of meat and threw them down for the unsuspecting creatures to eat. I felt such a rage against them and the terrible act they had committed. Anger like this is fertile ground for notions of revenge but, as the night wore on and my fury turned to grief, I made up my mind I wouldn’t leave it there. Somehow I would help these cats.