Chapter Eight
A half day of rain, a brief interlude of cool weather, then June arrives, hot and heavy with summer, pregnant with the tastes and smells of pleasures to come. The children drag themselves through the last tormenting days of school, the textbook pages dancing before their eyes unabsorbed, and teachers and students alike complain of the absurdity of making Sicily adhere to a national academic calendar ending in mid-June, when nothing can be achieved after the end of May in this climate. Francesco goes off in the morning, his book bag bulging with towel and bathing suit, ready to head for the beach at Mondello as soon as classes are out, while Natalia, young yet for such an adolescent gathering, languishes about the apartment licking ice cream cones.
From the moment we enter the autostrada and see the lanes of flowering oleander bushes stretching pink, white, and red ahead of us, the weekend is a summer in microcosm: long hours of watering, Sunday morning at the beach, a trip with basket in hand to gather fruit, even the first canning of the season, since the sour cherries are ripe enough to make the cherry syrup that, diluted with ice water, will cool us off when the heat comes in earnest.
Natalia and I set out to pick the cherries, which grow down in the lowest part of the farm. We walk down between Mr. Amato’s melons, whose single tufts have shot out long feelers toward one another, and swollen into broad stripes dotted with yellow flowers that hide tiny melons under the canopy of their leaves. We pass the citrus grove, where next year’s grapefruit hang like dark green golf balls from the trees, and stop to give a gentle squeeze to the peaches, not quite ripe yet. Beyond the fallow field where the drought has killed all but four or five of the trees that were our attempt to start an avocado plantation, the red grapes run along a ridge. We turn here, skirting the rim of a bank that is thick with brambles and hawthorn trees, with bushy heather and ’ddisa, the tough ampelodisa grass with long plumes that is used to tie up the grapevines.
Turiddu has been at work this past week, a big bunch of ’ddisa, first dried and then soaked in water to make it pliable, tucked into his belt. Embracing each vine in turn, he gently gathers up the long branches that wave curly-fingered tendrils at the sun, pulls them carefully together to form a protective blanket about the newborn bunches of grapes, and with one deft motion extracts two or three blades of ’ddisa from his belt, wraps them around the vine, twists and tucks in the ends. His hands are so horny and callused that they hardly feel the sharp edges of the grass that tear and scratch at our bare legs as Natalia and I brush by.
At the bottom of the path we enter another world, an island lifted from another climate, where even on the hottest day the air is cool and damp, and the light filters down pale green and gentle. Here, where four adjoining farms meet, an underground spring feeds three wells and a miniature marsh. Two of the wells are on our land, the new one with a concrete wellhead built a few years ago to replace the old one that caved in during the earthquake and now sits in the shade of the cherry trees, a ring of mossy stones and a few feet of water housing a family of enormous toads.
Behind them the canes grow seven or eight feet high, clustering about a few alder trees and stitched together by brambles, wild grapevines, and morning glories into an almost impenetrable wall that hides the third well, of old stone, dark green and mysterious, and shields the little swamp with the bulrushes and then circles the big pit of long-forgotten origin, this year barely covered with slimy green water, where Francesco and Natalia used to hunt tadpoles in the spring. Huge saucers of white sway among the canes, Queen Anne’s lace grown to giant proportions in the damp soil.
“Speaking with all modesty,” Natalia reminds me proudly each year, “I was the one to teach you that these are really wild carrots.”
There is no cave that I know of, yet Pan never seems far off. Whether it is the witches’ hawthorn, or the alders—the tree of the fourth month, the tree of Orpheus, which grew in a ring around the island of Circe—or the reeds that belong to the twelfth month, when they whisper that the year is ending and death approaching, I do not know, but there is often some other presence near the wells. It is not always just my imagination: one afternoon I felt someone looking at me, and glancing around and up I discovered a marsh rat, crouched in the crook of a cane leaf, swaying back and forth in the wind like a sailor in a crow’s nest as he stared down at me, black eyes sharp and wary over quivering whiskers.
Today the presence is withdrawn. The reeds and canes are still and silent in the late-afternoon calm, and the slanting sunlight illumines the red translucence of the ripe cherries. We stoop to slide beneath the low-hanging branches until we are standing inside a tent of dark green glossy leaves, lacy against a brilliant azure sky and lit by a thousand little lanterns glowing red, and we laugh for the pure pleasure of such a harvest.
Our neighbors’ fields of grain are ripe and rustling, and the wild oats have dried to a white haze that floats above the wheat like smoke in the sunlight. An artichoke, unharvested from the plant that Turiddu was moved to put in the middle of the herb garden, has opened to a flower, the leaves a purple spiky crown around the choke, which has grown long and silky and turned a brilliant cornflower blue. The first harvest of oregano, hanging from the rafters in the palmento, perfumes the kitchen with its pungent aroma, and at suppertime a young mantis, no more than an inch and a half long, flies into the kitchen and kneels on the rim of Tonino’s wineglass. Summer’s troops are on the move: the daddy longlegs know no seasons, but now the mosquitoes are gathering to attack, and the mercurial centipedelike horrors that we have baptized “ugly bedfellows,” the moths that tap on the kitchen door in the evenings, and the tiny, foolish dragonflies that end up in the salad bowl, to be fished out gingerly by my tenderhearted children and have their oily wings blotted dry with paper napkins. Least welcome of all, the first flies have come to hover and dive, their loops and spins spelling out a warning of the swarms to come.
But the countryside slips into summer much more easily than I do: her winter clothes dry up or rot where they fall, whereas mine have to be put away in mothballs, and new ones bought, and dentists and medical certificates seen to, and the apartment closed for the summer, and the materials assembled for all my summer projects. The rites of passage are unusually complicated this year, as I must accompany the children to Rome, to put Francesco on a plane for America, and then to take Natalia to a three-week camp near Paestum. The idea of going to camp in the shadow of a Greek temple seems strange to someone accustomed to associate camp with the Adirondacks, but even more mind-boggling is the flood tide of forms and instructions that arrive from the American hosteling group with which Francesco will be doing a bike tour: after all these years of Italian improvisation, such superorganization staggers me.
It is not only the complicated preparations that cost me so much sleep, however, or the fact that this is the first time one of my children is going away so far and for so long. As I weed the courtyard the morning before we leave, my fingers occupied but my thoughts free to poke and pry, I suddenly realize that it is Francesco’s destination that weighs upon me. For all that I thought I had made definitive and lasting peace with myself about having left America, I have been unconsciously investing Francesco with a terrible ambassadorship: to like America (and therefore me), to be liked there (and thereby justify my choice).
Francesco is uneasy too—loath to leave his friends and worried that his English is not good enough to get him through the summer. More or less bilingual when he was learning to talk, he discovered at age two and a half that all the children around him spoke Italian, and he became very angry with me, standing up in his crib and glowering when I came in to get him up in the morning.
“Non si dice good morning, si dice CIAO!”
In the long intervals between our rare visits to America he would lose his English, remembering only what he needed to squeak by in school without studying, and only in the past two years has he been making a serious effort to regain his fluency.
Francesco is almost five foot eleven, and despite his leanness looks a lot like me, even to the shape of his head. (A Palermo neurologist, called in to examine the children at the pretentious private school where Francesco went to kindergarten, exclaimed at first sight: “Look at that narrow skull! Either this child is mentally deficient or he has Anglo-Saxon blood!”) His height and his intellectual curiosity are misleading, however; at fifteen he is less sure of himself than he seems, and like his mother is plagued by ambivalence. Being different from his friends, finding a part of the American image abroad that he can identify with, reconciling the conflicting indications of home and society, and at the same time charting his own path in the enormous space allowed him by his father, whose only expectations are that his children develop a sense of responsibility and respect for other people—these are all problems for Francesco in a way that they will never be, I suspect, for Natalia. And in a few days’ time, when I kiss him good-bye in front of the passport control desk at Fiumicino and watch him stride off without hesitation, I will be full of pride for this good-looking and seemingly self-possessed young man, and full of admiration too, as I remember another morning ten years earlier, when we accompanied Francesco to have his tonsils removed. He had seemed quite tranquil and convinced by our explanations, but as we got out of the car in front of the hospital entrance, he suddenly took off down the street, his short legs pumping up and down as fast as they could. I am sure that Francesco is controlling at fifteen much the same urge that he gave in to at five.
We leave Palermo on the thirteenth, Saint Anthony’s Day, and I punctually forget to wish Tonino Happy Onomastica—the Italian custom of celebrating the day of the saint one is named after is one custom I just can’t fit my mind around. Saint Anthony is the patron of the wheat harvest and, I have just discovered, of Palermo drivers. Faced with the impossible task of parking anywhere near the center of town, one has only to say:
Sant’Antoninu, vestutu di velluto,
Fammi trovare un posto fotuto!
Help me to find some damned parking spot!
Today the children and I leave harvest and car and Tonino in Saint Anthony’s care and board the train for Rome. We are well supplied with reading material for the twelve-hour trip, but the majority of the travelers come equipped only with bananas and bottles of mineral water and settle down to sleep in their seats or strike up a conversation with their neighbors. My Anglo-Saxon reserve, or shyness, usually keeps me from joining in, but I often eavesdrop behind the protective shield of newspaper or paperback and occasionally learn some startling information, such as the explanation I once overheard of how the balance of nature was threatened.
“Now, the earth turns on an axis, see, and this axis isn’t quite straight, it’s a little tilted, like so.” The speaker was illustrating his story with gestures, as any proper Sicilian would, one hand held up with palm and fingers slightly inclined, while the other hand began to dart back and forth from one side of the upright hand to the other.
“Now, you take all this construction, digging out quarries here and building up these great heavy skyscrapers there, it’s ruining the balance, it is. If we aren’t careful, the earth’s going to start tilting more and more, and all of a sudden—bang! The whole thing’s going to fall right over.”
This time we have the compartment to ourselves, and as the train, a rapido, rushes northward, I give Francesco a last English lesson on sprockets and chain rings, inner tubes and handlebars, and try to remember for his benefit how the pay telephones in America work. It gets cooler and cooler as we go north. In the fields of Calabria the poppies are still in full bloom, much to the children’s surprise.
“The season comes later here.”
“Backwards, these Calabresi!” Tongue in cheek, but only up to a point, Francesco is tinged with the Sicilian conviction that the Calabrians are far more underdeveloped and ignorant than the islanders, just as a Calabrian woman I travel with on the return journey will explain the rowdy behavior of some young men in the next compartment by saying that they must be Sicilians.
“I get so damn mad when I see people laugh!” she said fiercely. “They have no idea of the pain involved, the tearing out of roots and the rending of hearts. Family is all most of these people have ever had, and to see it split apart is dreadful!”
But it appears that there has been a strike near Turin, and the Treno del Sole is three hours behind schedule, so I board a local that will take me to a big station farther south where I can catch the rapido coming down from Rome.
All of one carriage long, the local train has hardly time to gather speed before it must slow down again at the next tiny station, and so by fits and starts it bears me down along the Campanian and the Lucanian coast to Maratea, like a leaf propelled by a breeze across a stagnant pond. These jerking, halting windows open on a world other than that glimpsed from the hurrying, indifferent rapido.
Half of the passengers are railway men, hoping to get home for Sunday dinner, boarding, jumping off, leaning out to exchange a crack or a bit of gossip at each station. The other passengers either know each other or discover after ten minutes of conversation that there is some mutual connection. I board together with an elderly woman, long since emigrated to Val d’Aosta, who has brought her little granddaughter south for a seaside vacation. We enter a compartment occupied by a young student, who turns out to be the nephew of the brother-in-law of a woman to whose second cousin this grandmother from Val d’Aosta was engaged for six years.
Each station looks like the last and like the next; SALA D’ATTESA Ia CLASSE written in marble letters from the Fascist era, RITIRATA and USCITA all stamped in tin at some central headquarters, even the same carefully tended zinnias and marigolds growing in the flower beds and the same bougainvillea vine growing on the fence. No doubt the seeds are traded up and down the line. The student yells out the window to a friend climbing down from the other end of the carriage, hails someone else boarding at the next station, finally shakes hands with the grandmother and with me, wishes us a good journey, and gets off himself.
An express roars past us headed north, and our solitary carriage shudders and sways in the wind, then resumes its own rhythm, its wheels clicking and clacketing like steel needles knitting up the rent, stitching up the holes that speed, emigration, and the passage of the modern world have torn in the fabric of the South.
A little boy, playing ball in front of a house stuccoed in the faded wine color the Italian government has deemed appropriate to station masters and road menders, looks up as we pull in and waves to the blue-suited, black-satcheled conductor who jumps down. I wonder what this delicate equilibrium between the restless, open-horizoned speed of the rapido and the shabby familiarity of the local will produce in him, where the eddy and tug of this current moving through the still waters of the South will pull him. In Sicily these same wine-red houses have produced writers like Elio Vittorini, Salvatore Quasimodo, Danilo Dolci.
I am almost sorry to leave the local at Maratea, and I enjoy the hour’s wait in the sun on the little platform. It is hard to orient oneself out of sight of the sea; someone has hung up an old shutter on the other side of the tracks and stenciled on it “Battipaglia” with an arrow pointing north. I noticed the other half of the shutter doing the same service at the last station.
Once aboard the rapido I am swept into another dimension of time, restless and eager to get home, lowering my book at frequent intervals to check on our progress and catch the first familiar glimpse of the dark hills of Messina beyond the Straits and peering through the haze in vain for a look at Etna, still tiredly drooling lava after almost three months. It is all familiar now, the fried arancine eaten at the bar on the ferryboat, the long wait at Messina, leaning out the window to buy a lemon ice from the little boy in the white jacket at the station of Sant’Agata Militello, the new cars lined up outside the Fiat assembly plant at Termini, the proud villas of Bagheria that appear in the opening shots of The Leopard, cleverly isolated by the movie camera from their surrounding slums, and then the wooded slope of Monte Grifone soaring up from the squalid outskirts of Palermo.
Even too familiar. While I was in Rome, the captain of the carabinieri at Monreale was shot down, together with the two men in his escort, as he was getting out of the car in front of his fiancée’s house. He had come down from the north to replace Captain Basile, who was killed a few years ago as he was walking hand in hand with his wife and small daughters down Monreale’s main street on the evening of the local festa.
When I call Maria Vica to tell her that I am back, she has just come from paying a visit to the captain’s fiancée, who is a friend of hers, a girl from northern Italy who had followed her young man south when he was posted to Sicily.
“I felt so ashamed for Sicily. I’m thinking of leaving Palermo. There is no hope for Sicily—she told me that during the funeral the children in the street outside the church were playing at being mafiosi and shooting down the policemen. You’re lucky, Mary, at least you have Bosco to go to.”
Maria Vica is holding up to me the mirror of my own illusions, and today I am happy to believe in them, anxious to assemble the last bits and pieces of packing and shopping and be gone. I have missed so much in the ten short days I have been away. The fields around Bosco have been drained of their golden sea of grain and dredged by the harvesting machines into spiraling rings of yellow stubble and pale blond chaff. As I drive up the hill, the dog trotting happily behind the overloaded car and the cat balancing on my shoulder to peer eagerly through the windshield, I can see a big combine circling the crest of the next hill over, the driver standing high up on his platform like a captain on the bridge, the machine spewing out a wake of straw bales behind it and pausing to pour into the waiting truck a cascade of wheat that glistens and sparkles in the sunlight.
I am sorry not to have heard the whining and clacking of its careful navigation around the nearer fields, not to have watched the spears of wheat falling to the wide blades, or to have climbed up on the truck to plunge my hands down into the warm and powdery smoothness of the grains slithering against my skin. But I am sorrier still never to have seen the old harvest, with the long line of reapers strung out across the hillside, their sickles rising and falling in unison. For every seven reapers there was a gatherer, who followed behind them, gathering the severed stalks into the fork of a stick by means of a blunt-edged sickle and then tying them into a sheaf with a blade of ’ddisa from the bunch hanging at his belt. The arms of the reapers moved to the rhythm of the songs, always sacred at harvest time, that they sang, each verse ending in:
Praise be and thanks
To the Holy Sacrament!
Praise be and thanks
Every hour and every moment!
Or they followed the playing of drummers and bagpipes hired by the landowner to step up the pace with lively music.
Five times in the course of the day, which went from dawn to dusk, the line would break up to eat, and still more often it would halt “to pass the saint,” to hand from reaper to reaper the barrel of wine that would quench their thirst and replenish their flagging energy.
Then the flattest part of the field was smoothed into a threshing floor where a pair of mules were driven round and round to trample the ears of wheat with their hooves and break off the grains as the peasants stirred and tossed the wheat with pitchforks. More hymns accompanied this endless circling, cries of encouragement to the mules alternating with prayers to all the saints to invoke their blessing on an abundant harvest. Later still a different sort of chant, droning and solitary, urged forward the long string of pack mules, eight mules to each driver, that carried the harvest back to town.
The Romans too had music at their harvest:
See that your country folk adore the goddess:
For her let milk and honey flow, and wine,
And lead the sacrificial victims round the crops
Three times, to bring good fortune, let a chorus
Follow the procession, singing hymns
To Ceres, ask her blessings on their homes;
Let no one lay his sickle to the grain
Until, with festive oak wreath of his brow,
He honors Ceres’ name in dance and song.
Virgil, The Georgics
Alcamo, however, has long since abandoned Ceres for Santa Maria dei Miracoli, its patroness, whose worship goes back to June of 1547, when the Madonna appeared to some women who were washing their clothes in the millstream that ran along the northern edge of town. As the Blessed Virgin disappeared into the bushes, some stones rolled down into the water with a splash. One drop of water fell on the lips of a mute, who instantly found her voice, while another woman recovered the use of an arm that had long been paralyzed. When a crowd gathered the next day, more stones fell, causing more miraculous cures, and when the men cut down the brambles from where the stones had come, they found an image of the Madonna attached to the wall of the mill. A church was built around the image, and each year its discovery is celebrated in a three-day feast culminating in the procession of the twenty-first of June in which a statue of the saint is carried about the town.
Like many Sicilian festivals, Santa Maria dei Miracoli has had its ups and downs. In the early nineteenth century it was a very extravagant affair, and the procession was preceded on the second day by the exhibition of the triumphal cart, a small-scale version of the famous wagon of Saint Rosalia used for the Festino in Palermo, and on the first day by horse races, the so-called corse dei barbari.
The triumphal cart went out of use in the 1860s, swept away by the wave of anticlericalism that followed in Garibaldi’s wake, but the horse races, dangerous hell-for-leather rides up the Corso, continued into the twentieth century. Pitré describes an ex-voto painting hanging in the sanctuary of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, dated 1883, which shows the racing horses galloping out of control into the middle of the town band. Miraculously not one of the musicians was injured, and the band repaired forthwith to the sanctuary to give thanks.
The races were revived some years ago, with wooden transepts erected all along the Corso and a thick layer of sand spread underfoot, which would then blow back and forth with the scirocco for the rest of the summer. All through the spring one could see beautiful, nervy, and well-groomed horses being exercised on country roads—the modern miracle of the festa being how certain people acquired the money to indulge in such an expensive hobby—and on the day of the races an enormous crowd would gather from all the towns around.
The horses ran four at a time, the whole length of the Corso, from Porta Palermo to Porta Tràpani, and only a small percentage of the crowd got to see the finish. The rest of the people, like the Simeti family hanging over their balcony railings halfway up the Corso, would watch the horses gallop past but would know who had won only when the triumphant jockey rode back down the Corso in the back of a truck, brandishing his prize, a wooden eagle glistening with silver paint.
It was more fun to watch the crowd itself. Those who had no access to a balcony would begin to gather hours before the races began: old grandfathers bent double scuttling out from the side streets and dragging little chairs, which they would set up on the curb right behind the transepts so as to be sure of a good view; little boys staking out the lampposts they would shinny up as soon as the action started; families purchasing a generous supply of semenza before occupying their piece of sidewalk.
In my mother-in-law’s house both the salotto and the master bedroom open onto the Corso, so we had two large balconies on which to offer hospitality, and on race and procession days they were always alarmingly crowded, my mother-in-law carefully piloting her various nieces and cousins onto the bedroom balcony, while reserving the less intimate salotto for the Pirrellos, the Vivonas, and for Genoveffa, a maid who had long since retired but reappeared once a year to hug and kiss everyone and watch the races, wrapped in an enormous black shawl and surrounded by an even larger flock of grandchildren.
This year, however, Alcamo has been deprived of its races once more. It appears that this custom, which is not limited to Alcamo, has come to involve the prestige of rival Mafia clans, and the races held a few months ago for the festa of Monreale ended in knifings and bloodshed, causing the prefect of Palermo to ban them throughout western Sicily. There is much discontent among the horse owners, and the townspeople have had to make do with the procession, the fireworks, the traveling fun fair, and the usual influx of torrone and toy sellers.
All this is over by the time that I arrive at Bosco on the twenty-third, and the Alcamesi, exhausted by three days of festivities, hardly notice that Midsummer’s Night has come. Midsummer is the middle age, the moment of greatest vigor, and if the days begin to shorten we will nonetheless have light enough and more to spare in the blazing months to come, before the waning of the year and the onset of old age and decay begin to weigh on us. We have forgotten the death of the sacred king, who was chosen at midwinter to be the consort of the Great Goddess and put to death at the summer solstice in the shadow of the oak, most sacred of all the trees, Which rules this month. All the oracular powers of the oak have been transferred to Saint John the Baptist, whose feast day falls on the twenty-fourth, when young girls throughout the island used to question the saint about the husband that the future held in store for them: either by throwing an apple into the street and waiting to see who would pick it up or by throwing molten wax or lead into water and observing the shape into which it solidified. (A T-shaped piece could mean a hammer or a hoe, conveniently allowing one’s fancy room to choose among a cobbler, a carpenter, and a contadino!)
This melting pot of traditions is nowhere stronger than at Marsala, where the church of Saint John the Baptist was built over a well that marked the seat of the Sibyl of the Roman city of Lilybaeum. Pitrè quotes the Marchese di Villabianca’s description of an odd medieval custom that was observed on the saint’s day:
… a superstitious abuse that was practiced in the underground crypt, where people were leached by barbers; and the bleedings were of such great numbers that at times they could be counted at more than four hundred.
Giuseppi Pitrè, Spettacoli e feste popolari siciliani
and elsewhere Pitrè speaks of
the cara Sibilla, who to the simple people of Marsala has become a beneficent genie, a sort of fairy who brings fortune to whom she chooses … [and] is to be invoked at noon on the 24th of June …
Giuseppe Pitrè, Feste patronali in Sicilia
There is none of all this at Alcamo—or so I thought. On the twenty-fifth Tonino and I must telephone to my sister’s in New York to wish Francesco well on the eve of his departure for the bicycle tour, and we decide to make the call from Alcamo Marina, the long strip of beach where the Alcamesi have their summer houses. They were late in discovering the sea: the Simetis’ villa, one of the first to be built, dates only from 1936. According to Sciascia, Sicilian towns turn their backs on the sea, “capable only of carrying away the emigrants and disembarking the invaders,” and this is almost true, despite its name, of Alcamo Marina. When I first spent summers there, before Bosco was rebuilt, it still had the air of a tentative approach, a knot of houses around the old tuna fishery, and then beach running for several miles beside the railroad tracks and the provincial highway. Beyond these, the houses dotting the narrow strip of flat land were still spaced out by pieces of vineyard. Now row upon row of villas and small apartment buildings sit cheek by jowl, nudging and elbowing each other in an attempt to get whatever view of the sea the house in front allows, or clamber up the ridge behind, clinging perilously to the sandy slope, where the better view comes at the price of a longer walk to the beach. Having banished all danger of solitary converse with the sea, the Alcamesi can now take up their normal life, noisy and crowded, the afternoon visits followed by the evening passeggiata either on foot with the baby carriage or by car, up and down the main road in such force that on weekend afternoons all traffic comes to a standstill, except for the swarm of Vespas and motorcycles that weave in and out of the stationary lanes of cars.
In June and September it is pleasant here, however, with the bulk of the houses closed and shuttered and the festoons of shells and seaweed still stretched out along the beach where the winter storms have thrown them. Here and there an open window, a thread of smoke from a barbecue, a beach towel hung out to dry indicate the early arrival of an enthusiast, and elsewhere workmen are hurrying to finish a new house or repair an old one before the season starts. As we drive along, Tonino points out to me a black smudge on the wall of one house, the twisted metal shutters of another, where the wear and tear of winter weather have given way to the ravages of the Mafia.
We have left time for a quick swim before the call must go through, and we head toward the beach, which is hidden from view until we cross the last row of houses. At two-thirty in the afternoon there is no human presence to break the long white line of sand that stretches from Castellammare in the west more than ten kilometers east to Balestrate. But the beach is not empty. Standing up some seven feet high against the sea and sky is a cross of green canes, decorated with pink oleander flowers and yellow euphorbia, a garland of flowering oleander branches hanging from each arm. It sticks up out of the sand, a solitary priest stretching its arms northward. Robed in Mediterranean vegetation, its origins are otherworldly: in fact a small crayoned Swedish flag is fastened to the top.
Back at Bosco, I rush to Sir James Frazer, and sure enough, in a quote from a source unidentified in the abridged edition, The Golden Bough tells me that I have seen a Maypole, which in Sweden is set up on the Eve of Saint John.
This consists of a straight and tall spruce-pine tree, stripped of its branches. “At times hoops and at others pieces of wood, placed crosswise, are attached to it at intervals; whilst at others it is provided with bows, representing, so to say, a man with his arms akimbo. From top to bottom not only the ‘Maj Stang’ (Maypole) itself, but the hoops, bows, etc., are ornamented with leaves, flowers, slips of various cloth, gilt egg-shells, etc.; and on top of it is a large vane, or it may be a flag.”
I later learn that this expatriate Maj Stang was the work of a Swedish family who have rented a house on the beach for the month of June, who even brought with them cans of pickled herrings and boiled potatoes, the traditional fare for the Eve of Saint John. But this rational explanation does not remove the memory of how my blood ran cold to see the Maypole standing there, or shake my conviction that I have received some private oracle.
Directly below are the ancient buildings of the tonnara, the cobble and cement slide that leads down to the water from the low boat sheds with their wide-arched doors, the narrow-windowed barracks where the tonnaroti, the fishermen, sleep while the tuna are running, and to the west the flaking chalky-pink stucco of the complex that houses the owner’s apartments, the chapel, and the storerooms, all disposed about a courtyard shaded by an overgrown fig tree. The buildings nestle in the arc of the bay, exploiting with great economy the thin margin of flat land before the mountainside begins to climb, and appearing to grow out of the rock rather than to be built over it.
The waters of Scopello are cool, deep, and limpid, shifting from turquoise to azure as the sea bottom changes from sand to eel-grass, blending slowly into the intense blue of the distance, where we can see the black boats of the tonnara dismantling the nets. The season is ending now. The tuna come in May and June to lay their eggs in the warm waters off the northern coast of Sicily, and the catching of them is supposed to be, for the strong-stomached, one of the most fascinating spectacles that Sicily has to offer, repeating with unfaltering fidelity the rites and rules that were brought here by the Arabs more than a thousand years ago.
Nets mended and boats caulked, the crew begins its work in April when the long, low wooden boats are brought down to the water’s edge and the fishermen fold in the huge nets with care so that they will feed out smoothly and quickly when they are being set. Following the orders of the head fisherman, who is still addressed by the Arabic title of raìs, the crew works to the rhythm of a chant which at the end of each net becomes a prayer to the Virgin that the net may be filled with a good catch.
The tonnara proper is an enormous rectangle formed by huge cords that are floated by corks and stretched taut by forged iron anchors eight feet tall. Nets drop down vertically from the cords to the sea bottom to form a long corridor, the shore end of which is open to admit the fish. More nets, placed crosswise along the length of this corridor, can be raised or lowered to create a series of chambers through which the tonnaroti force the fish toward the closed end of the corridor, known as the “death chamber.”
Once this elaborate mechanism is set up, the long wait begins (it was not rare in the past for the statues of the tonnara’s patron saint to get a dunking if the fish were slow in coming). When at last the lookouts announce the arrival of a school of tuna, the boats drive the fish into the mouth of the trap and then gather round the “death chamber.” The rats waits till the nets are full to order the closing of the doors, and then the tonnaroti begin the slow pulling in on the ropes, leaning and heaving to the beat of the cialoma. Each verse of this ancient chantey begins and ends with the cry “Aimola! Aimola!” which some say derives from “Allah! Che muoia!—Allah! May it die!”
The pace of the chant quickens as the great fish come to the surface, crazed by the tightening nets, thrashing their powerful tails in an attempt to clear a space for themselves with blows that maim their neighbors and send sprays of bloody water fifteen feet into the air. The boats close in around the mass of heaving, shining, bleeding, thrashing dark gray bodies, and at a command from the raìs, the mattanza, the slaughter, begins, as the fishermen spear the frenzied fish with long-handled harpoons and drag their dying bodies into the boats. The sea churns with foam and blood and the air throbs with the splashing and the shouting and the relentless, quickening beat of the cialoma.
I have never quite been able to decide whether I really want to see the mattanza or not and am not displeased today to find that the sea has washed away all traces of blood. Nor have the summer crowds arrived: we float lazily in the cool water in solitary peace, interrupted only by bits and snatches of song and laughter that waft in from the distant boats and by the cries of the seagulls searching for the last remnants of the slaughter.
If I am hot, I cool off in the garden, hose in hand, watering and watching the sunlight ring its changes of the landscape. Forthright and industrious in the morning, it freshens the olives and the vineyards, a good housewife plumping up her pillows, only to flatten them out again at noon and deprive them of their color. An element of drama creeps across the hillsides toward six o’clock, as the slanting rays pencil lines of black shadow behind the grapevines, add inches onto the melon plants, intensify the red of the soil and the emerald of the fruit trees. All this art is erased when the sun drops into the sea near Capo San Vito, leaving only the lighthouse to twinkle on the horizon, and a lavender haze falls, a giant cobweb strung from the gray-blue mountains in the west to the reddish purple peaks of the east, resting on the hilltops and sagging into the valleys.
If I am hungry, ten paces to the right of the kitchen door will take me to the perazzoli, tiny pears an inch in diameter, a concentrate of flavor that grows in bright yellow bunches on a young tree near the quinces. Or I can turn left to the mulberry trees. The black mulberries are ripe now and bursting with crimson juice that trickles down your arm when you reach up to pick them, delight of children who feign mortal accidents and flourish bloodstained fingers before their mother’s horrified eyes. If I want something more substantial, the figs are waiting for me down in the valley, the early ones, dark purple sacks of honey dangling from the branches, and the peaches yield in ripeness beneath my touch. If I feel industrious, I can slither down the steep hill to the casette di Zu Natale, two little stone huts that nestle into the hillside as if inhabited by hobbits, part of a piece of adjoining land that we bought from a contadino who had grown too old to work it. In front of the bigger hut a rich orange carpet is spread out, apricots that at the least breath of wind drop gently onto a soft bed of dried grass and lie there, waiting for me to gather them and turn them into jam.
If I am lonely I stick my head out and greet Mr. Amato in his comings and goings or hail Turiddu as he comes into the cantina for another load of copper sulphate to spray on the grape vines, to fight off the fungi that heavy dew has encouraged. Mr. Amato is pleased with his novara, although he tells me he has given up on one piece of land:
“I’ve seeded it with tomatoes four times, but nothing has come up. You need a little shove from the soil too.”
Calm and careful, Mr. Amato offers a contrast to Turiddu’s volatile nature. He is also very generous: each time I proudly gather a first meager handful of string beans from my vines, he appears with a plastic bag bulging with beans from his vines.
“Per Lei, signora.”
And yesterday he arrived with two fine cucuzze. The cucuzza, the same from which the cucuzzata used to fill pastries is made, is a particularly Sicilian squash. A long, smooth, pale green cylinder, it grows in a comma or a curlicue if the vine is left on the ground, or straight as a ruler and as much as five feet long when trained on a trellis. In the absence of any flavor of its own, it has an amazing capacity for absorbing and neutralizing any other taste. Hence the proverb “Consatala come vuoi, sempre cucuzza è—Flavor it as you will, it’s always cucuzza,” which applies to anything intrinsically insipid or uninteresting. A person who answers this description is said to have a cucuzza head.
Cucuzza is nonetheless held in high esteem, A mainstay of the summer diet, it occupies a very high slot in the hierarchy the Sicilians have devised in their endless preoccupation with the workings of their innards, a topic that, far from being banished from polite conversation, is preferred for the dinner table.
Cucuzza is fresca, the ultimate in “cool” food. This has nothing to do with the temperature at which it is served but indicates its effect on the bowels. Like lettuce, chicory, dandelion greens, and endive, cucuzza refreshes, while cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and artichokes are “hot” and irritate. Spinach and chard are in between, not quite condemned but suspect enough to make them rare visitors to my mother-in-law’s table. A friend of my brother-in-law’s tried to seminate panic at Alcamo Marina one summer by spreading the rumor that cucuzza has been found to be bad for the liver. Tradition won out, but not before one dreadful quake of doubt had menaced the very foundations of the local domestic economy.
In return for the cucuzze I have promised to give Mr. Amato some of my parsley seed as soon as it has ripened enough to be harvested and put away for resowing on Saint Francis’ Day at the beginning of October. It was indeed enviable parsley, not at all like the parsley in my favorite Sicilian proverb, which is used, with a resigned shrug of the shoulders, to indicate something or someone who has seen better times: “Cera beddu lu pitrusinu, c’iì lu ‘attu e ci piscio—It wasn’t such beautiful parsley in the first place, and then the cat went and peed on it.” But I wish it would hurry up and finish going to seed; having grown to staggering heights it hides from sight the flower beds beyond it.
The herb garden is hidden too, by a sea of flowering lavender, the long spears bobbing and dancing under a multicolored regatta, the white jibs of the cabbage moths, the striped spinnakers of the swallowtails, the bumblebees, and the huge and furry purple wasps. I have decided to leave the flowers on the plants for all to enjoy; last year’s harvest still hangs from the rafters of the palmento waiting for someone to make it into sachets, and often there is another flowering in the fall.
For the better part of the day I am happy to be a hermit. I have spread my books and file cards on the table in the guesthouse while it is still free of tenants, and I work there or pace the courtyard with lined pad in hand, pausing to breathe in the sweet smell of the wild mint that I have trodden underfoot or to admire the grapevine that sags under the weight of a thousand rock-hard grapelets (“And at zero cost!” says Tonino wistfully. “What did you do, some two minutes’ worth of pruning?”) or the pomegranate tree on which each of the two flowers has set to fruit. When inspiration comes, I stretch out with it on a deck chair in the sun, or swing with my sources in the hammock under the porch roof.
Although the courtyard at Bosco is closed to the world beyond, it is of itself a microcosm. One has only to tune one’s senses down to its proportions, to adjust one’s focus: the grasshopper sitting next to my foot flexes his powerful hind legs for flight; three ants drag a worm across the stubble left by my diligent weeding, their route, filled with useless detours and unnecessary climbs, revealing the lack of intelligence behind a seemingly rational endeavor. The erratic flight of a yellow-winged butterfly, thus confined, becomes a careful exploration of possibilities, beginning with the scarlet bougainvillea, then the orange and crimson of the geraniums, then the last of the purple clematis lingering among the leaves of the Virginia creeper, while discarding the mere green of the succulents, the spiky yuccas, the potted kumquat tree. On the sun-warmed cobblestones lizards keep their immobile watch, heads raised to spit out a tongue and gather in a fly, and as dusk falls the geckos creep out to take up their posts beside the wall lamps.
Sounds, too, wash over the courtyard walls: the waxing and waning hum of a tractor, the pitiful cry of a sparrow fallen prey to the cat’s patrols, occasionally the motor of a passing car that obliges me to peer out the gate to see who is using our road. One morning I hear fire, a greedy, sinister sound like the snapping and cracking of a thousand tiny bones. Someone has fired the stubble in the Blundas’ wheat field, but I can see no one, and, alarmed, I call Tonino, who fortunately is working at home this morning.
“No, they’ll be down in the valley somewhere. It’s not hot enough for spontaneous combustion, and the Blundas aren’t the sort to start a fire and then go away and leave it.”
But I am not reassured. It is a windy day, a poor choice for firing stubble, and the flames dance and crackle, leaping in frenzy to reach the tall grass along the road. Cinders blow in the window onto the table where I am working, and the acrid smell of burning straw calls me back to the door again and again. The roar of the fire is so loud that I do not hear the knocking of Nino Di Giovanni, the elderly contadino who lives just down the road, come to call Tonino for help in putting out the flames that are threatening his olive trees.
In half an hour they manage to extinguish the blaze, working up the hill along the flickering orange line and beating on the flames with green branches. Two days later Mr. Blunda stops by to thank Tonino. He is convinced that the fire was set by a farmer of dubious repute who lives just a little north of us on the next hill over. Blunda had told this man that he intended to plow a firebreak around the field before firing it himself, but the man has a grudge against our local shepherds and wanted to prevent them from pasturing their sheep in the stubble, as Blunda had given them permission to do.
The smell of smoke comes often in the days that follow, and columns of gray pulse skyward from the valleys and the hillsides as one by one the harvested fields are fired in order to destroy the seeds of the wild oats and the other weeds that infest the grain. I am always quick to try to locate the source of the smoke or the crackle: the piles of firewood waiting to be sawn and the dried grass about the house make me uneasy, nor do I like sitting in the line of fire between the shepherds and their enemies.
Following on the heels of the fire come more reassuring sounds, the rattle, squeak, and roar of the giant tractors with their one monolithic plow blade, hastening to deep-plow the fields now, before the sun hardens the claylike soil to granite, so that they will be ready in October, as soon as the vendemmia is over and the grapes are in, to begin the cycle anew.