Diversions in Sicily
by Henry Festing Jones · English · Gutenberg #24652 · 361,835 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Diversions in Sicily
Author: Henry Festing Jones
Release date: February 19, 2008 [eBook #24652]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24652
Credits: This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DIVERSIONS IN SICILY ***
This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler.
DIVERSIONS IN
SICILY
BY
HENRY FESTING JONES
[Picture: Title illustration]
LONDON: A. C. FIFIELD 1920
_First Published_ . . . 1909
_Re-issued_ . . . 1920
TO
ENRICO PAMPALONE
MY DEAR ENRICO,
Your father and I, sitting one summer night on the terrace at
Castellinaria watching the moon on the water, agreed that this book might
be dedicated to you, although you have not yet put it into my power to
ask your permission.
"After all," exclaimed your father, "what is existence?" And I was
unable to give him a satisfactory reply.
When Orlando and his Paladins were overcome at Roncisvalle through the
treachery of Gano di Magonza, were they all slain? When "the Crusaders'
streams of shadowy midnight troops sped with the sunrise," did none
linger? When the angel carried up to heaven the soul of Guido Santo, did
he never fight another battle? The young men of your island hardly think
so; their thoughts and actions are still coloured by the magnificent
language and the chivalrous exploits of Christian and Turk. As long as
there is an imaginative shoeblack in the Quattro Canti working for
pennies by day, so long will those pennies be paid for the story to be
told by night in the marionette theatre. Often will Angelica recover her
ring, and as often be robbed of it again; often will the ghostly voice of
Astolfo, imprisoned in a myrtle upon Alcina's magic isle, reveal the
secret of his woe; often will Rinaldo drink of the Fountains of Hatred
and of Love, and, forgetful of the properties of those waters, return and
drink once more.
And what of those other and less heroic figures--the brigadier and his
guards gambling among the ruins of Selinunte, the ingenious French
gentleman classifying the procession at Calatafimi, Micio buying his
story-books and chocolate at Castellinaria, and many another whom I
should like to think you will some day meet, palely wandering up and down
these pages?
To pursue the subject might disincline you ever to take leave of the
world of the unborn, whereas I am desirous of making your acquaintance as
soon as possible. Let me, then, rather assure you that life is not all
marionettes and metaphysics, and that I know of no reason why you should
not at once enter upon an existence as real as that enjoyed by your dear
father or your beautiful mother--it would be unbecoming in a son to
expect more. Castellinaria is waiting to welcome you. You could not
have a more delightful birthplace than your native town, or more charming
compatriots than your fellow-townspeople. Only resemble your parents,
and you will never regret having hastened the day when I shall be
entitled to sign myself
Your affectionate Godfather,
HENRY FESTING JONES.
NOTE
Chapters VIII-XI have been enlarged and re-written since August, 1903,
when they appeared as _A Festa on Mount Eryx_ in _The Monthly Review_. I
have to thank Mr. John Murray for kindly giving me permission to reprint
them here.
A few sentences in Chapter XIII have been taken from a pamphlet I wrote
and had printed for private circulation in 1904, entitled: _Diary of a
Journey through North Italy to Sicily in the spring of 1903_, _undertaken
for the purpose of leaving the MSS. of three books by Samuel Butler at
Varallo-Sesia_, _Aci-Reale and Trapani_.
It would be impossible to enumerate and thank all the many friends who,
with the courtesy and patience that never desert a Sicilian, have given
me information, explanation and assistance. Among them are two, however,
to whom, and to whose families, I desire to give my special thanks,
namely: Cavaliere Uffiziale Giovanni Grasso, of the Teatro Macchiavelli,
Catania; and Signor Achille Greco, of the Marionette Theatre, in the
Piazza Nuova, Palermo.
Signor Greco wrote to me recently that, for Rosina's riddle in his
episode of the masks in _Samson_, he had dipped in the stream of
children's games current to-day in Palermo; he did not appear to know
that Plato had dipped in his own Athenian stream for the riddle quoted by
Glaucon towards the end of the fifth book of the _Republic_. The riddles
are similar not because Rosina had read the dialogue, nor because Glaucon
had seen the play, but because the two streams flowed as one until Greek
colonists took their folk-lore with them into Sicily before Plato was
born.
CONTENTS
SELINUNTE
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BRIGADIER AND THE 3
LOTTERY
CASTELLINARIA
II. PEPPINO 29
III. THE PROFESSOR 41
IV. THE WINE-SHIP 52
CATANIA
V. MICHELLE AND THE 77
PRINCESS OF BIZERTA
TRAPANI
VI. FERRAU AND ANGELICA 97
VII. THE DEATH OF 113
BRADAMANTE
MOUNT ERYX
VIII. MONTE SAN GIULIANO 131
IX. THE MADONNA AND THE 149
PERSONAGGI
X. THE UNIVERSAL DELUGE 166
XI. THE RETURN 181
CUSTONACI
XII. FAITH AND 189
SUPERSTITION
CALATAFIMI
XIII. THE PRODIGAL SON AND 213
THE ARTS
PALERMO
XIV. SAMSON 235
XV. THE CONVERSION OF THE 254
EMPEROR CONSTANTINE
CASTELLINARIA
XVI. A GREAT ACTOR 279
XVII. SUPPER WITH THE 290
PLAYERS
XVIII. A YOUNG CRITIC 304
XIX. BRANCACCIA 317
SELINUNTE
CHAPTER I--THE BRIGADIER AND THE LOTTERY
One wet Saturday evening in May I found myself at Castelvetrano
consulting Angelo, the guide, about the weather. His opinion was that it
would clear up during the night; I said that if it did we would go to
Selinunte, and this confirmed his view; so, on the understanding that
there was to be no rain, I appointed him padrone of the expedition and
promised to acquiesce in all his arrangements.
He was quite right; Sunday morning was brilliantly fine, and at about
8.30 we started. He began by showing me his purchases; he had been out
early, marketing, and his basket contained fresh tunny, the first of the
season, veal, salame, dried fish, bread and oranges, but no wine; he said
we should find that at the locanda, where they would cook the tunny and
the veal for us.
Cicciu, our driver, was one of those queer creatures one sometimes meets
in Italy. At first I took him to be of feeble intellect, for when I
spoke to him or merely looked at him, he shut up his eyes, showed his
teeth and covered his face all over with grinning wrinkles; but on
knowing him better, I found he was really extremely intelligent and
perfectly good. He was about sixteen, but would have passed for twenty.
His general appearance was grey, the actual colour of his face, hands and
clothes being powdered out of sight by the dust which held all together
like a transparent glaze over a painting. He drove us along between
flowery fields of cistus until the temples of Selinunte came in sight,
then down to the Marinella, a handful of houses on the shore under the
low cliff. We drew up at the locanda which distinguished itself by
displaying over the door, in a five-ounce medicine bottle, a sample of a
cloudy, canary-coloured fluid to advertise the wine Angelo had spoken of,
and the forlorn bunch of five or six faded sprigs of camomile which hung
on the same hook constituted the bush. We left our basket with
instructions and drove off to inspect the acropolis and the ruins,
returning in about an hour and a half.
The locanda was an immense, cavernous room divided into front and back by
a partition about seven feet high with an opening in the middle. There
was no regular window, but we were only a few feet from the sea which
reflected the sunshine through the open door and up into the arched roof
and illuminated the front part. In the obscurity behind the partition
were dim ladders leading up to trap-doors and, through a few holes in the
roof and in the end wall, blinding rays of light glinted on piles of
earthenware--saucepans, jugs, cups and saucers, coloured crockery lamps,
rough basins glazed green inside, heaped up in stacks and protected from
one another by straw. There were hanks of rope, fans of hawks' feathers
for blowing the fire, palm-leaf brooms and oil-jars big enough for
thieves. There were horns on the walls to keep off the evil eye, prints
of the Madonna, some with sprigs of camomile stuck into the frame, a
cheapissimo coloured lithograph of S. Giuseppe with the Bambino, and in
front of it on a little bracket, in half a tumbler of oil, floated a
burning wick. In a corner was the landlord putting his whole soul into
the turning about of a sieve full of coffee beans which he had roasted
and was now cooling. And everything was covered with a grey dust like
the bloom on a plum or like Cicciu.
Our table was spread in a clearing among the pottery in the front part of
the room and everything was ready on a clean white cloth, wine and all.
Besides the landlord and his wife there were two men in uniform, one a
corporal of the coastguards and the other a policeman. There was also a
third man in ordinary clothes--I did not find out what he was, but they
were all, including the landlord, friends of Angelo who, in his capacity
of padrone, invited them to join us at lunch. We were just about to
begin when I missed Cicciu. Angelo said we need not wait for him, he had
only gone to the sea to wash his feet. So we sat down without him and
presently he returned saying he had washed all over, but he looked just
as dusty as before his bath.
There must be something in the air of Selinunte that encourages bathing,
for they told me that in a few days an annual festa was to take place
there, the pilgrims arriving the evening before and spending the whole
night bathing in the sea, the men in one part and the women in another;
at dawn they would come out of the water, dress and attend to their
religious duties. I said I should like very much to see it, whereupon
the corporal, who sat next me and clinked glasses with me every time he
drank, invited me to stay--there would be plenty of room in the caserma
and they could make me comfortable for as long as I would remain. I had,
however, made appointments elsewhere, so I told him it was unfortunate,
but I could not alter my plans and was sorry I must decline his
invitation.
After lunch by general consent we all went strolling up the cliff and
through a garden belonging to a large house. I assumed that Angelo had
been arranging something in dialect and asked the corporal, who happened
to be next me, where we were going. He first picked a geranium most
politely and stuck it in my button-hole; then he told me we were going to
the big house which was the caserma. It appeared that he had been so
overcome by my hospitality that he had invited Angelo to bring me to call
upon the brigadier and his companions-in-arms at the guard-house. It was
really Angelo who had shown the hospitality, nevertheless, though not
directly responsible for all details, I was responsible for having
shifted the responsibility on Angelo by making him padrone of the
expedition, so that the hospitality was in a sense mine. But if left to
myself, I should never have had the courage to invite two such
influential members of the legal profession as a coastguard and a
policeman to lunch with me, not to speak of the third man who might have
been anything from a sheriff's officer to the Lord Chancellor himself.
But they were all friends of Angelo and so was I and in Sicily the maxim
"Gli amici dei nostri amici sono i nostri" is acted upon quite literally.
Passing through the door of the caserma we entered a large oblong room;
at each end were three or four beds and on the side opposite the door two
open windows. Through the windows across a barley-field, lightly stirred
by the breeze from the sea, the Temple of Apollo was lying in the heat,
an extinct heap of ruins, as though the naughty boy of some family of
Cyclopes had spilt his brother's box of bricks. In the middle of the
room ten or twelve men were sitting round a table on which were dishes of
what at first I took to be some kind of frutta di mare, objects about the
size and shape of sea-urchins. The brigadier received me with great
courtesy and put me to sit next him, and the corporal sat on the other
side of me. A dreamy Sunday afternoon feeling pervaded the air, the
brigadier said they were slaughtering time ("bisogna ammazzare un po' di
tempo"). Being to a certain extent soldiers, their business was to kill
something and they were compassing the destruction of their present enemy
by drinking wine and eating not sea-urchins but cold boiled artichokes.
He gave me some and begged me to make myself at home. The corporal
clinked glasses with me and said that the wine was better than that at
the locanda, wherein I agreed with him, but I did not tell him I found
the artichokes a little uninteresting. They were so very small and there
was so much to do to get what little there was of them that they were
more trouble than shrimps or walnuts. Looked at from the brigadier's
point of view, as a means of passing the time on Sunday, they reminded me
of the Litany; pulling off each leaf was like listening to each short
clause and eating the unimportant little bit at the end was like intoning
the little response; then the larger piece that was left, when all the
leaves were off, followed like the coda and finale of the Litany after
the more monotonous part has been disposed of. The Litany has, however,
the advantage that it comes only one at a time, we do not kneel down to a
whole plateful of it; on the other hand, there was wine with the
artichokes and they were free from any trace of morbid introspection.
The brigadier and Angelo were in earnest conversation about something,
and, as my mind began to wander from the artichokes (here again they
resembled the Litany) and was able to attend more to what was going on, I
became aware that they were talking about the lottery. Selinunte depends
for news upon chance visitors and Angelo had brought the winning numbers
which he had got from a cousin of his in one of the lottery offices at
Castelvetrano. The brigadier had lost and in giving his instructions for
the next week's drawing seemed to experience great difficulty in making
up his mind.
Presently there looked in at one of the windows a hunchback riding on a
mule and carrying a guitar. Several of the guards went to help him in,
greeting him with shouts of--
"Addio, Filippo!"
He lifted one of his legs over the saddle, and then I saw that not only
was he a hunchback but that his legs were withered. He reached up and
hung on to the ledge over the window with both hands and swung himself
very cleverly and with no assistance into a sitting position on the
window-sill; two of the guards then picked him up, carried him into the
room, set him on a chair and gave him some wine and artichokes. Being a
jolly fellow, as cripples often are, he soon tired of the artichokes,
asked for his guitar and began to sing Neapolitan songs. He had not sung
more than two before the brigadier told me I should like to wash my hands
and had better come into his bedroom. I glanced at Angelo who nodded
back and the brigadier took me off with him. He began by showing me his
room which was very clean and tidy. His bed was at one end, his table,
with his official papers and books, in the middle and against the wall
hung his guns which he showed me particularly, declaring that he was
passionately devoted to the chase. After he had done the honours I
washed my hands and so did he; then he led the conversation to what his
manner betrayed was the real business of the interview. He asked me my
name and age, whether I was married or single and particulars of my
family, whether I was an Englishman from London or from New York and how
much a metre I had paid for the stuff my clothes were made of. This last
was the only question that gave me any real trouble, but I made a hasty
calculation, converted the result into francs, deducted five per cent.
for cash and hazarded--
"Fourteen lire."
In return for his polite interest in my affairs I pretended a similar
interest in his, and it turned out that we had a friend in common--a
maresciallo dei carabinieri whom I had met on Monte San Giuliano and of
whom I was able to give the latest information namely, that he had
retired, gone home to Cremona and married. Carabinieri are not allowed
to marry so long as they are in service, or rather they may marry but
only on condition of depositing a sum of money which is fixed at an
amount beyond anything they are likely to be able to lay their hands on.
Having exhausted our questions and answers we returned to the guard-room
and the corporal welcomed us by filling our glasses again. The
brigadier, before sitting down, took Angelo aside and became again
immersed in conversation; this time he appeared to be getting on more
satisfactorily with his instructions. The artichokes were beginning to
lose their attractions for every one, so I took out a packet of
cigarettes and offered them round. In those days there used to be in
every packet of Italian cigarettes a loose piece of paper about the size
of a postage stamp with a number on it. Boxes of biscuits in England
sometimes have a similar paper to identify the person responsible for the
packing should anything be found to be wrong. In my packet there
happened to be two pieces of paper which fluttered out upon the table as
I opened it. The brigadier instantly pounced upon them. There was
silence in the room. Every one watched and waited. Each of my pieces of
paper bore the number thirty-three. The brigadier did me the honour of
cancelling all his previous orders to Angelo and of putting his money for
next week's lottery on thirty-three. The corporal and several of the men
who had not intended to gamble changed their minds and gave similar
instructions.
It was now time to think of returning, so Angelo got out of the window
into the sunlight and went off to fetch the carriage and the guards began
to chaff poor Cicciu about his watch-chain which was a massive and
extensive affair in silver. The corporal said they were playing a game
with him and offered to teach it to me. I am not good at games, but this
one was so simple that I mastered it in less than a minute and played it
thus--
First I asked Cicciu to tell me the time. He shut up his eyes, showed
his teeth and covered his face all over with grinning wrinkles. Then I
asked him the time again. He replied in the same way. I asked him again
and so on till he had overcome his shyness and at last pulled out his
watch which was found to consist of a circular piece of tin with a paper
watch-face gummed on to one side of it. Then we all laughed at the
contrast between this and what his elaborate watch-chain had led us to
expect.
While we were still laughing, Angelo drove up to the window and said it
was time to go, so we began saying "Good-bye." Some of the men departed
before us, but the brigadier, the corporal and one or two others were
going our way. The brigadier fetched his gun in order to enjoy the chase
and we all got out of the window. Angelo accompanied the hunting party,
but the corporal came in the carriage with me and Cicciu drove us round
the barley-field to the Temple of Apollo to wait for the others. On the
way we heard the brigadier firing off his gun and wondered what sport he
was having, and I took a leaf out of his book of politeness and asked the
corporal his age and particulars of his family, after which, of course, I
had to tell him all about myself and to promise I would take the first
opportunity of visiting him in his home to clink glasses and drink wine
with him.
We went all over the ruins while waiting for the hunting party which
presently joined us. The brigadier was satisfied with his sport and
permitted himself the pleasure of offering me the spoils--two birds the
size of sparrows--which Angelo was to cook for supper. Then we said
"Good-bye," promising to exchange picture postcards when I should be back
in England. The corporal, however, was still going our way and we took
him in the carriage a little further. We asked if he could not come with
us all the way to Castelvetrano and he seemed inclined to do so, but he
had to patrol the coast in the direction of Marsala from eleven o'clock
that night till eleven the next morning, and it was so annoying because,
as he must go to Castelvetrano in a few days, he might almost just as
well come with us now. We hoped he would see his way to doing so and he
hesitated and appeared to be on the point of yielding, but finally made
the Herculean choice of duty before pleasure on the very sensible ground
that, if it should be discovered he had deserted his post, he would be
put into prison for two months. With the brigadier and all the guards in
the secret, it seemed impossible that he should escape detection, so we
pressed the invitation no further and took leave of him after exchanging
names and addresses and promising to send postcards to one another.
As we drove away I could not but draw a comparison in my mind between the
corporal's refusal of my invitation and mine of his, and I was ashamed of
myself for the way I had scamped the bathing festa. I had made another
engagement and there was an end of it. The corporal, on the other hand,
had spared no expense in the manner of his refusal, nothing short of two
months' imprisonment could have prevented him from coming with us. We
English ought to be able to do this and some of us, I suppose, can, but
there is no Italian who cannot. The French are polite, but not always to
be trusted. A Frenchman, speaking of an Englishman to whom I had
introduced him, said to me--
"He speaks French worse than you do."
Any Italian, wishing to express a similar idea, would have said--
"He speaks Italian, it is true, but not so well as you do."
My meditations were interrupted by Angelo who had been taking stock of
our possessions and, on looking into the basket, exclaimed with disgust
that we had been robbed of our fish. It was the first I had heard about
our fish, but he said the brigadier had given us ten and he had put them
into the basket. How could they have got out again? All the afternoon
we had been surrounded by coastguards and policemen whose profession is,
as every one knows, to prevent robbery and to take up thieves. Angelo
was furious and wanted to drive back and complain to the brigadier, but,
on looking further through the basket, we found there were still two fish
and I said they would be quite enough for supper--with the sparrows--and
he finally agreed that we had better do nothing, it might look as though
we thought the brigadier was not up to his business.
"And when the tailor is wearing a coat that does not fit him," said
Angelo, "it is rude to tell him of it."
So we drove on among the cistus bushes and I asked him about the lottery.
Every Saturday morning ninety cards numbered from one to ninety are put
into a wheel of fortune and a blind-folded child from the orphan asylum
publicly draws out five. Italy is divided into several districts and a
drawing takes place in the chief town of each, the winning numbers are
telegraphed to the lottery offices all over the country and afterwards
posted up and published in the newspapers. Any one wishing to try his
luck chooses one or more numbers and buys a ticket and this choosing of
the numbers is a very absorbing business. In the neighbourhood of
Castelvetrano at that time the favourite numbers were five and twenty-six
and the people were betting on those numbers when they had no special
reason for choosing any others. Angelo could not tell why these two
numbers were preferred, he could only say that the people found them
sympathetic and, as a matter of fact, twenty-six had come out the day
before. There are many ways of choosing a number if you find five and
twenty-six unsympathetic; you can wait till something remarkable happens
to you, look it out in "the useful book that knows" and then bet on its
number, for everything really remarkable has a number in the book and, if
you do not possess a copy, it can be consulted in a shop as the _Post
Office Directory_ can be consulted in London. Or, if nothing remarkable
happens to you in real life, perhaps you may have dreamt of a lady in a
white dress, or of a man whetting a scythe, or of meeting a snake in the
road--anything will do, so long as it strikes you at the time. When you
see the country people coming into town on market day you may be sure
that each one has received instructions from relations and friends at
home to put something on a number for them.
Some make a practice of gambling every week, others only try their luck
when they have a few spare soldi, others only when they have witnessed
something irresistibly striking. A favourite way of choosing a number is
to get into conversation with certain old monks who have a reputation for
spotting winners, if I may so speak. You do not ask the monk for a
number outright, you engage him in conversation on general topics and as
he understands what is expected of him, though he pretends he does not,
he will presently make some such irrelevant remark as, "Do you like
flowers?" whereupon you rapidly bring the interview to a conclusion and,
if you do not know the number for "flower," you look it out in the book
and bet on it. It occurred to me that possibly that was what the
brigadier had been doing with me when he took me into his room to wash.
"Of course it was," said Angelo; "he did not really want you to wash your
hands, he wanted to get a number out of you."
"Did he get one?" said I.
"He told me to put his money on 14."
"That must have been because I said I paid 14 francs a metre for this
cloth. But he changed that afterwards."
"Yes," replied Angelo. "He thought the number that came out of your
packet of cigarettes would be better."
Angelo was not strictly right about the brigadier not wanting me to wash,
he said so merely to agree with me, for in Sicily, among those who have
not become sophisticated by familiarity with money and its little ways
nor cosmopolitanized by travel, and whose civilization remains unmodified
by northern and western customs, it is usual for the host to give his
guest an opportunity to wash after eating. Sometimes the lady of the
house has herself taken me into her bedroom, poured out the water and
held the basin while I have washed; she has then handed me the towel and
presently escorted me back to the sitting-room.
We soon overtook a man who had caught a rabbit and wanted to sell it for
a lira and a half. Angelo bargained with him for ever so long and, being
at last satisfied that the rabbit was freshly killed, bought it for a
lira and put it into the basket, saying he would cook it for supper, and
that no doubt the Madonna had sent it to make up for the loss of the
fish.
I asked him what I must do to get a ticket in the lottery for the
following Saturday. He replied that his cousin would be happy to sell me
one and, if I would settle how much to risk and what number to put it on,
he would take me to the office in the morning. I said I would risk a
lira, which he thought overdoing it, as he and his friends seldom risked
more than four or five soldi, but there was still the troublesome matter
of the number. He asked whether anything unusual had happened to me
lately, either in real life or in a dream. I told him that I seldom
remembered a dream, but that I had had an unusually delightful day in
real life at Selinunte. In his capacity of padrone he acknowledged the
compliment, but feared there would be no number for that in the book.
Then I asked if there was likely to be a number for having breakfast with
a coastguard as it was the first time I had done so. He mused and said
no doubt there would be a number for breakfast and another for
coastguard, but not for the combination. Could not we add the two
numbers together and bet on whatever they amounted to, if it were not
over 90? Angelo would not hear of anything of the kind; we must think of
something less complicated. It would never have occurred to him to read
for Metaphysics under M and for China under C, and combine the
information into the article that appeared in the _Eatanswill Gazette_ as
a review of a work on Chinese Metaphysics. He asked if I had not lately
had "una disgrazia qualunque." I reminded him of the theft of our fish,
but that did not satisfy him, he considered it too trivial, though he had
made enough fuss about it at the time, and 17, which in Sicily is one of
the numbers for an ordinary misfortune, was too general. It seemed a
pity I had not been involved in the fall of a balcony because that was a
very good thing to bet on and he knew it had a number, although he did
not remember it at the moment. Filippo, the hunchback, was no use
because, though it is fortunate to meet hunchbacks, and of course they
have a number, there was nothing remarkable in seeing Filippo at the
caserma--he is always there.
By this time we had reached Castelvetrano, and supper overshadowed the
lottery. Angelo cooked everything; we began with maccaroni, after which
we ate the fish and the sparrows, and wound up with the rabbit. It was
all very good, but it seemed hardly right to eat the sparrows, besides,
there was scarcely as much on one of them as there had been on one of the
artichokes at the caserma.
During supper, something--it may have been the sparrows or, perhaps, the
Madonna again--inspired me with an idea for a number that met with
Angelo's enthusiastic approval. I remembered that my birthday was near
and proposed to put my money upon the number of that day of the month.
Nothing could have been better and he recommended me to take also my age,
that would give me two numbers and I could have an ambo, I should not win
on a single number unless it came out first, whereas, if I did not
specify their positions, my two numbers might come out anywhere and if
they did I should win about 250 francs. Angelo accepted as a good omen
the fact that neither of my numbers exceeded 90, and next morning we
called on his cousin and put a franc on 27 and 52.
Now, a lottery is an immoral thing, accordingly I expected to feel as
though I had committed an immoral action, instead of which I felt just as
I usually do. I, therefore, gave my ticket to Angelo in order that, if I
should develop a conscience by the time the numbers came out, I might
silence it by the consciousness of having disclaimed all hope of gain.
This was perhaps a little cowardly, for the effects of a lottery are said
to be most pernicious to those who win. But no harm was done in the end,
the actual numbers drawn the following Saturday being 39, 42, 89, 83, 28,
so Angelo lost and likewise the brigadier and the corporal and the guards
who had put their money on 33.
CASTELLINARIA
CHAPTER II--PEPPINO
The train passed through the tunnel under the headland on which stands
the Albergo Belvedere, and steamed into the station of Castellinaria, a
town that is not so marked on any map of Sicily. I had written to
Carmelo to meet the train and drive me up, but he was not among the
coachmen. I recognized his brother, and said to him--
"Hullo! Rosario, where have you been all these years?"
"Well, you see," he replied, "I have been away. First there was the
military service and then I had a disgrazia; but I have come back now."
I avoided inquiring into the disgrazia till I could ascertain from some
one else whether he meant what we should call a misfortune or something
more serious and merely said I was glad it was all over and asked after
his brother.
"Carmelo is quite well--he is in private service. He told me to meet you
and sent you his salutes and apologies for not coming himself; he will
call on you this evening."
"At the Albergo Belvedere?"
"No, excuse me, the Belvedere is closed; he told me to take you to the
Albergo della Madonna, unless you wish to go anywhere else."
So Rosario drove me with my luggage up the zigzags for an hour and a half
through dust and sunshine, past orchards of lemons and oranges, among
prickly pears and agave overgrown with pink and red geranium, by rocky
slopes of mesembryanthemum, yellow marguerites, broom and sweet peas,
between white walls with roses straggling over them and occasional
glimpses of the sea dotted with fishing boats and, now and then, of the
land covered with olives, almonds, and vines.
We stopped in the corso at the Albergo della Madonna (con giardino) and
were received by a young man who introduced himself as Peppino, the son
of the landlord. He also said he remembered me, that he had been a
waiter in a restaurant in Holborn where I used to dine; I did not
recognize him, though, of course, I did not say so. There was something
in his manner as though he had recently been assured by my banker that
the balance to my credit during the last ten years or so had never fallen
below a much larger sum than my passbook had been in the habit of
recording. He would not hear of my doing anything about my luggage or
dinner, he knew my ways and would show me to my room at once. It was a
very fine room with two beds, and he promised that no one should be put
into the second bed, not even during the festa which in a few days would
fill the town with pilgrims. He then departed to bring up my luggage and
I went out on to the balcony.
Before me lay one of those stupendous panoramas which are among the
glories of Sicily. First a garden of flowers with orange and lemon trees
whose blossoms scented the air, then a thicket of almonds full of
glittering goldfinches, then a drop of several hundred feet; beyond, to
the right, a great mountain with snow on its rocky summit, its lower
slopes and the intervening country highly cultivated; to the left the
sea, an illimitable opal gleaming in the sunset. Between the mountain
and the sea the coastline went in and out, in and out, in a succession of
bays and promontories that receded and receded until sea and land and sky
were blended into one distant haze. Across the first bay was the port
and, as the dusk deepened, constellations of lights gathered and glowed
among the shipping. I took possession, thinking that if, like Peppino's
parents, I might spend my declining days here, the troubles of life, and
especially those attendant upon old age, might be easier to bear. And
yet, possibly, a stupendous panorama might turn out as deceitful as
proficiency at whist, or great riches, or worldly honours, or any of the
other adjuncts of age popularly supposed to be desirable; for I suspect
that most of these things fail and become as naught in the balance when
weighed against a good digestion, a modest competency and a quiet
conscience. These are the abiding securities that smooth our passage
through life and bring a man peace at the last, and each of us has his
own way of going about to win them.
Peppino brought my luggage and, with no nonsense about what I would have
for dinner or when or where I should like it, told me that it would be
ready at 7.30 in the garden. Accordingly I went down punctually and
found a table spread under a trellis of vines from which hung an electric
light. Peppino waited on me as, according to his account, he used to do
in London, and entertained me with reminiscences of his life there. He
had attended divine service at St. Paul's, which he called il Duomo di
Londra, and had found it a more reverent function, though less emotional,
than Mass at home. He was enthusiastic about the river Thames, the
orators in Hyde Park and the shiny soldiers riding in the streets. He
remembered the lions in the Zoological Gardens and the "Cock" at
Highbury, where he once drank a whisky-soda and disliked it intensely.
He had stood on the base of La Torre del Duca di Bronte (by which he
meant the Nelson Column) to see the Lord Mayor's Show, and considered it
far finer than any Sicilian procession--more poetical in conception, he
said, and carried out with greater magnificence. He had been to Brighton
from Saturday to Monday and burst into tears when he saw the sea again.
It is difficult to travel on the Underground Railway without losing
oneself, but Peppino can do it. He got lost once, but that was in some
street near Covent Garden, soon after his arrival, and before he had
ventured alone in the Underground; he asked his way of a policeman who
spoke Italian and told him the way: he believes that all London policemen
speak Italian, but he himself prefers English if he can get a chance to
speak it.
Sicilians always want to speak English, especially those of the lower
orders who invariably consider it as a master-key that will open every
door leading to wealth. Sometimes what they say is, of course, nothing
more than otiose compliment; sometimes they are merely introducing the
subject of their want of money in an artistic manner in the hope of
anything from a soldo to a promise to take them into service as valet,
courier, coachman, or whatever it may be--a sort of shaking of Fortune's
bag to see what will come out. Sometimes they really do want to learn
English and some of them even make attempts to pick up a few words and
actually retain them.
I went once from Siracusa to Malta at the end of December; it was
abominably rough, and my luggage was thrown about in the cabin with such
violence that some of the things slipped out of my bag. I was too
sea-sick to be sure I had picked them all up, but afterwards discovered
that the only thing left behind was my new diary for the next year. On
returning from Valletta to Siracusa about a fortnight later, I asked the
steward if he had found my diary and it was produced by the cabin-boy who
must have been a youth of considerable energy and enterprise. He had
apparently learnt by ear several English words and, finding a book full
of blank paper, had written them down, spelling them the best way he
could, that is phonetically, according to Italian pronunciation, and
writing the Italian equivalents, spelt in his own way, in a parallel
column. His writing is so distinct that I am certain I have got every
letter right, but I do not recognize his second English word for latrina,
it is probably some corrupt form of lavatory. The vocabulary, though
restricted, seems a fairly useful one for a cabin-boy to begin with:
ENGL. ITALY.
Fork Forketa
Spoun Cuchiaio
Neif Coltelo
Pleit Piati
Glas Bichiere
Bootl Butiglia
Voutsch Orologio
Tebl Tavola
Ceaer Sedia
Taul Tavaglia
Serviet Serviette
Dabliusii Latrina
Lavetrim ,,
Vouder Aqua
Badi Letto
Peppino is not exactly of this class, his parents were able to give him a
good education, he took his degree at the University of Palermo and,
though he does not practise his profession, is a qualified engineer.
When he returned from London his English was probably better than the
cabin-boy's will ever be, but he is a little out of practice.
I had observed a couple of picturesque ruffians hovering about in the
gloom of the garden; towards the end of dinner they wandered into the
circle of the electric light and resolved themselves into Carmelo and
Rosario. We invited them to sit down, gave them wine and cigarettes and
talked over the changes that had taken place in the town since I had last
been there.
When they had gone, I asked Peppino about Rosario's misfortune and learnt
that he had been put into prison for stabbing his father. He had only
wounded him, and Peppino thought the father had probably been in the
wrong, for he has a bad history in the books of the police, but Rosario
had not done himself any good over it, because, of course, the crime and
its consequences have now gone down into his own history.
An Englishman may be a mass of prejudices, but I confess I did not like
the idea of hob-nobbing with a would-be parricide and determined that
Rosario should not drive me any more; if I wanted a carriage, Carmelo
should get leave of his padrone and take me.
Next morning, while I was having my coffee, there was a sound of passing
music; I recognized it as belonging to a funeral, and asked Peppino if he
knew who was dead. Several people were dead and he did not know which
this was, unless it was old Baldassare; it must be either a married woman
or a grown-up man. I asked how he knew that. He replied that when
apprenticed to his father, who had been sagrestano before taking the
hotel, he had learnt all about the ceremonies of the Church.
"They do this," he said, "when it is a married lady dead or a grown man.
If it shall be the woman dead unmarried or a boy dead, then shall it be a
different song, a different ring of bell and the dead shall go very
directly in the paradiso; it is like the--please, what is fuochi
artificiali? Excuse me, it is the rocket; prestissimo and St. Peter he
don't be asking no question. Did you understand?"
He then diverged to ceremonies connected with last illnesses--
"When the doctor is coming it is telling always that you would be good of
the malady, but when the priest is coming it is telling that you are
finished. This is not a good thing. It is difficult to hope when the
doctor is shaking the head and is telling 'Please, you; go, catch the
priest quickly, quickly.' And sometimes the notary, the man of law, if
the malade is having money; if no money, it is the notary not at all.
When the doctor is coming out, the priest is coming in, and generally
after would be the death. But you must pay. If to pay less would come
only one priest and not well dressed, if to pay more, very well dressed
and too many priests. If to pay plenty, plenty, then to ring all the
bells and enter by the great door; but if to pay few, then not many bells
and to enter by the second door. Did you understand?
"When they die the parents always, and also the man that is to die, they
fear the--please, what is not the paradiso? Excuse me, it is the
inferno: and they tell to the priest 'Please come.' Then they pay him to
tell all that is good, and sometimes the priest arrive that you will be
dead. If you shall suicide, very likely you are dead before. Then shall
the parents pay him to tell that the man to die has taken all the
functions of religion and the holy oil to put in the foot to prevent him
the death. But it is prevent not at all.
"Did you know what is sacramento? All right, I shall tell you. The
priest is going with the sacramento on the hand and the umbrella on the
head and you must pay--always must pay, it is the interesting thing. And
the old women are going and are praying because the man is dead: and the
soldiers are going and are taking the arms before the risorgimento, but
now the law it is redeemed. Then they arrive into the room of the malade
and take the sacramento and up and down and put the holy oil in the foot
and pray and went away, and the malade who is not dead would very soonly
die."
CHAPTER III--THE PROFESSOR
The day before the festa there came a professor of pedagogy, and Peppino
was not best pleased to see him because he knew him as a jettatore. I
had supposed this word to mean a person with the evil eye who causes
misfortunes to others, but he used it in the sense of one who causes
misfortunes to himself or, at least, who is always in trouble--a man who
is constitutionally unfortunate, the sort of man with whom Napoleon would
have nothing to do. He will miss his train more often than not; if he
has to attend a funeral it will be when he has a cold in his head, and
all his white pocket-handkerchiefs will be at the wash, so that he must
use a coloured one; he will attempt to take his medicine in the dark,
thereby swallowing the liniment by mistake. Of course, this kind of man
is incidentally disastrous to others as well as to himself and is,
therefore, also a jettatore in the other sense, so that Napoleon was
quite right.
The arrival of the professor led Peppino into giving me a great deal of
information about the evil eye in which he swore he did not believe. It
was all rather indefinite and contradictory, partly, no doubt, because
those who believe in it most firmly are the analfabeti and unaccustomed
to express themselves clearly.
The prevailing idea seems to be that an evil influence proceeds from the
eye of the jettatore who is not necessarily a bad person, at least he
need not be desirous of hurting any one. The misfortunes that follow
wherever he goes may be averted by the interposition of some attractive
object whereby the glance from his eye is arrested, and either the
misfortune does not happen at all, or the force of the evil influence is
expended elsewhere. Therefore, it is as well always to carry some charm
against the evil eye. All over Italy, but especially in the south, it is
rare to meet a man who does not carry a charm, either on his watch-chain
or in his pocket, or on a string or a chain round his neck under his
clothes, and he usually carries more than one. Women, of course, always
wear them, which may be because a woman likes to surround herself with
pretty things, and, if she can say that they protect her, she has a
reason, unconnected with vanity, which she may be apt to profess is her
true reason for wearing ornaments. The same applies to men who, though
less in the habit of wearing ornaments, are, as has been often remarked,
no less vain than women. This may be called the ornamental view and may
account for some of the fashions that arise in the wearing of charms.
But there is also the utilitarian view, and a new form of charm will
sometimes become popular, just as a new sanctuary becomes popular,
because it is reported to have been effective in some particular case.
Probably no change of fashion will ever banish horns made of coral or
mother-of-pearl; being pointed, they are supposed to attract and break up
the evil glance as a lightning conductor is supposed to attract and break
up a flash of lightning.
Peppino was very contemptuous about all charms and coral horns
especially. Even assuming that horns in a general way are prophylactic,
it is no use having them made of coral or mother-of-pearl and wearing
them on one's watch-chain, because the Padre Eterno, when he designed the
human form, was careful to provide man with natural means of making horns
so that the evil eye might be averted during the period that would have
to elapse before the wearing of ornaments became customary. We can still
benefit by this happy forethought if we are threatened with the evil eye
when divested of all our charms--when bathing for instance. The pope,
Pio Nono, was believed to have the evil eye, and pious pilgrims asking
his blessing used, at the same time, to take the precaution of protecting
themselves from his malign influence by pointing two fingers at him under
their clothes.
Inanimate things, of course, cannot be said literally to have the evil
eye, but many of them cause misfortunes. A hearse is a most unlucky
thing to meet when it is empty. Peppino says--
"If you shall meet the carriage of the dead man and it is empty, perhaps
it shall be coming to take you; this is not a good thing and then must
you be holding the horn in the hand. But if the dead man shall be riding
in his carriage, then certainly this time it shall not be for you and the
horn it is necessary not at all. This is what they believe."
He did not mean that you are bound to die if you see an empty hearse, but
that unless you take precautions you will certainly meet with some kind
of misfortune. I should say that the professor meets an empty hearse
every day of his life. He came up to Castellinaria, not knowing there
was to be a festa, found every place full and spent the night wandering
about the streets. It was impossible not to be sorry for the poor man
when I found him the following afternoon dozing on a chair in the kitchen
and, in a fit of expansiveness, I offered him the other bed in my room.
He accepted it with gratitude and said he should retire early as he was
too much fatigued to care about religious festivities.
Peppino took the earliest opportunity of blowing me up for this, saying
that it was most dangerous to sleep with a jettatore in the room. I told
him I did not believe in all that nonsense any more than he did and we
had a long discussion which he ended by producing a coral horn from his
pocket, saying the professor might have the other bed if I would wear the
coral all night. Of course I chaffed him about having the horn in his
pocket after his protestations of disbelief, but it was like talking to a
kitten that has been caught stealing fish and I had to take his charm and
promise to conform on the ground that one cannot be too careful.
The procession, which was the climax of the festa, did not begin till
11.30 P.M. and was not over till 3.30 the next morning. On returning to
the albergo I found the professor still dozing on his chair, undisturbed
by the constant chatter of all the servants and their friends. He had
not gone to bed because the padrone, Peppino's father, with the key of my
room in his pocket, had gone out early in the evening and got lost in the
crowd, so there were both my beds wasted and nothing to be done but to
make the best of it. I settled myself on a chair in a corner and wished
for day. Whereupon, almost immediately, Peppino, who, though I did not
know it till afterwards, had been keeping near me and watching me all
night in case I might meet the evil eye among the people, came in and the
discussion rose into a tumult of dialect, as the situation was made clear
to him, and then sank into complete silence which was broken by his
suddenly saying to me--
"You wish to sleep? All right. I show you the bed. Come on."
He preceded me up some back stairs into a room occupied by a lady in one
bed, her female attendant in another and, in various shakedowns on the
floor, another woman, two men and more children than I could count by the
light of one candle. We picked our way among them to the farther end of
the room where there was a door. Peppino produced a key and opened it;
to my surprise it led into my room.
"Buon riposo," said Peppino, and was about to disappear the way we had
come when I reminded him that the professor was to have the other bed. I
had some difficulty with him, but when I had hung his coral round my neck
he gave way.
After this I saw a great deal of the professor. He said he was
forty-five and he was perhaps the most simple-minded, gentle creature I
have ever known. Being with him was like listening to a child strumming
on a worn-out piano. As we sat down to dinner next day he asked if he
could have a little carbonate of soda. Peppino, with a glance at the
bill of fare, regretted that there was none in the house. The professor
then explained to me the advantages of taking carbonate of soda before
meals and said that some chemists gave one an enormous quantity for two
soldi. Evidently the professor had not a good digestion. He helped me
with his own fork to a piece of meat off his own plate. This is a mark
of very great friendliness and makes me think of Joseph entertaining his
brethren when they went down to buy corn in Egypt.
"And he took and sent messes unto them from before him; but Benjamin's
mess was five times so much as any of theirs."
And I think of Menelaus in the _Odyssey_ sending a piece of meat to
Telemachus and Pisistratus when they supped with him at Lacedaemon; and
of Ulysses, at supper in the palace of Alcinous, sending a piece of meat
to Demodocus to thank him for his singing, in spite of the pain his lays
had caused him.
I always accept the gift, after deprecating the honour with words and
gestures, and a little later, in accordance with what I believe to be the
modern practice, return the compliment.
The professor was pleased to have an opportunity of improving his
knowledge of England and asked me many questions. I am afraid he only
pretended to believe some of the things I told him. I said that in
England a man who is the proprietor of the house he lives in is not on
that account necessarily a rich man; he may or may not be, it all
depends. He was surprised to hear that I had travelled from London to
Castellinaria in less than three weeks; that the channel passage takes
under twelve hours and has been known to be smooth; that London is not
actually on the coast but a few miles inland and on a river; that we have
other towns even more inland and that after the death of Queen Victoria,
England did not become a republic.
I had the professor at a disadvantage because, being a Sicilian, his
natural politeness would not permit him to show that in his opinion I was
drawing upon my imagination after the manner of travellers. Moreover
Peppino declared that all I said was quite true and added that what in
Sicily is like this (holding his hand out with the palm upwards) in
England is like that (holding it with the palm downwards). Nevertheless
I was beginning to feel that I had gone far enough and had better be
careful, so when he asserted that England refuses Home Rule to New
Zealand, and grinds her colonies down under the iron heel of the
oppressor because she cannot afford to lose the amount they pay us in our
iniquitous income tax, I did not contradict him. It is possible that I
misunderstood him, or he may have guessed I did not agree, or there may
have been even more confusion in his mind than I suspected, for he
afterwards said that the income tax paid by the colonies went into the
private pocket of Mr. Chamberlain, and that explained why the Secretary
for the Colonies was so rich.
"My dear professor," I said, "permit me to tell you something; my poor
mother had a cousin whose name was James. He was perhaps the most
simple-minded, gentle creature I have ever known. Being with him was
like listening to--well, it was like listening to certain kinds of music.
He lived by himself in the country, with an old woman to do for him, and
was over sixty before we came to know him; then we were all very fond of
him and often wondered what the dear, good old gentleman could have been
like in his early days. It has just occurred to me that you, sir, are
like what cousin James must have been at your age."
He was overwhelmed; his eyes filled with tears; he said he should
remember for all his life the flattering words he had just heard; they
constituted the most pleasing and genteel compliment he had ever
received; he shook hands with me and remained silent as a sign that his
emotion was too deep for more words.
CHAPTER IV--THE WINE-SHIP
Peppino usually took half an hour off and came about noon to wherever I
was sketching to fetch me to lunch. One morning as we walked along
nearly every man we met smiled and said to him--
"Buona festa, Peppino," and he smiled and returned their salutes with the
same words. He accounted for it by saying it was his onomastico--the day
of the saint whose name he bears.
"What?" said I, "is it S. Peppino and you never told me? I wish you many
happy returns of the day. But it cannot be everybody's onomastico as
well, and you say 'Buona festa, Peppino' to all who speak to you."
He replied that it was the 19th of March, the festa of S. Giuseppe, and
assured me that he had said "Buona festa, Peppino" to no one who was not
a namesake; so that about two-thirds of the men at Castellinaria must
have been baptized Giuseppe.
"Then that explains it," said I. "I was beginning to think that you
might have become engaged to be married and they were congratulating
you."
That did not do at all.
"I got no time to be married," said he, "too much busy. Besides,
marriage very bad thing. Look here, I shall tell you, listen to me.
Marriage is good for the woman, is bad for the man: every marriage makes
to be one woman more in the world, one man less. Did you understand?
And they are not happy together. We have a bad example in this town."
"Surely you don't mean to tell me that here in Castellinaria, where
everything moves so smoothly and so peacefully, you have an unhappy
married couple?"
He replied solemnly, slowly and decidedly, "Not one--all."
He continued in his usual manner, "Did you read the ten commandments for
the people who shall be married? If to find, shall be showing you. It
says, 'Non quarelate la prima volta.' Did you understand? 'Don't begin
to quarrel,' because you will never stop. After the quarrel you make the
peace, but it is too late: the man shall forget, perhaps, but the woman
shall forget never, never, never, and you have lost.
"I was telling to my friend," he continued, "'Please do not be married,
because when you would be married you would not love any more that lady.'
And he was telling to me that he would marry, because it would be a good
thing for him, good wife, good food, good care and many things like this.
And I was telling to him, 'I would be seeing if you shall be repeating
these words when you shall be married one year.' The year was passed but
my friend he don't be saying nothing to me. Excuse me, I am not so bad
man to ask him. I found him many times in the street, but he would not
meet me, would not speak. Oh, no! And he is not laughing any more. Not
one friend; fifteen friends, all married. Never they are telling they
are happy."
Having disposed of the question of marriage he told me that Carmelo had
been to see me and would call again. He had already been several times,
and I was puzzled to know what he wanted. He could hardly be wanting to
propose an excursion, for I had already made him get leave and take me
for several. But as, sooner or later, an opportunity must occur for
clearing up the mystery, I left it alone for the present and asked
Peppino, who always knew everything that was going on in the
neighbourhood, what ship it was I had seen coming into the bay and making
for the port.
He said she was the _Sorella di Ninu_, returning from Naples, where she
had been with a cargo of wine. He knew because she belonged to his
cousin Vanni, who was a wine merchant and, if I would give up a morning's
sketching, he would give up a morning's work, take me down to the port,
introduce me to his cousin and show me over the ship.
Accordingly next morning Carmelo got leave from his padrone and drove us
down the zig-zags among the flowers while Peppino told me about his
cousin. His father had two brothers, one was the father of Vanni and
used to keep a small wine shop down in the port and Vanni, who had a
voice, studied singing and went on the opera stage. The other brother
emigrated to America and never married. Very little was heard of him,
except that he was engaged in some speculative business, until at last
news came of his death. Had he died six months before, he would have
left nothing, but it happened that the markets were favourable and he
died rich. After the usual delays, his money came and was divided
between his surviving brothers. Vanni's father enlarged the wine shop,
bought vineyards and a ship, took his son away from the stage and sent
him to the University. In course of time he enlarged his business and
took Vanni into partnership. Peppino's father gave up being sagrestano,
bought vineyards and the Albergo della Madonna (con giardino) and
educated his son. The part of Peppino's education that was most useful
to him was his two years in England, and that did not cost his father
anything, for he would only take money enough for the journey and all the
time he was away he kept himself and saved, so that he not only repaid
his father and paid for his journey home but had money in the bank.
By this time we had arrived at the quay and Peppino went off to his
uncle's shop for information as to approaching the _Sorella di Ninu_,
leaving me alone with Carmelo. He seized the opportunity.
"I have been to see you several times because I wanted to tell you that I
also have been in prison."
"Hullo! Carmelo," I said, "have you been trying to murder your father?"
"No," he said, "it was not my father. It was a friend. We quarrelled.
I drew my knife and stabbed him in the arm. It happened last year."
I sympathized as well as I could and assured him that it should make no
difference in the relations between us.
Why did I say this? Why was I so indulgent towards Carmelo and so
implacable to Rosario? It seems as though an Englishman may also be a
mass of contradictions. It is true that parricide is perhaps the most
repulsive form that murder can take, but I do not think this had anything
to do with it, for ordinary murder is sufficiently repulsive. I believe
I was influenced by a conversation we had had during our last expedition;
Carmelo had told me that he intended soon to leave private service, to
marry and go into partnership with Rosario.
"But, Carmelo," I had objected, "would not that be rather risky? Don't
you remember that Rosario has been to prison for trying to kill your
father?"
"Oh, that all happened a long time ago and Rosario has married and
settled down since then."
Evidently Carmelo had thought this over and had felt uncomfortable that I
should shun Rosario for being a jail-bird and not shun him who was one
also. It seemed to indicate considerable delicacy of feeling on his part
and I was pleased with him for taking so much trouble to get the
confession off his chest. Whereas Rosario had treated his disgrazia as
merely an annoying little accident that might happen to any gentleman.
Peppino returned, stood on the quay and shouted to the ships; presently a
small boat containing Vanni and a sailor detached herself from the
confusion and rowed to our feet. I was introduced and, amid the usual
compliments, we took our seats and glided past the _Sacro Cuore_, the
_Due Sorelle_, the _Divina Provvidenza_, the _Maria Concetta_, the
_Stella Maris_, the _La Pace_, the _Indipendente_, the _Nuova Bambina_
and many more. Peppino called my attention to the names of the ships and
said how commonplace and dull they were after the romantic names he had
seen on the beach at Brighton. He gave, as an instance, _Pride of the
Ocean_, which I remembered having often seen there; it was all very well,
but somehow it had never impressed me as hitting the bull's-eye of
romance. During their voyage through time the words of one's own
language become barnacled over with associations so that we cannot see
them in their naked purity as we see the words of a foreign tongue. I
translated _Pride of the Ocean_ into _Vanto del Mare_ and offered it to
Peppino; it seemed to me to gain, but he said I had knocked all the
poetry out of it. One of the ships was the _Riunione dei due Fratelli_.
I inquired whether the brothers had quarrelled and made it up.
"Yes," said he, "that is the worst of family quarrels; they do not last."
"What do you mean, Peppino? Surely it is better for brothers to be
friends than to quarrel?"
"If to be friends inside also, then is it a good thing and much better;
but look here, excuse me; the brothers are quarrelling and fighting and
are failing to kill each others and the parents are telling to don't be
quarrelling and the brothers are telling that they would be quarrelling
and the parents are telling to don't be stupid and to embrace and became
friends and the brothers are telling, Go away, parents, and to leave
alone to be quarrelling in peace. But it is too difficult and many
months are passing and the brothers are--please, what is stanchi? Excuse
me, it is fatigued, and are embracing to make pleasure to the parents and
to make riunione outside and to baptize the ship, but inside it is
riunione not at all. It is to kiss with the lips and the heart is hating
each others. This is not a good thing."
The boat with the name that pleased me best was not there. Peppino told
me about it: it belonged to him before the money came from America and he
used it to ferry tourists across the bay and into the bowels of the
promontory through the mouth of a grotto where the reflected lights are
lovely on a sunny day; he called it the _Anime del Purgatorio_.
This would have been just the morning to visit the caves, for there were
no clouds. We stood on the deck of the _Sorella di Ninu_, looking up
through the brown masts and the rigging into the blue sky, and watching
the gulls as they glided and circled above us and turned their white
wings to the sun. Vanni did the honours of his ship, showed us his
barrels and casks, nearly all empty now, and made us look down into the
hold where there was a cask capable of holding, I forget how much, but it
was so big that it could never have been got into the ship after it was
made, so it had to be built inside. Then we must taste his wine, of
which he still had some in one of the casks, and the captain brought
tumblers and another queer-shaped glass with a string round its rim in
which to fetch the wine up; it was about the size and shape of a
fir-cone, the broad upper part being hollow to hold the wine, and the
pointed lower part solid. The captain held it by the string and dropped
it neatly down through the bung-hole, as one drops a bucket into a well;
its heavy point sank through the wine without any of that swishing and
swashing which happens with a flat-bottomed, buoyant, wooden bucket, and
he drew it up full and gleaming like a jewel. The first lot was used to
rinse the tumblers inside and out and then thrown overboard, sparkling
and flashing in the sunlight as it fell into the sea. The taster was
lowered again and the tumblers filled.
Vanni, seeing I admired the taster, wanted to give it to me, but it was
the only one he had and was in constant use when customers came to the
ship, so I declined it and he promised to bring one for me next time his
ship made a voyage; in the meantime I took one of the tumblers as a
ricordo. Then we went into the captain's cabin and sat round his table
listening to his stories and smoking cigarettes. Every now and then a
silence came over us, broken occasionally by one of us saying suddenly--
"Ebbene, siamo qua!" ("Well, here we are!")
This sort of thing formerly used to make me feel nervous; it was as
though I had failed to entertain my friends or as though they had given
up the hope of entertaining me. After experiencing it several times,
however, I came to take a different and more accurate view. There was no
occasion to do or say anything. We were enjoying one another's society.
Vanni told us he was thinking of taking a cargo of Marsala to England and
what would the English people say to it? Now the Marsala was very good
and, according to Vanni, could be put upon the market at a very low
price, but I foresaw difficulties. Knowing that he had sung in opera in
Naples, Palermo, Malta and many other places, I asked if he liked music.
He said he adored it. Music, he declared, was the most precious gift of
God to man--more precious even than poetry. He had his box at the opera
and always occupied it during the season. And he enjoyed music of all
kinds, not only the modern operas of Mascagni, Puccini and so on, but
also the old music of Verdi, Donizetti and Bellini. I asked if he did
not like _Le Nozze di Figaro_. He had never heard of it, nor of _Don
Giovanni_, nor of _Fidelio_. He had heard the names of Beethoven and
Mozart, but not of Handel, Schubert or Brahms. He had heard also of
Wagner, but had never heard any of his music.
I was not surprised he should not have heard of those composers who are
not famous for operas, nor by his odd list of so-called old musicians,
but I was surprised that he should place music so decidedly above poetry.
I said it appeared to me he had practically expressed the opinion that
Donizetti was a more precious gift of God to man than Dante. Put like
that, he did not hold to what he had said and confessed he had been
speaking without due consideration. But Peppino said that in some
respects Donizetti was a better man than Dante; he was smoother and
better tempered, "and many things like this." Peppino had been brought
up, like every Italian, to worship Dante, but when he went to London and
mastered the English language, when he began to read our literature and
to think for himself, then he saw that Dante was "un falso idolo." Every
nation gets the poet she deserves and Italy has her faults; but what,
asked Peppino, what has Italy done to deserve her dreary Dante? On the
other hand, with all his admiration for England, he could hardly believe
that we really do deserve our Shakespeare.
I was beginning to feel giddy, as though the _Sorella di Ninu_, instead
of being quietly in port, was out on the tumbling ocean in a sudden gale,
so very unusual is it to hear such opinions in Italy. But Peppino is
full of surprises. To recover my balance I turned the conversation back
to the wine, taking my way through the music and telling them that in
England we thought very highly of the Austrian and German composers, and
asking Vanni if he would recommend any one to introduce their
compositions into Sicily. He replied that if it was pleasing music it
might be successful, but that if it was very different from Italian music
it would hardly pay to bring it over until the people had been educated.
I feared it would be the same with the wine. He must first educate us to
forsake our old friends, beer, whisky and tea, before he could create a
market on which he could put his Marsala.
Driving back, I told Peppino about the lottery at Castelvetrano and how
my numbers had lost. He inquired whether my birthday fell during the
week I bought the ticket. It did not.
"Then," said he, "of course you could not be winning and Angelo very
stupid to let you play those numbers."
It seems that numbers are no good unless they are connected with
something that happens to you during the week. This explained why at
Selinunte the brigadier had discarded the price of my clothes, which was
not his concern but mine and belonged to the week in which I had bought
them, and preferred to play the number that fell from the cigarettes, of
which he was at the moment actually smoking one.
"If there shall be a railway accident," continued Peppino, "on Thursday
night, then shall there be going plenty much people and shall sleep in
the ground to be first on Friday morning, because the office shall shut
early to take the papers to Palermo to turn the wheel the Saturday. And
if to come out the number, the people shall be gaining many money, but if
to don't come out, shall be gaining no money. This is not a good thing.
"They think it is fortunate the--please, what is sogno? Excuse me, it is
the dream. But it must be the dream in the week you play. When the man
in the dream shall be coming from the other world and shall be saying,
'Please you, play this number,' then they believe you shall certainly
win. But if to play the number, very uncertain to win."
They live in a state of wild hope after buying their tickets until the
numbers are declared and, the odds being enormously in favour of the
government, the gamblers usually lose. Then they live in a state of
miserable despair until the possession of a few soldi, the happening of
something remarkable, or merely the recollection of the departed joys of
hope compared with present actual depression, urges them to try their
luck again. So that the gambler's life consists of alternations of
feverish expectation and maddening dejection. "This is not a good
thing"; but it is a worse thing for the gambler who wins. He sees how
easy it is and is encouraged to believe he can do it every time; in his
exaltation he stakes again and loses all his winnings, instead of only a
few soldi. If he does not do this he spends the money in treating his
friends and getting into debt over it and has to pawn his watch. So that
the Genovese, by way of wishing his enemy ill-luck, while appearing to
observe the proprieties, says to him--
"Ti auguro un' ambo." ("I hope you may win an ambo.")
Peppino does not approve of the lottery, yet he has not made up his mind
that it ought to be abolished. It certainly does harm, but so deep is
the natural instinct for gambling that innumerable private lotteries
would spring up to replace it, and they would do far more mischief,
because they would be in the hands of rogues, whereas the government
manages the affair quite honestly. The government pays no attention to
dreams or ladies in white dresses or anything that happens during the
week; it bases its calculations on the mathematical theory of chances,
and gathers in the soldi week after week, so that it makes an annual
profit of about three million sterling. Besides, if people are willing
to pay for the pleasure of a week of hope, why should they not be allowed
to do so? The uneducated as a class ought to contribute to the expenses
of governing their country, and the lottery is a sure and convenient way
of collecting their contributions. It is literally what it is often
called--La tassa sull' ignoranza. (The tax upon ignorance.)
Peppino even uses the lottery himself, but in a way of his own. He
chooses two numbers every week, according to what occurs to him as though
he were going in for an ambo and, instead of buying a ticket, puts four
soldi into an earthenware money-box. The numbers he has chosen do not
come out and he considers that he has won his four soldi and has put them
by. In this way he has accumulated several money-boxes full, and if ever
his numbers come out he intends to break his boxes and distribute the
contents among the deserving poor.
As a way of making money Peppino prefers the course of always doing
whatever there is to be done in the house and in the vineyard. A few
years ago his father's vines were suffering from disease; he made
inquiries, studied the subject, ascertained the best course to pursue
and, with his own hands and some little assistance, rooted up all the
plants and laid down American vines, with the result that the yield is
now more than double what it ever was before. And this he thinks was a
great deal better than losing money week after week in the lottery, not
only because of the result, but because of the interest he took in the
work. In fact, he attends to his own business and finds every moment of
the day occupied. He says--
"Always to begin one thing before to finish some other thing, this is the
good life."
Certainly it seems to agree with him. There is not much the matter with
Peppino's health nor with his banking account nor with his conscience, so
far as I can judge. Every one in the town is fond of him and he is
always happy and ready to do any one a good turn. Indeed, his popularity
is the only thing that causes me any uneasiness about him. There is
generally something wrong about a man who has no enemies--but there are
exceptions to every rule.
The poor professor, on the other hand, has at least one enemy and that
the worst a man can have, namely himself. The evening before he went
away he took me into his confidence and consulted me about his future and
his prospects. He is married, but his wife is out of her mind, and he
has three sons, all doing badly, one of them very badly. He told me he
was not at the moment employed as professor, he was living on his
patrimony which consisted of a few acres of vines; he was gradually
selling his land and spending the proceeds, and he thought this the best
plan because the vines were all diseased and did not bring him in enough
money to keep himself and his family. Should I recommend him to come to
England, learn English and try to keep himself by the exercise of his
profession? It was like Vanni's idea of bringing his wine to England. I
could only say I was afraid we already had enough professors. Then he
thought he might write and earn a little money that way; he had read all
Sir Walter Scott's novels in a translation--thirty-two volumes I think he
said; he admired them immensely and was thinking of writing a romance; he
had in fact an idea for one, and would I be so good as to give him my
opinion about it? A young lady is desired by her father to marry a man
she does not love, a rich man, much older than herself. She refuses,
but, later on, consents to make the sacrifice. After a year of unhappy
married life she meets a man of her own age, falls in love with him, and
one day her husband surprises them together, in his rage kills them both
and commits suicide.
"Now," said the professor, "what do you think of my theme?"
I said that, so far as I could remember Sir Walter Scott's novels at the
moment, they contained nothing from which any one could say he had taken
his plot which, of course, was greatly to his credit on the score of
originality, but I begged to be allowed to defer giving any further
opinion until he had finished the work; so much depends upon the way in
which these things are carried out.
He had also written a poem entitled _Completo_, of which he gave me a
copy. It was, he said, "un grido dell' anima." He had not found a
publisher for it yet, but if I would translate it into English and get it
published in London, I could send him any profits that might accrue. I
showed it to Peppino who swore he remembered something very like it in an
Italian magazine and that the professor had had nothing to do with it
beyond copying it. I translated it without rhymes, the professor not
having gone to that expense. I have not offered the result to any
English publisher, none of them would receive it as Peppino did when I
showed it to him. He said I had performed a miracle, that I had
converted a few lines of drivelling nonsense--just the sort of stuff that
would attract the professor--into a masterpiece. But I am afraid the
prestige of the English language may have blinded Peppino to any little
defects, as it made him see more romance than I could find in the names
of the English boats. This was my "masterpiece":
FULL INSIDE.
The train is full; Ah me! the load of travellers!
The engine whistles; Ah me! the piercing shriek!
My heart is burdened; Ah me! the weight of sorrows!
My soul exclaims; Ah me! the despairing cry!
O Train! have pity upon me
For you are strong and I am weak,
Transfer to my heart the load of your passengers
And take in exchange the weight of my sorrows.
Next time I saw the professor he was in charge of a newspaper kiosk in
Palermo, looking older and more dilapidated and still waiting for the
manna to fall from heaven. He complained of the slackness of trade. He
also complained that the work was too hard and was killing him; so that,
one way or the other, he intended to shut up the kiosk and look out for
something else.
CATANIA
CHAPTER V--MICHELE AND THE PRINCESS OF BIZERTA
Educated Sicilians have not a high opinion of the marionettes; it is
sometimes difficult to induce them to talk on the subject. They say the
marionettes are for the lower orders and accuse them of being responsible
for many of the quarrels we read about in the newspapers. The people
become so fascinated by the glamour of the romance in which they live
night after night that they imitate in private life the chivalrous
behaviour of the warriors they see fighting in the little theatres, and
thus what may begin as a playful reminiscence of something in last
night's performance occasionally leads to a too accurate imitation of one
of last night's combats and perhaps ends in a fatal wound. This being
like the accounts in English papers about boys becoming hooligans or
running off to sea as stowaways in consequence of reading trashy
literature, my desire to attend a performance of marionettes was
increased, but I did not want to go alone for, in the event of a row,
with knives, among the audience it would be better to be accompanied by a
native.
I was in Palermo where I knew a few students, whose education was of
course still incomplete, but they were cold on the subject and said that
if they came with me we should probably be turned out for laughing. That
was not what I wanted. It ought to have been possible to do something
with the waiter or the porter, or even with the barber whom I met on the
stairs and in the passages of the hotel when he came in the morning to
shave the commercial travellers; but they all made difficulties--either
they did not get away from their work till too late, or it was not a
place for an Englishman or it was not safe. At home, of course, one does
not go to the theatre with the waiter, but when in Sicily, though one
does not perhaps do altogether as the Sicilians, one does not do as one
does in England. I know a Palermitan barber with whom I should be proud
to be seen walking in the Via Macqueda any day--that is, any day when his
Sunday clothes were not in pawn--and there used to be a conduttore at my
hotel who took me round to many of the sights in the town and who was a
person of such distinguished manners that when with him I felt as though
walking with a Knight-Templar in disguise--a disguise that had to be
completed by my buying him a straw hat, otherwise he would have given us
away by wearing his cap with "Albergo So-and-so" written all round it.
These are the people who really know about the marionettes, for whenever
they get an evening off they go. It seemed, however, that I had met with
a conspiracy of obstruction. Palermo was treating me as a good woman
treats her husband when he wants to do something of which she
disapproves--there was no explanation or arguing; what I wanted was
quietly made impossible. So I replied by treating Palermo as a good man
treats his wife under such circumstances--I pretended to like it and
waited till I could woo some less difficult city.
Catania provided what I wanted. There I knew a professor interested in
folk-lore and kindred subjects to whom I confided my troubles. He
laughed at me for my failures, assured me there was no danger and offered
to take me. It was a Sunday evening. On arriving at the teatrino, he
spoke to an attendant who showed us in by a side entrance and gave us the
best places in the house, that is, we were near the only open window.
The seating arrangements would have been condemned by the County Council;
there were rows of benches across the floor and no passages, so that the
people had to walk on the seats to get to their places; two galleries ran
round the house very close together, an ordinary man could not have stood
upright in the lower one, and it was difficult to move in the upper one
in which we were, because the arches supporting the roof nearly blocked
it in three places on each side. Presently a man came round and
collected our money, twenty centimes each, the seats on the ground being
fifteen.
There were four boys sitting on the stage, two at each side of the
curtain, as they used to sit in Shakespeare's theatre. Like the rest of
the audience, these boys were of the class they call Facchini, that is,
porters, coachmen, shop assistants, shoeblacks, water-sellers, and so on.
It sometimes happens when travelling in Sicily that one has to spend half
an hour, half a day, or it may be more, in company with one of these men.
He is usually a delightful person, dignified, kind, courteous, full of
fun and extremely friendly without being obtrusive. During conversation
one may perhaps ask him whether he can read and write; he will probably
reply that at school he was taught both. Presently one may ask him to
read an advertisement, or to write down an address; he will probably
reply that the light is bad, or that he is occupied with the luggage or
the horses. The fact is that reading and writing are to him very much
what the classics and the higher mathematics are to many an English
gentleman--the subjects were included in his youthful studies, but as
they have never been of the slightest use to him in earning his bread, he
has forgotten all he ever learnt of them, and does not care to say so.
The Sicilian, however, no matter how uneducated he may be, has an
appetite for romance which must be gratified and, as it would give him
some trouble to brush up his early accomplishments and stay at home
reading Pulci and Boiardo, Tasso and Ariosto, he prefers to follow the
story of Carlo Magno and his paladins and the wars against the Saracens
in the teatrino. Besides, no Sicilian man ever stays at home to do
anything except to eat and sleep, and those are things he does out of
doors as often as not; the houses are for the women, the men live in the
street. It is as though in England the cab-drivers, railway porters and
shop-boys were to spend evening after evening, month after month, looking
on at a dramatized version of the _Arcadia_ or _The Faerie Queene_.
Presently the curtain went up and disclosed two flaring gas-jets, each
with a small screen in front of it about halfway down the stage; these
were the footlights, and behind them was a back cloth representing a hall
with a vista of columns. In the rather confined space between the
footlights and the back cloth there came on a knight in armour. He stood
motionless, supporting his forehead with his right fist, the back of his
hand being outward.
"Is he crying?" I inquired.
"No," replied the professor, "he is meditating; if he were crying the
back of his hand would be against his face."
He then dropped his fist and delivered a soliloquy, no doubt embodying
the result of his meditation, after which he was joined by his twin
brother. They conversed at length of battles and the King of Athens, of
Adrianopoli and the Grand Turk, of princesses and of journeys by sea and
land. The act of speaking induced a curious nervous complaint, useful
because it showed which was the speaker; not only did he move his head
and his right arm in a very natural and Sicilian manner, but he was
constantly on the point of losing his balance, and only saved himself
from falling by swinging one leg from the hip forwards or backwards as
the case required. The listening knight stood firm till he had to speak,
and then he was attacked by the complaint and the other became still.
At first I was puzzled as to the actual size of the figures and, starting
with the idea that marionettes are always small, assumed that these were
about three feet high; but, as the novelty wore off, I compared them with
the audience and especially with the boys sitting in the corners and with
various assistants of whom occasional glimpses could be caught at the
wings; sometimes the hand of an operator appeared below the scenery and
gave a hint, and gradually I came to the conclusion that the puppets
could not be much smaller than life, if at all.
The operators must have been standing on a platform behind the back
scene; the figures were able to pass one another, but never came forward
more than a step or two, the footlights being in the way, and no doubt
the operators could not reach further forward than they did. Each figure
was worked by two iron rods, one to his head and one to his right hand,
and several strings to which after a few minutes I paid no attention;
perhaps their very obviousness saved them from notice. Any attempt to
conceal them would have been a mistake, for what is the use of announcing
a performance by marionettes and then pretending there is no mechanism?
Besides, if one cannot accept a few conventions one had better stay away
from the theatre altogether.
At the conclusion of the interview the knights followed one another off;
and the buoyancy of their walk must be seen to be believed. The students
have seen it and believe it so thoroughly that, when they meet one
another in the Quattro Canti, they not unfrequently adopt it to the
amusement of the bystanders. But the students make the mistake of
slightly overdoing it. The marionettes often take a step or two quite
naturally, and this, while adding to the absurdity (which cannot be the
intention of the operator), also shows what is possible and makes one
think that with a little extra trouble they might be made to walk always
as smoothly as they move their heads and arms. It might, however, be
necessary for them to have more strings, and this would make them more
difficult to manipulate. In Sicily the marionettes who tell the story of
the Paladins do not lay themselves out to be of a mechanism so ingenious
that they shall appear to be alive; such illusion as they do produce,
like the incompetent illustration to Shakespeare which Lamb preferred, is
insufficient to cripple the imagination of the audience who are the more
intimately touched by the romance of the story and by the voice of the
speaker.
The back cloth was raised and we had before us a tranquil sea with two
little islands sleeping under a sunset sky. Michele entered; he was a
very splendid fellow in golden armour with draperies of purple and
scarlet and white, and in his helmet a plume that nearly trailed on the
ground. No playbill was provided, but none was wanted for Michele, he
could not have been taken for anything but an operatic tenor of noble
birth about to proceed against the Saracens. He first meditated and then
soliloquized as he paced the sandy shore. The Princess of Bizerta in a
flowing robe, covered with spangles, though not actually in sight, was
not far off, imparting her griefs to the unsympathetic ocean. Spying the
paladin, she strolled in his direction and spoke to him, but it was not
an assignation; Michele, indeed, was obviously distressed at having his
soliloquy interrupted; nevertheless, being a knight and a gentleman, he
could but reply politely, and so they got into conversation. She told
him who she was, which would not have been necessary if they had ever met
before, then she told him of her unhappy plight, namely, that she was in
the custody of an Arabian giant, and then she implored his assistance.
Michele was as unsympathetic as the ocean, his mind being full of
Saracens; but before he had time to invent a plausible lie, the giant
entered very suddenly. Physically he was not a particularly gigantic
giant, being but three or four inches taller than Michele. If he had
been much more, his head, which like that of all stage giants was
undeveloped at the back, would have been hidden by the clouds that hung
from the sky. His inches, however, were enough, for, in romance, height
is given to a giant to symbolize power, and provided he is perceptibly
taller than the hero, the audience accept him as a giant and a bully and
one, moreover, who is, as a rule, nearing the end of his wicked career.
Accordingly, when, in a voice of thunder, he demanded of Michele an
immediate explanation--wanted to know how he dared address the
princess--we all felt that he was putting himself in the wrong and that a
catastrophe was imminent. Giants, that is, unscrupulous people in power,
are too fond of assuming this attitude of unprovoked hostility and
overbearing insolence, but they assume it once too often. Had he
remembered Adam and Eve and the apple it might have occurred to him to
inquire whether in the present case also the lady had not begun it.
Giants, however, are for the most part unintelligent, not to say
downright stupid people, and seldom have the sense to know how to use
their power wisely--think of the giant in _Jack and the Beanstalk_, think
of Polyphemus and Ulysses, think of the Inquisition and Galileo.
And then this giant made the mistake of losing his temper, and the
further mistake of showing that he had lost it, and when giants do this,
it means that they know they are in the wrong and don't care. He
insulted Michele most grossly, and the knight very properly drew his
sword and went for him, and a terrible battle ensued throughout which
realism was thrown to the waves. The combatants rose off the ground so
high that Michele's head and the giant's head and shoulders were
frequently lost in the clouds; and they clanked down again upon the sandy
shore two or three feet in front of where they had stood--or behind, just
as it happened; and their swords banged against their breast-plates and
shields, proving that they were real metal and not merely tinsel; and
they twirled round and round like beef on a roasting-jack, until at last
Michele dealt the inevitable blow and the giant fell dead on the sand
with a thud that jolted the coast, shook the islands, rippled across the
sunset sky and restored animation to the lifeless form of the princess.
While the battle raged she had been standing by, unmoved, blankly glaring
at the audience; and yet she must have known as well as we did that it
was all about her. The probability is that her operator had temporarily
moored her to a convenient peg in the back of the clouds while he worked
the giant, and that at the conclusion of the duel he was free to return
to her. She first looked round and then swooped hurriedly across the
stage, three inches from the ground; before quite touching her protector,
however, she swung halfway back again, then a little forwards, and
finally, coming to anchor at a suitable distance, raised her two hands
and, as though offering him a tray of refreshments, said--
"Grazie."
He, pursuing his policy of frigid politeness, bowed in acknowledgment and
followed her off the stage, leaving the corpse of the giant lying near
the sea.
The back cloth was intentionally too long, so that the bottom was
crumpled into folds which did well enough for little waves breaking on
the shore. These waves now began to be agitated, and gradually rose
gustily and advanced until they had covered the dead giant. It was a
very good effect and avoided the banality of removing the body in sight
of the audience; it looked as though the wind had risen and the depths
had swallowed him. And this, as I afterwards was told, is what happens
to the giant's body in the story.
When the back cloth went up for the next scene the corpse was gone, and
we were in The House of the Poor Man where Michele came to take
refuge--from what I did not clearly understand, but if from the Princess
of Bizerta he would have been better advised had he sought some other
sanctuary; for no sooner had he performed his usual meditation and
soliloquy and got himself to sit down on The Poor Man's chair, where he
instantly fell asleep with his head resting on his hand, than Her
Highness entered and, addressing the audience confidentially, said that
she loved him and intended to take this opportunity of giving him a kiss.
She was, however, on the other side of the stage and had first to get to
him, which she did so like a bird with a broken wing that he woke up
before she reached him. She evidently did not consider that this added
to her difficulties, but something else did.
A dispute had been simmering in the gallery just opposite where we sat,
and now began to boil over, and threatened to swamp the play as the waves
had submerged the Arabian giant. I thought perhaps we ought to leave,
though it would have been impossible to pass out quickly, but the
professor again assured me there was no danger; the management are
accustomed to disturbances and know how to deal with them. So I sat
still, and the proprietor came on the stage and stood in front of the
gas-jets. He joined his hands as though in prayer and begged us to be
quiet, saying that it was a complicated story and would require all our
attention, that Michele would die on Wednesday, and he hoped we should
not cause the speaker to die of starvation before that day by preventing
him from earning his bread. The appearance of the proprietor among his
puppets confirmed me in the conclusion I had arrived at as to their size;
he may have been a small man, but he was about the size of the giant. He
must have been a strong man, for, with all their armour, the figures must
be very heavy.
The proprietor's appeal went to all our hearts; silence was restored and
the princess repeated to the warrior what we already knew--that she loved
him and desired to kiss him. Something of the kind was exactly what poor
Michele had been dreading. He turned to her and, almost choking with
despair, said, "Misericordia," not meaning to be hostile, but that the
killing of her giant had already delayed him, and if he were to allow
himself to yield to her blandishments he would be too late for the
Saracens. No doubt he also had a vow. But when a lady has made up her
mind on a matter of this kind, to thwart her is to invite disaster--think
of Joseph and Potiphar's wife. Not that Michele thought of them, nor
would it have influenced him if he had, for he was a paladin and
incapable of fear; but he had the instincts of a gentleman, so, in spite
of his anxiety to be off to the wars, he rose as well as he could, which
was unsteadily, and staggered towards the princess who made every effort
to meet him. In time they drew close enough to fall into one another's
arms, and the curtain descended as they were accomplishing not a
passionate but a quite creditable embrace.
Then there was a scene between three kings with golden crowns who
conversed at length of battles and the King of Athens, of Adrianopoli and
the Grand Turk, of princesses and of journeys by sea and land. These
were the things they spoke about as they stood together in the hall that
had served for the first scene with a vista of columns behind, and when
they had done they followed one another off. Then we also followed one
another out of the theatre, not because of the Saracens, nor because we
had any vow, nor because we feared a repetition of the uproar, nor even
because of the coming-on disposition of the Princess of Bizerta, but
because one open window was not enough.
TRAPANI
CHAPTER VI--FERRAU AND ANGELICA
My next experience in a marionette theatre was at Trapani. I approached
the subject with Mario, a coachman whom I have known since he was a boy.
He was quite ready to help me, and told me there were two companies in
the town, one of large puppets, about as high as my umbrella, the others,
to which he went every evening, being rather smaller. Accordingly, at
about a quarter to eight, he called for me, wrapped in his melodramatic
cloak, and hurried me through the wet and windy streets to the teatrino.
He kept me on his right hand because he was the host and I the guest, and
if, owing to obstructions, he found me accidentally on his left he was
round in a moment and I was in the place of honour again. He insisted on
paying for our seats, fifteen centimes each, and we went in.
This teatrino was in every way a much smaller place than that in Catania;
it belonged to a private gentleman who had bought the puppets for his own
amusement and spent much of his time among them, sometimes working them
himself. He has since married and parted with them and the theatre is
now (1908) closed. No complaint could be made about the seating
arrangements or the ventilation. There were benches on the floor with a
passage down the middle, a few rows in front were reserved for boys at
ten centimes each and at the other end of the hall was a small gallery
for ladies, twenty centimes each. I asked Mario so many questions that
he proposed we should go behind the scenes, which was exactly what I
wanted. He spoke to one of the authorities, who was politeness itself
and, showing us through a door and up three steps, introduced us behind
the curtain. Our heads were high above the opening of the proscenium,
which was about the size and shape of the opening of the fireplace in a
fairly large room. We were in a grove of puppets hanging up against the
walls like turkeys in a poulterer's shop at Christmas--scores and scores
of them. There were six or eight men preparing for the performance and a
youth, Pasquale, took charge of us and pointed out the principal figures.
"This warrior," he said, "is Ferrau di Spagna."
He was in tin armour, carefully made and enriched with brass and copper
ornamentation, all as bright as a biscuit-box. I said--
"He looks a very terrible fellow. Why is he so red about the eyes?" for
the whites of his eyes were redder than his cheeks.
"Because he is always in a rage. And this lady is Angelica, Empress of
Cathay; she wears a crown and will die this evening. This is her
husband, Medoro; he is a black man and wears a crown; he will perish
to-night by the sword of Ferrau."
I rapidly constructed by anticipation the familiar plot. The jealous
husband would kill his erring wife and would then be killed by her lover;
but, being unversed in the habits of Cathaian emperors and their
entourage, I had run off the track. Pasquale put me straight.
"Prima Ferrau uccide Medoro." (Ferrau first kills Medoro.)
"And then kills Angelica?" I inquired.
"No. Angelica si uccide personalmente, so as not to marry Ferrau."
I was next introduced to Galafrone, the father of Angelica, who also wore
a crown, and to two valorous knights, Sacripante, King of the
Circassians, and the Duca d'Avilla.
There were more than two hundred marionettes altogether, including
Turkish and Spanish soldiers. The knights and ladies were kept in green
holland bags to preserve them from the dust, and taken out as they were
wanted. They varied in height from twenty-four to thirty-two inches.
Ferrau was thirty-one and a half inches from the soles of his feet to the
top of his helmet; Angelica was twenty-six and a half inches; ordinary
Turks and Spanish soldiers were only twenty-four inches each.
Pasquale was very proud of Ferrau who really was magnificent. He was
made of wood with loose joints. An iron rod went through his head, and
was hooked into a ring between his collar-bones. Another rod was
fastened to his right wrist. There were three strings--one for his left
hand, which held his shield, one to raise his vizor and one which passed
through his right fist and across his body to his sword-hilt so that he
could draw his sword. I should have liked to buy him and bring him to
London with me; he would be an ornament to any house. But he was not for
sale; and, besides, it would not have been right to break up the company.
When Don Quixote, carried away by his feelings like a Sicilian facchino,
came to the assistance of Don Gayferos by drawing his sword and attacking
the Moorish puppets, he broke up Master Peter's company in a very literal
sense, and had to pay four and a half reals for King Marsilio of
Saragossa and five and a quarter for the Emperor Carlo Magno; but it is
not clear how large or how splendid they were.
Each figure requires one operator who stands between the wings, which are
about up to his waist and so solid that he can lean his elbows on them
and reach comfortably more than halfway across the stage. There are four
openings between the wings, and thus there can be eight puppets on the
stage at once, operated by eight manipulators, four on each side. This
could not be done with the life-sized marionettes in Catania, which were
all operated from behind, and never came forward. At Trapani the stage
was much deeper in proportion, and the flies from which the scenery
descended were high above the heads of the operators, so that the figures
could walk about backwards and forwards all over the stage. The
footlights were in the usual place in front of the curtain, and during
the performance boys got up from their seats in the front row and lighted
their cigarettes at them.
I had not nearly completed my investigations; but, fearing we might be in
the way, we returned to the front and inquired about play-bills. There
was only one in the house, posted up near the box-office; we went and
inspected it--
TEATRO DI MARIONETTE.
Per questa sera dara 2 recite
la prima alle 5.5 la seconda alle 8
Pugna fra Sacripante e il Duca d'Avilla--
Ferrau uccide Medoro e acquista Angelica--
Morte di Sacripante per mani di Ferrau--
Morte di Angelica.
MARIONETTE THEATRE.
This evening two performances will be given
The first at 5.30, the second at 8
Fight between Sacripante and the Duke of Avilla--
Ferrau kills Medoro and gains possession of Angelica--
Death of Sacripante at the hands of Ferrau--
Death of Angelica.
There was a pleasant-looking, retiring young man in the box-office, who
was pointed out to me as "Lui che parla"--the one who speaks. They said
he was a native of Mount Eryx and a shoemaker by trade.
We returned to our places and sat talking, smoking, eating American
pea-nuts and waiting. The audience, which consisted of men of the class
of life to which Mario belonged, all knew one another; most of them met
there every evening. A subscription for one month costs three lire and
entitles the holder to one performance a day, the performance at 8 being
a repetition of that at 5.30.
The play now being performed is _The Paladins of France_; it was written
by Manzanares in Italian prose and is in three volumes. It does not
always agree with the other versions of the same story; but that is only
as it should be, for romances have always been re-written to suit the
audience they are intended for. It has been going on about four months,
that is, since last October, when it began with Pipino, Re di Francia ed
Imperatore di Roma, the father of Carlo Magno, and it will continue day
after day till May, like the feuilleton in a journal. During the hot
weather there is no performance in this theatre; but the same story will
be taken up again next October and is long enough to last through two
winters. It could last longer, but they bring it within reasonable
limits by removing some of the boredom. It concludes with the defeat and
death of Orlando and the paladins at Roncisvalle.
The portion of the story appointed for the evening's performance was in
five acts, divided into a large number of very short scenes, and if I did
not always know quite clearly what was going on, that was partly due to
the distracting uproar, for nearly every scene contained a fight, and
some contained several, the shortest lasting well over a minute. Whoever
had been employed to shorten the story would have earned the thanks of
one member of the audience if he had acted upon Pococurante's remarks to
Candide about the works of Homer. He ought not to have left in so many
combats; they were as like one another and as tedious as those in the
_Iliad_, besides being much noisier, at least we are not told that the
Homeric heroes were accompanied by a muscular pianist, fully armed, and
by the incessant stamping of clogged boots. Nevertheless the majority of
the audience enjoyed the fights, for no Sicilian objects to noise.
This is what I gathered: Angelica had come from far Cathay with the
express intention of sowing discord among the paladins by inducing them
to fall in love with her, and at the present moment Sacripante and the
Duca d'Avilla were her victims. These two knights met in a wood, raised
their vizors and talked matters over; there was to be a fight about it,
of course, but the preliminaries were to be conducted in a friendly
spirit--like a test case in Chancery. They separated, no doubt to give
them an opportunity of going home to make their wills and take leave of
their wives and families, if any. In the second scene they met again,
lowered their vizors, drew their swords and fought till Angelica
supervened. In the next scene the two knights and Angelica were joined
by Medoro with whom one of the knights fought. I recognized Medoro when
his vizor was up because he was a black man, but Sacripante and the Duca
d'Avilla were so much alike that I did not know which was fighting and
which was standing with Angelica looking on; say it was Sacripante that
was fighting, being king of the Circassians he was probably entitled to
precedence over a mere duke. Angelica, after some time, began to feel
qualms of conscience, so she interrupted and mentioned who Medoro really
was. Sacripante, in the most chivalrous manner, immediately desisted and
apologized--he had failed to recognize his opponent and had no idea he
had been fighting with the lady's husband. The apology was accepted in
the spirit in which it was offered, all accusations, expressed or
implied, were withdrawn, and friendly relations established. The four
then set out together to pass the night in an albergo. Angelica,
however, with her quick, womanly instinct, mistrusted the knights and,
taking her husband aside, proposed that they two should depart by stealth
and escape to Cathay, leaving Sacripante and the Duca d'Avilla asleep.
Medoro demurred, saying it was a very good inn and he was quite
comfortable where he was. So she told him a few facts which alarmed him
to such a degree that he consented and they decamped.
On their way they encountered Ferrau who entered with a stamp of the
foot, sforzando, attacked Medoro and killed him dead, thus obtaining
possession of Angelica according to the play-bill. But she managed to
get free and appeared upon the coast where she met a sea-captain and,
telling him she was very rich, made terms with him, bought his vessel and
embarked for the Court of her father, Galafrone. She might have made
better terms had she not opened negotiations by telling him she was very
rich, but it was a matter of life or death and she was reckless, knowing
that Ferrau was after her. Sacripante and the Duca d'Avilla were after
Ferrau and presently caught him up and attacked him. He fought with them
both at once and killed one of them in a minute and a half. With the
exception of myself, every one in the theatre knew which he killed, for
they knew all the knights as they came on. Let us again give Sacripante
the precedence and suppose that he was killed first. Ferrau went on
fighting with the Duca d'Avilla and both were hard at work when the
curtain fell.
It rose again, very effectively, on the continuation of the fight, and
almost at once Ferrau cut off the Duca d'Avilla's head which rolled about
on the stage. Immediately there came three Turks; Ferrau stabbed each as
he entered--one, two, three--and their bodies encumbered the ground as
the curtain fell.
It rose as soon as the bodies had been removed and disclosed Ferrau
stamping about alone. There came three more Turks; he stabbed them each
as they entered--one, two, three--and their bodies encumbered the ground.
Then there came three knights in armour; Ferrau fought them all three
together for a very considerable time and it was deafening. He killed
them all and their bodies encumbered the ground with those of the last
three Turks. It was a bloody sight that met the eyes of Galafrone who
now entered.
The curtain fell, while Galafrone had the corpses cleared away, and rose
again on the same scene which was the ante-chamber of Angelica's
bedroom--for somehow we were now in her father's dominions, and it was
she who had sent the knights and the Turks to kill Ferrau before he could
approach her. Then there was an interview between Ferrau and Galafrone
on the subject of Angelica. The knight, having made her a widow, now
wished to make her his wife, the king saw no objection and promised to
use his influence with his daughter.
The scene changed to Angelica's bedroom; her bed was at the far end of
the stage with a patchwork quilt over it, but there was no other
furniture in the room except a sofa near the front. Her father brought
her in and I, knowing that she was to kill herself personally and that
this must be her last entry, examined her closely and detected a string
passing through her right hand and ending in the hilt of a dagger
ostentatiously concealed in her bosom. Of course I knew what that meant.
Her father, true to his promise, began to urge Ferrau's suit, saying that
he had forgiven him for having killed Medoro. But Angelica had not
forgiven him, and moreover she hated Ferrau with his bloodshot eyes and
his explosive manners. She made a long speech, admirably delivered by
the cobbler and as full of noble sentiments as a poem by Mrs. Browning,
then, suddenly drawing her dagger with the string, she stabbed herself
and fell dead on the couch, exclaiming--
"A rivederci."
It was an extremely neat suicide and her father concluded the
entertainment by weeping over her body.
These marionettes were not nearly so comic in their movements as the
life-sized ones in Catania, not because they were better managed, but
because they attempted less and because, being so small, their defects
were less obvious. A small one may, and generally does, enter like a
bird alighting on a molehill, but he has such a short distance to go that
he is at rest before one realizes that he has not attempted to walk.
Besides it is a mode of progression we are all familiar with, having
practised it in dreams since childhood. A life-sized marionette, on a
larger stage, has, perhaps, two or three yards to traverse; he tries to
take steps and is easily caught tripping, for without strings to his feet
his steps can only be done in a haphazard way. There are marionettes
with strings to their feet, and though they may do _The Story of the
Paladins_, this is not their usual business, they are more elaborately
articulated, and are intended for operas, ballets and other complicated
things.
And then, again, in Catania a glimpse of the hand of an operator or of
some one standing in the wings offended at once as a blot on the
performance. But looking at the small figures at Trapani one accepted
them almost immediately as men and women, and forgot all about absolute
size, so that when the hand of an operator appeared and it was larger
than the head of a marionette, it seemed to belong to another world,
while a real man standing in the wings could not be seen above his knees,
and it required a mental effort to connect his boots and trousers in any
way with the performance.
The speaker at Catania did well with a good voice; nevertheless one felt
that disaster was in the neighbourhood and was being consciously avoided.
The idea of failure never crossed the mind of the cobbler from Mount
Eryx. His voice was rich and flexible, full of variety and quick to
express a thousand emotions. Listening to it was like looking long and
long into a piece of Sicilian amber in whose infinite depth, as you turn
it about in the sunlight, you see all the colours of the rainbow, from
red, through orange, yellow, green and blue, even to a glowing purple.
There was nothing he could not do with it, and he managed it with the
quiet dignity and easy grace of a young lion at play.
CHAPTER VII--THE DEATH OF BRADAMANTE
Before the last act, which concluded with the death of Angelica, a dwarf
had appeared in front of the curtain (not a human dwarf, but a marionette
dwarf) and recited the programme for the following day, stating that the
performance would terminate with the death of Ferrau. Unfortunately I
was not able to witness his end, but I went to the teatrino the evening
after. We arrived early and began by inspecting the programme--
Carlo ottiene piena vittoria contro Marsilio--
Fuga di costui e presa di Barcelona--
Marfisa trova Bradamante che more fra le sue braccia.
Charles obtains complete victory over Marsilio--
Flight of the latter and taking of Barcelona--
Marfisa finds Bradamante who dies in her arms.
We then went behind the scenes to spend some time among the puppets
before the play began. First I inquired whether Ferrau had perished and
ascertained that Orlando had duly killed him the night before with la
Durlindana. This famous sword was won by Carlo Magno in his youth when
he overcame Polinoro, the captain-general of Bramante, King of Africa.
Carlo Magno, having another sword of his own and wishing to keep la
Durlindana in the family, passed it on to his nephew Orlando. That is
Pasquale's version. Others say that it was given to Orlando by Malagigi
the magician. The most usual account is that la Durlindana belonged to
Hector. After the fall of Troy it came to AEneas; and from him, through
various owners, to Almonte, a giant of a dreadful stature, who slew
Orlando's father. An angel in a dream directed Orlando, when he was
about eighteen, to proceed to a river on the bank of which he found Carlo
Magno and Almonte fighting. He took his uncle's part, avenged his
father's death by killing Almonte, threw his gigantic body into the
stream and appropriated his enchanted possessions, namely, his horse,
Brigliadoro, his horn, his sword and his armour. He had the sword with
him when he was defeated at Roncisvalle and threw it from him, about two
hundred miles, to Rocamadour in France where it stuck in a rock and any
one can see it to this day.
I do not remember that Homer speaks of Hector's sword as la Durlindana;
perhaps he did not know. But every one knows that horses have had names,
both in romance and real life, from the days of Pegasus to our own.
Mario calls his horses Gaspare, after one of the Three Kings, and Toto,
which is a form of Salvatore. They were so called before he bought them,
or he would have named them Baiardo and Brigliadoro. Having no sword, he
calls his whip la Durlindana. He assured me that the barber whom he
employs calls all his razors by the names of the swords of the paladins,
and that the shoe-blacks give similar names to their brushes.
If Pasquale's statements were at variance with other poetical versions of
the story, they were, as might be expected, still more so with the prose
authorities. In the books, Carlo Magno was born sometimes in the castle
of Saltzburg, in Bavaria, and sometimes at Aix-la-Chapelle; which may be
good history, but could not well be represented by the marionettes
without a double stage, and even then might fail to convince. The Carlo
Magno of romance, son of Pipino, King of France, and Berta, his wife, was
not born until many years after the wedding; for Berta had enemies at the
French Court who spirited her away immediately after the ceremony,
substituting her waiting-maid, Elisetta, who was so like her that Pipino
did not notice the difference. Elisetta became the mother of the wicked
bastards Lanfroi and Olderigi, while Berta lived in retirement in the
cottage of a hunter on the banks of the Magno, a river about five leagues
from Paris. Pipino lost himself while out hunting one day, took refuge
in the cottage, saw Berta, did not recognize his lawful, wedded wife and
fell in love with her over again. Carlo Magno was born in due course in
the cottage, and his second name was given to him, not for the prosaic
reason that it means the Great, but because it is the name of the river.
The bastards afterwards murder their father, which is a warning to any
bridegroom among the audience to be careful not to mistake another lady
for his bride upon the wedding night. And thus Romance becomes the
handmaid of Morality.
Carlo Magno is now on the throne. I was presented to him, and found him
in mourning for a nephew who had been killed a few evenings before and
whose corpse was still hanging on a neighbouring peg, waiting for the
slight alteration necessary to turn him into some one else. All the
paladins who had recently lost relations were in mourning and wore long
pieces of crape trailing from their helmets. Pasquale took me round,
told me who they all were and explained their genealogies.
I was in a hades peopled with the ghosts of Handel's operas. I saw
Orlando himself and his cousins "Les quatre fils Aymon," namely Rinaldo
da Montalbano, Guicciardo, Alardo, and Ricciardetto. I saw their father,
whose name in Italian is Amone, and their sister Bradamante, the widow of
Ruggiero da Risa, and her sister-in-law, the Empress Marfisa, Ruggiero's
sister. These two ladies were in armour, showing their legs, and in all
respects like the men warriors, except that they wore their hair long.
"Bradamante will die this evening," said Pasquale.
I expressed regret, and asked for particulars.
"She will die of grief for the loss of her husband, Ruggiero da Risa, who
has been killed by the treachery of Conte Gano."
Then I saw my fellow-countryman, Astolfo d'Inghilterra; he it was that
brought back from the moon the lost wits of Orlando when he became
furioso because Angelica would have nothing to say to him and married
Medoro. And I saw Astolfo's father, Ottone d'Inghilterra, and Il Re
Desiderio and Gandellino, who seemed undersized; but when I said so,
Pasquale replied--
"Si, e piccolo, ma e bello--stupendo," and so he was.
I took down one of the knights, stood him on the floor and tried to work
him. The number of things I had to hold at once puzzled me a good deal,
especially the strings. Pasquale took another knight and gave me a
lesson, showing me how to make him weep and meditate, how to raise and
lower his vizor, how to draw his sword and fight. It was very difficult
to get him to put his sword back into the scabbard. I could not do it at
all, though I managed the other things after a fashion.
Then I saw the Marchese Oliviero di Allemagna and Uggiero Danese and
Turpino, a priest, but a warrior nevertheless.
"This," said Pasquale, "is Guidon Selvaggio, and this is his sister
Carmida. They are the children of Rinaldo."
"But spurious," interrupted another youth.
"Yes," agreed Pasquale; "they are bastards. Shall I tell you how?"
But I declined to rake up the family scandal and we passed on to
Carmida's husband, Cladinoro, Re di Bizerta, a spurious son of the old
Ruggiero da Risa, and so valorous that they speak of La Forza di
Cladinoro.
All these knights and ladies were hanging on one side of the stage in two
rows, one row against the wall and the other in front. I asked Pasquale
how he knew which was which. He concealed his astonishment at such a
simple question and replied--
"By the crests on their helmets."
I then observed that they all wore their proper crests, a lion or an
eagle, or a castle, or whatever it might be; Ferrau had no crest, but he
had a special kind of helmet, and these boys knew them all in the
legitimate way by their armorial bearings, and that was how, on the
evening of Angelica's death, the audience knew all the knights and said
their names as they entered.
On the other side of the stage were two rows of pagans who in this hades,
where the odium theologicum persists, are not admitted among Christians.
Here hung Il Re Marsilio di Spagna, who was to be defeated this evening,
and his two brothers, Bulugante and Falserone, his son the Infanta di
Spagna, his nephew Ferrau, now dead, and Grandonio. Then I came upon a
miscellaneous collection and could look at no more knights or ladies
after I had found the devil.
He was not The Devil, he was only "un diavolo qualunque," but he was
fascinating, and he had horns and a tail--Pasquale and the other youths
showed me his tail very particularly and laughed at him cruelly for
having one. But it was not his fault, poor devil, that he had a tail:
except for the wear and tear of his tempestuous youth he was as he had
left the hands of his maker.
There was also a skeleton; they made him dance for me and said that he is
used to appear to any one about to die; but this cannot apply to the
warriors, for they fight and die freely, and put whole families into
mourning nightly, and if the skeleton appeared to them every time, a new
one would be wanted once a month.
And there was "un gigante qualunque"--the raw material for a giant,
something that could be faked up into this or that special giant when
wanted. Similarly there was a lady having her dress and wig altered,
they told me she was "una donna qualunque"--the very words I had seen a
few weeks previously written up in Rome to advertise a performance in
Italian of _A Woman of no Importance_. I suspect there must have been
somewhere "un guerriero qualunque" so constructed that his head could be
cut off, and that he had been disguised as and substituted for the Duca
d'Avilla when Ferrau appeared to kill that warrior, for, without
trickery, no sword in the teatrino, not even la Durlindana, could have
cut off a head which had an iron rod running through it.
There was a confused heap of Turks and Spanish soldiers lying in a
corner, and at the back of the stage, between the farthest scene and the
wall of the theatre, was the stable containing seven war horses and one
centaur. Pasquale told me that the centaur was "un animale selvaggio"
which I knew, but he did not tell me what part he took in the play. One
of the horses, of course, was Baiardo, the special horse of Rinaldo.
Baiardo is still living in the forest of Ardennes, he formerly belonged
to Amadis de Gaul and was found in a grotto by Malagigi when he found
Rinaldo's sword, Fusberta, which used to belong to the King of Cyprus.
It appeared to me time to go to the front, but Pasquale said that this
evening I might stay behind during the performance if I liked and I
accepted his invitation, for I had a toy theatre of my own once and used
to do _The Miller and His Men_ with an explosion at the end; it had to be
at the end, not only as a bonne-bouche, but also because my audience, not
being composed of Sicilian facchini, were driven out of the room by its
effects. Smokeless explosions may be possible now, but we did not then
know how to do any better. I would have given much--even the
explosion--if I could have had a teatrino and real marionettes of my own,
as one of my Sicilian friends had when he was a boy; he dressed his own
dolls and made his own scenery, and used to do the _Odyssey_--a
first-rate subject that could easily be made to last two winters.
I was so much interested that I may have paid less attention this evening
to the story than to the working of the puppets. The rods that pass
through their heads have wooden handles and end in hooks; across the
stage, pretty high up, were laid two horizontal laths with six or seven
chains hanging from them; when the paladins appeared, marching in one
after another and taking up their positions in two rows, as they
frequently did, what really happened was that an operator on one side
reached across and handed them over one by one to an operator on the
other side, who hooked them up into the chains, choosing the link
according to the height of the particular puppet in such a way that, if
possible, its feet just rested upon the stage. After three or four had
been hooked up, the first operator could hang up the rest, and as soon as
the two rows were in their places Carlo Magno entered in front and
addressed them in a majestic voice. During the pauses of his speech and
at its conclusion the paladins all murmured in agreement or shouted
"Evviva" which was done by us who were behind and, as there were thirteen
of us, it ought to have sounded fairly imposing. Three of the thirteen
were regular operators, pretty constantly employed, who took off their
coats, waistcoats and shirts, and found it very hot work; of the
remainder some were authorized assistants, some were friends and one was
the reader--"Lui che parla."
The siege of Marsilio's city was managed in this way. First a scene was
let down as far back as possible on the stage. This, Pasquale said,
represented "una citta qualunque." The collection of little wooden
houses on Captain Shandy's bowling-green was not a more perfect Proteus
of a town than Pasquale's back cloth. This evening it was Barcelona. In
front of it, about halfway to the footlights, was a low wall of
fortifications. Just behind the fortifications the Spaniards were hooked
up into rather high links of the chains, so that, from the front, they
appeared to be looking over the wall and defending the city. Carlo Magno
and his paladins brought ladders, scaled the wall, fought the Spaniards
and effected an entrance. The fights were mostly duels. At one time
there were three duels; that is, six knights were all fighting at once,
three on each side. The places on the stage occupied by the front pair
were worn into hollows by their feet. The damage sustained by the
figures in the fury of the combats is very great; their armour gets
broken, their draperies torn, their joints and the hinges of their vizors
are put out of order and there is much to be done to them before they can
appear again.
For the conclusion we came to the front and took our places as the
curtain drew up on a wood. The Empress Marfisa entered in all her
bravery, riding cross-legged on her charger and looking round, first this
way, then that. She was searching the wood for Bradamante who had
retired from the world to "una grotta oscura" to die of grief. The
empress looked about and rode here and there but could see Bradamante
nowhere, so she rode away to search another part of the wood and the
scene changed. We were now in the obscure grotto and here came Marfisa,
riding on her charger and looking about; she could see her sister-in-law
nowhere and was overcome with anxiety. Presently, in the dim light, she
spied something on the ground; she dismounted, went far into the cave,
and--could it be?--yes, it was the unconscious form of Bradamante. She
knelt down by her, embraced her and called her by her name, but there was
no reply. She kissed her and called "Bradamante," still there was no
reply. She fondled her, and called her her "dolce cognata,"--her sweet
sister-in-law--and at length Bradamante raised herself with an effort,
recognized Marfisa and saying, "Farewell, sister, I am dying," fell back
and expired. An angel fluttered down, received her soul from her lips
and carried it up to heaven, while Marfisa wept over her body.
Then the dwarf came on and recited the programme for the next evening.
This was, as usual, followed by the last scene. The paladins all marched
in--that is to say, they were handed over and hooked up in two rows, the
audience recognizing each, and saying his name as he took his place, and
Carlo Magna came and addressed them in a magnificent speech beginning--
"Paladini! noi siamo stanchi."
Their fatigue was caused by their exertions at the siege of Barcelona and
their Emperor went on to promise them some repose before proceeding
against Madrid.
This epilogue struck me as out of place; nothing ought to have followed
the death of Bradamante, which was as affecting a scene as I have ever
witnessed. The only hitch occurred when Marfisa dismounted; her left
foot came to the ground capitally, but her right would not come over her
saddle for some time; she got it free at last, however, and stood upright
on both feet. I thought again of Master Peter's puppet-show and of how
the petticoat of the peerless Lady Melisendra caught in one of the iron
rails as she was letting herself down from the balcony, so that she hung
dangling in midair, and Don Gayferos had to bring her to the ground by
main force.
The rest of the scene in the grotto could not have gone better and the
audience were enthralled by it. Yet what was it after all? Nothing but
a couple of loosely jointed wooden dolls, fantastically dressed up in tin
armour, being pulled about on a toy stage. Yet there was something more;
there was the voice of the reader--the voice of "Lui che parla." In the
earlier part of the evening he had been giving us fine declamation, which
was all that had been required. The meeting between the two princesses
brought him his opportunity and he attacked the scene and carried it
through in a spirit of simple conviction, his voice throbbing with
emotion as he made for himself a triumph.
Art abounds in miracles, and not the least is this, that a man can take a
few watery commonplaces and by the magic of his voice transmute them into
the golden wine of romance. The audience drank in the glowing drops that
poured from his lips, and were stilled to a silence that broke in a great
sob as the curtain fell. What did they know of loosely jointed wooden
dolls or of toy stages? They were no longer in the theatre. They had
wandered the woods with Marfisa, they had sought Bradamante in the leafy
glades, they had found her dying in the grotto, they had received her
last breath and the world would never be the same to them again. A voice
that can do this is rare and, like the power of a giant, rarely found in
the possession of one who knows how to use it worthily.
MOUNT ERYX
CHAPTER VIII--MONTE SAN GIULIANO
Three or four miles inland from Trapani, at the north-west corner of
Sicily, rises a precipitous solitary mountain, nearly 2500 feet high,
with a town on the top. A motor bus makes a circuit of the mountain,
taking one up to the town in about an hour. It proceeds inland, past the
church of the Annunziata, the famous shrine of the Madonna di Trapani,
and the ascent soon begins. As one looks back towards the sea, Trapani
gradually assumes the form that gave it its Greek name of Drepanum, for
it juts out towards the island of Levanzo like a sickle "with the sea
roaring all round it." Marsala is usually visible beyond the innumerable
salt pans and windmills. One of these windmills is especially pleasing;
it consists of five or six dummy ships with real sails on a pond; these
ships form, as it were, the rim of a wheel lying on its side, the spokes
being poles which attach the ships to the axle, an island in the middle
of the pond. The wind blows and the ships race after one another round
and round the pond, causing the poles to work the mechanism which is
inside the island.
The manufacture of salt is one of the chief industries of Trapani and one
of the chief causes of its wealth. In Sicily it practically never rains
during the summer; the sea water is collected in large, open pans, being
raised by means of the screw which has been in use all over the island
for nearly twenty-two centuries, ever since Archimedes invented it to
remove the water from the hold of one of Hiero's ships at Siracusa. All
through the summer the heat of the sun evaporates the moisture, leaving
the salt which is afterwards exported to Newfoundland, Norway, the North
of France and many other countries and used for salting fish and other
purposes.
The road continues to ascend and the horizon appears to ascend also, so
that the sea takes up with it the AEgadean islands till, presently,
Marettimo looks over the top of Levanzo, while Favognana lies away to the
left. The Isola Grande (S. Pantaleo), the fourth island, is not a
prominent object, being low and near the land, a good deal to the south
towards Marsala; but in former times, when it was Motya, it was the most
important of them all. The sea extends right and left till it is lost in
the haze which so commonly obscures a Sicilian horizon.
The road goes more and more inland and, still rising, diverges from the
shorter road taken by the old horse bus and passes through Paparella.
Presently the mountain shuts out Trapani and the sea, and then the
country lying inland about the base of the mountain comes into view
bounded by a distant amphitheatre and, as the road completes the circuit
of the mountain, and still rising joins the other shorter road at the
Trapani gate of the town, the sea comes into sight again, with the
horizon high above Trapani and the promontory of Capo S. Vito bounding it
on the right.
This mountain, formerly world-renowned as Mount Eryx, and still often
called Monte Erice, is now Monte S. Giuliano and gives its name both to
the town on the top and to the comune of which that town is the chief
place. The highest point of the town is towards the east of the
mountain-top, and here are several towers, some belonging to the
Castello, a Norman fortress, and others to Le Torri, the summer residence
of Count Pepoli. On the north, east and south sides of the summit the
mountain is precipitous, but towards the west it slopes from the towers
through a public garden called the Balio, and then through a maze of
narrow, winding streets, down to the Trapani gate. The normal population
of the town is about 4000, but in the summer and autumn this is largely
increased, inasmuch as the great heat of Trapani and the low country
drives as many as can afford it to live on the summit where it is seldom
too hot.
The rest of the comune lies dotted about on the plain at the foot of the
mountain and consists of a dozen small villages, all visible from the
summit. These have mostly grown up within the last hundred years or so
as colonies from the chief town, for when the country was less secure the
women and children were left within the town walls while the men went
down to work in the fields and to fish in the sea, returning for Sundays
and festas, and gradually, as it became possible, settlements were formed
below to which the women and children could safely be moved. Custonaci,
however, one of the villages of the comune, did not spring up in this way
and is of older date than the others.
The peculiar charm of the mountain cannot be fully realized unless one
visits it at all seasons and in all weathers. I have been there in the
winter; the summit was hidden in a cloud which, as we drove up into it,
obscured the view and chilled the marrow. It was before the days of the
motor, when a horse bus did the journey by a shorter route in about three
hours. I was on the box with the coachman who gave me a spare cloak with
a hood to keep me dry and warm. Two of my friends, natives of the
mountain, one a doctor and the other the accountant to the Municipio,
were at the Trapani gate to meet me, both in hooded cloaks, so that I did
not recognize them till they spoke. The wind was tremendous. The narrow
sloping streets were running with water as we walked up through the town
to the albergo, where Donna Anna received us. There was no blazing fire
or warm room as there would have been in an English inn, only
semidarkness and dampness. The damp had patched the painting on the
ceiling and disfigured the whitewashed walls, on which were hung a few
pictures--a lithograph of the Madonna di Custonaci, a cheap Crucifixion,
a reproduction of the design for the monument to Vittorio Emmanuele in
Rome, three shiny chromolithographs of English country scenes,
representing the four seasons minus one, an absurd French engraving,
_Education Maternelle_ and S. Francesco da Paola, with a shell for holy
water. S. Francesco belongs to South Italy, but he is a favourite in
Sicily because he walked across the Straits of Messina to carry the Last
Sacraments to a dying man. On the undulating tiled floor were a few of
the rugs peculiar to the neighbourhood. They are made by the natives on
looms, the length being thin, strong string and the width white, black
and coloured cotton rags--old petticoats, shirts, aprons and so on,
washed clean and torn into narrow strips. With a little ingenuity they
make the colours go in simple patterns, chiefly diamonds and zigzags; but
sometimes they are more daring and attempt drinking-cups, etc.: the most
effective are made by running the strips in rows without any regard to
pattern.
Some winds blow some clouds away, but the roots of this cloud were so
firmly wedged in among the narrow streets and through the cracks of the
doors and windows, which would not shut close, that this wind could do
nothing with it but blow it more deeply in and the house was full of mist
like the Albert Hall in a winter fog. The natives consider it more
healthy to keep the same temperature indoors and out, so there is not a
house on the mountain with a fireplace, and only a few with stoves. The
absence of chimneys is a feature of the town, as it is of other Sicilian
towns that can bear their absence better. And these are the people who
commiserate an Englishman on being compelled to live in our cold, damp,
foggy island! In support of my statement that we do occasionally see the
sun, I showed them a picture-postcard of a house in London standing in a
garden. It was midday, but we had to have a lamp to see the picture;
nevertheless they supposed that the flowers were artificial and were
renewed when we had a festa because, of course, real flowers will not
grow in our perpetual fog. I told them that our fogs prevent flowers
from growing in England just as much as their brigands prevent foreigners
from travelling in Sicily, and that both are more spoken of than seen.
It must, however, be admitted that the natives do not appear to suffer
from the effects of their climate. They boast that statistics show them
to be particularly free from pulmonary complaints, and to have an
unusually low death rate. As the doctor said, in a tone of professional
discontent, they enjoy an epidemic of good health.
Supper consisted of maccaroni, bread and wine, and the table-cloth and
napkins were as damp as one's towels after a bath. My two friends sat
with me and introduced me to a student with a slight cast in one of his
melancholy eyes, a misty tenor voice and the facile Italian smile, who
had come up from Castelvetrano to study a little philosophy, and supped
with me.
When it was bedtime, they all three came with Donna Anna into my bedroom
to make sure that I was comfortable and the old landlady took the
opportunity of consulting the accountant about the prisoners. Although
the inhabitants of the province of Trapani are all good people,
nevertheless now and then some slight crime is committed, an occasional
wounding, a simple stabbing or so, and consequently it is convenient to
have a prison handy. Part of the castle on the mountain is used for the
purpose and Donna Anna provides the prisoners with their food and also
sees to their sheets, bedding etc. They could not have a better matron
and if she keeps everything in the prison as clean and good as it is in
her house, I am afraid she may perhaps make the prisoners more
comfortable than they deserve.
When she had disposed of her business she asked whether I should like
some fire in my bed. I was going to decline, not being in the habit of
using a warming-pan, but then I thought of the table-cloth and the
napkins at supper--and my friends said that every one on the mountain
always has fire in the bed in cold, damp weather--so I agreed, and Donna
Anna fetched what looked like a flower-pot containing hot charcoal. She
put this between my sheets with a wicker cage over it, and presently
shifted its position. I wanted her to leave it all night in a corner of
the room to take the chill off, but this met with opposition from all
because they did not wish me to be found in the morning asphyxiated in my
sleep like a Parisian milliner in a novel. I would have chanced it, had
I been allowed, for the milliners always have the greatest difficulty in
stopping up all the chinks, and even then occasionally survive; whereas,
although Donna Anna pinned up a blanket across my window, it did not keep
out the gale that was raging all about the room. The general opinion
being against the charcoal, I acquiesced and it was taken back to its
home in the kitchen. It was the only fire in the house and was what
Dickens would have called an honest and stout little fire. It had cooked
the maccaroni for supper and, after warming all the beds, went back to
rest from its labour until the morning when it would be called to make
the coffee for breakfast. It deserved its rest, not that it dried my
sheets, but it warmed them; and the doctor assured me that it is the
coldness and not the dampness of wet sheets that gives one a chill, so he
considered me practically safe. If only I had had a cold at the time, he
said, I should have been completely safe on the principle that one must
be off with the old cold before one can be on with the new. Owing,
doubtless, to the kindly influence of the good little fire, I passed a
comfortable night and took no harm.
When I came down in the morning there was the student immersed in his
philosophy; the industrious little fire had obligingly allowed itself to
be coaxed into two, and he had secured part of it in a flower-pot on the
floor between his feet and had a rug over his knees. The cloud was as
thick and the wind as boisterous as it had been the day before, so I
followed his example, got another flowerpot, split off a bit of fire for
myself and sat down with a rug.
The next morning the cloud had gone and I returned to Trapani. The bus
started very early and I had to rise before the sun, but the view would
have repaid sitting up all night. We saw Marettimo hovering over Levanzo
"on the horizon all highest up in the sea to the West," as Ithaca is
described in the _Odyssey_. We saw Ustica floating over Cofano and Capo
S. Vito. We looked down on Custonaci, the Sanctuary of the Madonna and
the great curve of the bay from Cofano to the foot of the mountain. We
gazed over the low, undulating country covered with villages, roads,
fields and villas that lay all around us on the inland sides--the country
through which in 1860 Garibaldi marched to Calatafimi with his thousand
volunteers after landing at Marsala. We saw Monte Inice and the heights
above Segesta. We saw Pantellaria, halfway to Africa, but we could not
see Africa itself for Cape Bon is only visible under very exceptional
atmospheric conditions.
I have been on the mountain in the spring and eaten quails for supper.
It was the time of their migration, and they had been caught as they
rested on the islands. I have never been able to ascertain exactly what
it is that the quails do. First I read in a book that when going north
in the spring they rest on Levanzo and when returning south in the
autumn, on Favognana. Levanzo being north of Favognana this meant that,
in both cases, they choose for their resting-place the second island they
come to. There is no mistake about this being what I read, for I made a
memoria technica about it at the time out of what Rockstro, my old
counterpoint master, used to say musicians do in performing the diatonic
major scale unaccompanied. In ascending they pass over the grave
supertonic and take the acute supertonic, and in descending they pass
over the acute supertonic and take the grave supertonic; the two
supertonics being only a comma apart, as the two islands are only a very
little way from one another.
Then I was told by a native of Trapani that this is just what the quails
do not do, and that, in fact, they rest on the first island they come to,
namely, on Favognana when going north, and on Levanzo when going south,
being too tired to fly across the geographical comma that divides the two
islands. I was next told by another native of Trapani that the quails
rest on all the three islands indiscriminately and not merely on Levanzo
and Favognana, thus destroying any attempt at purity of intonation and
introducing equal temperament along with Marettimo, which had not
hitherto been touched upon. He also said that if in any year it was
found that the quails avoided any one of the islands, the reason would be
that there were too many people on it. Finally, I was told by another
native that when the quails were going north in the spring of 1906 the
wind suddenly changed and blew most of them into Trapani itself, and
people picked them up by hundreds in the streets. It does not matter, of
course, so long as one gets the quails for supper, but if one really did
want to know, one would have as much difficulty as in finding out how
Orlando got hold of la Durlindana and where it originally came from.
The student from Castelvetrano was still there with his melancholy eyes,
studying philosophy. He said he found the mountain more suitable for his
purpose than his native town because it was more tranquil. I had been at
Castelvetrano, but had not noticed that it was a particularly noisy
place, indeed, I could no more have distinguished between the
tranquillity of Castelvetrano and that of the mountain than between the
acute and the grave supertonic.
The next time I met this student he had completed his studies and was
employed as a clerk in the Italian railway station at Chiasso, the
frontier town on the S. Gottardo, at an annual salary of 1,080 lire,
which is about 43 pounds 4s. He could hardly have been sent to a station
more remote from his native town. He had had a holiday of twelve days,
and had gone home to embrace his adorata mamma. The government gave him
a free pass, so he travelled by rail, crossing from Reggio to Messina,
and it took him forty-six hours. When he arrived at Castelvetrano he was
so knocked up by the journey and the change of air that he was obliged to
go to bed, where he remained till it was time for him to get up and
return to Chiasso, and this means that he was in bed for more than a
fortnight, because his holiday was extended to twenty days in
consideration of his illness. He was quite contented about his position
and prospects and told me these facts without any complaint. On the
whole, Mount Eryx would appear to be not such a bad school for
philosophers: nevertheless, when one considers the large part played in
evolution by the inherited desire of the organism to live beyond its
income, one may doubt whether it is good for a country's progress that
many of its men should be so philosophically contented with so little.
They do not, however, include the whole of the population, for Italy
cannot be said to be without examples of aggressive discontent. It is
somewhere between the two extremes that practical commonsense should be
looked for. In the meantime, if it is a question of sharing a supper of
spring quails on Mount Eryx, a peaceful, gentle philosopher is probably a
more agreeable companion than a socialistic nihilist.
If one had the power of choosing one's company, this philosopher would
counsel one not to exercise it; for he looks upon choosing as a
presumptuous kind of trying to control nature. I pointed out that one
cannot altogether detach oneself from nature and that doing nothing is
still choosing not to choose, but he replied that it is the lesser evil,
as in choosing not to write a tragedy in five acts, which I had to admit
can seldom be wrong. Further he asked, inasmuch as we had neither
arranged our meeting nor ordered the quails, were we not at the moment
both enjoying the advantage of having acted on his philosophy? I bowed
and said I had been particularly fortunate this evening; but in Sicily
one is always safe because the people are so charming that the art of
travelling among them consists in allowing things to happen and in being
ready to welcome whatever may come.
Perhaps the best season for going on the mountain is the late summer and
early autumn, when the Trapanese come up for the villegiatura. It is not
too hot during the day, as it is by the sea, and it can be almost chilly
by night, which it never is below. Every one is in a holiday frame of
mind; even the ladies of Eryx go out, whereas during the winter they
seldom leave the house, unless, perhaps, after a storm for a turn in the
balio to see how the trees look when laden with snow. There are picnics
and excursions to other places on the slopes of the mountain where
friends are passing the summer who presently return the visits by coming
up to breakfast with us. There is a touring company performing in the
theatre, there is music, there are drives and all manner of quiet
amusements.
On the mainland of Italy, tobacconists' shops display the Royal Arms with
a notice that they are licensed to sell tobacco and salt. Here a license
is necessary only for tobacco, salt being free in Sicily. This combines
with the absence of rain to make the manufacture of salt profitable; but
should a thunderstorm dilute the pans, the fresh water must be evaporated
out again and time and money are lost. Storms come so rarely in the
summer, however, that the caprices of the weather interfere but little
either with the salt works or the excursions.
If there is no excursion or no special occupation, we go to the caffe or
the club, or call on the chemist who is sure to be surrounded by friends,
or sit in the balio smoking and talking nonsense by the hour. And there
is always the inexhaustible wonder of the great view. The spacious dome
of the sky, which curves above and around, unites at the horizon with the
inverted dome of the earth and sea, which curves around and below, the
two together forming an enormous hollow globe in the midst of which the
top of the mountain seems to be suspended like the floating island of
Laputa. Conte Pepoli can sit in his castle and watch the half-tame
ravens, with little silver bells on their necks, as they flit around the
window and perch on the crazy wooden balcony where an old priest is
asleep in a chair, over the edge of a precipice of many hundred feet,
backed by leagues upon leagues of Sicily.
CHAPTER IX--THE MADONNA AND THE PERSONAGGI
In August, 1901, I was on the mountain and saw a procession representing
Noah's Ark and the Universal Deluge--one of those strange and picturesque
cavalcades that were formerly more common than they are now.
Usually, in other parts of Italy, the same story is repeated at the same
season: in one place, always the Passion at Easter; in another, always
the Nativity at Christmas, and so forth. On the mountain they have the
procession at irregular intervals, after perhaps three or four years, and
the story, though now, as a rule, scriptural, is never the same again.
When it does occur, it is as an extra embellishment of the annual harvest
thanksgiving; it takes place by night and always introduces the Madonna
di Custonaci. And now it is time to say a few words about this famous
Madonna, whose influence is felt throughout the whole comune at all
times, but nowhere more than on the Mountain, and at no time more than
during the harvest thanksgiving.
Mount Eryx, as every one knows, was in classical times famous for the
worship of Venus: here stood perhaps the most celebrated of all her
temples--the one with which her name is most familiarly associated--and
here, long before Horace wrote of "Erycina ridens," she was worshipped as
Aphrodite by the Greeks, and as Astarte or Ashtaroth by the Phoenicians.
Hardly any vestige of a temple can now be made out, but the remains of
the Pelasgic walls that protected the city in prehistoric ages are still
to be seen near the Trapani gate. The late Samuel Butler (author of
_Erewhon_) wrote _The Authoress of the Odyssey_ (Longmans, 1897) in
support of his view that the _Odyssey_ was written by a woman who lived
at Trapani and upon the mountain, and who in the poem described her own
country. In Chapter XII. he quotes Thucydides (vi. 2), to show that the
Sicans had inhabited this corner of the island from a very remote period,
having come probably from Spain. After the fall of Troy, some of the
Trojans, who had escaped the Greeks, migrated to Sicily, settled in the
neighbourhood of the Sicans and were all together called Elymi, their
cities being Eryx and Segesta. The city walls were originally built by
the Sicans, and restored by the Phoenicians when they came to the
mountain; on many of the stones the quarrymen's marks in Phoenician
characters are still visible.
It was believed that at certain seasons of the year the goddess left her
shrine on the mountain and went over into Africa accompanied by all the
pigeons of the neighbourhood, and this was the occasion for a festival of
Anagogia. {151} A little later, when the pigeons returned, the goddess
was believed to come back with them, and then there was another festival
of Catagogia. {151} Seeing that she would have had to go little more
than 120 miles in order to reach what is now Cape Bon, and then only to
cross the gulf of Tunis to arrive at the Phoenician colony of Carthage,
one may suppose it probable that these flittings began when Astarte was
in power.
In our own time the Madonna di Custonaci reigns upon the Mountain, and is
Protectress of the whole comune. Her sacred picture is normally in her
sanctuary down at Custonaci, about 15 kilometres distant, but when any
general calamity afflicts the district, it is brought up to the Matrice
or Mother Church of the comune on Mount Eryx. On these occasions three
days of humiliation are proclaimed, priests and men, their heads crowned
with thorns, their necks encircled with cords, go about the town
flagellating themselves; in the evening fires are lighted in the balio,
and all the villages below answer by lighting fires too, to show that
they are taking part in the general tribulation. A document is signed by
the sindaco, and then the picture is brought from Custonaci and set over
the great altar in the church of the Matrice. When it has become quite
clear that the anger of Heaven has been appeased, the picture is taken
back to Custonaci.
The calamity that most commonly befalls the comune is a drought, or the
fear of a drought. Rain is not wanted while the salt is being made, but
as soon as that is all under cover in the autumn it is time for the rain
to begin, otherwise the crops will fail. In 1893 the rain was delayed
until matters began to look so serious that it was determined to bring
the picture up to the mountain. The proper formalities having been
observed, the people all went out in crowds to welcome it and, as it was
borne along, cried--
"Acqua, Maria, acqua!" ("Rain, Maria, rain!")
Meanwhile the clouds were gathering and presently a tremendous
thunderstorm came on which drenched them all, and they returned to the
mountain, shouting--
"Basta, Maria, basta!" ("Leave off, Maria, leave off!")
The lightning struck the church and injured four persons who were
standing near the altar, but the Madonna was already in her place, and
owing to her presence they recovered.
The picture, like many of the thaumaturgic representations of the
Madonna, is the work of St. Luke the Evangelist--all except the head
which was done by an angel who descended from heaven expressly for the
purpose. This being so, one would expect to find its home on the top of
the very Mountain itself, in the chief place of the comune, and not down
at an insignificant little village like Custonaci. Some have thought
that to allow the Sanctuary of a Madonna Ericina to take the place of the
Temple of Venus Erycina would have been to insist on a parallelism about
which it was desirable to say as little as possible. Others believe the
real reason why we have a Madonna di Custonaci to be preserved in the
following legend. {154}
A French vessel, laden with precious merchandise and also with this still
more precious picture, was returning to Marseilles from Alexandria in
Egypt, and, while sailing the Sicilian seas, encountered a furious
tempest. The more the unhappy mariners laboured to govern their craft,
the less they succeeded, and at last, despairing of earthly help, they
turned their thoughts to the Madonna. With streaming eyes they knelt
before the painting and prayed without ceasing to the Queen of Heaven
that she would be graciously pleased to conduct them safely home. For a
long time they met with no response, but when they were nearing Cofano,
every sailor heard a voice, as though coming from the picture and
declaring that the Madonna desired to be landed on the neighbouring
coast. Whereupon they bound themselves by a vow that if they reached
land in safety they would build a sanctuary then and there in memory of
their miraculous preservation. No sooner was the vow uttered than the
wind fell, the storm ceased and the surface of the waters became as
smooth as polished glass, over which the fortunate bark glided without
guidance into harbour--and this to the great astonishment of the crew who
observed that her course lay among dangerous shoals and sunken rocks.
The joyful mariners returned thanks to their Blessed Protectress and
immediately began to perform their vow; but while disembarking, they
found themselves surrounded by a crowd of armed peasants who, taking them
for Turkish pirates, ran to the spot with the intention of frustrating
their supposed nefarious designs. Mutual explanations averted bloodshed,
and the peasants then began to dissuade the sailors from performing their
vow in so literal a manner, pointing out that they would be abandoning
their precious charge to the risk, if not the certainty, of sacrilegious
theft at the hands of the corsairs who frequented that harbour. In the
end the simple mariners yielded to the arguments of the peasants, and
with many tears consigned the picture to their care. The peasants put it
into a cart harnessed with two oxen who started to draw it inland, but
would only go in a direction chosen by themselves and, after proceeding
two or three kilometres, lay down and by no means could be persuaded to
go a step further. This was accepted as an indication of the Madonna's
approval of what had been done and of her desire that her church should
be erected there, and on that spot now stands the Sanctuary of Custonaci.
The poor sailors, grieving bitterly for the loss of their treasure,
returned to the ship and continued their interrupted voyage till they
reached Marseilles in safety.
Owing to the culpable negligence of those who ought to have considered it
a privilege to be permitted to chronicle the many important miracles
which the Madonna performed in honour of the arrival of her picture, we
have particulars of only two cures wrought in those times, one on a
cripple and the other on a mute. Any one, however, who is disposed to
doubt that there were many more has only to visit the sanctuary and take
note of the large number of votive pictures there exhibited. Besides,
how else could the fame of this wonder-working image have travelled
abroad so extensively unless the wonders had been not less numerous than
undoubted?
There is uncertainty as to the exact date of the arrival of the picture
at the Sanctuary: some give the year 1570; others consider this too late,
if only because wills exist dated as far back as 1422 bequeathing gifts
to Santa Maria di Custonaci; others say that this need not have anything
to do with our Madonna, because there has been a church or chapel at
Custonaci dedicated to the Virgin from very early times, and there is
nothing to show that these wills do not refer to the earlier Madonna;
others believe 1370, not 1570, to be the true date. We should have
something to guide us if we could ascertain how often the picture has
been transported to the mountain in times of calamity, but here again the
culpable negligence of the chroniclers has left us with records of only
fifty-one such occasions from the beginning of the 16th century to 1794,
viz. five when the pestilence walked by midday, four when the mountains
trembled and the earth opened, two when the locusts came without number
and devoured the fruits of the ground, four when war clouds gathered in
the sky and thirty-six when the autumn rains were delayed.
The disputes extend also to the date of the painting, some even denying
that it was painted by St. Luke. But to do this they are obliged to
ignore all the considerations which support the orthodox view, viz. the
place from which the sailors brought it, the many wonders performed by
it, the miraculous preservation of the colouring during all the years
that have elapsed since St. Luke's time, the widespread belief in the
efficacy of its powers and lastly the fact that, though many have made
the attempt, no artist has yet succeeded in producing a perfect copy of
the original.
I asked several people what St. Luke had to do with Alexandria, and was
always told that St. Mark's body was brought from there to Venice in 828,
why then should not another of the Evangelists have been there also? Why
not indeed? But this reply was as little satisfying as those with which
pre-occupied age endeavours to silence inquisitive childhood, and
produced much the same sort of result, spurring me on to further
investigations.
A musician who desires to compose a tune that shall become popular must
contrive something apparently original and yet not so original as to
demand study; it must also contain echoes of other tunes previously
popular, and yet they must be so indefinite that no one can tell for
certain where they come from, which is what we mean when we say it is a
wise tune that knows its own father. Similarly, the framers of the
foregoing legend had to compose an entirely Christian story, as original
as was compatible with the use of the forms of Christian legend, and yet
they could not neglect all the pagan traditions with which their public
had been impregnated for generations. In the first place the picture
must come over the sea--everything that arrives in an island does so; one
of the most effective of the common forms in legend is the arrival of a
boat with a precious cargo from a distant land, often bringing corn to
stay a famine, and every one is now familiar with the opening of
Lohengrin. Tunis would not do for the point of departure, not only
because it is where pagan Astarte came from when she arrived in Sicily,
but also because it had been Moslem since the seventh century and could
not have been accepted by the people as a Christian seaport. It is quite
likely that the popularity of the St. Mark legend determined the
selection of Alexandria, which had the advantage also of being on the
coast of the same continent as Tunis. The storm, the vow and the oxen
are as much common form in legend as the ship; and the next thing that
strikes one is the curious similarity between the alternate domiciles of
the Madonna on the mountain and at Custonaci, and the flittings of Venus
Erycina to and fro between the mountain and Carthage. If we look upon
the arrival of the picture at Custonaci as involving the transplanting of
a piece of Africa into Sicily, much as an ambassador's house is regarded
as being part of his own country transplanted into a foreign land, we may
then consider that the Madonna, to all intents and purposes, still
travels between the Mountain and Africa, only she now has an easier
journey and avoids actually dwelling among heretics. In this view the
transporting of her picture backwards and forwards should be looked upon
as the modern version of the feasts of Anagogia and Catagogia.
It is admitted that the picture has, more than once, been placed in the
hands of skilful modern painters whose services have been called in
merely to repair any damage it may have sustained in its
journeyings--they have had nothing to do therefore with the miraculous
preservation of the colouring. What these experts thought about the date
of the original painting is known only to themselves. We need not
suppose that they agreed--that would have been indeed a miracle and quite
a fresh departure for a picture with a reputation earned in a different
branch of thaumaturgy. It does not much matter, however, what they
thought, for experts in matters of art are the victims of such cast-iron
prejudices that if once they fancy they see the influence of Leonardo da
Vinci in a picture and take it into their heads that it comes from
Piedmont, it will be found the most difficult thing in the world to
persuade them that it really was painted in Egypt more than 1000 years
before Giotto.
We shall probably not be far wrong if we assume that something like the
processions of the Personaggi, involving the display of the most
beautiful men and women that could be found, took place on the mountain
in heathen times as part of the cult of the goddess and that, as a
compromise, they were not abolished but accommodated to Christian usages.
Giuseppe Pitre, in his _Feste Patronali in Sicilia_, gives an account of
the procession on the mountain held in 1752. We are to suppose that the
wickedness of the good people of Eryx had attained to such monstrous
proportions that the whole universe, incited thereto by observing the
anger of God against them, took up arms in the cause of justice. The
Madonna di Custonaci, however, intervened and saved her chosen people.
It began with the Wrath of God, personified by a warrior armed with
thunderbolts and lightning and setting forth to destroy the mountain.
Then came the Angry Heavens, the Benignant Moon, Mars and Mercury ready
to avenge the outrages done to God; Jove grasping a thunderbolt and about
to hurl it against the comune, Venus anxious to overthrow the city, and
Saturn whetting his golden scythe. The Sun is obscured, the Four Winds
blow terribly, the Four Elements assist in the work of desolation, the
Four Seasons threaten misery and affliction. Mount Eryx being convinced
by this display that it is in a great danger, the Genius of the city
appears next, bearing in his hand a figure of the Madonna di Custonaci.
He calls to his assistance Divine Counsel, Devotion, Beneficence and
Piety, and the procession closes with the Guardian Angel.
It must have been a magnificent spectacle. Many clouds have rested on
Mount Eryx since 1752 and we do not now expose our bedrock of paganism
quite so openly. This, indeed, but for the slight veneer of
Christianity, might have passed for a downright pagan procession.
In 1894, _L'Aurora Consurgens della Cantica_ was the subject. There were
twelve figures showing the growth of idolatry and culminating with the
Emperor Julius Caesar who, it will be remembered, accepted worship as a
god; moreover, his death having occurred not half a century before the
birth of Christ, he was naturally followed by the Aurora, symbolizing the
Madonna di Custonaci, and the explanatory pamphlet contained a reference
to the _Song of Solomon_ vi. 10: "Who is she that looketh forth as the
morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with
banners?" After the Aurora came the Rising Sun, Faith, Christian
Civilization, Mount Eryx, Charity and Youth--meaning, probably, that
Christianity will never grow old. In conclusion came a car with a copy
of the sacred picture and a chorus of youths.
It would seem that the personages formerly appeared on foot, for the
earliest record states that in 1750 they appeared for the first time on
horseback. In 1897 the subject was _Jael_, and the cavalcade consisted
of eight figures, of whom Deborah, seated in the shade of a palm tree
surrounded with a chorus of damsels, Jael in the tent with Sisera nailed
to the ground, and Triumph, appeared on cars, each of the others being on
horseback and the horses being led by grooms suitably attired. A
nocturnal procession, whether the figures go on foot, on horseback, or on
cars, does not strike one as being a particularly favourable medium for
the telling of a story. Nevertheless, by choosing a subject with which
the people are more or less familiar, by emphasizing the climax and by
providing an explanatory pamphlet for 2d., a more satisfactory result is
produced than one would have supposed probable, as I realized when I saw
the procession in August, 1901. The sacred picture had been on the
mountain since 1893, an unusually long time, and was now to be taken back
to the sanctuary at Custonaci, which, during its absence, had been
beautified "in the Gothic style." The two events of the Procession and
the Return synchronizing, there was a double festa, lasting four days on
the mountain and four days more at Custonaci.
CHAPTER X--THE UNIVERSAL DELUGE
On the morning of Sunday, 25th August, 1901, every one on Monte San
Giuliano was up early and at 7.30 a brass band began to perambulate the
town to announce that the festa had begun. At 8.30 the band entered the
Matrice, and before Mass the sacred picture was unveiled, the band
saluting it with a burst of music. Much may be done in music by allusion
and suggestion. The service concluded with an extremely graceful
movement in six-eight time, that drove the Madonna out of the mind of at
least one listener and substituted a vision of laughing girls swaying
lightly to the rhythm and singing of the dancing waves whose foam gave
birth to Venus.
When the church emptied we got a better view of the picture. It is about
6 ft. high by 3 broad, painted in oils on wood prepared with gesso, and
represents a smiling Madonna with the Child at her breast. She is seated
on a throne in a landscape; two angels hold over her head a massive
golden crown; the Child is crowned also and in His hand are three ears of
corn, to signify fruitfulness; He also holds the keys. The crowns are
really only half-crowns, but they are gold or silver-gilt, and are
fastened into the wood of the picture. All round the Madonna's nimbus is
a raised band of gold set with twelve diamond stars, valued at 14,000
lire. A large diamond earring hangs in her right ear, the only one that
is visible; three large diamond rings are on the fingers of her right
hand and one on the finger of her left which supports the Child, and
suspended all over her skirts is an immense quantity of jewellery. The
frame is of wood entirely coated with silver, in the form of a
Renaissance doorway with a fluted column on each side and a broken
pediment over the top. It is almost concealed by the jewellery hung
about it, earrings, chains, necklaces, rings, watches etc. These are
offerings from the faithful, but what is shown is nothing like all.
There is a large chest containing much more and what has been given this
year is exposed in a separate case. These valuables constitute the
Madonna's dowry and she carries it with her on her journeys; but some of
the more important articles never leave the mountain; her diamond stars,
for instance, are removed from the picture when it goes down, and their
place is taken by less valuable stars of gold.
In the afternoon there were horse-races outside the Trapani gate on a
fairly level piece of road, and a concert and illumination in the balio
in the evening.
In the course of the day I bought a copy of the explanatory pamphlet.
Its title was _L'Arca Noetica_. _Simbolo Mariano_. _Processione
notturna figurativa_ (_I Personaggi_) _in omaggio alla Diva di Custonaci
Celeste Patrone degli Erecini_. _Ultimo Lunedi d'Agosto_, 1901. It was
to be a procession of cars, there were to be no figures on horseback.
Having introduced cars, as in _Jael_, to give special importance to the
three points of the story, viz. the opening, the climax, and the
conclusion (or, as the pamphlet expressed it, Causa, Consequenza e
Termine), it was, no doubt, felt that more could be done with them than
with single figures on horseback in presenting the somewhat intractable
subject of _Noah's Ark and the Universal Deluge_.
The preparations had taken a month or six weeks. The course is for the
arciprete of the Matrice, who is the head of the clergy of the district,
to determine what the story shall be and how it is to be told. The
designing of each personaggio, or of each group of personaggi, is then
confided to one of the inhabitants, who, provided he bears in mind the
general scheme, is free to follow his natural artistic instincts. The
dresses are hired from Palermo, and an astonishing quantity of jewellery
is lent by the families of the comune; in 1897 the personaggi carried 85
lbs. weight of it, and far more is always lent than can possibly be used.
It is all gold and precious stones, no silver is to be seen, and nothing
is ever lost, stolen, or mislaid; even the thieves become honest on these
occasions. It is sewn on to the dresses in various designs and makes
them look very rich, so that what is hired from Palermo is only the
costumes in the rough, so to speak.
In wandering about the town next day, I came upon four or five of the
cars lurking in obscure churches where they had been prepared. It was
not easy to make much of them; there were a few rocks, banks and clouds,
also the waters of the deluge, all made of papier mache painted to appear
real, and in among the rocks and banks were real plants, mostly the dwarf
palm which grows plentifully on the mountain. There were wooden supports
for the figures, to help them to stand in their places. Each car carried
under it an apparatus to supply it with acetylene gas, used in 1901 for
the first time.
All day long people kept on coming up the mountain and pouring into the
town. Those who did not come on foot left their carts and horses
outside, and they all swarmed up through the narrow, irregular, roughly
paved streets from the Trapani gate to the balio, till by nightfall the
Piazza was as crowded as Piccadilly on Mafeking night. Every one who has
been present at an Italian festa knows what it is like--men shouting and
elbowing their way through the people with flaming lamps fitted to their
baskets, selling water and syrups, cakes and confectionery, melon seeds
and peanuts--others going about with halfpenny buttonholes of gelsomina,
each neatly folded up in a vine-leaf to keep the scent in--three
independent piano-organs and a brass band in the middle distance--an
enthusiastic blind singer, a survival of Demodocus in the _Odyssey_, with
a falsetto voice and no bridge to his nose keeping a group of listeners
spellbound in the foreground with their favourite ballad, illustrated by
a large sheet of oil paintings in eight tableaux, about the man who
murdered his wife and mother with one bloody knife--there it is lying on
the supper-table--and was ultimately taken by the carabinieri and
executed.
This blind singer with no bridge to his nose is a humorist; on one
occasion when he was fibbing in a particularly flagrant manner, he
enforced his remarks by calling upon heaven to strike him blind and smash
his nose if he was not speaking the truth.
While you are thinking that the tumult must be at its height, peaceful
nuns are creeping up the convent stair, silently, one by one, they reach
the roof, every one can see them collecting together in the moonlight and
taking hold of the dangling bell-ropes. All of a sudden you realize what
a mistake you had been making about the tumult as the riotous bells fling
their additional accompaniments out into the night, all over the town,
over the whole comune, down to Trapani, to Cofano and out to the islands.
In the meantime those in charge of the cars had been giving their final
directions and seeing that everything was in order, and the personaggi,
who had been being dressed ever since early in the afternoon, were ready
to receive visitors. About 10 p.m. each of them began to hold an At
Home. They sat there silent and motionless in their houses among trays
full of superfluous jewellery and surrounded by lighted candles, gazing
imperturbably in front of them while people streamed through the room
admiring them, fingering their dresses and jewels, and asking questions
of their relations and friends. About 11.30 I was conducted along the
illuminated streets through the crowd to a house where I stood on a
balcony looking up a street down which the procession was to come.
We had to wait till long after midnight, but at last the moving lights
began to shine on the high houses in the distance, the band was heard
approaching, and at 1.45 the first car staggered into sight. It
represented _The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men_; there were three
of each, reclining in the front part of the car and offering flowers to
one another, instigated so to do by the Monster of Iniquity, a loathsome
dragon, who was insinuating himself among them from rocks behind, while
the Angel of the Lord, a singularly beautiful child, stood on a high
cloud in the background, in an attitude of horror, about to take wing
from such a world of wickedness. Cupid was there also, sitting at the
feet of the daughters of men and taking aim generally.
The second car brought _Sin_, a bearded man in an imperial attitude with
a golden sceptre resting on his hip. He dominated a globe round which
the old Serpent had coiled himself. He was dressed in dark-blue velvet,
and wore a voluminous red cloak. On his breast was a bunch of grapes,
made entirely of diamond rings; each grape was a separate ring isolated
from the others and so sewn on that the hoop, being passed through a hole
in the material, was not visible, and only the rose of diamonds was
displayed. There were fifty-five grapes, and they sparkled and glittered
in the flickering lights as the car lurched down the street and passed
the balcony.
The third car represented _The Voice of God_, a beautiful figure of an
Angel blowing a trumpet, and the words written on the cloud behind were
"Delebo hominem." In the front of the car sat a youth and a girl holding
hands to represent the wicked population destined to destruction.
Then _The Universal Deluge_ came pitching and tossing round the
corner--rather an ambitious car. The foreground was occupied by the
water, with the head of a drowning man throwing up his arms, and the
indication of another entirely submerged. The waves were beating against
a steep bank up which a tigress was climbing, carrying her cub in her
mouth. On the top of the bank stood a lovely woman endeavouring to save
her terrified child. She was the only living figure on the car,
everything else, even the terrified child, being of papier mache.
_The Ark_ came on the fifth car and had no living figure at all, being
merely Noah's Ark resting on Mount Ararat with a dove in front. This may
sound rather uninteresting and as though designed to support home
industries, but, to the initiated, it palpitated with significance, for
it symbolized the Madonna herself, the only means of salvation from the
waters of punishment; and as the Ark rested on Mount Ararat while the
flood subsided, so does the Madonna di Custonaci rest upon Mount Eryx
while the calamity is stayed.
No. 6 was _The Sacrifice_ and represented Noah, an imposing old man with
long white hair and beard, standing at an altar where a real sheep lay
dead under a net and his three sons were in front praying.
No. 7 was _The Rainbow_, another lovely girl as an angel standing between
a bank of clouds and a rainbow. On the breast of this figure was worked
in jewels Noah's dove with an olive-branch; this was particularly
appropriate, as it happens also to be the badge of the town.
The procession was closed by a long car carrying first a band of
musicians, then a chorus of youths attired as angels and crowned with
roses, the whole backed by a sort of temple front framing a copy of the
sacred picture. This car had to stand still from time to time while its
occupants performed music composed specially for the occasion, and the
continual stopping dictated the movements of the other cars and was
signalled to them by bells, so that there might always be about the same
space between them.
The cars were drawn by men and the figures made no attempt to stand
rigidly still--anything of the kind would have been out of the question,
for they must have been on the move between five and six hours. The last
car passed my balcony at 3.30, an hour and three-quarters after the first
had come into sight, and one could tell the next day that they had been
through nearly the whole town, for hardly a street was safe to walk
in--they were all so slippery with the wax that had dropped from the
candles. The constant moving of their limbs by the figures, though they
never lost the general idea of the attitude, together with the tottering
motion caused by the roughness of the paving, prevented any sense of the
pose plastique or living picture.
Every one of the female figures, except _The Voice of God_, had her
breast encrusted with jewels, usually in a floral design, and the borders
of their dresses were heavy with jewellery; the male figures also wore as
much as could be suitably sewn on their costumes.
Omitting consideration of the final car, which was there to close the
procession and bring on the music and the Madonna, and also of the Ark,
which could hardly have been otherwise, there were six cars, three
carrying groups and three practically single figures, for the boy and
girl at the feet of _The Voice of God_, though they were the children of
Donna Anna, my landlady, were not really necessary. Of the groups, the
one representing _The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men_ was certainly
the finest. It told its story in the right way and was full of the right
kind of imagination. _The Sacrifice_ was next best, and owed much to the
extreme dignity of the principal figure. I should have liked _The Flood_
better if it had had more living figures and less papier mache, though I
am not ashamed to admit that I have no idea how this could have been
done. Shakespeare himself, who apologizes for trying to make a cockpit
hold the vasty fields of France, might have been excused for not
attempting to decant The Universal Deluge into a receptacle scarcely
bigger than a costermonger's barrow. Of the three remaining cars, _Sin_
was beyond comparison the finest both in conception and execution.
Perhaps he would have looked the part more obviously if he had had more
of a once-aboard-the-lugger expression on his kind and gentle face; on
the other hand, the designer of this car may have intended that Sin is
most successful in seducing the righteous when he appears with nothing
repulsive in his aspect. The other two were merely just what they should
have been--ordinary business cars, so to speak. Had these three single
figures appeared on horseback with grooms to lead them, as in former
times, the procession would have gained in variety and the importance of
the groups on the cars would have been emphasized.
But this is a small matter. The procession as it was, with its car after
car jolting along under an August full moon, the sparkling of the jewels,
the flashing of the torches, the blazing of the gas, the beauty of the
figures and the immense multitude of reverent worshippers made up a scene
never to be forgotten. The impressiveness was deepened by the knowledge
that this Mountain, where Astarte, Aphrodite and Venus have all reigned
in turn, is also a place where much that has helped to mould the poetry
and history of the world has happened since the Sicans first girded it
with its megalithic cincture. Added to this was the conviction that for
many and many an age some such procession has been winding through these
narrow, irregular streets, the form changing, but the intention remaining
ever the same--Praise to the Giver of the Increase.
The programme for the next day contained nothing till 5 p.m., when there
were more horse-races, then Vespers in the Matrice, brilliantly
illuminated; after dusk fireworks outside the Trapani Gate, and at night
a concert in the illuminated balio.
In the afternoon of Wednesday, the 28th, a procession of fifty-nine mules
and horses passed through the town. Each animal was accompanied by its
owner, a peasant of the comune, and was loaded with bags of grain, an
offering for the Madonna. This grain was to be sold and, in the mean
time, was estimated to be worth 2500 lire. About 1500 lire was collected
during the festa, partly at the church doors and partly in the value of
unused wax candles, and the municipio gave 1000, so that altogether the
receipts were about 5000 lire. Against this the expenses of the festa
were expected to amount to about 4000 lire, and the balance will go
towards the expenses of the next.
CHAPTER XI--THE RETURN
The procession of the grain closed the harvest home and in the evening of
the same day began the proceedings relating to the Return of the Madonna
to Custonaci. At 8 p.m. another procession started. First came the band
to clear the way, then a man beating a drum; this is a feature of
Sicilian processions and is said to date from the time when the Saracens
had possession of the island; it continues as long as the procession
lasts, which may be for hours, and produces an unexpected effect. There
is so much else going on that after a time you forget to notice it. But
you have not really got away from it; you are being unconsciously
saturated, and after the festa is over you become aware that you are
suffering from a surfeit of drum; the rhythm runs in your head and keeps
you awake at night; when you go out of doors you expect to hear it in the
distance; when you turn a corner you listen for it, and as it is not
there you find yourself listening for it all the more anxiously. But
this wears off after two or three days.
Behind the drum came peasants walking two and two, carrying candles and
an occasional banner; then the Society of the Misericordia, wearing those
mysterious dresses that cover them entirely from head to foot, with holes
for the eyes; then priests and men with lamps, and, lastly, the sacred
picture out of the Matrice, carried by men, the whole frame quivering
with its fringes of jewellery. Every few yards the procession stopped,
partly to rest the bearers and partly to give the crowd an opportunity of
seeing the picture.
Every church that lay on the route was lighted up and not till long past
midnight, when the picture had been taken into each one of them to pay a
farewell visit, was it carried back to the Matrice.
On Thursday, 29th, the day appointed for transporting the picture back to
Custonaci, there was early Mass in the Matrice, where there was not
nearly room for all the people, and after Mass a short sermon. The
preacher contrasted the sadness of the present occasion with the joy of
that happy day in 1893 when the Madonna had come to dwell among them,
bringing the rain with her. He told them of her love for her people, of
all she had done for them, of all they owed her and of how deeply she
entered into the life of each one of them. He reminded them that the
first name they had been taught to lisp at their mother's knee was Maria;
that she to whom they raised their prayers in time of tribulation was
Maria; that the one they blessed for benefits received was always Maria.
And now her gracious presence was to depart from her beloved Mountain;
the time had come to utter the last farewell. Here the preacher spoke a
few words so touching in their eloquence that all the women and most of
the men burst into tears and made no attempt to conceal their emotion.
It would not occur to an Englishman to weep because a picture is taken
from one place to another. Not so long ago quite a number of pictures
were taken and put away in the Tate Gallery, and yet London looked
stolidly on and not a tear was shed. Had one been shed, it would have
been laughed at; and had only one or two of the congregation in the
Matrice been so powerfully affected, it might have passed unnoticed, but
the simultaneousness and spontaneity of their almost hysterical grief was
very impressive, and no one could have had any idea of laughing who saw
the weeping crowd that accompanied the Madonna out of the church while
the band played a funeral march. She was carried on men's shoulders, her
face constantly turned towards the town, through the Trapani gate and
down the road to the little church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, while the
drum went in front, filling the air with the mournfulness of its
perpetual rhythm. As the picture passed among the people one of the
women cried out--
"See how pale the face of the Madonna has become; it is with sorrow to
leave the Mountain."
Another lifted up her voice and prayed that it might not be long before a
calamity befell the comune--as that it might not rain till December, for
example--in order that she might soon return. The bearers stopped at the
little church, where a large chest had been prepared in which she was to
repose during the rest of the journey, and the people's grief culminated
as the chest received her out of their sight.
In _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, Blake tells us that, when the
Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with him, he asked, "Does a firm
persuasion that a thing is so make it so?" and Isaiah replied, "All poets
believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion
removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of
anything." Certainly most of the Ericini are capable of a firm
persuasion of something and probably, if Blake could have visited them at
a time when the Madonna was going away from the mountain or coming back
to it, he would have agreed that the age of imagination still lingers in
this classic spot.
Those who did not accompany the picture beyond Santa Maria delle Grazie
now proceeded to the balio, and the beating of the drum floated up
continuously as the chest, followed by an immense crowd on foot, in
carts, and on horseback, was carried down the zigzags and along the
winding road to Custonaci. In many places booths had been erected, where
wine and bread were given freely to all while the bearers rested. At
other points were pulpits, and here they stopped to listen to a short
sermon. A crowd had come out from Paparella to meet and join the throng,
other crowds from Fico, Ragosia, Crocevia, Palazzolo and the other
villages forming the comune, were waiting at various points along the
road. From the balio the whole journey was visible, except when the
windings of the road hid part of the crowd, and, with the help of
glasses, the arrival at the sanctuary could be seen distinctly at about 5
p.m., nearly nine hours after the morning start. On ordinary occasions
the journey takes about three hours. In the evening there were fireworks
and illuminations at Custonaci and bonfires in many of the other
villages.
When the picture is on the mountain it is the custom for the women of the
town to go to the Matrice in the evening to pray. When it is at
Custonaci they go to the balio, where a stone prie-Dieu has been built
for them from which they can see the sanctuary. Here they will go and
pray every evening until such time as the next calamity brings the
picture up among them again.
CUSTONACI
CHAPTER XII--FAITH AND SUPERSTITION
The brigadier and the corporal both sent illustrated postcards to me from
Selinunte and I sent them postcards in return, but the corporal
unaccountably desisted after being transferred to another station; for
instead of returning home in about a month, as he had intended, he signed
on for a further term of service. Perhaps on his change of address one
of my cards may have gone wrong in the post, and he may have considered
that I was neglecting him. I have never seen him again. The next time I
went to Trapani the brigadier, who had been transferred to Custonaci, was
guarding the coast between Monte San Giuliano and Cofano; I put off going
to see him, however, because it was cold and wet and windy, not weather
for excursions into places beyond the reach of civilization. I talked to
Mario, the coachman, about it, and he said he would be ready to take me
if a fine day occurred. I had another reason for wishing to go to
Custonaci: I thought it due to the Madonna di Custonaci that I should pay
my respects to her in her sanctuary after having been present at her
festa on the mountain.
Suddenly there came a fine Saturday. I went out immediately after
breakfast, found Mario, told him to be ready in half an hour, ordered a
basket of provisions from the hotel, put a few things together in case
they might be wanted, and we started.
The road took us inland and round the foot of Mount Eryx, through
Paparella and the other villages where some of the wealthy Trapanese have
their summer villas, and after a most lovely drive of three hours, we
arrived at Custonaci. The village is on a low rocky cliff which rises
not from the sea but from an extensive plain. Standing on the cliff one
looks over the plain with Monte San Giuliano closing the view on the left
and on the right the mountain promontory of Cofano, a great, isolated,
solemn, grey rock, full of caves, sprinkled with green and splashed with
raw sienna; between them, two or three kilometres away, is the sea which,
I suppose, formerly covered the plain and washed the foot of the cliff.
Prominent on the shore, rather nearer to Cofano than to Monte Erice, is
the caserma, an oblong white bungalow, and scattered upon the plain are a
few fishermen's cottages, but no other dwellings. We first sent a boy
off to the caserma to tell the brigadier I had come, and then Mario,
after attending to his horses, joined me in the only trattoria in the
place and we ate our provisions.
After lunch we went to the sanctuary, the home of the famous
wonder-working picture of the Madonna which hangs over the altar. The
sagrestano pulled aside the curtains while another man pulled a cord
which operated a wheel hung with bells of different sizes, thereby making
a tremendous and discordant noise and sign
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