Sicilian Carousel (11 page)

And on that note Mario whiffled and we straggled back to the bus which was drawn up in a shady corner—the heat had really begun. We made a slow circuit of the little island, which reminded me a little of the circuit one can make round the town and battlements of Corfu. The sea glittered and winked and here and there in a shady nook there was a sudden blaze of bougainvillea or oleander to temper the stone. But everything seemed deserted—all the raffish lower life of the town centered upon the Apollo square; up here the buildings opened inwards; they were full of the inner reserve which is expressed in courtyards and patios. The answer of course is the sea with its salt
which rots everything. I am thinking among other things of the huge Castello Maniace which offered a total contrast in epoch and style to all the Greek remains we had been concentrating upon. It was, according to Roberto, only one of many such features on the island, and if people were not so damned obstinate about Greek remains they would really profit by having a good look at the palazzi of Ortygia. We only got a glimpse of two of them but they certainly bore out his contention by their reserved nobility. And so through a network of narrow streets which Mario navigated with an effortless skill which was quite astonishing: in places his outside mirror passed within a couple of centimeters of the street wall without ever grazing it. Presumably long practice was responsible for this. I wondered how many carousels a season fell to his lot. We rolled back across the causeway into fairly dense traffic and bore steadily right, gradually emerging from the press of buildings until we reached the sea, and a pleasant-looking fish restaurant placed right on the beach; with its own little jetty too, and wooden diving pontoons floating off shore. A swim in that blueness would cure all rumples, I felt, and indeed most of the party must have felt the same to judge by the alacrity with which they alighted and sought the terrace where, while sorting out where to change, we all profited by a shrewdly aimed
aperitif
which the good Roberto paid for out of his own pocket, though he swore, without much conviction, that he would get
it back from the Company. He was so happy; our behavior had been decorous; there had been no scenes and no bad blood. Lunch stretched before us, and it was one of the better and more characteristic Italian meals—mixed grilled fish of every variety with fresh lemon followed by an eggplant pie which reminded me more of Greece and Anatolia than Italy. And then the wine was potable red with a slight “nose”—it avoided fruitiness, that besetting sin in lands where people seem to adore drinking pure diluted sugar with just a sniff of alcohol in it. We hailed the wine and behaved like masterful Sileni, smacking lips, holding it up to the light. Vino! Not all of us bathed, so that we had to wait for the general assembly of all before the hot food could be served;
amuse-gueules
of cucumber and radish staved off that caving-in feeling. The light was prodigious, the light wind off the lustrous sea made everything throb with importance. Whatever we might forget about Sicily we would remember this newly minted day.

The caverns and the quarries called the Latomie are nowadays one of the sights of the city; once they quarried stone from them for their temples and palaces. But since they were abandoned for this use they metamorphosed to underground grottoes thick with a luxuriant vegetation so dense that it needed the skilled services of landscape gardeners to control—and indeed the work of engineers to cut paths and asphalt them securely down so that the public could take
extensive strolls through this underground jungle. But this excursion was planned for the cool of the evening, and the general idea was that we should have a siesta after lunch back at the hotel. Nothing more pleasant to think of—that seemed to be the generally accredited view. The French Count was pleased when I said how much I regretted that we did not have a quirky guide of Sicily by Stendhal to match his
Walks in Rome
. Indeed he would have been the ideal companion for the trip—perhaps with Goethe as well.

There would probably have been a good Sicilian candidate also, but our ignorance of the island's letters was abysmal. Yes, Pirandello and Lampedusa, and someone that Lawrence translated successfully; I had heard of others whose renown was also widespread but could not recall their names. Roberto was impatient too and ate in a boneless exhausted sort of way. He had had a long morning march and was not disposed for any more casual gossip before his nap.

So we returned, well fed and rested by a bracing cold swim in the sea. By contrast with the sea coast the hotel which was a little way inland was somewhat hot. I opened my shutters and stepped out on to my balcony to judge what siesta conditions were to be like. To my left a thoughtful Deeds was hanging up a bathing costume; to my immediate right the Bishop's opera glasses had been placed on the balustrade to dry out; they indicated his presence next door. Beyond the Bishop stood the figure of Beddoes engaged in some
domestic pursuit—he seemed to be darning a sock. I set out these dispositions in some detail because a small incident took place which lent depth and perspective to the portraits of the ecclesiastical pair—putting them in a somewhat intriguing light. Neither was on the balcony but their shutters stood open. Beddoes was about to address some cheerful remark to me across the gap when I shut him up by pointing to the Bishop's balcony and miming people asleep. He duly broke off and it was at that minute that we heard the voice of the lady lifted in plangent rebuke. She said: “O yes, you
are
and you know it,
you are against the whole universe!
“ This sublime accusation, searing enough to become the foundation of a new Council of Nicea, reverberated on the silence and hung there, so to speak, unqualified by further noise or gesture. Beddoes and I gazed at one another. Deeds discreetly withdrew. I was about to do the same when a slap rang out, a distinct and unmistakable slap, followed once more by a wave of silence. We hovered there for a moment, Beddoes and I, like figures hastily improvised with the airbrush, or graven images reflected shimmering in a sunbeam. Nothing further happened after this and we both beat a tactful retreat into our rooms where in a matter of moments I was asleep, having set my little alarm for four. I wondered for a moment which of the two had slapped the other—had she swiped him? It was hardly conceivable that he had landed her one for such an impudent remark. And anyway what did it
mean?
Have women no innate respect for the Cloth? But sleep came to dispel these useless questions, and it came on bare feet, noiseless on the tiled floors. The alarm set me by the ears with a shock of surprise—it was like being hit by a thunderbolt.

When I got down to the terrace we were nearly all present tucking into an excellent tea with several kinds of cake. The transformation in the Bishop was marvelous to behold; he was expansive and smiling and relaxed. He caressed his wife's arm like a clumsy but affectionate gundog. She too had a touch of red in her pale cheeks—had she made up? At any rate she was less pale than usual. Beddoes caught my eye from a neighboring table and gave us a wink of complicity which Deeds did not acknowledge; but undaunted he came over to us and whispered hoarsely: “After the slap they made love all afternoon in a disembodied way—perhaps for the first time since their marriage fifty years before; but I couldn't make out who hit who, could you? At any rate that humble slap uncorked an unearthly lust….” Deeds got angry and said, “I wish you would go away and take your rumors with you.” Beddoes looked hurt. “It's not rumors,” he said, “I watched them through the keyhole.”

The man was incorrigible and Deeds told him as much with a vehemence controlled only by good breeding; but undaunted by this the fellow followed us still and took a seat near us in the bus. The ride was not a long one, though my sense of direction was fazed and
I could not tell if we went east or west. But today was to be a great treat for we were decanted upon a shady walk where another guide awaited us—to the relief of Roberto. This was an elderly man in dark glasses who looked like a policeman or a spy in a story of detection or espionage. Dark glasses—but so dark you could not see his eyes. He wore a bow tie and a Homburg hat with his well-cut but rather weary suit. Cufflinks, also. He was rather hard to place at first for his manners were somewhat seigniorial; was he an aristocrat down on his luck, and doing this job for the tips? But I think that Deeds had the right idea when he insisted that he was a university professor in classics who had become bored with retirement and was glad to use his knowledge in this way. He was certainly a most instructed and knowledgeable man, and his English and French were extremely good despite a bit of an accent. Moreover, he was mad about his subject and knew how to convey his enthusiasm. We were in good hands for a visit to the Roman and Greek treasures—the Roman amphitheater and the Greek theater which lay there, so fortunately rump to rump although belonging to different epochs of time. To have them both under our noses for comparison was a bit of luck—and the old guide told us as much….

But I am going too fast, for our attention was first directed to the huge altar to Zeus built by Hieron of which nothing remains save the stone emplacement with a few shattered stone suggestions as to its erstwhile
function when it was used for the giant sacrifices to the god. There was still the ramp up which the animals were driven to the place where the priests waited to dispatch them. This gave our guide the chance of a little disquisition upon the nature and function of the Greek sacrifice—and of course here one could see all the difference between him and Roberto. He knew his Ancient Greece and had extensively visited the modern one—so he had a yardstick with which to compare Sicily. (Diodorus records a sample sacrifice here as counting 450 oxen, a prodigious number.) But our guide made haste to point out that there was nothing gloomy, or cruel or depressing about such a custom—for the whole town ate the sacrifice after it had been consecrated by the priests. It was a Bank Holiday celebration with everything on the house. “Greek writers of the fifth century have a way of speaking of, an attitude towards, religion which is wholly a thing of joyful confidence, a friendly fellowship with the Gods whose service is but a high festival for man.” He was quoting, of course, and Deeds, who had already been on this tour once before whispered to me that it was from Jane Harrison (peace be to her shade!). But the guide was in full spate now and we got a chunk of Xenophon thrown at us which later I noted down from his little black notebook. It was very much to the point, running: “As to sacrifices and sanctuaries and festivals and precincts, the People, knowing that it is impossible for each poor man individually to sacrifice and feast and have sanctuaries in a beautiful and ample
city, has discovered by what means he may enjoy these privileges. The whole state accordingly, at the common cost, sacrifices many victims, while it is the People who feast on them and divide them among themselves by lot.” The old guide made no bones about the fact that he was reciting, for he beat time with his fingers to the English text; and added in English and French: “It was a great fiesta, religion, then. Nowadays, we Sicilians still keep quite a shadow of the sentiment—unlike the Italians.” O dear, another fanatic nationalist!

But he was the complete master of his subject and in that hot afternoon light, westering now, he gave an expressive account of these once beautiful monuments which now lie, shorn of all decoration, unprotected by shade and stripped of all statuary. It is hard work, too, to try and visualize the great altar as it once must have been. All the statues have vanished and also the pillars. But even if they had survived they would presumably have been like those in the existing Sicilian temples—stripped of their false marble surfaces and now the color of dry tobacco. “I suppose it is silly to regret the wholesale destruction of fine objects as one culture succeeds another; after all, if nothing ever got destroyed where the devil would we put everything?” The musings of Deeds as we sat in the hot Roman amphitheater, chewing blades of grass and smelling the rich resinous smell of the hot pines which instantly brought to my memory the slopes of Acropolis or Lycabettos where as a young man I so often slept out
on warm windless summer nights, brilliant with star fall. It must be the same here.

But the guide was harping on our good luck to have the Roman and Greek cultural world set side by side in Sicily as nowhere else. “The very architectural shape will tell you of two different predispositions. In this great amphitheater the Romans were organizing for the eye, for a
show
, a public show. Now just a few yards away you have the Greek hemicircle, organized in a different age for the
ear
. The difference between art as a quasi-religious intellectual event and a popular spectacle. Aeschylus and his Gods against bread and circuses. Here you can study both predispositions as if they were historically coexistent while in fact they are separated by centuries.” It was astute and highly suggestive as a way of looking at these now shadowy monuments of a lost world. The heat of the declining sun still throbbed, the rocks were dazing. Capers grew in the white rock as they did in Athens. There was even a little owl which flew into a cypress tree with the unmistakable melancholy little whoop of the
skops
. But what is astonishing is the speed with which the exact nature and function of things becomes forgotten; the archaeologist tries to read a sort of palimpsest of superimposed cultures, one displacing or deforming the other—and then tries to ascribe a
raison d'être
, function, to what he sees. In vain. Or at any rate in Sicily, and more specially here in Syracuse. The ruins keep their secret. The monuments have been worn down like the teeth of an ancient jawbone;
what was exportable was expendable, what was beautiful had a value worth despoiling. Only the hot bare rock still contains the imprint of a half-obliterated inscription here or there, or the pedestal of a vanished statue, or a carved hole to admit the locking elbow of a stone mortise. It had all been eaten up as flesh is eaten up by the ground. Yet sitting in this old Roman theater it takes no great act of the imagination to reconstruct the crowds, themselves now swallowed up by the centuries, as they watched the sports offered to them by the state—sports of blood.