Sicilian Carousel (13 page)

Deeds went to some trouble to explain the intricacies of the Athenian war and the resounding defeat of Athens by the Syracusans; it was a homely way to do history, describing how Alcibiades, that “disreputable feller got a bowler hat and was sent back under arrest, only to escape to Sparta.” This exposition only elicited a grave and sympathetic clicking of the tongue from Beddoes, who added under his breath something about not being able to trust a queer. But all these speculations were pushed awry by the Bishop who suddenly announced that there never had been any prisoners in the Latomia del Paradiso—they had all been herded into another and more sinister cutting not far from
Santa Lucia—the church of which, with its famous Caravaggio, we had been hoping to catch a glimpse. Here indeed some asperity had developed as it was not on our official itinerary and the lapse seemed inexcusable. Was it not a renowned set piece for the curious tourist? Roberto was plaintive at first—the tour had not been arranged by him personally. But after more argument in which almost everyone seemed to have something to say, he agreed to foreshorten the catacombs and try to cram in a brief visit to the Saint before we were expected back at the hotel for dinner. This little argument occupied us while Mario grimly circled the town and finally drew rein before the catacombs. There was an unhealthy-looking monk on duty at the picture postcard stall. He looked as if he had just been disinterred himself. The catacombs were not unimposing, but to tell the truth it took a good deal of imagination to re-people them with the stiffening dead in their winding sheets—a coal mine would have offered the same spectacle, really.

Moreover, if we had found the gloom and shade of the Latomie disagreeable how could we be disposed to relish the even more absolute gloom of these long sinister catacombs with their marker points of light and their dank pesty atmosphere. Nor was the wretched church where St. Paul is supposed to have preached of any great aesthetic interest. This is the whole trouble with guides and guidebooks—the difficulty of disentangling what is historically important from what is
artistically essential. So far the annotations of Deeds seemed the best way of dealing with the problem; though it must be admitted that the great Baedeker did his best in this field of appreciation with astonishingly good insight and great care. But ages change, and taste which is so unstable an element changes with them. There is no certainty to be found in judgment. We were glad when at last we assembled at the little postcard kiosk with its hangdog monk, where the French ladies once more slaked their unquenchable thirst for picture postcards.

And so downwards, seawards, to keep our tryst with Santa Lucia, the patron saint of the town who was done to death among these peaceable streets and squares in 304. The church is supposed to mark the site but … there was a surprise in store for us. It explained why the tourist itinerary had left out this object of veneration; everything was all closed up for repairs. The two ancient and queer crucifixes which one has seen on film and read about so often had both been carted off for cleaning; worst of all, so had the Caravaggio. We hung about in the neighborhood of San Sepulcro (also closed) and felt rather sheepish about having complained so bitterly to Roberto about the shortcomings of the trip. Nor did he himself crow—he was too nice for that; he looked as chagrined as the rest of us by this unexpected vexation. There was nothing to be done. But at least he had kept his word and tried to show us the great painting.

Dinner was some way off as yet so we took a brief stroll among the network of pleasant streets leading down to the waterfront and it was on our return to regain the little red bus that a new diversion was presented to us by the female Microscope who was taken suddenly ill. She had been eating sweets or cough drops all day, and also drinking iced almond milk. Suddenly she turned an anguished, pewter-colored visage towards us and took a few lurching steps forward to fall flat on her face at our feet, shuddering slightly as if with an attack of epilepsy. Roberto showed great consternation, and Mario positively bounded from his perch in the bus to help lift her. She was trying to be sick it appeared but without result. Everyone fussed. Her pulse was faint and her gunmetal color was far from reassuring. Roberto decreed that we must get back to the hotel with all dispatch and ask a doctor to come at once and examine her. Her husband who showed little alarm put his arm round her and said: “It is nothing. It will soon pass. It is just a little
aéro-phagie
to which she has often been subject.” This is an extraordinary French disease which is quite common in the Midi and is based on the notion that there are some people so singularly constituted that they involuntarily keep on swallowing air until it gets to such a point that they either go off with a bang or develop a tremendously painful series of symptoms like colic and gastritis. I have known a number of cases of this scourge; and here was another virulent example of air
swallowing which had turned this harmless lady into a gulping, pewter-colored wreck with heaving stomach and rolling eyes. She really did look awful and I wondered what sort of remedy might be proposed by an Italian medical man—perhaps to give her a potion of castor oil and then stand back with his fingers in his ears? But it was all very well to joke—poor Roberto was in a fearful state and with reason. He was more or less in charge of us and naturally dreaded anything going wrong which might hamper the smooth working of the tour. We had, after all, embarked so lightly on the Sicilian Carousel, giving hardly a thought to doctors or undertakers or insurance lawyers. And here we were with this cautionary attack of air tightness.

The lady was now moaning slightly and rocking and had folded her hands across her middle in a childish (and curiously reassuring) gesture like a small girl who had eaten too many green apples. But Mario got us back to the hotel in record time and here everyone showed anxiety and concern for the patient as we helped her out of the bus and up the steps into the hotel. The infant was there, all eyes, but playing no part. It was one huge gape—if a microscope can be said to be a gape. Our faces would have made an interesting study in concern—selfish concern, for we did not know whether this attack of illness might not prejudice the tour. Also, as almost nobody in the group liked the Microscopes there was a good deal of hypocrisy mixed into our concern and perhaps clearly
decipherable in our expressions. There was general movement to get the lady up to her room where she could be undressed, but perhaps this is what she feared for she refused to move off the sofa in the lounge and elected to treat with the doctor there, upright and in full public view. It was not satisfactory from a medical point of view but as she was French and extremely obstinate there was little to be done about it. Here she waited then, gulping and closing her lidless eyes like a sick lizard, and here we hovered around the outskirts with well-meaning solicitude, waiting for the doc who would certainly be called El Dottore and would flourish one of those continental-type thermometers which are large and impressive and have to be operated in an embarrassing posture.

He was some time coming, but come he did at last and it was clear that he had dressed for the event for he wore an elaborate outfit topped off by a sort of white silk stock. The material of his dark suit was of obvious weight and quality—it made one perspire just to look at it; but the whole ensemble was beautifully tailored, while his small feet were encased in elastic-sided boots. He was youngish, a man in his forties, with a large dark head, furry as a mole, and skin the color of plum cake. He had a singular sort of expression; a sort of holy expression which one suddenly realized came from the fact that he was scared stiff in case someone asked him a question in a foreign language. His cufflinks gleamed, so did his teeth. He carried pigskin
gloves. But he was scared. He looked in fact as if he had just emerged after partaking of the Eucharist with Frank Sinatra. He sat down uncomfortably facing his patient and put a bag containing his instruments on the floor. Roberto now intervened with a spirited outline of the case and everybody's hands began to move in rhythm with their inner rhetoric—Roberto staggering, falling, holding his stomach.

The lady was looking less alarmed and seemed rather pleased to have merited such a lot of attention. El Dottore listened with a dark and disabused air, nodding from time to time as if he knew only too well what made people fall about and hold their stomachs. From time to time he allowed one hand off the leash, so to speak, and allowed it to describe a few eloquent gestures to illustrate his discourse—he had a rich and agreeable voice as well. The hand evolved in the air in a quite autonomous sort of way and if one had not been able to understand what its owner said one might have imagined it to be picking a grape or milking a goat or waving goodbye to a dying patient. It was expressive and strangely encouraging, for he did have a definite presence. He produced a stethoscope and after waving it about as he was talking made a sudden dart for his patient's wrist. This she did not mind. He planted it on her pulse and listened gravely and for a long time to her cardiac performance. He nodded slightly. They had now got on to trying to explain to him what her illness was and how she had come to catch it. He did
not understand. So everyone, led by Roberto and the woman's husband, began to make as if to swallow air like the French do. The doctor swallowed with concern as he watched them; he did not seem to have heard of this disease—are Italians immune to it because they talk too much: the air can't get in? At any rate he did not get it. He raised a carefully manicured finger and scratched his temple as he thought. Then he bowed once more to his pulse, hearkening with great concentration. Ah! After a long and pregnant pause the truth dawned. He put away his little stethoscope with a snap and locked his bag. Sitting well back and with an aggressive tilt to his chin he came up with a remedy which certainly matched the singularity of the disease. “In my opinion the spleen must come out at once,” he said. The translation was handed about to the party in several tongues. The spleen! So that was it!

The only person who refused to register surprise whatever happened—nothing could surprise him, it seemed—was the male Microscope. The spleen, pouf, of course he had heard all about it before. She had always been splenetic—if that is the
mot juste
—and had had numberless attacks which always wore off after she had been treated in the ordinary way for wind in the rigging. One gathered that there was some immense mauve suppository manufactured in Geneva which would meet the case. Nor were we wrong for the doctor produced a gorgeous fountain pen and wrote out a prescription with untrembling hand which he handed
over to Roberto who glanced at it and offered to send someone out to the chemist at once. And the spleen? One could hardly launch her into an operation of that order while we were on the move. She would have to go into hospital. Roberto's perplexities were grievous to behold. Would her damned spleen hold up until he could get shot of her, could push her over the border? That is what he wanted to know. The doctor shook his head, smiled persuasively, and said that it was up to God. Strangely enough the woman's husband took the whole matter with a philosophic optimism which seemed rather noble. Or perhaps he had been through these storms often enough to know that they subsided as quickly as they arose? But nobody thought of invoking Santa Lucia—had we been in Greece it would have been the first, the most urgent thing to do, for were we not in her domain? It was just a small indication of the degree to which we, so-called “evolved” Europeans, had become demagnetized to the sense of pagan realities. Spleen!

Well, the doctor, having pronounced upon his client, rose to take his leave; he did not elaborate about taking out the spleen—one could hardly do this in the lounge. He simply shook hands all round, discussed his fee in a gruff tone with Roberto, and slid through the tall doors of the hotel into the sunlight. Much reassured by such a matter-of-fact approach, the female Microscope rose to her feet looking very much better. Her husband, in a surprising gesture of sympathy, put his
arm round her and led her up to her room to lie down. Yet all had ended on a note of interrogation, nothing finally had been decided. But Roberto sent a hotel messenger out for the medicine and we all hoped for the best. “In my experience,” said Deeds, “the French have only one national disease and it is not the spleen—it's the liver. And a more honorable thing than a French liver you could not have. It comes from them being the most discriminating people on earth when it comes to food and drink.” He did not want to labor the point for he saw Beddoes hovering around with the intention of making some dastardly remark, probably about morning sickness. It was time for an early dinner and bed, for we planned an early start on the morrow—unless hampered by the spleen of the French lady.

Agrigento

M
ARTINE
: “B
UT
A
GRIGENTO
for me is the acid test and I am sure you will feel it as I have; it reminded me of all our passionate arguments about the Greekness of a Cyprus which had never been either geographically or demographically part of Greece. What constituted its special claim to be so? Language of course—the eternal perennity of the obdurate Greek tongue which has changed so little for thousands of years. Language is the key, the passport, and unless we look at the Greek phenomenon from this point of view we will never understand the sort of colonizers they were. It was not blood but language which gave one membership of the Greek intellectual commonwealth—barbarians were not simply people who lived other where but people who did not
speak Greek. It is hard for us to understand for we, like the Romans, have a juristic view of citizenship—in the case of the British our innate puritanism makes it a question of blood, of keeping the blood untainted by foreign admixtures. The horror for us is the half-caste, the touch of the tar brush. It is a complete contrast to the French attitude which resembles in a way the ancient Greek notion in its idea of Francophone nations and races. The possession of the French tongue with its automatic entry into the riches of French culture constitutes the only sort of passport necessary for a non-French person whatever the color of his or her skin. It is easier to find a place in a French world than in a British—language determines the fact; yes, if you are black or blue and even with a British passport it is harder to integrate with us.