Sicilian Carousel (16 page)

The land had gone yellower and more ochreous; the valleys had become longer and more spacious. It had a feel of wildness. But there were strings of lorries loaded with dust-producing chemicals which floated off into the air and powdered the bus until Mario swore and shook his fist at them. Somewhere some Herculean constructions were being mounted—I hoped it was not Agrigento which had come under the scourge of urbanization. On one of these long declines we slowed down for an accident involving a lorry and a large sports car. A very definitive accident for the sports car with its occupant still in it had been pushed right into the ditch on one side, while the lorry responsible for the push had itself subsided like an old camel into the ditch on the opposite side. As in all scenes of terror and dismay everything seemed to have settled into a sort of timeless tableau. The police had not yet arrived. Someone had covered the form of the lorry driver with a strip of sacking—just a bare foot sticking out.

But the occupant of the sports car was a handsome blond youth, and he was lying back in his seat as if replete with content, with sunlight, with wine. The expression on his face was one of benign calm, of beatitude. He wore a blue shirt open at the throat. There was no disorder in his dress, nor was he marked by the collision; he seemed as if asleep. The light wind ruffled a strand of blond hair on his forehead to complete the illusion of life, but the little man whose stethoscope was planted inside his blue shirt over the heart, was shaking his head and making the traditional grimace of doctors the world over. The front of the sports car, the whole engine, was crumpled up like a paper bag. Yet there was no blood, no disorder; the young man had simply ceded to the demands of fate. It was a death by pure concussion. He lay, as if in his coffin, while around him stood a group of half a dozen peasants who might have been chosen by a dramatist to give point and resonance to this classical accident in which so unexpectedly death had asserted itself. No one cried or beat his breast; the women had drawn the corner of their head shawls into their mouths and held them between white firm teeth—as if by this gesture to allay the possibility of tears. Two peasants, with mattocks held lightly in hands wrinkled as ancient tortoises, stared at the young man and his sumptuous car as one might stare (the operative phrase is perhaps “drink in”) at a holy painting above an altar. Their black eyes brimmed with incomprehension. They did not try to
understand this phenomenon—a dead boy in a brilliantly colored car with yellow suede upholstery. But there was no sorrow, no breast beating, no frantic curiosity such as there would have been in the north or in Greece. Nobody crossed themselves. They simply stared, without curiosity, indeed with a kind of stern bravado. You felt that they and death were equals. It was simply that the island had struck home once more. This was Sicily! And one realized that even death had a different, a particularly Sicilian resonance. The groups of black eyes remained fixed and unwinking whereas the Greek or Italian eye is forever darting about, restless as a fly. In the background there was an older man with a mane of white hair, who stared as hard as the others—indeed with such concentration that his little pink tongue tip stuck out and gave him an absurdly childish expression. But no fear.

It was we in the bus who felt the fear—you could see gloom and dismay on every visage as Mario drew up in a swirl of whiteness and leaned out to inform himself of the circumstances. Was there anything we could do? Nothing. An ambulance was on the way from Agrigento, also the police. The doctor with his open shirt looked more like a youthful vet. He had managed to edge his tiny Fiat right off the road into a nook while he examined the young man in the car. Nobody used the word for death either: the fact was conveyed with gestures of the fingers or the head. The whole thing was amazingly studied; it was as if all of us, even us in
the bus, had been chosen by a dramatist to fill a part in this tableau. The Bishop had put on an expression which read as: I told you so. He seemed rather like the chief cashier of a great Bank (Death Inc.) who had a good deal of inside knowledge. The old Italian apple people stayed quietly smiling; perhaps they did not understand or remained locked in their dream of Eden. Renata, the German girl, closed her eyes and turned her head away. Miss Lobb looked severe, as if it reflected discredit on the tourist company to let people who had paid good money suddenly come up against this kind of thing. Beddoes straightened an imaginary tie furtively; you could see that death was for him a headmaster in Dungeness. How did I look? I caught sight of my reflection in the dusty glass and thought I looked a trifle sick—I certainly felt it; it was so unexpected on that brilliant afternoon with the sun sliding down into the mist-blue waters of the Underworld. Would we arrive before dark? We had gathered speed now, and had at last cleared the long file of lorries which were causing all the dust. The air was dry and hot; the limestone configuration of the land spoke of water and green, of spring and rivers and friendly nightingales. Deeds seemed rather remote and preoccupied by his own thoughts and I did not subject him to mine which as usual were rather incoherent and muddled—across the screens of memory old recollections of Athens and the islands came up like friendly animals to be recognized and stroked. Yes, we were in Attica, there was no
doubt about it; just north of the capital, say in Psychico or perhaps east near Porto Rafti … I must not hurt Roberto's patriotic feelings by all my Greek chatter. Sicily after all belonged to neither Greece nor to Italy now (geographical frontiers mean nothing) but strictly to itself, to its most ancient and indestructible self. On we sped, skimming the hills like a swallow.

It came in sight slowly, the famous city; at first as a series of suggestive shapes against the evening sky, then as half dissolved forms which wobbled in the heat haze to settle at last firmly into the cubist boxes of a modern city—and with at least two small skyscrapers to mark the ancient (I supposed) Acropolis. But as we approached, a black cloud of a particularly heavy and menacing weight began to obscure the sun. It was very strange—the whole of heaven was, apart from this cloud, serene, void, and blue. It was as if the thing had got left over from some old thunderstorm and lay there undissolved, drifting about the sky. It was not to be regretted as it was obviously going to cause a dramatic sunset, threshing out the sun's rays, making it seem like the lidless dark eye of a whale from which stray beams escaped. If I make a point of this little departure from the norm of things it is because as we journeyed along we saw to our left a small cottage perched on a headland with two wind-bent pines outside it—the whole hanging there over the sea, as if outside the whole of the rest of nature. There was no other sign of human habitation save this desolate and
memorable little cottage. With the black sunlight it looked deeply tragically significant, as if it were the backdrop for a play. Hardly anybody paid attention to the little scene, but Roberto with an air of sadness, announced over the speaker: “The birthplace of Pirandello. A little hamlet called Chaos!” He looked at his watch. The museum would be shut he thought. Perhaps one might just stop for a moment? If the idea was tentative it was because he knew that hardly anyone in the bus knew or cared much about this great man, this great original poet of Agrigento. We risked, by a detour, to arrive a trifle late and perhaps prejudice a trip to the valley of the Temples which were floodlit at night. Would anybody care to … but only three or four hands were raised so it was decided to press on.

Meanwhile, staring across the dusty
bled
on my left I saw the sunbeams lengthen and sink, like stage lights being lowered for a play, while suddenly from the beaches behind the silhouette came a stream of grinding laboring lorries, like a string of ants upon a leaf. I suppose they were doing nothing more sinister than bringing up sea sand from the beaches, but the clouds of whiteness they sent swirling heavenwards contained so many tones of pearl, yellow, amber that the whole display, with the sunlight shining through it, was worthy of a nervous breakdown by Turner. It made my heart beat faster, it was memorable and at the same time a little ominous—as if by it we were warned not to take the famous city we were about to visit too
lightly. To bring to it our real selves. Yet it was all over in a matter of half a minute, but it had a sort of finalizing effect on our decision, for we turned our backs upon this vision and set about climbing into the sky, towards the town whose shabby outlines and haphazard building became slowly more and more evident as we advanced. Roberto uttered its name with a small sigh of fatigue.

I had not conveyed my impressions to Deeds believing him to be otherwise occupied, but the all-seeing eye had taken in the headland and he said now: “Pity about Pirandello. The little museum is very touching. But what a strange light. And the small scale is striking—like the humbleness of Anne Hathaway's cottage.” It was an apt comment on the origins of greatness.

But by now the cloud had mysteriously vanished backstage and all was serene, a transparent, cloudless dusk with no trace of wind; and as we followed the curves and slants of the road up to the town it became slowly obvious that what was being unfolded before us and below us was a most remarkable site. Successive roundels led in a slow spiral up to the top of the steep hillock upon which once an Acropolis had perched, and where now two parvenu skyscrapers stood and an ignoble huddle of unwarranted housing did duty for the old city's center. We had reached by now the commercial nexus of the new town which lies a bit below the city, makeshift and ugly. But the light was of pure opalescent honey, and the setting (I am sorry to labor
the point) was Hymettus at evening with the violet city of Athens sinking into the cocoon of night. I tremble also to insist on the fact that from the point of view of natural beauty and elegance of site Agrigento is easily a match for Athens on its hills. Just as the ocean throws up roundels of sand to form pools, so the successive ages of geological time had thrown up successive rounds of limestone, rising in tiers like a wedding cake to the Acropolis. From the top one looks down as if into a pie dish with two levels, inner and outer ridges. It is down there, at the entrance to the city, that all the Temples are situated, like a protective screen, tricked out with fruit orchards, with sweeps of silver olives, and with ubiquitous almond trees whose spring flowering has become as famous as the legendary town itself.

We climbed down into the twilight with a strange feeling of indecision, not knowing exactly what was in store for us. It was only after a brief walk across a square, when we found ourselves looking down into the tenebrous mauve bowl where the Temples awaited us that we realized that our arrival at that precise time was an act of thoughtful good sense on the part of Roberto. “Before the city lights go on you may see more or less how the classical city looked at sunset.” The air was so still up here that one could catch the distant sounds of someone singing and the noise perhaps of a mattock on the dry clay a mile below us. At our back the streets were beginning to fill up for the evening Corso, the tiny coffee shops to brim over with lights which seemed, by
contagion, to set fire at last to the street lamps behind our backs and set off the snarling radios and jukeboxes and traffic noise. Ahead of us the darkness rose slowly to engulf us, like ink being poured into a well; but it was a light darkness, slightly rosy, as if from a hidden harvest moon. But we belonged to the scattered disoriented city now with its stridulations of juke.

We were about to turn away from this slowly overwhelming darkness and back into the raucous streets when Roberto, who still peered keenly down the valley, implored a moment's patience of us, for what reason I could not tell. He seemed as keyed up as if we were to expect something like a firework display. But it was better than that; presently there came the swift wing beats of a church bell which sounded like a signal and soundlessly the temples sprang to floodlit life all together, as if by a miracle. This was aerial geography with a vengeance, for they were to be our after-dinner treat tonight! But there were signs of raggedness and fatigue in the party and I could see that some of us might prefer to stay in the hotel and sleep. The Count's wife looked really ill with weariness and I wondered why they had embarked her on such a journey. Mrs. Microscope too looked crusty though we had had no more news of her spleen. But there was to be a bit of delay as yet for our schedule called for half an hour's shopping halt in the town, to enable us to buy curios and generally take a look round. Not all set off for this treat; many stayed in the bus. While, rather cowardly,
I took myself off with Deeds to a
bistro
where I anticipated dinner and the fatigues of temple haunting by a couple of touches of
grappa
which was like drinking fumed oak in liquid form. Heartening stuff. Deeds fell into conversation with a eunuchoid youth who brought us coffee with a kindly but disenchanted air.

In the far corner, however, there was a small group of middle-aged to elderly men who attracted my instant attention by their hunched-up look and their black clothes and battered boots. They were gnarled and leathered by their avocation—could they have been coal miners, I wondered? Dressed awkwardly in their Sunday best with heavy dark suits and improbable felt hats which looked as if very seldom worn. Or perhaps they were mourners attending the funeral of some local dignitary? They spoke in low gruff tones and in a dialect Italian. The sister of the eunuch served them exclusively and with such obvious nervousness that I finally concluded that they must be a group of Mafia leaders on a Sunday outing. Their little circle exuded a kind of horrid Protestant gloom, and most of their faces were baneful, ugly. They were drinking Strega as far as I could make out, but the massive sugar content was not making them any sweeter. It was a strange little group and all the other customers of the place beside ourselves shot curious glances at them, wondering I suppose like ourselves, what and from where.… The mystery was only cleared up when Roberto appeared in search of a quick coffee and caught sight of us. He
seemed not unprepared for the question, and it was clear from his way of looking at them when Deeds pointed them out that they did seem singular, almost like another race. But no, that was not the case. They were simply sulphur miners on a night out in town.