Sicilian Carousel (19 page)

I could not sleep, with all these thoughts fluttering about in my mind. I lay for a while on the balcony quietly breathing in the warm unmoving night air; it was strangely light, too, as if from somewhere offstage there was a bronze moon filtering its light through the vapors of the night. But before I realized it the dawn had suddenly started to come up, the distant sea lines to separate from the earth like yolk from white of the cosmic egg. The hills with their soft chalk tones rose slowly, tier upon tier, to where the city stood once more revealed with its two baleful skyscrapers. But an infinity of pink and fawn light softened every outline; even the huge boxlike structures looked well. I slipped down and coaxed the night porter to open the changing room
door; the pool was delicious, not a tremor of coolness. I was swimming in something the temperature of mammals' blood.

Yes, Sikelianos belonged to that old assured classical world where only great men wrote great poetry—there was an assumed connection between the power to write and orate great verse and the power to be morally and psychically superior to one's fellow men. Greatness, though thrust upon one by the Muse, did not absolve one from being a great example to one's fellows. An epic grandeur of style was believed to match an epic grandeur of insight and thought. They were another race these men—they were bards, whose sensibilities worked in every register, from uplift to outrage. The poet was not cursed, but blessed in his insight; and his themes must be equal to his mighty line. It is probably a fallacy to imagine that with the Symbolistes, with Baudelaire, there comes a break and the poet becomes a passive object of suffering, a sick man, a morally defective man like Rimbaud, like Leopardi. His work comes out of sickness rather than an over plus of health. Swinburne, Verlaine.… No, this is donnish thinking, for Sikelianos existed side by side with Cavafy, just as Mistral lived in the epoch of Apollinaire. But we should avoid these neat ruled lines between men and periods. The distances are much vaster than that and the poetic constellations move much more slowly across the sky. I betook myself to the coffee room where the majority of my
fellow travelers were hard at work on breakfast, and where Deeds had emerged in some magical fashion with a brand new
Times
. This always made him vague, and over his coffee he was repeating “Sixty-three for five—I can't believe it.” It seemed that a disaster had overtaken Yorkshire, and that Hampshire….

It was by far the hottest day yet, and brilliantly invigorating; there was no wind, the sea had settled into long calms like a succession of soft veils. Agrigento glimmered up there on the sky and Mario in some mysterious fashion had succeeded in giving the bus a wash and brush up for the floors were still moist from his mop.

The temples were bathed in an early morning calm and light, and there were no other tourists at the site, which gave us the pleasant sense of propriety, the consciousness that we could take them at our ease. Drink them in is the operative tourist phrase—and it wasn't inapposite, for the atmosphere on this limestone escarpment with its sweeps of olive and almond, and its occasional flash of Judas was quite eminently drinkable. The air was so still one was conscious that one was breathing, as if in yoga. The stolid little temples—how to convey the sense of intimacy they conveyed except by little-ising them? They were in fact large and grand, but they felt intimate and life-size. Maybe the more ancient style of column, stubby and stolid, conveys this sense of childishness. It was not they but the site as a whole which conveyed a sense of awe; the ancients must have walked in a veritable forest of temples up
here, over the sea. But one slight reservation was concerned with the type of light tufa used in the Sicilian temples; it was the only suitable material available to the architect, and of course all these columns were originally faced with a kind of marble dust composition to give the illusion of real marble. In consequence now when they are seen from close to the impression is rather of teeth which have lost their glittering dentine.

They are fawnish in tone, and matt of surface; while embedded in the stone lie thousands of infinitesimally small shells, tiny worm casts left by animalcules in the quarries from which the stone was taken. This is not apparent at night during the floodlighting unless one looks really closely. But by day they strike a somewhat secondhand note which forces one to recall that originally all these temples were glossy—fluted as to their columns while their friezes and cornices were painted in crude primary colors. It is something too easy to forget—the riot of crude and clumsy color in which the temple was embedded. Statues painted.… It is my private opinion that the Greeks had, for this reason, little of what we would call plastic sense in our present-day terms. I speak of our lust for volume and our respect for the parent matter out of which our sculptures are shaped. Obviously for them wholly different criteria obtained; it is intriguing to try and imagine whether we would not have been shocked rather than moved by these sites if they had been today in their ancient state of repair, bright with color washes. It might have
seemed to our contemporary eyes as garish but as refreshingly childish as the painted sideboards of the little Sicilian carts which from time to time we passed in the streets of the towns. I thought back to the Pausanian description of the Holy of Holies on the Acropolis; perhaps one should make the mental effort to compare our impressions of, say, Lourdes (horrible!) or St. Peter's or the Cathedral of Tinos….

So we slowly passed down at a walking pace in that pleasant sunshine following the sweet enfilade of the temples as they curved down towards the one to the Dioscuri—like a descending chromatic scale. One by one these huge mythological beasts came up to us, as if they were grazing, and allowed us to pat them. The image had got muddled up in my mind with another thought about temples as magical defensive banks; and by the same token with the thought that all religious architecture carries the same sort of feeling. In America the most deeply religious architecture (in the anthropological sense) is the banks, and some are watched over by precisely the same mythical animals as watched over the temples here, animals staring down from a frieze—lions or boars, bulls or bears. Just as in the Midi, added Deeds jokingly, the deeply religious architecture of the wine cooperatives betrays the inmost religious preoccupations of the inhabitants. He thinks this a
boutade
but has in fact made an observation of great perspicacity and truth. They are indeed very much alike, and quite religious in their style, like stout laic churches.

The Bishop now elected to fall into a shaft, gracefully and without damage, and for a moment a terrible beauty was born. One touch of music hall makes the whole world kin. All we heard at first was a kind of buzzing and booming. It was his voice from the depths giving his rescuers instructions as to how to help him clamber back into the daylight. Beddoes at once suggested that Hades had mistaken him for Persephone and had made an unsuccessful snatch at his coattails, almost dragging him into the Underworld. He would have been disappointed one supposes. At any rate a pretty scene was enacted not unworthy of its ancient Greek echoes, for his savior turned out to be none other than Miss Lobb who (like Venus on a similar occasion) undid her plaited goat-skin belt and extended the end of it to the upraised hands of the holy man. The idea was simple and efficacious. We all formed up, myself with my arms round Miss Lobb and the rest linked on as in a childish game and with a tug or two we raised the Bishop into the daylight, where he seemed none the worse for this brief adventure. The one who was really pale with anxiety was of course Roberto who at once realized that his charge could have broken an ankle. The shaft was not profound, however; the sides had subsided, that was all; and as for the Bishop he was only wounded in his
amour propre
.

The theory of Hades snatching at him was all the more plausible as down here there had once been a shrine to the chthonic deities—another bewilderment
of contradictory ascriptions—and it was just the place where a Protestant Bishop might expect to run afoul of a pagan God. Anyway, this accident put us all in a very good humor and we felt a little touch of pride in the classical aspect of the whole affair. Though we were mere tourists we had a touch of the right instinct. As for poor Persephone, that is another story. But I could feel no trace of her sad spirit calling from its earthen tomb—the sunlight made such fictions too improbably cruel to contemplate. The chthonic deities had little reality for us on that sunny morning. It was hard to admit that one so beautiful had, as one of her attributes, the title of “bringer of destruction.”

But what was a real knockout on this extensive and rather chaotic site was the enormous figure of the recumbent telamon—that gigantic figure whose severed fragments have been approximately assembled on the ground to give an indication of his enormous height and posture. This temple of Zeus is the most extraordinary in conception and has a strangeness which makes one wonder if it was not really constructed by some strange Asiatic race and left here. It feels somehow unlike anything else one may think of in the Greek world of temples, and particularly here in Sicily. I found the thing as barbaric and perplexing (despite its finish) as an Easter Island statue, or a corner of Baalbek. Who the devil executed this extraordinary Bank—which could have been the City National Bank in Swan Lake City, Idaho, or that of Bonga Bonga
in Brazil? My elated puzzlement communicated itself to Deeds who raided his battered holdall and finally found a copy of Margaret Guido's admirable book on the archaeological sites of the island. He used no other, it seemed. From it he read me a bit, sitting on a fragment of pediment to do so. The great temple had, like so much else, been toppled by an earthquake; but the fragments had fallen more or less in order and some notion of its construction could be deciphered. With this lucky factor, and with the description of Diodorus Siculus who had seen it standing, it was possible to work out its shape. But the real mystery begins at this point for the wretched thing is unlike anything else in the island—it is overgrown and vainglorious and, if one must be absolutely truthful, overbearing, and grim. It makes you uneasy when you look at the architectural reconstruction.

The whole thing, to begin with, stands on a huge platform about 350 feet long, reposing on foundations nearly 20 feet deep. Around this chunk had been strung a series of Doric half columns of staggering size. Their diameter is 13 feet. The top of this wall was surmounted by a sort of frieze of enormous stone men—the telamones. They supported the architrave with the help of an invisible steel beam linking column to column. Each of these giant men was over 25 feet tall, male figures, alternately bearded and beardless. Feet together and arms raised to support the architrave they must have been really awe-inspiring. Some of this
feeling actually leaks into the dry-as-dust description of Diodorus who notes with wonder that the simple flutings of the columns were broad enough to contain a man standing upright in them. “The porticos,” he writes, “were of tremendous size and height and on the eastern pediment they portrayed the battle between the Gods and the Giants in sculptures which excelled in size and beauty, while in the west they portrayed the Capture of Troy in which each one of the heroes may be seen depicted in a manner appropriate to his role.”

Nothing but ruins and conjectures remain of all this. Mutilated fragments of statues and coins and walls marked by fires. But here to my astonishment the Japanese couple suddenly began to behave strangely, overwhelmed I suppose by the giant stone figure on the ground. They screamed with laughter and pointed at it. They started to talk one hundred to the dozen and to nod and giggle. They climbed on it and photographed each other sitting on it. They clucked and beamed. They behaved like children with a new toy. And climbing about its defenseless body they reminded me of illustrations of
Gulliver's Travels
. It was an intriguing reaction and I would have given a good deal to ask them what had provoked such an expression of feeling, but the limitations of language made it impossible. We walked thoughtfully around the recumbent warrior, wondering at the coarseness of the workmanship yet aware that in terms of imaginative pictorial originality the temple marked an
important point in the architectural history of Sicily. There was only one other construction which in style resembled it—and that we had not seen as yet; but I made a mental note to watch out for the Temple labeled F at Selinunte, and was struck by the suggestion that perhaps this heavy treatment of the building may have come here via Egypt—where of course they worked in heavy and recalcitrant stones for their religious buildings.

But what earthquakes and weather began was more often than not finished off by the marauders—not necessarily foreign invaders, but simply lazy local builders who picked these choice bones of history and culture simply because they lay to hand and saved transport costs. Every architect will tell you what a godsend it is to find your building materials on the site, instead of being forced to transport them.

The party had spread out to visit the further corners of the site but Deeds, who knew from old not to waste time, headed me away across the meadows towards a pleasant little bar where we celebrated the Bishop's narrow escape from Hades with a glass of beer and a roundel of salami. “It was a very singular sound he made,” said Deeds. “Like a bumble bee in a bottle. I heard it from quite a distance. It sounded like the bees in Agamemnon's tomb.” It was another reference which carried a small built-in pang—for a whole generation had heard and remembered those bees at Mycenae; but an unlucky spraying with insecticide
had silenced them and the great tomb has sunk back into its original sinister anonymity.

But the mystery of the Japanese behavior was absolute; we could not evolve a theory to account for this little wave of hysteria. Unless, as Beddoes suggested, they were suddenly filled with the conviction that this gorgon-like figure was a sort of carnival joke, placed there to evoke innocent merriment.