Sicilian Carousel (14 page)

“This little homily is written in the belief that one day you will visit the temples in that extraordinary valley below the horrid tumble of modern Agrigento's featureless and grubby slums—and suddenly feel quite bewildered by finding yourself in Greece, one hundred per cent in Greece. And you will immediately ask yourself why (given the strong anti-northern and secessionist sentiments of the Sicilians) there has never been a Greek claim to the island. You will smile. But in fact if we judge only by the monuments and the recorded history of the place we are dealing with something as Greek in sinew and marrow as the Argolid or as Attica. How has it escaped?
Because the language is no longer
a vital force
. There are a few pockets where a vestigial Greek is still spoken, but pathetically few (luckily for the Italians). There is an odd little Byzantine monastery or two as there is in Calabria. But the gleam of its Greekness has died out; its language has been swamped by Italian. Only the ancient place names remain to jolt one awake to the realization that Sicily is just as Greek as Greece is—or never was! The question of Greekness—and the diaspora—is an intriguing one to think about. If we take Athens (that very first olive tree) as the center from which all Greekness radiates outward … Sicily is about like Smyrna is—if we take its pulse today. O please come and see!”

Not very well expressed perhaps, but the sentiments harked back to our long Cyprus arguments in the shade of the old Abbey of Bellapais. The dust raised around the question of Enosis with Greece, which constituted such a genuine puzzle to so many of our compatriots. Their arguments always centered around the relative amenities offered the Cypriots under our unequal, lazy but relatively honest regime. No military service, standards of living etc.… all this weighed nothing against a claim which was purely poetic, a longing as ancient as Aphrodite and the crash of the waves on the deserted beaches of Paphos. How to bring this home to London whose sense of values (“common sense”) was always based upon the vulgar contingencies of life and not on its inner meaning? You would hear nice-minded civil servants say: “It's astonishing their claim—they have
never been Greek, after all.” Yet the Doric they spoke had roots as deep as Homer, the whole cultus of their ethnographic state was absolutely contemporary, absolutely living. Was it, then, the language which kept it so? The more we disinterred the past the Greeker the contemporary Cypriot seemed to become.

Through all these considerations, as well as many others—for I had been living in the Mediterranean nearly all my adult life—I had started very tentatively to evolve a theory of human beings living in vital function to their habitats. It was hard to shed the tough little carapace of the national ego and to begin to see them as the bare products of the soil, just like the wild flowers or the wines, just like the crops. Physical and mental types which flowered in beauty or intelligence according to what the ground desired of them and not what they desired of themselves or others. One accepts easily enough the fact that whisky is a product of one region and Côtes du Rhône the product of another; so do language and nationality conspire to evolve ways of expressing Greekness or Italian-ness. Though of course it takes several generations for the physical and mental body to receive the secret imprint of a place. And after all, when all is said and done, countries as frequently overrun and ravaged as Greece cannot have a single “true” Greek, in the blood sense, left.

If indeed the phrase means anything at all. What is left is the most hard wearing, even indestructible part, language whose beauty and suppleness has nourished
and still nourishes the poet, philosopher, and mathematician. And when I was a poor teacher in Athens striving to learn demotic Greek I found with surprise that my teacher could start me off with the old Attic grammar without batting an eyelash. Much detail had obviously changed, but the basic structure was recognizably the same. I could not repay this debt by starting my own students off with Chaucer; the language had worn itself away too quickly. Even Shakespeare (in whose time no dictionary existed) needed a glossary today. What, then, makes a “Greek”? The whole mystery of human nationality reverberates behind the question. The notion of frontiers, the notion of abstract riches, of thought, of possessions, of customs.… It all comes out of the ground, the hallowed ground of Greece—wherever that was!

This train of thought was a fitting one for a baking morning with a slight fresh wind off the sea. The little red bus had doubled back on its tracks and was heading north briefly before turning away into the mountains. Today we would climb up from sea level into the blue dozing escarpments which stretched away in profile on our left. Mario plied his sweet klaxon to alert the traffic ahead of us—mostly lorries bringing building materials to Syracuse. Roberto hummed a tune over the intercom and told us that it would be nice and cool in the mountains, while tonight we would find ourselves once more at sea level in a good hotel just outside Agrigento. Deeds felt like reading so I pursued
my long argument with Martine's ghost, upon themes some of which had invaded my dreams. I saw her irritating the Governor at dinner by being a trifle trenchant in support of the Greek claim—it made him plaintive for he felt it was rather rude of her, which perhaps it was. What could he do about a situation fabricated by his masters in London?

But in fact these old arguments had a burning topicality for me, for they raised precisely the questions I had come to Sicily to try and answer. What was Sicily, what was a Sicilian? I had already noticed the strongly separatist temper of the inhabitants which had won them (but only recently) a measure of autonomy. The island was too big and too full of vigorously original character to be treated as if it was a backward department of a rundown post-war Italy. In every domain the resemblance to Greece was fairly striking—and Sicily was politically as much a new nation as the Turk-free modern Greece was. Indeed metropolitan Greece was itself still growing—acquiring back places like Rhodes from Italy itself. All this despite the predictable tragedy of the Cyprus issue, envenomed by neglect and the insensitivity and self-seeking of the great powers with their creeping intrigues and fears of influence.

What was the Mediterranean tapestry all about anyway; particularly when it came to extending the frame of reference in the direction of art, architecture, literature? Italy, Spain, Greece, the Midi of France—they all had the same light and the same garden produce. They
were all garlic countries, underprivileged in everything but the bounteous sense of spareness and beauty. They were all naïfs, and self-destroyers through every predatory Anglo-Saxon toy or tool from the transistor to the cinema screen. Yet something remained of a basic cultural attitude, however subject to modification. But why wasn't Spain Italy, why wasn't Italy Greece, or Greece Turkey? Different attitudes to religion, to love, to the family, to death, to life.… Yes, deep differences, yet such striking likenesses as to allow us to think of such a thing as a Mediterranean character. After all, there are many varieties of the olive tree, which for me will always mark the spiritual and physical boundaries of that magical and non-existent land—the Mediterranean. Martine was right. How I regretted not having come here before.

We passed Augusta again—how dismal it looked by daylight with all its rusty refineries and sad clumps of rotting equipment. But oil had come to Sicily, and with it prosperity and of course the death of everything that makes life valuable. They were doomed to become soft, pulpy, and dazed people like the Americans so long as it lasted. But in a generation or two, after the land had had its fill of rape and disaster the magnetic fields would reassert their quiet grip once more to reform the place and the people into its own mysterious likeness—the golden mask of the inland sea which is unlike any other. How lucky France was to have one foot in the Mediterranean; it modified the
acerbe
French northern character and made the Midi a sort of filter which admitted the precious influences which stretched back into prehistory. It would not be the first time or the last that a whole culture had plunged to its doom in this land. The long suppurating wars of the past—Etruscan against Italian, Carthaginian against Greek against Roman. After every outburst of hysteria and bloodshed came an era of peace during which the people tried to reform their scattered wits and build for peace. It never lasted. It never would. A spell of years with the promise of human perfection—then collapse. And each succeeding invader if given time brought his own sort of order and beauty.

Such a brief flowering fell to the lot of Sicily when the Arabs came, during their great period of ascendancy, at the invitation of the Byzantine admiral Euphemius. It was a fatal invitation, for the island slipped from the nerveless fingers of Byzance into the nervous and high-spirited fingers of the Arabs who immediately entered the struggle and at last succeeded in mastering the masterless island. Then there was another period of productive peacefulness—just as there had been when Syracuse had enjoyed its first flowering of peace and prosperity. They were astonishingly inventive and sensitive these newcomers from over the water, people with the austere desert as an inheritance. For the Arab knows what water is; it is more precious to him almost than oxygen.

So were rural areas resettled, inheritance laws revised, ancient waterways brought back into use for irrigation.
They were planters of skill and choice; they brought in citrus, sugarcane, flax, the date palm, cotton, the mulberry with its silkworms, melon, papyrus, and pistachio. Nor was it only above ground for they were skillful miners and here they found silver, lead, mercury, sulphur, naphtha, and vitriol—not to mention alum and antimony. The extensive saltpans of today date from their inspired creative rule. But they also vanished within the space of a few decades—like water pouring away down a drain; the land took over once more, trying to form again its own obstinate image.

We were entering the throat of a plain which led directly into the mountains, and here I got a premonitory smell of what the valley of Agrigento must be like—it was purely Attic in the dryness, in the dust, and the pale violet haze which swam in the middle distance foxing the outlines of things. To such good effect that we found ourselves negotiating a series of valleys diminishing all the time in width as they mounted, and brimming with harvest wheat not all of which had yet been garnered. It is impossible to describe the degrees of yellow from the most candent cadmium to ochre, from discolored ivory to lemon bronze. The air was full of wisps of straw and the heat beat upon us as if from some huge oven where the Gods had been baking bread. I expected Argos to come in sight at any moment. What is particularly delicious to me about Attic heat is its perfect dryness—like a very dry champagne. You are hot, yes, you can pant like a dog
for water; but you don't sweat, or else sweat so very lightly that it dries at once on your skin. In such heat to plunge into an icy sea is marvelous—you get a sharp pain in the back of the throat as if from an iced wine. But here we were far from the sea, and starting to climb amidst all this glaze of peacock-blue sky and yellow squares of wheat. Underneath that hot heaven the sun rang as if on an anvil and we were glad of Mario's cooling apparatus which sent us little draughts of cool air. Dust devils danced along the plain, and the few lorries we passed were powdered white—they had left the main roads for the country paths. Halfway up Roberto announced a “physiological halt” as he called it, and we pulled into a petrol station in order to fill up and, by the same token, to empty out.

There was a canteen where we had a few moments of quiet conviviality over wine and a strange white aperitif made from almond juice and milk. Like everything in Sicily it was loaded with sugar though a delicious drink when sufficiently iced. The Petremands stood treat and Mrs. Microscope was back in sufficient form to engulf a couple of glasses before Mario honked and we all trooped back to the bus to resume our ascent which was now to become a good deal more steep as we left the plain behind. It was pleasant to look down on it as it receded, for the sinuous roads curved snake wise in and out among the hills and the fine views varied with angle and altitude. We were heading for a Roman villa where quite recently the
archaeologists had discovered a magnificent tessellated floor of considerable importance to them—and in consequence to us, the curious sightseers of the Carousel. We would base ourselves at Piazza Armerina in order to see the Villa Imperiale and have lunch before crossing the scarps and descending with the descending sun upon Gela and Agrigento. This gave us our first taste of the mountains and it was most refreshing. In one of the rock cuttings there were little tortoises clicking about and Mario stopped to allow Deeds to field one smartly and hand it to Miss Lobb who did not know what to do with it. It was an astonishingly active animal and ran all over the bus into all the corners, upsetting all of us and causing a full-scale hunt before it was caught. Finally she freed it. Its little claws were extremely sharp and it fought for dear life, for its freedom. I had always thought of tortoises as such peaceable things which simply turned into stones at the approach of danger. This little brute attacked all along the line and we were glad when at last it clicked off into the bushes.

Piazza Armerina is a pretty and lively little hill town, boasting of more than one baroque church, a cathedral and a castle, and several other sites of note in the immediate environs. But it is quite impossible to convey that elusive quality, charm, in writing—or even in photography which so often deludes one with its faked images and selected angles. The little town had charm, though of course its monuments could not compare
in importance to many another Sicilian town. Yes … I found myself thinking that it would be pleasant to spend a month there finishing a book. The walking seemed wonderful among these green and flourishing foothills. But the glimpse we had of it was regrettably brief; having signaled our presence to the hotel where we were to have lunch we set off at once to cover the six or so kilometers which separated us from the Imperial Villa—a kind of summer hideout built for some half-forgotten Roman Emperor. What is intriguing is that almost no ascription ever made about a Sicilian site or monument is ever more than tentative: you would have thought that this important version of Government House. Everywhere would offer one a little firm history. No. “It has been surmised that this hunting lodge could have belonged to the Emperor Maximianus Heraclius who shared his Emperorship with Diocletian.” The site they chose for the Imperial Villa is almost oppressively hidden away; it makes one conjecture why in such a landscape one should plank down a large and spacious building in the middle of a network of shallow ravines heavily wooded, and obviously awash in winter with mountain streams. Instead of planting it on a commanding hillock which (always a problem in hill architecture) drained well during the rains. There was something rather unhealthy and secretive in the choice of a site, and it must be infernally hot in August as a place to live in. It buzzed with insects and butterflies. We arrived in a cleared space
where, together with a dozen or so other buses, we dropped anchor and traipsed off down the winding walks to the villa, marveling at the sultriness and the oppressive heat—so different from the Attic valleys we had traversed with all their brilliant cornfields.