Sicilian Carousel (4 page)

But before I put out my light I could not resist opening the little green file of her letters in order to re-read the two she had sent me from here while she had been touring the island in her little car. There were good things there, things which connected.… “I always remember the way you pronounce the word ‘impossible!' But Larry dear the impossible has always been just within man's grasp—happiness and justice and love. You feel it so strongly among these battered vestiges. It is always such a near miss. O why can't man reach for the apple instead of waiting for Eve?” Why indeed? “The universe is always bliss side up if only he knew it.”

To sleep. To dream. Light airs, ever so faintly sulphurous seemed to drift into the room through the curtains. Does lava have any smell—or am I imagining things?

I had an extraordinarily vivid dream of our long-lost selves reliving a short sequence of our Cyprus lives. The house had been built on a promontory hard by a little Turkish mosque. Underneath was a tiny beach where we bathed half the night. Though the island had
plunged into an insurrection against our rule there were pockets of emptiness where one could still find a moment of ordinary peace in which to swim and talk—yet never be too far from a pistol. By that time I was working in Nicosia but I used to slip over the Kyrenia range as often as possible to meet her. As a matter of fact I had got her into bad habits—for we often drove outside the sectors under army control and deep into enemy country, so to speak, in order to see a particular church or bathe at a special beach I knew. How dangerous was it? Not very, but the thing was problematic and depended upon a chance meeting with a platoon of resistance fighters armed with automatic weapons. It salted the whole operation with a fitful uneasiness. One never knew.

And then, too, one had a bad conscience like naughty children who know they are disobeying their parents. But these sallies brought us very close together. She sat beside me with my pistol lying in her lap—just to have it handy in case we were overtaken on some country road by some youthful band of hotheads. More than once a car had been overtaken and shot up by the EOKA youth. Through all the beautiful hills and dales of the island we traveled thus, with our lunch in a hamper and our towels beside us. Nothing ever happened, thank God. But once I had a glimpse of the courage of Martine. We had climbed a hill to visit a church and left the car along the olive groves. Having stayed rather longer than usual we came down at dusk to find three
darkly clad men in the middle foreground advancing towards the grove where our car lay.

It looked suspiciously like a reception committee which had finally made contact—perhaps signaled by one of the villages through which we had passed. My heart sank as I measured our distance from the car. I cursed myself for taking such risks, especially with the precious lives of others. How foolhardy to imagine that just by staggering our times and places for excursions we could in the long run escape the vigilance of the terrorists! But there was no time for breast-beating, for they had seen us coming. At all costs we must recover our car. They had something in their hands, perhaps weapons. It was still too far to see clearly. My hand sought the little pistol which lay under a napkin in the food haversack. We advanced arm-in-arm with a simulated nonchalance.

I could have imagined a slightly tremulous Martine in the circumstances, but not at all. The hand on my arm was firm and untrembling and her step was light and confident. It was a moment of tension which did not last long however. We saw that they were forest guards making some sort of inventory of the trees—forest guards and tax collectors no doubt. The only weapons they carried were pens and ink and writing blocks. They talked in preoccupied tones, and looked up idly to see us pass in front of them and regain the car. It was irritating to have been scared by such a meeting; and Martine, divining my pique, smiled and pinched
my arm affectionately. “Not this time,” she said, as I let in the clutch and eased the car out of the olive shadow on to the tarmac. The sunny glades smelled of rosemary and dust even in the dream; a blessed wind rose with our movement and cooled our foreheads. Martine was deeply thoughtful—that beautiful face with its snow-brown skin held sideways against the flying olive groves, deeply thinking. No one could look like that and not be thinking very deep thoughts. I offered her a penny. “I was wondering what we will have for dinner,” she replied with the same Socratic air. And then slept like a white Sphinx.

The dream faded into an untroubled sleep, and when I woke it was almost seven on a cloudless morning. Time for a dip in the hotel pool before breakfast. And here I found the gallant Bishop performing feats of youthful athleticism while his wife sat in a deck chair holding his towel. His morning boom of greeting proved that he had become acclimatized by now and was ready for anything. He swung about on elastic calves and even was so bold as to go off the top board—at which his wife covered, not her eyes, but her ears. I hoped he would not become too hearty and decide to hold Protestant services in the lounge as is the way of bishops traveling in heathen countries. I returned to pack and dress and then descended to find Deeds eating a slow breakfast and picking his way through the local Italian paper while Roberto guided him with an occasional bit of free translation.
The French proconsular couple shared our table and seemed rested and refreshed.

I thought, however, that they eyed me a trifle curiously, as if they too were busy speculating as to what I did in life. The German girl was reading Goethe's enthusiastic account of his own trip round Italy. I hoped to find the text in English or French as I knew no German. The Microscopes were wolfing their food and calling for refills of coffee with the air of people who knew that it was all paid for in advance. They were determined to leave no crumb unturned. Pretty soon, I could see, complaints would start. The British would revolt over the tea and the absence of fish knives. The French would utter scathing condemnation of the cuisine. Poor Roberto! For the moment, however, all was harmony and peace. The novelty of our situation kept us intrigued and good tempered. The brilliance of the Sicilian sun was enthralling after the northern variety. And then there was the little red bus which we had not as yet met, and which was at this moment drawing up outside the hotel to await us. It was a beautiful little camionette of a deep crimson-lake color and apparently quite new. It was richly upholstered and smelled deliciously of fresh leather. It was also painstakingly polished and as clean inside as a new whistle. It gave a low throaty chuckle—the Italians specialize in operatic horns—and at the signal the chasseurs humped our baggage and started to stow.

We were introduced to its driver, a stocky and severe-looking young man, who might have been a
prizefighter or a fisherman from his dark scowling countenance. His habitual expression was somber and depressive, and it took me some time to find out why. Mario was a peasant from the foothills of Etna and understood no language save his own dialect version of Sicilian. He also distrusted nobs who spoke upper class—and of course Roberto spoke upper class and was a nob, being a university man. But from time to time, when a word or a phrase became intelligible to Mario, the most astonishing change came about in that black scowling face. It was suddenly split (as if with an axe blow or a saber cut) by the most wonderful artless smile of a kindly youth. It was only lack of understanding that cast the shadow; the minute light penetrated he was absolutely transformed. But he was grim about his job, and would not touch a drop of drink throughout the trip; it made Roberto, who was a convivial soul, a trifle plaintive to see such devotion to duty. Well, on the sunny morning we gathered around the little bus and eagerly appraised it, for we would be virtually living in it for a week. It looked pretty good to me—the luxury of not having to drive myself. Mario shook hands darkly with us all, the proconsulars, the Microscopes, ourselves, the German girl, the two smart French ladies and the half dozen or so others who as yet swam in a sort of unidentifiable blur, waiting to develop their pictures, so to speak. Among them, as yet unidentified by science, were the egregious fellow called Beddoes, a Miss
Lobb of London, and a rapturous Japanese couple, moonstruck in allure and wearing purple shoes.

Deeds and I settled ourselves modestly in the last two seats in the back row, enjoying therefore a little extra legroom and a small lunette window of our own. The others took up dispositions no less thoughtful, realizing that we would need space to stretch and smoke and doze. Across the aisle from us, however, there was an empty row and this was suddenly occupied by a passenger to whom we hadn't paid attention before. He was a somewhat raffish-looking individual of medium height clad in veteran tweeds with dirty turn-ups; also old-fashioned boots with hooks and eyes and scarlet socks. On his head he wore a beret at a rakish angle from under which effervesced a tangled mop of dirty curls worthy of Dylan Thomas. To everyone's discomfort he smoked shag in a small and noisome French briar. He talked to himself in a low undertone and smiled frequently, exposing very yellow canines. “A rather rum chap,” whispered Deeds confidentially, and I could bet that after a pause he would sigh and add resignedly, “O well, it takes all sorts.…” The nice thing about Deeds was not only his kindness but his predictability. I felt I already knew him so well by now that I could guess the name of his wife—Phyllis. And so it proved to be. But the chap over the way had started to make conversation—a sort of sharp and knowing line of talk. He said his name was Beddoes and that he was a prep school master. “Just been
hurled out of a prep school near Dungeness for behavior unbecoming to an officer and a hypocrite.” He gave a brief cachinnation and sucked on his noisome dottle. Deeds looked thoughtful. Well, I could almost hear him think, if one goes abroad it is to meet new faces in new places.

Yet, at the moment all was harmony, all was beatific calm and indulgence. Even Beddoes seemed all right in his rather sharp-edged way. Later of course we were to ask God plaintively in our prayers what we had done to merit such a traveling companion. But not today, not on this serene and cloudless morning with its smiling promise of hot sunshine and a sea bath along the road. The little hearts blood-colored bus edged off with its cargo into the traffic, feeling its way circumspectly about the town, while Roberto sat down beside the driver and conducted a voice test on the microphone through which he was to keep us intellectually stimulated throughout the Carousel. His own ordeal was just beginning, of course. At breakfast he had bemoaned a guide's fate to Deeds, saying that one was always telling people something they already knew or something they did not wish to know. One could never win. Sometimes, attacked by hysteria, he had tried telling people false facts at breakneck speed just to see if anyone was awake enough to contradict him: but nobody ever did. But today he ran a certain risk with the Bishop as a passenger, for the latter sat forward eagerly, on the
qui vive
like a gundog, all set
to ingest Roberto's information. A trifle patronizing as well, for it was clear from his manner that he already knew a good deal. Yes, it was as if he were doing a
viva voce
in school catechism. Roberto began somewhat defensively by saying that we would not have time to do everything as there was much which merited our judicious attention. “But we will do the two essential things so that you can tell your friends if they ask that you have seen the Duomo and St. Nicolo.” It wasn't too bad as a ration, Deeds told me; but he had spent a delightful hour in the Bellini Museum and the Fish Market, both of which we should be missing on this trip. No matter. Sicily smelled good in a confused sort of way. I was anxious too to get a first glimpse of that curious architectural bastard, Sicilian baroque, which had so enraptured Martine. “You expect it to be hell, but you find it heavenly—sort of fervently itself like the Sicilians themselves.” At that moment our bus passed under a balcony from which apparently Garibaldi had prefaced a famous oration with the words “
O Roma, O morte
.”

Beddoes made some opprobrious comment about demagogues which earned him a glare from the sensitive Roberto. At the site of the no longer extant Greek theater the guide uttered some wise words about Alcibiades, a name which made the Bishop frown. “A dreadful homo,” said Beddoes audibly. Deeds looked rather shocked and moved three points east, as if to dissociate himself from this troublesome commentator. I hoped
he wasn't going to go on like this throughout the journey. But he was. “Dreadful feller,” said Deeds under his breath. Beddoes proved unquenchable and totally snub proof. Moreover, he had very irritating conversational mannerisms like laying his forefinger along his nose when he was about to say something which he thought very knowing; or sticking his tongue out briefly before launching what he considered a witticism. Now he stuck it out to say, apropos Aeschylus, that his play
Women of Etna
was based on reality. “The women of Etna,” he went on with a winning air of frankness, “were known in antiquity for their enormous arses. The whole play, or rather the chorus, revolves around them, if I may put it like that. The women …” But Roberto was wearing a little thin, at least his superb patience was markedly strained. “The play is lost,” he hissed, and repeated the observation in French and German, lest there should be any mistake about it. But this remark of Beddoes was not lost on the German girl who was, I later discovered, called Renata and came from Heidelberg. She turned hot and cold. Beddoes winked at her and she turned her back.

The parent Microscopes held hands and yawned deeply. I wasn't shocked by this, though Roberto looked downcast. The reaction was at least honest and simple. The proconsulars had the air of having read up the stuff before coming on the trip, as of course anyone with any sense would have done. But I prefer to experience the thing first without trimmings and read it up
when I get back home. I know that it is not the right way round, for inevitably one finds that one has missed a great deal; but it gives me the illusion of keeping my first impressions fresh and pristine. Besides, in the case of Sicily, I had my guide in Martine whose tastes, as I knew from long ago, coincided very closely with mine. Consequently I was not unprepared for the mixture of styles which she found so delightful. The little hint of austerity from the north housed the profuse and exuberant Sicilian mode, which itself glittered with variegated foreign influences—Moorish, Spanish, Roman.… But even Catanian baroque managed to convey a kind of dialect version of the Sicilian one; though its elements, fused as they were into several successive bouts of building after natural catastrophes, gave off a touching warmth of line and proportion which argued well for the rest. We paid our respects to Saint Agatha, the patron saint, in the cathedral dedicated to her, which wasn't, however, quite as thrilling as Roberto tried to make it sound—there seemed little about it except the good proportions which we might appreciate. As for Agatha.… “I had an aunt called Agatha,” said Deeds, “who was all vinegar. Consequently the name gives me a fearfully uneasy feeling.”