Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell

  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 th
e 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.

  We came at last to a clearing where an absolute monstrosity greeted our eyes—a straggling building in dirty white plastic which suggested the demesne of a mad market gardener who was specializing in asparagus. I could not believe my eyes. None of us could. We stood there mumchance and swallowing, wondering what the devil this construction was. Roberto, blushing and apologetic, told us.

  So precious were the recently uncovered mosaics and so great the risk that they would be eaten into by the climate that someone had had the brilliant idea of covering them in this grotesque plastic housing through which a series of carefully arranged plank walks and duckboards allowed the curious to walk around the villa. It was a groan-making thing to do and only an archaeologist could have thought of it. Moreover, the mosaics, so interesting historically that one is glad to have made the effort to see them, are of a dullness extraordinary. But then the sort of people who build villas for Governors are for the most part interior decorators with a sense of grandiose banality, a sense of the expensively commonplace. Of such provenance is the Imperial Villa, though of course the number and clarity of the decorations merit interest despite their poor sense of plastic power. Historians must be interested in these elaborate hunting scenes, the warfare of Gods, and the faintly lecherous love scene which ends in a rather ordinary aesthetic experience. And all this in a white plastic housing which turned us all the color of wax. Was this the pleasure dome of an Emperor, or was it perhaps (an intelligent suggestion by Christopher Kininmonth) more the millionaire’s hideaway, constructed for the rich man who purveyed animals for the Roman arenas? The frescoes of animals are so numerous and their variety so great that it makes one pause and wonder. But as usual there is no proof of anything.

  Dutifully we prowled the duckboards while Beddoes, who had culled a whole lot of Latin words from the Blue Guide, made up a sort of prose poem from fragments of it which he murmured aloud to himself in a vibrant tone of voice. Thus:

  And so we enter the Atrium

  By its purely polygonal court

  To the left lies the Great Latrine

  Ladies and Gents, the Great Latrine

  For those who are taken short

  But the marble seats are lost

  Yet ahead of us is the Aediculum

  Giving access to the Thermae

  The vestibule can be viewed from

  the Peristyle

  Do not smile.

  Next comes the frigidarium

  With its apodyteria

  Leading onwards with increasing hysteria

  To the Alepterion

  Between tepidarium and calidarium

  Whence into a court where the Lesser

  Latrine

  Waits for those who have not yet been

  In construction sumptuous

  As befitted the Imperial Purple

  But here the Muse punished him and he wobbled off a duckboard and all but plunged down upon one of the more precious tessellations, to the intense annoyance of Roberto and the collective disapproval of the Carousel. The dentist’s lady seemed particularly shocked and enraged and flounced about to register her disapproval. “That guy is sacrilegious,” she told her companion with a venomous look at Beddoes who seemed only a very little repentant. Frescoed bathers massaged by slaves, animal heads bountifully crowned with laurel—yes, but it was a pity that so extensive and such energetic cartoons had not come from more practiced or feeling hands. The commonplaceness of the whole thing hung about in the air; I was reminded suddenly of the interior decorations of the Castle of the Knights at Rhodes—which had been hatched by a Fascist Governor of the Dodecanese Islands who tried to echo the pretensions of Mussolini in this seat of government. The same empty banality—and here it was again—an echo from the last throes of the expiring Empire. “In richness and extent the villa can fairly be compared to Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli or Diocletian’s Palace at Split.” I don’t agree, but then who am I to say? The site alone militates against this opinion. These idle thoughts passed through my brain as we slowly negotiated the lesser latrine; “whose brick drain, marble hand basin, and pictorial decoration attest to the standards of imperial Roman comfort.” Yes, but if it were just the home of the local Onassis of the day all would be clear.

  The visit was long, it was thorough, and it explained why when Martine listed the places she wished that I might visit in order to write the “pocket” Sicily for her children, she had quite omitted to mention it. Perhaps she had just forgotten—such is the vast prolixity of memorable monuments in this island that one could be forgiven for simply forgetting one which made no particular mark on one’s nervous system. I write these words, of course, subject to caution and with a certain diffidence, for the finds at the Imperial Villa, the most extensive in Europe, have become justly famous and it may well be that I am putting myself down as a hopeless Philistine. But I think not. And I am somewhat comforted by the fact that Deeds gave the place a very tentative marking in his little guide. But this he rather tended to explain away over the lunch table by saying that he was so deeply in love with the little red town of Aedoni which was a few kilometers off—and with the marvelous ancient Greek site of Morgantina—that all this heavy dun Roman stuff did not impress him. Indeed opinions were rather divided generally, and there were one or two of us who rather shared my view of the Villa. The dentist’s lady was most unsparing in her open dislike for Beddoes who glimmered abou
t everywhere like a dragonfly peering over people’s shoulders and whispering things they didn’t want to hear. “That man,” she told her dentist at the lunch table, “is a pure desecrator.” It was as good a way of viewing Beddoes as any we had invented, and her accent had an envenomed Midwestern sting in it.

  The lunch was toneless but the mountain air was fresh and we drank a good deal of wine with it; one had begun to feel rather fatigued, almost sleepy. We had been on the move for what seemed an age now, though in reality it was only a few days; but we had begun to feel the stress of traveling about, even over perfect roads, and being exposed the whole time to new sights and sounds. We took off languidly in the cool air, replete with wine, and for the most part with the intention of having a short doze as Mario negotiated the hairpins and forest roads on the way down to Agrigento. The very old Italian couple who never spoke but tenderly held hands like newlyweds seemed in the seventh heaven of smiling joy. They sat back, quiet as apples, and smiled peacefully upon the world as it wheeled by. The little red bus chuckled and rippled its partridge-like way among the forests and pretty soon we once more came in view of the distant sea and the black smudges which marked the site of Gela. There was a good deal of fairly purposeful reforestation among these cliffs and scarps but I was sorry to see to what extent the eucalyptus had been used, not because it isn’t very beautiful as a tree—its shimmering spires of poplar-like green are handsome; but the shallow spread of its roots makes its demands for soil immoderate and nothing very interesting can be set beside it. I suppose that it was chosen precisely because the roots hold up the friable and easily washed-away soil. And Sicily has the same problems of reforestation as Greece has.

  And so from Caltanissetta the long downswing began into the plain where Gela lay; the sea line today as misty and incoherent as only the heats of July can make it. Somewhere away to the left sweet Vittoria (another dream town of Deeds which we were going to miss) whose smiling baroque remained to this day a suitable monument to the lady who founded the city, Vittoria della Colonna—was she not once Queen of Cyprus? The slopes lead enticingly downwards towards the Bay of Gela, one of the American landing places in 1943. The dust is rich in this long valley intersected by a number of lively rivers which seemed very high for the time of the year. For a long while, half dozing, we descended along the swaying roads through vineyards and clumps of cane, olive groves, and extensive plantations of oranges. And at last of course we struck oil—as we neared the town which Aeschylus had chosen to spend his last years in, indeed to die in.