Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell

  There was probably a hotel named after him—there always is such a fitting memorial of the mercantile age we live in! The last whiff of the open country is soon extinguished at the approaches to this famous town whose great complex of petro-chemical installations seems to girdle it. There is little to see save what the museum has put on view—an extensive and fine historical collection of objects both votive and utilitarian. The bald skull of the Greek dramatist should perhaps have been among the relics? The legend says that an eagle mistook his skull for a stone and dropped a tortoise shell upon it in order to break it.

  Now I took this story to be simply one of those literary fables with which we are so familiar until … one day in Corfu, long ago, I actually saw a big bird, perhaps a buzzard, doing exactly this, dropping shells from a great height, on to a seagirt rock and then coming down to inspect and peck. I watched it for over an hour and in all it tried out three or four different shells—they seemed to be clams of a sort, and not tortoises. Though a tortoise would be quite a logical animal for an eagle to sweep in its claws and try to crack apart in this fashion. One Doric column is all that is left unless you like a chunk of defensive ancient wall half silted into the sand. Oil rigs off the shore with their ominous message. But the sweep of the bay is in the grand style and even in the mess of modern Gela one sees how sweet a place it must have been, how rich in fruit and vine, and how splendid as horse country because so well watered and green. Also it lay just back from the coast so that Syracuse and Akragas were in the front line as far as commerce and warfare were concerned; Gela must have been a little démodé, a little second-hand and old-fashioned, a fitting place for Pythagorean thinkers and poets who wanted a quiet life. At any rate that is what one feels even today. How ugly, though, they have allowed this important site to become (ah Demeter, where is your shrine!) with its haphazard modern development.

  There was no time to go down to the sea for we were due in Agrigento that evening, so that after Gela we tumbled back into the bus and set off along the coastal road—the section leading us to Agrigento struck me as desolate and full of dirty sand dunes; even melancholy, if you like, but not melancholy and depressing as some of the later stretches after Marsala. Perhaps it was the anticipation of the Vale of the Temples which lay ahead, or simply the sun made one drowsy and content to feel the ancient pulse beat of the vanished Gela where now, off the coast, strange steel animals with long legs probed about like herons in a shallow lake. An idea came to me, and I jotted it down in order to chew it over later at leisure. (Before Christianity the sources of power were in magic, after it in money.) What is to be done? Nothing, it is too late.

  On a remote country road, in the deep dust, we unexpectedly drew to a halt under a great carob tree full of fruit, which is known as the locust bean. There was an enclosure with trees and a wicket gate behind which one could see a trimly laid out little cemetery. This little halt had been organized specifically for Deeds by Roberto. It was a war cemetery which came into his purlieu for inspection. Accordingly he somewhat apologetically took himself off in the direction of the British and Canadian graves, lighting a cigarette and promising us not to be long. Roberto turned us loose in the road and we straggled about for a while like lost sheep. I walked a little way and entered a vineyard where I found a patch of grass, almost burned brown by the summer heat. Here I lay down in its warm crackling cradle, dislodging swarms of crickets which hardly ceased their whirring as they retreated. The earth smelled delicious, baked to a cinder. Ants crawled over my face. In my heat-hazed mind dim thoughts and dreams and half-remembered conversations jumbled themselves together as a background to this throbbing summer afternoon with the cicadas fiddling away like mad in the trees. Every time a light patch of high cloud covered the sun the whole of nature fell silent—or at least the crickets did. Did they think that winter had suddenly returned? And when the heat was turned on again was I wrong to detect in their fervor a tremendous relief that such was not the case? I hovered on the edge of sleep and then called myself to attention, for the others did not know where I was and it would not do to miss the bus or keep poor Mario fretting and scowling by being late.

  I hoisted myself sleepily to my feet and crossed the field back to the road where Roberto, who had been trying to explain something about the carob tree to the rest of the party, had run into vocabulary trouble. Here I could help a little, for these great strong carob trees were a handsome feature of Cyprus with their long curving bean. When wind or lightning broke a branch of the tree one was always surprised to see that the wood revealed was the color of human flesh. The locust bean, Roberto was trying to explain, was highly nutritious. He was picking a few—they were dry and snapped between his teeth—and handing them round for the party to try. We had often done this on picnics in the past and I was pleased once more to make the acquaintance of this noble tree whose produce is “kibbled” (an absurd word) very extensively in Cyprus for animal fodder. By now Deeds had sauntered back to us in time to take the long seed in his fingers and try it with his teeth. “Can I bore you with a story?” he asked diffidently. “Some of the boys in that cemetery came from a commando I trained in Cyprus. Now among our training tips was to keep an eye wide open for carobs if short of food. You can live almost indefinitely on carob seed and water, and for a commando in this theater it was most essential gen. In fact several of those men were lost between the lines during the first assault for about ten days, without rations of any sort. But they found fresh springs and they found locust beans and lived to tell the tale. Alas, they were killed later in a counter-attack. But if we had been training a commando in the U.K. we would have forgotten about the nutritive qualities of the carob. I always think of Cyprus in those days when I inspect this little cemetery.” He had been quite a time and seemed a trifle sad, and somewhat glad to pile back into the bus with us and start off again down the long roads which led onwards to Agrigento and the Temples which for Martine (and not ruling out Taormina) had been the great Sicilian experience. So, on we sped now, eating carobs.

  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 b
ecome 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.