Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell
We were about to turn away from this slowly overwhelming darkness and back into the raucous streets when Roberto, who still peered keenly down the valley, implored a moment’s patience of us, for what reason I could not tell. He seemed as keyed up as if we were to expect something like a firework display. But it was better than that; presently there came the swift wing beats of a church bell which sounded like a signal and soundlessly the temples sprang to floodlit life all together, as if by a miracle. This was aerial geography with a vengeance, for they were to be our after-dinner treat tonight! But there were signs of raggedness and fatigue in the party and I could see that some of us might prefer to stay in the hotel and sleep. The Count’s wife looked really ill with weariness and I wondered why they had embarked her on such a journey. Mrs. Microscope too looked crusty though we had had no more news of her spleen. But there was to be a bit of delay as yet for our schedule called for half an hour’s shopping halt in the town, to enable us to buy curios and generally take a look round. Not all set off for this treat; many stayed in the bus. While, rather cowardly, I took myself off with Deeds to a bistro where I anticipated dinner and the fatigues of temple haunting by a couple of touches of grappa which was like drinking fumed oak in liquid form. Heartening stuff. Deeds fell into conversation with a eunuchoid youth who brought us coffee with a kindly but disenchanted air.
In the far corner, however, there was a small group of middle-aged to elderly men who attracted my instant attention by their hunched-up look and their black clothes and battered boots. They were gnarled and leathered by their avocation—could they have been coal miners, I wondered? Dressed awkwardly in their Sunday best with heavy dark suits and improbable felt hats which looked as if very seldom worn. Or perhaps they were mourners attending the funeral of some local dignitary? They spoke in low gruff tones and in a dialect Italian. The sister of the eunuch served them exclusively and with such obvious nervousness that I finally concluded that they must be a group of Mafia leaders on a Sunday outing. Their little circle exuded a kind of horrid Protestant gloom, and most of their faces were baneful, ugly. They were drinking Strega as far as I could make out, but the massive sugar content was not making them any sweeter. It was a strange little group and all the other customers of the place beside ourselves shot curious glances at them, wondering I suppose like ourselves, what and from where.… The mystery was only cleared up when Roberto appeared in search of a quick coffee and caught sight of us. He seemed not unprepared for the question, and it was clear from his way of looking at them when Deeds pointed them out that they did seem singular, almost like another race. But no, that was not the case. They were simply sulphur miners on a night out in town.
THE TEMPLES OF JUNO LUCINA AND CONCORD AT AGRIGENTO
“They are Zolfataioi,” said Roberto with a smile. “We have been shielding you from the uglier side of Sicily, but we have our own black country here like you have; only it’s not black, it’s yellow. The sulphur workers live a sort of grim separate life except for their occasional excursions like this—though it’s usually to Caltanissetta that they go. It’s the headquarters of the trade.” The men looked as if they were waiting anxiously for transport and those at the two tables playing cards were doing so abstractedly, as if marking time. They were as impressively different from the other Italians as would have been, say, a little group of Bushmen, or Japanese. But they drank with precision. One of the elder ones with a leather face and expressionless eyes had the knack of tilting and emptying his glass in a single gesture, without swallowing. He looked like Father Time himself, drinking a whole hourglass of time at each quaff. I watched them curiously.
At that moment there came a diversion in the form of a large grey sports car which drew up outside the cafe. From it descended a couple of extremely well dressed and sophisticated youths of a vaguely Roman allure—I put them down as big-city pederasts having a holiday here. But their manner was offensively superior and they acted as if they owned the place. They were fashionably clad in smart colored summer wear and open collars, while their hair was handsomely styled and curled. They wanted to leave a message for some local boy and they engaged the flustered eunuch in conversation. Meanwhile, and the touch had a somewhat special insolence, they had left the car’s engine running so that the exhaust was belching noisome fumes on to the terrace and into the cafe itself. One felt resentful; it was as if they were deliberately flaunting not only their classical proclivities but their superiority as well. Their tones were shrill and their Italian of the cultivated sort.
Their arrival produced a little ripple of interest in the circle of sulphur miners, though the general tone was apathetic and not resentful. They eyed these two butterflies in their expressionless way and then looked at one another with a kindly irony. It was not malicious at all. Then the old man set down his tiny Strega glass and, wiping his moustache, said in a firm audible tone, “Ah! pederastici!” It was not offensive, simply an observation which classified the two, who must have overheard for they shrugged their shoulders and turned back to the eunuch with more questions about their friend Giovanni. Moreover, the word fell upon the silence with a fine classical limpidity—five lapidary syllables. It was perfectly summed up and forgotten—the whole incident. The one eloquent word was enough. No further comment was needed, and the miners turned back to their inner preoccupations and sank ever deeper into their corporate reserve while the two turkeys gobbled on.
A Greek root with
A Latin suffix
A Grecian vice
A Latin name
But at last it was time to take ourselves off to the gaunt restaurant where a single long dinner table had been prepared for us. There were to be some casualties among us, and about six of the wearier, as predicted, decided on an early night. We were anyway to have another look at the Temples by daylight on the morrow so that they were not to lose very much. It was only annoying for Mario, for the hotel was in the valley, some way off, and he would have to ferry them and then come back and ferry us to the Temples, going without dinner in the process. But he took it all with grave good humor and that undemonstrative courtesy that I was beginning to recognize as a thoroughly Sicilian trait. The weary therefore moved off, content to eat a sandwich in bed, while we doubled up our ranks and did our best to look joyfully surprised by yet another choice between spaghetti and rice. But the wine was good in its modest way. And we did full justice to it telling ourselves that we owed it to our fatigue, though Roberto warned us that we were only going to have a sniff at the Temples and not attempt to “do” them thoroughly until tomorrow. It was to see them floodlit, that was all. But how grateful one finally was for the glimpse, however brief, and how sorry one felt for the absentees.
We had hardly finished dinner when impassive Mario appeared with the bus and we were on the way down the hill, curving away upon the so-called passe-giata archeologica, a beautiful modern road which winds in and out of the temple circles; one by one these great landmarks came out of the night to meet us, while a thousand night insects danced in the hot light of the floods. The bare ground—yes, it smelled of Attica again. The whiffs of thyme and sage, and the very soil with its light marls and fawn-colored tones made the island itself seem like some huge abstract terracotta which by some freak of time might give birth to vases, amphorae, plates, craters. An ancient Athenian must have walked here with the sympathetic feeling of being back in Athens. And it was extraordinary to realize that this huge expanse of temples represented only a tiny fraction of what exists here in reality, and which remains to be unearthed. The archaeologists have only scratched the surface of Agrigento; stretching away on every side, hidden in the soft deciduous chalk through which the twin rivers have carved their beds, there lie hidden necropolises, aqueducts, houses and temples and statues as yet quite unknown to us; and all the wealth inside them of ceramics and jewelry and weapons. It seems so complete as it is, this long sparkling ridge with its tremendous exhibits. Yet Agrigento has hardly begun to yield up all its tr
In the circumstances, with the massive and blinding whiteness of the floodlights, the magical temple looking down upon us from some unimaginable height of centuries, the activity of the group of persons clustering about the stylobate, kneeling, bending, crawling, seemed to suggest that they were engaged in some strange archaic rite. Was it a propitiatory dance of some sort, an invocation to the God of the site? But no, the explanation was more prosaic. Yet before it was given to us the strangeness of the scene was increased by the fact that, as we approached upon the winding paths, punctuated by lanterns, we saw that they were Asiatics—Chinese I thought. Their faces were white in the white light, and their eyes had disappeared with the intensity of their concentration upon the ground. Our groups mingled for a moment to wander about on this extraordinary headland over the brimming darkness of the valley. Their guide was an acquaintance of Roberto’s and provided a clue as to the mysterious behavior of his group. Two of the more ardent photographers had lost their lens caps and everyone was trying to help them recover these valuable items. It was extremely hard. The floods were pouring up into the sky with such power that unless one was directly in their ray one could see nothing; one became a one-dimensional figure, a silhouette. They cast an absolutely definitive black shadow.
Even if you held out your hand in the light the underneath, the shadowy side, was plunged into total blackness. Thus to pick up something small from the ground just outside the arc of white light presented extraordinary difficulties. Which explained all the crouching stooping peering people. Standing off a little from them, feeling the velvety warmth of the night upon my cheek, I felt grateful to have outgrown the desire to photograph things; I had once been a keen photographer and had even sold my work. Now I preferred to try and use my eyes, at first hand, so to speak, and to make my memory do some work. In a little schoolchild’s exercise book I occasionally made a note or two for the pleasure of trying to draw; and then later I might embark on a watercolor which, by intention, would try to capture the mood or emotion of a particular place or incident. It was a more satisfactory way of going about things, more suitable to my present age and preoccupations. The photograph was always a slightly distorted version of the subject; whereas the painting made no pretensions to being anything more than a slightly distorted version of one’s feelings at a given moment in time.
Our Japanese couple seemed disposed to exchange a word with the Chinese, but the attempt made no headway and they retired into their shell once more, having pronounced the other group to be North Koreans. Some of us, with simulated good will, tried to join in the search for a moment, but it did not last long for we were now a little tired. Indeed we were glad to regain the bus, and after one more brilliant glimpse to coast quietly down the sloping roads towards the hotel where doubtless the others were already fast asleep. Fatigue lengthens distance mentally—we felt now as if we had been to the moon and back. And yet, despite it, a queer sense of elation and of freshness coexisted with the fatigue. The darkness was sort of translucent, the air absolutely warm and still; the hotel was rather a grand affair pitched at a main crossroads and obviously laid out for tourism. There was a huge swimming pool, and its lights were still on. A few people still lounged by it in deck chairs or swam; and so warm was it that several of our party, notably the German girl and her boy friend, elected to have a dip before going to bed. I hesitated but finally decided upon a whisky on the balcony before turning in; Deeds had retired sleepily, and I did not fancy the company of Beddoes who had doubtless been peering through keyholes already.
In the little file there were no letters actually written from Agrigento though she had had plenty to say about the place which she had visited on numerous occasions with her little car. “In early February it is pure wedding cake with the almond blossom of three tones and the fabulous later flowering of an occasional Judas. That is the real time to come, though of course it will be still too cold to swim.” I had missed it, but I already had the configurations of the Temple hills clearly in mind and could visualize easily how they must look—like a series of flowered panels, Chinese watercolors, with the mist-mauve sea behind. From my balcony I could sit in the warmth of the scented night and see the distant moth-soft dazzle of the temples crowning the lower slopes of Agrigento; immediately underneath me in loops of artificial light swam the fish-white bodies of northern bathers who as yet had not become nut brown with Sicilian sunlight. A slight splashing and the murmur of voices was rather agreeable from the second storey of this comfortable if nondescript building. I read for a little while, dipping here and there among the letters to recover references to the temples, and listening with half an ear to the voices in the pool.
Whole conversations at Bellapais in Cyprus came back to me when I visited the Temples at night—they have only just started to floodlight them, and the result is marvelous—the whole of nature takes part; every insect in creation, every moth and butterfly comes rushing to this great kermess of light, like people impelled to go to war, only to perish in the arcs. In the morning they are swabbed off with cloths. I picked up a most beautifully marked moth which looked as if it came from India specially to see Pythagoras or the other one—who is it? The one you find so great with his two-stroke universe, operating like a motorbike on the Love and Hate principle? O and yes, when I saw the ring of the temples, the so obviously defensive ring of them here on the outer slopes of the town I thought of your notions of ancient banking.
It was not simply banking, though we had canvassed pretty thoroughly the notion of the temple as a safe deposit of values, both sacred and profane. I had been trying to sort out some muddy notions about the idea of Beauty, and its origins in history and myth. You could not well take on a more intractable field to hoe—for we cannot even establish a working notion which defines excellence (“purity of function?” “congruence?”) let alone something as absolute as an aesthetic ideal of Beauty. Greece was an appropriate place to chew such an idea to death, since it was in Greece that all these unanswerable questions had first been ventilated. But riffling a large book of ancient Greek sites drawn and described for architects, I had been struck by the frequency with which the temple or the sacred fane had found its place, not in the interior of the city or fortress, but along its defensive walls. The temples with their magical properties were a more efficacious defense against piracy in a world of superstition than bolts and bars and moats even. And thinking over the theory of value as another mystery of our time (unless you accept the Freudian or Marxian notions which oppose each other) it seemed to me that in ancient times the whole notion of sacred and profane had not been separated; the riches of the temple were protective; and a site protected by the magic of its temples and its Gods would encourage investment in the form of artisanship—workers in metal and precious stones and furs. The numen would protect them and let them work in peace, while in their turn they would render the city rich and notable with their products. There was an underground connection between the Bank and the Temple and it has cropped up over and over again. In the Middle Ages the Order of Templars, themselves vowed to frugality and poverty, became the bankers of kings, and their temples the actual banks where treasure was deposited for safety.
The Greek temple implicated the whole of nature in its magical scheme—the world of animals as well as Gods. The notion of value was twofold, namely, material gain and also a degree of beauty which enslaved and ennobled, which enchanted and enriched on the spiritual plane. But how inadequate words were when it came to trying to point up the difference between these two degrees of excellence. There was, however, a continuity between the Greek temple with its ex-votoes and the modern Christian or Orthodox
Martine took the idea and played with it for a while, making fun of my woolliness and vagueness—it is impossible to be too precise, for so many fragments of the jigsaw are missing. Everything is supposition.
But we have had enough experience now of the thought schemes of savages to be thoroughly on our guard when it comes to trying to imagine how primitive peoples think, how they associate. Were the ancient Greeks, with their highly organized and, to them, very logical superstitious systems, any different? I don’t think so. Why, the notion of gold being valuable may well have come from the first golden Aryan head which the Greeks saw, with its marvelous buttercup sheen. The men went mad over this hypothetical girl—Circassian or Scythian or British perhaps? Gentlemen preferred blondes even then, so it became necessary to manufacture golden wigs, or tresses of beaten filigree gold as a head ornament. We know that prostitutes in ancient Athens were forbidden by law to imitate the blandishments of respectable married women by wearing rich gold ornaments, fillets, or clips, in their hair. That is probably why they set about finding cheap dyes in order to effect a transformation that was legitimate. They tried saffron and, like the modern Egyptian of the poorer classes, common soap with its strong bleaching agent. The story of Goldilocks. A theory of how beauty came to be evaluated. But where, then, did the metal come into this scheme of things? These matters we used to argue to the point of sheer irritation with each other. In one of her letters she records our violent disagreements.