Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell
Sleep had almost wrapped me up when I felt a restraining hand upon my arm, and Roberto stood smiling before me. “We are off,” he said, and as if to underline the thought the far-off bus gave a little whiffle of sound. Languidly we returned to it to find Mario sitting on the step sorting out his first aid kit with pensive attention. “Yes,” said Roberto catching my eye, “we must take every precaution. You tourists are capable of anything from dysentery to sunstroke, from fever to broken bones. And it’s always our fault! That is why we carry a full medical kit with us.” He had hardly uttered the words when the American dentist advanced and requested a Band-Aid as he had cut his finger in some mysterious way. More classical was the wasp sting incurred by one of the French ladies. Pleased to show his medical prowess, Roberto whipped out his tweezers and drew the sting before drenching the wound in ammonia. “He’s right,” said Deeds, “people are such fools anything could happen.” And so we rolled down the dusty inclines towards the far off blue promise of a first sea bathe, though truth to tell the little beach was not the prettiest I had ever seen, and there was quite a disturbed little sea running. Beddoes would have things to say about it!
But no. He just sat and scowled upon the shingle, sucking at his pipe. The rest of us showed a commendable burst of energy, changing into our bathing costumes in a nearby thicket and advancing intrepidly towards the sea, which frolicked about in a disconcerting manner—at least for those who did not, or could not, dive through the waves which broke on the shore, in search of the relative calm beyond. The American dentist’s lady friend behaved too irresolutely, too pensively, and was knocked down in a heap—or perhaps she had decided to fall in just this beautiful soft waxen way. We all rushed to help in order to get our hands on that beautiful form but her man was there ahead of us, alive to every eventuality. Deeds bumped his toe. The pebbles were blazing hot and we all scuttled about with burning soles, to cool them at last in the innocent surf. I swam a little, regretting that I was not in better shape physically: a winter of French cooking had done me in. Perhaps the modest fare of Sicily—if one could defeat its copiousness—might do the trick? But no, because when one traveled this way one was always famished, and the only choice lay between spaghetti and rice.…
The sea tasted of oysters and brine when I inadvertently swallowed a mouthful. Some anxiety was now caused by the German beauty who had apparently decided to swim over to Piraeus, so far out was she. (She explained later that she was simply keeping pace with the sinking sun.) But how was Roberto to know this, as he stood shouting at her on the brink and wringing his responsible hands? She was finally persuaded to come back to us, which she did at a smart crawl—to be fiercely rebuked by the guide who said he would post no more letters for her unless she showed more good sense. But she seemed unaware that she had done anything to cause alarm and annoyance. She shook out her blonde hair and of course the gallant soul of Roberto melted, his wrath cooled like lava. But the sun was already behind the hills and the night had begun to fall. We should arrive after dark in Syracuse—the town which Martine had esteemed superior to all the towns of Sicily. We dressed once more, relaxed into happy fatigue by water and sun, and recovered the saturnine Mario and our little bus—together with all the belongings we had left in it. The atmosphere of the interior was now becoming ever so faintly disorderly—the disorder of gypsies who have no time to be tidy when they are on the road. Binoculars, scarves, Thermos flasks, picnic baskets and cameras; we carried all this lumber with us like all modern pilgrims do, and Mario watched over it all while we were absent, sitting to play himself a hand of patience on a little board erected over the wheel; or else to study a Sicilian paper with great care and slowly while he sucked a match stick which he had carved into a toothpick.
Darkness fell while we were on the road; the familiar daylight forms receded and melted slowly away into the tenebrous hinterlands around us. We put on coats and scarves and settled into our seats, glad of the warmly lighted bus which we could feel burrowing its way through the darkness towards Syracuse. Mario played his chuckling horn, sometimes it seemed for pure pleasure as there was hardly any traffic on the road. It was a horn on two notes, like a magpie’s rattling call. In silent villages he let out this pretty call sign to register our presence. Answer came there none. Then as we climbed a hillock and took a smooth curve Roberto announced that we had reached Augusta and this was well worth sitting up for.
It was of an extraordinary beauty, this little oil port. A thousand tulips of light and colored smoke played about its derricks and towers and drums—a forest of refineries whose beauty was made quite sinister by the fact that the whole was deserted. There was not a soul in the whole place, not a dog, nor a cat: there wasn’t even a guard post. Yet the light played about in it, the smoke gushed and spat, as if it were the very forge of the Titans, and a thousand invisible trolls were hard at work in it. Its beauty was quite breathtaking. I watched it in diminishing perspective, reflected in the windows of the bus, and it seemed like a thousand wax lights afloat on the waters of chaos. Two days later we were to pass it in daylight and to have our ardor quenched by its hideous ugliness, its ungainly spider-like instruments. But indeed it was an important guarantee of Sicily’s economic progress. No more would she be a poor relation of the north. Roberto spared us statistics tonight out of sheer tact, and because he knew that in two days’ time he could spout them all out by daylight. “Augusta,” said Deeds shaking his head. “All through the damn war we tried to shell it, with never a single hit. How could it have escaped? But it did.” I thought I knew the answer. “Every time the Fleet Air Arm tried to bomb Augusta or even Catania the Italians came back and knocked a piece off my balcony in Alexandria. Finally there was no balcony left.” The little spots of light receded into the rolling hills, until Augusta looked like a small forest fire, or the brindles on a tiger’s hide. It hung for a while like a sinking constellation and then extinguished itself while ahead of us, more warming but less spectacular, glowed the lights of Syracuse. We had begun to feel hungry and watched with a certain envy the Americans who poured out coffee from a vacuum flask and ate a sandwich in a lingering way. I thought that, after all, I would sleep like a lead soldier tonight once I had had dinner and a drink.
Marble Stele: Syracuse
One day she dies and there with splendor
On all sides of her, for miles and miles,
Stretches reality in all its rich ubiquity,
The whole of science, magic, total time.
The hanging gardens of folly, the aloof sublime,
Just as far as thinking reaches,
Though lost now the nightingale’s corroboration
Of spring in meadows of dew uprising.
Only the avid silence preaches.
“Whence came we, blind one?” asks the nursery rhyme,
“And whither going, say?” The cherub questions us
“In the dark of his unknowing clad
He charms eternity, makes all process glad.”
Time has made way at last, the dream is ended
Least said is soonest mended.
Hear old Empedocles as calmly wise
As only more than mortal man can be
Who stands no nonsense from eternity.
“The royal mind of God in all
Its imperturbable extravagance,
Admits no gossip. All is poetry.
There is no which, nor why, nor whence.”
Syracuse
THE TOWN SEEMED quiet and with little movement despite the earliness of the hour; there was a trifling contretemps at the hotel, where we found that the porters were on strike for the day. We had to hump our suitcases for the night.
This would not have been a very serious matter had the lift not been so cramped, and had the French diplomatic couple learned the elementary art of packing. There seemed to be something absolutely necessary to their peace of mind in each of half a dozen suitcases—so the poor husband had to make several trips. Both Deeds and I c
My heart sank, for I had been recognized; due perhaps to too many television appearances in Paris. But he went on, “Be assured. Your anonymity is safe with me and with my wife. Nobody shall ever know that Lawrence Durrell is with us.” It was like Stendhal meeting Rossini in the lift. He almost genuflected; I suppose that I swelled up with pride like a toad. He walked away backwards down the corridor to his room—like one does for Royalty or the Pope. I went pensively to mine to unpack. Deeds came in with a hip flask and offered me an aperitif before we went down to the cold collation which had been prepared for us in the dining room of the hotel. He approved of my neat packing, and showed quite a streak of psychological insight, for when I said: “I suppose you detect the signs of old maidishness in this mania for tidiness?” he replied, “On the contrary, I detect a camper and a small boat owner. You simply have to be tidy if you are either; since you weren’t in the army I mean.”
After dinner we smoked a cigar in the garden of the hotel and I tried to divine the nature of the town by sniffing the night air—which was pure and scentless. We were on a pleasant but suburban street, made somehow agreeable by flowering oleander which reminded me of Rhodes in a way, modern Rhodes whose towns are made beautiful by this graceful and tough bush which can feast on the bare rock or the crumbling shale of a deserted riverbed—as it does in Cyprus and Sicily alike. The night was still, and balmy. As we walked to and fro the Frenchman came out and spotting us came over with his visiting card in his hand. “As an ancien préfet de Paris,” he said, “allow me to make myself known. Count Petremand at your service.” His manners were delightful and innocent of guile. Then he added, “I had the great honor once to help your friend Henry Miller, and he was grateful enough to immortalize me in a short story under my own name—imagine how that pleased me. He had been picked up by the police for not having a residence permit—after two years, mind you. Luckily I was at the Prefecture and … well, fixed him up.” I vaguely remembered him now. “But Miller was totally unknown then,” I said, “and he had published nothing.” Count Petremand held up his hand and smiled. “He was an artist,” he said, “and that was enough for us.” It wouldn’t, I thought, be enough for the competent authorities anywhere else—except perhaps Greece. He joined us in a cigar and the three of us took a turn up and down the warm still garden. “I was touched by your mention of my incognito,” I said with feeling. “I have never had any trouble with it before. Once or twice I have nearly been declared persona non grata but that is all. In fact the only cross I have to bear is that everywhere I go I am asked to sign one of my brother’s books. It is invariable.” I must have sounded rather vehement for Deeds looked at me in some surprise and said, “It hasn’t happened yet.” “It will, Deeds. It will.” (Two days later it did. As usual I obliged, signing the book Marcel Proust, with the appropriate flourish.)
Our acquaintance was pushed no further that evening for the Count’s wife appeared with a sheaf of letters for him to address and stamp; and he took his leave, once more with the same exquisite courtesy.
I spent a while longer in the garden, taking the temperature of Syracuse, so to speak; sniffing the warm night like a hound, to divine (or imagine) the faint smell of brine from the invisible sea. The place gave off a feeling of peace and plenitude, and the late moon would rise long after I had drifted into sleep to touch the graceful flowering bushes of hibiscus and oleander which lined the streets. It was in a sense the real beginning of our trip, the first great city whose antiquities we were to visit in any detail; up to now we had been mobilizing ourselves, getting to know one another, improvising. But now the ice had been broken and we were a distinct party. As I came back into the hotel to go to bed I saw the Microscopes sitting in the lounge, the man with his head buried in L’Equipe (The Team)—a weekly sports paper which he had hardly left out of his sight throughout the trip. Either he had a number of copies or he was reading one special issue over and over again. But his concentration was quite ferocious and proof against any other pleasure one might offer him in the way of ruins or landscapes, even food and drink—for at meals he read at table. Well, as I passed them I saw his wife put her hand on his arm and say with real feeling, “Eric, si tu continue comme ça je sens que je perderai l’oriflamme.” It was so ridiculous as a remark that it took my breath away.
“I remember you saying once that there was something very slightly suspect about our Mediterranean raptures—I mean the islomania we invented in Cyprus and which characterized all your previous poetic transactions with Rhodes and Corfu. I suddenly recalled this remark on a sunny afternoon when I was sitting in the Greek theater of Syracuse, knitting, and reading while the children foraged for stalks of grass to chew.”
She had forgotten the provenance of the remark, but I recalled it quite distinctly. It had suddenly occurred to me that we had given very little thought to what these islands, Cyprus or Sicily, must have been like before the extraordinary efflorescence of temples and statues had taken place—all the paraphernalia of a fully-fashioned and self-confident culture which had created plenty out of barrenness, beauty out of the incoherence of a nature run wild; piety, literacy, art. It is sufficient to cast an eye over the leavings of earlier cultures to be aware of the sweeping definitive-ness of the Greek thrust—its glorious freedom from self-doubt, hesitation. But it was as much due to what they planted in the ground as to what they erected upon it in the way of cities, temples, and harbors. In a sense all our thinking about the Mediterranean crystallized around the images planted here by the Greeks—in this Greater Greece, so aptly named. In Sicily one sees that the Mediterranean evolved at the same rhythm as man, they both evolved together. One interpreted itself to the other, and out of the interaction Greek culture was first born. If it becomes clearer in Sicily than elsewhere it is because when the Greeks arrived their homegrown culture was at meridian, and the similarity of landscape and climate did not impose upon them any modifications, either of worship or of jurisprudence or of politics. Athens evolved as piously and rigorously here as it did in Greece proper. I use the name loosely for the first settlers came from various places; but the cultural problems, even to their bitter differences and disputes, were first broached in Athens and by Athens. In a sense the word Greek and the word Athens are interchangeable except for purists and historians.
Comparing site for site—Neolithic and Greek in Sicily—one stumbles upon the fact that before the Greeks came men were terrified of rapacious nature, its excesses and its unpredictability. No evolution was possible—man stayed crouched in fear under the threat of extinction. Then something happens. Hope is born. But how? And for what reason? Nobody can tell us, but with the Greeks men began to see Nature not as hostile and dangerous, but as a wife and even Muse—for her cultivation made leisure (with all its arts) possible. What we mean when we use the word Mediterranean starts there, starts at that first vital point when Athens enthrones the olive as its reigning queen and Greek husbandry draws its first breath.…
Scholars will rush in at this point with their warnings against too simplified a picture—and indeed my choice of turning point in the consciousness of man is rather arbitrary; it is more probable than certain. But there certainly was such a point and the election of the olive in Attica will do as well as any other. Of course there were Gods and beliefs of all sorts circulating at the same time—local as well as imported ones; this is what makes the c
But even the provenance of the olive is something of an open question. Where did it come from—Egypt? We cannot be sure. Yet of the qualities which made it valuable enough to become the Muse and Goddess of the Athenian we can speak with the authority of someone who has spent more than one winter in Greece, even modern Greece. The hardiness of the tree is proverbial; it seems to live without water, though it responds readily to moisture and to fertilizer when available. But it will stand heat to an astonishing degree and keep the beauty of its grey-silver leaf. The root of the tree is a huge grenade—its proportions astonish those who see dead trees being extracted like huge molars. Quite small specimens have roots the size of pianos. Then the trimmings make excellent kindling and the wood burns so swiftly and so ardently that bakers like to start up their ovens with it. It has other virtues also; it can be worked and has a beautiful grain when carved and oiled. Of the fruit it is useless to speak unless it be to extol its properties, and the Greek poets have not faulted on the job. It’s a thrifty tree and a hardy one. It has a delicate moment during the brief flowering period when a sudden turn of wind or snow can prejudice the blossom and thus the fruit. But it is a tree which grows on you when you live with it, and when the north wind turns it inside out—from grey green to silver—one can imagine with accuracy the exact shade of Athena’s smiling eyes.