Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell
“If you tell Beddoes that,” said Deeds, “he will at once ask for his money back.” I could see that he was not going to let these grave considerations disturb his mature pleasure at sightseeing in an island which had become as precious to him as it had once been for Martine. In a sense he was right. If the Greeks were gone and their monuments were dust there were still vestiges of their way of life to be found in the food, the wine and the wild flowers of the land they had inhabited and treasured.
Today, then, Syracuse waited for us to disinter its ancient glories by an act of the imagination, aided by whatever Roberto could tell us, which was not much. Oleanders, however, and sunny white streets leading down to a bright dancing sea! There was pleasure in the air, and I did not need to sniff the horizon to determine that we were in one of those benign spots which favor happiness, encourage “all the arts—even love and introspection” as Martine used to say when she awoke from a spell of sleep on the green grass of the Abbey. Today the Carousel tackled its breakfast with dispatch and good humor; the Bishop forgot to tell the world how much he preferred bacon and tomatoes in the morning, a very good sign indeed for the rolls were not very fresh and the coffee insipid.
Even Beddoes—Beddoes had washed. He had parted his hair in the middle and combed down his thatch of wet ringlets with energy and science. He came up to me as I stood on the terrace with my coffee, watching Mario growling at the porters and feeling the fine morning sun on my fingers and forehead—omens of a good day to come. Miss Lobb was already aboard the bus, and remarking this Beddoes said: “If you asked me why one felt compelled to like Miss Lobb I should reply that it was because she was so completely herself. She has grown on me. Or perhaps it is the heat.” It was not the heat, for Miss Lobb had grown on us all. Gradually the outlines of her splendid personality had flowered in the Sicilian summer, her robust but handsome figure had emerged now clad in those rather expensive summer prints from Liberty’s or Horrocks with becoming style. There was a touch of cretonne-covered sofa about her which was somehow suitable to her general style of mind. She introduced herself with simplicity as Miss Lobb but always added the phrase “Of London” as if it were a lucky charm. She was indeed the spirit of London—the “best-foot-forward” of that rainy but warm-hearted town.
Miss Lobb was a barmaid and she worked in the Strand in what she described as a “good house”; once again adding an explanatory phrase in the words “a tied house,” whatever that was. Her warmth and good humor were infectious, and she talked English loudly but with grace to everyone, even when she fully realized that they did not understand what she was saying. “I think what I like about her,” said Beddoes, “is her way of saying ‘OOPS!’ when she trips over a bush, and then flicking up her skirts in a skittish manner.” Yes, but that was not all. She also had a way of crying “Righty ho!” which brought all hands running on deck to reef sail. Beddoes watched her fondly as she sat; reading a novel by Marie Corelli which she had stolen from the last hotel. Perhaps it was the association with bars? Though Miss Lobb did not herself drink, or so she said. Yet her frame was broad and buxom and her face large and red with a strongly arched nose and large sound white teeth. Later she was to explain to Deeds that even if one did not drink the mere fact of working near the stuff made one breathe it in through the pores—the reason why barmaids were always on the stout side. I forgot what he answered to this; but he too like the rest of us was a willing captive of her charms. And when she began a sentence with the phrase “Lord love yer now” he winced with pleasure; it was the very soul of London speaking. “I think I am deeply in love with little Lobbie; in love for the first time in my life,” said Beddoes and I gazed at him anxiously, wondering if perhaps he had been drinking before breakfast. Little Lobbie!
Such was the prevailing good humor—and I am disposed to attribute this to Syracuse itself, for the whole place radiated good humor and mildness—that even the Bishop unbent and became almost expansive; he strolled over to us and asked Beddoes what he did for a living. “At the moment I am on the run from the police,” said Beddoes unexpectedly, and after a moment’s pained surprise we all laughed heartily at the supposed witticism. “I got flung out of Dunge-ness Junior for setting an exam paper which they said was far above the heads of the children.” The Bishop looked perplexed and concerned. “But there were other reasons too,” said Beddoes and gave his yellow smile. “For instance, my paper said ‘Enumerate all the uses of adversity and explain why the hell they are sweet.’” The Bishop’s wife beckoned him, and he left us with obvious relief. It was time to crawl aboard the little bus. Today there was no problem with our gear as we were staying in Syracuse for a couple of nights or so. There was simply the organization of the medical supplies and the lunchboxes of Mario and Roberto.
So we began to sidle down the inclined planes towards the little island of Ortygia, the original site from which the ancient Syracuse had grown up into a capital of 500,000 souls—a giant among ancient cities. There was not much traffic along the broad avenues but I was glad that Mario was taking things softly—I felt that there was something precious about the place and that one should not damage its atmosphere by rushing greedily about. The modern town has spread in a smeary way towards the landward side and the little island of Ortygia is slowly becoming depopulated, though for the moment it is full of tumbledown houses of great charm—like a little Italian hill village sited upon an ancient fortress. But the presence of water, of the blue sea, gave it radiance and poise. Like so many choice Greek harbors (Lindos, Corfu, Samos, etc.) it had been sited on a spit between two perfect anchorages; owing to the stability of the Mediterranean weather, and its predictability, one could always live upon a double harbor like this, confident that when the south wind blew the north wind packed up; there was always a good lee. So with Ortygia. It must have made an instant appeal to Greeks who had known the beauty and security of Lindos in Rhodes or Paleocastrizza in Corfu. The actual soil erosion in limestone lands must always produce this sort of configuration under the rubbing of the sea; I can think of dozens of such harbors and have often wondered whether the Cretan or Minoan symbol of the double axe was not a reproduction of this sort of ideal harbor.… Alexandria too had this to offer the sailor; the safe anchorage during the winter storms and the safe lay-by for the spring and autumn squalls brought by the changing equinoxes. I made a mental note to try this theory out on Roberto when next I got the chance; at the moment he was vaguely describing the streets through which we were passing as we moved towards the narrow causeway which led to the island.
“I have a nagging memory about the word Ortygia,” I told Deeds; “I think that somewhere I saw that it really meant ‘Quail Island’ and that it was one of the possible sites where Ulysses (always accident prone when it came to females) ran into a lot of trouble with Circe.” It would need the Lexicon to check this vague and irritating notion. Deeds said that in the islands off the coast of Turkey there were some small and remote ones famous for their quails; and that the women hunted them with a curious kind of little net like a lacrosse stick which had two large eyes painted on it. It resembled a strange savage totem. When the quails saw the eyes they crouched down and seemed hypnotized, and they were easily netted. He had often wondered whether this was an ancient survival, this curious hunting art.
Today, however, Quail Island was agreeably crowded with loafers drinking lemonade and waving to us as we passed over the narrow causeway and slowed almost to a halt in front of the Temple of Apollo—disappointingly battered and placed all askew with reference to the modern town in which it had got itself stuck—it seemed almost by accident. It had a forlorn benignity in the sunlight but it would need a very advanced state of rapturous romanticism to feel deeply moved by it. Mario drew rein for the statutory pause and himself rested with his forehead on his arms; he did not give poor Apollo as much as a glance. I think that he never had given it a glance or a thought. Was he right or wrong, I wondered? Here we were all politely craning our necks, while
Deeds’s Guide was all carefully marked up with symbols which strongly suggested the Sikel alphabet or Linear B. Intrigued, I asked him what they represented. “I am evaluating my own Sicily,” he said. “There are four terms, four values for the monuments. Together they form the word Moss. M is for must, O is for ought really, SH is for should really, and SK is for skip. Over the years my taste has varied a little but not so much. I see for example that for old Apollo I have given him an ‘ought really’.… We can’t afford to skip him outright on historical grounds, but he doesn’t invigorate one. But just you wait a moment.” I waited and it was not for long, for Mario crawled down a couple of streets so narrow that we could have touched the walls without leaning forward—and at last into the fine airy cathedral square. It was not only spacious but it was smothered in oleander blossom—full-grown trees this time and in full flower. It was no surprise in this halcyon air to hear a girl singing, the cooing of doves, and the brisk clip-clop of the little colored fiacres which plied for hire in this enchanted corner of Quail Island, as I dared to call it in my own mind—until either Liddell or Scott or both told me I was all wrong. We drew up outside the cathedral and Roberto had a sudden access of hopelessness. “There is so much to tell,” he said wringing his hands at the immensity of the task, “we should really stay a week or a month.… But the important thing is to look first!”
It was a happy injunction, and we clambered down from the bus in a sunshine fragrant with flower smells to follow him into the deep booming warmth of the old church which was surprising and unreal—and above all sublimely beautiful. One felt that little knock at the heart which told one that we were really visiting the heart of the island—the quick or quiddity of Sicily. Why is it so astonishing a place? It takes a moment’s thought and a hundred paces down the side street to analyze its singularity. For the ancient Greek temple, or what remains of it (the remains are really considerable), has been comfortably and capaciously cocooned in the Christian edifice without attempting to disguise the modernity of the successor to Gelon’s noble construction.
You would think that this simple but daring idea would result in a dreadful fiasco. But you are astonished to find the result deeply harmonious and congruent; it has a peaceful feeling of inevitability, as if it had been achieved during sleep, unerringly. I think everyone in the party felt a strong tug of admiration at these fine proportions, and the simple dignity of the whole conception. It was also a sort of living X-ray of our whole culture, or let us say, the history of the religious impulse in one vivid cross section. Usually the age that succeeds manages to smash everything and sweep it, if not under the carpet, at least into the new construction. Here we were standing on a spot which had been consecrated ground before the Greeks, then during the Greek reign, and finally for the Christians.… The past had been not razed but accepted and accommodated with reassuring tact and ampleness. I felt suddenly like chuckling as I walked about inside this honeycomb—so full of treasures, a real Ark of the human covenant. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel anti-Christian. Roberto must have been used to seeing the impact of this lovely spot upon his tourists for he did nothing, said nothing, just stood by with his hands in his pockets, waiting to brief us when we so desired.
In one side chapel there was some sort of office being read aloud by a young sleek priest. His only congregation consisted of two old washerwomen who seemed to be half-asleep. But in the duskier hinterland of the church there were children skirmishing and their sharp little voices made the priest half cock a reproachful eye in their direction. But the reading went on with a suavity which suggested not only his pleasure in language but also the knowledge that he had a fine voice for poetry. He was clad all in green, a color which I usually associated with Byzantine robes. He looked like a slim and self-possessed green lizard standing at the elaborately carved lectern.
But while we were all marching about the great cathedral, full of the pleasant inner disturbance which comes from a shock of aesthetic pleasure, it was Miss Lobb who hit upon the most appropriate gesture with which to acknowledge it. She walked quietly away into the body of the church and, kneeling down in a pew, covered her face to pray. It was rather moving, the simple inevitability of the act. After a moment of hesitation the dentist and his lady followed suit. It was then that I saw the Bishop’s throat contract with sympathetic emotion, and he gave a distinct sob on a funny juvenile note—like a boy of fourteen. It was another revelatory moment of insight, the little gesture of concern and affection sketched by his wife in taking his arm. That sob of a choirboy with an unbroken voice somehow made me see in a flash that he had been wrestling with weighty inner stresses, problems, in a word, Doubts. Later when Roberto told me about his nervous breakdown—his losses of memory, nagging insomnia, bursting into tears in the pulpit … it all related itself back to that moment of stress and the little sob. Yet—am I wrong?—I felt that he had an overwhelming desire to imitate Miss Lobb and kneel down in prayer but was held back by some unconscious and unformulated scruples against the heathen relics embedded in the church walls; the presence of Athena, in fact. But perhaps not, perhaps I am just romancing. At any rate the fact remains that he watched Miss Lobb with a kind of hungry envy, but just stood there, with his wife’s sympathetic and restraining and comforting hand on his arm.
I was not too sophisticated to follow suit though what prayers I had to offer up were addressed rather in the direction of Athena than in that of the Virgin. But the pleasure in the graciousness of the building persisted. And it was here that Martine had tried to interest her children in the history of Greek Sicily—which is really to say Syracuse, for everything started here on this queer little island. At first she was exasperated by the flatness of the guidebook accounts, but gradually as she went on trying to make the history come alive to the children she began to “see” it herself as something real and full of color. It is not the fault of the guides for they are forced to be dryly accurate; they cannot afford the coloring matter which gives such pith and vision to master journalists like Suetonius, who knows exactly when to add that small distinguishing visual touch which brings the subject alive. With a harelip, a mole, a squint, a tonsure … with one little attribute the whole portrait breathes. But now, in Syracuse, reading about the great Gelon of Gela all the guide book is allowed to do is to repeat the name of this remarkable but unknown man—the man who began everything here that gathered weight and shaped itself into the great efflorescence of Greek culture which even today as a relic quickens and moves us. Who the devil was Gelon when all is said and done?
The ambitious and energetic tyrant of Gela had already shown his restlessness and administrative skill by making a diplomatic marriage to Damarete, the beautiful daughter of a neighboring tyrant at Akragas, Theron by name. But his real chance came when he received an invitation from the aristocratic party in Syracuse to come and govern the city. He seized it with both hands, happy to see his powers extended further still in a three-cornered diplomatic federation which was to stand the acid test of the Carthaginian assault at Himera.
The numerologists insist that both in individual lives and in the lives of nations there are fateful days and fateful years; for England 1066, 1588, 1814, 1940.… For ancient Greek culture there came such a day in 480 BCE when the Greek spirit asserted once and for al
As for the famous temple, he did not live to see it completed as he died in 478, but he bequeathed all he had to his brother Hieron I who had been his deputy at Gela. His was not a long rule either but such had been the decisiveness of the victory over the Carthaginians at Himera that he could afford to draw breath. A period of peaceful prosperity and culture dawned in Syracuse; Hieron showed himself a discriminating patron of the arts and the list of visiting luminaries is impressive; it allows one to have some reservations as to the appalling portrait of Hieron painted by worthy Diodorus, who says he was as avaricious as he was violent, and an utter stranger to sincerity and nobility of character. We must weigh this bit of character assassination against the fact that Pindar, Aeschylus, and Simonides all found a generous welcome at his court. Pindar (am I wrong to think of him as a somewhat laborious poet?) stayed a whole year and extolled his host’s skills in several unusual domains like chariot racing. Aeschylus seems to have had quite a love affair with Sicily; it is believed that he had the luck to get his Prometheus Bound and Prometheus Freed produced in the theater here, presumably at a time when his work was still felt to be modern and rather revolutionary in style. But then there is so much that we don’t know, presumably may never know. Eighty of his plays are known only by title, and a mere seven survive. In the puzzling epitaph he wrote upon himself he seems to extol his military service at the expense of his art—which makes Deeds rather distrustful of his sincerity. The soldier has an absurdly high opinion of men who can write, and not much use for the “service mentality” as he calls it. But then civilians are always prouder of having borne arms than regulars are. At any rate the dramatist actually retired to Gela to live out his declining days; perhaps the very things which made old Gelon fume with impatience—the absence of a harbor, the seclusion of the quiet little town on its promontory high over the sea, its remoteness from the bustle of everyday politics … were the very things which made it precious in the eyes of Aeschylus. Or was it perhaps something else of which the tyrant himself may never have been aware? I mean the existence of the secret religious sect professing a Pythagorean life and principle? We know that there was such a sect of philosophers in Gela.