Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell

  But he was the complete master of his subject and in that hot afternoon light, westering now, he gave an expressive account of these once beautiful monuments which now lie, shorn of all decoration, unprotected by shade and stripped of all statuary. It is hard work, too, to try and visualize the great altar as it once must have been. All the statues have vanished and also the pillars. But even if they had survived they would presumably have been like those in the existing Sicilian temples—stripped of their false marble surfaces and now the color of dry tobacco. “I suppose it is silly to regret the wholesale destruction of fine objects as one culture succeeds another; after all, if nothing ever got destroyed where the devil would we put everything?” The musings of Deeds as we sat in the hot Roman amphitheater, chewing blades of grass and smelling the rich resinous smell of the hot pines which instantly brought to my memory the slopes of Acropolis or Lycabettos where as a young man I so often slept out on warm windless summer nights, brilliant with star fall. It must be the same here.

  But the guide was harping on our good luck to have the Roman and Greek cultural world set side by side in Sicily as nowhere else. “The very architectural shape will tell you of two different predispositions. In this great amphitheater the Romans were organizing for the eye, for a show, a public show. Now just a few yards away you have the Greek hemicircle, organized in a different age for the ear. The difference between art as a quasi-religious intellectual event and a popular spectacle. Aeschylus and his Gods against bread and circuses. Here you can study both predispositions as if they were historically coexistent while in fact they are separated by centuries.” It was astute and highly suggestive as a way of looking at these now shadowy monuments of a lost world. The heat of the declining sun still throbbed, the rocks were dazing. Capers grew in the white rock as they did in Athens. There was even a little owl which flew into a cypress tree with the unmistakable melancholy little whoop of the skops. But what is astonishing is the speed with which the exact nature and function of things becomes forgotten; the archaeologist tries to read a sort of palimpsest of superimposed cultures, one displacing or deforming the other—and then tries to ascribe a raison d’être, function, to what he sees. In vain. Or at any rate in Sicily, and more specially here in Syracuse. The ruins keep their secret. The monuments have been worn down like the teeth of an ancient jawbone; what was exportable was expendable, what was beautiful had a value worth despoiling. Only the hot bare rock still contains the imprint of a half-obliterated inscription here or there, or the pedestal of a vanished statue, or a carved hole to admit the locking elbow of a stone mortise. It had all been eaten up as flesh is eaten up by the ground. Yet sitting in this old Roman theater it takes no great act of the imagination to reconstruct the crowds, themselves now swallowed up by the centuries, as they watched the sports offered to them by the state—sports of blood.

  All round the arena were the gloomy and secretive cages where the lions and tigers for the combats were lodged; the gladiator or the slave had to open the door of his choice—and here luck took a hand, for not all had animals in them. I did not know this. According to the old guide the crowds respected a lucky choice and set the slave free if he did not wish to exhibit his skill. Nor, he went on, need one imagine that in terms of danger this sort of combat represented anything peculiarly terrible for the experienced gladiator—usually an ex-soldier in retirement. It was not more dangerous to take on and dispatch a lion than it would be today for a boxer to undertake to win a match against a heavyweight champion. I wondered. The German girl appeared to disagree with this; she had become quite perked up by the discovery that one of the rather duller looking sandy men of the party (I took him to be Dutch) was actually a compatriot of hers, and an architectural student who had done a sketch of her on a paper napkin during the seaside lunch. This sudden rapprochement had thrown a spanner into the works of Roberto who had been gradually cementing his acquaintance with the blonde beauty by judicious gifts of sweets and bulletins of special information intended for her alone. All this quite decorously—a mere sympathy had flowered between them. They bent their heads over a map or a plan until they just touched … by accident it would seem. And now this damned German student with freckles and knock-knees.…

  “We do not know enough about the matter but there is no reason why the gladiators should always die—some more lucky or more skilful must even have made a living with the sword. Why not?”

  My mind went back to those modern versions of the Roman gladiator—the razateurs of Provence who make a good living in prize money from the dangerous game of cocarde snatching, the bull dusting form of bullfight which does not kill the bull and which is widespread in the Midi.

  “Even the slave or the Christian lucky enough, say, to open two successive cages with no animal in them—almost certainly he benefited with a thumbs-up, was released. Underneath it all must have been a respect for destiny or luck—there was a certain magnetism in chance—rouge ou noir, life or death.…”

  The German girl had descended now and stood in the center of the amphitheater to test the acoustics. She sang a little bit of a folksong in a beautifully modulated contralto which made Roberto’s blood fairly whistle in his veins. Then she turned smiling to the awful compatriot and patted his arm. She patted his arm! Miss Lobb got a stone in her shoe.

  “Before we leave the Romans—this is one of the largest amphitheaters in existence—I have to confess that we still cannot deduce everything we would like from it. For example, that little water tank in the middle of the arena—too small to be of any aquatic significance. A holy water stoup? We don’t know.”

  Here I had a brainwave, for back in the Midi, apart from the professional Spanish-style bullfights they also have the odd evening of bull dusting where they try out the baby bulls and cows and then young people are invited to leap into the ring and have a go. The horns of the young bulls are padded so they can do no harm. These evenings of absurdity and fun are called Les Charlotades in memory of Chaplin, and indeed a couple of village boys often dress up as Charlie and enter the ring with umbrellas in order to do battle with the bulls. The antics of both bulls and Charlies provide great fun and an occasional brisk knock in the behind from a frisky young cowlet. Now one of the special features of these evenings is the piscine, a water tank in the middle of the arena over which and into which the young amateur bullfighters jump. The antics of the bull, puzzled by the water and with its attention scattered by all the yelling children, are amusing to behold. But the piscine is a regular feature of an evening of charlotade and all the posters announce the fact—course libre avec piscine—which makes one wonder whether the Romans themselves were not given to bull dusting and whether the faint echo of their passage in Provence (a country still sown with their grandiose monuments) has not remained in this puzzling feature of the ancient bullfight. But it was not the moment to try out my knowledgeable theories on the old guide who was now showing a little bit of well-earned fatigue, and so I let the matter pass, promising myself to investigate it in detail when I got back to Provence.

  At last, when the cameras had stopped clicking, we straggled back the hundred yards or so into another world—so different in its white presence that the whole Roman venture in its vastness and impersonality seemed hopelessly debased in comparison with this white almost prim little theater which expressed a world of congruence and vital intelligence where the poets were also mathematicians—the imaginative link had been made which we are only just beginning to try and recover. The blue infinity of sky and the white marble were the keynotes to the Greek imagination; somehow one associates the Roman with the honey-colored or the dun. A massive eloquence which was intended to outlast eternity. The Greeks felt time slipping through their fingers—one had quickly to seize the adventive minute before it trickled away like quicksilver and was lost. Yet there was strictness in this urgency—the singing for all its purity (perhaps because of it?) was based on an equation which linked it with its celestial parentage, the harmony of th
e all.

  Martine:

  I don’t know what you will make of the quarries. Holes in the ground have always had a depressing effect upon me, and the Latomie proved no exception, specially as I wandered about them in the afternoon with a westering sun and lots of dense shadow which gives off waves of humidity. Beautiful yes, the gardens and their luxuriance. But once or twice when I found myself alone on the asphalt paths among the dense lemon groves with their great clutches of fruit.… I felt a kind of panic, a sense of urgency, a premonition of doom. Almost the desire to cut and run back, back into the warm sunlight of the open earth above. It was the original ‘panic’ sense about which you talked—but in Greece proper it is that moment of noonday when suddenly silence falls, the cicadas stop, the sea subsides, the whole of nature holds its breath. And you hear the breathing of Pan himself as he sleeps under an olive tree. We have all experienced it. It is a terrifying experience. Well, down here in the Latomie I experienced it all over again, and cried out to call the children who were clambering about in the Ear of Dionysos testing the echo. Whew! I was glad when they came running.

  So Martine on the subject of these singular caves—the one we visited was precisely the Paradiso which contained the strange feature which Caravaggio is supposed to have christened The Ear of Dionysos.

  Our guide, now somewhat exhausted by his long and admirable disquisition of the monuments above ground, led our loitering crocodile down the sloping ramps and paths into the Paradise Quarry where I looked forward eagerly to encountering Martine’s version of the Great God Pan. Certainly it was a little heavy and tideless as a place but there was no doubt about its singularity—one almost felt that it had been designed this way, and not just carved out in haphazard fashion by the architects who had other things in mind. It was not simply the layout of the gardens—which had an almost Turkish prolixity and richness. There was water here and shade and humidity below ground where every sort of fruit and flower flourished in a luxuriance which was really paradisical. But the actual cuttings themselves seemed somewhat artificial, in the sense that everywhere there were grottoes and caverns, pediments and columns holding up large sections of undercut ground in the most precarious fashion. It was very much after a sketch by Doré or Hugo.

  But of Pan himself honestly no trace, alas; I thought it might perhaps have been the time of day—perhaps she had been down here at high noon? But no, for she had spoken of a westering sun. For my own part, apart from the luxuriance—you could see vines literally leaping up into tall green trees to dress themselves on their outspread branches—I felt most the heavy melancholy of the passages in Thucydides describing the fate of the prisoners who were once herded here. There was even a passionflower which had wound itself about a young cypress—its flowers giving the tall tree the strangest appearance. As to the prisoners, in their time these quarries must have been bare; all this luxuriance is relatively modern. In the great battle against Athens some seven thousand prisoners fell into the hands of the Syracusans; there was nowhere to put them, so they were shoved down in these ready-made cages, easy to guard. One thinks of the Mappin Terraces in the London Zoo with their puzzled-looking inhabitants. But here life was no joke for the prisoners. The historian who records the Athenian defeat in great detail—Deeds had the advantage of reading Thucydides during the Eighth Army’s advance through Sicily—made no bones about the great heat during the day, and the great evening damps which followed, particularly in the autumn with the turn of the equinox. Illness ravaged them. “During eight months the daily allowance per man per day was half a pint of water and a pint of corn,” he adds.

  Later, one supposes, when the war had been won, these prisoners were either sold as slaves or used as directed labor on the new monuments which celebrated another era of peace and plenty.

  The so-called Ear of Dionysos is hardly less of an enigma than so many other features among the monuments of Sicily. The echo is prodigious. And it suggested immediately the cave of the Gumaean sibyl (my guidebook told me it would). But our guide had other notions, based on the fact that the issue of the cave comes out just above the prompter’s place in the Greek theater and he seems convinced that the two things are somehow connected. The cave for him was a sort of sound box—his image is the case of a violin or the body of the cicada. As far as I could understand his notion the echo of the cave lent strength to the acoustics of the theater—but somehow this pretty theory seemed to me a little doubtful. I preferred the sibyl as a notion. But of course unless some literary reference is unearthed we shall never really be sure. For my own private satisfaction I did what one should do in sibyls’ caves—I addressed a direct question to the nymph which concerned Martine. It was to be answered if she so pleased with a yes or no, and I would count ten words along in the leading article of the daily paper on the morrow in the hope of an answer. In part it was silly, I knew that; but I am superstitious. So had she been.

  Moreover, on reflection I had come to the conclusion that the panic which Martine had felt was not that of Pan but that of Persephone—the horror of the deep ground in contrast to the pure open air, the flowers and trees of our mother, the earth. All grottoes and caverns and labyrinths have this enormous brooding melancholy about them, and this huge prison with its grotesque name is no exception.

  Yes, we were all glad to regain the outer air, to be liberated from that hangover-like presence of darkness and shadow which reigned below ground. When the wind swept through it the foliage shuddered and twittered—it sounded like the souls of all the prisoners who had died here, so far from baking Athens. Whatever one may say to oneself it is hard to swallow the fact of death—the blank white space that follows a name about for months and years after its owner’s disappearance. I saw the German girl Renata with her burnt-sugar tan and blonde bell of thick hair walking lightly down the paths ahead of me with her little finger linked to the little finger of her compatriot as they talked about Greek tragedy; I wished my German were better for he spoke with great animation and eloquent gestures. For my part, in searching for a definition of what constitutes the tragic element in people and situations, I had evolved an explanation which seemed to me to meet the theatrical case as well. It is not the simple fact of great beauty being wantonly, mindlessly destroyed by a cruel force called Nature. We would by now have become blunted in our feelings about the matter—the poignancy of this inevitable destruction. No. The Greeks had from early on transplanted the Indian notion of karma to Greece, and in Greek tragedy what assails us is the spectacle of a human being trapped and overthrown by the huge mass of a past karma over which he has no control. Beauty is born of the spectacle of a perfect life or a perfected action in this life doomed by something emanating from an unknown past. The accumulated weight of—no, evil is not the word—of misconduct in the pure sense which occurred far beyond the range of his present awareness. In the shadows of a past which he has forgotten and which he once inhabited under another name. The Hero’s fate is the past, the unknown past; and in watching him sink and fall under the blows of destiny we feel how inexorable is the nature of process. The satisfaction, the Aristotelian catharsis is contained in the fact that in its realization we feel we know the worst about life and death—and once you know the very worst about anything you are automatically comforted, delivered.

  I did not think this a suitable line of talk to embark upon with my companion, for he was full of funny little inferiorities, and tended to panic in the face of an abstract idea. No, I held my peace as we returned to recover our coach in which Mario and Roberto were playing cards.

  We had made good time apparently and our next port of call was to be the network of Christian catacombs which honeycombed a whole sector of the town not far distant from these broad and smiling slopes. It was so well grouped—the cluster of monuments—that there was time for one swift parting glimpse of the theater which was now cooling rapidly in the westering light. In ancient times the whole auditorium, which could seat up to fifteen thousand people, opened
upon the slopes leading to the harbor of Plymerion—a wonderful backcloth as in almost every ancient Greek theater in Greece as well. It is always a little pang, and indeed a sense of puzzlement, to realize that there was always a backcloth to the stage, shutting in the action, condensing and concentrating it, I suppose. One wishes one could read a little more accurately into the monuments and their ancient functions. Who produced, who stage mounted these strange hieratic pieces of theater? It could not have been a committee. Perhaps a small group of select priests? There is something we have not yet grasped, and it has to do with a different notion of the sacred and the profane from our own.

  Deeds went to some trouble to explain the intricacies of the Athenian war and the resounding defeat of Athens by the Syracusans; it was a homely way to do history, describing how Alcibiades, that “disreputable feller got a bowler hat and was sent back under arrest, only to escape to Sparta.” This exposition only elicited a grave and sympathetic clicking of the tongue from Beddoes, who added under his breath something about not being able to trust a queer. But all these speculations were pushed awry by the Bishop who suddenly announced that there never had been any prisoners in the Latomia del Paradiso—they had all been herded into another and more sinister cutting not far from Santa Lucia—the church of which, with its famous Caravaggio, we had been hoping to catch a glimpse. Here indeed some asperity had developed as it was not on our official itinerary and the lapse seemed inexcusable. Was it not a renowned set piece for the curious tourist? Roberto was plaintive at first—the tour had not been arranged by him personally. But after more argument in which almost everyone seemed to have something to say, he agreed to foreshorten the catacombs and try to cram in a brief visit to the Saint before we were expected back at the hotel for dinner. This little argument occupied us while Mario grimly circled the town and finally drew rein before the catacombs. There was an unhealthy-looking monk on duty at the picture postcard stall. He looked as if he had just been disinterred himself. The catacombs were not unimposing, but to tell the truth it took a good deal of imagination to re-people them with the stiffening dead in their winding sheets—a coal mine would have offered the same spectacle, really.