Sicilian Carousel (2 page)

N
ice was clothed in a fragile brightness; wind furrowed the waters of the bay making the yachts dance and bow. Light clouds, washed whiter than white, passed smoothly against the summer sky. Colored awnings, strips of Raoul Dufy—it was all brilliantly there. Yes, but the airport was a ferment of police and militia armed to the eyes with automatic weapons. We had been having an epidemic of aimless kidnappings and slayings during the past few weeks—the new patriotism. Hence all these precautions. The two Arab gentlemen up front hid something in their shoes—a permit to work or shirk I suppose? It could not have been a gun. Hashish? But I had to hurry to make my connection with Rome and I passed through all the X-raying in a rage of impatience. The travel plan was, as always, brilliantly conceived down to the last detail, but no travel agent can make allowances for such weird contingencies as a tommy gun attack or a police search. Nevertheless I did it, but only just. We skated off the end of the Nice runway and out over the sea once more, rising steadily until the regatta below us became a bare scatter of pinpoints on the hazy blue
veil. I had now become quite detached, quite resigned in my feelings; the sort of pleasant travel-numbness had set in. Consigning my soul to the gods of change and adventure I had a short sleep in which I had a particularly vivid dream of Martine—but it was Cyprus, not Sicily. There were problems about her land which I was helping to settle in my limping Greek. And then, superimposed on this scene was the troublesome poem about Van Gogh which, like an equation, had refused to come out over the months. I had become so fed up with it—it was almost very good—that I had tried publishing it in its unfinished state in order to provoke it to complete itself. In vain. It needed both pruning and clinching up in a number of places. It was a charity to suppose that Sicily might do the trick, yet why not? A jolt was in order.

Rome airport was no consolation—for it was being literally riven apart, torn up, bulldozed into heaps, smashed. Red dust rose from it as if from a sacrificial pyre. To the roar of planes was added the squirming and snarling of tractors wrestling with the stumps of trees. It was for all the world like the battles of mammoths in the Pleistocene epoch. Improvised footpaths and bridges across this battlefield awaited the visitors on the international lines. As for the internal and domestic flights a whole new airport had been constructed for them—but transport was lacking. Nor were there any taxis, it seemed. Glad that I had packed so lightly I humped my effects and jogged along like the
half-witted Sherpa I was towards the new buildings, following clusters of green arrows. I had a good hour and a half in hand for the Catania plane which was a relief, but when I reached my objective I found that once again all passengers were being X-rayed for guns and then passed through the long smugglers' tunnel. On the whole a bad ambience in which to start on a holiday journey, but my spirits rose slightly for I saw ahead of me what seemed to be the whole cast of
Porgy and Bess
, or some other big musical, being processed with operatic dignity by weary policemen. It was complicated by the fact that the only bar lay outside the clearance area and some of the cast kept slipping out of the cordon to buy a drink or a sandwich, to the annoyance of the officials. There were some cries and expostulation. One tipsy member of the party broke into a soft shoe routine which won all hearts but did nothing to settle the problems of the police. At last all was in order and the company assembled in a waiting room for their plane—alas, they were not to be on ours.

I was turned aside into another enclosure where the Catania passengers were submitting resignedly to the same processing. Immediately ahead of me was a huge Sicilian mother who had, as far as I could make out, won a fertility competition and had come up to Rome to receive her prize and make television history by explaining how she had won the trophy. She had her supporting evidence with her in the persons of six large and lugubrious sons with heavy moustaches.
They caused quite a fuss in spite of their good nature and had to be pushed and pulled and shoved like cattle. And volubility! How delicious and infantile Italian sounded after a long absence, how full of warmth and good humor. The policemen conducted, so to speak, their swelling emotions with the bunched tips of their fingers—all so
molto agitato
. The Sicilian version of ox-eyed Hera did her own act back; then all swept into the waiting lounge and sank sighing into seats where the men fell into a prolonged brooding examination of their air tickets. They were on the plane but not of our party. We had been given little distinguishing rosettes for the Carousel. It was about time I pinned mine up. Immediately next to me was an aggrieved French couple with a small child who looked around with a rat-like malevolence. He had the same face as his father. They looked like very cheap microscopes. To my horror the mother wore a Carousel rosette. I bowed and they inclined their heads with coolness.

Then I saw Deeds sitting in a corner also with a distinguishing badge, bowed over his
Times
. I can't say I “recognized” him for I did not know him; but what gave me an instant shock of recognition was the clan to which he belonged. The desert boots, the trench coat hiding a faded bush jacket, the silk scarf knotted at his throat, the worn and weathered grip on the floor at his feet.… Had he appeared in a quiz I would have had no hesitation in writing out his
curriculum vitae
. Colonel Deeds, D.S.O., late Indian Army, later still,
Desert Rat. Nowadays I suppose they have broken the mould of that most recognizable of species, the Eighth Army veteran. The clipped moustache, the short back and sides haircut.… “I see you are on this jaunt,” he said mildly, to break the ice. And I said I was. His blue eyes had a pleasant twinkle. He said, “I have just come down from Austria. I don't suppose there'll be many of us on this flight.” It was at Catania that we were to join the rest of the Carousel group—though the very word “group” gave me a twinge of resigned horror. If they were all like the two Microscopes in the corner I could just imagine the level of the conversation.

But Deeds was quite a find. He had, he said (somewhat apologetically), managed to secure one of the “plum” jobs on the Allied Graves Commission which entitled him to have a regular “swan” every two years, notably in Sicily his favorite island. (“You can have the whole Med, but leave me Sicily.”) The jargon was heart warmingly familiar—it was Cairo 1940. It was the lingo of El Alamein, of the Long Range Desert Group. We had done everything together, it seemed, except meet; and, I might add, fight, for I had spent those years safely in the Embassy at Cairo and later on in Alexandria. But it was a mystery how we had not contrived to meet. We were both, for example, at the fateful party given by Baron the photographer in a tethered Nile houseboat where he lived. Our chief entertainment was provided by a huge belly dancer like a humming top who, as she rotated, kept altering
the axis of the overcrowded boat; once, twice, it shivered and righted itself again. But just as the orchestra swept into a climax the whole thing suddenly turned over with its hundred guests and we were all of us in the Nile. Deeds like myself had waded ashore, but a shadow was cast over what was a hilarious evening by the death of one of the guests, who had grabbed the landline of electric wire which fed the lights on the houseboat. He was instantly electrocuted. We remembered many other occasions at which we had both been present, both in Cairo and then later in Cyprus. Yet we had never met! It was bizarre. He even remembered Martine, “Rich society girl wasn't she? Good dancer.” But I did not feature in these memories. Where had I been, he wanted to know?

As for Martine he remembered her, indeed had known old Sir Felix, her father. “A good-looking blonde? Yes, I do remember. She looked rather spoiled.” Martine would not have forgiven him the description, for when I first met her it was only too true; and curiously enough when first we found ourselves alone on the deserted beaches beyond Famagusta, it was roughly her own estimate of herself. She had just come back from a trip to Indonesia and Bali and proposed to try her hand at a travel book about the experience. “I found,” she said somewhat disarmingly, “that I was becoming hopelessly spoiled by money, birth, and upbringing. I decided to stop being a society fashion plate and start trying to realize myself. But how, when
you haven't much talent? I started with this journey, which I did entirely by bus and train. I avoided all the Embassies and all my compatriots. Now I want to settle in this island and live quite alone. But I'd like to write.”

She was forthright and without vainglory and consequently very touching. I was terribly glad that chance had made us friends as I too had decided to settle in the island and was experiencing numberless difficulties in shaping up my little house in Bellapais, in the shadow of the Tree of Idleness which was for two marvelous summers our point of rendezvous.…

The Catania lounge had filled up now and I delayed expatiating on Martine to Deeds; I simply said that it gave me pleasure to recall her memory and that in venturing into Sicily I felt that I was accepting too late an invitation which I should have taken up years before. And also I expressed my misgivings about this way of doing it. I had begun to think that my decision to join the Carousel was utterly mad. “I shall loathe the group, I feel it. I was not made for group travel.” Deeds looked at me with a quizzical air and said, after a pause: “Yes, one always does at first. It's just like joining a new battalion. You think: God, what horrible people, what ghastly faces and prognathous jaws, what badly aspected Saturns! Jesus, save me! But then after a time it wears off. You get to know them and respect them. And after a couple of battles you don't want to part with them. You see, you'll be sorry when it comes time to say goodbye.” I didn't believe a word of it, but the
presence of this quiet reserved Army officer was comforting, simply because we had a good deal in common and had lived through the same momentous epoch. “Remains to be seen,” I said warily and Deeds unfolded his
Times
and scrutinized the cricket scores with the air of a priest concentrating on Holy Writ. I was tempted to ask him how Hampshire was doing, but it would have been false to do so; I had been out of touch with cricket for more than fifteen years and it was possible that Hampshire no longer existed as a county eleven. I turned and watched the sea unrolling beneath us, and the distant smudges of the island printing themselves on the hazy trembling horizon. Deeds grunted from time to time. In his mind's eye he could see green grass, hear the clicking of cricket balls.…

The evening had begun to fall softly and the grey-green theatrical light of the approaching sunset had begun to color everything. The dusk seemed to be rising from the ground like a faint grey smoke. From this height the sea looked motionless and the relief map of the island's southern slopes had attained a fixity of tone which made it look fabricated, unreal. Indeed, to be sincere, it was not vastly different from flying over Crete or Rhodes—at least not yet. I murmured something like this to Deeds who agreed but said, “Wait till we reach Etna—that's an individual sort of feature.” So wait I did, drinking a bitter blush of Campari. We were slowly descending now in a carefully graduated descent: this could only be judged by the fact that the
minutiae below us began suddenly to come into focus, to become coherent forms like farms and lakes and valleys. “There!” said my companion at long last and Etna took the center of the stage to capture our admiring vision. It was very close indeed—for we had come down low to prepare the run in on Catania airport. It looked like a toy—but a rather dangerous one. Moreover, it gave a small puff of dark smoke—a languid gesture of welcome, as if it had heard we were coming. Though we were flying not directly over it (I presumed because of the hot currents which it siphoned off), we were not too far to the side to avoid looking down into the charred crater—a black pit in the recesses of which something obscure boiled and bubbled. Then, as the range spread out a little I saw that it was not simply one crater but a whole network of volcanoes of which Etna was the most considerable in size and beauty. But everywhere there were other little holes in the earth crust, for all the world as if the whole pie had burst out because of the heat in minor geysers. It was beautiful in its toy-like way, this range, and yet I could not avoid a slight feeling of menace about it. There was really no reason, in spite of the occasional severity of an outburst of lava. Etna had become an almost domesticated showpiece, and we were promised an “optional” ascent to the crater in the last week of the tour.

I was reminded, too, that the volcanic crack which here traversed the southern tip of Sicily passed also through the Ionian Sea, under Xante and a part of
Greece near Corinth, and finally through Cyprus where it usually tore Paphos apart. Twice during my years there I had been woken by its passing during the night—with the mad roar of an underground train, seeming to pass under my very bed, while the dust rose in clouds and the timbers of my old house groaned in their sleep. Earthquakes, I have experienced quite a number! The premonitory signs too are strange if you are on the seacoast. The water becomes still and lifeless and almost opaque; a few little involuntary waves spin up, as if the sea was trying to be sick. And then the dead leaden hue of the horizon! Birds stop singing suddenly and dogs lope back to their kennels full of an inexplicable uneasiness. And then, when it does come, at first one only notices the eccentric behavior of solid objects, like an electric wire swinging like a pendulum or an armchair mysteriously airborne. Then comes the roar like a thousand avalanches. And the small birds in the orchard fall to the ground and chirp.… “If you drew a line along the earth crack, the long fault which ends somewhere in Persia I suppose—Could one find similarities of temperament and outlook in the inhabitants who live along it?” Deeds shook his head; “The sort of question I distrust,” he said, “unless you would say that they were all a little cracked. Revolutionary secessionists—Sicily is as much that as Crete and Cyprus.”