Sicilian Carousel (26 page)

The pace had become smarter for we had ambled away a bit too much of our allotted time in the museum; Mario even skipped on to a motorway for a few miles to take in the slack. Then back along a rather grim seacoast, with monotonous outcrops of black cliff covered in sea holly, and black beaches presumably of volcanic ash. Our lunch tables had been set out on a fine shady terrace with a marvelous view but the little beach below was disappointingly rocky and pebbled. Nevertheless a few of our braver members ventured upon a quick dip before lunch over which Roberto presided in an expensive scarlet bathing costume. He was obviously dying to save a life, but nobody gave him the chance. The lunch was banal but the fine setting made it feel almost sumptuous. The Germans held hands in a purposeful way. Beddoes, to everyone's surprise, took a piece of knitting out of his pocket and started to work his way round the heel of a sock. The dentist's lady was so amused by this that she offered to darn the hole for him, an offer which he accepted with grace. Roberto, wounded by the signs
of German intimacy, played with the cutlery and went hot and cold by turns.

Today despite the superb sunlight one felt a certain heat heaviness which made one think of earthquakes—and what more appropriate since we were heading for Messina. I gathered that normally the Carousel spent the last week together in a Taormina hotel with all excursions optional; but this year there had been trouble with strikes and all European bookings had become problematical. Hence the rather
ad hoc
arrangements for Taormina where each of us found himself alone in a separate lodging. I was surprised to verify Deeds's earlier opinion about being sorry to part with my fellow travelers. It was true that I felt a twinge of regret; but I also felt a twinge of relief—for it would have been unthinkable to extend this mode of travel over a longer space of time without coming to dislike, even to hate, it. Had the distances been greater and the stresses more intense we should all now be life enemies instead of friends.

A wind off the sea had got up and on the coast road tugged at our tires like a puppy, making the task of Mario rather more difficult since he wanted to put on a bit of speed. The sea rose. Roberto made a short apologia through the microphone about the wicked way we were just about to treat Cefalu. “You will begin to complain and say it is a scandal to rush into the cathedral and then rush away again. But please try to be charitable. What would you have felt about the
Agency if we had cut out Cefalu altogether, saying that there wasn't enough time, which there isn't?” It was marvelous the way he found his way among the English tenses; it proved that he always felt called upon to make this statement at this particular place, so that the little speech was well rehearsed. Indeed it was not long before one of the sharper loops of the coast road brought us up on a wooded knoll from which we saw the characteristic profile of Cefalu facing us across a blue bay. I found it astonishingly like the headland of Paleocastrizza in Corfu. It looked like a great whale basking in the blueness—a mythological ruminant of a fish, dreaming of some lost oceanic Eden, its eyes shut. The town clustered close about it. It was very beautiful and Roberto was right really—it was no place to treat with tourist disrespect. But on the other hand, was he right to bring the matter up at all? The Microscopes, for example, would have noticed nothing untoward in our haste, whereas this little speech only tended to make them feel that they ought to ask for their money back. But the Bishop felt the full cultural enormity of the thing for he sunk his chin on his breastbone and gave out the impression of seething like hot milk.

We nosed into this most atmospheric of little towns on a low throttle, for the streets were crowded with holiday-makers in different stages of undress; Mario had by now convinced us that he could put our bus through the eye of a needle if he wished. But Cefalu was quite a trial with its narrow and encumbered medieval streets,
and the cathedral lay right at the end of a loop of oneway streets which did not seem to correspond to the traffic realities of the little spa, where ten bicycles might block all the traffic for days, it would seem. But what was good was that the unafraid pedestrian had taken possession of the place and everything conformed to his walking pace. This at once made things harmonious and pleasant—at this speed you could lean out and buy an ice, for the French ladies did, or a clutch of gaudy postcards, for the old Count did, or a charm against the evil eye, for Roberto did. This he handed to Beddoes to preserve him from harm. In a way it sort of accredited us to the townspeople of Cefalu and made us feel at home straight off. But owing to the fool one-way street we had to do that last hundred yards on foot, a pleasant martyrdom for the square in which the church stands is a handsome one.

Once again we had the place more or less to ourselves, and once more Miss Lobb took the opportunity to say a short and comforting prayer to her creator—or was she just praying for the death of Beddoes, as Deeds rather wickedly suggested? Not Miss Lobb, the spirit of London town. Deeds, who knew the place well, elected to spend his time in the lofty porch while the rest of us perambulated the shadowy interior of the building. He was unwilling to snuff out his pipe which was drawing particularly well that day. One of the French ladies had beautiful teeth and was most conscious of the fact, for she showed them frequently in a large smile.

It had become somewhat automatic as a gesture and it was interesting to see her giving this warm alert smile of recognition to inanimate objects, even to the saints in the frescoes. But Roberto was right about Cefalu—the church of Roger II was too important to miss out. It was a wonderful example of the same Norman-Byzantine-Spanish-baroque which had been such a singularly new experience in the island. The building was started in 1131, but took over a century to complete, so that it reflects more than one cycle of historic changes in forms and materials. But William had vowed to have a cathedral built in this place after he nearly suffered shipwreck on the headland. It was the customary way to express gratitude at that epoch, and we have been the ones to benefit from it.

Half an hour was soon spent and once more we sailed out from the crags of Cefalu and up on to the snaky coastal road which would carry us from headland to headland, past Himera with its Doric temple, towards Messina which would be our penultimate port of call. Tomorrow Mario would distribute us all over Taormina to continue our Sicilian adventure alone. Alone!

It was dusk when we arrived at Messina—sunset is an ideal time to take in the marvelous views of the harbor, subject of so many Victorian watercolors. But the earthquake which devastated Messina still rumbles on historically—it is a black date which has permanently marked the historical calendar of modern
Sicily, grim and cruel, as if in contrast to the sweet Theocritan landscapes of this part of the island. The words have a kind of density, an echo, like the date of the Fall of Constantinople. We did several of the standard views of the town—the whole island seems to be one extraordinary belvedere—and then disembarked at the hotel in rather a sober mood. The only cultural fixture was a glimpse of the cathedral on the morrow. Tonight we were free to visit the town with Roberto or dine and go to bed. No one was in the mood to go out, it seemed. So in a shuffling unpremeditated fashion we congregated in the bar to exchange visiting cards and addresses against the parting tomorrow. Someone offered a drink all round in honor of the German engagement and this was loyally drunk.

It was a little sad.

I went for a trot round the town to do a little bit of shopping, and to gather what impressions I could of its relative newness, its rawness—for it had been laboriously put together again after the cataclysm. I found it atmospherically most appealing, perhaps the town in Sicily where life would be the most delightful. In trying to analyze why I discovered that it was once more the question of scale. Since the earthquake the houses had been limited to two or three stories, so that it had all the spacious charm of somewhere like the Athens Plaka under the Acropolis, or like Santa Barbara in California. The minute your architecture dwarfs people, shows disrespect for the purely human scale, you
start to stunt their minds and chill their spirits. Messina was a fine proof of this notion of human relevance to architecture—a model in fact. And on the morrow these views were underlined in the most overwhelming way by the qualities of the cathedral.

VIEW OF MESSINA BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE.

At the hotel our identities were looked into by a couple of suspicious looking carabinieri to the intense annoyance of Roberto who felt it was a slur on the good name of the Company. Did they think he was ferrying carloads of criminals all over Sicily? But I missed this visitation.

Italy of course was in the grip of an inflation far worse than anything we had seen back in France; but one singular aspect of it was the sudden disappearance of small change. It had just happened in Messina. Nothing under a thousand-lira note seemed to exist and in order that business should continue as usual one was forced to accept change in kind so to speak. For example, in order to buy some toothpaste, aspirin, and tissues, which I did need, I was forced to accept as “change” a pair of silk stockings, a surgical bandage for sprains, and a pair of nail scissors. This sort of thing was going on in all the shops with the result that people were being loaded down like Christmas trees with things they didn't want. I even got a telephone tally of nickel as part of my change in a tobacconist's shop. It represented the price of a local phone call. Of course we were obliged to carry over this strange kind of primitive barter into our own lives—I tipped the hall porter with the telephone tally and an unwanted Tampax which had strayed into my chemist's bundle. It was quite childish and chaotic. But the staff of the hotel seemed used to accepting these strange collections of objects instead of money tips. And finally one got quite used to going out to buy one orange and coming back with a bunch of grapes and a pound of figs as well. In a couple of days we had accumulated dozens of unwanted objects like this.

The evening was a trifle saddening; we all hung about a little, rather feeling that perhaps the situation
called for a little speech from Roberto, or a more formal farewell to each other. But timidity and lack of organization held us imprisoned in the mood until it was too late.

Messina was a calm and tranquil place to spend a night, but we slept badly, afflicted by a woebegone sense of anti-climax. Even breakfast was an unusually subdued affair. We packed and loaded our gear automatically like the experienced tourists we had by now become. Then we swung off in the bright sunshine to have one glance at the cathedral before taking the long coastal road to Taormina. Here again was a fascinating aesthetic experience for me, and one which I had not expected. I knew that, like the rest of the town, the cathedral had been shattered to bits by the famous earthquake, and had been more or less shoved together. I had little hopes that this forced restoration of the great building would be a success. It is a quite fantastic success; it has been done so simply and without pretensions, executed with a bright spontaneity of a Zen watercolor. Whatever they found left was run into the new structure which itself was graced with an anti-earthquake armature. The result is simply marvelous; the huge building is among the most satisfying and gorgeous to be enjoyed in the island; and one is moved by the almost accidental simplicity with which it has all been brought off. Deeds was touched by my enthusiasm, and was glad, he said, that he had not over-praised the thing.

And so off along the coast road in the fine sunlight towards the last port of call. On the last headland Roberto called a halt and we made a few color photographs of the Carousel which I knew I would never see. Somewhere, in discarded photograph albums, they would lie, melting away year by year.

And soon we ran in on Taormina and the melancholy distribution began; the French ladies and the Count with his wife were put down on the road to Naxos, the Japs disappeared, Beddoes was dropped at a pension which looked like the headquarters of the Black Hand. It was indeed like the casualty list of a battalion, men dropping away one by one. “So long!” “Bye-bye!” “See you again I hope.” “Ring me in London!” “Come to Geneva, but let me know.” Mario had become sulky with sadness and Roberto was a little bit on edge too it seemed. We sorted out baggage and shook hands. Deeds disappeared into an orange grove with his bags, promising that we should meet again for a drink somewhere in the island. He had a few more visits to make as yet. The pre-Adamic couple walked away into the sunlight with an air of speechless ecstasy. I was the last one—the higher we went the fewer we became; my little
pension
was in the heart of Taormina—which is built up in layers like a wedding cake. But at last my turn came. I embraced Mario and Roberto and thanked them for their kindness and good humor. I meant it. They had done nobly by us.