Happy Ant-Heap (14 page)

This was all too much for the pillars of the established Church in Italy. The report was brought to the notice of the Bishop of L’Aquila, who had jurisdiction over the region: he went into scandalised action. It was deemed inadvisable to attempt the total suppression of a ceremony that had been going on for over 2,000 years, so the procession was allowed to stay, but other ‘barbarous superstitions’ practised in Cocullo were banned. Thenceforward no animal was to be taken into the church, and the toothache bell was to go. Also abolished was the custom by which earth dug from a cave in which San Domenico, a hermit, had preferred to shelter was sprinkled round village houses to keep the snakes away. Some years passed before cautious back-sliding was reported. The dogs excluded from church received the magic touch of the mule’s shoe that warded off rabies within sight of the saint’s image through the open door. The shoe had now been renamed ‘the branding iron’, and every sheep leaving Cocullo to join the winter migration to the plains of Apulia was branded in the same way. A decade passed before the toothache bell was smuggled back and put into service again, and now, once more, people sneaked by night into the cave under the church to scrape up the soil considered still to be saturated with spiritual radioactivity from the saint’s body. It is rumoured that, even as recently as 1986, one or more snakes found their way into the church itself after the May procession, under the pretence of a competition in which they were judged for colour and size and prizes were distributed.

It was a sharp, clear morning in Cocullo on 4 May of this year. The first days of spring had breathed a little snow over the mountain tops but enormous violets showed in the road verges all along the steep climb up to the village. The houses were twisted turban-fashion through the upthrust of rocks, a little unbalanced in their grouping by a basilica that gave the place something of a Greek appearance. Under this was the cave where San Domenico had once sheltered and performed his miracles, but the building had been partly destroyed by the earthquake of 1981, since which the cult had moved its centre to the Romanesque parish church at the top of the hill. This occupied most of one side of the small square, which otherwise contained a handsome bandstand, a deeply cavernous bar and a few substantial houses with balconies.

The
serpari
pacing below were not as expected. As protagonists in an ancient magico-religious rite there should have been something about them, a certain nonconformity of appearance and manner setting them apart, but they were no different from any gathering of young men with time on their hands in a small-town square, except for the imposing presence of the snakes, some of which were surprisingly large. Big snakes roped round their necks hung down to the knees of well-pressed trousers, and small ones were worn, coiled like bracelets, round the wrists. The snakes, while alert and watchful, were sluggish in their movements. The snake-men stroked them gently and in response the snakes lifted cautious, swaying heads to study them with brilliant eyes, and thrust flickering tongues through mosaic lips.

The snake-men were willing and even eager for their snakes to be handled by strangers, although they were clearly nervous that they might be damaged. A young man in a blue suit, who appeared to exercise some special authority, was quite prepared to talk about his involvement with
the festa.
Alberto Lanzara had been born into a shepherd family—all the men of Cocullo had begun life by following the flocks—but now he was a technician in the Fucino Telecommunications Centre, Telespaziale, off the next exit but one from Cocullo on the
autostrada.
The easy accessibility of this area of snake-fetishism to the temple of high technology made it possible for him to pop backwards and forwards in his Fiat to supervise the collection of the snakes and their care. It was an occupation providing perfect relaxation from the mental effort demanded by his work. This, he said, had been an excellent year for the snakes. The weather (sun following rain) had favoured their appearance on 19 March—the traditional date on which, if disposed to collaborate in the ritual, they could be expected to emerge, wriggling from the earth. Thereafter they were kept in roomy earthenware jars, fed and tended until the day of the ceremony, and immediately afterwards returned to the place where they had been found, in the knowledge that they would present themselves and await recapture the following year. No poisonous snakes were now employed in the ritual, although one of the preferred varieties, the
colubri dalle quattro linee,
was the largest found in Europe. Lanzara understood that his predecessors in times of old charmed snakes with the music of flutes and by spitting upon them, but nothing of that kind went on now.

The arrival at about this time of the pilgrims marked another stage in the proceedings. Parties walked painfully across the mountains from local villages, or were brought by bus from the towns of Frosinone or Sora, where descendants of people who had emigrated from Cocullo had established pockets of the cult. The first contingent, comprising elderly persons of both sexes, struggled up the hill into sight, lighted candles clenched in hands, heads bent—humbled by this moment of the great day of their year. A soft mewing of hymns was smothered suddenly under the vast wheeze and groan of their bagpipes.

Firecrackers exploded overhead and, passing under a beflagged arch, the pilgrims found the
serpari
awaiting them, and reached out to be refreshed by the touch of the snakes.

With this influx the mood in the square quickened. New faces had appeared; faces sculpted with the long agony of field labour, and the faces of the middle class imprinted with city calculation and stress. The crowd filled all the open spaces, crammed into the church under the firmament of candles, and into the tunnel of a bar where there were thimblefuls of raw spirits on offer with ritual bread baked in the form of coiled serpents.

Midday approached, and with it the climax of the ceremony. A woman who had been couched behind the toothache bell with plastic bagfuls of earth from the old cave packed up and went away; girls dressed in the marvellous uniforms of antiquity dismantled a pyramid of sweet cakes for distribution among the snake-men. The saint’s image on its platform appeared at the church door, and with this the crowd shouted all at once—a sound that surprised like a clap of thunder out of clear sky. This was the moment of the blessing of the snakes and their ‘offering’ to San Domenico, which took the form of dressing the image with their writhing shapes until every part, head, body, arms, pastoral staff and metal aureole, squirmed with stealthy serpentine movement.

The procession began, seen from the square as a slow, twisting advance through the static mass of the crowd. The top half of the image, jerking forward foot by foot, was occasionally blocked from view by children hoisted upon paternal shoulders, upheld arms holding cameras, and the magnificent hats of the police who were clearing the way.

Mixed in with locals and pilgrims were a small number of young men clearly from the outside world, some of whom I had seen arrive in big cars with Roman numberplates, which they parked at the bottom of the hill. As late arrivals they found themselves at the back of the crowd, and now, suddenly, they formed themselves into a wedge and surged forward with such determination that they were able to reach up and fondle the snakes as they passed. And it was clearly all-important for them to be able to do so.

In this, for me, lay the surprise of the day. These men were not here for a tourist spectacle, or for an excuse for a few hours’ escape from the world of banks. They were as much participants in the ceremony as the local peasants and shopkeepers, or the pilgrims who were now walking backwards at the head of the procession in order to be able to keep their eyes fixed upon those of the saint. Whatever the credences involved, they shared in them.

With that, the procession passed out of the square and the show was over. Many of those with cars now took themselves off to Villalago, a matter of ten miles away on the Lago di Scanno, where San Domenico had taken refuge uncomfortably for a year or two in a tiny cave over the lake. Like most of the heroes of religion he was a poor man, who had difficulty in feeding his mule, let alone himself. He appears also in the legends as an animal-lover, who objected to what he called fat laymen fishing in the lake for mere sport, and was apt to turn their catch into inedible scorpions and toads. In the close-knit family atmosphere of local religion he is spoken of as a well-liked relative, recently deceased.

A singular fact emerges about this cave, for in living memory (and as mentioned by W.H. Woodward) young children were taken there to bite through the necks of captive snakes. But why? The practices of magic, which so often present a reverse image of logic as we see it, can be strange indeed. The serpent, associated in the Bible with temptation, the Devil and banishment from Eden, appears in the mythology of old Europe in the benign form of Aesculapius, god of medicine and healing.

The cult seems always to have been strongest in the Cocullo area, where a universal medical cure has been compounded throughout history. This
teriarca,
which could be taken either in liquid form or applied as a salve, contained thirty ingredients, one being crushed vipers’ heads, and it was on sale by a pharmacist in Rome—who obtained it in Abruzzo—as recently as ten years ago.

In a shepherd community such as Cocullo, snakebite was once the most common cause of premature death. Yet in the festival snakes are treated with affection, even a kind of reverence. The emphasis is strongly on propitiation rather than retribution. Why, then, this massacre of snakes at Villalago? The probable answer is that at this point and even in this place the ancient ceremony in the goddess’s honour would have reached its climax with the sacrifice of the snakes.

Whenever such sacrifices—either of humans or animals—were performed, it was normal for the victim to be accorded the most solicitous treatment until the culminating act. In this case a bonus lay in the hope that in death the snake would transmit to the child some of those qualities, particularly sagacity, for which it was renowned.

1989

T
HE FIRST, BUT ENDURING
impression of Kerala is of multitudes: people streaming in all directions, filling every street, besieging every shop, forming instant crowds at the scene of any happening—an elephant bogged down in a ditch, two auto-rickshaws after collision, a boy on a hobbyhorse beating a drum. Privacy is unknown, nor does there appear to be any desire for it. Twenty-nine million Keralans are crammed into a 580-mile-long strip of land between the high mountains and the sea on the Indian south-west coast. This state has been described as a continuous village. Its population is packed three times more densely than the Indian average.

A wonderful combination of geographical and climatic factors has spared it from the misery so often coexistent with a high level of the human presence. The soil is superbly fertile; the waters of the Arabian Sea bordering the state teem with fish, the mountains have kept out all but the most determined invaders, and two infallible monsoons renew the rivers and water the crops. Kerala experiences neither famines nor floods, and somehow or other the multitudes are fed.

Apart from the sheer weight of numbers, the Keralan scene is one of antlike activity. It is the homeland of cottage industry, with people busying themselves in public on all sides with an assortment of small-scale enterprises. To the newcomer an arresting sight is that of the female members of whole families settled for mile after mile at the side of main roads to break stones: the seven-year-olds tapping away with their toy hammers, stylish teenagers wielding four-pounders with accuracy and effect, aged and toothless grandmothers sorting out the chippings into piles according to size. The onlooker may object that stone-breaking machines could easily replace this human labour. To this the reply is, what in that case would all these people do with their spare time? As things are the women pop out in between household chores for an hour or so’s work, on rocks delivered to the front door. The operation is leisurely and good humoured, and the girls make up for it as they would to go shopping. The money earned does not rate as an income by Western standards. Nevertheless many families manage to survive in this way. The low income generated can be doubled by the production of coconut fibre—Kerala’s second cottage industry. Most back gardens can fit in ten coconut palms.

Kerala depends almost wholly on agriculture and fishing and, being devoid of large-scale industry, is among the poorest of the Indian states with a per capita income of only £80 per annum. As against this the price of most foodstuffs is extremely low. One hundred sardines cost three rupees (12p), and a kilo of tapioca, one rupee. This with a few vegetables from the garden feeds a family for a day. Nine people out of ten live in a village—of which there are over 1,000, with an average expenditure per family on food of 500 rupees (£20) per month. There are no signs here of the poverty and degradation of the shanty towns surrounding so many affluent Latin American cities, or, say, in Calcutta, or in Cairo—where it is said that a half million destitute Egyptians take refuge in the cemeteries among, or even inside, the tombs.

This is the East at its tidiest. The citizens of Trivandrum, the capital, are squeezed far more tightly together than those of Naples, for example, by comparison with which this Indian town is spic and span. Public discussion—largely upon political issues—is part of the Keralan way of life, and takes place in impromptu fashion, crowds gathering as they do round an interesting speaker in Hyde Park on a Sunday morning. The difference in Kerala is that such spontaneous gatherings immediately set themselves in orderly and attentive rows, not only in the open spaces of the local park but on any sufficiently wide expanse of pavement, without fear of soiling the well-laundered garments customarily worn by the Trivandrum populace.

Keralans are famous in India for their political consciousness and passion for argument, characteristics which may have contributed to the Communist Party’s takeover of power on 5 April 1957—the first time in history that such a victory had been achieved through the processes of democratic election. In many ways the political experiment seems to have worked. Kerala spends 40 per cent of its budget on education and, despite its poverty, is far ahead of the other states in this field, with almost the whole child population at school. Its successes in public health are equally impressive. There are more hospital beds than elsewhere on the subcontinent, the infant mortality rate is the lowest, and if you are a native of Trivandrum you can expect to live about fourteen years longer than one of Delhi.