NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (26 page)

The scariest-looking people in Sardinia were not the Barbagians, the Senegalese, the toothless shepherds, sheep-rustlers, kidnappers and Gypsies, but rather the punks of Cagliari. Young, filthy, ragged, with greasy hair and dreadlocks, rings through their noses, their lips, sniffing glue, gagging on wine and shouting vicious abuse at passersby.

There were plenty of these strange young people hanging about in gangs near the castle, where I had gone for its good view of the harbor.

“So what have we got here?” I asked a man, while six punks quarreled over a bottle. They wore studded dog collars and chains, and one had a tin cup that clinked at his belt.

“It’s a shame,” the man said.

“Anarchists?”

“No. They believe in nothing.”

“Nihilists, then?”

“No. They are abandoned.”

“There are young people like that in England and America.”

“I’ve seen them in Latin America,” the man said.

Now we were walking along, up a steep cobblestone street.

“In Brazil,” he said. “I lived in Brazil for three years. I never thought I would see them here. It was very strange there. It was ridiculous, really. Brazil is a huge country—rich too.”

He laughed out loud.

“So there were these paupers sitting on a mountain of gold!”

The expression made me laugh, and my laughter encouraged him.

“Here it’s the opposite. We’re rich, but we’re sitting on a mountain of ruins.”

I asked him whether he ever went to Sicily.

“Why would I want to go there?” he said, and tapped my shoulder. “Just a joke. It’s surely a nice place. But when I leave here I go to the continent”—by which he meant the Italian mainland.

The travel agent who sold me the ferry ticket to Palermo said, “You’d be better off taking the plane. It costs the same.”

It was sixty-seven dollars for the ferry from Cagliari to Palermo, but
this way I had a first-class cabin and because it was an overnighter it was both my fare to Sicily and a bed. And there was the added pleasure of setting out from Cagliari in the evening, watching the lights of the city recede; and after a good night’s sleep, seeing the coast of Sicily appear with the sunrise.

            
I
t would have been quicker for me to sail to Africa. It was a much shorter trip from Sardinia to Tunisia. Cagliari was only about 120 miles from Bizerte, city of Berbers; it was more like 180 to Palermo, Sicily. But it was generally bad manners, if not heresy, to mention Italy’s proximity to Africa and its
melanzane
—“eggplants,” as black Africans are described in Italian slang.

Under a full moon in a cloudless night sky the ferry glided out of the Gulf of Cagliari, past the lighthouses and beacons, and soon the city and its twinkling hill was far astern. We were at sea and, as another Ulysses—James Joyce’s—saw it, “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

The Sicilian crew were offhand and seemed to make a virtue of being unhelpful, so busy were they being themselves, smiling at each other with yellow faces and fangy teeth, muttering backtalk in slushy accents, and shrugging, and avoiding eye contact with any of the passengers, and all the while preserving their shabby dignity. At first there had been few passengers, but just before we left, a great number hurried on board, but few of them were cabin people. They slept in chairs, smoked on the deck, lurked in the passageways, played cards in the lounge.

The galley steward fussed when he saw me showing up for dinner.

“You’re late—I can’t help you.”

“The ship’s just leaving,” I said. “What time do you close?”

It was a buffet, there was food all over the place and not many eaters. But this was just a little spirited obstinacy on the part of the steward.

“We were going to close right now,” he said, and sighed and looked overworked, and shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“I am just an ignorant American, but I’m hungry.”

“Where did you learn Italian?”

“From my mother.”

“Okay, go ahead. But all we have is menu food. No natural.”

“What’s ‘natural’?”

That set off in him a virtuoso flurry of gestures, hurried shrugging, the what-do-you-expect-me-to-do? pursing of hands, and he looked around in his impatience, as Italians do, as though pleading for a witness.

I paid my money, I got my receipt, I chose my food, as the ship’s engine made a meat-grinder noise of departure. “Natural” was a sign of the times; the theory of sensible eating had arrived in the island of spaghetti-benders: it meant health food, low-fat mozzarella and low-sodium pasta. The rest was fried and fatty.

A young man, monotonously complaining and stuffing his face with pasta, had put one foot on the arm of his girlfriend’s chair, in a sort of misplaced tenderness, as though chunking his big clumsy foot against her elbow was a romantic gesture.

Because in Italy there was such an ingrained contempt for the law,
la legge
, it continued to amaze me that anything as orderly as meals and departures and arrivals were timely; yet my experience of boats and trains was favorable—there were very few hitches. Mealtime, for example, was sacred. It would have been unusual if the steward had turned me away from the buffet. Traveling in Italy, I could nearly always depend on a meal at the end of the day and a cheery person to serve it. I was seldom disappointed.

The life of the mind was something else. Any honest thoughtful effort, any attempt at seriousness or intellectual ambition, was usually ridiculed. I knew that I would be made a fool of for my diligent note-taking
and—though I tried to hide it—my air of scholarly industry. Only suckers tried to get ahead, bookish people were laughable, and already I could sense that once again I was among philistines, with all the responsive jollity and hearty appetite that was usual with philistinism.

As far as I could tell there were very few Sardinians on the
Torres
, but there were all sorts of Sicilians: city slickers (Armani suits, pointy shoes), smug Palermitanis (overcoats draped on their shoulders like a cape), sinister toughs (sunglasses at midnight), and all the rest: the students, the punks, the poor; from “men of respect” (as the mafiosi called themselves) who looked stylish and unreliable, to Gypsies with gold teeth and long skirts and scarves, squatting on the floor and breast-feeding babies.

I saw a sign,
Your Muster Station is—(II Vostro Punto di Riunione
è—
)
and it filled me with alarm.

Supine in my cabin, listening to the engine’s drone and the thumping of the screws, I could just imagine the panic and clawing and yelling and colorful language and class warfare if the ship ran into trouble. I thought:
Do I want to be in a sinking boat with these people? Do I dare to share a lifeboat with them?

In a sunny Sicilian dawn, the sun blazing behind a golden haze, we entered the Bay of Palermo, mountains on either side and a great harmonizing background of stucco-colored peaks behind the ancient buildings. The tallest man-made structures were the church steeples and cathedral domes.

Rather than stay in Palermo, where I had been before, I wanted to spend a day in Cefalù, just down the railway line; and then go to Messina and Taormina and Siracusa, places I had never seen. Still, I needed to walk in order to stretch and get the stiffness out of my legs, and I wanted just to browse in the city. So I left my bag at the station and then looked around, and decided on a hike.

Whenever I asked directions I was usually told the place I wanted was “very far”
(lontanissimo)
even when it was a fifteen-minute walk. I was urged to catch a bus.

“But you’ll need a ticket.”

“Of course.”

“You buy one there.”

Silly me for not knowing that bus tickets were sold in a seedy little tobacco and porno shop,
Bar “T”—Cafe Stagnitta—Articoli da Fumo, Articoli da Regalo, Articoli da Gioca
—smoking paraphernalia, presents and games. And bus tickets, of course. It was preposterous to think that a bus ticket would be sold in a bus or in a vending machine. A man who sold bus tickets had to have a large stock of cigarettes, and candy, and tit-and-bum magazines.

The swagger of the Sicilian men in Palermo was remarkable for its confidence, the men, swarthy as Arabs, shouting to each other. Anthony Burgess once heard a young man in Palermo telling his friends how he had devised a foolproof method for discovering whether his new bride was sexually innocent on his wedding night. “He was going to paint his penis purple, he said, and if his bride evinced surprise he was going to cut her throat.”

I was fumbling with my wallet, when a woman took me aside. She said, “You’re a stranger?”

“Oh, yes. American.”

“Watch your pockets,” she said.

“Thanks. I’ll do that.”

“You see, Palermo is very beautiful—eh—”

She lifted the fingers of her right hand and flicked forward, beneath her chin.

“We’re good people—eh—”

Again she grazed her chin with her fingers.

“And you’ll be all right here—eh—”

Her gesturing continued, as she looked slightly away, and then with a final caution, she walked off.

I had seen this chin-flick gesture before. I had understood it to mean a deep defiance,
Up yours
, so to speak. But that is another, more severe use of it, say in Naples and north. Here, the flicking fingers were meant as a contradiction.
Yes, I am saying this is a nice place but notice that I am indicating with my hand that it is not true in every instance; be warned.

That was nicely candid. Standing at a bus stop, the gestures were more subtle as a priest joined the little crowd. There were some mutters but no
one spoke to the priest. Italians—men especially—squint at priests’ skirts. They believe that priests who pass butcher shops turn the meat bad. Priests are neither men nor women. They have the evil eye.

I was alert to everyone around me when I saw a priest in Italy. A silence fell when this one appeared, but often there would be a series of simultaneous gestures, because of the belief that priests had the evil eye. For an Italian man, the commonest and most effective way of dealing with the clerical evil eye was to touch his own testicles and subtly prong his fingers at the priest. I never found out what Italian women did. Perhaps they prayed, but in any case they were less anxious than the men in matters that related to the supernatural.

I took a bus to Monte Pellegrino, on the recommendation of Goethe, who had written about it. The high hill was outside the northwest corner of the city and as this was a weekday in March, there was hardly anyone else on the footpath. I had been told that I could see as far as the Lipari Islands from the summit of Pellegrino; the day was too hazy to see any distance, yet the view of Palermo and its bay was splendid, enough of a reward for a two-hour walk.

But the view had stirred something in me. Walking down the slope towards the bus, I became agitated about my trip. Perhaps it was the sight of all that coast, and the thought that almost two months into it, where was I? Kicking along a dusty path in Sicily made me feel tiny, overwhelmed by everything that lay ahead of me—Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, all the rest of North Africa, not to mention the war in Croatia and Bosnia, the islands of Cyprus and Malta.

Then I remembered that I had plenty of time. I had no job, no deadlines, nothing else; and I reminded myself why I had come here. To eat spaghetti and talk to people and, first of all, to see Cefalù.

Cefalù was where the English Satanist Aleister Crowley had lived in the 1920s and 30s, studying yoga and black magic and writing dismal poetry. He was also a mountaineer, and had climbed a number of high peaks—had even worked out a method for climbing Mount Everest, “rushing the summit.” His
Confessions
, published only in 1970, showed him to be one of the loonier figures in recent history. He was a dabbler and a dilettante, and as a wealthy man—he had inherited a fortune from the family brewing business—he could afford to be. There was no end to his high spirits.
He filed his teeth to points. He showed these fangs to women and said, “Would you like a serpent’s kiss?” A number of women doted on him. Today he would be called a New Age guru, they would be called groupies or cultists. He had named his favorite sex partner The Ape of Thoth.

So, after a late lunch, I traveled about twenty miles down the coast on the line to Messina and stopped at Cefalù to see whether anything remained of the Crowley ménage. But no one in town recognized the name of Aleister Crowley and, though I walked the streets, I could not find the house where he had worked black magic and tried to bamboozle visitors and wore a sorcerer’s funny hat.

But mine was not a wasted trip. There was something pagan and animistic in the monstrous lions carved in the facade of Cefalù’s cathedral—how appropriate that Crowley had chosen to live in a place where the supernatural still mattered. There were oranges and lemons on the trees and behind the little town, snowcapped mountains. And from the cliff at Cefalù, I could at last see to the east the Lipari cluster of islands, also known as the Aeolian Islands. The volcano Stromboli was regarded in ancient times as the home of Æolus, god of the winds.