Sicilian Carousel (15 page)

We came at last to a clearing where an absolute monstrosity greeted our eyes—a straggling building in dirty white plastic which suggested the demesne of a mad market gardener who was specializing in asparagus. I could not believe my eyes. None of us could. We stood there mumchance and swallowing, wondering what the devil this construction was. Roberto, blushing and apologetic, told us.

So precious were the recently uncovered mosaics and so great the risk that they would be eaten into by the climate that someone had had the brilliant idea of covering them in this grotesque plastic housing through which a series of carefully arranged plank walks and duckboards allowed the curious to walk around the villa. It was a groan-making thing to do and only an archaeologist could have thought of it. Moreover, the mosaics, so interesting historically that one is glad to have made the effort to see them, are of a dullness extraordinary. But then the sort of people who build villas for Governors are for the most part interior decorators with a sense of grandiose banality, a sense of the expensively commonplace. Of such provenance is the Imperial Villa, though of course the number and clarity of the decorations merit interest despite their
poor sense of plastic power. Historians must be interested in these elaborate hunting scenes, the warfare of Gods, and the faintly lecherous love scene which ends in a rather ordinary aesthetic experience. And all this in a white plastic housing which turned us all the color of wax. Was this the pleasure dome of an Emperor, or was it perhaps (an intelligent suggestion by Christopher Kininmonth) more the millionaire's hideaway, constructed for the rich man who purveyed animals for the Roman arenas? The frescoes of animals are so numerous and their variety so great that it makes one pause and wonder. But as usual there is no proof of anything.

Dutifully we prowled the duckboards while Beddoes, who had culled a whole lot of Latin words from the Blue Guide, made up a sort of prose poem from fragments of it which he murmured aloud to himself in a vibrant tone of voice. Thus:

 

And so we enter the Atrium

By its purely polygonal court

To the left lies the Great Latrine

Ladies and Gents, the Great Latrine

For those who are taken short

But the marble seats are lost

Yet ahead of us is the Aediculum

Giving access to the Thermae

The vestibule can be viewed from
the Peristyle

Do not smile.

Next comes the frigidarium

With its apodyteria

Leading onwards with increasing hysteria

To the Alepterion

Between tepidarium and calidarium

Whence into a court where the Lesser
Latrine

Waits for those who have not yet been

In construction sumptuous

As befitted the Imperial Purple

 

But here the Muse punished him and he wobbled off a duckboard and all but plunged down upon one of the more precious tessellations, to the intense annoyance of Roberto and the collective disapproval of the Carousel. The dentist's lady seemed particularly shocked and enraged and flounced about to register her disapproval. “That guy is sacrilegious,” she told her companion with a venomous look at Beddoes who seemed only a very little repentant. Frescoed bathers massaged by slaves, animal heads bountifully crowned with laurel—yes, but it was a pity that so extensive and such energetic cartoons had not come from more practiced or feeling hands. The commonplaceness of the whole thing hung about in the air; I was reminded suddenly of the interior decorations of the Castle of the Knights at Rhodes—which had been hatched by a Fascist Governor of the Dodecanese Islands who tried to echo the pretensions of Mussolini in this seat of government. The same empty banality—and here it was again—an
echo from the last throes of the expiring Empire. “In richness and extent the villa can fairly be compared to Hadrian's villa at Tivoli or Diocletian's Palace at Split.” I don't agree, but then who am I to say? The site alone militates against this opinion. These idle thoughts passed through my brain as we slowly negotiated the lesser latrine; “whose brick drain, marble hand basin, and pictorial decoration attest to the standards of imperial Roman comfort.” Yes, but if it were just the home of the local Onassis of the day all would be clear.

The visit was long, it was thorough, and it explained why when Martine listed the places she wished that I might visit in order to write the “pocket” Sicily for her children, she had quite omitted to mention it. Perhaps she had just forgotten—such is the vast prolixity of memorable monuments in this island that one could be forgiven for simply forgetting one which made no particular mark on one's nervous system. I write these words, of course, subject to caution and with a certain diffidence, for the finds at the Imperial Villa, the most extensive in Europe, have become justly famous and it may well be that I am putting myself down as a hopeless Philistine. But I think not. And I am somewhat comforted by the fact that Deeds gave the place a very tentative marking in his little guide. But this he rather tended to explain away over the lunch table by saying that he was so deeply in love with the little red town of Aedoni which was a few kilometers off—and with the marvelous ancient Greek site of Morgantina—
that all this heavy dun Roman stuff did not impress him. Indeed opinions were rather divided generally, and there were one or two of us who rather shared my view of the Villa. The dentist's lady was most unsparing in her open dislike for Beddoes who glimmered about everywhere like a dragonfly peering over people's shoulders and whispering things they didn't want to hear. “That man,” she told her dentist at the lunch table, “is a pure desecrator.” It was as good a way of viewing Beddoes as any we had invented, and her accent had an envenomed Midwestern sting in it.

The lunch was toneless but the mountain air was fresh and we drank a good deal of wine with it; one had begun to feel rather fatigued, almost sleepy. We had been on the move for what seemed an age now, though in reality it was only a few days; but we had begun to feel the stress of traveling about, even over perfect roads, and being exposed the whole time to new sights and sounds. We took off languidly in the cool air, replete with wine, and for the most part with the intention of having a short doze as Mario negotiated the hairpins and forest roads on the way down to Agrigento. The very old Italian couple who never spoke but tenderly held hands like newlyweds seemed in the seventh heaven of smiling joy. They sat back, quiet as apples, and smiled peacefully upon the world as it wheeled by. The little red bus chuckled and rippled its partridge-like way among the forests and pretty soon we once more came in view of the distant sea and the black smudges
which marked the site of Gela. There was a good deal of fairly purposeful reforestation among these cliffs and scarps but I was sorry to see to what extent the eucalyptus had been used, not because it isn't very beautiful as a tree—its shimmering spires of poplar-like green are handsome; but the shallow spread of its roots makes its demands for soil immoderate and nothing very interesting can be set beside it. I suppose that it was chosen precisely because the roots hold up the friable and easily washed-away soil. And Sicily has the same problems of reforestation as Greece has.

And so from Caltanissetta the long downswing began into the plain where Gela lay; the sea line today as misty and incoherent as only the heats of July can make it. Somewhere away to the left sweet Vittoria (another dream town of Deeds which we were going to miss) whose smiling baroque remained to this day a suitable monument to the lady who founded the city, Vittoria della Colonna—was she not once Queen of Cyprus? The slopes lead enticingly downwards towards the Bay of Gela, one of the American landing places in 1943. The dust is rich in this long valley intersected by a number of lively rivers which seemed very high for the time of the year. For a long while, half dozing, we descended along the swaying roads through vineyards and clumps of cane, olive groves, and extensive plantations of oranges. And at last of course we struck oil—as we neared the town which Aeschylus had chosen to spend his last years in, indeed to die in.

There was probably a hotel named after him—there always is such a fitting memorial of the mercantile age we live in! The last whiff of the open country is soon extinguished at the approaches to this famous town whose great complex of petro-chemical installations seems to girdle it. There is little to see save what the museum has put on view—an extensive and fine historical collection of objects both votive and utilitarian. The bald skull of the Greek dramatist should perhaps have been among the relics? The legend says that an eagle mistook his skull for a stone and dropped a tortoise shell upon it in order to break it.

Now I took this story to be simply one of those literary fables with which we are so familiar until … one day in Corfu, long ago, I actually saw a big bird, perhaps a buzzard, doing exactly this, dropping shells from a great height, on to a seagirt rock and then coming down to inspect and peck. I watched it for over an hour and in all it tried out three or four different shells—they seemed to be clams of a sort, and not tortoises. Though a tortoise would be quite a logical animal for an eagle to sweep in its claws and try to crack apart in this fashion. One Doric column is all that is left unless you like a chunk of defensive ancient wall half silted into the sand. Oil rigs off the shore with their ominous message. But the sweep of the bay is in the grand style and even in the mess of modern Gela one sees how sweet a place it must have been, how rich in fruit and vine, and how splendid as horse country
because so well watered and green. Also it lay just back from the coast so that Syracuse and Akragas were in the front line as far as commerce and warfare were concerned; Gela must have been a little démodé, a little second-hand and old-fashioned, a fitting place for Pythagorean thinkers and poets who wanted a quiet life. At any rate that is what one feels even today. How ugly, though, they have allowed this important site to become (ah Demeter, where is your shrine!) with its haphazard modern development.

There was no time to go down to the sea for we were due in Agrigento that evening, so that after Gela we tumbled back into the bus and set off along the coastal road—the section leading us to Agrigento struck me as desolate and full of dirty sand dunes; even melancholy, if you like, but not melancholy and depressing as some of the later stretches after Marsala. Perhaps it was the anticipation of the Vale of the Temples which lay ahead, or simply the sun made one drowsy and content to feel the ancient pulse beat of the vanished Gela where now, off the coast, strange steel animals with long legs probed about like herons in a shallow lake. An idea came to me, and I jotted it down in order to chew it over later at leisure. (Before Christianity the sources of power were in magic, after it in money.) What is to be done? Nothing, it is too late.

On a remote country road, in the deep dust, we unexpectedly drew to a halt under a great carob tree full of fruit, which is known as the locust bean. There
was an enclosure with trees and a wicket gate behind which one could see a trimly laid out little cemetery. This little halt had been organized specifically for Deeds by Roberto. It was a war cemetery which came into his purlieu for inspection. Accordingly he somewhat apologetically took himself off in the direction of the British and Canadian graves, lighting a cigarette and promising us not to be long. Roberto turned us loose in the road and we straggled about for a while like lost sheep. I walked a little way and entered a vineyard where I found a patch of grass, almost burned brown by the summer heat. Here I lay down in its warm crackling cradle, dislodging swarms of crickets which hardly ceased their whirring as they retreated. The earth smelled delicious, baked to a cinder. Ants crawled over my face. In my heat-hazed mind dim thoughts and dreams and half-remembered conversations jumbled themselves together as a background to this throbbing summer afternoon with the cicadas fiddling away like mad in the trees. Every time a light patch of high cloud covered the sun the whole of nature fell silent—or at least the crickets did. Did they think that winter had suddenly returned? And when the heat was turned on again was I wrong to detect in their fervor a tremendous relief that such was not the case? I hovered on the edge of sleep and then called myself to attention, for the others did not know where I was and it would not do to miss the bus or keep poor Mario fretting and scowling by being late.

I hoisted myself sleepily to my feet and crossed the field back to the road where Roberto, who had been trying to explain something about the carob tree to the rest of the party, had run into vocabulary trouble. Here I could help a little, for these great strong carob trees were a handsome feature of Cyprus with their long curving bean. When wind or lightning broke a branch of the tree one was always surprised to see that the wood revealed was the color of human flesh. The locust bean, Roberto was trying to explain, was highly nutritious. He was picking a few—they were dry and snapped between his teeth—and handing them round for the party to try. We had often done this on picnics in the past and I was pleased once more to make the acquaintance of this noble tree whose produce is “kibbled” (an absurd word) very extensively in Cyprus for animal fodder. By now Deeds had sauntered back to us in time to take the long seed in his fingers and try it with his teeth. “Can I bore you with a story?” he asked diffidently. “Some of the boys in that cemetery came from a commando I trained in Cyprus. Now among our training tips was to keep an eye wide open for carobs if short of food. You can live almost indefinitely on carob seed and water, and for a commando in this theater it was most essential gen. In fact several of those men were lost between the lines during the first assault for about ten days, without rations of any sort. But they found fresh springs and they found locust beans and lived to tell the tale. Alas, they were killed
later in a counter-attack. But if we had been training a commando in the U.K. we would have forgotten about the nutritive qualities of the carob. I always think of Cyprus in those days when I inspect this little cemetery.” He had been quite a time and seemed a trifle sad, and somewhat glad to pile back into the bus with us and start off again down the long roads which led onwards to Agrigento and the Temples which for Martine (and not ruling out Taormina) had been the great Sicilian experience. So, on we sped now, eating carobs.