Sicilian Carousel (27 page)

Taormina

We three men sit all evening

In the rose garden drinking and waiting

For the moon to turn our roses black,

Crawling across the sky. We mention

Our absent friend from time to time.

Some chessmen have tumbled over,

They also die who only sit and wait,

For the new moon before this open gate.

What further travel can we wish on friends

To coax their absence with our memory—

One who followed the flying fish beyond the

Remote Americas, one to die in battle, one

To live in Persia and never write again.

She loved them all according to their need

Now they are small dust waiting in perfect heed,

In someone's memory for a cue.

Thus and thus we shall remember you.

The smoke of pipes rises in pure content

The roses stretch their necks, and there

She rides at last to lend

A form and fiction to our loving wish.

The legions of the silent all attend.

Taormina

“T
AORMINA, THE OLD
Bull Mountain—I'm so glad I followed my instinct and saved it up for the last. It was like a kind of summation of all that went before, all the journeys and flavors this extraordinary island had to offer. Like a fool, I loped up it with Loftus in an old racing car at full moon; but something made me aware of the sacrilege and next day I walked humbly down to the bottom where I left a propitiatory candle in the little Christian shrine of St. Barnabus (isn't it?) and retraced my way up again. Of course it must have once been a sort of sacred way, laid out against the breast of this steep little mountain so that one could approach it step by step, loop by loop. The long steep zigzags of the road must have been punctuated significantly with statues
and flowering shrubs and little fanes to take an offering of the first fruits. One arrived, slowly and breathlessly, watching the scene widen out around one, and deepen into a screen of mountain and sea and volcano.”

Thus Martine. In the garden of the Villa Rosalie to which I had been assigned, two white-haired men played chess amidst dense flowering shrubbery which suggested rather the cultivation of a spa like Nice than the wild precincts of Sicily; I had come back to Europe really. I left my bags and walked the length of the main street with its astonishing views. It was so good that it aroused indignation: one almost suspected it to be spurious; but no, it simply outstripped language, that was all. And a wonderful sense of intimacy and well-being suffused the whole place. Yes, it was sophisticated as well—and as if to match the idea I found a small visiting card from Loftus waiting in my box inscribed in that fine old-fashioned lace hand which he had cultivated in order to write ancient Greek. A message of greeting, giving me his phone number. But tonight I was in a mood to be alone, to enjoy, and to regret being alone. It was a strange new feeling, not unconnected with fatigue. But the sinking sunset which one drank out of one's glass of Campari, so to speak, was as extraordinary as any that Greece or Italy has to offer. And Etna did her stuff on the skyline.

However blasé one is, however much one has been prepared for the aerial splendors of the little town, its freshness is perennial, it rises in
one like sap, it beguiles and charms as the eye turns in its astonishment to take in crags and clouds and mountains and the blue coastline. Here one could sit in a deck chair gazing out into the night and thinking about Greek flair and Roman prescience—they married here in this place; but why was it a failure at last, why did it fall apart?

Because everything does I suppose. And now after so long, here come I with my valedictory admiration, inhabitant of yet another culture which is falling apart, which is doomed to the same decline and fall, perhaps even more suddenly.… How marvelous to read a book at dinner. I had chosen that fussy but touching civil servant Pliny; his pages tell one all one wants to know and admire about Rome.

And how pleasant, too, to dawdle the length of that main street—like walking the bridge of a Zeppelin. And how astonishingly still the air is at this great height. It is what constitutes the original feature of Taormina, I think; one's thoughts naturally turn to places like Villefranche or Cassis (as they must have been a hundred years ago); and then, quite naturally, to Capri and Paleocastrizza. The difference is not only in variety and prolixity of classical views—the whole thing has been anchored in mid-heaven, at a thousand feet, and up here the air is still and calm. The white curtains in my hotel room breathed softly in and out, like the lungs of the universe itself. There were cafes
of Roman and Venetian excellence, and there were the traditional hordes of tourists perambulating up and down the long main street. Its narrowness grew on one after the sixth or seventh turn upon it.

And in the little side streets there were unforgotten corners of the real Italy—by which I mean the peasant Italy with its firmly anchored values and purity of heart. At dusk next day I walked up to have a look at the villa Lawrence occupied for three years. It was modest and quite fitting to the poems he wrote here in this pure high tower of silence which is Taormina at night. But at the first corner of the road there stood a tattered trattoria with a dirty cloth across the door to keep the flies at bay. In the street, under a faded-looking tree, stood a rickety table and two chairs. Just that and nothing more. A tin table which had been racked with smallpox and perhaps some hunter's small shot. A slip of broom was suspended from the lintel. And here I was served a harsh black wine by a matron with a walleye and hairy brown arms. She was like Demeter herself and she talked to me quietly and simply about the wines of the island. Hers was Etna, volcanic wine, and it tasted of iron; but it was not sugary and I bought a demijohn as a present for Loftus when I should decide to take up his invitation. If I hesitated, it was for a rather obscure reason; I wanted, so to speak, to let the Carousel experience evaporate before I changed the whole key. For I knew that encountering Loftus and his life here meant that I would find myself
back in the Capri of the twenties; in the world of Norman Douglas—a world very dear to me precisely because it was a trifle precious. Martine had had one foot in this world, to be sure, but what I had personally shared with her had not belonged to this aspect of our islomania. Capri had long since sunk below the horizon when Cyprus became a reality. Yet she had loved Douglas as much as I, and Compton Mackenzie as well, while the silent empty villa of Lawrence up the hill also carried the echoes of that Nepenthean period where
Twilight in Italy
matched
South Wind
.

But Taormina is so small that it was inevitable that from time to time I would bump into other members of the Carousel. I saw the Microscopes in the distance once or twice, and the American dentist waved from the April cafe as I passed. I also saw the Bishop—he had taken up a stance in order to “appreciate” a piece of architecture, while his wife sat on a stone and fanned herself with her straw hat. But that was all. There was no sign of Deeds. After two days of this delicious privacy in my little pension where I knew nobody, I visited the bookshop and bought a guide to the island, intending to spend my last few days filling in the lacunae in my knowledge. I could not leave without bracing Etna for example, or standing on the great “belvedere of all Sicily,” Enna; then Tyndarus … and so on. I thought I would rent a small car to finish off the visit in a style more reminiscent of the past than by having any truck with trains and buses. It would be interesting to see what Loftus thought.

I rang him, and was amused and pleased to recognize his characteristic drawl, and the slight slurring of the r's which had always characterized his speech. He had a little car he could lend me, which was promising, and so I agreed to dine at his villa the following evening. In a way it was reassuring that nothing much had changed for Loftus; he had ruined a promising diplomatic career by openly living with his chauffeur, an ex-jailbird, and then, as if that were not enough, winning notoriety by writing a novel called
Le Baiser
in French which had a
succès de scandale
. Someone in the Foreign Office must have known that the word “baiser” didn't only mean “kiss” (though it is difficult to think who) and Loftus was invited to abstract himself from decent society. This he did with good grace—he had a large private income—and retired to Taormina where he grew roses and translated the classics. He had been one of the most brilliant scholars of his time, though an incurable dilettante. About Sicily he knew all that there was to be known. But of course now he was getting on, like the rest of us, and hardly ever moved from the Villa Ariadne—a delightful old house built on a little headland over the sea, and buried in roses. He too was a relic of the Capri epoch, a silver-age man.

I hardly recognized the chauffeur lover after such a long lapse of time—he had grown fat and hairy, and spindle shanked. But he panted with pleasure like a bull terrier at meeting me again and ushered me into the car with a good deal of friendly ceremony. I was glad that
I had been fetched when he started to negotiate the steep descent from the mountain to the coast where the villa was. It was a labyrinth of crisscrossing roads, with snatches of motor road to be crossed. But at last we arrived in that cool garden full of olives and oleanders and the smell of rushing water in dusty fountains—the house had been designed by water-loving Romans. And there was Loftus frail and smart as always, though a little greyer, waiting for me.

Terraces led down to the sea; there were candles already burning on a white tablecloth; wide divans with stained cretonne covers were laid out under the olives. The parrot Victor had gone to bed; his cage was covered in a green baize cloth. Smell of Turkish tobacco. “Dear boy,” said Loftus, “I can't rise to greet you as is fitting. I had a small ski mishap.” His crutches lay beside him. The tone and temper of his conversation was reassuringly the same as ever, and I was glad to feel that now it would never change. It belonged to an epoch, it marched with the language of the eighteenth century whose artists (like Stendhal?) discovered how to raise social gossip to the level of an art. The trivia of Loftus had the same fine merit—even though he had not much at present to recount. Various film nabobs from Beverley Hills had come and gone. Then Cramp the publisher from London. There were two amusing local scandals which might lead to a knife fight. “All this is simply to situate you, dear boy. You are in Taormina now which has its own ethos and manners.
It is very degenerate in comparison to the rest of Sicily which is rather straitlaced.”

In this easy and languid style the conversation led him closer and closer to the last days of Martine. She had spent a lot of time with him; she would bring over her two children and a picnic and spend the day on his little beach, reading or writing. She had never been happier, she said, than during that last summer. She had spoken of me with affection, and indeed had rung me up once or twice for advice about a book she was planning to write about Sicily. I surmised it must have been the “pocket Sicily” for her children—Loftus agreed that it was. “Finally she gave up and said she would make you do it. She found that in Sicily there is no sense of time; her children inhabited a history in which Caesar, Pompey, and Timoleon were replaced, without any lapse of time, by Field Marshal Kesserling and the Hermann Goering division—the one the Irish knocked about.” He smiled. “It's difficult to know how you would have dealt with that sort of Mediterranean amnesia. Everything seems simultaneous.” By the same token Martine seemed as ever present as Loftus himself—the mere intervention of death seemed somehow unreal, untruthful. “She took everything calmly, gaily, lightly. Her husband was marvelous, too, and made it easy. Also she wasn't encumbered by any heavy intellectual equipment like a theological attitude. She wasn't Christian, was she?” As far as I knew she wasn't anything, though she observed the outward forms
for fear of wounding people—but that was just part of a social code. What Loftus really meant was that she was a Mediterranean, by which he meant a pagan; she belonged to the Astarte-Aphrodite of Erice rather than to Holy Mary of Rome. I did not elaborate on all this, it was not our business.

At any rate she had satisfactorily managed to answer the question I had put to her in the Latomie at Syracuse; the word “yes” had been exactly where I had asked her to arrange for it to be. But about the question, it went something like this: “Do you remember all our studies and arguments over the Pali texts and all the advice you got from your Indian princeling? Well, before you finally died, did you manage to experience that state, however briefly, which the texts promised us and which was rendered no doubt very inadequately in English as ‘form without identity'?” Rather long winded, but it is hard to express these abstract notions. Yet I was delighted to think that perhaps she might have experienced the precious moment of pure apprehension which had so far eluded me—which I could intuit but not provoke: poems are inadequate substitutes for it.