The brigadier and the corporal both sent illustrated postcards to me from
Selinunte and I sent them postcards in return, but the corporal
unaccountably desisted after being transferred to another station; for
instead of returning home in about a month, as he had intended, he signed
on for a further term of service. Perhaps on his change of address one
of my cards may have gone wrong in the post, and he may have considered
that I was neglecting him. I have never seen him again. The next time I
went to Trapani the brigadier, who had been transferred to Custonaci, was
guarding the coast between Monte San Giuliano and Cofano; I put off going
to see him, however, because it was cold and wet and windy, not weather
for excursions into places beyond the reach of civilization. I talked to
Mario, the coachman, about it, and he said he would be ready to take me
if a fine day occurred. I had another reason for wishing to go to
Custonaci: I thought it due to the Madonna di Custonaci that I should pay
my respects to her in her sanctuary after having been present at her
festa on the mountain.
Suddenly there came a fine Saturday. I went out immediately after
breakfast, found Mario, told him to be ready in half an hour, ordered a
basket of provisions from the hotel, put a few things together in case
they might be wanted, and we started.
The road took us inland and round the foot of Mount Eryx, through
Paparella and the other villages where some of the wealthy Trapanese have
their summer villas, and after a most lovely drive of three hours, we
arrived at Custonaci. The village is on a low rocky cliff which rises
not from the sea but from an extensive plain. Standing on the cliff one
looks over the plain with Monte San Giuliano closing the view on the left
and on the right the mountain promontory of Cofano, a great, isolated,
solemn, grey rock, full of caves, sprinkled with green and splashed with
raw sienna; between them, two or three kilometres away, is the sea which,
I suppose, formerly covered the plain and washed the foot of the cliff.
Prominent on the shore, rather nearer to Cofano than to Monte Erice, is
the caserma, an oblong white bungalow, and scattered upon the plain are a
few fishermen's cottages, but no other dwellings. We first sent a boy
off to the caserma to tell the brigadier I had come, and then Mario,
after attending to his horses, joined me in the only trattoria in the
place and we ate our provisions.
After lunch we went to the sanctuary, the home of the famous
wonder-working picture of the Madonna which hangs over the altar. The
sagrestano pulled aside the curtains while another man pulled a cord
which operated a wheel hung with bells of different sizes, thereby making
a tremendous and discordant noise and signifying to all within earshot
that the Madonna was being unveiled, in case any one might care to offer
up a petition.
The light is better in the sanctuary than in the Matrice upon the
Mountain, but this picture of the happy Mother with the Child at her
breast holding three golden ears of corn did not thereby seem to gain as
a work of art. The people, however, look upon it less as a work of art
than as the representation of a divinity who lives for them as surely as
Venus lived for the Romans, Aphrodite for the Greeks and Astarte for the
Phoenicians, and as surely as other goddesses have lived here for other
peoples. Cofano, looking across to Mount Eryx, saw the earliest appear
on some prehistoric morning when man, born of a woman and living by the
fruits of the earth, fashioned his first image of the Giver of Life and
Increase, vivified it with the spirit of his faith and offered before it
the homage of his praise and gratitude. His faith gradually lost its
freshness and suffered corruption like the manna which the disobedient
children of Israel left until the morning, so that the image of the
goddess became a sepulchre and a breeding-place of unclean imaginings.
Then man, seeing that virtue had gone out of the work of his hands,
fashioned a new one, scarcely different in form, and breathed into it the
breath of a new faith, scarcely different from the old. Again his faith
carried with it into its stagnant prison the germs of its own decay.
Thus was established the recurrent rhythm of the death and resurrection
of the deity. Cofano has watched them come and go and will one day see
the Madonna dethroned to make way for her successor. But that day will
not dawn until, in the Sanctuary or upon the Mountain, the peasants shall
stand unmoved before this touching symbol of the universal worship of
Motherhood.
The brigadier was in sight when we came out of the church and before we
had met in the piazza I became aware that I had caught cold--not a very
remarkable thing in a wet January with a Sicilian wind. He was as
courteous as ever, though a little inclined to grumble because I had not
let him know when to expect me so that he could have met me on my
arrival. I pleaded uncertainty caused by the bad weather, and he
promised to forgive me if I would spend the night at the caserma instead
of returning to Trapani. He would give me his own room all to myself,
for he had to be out on duty guarding the coast between Monte San
Giuliano and Cofano from 9 p.m. till 6 a.m. and, if he should find the
coast quiet and wish to lie down in the early morning, there would be no
difficulty, because one of his men had left him, so that he had four beds
and only three guards to put into them.
It was getting late; we had taken longer to come than I had anticipated,
the horses were tired. There is no inn at Custonaci, but I knew that
Mario could manage somehow; so I accepted, and we went through the
village, down the cliff by a steep and difficult path, and across the
plain. On the way we talked of our day at Selinunte and I asked after
his companions there, but he had heard nothing further of any of them.
Soon we met one of the guards who had come from the caserma to look for
us. He crossed himself as he told us that, coming along, he had heard
the bells ring and knew that the picture of the Madonna was being
unveiled. He was a man of few words, or found our conversation
uninteresting, for he said nothing else all the rest of the way.
The caserma is quite close to and facing the sea. All round the door is
a skeleton porch of wood, which in the summer is fitted with wire gauze
to keep out the mosquitoes. Going through this, we were in the general
room where I was introduced to the other two guards. Behind this room,
with windows looking inland over the plain towards Custonaci, is the
kitchen, and these two rooms make up the middle of the bungalow. The
right wing consists of the brigadier's sitting-room, out of which a door
leads to his bedroom, and the left wing is all one large room, occupied
by the men as their bedroom.
The brigadier took me into his sitting-room to rest. There were only a
few things in it, merely his table with his books and official papers and
three or four chairs; but everything, as at Selinunte, was clean and
tidy. On the wall was an extensive eruption of postcards and among them
those that had come from me. As I looked on the tranquil whitewash of
this secluded caserma, dotted with views of our complicated and populous
London, with its theatres and motor buses and the feverish rush of its
tumult, I found myself wondering what it would be like to listen to the
_Pastoral Symphony_ in the _Messiah_, performed with occasional
interpolations from _Till Eulenspiegel_.
The brigadier proposed a stroll while the guards prepared supper--they
take it by turns to be cook, one each day, but this being an occasion,
all three would be cooks to-night. We called at a cottage in the hope of
buying some fish, but the weather had been too bad and there was none.
We met a young man, however, who had a kid for sale and wanted 95
centesimi per kilo; the brigadier would only give 80. The young man
could not deal; the kid belonged to his father, and he had no power to
exceed his instructions; he would go home and call at the caserma in the
morning with the ultimissimo prezzo. We passed a great hole in the
ground like a dry well. The brigadier said that if it were not so very
near the caserma, it might do as a hiding-place for any one flying from
justice, or for brigands to conceal a prisoner.
"Or for smugglers to keep their spoils in," I said; and the brigadier
chuckled.
He showed me the stone that had been put up to mark the spot at which the
Madonna was landed by the French sailors as they returned from
Alexandria. We strolled back and tied up the pig which had broken loose
and, the brigadier said, was not yet old enough, meaning that there would
be no pork for supper yet awhile. With all this difficulty about pork
and fish and kid, the simple life, as lived at the caserma, appeared to
be less simple than it might have been if the shops had been a little
nearer.
Supper consisted of chicory served with the water it had been boiled in,
to which was added some oil; there was also bread and wine, then chicken
and afterwards poached eggs which they call eggs in their shirtsleeves.
Before we had finished I told them that we have a proverb in England that
too many cooks spoil the broth, and added that I had never known
precisely how many were supposed to be too many, but that, judging by the
excellence of the repast, certainly more than three would be required in
the caserma of Custonaci. I said this because I was beginning to feel it
was time that something of the kind should come from me. Sicilians are
not only polite in themselves, but the cause that politeness or an
attempt at it, is in other men; and this was the best I could do at the
moment in their manner. Knowing I was among experts, I had not much fear
as to their reception of my little compliment, just as a student of the
violin is less nervous when performing before a master of the instrument
than before the general public. The brigadier and his guards accepted it
as though it were of the finest quality, and even complimented me upon
it.
After supper there came a large moth which fluttered about the lamp; one
of the guards called it a "farfalla notturna," a nocturnal butterfly, and
said it had come to bring us good fortune. Another of the men, who was
of a sceptical temperament, said it might be so, but that in matters of
this kind one never can be sure what one's fortune would have been if the
moth had not come. I said that if there was to be any good fortune for
me I should like it to take the form of curing the cold which, for my
sins, I had caught that morning as I came out of the sanctuary. The
guard who believed in the moth--after returning my compliment about the
cooking by saying I must be wrong to talk about my sins, for he was sure
I had never committed any--said that as to the kind of luck the moth
would bring, Fortune would not submit to dictation, the most I could do
to control her would be to look out farfalla notturna in the book and put
a few soldi on the number in the next lottery. I told him I had had
enough of the lottery at Castelvetrano. The brigadier was interested, so
I told him about it and said I was afraid the reason I had lost was that
my numbers had nothing to do with anything that had happened to me during
the week. He confirmed what Peppino had said and added that he was
always very careful about the choosing of his numbers.
"But surely," I said, "you do not always win when you follow that rule?"
"I have played every week for twenty years," said the brigadier, "and
have only won four times; but I always hope."
"One can hope," I said, "without spending any soldi."
Here the guard who believed in the moth interposed, seeing that I did not
know much about it--
"It is no use hoping unless you do something. It would be absurd to hope
for two hundred and fifty francs next week unless you encouraged Fortune
to send you the money. Buy a ticket with a likely number and you will
have the right to hope."
"It is like praying for rain," added the brigadier; "the Madonna may not
answer the prayer, but those who pray have done their best and are
entitled to hope that rain will follow."
"This," I said, "reminds me of an old lady who always insisted on her
daughter taking a dose of the medicine her doctor prescribed for her own
imaginary complaints. 'How can you hope to be well,' she used to say,
'if you never take any medicine?'"
"Exactly," said the guard who believed in the moth, "we do not know how
the medicine works any more than we know how the Madonna works, or how a
dream affects the lottery, but if you do nothing it is no use hoping."
With regard to my cold, the sceptical guard, with a twinkle in his eye,
recommended me to repent of the sins for which I had said it was a
punishment. I was ready to do so if I could be sure as to which sins it
was more particularly aimed at. The sceptical guard thought he knew.
"Did you not tell us you had been on the Mountain at the festa? When the
sagrestano unveiled the picture in the sanctuary this morning, the
Madonna heard the bells ring and looked round the church; no doubt she
recognized you as the heretical Englishman she had seen prying into her
mysteries. She probably regretted she had not paid you out at the time
and, as you came her way this morning, took the opportunity of doing it
now."
I agreed that it would have been more of a miracle had she done it in a
balmy August, in the midst of other occupations, instead of in a
tempestuous January when business was slack; but, on the whole, I did not
believe that either the Madonna or my sins had had anything to do with my
cold which I considered to be a natural, or non-miraculous, consequence
of the rain and the wind. But the sceptical guard objected that even so
the Madonna could not get quite clear, for, if she is credited with the
rain, as she certainly is, she must be debited with its unpleasant
consequences, if any.
The guard who had heard the bells ring, when he came to meet us, gravely
nodded his approval, not seeing that the sceptical guard was speaking
ironically, but he began to suspect presently. The guard who believed in
the moth told us that he had been stationed once on the coast a little
east of Girgenti, near a town where the peasants pray for rain to their
patron, S. Calogero, whose painted image, carved in wood, stands in their
church. If it rains at once, well and good, they return thanks, and
there is an end of the matter. But if their prayers are unanswered after
what they consider a reasonable time, they hold a service and punctuate
their prayers with threatening cries--
"Corda, o pioggia!"
The saint sometimes chooses the second alternative and sends the
rain--the peasants return thanks, and all goes well. But if he is still
obdurate, they assume he has chosen the first, put the threat into
execution, take down S. Calogero, tie a cord about his neck and
reverently cast him into the sea where they leave him till it does rain.
If one waits long enough the rain always comes at last, even on the south
coast of Sicily. Then they pull the poor saint out of the water, dry
him, give him a fresh coat of paint and carry him back to his place in
the church, with a brass band and thanksgiving--another form of the
recurrent death and resurrection of the god, imitating sunset and
sunrise.
"We call this treatment of S. Calogero an act of faith," said the
sceptical guard, "and yet when a gambler puts a few soldi on any number
he may have dreamt of, we call it superstition. The peasant and the
gambler are both playing for material gain, and S. Calogero in the sea
has as much connection with the meteorological conditions as the dream
has with the lottery numbers; yet the treatment of the saint has the
sanction of the Church and the act of the gambler is branded as
superstitious. But to abuse a thing is not to alter its nature."
The guard who had heard the bells ring now began to remonstrate gently
and begged there might be no confusing of faith with superstition.
The sceptical guard replied that it was difficult to keep them apart, or,
indeed, to look upon them as two different things. The only confusion
there was arose because of the imperfections of language--a clumsy
instrument, though the best we have for its purpose. We call a kiss a
kiss whether it be given by an old woman to her grandchild or by a young
man to his bride; but the having one word for two things does not make
them the same in intention, and so the having two words for faith and
superstition does not make them fundamentally different. The guard who
had heard the bells was beginning to look uncomfortable, if not actually
offended, the tendency of all this being to depreciate his faith in the
Madonna and treat it as superstition. The brigadier and the guard who
believed in the moth, on the other hand, were rather pleased, their
superstition about the lottery numbers was being elevated into faith.
The brigadier was an unselfish man and anxious to spare from further
annoyance the guard who had heard the bells. He was also a sensible man
and knew that discussions of this kind, endless if left to develop, will
generally yield to surgical treatment. He rose, saying it was time for
him to begin protecting the coast. I took the hint, thanked them all for
a very pleasant evening and wished them "Buon riposo." The brigadier
shut me in for the night, promising to call me in the morning, and the
legend above my bedroom door was--
"Comandante della Brigata."
In the morning he knocked while it was still dark. I got up, dressed,
and as the sun began to stir behind Custonaci, came through the general
room and the porch of the bungalow into the translucent freshness where
the sceptical guard was already smoking an early cigarette. To the right
of us rose Cofano and to our left, on the top of Mount Eryx, where
formerly stood the temple of Venus, were the towers of Conte Pepoli's
castle, touched by the rising sun and so distinct that we could almost
count the stones. In front of us, between these two enormous headlands,
lay the sea as calm as when the Madonna stayed the tempest, and all along
the great curve of the shore little waves were lazily playing in the
morning stillness. I asked the sceptical guard what part of Sicily he
came from.
"I am not a Sicilian," he replied, "I come from another mountain near
Rome where there was once another temple dedicated to Fortune."
"Are you from Palestrina?"
"Yes," he replied. "You cannot see much here of what the temple of Venus
was, but on my mountain you can see what the temple of Fortune must have
been. In the days when she flourished, kings and princes travelled from
distant lands to consult her oracle; now no one ever comes near the place
except a tourist or two, passing to some more prosperous town, who may
stay an hour to gaze upon the remains of her fallen greatness."
"Perhaps her temple was too prosperous and too near the shrine of St.
Peter."
"St. Peter should have seized her temple and preserved her popularity for
his own profit instead of condemning the faith in her as superstition and
allowing the control of it to pass into the hands of the state. For if
Fortune ever died she rose again and is worshipped as much as ever she
was, only she is now called the Lottery."
"It was a neglected opportunity."
"And it would have been so easy to invent a legend of the arrival of a
picture or a statue of la Madonna di Palestrina to inherit the prestige
of Fortune. Then I should never have left home to join the guardia di
finanza."
I said that possibly something of the kind had been attempted, and that
there may have been insuperable obstacles of which we knew nothing; and
in any case, whatever the desolation of Palestrina, Custonaci was not in
a particularly thriving condition, while the prosperity of Monte San
Giuliano is due more to the salt than to the Madonna. But he would not
be comforted; so I asked him what he would have done if he had not left
home, and he told me that he had been educated to be a chemist and had
taken his diploma at Rome with the intention of succeeding to his uncle's
shop, but he could not stand the dulness of the life.
The brigadier called to us that coffee was ready and we turned to go in.
The young man came about the kid, which meant that his father had agreed
to take 80 centesimi per kilo. So the kid had to be weighed and it was
some time before we could persuade the vendor that it was just under and
not just over 5.5 kilos. To tell the truth, it was a delicate job, for
the steelyard was a clumsy instrument, though, like the sceptical guard's
language, the best we had. The brigadier paid the young man entirely in
coppers, so he had a good deal of weight to carry home with him.
After coffee we started to walk across the plain back to Custonaci,
calling again at the settlement of cottages and waiting for the boats to
come in, thinking it possible that the luck brought by the farfalla
notturna might take the form of fish. But the boats brought nothing. We
agreed therefore to consider that the beauty of the morning had exhausted
the good fortune and, if so, the farfalla had done the thing handsomely.
It was a day of blue sky and brown earth, with flocks of sheep and goats
tinkling their bells in the distance; a day of dwarf palm and
almond-blossom, and the bark of a dog now and then; of aloes and flitting
birds, of canes with feathery tops, of prickly pears and blooming red
geranium. The bastone di S. Giuseppe had begun to come up and the tufts
of grass were full of lily-leaves preparing for the spring.
We climbed the cliff and scrambled into the village. It was Sunday
morning; the first Mass was over and half the population was coming out
of the sanctuary, the other half waiting to go in for the second Mass.
Among them, talking to a shoemaker, who seemed to be the principal man of
the place, we found Mario. I inquired what he had done with his horses
and how he had passed the night. He said he had found a stable for
Gaspare and Toto and had himself slept in the carriage. I trusted he had
not been very uncomfortable and he replied that he always slept in his
carriage. So I had travelled to Custonaci and was about to return to
Trapani in Mario's bed. He introduced me to the shoemaker.
"You see all these young men?" said the shoemaker. "In another couple of
months they will be in America."
I spoke to some of those who had returned from the States and from South
America. Those who have been to the States like an opportunity to speak
English, but they are not very strong at it, and it is more than tinged
with Yankeeisms. One of them told me that in New York he was treated
very well by his Capo-Boss. They earn more over there than they can at
home; every week brings American money-orders to Custonaci and on mail
days the post-office is crowded with wives, mothers and sweethearts.
When they have saved anything up to 5000 lire (200 pounds) they return
and buy a bit of land on which a family of contadini can live, or they
embellish the family shop or open a new one and hope for the best. If
business is bad and they lose their money before they are too old, they
can go back and make some more. It is the same on the Mountain; the
young men emigrate and bring back money and new ideas. The time will
come when Cofano will see what influence this wooing of Fortune in a
foreign land by the sons of Mount Eryx and Custonaci may have on the next
incarnation of the goddess who reigns in this corner of the island.
CALATAFIMI