Here I had a brainwave, for back in the Midi, apart from the professional Spanish-style bullfights they also have the odd evening of bull dusting where they try out the baby bulls and cows and then young people are invited to leap into the ring and have a go. The horns of the young bulls are padded so they can do no harm. These evenings of absurdity and fun are called Les Charlotades in memory of Chaplin, and indeed a couple of village boys often dress up as Charlie and enter the ring with umbrellas in order to do battle with the bulls. The antics of both bulls and Charlies provide great fun and an occasional brisk knock in the behind from a frisky young cowlet. Now one of the special features of these evenings is the piscine, a water tank in the middle of the arena over which and into which the young amateur bullfighters jump. The antics of the bull, puzzled by the water and with its attention scattered by all the yelling children, are amusing to behold. But the piscine is a regular feature of an evening of charlotade and all the posters announce the fact—course libre avec piscine—which makes one wonder whether the Romans themselves were not given to bull dusting and whether the faint echo of their passage in Provence (a country still sown with their grandiose monuments) has not remained in this puzzling feature of the ancient bullfight. But it was not the moment to try out my knowledgeable theories on the old guide who was now showing a little bit of well-earned fatigue, and so I let the matter pass, promising myself to investigate it in detail when I got back to Provence.
At last, when the cameras had stopped clicking, we straggled back the hundred yards or so into another world — so different in its white presence that the whole Roman venture in its vastness and impersonality seemed hopelessly debased in comparison with this white almost prim little theater which expressed a world of congruence and vital intelligence where the poets were also mathematicians — the imaginative link had been made which we are only just beginning to try and recover. The blue infinity of sky and the white marble were the keynotes to the Greek imagination; somehow one associates the Roman with the honey-colored or the dun. A massive eloquence which was intended to outlast eternity. The Greeks felt time slipping through their fingers — one had quickly to seize the adventive minute before it trickled away like quicksilver and was lost. Yet there was strictness in this urgency — the singing for all its purity (perhaps because of it?) was based on an equation which linked it with its celestial parentage, the harmony of the all.
Martine:
I don’t know what you will make of the quarries. Holes in the ground have always had a depressing effect upon me, and the Latomie proved no exception, specially as I wandered about them in the afternoon with a westering sun and lots of dense shadow which gives off waves of humidity. Beautiful yes, the gardens and their luxuriance. But once or twice when I found myself alone on the asphalt paths among the dense lemon groves with their great clutches of fruit.… I felt a kind of panic, a sense of urgency, a premonition of doom. Almost the desire to cut and run back, back into the warm sunlight of the open earth above. It was the original ‘panic’ sense about which you talked — but in Greece proper it is that moment of noonday when suddenly silence falls, the cicadas stop, the sea subsides, the whole of nature holds its breath. And you hear the breathing of Pan himself as he sleeps under an olive tree. We have all experienced it. It is a terrifying experience. Well, down here in the Latomie I experienced it all over again, and cried out to call the children who were clambering about in the Ear of Dionysos testing the echo. Whew! I was glad when they came running.
So Martine on the subject of these singular caves — the one we visited was precisely the Paradiso which contained the strange feature which Caravaggio is supposed to have christened The Ear of Dionysos.
Our guide, now somewhat exhausted by his long and admirable disquisition of the monuments above ground, led our loitering crocodile down the sloping ramps and paths into the Paradise Quarry where I looked forward eagerly to encountering Martine’s version of the Great God Pan. Certainly it was a little heavy and tideless as a place but there was no doubt about its singularity — one almost felt that it had been designed this way, and not just carved out in haphazard fashion by the architects who had other things in mind. It was not simply the layout of the gardens — which had an almost Turkish prolixity and richness. There was water here and shade and humidity below ground where every sort of fruit and flower flourished in a luxuriance which was really paradisical. But the actual cuttings themselves seemed somewhat artificial, in the sense that everywhere there were grottoes and caverns, pediments and columns holding up large sections of undercut ground in the most precarious fashion. It was very much after a sketch by Doré or Hugo.
But of Pan himself honestly no trace, alas; I thought it might perhaps have been the time of day — perhaps she had been down here at high noon? But no, for she had spoken of a westering sun. For my own part, apart from the luxuriance — you could see vines literally leaping up into tall green trees to dress themselves on their outspread branches — I felt most the heavy melancholy of the passages in Thucydides describing the fate of the prisoners who were once herded here. There was even a passionflower which had wound itself about a young cypress — its flowers giving the tall tree the strangest appearance. As to the prisoners, in their time these quarries must have been bare; all this luxuriance is relatively modern. In the great battle against Athens some seven thousand prisoners fell into the hands of the Syracusans; there was nowhere to put them, so they were shoved down in these ready-made cages, easy to guard. One thinks of the Mappin Terraces in the London Zoo with their puzzled-looking inhabitants. But here life was no joke for the prisoners. The historian who records the Athenian defeat in great detail — Deeds had the advantage of reading Thucydides during the Eighth Army’s advance through Sicily — made no bones about the great heat during the day, and the great evening damps which followed, particularly in the autumn with the turn of the equinox. Illness ravaged them. “During eight months the daily allowance per man per day was half a pint of water and a pint of corn,” he adds.
Later, one supposes, when the war had been won, these prisoners were either sold as slaves or used as directed labor on the new monuments which celebrated another era of peace and plenty.
The so-called Ear of Dionysos is hardly less of an enigma than so many other features among the monuments of Sicily. The echo is prodigious. And it suggested immediately the cave of the Gumaean sibyl (my guidebook told me it would). But our guide had other notions, based on the fact that the issue of the cave comes out just above the prompter’s place in the Greek theater and he seems convinced that the two things are somehow connected. The cave for him was a sort of sound box — his image is the case of a violin or the body of the cicada. As far as I could understand his notion the echo of the cave lent strength to the acoustics of the theater — but somehow this pretty theory seemed to me a little doubtful. I preferred the sibyl as a notion. But of course unless some literary reference is unearthed we shall never really be sure. For my own private satisfaction I did what one should do in sibyls’ caves — I addressed a direct question to the nymph which concerned Martine. It was to be answered if she so pleased with a yes or no, and I would count ten words along in the leading article of the daily paper on the morrow in the hope of an answer. In part it was silly, I knew that; but I am superstitious. So had she been.