THE TEMPLES OF JUNO LUCINA AND CONCORD AT AGRIGENTO
“They are Zolfataioi,” said Roberto with a smile. “We have been shielding you from the uglier side of Sicily, but we have our own black country here like you have; only it’s not black, it’s yellow. The sulphur workers live a sort of grim separate life except for their occasional excursions like this — though it’s usually to Caltanissetta that they go. It’s the headquarters of the trade.” The men looked as if they were waiting anxiously for transport and those at the two tables playing cards were doing so abstractedly, as if marking time. They were as impressively different from the other Italians as would have been, say, a little group of Bushmen, or Japanese. But they drank with precision. One of the elder ones with a leather face and expressionless eyes had the knack of tilting and emptying his glass in a single gesture, without swallowing. He looked like Father Time himself, drinking a whole hourglass of time at each quaff. I watched them curiously.
At that moment there came a diversion in the form of a large grey sports car which drew up outside the cafe. From it descended a couple of extremely well dressed and sophisticated youths of a vaguely Roman allure — I put them down as big-city pederasts having a holiday here. But their manner was offensively superior and they acted as if they owned the place. They were fashionably clad in smart colored summer wear and open collars, while their hair was handsomely styled and curled. They wanted to leave a message for some local boy and they engaged the flustered eunuch in conversation. Meanwhile, and the touch had a somewhat special insolence, they had left the car’s engine running so that the exhaust was belching noisome fumes on to the terrace and into the cafe itself. One felt resentful; it was as if they were deliberately flaunting not only their classical proclivities but their superiority as well. Their tones were shrill and their Italian of the cultivated sort.
Their arrival produced a little ripple of interest in the circle of sulphur miners, though the general tone was apathetic and not resentful. They eyed these two butterflies in their expressionless way and then looked at one another with a kindly irony. It was not malicious at all. Then the old man set down his tiny Strega glass and, wiping his moustache, said in a firm audible tone, “Ah! pederastici!” It was not offensive, simply an observation which classified the two, who must have overheard for they shrugged their shoulders and turned back to the eunuch with more questions about their friend Giovanni. Moreover, the word fell upon the silence with a fine classical limpidity — five lapidary syllables. It was perfectly summed up and forgotten — the whole incident. The one eloquent word was enough. No further comment was needed, and the miners turned back to their inner preoccupations and sank ever deeper into their corporate reserve while the two turkeys gobbled on.
A Greek root with
A Latin suffix
A Grecian vice
A Latin name
But at last it was time to take ourselves off to the gaunt restaurant where a single long dinner table had been prepared for us. There were to be some casualties among us, and about six of the wearier, as predicted, decided on an early night. We were anyway to have another look at the Temples by daylight on the morrow so that they were not to lose very much. It was only annoying for Mario, for the hotel was in the valley, some way off, and he would have to ferry them and then come back and ferry us to the Temples, going without dinner in the process. But he took it all with grave good humor and that undemonstrative courtesy that I was beginning to recognize as a thoroughly Sicilian trait. The weary therefore moved off, content to eat a sandwich in bed, while we doubled up our ranks and did our best to look joyfully surprised by yet another choice between spaghetti and rice. But the wine was good in its modest way. And we did full justice to it telling ourselves that we owed it to our fatigue, though Roberto warned us that we were only going to have a sniff at the Temples and not attempt to “do” them thoroughly until tomorrow. It was to see them floodlit, that was all. But how grateful one finally was for the glimpse, however brief, and how sorry one felt for the absentees.
We had hardly finished dinner when impassive Mario appeared with the bus and we were on the way down the hill, curving away upon the so-called passe-giata archeologica, a beautiful modern road which winds in and out of the temple circles; one by one these great landmarks came out of the night to meet us, while a thousand night insects danced in the hot light of the floods. The bare ground — yes, it smelled of Attica again. The whiffs of thyme and sage, and the very soil with its light marls and fawn-colored tones made the island itself seem like some huge abstract terracotta which by some freak of time might give birth to vases, amphorae, plates, craters. An ancient Athenian must have walked here with the sympathetic feeling of being back in Athens. And it was extraordinary to realize that this huge expanse of temples represented only a tiny fraction of what exists here in reality, and which remains to be unearthed. The archaeologists have only scratched the surface of Agrigento; stretching away on every side, hidden in the soft deciduous chalk through which the twin rivers have carved their beds, there lie hidden necropolises, aqueducts, houses and temples and statues as yet quite unknown to us; and all the wealth inside them of ceramics and jewelry and weapons. It seems so complete as it is, this long sparkling ridge with its tremendous exhibits. Yet Agrigento has hardly begun to yield up all its treasures, and in coming generations what is unearthed might well modify all our present ideas about it. Long shadows crisscrossed the night. Leaving the glare of the floods one was at once plunged into dense patches of fragrant darkness. There was another busload of dark figures round the Temple of Concord, all down on their knees. Were they praying? It seemed so.
In the circumstances, with the massive and blinding whiteness of the floodlights, the magical temple looking down upon us from some unimaginable height of centuries, the activity of the group of persons clustering about the stylobate, kneeling, bending, crawling, seemed to suggest that they were engaged in some strange archaic rite. Was it a propitiatory dance of some sort, an invocation to the God of the site? But no, the explanation was more prosaic. Yet before it was given to us the strangeness of the scene was increased by the fact that, as we approached upon the winding paths, punctuated by lanterns, we saw that they were Asiatics — Chinese I thought. Their faces were white in the white light, and their eyes had disappeared with the intensity of their concentration upon the ground. Our groups mingled for a moment to wander about on this extraordinary headland over the brimming darkness of the valley. Their guide was an acquaintance of Roberto’s and provided a clue as to the mysterious behavior of his group. Two of the more ardent photographers had lost their lens caps and everyone was trying to help them recover these valuable items. It was extremely hard. The floods were pouring up into the sky with such power that unless one was directly in their ray one could see nothing; one became a one-dimensional figure, a silhouette. They cast an absolutely definitive black shadow.
Even if you held out your hand in the light the underneath, the shadowy side, was plunged into total blackness. Thus to pick up something small from the ground just outside the arc of white light presented extraordinary difficulties. Which explained all the crouching stooping peering people. Standing off a little from them, feeling the velvety warmth of the night upon my cheek, I felt grateful to have outgrown the desire to photograph things; I had once been a keen photographer and had even sold my work. Now I preferred to try and use my eyes, at first hand, so to speak, and to make my memory do some work. In a little schoolchild’s exercise book I occasionally made a note or two for the pleasure of trying to draw; and then later I might embark on a watercolor which, by intention, would try to capture the mood or emotion of a particular place or incident. It was a more satisfactory way of going about things, more suitable to my present age and preoccupations. The photograph was always a slightly distorted version of the subject; whereas the painting made no pretensions to being anything more than a slightly distorted version of one’s feelings at a given moment in time.