Roberto had a small chore to do and it was quite a compliment that he should ask Deeds and myself if we would like to accompany him. He had to visit the ancient grandmother of a friend and give her some messages of congratulation for her eighty-sixth birthday plus various assorted messages. We found the house without much difficulty and when the portals opened to us we saw that quite a number of people were there on the same errand. It was rather a spacious house on its own courtyard, and a short flight of steps led up to the upper room and gallery where the old lady lay in state to receive her visitors, in a great bed like a galleon with carved headboards. It looked, as Deeds said afterwards, as if one could have hitched a horse to it and just ridden off into the sky, there were so many cherubs and saints carved upon it, all con furioso. She wore an old-fashioned shawl of fine black lace with a white fichu and her long witch-like white hands with their filbert nails were spread on the sheet before her, while her clever old eyes accepted the compliments of her visitors with grace and no weariness. Her fine room was furnished with graceful Sicilian earthenware plates beautifully painted, and flowers in bloom. Two small children played with a sailboat upon a handsome carved trunk under the window. She must have been a person of great consequence for several of her visitors were local dignitaries, as Roberto explained later — the barber, the chemist, the podesta, and medico condotto. It all went off with great style and ease, but the appearance of Roberto was a thrilling surprise and his presence evoked questions and answers which took a good twenty minutes. She had questions to ask involving several generations and several families and I had the impression that nobody was passed over — she checked up on the whole lot of them, for who knows when she might have another chance? The peasant memory and the peasant sense of life is a tenacious and determined thing — it draws its strength from this sense of a corporate life, shared by all, and to which all contribute a share of their sap. Moreover, I think the old lady felt that she was not long for this world and that she must make the most of things, such as this surprise visit which had brought her all the gossip of a far corner of the island.
Duty thus done, Roberto kissed the long patrician fingers of the old lady and we made our way back into the sunshine to negotiate the little curling streets back to the main square where by now the rest of the party must be sitting under awnings and writing postcards or drinking lemonade. The day was bright and hot, and it was quite a contrast to think back to the evening before with its mists and murmurs of another world, another order of life. Nothing could be more ordinary in its beauty than Erice by day, with all the little shops functioning — post office, bank, gendarmerie. The minute main square was built upon a slope — indeed such an acute tilt that everything tended to slide about and run down to the bottom. Tables at this angle were in danger of falling over, as were chairs; as one wrote one’s postcards or drank one’s beer, one found one was insensibly sliding downhill. People who came out of the cafe had to brake sharply in order not to find themselves rolling about like dice.
A very fat policeman made something of an act of this natural attribute of Erice’s Piazza Nationale by allowing himself to slide helplessly downhill until he ended up on the lap of a friend who was trying to eat ice cream at an angle of fifty degrees. Just how the poor cafe owner managed to dispose his tables and chairs was something of a mystery — it would have seemed necessary to wedge them in place. Over the lintel of the butcher’s hung a peeled and dry little kid which bore a label reading “Castrato” and giving a price per pound. This intrigued Beddoes who said: “It’s a rum word, I thought it meant something frightful that Monteverdi did to his choirboys to enable them to hit high C.” The kid was so neatly cut in half that it looked rather like a violin hanging up there; the rest of the meat on display was pretty indifferent-looking stuff; of course, like all Mediterranean islands Sicily is a lamb country.
Our little visit had cost us a bit of time and by now the others had already done the cathedral and the Church of St. John as well as the public gardens, so full of yellow broom; but the real heart of the place was the restored towers and the old castle standing grimly on its sacred site, sweating with every gush of mists from the lowlands. What a farewell sweep the eye takes in up there — the whole sweep of western Sicily exposed in a single slice, as if from an airplane! Roberto was disposed to be knowledgeable about the Aeneid with its famous cruise along this coast which is described in poetic detail — but to my shame I have never read it, and I rather doubted whether anyone else had either. But the few lines he quoted from memory sounded sinewy and musical on that fine silent air and I made a mental note to repair this grave omission as soon as I could happen upon a version of the poem in parallel text. We were leaving and suddenly as we entered the bus I had a sudden reversion to the mood of the night before — a sudden atmosphere of unreality in which some momentous happening lay embedded, encysted, waiting to flower. But the faces of my fellow travelers did not seem to express any untoward emotion and it was perhaps my own imagination. But whatever they were, these small preoccupations, they were swept away like cobwebs by the fine speed of our descent, for Mario was in a particularly expansive humor and swung the little bus about with a professional dexterity that was marvelous — in the sense that it caused us no alarm, so confident were we in his ability. And the land swept about with him on this turntable of a road, swinging like a cradle this way and that. At one corner he slowed for the Japanese girl and her camera and I caught a glimpse of a couple of appropriate eagles sitting motionless in the mid-heaven, staring down at the vanished altars of Erice.
7: Segesta
WE WERE ON the Palermo run at last, once we had arrived at sea level, but we hoped to take a running look at Segesta — a temple and a site hardly less important than the others, for it had had a full share in the ancient politics and the wars, even though its position lay some little way inland. Running along the sea roads the bays opened in all their blueness, and the gentle limestone valleys seemed awash with yellow wheat. But goodness it was hot. In half an hour of this we felt the full power of the sun’s rays on our roof and were glad of the air-cooling devices. Roberto had an unexpected sneezing fit, the first manifestation of which got into the loudspeaker and shook us all up. But he was happy, there was little to describe, and so he decided to sing us a couple of Sicilian folk songs, which he did in a remarkably true and robust tenor, while we tried to help him out with the choruses. Then with courtesy he asked us each to sing a song of our country, and this threw a sudden shyness over us all. Yet after much giggling and persuading Miss Lobb went forwards and sang to us of the “ Foggy Foggy Dew,” which was very warmly applauded. Surprisingly, the Japanese girl took her place at the microphone but it was only to sing “Parlez Moi d’Amour.” There were of course numerous abstentions due to shyness.
Deeds and I had not brought our music, nor had the Bishop. But Beddoes sang a surprisingly discreet version of Colonel Bogey, to the chorus of which we all joined in heartily, though the soldier next to me rather avoided my eye, doubtless because he remembered the ribald Eighth Army version of the song. But it was a stirring melody and had been made world famous by the film of the famous Bridge on the River Kwai, so nobody could feel left out. What with the heat and the dust, however, this song contest left us rather weary and it was very pleasant when, after curling through the soft green hills, we came into a smiling and verdant valley where the old temple stood — the general atmosphere of the place reminding one not of Mycenae this time but of gracious quiet Olympia. There were no strange atmospheres and no bogies; just the exceptional heat and the quiet density of the old temple sitting there with some of the assurance of a country town hall. Under a fine tree there was a rather handsome tavern where we were to have lunch, I surmised.