But the links of our friendship had, I observed, begun to weaken already for I had forgotten their names. I racked my brains to recall them. Anyway they were leaving in the morning and were half nostalgic and half irritated by the high price of things and the general slipshodness and insolence of the small shopkeepers. But it is ever thus in tourist centers.
Soon I was to begin my solitary journeys in the little borrowed car, trying, in the days which were left me, to fill in the jigsaw of names and strike up a nodding acquaintance with so many of the places mentioned in the letters of Martine and in the guide. It was rather a breathless performance. I realized then that Sicily is not just an island; it is a sub-continent whose variegated history and variety of landscapes simply overwhelms the traveler who has not set aside at least three months to deal with it and its overlapping cultures and civilizations. But such a certainty rendered me in the event rather irresponsible and lighthearted. I took what I could get so to speak, bit deeply into places like Tyndarus, revisited Segesta, crossed the hairy spine of the island for another look at Syracuse; but this time on different roads, deserted ones. In some obscure quarry I came upon half-carved temple drums which had not yet been extracted from the rock. I had a look at the baby volcanoes in their charred and stenchy lands. Islands whose names I did not know came up out of the mist like dogs to watch me having a solitary bathe among the sea lavender and squill of deserted estuaries near Agrigento. But everywhere there came the striking experience of the island — not just the impact of the folklorique or the sensational. Impossible to describe the moth-soft little town of Besaquino with its deserted presbytery where once there had been live hermits in residence. Centuripe with its jutting jaw and bronzed limestone — an immense calm necropolis where the rock for hundreds of yards was pitted like a lung with excavated tombs. Pantalica I think it was called.
But time was running out. I had decided, after a chance meeting with Roberto in the tavern of the Three Springs, to keep Etna for my last night — the appropriate send off. He had promised to escort me to the top to watch the sun come up, and thence down to the airport to catch the plane.
I burnt Martine’s letters on a deserted beach near Messina — she had asked me to do so; and I scattered the ashes. I regretted it rather, but people have a right to dispose of their own productions as they wish.
It was the end of a whole epoch; and appropriately enough I spent a dawn in the most beautiful theater in the world — an act of which Etna itself appeared to approve because once, just to show me that the world was right side up, she spat out a mouthful of hot coals, and then dribbled a small string of blazing diamonds down her chin. Roberto had been a little wistfully drunk in the tavern; he was recovering from his heart attack over the girl Renata, but he was rather bitter about tourism in general and tourists in particular — there was a new Carousel expected in a few days. I wondered about Deeds, what he was doing with himself; and then I had the queer dissolving feeling that perhaps he had never existed or that I had imagined him. Roberto was saying: “Traveling isn’t honest. Everyone is trying to get away from something or else they would stay at home. The old get panicky because they can’t make love any more, and they feel death in the air. The others, well, I bet you have your own reasons too. In the case of the officer Deeds you know his young brother is buried in that little cemetery where he told us about the locust beans — one of the commandos he mentioned. Much younger than him I gather.” He went on a while in a desultory fashion, while we drank off a bit of blue-black iron-tasting wine — I wondered if our insides would rust. I had done my packing; I had bought my postcards and guides. I wondered vaguely what Pausanias had been trying to get away from as he trudged round Athens taking notes. A Roman villa on the Black Sea, a nagging wife, the solitary consular life to which he had, as an untalented man, doomed himself?
We walked slowly back to my hotel in the fine afternoon light; and there another surprise awaited me. In my bedroom sat an extraordinary figure which I had, to the best of my knowledge, never seen before. A bald man with a blazing, glazed-looking cranium which was so white that it must have been newly cropped. It was when he removed his dark glasses and grinned that I recognized, with sinking heart, my old traveling companion Beddoes. “Old boy,” he said, with a kind of fine elation, “they are on my trail, the carabinieri. Interpol must have lit a beacon. So I had to leave my hotel for a while.” I did not know what to say. “But I am sneaking off tonight on the Messina ferry and Roberto has arranged to have me cremated, so to speak.”
“Cremated?”
“Tonight, old boy, I jump into Etna like old Empedocles, with a piercing eldritch shriek. And you and Roberto at dawn scatter some of my belongings round the brink, and the Carousel announces my death to the press.”
“You take my breath away. Roberto said nothing to me. And I have just left him.”
“You can’t be too discreet in these matters. Anyway it is just Sicilian courtesy. They often let people disappear like that.”
“Beddoes, are you serious?”
It sounded like the sudden intrusion of an opera bouffe upon the humdrum existence of innocent tourists. And then that amazing glazed dome, glittering and resplendent. It looked sufficiently new to attract curiosity and I was relieved to see that he covered it up with a dirty ski cap. Clad thus he looked like a madly determined Swiss concierge. “Roberto asked me to leave my belongings here with you. When he calls for you at midnight just carry them along; he will know what to do. And it’s quite a neat parcel.”
“Very well,” I said reluctantly, and he beamed and shook my hand as he said goodbye. Then, turning at the door, he said: “By the way, old scout, I forgot to ask you if you could loan me a few quid. I am awfully pushed for lolly. I had to buy a spare pair of boots and an overcoat to complete my disguise. Cost the earth.” I obliged with pardonable reluctance and he took himself off, whistling “Giovanezza” under his breath.
His belongings consisted of a sleeping bag and a mackintosh, plus a pair of shapeless navvy’s boots. The suitcase was empty save of a copy of a novel entitled The Naked Truth.
Roberto was punctual and accepted full responsibility for the plot concerning Beddoes’s disappearance. Apparently the authorities often turned a blind eye to the disappearance of people into Etna. He said: “There’s only one other volcano where one can arrange that sort of thing for hopeless lovers or bankrupts or schoolmasters on the run like Beddoes. It’s in Japan.”
The car drummed and whined its way into the mountains and I began to feel the long sleep of this hectic fortnight creep upon me. I had a drink and pulled myself together for we had to envisage a good walk at the other end, from the last point before the crater, the observatory. It became cooler and cooler. Then lights and mountain air with spaces of warmth and the smell of acid and sulphur as we walked up the slopes of the crater. Somewhere near the top we lit a bonfire and carefully singed Beddoes’s affairs before consigning them to the care of a carabinieri friend who would declare that he had found them on the morrow. The boots burned like an effigy of wax — he must have greased them with something. Poor old Beddoes!
Then the long wait by a strange watery moonlight until an oven lid started to open in the east and the “old shield bearer” stuck its nose over the silent sea. “There it is,” said Roberto, as if he had personally arranged the matter for me. I thanked him. I reflected how lucky I was to have spent so much of my life in the Mediterranean — to have so frequently seen these incomparable dawns, to have so often had sun and moon both in the sky together.