Sicily in Spring
ny lAIN HAMILTON T the end of an uncomfortable winter and the beginning of a peevish spring which seemed until the other day little better than a continuation of discomfort, with razor-edged winds hanging about the street-corners and influenza still lurking in the Tube and a staleness in the air and a corresponding bleakness In our voices—at such a gritty time thoughts need little encouragement to swing southwards. A book like Sean O'Faolain's South of Sicily* acts like a drug, and in a • rigid stupor of greed for the sun one thinks how two months ago the valley of the temples at Agrigento was already quick with fresh green; even in January almond-blossom framed the honeyed columns as though in readiness for a photographer Sent by the Assessorato Regionale Turismo. Mr. O'Faolain in an honest writer who does not hesitate to set down present Imperfections beside the relics of past glories, and anyone who has ever travelled in Sicily will sympathise with him in his dis- traction from the baroque splendours of Noto by the lavatorial deficiencies of the restaurant where he lunched; but, just as memory covers over, all irritants with its shimmering nacre, so does the simple constitutional hunger for the south light up the pages of praise and obscure the others on which there is talk of torrential rain of flies or fleas or clownish restaurateurs who mix Marsala with their Chianti.
Nor, I am afraid, does one, longing for the south, think of :the thousands of poverty-stricken Sicilians who long with better reason for the north. It is. an ideal landscape that one sees When thoughts turn southward at this time of year, a Claudean Composition with the sun high and promontories melting into the distance. I need no travel poster of Il Paradiso del Medi- terraneo, for I think already in terms of the t9urist's folder- l'azzurro mare, la magnifica vegetazione, gli imponenti monu- menti dell' epoca greca e romana. Reach me an atlas : Messina, Taormina, Catania, Siracusa; Gela, Agrigento, Marsala, Trapani; Palermo, Cefalii, Milazzo; and in the centre of this triangle I prick Enna (Castrogiovanni, Kasr Yanni, Castrum liennae), where John Henry Newman nearly expired of a fever amid the encircling gloom, where Demeter lost her daughter. " To travel in the south Without a constant sense of history," Says O'Faolain, " is to turn Sicily into a Gioconda Smile." But in Sicily the sense of history comes unbidden, and is always tapping the shoulder of the traveller who keeps his eyes open. There is a large and splendid hotel on the outskirts of Palermo, Under Monte Pellegrino, with a garden of palm and cactus and orange running down to the little limestone cliffs that fall into the Tyrrhenian Sea, and down on the edge of the cliff there is a small belvedere of columns that were cut two thousand years ago and are now pitted like the grey rock beneath them. The last time I saw these columns they were glorified by the presence of half-a-dozen starlets from Rome, who had come south for a film festival and to pose for photographers. Anything more modern than six film starlets from Rome has still to be thought Of, but their brown limbs and the golden stone went well together, and leering down on the pleasing juxtaposition was the Undeniably saracenic facade of the hotel. If one walked out of the grounds on to the road to Mondello, one saw the painted and carved carts of Sicily go by, drawn by plumed horses; and from the gay panels Count Roger of Hauteville (who took Palermo in 1071) looked out, and Roland and Oliver and the great Charlemagne. The sense of history is simply not to be
* Collins: 16s.
avoided. Two-and-a-half thousand years are telescoped into the present moment, and every imaginable sort of contrast is set before the visitor in the shortest possible time. Palermo is a city of considerable sophistication, but you may turn out of a fashionable street and see four men riding astride one small donkey. Such a sight, as O'Faolain says, invites reconsideration.
But for me at this moment all memories of Sicily are knotted up in one word--Cefalii; not because I have been there but because I have not. And this is how it came about. There were a few of us from London and a few from Paris, and the purpose for which we had been flown across the sea from Naples was, first and foremost, to look at films in the company of many beautiful girls and the Palermitan gentry. But how unreal these evenings were compared with the daylight hours which preceded them. Where, enquired the Count our circus-master one mid- night, would you like to go tomorrow? Agrigento was too far, and so was Siracusa, and Taormina was out of the question. One had been to Segesta and heard the wind from Monte Barbaro sighing past the superb columns and rustling the withered asphodel. One had stood on Monte Catalfano by the Roman gymnasium and peered away towards Etna and the dim wraiths of the Aeolian Islands. From a hill-pasture a flute had been heard; Theocritus was evoked for a bus-load of trippers; and in celebration the noble person in charge of us, starlets and all, had doled out little bottles of vermouth from a cocktail-bar up in the front of the bus. From Monreale we had turned away from the huge mosaic Christus and looked down over the Conca d'Oro towards the gulf and the lateen sails on it that were identical with the sails which those who built Monreale saw when they turned away from their work. In an inland town of Arab aspect we had taken coffee in the piazza, surrounded by a curious populace who, reasonably, had eyes only for the bare shoulders and legs of the girls. For fifty miles we had raced a rapido from level-crossing to level-crossing, horn answering whistle all the way, past mountains like petrified, magnified crests of lizards, through endless groves of olive and orange, by tall hedges of prickly pear.
We had been guests in a princely house, and we had drunk ferocious white wine in tavernas that had the look and smell of imperfectly sealed tombs. In a real catacomba (of the Capuchins) we had inspected in prim silence eight (or was it eighty ?) thousand mummified corpses. In a tobacconist's a venerable man had taken me by the hand, smiled affectionately, and said considerately : " What the hell you want, Joe ? "— this presumably being regarded in Palermo as the American- English equivalent of buon giorno: In a dozen places one had remarked conventionally the close proximity, as in Naples, of slum to palace. (As in Edinburgh, too.) On the terrace of the hotel we had shuffled until five in the morning to the music of two American bands. I had even tried to sleep at that hour through the strange ululations of the alto parlando. We were sated, and one thing only, it seemed, could revive, us: a visit to Cefalh. An absurd and unreasonable passion for Cefalh seized all of us, and at half-past-nine in the morning we crowded the steps of the hotel, waiting for the bus. It did not come until eleven o'clock, and then there was a magnificent • scene, with the driver stamping and our noble Roman shouting and the infection spreading until everyone was drunk with rage and seized by a southern eloquence. The sun climbed higher and the heat grew greater, and before we had gone twenty miles eastward out of Palermo the chorus of beautiful starlets at the back of the bus were screaming for a lido and to the devil with Cefalh. Neither that day nor any other day did I arrive at Cefalh, but, instead lay spreadeagled and mindless on the surface of the Tyrrhenian, blinking into the sky's enamelled depths, aware of nothing but the body and the sea below it and the sun above it.
In London in March it is the memory of such simplicity as this that makes me devour Mr. O'Faolain's. hook (which has more of weight and wit in it than I have suggested) and think of making a second attempt to arrive at Cefalti. It will be . easier on £40 than on £25. But if the attempt ends like the last one I shall not complain.
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