Sicilian Carousel: Adventures on an Italian Island

9: Taormina

“TAORMINA, THE OLD Bull Mountain — I’m so glad I followed my instinct and saved it up for the last. It was like a kind of summation of all that went before, all the journeys and flavors this extraordinary island had to offer. Like a fool, I loped up it with Loftus in an old racing car at full moon; but something made me aware of the sacrilege and next day I walked humbly down to the bottom where I left a propitiatory candle in the little Christian shrine of St. Barnabus (isn’t it?) and retraced my way up again. Of course it must have once been a sort of sacred way, laid out against the breast of this steep little mountain so that one could approach it step by step, loop by loop. The long steep zigzags of the road must have been punctuated significantly with statues and flowering shrubs and little fanes to take an offering of the first fruits. One arrived, slowly and breathlessly, watching the scene widen out around one, and deepen into a screen of mountain and sea and volcano.”

Thus Martine. In the garden of the Villa Rosalie to which I had been assigned, two white-haired men played chess amidst dense flowering shrubbery which suggested rather the cultivation of a spa like Nice than the wild precincts of Sicily; I had come back to Europe really. I left my bags and walked the length of the main street with its astonishing views. It was so good that it aroused indignation: one almost suspected it to be spurious; but no, it simply outstripped language, that was all. And a wonderful sense of intimacy and well-being suffused the whole place. Yes, it was sophisticated as well — and as if to match the idea I found a small visiting card from Loftus waiting in my box inscribed in that fine old-fashioned lace hand which he had cultivated in order to write ancient Greek. A message of greeting, giving me his phone number. But tonight I was in a mood to be alone, to enjoy, and to regret being alone. It was a strange new feeling, not unconnected with fatigue. But the sinking sunset which one drank out of one’s glass of Campari, so to speak, was as extraordinary as any that Greece or Italy has to offer. And Etna did her stuff on the skyline.

However blasé one is, however much one has been prepared for the aerial splendors of the little town, its freshness is perennial, it rises in one like sap, it beguiles and charms as the eye turns in its astonishment to take in crags and clouds and mountains and the blue coastline. Here one could sit in a deck chair gazing out into the night and thinking about Greek flair and Roman prescience — they married here in this place; but why was it a failure at last, why did it fall apart?

Because everything does I suppose. And now after so long, here come I with my valedictory admiration, inhabitant of yet another culture which is falling apart, which is doomed to the same decline and fall, perhaps even more suddenly.… How marvelous to read a book at dinner. I had chosen that fussy but touching civil servant Pliny; his pages tell one all one wants to know and admire about Rome.

And how pleasant, too, to dawdle the length of that main street — like walking the bridge of a Zeppelin. And how astonishingly still the air is at this great height. It is what constitutes the original feature of Taormina, I think; one’s thoughts naturally turn to places like Villefranche or Cassis (as they must have been a hundred years ago); and then, quite naturally, to Capri and Paleocastrizza. The difference is not only in variety and prolixity of classical views — the whole thing has been anchored in mid-heaven, at a thousand feet, and up here the air is still and calm. The white curtains in my hotel room breathed softly in and out, like the lungs of the universe itself. There were cafes of Roman and Venetian excellence, and there were the traditional hordes of tourists perambulating up and down the long main street. Its narrowness grew on one after the sixth or seventh turn upon it.

And in the little side streets there were unforgotten corners of the real Italy — by which I mean the peasant Italy with its firmly anchored values and purity of heart. At dusk next day I walked up to have a look at the villa Lawrence occupied for three years. It was modest and quite fitting to the poems he wrote here in this pure high tower of silence which is Taormina at night. But at the first corner of the road there stood a tattered trattoria with a dirty cloth across the door to keep the flies at bay. In the street, under a faded-looking tree, stood a rickety table and two chairs. Just that and nothing more. A tin table which had been racked with smallpox and perhaps some hunter’s small shot. A slip of broom was suspended from the lintel. And here I was served a harsh black wine by a matron with a walleye and hairy brown arms. She was like Demeter herself and she talked to me quietly and simply about the wines of the island. Hers was Etna, volcanic wine, and it tasted of iron; but it was not sugary and I bought a demijohn as a present for Loftus when I should decide to take up his invitation. If I hesitated, it was for a rather obscure reason; I wanted, so to speak, to let the Carousel experience evaporate before I changed the whole key. For I knew that encountering Loftus and his life here meant that I would find myself back in the Capri of the twenties; in the world of Norman Douglas — a world very dear to me precisely because it was a trifle precious. Martine had had one foot in this world, to be sure, but what I had personally shared with her had not belonged to this aspect of our islomania. Capri had long since sunk below the horizon when Cyprus became a reality. Yet she had loved Douglas as much as I, and Compton Mackenzie as well, while the silent empty villa of Lawrence up the hill also carried the echoes of that Nepenthean period where Twilight in Italy matched South Wind.

But Taormina is so small that it was inevitable that from time to time I would bump into other members of the Carousel. I saw the Microscopes in the distance once or twice, and the American dentist waved from the April cafe as I passed. I also saw the Bishop — he had taken up a stance in order to “appreciate” a piece of architecture, while his wife sat on a stone and fanned herself with her straw hat. But that was all. There was no sign of Deeds. After two days of this delicious privacy in my little pension where I knew nobody, I visited the bookshop and bought a guide to the island, intending to spend my last few days filling in the lacunae in my knowledge. I could not leave without bracing Etna for example, or standing on the great “belvedere of all Sicily,” Enna; then Tyndarus … and so on. I thought I would rent a small car to finish off the visit in a style more reminiscent of the past than by having any truck with trains and buses. It would be interesting to see what Loftus thought.

I rang him, and was amused and pleased to recognize his characteristic drawl, and the slight slurring of the r’s which had always characterized his speech. He had a little car he could lend me, which was promising, and so I agreed to dine at his villa the following evening. In a way it was reassuring that nothing much had changed for Loftus; he had ruined a promising diplomatic career by openly living with his chauffeur, an ex-jailbird, and then, as if that were not enough, winning notoriety by writing a novel called Le Baiser in French which had a succès de scandale. Someone in the Foreign Office must have known that the word “baiser” didn’t only mean “kiss” (though it is difficult to think who) and Loftus was invited to abstract himself from decent society. This he did with good grace — he had a large private income — and retired to Taormina where he grew roses and translated the classics. He had been one of the most brilliant scholars of his time, though an incurable dilettante. About Sicily he knew all that there was to be known. But of course now he was getting on, like the rest of us, and hardly ever moved from the Villa Ariadne — a delightful old house built on a little headland over the sea, and buried in roses. He too was a relic of the Capri epoch, a silver-age man.

I hardly recognized the chauffeur lover after such a long lapse of time — he had grown fat and hairy, and spindle shanked. But he panted with pleasure like a bull terrier at meeting me again and ushered me into the car with a good deal of friendly ceremony. I was glad that I had been fetched when he started to negotiate the steep descent from the mountain to the coast where the villa was. It was a labyrinth of crisscrossing roads, with snatches of motor road to be crossed. But at last we arrived in that cool garden full of olives and oleanders and the smell of rushing water in dusty fountains — the house had been designed by water-loving Romans. And there was Loftus frail and smart as always, though a little greyer, waiting for me.

Terraces led down to the sea; there were candles already burning on a white tablecloth; wide divans with stained cretonne covers were laid out under the olives. The parrot Victor had gone to bed; his cage was covered in a green baize cloth. Smell of Turkish tobacco. “Dear boy,” said Loftus, “I can’t rise to greet you as is fitting. I had a small ski mishap.” His crutches lay beside him. The tone and temper of his conversation was reassuringly the same as ever, and I was glad to feel that now it would never change. It belonged to an epoch, it marched with the language of the eighteenth century whose artists (like Stendhal?) discovered how to raise social gossip to the level of an art. The trivia of Loftus had the same fine merit — even though he had not much at present to recount. Various film nabobs from Beverley Hills had come and gone. Then Cramp the publisher from London. There were two amusing local scandals which might lead to a knife fight. “All this is simply to situate you, dear boy. You are in Taormina now which has its own ethos and manners. It is very degenerate in comparison to the rest of Sicily which is rather straitlaced.”

In this easy and languid style the conversation led him closer and closer to the last days of Martine. She had spent a lot of time with him; she would bring over her two children and a picnic and spend the day on his little beach, reading or writing. She had never been happier, she said, than during that last summer. She had spoken of me with affection, and indeed had rung me up once or twice for advice about a book she was planning to write about Sicily. I surmised it must have been the “pocket Sicily” for her children — Loftus agreed that it was. “Finally she gave up and said she would make you do it. She found that in Sicily there is no sense of time; her children inhabited a history in which Caesar, Pompey, and Timoleon were replaced, without any lapse of time, by Field Marshal Kesserling and the Hermann Goering division — the one the Irish knocked about.” He smiled. “It’s difficult to know how you would have dealt with that sort of Mediterranean amnesia. Everything seems simultaneous.” By the same token Martine seemed as ever present as Loftus himself — the mere intervention of death seemed somehow unreal, untruthful. “She took everything calmly, gaily, lightly. Her husband was marvelous, too, and made it easy. Also she wasn’t encumbered by any heavy intellectual equipment like a theological attitude. She wasn’t Christian, was she?” As far as I knew she wasn’t anything, though she observed the outward forms for fear of wounding people — but that was just part of a social code. What Loftus really meant was that she was a Mediterranean, by which he meant a pagan; she belonged to the Astarte-Aphrodite of Erice rather than to Holy Mary of Rome. I did not elaborate on all this, it was not our business.

At any rate she had satisfactorily managed to answer the question I had put to her in the Latomie at Syracuse; the word “yes” had been exactly where I had asked her to arrange for it to be. But about the question, it went something like this: “Do you remember all our studies and arguments over the Pali texts and all the advice you got from your Indian princeling? Well, before you finally died, did you manage to experience that state, however briefly, which the texts promised us and which was rendered no doubt very inadequately in English as ‘form without identity’?” Rather long winded, but it is hard to express these abstract notions. Yet I was delighted to think that perhaps she might have experienced the precious moment of pure apprehension which had so far eluded me — which I could intuit but not provoke: poems are inadequate substitutes for it.

Loftus said: “After dinner I must put you on a tape recording of a dinner party we had once here; she wanted to ask me some questions about Theocritos and Pindar, and then she forgot to take the tape. I found it long afterwards. It’s pleasant to hear her voice again.”

So it was, and the setting was not the less pleasant, this warm olive grove steepening towards the sea. The chink of plates and the little rushes of laughter or the clash of people all talking together. Martine’s swift Italian. Somewhere she said that she had given instructions to her lawyers to let her lie in state one whole night on the beach at Naxos, close to the sea, so that like a seashell she could absorb the sighing of the sea and take it with her wherever she was going. “I don’t know if she did,” said Loftus, “but the idea struck me as typical of her and I dreamed about it for several nights. Martine, all dressed in white, lying in her beautiful coffin which was like a Rolls, lying on the beach almost within reach of the waves, under the stars.”

It was late when the chauffeur finally dropped me back in Taormina, but despite the lateness of the hour there were cafes open and I felt sufficiently elated by my evening to want to prolong it for a while; to have a quiet drink and think before turning in with my Pliny. I had, in a manner of speaking, recovered contact with Martine. It was reassuring to feel that she was, in a sense, still there, still bright in the memory of her friends. On the morrow I had promised to return and lunch with Loftus, bathe, and work out an itinerary for my last few days in Sicily. He on his part would have the little Morris serviced and fixed up for my journey on which he would have accompanied me had it not been for his ankle. I must say I was glad, for though he was good company, I still felt a little bit as if I was on a pilgrimage and wanted to spend the time alone before I took off once more for France.

I sat long over my drink, tasting the cool balm of the midnight air and listening to the occasional chaffering voices in the dark street. Taormina had fallen asleep like a rooks’ nest; occasionally there was a little movement, a few voices — as if a dream had troubled the communal sleep. Then everything subsided once more into a hush. My waiter was almost asleep on his feet. I must really finish up, I thought, and have pity on him. Yet I lingered, and if I reflected upon Martine the thoughts were relatively down to earth and free from all the nostalgias which tend to lie in wait for one when the mysterious matter of death comes to the front of the stage. I was still very conscious of that tiny chuckle with which my friend had always demolished anything slack or sentimental, anything sloppy in style or insipid. Truth to tell, I hardly dared to mourn the girl so much did I dread the memory of that chuckle. For her even death had its own rationale, its strictness, and inevitability. It was thus. It was so. And it must be accepted with good nature, good grace, good humor.

Even Loftus, homo beatus as he used to call himself (sitting in the garden in a deck chair looking out to sea through an old brass telescope) — even he could not speak of her without a smile, as if of recognition. “You know,” he said, during our dinner, and apropos of the tape recording of her voice, “the English can be disappointing in so many ways, but in friendship they have no peers.” Due, I think, to this quality of smiling good sense which made it easy to confront life and death without a false Roman stoicism.

I spared the waiter at last and walked slowly back to my lodgings, savoring the soft airs of the invisible dawn with delectation. I did not feel a bit sleepy, and indeed it was almost too late to go to bed. I was sorry not to be on the beach at Naxos, for I should have bathed and waited for the light to break before making myself some breakfast. I compromised with a tepid shower and a lie down of an hour which was interrupted by the breakfast gong.

That morning I had some shopping to do, and a suit to get cleaned. At the post office I ran into the two French ladies. They had had a great shock, and they gobbled like turkeys as they told me about it. As usual they had been sending off clutches of postcards to their friends and relations in France — they seemed to have no other occupation or thought in mind. But peering through the grille after posting a batch they distinctly saw the clerk sweep the contents of the box into the lap of his overall and walk into the yard in order to throw all the mail on to a bonfire which was burning merrily on the concrete, apparently fed by all the correspondence of Taormina. They were aghast and shouted out to him — as a matter of fact they could hardly believe their eyes at first. They thought they had to do with a madman — but no, it was only a striker. He was burning mail as fast as it was posted. When they protested he said “Niente Niente … questo e tourismo.…”

I transcribe phonetically and consequently inaccurately — but that is what they said he said; and I took him to be telling them something like “It’s nothing at all, my little ladies, just a clutch of tourist junk.”

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.

Autumn Lady: Naxos

Under spiteful skies go sailing on and on,

All canvas soaking and all iron rusty,

Frail as a gnat, but peerless in her sadness,

My poor ship christened by an ocean blackness,

Locked into cloud or planet-sharing night.

The primacy of longing she established.

They called her Autumn Lady, with two wide

Aegean eyes beneath the given name,

Sea-stressed, complete, a living wife.

She’ll sink at moorings like my life did once,

In a night of piercing squalls, go swaying down,

In an island without gulls, wells, walls,

In a time of need, all stations fading, fading.

She will lie there in the calm cathedrals

Of the blood’s sleep, not speaking of love,

Or the last graphic journeys of the mind.

Let tides drum on those unawakened flanks

Whom all the soft analysis of sleep will find.

Besaquino

No stars to guide. Death is that quiet cartouche,

A nun-besought preserve of praying time,

That like a great lion silence hunts,

At noon, at ease, and all because he must.

His scenery is so old, His sacred pawtouch cold.

A lupercal of girls remember him

In nights defunct from lack of sleep

Tossing on iron beds awaiting dawn …

He wound up his death each evening like a clock,

Walked to obscure cafes to criticize

The fires that blush upon the crown of Etna.

Leopardi in the ticking mind,

Lay unknown like an exiled king,

Printing his dreams among the olive glades

In orchards of discontent the fruitful word.