Sicilian Carousel: Adventures on an Italian Island

6: Erice

AT ERICE ONE feels that all the options of ordinary life are reversed. I do not know how else to put it. We steer our lives by certain beliefs which are perhaps fables but which give us the courage to continue living. But what happens even before you reach the “sickle” of Trapani is that you lose your inner bearings, become insecure. It’s as if the giant of the mountain up there, riding its mists, had kicked away your crutches. History begins to stammer; the most famous and most privileged temple to Aphrodite in the whole of the Mediterranean has vanished without leaving a trace. The one late head of Aphrodite is nothing to write home about. The holy shrine of Eryx has been blown out like a light, yet as at Delphi, one can still smell the sulphur in the air. You feel it in the burning sun like a cold touch on the back of the neck. But I am going too fast for we are still approaching Trapani, that deceptively happy and unremarkable town so beautifully perched upon its seagirt headland. The old part of the town, rather as in the case of Syracuse, occupies a firm promontory thrust out into the sea like a pier; the town has developed on the landward side. Salt pans and windmills, yes, and the view from the so-called Ligny Tower is a fine one; but what is really fine is the fresh sea wind, frisky as a fox terrier, which patters the awnings and bends the trees and sends old sailors’ caps scuttering along the cobbles of the port. Westward a fine expanse of the Tyrrhenian Sea, smoldering in the sinking sun; two of the Egadi Isles with the choice names of Levanzo and Favignana glow with a kind of mysterious malevolence.

We were tired, we were really in no mood for further sightseeing, and Roberto let us off easily with a short visit to an indifferent church and a glimpse of the stern battlements constructed by Charles V. But the main thing was the frolicking wind whose playfulness allayed somewhat the curious feeling of tension and misgiving which I felt when I gazed upwards towards the ramps of Monte Giuliano and saw the sharp butt of Erice buried in the mountain like a flint axe head which had broken off with the impact. There was a short administrative pause while Mario made some growling remarks to the world at large and some adjustments to his brakes. Somewhere in the town a small municipal band had slunk into a square and started to play fragments of old waltzes and tangos. The sudden gusts of wind offered the musicians a fortuitous nautical syncopation — the music fading and reviving, full of an old-world charm. The Petremands ate a vividly colored ice cream and bought one for Mario. The Bishop had broken a shoelace. The old pre-Adamic couple were fast asleep in their seats, arm in arm, smile in smile, so to speak. It is pleasant when sleeping people smile and obviously enjoy their dreaming; they looked like representations of the smiling Buddha — though he is very far from asleep, sunk rather in smiling meditation. At last we began the ascent.

The sun was over the border now, rapidly westering, apparently increasing speed in its long slide into the ocean. Our little red bus swung itself clear of the crooked streets of Trapani and then started its tough climb up the dark prow of Eryx. Adieu Via Fardella, Via Pepoli! The road now began to mount in short spans on a steepening gradient, swinging about first to the right, then to the left; and there came a gradually increasing sobriety of spirit, a premonition perhaps of the Erycinean Aphrodite whose territory we were approaching. I am not romancing, for several of my fellow travelers expressed a sharpened sense of excitement in their several ways. Mario varied his engine speeds with great skill and the little motor had us valiantly swarming up the steep cliffs in good order.

The vegetation gradually thinned away, or made room for hardier and perhaps more ancient plants to cling to the crevices and caves in the rock. The precipices hereabouts were bathed in the condensations of cloud, as if a rich dew had settled on them; or as if the whole of nature had burst into a cold sweat. Yes, there were clouds above us, hanging lower and lower as we climbed, but they seemed to part as we reached them to offer us passage. At each turn — for we were still tacking up the cliffs like a sailboat — the view increased in grandeur and scope until the whole province of Trapani lay below us bathed in golden light and bounded by the motionless sea. Far off twinkled the Egadi, with Marettimo printed in black letter — the island which Samuel Butler so surprisingly decided must be the historical Ithaca in his weird book about the supposed female author of the Odyssey. I love wrong-headed books. But a short residence in modern Greece would have made Butler somewhat uncertain about the main theme of his book. Only a man, only a Greek could have written the poem — at least so think I.

We worked our way with elephantine determination round the northeastern flank of our two-thousand-meter odd mountain. There was only one little village to traverse, Parparella, perched up in solitude like a nest and empty of inhabitants at that hour. Bare rock now, with sudden ferns, cistus, caper, and an occasional asphodel to surprise one. And the views below us went on steadily unwinding like a scroll. The air had become purer, colder, as if filtered by the passing clouds. Once or twice our engine sneezed and Mario cocked an alert ear; but there was no trouble and on one of the penultimate loops we called a halt designed to let the amateur photographers in the party record the scene below. But while they clicked happily away at Trapani I found myself craning upwards to gaze at the crest of Eryx, printed on the unfaltering blue of the evening sky, still touched by the sun’s rays. You could see a dabble of ancient wall and some higgledy-piggledy towers and minarets just below the summit. They must mark the site of the now vanished temple of Aphrodite. From the rugged Cyclopean bases the walls mounted in a faltering and somewhat ramshackle fashion — improvised in layers, in tiers, in afterthoughts and false starts — Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Norman.

Once we had broken the back of the ascent, the road spanned pleasant but lonely pinewoods which scented the still air and led us in mysterious hesitant fashion to the gates of the little town, the Porte Trapani, where Roberto got down for a long confabulation with a clerk from the Mairie while the rest of us set about digging into our luggage for pullovers. The dusk was about us now though the higher heavens were still lit by the sun and up there the swifts darted and rolled, feasting on insects. A chill struck suddenly and the Bishop shivered.

There had been a hitch, said Roberto, and we had been switched to an older hotel; this was irritating. Like all guides he decried the old-fashioned and only respected modernity. But in this case there was no need for apologies; the hotel was a fine old-fashioned tumbledown sort of place but with all the right amenities. Mario turned the bus round and conducted us steeply downhill upon a forest road; but it was not far, for we emerged upon a sort of ledge like an amphitheater above the sea. It was a spacious site and belonged to spacious times when they built hotels with comfortable billiard rooms and lounges and terracotta swimming pools. It was fine to be thus perched over the sea in the middle of a pine forest. The wooden floors creaked under our feet in comfortable fashion. There were several dusty bars full of dusty half-full liqueur bottles. But at the back underneath the dining room there came a short stretch of forest followed by an astonishing vertical drop — a sheer drop to the bottom of the world as represented now in diagrammatic fashion by a Trapani with its saltpans and harbor picked out in lights. We were a bit below the castle here and the little town was not visible. A heavy mist from the precipice rose and dispersed, rose and dispersed. “It’s all very well, but I have got cold feet and I want my money back,” said Beddoes to the distress of Roberto who took everything he said seriously. Despite the season the mountain chill and the fatigue had chastened us and we were glad to settle for a drink and dinner and early bed.

The Count walked about in the dark for a while before turning in — I saw the glow of his cigar. Deeds found a crossword in an ancient paper while Miss Lobb replaced her book and appropriated another. I retired to my narrow wooden chamber which reminded me a bit of a ship’s cabin, or a room in a ski chalet. The wood smelled lovely and it was not too cold to step out upon the balcony with its great view. All along the horizon line there was a tremulous flickering of an electrical storm, soundless from this great distance. It reminded me of the only naval engagement I have ever witnessed — if that is the correct word; the ships were all out of sight and only this steady flicker (followed centuries later by the thunder of guns) was to be seen. It went back and forth regular as a scythe stroke.

I watched, straining to hear the following thunder, but none came for ages. It was up here, perhaps in this very room that Martine had spent a night of “intense nervous expectation.” It was so intense that she could not sleep, and it was at last with weary elation that she had watched the dawn break over the exhausted sea. She felt as if she had escaped whatever it was that had been haunting her subconscious in the form of vague premonitions of something doom laden which she would encounter here at Erice. Nor was she completely wrong. Nor had she escaped, for months afterwards she realized that it was here, and more especially on that sleepless night, that she had felt the first twinges in the joints, the first stiffness of the neck and backbone which were only to declare their meaning long months afterwards. “I recognize now in retrospect just what I went to Erice to find. It was a rendezvous which would finally lead me towards death — one must not fuss too much since it is everyone’s lot. Only now I know what I did not at Erice — I know roughly when. Yes, I am going into a decline in a year or two. Or so they say, the professors in Rome. I like the Victorian phrase, don’t you? It has pride and reserve — though I was never a woman of ice, was I?”

But all this was at another season, and the hotel had been deserted, and the rock levels of Venus’s temple had been smothered in tiny spring flowers she could not identify. Now I had followed her, not with quite such an acute apprehension of momentous happenings, but with something nevertheless which troubled and disturbed me and made me expectant. During that first night (I could hear the desultory click of billiard balls, where Beddoes was still up. Floors creaked.), during the long vigil she had spent some time

scratching about among the bewildering debris of legend and conjecture which makes everything Greek in Sicily such a puzzle. It is as if everything has been smashed into dust by a giant trip hammer; one can reach nothing coherent among these shattered shards; just the tantalizing hints and glints of vanished people and their myths. So finally one says, to hell with Daedalus the engineer, and first labyrinth maker — what did he find to do here in Sicily? Head of public works for old King Cocalos? Why did he assent to the murder of Minos his old patron? One becomes so weary of the oft-repeated tales which make up the historic pattern. It is hopeless! And then what about the ultra-famous temple of Venus — Astarte — Aphrodite — Venus — the goddess had diverse roots and multiple attributes? Everything, woman, wife, nurse, mother, Muse, as well as ritual prostitute.… There was no aspect she did not rule over. In this grim temple there was ritual prostitution, as well as fertility rites — while for the sailor the place was a notable navigational seamark to guide him to Trapani; and just as today the sailor asks for weather reports, so his ancestor took the omens for the voyage from the temple and acted according to whether they were fair or foul.

But how could it have disappeared so completely from sight, this world-famous place? Nothing but a tiny bit of stone ramp remains to mark the site of the temple. Nothing? Well, only this intangible feeling of dread, of something momentous preparing itself. And the empty sockets mock one in the one late banal head of Aphrodite.

Youth, beauty, death — the three coordinates of the ancient world. Martine wrote:

I told myself that in Sufism and Taoism (it would take too long to convince you that the original Astarte of Erice was much older than Greek) they do not have any truck with the notion of disease as we see it. They do not talk of getting cured but simply of modifying conduct. It is presumed that your wrong action has procured a disharmony with the universe which manifests itself in disease. I believe this with all my heart, but I also believe in destiny, as well as in just wearing out like a pot. Then there is another aspect of things — I hate the Christian notion of prayer as an act of propitiation. But I like the old Byzantine notion of turning it into a sort of heartbeat — each man his own prayer wheel so to speak. Everything you feel in Erice goes way back beyond any notion which the monkey mind or tongue can formulate. Into the darkness where those great vegetable forms, tuberose creatures, wait in order to munch your flesh when you are once in the ground. The chthonic gods and goddesses as they are so strangely called.…

The light went out — the hotel generator packed up at midnight. It was still very light — a white milky light as if of moonlight diffused through a silk screen. I was weary now and I set down my papers and slept — but it was a light, nervous sort of sleep without great density.

At about three I woke with a start and sat up to look at the forest. I thought at first what I had heard was muffled sobbing somewhere in the building. I am still not sure. But what had happened was that a powerful surge of wind had sailed upon the promontory and bent the pines. It made a sudden rich hum, like a sweep of strings long drawn out but slowly dying away. Then the quivering silence returned. But one felt excited, on the qui vive. It was exactly as if one woke in the middle of the night on the African veldt slowly to realize that the noise which had wakened one was the breathing of a lion. The forest stirred and shook and resettled itself. A kind of breath of music had passed over it — like breath passing over embers. No, there was nothing particularly disquieting or singular about it, but waking, I felt the need to get up and drink some water. It was icy. I went to the balcony and looked down at the necklace of lights etching in their diagram of Trapani. It was some time off dawn yet but I felt completely rested and wondered if I would get to sleep again. Hesitating there I suddenly caught sight of a figure advancing towards the hotel through the pines. It was the German girl and she was naked.

The light, though diffused, was extremely bright and I saw quite clearly that she had no clothes on. I wondered if she could be sleep walking but it did not seem so for she looked about her, turning her head now this way and now that. She carried her hands before her, palms turned up, but lightly and without emphasis. And her walk was slow and calm.

Perhaps the sweep of wind in the pines had woken her also, or else the forest had evoked in her her native Bavarian landscapes? Or more simply still, she felt the incoherent stirrings of a primeval inheritance — suppose she were, without realizing it, some Nordic goddess who had come on an accidental visit to a remote cousin called Aphrodite of Eryx? She walked slowly and calmly under my balcony and disappeared round the corner of the house. And that was all. I dwelt a little while on the spectacle, wondering about it. Then I turned in again and at once fell into the profound sleep which up to now had been lacking. The sun was up when I awoke. And the disquiet had been replaced by a calm elation. Yet in a sort of way I felt that it was a relief to have traversed the night without incident.

Breakfast was very welcome on that fine sunny day; and we had been promised a look at the castle before being spirited away to Segesta and thence Palermo. Our trip was soon going to be at an end, and the consciousness of it provoked a new sense of friendliness. Conversations became warmer and more animated. A Microscope helped the Japanese girl change a film. I looked curiously at Renata, the German girl, when she came down but she seemed perfectly normal and assured, and of course one could not question her about her nudist escapade. I wondered if her boy friend knew of it. They were both very obviously much in love and went to no pains to hide it — which crucified poor Roberto as he watched, biting his nails.

It was necessary to set the red bus to rights this morning, for the little town of Erice was only going to be a brief stop on the road to Segesta whence we would face a long haul into Palermo.

I rather feared the ardors of this journey but in fact the calculations of Roberto were fairly exact and we arrived at night not too late and not too fatigued. But Erice in that bright blue morning was something for a glider pilot’s eye or an eagle’s. The drops, the views, the melting sea. Light clouds frolicked way below us. The little town had tucked itself into the nape of the mountain while the successive fortresses had been squarely planked down on the site of the ancient temple, thus obliterating it. But the rock promontory, sticking out like a stone thumb, was a perfect emplacement for a place of worship. “It makes me wonder,” said Deeds, “since all the ancient shrines have served as Christian foundations for our churches, whether there isn’t always a little bit of the pagan devil leaking into the stonework of our Christian edifices. I would like to think there was; we seem such a rigid and unfunny lot. But I don’t think I dare ask the parson.”

The little town stumbled up and down its net of cobbled streets below the fortress garden. The architecture was all that one finds in the Aegean — houses built round a courtyard tessellated with colored pebbles and decorated with old corned beef tins full of sprouting basil and other sweet-smelling plants. It was Samos; it was Tinos all over again. We were warmly bidden to enter several courtyards to admire the arrangements of the house; these dark-eyed smiling people might have been Corfiots. The snug little courtyards bounded in their lives, and one felt that here, when once night fell and the mists began to climb up from the valley below, people did not hesitate to lock their courtyard gates. After midnight one could knock a long time on a door without getting an answer, for their world was both ancient and also one of contemporary goblins and fays. And with the temple site brooding up there.… But the domestic organization of their houses was that of birds’ nests, and they had all the human force which comes from living on top of one another in a small place; making room for children, for livestock, for everything important to life — and not less for the sacred icons which ensure that the dark spirits shall be kept at bay.

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.