Sicilian Carousel: Adventures on an Italian Island

8: Palermo

AND PALERMO, DESPITE the fine presence of a colorful capital, exuded simply stress. It was everything that we had come to Sicily to get away from! Yes, the physical amenities were there, the hotel was large and comfortable; but there had been a strike of personnel and the beds were not made, while the meals had to be on the self-service pattern and luggage had to be man hauled into lifts. Inevitably there was a bit of irritation and Roberto, always sensitive, began to feel once more that everything was his fault. It was late evening when we got in and we were offered a chance to see a few of the night spots, such as Mentobello Beach, and while this was pleasant it was touched very heavily with the brush of Palm Beach or Torquay and for that reason did not specially enchant us. The lighting in the hotel was precarious and early in the evening, due to some unspecified contingency, the bath water gave out and an official communiqué assured that it would not be restored until the following morning. It may be imagined that this did not lead to rejoicing, and the more acrimonious among us (the French take the first prize for selfishness and bad temper in moments of crisis) became very angry with Roberto who had the bar specially opened (there was no barman) in order to try and mollify them. Mario offered us a short bus tour of the town but there were few takers — especially when it was discovered that this extramural trip would cost a small supplementary sum. The sniffs of the French could have been heard a mile off. What was one to do?

I walked a bit and ate in a trattoria and then went straight to bed with a couple of paperbacks I had found in a kiosk. I was surprised to find how well Sartre came over in English and what an accomplished novelist he was. But I slept ill. I resorted to Mogadon to help — breaking my promise to myself.

Meanwhile Beddoes, who never seemed to go to bed, played his eternal pool in the bar and Deeds drank a quiet whisky and pondered the cricket scores in a brand new Times he had found in a waterfront kiosk. It was now the turn of Miss Lobb to produce an unusual reaction to circumstance. She had been very quiet all day, indeed rather sleepy. Now, seated in a dark corner of the bar not too far from Deeds she began to drink in a slow but extremely purposeful way — gin and soda, one following hard upon another. Gradually her quiet concentration forced itself upon the attention of Deeds who saw, to his astonishment, that Miss Lobb was showing signs of getting steadily drunker as glass succeeded glass. He felt alarm and concern, but after all her life was as much her own as her bank balance. What could he do, after all? Perhaps she had, in the course of a long bar life, contracted a touch of that blissful alcoholism which makes all the difference between despair and muddled indifference? Perhaps there was some past experience which ached her? Deeds felt sympathy and deep respect for Miss Lobb — who did not? But on she went.

He continued his careful analysis of the psychological weaknesses of the Hampshire eleven, and it was about eleven when he looked up to see that Miss Lobb’s eyes were swimming in tears. She was not actually sobbing or sniffing but, as if from some invisible fountain inside her, tears just welled out and rolled down her cheeks. Deeds felt acute embarrassment, which was succeeded by anxiety as he saw her rise and slowly cross the hall towards the front door of the hotel. Surely she was not going out into the streets like that? She walked with a certain slow majesty which some people would say was the authentic Dublin glide — just a hint of being on castors, propelled by dark interior forces. It was rather a dilemma for a quixotic Englishman; after all, if the girl had trotted off in search of adventure surely he could not intervene. On the other hand if she got into trouble…. A perplexed Deeds pocketed his Times and set off in tactful pursuit of the lady, keeping a fair distance behind her and not in any way trying to bring himself to her attention. It was rather like following a sleepwalker about. But he felt his position acutely — after all he did not know her very well. She was simply a traveling companion. But on the other hand he could not bear the thought that she might by some accident of hazard find herself in a situation where she needed help. He followed.

Miss Lobb walked absently along the sea front for a while, apparently having decided to let the sea wind sober her up a little; but from the occasional glimpse Deeds caught of her face it seemed that her tears still flowed. She turned into the side streets and walked along the sides of a rectangle in order to emerge once more on the sea front which was not completely empty of life at that hour. There were a few rather undesirable-looking youths about and Miss Lobb appeared to wake up to the fact for she suddenly turned round, as if to return to the hotel, and found herself face to face with Deeds. She smiled at him and said: “O I am so glad to see you,” which at once set Deeds’s doubts at rest concerning his appropriateness on the scene. She now relaxed and settled upon a bench with an air of sleepy devoutness, and after a moment’s hesitation he sat beside her and put his arm through hers, a gesture which she appeared to find reassuring. “It’s this damned old anniversary of my mother’s death,” she explained at last, drying her tears in a pocket-handkerchief. “It always catches me, and I get the migraine.” She was in a sodden depression but not drunk, and Deeds, after showing an appropriate sympathy which was not unfeigned — and which contained a good portion of relief that she was in her right mind — suggested the only sort of therapy suitable for such cases, such circumstances, such moods. “We must walk it off,” he said briskly, glad to have such a simple solution at hand. So walk they did.

All this of course he described to me on the morrow over a late breakfast, and I envied him the experience. They had walked half the night, in fact, and in fairyland. The sea front was more or less folded up and deserted but as they advanced upon the interior of the town they came to the margins of the darkness, and saw everywhere lights budding and springing up. It was an inferno of activity, and they realized that they were intruding upon the preparations for a great fête — in fact the name day of Palermo’s patron saint, Saint Rosalie. Half the great city was still alive and awake, for apart from the numerous artisans who were busy arranging the decorations the streets were full of wide-eyed onlookers and curious children. The crowds walked up and down in this atmosphere of impromptu kermess, watching the colored awnings going up, the electric light fixtures being set and tried out, watching the Catherine wheels and other fireworks being settled on their pinions. And tall as giraffes, moved the three-storey trolleys normally used to change the municipal electric light bulbs but now pressed into service to string out rolls and rolls of colored bunting across the streets. Children were bathing in the fountains, infected by all this blazing light and excitement. A whole market garden of flowers had sprung up in one quarter which they doused down with water every few minutes. It gave off a smell of wet earth like paradise. No wonder the hotels were short of bathwater! Livestock too was coming into town in lorries and being planked down beneath the booths and stalls; pigeons, ducks, quail and chickens, and morbidly sensitive rabbits! Miss Lobb thought herself in Paradise, and she was sad to think that she could not at that late hour buy a rabbit or a pot of basil. But the stress of the alcohol was diminishing now, and it was clear that by the time they regained the hotel she would be all right again. Deeds, combining therapy with culture, told her the story of Saint Rosalie.

Walking lightly thus, arm in friendly arm, they joined themselves to the dense groups of curious promenaders, who had turned the principal streets into an impromptu midnight Corso. The crowd swayed and swelled, ebbed this way and that, just like batches of seaweed in a sea grotto. It was quite simply bliss, and the history of Rosalie gave a kind of folklorique color to all that was going on round them. Deeds, who had had a lot of practice telling stories to his own children, found no difficulty in enlisting Miss Lobb’s tenderest feelings on behalf of this little fifteen-year-old niece of William the Good who was so overcome by feelings of sanctity that she disappeared from the face of the earth — translated, some say, by angels direct to heaven. In fact, she had retired to a hermit’s cave on Monte Pellegrino, there to pass a long life of anonymity, and finally there to die without letting anybody know what she had done. This was in 1159. The long silence fell and she was forgotten, all trace of her was lost. Then in 1624 while the town was in the dread grip of the plague, a holy man was troubled by a dream of her. He dreamed her history, and quite clearly saw in a vision that her remains lay buried in a mountain cave — he could indicate the exact spot. He suggested to the proper authorities that if these relics, which had in the interval acquired great magical powers of healing, were reverently gathered and carried in triumphal procession round the walls of the city, there was a sporting chance that the plague would abate.

This was duly done and Saint Rosalie saved the city and became its patron. The relics of the little saint were placed in a silver coffer and duly housed in the main cathedral of Palermo while her festival (July 15) leads off several days of rejoicing and present giving, with brilliant and extravagant firework displays and religious services. It was the dress rehearsal to this event that Deeds had so luckily attended with Miss Lobb. They were so thrilled with all there was to see that they did not get back to the hotel for several hours. By then Miss Lobb was completely sobered and went to bed with expressions of rapturous gratitude. Deeds felt ennobled, if a bit exhausted, or at any rate so he admitted. But it was while he was embarking on an account of his wild night out with Miss Lobb that Saint Rosalie intruded on our sunlit breakfast in person, so to speak. Maroons started going off all over the town and for those not in the know there was a moment of pardonable anxiety. I thought the strikers had blown up the hotel. The Bishop, who was in the pool, almost gave signs of cardiac failure — he thought for a moment that the Catholics had struck home. But after the first smoke had cleared a smiling Roberto came to explain the noise, and suddenly we all noticed that everything was all right again, the stress and fatigue. We were all friends again and full of joy abundant — a new mood had set in, though there was no real reason for it unless it be a change of wind in the night. Or the soothing effect of little Rosalie’s sanctity.

Good humor, like the bath water, had all of a sudden returned to the company and breakfast in the bright sunlight of a Palerman summer morning was almost a convivial affair. After the onslaught of the maroons had been explained away, that is. But this morning we were to bend our mind to sterner cultural things than the processions which had already started forming in the streets of the capital. We were going to visit the Archaeological Museum in order to see the sculptural treasures which the wretched archaeologists had carefully removed from Selinunte. It was distasteful to be forced to replace them mentally in order to admire them — I was reminded of my youth when I used to traipse round the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, trying in a dispirited fashion to replace them upon the Acropolis which I had not as yet seen, with the help of photographs. It did not work, context is everything; besides, these were decorative additions to structure not independent art works.

PALERMO, THE CATHEDRAL

Nevertheless the Sala de Selinunte contains real treasures like the famous Zeus and Hera on their wedding day, Heracles strangling an Amazon; they brought back memories of the deserted dunes, melting away in the sunlight above the lonely blue sea. There were other fine things too, from Himera and from Agrigento — indeed the museum is apparently the largest Greek Classical Museum outside metropolitan Greece itself. But something stuck, some subtle change of key, of rhythm; it was like a grain of sand in a Thermos flask. One somehow couldn’t receive the full impact of these disembodied objects, however beautiful they were. Something that Deeds said made me realize that the reason was, of course, Saint Rosalie. What had happened was that we had stepped out of the Greek and Roman world, the historical Sicily of ancient times; and we had entered a new Sicily, the Arab, Norman, Spanish Sicily with its own notions of temporal beauty. The arrival of Saint Rosalie had been timely — together with her uncle William the Good — she symbolized this sudden change of axis and emphasis which was the message that Palermo held for us. We were now in modern times, and the effect of the Greek spirit had become distant, diluted, all but lost under the waves of cultures more recent if just as agitated. That was why these precious Greek relics seemed to lose their density and weight. Yes, objectively one realized that they must be seen, for even as fragments many of them were superb. Nor do I really know if the other members of the party shared this queer feeling that they were somehow dispossessed of their birthright in being put on view in this spacious and beautifully lit museum. But altogether it was an hour agreeably spent in a cool cavern of sculpture and nobody could pretend to be the worse for the experience.

It was a pleasant walk too to rejoin the little bus which waited for us in a small piazza nearby. Of course I realized that we would hardly see a tithe of the treasures available in Palermo, for we were leaving for Messina in the early afternoon. Nevertheless when I actually stood in the hushed shadow of the cathedral in Monreale and waited my turn to enter its august portals, I knew what it was. It was as if we had turned a page in the storybook which was Sicilian history and emerged into a period which echoed the most unusual juxtaposition of styles imaginable. This pure Palermo Sicilian is an extraordinary thing, the most beautifully realized merging of the grave and lofty Norman shapes with riotous and intricate Byzantine and Moorish decorative motifs, a brilliant syncopation of the grave central theme. It was my first taste of Sicilian baroque-Moorish — I think there is no established designation for this weird Gaudi-Arabian-Gothic. But it comes off in a magnificently innocent and playful way. The central religious solemnity of the impulse has been rendered childish, naïve and touching as a child’s view of the Garden of Eden. Most of this work belongs to the period of Norman rule. Indeed the cathedral was the work of William the Good, while in its precincts lay the tombs of the other Williams, Good, Bad and Downright Indifferent; but no tomb for Rosalie who had first brought us this inkling of a sea change.

A whole town has grown round the cathedral but it draws its life from this great munificent work, one of the wonders of Christendom today. The marble rood screen, the sparkling mosaics and the gorgeous Byzantino-Moorish decoration make the whole thing feel as vibrant in color as the heart of a pomegranate. Yet quickened and excited as one was by the novelty of this style one could not help asking oneself who actually worshipped here: or did all the denominations regard it as their own altar of worship? “You have a point,” said Deeds who had read all the relevant books on the subject. “The dons seem to think that the style grew up as a kind of political accident; the Normans wanted to create an all-inclusive style for political reasons — they wanted a home-grown Sicilian style to emphasize the separateness of the island, its political uniqueness. With all the many races and religions it was very necessary to seek some kind of unifying motif. Maybe so. Myself I think that it was even simpler — giving work to the local artisan, creating jobs for the locals in order to keep them happy. It was completely unplanned; it just happened that the mix was a godsend, and worked. Genius in fact but quite accidental. And the jobs kept the chaps quiet and silenced criticism. These bloodthirsty northern invaders were sometimes relatively peaceful people and longed for a quiet life; why not mollify local resentments and satisfy local needs? Unless you prefer to believe that old William was an architectural genius and had the whole thing built to specification. I don’t myself.”

And there we had to leave the matter for I was determined to spend a few moments loitering in the cool and water-sounding colonnades which stretched away tenebrously from one side of the main building. Deeds left me for a moment to buy a few postcards in order to illustrate his remarks with views of the Cefalu Cathedral.

Yes, it was a new world with a different world style and attitude. The various elements of this Norman-Oriental thing had no right to fuse so happily together and form something which was downright cheeky exuberant but without archness. After all, when one thought of the relative gravity and staticness of the two differing styles — Norman architecture reaching to high heaven like a grave bear, and the Oriental feeling for intaglio, for marquetry, for the involuted forms of the Arabic script. No, it should not have worked so marvelously well as to constitute something preeminently Sicilian. One thinks of a place where the marriage did not work — Cyprus, where the Turks knocked off the towers of medieval cathedrals to add minarets; and of course the pictures one has seen of the Acropolis transformed into a mosque.… Here the whole thing is a triumphant success — would that something similarly fond and creative had emerged on the political scale after the long suppurating Crusades. I made my way slowly back to the huge doors and looked for traces of my friend. He was busy postcard hunting in the veritable tourist bazaar that had grown up in the little square outside the cathedral. What mountains of rubbish in bad taste the poor tourist is obliged to buy, for want of something pretty to spend his souvenir money on. Or have they gauged our taste aright? It would seem so. One wonders what the old Greek equivalent would have been — in the time of Pausanias say. Sellers of magic herbs, snake oil (still used in Cyprus against the sting of scorpions), spells.… “Nothing ever changes,” said Deeds comfortably when I broached the idea to him. “Any Greek cathedral or Italian has always been like that; first of all it was a place of pilgrimage, you came from far away, you bought a candle, you left a thank you gift or an ex voto. Now in order to mark the event you felt you ought to buy a medal or a trinket which would prove to your pals back at home that you had actually done the trip — you had been to Mecca.”

“And that would give you a right to call yourself Hadji-Deeds or Hadji-Durrell?”

“Exactly. And you would sport a green turban.” “It would be simpler than buying all this trash.” There was a yellow-eyed man, a gipsy, leaning against a wall and playing monotonously upon a Jew’s harp, its dull twang rising above the chatter and turmoil of the market. His wife was circulating in the crowd touting for fortunes. Mario was oozing his bus through the crowd with the slowness of oil in order to place it square before the entrance. I suddenly realized that it was crazy — to leave Palermo with so much unseen, and with the prospect of a night of carnival to witness. But our itinerary had been fixed by other hands, elsewhere, and with another part of me I felt I ought to stick with my fellow travelers. Anyway it was not for long — the Carousel would come to an end at Messina, whence we would be scattered all over Taormina for the “supplementary free week,” but in different hotels. Nevertheless … “It seems mad not to stay longer,” I said, and Deeds agreed but added, “You can come back in your free week, just rent a little car. This trip is only a spot reconnaissance.” It was the right way to look at it. Superficial as it was I felt that the admiring recognition of the force of the new architecture was really the key to this end of Sicily. I had grasped the language of its later invaders. Moreover, I had bitten off a sufficiently large chunk of the Norman Oriental aesthetic to chew on for the present; a glimpse of Cefalu Cathedral would help, of course, and that was scheduled for the late afternoon. We regained our places and moved slowly off down the long glades towards the capital, whence the roads led outwards again along a grim stretch of coast, towards Cefalu.

The pace had become smarter for we had ambled away a bit too much of our allotted time in the museum; Mario even skipped on to a motorway for a few miles to take in the slack. Then back along a rather grim seacoast, with monotonous outcrops of black cliff covered in sea holly, and black beaches presumably of volcanic ash. Our lunch tables had been set out on a fine shady terrace with a marvelous view but the little beach below was disappointingly rocky and pebbled. Nevertheless a few of our braver members ventured upon a quick dip before lunch over which Roberto presided in an expensive scarlet bathing costume. He was obviously dying to save a life, but nobody gave him the chance. The lunch was banal but the fine setting made it feel almost sumptuous. The Germans held hands in a purposeful way. Beddoes, to everyone’s surprise, took a piece of knitting out of his pocket and started to work his way round the heel of a sock. The dentist’s lady was so amused by this that she offered to darn the hole for him, an offer which he accepted with grace. Roberto, wounded by the signs of German intimacy, played with the cutlery and went hot and cold by turns.

Today despite the superb sunlight one felt a certain heat heaviness which made one think of earthquakes — and what more appropriate since we were heading for Messina. I gathered that normally the Carousel spent the last week together in a Taormina hotel with all excursions optional; but this year there had been trouble with strikes and all European bookings had become problematical. Hence the rather ad hoc arrangements for Taormina where each of us found himself alone in a separate lodging. I was surprised to verify Deeds’s earlier opinion about being sorry to part with my fellow travelers. It was true that I felt a twinge of regret; but I also felt a twinge of relief — for it would have been unthinkable to extend this mode of travel over a longer space of time without coming to dislike, even to hate, it. Had the distances been greater and the stresses more intense we should all now be life enemies instead of friends.

A wind off the sea had got up and on the coast road tugged at our tires like a puppy, making the task of Mario rather more difficult since he wanted to put on a bit of speed. The sea rose. Roberto made a short apologia through the microphone about the wicked way we were just about to treat Cefalu. “You will begin to complain and say it is a scandal to rush into the cathedral and then rush away again. But please try to be charitable. What would you have felt about the Agency if we had cut out Cefalu altogether, saying that there wasn’t enough time, which there isn’t?” It was marvelous the way he found his way among the English tenses; it proved that he always felt called upon to make this statement at this particular place, so that the little speech was well rehearsed. Indeed it was not long before one of the sharper loops of the coast road brought us up on a wooded knoll from which we saw the characteristic profile of Cefalu facing us across a blue bay. I found it astonishingly like the headland of Paleocastrizza in Corfu. It looked like a great whale basking in the blueness — a mythological ruminant of a fish, dreaming of some lost oceanic Eden, its eyes shut. The town clustered close about it. It was very beautiful and Roberto was right really — it was no place to treat with tourist disrespect. But on the other hand, was he right to bring the matter up at all? The Microscopes, for example, would have noticed nothing untoward in our haste, whereas this little speech only tended to make them feel that they ought to ask for their money back. But the Bishop felt the full cultural enormity of the thing for he sunk his chin on his breastbone and gave out the impression of seething like hot milk.

We nosed into this most atmospheric of little towns on a low throttle, for the streets were crowded with holiday-makers in different stages of undress; Mario had by now convinced us that he could put our bus through the eye of a needle if he wished. But Cefalu was quite a trial with its narrow and encumbered medieval streets, and the cathedral lay right at the end of a loop of oneway streets which did not seem to correspond to the traffic realities of the little spa, where ten bicycles might block all the traffic for days, it would seem. But what was good was that the unafraid pedestrian had taken possession of the place and everything conformed to his walking pace. This at once made things harmonious and pleasant — at this speed you could lean out and buy an ice, for the French ladies did, or a clutch of gaudy postcards, for the old Count did, or a charm against the evil eye, for Roberto did. This he handed to Beddoes to preserve him from harm. In a way it sort of accredited us to the townspeople of Cefalu and made us feel at home straight off. But owing to the fool one-way street we had to do that last hundred yards on foot, a pleasant martyrdom for the square in which the church stands is a handsome one.

Once again we had the place more or less to ourselves, and once more Miss Lobb took the opportunity to say a short and comforting prayer to her creator — or was she just praying for the death of Beddoes, as Deeds rather wickedly suggested? Not Miss Lobb, the spirit of London town. Deeds, who knew the place well, elected to spend his time in the lofty porch while the rest of us perambulated the shadowy interior of the building. He was unwilling to snuff out his pipe which was drawing particularly well that day. One of the French ladies had beautiful teeth and was most conscious of the fact, for she showed them frequently in a large smile.

It had become somewhat automatic as a gesture and it was interesting to see her giving this warm alert smile of recognition to inanimate objects, even to the saints in the frescoes. But Roberto was right about Cefalu — the church of Roger II was too important to miss out. It was a wonderful example of the same Norman-Byzantine-Spanish-baroque which had been such a singularly new experience in the island. The building was started in 1131, but took over a century to complete, so that it reflects more than one cycle of historic changes in forms and materials. But William had vowed to have a cathedral built in this place after he nearly suffered shipwreck on the headland. It was the customary way to express gratitude at that epoch, and we have been the ones to benefit from it.

Half an hour was soon spent and once more we sailed out from the crags of Cefalu and up on to the snaky coastal road which would carry us from headland to headland, past Himera with its Doric temple, towards Messina which would be our penultimate port of call. Tomorrow Mario would distribute us all over Taormina to continue our Sicilian adventure alone. Alone!

It was dusk when we arrived at Messina — sunset is an ideal time to take in the marvelous views of the harbor, subject of so many Victorian watercolors. But the earthquake which devastated Messina still rumbles on historically — it is a black date which has permanently marked the historical calendar of modern Sicily, grim and cruel, as if in contrast to the sweet Theocritan landscapes of this part of the island. The words have a kind of density, an echo, like the date of the Fall of Constantinople. We did several of the standard views of the town — the whole island seems to be one extraordinary belvedere — and then disembarked at the hotel in rather a sober mood. The only cultural fixture was a glimpse of the cathedral on the morrow. Tonight we were free to visit the town with Roberto or dine and go to bed. No one was in the mood to go out, it seemed. So in a shuffling unpremeditated fashion we congregated in the bar to exchange visiting cards and addresses against the parting tomorrow. Someone offered a drink all round in honor of the German engagement and this was loyally drunk.

It was a little sad.

I went for a trot round the town to do a little bit of shopping, and to gather what impressions I could of its relative newness, its rawness — for it had been laboriously put together again after the cataclysm. I found it atmospherically most appealing, perhaps the town in Sicily where life would be the most delightful. In trying to analyze why I discovered that it was once more the question of scale. Since the earthquake the houses had been limited to two or three stories, so that it had all the spacious charm of somewhere like the Athens Plaka under the Acropolis, or like Santa Barbara in California. The minute your architecture dwarfs people, shows disrespect for the purely human scale, you start to stunt their minds and chill their spirits. Messina was a fine proof of this notion of human relevance to architecture — a model in fact. And on the morrow these views were underlined in the most overwhelming way by the qualities of the cathedral.

VIEW OF MESSINA BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE.

At the hotel our identities were looked into by a couple of suspicious looking carabinieri to the intense annoyance of Roberto who felt it was a slur on the good name of the Company. Did they think he was ferrying carloads of criminals all over Sicily? But I missed this visitation.

Italy of course was in the grip of an inflation far worse than anything we had seen back in France; but one singular aspect of it was the sudden disappearance of small change. It had just happened in Messina. Nothing under a thousand-lira note seemed to exist and in order that business should continue as usual one was forced to accept change in kind so to speak. For example, in order to buy some toothpaste, aspirin, and tissues, which I did need, I was forced to accept as “change” a pair of silk stockings, a surgical bandage for sprains, and a pair of nail scissors. This sort of thing was going on in all the shops with the result that people were being loaded down like Christmas trees with things they didn’t want. I even got a telephone tally of nickel as part of my change in a tobacconist’s shop. It represented the price of a local phone call. Of course we were obliged to carry over this strange kind of primitive barter into our own lives — I tipped the hall porter with the telephone tally and an unwanted Tampax which had strayed into my chemist’s bundle. It was quite childish and chaotic. But the staff of the hotel seemed used to accepting these strange collections of objects instead of money tips. And finally one got quite used to going out to buy one orange and coming back with a bunch of grapes and a pound of figs as well. In a couple of days we had accumulated dozens of unwanted objects like this.

The evening was a trifle saddening; we all hung about a little, rather feeling that perhaps the situation called for a little speech from Roberto, or a more formal farewell to each other. But timidity and lack of organization held us imprisoned in the mood until it was too late.

Messina was a calm and tranquil place to spend a night, but we slept badly, afflicted by a woebegone sense of anti-climax. Even breakfast was an unusually subdued affair. We packed and loaded our gear automatically like the experienced tourists we had by now become. Then we swung off in the bright sunshine to have one glance at the cathedral before taking the long coastal road to Taormina. Here again was a fascinating aesthetic experience for me, and one which I had not expected. I knew that, like the rest of the town, the cathedral had been shattered to bits by the famous earthquake, and had been more or less shoved together. I had little hopes that this forced restoration of the great building would be a success. It is a quite fantastic success; it has been done so simply and without pretensions, executed with a bright spontaneity of a Zen watercolor. Whatever they found left was run into the new structure which itself was graced with an anti-earthquake armature. The result is simply marvelous; the huge building is among the most satisfying and gorgeous to be enjoyed in the island; and one is moved by the almost accidental simplicity with which it has all been brought off. Deeds was touched by my enthusiasm, and was glad, he said, that he had not over-praised the thing.

And so off along the coast road in the fine sunlight towards the last port of call. On the last headland Roberto called a halt and we made a few color photographs of the Carousel which I knew I would never see. Somewhere, in discarded photograph albums, they would lie, melting away year by year.

And soon we ran in on Taormina and the melancholy distribution began; the French ladies and the Count with his wife were put down on the road to Naxos, the Japs disappeared, Beddoes was dropped at a pension which looked like the headquarters of the Black Hand. It was indeed like the casualty list of a battalion, men dropping away one by one. “So long!” “Bye-bye!” “See you again I hope.” “Ring me in London!” “Come to Geneva, but let me know.” Mario had become sulky with sadness and Roberto was a little bit on edge too it seemed. We sorted out baggage and shook hands. Deeds disappeared into an orange grove with his bags, promising that we should meet again for a drink somewhere in the island. He had a few more visits to make as yet. The pre-Adamic couple walked away into the sunlight with an air of speechless ecstasy. I was the last one — the higher we went the fewer we became; my little pension was in the heart of Taormina — which is built up in layers like a wedding cake. But at last my turn came. I embraced Mario and Roberto and thanked them for their kindness and good humor. I meant it. They had done nobly by us.

Taormina

We three men sit all evening

In the rose garden drinking and waiting

For the moon to turn our roses black,

Crawling across the sky. We mention

Our absent friend from time to time.

Some chessmen have tumbled over,

They also die who only sit and wait,

For the new moon before this open gate.

What further travel can we wish on friends

To coax their absence with our memory—

One who followed the flying fish beyond the

Remote Americas, one to die in battle, one

To live in Persia and never write again.

She loved them all according to their need

Now they are small dust waiting in perfect heed,

In someone’s memory for a cue.

Thus and thus we shall remember you.

The smoke of pipes rises in pure content

The roses stretch their necks, and there

She rides at last to lend

A form and fiction to our loving wish.

The legions of the silent all attend.