NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (27 page)

Late in the day, I caught an express train to Messina. It was called “The Archimedes” (the mathematician was born in Siracusa, on the other side of Sicily) and it was due in Messina in a couple of hours.

More interesting than the fruit trees and the sight of the sea and the snowy peaks was the man next to me in the compartment, scribbling notations on sheets of paper lined for musical scores. He was murmuring, but he was not humming. He was thoroughly absorbed in his scribbling. Occasionally he tapped his foot. He was writing music?

I would not have believed such a thing was possible except that various people had claimed they had done it, the most famous example being Beethoven in his deafness.

The man was small and bald, about fifty, with a pleasant face. He quickly filled three sheets of paper with music. Then I interrupted him with a grunt.

He stopped tapping his feet. He smiled. “Yes?”

“Are you writing music?”

“Yes,” and showed me the sheet with beads and squiggles on it. “I usually write music on this train. It’s not hard.”

“But you have no instrument. There’s no music.”

“This is music. And I don’t need an instrument. I write from memory.”

“Amazing.”

“The music is already in my mind before I write it. When I get home I will continue.”

“In silence?”

“I use a piano at home for composing, but my favorite instrument is an accordion.”

This odd word
fisarmonica
I had learned in high school as a joke, and this was the first time in my life I had ever heard it spoken. And this man was a
fisarmonicista.

“It’s a typical Sicilian instrument. But I am the only composer of accordion music that I know. I think I might be the only one in Sicily. I love modern music, and mine has folkloric melodies in it.”

His name was Basilio. He had just been in Palermo playing in a piano bar, both piano and electric keyboard. Not only his own music but Frank Sinatra hits.

“‘Staranger Een Danah,’ ‘Conflowah Me,’ ‘Myweh’—they are the most beautiful,” he said, mingling English and Italian.

“You spend a lot of time traveling back and forth to Palermo.”

“I don’t have a problem. I’m not married,” he said, and laughed. “I have a girlfriend, though. My family is always asking me when I’m getting married, but I say to them, ‘Eh, what about my music?’ ”

We were passing more orchards and a stretch of coast where there were empty beaches.

“Look, all empty,” he said, seeing that I had glanced out the window. “It’s so lovely. Sicily is warm from March until October, but no one comes here—why?”

“Maybe something to do with the Mafia?”

“The newspapers! The newspapers! It’s all lies,” Basilio said. “All the news is about Mafia and danger. Eh, where’s the Mafia? Do you see them?”

“I haven’t looked,” I said, startled by his sudden energy.

“Forget it—it’s lies. As for beauty, listen to me—three-fourths of Sicily is untouched. Absolutely untouched! No one comes here—they’re afraid. Of what?”

“Yes, it is very pretty,” I said, wishing I had not roused his fury.

He was now talking to the other person in the compartment, a man in a heavy sweater and purple socks, holding on his lap a damp and stained parcel that stank of cheese.

“We have—what—a million people or so?” Basilio said.

“About a million,” the man agreed.

Surely more? I thought. In fact, there are more than five million people in Sicily.

“A little island. Not many people. And so that makes it all the more friendly,” Basilio said. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a writer, Basilio.”

“That’s great. Please, when you write”—he put his hands together in a little prayer gesture, then he held them apart, cupping them in a Do-me-a-favor mode—“tell people it’s nice here.”

It’s nice here. Lemons, oranges. Composers on trains.
Staranger Een Danah!

“I travel a little myself,” he said. “We find Sicilians everywhere. You don’t have to speak French or English. There’s always a Sicilian taxi driver!”

“You’ve been in Sardinia?”

“To my shame, no, not to Sardinia. The purest dialect is Sardinian—the worst is Bergamo. As for Corsica—what’s wrong with them? Why don’t the Corsicans admit they’re Italians?” He was laughing. “I love to travel, of course. Although I haven’t been to other places in Italy, I have been everywhere in Sicily.”

He sounded a bit like Henry David Thoreau, who wrote,
I have traveled much in Concord.

“Sicily fascinates me, the way the dialects here reflect Spanish, French, and Arabic.”

“I am headed for Siracusa.”

“One of the best places,” Basilio said. “Ancient. And natural too. Up north, the beaches are filthy. But here they are clean.”

We happened to be passing one that was brown with muddy water from runoff.

“Some of the beaches are a little muddy from the recent rains.”

“Very muddy, I’d say.” And they were strewn with such rubbish and
rocks, and bounded by trash-filled streams and open sewers. Italians were such litterers.

“It will pass! Listen, Germans come here in November and go swimming. For them the water is warm!”

Protesting that I was a wonderful person, and urging me to tell people how delightful Sicily was at all times of the year, he called out, “See you again!” and got off at Santa Agata di Militello. Then it was just small hot stations and embankments and so many tunnels it was as though we had traveled to Messina in the dark.

The most God-fearing places in Italy were those that had experienced a natural disaster; such an event was inevitably a goad to Italian piety, and nothing provoked prayer like a flood or an earthquake or a tidal wave. Messina had all three just after Christmas in 1908, when almost the entire city, in fact this whole corner of the island, was destroyed. Part of Calabria was also leveled. Almost a hundred thousand people died in the one-day disaster (earthquake at 5
A.M.
, tidal wave just after that, then flooding; cholera came later)—it was equivalent to the entire population of the city.

That is why there are no ancient buildings in Messina, though quite a lot of talk about how the Virgin Mary engaged in vigorous correspondence with Messina’s city fathers and reassured them, “We bless you and your city.” There is a large pillar in the harbor of Messina, too, with a statue of Mary, making a gesture of blessing that also looks as though she is dropping a yo-yo, and under it, for every ship to see, the same message in Latin,
Vos et ipsam civitatem benedicimus.

A melancholy plaque at Messina railway station records the fact that 348 railway workers died in the earthquake
(A pietoso ricordo dei 348 funzionari ed agenti periti nel terremoto del 28 dic MCMVIII).

It was easy enough to find a place to stay in Messina, and no problem eating, but apart from strolling along the harbor, and admiring the Calabrian coast across the straits—lumpy gray mountains streaked with snow—there was not much to do in this rebuilt city. It had obviously been
brought back to life, but it was not quite the same afterwards. Or perhaps it was something else.

I fell into conversation with a man in Messina who told me that, without any hesitation, Catania was an absolute haunt of crime.

Catania is a port about halfway between Messina and Siracusa on the southeast-facing side of the Sicilian triangle.

“The Mafia control the whole city,” he said.

Now and then you got one of these Sicilians who admitted flat-out that the Mafia was pervasive and dangerous; and they could be specific, too, about certain towns or cities.

“How do you explain it?”

“Business is good there. They get a share of it. And the drugs.”

“Because it’s a port?”

“That’s probably the main reason.”

“Palermo and Messina are also ports. So perhaps the Mafia is strong in these places as well.”

His reply was the Italian lip-droop and finger signal, a combination of affirmative gestures that meant
Indubitably.

I could well believe that Messina was one of the Mafia strongholds. Such a place seemed shut and unwelcoming and buzzing with suspicion. There was plenty of money to be made by getting a stranglehold on the port; it was so easy to be disruptive if you controlled the wharves. Organized crime was seldom entrepreneurial; it was mainly a lazy business of bullying and intimidation. The idea was to find someone with a cash flow and strongarm that person or business.

All areas of Italian life, even the Church, had been penetrated by the Mafia. In 1962, the Franciscan monks of the monastery of Mazzarino in central Sicily were put on trial, charged with extortion, embezzlement, theft, and murder. The prior, Padre Carmelo, was the capo of this band of Mafia monks. He was a sinister, sprightly man—greedy and libidinous, with Mazzarino in his foxy jaws. The monks were eventually found guilty of most of the charges at their trial in Messina. And it emerged that what was perhaps the most surprising aspect of their criminality was that it had not interfered with their religious routines. The fact that they entertained prostitutes, and ordered killings, and amassed large sums of money in their extortionate
activities never prevented their hearing confessions, saying masses, or preaching at funerals—in at least one case, the monk in question saying a funeral high mass and preaching piously over the body of a man he had ordered killed.

Italians use obscure gestures and elaborate euphemisms whenever they talk about criminal organizations—the Mafia in Sicily, the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria, the Camorra of Naples. Even the most specific word in Italian for the fees the gangsters charge to businessmen they threaten is somewhat vague—
tangenti.
It is a simple word, meaning “extras.” But anyone in the know defines it as “extortion.”

Bored with Messina—and anyway I would be back here next week to take the ferry to Calabria—I caught a train to Taormina, twenty-five miles down the coast.

Lovely beaches!
Basilio had said to me, but the beaches outside Messina were littered with old fridges and rusty stoves, junked cars, hovels, plastic trash and rusty tomato cans. Then it was just driftwood, and finally stony beaches. At Nizza di Sicilia station I saw my first tourists in Italy. They were of course Germans, two young women wearing army boots and heaving forty-pound rucksacks and studying their handbook
Sizilien;
they were sturdy, short-haired, sapphic.

They got off with me at Taormina, the elegant shoreline station. The town itself is high on a cliff, glittering and vertical.

At the station a man approached a conductor of a train going in the opposite direction and said, “Where are we?”

“Taormina Giardini,” the conductor said.

“And where are you going?”

“Venice.” And the conductor turned his back and reboarded the Venice Express, Siracusa to Venice, a long haul of more than seven hundred miles.

I began walking up the hill, thinking that it was not far, but a shrewd taxi driver followed me, guessing that I would get sick of the climb. He laughed when I got in.

“Gardens, lovely view,” he narrated, then glanced at the people by the road. “Germans.”

Farther along, he said, “English church. Beautiful, eh?” and paused. “Germans.”

They were the inevitable low season people wherever I went.

The main attraction at Taormina was said to be its ancient theater, built by the Greeks and completely remodeled by the Romans. But that was simply a backdrop, the classical excuse. Taormina had been taken up by the Edwardians as a place to droop and be decadent. It was a lovely town, but it was now entirely given over to tourists. There was nothing else generating income for the local people. It was one of the more anglicized seaside resorts of Italy, and though it was now simply a tourist trap, retailing ceramics, and postcards, and letter openers, and clothes of various kinds, it had once known true scandals, mainly imported ones, perpetrated by the northern Europeans escaping the cold winter. It was strictly seasonal. In the early part of this century all the hotels in Taormina were closed in the summer.

Taormina had been mainly for wealthy foreigners, though a title helped. Any number of sponging aristocrats idled away their time among Taormina’s flower gardens, and a German baron who was an unrepentant pederast became something of a local celebrity for taking photographs of young Italian boys holding what certainly looked like lengths of salami. These pictures were sold with views of Mount Etna in Taormina’s shops.

D. H. Lawrence had spent time in Taormina, writing poetry. His well-known poem “Snake” he had written in Taormina, describing how he had been standing in his pajamas and seen a thirsty snake and bashed it over the head; and how he had to expiate his pettiness. But snakes were not Lawrence’s problem in Taormina. His daily chore was finding ways to control his wife, Frieda, in her adulteries.

Night in Taormina was silence and skulking cats. These tourist towns shrank in the off-season, and yet at this time of year eighty years ago the place would have been thronged with visitors. Taormina’s season was the winter. Now it was busy mainly in the summer.

The next day, I found Lawrence’s house on the Via Fontana Vecchia, and walked up and down the main street, looking at the shops. I looked at the old amphitheater. The only other people there were the two German women from yesterday’s train.

But the spectacle here was not the amphitheater—it was the volcano, Mount Etna. I had not expected to get such a dramatic view. With lantana and palms and bougainvillea and marigolds, sunny and serene, it was hard
to imagine a prettier place or a more dramatic setting. The ancient Greeks praised Taormina in similar terms. But these days it exists only to be patronized and gawked at. It was not a place to live, only to be visited, one of the many sites in the Mediterranean that are almost indistinguishable from theme parks.

Looking down the coast, I was startled by the sight of it, an old bulgy mountain covered in snow, with a plume of smoke rising from its cone. The morning light took away its shadows and its grandeur and made it clumsy and pretty, with a splendor all its own, because its potbellied shape was unique for a mountain on this coast—and the sea so near emphasized its height.