Diversions in Sicily Part 8

When the picture is on the mountain it is the custom for the women of the town to go to the Matrice in the evening to pray. When it is at Custonaci they go to the balio, where a stone prie-Dieu has been built for them from which they can see the sanctuary. Here they will go and pray every evening until such time as the next calamity brings the picture up among them again.

CUSTONACI

CHAPTER XII--FAITH AND SUPERSt.i.tION

The brigadier and the corporal both sent ill.u.s.trated postcards to me from Selinunte and I sent them postcards in return, but the corporal unaccountably desisted after being transferred to another station; for instead of returning home in about a month, as he had intended, he signed on for a further term of service. Perhaps on his change of address one of my cards may have gone wrong in the post, and he may have considered that I was neglecting him. I have never seen him again. The next time I went to Trapani the brigadier, who had been transferred to Custonaci, was guarding the coast between Monte San Giuliano and Cofano; I put off going to see him, however, because it was cold and wet and windy, not weather for excursions into places beyond the reach of civilization. I talked to Mario, the coachman, about it, and he said he would be ready to take me if a fine day occurred. I had another reason for wishing to go to Custonaci: I thought it due to the Madonna di Custonaci that I should pay my respects to her in her sanctuary after having been present at her festa on the mountain.

Suddenly there came a fine Sat.u.r.day. I went out immediately after breakfast, found Mario, told him to be ready in half an hour, ordered a basket of provisions from the hotel, put a few things together in case they might be wanted, and we started.

The road took us inland and round the foot of Mount Eryx, through Paparella and the other villages where some of the wealthy Trapanese have their summer villas, and after a most lovely drive of three hours, we arrived at Custonaci. The village is on a low rocky cliff which rises not from the sea but from an extensive plain. Standing on the cliff one looks over the plain with Monte San Giuliano closing the view on the left and on the right the mountain promontory of Cofano, a great, isolated, solemn, grey rock, full of caves, sprinkled with green and splashed with raw sienna; between them, two or three kilometres away, is the sea which, I suppose, formerly covered the plain and washed the foot of the cliff.

Prominent on the sh.o.r.e, rather nearer to Cofano than to Monte Erice, is the caserma, an oblong white bungalow, and scattered upon the plain are a few fishermen's cottages, but no other dwellings. We first sent a boy off to the caserma to tell the brigadier I had come, and then Mario, after attending to his horses, joined me in the only trattoria in the place and we ate our provisions.

After lunch we went to the sanctuary, the home of the famous wonder-working picture of the Madonna which hangs over the altar. The sagrestano pulled aside the curtains while another man pulled a cord which operated a wheel hung with bells of different sizes, thereby making a tremendous and discordant noise and signifying to all within earshot that the Madonna was being unveiled, in case any one might care to offer up a pet.i.tion.

The light is better in the sanctuary than in the Matrice upon the Mountain, but this picture of the happy Mother with the Child at her breast holding three golden ears of corn did not thereby seem to gain as a work of art. The people, however, look upon it less as a work of art than as the representation of a divinity who lives for them as surely as Venus lived for the Romans, Aphrodite for the Greeks and Astarte for the Phoenicians, and as surely as other G.o.ddesses have lived here for other peoples. Cofano, looking across to Mount Eryx, saw the earliest appear on some prehistoric morning when man, born of a woman and living by the fruits of the earth, fashioned his first image of the Giver of Life and Increase, vivified it with the spirit of his faith and offered before it the homage of his praise and grat.i.tude. His faith gradually lost its freshness and suffered corruption like the manna which the disobedient children of Israel left until the morning, so that the image of the G.o.ddess became a sepulchre and a breeding-place of unclean imaginings.

Then man, seeing that virtue had gone out of the work of his hands, fashioned a new one, scarcely different in form, and breathed into it the breath of a new faith, scarcely different from the old. Again his faith carried with it into its stagnant prison the germs of its own decay.

Thus was established the recurrent rhythm of the death and resurrection of the deity. Cofano has watched them come and go and will one day see the Madonna dethroned to make way for her successor. But that day will not dawn until, in the Sanctuary or upon the Mountain, the peasants shall stand unmoved before this touching symbol of the universal worship of Motherhood.

The brigadier was in sight when we came out of the church and before we had met in the piazza I became aware that I had caught cold--not a very remarkable thing in a wet January with a Sicilian wind. He was as courteous as ever, though a little inclined to grumble because I had not let him know when to expect me so that he could have met me on my arrival. I pleaded uncertainty caused by the bad weather, and he promised to forgive me if I would spend the night at the caserma instead of returning to Trapani. He would give me his own room all to myself, for he had to be out on duty guarding the coast between Monte San Giuliano and Cofano from 9 p.m. till 6 a.m. and, if he should find the coast quiet and wish to lie down in the early morning, there would be no difficulty, because one of his men had left him, so that he had four beds and only three guards to put into them.

It was getting late; we had taken longer to come than I had antic.i.p.ated, the horses were tired. There is no inn at Custonaci, but I knew that Mario could manage somehow; so I accepted, and we went through the village, down the cliff by a steep and difficult path, and across the plain. On the way we talked of our day at Selinunte and I asked after his companions there, but he had heard nothing further of any of them.

Soon we met one of the guards who had come from the caserma to look for us. He crossed himself as he told us that, coming along, he had heard the bells ring and knew that the picture of the Madonna was being unveiled. He was a man of few words, or found our conversation uninteresting, for he said nothing else all the rest of the way.

The caserma is quite close to and facing the sea. All round the door is a skeleton porch of wood, which in the summer is fitted with wire gauze to keep out the mosquitoes. Going through this, we were in the general room where I was introduced to the other two guards. Behind this room, with windows looking inland over the plain towards Custonaci, is the kitchen, and these two rooms make up the middle of the bungalow. The right wing consists of the brigadier's sitting-room, out of which a door leads to his bedroom, and the left wing is all one large room, occupied by the men as their bedroom.

The brigadier took me into his sitting-room to rest. There were only a few things in it, merely his table with his books and official papers and three or four chairs; but everything, as at Selinunte, was clean and tidy. On the wall was an extensive eruption of postcards and among them those that had come from me. As I looked on the tranquil whitewash of this secluded caserma, dotted with views of our complicated and populous London, with its theatres and motor buses and the feverish rush of its tumult, I found myself wondering what it would be like to listen to the _Pastoral Symphony_ in the _Messiah_, performed with occasional interpolations from _Till Eulenspiegel_.

The brigadier proposed a stroll while the guards prepared supper--they take it by turns to be cook, one each day, but this being an occasion, all three would be cooks to-night. We called at a cottage in the hope of buying some fish, but the weather had been too bad and there was none.

We met a young man, however, who had a kid for sale and wanted 95 centesimi per kilo; the brigadier would only give 80. The young man could not deal; the kid belonged to his father, and he had no power to exceed his instructions; he would go home and call at the caserma in the morning with the ultimissimo prezzo. We pa.s.sed a great hole in the ground like a dry well. The brigadier said that if it were not so very near the caserma, it might do as a hiding-place for any one flying from justice, or for brigands to conceal a prisoner.

"Or for smugglers to keep their spoils in," I said; and the brigadier chuckled.

He showed me the stone that had been put up to mark the spot at which the Madonna was landed by the French sailors as they returned from Alexandria. We strolled back and tied up the pig which had broken loose and, the brigadier said, was not yet old enough, meaning that there would be no pork for supper yet awhile. With all this difficulty about pork and fish and kid, the simple life, as lived at the caserma, appeared to be less simple than it might have been if the shops had been a little nearer.

Supper consisted of chicory served with the water it had been boiled in, to which was added some oil; there was also bread and wine, then chicken and afterwards poached eggs which they call eggs in their shirtsleeves.

Before we had finished I told them that we have a proverb in England that too many cooks spoil the broth, and added that I had never known precisely how many were supposed to be too many, but that, judging by the excellence of the repast, certainly more than three would be required in the caserma of Custonaci. I said this because I was beginning to feel it was time that something of the kind should come from me. Sicilians are not only polite in themselves, but the cause that politeness or an attempt at it, is in other men; and this was the best I could do at the moment in their manner. Knowing I was among experts, I had not much fear as to their reception of my little compliment, just as a student of the violin is less nervous when performing before a master of the instrument than before the general public. The brigadier and his guards accepted it as though it were of the finest quality, and even complimented me upon it.

After supper there came a large moth which fluttered about the lamp; one of the guards called it a "farfalla notturna," a nocturnal b.u.t.terfly, and said it had come to bring us good fortune. Another of the men, who was of a sceptical temperament, said it might be so, but that in matters of this kind one never can be sure what one's fortune would have been if the moth had not come. I said that if there was to be any good fortune for me I should like it to take the form of curing the cold which, for my sins, I had caught that morning as I came out of the sanctuary. The guard who believed in the moth--after returning my compliment about the cooking by saying I must be wrong to talk about my sins, for he was sure I had never committed any--said that as to the kind of luck the moth would bring, Fortune would not submit to dictation, the most I could do to control her would be to look out farfalla notturna in the book and put a few soldi on the number in the next lottery. I told him I had had enough of the lottery at Castelvetrano. The brigadier was interested, so I told him about it and said I was afraid the reason I had lost was that my numbers had nothing to do with anything that had happened to me during the week. He confirmed what Peppino had said and added that he was always very careful about the choosing of his numbers.

"But surely," I said, "you do not always win when you follow that rule?"

"I have played every week for twenty years," said the brigadier, "and have only won four times; but I always hope."

"One can hope," I said, "without spending any soldi."

Here the guard who believed in the moth interposed, seeing that I did not know much about it--

"It is no use hoping unless you do something. It would be absurd to hope for two hundred and fifty francs next week unless you encouraged Fortune to send you the money. Buy a ticket with a likely number and you will have the right to hope."

"It is like praying for rain," added the brigadier; "the Madonna may not answer the prayer, but those who pray have done their best and are ent.i.tled to hope that rain will follow."

"This," I said, "reminds me of an old lady who always insisted on her daughter taking a dose of the medicine her doctor prescribed for her own imaginary complaints. 'How can you hope to be well,' she used to say, 'if you never take any medicine?'"

"Exactly," said the guard who believed in the moth, "we do not know how the medicine works any more than we know how the Madonna works, or how a dream affects the lottery, but if you do nothing it is no use hoping."

With regard to my cold, the sceptical guard, with a twinkle in his eye, recommended me to repent of the sins for which I had said it was a punishment. I was ready to do so if I could be sure as to which sins it was more particularly aimed at. The sceptical guard thought he knew.

"Did you not tell us you had been on the Mountain at the festa? When the sagrestano unveiled the picture in the sanctuary this morning, the Madonna heard the bells ring and looked round the church; no doubt she recognized you as the heretical Englishman she had seen prying into her mysteries. She probably regretted she had not paid you out at the time and, as you came her way this morning, took the opportunity of doing it now."

I agreed that it would have been more of a miracle had she done it in a balmy August, in the midst of other occupations, instead of in a tempestuous January when business was slack; but, on the whole, I did not believe that either the Madonna or my sins had had anything to do with my cold which I considered to be a natural, or non-miraculous, consequence of the rain and the wind. But the sceptical guard objected that even so the Madonna could not get quite clear, for, if she is credited with the rain, as she certainly is, she must be debited with its unpleasant consequences, if any.

The guard who had heard the bells ring, when he came to meet us, gravely nodded his approval, not seeing that the sceptical guard was speaking ironically, but he began to suspect presently. The guard who believed in the moth told us that he had been stationed once on the coast a little east of Girgenti, near a town where the peasants pray for rain to their patron, S. Calogero, whose painted image, carved in wood, stands in their church. If it rains at once, well and good, they return thanks, and there is an end of the matter. But if their prayers are unanswered after what they consider a reasonable time, they hold a service and punctuate their prayers with threatening cries--

"Corda, o pioggia!"

The saint sometimes chooses the second alternative and sends the rain--the peasants return thanks, and all goes well. But if he is still obdurate, they a.s.sume he has chosen the first, put the threat into execution, take down S. Calogero, tie a cord about his neck and reverently cast him into the sea where they leave him till it does rain.

If one waits long enough the rain always comes at last, even on the south coast of Sicily. Then they pull the poor saint out of the water, dry him, give him a fresh coat of paint and carry him back to his place in the church, with a bra.s.s band and thanksgiving--another form of the recurrent death and resurrection of the G.o.d, imitating sunset and sunrise.

"We call this treatment of S. Calogero an act of faith," said the sceptical guard, "and yet when a gambler puts a few soldi on any number he may have dreamt of, we call it superst.i.tion. The peasant and the gambler are both playing for material gain, and S. Calogero in the sea has as much connection with the meteorological conditions as the dream has with the lottery numbers; yet the treatment of the saint has the sanction of the Church and the act of the gambler is branded as superst.i.tious. But to abuse a thing is not to alter its nature."

The guard who had heard the bells ring now began to remonstrate gently and begged there might be no confusing of faith with superst.i.tion.

The sceptical guard replied that it was difficult to keep them apart, or, indeed, to look upon them as two different things. The only confusion there was arose because of the imperfections of language--a clumsy instrument, though the best we have for its purpose. We call a kiss a kiss whether it be given by an old woman to her grandchild or by a young man to his bride; but the having one word for two things does not make them the same in intention, and so the having two words for faith and superst.i.tion does not make them fundamentally different. The guard who had heard the bells was beginning to look uncomfortable, if not actually offended, the tendency of all this being to depreciate his faith in the Madonna and treat it as superst.i.tion. The brigadier and the guard who believed in the moth, on the other hand, were rather pleased, their superst.i.tion about the lottery numbers was being elevated into faith.

The brigadier was an unselfish man and anxious to spare from further annoyance the guard who had heard the bells. He was also a sensible man and knew that discussions of this kind, endless if left to develop, will generally yield to surgical treatment. He rose, saying it was time for him to begin protecting the coast. I took the hint, thanked them all for a very pleasant evening and wished them "Buon riposo." The brigadier shut me in for the night, promising to call me in the morning, and the legend above my bedroom door was--

"Comandante della Brigata."

In the morning he knocked while it was still dark. I got up, dressed, and as the sun began to stir behind Custonaci, came through the general room and the porch of the bungalow into the translucent freshness where the sceptical guard was already smoking an early cigarette. To the right of us rose Cofano and to our left, on the top of Mount Eryx, where formerly stood the temple of Venus, were the towers of Conte Pepoli's castle, touched by the rising sun and so distinct that we could almost count the stones. In front of us, between these two enormous headlands, lay the sea as calm as when the Madonna stayed the tempest, and all along the great curve of the sh.o.r.e little waves were lazily playing in the morning stillness. I asked the sceptical guard what part of Sicily he came from.

"I am not a Sicilian," he replied, "I come from another mountain near Rome where there was once another temple dedicated to Fortune."

"Are you from Palestrina?"

"Yes," he replied. "You cannot see much here of what the temple of Venus was, but on my mountain you can see what the temple of Fortune must have been. In the days when she flourished, kings and princes travelled from distant lands to consult her oracle; now no one ever comes near the place except a tourist or two, pa.s.sing to some more prosperous town, who may stay an hour to gaze upon the remains of her fallen greatness."

"Perhaps her temple was too prosperous and too near the shrine of St.

Peter."

"St. Peter should have seized her temple and preserved her popularity for his own profit instead of condemning the faith in her as superst.i.tion and allowing the control of it to pa.s.s into the hands of the state. For if Fortune ever died she rose again and is worshipped as much as ever she was, only she is now called the Lottery."

"It was a neglected opportunity."

"And it would have been so easy to invent a legend of the arrival of a picture or a statue of la Madonna di Palestrina to inherit the prestige of Fortune. Then I should never have left home to join the guardia di finanza."