On Persephone's Island

  ALSO BY Mary Taylor Simeti

  Pomp and Sustenance:

  Twenty-five Centuries of Sicilian Food

  Bitter Almonds:

  Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood

  (with Maria Grammatico)

  ACCLAIM FOR Mary Taylor Simeti’s

  On Persephone’s Island

  “Fascinating.… From the delicate steps in wine-making to the Virgin Mary’s joyous meeting with the risen Christ in the Easter morning procession at Castelvetrano [this is] much more than a daily record of happenings, and Simeti is much, much more than an eager American junketing around with pen and wonder at the ready.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “In telling her story she reflects upon the history, myths and legends that have filtered into the traditions of Sicily and upon the island’s problems and pleasures. We see all these with freshness and amazement. Simeti has done a rare thing: she has written a happy book about Sicily and yet there is an undercurrent of sadness, one true to the reality of the island.”

  —Washington Post

  “Simeti displays a deft touch with scenic description and an amiably unsentimental view of country neighbors who are as wily as they are picturesque. Overall, she describes a beautiful country in which past and present collide rather than merge, and where families like her own live fairly comfortably in what amounts to a war zone.”

  —The Atlantic

  “Other erudite writers have written of these aspects of the Sicilian past, but rarely with the author’s talent for firmly engaging the reader’s attention. Entrancing.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A joyous, sensory celebration of an island and a people pulsating with life.”

  —American Way

  Mary Taylor Simeti

  On Persephone’s Island

  Mary Taylor Simeti was born and brought up in New York City. In 1962 she went to Sicily, where she married and raised two children. She is also the author of Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-five Centuries of Sicilian Food and, with Maria Grammatico, Bitter Almonds: Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood.

  FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, OCTOBER 1995

  Copyright © 1986 by Mary Taylor Simeti

  Drawings copyright © 1986 by Maria Vica Costarelli

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1986.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Penguin Books Ltd. Exerpt from The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, translated by Rex Warner (Penguin Classics, 1954).

  Copyright © Rex Warner, 1954. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd., London. Sellerio Editore. Excerpt from Delle cose di Sicilia, Vol. I, edited by Leonardo Sciascia. © Sellerio Editore, Palermo, 1980.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Simeti, Mary Taylor.

  On Persephone’s island.

  p.

  1. Sicily—Social life and customs.

  2. Simeti, Mary Taylor—Homes and haunts—Italy—

  sicily. I. Title.

  DG865.6.857 1986 945’.8092 85-45599

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77311-1

  v3.1

  For Tonino

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue—October 1962

  Part I Winter

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part II Spring

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part III Summer

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue—October 1983

  Author’s Note

  Sources

  Scatter, now, some glory on this island, which the lord of Olympus,

  Zeus, gave Persephone and bowed his head to assent, the pride of the blossoming earth,

  Sicily, the rich, to control under towering cities opulent;

  Kronion granted her also

  a people in love with brazen warfare,

  horsemen; a people garlanded over and again with the golden leaves of olive

  Olympian.

  Pindar, First Nemean Ode

  Prologue—October 1962

  Like most young Americans traveling abroad in the early sixties, I arrived in Sicily with an excessive number of suitcases, considerable ignorance, and a great many warnings. In college I had studied the Sicilian Middle Ages, and over the summer I had read about Sicilian poverty in the writings of Danilo Dolci, the social reformer at whose center for community development I hoped to volunteer. This kernel of fact, meager as it was, had been fleshed out by the cautionary tales of friends and acquaintances, both at home and in the north of Italy, who all considered me courageous, if not downright foolish, to set off by myself for an island of dazzling sun and bright colors where bandits and mafiosi lurked in the shadows and where the rest of the population was proud and reserved, distrustful of foreigners, and sure to misinterpret the presence of a young girl alone.

  But from the window of the train that was bearing me south to Palermo the only color to be seen was gray: gray storm clouds piled up against gray mountains, gray olive trees tossing up the silver undersides of their leaves to the wind, and a gray sea tossing up silver foam onto gray rocks and beaches as the train threaded its way through the necklace of tunnels and coves strung out along the coasts of Calabria and northern Sicily.

  My mother was living in Florence at that time, and it was there that I boarded the train in the middle of the night. Living on my own in a Sicilian village was not what my mother had had in mind when she offered me a year in Italy to celebrate my graduation from Radcliffe, and as she saw me into my compartment she was obviously hard put to be both encouraging and liberal minded, and yet with the same breath remind me to be careful about the men, the Mafia, the drinking water, and all the other things that would no doubt come back to her as soon as the train pulled out of the station.

  On her graduation trip in 1924 she and her college roommate had left the boat at Naples and taken a train across southern Italy to Bari. They were the only women on the train, and the soldiers who shared their compartment spent the whole trip comparing my mother’s ankles to those of her friend by measuring them between thumb and forefinger. Yet I did not recognize in her story my own age, my own curiosity, my own train ride south, since I was still too young to believe that she might ever have had any experience relevant to mine. So I hushed her up and settled my suitcases as quickly as I could, anxious not to disturb my fellow travelers who were already sleeping in their bunks. The Florence stop was not a long one, and soon we were moving, my mother waving forlornly in the yellow light of the station platform as the darkness swallowed us up.

  It was not a restful night. I was too excited to do more than doze, and two of my fellow travelers turned out to be under three and equally excited, so I was glad when the train pulled into Naples in the uncertain light of a gray dawn, and I could abandon any pretense of sleep and introduce myself to the Sicilian family whose compartment I was sharing. My Italian was only just adequate and I was quite unaccustomed to the Sicilian accent, but I managed to understand that they had emigrated to Milan in search of work some years
before and were returning to Palermo for a visit. I also managed to explain that I was traveling alone, via Palermo, to the town of Partinico, where I intended to live by myself and to work for the next year or two.

  They were horrified. Throughout the morning, as we wove our way slowly down the Calabrian coast, they alternated between pressing me with large rolls and thick slices of salame from their shopping bag of provisions, and reiterating their surprise and indignation that a young American girl should choose—nay—should be allowed to wander off into the wilds of Sicily with no family to protect her. There was no censure, only commiseration. Surely my mother was out of her mind.

  By the time the train had backed and filled itself, first on, then off the ferry that carried us across the Straits of Messina, it was early afternoon, but the heavy rain that shut out the landscape made it seem still later. Another passenger joined us at Messina, a man in his thirties who stared at me steadily from behind his dark glasses.

  His gaze was, however, a minor discomfort. What I could not avoid was the fact that I had wired the Dolci Center asking to be met at the Palermo station at two-thirty, yet as the train rolled on it was becoming increasingly apparent that we couldn’t possibly arrive anywhere near that hour. At last I broke the silence that had fallen upon the compartment since the man in dark glasses had joined us, and asked if we were far from Palermo. It turned out that we still had most of Sicily to cross, that the scheduled arrival time was two hours later than I had been told in Florence, and furthermore the man in dark glasses, who worked for the railroad, claimed that the train was already an hour behind schedule. As the afternoon wore on and the sky got darker and darker, it became clearer and clearer that there would be no one waiting for me at the Palermo station.

  I was somewhat of an anachronism even for 1962: most of my traveling had been done with my family, and in almost the same style in which my mother had traveled in 1924—not a step taken without the blessings of Wagon-Lits Cook. Confident of being met in Palermo, I had neglected to plan beyond my arrival there. I had no idea in which direction Partinico lay or how I could get there on my own. Neither, it turned out, did my fellow passengers, who were all true Palermitani and considered anything that lay beyond as unworthy of civilized interest. They supposed that there was a bus to Partinico, but when and from where it might depart, nobody knew.

  The compartment took my plight to heart, discussing the pros and cons of the various possible solutions with what I was discovering to be a true Mediterranean love and enthusiasm for other people’s problems. And, unfortunately for my already shattered peace of mind, with the true Mediterranean sense of melodrama: it seemed that wherever I might turn, a fate worse than death awaited me. I suggested a hotel. “A young girl alone?!” The couple insisted that I go with them to their parents’ house, but with visions of sleeping six to a bed I assured them that that was quite impossible. The man in dark glasses then promised that the minute we arrived he would go off to find out about the bus, and it was on that note of dramatic suspense that the train finally emerged from the darkening rain into the relative cheer of the Palermo station.

  Vast numbers of relatives were waiting to welcome home the young family, and, reluctantly accepting my last grateful but firm refusal of their offers of hospitality, they climbed down to be wrapped up and carried off in a cloud of tears, cries, and resounding kisses.

  I had brought with me all and more than I needed for a year’s stay and could not take a step without assistance. But the man in dark glasses helped me to assemble my luggage on the station platform and went off in search of a bus schedule. The astonishingly large crowd that had been waiting for the train had by this time captured and borne off its prey, and the platform was almost empty except for the railway workers. Perched on a large pile of suitcases, I watched the man in dark glasses disappear into the station. I felt sure that I would never see him again, and twenty-four hours of travel and admonitions had so flattened me that I never stopped to think how strange it was that this should upset me. But in a few minutes he was back.

  “The last bus left an hour ago. There is nothing to be done. I must drive you to Partinico in my car.”

  My better judgment didn’t stand a chance. It wasn’t until my suitcases and I were piled into a little Fiat and parked by a bar where the man in dark glasses was telephoning to his mamma that he would be late for supper, that the voice of my mamma could be heard above my desperation. Who was this man who was driving me off into the night? I was still debating whether I had time to get out and make a note of the number on the license plate without being caught in what would have been an excruciatingly embarrassing position when he came back and we were off.

  The lights of the city dropped rapidly behind and below us, as the road we were following climbed steadily upward. It was almost completely dark now, but the headlights reflecting off the wet tar gave enough light for me to see that we were curving back and forth along the side of a mountain, sheer rock on my side of the road, sheer drop on the other. It was interesting, he’d never driven this road before, said he as we skidded briskly around the bends. Very, said I, bracing myself for the crash.

  It seemed an endless journey, but it can’t have been more than half an hour before we were in Partinico, asking directions to the Center, and I was wondering how I could be sufficiently polite and grateful while discouraging any follow-up on our acquaintance. The Center was still open, and when I and all my luggage were safely unloaded, the man in dark glasses shook my hand, waved aside my thanks, and drove off. I never saw him again, or had another chance to express my gratitude for what he had done for me.

  I owe him much more than just a ride. By his disinterested generosity toward a foreigner in difficulty, the man in dark glasses stripped me of the prejudices instilled by the warnings of well-meaning friends and delivered me to Partinico with my honor and my belongings intact, my spirit cheered, and my mind free to discover Sicily for myself. Now, as twenty years later I attempt to draw a portrait of my destination, I can see that these two figures have stood sentinel throughout my journey: my mother, whose passionate curiosity for all that surrounded her was a legacy far more valuable to me than her warnings, and the nameless Sicilian whose chivalrous gesture was my introduction to the strong, impulsive soul of Sicily, a soul that reaches across and beyond all that is so distressing here and, like the island sun, warms and illumines even as it creates dark shadows.

  I

  WINTER

  In October the sowing of the wheat

  begins, and November honors that which

  lies beneath the ground awaiting

  rebirth; the dead return in a ritual visit to

  the living, just as the living celebrate

  the cult of the dead, and the whole period

  between the beginning of November

  and Epiphany is a tempus terribile, in which

  the gates to the Afterworld remain open.

  Franco Cardini,

  I giorni del sacro: il libro delle feste

  THE ZISA, PALERMO

  Chapter One

  November is a time of beginnings in the double calendar that we follow in our family. Our life here in Sicily is divided between the academic year, which requires our presence in Palermo—where my husband, Tonino, teaches agricultural economics at the university and where our children, Francesco and Natalia, go to school—and the agricultural year, which turns our attention to the vineyards and the olive groves at Bosco, the family farm thirty miles away. Here we take refuge as soon as school lets out for vacation, for a summer of farming after a winter of academic pursuits.

  The grapes ripened late this year because of the exceptionally dry summer, so we commuted back and forth from the middle of September, when the schools opened, well into October. But we cannot manage that all year round: quite apart from the exorbitant price of gas here, no one lives on the land in this part of Sicily, we have no neighbors in wintertime, no friends for the children to see, and no guarante
e of getting through the mud to the highway once the heavy rains begin.

  Every so often the unpleasantness of urban life becomes too much for us and we talk of moving out permanently, but the problems this would create for the children are enormous, so each time we reconcile ourselves to continuing this split existence, at least until our younger child has finished high school.

  We are sowing no wheat this year; the fields that last winter held the seed will lie fallow until spring, and October has been dedicated to equipping the children for the winter and to at least the pretense of catching up with the wear and tear on the Palermo apartment, despite our reluctance to invest time and money here when so much remains to be done at Bosco.

  That done, I am free to descend to the tiny office on the ground floor of our apartment building where I have spent the last few winters reading about Sicily, research for a book of months that would trace the varying rhythms and calendars—archaic, agrarian, contemporary—that govern the passage of time on the island. But time takes over as I take up my pen; the day I start to write ushers in my twenty-first year in Sicily. What began twenty years ago as a brief visit, an interlude between college and graduate school, has been transformed by choice and circumstance into permanence. Right from the outset, then, the book of months becomes a journal, a chronicle of my Sicilian coming of age, in which these personal beginnings, mine and my family’s, coincide with a new year in that classical calendar that provides the structure for my thoughts. For rural Sicily still belongs to Magna Graecia, her crops and her celebrations still echo those of the ancient Greeks, for whom

  the agricultural year fell into three main divisions, the autumn sowing season followed by the winter, the spring with its first blossoming of fruits and flowers, … and the early summer harvest … of grain and fruits [to which] was added with the coming of the vine the vintage and the gathering in of the later fruits.…