NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  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.

  In a fit of self-aggrandizement, Empedocles jumped into the crater of Mount Etna. In doing so, the Greek philosopher, who believed in reincarnation, hoped to inspire the sense in others that he was godlike.

  In a different fit of self-aggrandizement, the writer Evelyn Waugh, passing through here on a cruise ship, refusing to go ashore to visit Taormina, peers from the deck and gets a glimpse of the volcano beyond.

  “I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset,” he writes in his first travel book, Labels (1930), “the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel gray, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of gray smoke, with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a gray pastel sky. Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.”

  Sudden and strange, the description is marvelous for its utter perversity. You have to read it twice to make sure you haven’t missed a word. Labels is full of such snap judgments and hilarious generalizations. It recalls Cyril Connolly writing “a chocolate-box sunset disfigured the west”—Waugh and Connolly were friends and in mocking a sunset they believed they were against nature. Theirs was the ultimate rebellion—so they thought; defying every notion of harmony, by refusing to be impressed or admit that such loveliness could be moving. It was a self-conscious and envious way of needling other writers, but most of all it was diabolical blasphemy, for isn’t criticizing a brilliant sunset an English way of blaming God?

  Waugh’s work is always a salutary reminder that satire is usually more purposeful than veneration, and that one of the virtues of a good travel book is the chance to see a traveler’s mind, however childish, ticking away.

  Nothing held me in Taormina. I took a taxi down the hill and caught the train to Siracusa. Traveling towar
ds Catania, we crossed the lava flow from the volcano. At Carruba there were blackish cedars by the shore, and lemon groves sagging with fruit. Then, Cannizaro, Lentini, Paterno: almost every town in Sicily reminded me of the names of my high school friends, and a Sicilian railway timetable looked like a list of the Medford High Class of ’59.

  Catania was big and grim, the sort of place only a mafioso would tolerate, and that for its opportunities to whack it for money. The coast here was miles of great ugliness, oil storage depots, refineries, cracking plants, and cement factories. Offshore, a man was rowing backwards in the sea, pushing the oars instead of pulling them. By the side of the track, the scrawl Cazzo—Italian slang for the male member, when spoken sounding like gatz.

  The end of the line was Siracusa.

  “But what could I do at Syracuse? Why did I come there? Why did I buy a ticket just to Syracuse and not to any other place? Choice of destination had certainly been a matter of indifference. And certainly being at Syracuse or elsewhere was a matter of indifference. It was all the same to me. I was in Sicily. I was visiting Sicily. And I could just as well get on the train and return home.”

  This paragraph from Elio Vittorini’s novel Conversation in Sicily had a definite resonance for me. Vittorini was born in Siracusa the year of the earthquake, 1908, and was a young man in the fascist era, the period described in this novel and some of his stories. All this I discovered in Siracusa.

  I had stopped inside a bookstore on the long walk from the station to the old city, which was across a bridge, on a small island, Ortygia. The bookstore owner told me about Vittorini and recommended his writing.

  “This was a great city once—capital of Sicily,” he said.

  He named for me the famous Siracusans—Theocritus, the Greek playwright Epicarmo, Saint Lucy, Vittorini.

  “So many people have come and gone. We’ve been Phoenician, Greek of course, from long ago. But also more recently Arab, Spanish, French. You can hear it in the names. Vasqueza is a Siracusa name—Spanish. We have French ones too. Take my name, Giarratana—what do you think it is?”

  “Can’t imagine.” But the truth was that I did not want to guess wrong and risk offending him.

  “Pure Arab,” said Mr. Giarratana. “That Giarrat is an Arab word.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not an Arab!”

  Later I checked with my Arabic-speaking brother Peter and discovered that Giarrat was probably a cognate of Djarad, meaning locust.

  “Our dialect is amazing,” Mr. Giarratana said. “It would be hard for someone like you to understand. Even other Sicilians have trouble with it.”

  He had a growly Sicilian voice, deepened with dust and smoke. I asked him for some examples of the incomprehensible dialect.

  “Wango,” he said. “Asegia. Stradon. What do those words mean?”

  “No idea.”

  “Bank. Chair. Street,” he said, smiling because he had stumped me. “We don’t say orange [arancia], we call them portuale.”

  That was also from an Arab word for orange, which was burtugal, probably from one of the countries which grew them, Portugal.

  The most Sicilian of Sicilian words, known and used throughout the world, is mafia. It is identical to the obsolete Arabic word mafyá, meaning “place of shade,” shade in this sense indicating refuge, and is almost certainly derived from it. Norman Lewis describes in his 1964 book about the Mafia, The Honored Society, how, after the orderliness of Saracen rule in Sicily was obliterated by the Normans in the eleventh century, Sicily became feudalistic. “Most of the Arab small-holders became serfs on the reconstituted estates. Some escaped to ‘the Mafia.’ ” It became an alternative—and secret—system of justice, society and protection; a refuge.

  I bought the Vittorini novel he had spoken about and also a copy of Frankenstein, which I had been meaning to reread. Then I continued down the street and across the bridge to find a hotel. It was not much of a decision. Nearly all the hotels in Siracusa were closed, or being renovated, but not the nameless one run by Dr. Calogero Pulvino, poet and philosopher. One star, twenty-three dollars with breakfast and the occasional impromptu seminar by Dr. Pulvino.

  He sat, surrounded by books, looking harassed, as though inspiration had just deserted him, or he had momentarily mislaid his lyric gift. He kept his hat on, as though it was his badge of authorship if not part of his uniform, and he amazed me with his pedantry.

  I said, “So many books, doctor.”

  “This is not many,” he said, dismissing my question. “I own lots more than these.”

  “What sort of books are they?”

  “They are not books.” He smiled at my ignorance.

  “What are they?”

  “They are my friends.”

  To him this sort of excruciating exchange was sheer poetry.

  “Are you writing one yourself?”

  “Yes.” He showed me some closely typed pages. He wanted me to admire them, but when he had an inkling that I was reading them he snatched them away, saying, “These are unfinished chapters.”

  “A novel?”

  He laughed a big hollow theatrical laugh. He then said, “I am not interested in fantasy, my friend!”

  “Are novels fantasy?”

  “Completely.”

  “A waste of time?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “What are these chapters, then?”

  “Philosophy,” he said, in a reverential way, savoring the word.

  “What books have you published?”

  His arm snaked to the shelf and he withdrew a hardcover book, which he handed to me.

  I read the title, Il Riparo delle Rosse Colline D’Argilla (The Shelter of the Red Hills of Clay).

  “A volume of my poems,” said Dr. Pulvino.

  “About Sicily?”

  He sniggered slightly at my ignorance of geography. He said, “Tunisia. I went there for inspiration. You want to buy a copy?”

  I had just bought two books that morning. Books are heavy, especially hardcovers. My method was to buy paperbacks, and read and discard them. I only bought new ones when I had nothing more to read. It was pointless to explain this to Dr. Pulvino.

  “Not now.”

  “The price is twenty thousand.” That was thirteen dollars. No way.

  “I’ll pick it up in a bookstore.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I’ll bet Mr. Giarratana has it in his store.”

  “Mr. Giarratana does not have it. You see, my friend, this book is out of print. This is one of very few copies left.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be able to find it.”

  “Only I can supply you with one.”

  After that, whenever I saw him, he said, “Have you decided about the book?”

  Dr. Pulvino was one of a number of people in Siracusa who warned me to be careful of thieves. Mr. Giarratana had mentioned “clippers”—bag snatchers, known as scippatori. They were notorious in Sicily for their merciless efficiency, and I heard many stories of people who had lost passports, wallets, handbags, watches, jewelry. But perhaps because this was not the tourist season the thieves were on holiday.

  There was “A Very Important Notice” displayed in each of Dr. Pulvino’s tiny rooms. “The hotel’s esteemed guests, especially our lady guests, because of unpleasant incidents which have already happened, are advised, when going out of the hotel, to avoid taking any bags, or handbags, for the possible risk of becoming victims of bag snatchers and even of being hurt. The manager Dr Calogero Pulvino, together with the entire City of Syracuse, apologizes for this situation.”

  The next time I saw him I said, “You speak English.”

  “Without any doubt,” said Dr. Pulvino.

  • • •

  Another amphitheater, more broken columns, assorted marble slabs. Just by three pizzerias was the Fountain of Arethusa, with ducks bobbing in it. It is not really a Greek ruin. It is a place Siracusans take their kids to s
ay “Look at the duckies!” and throw pizza crusts at them. Probably the Greeks did the same thing. The Temple of Apollo was just down the street from Emporio Armani. The Catholic cathedral had been built into and around a Doric temple, probably Athena, and so you could see Grecian columns inside and out, and crucifixes, and bleeding hearts and gilded halos, and more old columns that even Cicero had praised (“in his oration against Verres”).

  The exaggerated attention in Siracusa as in much of Italy was this guff about Greeks and Romans, all glory and harmony, and then silence, as though nothing else had happened in the last two thousand years. Nothing about the years of lecherous and satanic popes settling into big feather beds with their mistresses and fondling them under gilt crucifixes, or plotting murder, stranglings and poisonings in the Vatican cellars. Never a word about Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92), who commercialized the papacy and sold pardons, and who had a hooligan son by one of his mistresses whom he set up in style; nothing about Pope Alexander VI and his seven children, one of whom was Lucrezia Borgia, another Cesare Borgia, who was made a cardinal, along with his uncle. Apart from the poisonings and murders, one of the highlights of Alexander VI’s papacy was a bullfight that was held in the piazza of St. Peter’s to celebrate a victory over the Moors. Nor anything about Leo X, who handed out cardinals’ hats to his cousins, or Sixtus IV, another murderer. Not relevant? But surely these were the ancestors and inspiration for Padre Carmelo and his Mafia monks at the Franciscan monastery in Mazzarino.

  The Middle Ages had not occurred. There was never anything about the centuries of rape and pillaging, cities destroyed by hairy Vandals or Ostrogoths in furry pelts; nothing about bubonic plague or cholera, nothing about the thirteenth-century Hohenstaufens, who goose-stepped all over Sicily, nothing about those religious fanatics and show-offs, the Crusaders, who went clanking around the island in their rusty suits of armor building castles and sniffing out Muslims to murder for Christ, nothing about Muslims and their weird depredations (though the occasional mutter about “Saracens”), nothing about the Jewish expulsions, the cruelty and intrigues, little villagers ratting on the local rabbi and then seeing the old bearded Jew carted off or tortured; and never anything about the war that ended just the other day, how they had changed sides; and nothing about their cowardly little dictator—just the mentioning of his name in polite company was immeasurably worse than farting.