Henry Festing Jones

“ If one were to be involved with a Sicilian in committing a crime, one might be perfectly certain that he would never turn King’s evidence, he would say, “Io son uomo, io non parlo” (“I am a man, I know how to hold my tongue”) and he would rather die than betray an accomplice who is his friend and probably his compare. Nor need the criminal fear that the victim or anyone in the secret whether accomplice or not, will blab. A man with a wound on his face, made obviously by a knife, will swear to the police that in drawing a cork he fell and cut himself with the bottle. ”

“ She was carried on men’s shoulders, her face constantly turned towards the town, through the Trapani gate and down the road to the little church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, while the drum went in front, filling the air with the mournfulness of its perpetual rhythm. As the picture passed among the people one of the women cried out—
“See how pale the face of the Madonna has become; it is with sorrow to leave the Mountain.” ”

“ But it’s not nonsense. Ah! you do not know what it is to lie awake all night, sleepless and trembling, between sheets that are made of lava, and to hear footsteps and the clanking of armour and to see Rinaldo shining in the dark and threatening you as he holds over you his sword, Fusberta, and shouts in your ear: ‘How dare you applaud when my brother-in-law is killed?’“
He seemed to enjoy his coffee, however, and to be ready for plenty of exertion. He wanted a piece of lava to take home with him, and would it not be possible to pick up a piece if we went to the slopes of Etna? ”

“ Pasquino is like Love, he is not Time’s fool. Never having been born, he can never die, and never to die is to be immortal. Accordingly, whenever a comic servant is wanted, whether as a messenger from a castle which is being stormed by Samson, or to assist a Grand Turk or a drunkard of no definite period, or to accompany a paladin on a journey, be put into prison with him and help him to escape, or merely on behalf of the proprietor of the show to invite the people to to-morrow’s performance, Pasquino is always there, with his dialect and his comic relief, to undertake the job. ”

“ And the spirit of the Gloria floated down the nave and through the open doors and out into the piazza, where the elephant of lava stands over the fountain. It passed up the Via Garibaldi, down the Corso, along the Stesicoro Etnea, it spread itself through the city and became identified with the morning sunshine.
“Come along,” said Turiddu, “let’s go and buy a paschal lamb for mother.”
We followed the Gloria into the piazza among the fireworks and the revolvers.
I said: “What about the plates, Turiddu? Don’t the people throw the crockery out of window in their joy? We must be careful.” ”

“ But Peppino said that in some respects Donizetti was a better man than Dante; he was smoother and better tempered, “and many things like this.” Peppino had been brought up, like every Italian, to worship Dante, but when he went to London and mastered the English language, when he began to read our literature and to think for himself, then he saw that Dante was “un falso idolo.” Every nation gets the poet she deserves and Italy has her faults; but what, asked Peppino, what has Italy done to deserve her dreary Dante? ”

“ These beliefs are based lower than Giovanni Bianca’s primeval lava, and I know no more about their origin than he does, but I suppose they are older than the Romans, older than the Greeks, older than the Sikels and the Sikans—probably much more than ten thousand or fourteen thousand years old. They spring from a soil which has become fertile by catching the dust of ages, tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine, wherein generations of beliefs have grown up, flourished and decayed. ”

“ When the angel carried up to heaven the soul of Guido Santo, did he never fight another battle? The young men of your island hardly think so; their thoughts and actions are still coloured by the magnificent language and the chivalrous exploits of Christian and Turk. As long as there is an imaginative shoeblack in the Quattro Canti working for pennies by day, so long will those pennies be paid for the story to be told by night in the marionette theatre. Often will Angelica recover her ring, and as often be robbed of it again ”

“ There is no more fertilising manure for a struggling young faith than the rotting remains of a dead superstition. And the roots pierce down beneath the soil and shoot into the crevices of an intolerance more unyielding than buried lava. To understand these things, one ought to become a pupil of Professore Pitrè, and make a study of the science of demopsicologia, and even then one would only get glimpses of the more recent deposits of civilisation that lie crushed one under the other like the parallel surfaces of rich earth in the pit sunk near Jaci. ”

“ Peppino received the proposition without enthusiasm, saying she was her own mistress and I could do as I liked.
“But first,” he said, “there shall be a contraddanza; did you know what is contraddanza? All right, I shall tell you. A dancing man shall be crying to the people to do and they shall do, but if to don’t know, better to don’t dance or would come confusion; better to see and to expect.”
“All right, Peppino,” I said. “I don’t know enough about it; I will look on and wait, and when it is over I shall ask Brancaccia to dance a waltz with me.” ”

“ He said he was composing a polka. He had ruled his own staves because, like Schubert, he could not afford to buy music paper; he wanted all the money he could save to pay a publisher to publish his polka—just as we do in England—and if it succeeded his fortune would be made. I felt a sinking at the heart, as though he was telling me he had been gazing on the mirage of the lottery until he had dreamt a number. He had filled about two pages and a half with polka stuff, but had not yet composed the conclusion. ”

“ Sicilians always want to speak English, especially those of the lower orders who invariably consider it as a master-key that will open every door leading to wealth. Sometimes what they say is, of course, nothing more than otiose compliment; sometimes they are merely introducing the subject of their want of money in an artistic manner in the hope of anything from a soldo to a promise to take them into service as valet, courier, coachman, or whatever it may be—a sort of shaking of Fortune’s bag to see what will come out. ”

“ Michele Lombardo, a goldsmith of Trapani, came to me one day and said he wished me to be his compare. I at once had a vision of myself as a black man riding round a circus on a bare-backed horse and jumping through hoops. That was because, at the time, all my knowledge about a compare was derived from a conversation I had had in the house of the Greco family at Palermo. Among the photographs grouped on the wall was one of a pleasant-looking nigger in European costume. I asked who he was, and Carolina said he was an African, a compare. ”

“ All the children of artists can do as well as she, but no one can really act who has not suffered. He himself used to act quite as well as Lola, but had not appeared on the stage for a long while—not since he had been at school. He could do better now.
“When I see the others acting,” he said, “I am not moved, it is like reading an index. But when I see Giovanni, it is all different, it is like reading a romance and it makes me cry.”
He found fault with some of the plays for not being worthy of the actor. ”

“ We also carried a light—the acetylene lamp off Ninu’s bicycle, and it functioned as inefficiently as the bull’s-eye lantern which Mr. Pickwick took with him on his nocturnal expedition at Clifton. The road was broad enough, but strewn with big lumps of lava lying half-hidden in lava sand. I stumbled frequently, but I never fell, because one of my friends was always at my elbow and caught me; either it was the brave brigadier or Alessandro or Joe or the other Peppino or that great hulking Ninu with his operatic smile lighted up by his fitful lamp. ”

“ Why should he be so constantly driven to use his strength? Why could he never use it without harming some one? Why was he born into a world where men played on his simplicity and women charmed him to destruction? These were the riddles that confused Samson. It seemed to him that he was no better than the Arabian giant who held the Princess of Bizerta in thrall—that cruel bully who cared not how many he killed, nor who they were, and believed every man to be as wicked as himself. ”

“ Until further knowledge shall eclipse the few feeble lanterns that are now doing their best to illuminate my course I shall continue to hold the opinion that, as in the sight of Him, who is the Life of the Universe, a thousand years are but as yesterday, so in the sight of man, who has been God’s image upon earth for more ages than anyone can tell, six thousand years are but as last week. ”

“ What was Giovanni doing at supper? Is Giovanni only an actor when on the stage and when everything he says and does has been thought out? Is he a great actor by virtue of producing the illusion of being a Lola? And is Lola not really an actress at all, because she has not prepared what she is doing and is not even trying to produce any illusion? What is acting? And what is realism? ”

“ Whatever he wants is always done at once and, as he never wants anything unreasonable, the method is working out admirably. I took him from Brancaccia, and he nestled down in my arms, all the time gazing up at me with an expression of satisfied wonder, as though at last he understood something that had been puzzling him. Peppino was present, but effaced himself by helping Carmelo with what he calls my “luggages.” ”

“ Now the Marsala was very good and, according to Vanni, could be put upon the market at a very low price, but I foresaw difficulties. Knowing that he had sung in opera in Naples, Palermo, Malta and many other places, I asked if he liked music. He said he adored it. Music, he declared, was the most precious gift of God to man—more precious even than poetry. He had his box at the opera and always occupied it during the season. And he enjoyed music of all kinds, not only the modern operas of Mascagni, Puccini and so on, but also the old music of Verdi, Donizetti and Bellini. ”

“ In the hollow places, like marshy pools reflecting the sky, lay beds of pale blue flax to be woven into wedding sheets for Mount Eryx.
San Cicciu looked upon it and saw that it was good, and he blessed all that fertility. He was doing for the campagna what the Cyclopean arciprete had asked the Madonna to do for Berto and Giuseppina. ”

“ Nevertheless the majority of the audience enjoyed the fights, for no Sicilian objects to noise.
This is what I gathered: Angelica had come from far Cathay with the express intention of sowing discord among the paladins by inducing them to fall in love with her, and at the present moment Sacripante and the Duca d’Avilla were her victims. These two knights met in a wood, raised their vizors and talked matters over; there was to be a fight about it, of course, but the preliminaries were to be conducted in a friendly spirit—like a test case in Chancery. ”

“ Possibly the Sicilian charm contains among its many ingredients a trace of this love of being dominated which, in England, we associate more particularly with women, spaniels and walnut trees; and if it were not so, history might contain less about the misgovernment of the island by foreigners.
The mafia is not like the Neapolitan Camorra, it is not an organised society such as one reads about in books for boys, nor is it a recognised trade union with a president, secretary, officers and so on. ”

“ Three or four miles inland from Trapani, at the north-west corner of Sicily, rises a precipitous solitary mountain, nearly 2500 feet high, with a town on the top. A motor bus makes a circuit of the mountain, taking one up to the town in about an hour. It proceeds inland, past the church of the Annunziata, the famous shrine of the Madonna di Trapani, and the ascent soon begins. As one looks back towards the sea, Trapani gradually assumes the form that gave it its Greek name of Drepanum, for it juts out towards the island of Levanzo like a sickle “with the sea roaring all round it.” ”

“ If a murder has been committed a crowd will collect round the murdered man—a crowd that includes the police and also the murderer—but no one has any idea who committed the crime, not even those who saw it done, and not even the dying man, who may carry his assumption of ignorance so far as to call his murderer to his side, embrace him affectionately and give him a Judas-kiss which bears a double meaning ”

“ They say the marionettes are for the lower orders and accuse them of being responsible for many of the quarrels we read about in the newspapers. The people become so fascinated by the glamour of the romance in which they live night after night that they imitate in private life the chivalrous behaviour of the warriors they see fighting in the little theatres, and thus what may begin as a playful reminiscence of something in last night’s performance occasionally leads to a too accurate imitation of one of last night’s combats and perhaps ends in a fatal wound. ”

“ Then Peppino told me the story of the Figlio di Etna. He called him this because he came from a village on the slopes of the volcano, where his parents kept a small inn, the Albergo Mongibello, and where also lived his cousin Maria, to whom he was engaged. In the days when he used to talk to me about his counterpoint, Alfio was about twenty-four, and always so exceedingly cheerful and full of his music that no one would have suspected that his private life was being carried on in an inferno, yet so it was; a widow had fallen in love with him, and had insisted on his living with her. ”

“ An Englishman may be a mass of prejudices, but I confess I did not like the idea of hob-nobbing with a would-be parricide and determined that Rosario should not drive me any more; if I wanted a carriage, Carmelo should get leave of his padrone and take me.
Next morning, while I was having my coffee, there was a sound of passing music; I recognized it as belonging to a funeral, and asked Peppino if he knew who was dead. Several people were dead and he did not know which this was, unless it was old Baldassare; it must be either a married woman or a grown-up man. ”

“ To despise Bellini because he is not Schubert would be to adopt the attitude of the buffo’s critic who escaped from Paris in the teatrino at Palermo; nevertheless the countrymen of Schubert have known how to appear before the world clothed in the solemn splendour of Haydn’s majestic Hymn to the Emperor, while the Italians come mountebanking along in an ill-fitting, machine-made suit of second-hand flourishes, as though that were the best they could lay their hands on. They have not done themselves justice. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It would be extremely interesting to see Giovanni Grasso in the part of an English gentleman, a Wyndham or a Hawtrey part. I believe he would succeed because I believe he would succeed in anything he set his mind to do, but for him to reproduce an Englishman’s tranquillity would be as much of an effort as it would be for an English actor to reproduce a Sicilian’s mobility.
Their power of acting is not confined to those who are actors by profession; the love of improvising little scenes in daily life may be said to be characteristic of them. ”