Henry Festing Jones

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For have you not observed in life that, with the exception of a few really sensible people like you and me, most men are merely puppets in the hands of others? They do not act on their own ideas nor do they think for themselves; also they adopt any words that are put into their mouths. Now, it seems to me that the proportion of real men compared with marionettes is not greater on this stage than we observe it to be in life, and therefore we may say that the proprietor of this theatre is following the advice of your poet. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There were soldiers arm-in-arm and singing, they had been interrupted while drinking in a wine-shop in a side street off the Via Macqueda and were saving the marsala which they had not finished.
After them came the maresciallo dei carabinieri in the uniform he wears for a festa, with a plume in his three-cornered hat. He was a broad, beefy fellow, taller than the soldiers, being made of a marionette who is usually a giant. He came swinging along, all so big and so burly, followed by a lady, showily dressed, who walked mincingly and was saving a pair of pink satin shoes and a powder-puff. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The arts are concerned more with faith than with reason, more with the spirit than with the flesh, more with truth than with fact, and we can never get away from the intention of the artist. Even in that Art of Arts which we call Life, our judgment must always be influenced by the spirit in which we believe that a thing is done. I have read somewhere that one coachman will flick flies off his horse with the intention of worrying the flies, while another (Mario, for instance) does the same thing with the intention of relieving the horse. ”

“ People who take a gloomy view of life naturally expect something cheerful in the theatre. But what if it is a tragedy? And how are you going to dispose of the cavaliere? Is he to carry his wickedness through your comedy?”
“You want it to be a tragedy because you are a buffo, I suppose. Now let me think. If you are right—”
Before I could see my way to a tragic plot, the curtain rose on Act II. The women of the village were going to Mass, but Rosina, reduced to ragged misery, fell on the steps, not worthy to enter. The cavaliere came by and offered her money, which she indignantly spurned. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And they go on to regret that Giovanni Grasso should have so much success with his plays in foreign countries, because they contain a great deal of mafia and mala vita which he presents with so much realism that foreigners are encouraged in the idea that all Sicilians are for ever sleeplessly going about with knives in their belts seeking to execute vendettas. But most theatre-goers know by this time that melodramas are not made up of the events of ordinary life. ”

“ It is always the same old story. It was your fault that Alpheus chased Arethusa out of Greece and that Proserpine was carried off from Enna. It was you who suggested to those Phœnician traders that the nurse of the little Eumæus would be good company for them, and you who made her consent to go. This music, of which I should have heard more this evening but for your frequent interruptions, you were at the bottom of it all. And it is because you are always hanging about the theatre that those wretched puppets are so constantly going mad for love of one another. ”

“ When a modern Frenchman in the spirit of the Scenes de la Vie de Boheme paints the guests in modern evening dress at a Marriage in Cana of Galilee we are offended. The Nascita is not done by such an artist; it is peculiarly a woman’s subject, being a picture of home life with a birth for its occasion, and is usually made by a girl who has never heard of Bohemia. She has seen trains in the railway station and ships in the port, but probably has never herself travelled in either. ”

“ He saw what I meant at once and, in his reply, somewhat followed my lead.
“Where,” he asked, “is the irreverence in making S. Joachim’s friends arrive in tall hats and dress clothes? Why should they not read the Giornale di Sicilia and play cards? Where is the irreverence in making the children celebrate his daughter’s birth by dancing to a piano? Why should not the Madonna have her baby-linen made on an American sewing-machine?” ”

“ We went to the bride’s house and entered by the door that leads into the courtyard which was occupied by Peppi Bosco, who had again preceded us with his trombone and municipal music. The bride retired and, after a few moments, reappeared among the guests, escorted by Berto and accompanied by someone bearing a large tea-tray piled up with sugared almonds, which she ladled to us in handfuls with a silver coffee-cup. On whatever system a Sicilian wedding is conducted it would be incomplete without sugared almonds, and they are sent in boxes to all friends who are unable to attend. ”

“ The conditions of life in the albergheria are not identical with those of life in the open country, either in England or in Sicily, nor with those of life in the orange-groves of the Conca d’Oro round about Palermo. Both in the Conca d’Oro and in the open fields the guardians employed to protect the crops are all mafiosi and are able to prevent the employment of any who are not. The conditions in a sulphur-mine again are different. Confusion arises unless one knows which conditions are present to the mind of him who is trying to explain the mafia. ”

“ We sat round and listened while one of the actors read about the convulsion of nature, the trembling of the palaces, the flashes of flame at a great height in the sky, the terror of the inhabitants of Catania. Was the phenomenon of telluric origin—Etna or an earthquake? Was it of atmospheric origin—a thunderbolt or a waterspout? Or could it be a miracle in the dictionary sense of something contrary to the course of nature? No one knew. Gradually a sufficient number of the public overcame their fright and took places in the theatre ”

“ After the curtain rises there is an earthquake, and Misandro comes to see whether the watching soldiers are doing their duty; he finds them asleep and wakes them. This is repeated, and the third time Misandro sees the tomb open with a loud noise and a bright light—“like the bolide,” said Angiolino. Christ rises, and Misandro, seeing the actual Resurrection, is convinced that Christ is the Son of God and not a magician; he goes to spend the rest of his life preaching the gospel among the heathen. I did not ask what music accompanies the miracle of the Resurrection ”

“ I prefer Ricuzzu alive.”
“You are a bad papa,” said Brancaccia, “and the compare is a good man.”
So she gave me the baby as a reward and slapped her husband’s cheek as a punishment. Peppino naturally retaliated, and in a moment they were rolling over and over and bear-fighting like a couple of kittens at play, while Carmelo and I sat and laughed at them, and the baby crowed and clapped his hands and grew so excited I could scarcely hold him. ”