We nosed into this most atmospheric of little towns on a low throttle, for the streets were crowded with holiday-makers in different stages of undress; Mario had by now convinced us that he could put our bus through the eye of a needle if he wished. But Cefalu was quite a trial with its narrow and encumbered medieval streets, and the cathedral lay right at the end of a loop of oneway streets which did not seem to correspond to the traffic realities of the little spa, where ten bicycles might block all the traffic for days, it would seem. But what was good was that the unafraid pedestrian had taken possession of the place and everything conformed to his walking pace. This at once made things harmonious and pleasant—at this speed you could lean out and buy an ice, for the French ladies did, or a clutch of gaudy postcards, for the old Count did, or a charm against the evil eye, for Roberto did. This he handed to Beddoes to preserve him from harm. In a way it sort of accredited us to the townspeople of Cefalu and made us feel at home straight off. But owing to the fool one-way street we had to do that last hundred yards on foot, a pleasant martyrdom for the square in which the church stands is a handsome one.
Once again we had the place more or less to ourselves, and once more Miss Lobb took the opportunity to say a short and comforting prayer to her creator—or was she just praying for the death of Beddoes, as Deeds rather wickedly suggested? Not Miss Lobb, the spirit of London town. Deeds, who knew the place well, elected to spend his time in the lofty porch while the rest of us perambulated the shadowy interior of the building. He was unwilling to snuff out his pipe which was drawing particularly well that day. One of the French ladies had beautiful teeth and was most conscious of the fact, for she showed them frequently in a large smile.
It had become somewhat automatic as a gesture and it was interesting to see her giving this warm alert smile of recognition to inanimate objects, even to the saints in the frescoes. But Roberto was right about Cefalu—the church of Roger II was too important to miss out. It was a wonderful example of the same Norman-Byzantine-Spanish-baroque which had been such a singularly new experience in the island. The building was started in 1131, but took over a century to complete, so that it reflects more than one cycle of historic changes in forms and materials. But William had vowed to have a cathedral built in this place after he nearly suffered shipwreck on the headland. It was the customary way to express gratitude at that epoch, and we have been the ones to benefit from it.
Half an hour was soon spent and once more we sailed out from the crags of Cefalu and up on to the snaky coastal road which would carry us from headland to headland, past Himera with its Doric temple, towards Messina which would be our penultimate port of call. Tomorrow Mario would distribute us all over Taormina to continue our Sicilian adventure alone. Alone!
It was dusk when we arrived at Messina—sunset is an ideal time to take in the marvelous views of the harbor, subject of so many Victorian watercolors. But the earthquake which devastated Messina still rumbles on historically—it is a black date which has permanently marked the historical calendar of modern Sicily, grim and cruel, as if in contrast to the sweet Theocritan landscapes of this part of the island. The words have a kind of density, an echo, like the date of the Fall of Constantinople. We did several of the standard views of the town—the whole island seems to be one extraordinary belvedere—and then disembarked at the hotel in rather a sober mood. The only cultural fixture was a glimpse of the cathedral on the morrow. Tonight we were free to visit the town with Roberto or dine and go to bed. No one was in the mood to go out, it seemed. So in a shuffling unpremeditated fashion we congregated in the bar to exchange visiting cards and addresses against the parting tomorrow. Someone offered a drink all round in honor of the German engagement and this was loyally drunk.
It was a little sad.
I went for a trot round the town to do a little bit of shopping, and to gather what impressions I could of its relative newness, its rawness—for it had been laboriously put together again after the cataclysm. I found it atmospherically most appealing, perhaps the town in Sicily where life would be the most delightful. In trying to analyze why I discovered that it was once more the question of scale. Since the earthquake the houses had been limited to two or three stories, so that it had all the spacious charm of somewhere like the Athens Plaka under the Acropolis, or like Santa Barbara in California. The minute your architecture dwarfs people, shows disrespect for the purely human scale, you start to stunt their minds and chill their spirits. Messina was a fine proof of this notion of human relevance to architecture—a model in fact. And on the morrow these views were underlined in the most overwhelming way by the qualities of the cathedral.
VIEW OF MESSINA BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE.
At the hotel our identities were looked into by a couple of suspicious looking carabinieri to the intense annoyance of Roberto who felt it was a slur on the good name of the Company. Did they think he was ferrying carloads of criminals all over Sicily? But I missed this visitation.
Italy of course was in the grip of an inflation far worse than anything we had seen back in France; but one singular aspect of it was the sudden disappearance of small change. It had just happened in Messina. Nothing under a thousand-lira note seemed to exist and in order that business should continue as usual one was forced to accept change in kind so to speak. For example, in order to buy some toothpaste, aspirin, and tissues, which I did need, I was forced to accept as “change” a pair of silk stockings, a surgical bandage for sprains, and a pair of nail scissors. This sort of thing was going on in all the shops with the result that people were being loaded down like Christmas trees with things they didn’t want. I even got a telephone tally of nickel as part of my change in a tobacconist’s shop. It represented the price of a local phone call. Of course we were obliged to carry over this strange kind of primitive barter into our own lives—I tipped the hall porter with the telephone tally and an unwanted Tampax which had strayed into my chemist’s bundle. It was quite childish and chaotic. But the staff of the hotel seemed used to accepting these strange collections of objects instead of money tips. And finally one got quite used to going out to buy one orange and coming back with a bunch of grapes and a pound of figs as well. In a couple of days we had accumulated dozens of unwanted objects like this.
The evening was a trifle saddening; we all hung about a little, rather feeling that perhaps the situation called for a little speech from Roberto, or a more formal farewell to each other. But timidity and lack of organization held us imprisoned in the mood until it was too late.
Messina was a calm and tranquil place to spend a night, but we slept badly, afflicted by a woebegone sense of anti-climax. Even breakfast was an unusually subdued affair. We packed and loaded our gear automatically like the experienced tourists we had by now become. Then we swung off in the bright sunshine to have one glance at the cathedral before taking the long coastal road to Taormina. Here again was a fascinating aesthetic experience for me, and one which I had not expected. I knew that, like the rest of the town, the cathedral had been shattered to bits by the famous earthquake, and had been more or less shoved together. I had little hopes that this forced restoration of the great building would be a success. It is a quite fantastic success; it has been done so simply and without pretensions, executed with a bright spontaneity of a Zen watercolor. Whatever they found left was run into the new structure which itself was graced with an anti-earthquake armature. The result is simply marvelous; the huge building is among the most satisfying and gorgeous to be enjoyed in the island; and one is moved by the almost accidental simplicity with which it has all been brought off. Deeds was touched by my enthusiasm, and was glad, he said, that he had not over-praised the thing.
And so off along the coast road in the fine sunlight towards the last port of call. On the last headland Roberto called a halt and we made a few color photographs of the Carousel which I knew I would never see. Somewhere, in discarded photograph albums, they would lie, melting away year by year.
And so
on we ran in on Taormina and the melancholy distribution began; the French ladies and the Count with his wife were put down on the road to Naxos, the Japs disappeared, Beddoes was dropped at a pension which looked like the headquarters of the Black Hand. It was indeed like the casualty list of a battalion, men dropping away one by one. “So long!” “Bye-bye!” “See you again I hope.” “Ring me in London!” “Come to Geneva, but let me know.” Mario had become sulky with sadness and Roberto was a little bit on edge too it seemed. We sorted out baggage and shook hands. Deeds disappeared into an orange grove with his bags, promising that we should meet again for a drink somewhere in the island. He had a few more visits to make as yet. The pre-Adamic couple walked away into the sunlight with an air of speechless ecstasy. I was the last one—the higher we went the fewer we became; my little pension was in the heart of Taormina—which is built up in layers like a wedding cake. But at last my turn came. I embraced Mario and Roberto and thanked them for their kindness and good humor. I meant it. They had done nobly by us.
Taormina
We three men sit all evening
In the rose garden drinking and waiting
For the moon to turn our roses black,
Crawling across the sky. We mention
Our absent friend from time to time.
Some chessmen have tumbled over,
They also die who only sit and wait,
For the new moon before this open gate.
What further travel can we wish on friends
To coax their absence with our memory—
One who followed the flying fish beyond the
Remote Americas, one to die in battle, one
To live in Persia and never write again.
She loved them all according to their need
Now they are small dust waiting in perfect heed,
In someone’s memory for a cue.
Thus and thus we shall remember you.
The smoke of pipes rises in pure content
The roses stretch their necks, and there
She rides at last to lend
A form and fiction to our loving wish.
The legions of the silent all attend.
Taormina
“TAORMINA, THE OLD Bull Mountain—I’m so glad I followed my instinct and saved it up for the last. It was like a kind of summation of all that went before, all the journeys and flavors this extraordinary island had to offer. Like a fool, I loped up it with Loftus in an old racing car at full moon; but something made me aware of the sacrilege and next day I walked humbly down to the bottom where I left a propitiatory candle in the little Christian shrine of St. Barnabus (isn’t it?) and retraced my way up again. Of course it must have once been a sort of sacred way, laid out against the breast of this steep little mountain so that one could approach it step by step, loop by loop. The long steep zigzags of the road must have been punctuated significantly with statues and flowering shrubs and little fanes to take an offering of the first fruits. One arrived, slowly and breathlessly, watching the scene widen out around one, and deepen into a screen of mountain and sea and volcano.”
Thus Martine. In the garden of the Villa Rosalie to which I had been assigned, two white-haired men played chess amidst dense flowering shrubbery which suggested rather the cultivation of a spa like Nice than the wild precincts of Sicily; I had come back to Europe really. I left my bags and walked the length of the main street with its astonishing views. It was so good that it aroused indignation: one almost suspected it to be spurious; but no, it simply outstripped language, that was all. And a wonderful sense of intimacy and well-being suffused the whole place. Yes, it was sophisticated as well—and as if to match the idea I found a small visiting card from Loftus waiting in my box inscribed in that fine old-fashioned lace hand which he had cultivated in order to write ancient Greek. A message of greeting, giving me his phone number. But tonight I was in a mood to be alone, to enjoy, and to regret being alone. It was a strange new feeling, not unconnected with fatigue. But the sinking sunset which one drank out of one’s glass of Campari, so to speak, was as extraordinary as any that Greece or Italy has to offer. And Etna did her stuff on the skyline.
However blasé one is, however much one has been prepared for the aerial splendors of the little town, its freshness is perennial, it rises in one like sap, it beguiles and charms as the eye turns in its astonishment to take in crags and clouds and mountains and the blue coastline. Here one could sit in a deck chair gazing out into the night and thinking about Greek flair and Roman prescience—they married here in this place; but why was it a failure at last, why did it fall apart?
Because everything does I suppose. And now after so long, here come I with my valedictory admiration, inhabitant of yet another culture which is falling apart, which is doomed to the same decline and fall, perhaps even more suddenly.… How marvelous to read a book at dinner. I had chosen that fussy but touching civil servant Pliny; his pages tell one all one wants to know and admire about Rome.
And how pleasant, too, to dawdle the length of that main street—like walking the bridge of a Zeppelin. And how astonishingly still the air is at this great height. It is what constitutes the original feature of Taormina, I think; one’s thoughts naturally turn to places like Villefranche or Cassis (as they must have been a hundred years ago); and then, quite naturally, to Capri and Paleocastrizza. The difference is not only in variety and prolixity of classical views—the whole thing has been anchored in mid-heaven, at a thousand feet, and up here the air is still and calm. The white curtains in my hotel room breathed softly in and out, like the lungs of the universe itself. There were cafes of Roman and Venetian excellence, and there were the traditional hordes of tourists perambulating up and down the long main street. Its narrowness grew on one after the sixth or seventh turn upon it.
And in the little side streets there were unforgotten corners of the real Italy—by which I mean the peasant Italy with its firmly anchored values and purity of heart. At dusk next day I walked up to have a look at the villa Lawrence occupied for three years. It was modest and quite fitting to the poems he wrote here in this pure high tower of silence which is Taormina at night. But at the first corner of the road there stood a tattered trattoria with a dirty cloth across the door to keep the flies at bay. In the street, under a faded-looking tree, stood a rickety table and two chairs. Just that and nothing more. A tin table which had been racked with smallpox and perhaps some hunter’s small shot. A slip of broom was suspended from the lintel. And here I was served a harsh black wine by a matron with a walleye and hairy brown arms. She was like Demeter herself and she talked to me quietly and simply about the wines of the island. Hers was Etna, volcanic wine, and it tasted of iron; but it was not sugary and I bought a demijohn as a present for Loftus when I should decide to take up his invitation. If I hesitated, it was for a rather obscure reason; I wanted, so to speak, to let the Carousel experience evaporate before I changed the whole key. For I knew that encountering Loftus and his life here meant that I would find myself back in the Capri of the twenties; in the world of Norman Douglas—a world very dear to me precisely because it was a trifle precious. Martine had had one foot in this world, to be sure, but what I had personally shared with her had not belonged to this aspect of our islomania. Capri had long since sunk below the horizon when Cyprus became a reality. Yet she had loved Douglas as much as I, and Compton Mackenzie as well, while the silent empty villa of Lawrence up the hill also carried the echoes of that Nepenthean period where Twilight in Italy matched South Wind.
But Taormina is so small that it was inevitable that from time to time I would bump into other members of the Carousel. I saw the Microscopes in the distance once or twice, and the American dentist waved from the April cafe as I passed. I also saw the Bishop—he had taken up a stance in order to “appreciate” a piece of architecture, while his wife sat on a stone and fanned herself with her straw hat. But that was all. There was no sign of Deeds. After two days of this delicious privacy in my littl
e pension where I knew nobody, I visited the bookshop and bought a guide to the island, intending to spend my last few days filling in the lacunae in my knowledge. I could not leave without bracing Etna for example, or standing on the great “belvedere of all Sicily,” Enna; then Tyndarus … and so on. I thought I would rent a small car to finish off the visit in a style more reminiscent of the past than by having any truck with trains and buses. It would be interesting to see what Loftus thought.
I rang him, and was amused and pleased to recognize his characteristic drawl, and the slight slurring of the r’s which had always characterized his speech. He had a little car he could lend me, which was promising, and so I agreed to dine at his villa the following evening. In a way it was reassuring that nothing much had changed for Loftus; he had ruined a promising diplomatic career by openly living with his chauffeur, an ex-jailbird, and then, as if that were not enough, winning notoriety by writing a novel called Le Baiser in French which had a succès de scandale. Someone in the Foreign Office must have known that the word “baiser” didn’t only mean “kiss” (though it is difficult to think who) and Loftus was invited to abstract himself from decent society. This he did with good grace—he had a large private income—and retired to Taormina where he grew roses and translated the classics. He had been one of the most brilliant scholars of his time, though an incurable dilettante. About Sicily he knew all that there was to be known. But of course now he was getting on, like the rest of us, and hardly ever moved from the Villa Ariadne—a delightful old house built on a little headland over the sea, and buried in roses. He too was a relic of the Capri epoch, a silver-age man.