Castellinaria, and Other Sicilian Diversions Part 28

She opened her cloak and showed that she wanted everything.

Another woman came with her daughter whose leg was broken and they were both naked. The doctor said to the mother:

"And what do you want?"

"Help for my daughter."

To another dest.i.tute woman: "And you?"

"Shoes for my baby."

Michele, a young man, was known to be in Reggio where he was employed in the Municipio. His father went from Caltanissetta to look for him and returned after four days, during which he had searched for his son and suffered mental anguish and physical discomfort. His friends went to the station to meet him. He talked politics to them and asked their opinion about the rotation of crops.

"And Michele?" they inquired.

"Oh! Michele," here he began to laugh: "Michele; yes, he is buried under the ruins of a house three storeys high."

They could get nothing more out of him except laughter and that Michele was lying under a house three storeys high. A few months later, Michele's body was found, with no traces of decay, brought to Caltanissetta and buried. Then his friends wrote elegies in verse about him and handed them round for approval.

Plenty of people went mad besides Michele's father. The streets of Messina were full of mad people. They told me of one who lost his wife.

Within a fortnight he married a widow whose husband had been destroyed.

This happy couple spent their honeymoon in digging out the bodies of their previous spouses and having them suitably buried.

When I say they married, a widow may not legally marry for ten months after the death of her husband, but this couple married on credit, as they call it. There were many fugitives who found a temporary asylum in a prison in Catania and who similarly married on credit, intending to return later and contribute to the population of the new Messina.

There was a family living on the top floor of a house close to the railway station near the port in Reggio. They were not hurt, but they could not get down because the earthquake had destroyed the stairs. The man made a rope of sheets, with the help of which he carried his wife down, then he went up and fetched his children one after another, three or four children. He went up again to fetch his money and while in his room the house fell with him, killing and burying him in the ruins. But he had saved his wife and children.

They told me of a victim, pinned down in a cellar, unable to rise; a chicken, whose coop had been broken, escaped and pa.s.sed near; the victim caught the chicken, killed it, plucked it and ate it raw. They told me of others, not pinned down but imprisoned in rooms, who ate what they found in cupboards--oil, biscuits, salame, uncooked maccaroni. These victims were saved and lived to recount their sufferings. But there were others, pinned down and imprisoned, whose bodies were not extricated till they had lain for weeks and months beside their emptied cupboards, no longer on the watch for escaping chickens. I was in Catania about a year and a half after the earthquake and saw the funeral of one whose body had recently been found; it was not the last.

THE SLOPES OF ETNA

CHAPTER XVIII LAVA

We started from Catania at three o'clock on a dull afternoon at the end of March to see one of the streams of lava that Etna was sending out during the eruption of 1910. Peppino Di Gregorio had arranged everything and provided four of his friends to make company for us and to act as guides, some of them having been before. He and I went in a one-horse carriage with two of the friends and the other two came on their bicycles. There was, first, another Peppino who had been in America, where he earned his living by making cigars. He had forgotten how it was done and, besides, it required special tools, so he could not have shown me even if he had remembered. Since his return home to Catania he has been employed by the municipio. He begged me to call him not Peppino but Joe, because he would be so English. Then there was Ninu, also employed by the municipio, a great bullock of a fellow bursting with health, whose legs were too short for him and his smile a dream of romance. The other two were Alessandro, about whom I got no information, and a grave brigadier of the Guardia Munic.i.p.ale.

The road took us up-hill among villas and between walls enclosing fields of volcanic soil, very fertile, and occasionally a recent eruption had buried the fertility under fresh lava, hard and black, on which nothing will grow for years.

Patrick Brydone went to Sicily in 1770, and wrote an account of his journey: _A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Letters to William Beckford_, _Esquire_, _of Somerly_, _in Suffolk_, _from Patrick Brydone_, _F.R.S._ Near Catania he saw some lava covered with a scanty soil, incapable of producing either corn or vines; he imagined from its barrenness that

it had run from the mountain only a few ages ago; but was surprised to be informed by Signor Recupero, the historiographer of Etna, that this very lava is mentioned by Diodorus Siculus to have burst from Etna in the time of the second Punic war, when Syracuse was besieged by the Romans.

It seems that the stream ran from Etna to the sea, and cut off the pa.s.sage of a detachment of soldiers who were on their way from Taormina to the relief of the besieged, and Diodorus took his authority from inscriptions on Roman monuments found on the lava itself. So that after about 2000 years this lava had scarcely begun to be fertile. Afterwards Recupero, who was a canonico, "an ingenious ecclesiastic of this place,"

told Brydone of a pit sunk near Jaci, where they had pierced through seven parallel surfaces of lava, most of them covered with a thick bed of rich earth.

Now, says he [Recupero], the eruption which formed the lowest of these lavas, if we may be allowed to reason from a.n.a.logy, must have flowed from the mountain at least 14,000 years ago. Recupero tells me, he is exceedingly embarra.s.sed by these discoveries in writing the history of the mountain.--That Moses hangs like a dead weight on him, and blunts all his zeal for enquiry; for that really he has not the conscience to make his mountain so young as that prophet makes the world.--What do you think of these sentiments from a Roman Catholic divine?--The bishop, who is strenuously orthodox--for it is an excellent see--has already warned him to be upon his guard, and not to pretend to be a better natural historian than Moses; nor to presume to urge anything that may in the smallest degree be deemed contradictory to his sacred authority. . . .

The lava, being a very porous substance, easily catches the dust that is carried about by the wind; which, at first I observe, only yields a kind of moss; this rotting, and by degrees increasing the soil, some small meagre vegetables are next produced; which rotting in their turn, are likewise converted into soil. But this process, I suppose, is often greatly accelerated by showers of ashes from the mountain, as I have observed in some places the richest soil, to the depth of five or six feet and upwards; and still below that, nothing but rocks of lava. It is in these spots that the trees arrive at such an immense size. Their roots shoot into the crevices of the lava, and lay such hold of it, that there is no instance of the winds tearing them up; though there are many of its breaking off their longest branches.

We pa.s.sed several villages, and on one of the churches there was a group of three saints--S. Alfio, the padrone of the district, and his two brothers. I had never heard of S. Alfio, who they told me was a physician and lived in the third century; one of his brothers, S.

Filiberto (whom the people call S. Liberto), was a surgeon, and his other brother, S. Cirino, was a chemist. They performed miracles, endured persecution, and were finally martyred for the faith in this way: First they had their three tongues cut out, then they were put into a saucepan such as the maccaroni is boiled in, only larger--large enough to hold three saints--and full of boiling oil: the saucepan was placed on a fire and they were cooked in it. Their bodies were afterwards burnt on a gridiron. This took place out of doors opposite a tavern, and three men, who had come to the tavern to drink, saw it all done. Having seen it, they went to sleep for three hundred years; then they woke up and wanted to pay for their drinks with the money they had in their pockets, which was money made of leather.

"What is this?" asked the landlord.

"It is money," they replied.

"It is no use," said the landlord. While they had been asleep that kind of money had gone out of circulation.

"It is good money," they insisted.

"It is not money at all, it is only a piece of leather."

"It was money yesterday evening," said the spokesman, "when I saw Alfio, Cirino, and Liberto being martyred." This is how the martyrdom of the three saints is represented on carts belonging to those spiritually-minded owners who prefer the Story of S. Alfio to the Story of the Paladins. It seemed to me that the painter had been suspiciously obsessed by the number Three; it was in the third century, there were three saints, they were each martyred three times over, though they cannot have known much about the boiling or the grilling, and there were three drunkards who went to sleep for three centuries. But I said nothing. I thought I would wait till I could see a cart.

By this time we had reached Nicolosi, that is we had nearly traversed the first of the three zones into which the Slopes of Etna are divided. This lowest one is the Regione Piemontese and Nicolosi is about 2250 feet above the sea--the place from which tourists often start to make the ascent of the volcano. Here we spent a declamatory half-hour discussing where we should eat the provisions we had brought from Catania and drink the wine we had bought at Mascalucia on the way. The discussion ended by our being received in a peasant's hut, where we spread a table for ourselves and the woman stood a low paraffin lamp in the middle of the cloth. This is a bad plan, the light dazzles one for seeing those sitting opposite and their shadows are thrown big and black on the wall and ceiling so that one cannot see the room, but I should say it was like Orlando's bedroom in the contadino's cottage on Ricuzzu's cart, the only room in the house, poorly furnished and used for all purposes. The woman of the hut had a baby in her arms and I said to Ninu:

"I wonder whether I may look at the baby?"

"Of course you may," he replied, "why not?"

So I asked the woman, who smiled proudly and gave me the baby at once.

She called it Turi (Salvatore) and said it was three weeks old. It was asleep and I nursed it till the table was ready, which was not long, for everything was cold. I handed Turi back to his mother and sat down, with Joe on one side of me and Ninu on the other. Presently Ninu inquired why I had asked whether I might look at the baby. I replied that I had heard that Sicilian peasants are so superst.i.tious they do not like strangers to look at their babies for fear of the evil eye; I admitted that I had never yet met with a peasant so superst.i.tious as to refuse to show me her baby, but on the Slopes of Etna, during an eruption, I had thought it wise to be careful.

Ninu, in the Sicilian manner, was about to say that anyone could tell by my appearance that there was nothing to fear from me, when Joe interrupted him:

"She is an intelligent woman," said Joe.

I said: "I suppose you mean that she throws her intelligence into the scale with her maternal pride, and together they overbalance any little superst.i.tion which the proximity of the volcano may have fostered."

"That's the way to put it," he replied.

"Why do people talk so much about the evil eye? Do they think it is picturesque, or do they really believe in it?"

Joe considered for a moment. Then he said: "Sometimes a peasant may decline to hand over her baby because she thinks the stranger looks clumsy and is likely to drop it; it would be rude to let him suspect this, so she allows him to think she has a superst.i.tious reason. And some of her neighbours believe--at least--well, what do you mean by believing? What is faith?"

"I'm sure I don't know. Sometimes one thing, sometimes another. It is a difficult question."

"Perhaps it is that she believes that her neighbours believe," said Joe, tentatively.

"That is not the faith of S. Alfio and his brothers, that is not the faith that wins a martyr's crown or that removes mountains."

"No, but it has its reward if it enables the believer to feel that he is not singular, it is comfortable to feel that one thinks as one's neighbours think."

I said: "Thou art a happy man, Poins, to think as other men think."