Vistas in Sicily Part 10

When I asked the girl, who could understand Italian perfectly, though she spoke none herself, if I might photograph her, she consented without a trace of her former ferocity and--with a self-respect unfortunately rare in Taormina--refused any gratuity, merely wis.h.i.+ng us a torrential good day as she vanished up the black and smoky stairs of a stone hut on one of the side streets.

It is a pity the town has not more like her. The Taorminians display comparatively little of the simple geniality and charm of the Palermitans, little of their bright-faced innocence and heartiness. At first it is hard to understand why, since they are no less Sicilian than their fellows of the capital. But a slight acquaintance with them will convince the most casual observer that they have learned their own value only too well as replicas of Greek and Roman and Saracenic beauty.

Consequently many of them have turned from simple hill folk into insincere, lazy, professional poseurs, alert for camera or pencil, and lost forever to the childlike graces that distinguish their brothers.

And not only are the people replicas of the past, but their native music is reminiscent also--pure Greek melodies that have floated down the river of time from the days when Bion and Theocritus rambled these same hills and wrote songs eternally young; Saracenic love-songs full of the wild spirit of desert and river, quavering and melancholic; pa.s.sionate lyric romances suggestive of cavalier Norman days. But it is the Greek that, being the purest and simplest strain, has always prevailed. Every day little shepherd lads stir the terrific solitudes of wind-swept mountain steeps with wordless songs drawn as by magic from their reedy flutes, music shrilly sweet and unforgettable. And at dinner in the evening you may hear some little minstrel wandering up and down the Corso, fluting his heart out in the moonlight.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The girl's utterance was fierce, her expression positively menacing."]

In your eagerness you peradventure hale him into the mysterious labyrinthine "Garden of the Moon" behind the hotel, where the silvery blue orb of a great arc-lamp glows among the interlacing almonds and medlars, and bid him play. But he is a shy, embarra.s.sed Pan, stiff of finger, timid of lip until he forgets the listening bystanders. Then the magic pipe takes up again the silver strain. There is no hotel upon the mountainside, but only the melody, the moon-mellowed primeval forest, the slumbering forms of the little shepherd's weary flock. The music ceases--the elfin charm is broken. Rudely over the fairy ring of your vision burst the ungentle voices of moderns in tailor-fas.h.i.+oned clothes, stiff boots and Paris hats, wearing no chaplets of ivy or acanthus upon ambrosial locks--and worst of all, some of them smoking cigarettes!

One such night I pleaded with the little minstrel, urged him by strange and magic names he never knew, to let me have his reed. Reluctantly, unsmiling, he gave it up, and as I write, it lies close by. But alas, no more it knows the Grecian strain--it will not sing for me!

XIII

SOME MOUNTAIN VISTAS

The ignorance and illiteracy to which reference has already been made are the chief misfortunes of the Sicilians. Since schools are few and far between, little girls are taught only to sew, knit and cook. The boys, more unfortunate, receive little or no instruction at all--there is work for them as soon as they are old enough, and they are useful in the fields and about the stables and goatpens at six or eight. The children of wealthy or n.o.ble families seem to be regarded as superior beings who have to learn practically nothing, and who accordingly go through life unworried by knowing anything. A few years ago an English lady undertook to make Taormina over single handed, and though the town still has a long and th.o.r.n.y road to travel, the results the Hill School has accomplished in helping the people to help themselves have surpa.s.sed all antic.i.p.ations, and prove that even with both heredity and environment against them, the people are willing to learn and to work when shown how.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "She charged ten cents a month each for tuition.... 'It is much for some!'"]

Within one of the dark doorways along the Corso is a typically Taorminian inst.i.tution, a knitting school where little tots sit demurely knitting, crocheting or embroidering with faces as expressionless as the visages of so many trained kittens. The "lady princ.i.p.al" comes forward graciously to welcome visitors in her tiny domain, and readily grants permission to make photographs. But the room is lighted only from the front door, and the little heads and bodies are so difficult to keep in repose for even a few seconds that photography is speedily abandoned for an inspection of the work of the pupils, babies of from three upward, except that occasionally an older girl takes a "post graduate course" in fine embroidering. They click away industriously as their visitors pa.s.s along the line, and some do not even glance up, so thoroughly have they been drilled by the schoolmistress. Each juvenile knitter uses two long needles and wears a belt with a little leather plastron, in which the b.u.t.t-end of the stationary needle rests, to protect the thinly clad little body from the p.r.i.c.k of the sharp steel instrument.

When we visited the school, I asked the teacher how much she charged for tuition.

"Ten cents a month each," was her grave reply. "It is much for some to pay."

"Does that pay you?"

She waved her hand at the circle of twenty-five pupils. "It does!"

The food of the people is intended to support life rather than gratify the palate. And though the little ones, like normal children anywhere in the world, are gifted with a sweet tooth, their desire for _dolci_ is very, very seldom gratified. So when you loiter about the door of the little school, be sure to have a bag of sweet cakes with you--the bakers along the Corso all sell them. The "lady princ.i.p.al" will gladly permit you to distribute the glistening, white-iced treasures, and you will be amply repaid in watching the pupils--the daintiness with which they accept and hold the proffered delicacies, the timid "_Graz', Signora!

Graz'!_" of each, the perfect restraint of eager eyes and mouths.

A very important personage in this little mountain town is Signor Atenasio Pancrazio, banker, steams.h.i.+p agent, postal messenger, and storekeeper; and curious indeed are his business methods. On four days which we noticed especially because of a desire to get at some of Signor Atenasio's money, he opened his bank-store at the somewhat irregular and unusual hours of eleven-thirty, a quarter before nine, noon, and twenty minutes past three. And then, to make the hours appear still less like a matter of sordid business for gain, the gentleman threw wide his doors on a Sunday morning and kept open shop, bank and house until long after everybody but the ubiquitous tourist had gone to bed.

Banker though he is, the good gentleman has ideas above mere money-making, and if you are content to sit at his feet in the big, dim counting-room--which smells of cheese and wine, of garlic and rubber-stamp ink--you can learn much about the Sicilian problem, which is as perplexing to the Italian Government as the Irish bogy is to Downing Street. When absentee landlordism is combined with ignorance and poverty, it makes a problem indeed.

The agricultural system is very old. It had its inception as long ago as the days when Pope Gregory the Great was one of the most important proprietors in the island, in the name and person of the Church. He was a good and careful landlord, but others are the opposite, and the system, always unjust, has degenerated. At the present time an estate is nominally managed on behalf of the owner by a factor, who most often re-rents it to someone else. This third person in turn, not wis.h.i.+ng to cultivate it personally, leases it in small patches to the farmer at exorbitant rates, or to a fourth factor, who repeats the operation. Thus when the peasant finally comes into possession of his acres, he is paying so heavy a rental that it is practically impossible to do more than make his actual expenses.

Driven to desperation by such a condition and often in actual need, he has recourse to the money-lender, who loans readily--and collects with grim certainty, practically enslaving the wretched farmer. The usurers grow rich, but they h.o.a.rd up their evil fortunes, keeping the money out of circulation, and the country is the poorer. Naturally the steams.h.i.+p office becomes the most important place in towns where discontent prevails. The companies have men ready to answer all questions, and more than willing to encourage the peasant to give up his hardly earned savings, providing he is physically sound. Indeed, they even send glib and persuasive agents about to drum up trade in likely districts by painting glowing pictures of the golden streets of America.

"Signor Atenasio," I said, "you are a steams.h.i.+p agent yourself. Do you go about and make trade this way?"

"The holy Saint Pancratius forbid!" he exclaimed, piously calling upon his patron. But he spoiled the effect by adding instantly: "No, I do not have to. I get all the trade there is in Mola anyway. It is very little," he shrugged, and turned the subject.

This Mola, the tiny town on the hilltop above Taormina, may be cited as a typical example of what taxes, lack of education, usury, and as a consequence, emigration, are doing for Sicily to-day. Though Mola lies only about a thousand feet higher up in the air than Taormina, it is ten times as far away by foot--and by foot you must go, "either your own or another donkey's!" as one weary but none the less enthusiastic visitor put it on returning. The road--a good part of it is low stone steps, the round, flat pebbles set on edge in mortar--winds along the uncertain sides of the little valleys, and since not a single tree of any size shades it from an almost tropical sun at full power, it is sufficiently trying. Here and there a female beggar pops up most unexpectedly to demand an alms "for the love of the blessed Christ who walked thus to Calvary!"

The town curves in a semi-circle around the top of the hill, behind the battered remains of stout old walls which even to-day are ma.s.sive and in places almost perfect, and might be turned to excellent account in defense. Just where the road skirts the base of the cliff, one night in December of 1677, forty stout-hearted native soldiers scaled the wall--when you look up at it, it seems an impossible feat--with ropes, and surprised and captured the French garrison then in possession. The highly picturesque entrance by a carved archway under a bit of wall leading outward at right angles from the overhanging cliff is commanded by an equally picturesque evil-looking iron smooth-bore cannon.

So still is Mola that the old lines fit it perfectly:

"Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all, And the long gra.s.s o'ertops the moldering wall; And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand, Far, far away, thy children leave the land."

It is literally the "Deserted Village." Half an hour suffices to explore the Corso--even tiny Mola has its highway named for the King!--and all the silent high- and by-ways from end to end; mere _gradini_, crooked and steep, slits between out-of-plumb houses whose only occupants seem to be pigs. The biggest, blackest, dirtiest and leanest razorbacks imaginable march solemnly up and down the front steps of the best houses, or snore comfortably inside on the parlor floor. Occasionally a savage mother with her little shoats takes up a good share of the way, snapping viciously at anyone who ventures too close. Our "guide," a mere baby, offered to go and stir up such a family when he saw me about to take its picture, and nearly lost a leg for his pains.

But in all these streets not a man is visible of adult years and able to work. Only at the "Cathedral" can vigorous men be seen, the verger and the priest. The whereabouts of the others are told in the single magic word that spells so much to all Europe--"America!" It is literally true.

Of all the male inhabitants only those too poor, too feeble to make the long trip, or too young to be acceptable as toilers, have remained at home. Even the exceptions, the verger and the priest, gaze seaward with longing eyes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Occasionally in Mola a savage mother with her shoats takes up a good share of the way."]

The "Cathedral" is a building to make the heart ache. Poor and ignorant though they are, the people strive with cheap, garish colors and hideous decorations to please the Deity as well as to give their lowly church the air of a rich-folks' Cathedral. What grips one most is to be found in the sacristy. Tied tightly to the arm of a much betinseled Mary Magdalen is a beautiful and amazingly thick braid of human hair. What is the tragedy behind the oblation? What poor little girl from Mola came cowering and repentant to the feet of the saint and fastened the simple ex-voto in broken-hearted grat.i.tude to the arm of her who wept over the sacred feet and wiped them with her hair? Is it a local tragedy or one from across the unfathomable seas? The verger pretends he does not know.

Yet as you wander through the unkempt streets of the deserted village, you cannot help looking curiously about for any woman whose head shows the trace of the votive shears.

Many a time throughout Italy we had been tormented by filthy beggars on the steps of the cathedrals; but it was reserved for Mola to show us a pig who owned to being a pig in such a place! As we came out a huge, lean razorback grunted in savage disapproval, lurched to his feet, and trotted heavily off down a side street.

If the ascent to Mola is difficult, what can be said of the coming down?

You stretch muscles you never knew you had, all the corns in the world seem to have concentrated upon your luckless feet, and you pitch and roll and toss like a mastless s.h.i.+p in a cross-sea.

After that Mola trip the most energetic traveler is apt to go to bed very early, and so for the first time hears the night noises of Taormina. The town makes quite a clatter on its way to bed--the click!

click! click! of hobnailed heels on the lava pavement, the light chatter and songs of the children, which for all their occasional gayety have an elusive element of the tragic in them, the fluting of some little shepherd, and the tired bray of a home-going donkey glad the day's work is over. And every half-hour the bell-baiting! Would that Poe had heard these Sicilian bells before he wrote his tintinnabulating rhyme. Beaten, not rung, they clamor with the maddening insistence of fiends until the ear rebels and no longer notices their angry tumult. One tradition has it that there is not a bell-clapper in the island, for the returning French took the iron tongues away after the Ma.s.sacre of the Vespers, to keep the people from ringing alarms. But the ingenious Sicilian found that he could make much more noise with a hammer, and though six hundred years and more have rolled by, he is still so tickled with the racket that he seems each time to be trying to break all previous records. A more plausible story is that the clappers were taken away by the Neapolitans as recently as the day of Garibaldi's arrival with his thousand red-s.h.i.+rts in 1860.

Save for the bell-baiting only, silence reigns from about ten until two.

Then the first donkey's tiny little overburdened feet come ticking down the Corso, the whack of his rider's stick and an occasional gruff adjuration to the patient little mouse-colored beast recurring in a regular work-_motif_. Slowly the light begins to come. A sleepy ringer bangs out fifty irregular notes from his bell, hesitates a moment as though not quite certain of his count, and adds one last vigorous clang for good measure. Chanticleer first awakes the echoes, in strenuous rivalry with stentorian peac.o.c.ks. Again silence reigns for half an hour or so. Then Taormina turns in bed, stirs luxuriously, yawns, and "gets busy."

Along the Corso donkeys bearing slim wine-casks and great tins of goats'

milk patter past at a smart pace; vegetable hawkers from the _piana_ shout their wares into open doorways; cats and chickens side by side strike out into the daylight from the obscurity of their shelters, stretching and flapping comfortably. Children, standing like models of Justice, scales and weights in hand, call their merchandise, weigh and measure with preternatural gravity, or eye older hucksters sharply as the latter use their own scales to weight out a "penorth" of this or a "haporth" of that.

These street views are keenly interesting, but after all it is aetna that makes Taormina an artist's paradise. Travelers and artists alike come for a brief glimpse or a sketch of aetna, return again and again, or perchance find the fascination of h.o.a.ry crown and delicate lights and shades so irresistible they settle down in the volcano's shadow and remain for years, proclaiming Taormina to be the rarest beauty spot in creation.

One of the American artists who came twenty years ago and has never been able to tear himself away from the thrall of the great cold peak, shows his studies of its moods, a great stack of marvelous water colors made at dawn, at noon, at sunset, at every hour of day and night, with every whimsical effect cloud or sun or shadow could give as he sat at his easel in a white-walled garden with the perpetually beautiful before him as a model. Perhaps the most remarkable contrasts are from a perfectly moonlight night to a clear dawn the next morning. All night the moon, sailing in solemn round overhead, tints the peak's snowy shoulders with a faint greenish tinge that makes it the wraith of a volcano. A little before four o'clock, slowly, tenderly, moon and pallid stars dwindle into spookish reflections of themselves as the sky lightens, the velvet blue of the night puckers into gelid gray, changes into pale turquoise through which majestically sail a vast fleet of enormous fluffy clouds, while aetna rises dark and forbidding from the piana below.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Many a protesting goat is compelled to scramble up four or five flights of dark stairs."]

Graciously a faint flush in the eastern sky increases in volume, deepens in tone; the grim pile of the volcano on the west darkens at the top, and as the ineffable pink spreads around behind it, the cone turns dead and spectral, and the thin, cottony tuft of curling smoke above the main crater eddies upward with all the seeming of steam on a foggy winter's morning. These first changes come with the measured caution of a master painter working carefully lest through some hasty stroke he spoil the effect of the tone picture to come. The light spreads. Neither camera nor pen can keep pace with the instantaneous transformations on every side. The vast crimson-coppery disc sails slowly up in majesty to eye the little world of Taormina from behind the inky green shoulder of the Greek Theater's hill. The upper edges of the clouds turn pink and silver; the lower, soft salmon pink, saffron, orange, gold. It is day!

There is something awe-inspiring, archaic, terrible about it all. It suggests the ancient Egyptian belief of Amen-ra riding through the horrible fastnesses of the Tuat in his sacred boat, and emerging in the glory of the resurrection.

It is a chilly performance of a spring morning, and a hungry one. At a quarter before six, an eight o'clock breakfast seems at a starving distance; so the best thing to do is to come down into the street to see the milk being delivered. Right, left, and everywhere are nothing but goats! goats! goats! the whole length of the Corso; by twos, singly, in herds of twenty or more, with a pair of fractious kids roped together under their mother's usually wide open, yellow old eye, or tied one to each hind leg, very much to mother's discomfort. They burst out upon the Corso from narrow little _gradini_ as if they had been kicked out of Mola on the crags above, and had not been able to check their speed on the long roll down. The tobacconist whose shop is directly opposite the hotel, opens at dawn to catch the early trade of the Mola goatherds in snuff and _sigari_. If you catch his eye he will throw wide both arms to include all the goats on the Corso, and exclaim: "_Latte de'capri e molto bell'!_"

Take his gracefully conveyed hint, and ask for a gla.s.s. One of the _ragazze_--two-thirds at least of the goatherds in Taormina and Mola are young girls--milks a rich, warm, foaming pint. Whatever your misgivings, the tobacconist is quite right--"Milk of goats is very beautiful!"--very grateful to a cold and empty stomach.

The hotel is quite civilized, the honest goatherd milking his animals into bottles which he carries in under the eye of a servant whose business it is to see that there is no adulteration or watering. In the private houses still more scrupulous care is observed. Many a protesting goat is compelled to scramble up as many as four or five flights of dark and difficult stairs to be milked in the "parlor" into the suspicious or indolent housewife's own can or bottle. The Taorminians are worried by no inspectors or supervision of their milk supply, for the purchasers are their own supervisors, and milk is one thing in Sicily absolutely above reproach.