Part 8 (1/2)
When the picture is on the mountain it is the custom for the women of the town to go to the Matrice in the evening to pray. When it is at Custonaci they go to the balio, where a stone prie-Dieu has been built for them from which they can see the sanctuary. Here they will go and pray every evening until such time as the next calamity brings the picture up among them again.
CUSTONACI
CHAPTER XII--FAITH AND SUPERSt.i.tION
The brigadier and the corporal both sent ill.u.s.trated postcards to me from Selinunte and I sent them postcards in return, but the corporal unaccountably desisted after being transferred to another station; for instead of returning home in about a month, as he had intended, he signed on for a further term of service. Perhaps on his change of address one of my cards may have gone wrong in the post, and he may have considered that I was neglecting him. I have never seen him again. The next time I went to Trapani the brigadier, who had been transferred to Custonaci, was guarding the coast between Monte San Giuliano and Cofano; I put off going to see him, however, because it was cold and wet and windy, not weather for excursions into places beyond the reach of civilization. I talked to Mario, the coachman, about it, and he said he would be ready to take me if a fine day occurred. I had another reason for wis.h.i.+ng to go to Custonaci: I thought it due to the Madonna di Custonaci that I should pay my respects to her in her sanctuary after having been present at her festa on the mountain.
Suddenly there came a fine Sat.u.r.day. I went out immediately after breakfast, found Mario, told him to be ready in half an hour, ordered a basket of provisions from the hotel, put a few things together in case they might be wanted, and we started.
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; between them, two or three kilometres away, is the sea which, I suppose, formerly covered the plain and washed the foot of the cliff.
Prominent on the sh.o.r.e, rather nearer to Cofano than to Monte Erice, is the caserma, an oblong white bungalow, and scattered upon the plain are a few fishermen's cottages, but no other dwellings. We first sent a boy off to the caserma to tell the brigadier I had come, and then Mario, after attending to his horses, joined me in the only trattoria in the place and we ate our provisions.
After lunch we went to the sanctuary, the home of the famous wonder-working picture of the Madonna which hangs over the altar. The sagrestano pulled aside the curtains while another man pulled a cord which operated a wheel hung with bells of different sizes, thereby making a tremendous and discordant noise and signifying to all within earshot that the Madonna was being unveiled, in case any one might care to offer up a pet.i.tion.
The light is better in the sanctuary than in the Matrice upon the Mountain, but this picture of the happy Mother with the Child at her breast holding three golden ears of corn did not thereby seem to gain as a work of art. The people, however, look upon it less as a work of art than as the representation of a divinity who lives for them as surely as Venus lived for the Romans, Aphrodite for the Greeks and Astarte for the Phoenicians, and as surely as other G.o.ddesses have lived here for other peoples. Cofano, looking across to Mount Eryx, saw the earliest appear on some prehistoric morning when man, born of a woman and living by the fruits of the earth, fas.h.i.+oned his first image of the Giver of Life and Increase, vivified it with the spirit of his faith and offered before it the homage of his praise and grat.i.tude. His faith gradually lost its freshness and suffered corruption like the manna which the disobedient children of Israel left until the morning, so that the image of the G.o.ddess became a sepulchre and a breeding-place of unclean imaginings.
Then man, seeing that virtue had gone out of the work of his hands, fas.h.i.+oned a new one, scarcely different in form, and breathed into it the breath of a new faith, scarcely different from the old. Again his faith carried with it into its stagnant prison the germs of its own decay.
Thus was established the recurrent rhythm of the death and resurrection of the deity. Cofano has watched them come and go and will one day see the Madonna dethroned to make way for her successor. But that day will not dawn until, in the Sanctuary or upon the Mountain, the peasants shall stand unmoved before this touching symbol of the universal wors.h.i.+p of Motherhood.
The brigadier was in sight when we came out of the church and before we had met in the piazza I became aware that I had caught cold--not a very remarkable thing in a wet January with a Sicilian wind. He was as courteous as ever, though a little inclined to grumble because I had not let him know when to expect me so that he could have met me on my arrival. I pleaded uncertainty caused by the bad weather, and he promised to forgive me if I would spend the night at the caserma instead of returning to Trapani. He would give me his own room all to myself, for he had to be out on duty guarding the coast between Monte San Giuliano and Cofano from 9 p.m. till 6 a.m. and, if he should find the coast quiet and wish to lie down in the early morning, there would be no difficulty, because one of his men had left him, so that he had four beds and only three guards to put into them.
It was getting late; we had taken longer to come than I had antic.i.p.ated, the horses were tired. There is no inn at Custonaci, but I knew that Mario could manage somehow; so I accepted, and we went through the village, down the cliff by a steep and difficult path, and across the plain. On the way we talked of our day at Selinunte and I asked after his companions there, but he had heard nothing further of any of them.
Soon we met one of the guards who had come from the caserma to look for us. He crossed himself as he told us that, coming along, he had heard the bells ring and knew that the picture of the Madonna was being unveiled. He was a man of few words, or found our conversation uninteresting, for he said nothing else all the rest of the way.
The caserma is quite close to and facing the sea. All round the door is a skeleton porch of wood, which in the summer is fitted with wire gauze to keep out the mosquitoes. Going through this, we were in the general room where I was introduced to the other two guards. Behind this room, with windows looking inland over the plain towards Custonaci, is the kitchen, and these two rooms make up the middle of the bungalow. The right wing consists of the brigadier's sitting-room, out of which a door leads to his bedroom, and the left wing is all one large room, occupied by the men as their bedroom.
The brigadier took me into his sitting-room to rest. There were only a few things in it, merely his table with his books and official papers and three or four chairs; but everything, as at Selinunte, was clean and tidy. On the wall was an extensive eruption of postcards and among them those that had come from me. As I looked on the tranquil whitewash of this secluded caserma, dotted with views of our complicated and populous London, with its theatres and motor buses and the feverish rush of its tumult, I found myself wondering what it would be like to listen to the _Pastoral Symphony_ in the _Messiah_, performed with occasional interpolations from _Till Eulenspiegel_.
The brigadier proposed a stroll while the guards prepared supper--they take it by turns to be cook, one each day, but this being an occasion, all three would be cooks to-night. We called at a cottage in the hope of buying some fish, but the weather had been too bad and there was none.
We met a young man, however, who had a kid for sale and wanted 95 centesimi per kilo; the brigadier would only give 80. The young man could not deal; the kid belonged to his father, and he had no power to exceed his instructions; he would go home and call at the caserma in the morning with the ultimissimo prezzo. We pa.s.sed a great hole in the ground like a dry well. The brigadier said that if it were not so very near the caserma, it might do as a hiding-place for any one flying from justice, or for brigands to conceal a prisoner.
”Or for smugglers to keep their spoils in,” I said; and the brigadier chuckled.
He showed me the stone that had been put up to mark the spot at which the Madonna was landed by the French sailors as they returned from Alexandria. We strolled back and tied up the pig which had broken loose and, the brigadier said, was not yet old enough, meaning that there would be no pork for supper yet awhile. With all this difficulty about pork and fish and kid, the simple life, as lived at the caserma, appeared to be less simple than it might have been if the shops had been a little nearer.
Supper consisted of chicory served with the water it had been boiled in, to which was added some oil; there was also bread and wine, then chicken and afterwards poached eggs which they call eggs in their s.h.i.+rtsleeves.
Before we had finished I told them that we have a proverb in England that too many cooks spoil the broth, and added that I had never known precisely how many were supposed to be too many, but that, judging by the excellence of the repast, certainly more than three would be required in the caserma of Custonaci. I said this because I was beginning to feel it was time that something of the kind should come from me. Sicilians are not only polite in themselves, but the cause that politeness or an attempt at it, is in other men; and this was the best I could do at the moment in their manner. Knowing I was among experts, I had not much fear as to their reception of my little compliment, just as a student of the violin is less nervous when performing before a master of the instrument than before the general public. The brigadier and his guards accepted it as though it were of the finest quality, and even complimented me upon it.
After supper there came a large moth which fluttered about the lamp; one of the guards called it a ”farfalla notturna,” a nocturnal b.u.t.terfly, and said it had come to bring us good fortune. Another of the men, who was of a sceptical temperament, said it might be so, but that in matters of this kind one never can be sure what one's fortune would have been if the moth had not come. I said that if there was to be any good fortune for me I should like it to take the form of curing the cold which, for my sins, I had caught that morning as I came out of the sanctuary. The guard who believed in the moth--after returning my compliment about the cooking by saying I must be wrong to talk about my sins, for he was sure I had never committed any--said that as to the kind of luck the moth would bring, Fortune would not submit to dictation, the most I could do to control her would be to look out farfalla notturna in the book and put a few soldi on the number in the next lottery. I told him I had had enough of the lottery at Castelvetrano. The brigadier was interested, so I told him about it and said I was afraid the reason I had lost was that my numbers had nothing to do with anything that had happened to me during the week. He confirmed what Peppino had said and added that he was always very careful about the choosing of his numbers.
”But surely,” I said, ”you do not always win when you follow that rule?”
”I have played every week for twenty years,” said the brigadier, ”and have only won four times; but I always hope.”
”One can hope,” I said, ”without spending any soldi.”
Here the guard who believed in the moth interposed, seeing that I did not know much about it--