This winter, as perhaps a frantic last measure, the town, in the hope that it will attract the international audience, is opening a gambling casino. I wish them luck: it is imperative that someone come along and buy all those hand-woven hats, handbags, that junk in the shops along the Corso. For myself, Taormina suits me the way it is; it has the comforts of a tourist center (running water, a shop with foreign newspapers, a bar where you can buy a good martini) without the tourists.
The town, not large, is contained between two gates; near the first of these, the Porto Messina, there is a small tree-shaded square with a fountain and a stone wall along which village idlers are arranged like birds on a telephone wire. Taking one of my first walks through Taormina, I was startled to see perched upon this wall an old man wearing velvet trousers and wrapped in a black cape; his hat, an olive fedora, had been dented into a peaked tricorne crown, and the brim threw a shadow over his broad, yellowed, somewhat Mongolian face.
It was a surprisingly theatrical appearance, merely that, until looking closely I realized it was André Gide. Through the spring and early summer I often saw him there, either sitting unnoticed on the wall, apparently only another of the old men, or browsing about the fountain, where, with his cape drawn about him in a Shakespearean manner, he seemed to be observing in the water his own reflection: si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait.
Beneath the excess trappings Taormina is an ordinary town, and its people have ordinary ambitions, occupations. However, many of them, the young men in particular, possess what I think of as the mentality of hotel-children, children who have spent their lives in hotels, and who know that all things are transient, that the heart must never be involved, for friendship is a matter of days.
These young men live, as it were, “outside” the town; they are interested in foreigners, not so much for gainful reasons as the distinction they believe it bestows upon them to have English and American acquaintances, and as most of them have a primitive way with several languages, they spend their days at piazza cafés courteously, artificially, chattering with travelers.
It is a beautiful piazza centering around a promontory with a view of Etna and the sea. Toy Sardinian donkeys, attached to delicately carved carts, go prancing past, their bells jangling, their carts filled with bananas and oranges.
On Sunday afternoons, while the town band plays an eccentric but catchy concert, there is a grand promenade, and if I am there, I always look out for the butcher’s daughter, a stout, beefy girl who all week swings a meat ax with the ferocity of any two men; but on Sunday, coiffed and scented, careening on two-inch heels, and accompanied by her fiancé, a slender boy rising not quite to her shoulder, there is about her a romance, an atmosphere of triumph that stalls the satiric tongue: hers is the haughtiness, the belief in oneself, that should be the spirit of a promenade.
Occasionally traveling entertainers appear in the piazza: goatlike mountain boys who play on hair-covered bagpipes haunting, yodelerlike tunes; or, as in the spring, a singer, a child whose family supported themselves by each year touring him around the island: his stage was the limb of a tree, and there, his head thrown back and his throat trembling with heart-bursts of soprano song, he sang until his voice tired to the saddest whisper.
When shopping, the tabacchi is my last stop before starting out into the country. In Sicily all tobacconists are irritable fellows. Their places are usually crowded, but few of the customers buy more than three or four loose cigarettes: with a pinched solemnity the weathered men put down their ragged lire, then minutely examine the cigarettes, the poky cigars that have been doled out to them—it seems the most important moment of their day, this visit to the tabacchi; perhaps that is why they are so reluctant to give up their place in line.
There are possibly twenty different Sicilian newspapers; great garlands of them are strung in front of the tobacconist shop. One afternoon as I walked into town it started to rain. It was not a serious rainfall; still, the streets were deserted, not a soul about until I came alongside the tabacchi—a crowd was gathered where the newspapers, shriekingly headlined, fluttered in the rain.
Young boys, bareheaded, unmindful, stood with their heads leaning together, while an older boy, his finger pointing to an enormous photograph of a man stretched in a pool of blood, read aloud to them: Giuliano, dead, shot in Castelvetrano. Triste, triste, a shame, a pity, the older people said; the young ones said nothing, but two girls went into the shop and came out with copies of La Sicilia, a paper whose front page was taken up by a giant portrait of the slain bandit; protecting their papers against the rain, the girls ran hand in hand skidding along the shining street.
Then it was August; we felt the sun before it had risen. Strangely, here on the open mountain, the days were cooler than the nights, for more often than not a booming breeze blew off the water; at sunset the wind turned, plowed seaward, south, toward Greece, Africa. It was a month of silent leaves, shooting stars, red moons, a season of gorgeous moths, sleeping lizards.
Figs split, plums swelled, the almonds hardened. One morning I woke to hear in the almond trees the rattle of bamboo canes. In the valley, off on the hills, hundreds of peasants, working in family groups, were knocking down the almonds, then gathering them off the ground; and they sang to each other, one voice leading the rest, Moorish, flamencolike voices whose songs began nowhere, ended nowhere, and yet contained the marrow of work, heat, a harvest. They were a week bringing in the almonds, and each day the singing reached a not quite sane intensity.
I could not think for it; there was in me such an overriding sense of extra-life. At the end, during the mad last days, the fierce fine voices seemed to rise from the sea, the almond roots; it was as if one were lost in a cave of echoes, and when darkness came, and stillness, even so I could hear, at the edge of sleep, the sound of singing, and it seemed, though one tried to push it back, about to tell a pitiful, painful story, about to impart some terrible knowledge.
We do not have many visitors at Fontana Vecchia; it is too far a walk for casual callers, and days go by when no one knocks at the door except the ice boy. Blond, witty, the ice boy is a scholarly-looking child of eleven. He has a beautiful young aunt, surely one of the most attractive girls I’ve ever known, and I often talk to him about her. Why, I wanted to know, does A., the aunt, have no beau?
Why is she always alone, never at the dances or the Sunday promenade? The ice boy says it is because his aunt has no use for the local men, that she is very unhappy and longs only to go to America. Perhaps. But it is my own theory that the men in her family are so jealous of her that no one dares come too near.
Sicilian males have quite a lot to say about what their women do or don’t; heaven knows, the women seem to like it. For instance our cook, G., who is nineteen, has a somewhat older brother. One morning she appeared with a split lip, blackened eyes, a knife gash in her arm, and bruised yellow-green top to toe. It was astonishing; she should have been in a hospital. Smiling lopsidedly, G. said, Well, her brother had beat her up; they’d quarreled because he felt she went too often to the beach. Of course, we thought that an odd objection; when did she go to the beach—at night?
I told her to pay no attention to her brother, that he was brute, ugly. Her reply, in effect, was that I should mind my own business; she said her brother was a fine man. “He is good-looking and has many friends—only to me is he brute.” Nevertheless, I went to our landlord and complained that G.’s brother must be warned that we would not tolerate his sister’s coming to work in this kind of condition. He seemed mystified: why should I blame the brother?
After all, a brother is entitled to reprimand his sister. When I spoke of it to the ice boy he agreed with the landlord, and stated firmly that if he had a sister who didn’t do what he said, he would beat her up too. One evening in August, when the moons were so preposterous, the ice boy and I had a small but chilling exchange. He asked, What do you think of the werewolf? Are you afraid to go out after dark?
As it happened, I’d just that day heard of the werewolf scare: a
