suddenly, that he must return to them.
When first we leased Fontana Vecchia—this was in the spring, April—the valley was high with wheat green as the lizards racing among its stalks. It begins in January, the Sicilian spring, and accumulates into a kingly bouquet, a wizard’s garden where all things have bloomed: the creek sprouts mint; dead trees are wreathed in wild clamber roses; even the brutal cactus shoots tender blossoms. April, Eliot writes, is the cruelest month: not here. It is bright as the snows on Etna’s summit. Children climb along the mountainside filling sacks of petals in preparation for a Saint’s Day, and fishermen, passing with their baskets of pearl-colored
pesce
, have geraniums tucked behind their ears. May, and the spring is in its twilight: the sun enlarges; you remember that Africa is only eighty miles away; like a bronze shadow autumn color falls across the land. ByJune the wheat was ready to harvest. We listened with a certain melancholy to the scythes swinging in the golden field. When the work was over, our landlord, to whom the crop belonged, gave a party for the harvesters. There were only two women—a young girl who sat nursing a baby, and an old woman, the girl’s grandmother. The old woman loved to dance; barefooted, she whirled with all the men—no one could make her take a rest, she would spring up in the middle of a tune to grab herself a partner. The men, who took turns playing the accordion, all danced together, which is a rural custom in Sicily. It was the best kind of party: too much dancing, far too much wine. Later, as I went exhaustedly to bed, I thought of the old woman. After working all day in the field and dancing all evening, she had now to start on a five-mile upward climb to her house in the mountains.
It is a walk to the beach, or beaches; there are several, all of them pebbly, and only one of them, Mazzaro, especially inhabited. The most attractive, Isola Bella, a guarded cove with water clear as barrel rain, is a mile and a half straight down; getting up again is the trick. A few times we have walked into Taormina and taken the bus, or a taxi. But mostly we go on foot. You can swim from March until Christmas (so the hearty souls say), but I confess I was not too enthusiastic until we bought the water mask. The mask had a round glass viewing plate, and a breathing tube that closes when you dive. Swimming silently among the rocks, it is as though one had discovered a new visual dimension: in the underwater dusk a red phosphorescent fish looms at alarming proximity; your shadow drifts over a field of ermine-colored grass; blue, silver bubbles rise from some long-legged sleeping thing lying in a field of blowing sea flowers, and it is as if a wind of music were moving them; the sea flowers, the Javanese tendrils of purple jelly. Coming to shore, how static, gross, the upper world seems.
If we do not go to the beach, then there is only one other reason for leaving the house: to shop in Taormina, and have an
apéritif
in the piazza. Taormina, really an extension of Naxos, the earliest Greek city in Sicily, has had a continuous existence since 396 B.C . Goethe explored here in 1787; he describes it thus: “Now sitting at the spot where formerly sat the uppermost spectators, you confess at once that never did any audience, in any theater, have before it such a spectacle as you there behold. On the right, and on high rocks at the side, castles tower in the air; farther on, the city lies below you, and although all of its buildings are of a modern date, still similar ones, no doubt, stood of old on the same site. After this the eye falls on the whole of the long range of Aetna, then on the left it catches a view of the seashore as far as Catania, and even Syracuse, and then the wide and extensive view is closed by the immense smoking volcano, but not horribly, for the atmosphere, with its softening effect, makes it look more distant and milder than it really is.”
When first we leased Fontana Vecchia—this was in the spring, April—the valley was high with wheat green as the lizards racing among its stalks. It begins in January, the Sicilian spring, and accumulates into a kingly bouquet, a wizard’s garden where all things have bloomed: the creek sprouts mint; dead trees are wreathed in wild clamber roses; even the brutal cactus shoots tender blossoms. April, Eliot writes, is the cruelest month: not here. It is bright as the snows on Etna’s summit. Children climb along the mountainside filling sacks of petals in preparation for a Saint’s Day, and fishermen, passing with their baskets of pearl-colored
pesce
, have geraniums tucked behind their ears. May, and the spring is in its twilight: the sun enlarges; you remember that Africa is only eighty miles away; like a bronze shadow autumn color falls across the land. ByJune the wheat was ready to harvest. We listened with a certain melancholy to the scythes swinging in the golden field. When the work was over, our landlord, to whom the crop belonged, gave a party for the harvesters. There were only two women—a young girl who sat nursing a baby, and an old woman, the girl’s grandmother. The old woman loved to dance; barefooted, she whirled with all the men—no one could make her take a rest, she would spring up in the middle of a tune to grab herself a partner. The men, who took turns playing the accordion, all danced together, which is a rural custom in Sicily. It was the best kind of party: too much dancing, far too much wine. Later, as I went exhaustedly to bed, I thought of the old woman. After working all day in the field and dancing all evening, she had now to start on a five-mile upward climb to her house in the mountains.
It is a walk to the beach, or beaches; there are several, all of them pebbly, and only one of them, Mazzaro, especially inhabited. The most attractive, Isola Bella, a guarded cove with water clear as barrel rain, is a mile and a half straight down; getting up again is the trick. A few times we have walked into Taormina and taken the bus, or a taxi. But mostly we go on foot. You can swim from March until Christmas (so the hearty souls say), but I confess I was not too enthusiastic until we bought the water mask. The mask had a round glass viewing plate, and a breathing tube that closes when you dive. Swimming silently among the rocks, it is as though one had discovered a new visual dimension: in the underwater dusk a red phosphorescent fish looms at alarming proximity; your shadow drifts over a field of ermine-colored grass; blue, silver bubbles rise from some long-legged sleeping thing lying in a field of blowing sea flowers, and it is as if a wind of music were moving them; the sea flowers, the Javanese tendrils of purple jelly. Coming to shore, how static, gross, the upper world seems.
If we do not go to the beach, then there is only one other reason for leaving the house: to shop in Taormina, and have an
apéritif
in the piazza. Taormina, really an extension of Naxos, the earliest Greek city in Sicily, has had a continuous existence since 396 B.C . Goethe explored here in 1787; he describes it thus: “Now sitting at the spot where formerly sat the uppermost spectators, you confess at once that never did any audience, in any theater, have before it such a spectacle as you there behold. On the right, and on high rocks at the side, castles tower in the air; farther on, the city lies below you, and although all of its buildings are of a modern date, still similar ones, no doubt, stood of old on the same site. After this the eye falls on the whole of the long range of Aetna, then on the left it catches a view of the seashore as far as Catania, and even Syracuse, and then the wide and extensive view is closed by the immense smoking volcano, but not horribly, for the atmosphere, with its softening effect, makes it look more distant and milder than it really is.”
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