In Sicily you must not believe everything you think you hear—and above all, you must not act rashly upon such an impression. When a Sicilian is feeling well, his “Good morning, sir!” sounds like “Spartacus to the gladiators.” When anyone addresses you as though murder were contemplated, with yourself as the victim, be easy. It is most likely to be a polite wish for a pleasant journey, delivered with characteristic Latin fervor and inflection. Our first morning in Taormina, a wild looking peasant beauty bearing upon her shapely head a huge dripping amphora, stopped us with uncouth gestures and a laugh so eldritch it startled us. Jerking her finger at La Signora, she poured forth a torrent of impassioned Sicilian dialect we failed to understand, though I thought she said we were folk unfit to be in Taormina and had better leave immediately.
Unpleasant thoughts of the Maffiusi—the Mano Nera we loosely call them—swept through me. The girl’s utterance was so fierce, her expression so positively menacing, I wondered whether she might not be really an agent of the dreaded band. But before my combined annoyance and alarm led me into difficulties, two Taorminians came up and explained in Italian: “The signorita is afraid your Signora will lose her handkerchief. It is falling out of her belt.”
I was glad I had not shouted for the police!
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 wishing 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; passionate 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.
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, embarrassed 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-fashioned 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!