Here and there a monk, crowded for lack of space from the shelves, hangs from a hook in limp, dishevelled leanness, his head drooped mockingly sidewise, his shrunken lips twisted in a dusty fatuous leer, a lid drooped over a withered eye in a hideous wink. Others huddle in fantastic postures within their contracted receptacles, as if convulsed by some obscenely wicked jest which forces them to throw back their heads, to fling out their hands, to writhe their limbs into unseemly attitudes of amusement. One lies flat, with rigid patience in every line of the meagre body, a rictus of speechless agony pinching back the mouldy cheeks.
Coffins are heaped about the floor everywhere. Through the glass tops the occupants grin in weary scorn from amid the brown and crumbling flowers that have dried around their faces.
The ghastliest section of this ghastly place is that where the women crouch in their cases, clad in the fripperies of old fashions. Earrings swing from dusty ears; necklaces clasp lean grey throats; faded hair is tortured into elaborate coiffures; laces, silks, and ribbons swathe the tragic ruins of beauty. And these women, too, all simper horribly, voicelessly, remembering perhaps how dear these faded gauds once were before they passed beyond thought of “tires and crisping pins.”
“Why do they do it?” demanded Peripatetica in whispered disgust. “What strange passion for publicity prompts them thus to flout and outrage the decent privacies of death”—for they noted that each case bore a name and the date of decease, and that some of these dates were but of a few years back. “Didn’t they know, from having seen others, how they themselves would look in their turn? Why would any woman be willing to come here in laces and jewels to be a disgusting nightmare of femininity for other women to stare at?”
“Vanity of vanities—all is vanity!” murmured Jane. “Now they all lie here laughing at the strange vanity that brought them to this place—at the vanity that will bring others in their turn to this incredible hypogeum.”
Then they turned a corner and came suddenly upon the little horribly smiling babies, and instantly fled in simultaneous nausea and disgust—flinging themselves at Gaspero, who with a tenderly sympathetic manner suggested an expedition to La Favorita as a corrective of gruesome impressions. Carrying them swiftly to it by way of the long double boulevards of the newer Palermo, between the smiling villas of creamy stone that were wreathed with yellow banksias and purple wisteria, their feet set among gay beds of blossoms and facing the cheerful street life of the town.
“How odd these Sicilians are!” reflected Jane, as they drove. “An incomprehensible mixture to an Anglo-Saxon. For example one finds almost universal open-hearted gentleness and courtesy, and yet the Mafia holds the whole land in a grip of iron—a dangerous, murderous, secret society as widespread as the population, yet never betrayed, and uncontrollable by any power, even so popular and so democratic a one as the present government.”
“Yes; their attitude to life is as puzzling as the face they turn toward death,” agreed Peripatetica, remembering that almost every other building in Taormina and many in Palermo wore nailed to the door a broad strip of mourning—often old and tattered—on which was printed “Per mio Frate,” or “Per mia Madre”—that even a newspaper kiosk had worn weeds—“Per mio Padre.”
At that very moment there passed a cheerful hearse, all glass and gilding, wreathed with fresh flowers into a gay dancing nosegay, and hung with fluttering mauve streamers which announced in golden letters that the white coffin within enclosed all that was mortal of some one’s beloved sister Giuseppina. It might have been a catafalque of some Spirit of Spring, so many, so sweet, so daintily gracious were the blooming boughs that accompanied Giuseppina to her last resting-place.... And yet they had but just come from the grim horrors of that crypt of the Cappuccini!...
La Favorita, curiously, is one of the few monuments of beauty or charm left by that long reign of the Spanish monarchs of Sicily, which, with some mutations, lasted for about six hundred years. They loaded the land with a weight of many churches and convents, yet what one goes to see is what was done by the Greeks, the Moslems, and the Normans. La Favorita is not old, as one counts age in that immemorial land of the High Gods. A slight century or so of age it has, being built for the villegiatura of Ferdinando IV. at the period when the Eighteenth Century affected a taste in Chinoiseries, bought blue hawthorn jars, ate from old Pekin plates, set up lacquered cabinets, and built Pagoda-esque pleasure houses. The Château is but a flimsy and rather vulgar example of the taste of the day, but the Eighteenth Century often planted delicious gardens, and the pleached allées, the ilex avenues, the fountains and plaisances of La Favorita, make an adorable park for modern Palermo, having by time and the years grown into a majestic richness of triumphant verdure.