Castellinaria, and Other Sicilian Diversions

by Henry Festing Jones

“It is in the church,” said Peppino.

“What church? Not the duomo?”

“No; this other church where is no longer the praying and they shall enchant no more the Glory of the Mass with music and the bells are not ringing and there is the cortile near the sea. It is not very long far.”

Then I knew he meant the disused church of S. Maria dell’ Aiuto which I had often admired. I called there the following day about three in the afternoon and inquired for the corporal. His comrade who let me in took me along two sides of a beautiful cloister, with sculptured marble columns, and upstairs into the barber’s shop, where we

found the corporal with a towel round his neck being shaved. He was so surprised to see me that I was afraid there would be an accident, but the barber was clever and nothing serious happened. After the shaving he took me into the dormitory, which extends all along one side of the cloister on the first floor with windows looking on the grass and flowers of the cortile on one side and over the sea on the other—very fresh and healthy. Some of his comrades, who had been on duty all night, were sleeping in their beds, other beds were empty, and their owners were blacking their boots and polishing their buttons. He told them to entertain me, which they did while he finished his dressing. He then returned and proposed taking me out.

As we went along he asked whether he might take me to see his young lady. I was surprised to hear she was in the town, knowing it was not her native place, and asked whether the remaining 4000 francs had dropped from heaven. He replied that he was still waiting. He was to have a month’s leave soon, and intended to take the girl to his home and introduce her to his family; in the meantime he had hired a room, and it was very expensive—twenty francs a month, in the house of most respectable people. I foresaw complications when they should arrive at home, at least I thought the journey might provoke remark among the friends of the family, but I said nothing, and we went to the house of the respectable people. Here I was introduced to the fidanzata, whose name was Filomena, and who appeared to be, as he had said, rather above him in station and of refined and lady-like manners. She was embroidering the top part of a sheet—the part that is turned down and lies over the pillow when the bed is made—no doubt for her trousseau. The design had been traced and traced again from the tracing so often that it was difficult to say what it represented. There was a balustrade of columns like those that were taken from old Kew Bridge and sold to support sun-dials; there were cauliflowery arabesques, and among the spiky foliage there were

meaningless ponds of open-work made by gathering the threads of the linen together into wonderful patterns. In the middle of all this stood one who after a few more tracings will have quite lost the semblance of a woman; the five fingers of her hands and the five toes of her feet had already become so conventionalised that all one could be sure of was that there were still five of each. The corporal said that this monster was Helen gazing out to sea from the topless towers of Ilium. She was really looking the other way, exhibiting to the spectator all that remained of the face that launched the thousand ships of which half a dozen were shown riding at anchor behind her back. I did not venture to criticise, because the corporal knew all about it, having seen the Story of Hector done by the marionettes. Filomena was embroidering this most beautifully; I should say that the needle-working of it was as much above all praise as the design of it was beneath all blame.

Most of the room was taken up by a bed large enough to hold three or four Filomenas without crowding, and upon it lay a mandoline and a guitar. The corporal called for music; Filomena cheerfully complied, left her broidery-frame, and took up the mandoline, whose only title to be considered a musical instrument is that Mozart uses it for the pizzicato accompaniment which Don Giovanni plays while he sings “Deh Vieni.” Filomena, knowing nothing about Mozart, used her mandoline for the delivery of a melody which she performed with great skill, though it was but a silly tune and sounded sillier than it was because of the irritating tremolo. It was like her embroidery—very well done but not worth doing. She had been taught the mandoline by the nuns, who had also taught her needlework. I expected the corporal to accompany her on the guitar; he admitted that he was passionately devoted to music, but excused himself from performing on the ground that he had not studied it. This is not usually put forward as an objection; the rule is

for them to play and tell one, unnecessarily but with some pride, that they are doing it all by ear. And in their accompaniment they show themselves to be artists of the school that preaches “Simplify, simplify, simplify” in that they exclude all harmonies except those of the tonic, dominant and sub-dominant. But they make the mistake of not being careful always to play each in its right place; they carry their simplifying process to the length of using their chosen harmonies in regular order, one after the other, two bars each—it may come right and it may not, and when it does not the resulting complexities ruin the simplicity. This sort of thing might become unbearable, but I know how to escape from people of the corporal’s class without being rude. I do not tell them I have another engagement—that is not accepted because, as there is no time in Sicily, punctuality is not recognised. If they have a proverb about it, it ought to be, “Never put off till to-morrow what can be done the day after.” Nor do I say I have letters to write—that only provokes discussion:

“We thought you had come all this way to see us, and now you want to write to England! You can talk to your English friends when you are at home.”