“Precisely. But it is not quite that with S. Alfio; they want him to exist; they are afraid that if they don’t believe in him, he will leave off performing miracles and will no longer cure them.”
“It seems to me,” I said, “that they are dominated by the prepotenza of S. Alfio very much as the sulphur-miners are dominated by the prepotenza of their capo-mafioso.”
“With this distinction,” he replied, “that the capo-mafioso has the power, and sometimes the will, to hurt them; it would require a struggle to destroy his prepotenza and there is the risk of failure. With S. Alfio, if they cared to be master in their own house, they have only got to leave off believing in him, there need be no struggle and there could be no risk.”
“You speak as though they could believe or leave off believing at will.”
“So they can, in the loose sense in which they use the word. They only go on believing because their vanity is involved—it flatters them to attribute the gift of miracles to a creature of their own imagination and, by being satisfied with very little and very poor evidence, they make things easy for S. Alfio. But they could not tell you this themselves, they are half asleep about it.”
I said: “Of course they are half asleep about it, and all S. Alfio’s interests are bound up in their remaining so. They are not only asleep, they are dreaming, as the Red
King dreamt of Alice. If they were to wake up S. Alfio would go out—bang!—just like a candle.”
Alice and the Red King were as unknown to Joe as Poins or Molière or Dickens. I did my best to explain the allusion, but I doubt whether I succeeded, for when I had finished he only said that Tweedledum and Tweedledee had better not go about saying things like that, or their bishop would be warning them to be on their guard as he warned the Canonico Recupero. I must try whether he will understand better if I send him a copy of Through the Looking-Glass for his next onomastico. He told me something which makes me suspect that the people must have a dim feeling of how things really are. It seems that sometimes, though rarely, it pleases them to pretend to believe that their padrone has displeased them. Then they half wake up and depose him; but nothing comes of it, they only choose a new one or, after a short time, reinstate the old one.
We went to a house on the route and sat on a balcony in the sunset and the drunken people pelted down-hill, smothered in the golden glory of the dust they raised, banging their tambourines, blowing their whistles, and singing that now the festa was over they must go home and work to pay the debts it had run them into. It was no more use to think of stopping them to see the pictures now than when they were going out; so I pigeon-holed what the carts say about S. Alfio with my poor mother’s problem about what influence people who never go to church have over their servants. The cavalli mafiosi and the carts were stuck about with coloured feathers and festooned with bunches of garlic, with flowers, with lumps of lard, with little flags and ribbons, with garlands of caruba beans and with vetch. The flags, the ribbons, the flowers and the feathers were, I suppose, for gaiety and festa—pour faire la frime—but garlic has some magically beneficent properties; not only does it avert the evil eye, it is also a symbol of robust health, so that instead of replying to “How do you do?” by saying “As right as
rain,” they reply, “As right as garlic.” They believe that to put three crosses of garlic under the bed of a woman in child-birth will ensure a happy issue. There is something fortunate or healthy also about vetch and, no doubt, some special significance about lard and the beans of the carob. These beliefs are based lower than Giovanni Bianca’s primeval lava, and I know no more about their origin than he does, but I suppose they are older than the Romans, older than the Greeks, older than the Sikels and the Sikans—probably much more than ten thousand or fourteen thousand years old. They spring from a soil which has become fertile by catching the dust of ages, tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine, wherein generations of beliefs have grown up, flourished and decayed. There is no more fertilising manure for a struggling young faith than the rotting remains of a dead superstition. And the roots pierce down beneath the soil and shoot into the crevices of an intolerance more unyielding than buried lava. To understand these things, one ought to become a pupil of Professore Pitrè, and make a study of the science of demopsicologia, and even then one would only get glimpses of the more recent deposits of civilisation that lie crushed one under the other like the parallel surfaces of rich earth in the pit sunk near Jaci.