Castellinaria, and Other Sicilian Diversions

by Henry Festing Jones

“It is the primavera,” he said. He also told me that the revolvers and the squibs and the plates had not done

much damage this year—perhaps ten or a dozen accidents, but none fatal, so far as was yet known.

I went along the Via Stesicoro, not considering my steps because I was looking up the street, wondering how long the Gloria would take to melt the snow on Etna, and I stumbled across Carmelo.

“Buona Pasqua, Carmelo, and have you been to church this morning?”

No, he had been to the port with his friends to see the steamer in which they were to go to Naples; there they would change into another steamer and be taken to the States. They had begged, borrowed, stolen, or, it may be, possibly even earned enough soldi to begin their new life upon another soil and under other skies in a new world. Buona Pasqua.

I returned to the albergo and found that Turiddu had been and had left for me a characteristic Sicilian cake—a ring of bread on one side of which, half embedded in the pasta, were four new-laid eggs. This was accompanied by a note from his mother begging me to accept it as her Easter offering of goodwill. She was telling me more than that the hens had begun to lay again. She was reminding me of how I had seen her at the Teatro Pessana as the link between her mother and her children, joining them and separating them like a passage of modulation. I understood her to mean that for the future I was to see an egg as a transitional something between the hen that laid it and the chicken that will burst from its shell, as a secret place of repose where the one is transmuted into the other, as a sacred temple wherein is prepared a mystery of resurrection. Mothers know some things that cannot be told except in symbolism, and not very clearly then, symbols being as perplexing as unresolved diminished sevenths which may be understood in many different senses. I read the riddle of the eggs in the sense suggested by the context of the Gloria, and I think I read it aright, for in Catania on that Easter morning we were all of one mind, we were all

breathing the Gloria, we were all filled with the spirit of the new life, the spirit that animated also our far-away English monk as he sat in his Berkshire cell making music for

Summer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu.

In the evening I went to the Machiavelli. The theatre had been taken by a young amateur who carries on a business of forwarding oranges and other fruit. He gave a performance of one of Giovanni Grasso’s plays, Feudalismo, part of which I was obliged to see because in the second act there is a song sung behind, and Turiddu had been asked to sing it; on such a day the claims of the family were stronger even than on Palm Sunday. His voice has not yet broken, but if it turns out to be as good for a man as it is now for a boy, he ought to do well with it. I must not continue—it would be more unbecoming in me to praise my compare for his singing than to praise his sister for her acting.

After the song in Feudalismo there was time also for the second representation at the Teatro Sicilia. The performance began with the wounding of Christ. Then Annas and Caiaphas discussed the question of whether, after all, they might not have made a mistake in treating Christ as a magician. They had been alarmed by the earthquake, the atmospheric disturbances and the rising of the dead from their graves. Could these phenomena signify that he was the Son of God? And something else troubled them; on consideration they did not like the wording of Pilate’s sentence. They went to his palace, but Pilate was not disposed to listen to their objections.