Castellinaria, and Other Sicilian Diversions

by Henry Festing Jones

In the garden at the entrance to one house was a baby taking the air in a perambulator and a band of eight

musicians with a conductor. There was real water with a tap and a basin in the kitchen so that the guests might wash their hands after dinner. There was a mouse-trap in the corner of the kitchen. In one room the guests were playing cards, in another eating ices, and I observed a toy piano with the extended compass of six notes.

In all the kitchens there was a Turk for the cuscuso. It is made with fish, semolina, and onions in a double saucepan which in England is called a steamer. In the bottom part water is boiled; in the top part, over the holes, they put a layer of chopped onions, and over that the semolina which has been previously made into very small balls by damping it. The onions prevent the semolina from falling through the holes into the water, and the steam of the water coming through cooks the semolina and the onions. The fish are put into the water at the right moment and are boiled while the semolina is being steamed. It is all served together like bouillabaisse, the semolina answering to the bread, and extract of pomidoro is added. One would not be likely to meet with cuscuso in the houses of the well-to-do; one might get it in the albergo by insisting on it, but they would rather not provide it because, like the Discobolus in Butler’s poem A Psalm of Montreal, it is vulgar. I have eaten it only once when I dined with my compare Michele Lombardo, a jeweller, to whose son I stood as padrino at his cresima, and I do not care to eat it again, not because it is vulgar, but because I did not find it nearly so good as bouillabaisse. The recipe for it has penetrated to Trapani from Africa as a result of the constant intercourse between Sicily and the French colony of Tunis, the fishermen of Trapani going over to the African coast not only for fish, but also for coral and for sponges.

My priest was inclined to treat the Nascita with tolerant contempt; he muttered the word “Anacronismo” several times and, since I have ascertained that Melchizedek was a contemporary of Abraham, I think he should not

have done so. I said that the anachronisms did not disturb me. I told him that in the marionette theatre in Palermo, when Cristoforo Colombo embarks from the port of Palos in Spain to discover America, a sailor, sitting on the paddle-box of the piroscafo, the steamboat, sings that Neapolitan song Santa Lucia. I passed over the anticipation of steam and contented myself with asking the buffo whether the song had been composed so long ago and also whether its popularity had extended from Naples into Spain. He replied that it had extended to Palermo and that his audience connected it in their minds with the sea, and as for the date of its composition he had made no inquiries, but he knew it was older than “O Sole Mio”; we do not go to the arts for accurate archæological details.

“I will make you a paragon,” said the buffo. “When I was returning from Catania I looked out of the side windows of the train and saw that the telegraph posts, as we passed by, were some distance apart. But I made friends with the guard, who took me into his van, and when I looked at them again out of the back window of the train they seemed to get closer and closer together in the distance until, far away, there appeared to be no space between them; but I knew that there was always the same space between them. So it is with the centuries, when they are in the distant past it is difficult to distinguish in what century any particular event happened. History may settle such points, but the arts come to us from a country of the imagination whose laws of time and space are not as our laws. Art is trying to get the people to realise that a thing happened, not to teach them precisely when.”

I quoted this to my priest, and he admitted its justice; also he was so polite as to waive his objection about anacronismo, which, I then saw, had only been started in consideration of my being a professor; not that I am really a professor but he had introduced me to our host as one, and I had accepted the distinction so as to avoid the dreary explanation that would have been forced upon me after

a disclaimer. He having waived his anacronismo so generously, it was now my turn to trump up an objection which I could deal with afterwards as circumstances might require. In making my choice I did not forget his cloth and, imitating as well as I could his tone of tolerant contempt, muttered the word “Irriverenza” several times. He saw what I meant at once and, in his reply, somewhat followed my lead.

“Where,” he asked, “is the irreverence in making S. Joachim’s friends arrive in tall hats and dress clothes? Why should they not read the Giornale di Sicilia and play cards? Where is the irreverence in making the children celebrate his daughter’s birth by dancing to a piano? Why should not the Madonna have her baby-linen made on an American sewing-machine?”

As he took this line so decidedly and we had given up the anacronismo, I gave up the irreverence at once and agreed with him that there is no reason against any of these things being done if it helps the spectators. The arts are concerned more with faith than with reason, more with the spirit than with the flesh, more with truth than with fact, and we can never get away from the intention of the artist. Even in that Art of Arts which we call Life, our judgment must always be influenced by the spirit in which we believe that a thing is done. I have read somewhere that one coachman will flick flies off his horse with the intention of worrying the flies, while another (Mario, for instance) does the same thing with the intention of relieving the horse. When a modern Frenchman in the spirit of the Scenes de la Vie de Boheme paints the guests in modern evening dress at a Marriage in Cana of Galilee we are offended. The Nascita is not done by such an artist; it is peculiarly a woman’s subject, being a picture of home life with a birth for its occasion, and is usually made by a girl who has never heard of Bohemia. She has seen trains in the railway station and ships in the port, but probably has never herself travelled in either. Her father or her brother