This naturally led to a torrent of compliments, which I battled with for some moments, and finally subdued by asking to see the rest of the house. We went to the room which had been arranged as the buffet; the walls were adorned with large looking-glasses, and in the middle was a table for the cakes and sweets. The buffet is to be my bedroom next time I come to the Mountain. We passed through two other saloni and then inspected two bedrooms, one for the happy couple, the other for Berto’s mother, who is to stay with them for the first few days. The presents were arranged on a table by the side of the nuptial couch, which had arrived that morning from Palermo together with the rest of the bedroom suite, very handsome, and made of Hungarian ash. The presents were rather as I have seen wedding presents in England, plenty of spoons and forks, gold brooches, rings, bracelets, some set with diamonds and some with other stones, and I was glad I was not really back in Regent Street choosing my pendant.
We went into the courtyard and into the stable where we saw Mille-lire the donkey, who is scarcely bigger than a Saint Bernard dog and only cost thirty-five lire. It was Berto who gave him the name of Mille-lire to signify that his value far exceeds his price. He has a cart to match and can take four people, but I think they must be rather small people. He shares his stable with thirty-eight chickens, old and young, and two ducks, who all come out into the courtyard to be fed in the sun. There are also three pigeons, making a total of forty-four creatures. In addition there are two cats who live in the house and two tortoises who live in the courtyard. Tortoises are found wild among the rocks in the mountains and the peasants bring them up to the town and sell them. These came from Monte Aspáracio, which is near Cofano; they cost forty centimes each, and bring good luck to the house. On Mount Eryx there is a convent of nuns of S. Teresa, to
whom flesh is forbidden, but the prohibition does not extend to tortoises, which the nuns eat with tomato sauce. When the nuns begin to feel the infirmities of age they are no longer limited to this strange meat, the prohibition is withdrawn, and they live like other old ladies, eating what they choose. I have no idea how many fourpenny tortoises would make a meal for a healthy young nun on Monte San Giuliano, where one’s appetite is sharpened by the air. They occasionally add a few snails, which are also permitted; there is a kind of snail which is found underground and is considered a luxury by others besides the nuns of S. Teresa.
After the stable and the courtyard we went to the terrace whence, over the roofs and cupolas and among the towers and belfries of the town, there is a view of the sea and the plain. Then we visited the kitchen and saw the oven for baking the bread. All the well-to-do families on the Mountain possess land on the campagna where they grow their own corn; they take it to the mill to be weighed and ground, and fetch back the flour which is also weighed; they know that if they leave a hundred kilograms of grain they must receive ninety-nine of flour, and in this wasted kilogram of flour lurks the true reason why the miller wears a white hat. They bake their own bread and sometimes make their own maccaroni at home. They grow their own grapes and make their own wine. They have olive trees for oil, and goats whose milk they drink, considering it lighter and more digestible than cows’ milk. Berto’s sister has a private goat of her own, who lives down in the country and comes up every morning, a journey of three-quarters of an hour, and she milks it herself. Thus they pass their lives very close to Mother Earth, and the seasons sensibly affect their comfort. They have little use for money except to buy coffee, fish, sugar, meat, and clothes, or the stuff of which they make their clothes, and some of them raise their own linen and wool. But they want money when there is a family festa; Berto
told me he had spent 700 lire merely for the sweetmeats and cakes at his wedding.
All Friday and most of Saturday I spent in being presented to various members of the family and in making preparations. Berto recommended me to visit the barber on Saturday afternoon and, as a good Sicilian, I followed his advice and went to the salone of Peppino. When Samuel Butler first came to Mount Eryx in 1892 to see whether he could identify the localities with those described as Scheria and Ithaca in the Odyssey, he slipped in the street and put his ankle out of joint. The doctor was away, and his foot was set by Peppino, who is a barber-surgeon with a salone close to the spot where the accident happened. Accordingly Peppino is the barber I employ when I am on the Mountain. While he was attending to me I observed a change in the salone, and, on asking where the looking-glasses were, was told they had been lent to Berto to ornament the buffet of his wedding festa.
After the barber, I had my dinner, as I found there would be no opportunity to do so when once the wedding ceremonies had begun, and then I dressed. In the meantime a cloud began to collect on the Mountain and the wind began to blow.
CHAPTER XI
BERTO’S WEDDING
A Sicilian wedding is conducted either on system a, when the happy couple go away for their honeymoon and the ceremony is performed in the morning, or on system b, when they do not go away but have a ball at home, and then the ceremony is performed in the evening. The wedding of Ignazio proceeded on system a, that of Berto and Giuseppina on system b. As for Alberto Bosco, his wedding was either a combination of a and b or an exceptional case.
Berto’s brother Nicolào came to fetch me at 5.30 p.m. and took me to the house of the bride’s brother in the piazza, where the bride was waiting. Her dress was of pale grey crèpe trimmed with dull silver embroidery and she wore zagara in her bonnet. Exceptional cases being excepted, it may be said that brides only wear white silk and a veil and wreath of orange blossom, as Ignazio’s bride did at the religious ceremony, when the wedding is conducted on system a. I failed to discover any rule about a cortège of bridesmaids, if there is such a rule it is probably elastic. The other ladies wore dresses as for a dance in England in the country in the winter. The gentlemen, like the guests at the Nascita, wore evening dress. And of course we all had cloaks or over-coats.