After the almonds, the music began in the front hall and we danced. There were waltzes, polkas and contraddanze, also games involving dances. I did not try to dance the waltzes or the polkas, they were quite different from those I used to be taught; Berto said they were dancing the ballo figurato. Nor did I dance the tarantella, which I never was taught in any form, but I saw it danced by
Berto’s mother and a brother of the bride. I danced in three contraddanze, first with Berto’s mother, then with his bride, then with his sister. One of the dancers called out in French what we were to do, and the mistakes we made added to the amusement. Frequently there was a promenade, the partners walking arm-in-arm round the room, which gave time to recover ourselves when we had got into any great confusion. Sometimes he who directs the contraddanza is so fertile in invention that he can make it last two hours. I do not think any that I danced lasted above half an hour, and they always ended by our promenading away to the buffet, which was under the joyous direction of Berto’s father. Here we ate sweetmeats and cakes and drank rosolio, which is any kind of light liqueur.
Berto’s brother Nicolào took me away at 3 a.m., and I wanted someone to show me the road because the cloud was still on the Mountain, and they do not keep the streets lighted all night. But the rest danced for another hour and then departed, leaving Berto’s mother to attend to the bride and to stay in the house.
Next day at noon we all called to inquire and I remained to dinner at two. While we were at table we heard the drum beating a Saracen rhythm and went to the window. It was the festa of S. Francesco da Paola; he was coming out of his church and going up to the balio on the top of the Mountain. The fog had cleared away, leaving a few light clouds whose shadows chased one another across the campagna and out to sea, where they played with the islands that were swimming in it, each separate and distinct in the brightness like those on a China plate. S. Francesco turned his back to the islands; he had not come out to bless the sea. Nor had he come to bless Cofano; he knew it was beyond his power to make that rocky wilderness to blossom as a rose. The translucent mountains stood back in a rugged amphitheatre before him, reverently saluting the throne of Venus; he acknowledged their salute, but he did not bless the barren mountains; he
remembered the words of his Master: To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have.
Good old San Cicciu da Paola turned his eyes away from the mountains and looked down upon the exuberance of the campagna. Every patch was a mother’s breast suckling the young bread and wine and oil, making the little figs to swell on their branches and the big blobby oranges to grow bigger and blobbier among their leaves. The salad was pushing, pushing up through the soil; peaches, apples, pears, medlars and plums were forming inside their faint pink and snowy blooms; there were almonds and blossoming pomegranates, asparagus and tomatoes, artichokes in disorderly tufts and beans combed into tidy rows. In the hollow places, like marshy pools reflecting the sky, lay beds of pale blue flax to be woven into wedding sheets for Mount Eryx.
San Cicciu looked upon it and saw that it was good, and he blessed all that fertility. He was doing for the campagna what the Cyclopean arciprete had asked the Madonna to do for Berto and Giuseppina.
TRABONELLA
CHAPTER XII
SULPHUR
Caltanissetta is a busy town of some 45,000 inhabitants near the middle of the island and about 2000 feet above the sea. It depends for its prosperity on almonds, grapes, olives and sulphur, especially the last, for there is much sulphur in the pores of the rock. I have several friends there of whom one, Beppe (Giuseppe) Catena, is an engineer with an interest in Trabonella, the largest sulphur mine in the neighbourhood, and another, Gigino (Luigi) Cordova, is an advocate. Sometimes Beppe is in the town and sometimes Gigino and I go to Trabonella and find him there. It is an hour’s drive along a road that winds among rolling hills. Through the depressions between the near hills other hills appear, and through their depressions higher hills, and beyond these are higher hills again until the view is bounded by the Monti delle Madonie where the snow lingers until May. It must have been some such country as this that was in the mind of him who first spoke of the sea running mountains high.