We started from Catania at three o’clock on a dull afternoon at the end of March to see one of the streams of lava that Etna was sending out during the eruption of 1910. Peppino Di Gregorio had arranged everything and provided four of his friends to make company for us and to act as guides, some of them having been before. He and I went in a one-horse carriage with two of the friends and the other two came on their bicycles. There was, first, another Peppino who had been in America, where he earned his living by making cigars. He had forgotten how it was done and, besides, it required special tools, so he could not have shown me even if he had remembered. Since his return home to Catania he has been employed by the municipio. He begged me to call him not Peppino but Joe, because he would be so English. Then there was Ninu, also employed by the municipio, a great bullock of a fellow bursting with health, whose legs were too short for him and his smile a dream of romance. The other two were Alessandro, about whom I got no information, and a grave brigadier of the Guardia Municipale.
The road took us up-hill among villas and between walls enclosing fields of volcanic soil, very fertile, and occasionally a recent eruption had buried the fertility under fresh lava, hard and black, on which nothing will grow for years.
Patrick Brydone went to Sicily in 1770, and wrote an account of his journey: A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esquire, of Somerly, in Suffolk, from Patrick Brydone, F.R.S. Near Catania he saw some lava covered with a scanty soil, incapable of producing either corn or vines; he imagined from its barrenness that
it had run from the mountain only a few ages ago; but was surprised to be informed by Signor Recupero, the historiographer of Etna, that this very lava is mentioned by Diodorus Siculus to have burst from Etna in the time of the second Punic war, when Syracuse was besieged by the Romans.
It seems that the stream ran from Etna to the sea, and cut off the passage of a detachment of soldiers who were on their way from Taormina to the relief of the besieged, and Diodorus took his authority from inscriptions on Roman monuments found on the lava itself. So that after about 2000 years this lava had scarcely begun to be fertile. Afterwards Recupero, who was a canonico, “an ingenious ecclesiastic of this place,” told Brydone of a pit sunk near Jaci, where they had pierced through seven parallel surfaces of lava, most of them covered with a thick bed of rich earth.
Now, says he [Recupero], the eruption which formed the lowest of these lavas, if we may be allowed to reason from analogy, must have flowed from the mountain at least 14,000 years ago. Recupero tells me, he is exceedingly embarrassed by these discoveries in writing the history of the mountain.—That Moses hangs like a dead weight on him, and blunts all his zeal for enquiry; for that really he has not the conscience to make his mountain so young as that prophet makes the world.—What do you think of these sentiments from a Roman Catholic divine?—The bishop, who is strenuously orthodox—for it is an excellent see—has already warned him to be upon his guard, and not to pretend to be a better natural historian than Moses; nor to presume to urge anything that may in the smallest degree be deemed contradictory to his sacred authority. . . .
The lava, being a very porous substance, easily catches the dust that is carried about by the wind; which, at first I observe, only yields a kind of moss; this rotting, and by degrees increasing the soil, some small meagre vegetables are next produced; which rotting in their turn, are likewise converted into soil. But this process, I suppose, is often greatly accelerated by showers of ashes from the mountain, as I have observed in some places the richest soil, to the depth of five or six feet and upwards; and still below that, nothing but rocks of lava. It is in these spots that the trees arrive at such an immense size. Their roots shoot into the crevices of the lava, and lay such hold of it, that there is no instance of the winds tearing them up; though there are many of its breaking off their longest branches.
We passed several villages, and on one of the churches there was a group of three saints—S. Alfio, the padrone of the district, and his two brothers. I had never heard of S. Alfio, who they told me was a physician and lived in the third century; one of his brothers, S. Filiberto (whom the people call S. Liberto), was a surgeon, and his other brother, S. Cirino, was a chemist. They performed miracles, endured persecution, and were finally martyred for the faith in this way: First they had their three tongues cut out, then they were put into a saucepan such as the maccaroni is boiled in, only larger—large enough to hold three saints—and full of boiling oil: the saucepan was placed on a fire and they were cooked in it. Their bodies were afterwards burnt on a gridiron. This took place out of doors opposite a tavern, and three men, who had come to the tavern to drink, saw it all done. Having seen it, they went to sleep for three hundred years; then they woke up and wanted to pay for their drinks with the money they had in their pockets, which was money made of leather.
“What is this?” asked the landlord.
“It is money,” they replied.
“It is no use,” said the landlord. While they had been asleep that kind of money had gone out of circulation.
“It is good money,” they insisted.
“It is not money at all, it is only a piece of leather.”
“It was money yesterday evening,” said the spokesman, “when I saw Alfio, Cirino, and Liberto being martyred.” This is how the martyrdom of the three saints is represented on carts belonging to those spiritually-minded owners who prefer the Story of S. Alfio to the Story of the Paladins. It seemed to me that the painter had been suspiciously obsessed by the number Three; it was in the third century, there were three saints, they were each martyred three times over, though they cannot have known much about the boiling or the grilling, and there were three drunkards who went to sleep for three centuries. But I said nothing. I thought I would wait till I could see a cart.
By this time we had reached Nicolosi, that is we had nearly traversed the first of the three zones into which the Slopes of Etna are divided. This lowest one is the Regione Piemontese and Nicolosi is about 2250 feet above the sea—the place from which tourists often start to make the ascent of the volcano. Here we spent a declamatory half-hour discussing where we should eat the provisions we had brought from Catania and drink the wine we had bought at Mascalucia on the way. The discussion ended by our being received in a peasant’s hut, where we spread a table for ourselves and the woman stood a low paraffin lamp in the middle of the cloth. This is a bad plan, the light dazzles one for seeing those sitting opposite and their shadows are thrown big and black on the wall and ceiling so that one cannot see the room, but I should say it was like Orlando’s bedroom in the contadino’s cottage on Ricuzzu’s cart, the only room in the house, poorly furnished and used for all purposes. The woman of the hut had a baby in her arms and I said to Ninu:
“I wonder whether I may look at the baby?”
“Of course you may,” he replied, “why not?”
So I asked the woman, who smiled proudly and gave me the baby at once. She called it Turi (Salvatore) and said it was three weeks old. It was asleep and I nursed it till the table was ready, which was not long, for everything was cold. I handed Turi back to his mother and sat down, with Joe on one side of me and Ninu on the other. Presently Ninu inquired why I had asked whether I might look at the baby. I replied that I had heard that Sicilian peasants are so superstitious they do not like strangers to look at their babies for fear of the evil eye; I admitted that I had never yet met with a peasant so superstitious as to refuse to show me her baby, but on the Slopes of Etna, during an eruption, I had thought it wise to be careful.
Ninu, in the Sicilian manner, was about to say that anyone could tell by my appearance that there was nothing to fear from me, when Joe interrupted him:
“She is an intelligent woman,” said Joe.
I said: “I suppose you mean that she throws her intelligence into the scale with her maternal pride, and together they overbalance any little superstition which the proximity of the volcano may have fostered.”
“That’s the way to put it,” he replied.
“Why do people talk so much about the evil eye? Do they think it is picturesque, or do they really believe in it?”
Joe considered for a moment. Then he said: “Sometimes a peasant may decline to hand over her baby because she thinks the stranger looks clumsy and is likely to drop it; it would be rude to let him suspect this, so she allows him to think she has a superstitious reason. And some of her neighbours believe—at least—well, what do you mean by believing? What is faith?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Sometimes one thing, sometimes another. It is a difficult question.”
“Perhaps it is that she believes that her neighbours believe,” said Joe, tentatively.
“That is not the faith of S. Alfio and his brothers, that is not the faith that wins a martyr’s crown or that removes mountains.”
“No, but it has its reward if it enables the believer to feel that he is not singular, it is comfortable to feel that one thinks as one’s neighbours think.”
I said: “Thou art a happy man, Poins, to think as other men think.”
“I do not know anyone called Poins,” said Joe, “it is not a Sicilian name; but to think as other men think is as comfortable as a crown of martyrdom, and if it can be won without any martyrdom worth speaking of—why, so much the better.”
I agreed, and went on: “And then there are the men who never think of religion or theology, but go to Mass to please their wives.”
“Plenty of them,” he said, “and by pleasing their wives they reap the reward of avoiding domestic friction, whereby they perform a miracle greater than removing Etna.”
I thought of my poor mother who used to say:
“But, my dear, if you never go to church what hold have you over the servants?”
At the time, I remember, I pigeon-holed her problem among others that are still awaiting solution, and she died before I realised how well she had translated into the language of modern Bayswater the “Paris vaut bien une Messe” of Henri Quatre.
“If you want to see faith,” said Peppino Di Gregorio, “why don’t you stay and go to the festa of S. Alfio at Trecastagne? You might even see a miracle there.”
It seems that when anyone is in hospital with a broken leg after an accident or suffering from any illness, especially hernia, he cries in his despair, making use of this form:
“O, S. Alfio! cure me of this illness, restore my broken leg or cure my hernia” (or as may be) “and for the love of my wife, of my children, of my mother” (or as may be) “I will run naked to Trecastagne and light a candle before your shrine.”
After making this vow, the patient recovers and then he must not fail. With any other saint there may be failure, but not with S. Alfio, for he is more powerful than the Madonna or than the Padre Eterno or than the Redeemer. He is the Padrone and performs miracles.
“But how long should I have to stay? When is this festa?”
It would not be till the 10th of May, nearly six weeks ahead, and that made it a matter requiring consideration and, as it was now half-past seven and dark, we had to leave off talking and start for the lava.
Those of our friends who had made the excursion before were delightful as company, but we hardly wanted them as guides, because the way was shown by hundreds of people who were returning, many of them carrying torches, and we only had to walk in the opposite direction. We also carried a light—the acetylene lamp off Ninu’s bicycle, and it functioned as inefficiently as the bull’s-eye lantern which Mr. Pickwick took with him on his nocturnal expedition at Clifton. The road was broad enough, but strewn with big lumps of lava lying half-hidden in lava sand. I stumbled frequently, but I never fell, because one of my friends was always at my elbow and caught me; either it was the brave brigadier or Alessandro or Joe or the other Peppino or that great hulking Ninu with his operatic smile lighted up by his fitful lamp. They took care of me all the way until, after about an hour, we turned into a vineyard, called the Contrada Fra Diavolo, and our progress was stopped by a sloping embankment over twenty feet high.
This was the broad nose of the stream of lava. It was coming towards us at about eighty feet an hour, but its velocity varies according to the slope of the ground and the cooling and consistency of the material. The course of the stream described a curve from the mouth to the place where we stood, and the width of it gradually increased until opposite us it was about a quarter of a mile broad. There was plenty of smoke, fiery with the light reflected from the glowing stream, and especially thick in the direction of the mouth. The lava was sluggish, viscous, heavy stuff, full of bubbles, pushing itself along and kneading itself like dough. Red-hot boulders and shapeless lumps of all manner of sizes were continually losing their balance and rolling lazily down the slope towards us; as they rolled they disengaged little avalanches of rapid sparks, and when they reached the ground they sometimes fell against a vine stump and set it in a blaze for a moment. They said that this is Etna’s cunning way of taking a glass of wine; he opens a mouth and consumes a vineyard. All the time there was a roaring noise like coals being thrown on the fire, only much louder, and the great sloping wall glowed in the places where open crevasses left by the crumbling blocks had stirred it. It was too hot for us to go very near, nevertheless, my companions were not content to leave without bringing some pieces of lava away. They went towards it with canes which the vines will not want this year, unless the stream stops before it has broadened over the contrada, and with much difficulty and scorching, manipulated bits of red-hot lava until they had got them far enough away to deal with them, and then, balancing them on the end of two canes, they brought them to where I was resting near a doomed hut.
After spending an hour, fascinated by the spectacle, we returned by the sandy, rocky road to Nicolosi. While the carriage was being got ready, I said to Joe:
“You know, if I lived on the Slopes of Etna, close to such a sight as we have been contemplating, I think I should believe in the evil eye and S. Alfio and everything else.”
He assured me that it would not have any such effect unless, perhaps, during the periods of actual eruption—as soon as the eruption was over I should forget all about it.
“Do we not all live on the slopes of volcanoes?” asked Joe. “An eruption cannot do more than ruin you or kill you. And without coming to live on the Slopes of Etna you might be ruined or die at any moment. How do you know that you have not now in you the seeds of some fatal disease that will declare itself before you return home? Or you may be run over in the street or killed in a railway accident any day. And as for ruin, next time you look into an English newspaper you may see that all your investments have left off paying dividends and have gone down to an unsaleable price. Perhaps at this moment, in some Foreign Office, a despatch is being drafted that will lead to a declaration of war and the ruin of England and you with it. And yet you never worry about all this.”
“Then perhaps I had better begin to believe in S. Alfio at once?”
“Especially if you are threatened with hernia.”
“You said something about hernia before. What has hernia to do with it?” I inquired.
“S. Alfio’s first miracle was to cure one of his brothers of that complaint, which he had contracted while carrying a beam.”
“But was not S. Alfio a medical man? Why do you call it a miracle when a medical man cures his patient? Have you been reading the plays of MoliÈre?”
“Who is MoliÈre?” asked one of them. “Did he write his plays in the Catanian dialect?”
It does not do to make these allusions when talking with Sicilians who are employed in the municipio. One might as well quote Candide to some young schoolmaster who thinks the only thing worth knowing is the date of the Battle of Salamis. So I returned to S. Alfio and asked whether he always answers all prayers; they said the people believe he does or they hope he will. One of them, thinking I was inclined to scoff, rebuked me, saying:
“If you had been to Trecastagne and seen what I have seen, you would believe. I saw in the church there a dumb man. He tried to shout ‘Viva S. Alfio,’ but could only make inarticulate noises. The people encouraged him, and he went on trying till at last he said the words distinctly. I heard him say them. You are making a mistake in not going to Trecastagne. You might also behold a miracle and then you would believe as I do.”
I thought of GÉronte when his daughter recovers her speech in Le MÉdecin MalgrÉ Lui and wanted to ask how long this dumb man retained his miraculous power and whether his relations and friends were pleased about it and whether, after the novelty had worn off, they continued shouting “Viva S. Alfio.” But I said nothing; I was afraid of confirming them in the notion that I was scoffing, whereas I was very much impressed; the influence of the stream of lava was still upon me and all that Joe had said about living on the slopes of volcanoes. And I was wondering whether I could manage to be back in Catania for the 10th of May and see the people running naked to Trecastagne. I was not anxious to go there myself, not because I should have had to run naked all the thirteen kilometres, they would have let me wear my clothes and drive in a painted cart, but because there is no albergo there and it would have meant being up all night. If S. Alfio had earned his reputation by restoring those who spend sleepless nights in the street, I might have given him a chance of exercising his power on me.
There is generally some way of doing anything one really wants to do, and by the time we were separating in Catania, at one o’clock in the morning I was promising to try to return in time for the Festa di S. Alfio.
CHAPTER XIX
S. ALFIO
I was back in Catania before the 9th of May and began talking about S. Alfio in the Teatro Machiavelli. One of the actors whose name is Volpes, the one who did the listening father in the play about Rosina and the good young man, is employed by day in the cathedral, his department being the brass-work; he is therefore something of a hagiologist. He was going on business to Lentini, which is situated to the south of Catania on the way to Siracusa, it is the place where the three saintly brothers were martyred, and there he bought for me a book—Storia dei Martiri e della Chiesa di Lentini, by Sebastiano Pisano Baudo (Lentini: Giuseppe Saluta, 1898)—from which I have collected particulars for this story of the Life of S. Alfio.
Towards the end of the first half of the third century after Christ, at Prefetta in Gascony, the wealthy and noble Prince Vitale lived a life of singular piety, united in matrimony to Benedetta di Locusta. Heaven had blessed them with three sons, Alfio born in 230, Filiberto born one year and eight months later and Cirino born one year and four months later again. Prefetta was not only in Gascony, it was also in Aquitaine, and, notwithstanding this, it was in Spain and also in the Abruzzi, which is a region of Italy between Naples and Taranto, if I understand correctly. Owing to its unsettled habits geographers do not mark it on the maps, but they and the historians are agreed that it certainly existed, and perhaps it exists still, if only in a Castellinarian sense. The interesting point is that it was the birthplace of S. Alfio.
The noble and saintly Benedetta, having been brought up in the school of sacrifice, ardently desired to die for the faith. Her husband placed no obstacle in her way. She obtained an interview with the prefect, abused his gods and awaited the sentence which took the form of decapitation.
Prince Vitale after the death of his wife was free to consecrate himself to the education of his three sons. I expected to find that he had them taught medicine, surgery and chemistry, but there is not a word about any of these subjects. Evodio di Bisanzio, flying from country to country to avoid the persecution of Massimino, happened upon Prefetta; he was welcomed by Vitale, who appointed him tutor of his boys. Evodio was learned in the sacred sciences, the Greek fables and how to live rightly. These were the subjects which he taught to his pupils. Alfio copied out the Books of the Prophets, Filiberto the Gospels and Cirino the Letters of S. Paul and the Acts of the Apostles. Thus they developed a manly spirit, angelic habits and an intelligence, a piety, a devotion which are the rare gifts of a few privileged souls.
Onesimo was their next tutor, a man of deep learning and a fervent missionary who came to Prefetta with a following of thirteen or fourteen disciples and boarded and lodged with Prince Vitale. He was more the kind of tutor Vitale wanted for his boys. Onesimo had no sympathy with flying from persecution; he took the view that it was not enough to copy the sacred Books, his pupils must know how to sacrifice their frail bodies for the glory of the Cross. He instructed them in the practical work of martyrdom.
In the year 249, Decio ascended the imperial throne and issued an edict against the Christians. Vitale and Onesimo heard of it and welcomed this opportunity for the three brothers who swore on the ashes of their mother that they would profit by it. They did not have to wait long. Nigellione, the imperial minister, came to execute the decree. Onesimo and his pupils, in spite of tortures, professed their unalterable faith in the Cross and were sent to Rome together with fourteen other Christians. Vitale, being thus freed from all family responsibilities, exiled himself with his friends and awaited his end in a sacred retreat so retired that our author does not specify it.
In Rome, Onesimo and his band of Christians suffered tortures. While in prison S. Peter and S. Paul appeared to them, healed their wounds, exhorted them to persevere and promised ultimate victory. On the seventh day they were taken before Valeriano, the imperial minister. Failing, as Nigellione had failed, to shake their faith, he sent them with a letter to Diomede, Prince of Pozzuoli, telling him that if he could not win the captives over from their new faith he was to put to death Onesimo and the fourteen disciples by means of fierce tortures, and to send Alfio, Filiberto and Cirino into Sicily to be dealt with according to instructions contained in another letter addressed to the crafty Tertullo, Governor of Sicily, at Lentini.
Diomede carried out his instructions. The Christians all refused to sacrifice to the false gods. Onesimo died in consequence of an unusually large stone being placed upon his chest, the fourteen disciples were decapitated and Alfio, Filiberto and Cirino were handed over to fifty soldiers under Captain Silvano, a man of a proud and cruel nature, and taken in a ship to Messina.
The voyage occupied three days; they reposed in Messina for two hours and then, chained together and barefooted, proceeded to Taormina, where Tertullo happened to be hunting for Christians, and to him Captain Silvano delivered the letter from Valeriano. Tertullo’s instructions were to make the most of his attractive appearance and his agreeable manners and by means of cajolery to persuade the three holy brethren to sacrifice to the gods of Rome; in case of failure he was to cause them to suffer many and various tortures and then to deprive them of their lives.
Tertullo concocted a scheme worthy of the devil. No sooner were the youths brought into his presence than he assumed the appearance of an affectionate father, embraced them and inquired sympathetically about their parents and their home. On their telling him they were Christians he endeavoured, with apparent kindness, to turn them from a faith which had brought them nothing but suffering. He promised that if they would sacrifice to the gods of Rome they should enjoy the pleasures of a court life. But there was none of the Paris vaut bien une Messe about the sons of the saintly Benedetta. They spurned his promises and continued to declare themselves firm believers in the true Cross. Tertullo, defeated and angry, thereupon showed himself in his true colours; he dropped the affectionate parent and ordered the brothers to be tortured. He then sent them with Captain Mercurio and a squadron of forty soldiers to Lentini to await his return to that city.
At Mascali they were fatigued, especially Filiberto, who almost succumbed. They prayed to the Omnipotent and, before they had risen from their knees, the azure heavens became obscured, the wind blew, the thunder roared, the lightning flashed and there was a great rain. The forty soldiers fell upon their faces, frightened nearly to death, and in the tempest onward came a venerable man, believed by all who saw him to be S. Andrea. This personage restored the youths; whereupon the rain ceased, the clouds dispersed, the heavens smiled again and the forty soldiers rose from the ground declaring that the God worshipped by their prisoners must be more powerful than they had supposed.
In those days the usual road from Taormina to Lentini passed along by the seashore, but Captain Mercurio took the three brothers by an inland route passing through Trecastagni, perhaps because the road by the shore was encumbered with lava from an eruption of Etna which occurred in the year 251 or 252. When I came to this I thought of Diodorus Siculus and the second Punic war, but I repressed the suspicion that the compiler of the story was consciously borrowing a bit of local colour in order to get S. Alfio to Trecastagni in a picturesque manner.
It was the end of August or the beginning of September in the year 252 when the three saints reached Trecastagni. Here they sat on a rock which diversified the uniformity of the landscape, partook of food and reposed. Exhilarated by a laughing sky of rarest beauty, the holy brethren unloosed their tongues and sang hymns of joy and praise to the Lord for that he had given them the strength and spirit to face their anticipated martyrdom. On the spot where they reposed now stands the parish church of Trecastagni.
The three saints proceeded to Catania, where they passed an uncomfortable night singing hymns in an obscure prison, and at daybreak were taken on towards Lentini. The river Simeto was in flood owing to the recent abundant rain, which is perhaps a reference to the storm at Mascali; as soon as the saints put their feet in the stream it shrank and they passed over. Eight of the soldiers attempted to follow in their footsteps, but a sudden rush of water engulfed them together with their horses; this danger caused the remaining thirty-two soldiers to stay where they were, and they patiently waited four days till they were fetched by their comrades who, I suppose, had got over the river and employed the time in drying their uniforms and recovering from their wetting, but at first I feared they had been drowned.
Eight hundred paces to the north of Lentini the glorious brothers met a young man of the Jewish religion who had eaten nothing for a month. Captain Mercurio, having seen and been much touched by the portents performed by his prisoners during the journey, begged them to restore the youth. Immediately, with no assistance from anyone, the saints broke the ropes that bound them, prayed to heaven, approached the sufferer, infused new life into his exhausted frame and restored him to perfect health. The youth and his parents confessed their faith in the Nazarene, Captain Mercurio also declared himself converted and twenty of the soldiers, dismounting from their horses, threw their arms on the ground and prayed to be bound with chains since they now abhorred the false pagan gods and intended for the future to worship only the God of the three brothers.
They entered Lentini on Wednesday the 3rd of September, 252, their hands bound behind them, their heads uncovered and their feet bare, presenting to the emotional crowd an appearance of great nobility. They were put in prison with the twenty converted soldiers, tortured and starved; but a venerable man girdled with grace and celestial light miraculously brought food to them, embraced them and blessed them, their wounds were healed, their strength was restored, their courage was reinforced. Their tortures were increased after this, and so it went on till the 10th of May, 253, when S. Alfio was killed by having his tongue pulled out, S. Filiberto was burnt on a gridiron and S. Cirino was boiled in pitch and bitumen.
Eight years later, in June, 261, Vitale in his retirement was cheered by a visit from Neofito and Aquila, who brought to him, as tokens of the martyrdom of his three sons, the mantle of Alfio, the girdle of Filiberto and the veil of Cirino, saturated with blood.
The geographers write Trecastagne on the maps as though the village took its name from Three Chestnut Trees, but the learned say it should be Trecastagni—Tre Casti Agni, that is Three Chaste Lambs, after the three saints who rested on the site of the parish church. Their memory is perpetuated also at Mascali, Catania and Lentini. And they are adored at Aci-reale, Pedara and at other places on the eastern slopes, whence the faithful come to their shrine at Trecastagne on the 10th of May.
CHAPTER XX
THE NAKED RUNNERS
One may see in the foregoing story of S. Alfio the foundation of some of the incidents painted on the carts, and perhaps the saints’ travelling bareheaded and barefooted is the origin of the people running so to Trecastagne, but I can find nothing in the book to support the belief that S. Alfio was a medical man or that he ever cured anyone of hernia. Nevertheless that he was a medical man, especially successful in treating hernia, is believed by everyone in and round Catania. Fortified by my book I ventured to doubt it and asked my friends in what university he took his diploma. They replied that I was confusing cause and effect; for in the beginning it was not the universities that made the doctors, it was the doctors that made the universities.
I then pointed out that he could not even cure himself from the wounds made by the tortures; SS. Peter and Paul had to come to the Roman prison, S. Andrea had to be called in at Mascali and the old man girdled with grace and celestial light at Lentini. But they disposed of this by reminding me that medical men are notoriously powerless to cure themselves.
Then I objected that a saint who was born in 230 and who died in 253 was too young to have got together anything of a practice. They replied that the carts show him exercising his profession.
“Where are these carts?” I exclaimed. “If they are in Catania, let them be called and give their evidence in the usual manner.”
So we looked at all the carts we met that were not going too fast. On one of them Garibaldi was landing at Marsala and overcoming the Bourbons at Calatafimi; on another Cristoforo Colombo was receiving a bag of gold from Ferdinand and Isabella, who wanted to put an end to all this wearing delay about the discovery of America; on another Don JosÉ was being made a fool of by Carmen in the wine-shop of Lillas Pastia; we saw the enthusiasm of the Crusaders on catching sight of Jerusalem; Otello was smothering Desdemona; we saw the Rape of the Sabines and somebody before the Soldan. But none of these pictures threw any light on S. Alfio.
Peppino Di Gregorio said we must have patience. So we patiently turned down another street and saw King Ruggero dismissing the ambassadors: “Return at once to your Lord and tell him that we Sicilians are not—” something for which the artist had left so little room that it was illegible, but the noble attitude of King Ruggero conveyed the meaning: we saw Mazeppa bound to a white horse rushing through a rocky wood and frightening the lions and tigers; Etna was in eruption; banners were being blessed by the Pope; Musolino was tripping over that cursed wire and being taken by the carabinieri; Paolo and Francesca were abandoning the pursuit of literature in favour of an eternity of torment—anything rather than go on reading in that book. Still there was nothing about S. Alfio.
They then proposed a visit to the workshop of a man who earns his living by painting carts. We found him at work on the birth of Rinaldo who came into the world with his right hand closed. The doctors and nurses were standing round, wondering; they all tried but they could do nothing. After eight days the baby, yielding to the incessant caresses of his adorata mamma, opened his fist and lo! it contained a scrap of paper with his name—Rinaldo—written upon it.
We begged the artist to show us a cart with the Life of S. Alfio, or the designs for such a life. And he could not. He said such carts were rare and he had no designs; when asked to paint the story of S. Alfio he does it out of his head, putting in anything that his patrons particularly order. We asked how old he makes the saints and he replied that his instructions usually are to make them about sixteen. So that the carts, if we could find them, would not be evidence of anything but the well-known habit of artists to flatter their sitters. Still I should have liked to see pictures of the young doctor, the young surgeon and the young chemist curing patients of hernia and being martyred for the faith.
On the 9th of May in the evening we all went to the Teatro Machiavelli and, coming out a little before midnight, walked up the Via Stesicoro Etnea to the Piazza Cavour. The pavements were lined with people who had come to see the sight and the roadway was left for those who were going to Trecastagne. There were innumerable painted carts, some of them nearly as fine as Ricuzzu’s birthday present; the horses and mules were so splendidly harnessed and so proud of themselves that Peppino Di Gregorio called them “cavalli mafiosi”; they were driving fast out of the city with coloured lights and fireworks. Every now and then came a naked man running in the road and carrying a large wax candle. They speak of them as I Nudi, but they were not really naked; they wore white cotton drawers down to their knees, a broad red waist-band and a broad red scarf and some of them wore a flannel jersey. They were all bare-headed and bare-footed, or rather without boots, for they wore socks; this is enough to satisfy S. Alfio, who, being a doctor, does not insist on their taking needless risk. Nevertheless the socks must get torn to pieces before they are out of the town, and their feet must be bleeding long before they reach Trecastagne. Some of the so-called nudi, both men and women, were fully dressed except that they were without hats or boots. They all ran, occasionally they may rest by walking, but they may not dance and they may not stop and they may not greet their friends in the crowd except by shouting “Con vera fede, Viva S. Alfio!” Each of them carries his candle in his hand and it may cost five or ten francs, some cost as much as twenty francs. For days before the festa they go about Catania with trays collecting soldi from all they meet. But if one of them meets the doctor who attended him in the hospital, he is careful not to make the mistake of asking the doctor for a subscription. So they ran and shouted, and I said:
“These are the carts that ought to have the story of S. Alfio. Couldn’t we stop one and look at it?”
They recommended me not to try, it would block the stream of traffic and the people would not like it. So we sat in the piazza till about two in the morning and watched them passing.
That was not all we were to see. In the afternoon of the 10th of May everyone who was left in Catania went out towards Trecastagne to see the return of the people, who are said to be drunk after their religious devotions. In order to do this in comfort Peppino Di Gregorio had arranged that we should go to colazione with Giovanni Bianca, a friend of his who has a country house on the Slopes of Etna near the route, and afterwards we would go where we could see the return of the devout. First, he said, we must go to the station and fetch Joe, because he was to come too.
I said: “With pleasure, but why go to the station? I thought Joe was employed in the municipio?”
“We shall find him keeping order among the coachmen in the station-yard,” replied Peppino.
And there he was in the uniform of a guardia municipale.
“Why, Joe!” I exclaimed, “I thought you were writing at a desk all day in the Mansion House. I did not know you were a policeman.”
He replied that he was a guardia municipale, which is not exactly the same thing, and was going on to explain the difference between the carabinieri, the pubblica sicurezza, the guardia municipale, the guardia campestre and all the rest of it, when I interrupted him:
“I shall never remember what you are telling me; I shall always think of you as a policeman.”
“All right,” he replied, “I’ll be Joe the Policeman, and Ninu is a policeman too.”
“I can quite believe it,” I said. “When we went to the lava you both treated me just as our policemen in London treat the old ladies and gentlemen who are afraid of the traffic; you helped me along and never let me fall down, and looked after me as though I had been given specially into your charge. London policemen are just like that—very kind and helpful. I know one of them in private life and he is a capital fellow. I made his acquaintance over my bicycle.”
“How was that?” inquired Joe. “Did you get run over and did he pick you up? What did I tell you about living on the slopes of volcanoes?”
“It was not exactly that,” I replied; “it was because I wanted to avoid being run over that I gave my bicycle to a man to sell it for me when the motor-cars began to get on my nerves, and this policeman bought it. He did not give much for it, but if the value of his friendship is taken into the account I think I made rather a good bargain.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Oh, there’s nothing to tell. He comes to see me sometimes, when he is free. We have tastes in common; for instance, we do not like knock-about brothers at a music-hall—they bore us. And then books; our tastes in literature, however, are less alike; but he is quite a reader. Once he had in his pocket The Beauties of Nature, by Sir John Lubbock—that was to improve his mind—and Little Lord Fauntleroy, which he was reading for pure enjoyment. I told him that I also had written a book and he wanted to read it, so I lent it to him.”
“I hope he appreciated it?” inquired Joe sympathetically.
“He was extremely polite about it. Next time I saw him he said: ‘Well, I’ve been reading your book’; (he spoke with great deliberation) ‘I can get on with it. Yes. It doesn’t drag upon me. I don’t feel it’s time wasted. But, you know, if I ever do anything of that sort, I think it will be more in the style of Charlie Dickens.’“
“I should not call that very polite of him, was it?”
“I am not so sure. We must distinguish. He was not thinking of the Dickens of Pickwick with all his beaux moments, he was thinking of that other Dickens of the Christmas Books with all his mauvais quarts d’heure.”
“But have you two authors named Dickens in England?”
Then I saw that to my audience Dickens was as much a sealed book as MoliÈre and that my literary policeman must be reserved until I can write Diversions in London. So I turned the conversation by telling Joe that Dickens is not an uncommon name in England and is a form of Riccardo, as Jones is a form of Giovanni.
While talking we were on our way to Joe’s house, where he changed from his uniform to his private clothes, and then we took the tram to Cibali. Here we bought provisions and carried them with us to the country house, which was not yet properly open for the summer. We had picked up our host, Giovanni Bianca, on the way, and he took us round and showed us the garden, which was full of flowers and fruit trees and vines; he showed us also the lava of 1669 which destroyed part of Catania. He gave me a piece of primeval lava from the bottom of the well which his father had dug, about 150 feet down. I inquired how old that lava would be. He was not sure, but it would be older than the Romans, older than the Greeks, older than the Sikels or the Sikans.
“Say ten thousand years old,” said Giovanni, and he said it without being in the least embarrassed, but then he is not a canonico and has not Moses hanging as a dead weight on him. He went on to say that he did not really know. “The memory of man,” he said, “works very imperfectly, and to understand these things one ought to study the science of geology.”
In the afternoon we went across country to a spot on the route, past which the people had already begun to come. I asked, what they had been doing at Trecastagne all night. They told me that the journey from Catania takes about three hours, more or less according to the ability of the runner, so that they begin to arrive somewhere about 3 a.m. and keep on arriving all the morning; and others come from other villages on the eastern slopes. Then they make a row till the church is opened and the nudi go in and light their candles before S. Alfio. Some of them go on their knees and lick the stone floor of the church all the way from the entrance to the altar, but this is being discouraged because it covers the floor with blood and is considered not to be hygienic. Perhaps it might also be well to prohibit the running with bare feet, for that must also make the floor in an unhygienic condition, to say nothing of the roads that lead to the village. Some take stones and beat their breasts, and they all shout continually “Con buona fede, Viva S. Alfio!” After Mass they dress and eat and drink. Some of them have carried their food on their backs, others have friends who have brought it in their carts, and the food includes eels, which come from the Lake of Lentini; thus they enjoy the luxury of eating fish on the Slopes of Etna and moreover fish from the place of S. Alfio’s martyrdom. At midday the car bearing the three saints is brought out into the street, but this, it seems, does not interest the nudi; they have run naked to the shrine, they have lighted their candles, they have performed their vow and are now free to enjoy themselves. Of course, those who suffer from hernia do not attempt to run until after they believe themselves to be cured of that complaint; but rheumatic patients are often much better after running to Trecastagne, the exertion has upon them an effect like that of a Turkish bath, but it knocks them up in other ways.
By the afternoon, when it is time to return, what with the running, the walking, the driving, the fasting, the shouting, the religious exaltation, the want of sleep, the eating and drinking, the fireworks and the jollity of the festa, many of them are drunk. Joe says the festa is a continuation of some Bacchic festival, and this is more than likely, just as it is more than likely that the Bacchic festival was a continuation of some earlier one. He wants S. Alfio to be a transformation of Bacchus, just as Bacchus was a transformation of Dionysus and Dionysus of some earlier divinity, and so on back to him who first discovered wine, ages and ages before the vates sacer who immortalised Noah.
“And how much do the people believe?” I asked.
“Ah!” replied Joe; “who knows? And what is faith?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I said; “sometimes one thing and sometimes another. It is a difficult question.”
Then I remembered that he had asked me the same question, and I had made the same reply at Nicolosi six weeks before, and I also remembered something that had happened in between. “The other day,” I continued, “I had to wait in the station at Messina, and I asked the porter who was helping me with my baggage whether he had seen the comet. He replied, ‘No, I have not seen the comet, and I shall not even look for it; I do not believe in the comet.’“
“Oh, well, you know what he meant by that? He had heard that it was going to destroy the world, so he did not want to believe in it; he did not want it to exist; he was not going to encourage such a dangerous phenomenon by having anything to do with it. ‘I’ll leave you alone and I expect you to leave me alone.’“
“Yes; I suppose he thought that if he removed his custom the comet would fail.”
“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.
Whatever the significance of the things they carried or the origin of their belief in them, the people in the carts kept flinging them to the boys in the road, who caught them and picked them up and carried them off to make their festa with them later on. They were all very lively, but no one seemed to me very drunk, not more drunk than the nudi were naked; there were drunken people among them, but not enough to make me feel sure that S. Alfio ought to be identified with Bacchus. One can see more drunkenness on Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday, but one does not hastily identify Saint Lubbock with Dionysus.
