The Pillars of Hercules

In a sunny Sicilian dawn, the sun blazing behind a golden haze, we entered the Bay of Palermo, mountains on either side and a great harmonizing background of stucco-colored peaks behind the ancient buildings. The tallest man-made structures were the church steeples and cathedral domes.

Rather than stay in Palermo, where I had been before, I wanted to spend a day in Cefalù, just down the railway line; and then go to Messina and Taormina and Siracusa, places I had never seen. Still, I needed to walk in order to stretch and get the stiffness out of my legs, and I wanted just to browse in the city. So I left my bag at the station and then looked around, and decided on a hike.

Whenever I asked directions I was usually told the place I wanted was “very far” (lontanissimo) even when it was a fifteen-minute walk. I was urged to catch a bus.

“But you’ll need a ticket.”

“Of course.”

“You buy one there.”

Silly me for not knowing that bus tickets were sold in a seedy little tobacco and porno shop, Bar “T”—Cafe Stagnitta—Articoli da Fumo, Articoli da Regalo, Articoli da Gioca—smoking paraphernalia, presents and games. And bus tickets, of course. It was preposterous to think that a bus ticket would be sold in a bus or in a vending machine. A man who sold bus tickets had to have a large stock of cigarettes, and candy, and tit-and-bum magazines.

The swagger of the Sicilian men in Palermo was remarkable for its confidence, the men, swarthy as Arabs, shouting to each other. Anthony Burgess once heard a young man in Palermo telling his friends how he had devised a foolproof method for discovering whether his new bride was sexually innocent on his wedding night. “He was going to paint his penis purple, he said, and if his bride evinced surprise he was going to cut her throat.”

I was fumbling with my wallet, when a woman took me aside. She said, “You’re a stranger?”

“Oh, yes. American.”

“Watch your pockets,” she said.

“Thanks. I’ll do that.”

“You see, Palermo is very beautiful—eh—”

She lifted the fingers of her right hand and flicked forward, beneath her chin.

“We’re good people—eh—”

Again she grazed her chin with her fingers.

“And you’ll be all right here—eh—”

Her gesturing continued, as she looked slightly away, and then with a final caution, she walked off.

I had seen this chin-flick gesture before. I had understood it to mean a deep defiance, Up yours, so to speak. But that is another, more severe use of it, say in Naples and north. Here, the flicking fingers were meant as a contradiction. Yes, I am saying this is a nice place but notice that I am indicating with my hand that it is not true in every instance; be warned.

That was nicely candid. Standing at a bus stop, the gestures were more subtle as a priest joined the little crowd. There were some mutters but no one spoke to the priest. Italians—men especially—squint at priests’ skirts. They believe that priests who pass butcher shops turn the meat bad. Priests are neither men nor women. They have the evil eye.

I was alert to everyone around me when I saw a priest in Italy. A silence fell when this one appeared, but often there would be a series of simultaneous gestures, because of the belief that priests had the evil eye. For an Italian man, the commonest and most effective way of dealing with the clerical evil eye was to touch his own testicles and subtly prong his fingers at the priest. I never found out what Italian women did. Perhaps they prayed, but in any case they were less anxious than the men in matters that related to the supernatural.

I took a bus to Monte Pellegrino, on the recommendation of Goethe, who had written about it. The high hill was outside the northwest corner of the city and as this was a weekday in March, there was hardly anyone else on the footpath. I had been told that I could see as far as the Lipari Islands from the summit of Pellegrino; the day was too hazy to see any distance, yet the view of Palermo and its bay was splendid, enough of a reward for a two-hour walk.

But the view had stirred something in me. Walking down the slope towards the bus, I became agitated about my trip. Perhaps it was the sight of all that coast, and the thought that almost two months into it, where was I? Kicking along a dusty path in Sicily made me feel tiny, overwhelmed by everything that lay ahead of me—Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, all the rest of North Africa, not to mention the war in Croatia and Bosnia, the islands of Cyprus and Malta.

Then I remembered that I had plenty of time. I had no job, no deadlines, nothing else; and I reminded myself why I had come here. To eat spaghetti and talk to people and, first of all, to see Cefalù.