The Pillars of Hercules

Cefalù was where the English Satanist Aleister Crowley had lived in the 1920s and 30s, studying yoga and black magic and writing dismal poetry. He was also a mountaineer, and had climbed a number of high peaks—had even worked out a method for climbing Mount Everest, “rushing the summit.” His Confessions, published only in 1970, showed him to be one of the loonier figures in recent history. He was a dabbler and a dilettante, and as a wealthy man—he had inherited a fortune from the family brewing business—he could afford to be. There was no end to his high spirits. He filed his teeth to points. He showed these fangs to women and said, “Would you like a serpent’s kiss?” A number of women doted on him. Today he would be called a New Age guru, they would be called groupies or cultists. He had named his favorite sex partner The Ape of Thoth.

So, after a late lunch, I traveled about twenty miles down the coast on the line to Messina and stopped at Cefalù to see whether anything remained of the Crowley ménage. But no one in town recognized the name of Aleister Crowley and, though I walked the streets, I could not find the house where he had worked black magic and tried to bamboozle visitors and wore a sorcerer’s funny hat.

But mine was not a wasted trip. There was something pagan and animistic in the monstrous lions carved in the facade of Cefalù’s cathedral—how appropriate that Crowley had chosen to live in a place where the supernatural still mattered. There were oranges and lemons on the trees and behind the little town, snowcapped mountains. And from the cliff at Cefalù, I could at last see to the east the Lipari cluster of islands, also known as the Aeolian Islands. The volcano Stromboli was regarded in ancient times as the home of Æolus, god of the winds.

Late in the day, I caught an express train to Messina. It was called “The Archimedes” (the mathematician was born in Siracusa, on the other side of Sicily) and it was due in Messina in a couple of hours.

More interesting than the fruit trees and the sight of the sea and the snowy peaks was the man next to me in the compartment, scribbling notations on sheets of paper lined for musical scores. He was murmuring, but he was not humming. He was thoroughly absorbed in his scribbling. Occasionally he tapped his foot. He was writing music?

I would not have believed such a thing was possible except that various people had claimed they had done it, the most famous example being Beethoven in his deafness.

The man was small and bald, about fifty, with a pleasant face. He quickly filled three sheets of paper with music. Then I interrupted him with a grunt.

He stopped tapping his feet. He smiled. “Yes?”

“Are you writing music?”

“Yes,” and showed me the sheet with beads and squiggles on it. “I usually write music on this train. It’s not hard.”

“But you have no instrument. There’s no music.”

“This is music. And I don’t need an instrument. I write from memory.”

“Amazing.”

“The music is already in my mind before I write it. When I get home I will continue.”

“In silence?”

“I use a piano at home for composing, but my favorite instrument is an accordion.”

This odd word fisarmonica I had learned in high school as a joke, and this was the first time in my life I had ever heard it spoken. And this man was a fisarmonicista.

“It’s a typical Sicilian instrument. But I am the only composer of accordion music that I know. I think I might be the only one in Sicily. I love modern music, and mine has folkloric melodies in it.”

His name was Basilio. He had just been in Palermo playing in a piano bar, both piano and electric keyboard. Not only his own music but Frank Sinatra hits.

“‘Staranger Een Danah,’ ‘Conflowah Me,’ ‘Myweh’—they are the most beautiful,” he said, mingling English and Italian.

“You spend a lot of time traveling back and forth to Palermo.”

“I don’t have a problem. I’m not married,” he said, and laughed. “I have a girlfriend, though. My family is always asking me when I’m getting married, but I say to them, ‘Eh, what about my music?’ ”

We were passing more orchards and a stretch of coast where there were empty beaches.

“Look, all empty,” he said, seeing that I had glanced out the window. “It’s so lovely. Sicily is warm from March until October, but no one comes here—why?”

“Maybe something to do with the Mafia?”

“The newspapers! The newspapers! It’s all lies,” Basilio said. “All the news is about Mafia and danger. Eh, where’s the Mafia? Do you see them?”

“I haven’t looked,” I said, startled by his sudden energy.

“Forget it—it’s lies. As for beauty, listen to me—three-fourths of Sicily is untouched. Absolutely untouched! No one comes here—they’re afraid. Of what?”

“Yes, it is very pretty,” I said, wishing I had not roused his fury.

He was now talking to the other person in the compartment, a man in a heavy sweater and purple socks, holding on his lap a damp and stained parcel that stank of cheese.

“We have—what—a million people or so?” Basilio said.