The Pillars of Hercules

On my walk back I took a different route, by way of the Anapo River, and reaching the shore saw ahead of me twelve nuns in black habits waving their arms and strolling by the blue sea. It was a Sicilian combination of the bizarre, the religious, the humorous, the tender, and the surreal.

9

The Ferry Villa to Calabria

            Instead of entering Messina on the way back, I stayed on the train, and the train and I were rolled onto the clanging deck of the ferry Villa—railway tracks were bolted to the deck. This shunting was done in jolting installments, sections of three or four coaches at a time, uncoupled, lined up side by side until the whole train was on board, sixteen coaches. The whole railway train, minus its engine, physically transferred to the vessel, was then floated across the Straits of Messina.

Standing in the darkness of the steel-hulled Villa among the greasy train wheels, I heard a man’s hoarse pleading voice.

“I lost my arm.”

It was too dark to see anyone, though I could hear the laborious pegging of a crutch or a cane knocking against the metal deck.

“Help me,” the voice said.

I stepped back, and the noise I made gave me away and directed him to me.

“Give me something,” he said. “I lost my arm.”

He then dimly emerged from the soupy darkness and I smelled him more clearly than I saw him. The smell was stale bread and decaying wool, spiked with a hum of vinegary wine.

“Please,” he said. And then, “No, I can’t take it!”

My coins were clinking because he bumped them with the stump in his ragged sleeve.

“No arm! Put them in my pocket!”

All this was in the stinking darkness of the ship’s hull, among the detached coaches of the train.

“Have a good trip,” he said, and pegged past me, rapping his crutch, and I heard other passengers giving him money—not out of mercy, but in exchange for his blessing, out of superstition.

On deck with the departing Sicilians and the returning Calabrese, all of them munching sandwiches, I saw that we were pulling out of Messina’s harbor. Sicily had clouds the shape and color of old laundry billowing over it, and the straits were windy too, but except for whitecaps and blown froth, it did not seem to be a bad sea. This could have been just an illusion. A whirlpool might make a low howling sound, but it is not usually visible until you are on top of it.

The Odyssey’s whirlpool Charybdis (“Three times / from dawn to dusk she spews … a whirling maelstrom …”) is not fanciful; it actually exists near Messina, on the Sicilian side, opposite the small village of Ganzirri. Scylla, the six-headed monster with twelve great tentacles, has not been sighted recently, but she is always heard. At just the spot where Scylla “yaps abominably” the sea-swells roll into the stone caverns on the Calabrian side, where they make a gulping sound, audible to anyone on the water—a familiar yapping to anyone who lives within earshot of cavernous seashore. This could easily be mistaken for the voice of the beast, Scylla, that Ulysses heard, “a newborn whelp’s cry, though she is huge and monstrous.”

Much of The Odyssey’s Mediterranean geography is either misleading or imaginary (I had passed the Islands of the Cyclops near Catania, but didn’t recognize them), yet occasionally, as in Bonifacio and here, the topographical description is so specific I got a thrill in matching it to the text. The art in Homer’s lines still precisely reflected nature. There was also a private satisfaction in savoring the ways that Ulysses managed to have a pretty bad time. Homer’s epic seldom celebrates the joys of seamanship or marvelous landfalls. It is about delays and obstructions and messy deaths. Ulysses’ crew is nearly always complaining or fearful, and the captain himself rather dislikes the gray sea and the fickle winds, the toil of shipboard life, the distances, the inconveniences, the dangers. Among many other things The Odyssey is a poem about the frustrations and miseries of travel, and the long voyage home; in a word, an epic of homesickness, greatly consoling to a traveler reading it.

The Calabrians had cracked a ghoulish joke by naming a village on the shore after the monster that had to eat six sailors at a time (“she takes, / from every ship, one man for every gullet”); in fact, Scylla was a little place nearby on the railway line to Naples and Rome, where this train was going. Above the shore here were great eroded slopes of steep hills, all settled and scraped bare, and like Sicily the landscape was mostly urbanized or settled. No hill existed in Italy without an antenna planted on it, or a fort, or a dome, or a crucifix. Italians fulfill themselves by building and reorganizing the landscape. It is as though nature has no interest for them until it has been improved by digging and urbanizing it. That is one thing Italians have in common with the Chinese. Another is a love of noodles. Yet another, an ancient belief in dragons.