Lawrence Durrell - Sicilian Carousel - Adventures on an Italian Island

But how could it have disappeared so completely from sight, this world-famous place? Nothing but a tiny bit of stone ramp remains to mark the site of the temple. Nothing? Well, only this intangible feeling of dread, of something momentous preparing itself. And the empty sockets mock one in the one late banal head of Aphrodite.

Youth, beauty, death — the three coordinates of the ancient world. Martine wrote:

I told myself that in Sufism and Taoism (it would take too long to convince you that the original Astarte of Erice was much older than Greek) they do not have any truck with the notion of disease as we see it. They do not talk of getting cured but simply of modifying conduct. It is presumed that your wrong action has procured a disharmony with the universe which manifests itself in disease. I believe this with all my heart, but I also believe in destiny, as well as in just wearing out like a pot. Then there is another aspect of things — I hate the Christian notion of prayer as an act of propitiation. But I like the old Byzantine notion of turning it into a sort of heartbeat — each man his own prayer wheel so to speak. Everything you feel in Erice goes way back beyond any notion which the monkey mind or tongue can formulate. Into the darkness where those great vegetable forms, tuberose creatures, wait in order to munch your flesh when you are once in the ground. The chthonic gods and goddesses as they are so strangely called.…

The light went out — the hotel generator packed up at midnight. It was still very light — a white milky light as if of moonlight diffused through a silk screen. I was weary now and I set down my papers and slept — but it was a light, nervous sort of sleep without great density.

At about three I woke with a start and sat up to look at the forest. I thought at first what I had heard was muffled sobbing somewhere in the building. I am still not sure. But what had happened was that a powerful surge of wind had sailed upon the promontory and bent the pines. It made a sudden rich hum, like a sweep of strings long drawn out but slowly dying away. Then the quivering silence returned. But one felt excited, on the qui vive . It was exactly as if one woke in the middle of the night on the African veldt slowly to realize that the noise which had wakened one was the breathing of a lion. The forest stirred and shook and resettled itself. A kind of breath of music had passed over it — like breath passing over embers. No, there was nothing particularly disquieting or singular about it, but waking, I felt the need to get up and drink some water. It was icy. I went to the balcony and looked down at the necklace of lights etching in their diagram of Trapani. It was some time off dawn yet but I felt completely rested and wondered if I would get to sleep again. Hesitating there I suddenly caught sight of a figure advancing towards the hotel through the pines. It was the German girl and she was naked.

The light, though diffused, was extremely bright and I saw quite clearly that she had no clothes on. I wondered if she could be sleep walking but it did not seem so for she looked about her, turning her head now this way and now that. She carried her hands before her, palms turned up, but lightly and without emphasis. And her walk was slow and calm.

Perhaps the sweep of wind in the pines had woken her also, or else the forest had evoked in her her native Bavarian landscapes? Or more simply still, she felt the incoherent stirrings of a primeval inheritance — suppose she were, without realizing it, some Nordic goddess who had come on an accidental visit to a remote cousin called Aphrodite of Eryx? She walked slowly and calmly under my balcony and disappeared round the corner of the house. And that was all. I dwelt a little while on the spectacle, wondering about it. Then I turned in again and at once fell into the profound sleep which up to now had been lacking. The sun was up when I awoke. And the disquiet had been replaced by a calm elation. Yet in a sort of way I felt that it was a relief to have traversed the night without incident.

Breakfast was very welcome on that fine sunny day; and we had been promised a look at the castle before being spirited away to Segesta and thence Palermo. Our trip was soon going to be at an end, and the consciousness of it provoked a new sense of friendliness. Conversations became warmer and more animated. A Microscope helped the Japanese girl change a film. I looked curiously at Renata, the German girl, when she came down but she seemed perfectly normal and assured, and of course one could not question her about her nudist escapade. I wondered if her boy friend knew of it. They were both very obviously much in love and went to no pains to hide it — which crucified poor Roberto as he watched, biting his nails.

It was necessary to set the red bus to rights this morning, for the little town of Erice was only going to be a brief stop on the road to Segesta whence we would face a long haul into Palermo.

I rather feared the ardors of this journey but in fact the calculations of Roberto were fairly exact and we arrived at night not too late and not too fatigued. But Erice in that bright blue morning was something for a glider pilot’s eye or an eagle’s. The drops, the views, the melting sea. Light clouds frolicked way below us. The little town had tucked itself into the nape of the mountain while the successive fortresses had been squarely planked down on the site of the ancient temple, thus obliterating it. But the rock promontory, sticking out like a stone thumb, was a perfect emplacement for a place of worship. “It makes me wonder,” said Deeds, “since all the ancient shrines have served as Christian foundations for our churches, whether there isn’t always a little bit of the pagan devil leaking into the stonework of our Christian edifices. I would like to think there was; we seem such a rigid and unfunny lot. But I don’t think I dare ask the parson.”

The little town stumbled up and down its net of cobbled streets below the fortress garden. The architecture was all that one finds in the Aegean — houses built round a courtyard tessellated with colored pebbles and decorated with old corned beef tins full of sprouting basil and other sweet-smelling plants. It was Samos; it was Tinos all over again. We were warmly bidden to enter several courtyards to admire the arrangements of the house; these dark-eyed smiling people might have been Corfiots. The snug little courtyards bounded in their lives, and one felt that here, when once night fell and the mists began to climb up from the valley below, people did not hesitate to lock their courtyard gates. After midnight one could knock a long time on a door without getting an answer, for their world was both ancient and also one of contemporary goblins and fays. And with the temple site brooding up there.… But the domestic organization of their houses was that of birds’ nests, and they had all the human force which comes from living on top of one another in a small place; making room for children, for livestock, for everything important to life — and not less for the sacred icons which ensure that the dark spirits shall be kept at bay.

Roberto had a small chore to do and it was quite a compliment that he should ask Deeds and myself if we would like to accompany him. He had to visit the ancient grandmother of a friend and give her some messages of congratulation for her eighty-sixth birthday plus various assorted messages. We found the house without much difficulty and when the portals opened to us we saw that quite a number of people were there on the same errand. It was rather a spacious house on its own courtyard, and a short flight of steps led up to the upper room and gallery where the old lady lay in state to receive her visitors, in a great bed like a galleon with carved headboards. It looked, as Deeds said afterwards, as if one could have hitched a horse to it and just ridden off into the sky, there were so many cherubs and saints carved upon it, all con furioso . She wore an old-fashioned shawl of fine black lace with a white fichu and her long witch-like white hands with their filbert nails were spread on the sheet before her, while her clever old eyes accepted the compliments of her visitors with grace and no weariness. Her fine room was furnished with graceful Sicilian earthenware plates beautifully painted, and flowers in bloom. Two small children played with a sailboat upon a handsome carved trunk under the window. She must have been a person of great consequence for several of her visitors were local dignitaries, as Roberto explained later — the barber, the chemist, the podesta , and medico condotto . It all went off with great style and ease, but the appearance of Roberto was a thrilling surprise and his presence evoked questions and answers which took a good twenty minutes. She had questions to ask involving several generations and several families and I had the impression that nobody was passed over — she checked up on the whole lot of them, for who knows when she might have another chance? The peasant memory and the peasant sense of life is a tenacious and determined thing — it draws its strength from this sense of a corporate life, shared by all, and to which all contribute a share of their sap. Moreover, I think the old lady felt that she was not long for this world and that she must make the most of things, such as this surprise visit which had brought her all the gossip of a far corner of the island.