Procida, a sun-kissed gem

Up in the hills in the countryside, my island has solitary narrow roads enclosed between ancient walls, behind which orchards and vineyards extend, like imperial gardens. It has several beaches with pale, fine sand, and other, smaller shores, covered with pebbles and shells, hidden amid high cliffs. In those towering rocks, which loom over the water, seagulls and turtledoves make their nests, and you can hear their voices, especially in the early morning, sometimes lamenting, sometimes gay. There, on quiet days, the sea is gentle and cool, and lies on the shore like dew. Ah, I wouldn’t ask to be a seagull or a dolphin; I’d be content to be a scorpion fish, the ugliest fish in the sea, just to be down there, playing in that water.

Around the port, the streets are all sunless alleys, lined with plain, centuries-old houses, which, although painted in beautiful pink or grayish shell colors, look severe and melancholy. On the sills of the small windows, which are almost as narrow as loopholes, you sometimes see a carnation growing in a tin can, or a little cage that seems fit for a cricket but holds a captured turtledove. The shops are as deep and dark as brigands’ dens. In the café at the port, there’s a coal stove on which the owner boils Turkish coffee, in a deep blue enameled coffee pot. She’s been a widow for many years, and always wears the black of mourning, the black shawl, the black earrings. A photograph of the deceased, on the wall beside the cash register, is festooned with dusty leaves.

[…] Those elegant pleasure boats and cruise ships that in greater and greater numbers crowd the other ports of the archipelago hardly ever greater dock at ours; here you’ll see some barges or merchant ships, besides the fishing boats of the islanders.

Never, not even in summer, do our solitary beaches experience the commotion of the bathers from Naples and other cities, and all parts of the world who throng the beaches of the surrounding areas. And if a stranger happens to get off at Procida, he marvels at not finding here that open and happy life, of celebrations and conversations on the street, of song and the strains of guitars or mandolins, for which the region of Naples is known throughout the world. […]

The innkeeper, in his tavern, which is opposite the monument of Christ the Fisherman, is raising an owl, chained to a plank high up against the wall. The owl has delicate black and gray feathers, an elegant tuft on his head, blue eyelids, and big eyes of a red-gold color, circled with black; he always has a bleeding wing, because he constantly pecks at it with his beak. If you stretch out a hand to give him a little tickle on the chest, he bends his small head toward you, with an expression of wonder. When evening descends, he starts to struggle, tries to take off, and falls back, and sometimes ends up hanging head down, flapping on his chain.

The old grandmother soon made her appearance, holding in her hand a lamp of red earthenware, which cast its light upon her thin, pale face […]. She kissed her husband’s hand and the boy on the forehead. […] We stood apart from them that we might not stop the natural outpourings of their hearts. They were poor; we were strangers; and we owed them a certain respect. The only way we had of showing it was by taking the place nearest the door and keeping perfectly still.

Graziella looked at us in surprise from time to time, as if she were in a dream; […] stepping up to the terrace above, she brought in a branch of rosemary and some orange-blossoms like large white stars. She took a chair, arranged her flowers into a bouquet, fastening them with the long pins that she drew from her hair, and placed them before a little plaster image of the Virgin, which stood above the door, and before which a lamp was burning.

The inside of the house was as bare and in almost every way as like to the outside, as both inside and outside were like the immense rocks that surrounded it. The walls were entirely without plaster and only covered with a thin coat of whitewash. The lizards, aroused by the light, shone in the crevices of the rocks and crept under the fern leaves that served as the children’s bed. […]

The other day, […] we found the fisherman, the grandmother, Beppo, Graziella […] getting ready to descend to the shore to visit the abandoned boat […] The boat had been securely fastened, but there being no anchor to hold the back part of it steady, it had been tossed about by the waves during the night, and torn to pieces on the sharp points of the projecting rocks, which should have protected it. […] The other parts of the hull — the stern, the mast, the painted seats, and the sides— were scattered here and there on the beach, like the limbs of a corpse torn asunder by wolves after a fight. […] The old fisherman was running from one to the other of these remnants. He lifted them up successively, stared at them with a tearless eye, and let them fall to walk further on. Graziella was weeping, seated on the ground, her head buried in her apron. The half naked children ran into the shallow water, crying after the floating boards and endeavoring to turn their course toward the shore.

As to the old woman, she did not cease sobbing for a moment, nor talking while she sobbed. We could only catch confused words or disconnected sentences that rent the air and pierced our hearts.

While speaking these words she raised herself upon her knees, and tearing off pieces of her dress and pulling handfuls of hair out of her head, she threw them vehemently into the sea. She threatened the sea with her closed hand, and kicked at the foam as it came up on the beach; then, passing alternately from anger to grief, and from terrible convulsions to resignation, she again sat down in the sand, leaned her head upon her hands, and, weeping all the while, looked around on the loose planks which were beating up against the rocks.

“Poor boat!” she cried, as if it had been the remains of some dear friend recently taken from life and love; “Is this the end that awaited thee? […] Lost so near our house, and within the reach of thy master’s voice! Thrown up upon the beach, like the remains of a faithful dog that the wave returns to the feet of the master who has drowned it.”

The Procidans are surly, taciturn. All the doors are closed, almost no one looks out the window, every family lives within its four walls and doesn’t mingle with the others. Friendship, among us, isn’t welcomed. And the arrival of a stranger arouses not curiosity but, rather, distrust. If he asks questions, they are answered reluctantly, because the people of my island don’t like their privacy spied on.

They are a small dark race, with elongated black eyes, like Orientals. And they so closely resemble one another you might say they’re all related. The women, following ancient custom, live cloistered like nuns. Many of them still wear their hair coiled, shawls over their heads, long dresses, and, in winter, clogs over thick black cotton stockings; in summer some go barefoot. When they pass barefoot, rapid and noiseless, avoiding encounters, they might be feral cats or weasels. They never go to the beach; for women it’s a sin to swim in the sea, and a sin even to watch others swimming. […]

[…] (Women) spent their lives shut up in kitchens and other rooms: that explained their pallor. Bundled into aprons, skirts, and petticoats, in which they must always keep hidden, by law their mysterious body, they appeared to me clumsy, almost shapeless figures. They were always busy, and elusive; they were ashamed of themselves, maybe because they were so ugly; and they went around like sad animals, different in every way from men, without elegance or daring. Often they gathered in a group, and discussed with passionate gestures glancing around in fear that someone might surprise their secrets. They must share many secrets, what could they possibly be? Surely all childish things! No absolute certainty could interest them. […]

Very occasionally, a foreign woman happened onto the island, who went down to the beach and took off her clothes to swim, without any respect or shame, as if she were a man. Like the other Procidans, I felt no curiosity about foreign swimmers; my father seemed to consider them ridiculous and hateful people, and, with me, fled from the places where they swam. We would happily have chased them away, because we were jealous of our beaches. And no one looked at those women. For the Procidans, and also for me, they were not women but crazy animals who had descended from the moon. It didn’t even occur to me that their shameless figures might have some beauty.

In books, the houses of ancient feudal cities, grouped together or scattered through the valley and across the hillsides, all in sight of the castle that dominates them from the highest peak, are often compared to a flock around the shepherd. Thus, too, on Procida, the houses -from those densely crowded at the port, to the ones spread out on the hills, the isolated country farmhouses- appear, from a distance, exactly like a herd scattered at the foot of the castle. This castle rises on the highest hill (which among the other, smaller hills is like a mountain) and, enlarged by structures superimposed and added over the centuries, has acquired the mass of a gigantic citadel. To passing ships, especially at night, all that appears on Procida is this dark mass, which makes our island seem like a fortress in the middle of the sea.

On the western side, which faces the sea, my house is in sight of the castle, but at a distance of several hundred meters as the crow flies, and over numerous small inlets from which, at night, the fishermen set out in their boats with lanterns lighted. At that distance you can’t distinguish the bars on the windows, or the circuit of the guards around the walls; so that, especially in winter, when the air is misty and the moving clouds pass in front of it, the penitentiary might seem the kind of abandoned castle you find in many old cities. A fantastic ruin, inhabited only by snakes, owls, and swallows.