Clowns At Midnight (18 page)

Ennio crossed himself. ‘Blood, you say?’ They were the first words any of them had spoken during my account. So Carlo had not told them the details of our phone conversation earlier, and Raina had probably enjoined them to silence before I arrived.
Leave it to Papa; he will tell you when he is ready
.
David has a condition and your Papa has something to tell you
.

‘Blood, yes,’ I said. ‘What it looked like. I just couldn’t stay to make sure. Now I wish I had.’

I finished by telling how I’d returned this morning but found the cross empty again, no signs of black wool or blood, nothing, as if it had never happened.

‘Someone does a prank!’ Fabrizio said, and Ennio nodded.

Fabiana disagreed. ‘Some prank,’ she said, pushing her dark hair back behind her ears. ‘So much trouble. And it’s the tower. It’s the tower, Mama!’

‘
Più tardi
, Fabiana,’ Raina said. ‘All this talk. We must eat. David is hungry. If our guest from the forest turns up, he’ll wipe his feet and wash his hands like the rest of us, eh?’

It was brave talk, but welcome right then. And a signal too. Raina and Fabiana went through to the kitchen; Fabrizio and Ennio excused themselves, very respectfully I thought, and went to join their wives and children in the other part of the divided room. The sound of happy voices through the partition was comforting.

Carlo and I remained at the table, and I moved around to the long side opposite him. We both sat gazing up at the mask above the fireplace. There was more to discuss, but I wanted him to know I was okay. ‘Etruscan, you say?’

Carlo glanced at the mask. ‘Probably Phoenician. At least in original design. The nose gives it away. Possibly the kind of face worn at the sacrificing of children, a happy face for priests and parents to wear. They were putting on a brave face, literally.’ He turned his eyes back to me. ‘I’m so grateful to you, David. Coming over like this. Sharing it.’

‘
We
is so much better than
I
in these things, Carlo.’ I spiralled my finger next to my head, just as I’d imagined him doing on the phone earlier today.

He laughed.

Fabiana brought in plates and cutlery and quickly laid them out, then helped Raina bring in steaming dishes.

‘
Capretto
, David,’ Raina said. ‘Young goat. You must try it. And here is something safer: pasta.
Farfalle carbonara
. Few dishes tonight, so eat big.’

Fabiana went through the partition to the other half of the room, leaving Carlo, Raina and me to eat together. It all tasted wonderful, though I was far too distracted to appreciate it properly. Finally Raina cleared the plates, insisting that Carlo and I stay and talk, leaving us to look up at the mask again as we sipped our wine.

It disturbed me as much as ever, but I made myself look at it. The dark grottoes of its eyes gave me focus. ‘Carlo, this site I accessed said the Shepherds’ Carnival commemorates a much older ritual, just as you told me the other day. The worship of Dionysos, Christianised like you said. The mamuthones go way back. Is that right?’

‘
Sì
, David. The winter months—November to February in Greece—belonged to Dionysos; the rest of the year belonged to Apollo. As the days started to get longer in the cold of the northern winter, when there was the promise of new life, hope in darkness, there were the great Dionysian festivals. The Lesser Dionysia, the Lenaia, was held in late January and celebrated the god’s emergence from the underworld and his second birth from Zeus’s thigh. It was the only time the mask of the god was ever displayed in the temple, set atop a mask-pole called a
stulos
—a tall wooden post with a short cross-bar. Part of calling out the Divine Child.’

‘The cross near the tower!’

‘
Sì
, and like the mamuthone masks today, this mask was made of fig wood, set above a loose robe. Mostly comedies were performed at the Lenaia, to celebrate the Divine Child. The following month, in late February, there was the Ancient Dionysia, the Anthesteria, an old festival of ghosts. The souls of the dead were said to walk the streets then, especially on Choës Day, and people wore masks to resemble spirits. Tragedies were performed. Here Dionysos was called the Lord of Souls, a role that would finally pass on to us in the rituals of All Souls’ Day. The second day of the Anthesteria was the only day of the year the temple was actually open to the people.

‘The Greater Dionysia at the end of March brought the Dionysian part of the year to a close. Tragedies—goat songs—were performed here, too, to commemorate that the god had died in the month of the he-goat, but with comedies as well to show that he had risen from the dead, that the cycle was securely in place.’

‘It’s like the original purpose of Carnival,’ I said. ‘Celebrating the continuation of life.’

‘It is, David. It is very much like it. Death as an essential part of the greater life of the world. We borrow that life for a time, take it into our separate selves, then surrender it again into the great cycle. Dionysos encompassed all that. Today we try to pretend death doesn’t exist, but the Greeks being the Greeks faced it as the profound truth it was, knowing that mere words couldn’t encompass it. Wisdom has to be protected by enigma. They knew this. They created rituals to fit it properly into their world order: the Eleusinian and Dionysian Mysteries which the Orphics later made even more like what Christianity would one day become: with a divine child become mortal mediator saving humanity so it could gain eternal life. All this existed and was later borrowed.

‘And you’re right about Carnival, David. If you read up on the Lesser Dionysia, you will read how the boundaries of the ordered world were deliberately turned upside down and mocked, just as in your Carnival and Commedia. It was a deliberate and profound irreverence, a challenging of all the accepted forms. Men dressed as women, women as men: you see it on the vase paintings and frescoes, recorded in the texts. They turned themselves into primal, elemental forms. Men became satyrs and sileni, women became all-powerful maenads wielding thyrssos wands. They dressed in animal skins, just like our mamuthone here on the hill, became totemic beasts. Cloth or goatskin masks were worn; bells were strapped over chests and shoulders, fixed around waists and ankles. It wasn’t just dressing up, nothing so simple. We’re not just talking about gods here; we’re talking about powerful organising systems for a way of seeing, a way of grasping what is prized and cherished by a society, what is recognised and understood in the workings of the world. It wasn’t just the suborning of order, not just masking and role-play to excuse excess. It was a restoring of the greater order of being, a profound commemoration of indestructible life. We have no easy equivalent today.’

‘And so like Christ, as you say.’

‘He was a Divine Child just as Christ would later be in the New Testament gospels. He was a Dying God, just like Christ would one day be, just as Osiris and Shiva were. He was born out of a union between a god and a mortal, just as Christ was. On Andros he changed water into wine. You see the similarities? Dionysos was cut into seven pieces by the Titans and his phallus given to Rhea, mother of the gods, for safekeeping, to keep the eternal cycle of life in place. It’s like the Egyptian goddess Isis rescuing the dead Osiris from the sarcophagus in which Set had imprisoned him, then mounting his penis, being fertilised and giving birth to Horus. Dionysos was born in death and triumphed over it too.’

‘Just like in that pop song by Traffic:
John Barleycorn Must Die
.’

‘
Scusi
, David. I do not know this name. John Barleycorn?’

‘Sorry, Carlo. It’s a song about harvesting the grain, killing it so it all comes round again. An allegory of the great cycle of nature. Death as an integral part of life.’

‘Ah,
sì
! Of course!’ he said, and poured us more wine. ‘Only later was Dionysos debased into the god of wine and orgies, a travesty of his real form. The wildness of heart and spirit that Euripides sought to commemorate in his second-last play,
The Bacchae
, was so easily misrepresented as excess and recklessness, as terrible violence and licentiousness. It was never that, David, but it was so wonderfully elusive that it had to be contained by its detractors. And what better way than to accentuate the extremes, distort the facts, produce a caricature?

‘David, what you wrote about the Commedia was fascinating for me. You know so much. You love history, love learning about old civilisations, but for you, for me, for everyone, there are gaps, and these gaps determine what we are and what we become no less than the knowledge that could fill them. There is just too much to know. You express concern about how people forget whole areas of knowledge. We can say the same about the Etruscans, about this worship of Dionysos, simple facts, simple truths no-one bothered to write down because they thought there would be no need, that somebody else was doing so, that it was all so obvious, so self-evident, why bother? It’s how it always happens.

‘Now we allow that there have always been agencies aiding such widespread forgetting. The Church has long been notorious for it, governments everywhere, victors in wartime most of all. There is so much to know. You marvel at the horns on a Zanni mask being like the devil’s horns in the mystery plays, but just look how the Dionysian mysteries were taken and used by the early Church. Look at this wine we drink. We do it together. We drink this symbolic blood. We become easier, more honest, too honest. We lose our better judgement, give in to expansiveness. We become Dionysian. Now there are movies, news broadcasts and television documentaries to give us the purification and purging of emotions, the
katharsis
that puts us back in the world and keeps us human. But we try to go back, you and I. We can try to rediscover this Dionysos behind the mamuthone who has scared us so.’

I held up my glass so it was between me and the dark eyes of the mask, so they became smudges of darkness in the rich red. Carlo had lost a good deal of his accent to present his spiel about Dionysos, had found it again the moment the spiel was done. And he knew that I’d noticed, had probably meant me to notice. This extraordinary man was playing at genial, rustic pig-farmer with a hobby-horse to ride, but he was far more. It was all becoming clear.

And what was keeping Raina, I wondered, then realised that, of course, she would be with the others, and that they were leaving us alone deliberately. Allowing Carlo to present this part of the mystery. It had all been planned. And Gemma was part of it too.

But somehow I still believed him about the mamuthone, that it had surprised even him. I held my glass up to the empty terracotta eyes again and decided to test him, to see if I could trigger the clear unaffected delivery once more.

‘Carlo, how did Dionysos come to Sardinia?’

‘Ah, much is still uncertain. There are ancient colony sites on Sardinia, either eighth or seventh century Greek colonies or Phoenician colonies bringing in Greek things. Trade was so vigorous, sometimes it’s hard to tell. There is the influence through the Etruscans, but there it all becomes darker, bleaker. There too he is the god of rebirth and wild nature, symbolised by the renewal of the wine harvest and all that meant in those times. Not just the god of wine, but what wine represents symbolically: renewal and the celebration of that renewal. But a much more fatalistic and bleak religion, as I say.

‘The Etruscan gods were detached and cruel. Any equivalents of mamuthones there wouldn’t have been just shepherds becoming one with the life god; they would have been closer to, well, something like the
charontes
, the Etruscan demons of death: winged, goblin-faced, swinging their double headed hammers. All the vivacious, wholesome Greek things—the ghosts of Choës Day, the playfully mocking masked figures—seem vicious and terrifying when passed through Etruscan hands. They were a glorious people, an attractive and influential people but, in spite of all their rituals, feasting and festivals, not a very happy one.’

Charontes. I’d do a search on the name, find what part they played, if any, in modern manifestations of the mamuthones.

‘Can you tell me what Yakkos means?’

‘David, it is Iackhos.’ He spelled it out. ‘I-A-C-K-H-O-S. One of the oldest names for Dionysos, the one that probably gave us the name Bacchus. It refers to the star Sirius and stands for the pure light of summer.’

Again, no accent. This
was
the new Carlo, the other Carlo, the Carlo who seemed one moment to be playing with me, the next to be sharing my predicament keenly.

Perhaps Raina had been listening, for now she appeared with coffee and pastries and sat with us again. For the first time I was aware of no longer hearing voices in the other half of the room. It seemed we were alone, just the three of us—the
four
of us, for the mask grinned gleefully, riotously on the wall, ogling us with its troubling, night-sighted eyes.

‘These are
seadas
,’ Raina said, identifying the pastries for me as she poured us coffee.

We were back to playing happy families. It seemed that the talk of intruders, Dionysian festivals and Etruscan charontes was to be set aside for a time.

But I couldn’t wait any longer. ‘What about the gumnuts, Raina?’

‘
Scusi
, David? The gumnuts?’

‘There was a sprig of them in my mailbox. I took it as a roundabout invitation to your picnic.’ I didn’t mention the one in her own mailbox, though I could have said I was checking for another invitation and they would have understood. ‘There was a sprig stuck in your bush-flower garland on the cross.’

Raina’s initial frown had steadily become a look of fright. When she set down the coffee pot, her hand was shaking. ‘Gumnuts, you say?’

‘Like tiny mamuthone bells. You didn’t put them there?’

She lifted her two hands to her face and peered over them at me, then lowered them again. ‘We only put a flower chain on the cross.’