Sillar - Sicily, its not quite Tuscany

Sicily

Its Not Quite

Tuscany

Sicily

Its Not Quite

Tuscany

SHAMUS SILLAR

First published in 2012

Copyright Shamus Sillar 2012

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Quotes from THE LEOPARD by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, translation copyright 1960, copyright renewed 1988 by William Collins PLC and Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

To Gill

Contents

Si cacci lu sceccu, tardu arrivi; si camina tardu, prestu arrivi.

If you urge the donkey on, youll arrive late; if you let the donkey amble, youll arrive early.

Sicilian proverb

Im sipping arancia rossa (blood orange juice) and gazing down on the Mediterranean, its surface puckered in a westerly wind. Gill has given me the window seat; she always does its why I married her.

An hour out of Rome, seven tiny islands appear, like the backs of swimming turtles. These are the famous Aeolians. In my best Italian accent, I recite their vowelly, singsong names from my map: Alicudi, Filicudi, Lipari, Vulcano, Panarea, Stromboli, Salina! (My best Italian accent, it turns out, is part Joe Dolces Shaddup You Face and part Gary Oldman in Dracula.) Then our plane is over the Sicilian mainland. I see parched rivers and russet hills; a landscape sucked dry by the sun.

Finally, Mount Etna. Shes dark and indistinct, swathed in cloud, keeping her cards up her sleeve. At the bottom of the volcanos slope, sprawling blackly against the stained sea, a city: Catania.

Big and grim: thats how Paul Theroux described Catania (in The Pillars of Hercules). Awash with drugs and pollution. A place only a mafioso could love. Its a place Gill and I will call home for the coming year. I havent told Gill about Therouxs sketch. I feel a twinge of guilt about this. Then again, she knows about the Mafia in general, of course, and about the risk of Etnas eruptions. Neither of those things has dampened her enthusiasm.

The pilot mustnt like the place either. He seems almost reluctant to land. We pass directly over the city and its port full of oxidised ships and swing out to sea again. Minutes tick by. Were heading in the direction of Libya. Hijacked?

Finally the plane circles back towards land. Gill grabs my hand for the descent. Outside I see a yellow smear of beach on Catanias southern edge. Thats where we head now, dropping steadily. A circle of choppy sea fills my window. I can make out individual waves, a man on a bobbing boat. The beach flits by within jumping distance. Then, the thud of asphalt.

A few days later, standing on the sand myself, I marvel at how low the planes fly before they land. The Catanese around me hardly glance up. September is here, so theyre desperately wringing the last good times out of a fading summer, focusing not on the 747s above but on the even noisier circus of the beach and its clutter of deckchairs, umbrellas, cabins and volleyball nets; the men in those tight, skimpy swimming shorts so mysteriously favoured in Europe, and the women in bikinis dancing to novelty remixes of La Macarena.

Gill has accepted a job in Catania with a private language college called Giga. The word is a combination of the first two letters of Giorgio and Gaia, the names of two Sicilian children whose mother, Palmina, is the founder and director of the college Gills boss. Shes waiting to pick us up at the airport.

Palmina drives a red Smart car smart, indeed, when it comes to manoeuvring through the dangerous, stony narrows of an Italian city; highly stupid, however, if you need to fit three people and several heavy suitcases. We somehow houdini ourselves inside and set off.

Gill and Palmina make small talk Palmina in thickly accented English, Gill trying to convert her respectable French into passable Italian. But Im muzzled by a faceful of luggage. I cant even turn my head to look out the window. I do hear the city, though a constant salvo of car horns, Italian ambulances with their distinctive warbling sirens, and the shrill, two-stroke buzz of Vespas.

Were here, says Palmina after twenty minutes. Your apartment.

The women shovel bags aside in the manner of rescue workers, freeing me from my seat. I fidget my way out of the cars micro-door onto the herringbone cobbles of a grimy backstreet. This is Via Gesuiti Street of the Jesuits our new address.

So, I ask Gill, how was your first glimpse of Catania?

Nice, she says politely, with an anxious sideways glance at Palmina. Somewhere in the distance, a polygraph machine scribbles furiously on a page.

Palmina doesnt notice: shes fiddling around with our front-door keys. Once we and our luggage are inside, she speeds off down the road in a red blur. It seems a mildly hasty departure, almost as though shes hoping to evade our scrutiny of the accommodation that Giga has found for us.

The apartment occupies one corner of the ground floor of a palazzo. What an exciting word, palazzo. For me it evokes ornate, Versailles-style buildings full of frescoed corridors and manicured lawns, with estate owners in Mozart wigs drinking fortified wines on the lawn and calling from time to time on the services of a piss boy.

That, however, would be to misinterpret the word. Palazzo is a false friend its meaning is different to what you might expect. Another false friend in Italian is dottore (doctor). In Italy, a doctor isnt necessarily a highly educated medical practitioner; rather, its anyone whos done a three-year university degree at undergraduate level. And it doesnt have to be a medical degree even doing a Bachelor of Arts is enough to earn you the title dottore. How very different from Australia, where we refer to BA graduates not as doctors but as drug dealers or the unemployed.