We needed a leader and one emerged in the shape of a young soldier who had boarded the train at Napoli. He suggested we walk over to the commercial ferry port and catch a ferry there. We went with him, aimlessly, without urgency. A fat woman who was also a late recruit to the compartment said that wherever he was going, that was her destination too. The soldier dissuaded her from tagging along, explaining that it was a long walk and there were far too many stairs to climb. We left her in the compartment, fanning herself with a crossword magazine. We walked for ten minutes and boarded a ferry which left immediately.
The sea: you watch it for a while, lose interest, and then, because there is nothing else to look at, go back to watching it. It fills you with great thoughts which, leading nowhere and having nothing to focus on except the unfocused mass of the sea, dissolve into a vacancy which in turn, for want of any other defining characteristic, you feel content to term ‘awe’. You lean on the rails, looking at the sea and the other ships whose passengers are leaning on the rails looking across at you, thinking about waving but somehow losing heart. The soldier said that the waters here in the Straits of Messina were very dangerous. A terrible undertow. Jump off the boat and you will be sucked under.
People who are separated from the mainland only by a thin strip of water often express pride and love of the sea in this way. Their version of ‘Welcome’ is always to point out that the sea is dangerous, treacherous, unfathomable, awash with currents and rip-tides which pull the unwary beneath the waves. Just because it is a small strip of water does not mean it is not a force to be reckoned with. That the sea is calm, safe, warm or good for bathing is nothing to take pride in; the sea must pose a threat. In England we do not need to make a meal of this because, on the one hand, the Atlantic is so obviously huge and daunting and, on the other, the Channel and the North Sea so blatantly unwelcoming, so obviously treacherous and harm-inducing, as to need no emphasis. But here, where the water was a lovely deep blue, attention had to be directed to the ills lurking below the surface. Maybe the waters were treacherous, I didn’t know, but the soldier’s remark actually had next to nothing to do with the sea, or at least the sea was being appealed to only as a metaphor, as a way of telling us something about the island it surrounded, about Sicily and the treacherous undertow of the Sicilian character.
We walked off the ferry without paying, ‘English style’, as our soldier-friend put it, intending no offence. None of us knew the way to the railway terminal.
‘I’ll ask,’ said Laura who is always happy to ask.
‘Don’t ask,’ said the soldier. ‘Don’t say anything. Let me do the talking.’ Which was fine by me – except his idea of doing the talking involved saying nothing. After five minutes he hadn’t said a word and we had made no progress.
‘He won’t ask the way and he won’t let me ask the way,’ said Laura. ‘He has this code of silence thing.’ Somehow we wound our wordless way to a taxi rank where we learned that the railway station was a good distance off. Of course it was a long way off. The nearest taxi rank is always the furthest distance from the place you want to go. A taxi was ready and waiting but before we climbed in Laura broke rank to ask how much it would cost. The driver went mad: did we doubt his honesty? How much would it be? It would be what it said on the meter. The soldier looked at her, vindicated. She had asked for it.
‘It’s like this in Sicily,’ Laura whispered to me in the back of the taxi. ‘You never know how they are going to react.’ It was true. We were in one of those touchy ‘respect’ cultures where the smallest action can cause enormous offence, where people are relaxed to the point of torpor and, at the same time, ferociously uptight. They slumber and slumber and then, suddenly, they erupt. It probably has something to do with living in close proximity to a volcano. Best to keep quiet, like our soldier said. The driver took advantage of our silence to explain that some taxi-drivers would charge as much as 12,000 lire for the trip, but he put it on the meter, because he was honest.
‘No,’ interjected Laura, ‘Non volevo dire. I didn’t mean to suggest—’
‘What are you interrupting for?’ interrupted the driver. ‘He and I were talking – not you and me.’ Oh yes, touchy as anything but still with a kind of slumbering good-naturedness beneath the fierceness, as if it were all just a joke.
Since the young soldier had helped us out I paid his share as well. ‘Why did you do that?’ he wanted to know, as if by paying for him I had offended him at least as much as I would have done by not offering to do so.
‘Quanto?’ I asked the taxi-driver.
‘12,000 lire.’
The whole performance turned out to have been a pyrrhic one in that we now had to wait for our train – still stranded on the mainland – to catch up with us. Rather than wait we leapt on a local train and waved goodbye to the soldier with whom we had struck up this tense friendship.
Darkness fell on either side of our train. We were running along the coast, a ping-pong moon bouncing along beside us. The light in the compartment was yellowy old. We stood in the corridor, leaning on the window, seeing the sea. The train stopped as frequently as a bus. It was like a little dog, scurrying and panting, tireless. If we’d had time to dash around and look at the front of the locomotive it would surely have had eyes and a willing smile like Thomas the Tank Engine. While the train was moving we seemed to be the only passengers; the stations were deserted too but people got on and off at each stop as if they were using the carriages as a bridge to cross the tracks, stepping on to the right-hand side, getting off at the left and disappearing before the puppy train went panting on its way again, sniffing out the next station.
When we arrived at Taormina there was no sign of Ciccio, Laura’s friend’s mother’s boyfriend, whose house in nearby Furci we were going to be staying in. We were both early and late. Later than the train was scheduled to arrive but earlier than the scheduled train was actually arriving. We phoned Ciccio who was engaged, then phoned Renata – Laura’s friend’s mother – who had just been on the phone to Ciccio who had come and gone and would return to meet our stranded train.
With half an hour to kill we looked for a place to have a beer. Opposite the station was what looked like a restaurant or, more exactly, like a living room in which there happened to be a great surplus of tables. A woman was watching a western dubbed into Italian. I’ll say this for Italian TV: you’re never more than a few channels away from a western. She was watching TV in that way of night porters the world over: they watch for hours but never become so absorbed in anything that they mind being interrupted. Given that there are a finite number of westerns and an infinite number of nights in which to watch them they figure that any gaps can be filled in later. To them each film is really no more than a segment of an epic ur-western spanning thousands if not millions of hours, offering a quantity of material so vast that it can never be edited into a finished form. The western thus takes the place of the great myths of antiquity: shifting glimpses of character and situations, variously recurring, but manifesting through the very fact of their myriad transformations, the existence of some stable, changeless order.
Laura asked if we could have just a drink, nothing to eat, and the woman said no, not just a drink. Then she gestured to us to sit down: she would bring us a drink. They are like that in Sicily, said Laura. Their instinct is to say ‘no’,