Ciccio arrived just as our train pulled in. He was stocky, dapper (rare for a Sicilian) and tanned to his bones from fifty years of sun. Had they remained still for any length of time his eyes would have been kind; as it was he looked kind of anxious. He had a perfect, firm handshake, the sort that suggested that the handshake originated here in the south and was then exported north and west. I wondered: did the handshake originate, as I had once read (in a Fantastic Four comic) as a gesture of trust, a way of demonstrating that you had no weapon in your hand? Or was it, from the outset, a compromise, enabling both parties to offer one hand in friendship while keeping the other free for protection, a way of establishing physical contact while maintaining the maximum possible distance? I felt Ciccio would know. There was knowledge in his handshake.
As soon as we had been introduced, Ciccio dashed off to reassure Renata (who had been worrying about a botched rendezvous) that all was well. I folded myself into the back of Ciccio’s small car, sharing the back seat with a cash register. It made the normal meter used in a taxi seem rather paltry, cheap. It was Ciccio’s business, Laura explained. He sold and repaired cash registers.
We wound our way up to Taormina which looked like the most beautiful place imaginable: coves and headlands, sea glittering in the moonlight, lovely old buildings and restaurants. Had we come on holiday we would not have been disappointed at this moment. All the accumulated worry as to whether Taormina had been a good choice would have been dispelled, we would have put our arms around each other and exchanged glances full of love and decisions vindicated. Even in the midst of this realisation, however, part of me was thanking God that we were not on holiday, not playing that game with its stakes that are so low and so high. Ciccio parked and then called Renata from a passing payphone. This time Laura had a word and then we moved on.
To a fine restaurant with a magnificently deserted terrace overlooking the bay. Down below but still part of the same restaurant was another terrace, crowded, overlooking the bay. We had entered the hierarchical topography of tourism where everything, if it has any value, must be overlooking something else. Anything not overlooking something is to be looked down on. The lower terrace was less formal than the upper terrace – so formal, in fact, that there were no people in it – and so we walked down there. The waiter showed us to a table with a view overlooking the bay but Ciccio insisted on a better one, one with an even better view overlooking the bay. A second waiter took our order and a third brought our beer. They all knew Ciccio. We had our beer, Ciccio and I, but there was no sign of Laura’s wine. ‘Hey Franco,’ said Ciccio, addressing a fourth waiter. ‘Portaci del vino. We need to make a toast.’ One way or another Ciccio was keeping the entire staff of the restaurant on their toes.
Because it was one of the few things I knew how to say in Italian, or any other language for that matter, I remarked on the deliciousness of the beer – whereupon Ciccio ordered two more even though we still had a third of a glass each. We were drinking grandi beers not piccole because to have ordered piccole would have suggested some failure of hospitality. The trouble with grandi beers, though, was that we couldn’t drink them fast enough: after a few minutes they were warm as tea and so the table filled up with half-finished glasses of beer which stood there not as waste but as excess, as trophies of hospitality. It was the same with the antipasti. Once I’d eaten my plateful, I asked Ciccio, for want of anything better to say, if we could go up for seconds. We couldn’t, strictly speaking, but Ciccio insisted that I have some more – insisted, rather, that the waiter bring us another tray of bits and pieces. I became wary of mentioning anything lest Ciccio took it upon himself – or on one of the waiters – to provide it. Not for the first time in my life I felt the slightly wearying, not to say utterly exhausting nature of this commitment to hospitality which was always a part of these respect-offence cultures. My own preference was for that busy urban version of hospitality where, if friends of a friend turn up, you have a quick drink at the neighbourhood bar, give them towels and a set of keys, show them how the sofa bed works, say ‘Mi casa es su casa’ and leave them to their own devices for the next four days.
Still, drinking these half grandi and lavishing hospitality appeared to be having a calming effect on Ciccio. He had not phoned Renata for twenty minutes – but what I had taken to be calm actually turned out to be the lull before the telephonic storm. A waiter arrived with a cordless phone: there was a call for Ciccio: Renata. They spoke for ten minutes. Then Laura had a chat – then, although I had never met Renata (who spoke no English), it was my turn. After that we were ready for another round so I handed her back to Ciccio. While he was talking Laura said she would love to open a hotel.
‘Would you?’
‘Well, not a hotel: a pensione. I’d take such pride keeping it clean,’ she said. By now the phone had achieved a position of such unquestioned predominance over our lives in Sicily that by simple virtue of the fact that it had been conducted face to face, in person, this exchange had a quaint, not to say archaic air about it.
Eventually Ciccio got off the phone and gestured for the bill. I offered to pay – English-style, without really expecting to – but Ciccio was already out of his seat, on his way to settle up. On the way out he introduced me to the manager of the restaurant, a guy with curly hair, a little younger than me, smoking a cigar and wearing a gingham jacket which may or may not have been – it was a question of style – too big for him.
‘Ciccio said you were writing an article about the restaurant,’ he said.
‘Well, about Taormina, generally,’ I said, catching on that Ciccio had settled the bill Sicilian-style, by saying I was writing an article for the British Airways in-flight magazine, the kind of piece that would guarantee a queue of customers seven nights a week.
‘This is nice restaurant, we have to have something like this, casual like this, but I have another restaurant, really good restaurant. A high-class restaurant where everything is special. You should go there. Is a special place. I think you would like.’
‘Yes I’m sure I would,’ I said, thinking that if I had an air mile for every time someone had told me I would like something that I felt pretty certain I would hate – for exactly the reason they claimed I would like it – I could have circumnavigated the globe by now. I took a card for the restaurant and a flyer for the disco that he also ran. Before we left, I promised, we would try out both the restaurant and the disco.
Once we were out of the restaurant Ciccio was able to relax totally, in the sense that he was able to head straight to a payphone and call Renata. When he was through talking to her he drove us to Furci where we would be staying. I asked why a red light on the dashboard was flashing.
‘Is to tell me I am not wearing seat belt,’ Ciccio said. An EU ruling meant that all new cars were fitted with this warning device. A stupid and dangerous idea, he thought. The flashing distracted and could make you crash. But there was someone he knew who was going to disconnect the wires so that he could ride in comfort without his seat belt and without this flashing light. Wouldn’t it be easier just to wear the seat belt? I asked, but that was beside the point. The point was that there was a way around this edict. Italians delight in exercising their ingenuity for trivial ends. To use ingenuity for some loftier purpose is somehow to diminish it. The more pointless the end the more vividly the means of achieving it is displayed. The further south you travel, the more extreme this tendency becomes. The ingenuity of the Romans, for example, is as nothing compared to that of the Neapolitans. Ciccio even knew someone who sold T-shirts with a diagonal black band printed across the chest so that the police would be deceived into thinking you were wearing your seat belt.
Furci, we saw the next morning, was a miserable little town with reinforced concrete rods sprouting from unfinished buildings that, for reasons of tax, had no chance of being completed. Ciccio