9
Michel’s birthday was to be a special one. One of those when the calendar falls away and another decade slips inevitably into play. He did not want a party, had not been intending to celebrate it in any particular fashion. I suggested a family gathering, but he shook his head. ‘Quietly,’ he said, ‘I want to cross over into that next decade quietly’, and so I had decided to set up some arrangements myself. A brief excursion. Travelling for any length of time was not feasible with the works and challenges going on at the farm. A short trip, then, was the solution. An opportunity to talk. I chose a location I had discovered during my quest-travels and had longed to share with my man. Sicily – not too arduous a trek, doable within a long weekend from the South of France. Not a circuit of the entire island, of course, but a selected destination or two. It was also an island I hankered to return to, to spend time on, to continue discovering. I had even harboured thoughts, fantasies, of living there. Michel knew how the island had touched me, knew that the olive oil produced there was excellent because he had also enjoyed the bottles I had returned home with. When I suggested a birthday weekend in Sicily, he accepted without hesitation. It was what we needed, time together, to celebrate our blessings and to consider the future.
I booked a hire car and a hotel for the first night in Palermo. The rest I was leaving to the whims of the day.
We landed on the north of the island, west of the capital, into the Falcone e Borsellino aeroporto, named for Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two anti-Mafia judges who were assassinated in the early nineties. At the entrance to departures, a plaque bears their names with the inscription: ‘L’orgoglio della Nuova Sicilia’, ‘Pride of the new Sicily’.
I was doubtful whether this sentiment was shared by all on the island.
It was at this time of year precisely that I had made my first visit. Spring, when the horned-goat winds blow and wild flowers pepper the verdant hillsides, whispering of warmer, sweeter weathers. A brief spell to be cherished before the scorched heat beat into the earth and shrivelled the souls of both man and beast. The Mezzogiorno. It had, as I knew it would, drawn me back. It had been waiting for me. Or I had been waiting to return.
It was early afternoon. We had risen at half past four, changed planes in Milan and had missed out on breakfast. Our first stop: lunch. Michel at the wheel, we decided against all motorways, took a minor, forgotten coast road that wound its way round the lip of the littoral towards the capital. Little better than a rutted cart track, it was flanked by lusty, dusty vegetation, semi-abandoned, single-storey residences and overlooked by mountains hoarding secrets. So forgotten was it that the likelihood of a good restaurant was slim and, eventually, I suggested Mondello, where even at this latening hour – half past three – we would be sure to find a beachside shack or resto serving fish and salad.
I had passed through Mondello briefly last time and knew it to have once been a fashionable resort, poised between hills and sea winds, for the bel mondo of Palermo. Nudging the tip of a cape on the western extremity of Conca d’Oro, it was also neighbouring the city centre. Day trips, lunch outings or weekends away were all within striking distance and feasible for the palermitani, the inhabitants, citizens of Palermo. After quitting our sabulous lane, on the outskirts of the renowned resort, snarled up within our first volley of traffic, hooting, convening, lunging from all directions simultaneously, we beat a retreat to la spiaggia, the beach, past elegant Liberty-inspired early twentieth-century residences, creeping north along the lungomare, the curved esplanade. One of Mondello’s highlights is its Art Nouveau beach huts, set on a raised wooden walkway out on the water and connected to the lido by a bridge. In the centre of these, a renowned upmarket restaurant, a 1913 gilded fantasy reminiscent of a film-set extravaganza. I doubted Michel would be tempted. Instead, beyond the mind-numbing hum of youths on scooters, north of the lido towards the heart of where the original fishing village had lain, we found a modest establishment, rickety, wooden, directly adjacent to the crystal-clear, green-eyed water’s edge. While cutlery and paper tablecloth were laid up, we waited. At our feet, beyond a breakwater lapped the pebbled fringes of the teal-blue Tyrrhenian Sea. We were crooked within a crescent bay sheltered between Capo Gallo and, to the south, Monte Pellegrino, sitting at the gingered, whiskery edges of a vast natural harbour, Conca d’Oro. Strategically ideal, it explained why every conqueror from the Phoenicians and Carthaginians onwards had chosen this station as their Mediterranean heartland. Leaning against rusted iron railings, I was recounting fractioned episodes from the island’s history to my husband at my elbow. He was taking photographs, listening, considering the information and the passion with which it was being transmitted.
‘You love this place?’
‘I do. Even in its ruined state, it is an “indestructible treasure”, and I hope you’ll soon see why. And yet, it isn’t indestructible. Nowhere is. What would you say if we found ourselves a farm, a home in Italy, or in Sicily, more precisely?’
He was watching me, puzzled. ‘Is this why you suggested this expedition?’
‘Not at all, but I am unsettled at Appassionata. I haven’t entirely returned, lacking an even keel, difficulties in accepting what’s demanded.’
We ate that lunchtime, as we did for the rest of our all too brief stay, simply, local dishes. Sea- and land-based produce. I ordered the fried black-ink squid, nero di seppia, which is not a dish I would opt for at home, and Michel expressed his surprise at my choice. Before my first visit to this island, I might have felt squeamish about devouring a creature with three hearts and its excretions of jet-black ink. Chewing its rubbery torso soaked in juices struck me as an almost visceral act, rather like drinking blood, yet I had no problem with it here. This was an insignificant shift, but one born of my travels, of the Carol who had spent so long away from home.
‘Upon this island, a tapestry of peoples, Asian, African, European, conquered, dwelt and left their imprints. It is a tri-cornered maelstrom, a mass of storms, conglomerations of winds, volcanoes, of ships being driven off course or wrecked and sunk. It is an island strangled by a dark and bloody brotherhood, who speak of honour above all else, kill for it, and where its starving peasant class have struggled to survive against every oppressor since time immemorial.’
‘It reminds you of Ireland,’ smiled my husband, who was gently alerting me to the fact that my lips and teeth had been blackened by the ink of the squid.
‘Yes, I can see that historically it bears many similarities.’
Although no plan had been hatched, I realised as we sat talking, gazing out to sea, that I wanted my partner, this wonderful man whose life I had chosen to share and who had chosen to accompany me through mine, I wanted him to give space to whatever change of direction was pulling me. I needed him to understand my doubts and confusions.
‘An olive farm in Sicily: is this what you are asking me to consider? To quit France?’
A lack of clarity about the new direction I was seeking, only a certainty about what I felt obliged to reject, I wanted to break the seal over the upcoming days, precious moments alongside one another. Begin by describing the people I had met. The men in Sophia, the mayor of Correns; I wanted Michel and me to grope our way forward together.
I was attempting, with pena and fatica, rather unsuccessfully to read in Italian, Goethe’s account in his Italian Journey of his trip to Sicily. After wintering in Rome, he travelled incognito to Sicily in 1787 and sojourned on the island between 2 April and 14 May. There was no reason for me to digest the writings of a German philosopher in Italian. It was only that I had chanced upon the book that morning at the airport in Milan and purchased it, hoping to use it as a multifold exercise. My Italian was hopelessly rusty – even during my recent excursions I had wrestled with it – and I longed to call it back within my grasp. Once upon a time, it had been my second language after English, but today it felt removed by centuries not decades, as distant to me as the voyages of Goethe himself.
I had lived in Rome in my twenties and had believed back then that I would settle in Italy, but this island discovered by me for the first time during my recent voyages, with its earthy, secretive people, its lushly heady wines, its chiaroscuro way of life and caliginous history, somehow struck me as the real thing. Authentic.
‘Italy without Sicily does not leave an impression on your soul.’ Goethe, 1787.
Goethe also hoped to find in the Sicilian landscape the unthwarted Nature he had been seeking ever since his departure from Germany the previous year.
‘Unthwarted Nature.’ I knew what I believed had to be done, but I was groping, one hand in front of another, tugging at Ariadne’s thread – should we stay, should we quit? – and I longed for the perspective and guidance of Michel.
At some point in the late afternoon – already time had left our table – we returned to the road. It was Friday. The working week was closing down as, replete and content, we reached the outskirts of Palermo. I had no idea where our hotel, a small boutique affair not of any renown, was situated. Debating the direction and caught up within the vortex of this city’s unhinged road manners, suddenly, out of nowhere, an argument flared up between us. We shouted and fell silent.
Given its modest tariff, the establishment was unexpectedly central, just steps from the opera house and, mood still strained between us, we found it eventually. To my surprise, they even offered free parking for our hired Cinquecento. It was judged unsafe to leave any vehicle out in the streets of Palermo.
Our evening was given to walking, to discovery, to the pleasures of one another’s company though I was aware that Michel was a little taken aback by our dispute of earlier. I was also shocked that a matter so trivial had driven us to an unseemly level of anger and raised voices. It was not our habit, had bruised us both and, I suspected, flagged a deeper disharmony.
Our wanderings led us to Vucciria, a filthy, fascinating, vibrant market and residential quarter where bands of squatters and down-and-outs were assembling in dingy piazzas, lounging, sipping beers, dragging on fags, hollering drunkenly. Aside from these lost, unkempt creatures, eyes as hollowed and shadowed as the finest of Caravaggio’s portraits, there was barely a soul. The echoing silence in semi-lit streets was broken by the mewing, hissing of scrawny cats, the growls of beige, tipped-with-white mongrels, skeletal, tongues lolling, fleeing from the sites of ransacked trash as we strode past. Cars, scooters flashed by, nudging against our elbows as though fully intending to pulverise us. It was a stinking death trap.
All market activity had long since been wrapped up. For now it was the hour of la passeggiata in every other part of Italy. But not here. Down among these decaying lanes, where the houses bullied against one another, jostling for space, exhaling foul breath, trouble was afoot. We came upon two gangs of young men on bikes and scooters congregating in a square outside a Baroque church, smoking, leaning, grease-haired. Were they picciotti or just regular kids hanging out on a Friday night with bugger all to do? Picciotto, a ‘young boy’ or ‘lad’, in local and Neapolitan dialect, an admired figure of dash and daring, the next generation of males in the neighbourhood. The word’s origins lay with the soldiers of Garibaldi’s army who were involved in the liberation of Sicily, but it was also used to describe those who at a junior level had been recruited by the Mafia. This was not an unusual story. It was a picture I had witnessed in many Mediterranean countries where the disenfranchised were chosen, trained as ‘soldiers’, in whatever fight or cause was worrying away in the region. Al-Qaeda was at work in the Maghreb recruiting in the poverty-stricken rural communities. Here, it was city youths subsisting on pittance.
One block further along we reached a long, straight avenue where unlikely posses of uniformed police behind perspex body shields, armed with guns, truncheons and other weapons, were lining the narrow pavements. I asked an onlooker what was going on and he gave a most bizarre response: students from two universities, Genoa and Palermo, were converging to fight it out. Fight what out? I wanted to know. The stranger shrugged, dragged deep on his cigarette. Folk huddled in small groups; a level of expectancy reigned like that of the prelude to a corrida: clash of forces, blood sports. We passed through several of the blockades and hurried away, not that we had an itinerary or plan, simply an urgent desire to be clear of any rioting, which, given the level of police presence, promised to be brutal, murderous.
This was Sicily. It cannot be escaped. This was a city whose history was drawn in blood, of rioting and revenge.
It reminded me of a local snippet I had picked up somewhere. In 1647, after Palermo had been struck by a series of riots, the guilds were given responsibility for keeping law and order. These guildsmen, the maestranze, were allocated specific gates and points within the city’s fortifications, each to provide a watchful eye. The fishermen and coppersmiths patrolled the streets by day and by night and had the right to pass beyond the city precincts, to bear arms and, if necessary, to hunt down, kill members of rioting factions. Precursors of the Mafia?
Our supper was an early one because we planned to be on the road soon after waking the following morning. We found an authentic Sicilian restaurant down a semi-darkened side street where the black-clad mamma sat with knobbled hands resting on swollen stomach. In a rattan chair near the doorway, she was nodding to, surveying, appraising the diners as they entered. It was her husband and two whippety-looking underlings with pencil-thin moustaches, possibly brothers, possibly sons of the proprietors, in shabby suits, who performed the role of waiters while father was the maître d’. Mamma did nothing beside eyeball the eaters and sit at table herself when a groaning meal was placed before her late in the evening. Judging by the décor, coloured lampshades, painted ceiling, it might have been a family sitting room, Sicilian-style, and perhaps had been in an earlier incarnation. The fare was simple but hearty. After my robust lunch of nero di seppia, I craved something light.
‘No heavy sauces, please.’
‘Signora, this is Sicily,’ spoke our host. (How frequently one was to hear those words.) ‘Here we never defile the quality of our vegetables by masking their flavours beneath thick, unnecessary sauces.’
That established, we accepted pappa’s suggestion of lasagne of minced beef, fennel seeds and ricotta cheese accompanied by a tomato and onion salad, local olive oil (supermarket purchased, I was surprised to see), washed down with a bottle of black-red Nero d’Avola. From my seat, I had a view into the kitchen occupied by one single man, a lumbering colossus with an enormous paunch and chef’s toque, flattened and misshapen. He manhandled the ingredients between fists as thick as steaks. After he had cooked the produce, he slapped it on to plates as though to be rid of it; done with this, done with that! All the while, he was muttering to himself, talking to his ingredients, coaxing the best out of those delicately fleshed offerings. Surrounded by flames, a series of stainless steel burners, mountains of fresh, gleaming vegetables, swags of herbs, slabs of meat hanging from hooks, great greasy canisters of olive oil from which he poured generously, he struck me as a solitary soul.
‘I wonder they don’t have an arrangement with a local olive farm to supply them directly.’ It was a question I asked myself in every establishment we visited and I never found an answer.
‘I wonder we shouted at one another like that,’ I whispered eventually.
‘Please don’t always be so certain,’ my husband replied and rubbed the back of my hand with his.
‘Certain? I don’t think so. I am still trying to find my way back into our life.’
Saturday. We rose and hit the road. At midnight, Michel’s new decade would be rolling in. I was hoping we would reach Siracusa, but as this was a gift to my loved one I left the decision-making to him. Following the coast, avoiding as far as possible Bagheria, with its suburban overspill, ghastly concrete semi-completed blocks of flats funded by Mafia heroin money, we reached Cefalù mid these northern shores by lat
e morning. Cefalù, a rock, a town, craggy, high above the harbour, gazing out to sea, bouldered fragments of a prehistoric city. Cefalù, conquered, reconquered, it told the history of this entire island: Greece, Carthage, Rome, Islam, followed by the Normans. Set back from the beach and harbour, winding up through the narrow alleys where the balconies were overhung with gloriously hued potted flowers, ascending eventually into Cefalù’s vast cathedral square, a haven of cool, soft stone and quietude. Our days were to be punctuated by meals and this one was taken at an osteria in this Piazza del Duomo, where few others were dining and our view was the magnificent cathedral conceived by Roger of Sicily, the Norman king who, driven south by a storm, beached here.
Onwards, passing by high cols into citrus groves and agriculturally rich gardens set around decaying aristocratic villas, we penetrated the National Park of Madonie. Thirty-five thousand acres of nature with villages scattered on high or nestling in the lowlands. Here, a glimpse of Sicily profondo, forgotten, unchanged, possibly uncompromised. First came the bucolic idyll of farming land with pastures so green they might have been painted in acrylic where, at the roadsides everywhere, shooting skywards, fennel bushes with feathery fronds and mustard-yellow umbels; golden chalices shining in the sun. A tea made from the seeds of this Foeniculum vulgare, finocchio in Italian, is believed in the Mediterranean to be a galactagogue, a substance to induce the flow of breast milk. As a medicine, this plant, its seeds, its essential oil, serves many purposes. Native to this southern Med, used also as a base for a sweet aniseed liqueur, it dwarfed the asphodel growing at its side.
Clumpy yellow broom bushes, Baptisia tinctoria, with their beaded blossoms, the golden necklaces of gods, perfumed the scene. Every sense was catered for here. Herbs and plants to eat, smell, heal, touch, as well as to feast upon visually. I was drinking in the sights, guzzling them, taking no notes for this was not a quest. This was a birthday gift to the man at my side, yet I felt a certain sadness. Sadness that my questing was over? Sadness that we were not relocating here? Sadness that I could not settle back at home, could not accept the constraints? Sadness that our all too precious weekend had got off to a rocky start? I let the questions drift away unanswered and as I did so a memory slid back of the jungled growth at Appassionata when we first found her. Within it, yellow broom had been growing wild, tall as bolting trees. It scented the garden, wafting heavenwards, and I could not get close due to the overgrowth to pinpoint which of the plants was giving off such an ambrosial perfume. I wound down the window now, stuck my head out, let the wind blow my hair, my nose do the work, sniffing silently like our dogs at home when the olfactory system had been alerted. Yes, it was there, cruising gently on the air, playing its part in spring. Curiously, since we had rigorously maintained our groves, unlike so many other plants the broom had never reappeared. I asked Michel if he remembered those butter-golden shrubs within the jungled land, all those years ago, and he confirmed that of course he did.
Return to the Olive Farm (The Olive Series Book 4) Page 26