Sciara
I’m distractedly watching a holiday programme. They are talking about Cuba, which is on my long list of places I’d like to visit. But I almost feel like I’ve been there already as the images are always the same: the 50’s American cars, the cigar factories, the giant images of Fidel and Che, the architecture bleached by the sun. They’ll probably tell me that a doctor there earns in a month what a road-sweeper earns here in a day.
A little later the programme moves to Italy and they show panoramic views of Etna. I start to pay attention as I went there some Septembers ago. They are showing exactly what I did: the cable car station closed since one of the last eruptions that caused the roads below to change course, the tourists boarding the lunar like vans that take them at a reasonably fast speed to the top of that enormous expansion of black and grey rock and ashes. There is even the very same gloomy sky I found that time, with gale force wind and fast moving smoke escaping from god knows where as it didn’t necessarily seem to come from the crater. Bending down to fissures in the ground, the rocks - here the colour of embers - released constant warmth; standing up the wind whipped me around to remind me that I was at 3000m and made it almost impossible to steady my arms to take a photo. But I must have read a travel guide as had come prepared, wearing chilly climate clothing incredibly unusual in Sicily.
But the travel team don’t show what I did later that day. The driver of the coach who took me there from Catania, and me, fucking at base camp. I don’t remember a great attraction or his name now, just his jet black hair and a degree of boredom. There was a long stretch of time ahead before the afternoon departure back to the city and nothing to do after we ate and walked around for a while, just more black ‘sand’ and rocks. No one had been enterprising enough to add a games room, a pool table, a cinema space showing footage from previous eruptions or other spectacular ones from around the world. There were only tacky souvenir shops offering no variety in ugly tat. I took home just fragments of the floor tiles of a restaurant swept away in the last eruption. Hardly Pompeii relics, but I liked the vivid glazed blue colour.
Fucking is too strong a term perhaps. We tried, but the rocks and slabs around us were too sharp and rough through our clothes. They grazed his knees and scratched my spine. And he wasn’t used to the situation: doing it standing up, fast, and with the voices of nearby tourists sounding so close. We were not on the moon as I tried to imagine. He had a girlfriend, he’d told me earlier, so maybe she came into his head because the directness and ardour of his initial words abated quickly. We gave up and he ended up telling me that theirs was a love very much opposed by her family who didn’t think he was good enough for their university educated daughter. He was ‘only’ a driver. I thought about the plot of a million ‘young love’ movies and recited him the few verses of Shakespeare I knew from Romeo and Juliet. Then I got back onto the stationary coach and sat and read a book till it was time to go. When he got on to drive, he couldn’t look at me. When we got off I said no to the offer of a drink in the evening.
Later the TV programme moves to the Stromboli volcano, considerably smaller than Etna, but much more disturbing for its absolute domination over the tiny island it occupies. I went there a distant August ago with Mark. There were no vans in Stromboli, or cars for that matter, not even electricity in the streets. The climb to the top took from dusk till midnight. Walking towards something we could barely see silhouetted against the moonless sky, we were forewarned by the insufferable smell of sulphur, which became overwhelming as we approached the summit. We arrived drenched in sweat that quickly seemed to ice over our skins and we were shocked to see there were no barriers: anyone who wished for a spectacular death could have run to the mouth of the crater and jumped in. We edged forward and circled it cautiously, disappointed by the lack of activity. The TV programme shows what I didn’t see then, but imagined: intense colours, flames exploding skywards and incandescent lava rushing toward the sea and illuminating the dark village below. We wanted to spend the night up there but it wasn’t possible without a permit and the guide wouldn’t let our little group linger. I picked up fragments of perfectly rounded rock reduced to black pellets and filled my pockets. We started to come down on the opposite flank from the one we had climbed, running ever faster on the ashes left by old sciaras, the local name for lava flows. It was an exhilarating run in the lunar landscape, like the opening scenes of Man Who Fell to Earth. All at a breakneck speed we weren’t used to, finding it impossible to halt, like skiing toward the mercury coloured Mediterranean in the distance. Stones, rocks and pebbles, displaced by our feet, were flying over the heads of those running in front of us, all screaming in total abandon like you do on rollercoaster rides. Nobody got hurt, but I destroyed a pair of favourite sneakers, the sole literally came off in my hands as soon as we reached the tall and dry, sometimes charred, vegetation at the bottom. This scratched our sooty legs and arms and left us disappointed that we couldn’t just jump in the cool sea. tantalizingly close, to finish our ‘race’. Panting, and with trembling muscles, we looked at our watches and it had only taken less than an hour to cover our descent from 900m. Sitting on basaltic rock benches in the deserted square in the main village half an hour later, we made plans to eventually go climb volcanoes further away, in Malaysia, Indonesia, Java, Hawaii. We reeled off a list of names, mostly we made them up on the spot.
I don’t remember if Mark and I fucked that night. Maybe yes, maybe not. It was one of our first holidays together, so technically yes, but perhaps we were too tired to move or even shower. I can still picture the house in which we lived for a few days, but not the actual bedroom. I only remember it was on the ground floor opening onto an orchard, not quite out of The Leopard, at a short distance from the villa where Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini lived during the filming of Stromboli whist simultaneously starring in one of the most famous post war scandals. There was a commemorative plaque there and the very few tourists about took photos. I remember the film well, it was so memorable: the ritual of the slaughter of the tuna clubbed to death in shallow waters - that made me flinch even shot in black and white; the heroine who doesn’t speak Italian and doesn’t understand anything of the life of the fisherman husband she met in a prisoner of war camp and married hastily; her drab existence trapped in an inhospitable rock miles from civilisation, full of old widows and topped by a menacing, rumbling volcano. Mark and I realised we loved it there because we could leave, if only to get to a more immediate death defying experience: dodging the traffic on the streets of Naples, ten hours away by ferry.
The programme ends and I get up to search for a photo I know I have somewhere. It takes me a while to find it in an old box. It’s showing Mark reading ‘Under the Volcano’ by Malcolm Lowry… under the volcano in fact. We thought we were so clever, maybe we really did believe we were the first tourists to bring that sad, interminable book on holiday on Stromboli… or Mexico. Later we acted out being the drunken characters and talked in posh voices. We, who know how to do irony with literature. There, a verb in the present tense has escaped into my reverie. I don’t know why, since Mark has been dead fifteen years. Sometimes I imagine his lungs, too quickly devoured by cancer, as porous, pitted and crumbling as the slate grey, solidified lava.
He’s ash of a different kind now. I’m still fire.
A little later the programme moves to Italy and they show panoramic views of Etna. I start to pay attention as I went there some Septembers ago. They are showing exactly what I did: the cable car station closed since one of the last eruptions that caused the roads below to change course, the tourists boarding the lunar like vans that take them at a reasonably fast speed to the top of that enormous expansion of black and grey rock and ashes. There is even the very same gloomy sky I found that time, with gale force wind and fast moving smoke escaping from god knows where as it didn’t necessarily seem to come from the crater. Bending down to fissures in the ground, the rocks - here the colour of embers - released constant warmth; standing up the wind whipped me around to remind me that I was at 3000m and made it almost impossible to steady my arms to take a photo. But I must have read a travel guide as had come prepared, wearing chilly climate clothing incredibly unusual in Sicily.
But the travel team don’t show what I did later that day. The driver of the coach who took me there from Catania, and me, fucking at base camp. I don’t remember a great attraction or his name now, just his jet black hair and a degree of boredom. There was a long stretch of time ahead before the afternoon departure back to the city and nothing to do after we ate and walked around for a while, just more black ‘sand’ and rocks. No one had been enterprising enough to add a games room, a pool table, a cinema space showing footage from previous eruptions or other spectacular ones from around the world. There were only tacky souvenir shops offering no variety in ugly tat. I took home just fragments of the floor tiles of a restaurant swept away in the last eruption. Hardly Pompeii relics, but I liked the vivid glazed blue colour.
Fucking is too strong a term perhaps. We tried, but the rocks and slabs around us were too sharp and rough through our clothes. They grazed his knees and scratched my spine. And he wasn’t used to the situation: doing it standing up, fast, and with the voices of nearby tourists sounding so close. We were not on the moon as I tried to imagine. He had a girlfriend, he’d told me earlier, so maybe she came into his head because the directness and ardour of his initial words abated quickly. We gave up and he ended up telling me that theirs was a love very much opposed by her family who didn’t think he was good enough for their university educated daughter. He was ‘only’ a driver. I thought about the plot of a million ‘young love’ movies and recited him the few verses of Shakespeare I knew from Romeo and Juliet. Then I got back onto the stationary coach and sat and read a book till it was time to go. When he got on to drive, he couldn’t look at me. When we got off I said no to the offer of a drink in the evening.
Later the TV programme moves to the Stromboli volcano, considerably smaller than Etna, but much more disturbing for its absolute domination over the tiny island it occupies. I went there a distant August ago with Mark. There were no vans in Stromboli, or cars for that matter, not even electricity in the streets. The climb to the top took from dusk till midnight. Walking towards something we could barely see silhouetted against the moonless sky, we were forewarned by the insufferable smell of sulphur, which became overwhelming as we approached the summit. We arrived drenched in sweat that quickly seemed to ice over our skins and we were shocked to see there were no barriers: anyone who wished for a spectacular death could have run to the mouth of the crater and jumped in. We edged forward and circled it cautiously, disappointed by the lack of activity. The TV programme shows what I didn’t see then, but imagined: intense colours, flames exploding skywards and incandescent lava rushing toward the sea and illuminating the dark village below. We wanted to spend the night up there but it wasn’t possible without a permit and the guide wouldn’t let our little group linger. I picked up fragments of perfectly rounded rock reduced to black pellets and filled my pockets. We started to come down on the opposite flank from the one we had climbed, running ever faster on the ashes left by old sciaras, the local name for lava flows. It was an exhilarating run in the lunar landscape, like the opening scenes of Man Who Fell to Earth. All at a breakneck speed we weren’t used to, finding it impossible to halt, like skiing toward the mercury coloured Mediterranean in the distance. Stones, rocks and pebbles, displaced by our feet, were flying over the heads of those running in front of us, all screaming in total abandon like you do on rollercoaster rides. Nobody got hurt, but I destroyed a pair of favourite sneakers, the sole literally came off in my hands as soon as we reached the tall and dry, sometimes charred, vegetation at the bottom. This scratched our sooty legs and arms and left us disappointed that we couldn’t just jump in the cool sea. tantalizingly close, to finish our ‘race’. Panting, and with trembling muscles, we looked at our watches and it had only taken less than an hour to cover our descent from 900m. Sitting on basaltic rock benches in the deserted square in the main village half an hour later, we made plans to eventually go climb volcanoes further away, in Malaysia, Indonesia, Java, Hawaii. We reeled off a list of names, mostly we made them up on the spot.
I don’t remember if Mark and I fucked that night. Maybe yes, maybe not. It was one of our first holidays together, so technically yes, but perhaps we were too tired to move or even shower. I can still picture the house in which we lived for a few days, but not the actual bedroom. I only remember it was on the ground floor opening onto an orchard, not quite out of The Leopard, at a short distance from the villa where Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini lived during the filming of Stromboli whist simultaneously starring in one of the most famous post war scandals. There was a commemorative plaque there and the very few tourists about took photos. I remember the film well, it was so memorable: the ritual of the slaughter of the tuna clubbed to death in shallow waters - that made me flinch even shot in black and white; the heroine who doesn’t speak Italian and doesn’t understand anything of the life of the fisherman husband she met in a prisoner of war camp and married hastily; her drab existence trapped in an inhospitable rock miles from civilisation, full of old widows and topped by a menacing, rumbling volcano. Mark and I realised we loved it there because we could leave, if only to get to a more immediate death defying experience: dodging the traffic on the streets of Naples, ten hours away by ferry.
The programme ends and I get up to search for a photo I know I have somewhere. It takes me a while to find it in an old box. It’s showing Mark reading ‘Under the Volcano’ by Malcolm Lowry… under the volcano in fact. We thought we were so clever, maybe we really did believe we were the first tourists to bring that sad, interminable book on holiday on Stromboli… or Mexico. Later we acted out being the drunken characters and talked in posh voices. We, who know how to do irony with literature. There, a verb in the present tense has escaped into my reverie. I don’t know why, since Mark has been dead fifteen years. Sometimes I imagine his lungs, too quickly devoured by cancer, as porous, pitted and crumbling as the slate grey, solidified lava.
He’s ash of a different kind now. I’m still fire.
posted by Lisa Taylor at 6:07 AM
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