Going South in Sicily

Going South in Sicily Darrei Mansell The last time we went to Sicily I took myWalkman. Late at night in the northern mountains when Adriana was asleep, I could get Radio Vaticana direct from Rome. In the hush after the last note ofa sonata or symphony , a recorded female voice promised in crisp Oxbridge EngUsh to see you through whatever dark night had brought you to RadioVaticana—music, with you, through the night. Further down the dial you could listen to a station in Donnalucata deep in southern Sicily toward Noto. Donnalucata. ... I drowsily imagined a rusty iron transmitting tower on a narrow, twisting seaside road. Next to the tower, a stifling cement-block radio station. Sicily gets hotter and hotter the further south you go. The air coming in the open window of the station would be hot even at midnight. Across the road, the waves were boiling and hissing over the rocks on the beach. Inside the station a sweltering Sicilian mago, a wizard, in a bright yeUow and green shirt of floral design was seated before a microphone . . . avendo l'ascendente in Sagittario . . . devi superare l'opposizione di Venere . . . nattering on the telephone through the hot July night with sleepless housewives about their horoscopes. After the local stations went off the air, as I drifted toward sleep, reedy, wailing music filtered through the static at the very bottom of the dial—an all-night station in Morocco.Yes, Sicily is the end ofsomething. An end that late at night has a way of turning into thoughts of death—my own. The spiny, forested Italian peninsula melts down into a drop—Sicily, the end of something. The drop draws down southward to Donnalucata, then Noto and the smooth, treeless, sparsely populated cape, then ends—evaporates— in a blazing, blank, baffling dead-end horizon oftorrid sirocco sea air bearing sand from unknown, unseen, otherworldly, just-over-the-horizon Africa, deep sleep and . . . terminal, baffling death. 94 Darrel Mansell95 Petralia Sottana The shepherds hut was near some cypress trees. I remembered. How I remembered. Was the shepherd still there? That's why I had come back to Petralia Sottana—to see ifthe shepherd was still there. Petralia Sottana is a Uttle town in northern Sicily. Its narrow, crooked main street is paved with stones from the mountains. I was staring down at the stones late in the afternoon. Had they been replaced in the nine long years since I was here before? Hard to teU. . . . Worn down, no doubt about that. Worn down Uke me— me, melancholy now, gaunt, sixty-three, preoccupied with thoughts of death. The stones were worn smooth as glass. In the middle of the street they were glaring white in the sun.You wouldn't want to walk there at this time in the afternoon. The stones would be searingly hot under your feet. In this bright, arid land ofsharply edged blacks and whites it was better for Adriana and me to skulk along toward the hotel single file in the deep cool shadows under the eaves of the shops. Where was everybody? Nine years ago you would have seen the whole town in the shadows parading up and down in the late afternoon passeggiata, women in black shawls on the arms ofstone-faced mountain men. Now, just the two of us with our bags. Now, nothing but pools of white dust in the gutters; süent sparrows haunting the shadows up under the eaves; stray dogs snuffling crumbling newspapers wedged in doorways; wilted, dusty celery in crates under the bleached awning in front of the empty greengrocer's shop. The greengrocer's! I remembered it. Nine years ago, yes!—the smiling, roguish grocer surrounded by bustling housewives as he smartly packaged cool, moist produce in twists of newspaper. He cracked jokes with Adriana—she a compaesana, his fellow countryman—as with a comical flourish and bow he handed over eggplant caponata and plump tomatoes for our mountain hikes. Where was he now, the old devil? The inside of his empty shop looked dark as a tomb. Our mountain hikes! I remembered them too. Breakfast on the terrace of the town bar beneath the vines. As...