I Know Where I’m Going. Whirlpool in the Tyrrhenian

The vague feeling that if you don’t use your life you might lose it. The night boat hisses into the Gulf of Naples like a fat man easing into a tub. I walk the deck, watch the constellation of the city turn to scribble under the shadow of Vesuvius. Dinner in the restaurant, one of three tables, each a man eating alone. Silver service, tagliatelle, bottle of red; shades of Odysseus, old now, crumpled, and penned by Graham Greene. Home to my cabin, a womb within a womb, where I dream of mermaids rolling in the amniotic swell. This morning, dawn over the Tyrrhenian, distant lumps of the Aeolians lying low in the water, slow-blinking like a crocodile. And there, at last, the rotten old wedding cake, Palermo, left out in the rain, slowly melting into the sea. A friend warned; “Beware of the Sirens!” “But I only do it for the Sirens,” I said. “Oh right”, she said, “I forgot.”

A couple of years ago I’d have gobbled up that Mussolini-era book on sanitation in war-time Italy from the sidewalk and it would have sat around for decades waiting for me to rip off its fonts, oblation for some girl I would adore but barely love. One benefit of having your house burn down is that you no longer have need of such things. I reach, out of habit, then put it back. Nowhere for it to go. What is it, this urge to accumulate? Proves we were alive, I suppose, like if we were vaporized our stuff would hang in space around a frazzled corona of what we used to be. The air we once were, evidenced by all we had gathered, our fetishes. We poke about life’s fleamarket looking for stuff to eulogize the highlights, when the highlights are everything, everywhere. Each day the Gods reach down and say, “here, taste this,” but we’re too busy rooting like swine to hear. We could be eating crumbs from the Table of the Gods. Instead we’re snouting at ceramics.

The man at the grill puts down his tongs and brushes off a plastic table, pulls out a plastic chair which I lower myself into with the deportment of Irene Handl. Appropriate, considering my flowery straw hat and billowing blouse, cleaved diagonally across my full bosom by a long-strapped handbag. I wince a weary (but grateful) dowager smile, he nods and returns to his duty tending Stephenson’s Rocket. Third night in a row eating horse at this bend in the road, pummeled by scooters, Sicilian voices raised in operatic hubris, a choral muezzin wail. I choose a different grill each night. Whereas at first I was treated as a baroque curiosity, now they see me coming and make space. “Will the Duchess dine with us this evening?” The scoliotic pirate brings my usual half-litre of red in an old limoncello bottle. Carne di cavallo con patatine. Horse ’n chips. He smiles his deferential one-toothed smile, eyes crinkled into asterisks, and leaves me to powder my nose.

What were the chances? Venice, Paris, London even. But in Catania? This little spot off Plebiscito where I’m tucked behind the door nursing sardines, nonsense spouting from my blowhole like a burst Scrabble bag, basking in the nimbus of some willowy dryad thirty years my junior, four inches my senior, just now loping off to the toilet. She sits for a second, this friend, this sometime dryad, and smirks through the squint of grey eyes forever weak in the sun. Don’t worry, she won’t stay long; and I find myself stung by the truth, evidenced by serendipity, that she is here, I am here, but we are not here together. Such defeats. But I’d have been lying not to admit the mermaid was some consolation.
“So I guess I never got what I wanted.”
“But you’re getting it now. You’re kissing Eliza Doolittle.”
“Who says that’s what I want?”
“Oh, that’s always what you want. For the rain in Spain to fall on the plain.”
“Mainly.”
“Right. Mainly what you want.”

Draped about the room like Oscar Wilde’s trousers, a little addled on booze and the lingering smell of bleach, phone on speaker to FerryHopper; some wheedling auntie, all of her agents are busy, begins, ends, begins again. Three hours and I hang up. It’s 11 in the morning. My Airbnb needs me gone. I plod to the station, but I’ve forgotten my charger so I plod back. And so to the station again, now pregnant with a hot, fizzing melon of pee, but without coins for the toilet. I buy a cappuccino for change, slug it, barge inside and during slow-motion hand-to-hand combat with a symphony of buttons, begin. Peeing. My pants. On Catania station staring at three hours on a train, twelve on a ferry. Not a full snaking fire-hose, but enough, a handsome blossom. Half-naked (the sorry half) I blunder about the stall like a badly anesthetized horse, the seeing-eye flush mechanism beeping and barking over and over, pulling stuff off, pulling stuff on, finally stumbling out onto the platform, a pig that ran through a jumble sale. The phone rings. My cabin on the ferry has been canceled. Overbooked. Urine-soaked fuckbuckets in old lady hats, they say, must spend the night in a recliner.

Eating fish at ‘a figlia d’o Marenaro. It’s quiet when I arrive, groups of men who know a lot about something have napkins at their throats and are crunching shells and sucking. Gradually whole families filter in. A matriarch with the regal bearing of a 60’s film star now in her 70’s, a ringer for my old friend Sylvia Syms, finishes her frittura, looks around and puts on sunglasses. Now it’s seething. Waiters in blue uniforms move through the crowd like mackerel. The patron sits with his Donatella in an aquamarine pantsuit with sequin lapels, and an enormously fat man. Groups of ten men, more, make their way through the throng; always one elderly gent who has been doing this for decades, guided at the elbows by the others, Lazarus or Socrates, a saint or a rabbi, eased into his seat at the top of the table. He sighs from the effort, smiles, wipes his mouth with a napkin. This could be my dad. I know he wishes it was. Taken out every week by his friends, his sons’ friends, for a long lunch of fish with other men.

Today I got the kids. Picked them up at the airport, took a taxi to the bottom of the hill, walked the thousand steps up to the flat. This is a new thing, a new chapter of the old book, your kids emerging through the arrivals door, all tired and grown-up and beaming. We did Vergini at mad twilight, the markets trilling, scooters swarming us like hornets. Then we walked back up. Too weary to eat out, they sat on the floor, gossiped, played cards; while I foraged ingredients for dinner. Turns out the bedroom-size minimarket on Miradois has it all; cherry tomatoes, anchovies, capers, garlic, black olives and a shard of parmiggiano. As I put the stuff on the counter the lady behind me nodded sagely and said to everybody, “he’s making puttanesca.”

We’ve guessed the taxonomy of the street cats and learned to step around the patch they use as a litter-box. The ground meat at Enzo Scotti comes preordained by Enzo in correct proportions, manzo to maiale (porkier than 50/50). You can make good ragù without soffrito, using anchovies for salt, cherry tomatoes and water for wet. The tagliatelle in the yellow box cooks almost exactly like fresh pasta, fast and elastic. It’s colder than expected in Stadio Diego Maradona and the beer is non-alcoholic which is why nobody but us is drinking it. The Ultras bounce up and down like Teletubbies, 10,000 Pavarottis weeping ‘Vesti la giubba’, waving vast flags with a passion inversely proportional to the action on the field. Home to Sanità and whist on the floor, primitivo that smells like Cherry Garcia, wet, salty, sour shards of this morning’s mozzarella on toast. If living’s about contriving pearls of experience that say nobody in the world’s having a better time than this, then stringing them on a necklace, close together as possible, then this is living.

Dragged inexorably towards the sea, the sands of time are piling up around our heels. Back at d’o Marenaro, a fishball eyes me from beneath a bloody blanket of tortiglioni. I should have been issued forceps and a swab. “They’ll be gone soon,” it whispers. The kids, it means. And parmesan on vongole? What augury of impending desolation is this? They’ve been here five days; only two to go. The clock ticks, a blacksmith pounding his anvil. Who decreed it should be this brief? They did. Unlike me, they have lives, they can’t be sitting about all day prodding wounded pizza in the bar on the Piccola Marina. Meanwhile the trains are on strike, so we hoof it to Bagno Elena where Wilde, three years from death, slumped in a deckchair and gazed at Vesuvius. Later, once they’ve vanished, I’ll traipse in his foorsteps through Posillipo, write limericks where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, munch fried alici on the beach, all flabby, floral and defeated, just like him.

It’s a unique sensation watching your kids walk away. For the next couple of days you blunder around shorn of purpose. That Larkin sentiment; ‘Where has the tree gone, that locked earth to the sky? What is under my hands that I cannot feel?’ Abjuring the bus, I walk home from the airport, needing to feel the process. Too soon to be back in the flat, the surrounding streets still clip-clopping with the echo of their voices, their footfalls. And anyway, there was Naples below me, spread out like a tapestry. On the way I passed the man selling flowers outside the cemetery on the bluff overlooking Vesuvius, the one who had cheered us on our journey out. “You’re back?” he shouted. It’s the hat. It does it every time. “Those were my daughters,” I said. “Where have they gone?” he said, his muddy palms upturned. “New York,” I said. He cocked his head, went in for the hug, but instead (my awkwardness), gifted me a lingering high-five.
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‘What loads my hands down?’

I woke from a dream. I was in one of the narrow streets of the fish market near Porta Nolana at night and a young man was walking towards me. At first it was just that, two people on their way somewhere, moving in opposite directions, but as we approached the point (maybe thirty or forty feet) where the uniqueness of shared time and space requires acknowledgement, we made eye-contact. Alert to the electricity of the solitude, we were gunslingers, a fated partnership. We kept walking, kept looking at each other, and I saw he was holding an iron bar across his chest. And we both knew he was going to hit me with it. It was an almost apologetic thing, a mutual nod to the inevitable, and the adrenaline surge of sudden realization was akin to a first kiss. I thought of Juliette, twenty-five years earlier, the loft in Tribeca, that toppling, almost swooning comprehension – it is happening. The Judas kiss. And I knew the only way to avoid a beating was to charge him, to be proximate, in an embrace, containing his swing so that pain was impossible.

The oak tree in the piazza has a single donut of leaves, just above the ears, like a monk or a history teacher. The rest, above, below, is bald as a billiard ball. Each year the people anticipate the demise of this valiant corona. Each year it defies them. Though sparse, the leaves are strong, locking elbows and prevailing through December. Beneath them, boys play football and the neighborhood eats. A slow tarantella, far older than the tree itself, insists upon the need for elegance. Sometimes Death knocks on the door and sticks around for sgroppino, before wiping its mouth. Unless it was yawning.

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