I knew nothing of this background that first morning, that first arrival after the journey travelling the length of Calabria, its interminable bays, sitting upright for hours, my companion a tiny Sicilian woman offering panini stuffed with salami and pungent cheese, black bitter coffee from a flask.
As we crossed the straits of Messina and I stood on the ferry deck, the light changed from grey to purple, then purple to rose and the tip of the sun flamed over the sea. I looked out at deserted beaches where gold-tipped waves broke over the shore. The air was warm at five in the morning. We must have stopped at a dozen stations, each seemed identical with curly thirties’ lettering and potted oleanders.
Suddenly, Taormina – the station locked in an exquisite time warp, a ceiling of carved panels and Victorian ironwork on the ticket booths.
In a bar filled with the scent of coffee and strong tobacco I ordered a cappuccino. This was a world where things ‘happened’, I told myself: ‘Now I begin to live.’
And then that drive up to Taormina, the serpentine roads and villas crouched behind blowsy shrubs, palm trees. And always that glimpse of blue sky and Etna’s plume of smoke on the still air. I did not see any shadows, not until much later.
When something so profound happens, what do you do? Avoid. Stay home or travel to other places; but all the same, and especially if you venture once more into Italy, it is inevitable you will hear the siren call. Which, if you are sensible, you will ignore. Until that moment when, like the bird whose nest is plundered but returns and returns, you experience a desire to create a meaning out of loss.
And that is what I did.
When the offer of a ‘small apartment looking over the sea’ came up, I decided to take it for six weeks and embark on the ‘Sicilian’ book I had long planned.
I did not reckon on the advent of Lizzie.