As the week went by, I was feeling the strain of having a feral cat in the apartment. I missed Andrew’s down-to-earth approach, although we spoke nightly on the phone. There was the daily chore of cleaning out her litter tray and trips to the butcher for mince, which she seemed to thoroughly enjoy. It must have been a welcome change to her normal diet of scraps. She had become less timid of me and came out from under the bed when I was around. But if I made any move to touch her, she darted away – her mother had trained her well.
My stay in Taormina was turning out to be very different from the one I’d planned: the excursions, the interviews for my long-imagined book, all must be abandoned now because of this small feline. But I only had to remember that image of Lizzie with her terrible injury to be content with what I was doing.
One morning, I decided to walk through the backstreets of this little town. Away from the Corso and its nightly street theatre, you step into the world of day-to-day life. In Via Numitorio, a caged bird sang its heart out. I paused to read some of those wry ceramic plaques showing the Sicilian biting sense of humour and pleasure in philosophising. One I knew: ‘A guest is like a fish –after three days he stinks’. Others were less familiar: ‘The viper that bit my mother-in-law died – poisoned’ and even: ‘Eat well, excrete well and you needn’t be afraid of death’. Some builders sang a Sicilian melody as they worked on a new house in Via Giardinazzo.
I stopped at Auteri, the ironmonger-cum-everything else shop that never failed me, no matter what I needed, from glue to a toilet plunger. The two elderly owners gaze at the customer over their glasses and then rummage and produce exactly what she is looking for. I could never fathom how they remembered where it might be among all those boxes and shelves of their cavernous store.
I went up and down flights of steps, up and down. Taormina is not for the lazy walker, if you truly want to know it. In a backstreet I paused outside the kitchen of Cyclopes and heard a chef singing. I sniffed the delicious scent of fish being cooked in the simple way: San Moriglio, with parsley, garlic, lemon and oil. A little open-backed van skimmed along, loaded with fennel and red onions.
This might have been Taormina before the tourists invaded. I wished I could have seen it. But beautiful as it is, you still wonder how it has reached these heights of popularity; in August you can scarcely make your way along the Corso. One significant event in its tourist history was the chance visit of a young German painter to what was then a practically unknown Sicilian village.
When Otto von Geleng set out from Rome to visit Sicily in 1859, there would have been no road linking the village to the coast. His journey through the precipitous ravines from Giardini was on the back of a mule. He stayed in Taormina for two or three months and it must have made a great impression on him because two years later he returned. Soon he was courting the sister of a Sicilian baron; he married her and settled in the town. The natural beauty of the place inspired him and before long he had painted enough oils and watercolours to hold an exhibition in Paris. Scenes of Taorminese gardens aflame with tropical flowers in brilliant sunlight while Etna glittered with snow, painted in the winter months, astonished visitors, who could not believe such a climate existed in Europe. Geleng was surely making it up!
As a kind of wager, Geleng invited three of his most sceptical critics to come and see for themselves this fishing village situated between Catania and Messina. If they did not find it was exactly as he had depicted, he would foot the bill. He knew he was on a safe wicket for, of course, he had not exaggerated. They were enchanted by the exotic colours and beautiful views and wrote back to friends in France until articles about Geleng’s Taormina began to appear in newspapers. In the Place du Tertre, Montmartre, all they could talk about was this unknown fishing village suspended between a turquoise sea and sky, with a smoking volcano, while at the same time there were almond trees in blossom, oranges, lemons and cactuses. Soon Geleng realised that Taormina could flourish if more visitors were encouraged but the town would have to smarten itself up; there was room for a lot of improvement.
Involving himself in local affairs, he emphasised that, if the foreigner was to undertake the necessarily long journey, he must find decent accommodation and at least some of the amenities he was accustomed to in his own country. At that time there was no hotel or inn in the place, no light or running water, only stone cisterns for collecting rain. Refuse was thrown into the streets and conditions were rather primitive. But Geleng’s forceful personality persuaded the Taorminese to put their house in order. A hotel, the Timeo, was opened in 1873 with a few rooms (later to be enlarged by the redoubtable Florence Trevelyan). The streets were cleaned, running water was introduced and no longer did the tourist have to grope his way through darkened streets at night.
At one o’clock all the shutters in Taormina clang down and everyone goes for lunch, but I wasn’t hungry. I took a left turn and walked down the steps to the old Naumachia, a monumental Roman supporting wall in brick, some 122 metres long, punctuated by huge niches. The name ‘Naumachia’ literally translates as ‘naval battles’. In fact, at one time it was believed that the monument was an aquatic circus representing such battles. In reality, it was a huge aqua theatre, a colossal fountain playing water.
I remembered it as a dank, insalubrious place but now I saw it had been cleaned up and planted with flowers. A notice said it was the work of the local gardeners group.
I admired the lilies, roses and marigolds, then caught sight of a black man crouched by the door of the Arcate restaurant, devouring spaghetti with a dab of tomato sauce. The Taorminese have tender hearts: if they have never been hungry, race memory recalls those who suffered under Sicily’s conquerors. Tender but also passionate, their tempers are easily provoked. Quarrels can break out, insults hurled that would sever an English friendship for life, but not here. You will see the combatants next day strolling along the Corso, arm in arm. They have not forgotten the incident but they do not intend it to create an eternal rift. The Taorminese knows when the moment has come to draw in his horns. He does not commit himself to anything, not even an appointment, always allowing a loophole for escape. It’s foolish to make a man an enemy, he reasons, you might need him tomorrow or the day after.
I hesitated, wondering whether to go inside the Arcate. I had a dim recollection of the last time I saw Turri; that I did not part on very good terms with this sometime acquaintance.
The restaurant was empty. From the kitchen I heard the sound of clattering pans, sniffed the unmistakable scents of Sicilian cooking – the garlic, the basil, the pesce spada. I cleared my throat. Turri, an incorrigible Taormina ‘character’, appeared in the doorway, an apron tied round his waist. He stared.
‘Good heavens, you!’ was all he said. But he seemed pleased to see me. ‘I’ve just got to finish what I’m doing. Go up to the terrace and I’ll be with you in a minute.’
Beyond the flight of steps was a delightful area gazing out over the rooftops. I could see the care that had gone into creating it – the white awning overhead, fresh flowers on the tables, pretty linen – but it was deserted.
‘I know.’ Turri nodded, pouring wine from the jug into our glasses. ‘I don’t know what to do. It’s the kind of people who come on holiday, these days.’
‘I’m surprised they don’t want to come to a lovely little place like this.’
‘Things aren’t what they were. People don’t go in for proper lunch, these days. They’ll buy a slice or two of pizza or a burger and then go and sit in the Irish pub.’
‘But you can’t hear yourself speak,’ I added, thinking of another pub I had sat in briefly the other day but had to leave, unable to write or think because of the constant loud music.
‘Do you really need pubs here?’ I asked.
‘Muh!’
For a moment we sipped our wine and looked back on the Taormina of all those years ago.
‘Not married then?’ Turri demanded.
I pondered aloud on why my romantic dreams have never been realised. How all these years I have come and gone, increasingly drawn to the little town but I have never found anyone who matches my romantic image.
Turri charged me with this: ‘Romantics are always sad. You should forget about romanticism, get on with life!’ And then: ‘Are you going to have something to eat?’
I ordered arrabbiata, angry pasta – it went with my mood.
While I waited, I thought about what he’d said. I mused that, whatever foreign women believe, the Italians are practical, earthy people, aware that life is fleeting. I remembered my first Sicilian love Amadeo’s favourite saying: take life as it comes. And if you retort that life is difficult, always ready to rise up and smack you on the nose, they refuse to know about remorse or recriminations.
If it’s OK, it’s OK, why think about tomorrow? No problem! And if you mention surely actions may have repercussions and responsibilities, how can one live in this fatalistic way, ‘Muh!’ they shrug.
Turri came back, set the plate in front of me and refilled my glass. A group of people had appeared and they were sitting round a large table consuming large quantities of wine. Turri’s attention wandered; like mothers, restaurateurs, it seems, have a super sensibility to desires even before they are expressed.
‘So you’re here for good now?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Don’t you miss the cruise ships?’
‘I had a good life,’ he grinned. ‘Girl in every port, but home is home.’
I thought of that song, ‘La Terra Amara’ (The Bitter Earth). Many Sicilian villages are abandoned because the young don’t want to work on the land anymore. They’ve left for the cities. And yet, as Turri confirmed, there is this pull to return.
‘What about your wife?’
He shrugged.
I remembered the dissatisfied woman who disliked anything that was not Irish. Marriage has made a cynic of Turri. Though they are often criticised, it is not always the fault of these men. There are foreign women who arrive in the town with only one idea in mind: to have a good time, to be wined and dined and to pay for it with their bodies. Many a young Taorminese in search of his inamorata has been met with: ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? It was just a holiday romance!’
Turri’s marriage was over; he accepted it philosophically, almost passively. Meanwhile, the day was to be enjoyed. Follow your instincts, feelings may develop or not…
There was something in me that still didn’t want to hear this. I, with my romantic temperament bred out of misty castles and ghostly visitations, could not accept this very present view. On the other hand, they were probably right. That way you cannot be disenchanted because you never had any romantic illusions in the first place. Perhaps it is in their genes, a part of their past; their passive waiting for yet another culture to dominate them, an innate self-preservation.
Take life as it comes… I wish I could.