The next morning, we grabbed our small bags and boarded a tour bus and took off through the heart of Sicily. The bus was big enough for fifty, but there were only five of us. Me and Daniel and some random guys on a TV film crew from the States. There was a hefty dude named Paul, who had the largest, thickest black glasses I have ever seen, and another slightly less hefty man named Archie, who had tattoo sleeves and a bumbag.
The film guys were camped out at the back of the bus, surrounded by black cases of equipment, passing a tablet Scrabble game back and forth without speaking. Finally, there was our driver, a white-haired Sicilian who only answered to Capo. Within the first ten minutes of the ride, he shouted a word that sounded like ‘catso’ over and over again. I asked Daniel to look it up on his phone and we found out it meant ‘dick’.
I kept thinking that I should have felt calmer – I was on a bus, finally heading to Siracusa, a place with real meaning for Jonah. Instead my nerves were fraying one at a time. The problem was that there were still so many loose ends. We didn’t have a plan yet for the ceremony. We didn’t even know where we were staying. And I had yet to turn on my phone to see the barrage of messages from my father and others.
As soon as this bus came to a halt I was going to have to create something meaningful with nothing but a tiny container of ashes. I tried to do some deep breathing, pulling the stale air of the bus through my nostrils. After a few breaths, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Daniel, reaching over from the seat next to me.
‘Look,’ he said, motioning out the window. ‘It’s so green.’
He still looked a little out of it from the Dramamine. His hair was messy, and his eyes were glazed. But I followed his pointer finger to the landscape rushing past the bus, and it was, without a doubt, green.
I didn’t know much about Sicily, but I had imagined it sun-baked and dusty, beige cities edged by rinds of twinkling turquoise water. But this was the height of spring, and the land outside was an unending sweep of green hills leading to the foot of olive-coloured mountains. The only break in the wall of green was the occasional citrus grove, bursting with fat lemons.
I felt a momentary calm come over me. How could anything bad happen in a place that looked like this? I wasn’t the only one moved. When I turned to look at the back of the bus, I saw Paul aiming a state-of-the-art digital camcorder out the window, trying to capture what I’d just been admiring. He was showing a sizeable amount of plumber’s crack, and Archie was behind him, helping him hold the camera steady.
An hour passed like this. A series of gorgeous landscapes and hairpin turns down narrow roads. After a while, I started to take the scenery for granted. My eyes glazed over and I let the green of the land and the blue of the sky blur together. I had been dozing off and on for about fifteen minutes when the bus took a sharp turn around a bend and I opened my eyes wider. I caught sight of something in the distance. Up a steep grassy hill, split in half by a row of cypress trees, was a tight cluster of little houses. A small walled-in town.
The layout was a perfect rectangle. I had never seen a town so compact and perfectly planned. But that’s because it wasn’t a town at all. As we got closer, I could see that the small-scale houses were made of stone. And they weren’t houses. They were mausoleums.
‘Stop!’ I said. ‘Stop the bus, please!’
At the sound of my voice, Capo stomped on the brakes, and the bus jerked to a skidding halt on the winding road. I held on to Daniel’s arm and braced myself. Behind me, Paul slammed into a seat back, somehow keeping hold of the camera as his black-rimmed glasses launched from his face.
‘What in the hell was that?’ he said.
I met each of the men’s eyes individually. I cleared my throat.
‘I apologize for the abrupt stop, guys, but . . . um . . . I’d like to step outside just for a moment to see something. Thanks. Grazie. Thanks.’
I motioned to a stunned-looking Daniel, and he followed me off the bus and on to the gravel-strewn road. There were no other cars and the air was as fresh as I’d ever breathed. I crossed the road and began to walk up the hill towards the walled cemetery-town before me. Daniel was a step or two behind.
The others were slow to leave the bus but, by and by, I heard the sounds of their voices, too. Eventually, I reached an open gate and stepped inside to find a series of streets, complete with tiled signs, lined by one-storey crypts, each bearing a small black-and-white photo of the entombed.
I started walking down a street named Viale San Giovanni, and as I got further towards the centre, the tombs became more ornate. Some of them were more like churches than homes, their facades swirling with carvings of angels. But of course there were churches; I was in a city for the dead.
It should have been spooky. We were the only ones in the cemetery, walking the streets of a literal ghost town. But, when I approached one particular mausoleum with a small dome on top, I looked at the two images of a married couple, grinning in black-and-white, and I felt comforted somehow. At least they were together.
I turned around to see Daniel watching me. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn’t know what. Then I heard a loud, unintelligible sentence from behind me.
Capo took a step forward.
‘Un terremoto,’ he said.
He paused a second, squinting as if he were searching for something on the horizon. Then he shook his hands. ‘The earth . . . quakes!’ he said. ‘Capito?’
‘There was an earthquake here?’ Daniel asked.
‘Sì,’ said Capo. ‘Un terribile terremoto.’
I noticed then that Paul was filming this, too. Capo walked up and stood directly in front of the camera, as if he had just been waiting for this moment to host his own television show.
‘The whole città. . . tutto destroy. Abbandonato!’
I looked again at the little crypt homes.
‘These are the victims?’
Capo seemed to understand. He nodded and gestured towards the crypts. I reached out and touched a wall. It was rough and chalky against my palm.
‘So, this is the only town left?’ I said.
Everyone was quiet.
I looked at the nearby tombs. Most of the pictures portrayed the victims in their youth. I didn’t know if this was because they’d actually died young or because these were the only photos the bereaved could find.
But each face seemed not much older than Jonah’s.
‘It must be a relief,’ I said.
Daniel squinted at me.
‘How do you mean?’ he said.
‘To the families. Just to know the dead are not alone,’ I said. ‘They have a whole town. They have one another.’
Capo crossed himself before he walked back to the bus and started it up again. Paul and Archie put their equipment down and took their seats. We rode for the next few hours in silence, and finally, in the early afternoon, the bus pulled up to the outskirts of Siracusa, unable to go further due to the narrow roads.
Daniel and I stepped out with our bags. The film crew stood surrounded by dollies, mics, and lens shades, like castaways with no tools useful for survival. I walked up to them.
‘What are you guys filming, anyway?’ I said.
They looked at each other. Then Paul stepped forward.
‘We don’t really know,’ he said. ‘Some kind of Italian nature show. But we haven’t heard from the client in days. Instructions have been a little loose.’
I looked them over. The beginning of an idea was coming to me.
‘How would you gentlemen like some side work?’ I said.