Sicily 6/12/24
It’s going on noon, the weather is temperate and overcast with the sun shining through on occasion, and the village is quiet except for a car now and then. People here are very fond of their tiny, well-maintained Fiats and mini Piaggio trucks which can fit through the narrow streets and have horns that sound like they belong to a jalopy.
As I mentioned yesterday, there is a pre-industrial infrastructure here which has sustained people as long as they have inhabited this island, which has never been destroyed, which there would be no reason to dismantle. The same can be said for Roman Catholicism and the cult of the Virgin, for the perennial trees and other food crops that are grown and consumed here, for the towns and villages situated in the hills and the snaking footpaths connecting them, for social structures and expectations.
There is no American free-for-all on Sicily. The land and water haven’t been gratuitously poisoned, no one has been taken from their homes and forced to live somewhere they are not accustomed to and that their souls don’t recognize, people have roles, functions and families from which they do not want or need to be liberated, and overall there is such a simple and profound basis for human existence, that a single life, my life for instance, is not so far removed from the life of any other living thing that has come and gone over the course of centuries.
If you wanted to distill the suffering of America into a few words, you could say it is the loss of scope in how we conceive of life: roughly four to five decades of adulthood to use for the ruthless acquisition of some of the plenty that was never set aside for common use; and therein lies the loss of a proper place on Earth, of a context within nature and her laws, and within a span of time that far exceeds any single existence.
I’ve been in a bone-deep exhaustion since yesterday. I was up at dawn, drank coffee and ate oatmeal, but was overwhelmed at the thought of taking the bus down the mountain and then catching a train one town east, as was my plan. Instead, I laid down again and slept four more hours. In the afternoon, I walked to the forest spring, which is on the footpath heading north, downhill, towards the coast. There is no spigot, just pristine water flowing continuously out of a pipe sticking out of a wall over a mossy concrete basin. I only bring the backpack jug and a water bottle to this spring, because it’s quite a bit further and entirely uphill on the return. Then I collected firewood, cut and stripped a hazelnut shoot, bent it into a circle and secured it with twine: I’d like to weave a hazelnut basket.
All of my needs have been met. Now what? Do I lay down to sleep? Read? Look out at the hills and the ocean? Eat an apple? Surely there has to be an urge that comes from somewhere deeper, for a serious undertaking, but I cannot find it.
I am downstairs washing my hands when I hear a whistle at the window. It’s Giro. Come stai? Bene, stanco. I mime sleeping, and he corrects my Italian: stanca, because I’m a woman. I ask him Come stai, he responds cosi, cosi; domani, tempo, arance, he’s alright, and something about tomorrow, time and oranges. I go upstairs and get my phone to translate. It turns out that he wants to tell me that if he has time tomorrow, he’ll pick me some oranges. I ask where his garden is and he points down the road, the same direction I went in this morning to go to the forest spring, and we make a plan to go there tomorrow at 3:00 after I’ve gotten back from town. He comes back a little while later with two onions fresh out of the ground, and the only word I understand is pomodori, tomatoes.
The naivete of youth has left me. To be the belissima ragazza in the village for the summer is worth its weight in citrus, but to be loved is not the same as to love.