by Rob Doyle
Usually I took my trips around Sicily alone, being a firm adherent to the maxim that no company is better than bad company. In those days I prided myself on my high standards. I viewed them and the solitude they entailed as signs of a Nietzschean ‘aristocracy of spirit’, but it’s possible I was just an arsehole. Whenever I had previously gone on excursions with people I wasn’t close to, I had suffered from not being able to do exactly what I wanted when I wanted, which usually meant burying my head in a book. Often I spent my trips to renowned historical sites ignoring the renowned historical sites in favour of reading in a nearby cafe, or writing in my notebook, or getting quietly fucked up and enjoying the drift of my thoughts.
As the days grew warmer, I felt less inclined to stay indoors working on my novel. Our flat had a balcony looking along a street that ran away from the piazza; instead of writing I would sit out there, eating incredibly succulent olives I bought from peasant farmers at the monthly street market. No one likes a traveller who lectures his compatriots on how much better things are elsewhere. And yet I had the sense, eating those olives that were so plump and juicy that the eating of them was a rapturous, almost a sexual, experience, that I had never really eaten olives before, that the puny, meagre, olive-shaped things I’d bought in jars in Ireland were not olives so much as insults to olives, shameful betrayals of the olive experience. I’d had a similar revelation eating fruit in Asia. None of the fruits I’d previously eaten – dutifully, as part of my five-a-day – had prepared me for the ravishing, implausible, juicy sweetness of the mangoes in Thailand, the pineapples in Vietnam, the watermelons in Laos. Even the banana – dullest of fruits, whose consumption had hitherto been a chore – pulsated with flavour. So delicious and juicy were the fruits of Asia, I was amazed such things could occur naturally, that such a congruence could exist between the produce of nature and the human capacity for sensual delight. It was almost an argument in favour of intelligent design – more compelling than the march of the penguins or whatever – for a benign Creator who liked us and wanted us to have lovely things, at least whenever we could afford the plane fare to Thailand.
From my balcony vantage I would watch the young Sicilians on Vespas clattering by, the girls in Prada and Dolce & Gabbana who texted while they talked, and the old men having long conversations that consisted exclusively of hand gestures (in the bookshop off the Corso VI Aprile there was an illustrated dictionary of Sicilian sign language, which I perused to decipher these exchanges). One afternoon there was a crash directly beneath the balcony: it was not too serious, but for an hour or so the young motorcyclist lay on the ground crying, while his friends and the paramedics who arrived on scene shouted and gesticulated at one another, ignoring the injured party (eventually he was taken on to a stretcher while his friends wheeled his twisted scooter away).
It was far more entertaining to sit on the balcony eating olives and watching the life of the street than it was to write. It wasn’t just idleness. Living in what the sunny weather increasingly revealed to be a gorgeous town populated by beautiful people, I was beginning to feel that it was wrong – sinful might even be the apt word, with its Catholic and therefore Sicilian connotations – to stay cooped up in a dim flat, typing away at a lightly fictionalised account of a prior period of my life, a period when I had been really living, in the sense of doing things that were worth writing about, even if doing them led to heartbreak and misery, to bitter remorse that I had done them at all.
My friends Matt and Sophie came to visit in late May. They rented a car, which Sophie drove (like many Irish males of my generation, Matt and I were used to being driven around by women, who had earned their licences while we were smoking bongs and playing in go-nowhere bands).
One Saturday morning we drove down to Castellammare to rent a speedboat. By eight o’clock it was already as warm as the nicest day of the year in Ireland. The four of us bundled into the shiny white boat (Georgina had come along, relieved to get away from Alcamo, where two hot-headed rivals for her favours were squaring off in what looked like the initiation of a mafia blood feud). After a brief piloting lesson and some safety advice, we were off. We bounced across the waves, heading west along the coastline, whooping every time a spray of foam washed over us. We dropped anchor off the coast at Scopello, in view of the faraglioni – dramatic rock formations that rose out of the water, fringed by moss. The sea was a ravishing blue, deep and inviting. We stripped to our trunks and bikinis and, standing around the rim of our bobbing vessel, dived into the ultramarine depths. Matt and I vied to outdo each other with the daring and technical prowess of our dives and jumps, incited by the presence of the onlooking women. Georgina was magnificent in her white bikini. To my surprise, I had never felt attracted to her over the time we’d spent working together, even though she was desired by seemingly every male in Sicily. Now the sunlight glinted in shifting watery ovals on her midriff, shoulders and long slender legs as she sat back laughing; I wondered how I could have spent months alongside this woman without taking an interest – all the while jerking off to visions of too-young, too-wrong Angelica. I found myself saddened by this sudden desire: it had come to frustrate me that I couldn’t seem to stay friends with a woman without desiring her, and that this desire invariably ruined the friendship, either through its consummation, or through the jealousy and frustration that developed if there was none.
I dived again, dissolving my confusions in the blue. There are few experiences more exhilarating, more conducive to the simple feeling of joy, than swimming in the sea in a part of the world where it is warm enough to do so without discomfort. Growing up in Ireland, I had assumed that swimming outdoors was essentially an ordeal. It always had to it a punitive, masochistic, ceremonial quality: you did it to prove that you could do it, to have done it. It was basically something to be gotten over with. On a wind-lashed shore on the furthermost rock in Western Europe, you stood before the hissing surf in grim resolve, psyching yourself up to take a plunge. Seconds later you were out again, shivering violently, craving a hot whiskey. Was it perhaps the coldness of the sea that gave life in Ireland its harsh and sullen quality, produced such coarse, tormented, lumpen people? ‘Is possible,’ as my friend Marco would have said.
A few days before Matt and Sophie reached the end of their stay, Coby knocked on my bedroom door.
‘Check out what the mailman brought.’
It was a rather basic food hamper: a jar of honey, a bar of chocolate, some type of sandwich spread and a packet of crisps.
I looked at the hamper and then at Coby. ‘Very nice,’ I said.
‘Try the chips.’
I opened the packet and tried one. They were salt and vinegar.
‘Not bad,’ I said politely.
‘Dude, look deeper. Find yourself.’
I fished around with my fingers and pulled out … a little plastic bag. Inside was a square of translucent paper, divided into faintly coloured sections.
‘Ten tabs of acid, motherfucker!’ said Coby.
The following day Georgina drove us out to Segesta, to see the Greek temple I’d been telling everyone about since visiting it on a rainy Saturday in February. On the drive, Matt, Sophie, Coby and I dropped acid. It was coming on just as the temple appeared on the horizon – majestic, serene and proudly aloof from the landscape around it. It was as if a vast starship had alighted in that remote place, or indeed as if a solitary god had made his home in the lushness of the Sicilian countryside – but which god? I knew nothing about the temple’s history, only that it had been there for a very long time, since the sixth century before Christ.
‘Which god is it for?’ I asked no one in particular.
‘Apollo … Creed?’ suggested Coby, who had double-dosed.
‘Dionysus,’ said Matt. ‘I don’t know if that’s true, but let’s assume it is. That way, our coming here and getting fucked up becomes an act of worship.’
‘We should have an orgy,’ said Sophie.
The temple was p
erfectly preserved – deathless and splendorous, immune to the centuries. We were not visiting the ruins of an ancient temple, we were visiting a temple, one that had stood its ground and would be there when the Sicilian countryside was arid and withered, when humankind itself had fallen into dereliction amid carcinogenic skies and poisoned seas. As when I’d come here first, there was no one else around, the landscape silent for miles in every direction, intensifying the aura of what can fairly be called Olympian detachment emanating from the colossal structure. ‘Dude …’ said Coby. He was able to draw an impressive range of emotion from that word and today it was awed and reverent. The broad pillars were pink-hued as they basked in the afternoon light. The pristine sky framing the temple was supernaturally blue. We stood before it, our necks craned. There was no noise, no breeze, no motion in the countryside around us. A lone bird soared high overhead, perhaps on migration to Africa. In the trance of psychedelia, the temple’s millennial stillness appeared not as an absence of change but as a positive force, an energy. The temple was both a mirror to our evanescence – our youth, the glow of our skin – and a doorway on to the eternal, an emission from some changeless substratum from which we had emerged, and into which we would soon resolve.
And then Matt and Sophie were gone, everyone was gone. Blasted by a cumulative hangover, I walked through the shaded streets of Alcamo, past the churches, across the sunny piazza, in an agreeable daze – the result of the Valium that Matt had left me as a parting gift ‘to soften the blow’. It was a midweek morning and the town seemed empty. Coby had left to visit his friend in Messina, and Georgina was staying with her lover Filippo – the man she would later marry – in his family’s summer house on Lake Como. Our teaching duties were all but fulfilled, the school closing for summer. I wandered into the gated courtyard behind the piazza, where I sat for a spell on a bench by a lone tree that I imagined was a palm. The church bells struck noon. Having no thoughts in my head, my senses heightened by fatigue, I heard with pellucid clarity their chiming and resounding, each nuance of tone and oscillation, as if the bells were ringing inside my mind, as if I were the campanile. The bells rang on and on, bounding through the alleys and across the piazza, over the rooftops and the sea air. I thought of the words from Plato that Matt had quoted as we stood before the temple in Segesta, stunned by sky and magnificence and hallucination: ‘All in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless …’ Three weeks later I would leave Sicily on a train that set out from Palermo, crossed the Strait of Messina on the deck of a ferry, and traversed the spine of Italy all the way to Milan. I would make no effort to stay in touch with the people I had met on the island, the friends and colleagues, the students and drinking buddies. For now, I sat in the courtyard in what I remember as total contentment. After a while I stood up and made my way out through the gate that creaked on its hinges, across the piazza in the shadow of the old church. As I stepped on to the Corso VI Aprile, I passed an old man who hobbled slowly through the shade, bolstered by a walking stick, his legs trembling with the effort.
I leave Croatia in the morning. The last time I lived in France I came to pieces: grinding, distorted, obsessional thoughts; relentless paranoia. But circumstances were different then. I was living on my own after a break-up, and there were problems in my life that felt so severe I couldn’t see a way out. You get spooked; you stop trusting yourself. Your brain becomes an enemy. But I think you know what I mean. I too used to have dreams of being swept away by the incoming tide, when I was a child. Some of the dreams were sketched as in pencil; in some of them my mother stood on the shore, helpless or impassive. Later there were nightmares of a flood: black waters rising up to drown the world.
The newspaper dropped me after that single column, and rightly so. I don’t care about whatever they required me to care about. They want someone with social concern, chronic indignation, a feel for the fluctuations of mob hysteria. Essentially I accept the world as it is. This is where you and I are different. You exert yourself in making some small change for the better, even though you suspect that it’s ‘closing time in the gardens of the West’. You believe that writing should concern itself with political action, a dutiful inching towards utopia, whereas I feel insufficient loyalty or vigour, and too much bitterness, to align myself with any of these movements. Politics engages me purely as an aesthetic phenomenon, as something interesting. I know this incenses you, yet here we are, still friends, sort of. Despite our differences, I imagine us as symptoms of the same drive towards oblivion. You, as a woman, admit you feel no dismay at the prospect of a civilisation you say oppresses you being swept away. I feel no dismay either – the spectacle of the catastrophe exhilarates me, at least insofar as it doesn’t impinge on me too directly. I used to feel appalled at myself for this; now I feel absolutely normal.
This afternoon I took the tram to the Mirogoj Cemetery, on a hillside just out of town. It was serene there, among the dead: autumn sun and fallen leaves; monuments to the soldiers of both world wars; the tombs of famous Croatians I’d never heard of. I sat on a bench by a war memorial to write and read, till there was no longer enough light. While I was there I came up with a possible title: European Graveyards. But I soon dismissed it.
Grave
In January of 2015, half a decade after I had left Italy and two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks, I took a trip to Paris with the vague intention of researching an essay on the Romanian writer E. M. Cioran, who lived in the city from 1937 until his death in 1995. What this research would consist of was not really clear. Cioran’s life in Paris was notable for the fact that, other than write books, he had done absolutely nothing of interest there. He had simply lived out year after year in the flat on Rue de l’Odéon that he shared with his long-term partner, Simone Boué, where he finally became senile, fell ill and died, inadvertently backing out of the suicide pact that he and Boué had made together. It seemed likely that my ‘research’ would be confined to loitering around Cioran’s grave at the Montparnasse Cemetery, and staring up at his inaccessible apartment from the street below. Nonetheless, I had persuaded myself that spending time in Paris was the only way the essay would ever get off the ground.
On the morning of my trip, I woke at 4 a.m. and made it to the airport in good time to catch my 6:25 flight. When I showed my boarding pass at the gate, however, I was informed that I’d been queuing for the wrong 6:25 flight to Paris. This was Air France and I was Ryanair. I ran back the way I’d come, and for reasons unclear was instructed to pass through security all over again. Hurrying towards the Ryanair gate, I told myself that somehow it would all work out. I had never missed a plane, regardless of hangovers, stoned muddles and misfiring alarm clocks: it followed that I would not miss this one. When I reached the gate, sweating extravagantly, the airport worker in his high-vis jacket told me that the plane had been delayed – that was it out there on the taxiway – but the doors were all closed up and there was no way of getting on. I would have to book another flight and check in all over again. And no, there wouldn’t be any refund from Ryanair.
I ended up flying with Aer Lingus a couple of hours later, at a cost I’d rather not think about. The one consolation in all this was that Aer Lingus actually flew me to Paris, rather than to what Ryanair calls ‘Paris’, in reality a remote zone called Beauvais, which on previous visits seemed to me even further from Paris than Dublin itself. Looking out the window of the train that brought me from Charles de Gaulle to the Gare du Nord, I ruminated on how I had always prided myself on never having missed a plane, and now I had missed one. It seemed to me that, as I grew older, the stock of personal traits I could pride myself on was steadily diminishing – I had managed to slip up in almost every category. Perhaps I had no option but to start taking pride in things I had done – accomplishments – rather than in things I had refrained from doing, such as missing a plane.
At Gare du Nord, I boarded the Métro. As the crowded train was pulling out of the station, I loo
ked out the window and saw four soldiers with machine guns descending the stairs on the platform. The sight triggered a momentary panic: had the soldiers arrived because they knew something? Were they moments too late to board the train and shoot dead the jihadists who were now about to blow us up or flood the carriage with poisonous gas? The panic receded as I reminded myself that the chances of actually being caught up in a terrorist attack, in Paris or anywhere else, were slim. On the other hand, the very fact that I was thinking like this – having to remind myself that I was probably safe – demonstrated the efficacy of terrorism: I felt terrorised, therefore terrorism had achieved its goal. I recalled the five years I had spent living in London. Not once had I managed to take the Tube in that city without imagining, as we hurtled through narrow tunnels deep underground, the horror that would ensue if a bomb went off or a gas attack was perpetrated – the airless panic as bodies pressed against one another, everyone desperate to get out but knowing there was nowhere to go. I used to wonder how much my nervous system could take before the agony caused me to pass out: I told myself that it wouldn’t be so bad, that the body would automatically shut itself down to avoid intolerable pain, but I never really believed it.
