Out of Sheer Rage. Geoff Dyer

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ I asked the taxi-driver.

      ‘12,000 lire.’

      The whole performance turned out to have been a pyrrhic one in that we now had to wait for our train – still stranded on the mainland – to catch up with us. Rather than wait we leapt on a local train and waved goodbye to the soldier with whom we had struck up this tense friendship.

      Darkness fell on either side of our train. We were running along the coast, a ping-pong moon bouncing along beside us. The light in the compartment was yellowy old. We stood in the corridor, leaning on the window, seeing the sea. The train stopped as frequently as a bus. It was like a little dog, scurrying and panting, tireless. If we’d had time to dash around and look at the front of the locomotive it would surely have had eyes and a willing smile like Thomas the Tank Engine. While the train was moving we seemed to be the only passengers; the stations were deserted too but people got on and off at each stop as if they were using the carriages as a bridge to cross the tracks, stepping on to the right-hand side, getting off at the left and disappearing before the puppy train went panting on its way again, sniffing out the next station.

      When we arrived at Taormina there was no sign of Ciccio, Laura’s friend’s mother’s boyfriend, whose house in nearby Furci we were going to be staying in. We were both early and late. Later than the train was scheduled to arrive but earlier than the scheduled train was actually arriving. We phoned Ciccio who was engaged, then phoned Renata – Laura’s friend’s mother – who had just been on the phone to Ciccio who had come and gone and would return to meet our stranded train.

      With half an hour to kill we looked for a place to have a beer. Opposite the station was what looked like a restaurant or, more exactly, like a living room in which there happened to be a great surplus of tables. A woman was watching a western dubbed into Italian. I’ll say this for Italian TV: you’re never more than a few channels away from a western. She was watching TV in that way of night porters the world over: they watch for hours but never become so absorbed in anything that they mind being interrupted. Given that there are a finite number of westerns and an infinite number of nights in which to watch them they figure that any gaps can be filled in later. To them each film is really no more than a segment of an epic ur-western spanning thousands if not millions of hours, offering a quantity of material so vast that it can never be edited into a finished form. The western thus takes the place of the great myths of antiquity: shifting glimpses of character and situations, variously recurring, but manifesting through the very fact of their myriad transformations, the existence of some stable, changeless order.

      Laura asked if we could have just a drink, nothing to eat, and the woman said no, not just a drink. Then she gestured to us to sit down: she would bring us a drink. They are like that in Sicily, said Laura. Their instinct is to say ‘no’, but once they have established that a thing cannot be done they are happy to do it. In this way serving a bottle of beer takes on a near-miraculous quality. We drank our beer on the balcony of the deserted café, looking across the deserted road at the deserted station, engulfed, periodically, by the thunder of hooves and the whine of ricochets from the television. For the third or fourth time that day a strange, floaty indifference to everything came over me. Since this sensation was utterly unfamiliar and not at all unpleasant I decided that, if experienced again, I would refer to it as contentment.

      Ciccio arrived just as our train pulled in. He was stocky, dapper (rare for a Sicilian) and tanned to his bones from fifty years of sun. Had they remained still for any length of time his eyes would have been kind; as it was he looked kind of anxious. He had a perfect, firm handshake, the sort that suggested that the handshake originated here in the south and was then exported north and west. I wondered: did the handshake originate, as I had once read (in a Fantastic Four comic) as a gesture of trust, a way of demonstrating that you had no weapon in your hand? Or was it, from the outset, a compromise, enabling both parties to offer one hand in friendship while keeping the other free for protection, a way of establishing physical contact while maintaining the maximum possible distance? I felt Ciccio would know. There was knowledge in his handshake.

      As soon as we had been introduced, Ciccio dashed off to reassure Renata (who had been worrying about a botched rendezvous) that all was well. I folded myself into the back of Ciccio’s small car, sharing the back seat with a cash register. It made the normal meter used in a taxi seem rather paltry, cheap. It was Ciccio’s business, Laura explained. He sold and repaired cash registers.

      We wound our way up to Taormina which looked like the most beautiful place imaginable: coves and headlands, sea glittering in the moonlight, lovely old buildings and restaurants. Had we come on holiday we would not have been disappointed at this moment. All the accumulated worry as to whether Taormina had been a good choice would have been dispelled, we would have put our arms around each other and exchanged glances full of love and decisions vindicated. Even in the midst of this realisation, however, part of me was thanking God that we were not on holiday, not playing that game with its stakes that are so low and so high. Ciccio parked and then called Renata from a passing payphone. This time Laura had a word and then we moved on.

      To a fine restaurant with a magnificently deserted terrace overlooking the bay. Down below but still part of the same restaurant was another terrace, crowded, overlooking the bay. We had entered the hierarchical topography of tourism where everything, if it has any value, must be overlooking something else. Anything not overlooking something is to be looked down on. The lower terrace was less formal than the upper terrace – so formal, in fact, that there were no people in it – and so we walked down there. The waiter showed us to a table with a view overlooking the bay but Ciccio insisted on a better one, one with an even better view overlooking the bay. A second waiter took our order and a third brought our beer. They all knew Ciccio. We had our beer, Ciccio and I, but there was no sign of Laura’s wine. ‘Hey Franco,’ said Ciccio, addressing a fourth waiter. ‘Portaci del vino. We need to make a toast.’ One way or another Ciccio was keeping the entire staff of the restaurant on their toes.

      Because it was one of the few things I knew how to say in Italian, or any other language for that matter, I remarked on the deliciousness of the beer – whereupon Ciccio ordered two more even though we still had a third of a glass each. We were drinking grandi beers not piccole because to have ordered piccole would have suggested some failure of hospitality. The trouble with grandi beers, though, was that we couldn’t drink them fast enough: after a few minutes they were warm as tea and so the table filled up with half-finished glasses of beer which stood there not as waste but as excess, as trophies of hospitality. It was the same with the antipasti. Once I’d eaten my plateful, I asked Ciccio, for want of anything better to say, if we could go up for seconds. We couldn’t, strictly speaking, but Ciccio insisted that I have some more – insisted, rather, that the waiter bring us another tray of bits and pieces. I became wary of mentioning anything lest Ciccio took it upon himself – or on one of the waiters – to provide it. Not for the first time in my life I felt the slightly wearying, not to say utterly exhausting nature of this commitment to hospitality which was always a part of these respect-offence cultures. My own preference was for that busy urban version of hospitality where, if friends of a friend turn up, you have a quick drink at the neighbourhood bar, give them towels and a set of keys, show them how the sofa bed works, say ‘Mi casa es su casa’ and leave them to their own devices for the next four days.

      Still, drinking these half grandi and lavishing hospitality appeared to be having a calming effect on Ciccio. He had not phoned Renata for twenty minutes – but what I had taken to be calm actually turned out to be the lull before the telephonic storm. A waiter arrived with a cordless phone: there was a call for Ciccio: Renata. They spoke for ten minutes. Then Laura had a chat – then, although I had never met Renata (who spoke no English), it was my turn. After that we were ready for another round so I handed her back to Ciccio. While he was talking Laura said she would love to open a hotel.

      ‘Would you?’

      ‘Well, СКАЧАТЬ