had lain asleep, life stirred. People busied themselves in their makeshift, cobbled-together sheds, and dogs leapt along the fences. Early spring was taking possession of the terrain. I took a long detour to the village, which let out farther down, practically at Piazzale Aldo Moro, at the small main road. The street lamps radiated a yellow light, the shops were illuminated. There were few pedestrians. I could already hear a woman’s voice yelling monotonously from below. ‘Tekiah! Tekiah!’ I understood from a distance, well aware that it could only be an illusion. The woman shouted repeatedly, without varying the volume or urgency of her tone. As I approached, I saw her standing in front of a large house on the corner, where the lane with the post office and the courthouse met the main road, and I understood that she was calling “Maria.” Relentlessly, without pause, “Maria! Maria!” It was a large house that she stood in front of, a beautiful, old building with a wide, carved entrance and many windows, and I wondered why I had never noticed it before. The light was on in several windows of the house, but I saw no one moving through the rooms. The doorbell panel was illuminated, there must have been six apartments in the building. A ways farther uphill, the Arab vegetable and fruit stands lay in dim light. No one noticed the woman. She stepped back into the street, as if to get a better view of the interior, and continued calling without pause. The street was full of her shouts for Maria, and no one appeared who felt spoken to. It was difficult to tell how old the shouting woman was. Perhaps she was in her early fifties. She wore a light winter coat with a belt, noticeably more fashionable than what most women here wore. The whole scene, the way she called, looked up, stepped back, even her clothing had something theatrical about it, the way she first stood, then paced up and down on a very small section of sidewalk by the door, the gesture with which she ultimately raised her hand and placed it to her ear, as if straining to hear sounds from inside the house, a sign from Maria, but above all, her monotone call—all that was a performance for an audience unfathomable to me, which sat somewhere silent in the dark, maybe even holding its breath in suspense.
Trade
EVERY OTHER WEEK a man selling citrus fruit pulled up in a small, three-wheeled cargo scooter, just like the one I remembered from my childhood. “Straight from Sicily” promised the inscription on the door, as did his feverish announcements emitted from a loudspeaker on the roof. But he couldn’t have possibly come all the way from the south on this old-fashioned three-wheeled vehicles. I imagined warehouses, somewhere along the Valmontone-Frosinone road, perhaps near the Hacienda restaurant, where mountains of oranges lay waiting for Sicilian vendors who would load them onto their old-fashioned motorized three-wheeler and, glinting with the dodgy luster of their actual or ostensible native island, drive to small mountain towns and peddle these sour oranges that no one wanted to harvest. On the cargo bed were blood oranges—he had a special fondness for his moro—and “blonde” oranges, clementines, and lemons. In addition to his announcements, the driver rang a bell and honked his stammering horn. A number of Olevanesi bought his goods, at times even the caretaker, who would look around nervously while standing by the Sicilian vehicle, as if she wanted to avoid being seen. I occasionally bought a few blood oranges. The man would then look at me, disappointed and somewhat contemptuous, because I had ordered not four kilos, but four oranges. I couldn’t explain to him that it was, after all, only a grief purchase, a kind of experimental ritual. M. would wait all year for the few blood orange weeks. And besides, the three-wheeled cargo scooter, the crackling calls from its loudspeaker, and the bell that swung out the driver’s side window all reminded me of my childhood, when I would marvel at the Italian cargo scooters, which I found much more beautiful than the heavy, three-wheeled delivery vans that potato merchants drove through the streets along the Rhine in autumn and winter. Bent oblique beneath their weight, a boy, the “thickwit” in the lowest service of the potato merchant, carried the potatoes in hundredweight sacks into cellars while the driver collected the money.
For hours, the orange man cruised around; until evening I would hear his horn, his bell, and the tireless announcements from his loudspeaker. He frequently quarreled with other drivers, because he moved forward slowly and longingly kept watch for customers, recklessly grazing the corners of houses and parked cars in the narrow lanes. He took lunch in the graveyard. He would stop in a pull-out niche directly in front of the main gate, where the sun, if it came out, would shine into his cart. Once I even saw him there with his mouth half-open, asleep, his cheek pressed to the window. He was the only one in the region who drove an old-fashioned three-wheeled scooter. Perhaps it was part of the image he had to embody as a Sicilian orange merchant, and the carts, coated in the bitter aroma of oranges, spent summers in a long sleep in the warehouses, then empty of all fruit and hot as embers.
Several times a traveling gas fitter came around, offering his services. He only surfaced on Sundays and would perform any job that involved cucine a gas; he always called out gásse as if twirling it around his tongue, giving it two syllables, emphasizing the first and following it with a small yet distinct swerve. Lavoro subito e immediatamente!, he would call into his loudspeaker, and between announcements he played a kind of marching music, certainly meant to startle potential customers and lend gravity to his question: Is your cucina a gásse in need of repair? Are you certain? Have you recently smelled gásse? He would add this last sentence to his repertoire only later, likely only when not a single housewife had hurried out into the street, ringing her hands, to save lunch. The gas fitter was also out all day. Perhaps he made a detour to Bellegra or Roiate—a small mountain village inhabited exclusively by old men—but he never stayed away for longer than an hour. Depending on the route and weather conditions, his announcements and marching music sounded either clear or muffled, and on the backside of Olevano, on the street between two partially inhabited developments, they reverberated from the hillsides; tone and echo tumbled, overlapped, robbing the words of all comprehensibility, so that only the word for gas hung in the air. Spring had arrived and the days were brighter, evening came later, mimosas were blooming and small white daffodils and Star-of-Bethlehem flowers unfolded about the olive trees, while the grass on the hillsides and plains became greener and in the slopes round holes emerged, through which I suspected snakes would soon leave hibernation, and sounding into these evenings, still brisk but ringing with blackbirds, imbued with a velvety blue dusk, were the anxious questions of the gas fitter, who had since given up hope for defective stoves, withdrawing his subito e immediatamente, so that only the question remained: had anyone recently smelled gásse?
Campo
AT IRREGULAR INTERVALS I heard the gray and blue regional buses hum up the steep curves and with creaking brakes groan downhill. They connected Olevano to the surrounding countryside. Uphill they drove on, to Bellegra and deeper into the mountains to Rocca Santo Stefano, and twice a day to Subiaco in the hinterland; downhill they drove toward Palestrina and Rome.
From my small balcony, where in the morning I would see the cemetery lying above like a dull gray box in the shadows, I looked between olive trees and houses directly onto the bus station below in the village, across from the tunnel entrance. I saw the small toy figures waiting around the arriving and departing buses, and the mayhem of buses, cars, and humans at noon, when school let out and many people drove home to take siestas. The bus station was a flat, angular concrete building with an overhanging roof, beneath which waiting passengers could find shelter if it rained and the waiting room behind the glass wall was still locked. Next to the waiting room was a ticket counter, which was always empty, and behind it, a bar. From the bar you looked out to the plain, to a new road swerving above the precipice to the lower districts, and a kind of junkyard for discarded everyday objects, which occupied the old observation deck and had perhaps arisen at random, unintentionally—an intermediate space for the partially discarded, whose time for final absence had nevertheless not yet arrived. The tunnel and bus stop flanked the entrance to the old village like two monstrosities, fending off outsiders; at this sight many would have preferred to turn back. In summer the leafy sycamores and lindens would soften the fright, amiably inviting travelers to keep going, journey on. But now, in winter, their bare branches warned of some danger lurking ahead.
I couldn’t
