Randozza

                            I was up late the night before eating horse meat at a sidewalk bar-be-que with an Italian cowboy  so i started off slowly in the morning.  I walked to the train station through the fish market to practice my Italian and to take photographs.  I was amused again by the friendliness of all the men and awed by their knife skills.   I watched one man slice swordfish carpacio with a cleaver. His small fingers tight, knuckles stacked up straight above his finger tips as he held down the flesh in front of the huge blade.  With his other hand he guided the blade through the flesh, parting it well for lack of a better metaphor, room temperature butter.  The slice was thin like a shed tortoise shell.  I could see light through it when he held it up to the light for his customer.  it wowed me and he liked that.  His mouth did not move a bit but his eyes smiled back at me.  he is the one here with the black hat.


                             I wanted to travel to a town called Randozza.  It was one of the villages surrounding Mount Etna.  The day before whet my appetite.  I wanted granite rivers of rubble with the oasis of trees and rocks and to walk a town where people lived out their lives near the belly of fire.  It was going to take hours to get there.  More than one train was needed to arrive.  The first was the city train,  starting off above ground and finishing underground.  I read the track number on the board and headed to the underground walkway.  I took the last stairway to the platform and waited on the bench.  The train was going to arrive in ten minutes.  I was feeling proud and pleased having had a lovely leisurely walk and arriving just in time.  I was a little surprised there were no other passengers only to see that there was the train arriving on another track.  I broke all the rules running,  ignored the yellow line on the platform sprinted over it to crossed the empty train tracks below, climbed onto a raised platform hand over foot  or maybe it was foot over hand to a full platform of Italians looking at me sideways as they boarded the train.  None of this of course was done in time to make the train but there was one sympathizer who was climbing a staircase that I somehow missed.  She smiled a little and shook her head.  I whipped the rubble off of my palms and was reassured by her that the next train would be in a half hour.  She told me in English.  I felt like she knew I was from away.  I am pretty certain that an Italian woman may not have approached arrival in the same way as I had.

The next train station and the track was much easier to find and it had a waiting room.  The number of people there was significantly more.  People lined the platform with rolling suitcases and shopping baskets with wheels.  Families in their polished city clothes, man, woman and child groomed perfectly without a hair out of place.  i felt like I was waiting for the ferry to an island miles off the coast.  It seemed that everyone had made a holiday of coming to the city or were making a holiday of leaving it.

The rail line that traveled around the mountain was the old fashioned chugga chugga trains.  It tousled you back and forth at the start, clicked and crackled a little as it rolled, everyone's head swaying involuntarily from side to side and it blew a good steamy horn of warning for all those in automobiles waiting for it to pass.  It was almost two hours for me to arrive to the little town of Randazzo. With a sunless sky, the train chugged through small sleepy mountain towns that felt dirty and sad.  In between were desserts of lava flow, charcoal and light-less.  Every inch of outside was a patchwork quilt of gray.  Some colors hard and dark, others soft.  It all made me feel very sleepy and a little lonely.  Passengers greeted each other as they boarded.  Exchanged small talk, often not in a hurry to find a seat.  their familiarity with one another made me sense the feeling of being from away a little deeper. 

When I arrive in Randazzo it was completely vacant.    No one in the station, no one on the street.  I was imagining tumble weeds and spaghetti westerns.  There was absolutely no one.  Everything was shut down, silent. Not a single car went by, no one was walking, not one single window or door was without a shutter, there were no cats in the alleys.  I kept looking over my shoulder.  It felt a bit creepy.  For a little while I had the same nervous feeling I had when the lights in the basement where turned off before I finished going up the stairs when I was little, like something scary was going to grab my ankles and drag me some place dark and eat me. 

Almost the entire town was made from lava.  The buildings were charcoal gray, the houses were charcoal gray, the streets were charcoal gray, the sky was charcoal gray.   It made me wish I was yellow.  I enjoyed thinking about being yellow for a little while but I was fighting an urge to be lazy and that thought took over everything.  "I could never live here."  I said to myself out loud.  I had to force myself to walk every street and followed every brown tourist sign.  The entire time the only sign of life that I saw was purple cauliflower on the sidewalk.  The town was beautiful though.  Sad with all its greyness but architecturally beautiful.  The grid of streets were named after other cities or regions in Italy.  I found one named after Abruzzo.  This was a new seed for daydreaming about visiting there soon to see where my people are from.  I wondered all I could before the rain.

I was a little relieved when the rain came. I now had a good solid excuse to do nothing.  I headed back to the station to settle in for a two hour wait. Unlike the rest of the town, the station was a little brighter inside.  Paneled, stuccoed, and aspestus tiles, it  was a completely unremarkable Mussolini building.  It had utility but nothing about it was beautiful, not even attractive.  The walls were lined with bright red plastic chairs bolted down to black metal frames, one next to another.  I chose one exactly in the middle and settled in for the wait.  Other than the sound of my breathing and the pounding of the rain on the roof, the building was silent and empty. My brain felt like I had just been swimming for hours, blank and tranquil.  No thoughts were taking hold.  I was relaxed and patient.

The scrap of train wheels approached and a cloud of loud was entering the building.  Italian adolescents in transport from school filled every chair and sound  poured in like water into a jar, filling every inch of the room. The sudden sound felt confusing next to my tranquil time alone.  It was like being woken up suddenly from a sweet sleep.  I took out my camera and quietly photographed them.  They were now a chorus of whispers, speaking behind their raised hands and staring at me, pointing.  I slipped my camera back into my pocket feeling self conscious of their notice.  Three girls sat next to me and piled on one another for a group shot-one with their arm out holding the camera at a distance.  Across a group of boys did the same.  Another group held their phones the same way that I had held my camera and photographed me.  The three girls that were on my left now leaned toward me, a new group coming to sit on my right.  Soon standing in front of me was the remaining mixed dozen of teenage boys and girls.  I was completely surrounded on all sides with my body pressed against the plastic back of my chair.  Screaming and pointing standing so close that I wish I could swollow somethng that would make me small.  A small girl standing pressed her legs against mine moving them a little to the side, not giving me enough room to look down at the ground if I wanted.  She was the spokes person for the unruly gang.  Leaning down she fired questions at me, I could feel her breath on my skin.  In the seconds that she was consulting with her friends I was contemplating what a wonderful photo this would be if I could take out my camera and how completely unintimidating these little people were individully but as a group in such close proximity I was finding it hard to swallow and I was flushed red.  Honestly I found them hard to understand, the yelling, the dialect, the stubbornness of the interrogation made communicating difficult.

I asked first if I could take out a note book for writing.  They stepped back so I could lean down under my chair to get my bag.  As soon as the bag was on my lap, they stepped back in.   I was hoping that this would calm things some, perhaps lower the volume of everything.  It did not.  The leader wrote and all the rest spoke at the same speed and the same volume.  They scolded me telling me to cancel the picture.  When she asked a question, everyone waited for a skinny second for me to answer before spitting out more questions and demands.  I tried to write what I could but another would continue with a question.  When I spoke there was more quiet but never lasting.  I explained that I photographed people that were waiting.  It went on and on.  Then something happened, it may have been a sound outside, in the mind numbing loudness of their voices I missed it but it all stopped.  They were silent and like the bottle had been knocked over and the water was silently running out.  they filed out, leaving me again with the sound rain of the roof, the sound of my breath and the resonennce of my heart pounding in my head and my chest.  The ringing in my ears lasted for hours.  My hands shook,  I took my camera out of my pocket, looked at the picture, smiled knowing that there was a snowballs chance in hell that I was going to delete it.  I held down the the button to take a photo, observed the light, I slid my figertip over it, "I have got to cover this thing." I said out loud.  The words bounced in the empty room like a ball and fell silent on the floor.