#129 Reflections and memories from my Sicilian kitchen table

Hello friend,

Recently, I’ve been looking over bits and pieces of my writing as a way of redrafting while searching for material I can share with you here. I have a completed travel writing memoir that has been finished for a few years, but I don’t know if I want to publish it as I feel my style has changed too much. I’d be embarrassed to publish it as it looks pretty different from my current voice. So, I might return to the material and share some with you.

The memoir is titled Sicilian Descent, and it is all about my Sicilian origins and my first year living in Sicily. Many of the people I mentioned have since passed away, but I have still changed their names to protect their identities. The landscape of my little Sicilian village of Sinagra has changed a bit, but the sights and sounds are still very similar to this present moment.

I hope you enjoy this small trip to Sicily with me.

Sitting at my kitchen table at my Sinagra home, I open the kitchen window onto the balcony, which peers out onto the next building. There is a balcony directly in front, part of a much smaller house with three rooms, one on top of the other. I feel immediately constricted, yet I’m thankful that my house isn’t as small as my neighbour’s, and, without realising it, Sinagra’s voice seeps inside me.

Olivia, a Romanian woman, lives in this house in front of my kitchen window. She continually battles cheeky neighbourhood children who play practical jokes on her. They ride their bicycles past her front door, which opens directly onto a courtyard

Next door is an abandoned house infested with nesting pigeons, who make their homes between the bricks in the old wall. I hear their amorous cooing every morning when I go to the bathroom. If I open the window, I see a nesting bird looking back at me, who must think I’m nesting, too. I don’t open the window as I feel she would invade my privacy and hers. I may be surrounded, but I can retreat into my own space. Yet I realise if I take one step outside, I’m inevitably on public display. I am overcome by the murmurs of those around me, which subtly become a part of my internal voice.

Olivia is chatting with another neighbour on the other side of the shutters. Her heavy Romanian accent easily mixes with the local dialect. She is a robust woman who lives with a Sinagrese man who left his wife after twenty-five years of marriage. Until recently, they were in Milan but moved here a few months ago, into his mother’s house, while renovating an old house in the countryside.

During the summer, the elderly mother comes from Milan to stay in her Sinagra house with Lucia, her blind daughter. Lucia navigates the stairs with surprising ease and sits on a chair most of the day, crocheting or doing other work with her hands. I hear her story after observing the silver-haired daughter reading a Braille book with thick pages, caressing the words like someone spreading their hands out on a keyboard.

I always assumed she was born blind, but I’m touched by the truth of how she lost her sight as a child. She fell, hitting her head and developing an infection which, left untreated, caused her to lose sight in both eyes.

Our other neighbours are an elderly pensioner couple, Leone and Tindara, whose front door opens into the street next to ours. Sometimes, I hear Tindara singing slightly off-key at the top of her voice as she dusts her mats from her balcony onto the street. Her singing voice is not unlike her speaking voice, which is loud and brash.

I hear Tindara a mile away gossiping loudly with another neighbour, fretting over her newborn grandson or calling her husband. She was a housekeeper to the Baron Salleo, who lived in the grand mansion a little down our street. I can easily imagine her fussing over the baron’s domestic affairs.

Leone, Tindara’s husband, is a rotund, gruff-voiced man. He is a dawdler who spends his retirement pottering around, not doing much. He enjoys occasional walking in the piazza or driving in his three-wheeled Ape trolley truck. The truck is one of those strange, now-vintage mini vehicles invented in the post–World War Two period to avoid paying motor registration.

Since the Ape has two back wheels and one big front wheel with little more than a handlebar to steer, they can hardly be classified as cars, so owners pay much less for insurance. When not driving around in his Ape, Leone often sits outside his front door on a fragile straw chair, which supports his girth surprisingly well, and talks to the people who go by.

When it is hot in the summer, he will poke his head out of his burrow to catch a cool breeze. When no one walks by, Leone sits and sits and sits, staring into space and perhaps entering into a deep state of meditation.

Tindara’s gossiping partner is a softly-spoken, kind-faced woman called Marianna, who lives on the other side of the street, directly across from our front door. Marianna is continually attending to the plants that have slowly taken over the balconies of her multiple-storey home, transforming it into an exotic treehouse. It requires tremendous work, and she is continuously sweeping, trimming and watering.

Marianna’s husband is a neatly groomed and polite man. He used to be a chef but now leads the everyday leisurely life of the retired in Sicily. This involves walking, talking in the square, and fussing over grandchildren.

Occasionally, I bump into him as he passes my house. We sometimes chat, and he proudly tells me about his grandson, who plays the piano and studied music at the Conservatory of Messina. He also told me how he’d been to Australia and often asked me where I was from. He stayed in Perth and vaguely remembered the central suburbs. He stopped asking after I mentioned the new suburbs he didn’t recognise.

As I write about my neighbours, I smile at myself as I, too, am being gradually sucked into this intricate web of communal gossip. I have picked up bits and pieces of information from overheard conversations and chinwags to create the tapestry of personalities around me. Perhaps I am becoming Sicilian after all.

I recall my grandparents’ long-winded stories and the complex connections, and I am amused by how their narrative is still firmly in place. This elaborate embroidery becomes ever more ornate at Sicily’s Baroque heart. Everyone knows each other’s parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters. They are familiar with everyone’s tragedies, love affairs, happiness, wealth or lack of wealth. In these small towns, everyone sees each other daily and gets to know each other’s personalities. They know who is hardworking, who isn’t, who is a snob, who is a drunkard, who is a criminal, who is honest and who is all talk and no action.

This underlying social shorthand creates a healthy sense of belonging and protection. Everyone knows one another’s voices, and people outside the community are spotted immediately. It is not only a complex network of gossip but also a secure interconnection strengthened by family, religion, and cultural ties, a strange double knot that, in turn, increases the common bond in the extended family community that has always existed in Sicily.

Small-town Sicily has no skeletons in the closet, as a distinct soprannome or nickname identifies everybody. These simple and often coarse caricatures have existed for generations and can pinpoint members of a particular family, distinctive physical features or personality traits, or are earned after a significant event.

A nickname is very quickly gained as Sicilians are extraordinarily observant and judgemental. Don’t dare try to tick them off, or you will be christened and branded behind your back with a name your children will most likely inherit. The soprannomi are the secret code of a small town’s collective social knowledge.

People are identified more frequently by their nicknames than by last names. Some are proud of their soprannome; others are embarrassed and downright peeved, so they are used behind people’s backs even if they are hardly a secret.

A whole world of these ‘ingurie’ is known in the local dialect. These names label every part of the social landscape, from the nobility to the working class. Some indicate the profession a particular family has worked in for generations.

Some nicknames are superficial, speaking to a particular physical feature like la pillusa (the hairy lady), friumentina (literally hair the colour of wheat, i.e. blonde), menzaricci (half ear) and nasolungo (long nose).

These creative pet names have their sense of musicality and are a language unto themselves. It is not uncommon for them to be handed down from father to son, and, as such, many have lost their original meaning through time and with the evolution of the Italian language and people’s lives. Names like giatman, puranca, callido, parasacco, sgaddati, and u monci have been used without anyone knowing their true meaning. 

Not everyone has the honour or curse of having one, depending on your point of view. These names illustrate people's unique relationship with one another and how Sicily has created its own concise and impenetrable social dialect.

I also earned a nickname, which I discovered clumsily one morning at the local markets while negotiating a crowd scrambling around different stalls. I often see faces I recognise yet cannot put names to. Passing in front of an older man whose face seemed familiar, yet I couldn’t place it, I heard him say ‘Australiana’ under his breath. I kept on walking, pretending I didn’t understand him.

Hearing someone identify me as ‘the Australian’ felt like I was being ridiculed. I thought I wouldn’t mind having a soprannome, yet being pointed out as a foreigner by people who don’t know what it means to be an Australian felt humiliating.

At least he didn’t call me Americana. I suppose it’s a step in the right direction, as once, Sicilians dumped all people who came from overseas and spoke English under this title.

The soundscape of Sinagra effortlessly melds into me. Music is playing loudly, and a young girl is singing along, repeating the chorus repeatedly. I hear the sounds of workers renovating a nearby home and the steel sparks created by metal cutters, which are as rasping as the jagged edges they leave behind.

During the summer holidays, the sound of the local brass band blends with whatever music I’m playing on my stereo, forming strange hybrids of opera, pop, folk and rock. During the first winter rains, the thick droplets explode on the thin perspex that covers my neighbour’s balcony as the cooing pigeons take cover in their hidden nests.

I listen for the loud, high-pitched humming of the postman’s motorcycle as he weaves his way through the small side streets and alleyways. I hear him stopping, starting, turning and revving the small motor as he delivers the mail. He slips letters through the outside shutters of my loungeroom window; they are caught in the space between the external screens and the glass of the windows.

We need a letterbox, as I always find my mail either dusty, covered in cobwebs, wet or hidden in nooks and strange places. We even find electricity bills tucked under the windscreen wipers of our car as our postman is lazy and knows my husband’s car.

My husband has his office downstairs, and I hear people ring the doorbell, their harsh voices making their way to my ears. There are so many loud, booming voices here in Sicily; it’s as if they lack volume control or no one has ever taught them the subtleties of speech. Women often have booming male voices, perhaps caused by too much yelling. One lady I hear has a voice as big and sprawling as the mountains around her. Her daughter hilariously picked up the same energy from her mother’s bounding voice. But the daughter seems stuck at a higher altitude: she sounds like a cross between Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop.

I often sit to read in my lounge, opening the window while keeping the shutters closed for privacy. I’m distracted by the chimes of the church bell, which announces vespers or rings the death knell for a funeral. The medieval clock tower marks when I count each beat on my fingers, often missing the first chime and carelessly losing an hour of my life.

In front of my house is a small chapel still used by the church for catechism classes. It is often filled with hyperactive school children or elderly female pensioners saying the rosary. Today, some elderly women gather to dedicate their afternoon to the Virgin Mary. Their warbling voices drone out the rosary with an arrogant persistence. I make out individual words of the Hail Mary, their voices making the prayers sound like one long chant. It echoes back to me: ‘Ave Maria piena di Grazie… il signore è con te … tu sei benedetta … pane quotidian… liberaci … tentazione … male … AMEN.’

At night, I close everything before I climb into bed, leaving the shutters ajar for air, and the sounds find their way to me again. As I lie half-asleep, Sinagra’s night-time echoes whisper in my ears. The old buildings rest in the stillness, their age and dust giving the silence an ancient quality.

This tranquillity is often broken by the revs of a scooter speeding down the empty street at one a.m. The sound cuts through the sleep which had possessed me. There is nothing to be made out while staring into the dimness of the early morning. Seeing nothing in the shadows, I turn over, close my eyes, and hope that the daybreak will come.

Walking towards my front door after grocery shopping the following day, I am met by some distinctive smells which waft in the narrow side streets. In summer, the back roads have fried eggplant, sweet peppers, and odours. Every morning and afternoon, there is the smell of espresso coffee.

When clothes are hung out to dry from the balconies, there is the aroma of scented rose fabric softener. My contribution is adding new scents that have never inhabited the air here before, like curry, stir-fried vegetables, and soy sauce. It feels empowering to contribute to the different perfumes in the townscape of Sinagra.

This is all I have on my mind for now.

Until next time.

Rochelle

Sometimes, I talk about Sicily.

Other times, I talk about whatever is on my mind.

My writing is always about lightning, the mental load and sharing something of my thoughts with you.

I hope you enjoy the randomness of A Load Off My Mind. 

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