Palermo

Palermo. How can I not love Palermo.

My taxi driver puts his foot down as if his life depended on it. It doesn’t. Nor does mine. Still, he negotiates the 45 minute trip from my hotel in the Via Vittorio Emanuele to the airport in half an hour, and he even has time to let a lady cross four or five (it’s impossible to be precise) lanes of traffic at a leisurely stroll, exclaiming: ‘Bella donna!’ To me she looks perfectly average…

Palermo, my taxi driver tells me, is stuck in the 1950s. And he’s right. Yesterday, Valentina, the lovely girlfriend or fiancee or possibly wife of Giuseppe, patron of the Carlo V restaurant on the Piazza Bologni, told me the same thing, except she’d moved Palermo about one decade further on in her mind, into the ‘60s. She’s right too. I’m sure somebody at the wedding I attended on Saturday told me it was the ‘70s Palermo had got stuck in. They’re all right in their own way. What Palermo resolutely, idiosyncratically, chaotically, infuriatingly and endearingly isn’t, is ‘now’. It’s not a ‘happening place’ they all tell me, it just is. As it has been, for decades. 

You realise something different long before you arrive. In fact, I first notice it in the ‘queue’ for my connecting flight from Rome to Palermo. It’s more of a throng, but that’s not what I notice, because it’s hardly atypical of Italy in general: ‘fare la fila’ or lining up in an orderly fashion is not exactly the Latin way. No, what catches my eye is the eyebrows. Sicilian men have apparently, when precisely I do not know, discovered the grooming of eyebrows, and taken to it with panache. It’s the kind of confidence - sometimes a touch narcissistic, though mostly benign and often heartfelt - with which they do everything. Where else in the world do you see a young jovial barista at the airport coffee bar tease his much older, much bulkier colleague, by kissing him on the cheek mid-flow during a busy crockery-clanking morning rush hour shift. They all kiss each other, Sicilian men, and the youths walk around arm in arm. It doesn’t mean a thing, other than friendship, masculine affection, and it’s just one of the many, many things that endear you to them. 

The warmth and friendliness is another. On my arrival at the hotel, I’m greeted like a long-lost friend by Ugo, the most sanguine receptionist I have ever met or seen in action. While checking me in, he gleefully sends two separate gaggles of teenage girls looking for the restaurant in the wrong direction and then calls them back just before they end up outside on the pavement, and steers them right. From now on in, every time he sees me he waves at me with genuine joy, and when I finally check out again, he shakes my hand and makes me feel sincerely sad to leave. I’ve only been here four nights.

Back at the Carlo V, Valentina and Giuseppe talk to me about the things that make their lives difficult. The taxes, the bureaucracy. The fact that the restoration works of the Piazza their restaurant looks out on and should have use of for its tables are scheduled to last two years. Their friend Nino tells me, in Sicily, everybody robs you. He does mean that literally, but it’s not the kind of robbing you might be worried about. In fact the opposite. One street vendor comes chasing after me once he realises he’s accidentally overcharged me fifty cents on a panino, to hand me back the correct change. There are, clearly, parts of Palermo that are best avoided, if you’re out and about alone at night. But that’s the case wherever you go. There are parts of Swindon I wouldn’t want to get lost in. Coming to think of it, I probably wouldn’t want to get lost in Swindon full stop. But Palermo feels surprisingly safe. Perhaps it is the fact that crime here has a history of being organised that renders you as an individual less exposed. Nobody talks about the mafia. The first time I come across the word locally is in the programme to a play based on the writings of Panormito Michele Perriero who was born here, lived here all his life and died here, who, so I learn, loved his city, who serenaded and berated it in equal measure. This programme piece about I nostri tempi, a collage assembled entirely of his words and staged, apparently in his vein and spirit, as a series of absurdist encounters of the near-eponymous, now deceased, character M. with his cellist brother, his mother, his much younger girlfriend, and a black-clad Arlequino type figure who may be the Angel of Death, refers to Palermo as the city both ‘cradled’ and ‘abused’ by the mafia.

I don’t sense its presence. I once spent two weeks in a village in Reggio Calabria and there you just knew that everything was being controlled. There you could really sense it, on a daily basis. Not even necessarily as a threat, but as something to be aware, perhaps wary of. Here you don’t. Here you see buildings that are falling apart because they haven’t seen any maintenance or renovation since the second world war, even though many are clearly inhabited; here you come across rubbish lying in the streets everywhere and piling up in town squares on a Sunday; here you can step out onto the small balcony of your hotel room and look out onto a street scene straight from a black-and-white picture, to have the nostalgia rather ruined by an old man casually lowering his Fiat’s window and chucking out a handful of unwanted napkins left over from his luncheon pizzetta; and here there are stray dogs everywhere, and the evidence they leave behind on the pavement that you’ll tread into if you’re not careful. 

But here you can also take a bus from the astonishing, awe-inspiring mosaic-covered cathedral of Monreale and find yourself cast in a half hour comedy involving a ticket stamping machine which is supposed to validate your ticket and a whole series of characters, both indigenous and foreign: the machine sort of works, but there’s a knack to it. You have to take either another ticket, or better still a slightly thicker piece of paper of the same shape and size and put it in the slot with your ticket for it to respond. So for the entire duration of the trip, packed with high school kids being merrily chatted up by some middle-aged men (one of their sons or grandsons looking on in silent wonder and with some bemusement), a bundle of tourists, a very aged ‘anziano’ and an assortment of commuters, this ‘magic ticket’, a blank strip of near-cardboard paper, gets handed around so everyone can, after several failed attempts without it, stamp their ticket, which makes everyone happy even though you get the impression that the appearance of ticket inspectors on this bus is rare.

Monreale is a highlight (with an excellent audioguide well worth its €5 price tag), as is the Palazzo dei Normanni with its gorgeous Cappella Palatina (and, not to be missed, though the entrance is tucked away a bit, behind the gift shop through which you will, indeed, exit, a current exhibition of contemporary sculptures by Tommaso Davino on the intriguing theme of the Knight Templars’ arrival in pairs on horseback at the court of Sicily). The Catacombs are meant to be a must-see, though I didn’t, and the Teatro Massimo is genuinely impressive: they do guided tours in English as well as Italian, so you don’t even have to sit through three-and-a-half hours of Boris Godunov to get a fine flavour of the architecture.

My own highlight though is being taken by Giuseppe on the back of his Vespa to join him, Valentina and Nino for a drink down near the port, where we have a few bottles of wine and the bestest of chinwags. We kiss goodbye all of us and promise to stay in touch, and somehow I reckon that in this case we will. 

I make it to the airport in one piece a full fifteen minutes early, thanks to my cab driver who loves his job and his car. It’s done nearly 400,000 miles, he proudly points out, and is still going strong. He’s been a cab driver since the age of nineteen, now he’s 34. He tells me: once you find something you love doing you just have to do it. And I’m with him on that, all the way. I’m glad he’s got me to the airport fifteen minutes early, because the throng here for passing through security is more of a crush and takes nearly an hour. There’s some audible tongue-smacking snogging going on, between two parting lovers behind me, and then a fair bit of brazen queue-jumping at the gate. All of it is forgiven, for this is Palermo.

I’m in Milan, now, waiting for my connecting flight back to London. Already everything feels a bit bland, and a bit cold, a bit ‘global’ and oh so normal by comparison. Don’t get me wrong: I love London, I look forward to coming home whenever I’ve been away. But for almost exactly every reason other than those for which I love London, I have to, just have to, love Palermo.

buttons

it was an
easy
mistake to make

true, there were only
two buttons

one on the left
one on the right

they had been there
for ages, the same, now for
decades

he had never been in any
doubt
as to which one was which
it had been pointed out to him
and they were clearly
labelled
they hadn’t changed
in years

some time in the distant past
nobody remembered exactly how long ago
forty fifty sixty years maybe
near the beginning
one
incumbent
had insisted: look
i sleep
on the left
you need to move both these buttons from the right hand side of the bed
to the left
and you need to
switch them around
otherwise
i will not be held responsible for the
consequences
if one morning i just
accidentally
reach for the one on the left
it is
only natural

so they’d sent for the man and he came and he
moved them from the one side of the bed to the other and he
switched them around
just as they were
exactly the same only
mirrored
and he tested them (as a dry run of course)
and they worked and
since then
there was never any
question
of getting them wrong
they were
always
the same:
snooze on the left
nuclear on the right
it was not
hard
to tell them apart

even if you had just been woken up by an
alarm
(that word now seems ironic)
and wanted
by definition
to stay
half asleep
for a while
you could not fail to
identify
them
bright red the one
silvery grey with a pale blue
symbol
the other
one was big and bulky and you had to
hit it
quite hard
while the other was smooth, barely a bump, and you just had to
stroke it
but still

he was
only human
was he not
it could happen to
anybody

so who can blame him
this morning
at seven
wishing nothing more than
to snuggle just that little longer cosy in his dreamy pillow
for pressing
very much
the wrong
button

heike has something going for herself

for a long time it looks doubtful if anything is going to happen at all.

the gig at the teatro montevergini in palermo’s old town is scheduled for ten but by about ten to eleven i and the two young women at the opposite end of what feels less like a theatre than a latter-day youth club are still the only people in the room apart from the sound guy, and so when the man who appropriately looks a bit like a youth worker breezes in to talk to us, i half assume he’s going to tell us the gig has been cancelled.

it hasn’t. they are having ‘some difficulties’ backstage and are going to go on a bit late, is that a problem for us? seeing that we’ve already been waiting for nearly an hour we all three and without conferring appear to reason that a few minutes more now are neither here nor there so, no, we do not have problem with that.

another man joins us for a short while, then gets up and leaves again and then suddenly, more or less out of nowhere, a whole bunch of people appear, followed almost immediately by the trio who take the stage and launch themselves unannounced and unequivocally into their set.

the backstage difficulty may well have been simply that they’d mislaid their audience and now that they’ve found it they reckon there’s clearly no time to waste, and you’re with them on that, not least because the wait has been worth it.

heike has the giggles is an unlikely name for a band whose sound picks up approximately where the white stripes left off and brings in a touch of kt tunstall on the way to an identity quite of their own, but what convinces from first note to last is their unfussy commitment to direct impact instrumentation that leaves no room for doubt and doesn’t want to be argued with.

in light of their busy touring schedule criss-crossing the breadth and considerable length of italy and an impressive track record of supporting some fairly major acts, combined with the fact that they’ve been doing this for some five years now and have just released their second album, their solid delivery hardly comes as a surprise. what’s more puzzling perhaps is that they’re not yet much, much bigger, filling this kind of joint to the hilt with rocking fans. perhaps ‘yet’ is still the operative term. certainly guido casadio is easily one of the most compelling percussionists i’ve ever seen and heard bashing a drum kit with absorbed passion and acute precision. emanuela drei’s guitar as well as matteo grandi’s bass bring a level of depth and dimension to their music that often catches you gratifyingly unawares and although the venue’s sound system didn’t quite render it justice and i couldn’t make out any of the lyrics, emanuela’s vocals certainly come across as the kind that have something to say.

the set ends, the three take a bow then give us an encore and the small but now enthusiastic crowd seem genuinely pleased to have made it to the gig after all. 

if you’re in italy between now and may, chances are they’ll be playing a venue near you; anywhere else, watch out for heike. giggles or not, she’s got plenty to be merry about…

http://www.heikehasthegiggles.com/main/

http://heikehasthegiggles.tumblr.com/

https://www.facebook.com/heikehasthegiggles/

when god closes a door he opens a window. 

then he slams another door shut, opens the skylight, lets a bit of sunshine in, draws down the blinds but leaves the window ajar so when it starts raining everything gets wet, opens the patio door, whacks two more windows shut (one breaks in the process), messes with the locks so your keys won’t work, dismantles some of your furniture, maybe plays around with your puter for a bit, deleting one or two files you haven’t backed up yet, and then sits there quiet and still in all his astonishing beauty. 

sometimes god’s behaviour is unnervingly similar to a that of an unruly four-year-old…

the young man with the old suitcase

the young man with the old suitcase
has an unusual style
unusual but
successful

his trousers are grey and black speckled wool and his shirt is a very dark brown
so dark it almost seems charcoal
just not quite
it sits firm but not tight on his compact sinewy body
with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows

he must have at least three friends because he wears
on his left wrist
a vintage watch with a light brown strap and
three friendship bracelets of three different types in three different colours

on his little left finger is a plain silver ring that might just be white gold but probably isn’t
and on his right ring finger there’s a broad silver ring
matte
with two dark grooves, one each side by the edge
it’s impossible to tell whether this is a symbol of friendship or love, or just
an adornment

his face is small but endearing
a little mousy, in a nice way
and his hair is dark blond and probably smells of
apple
(on second thought it probably doesn’t, it probably smells a little of musk from a decent but not overpriced shampoo he used just a short while
ago)
in his left ear he has a tiny diamond-type stud and another, slightly bigger one
under his lip, not in the centre, but to the right, which is both a little unusual and
also
not unattractive

the young man with the old suitcase peels the foil off a lid of a tub of pasta and releases from it a tiny black fork, he unfolds it and opens the tub and slowly starts eating the pasta. every so often he looks up at the panel above the seats opposite to check on the progress of his district line train: wimbledon to the centre of town. when he does so his small but endearing forehead frowns into four even folds, curious rather than worried. his eyes are a little uncertain but mild and you think any moment now he is going to smile.
but he doesn’t.
he seems quite content, and the pasta, while not exactly delicious, is clearly doing the trick.

he’s a fastidious eater and he doesn’t like it when some of the sauce or dressing or whatever it is on his pasta gets on his fingers and he doesn’t have a napkin to wipe his hands and i’m with him on that because i don’t like that either when it happens to me. he doesn’t lick his fingers and i’m glad he doesn’t because that, on a tube train, would be both unhygienic and crude and
unnecessarily
sensual.

on his lap he has a parka that’s black or a very dark grey with a brownish bit of fur around the hood the way you normally see in the winter. it’s august. but it has been raining a lot and although it’s not raining now it is going to rain again soon. he doesn’t want the sauce or the dressing or whatever it is that he has on his fingers from his pasta to get on the parka and i’m with him on that too, because that’s just a nuisance.

he finishes his pasta and puts the little black fork into the tub and replaces the lid and now
he doesn’t know what to do
he looks around for a bin but there isn’t one and so he puts the tub
carefully down
between his feet behind the old suitcase
that stands on the floor

his boots which are ankle high and probably leather or suede are sheepskin or fur-lined but it’s hard to see them properly because they’re
hidden
behind the suitcase

i wonder what’s in that suitcase

it’s light brown, almost beige, made of leather, with two belt buckles and straps to fasten it shut and no wheels or extendable handle, it’s
the kind of suitcase my grandmother would have taken to italy
from switzerland
on a train
it’s about that size too, a third the size of a normal big suitcase, the kind of case you’d use for a short trip or a weekend
but it’s loosely, sparingly packed and rather than bulge on the sides it actually has
some slack

maybe it’s empty.

i feel tempted to lift it up just to check, but that would surely alarm him

i wonder where he’s going with his empty
or half-empty
suitcase
and i wonder where he’s from with his successful albeit unusual style that’s a little fastidious but still very cool, maybe
eastern europe

a man with no style at all but possibly a very big heart enters the carriage and sits down nearer the doors and starts talking on the phone in polish. a flicker of recognition registers on the young man’s face, but he doesn’t really look polish to me and also maybe i’m imagining this having just thought that he might be from eastern europe. maybe he’s czech. what else is there. latvian?

i should probably just lean forward and say
excuse me young man
you have an unusual style that is very successful
where are you from?
and what, pray, if anything, is in your suitcase?

but i don’t because we’re now at earl’s court and i need
to get off
so i leave him to his style and his case and his
mystery


i hope
he doesn’t
forget
to pick up
the tub
when he leaves
and bin it

(because that would be simply
uncouth)

the post office in the earl’s court road

the post office in the
earl’s court road
is not
a place
for
a hurry

come not here in a fret or a flutter or
eager
to wing your most urgent missive to a lover, or to
dispatch
a parcel of import to a man already impatient in
downtown manhattan

think not
in a moment
to flit in and out
like a breeze, like a
butterfly on a frolic
to pick up a form D1 and maybe drop off
a card of
congratulations
to your aunt
in kolkata (who’s getting married
for the first time, you’re pleased,
at an age little short of
seventy-eight)

no

come here
to
ease
away
the
rush
of the day

experience here
time
standing still

relish
for an hour or so
(or so it feels)
what it feels like
for
nothing
to
happen
at all

relax
into the
zone
where
things do not
move
or if they do they do so
slowly

be content with the gift
of
being
as you watch
friendly figures behind glass
peeling labels
off foils and
gently
appending them to
envelopes marked
‘large’

see
with what
deliberation
a fact such as that that an envelope is
‘large’
is established as hands
in slow-motion
slide said envelope through a size guide
backwards and forwards
just to make sure

chuckle
inside
as just when you thought
a number is about to flash up to call someone forward
that position at the counter now gets
deserted
and instead of three out of nine being open
there are now
only two:
let it
warm
the cockles of your heart and sense that
glow of
generosity
as you say to yourself:
‘a cup of tea now
that will be nice. good for her.’

as coins are carefully counted and
bubble bags weighed
and forms filled in
in front of you far far ahead in the queue
let your mind
wander, let it
expand
into the farthest spheres of existence itself and
contemplate
how
wondrous it is
that in a world so
obsessed
with now
you now
have a now
that may well last
forever

so
come to the post office in the earl’s court road
and
enjoy
while you can

eternity

here
for a while