Il Dolce Far Niente (The Sweetness of Doing Nothing)
04.08.2024 Sabastian Fardell
04.08.2024 Sabastian Fardell
Children cling to the back of three-wheeled utilities as they rush the tapering, empty streets. Flashes of cherry, mustard and azure parade in a perfect farcical of mutual understanding. A kind of language only spoken by eyes that meet above cobblestones when distance recedes, and then, in a lance-less joust, vehicles pass and the conversation is over. Shop fronts and trattorias alike maintain the deception of closed doors and empty tables. Their perfect guise revealed only by the smoke rising from a butted cigarette.
The mid afternoon is a confusing place to the uninformed foreigner on the island of Panarea. What is ingrained in you as a section of the day that is ripe for eateries and an assortment of beverages is now served to you on an empty spoon with an empty glass. Parched and deviceless, you wander the port for hints of engagement, wherein you may hold an eye of interest as far as sprouting the assumption that this person may have something to trade with you. What goods they do have are concealed within a perfect frame of time. A portion of tradition unreachable by limbs, by words or by currency. This is a rest earned by the centuries of philosophy and of industry, passed through hands covered in scales, salt and cement render. The Spanish call it Siesta, the French may refer to the Code du Travail and in Italy--Riposo.
There is a certain kind of beauty that moors itself to surrendering your duties. It’s the same kind of beauty that leans softly on the arc of dawn, the kind of beauty that sways in the heat as the sea-breeze and a lambent drape perform a left box turn, the kind of beauty that mimics the crease of blushing cheek in a fit of ceaseless joy. I suppose in any case that it is romantic, the idea of committing to attention, invoking stillness--only in that place do you locate purpose or memory--and equally, I suppose that this is why we do it. What better to encourage your rest than a moment of recollecting the fervent commuter frenzy of months gone by? The schools of travellers and excursionists swimming shoulder to shoulder, right up out of the Tyrrhenian and onto Porto Di Panarea. Hearing the stentorian rumble of their hooves clattering the oak of the dock, feeling the warp of old Italia beneath them. The time where catamarans and cabin cruisers cascade from the shoreline, halfway to Stromboli, in perfect formation, as the harbour pilot tips his hat to yet another day resigning.
It’s almost hard to imagine now, sitting in the bottom of a piccolo glass, trading ideas with the shop dog and a stray cat with just enough fingers and toes between us to count occupants still residing. The prevailing question being why they’re still here. The baker is hard pressed filling the cannoli cabinet, the hotel staff are now only cleaning up after themselves, there’s barely a wet hull in sight. In the morning, if you listen hard enough, you may be able to convince yourself that you’ve heard the song of the fishmonger, in harmony with a calling gull, as he bobbles his cart along the alley. “Pesce fresco! Pesce fresco!” he calls, as a kind of summoning, as if the waft of the Mediterranean’s finest and the promise of another day wasn't enough.
You can almost hear too, the old tug ticking the engine over at dawn; spitting, moaning, reluctantly groaning its way into service. There’s a thought that the tireless murmurs of the abandoned morning streets, beneath the fishmonger and the tugboat, are trying to signify some kind of resolve. Like the faint chatter that fills a chapel after mass - indistinct yet inextricably linked to the sensation of a time concluding. There’s a thought too, that if you listen hard enough to an empty street for long enough, you can make out the sound of just about anything.
Of the wet hulls that are visible, only a select few appear ripe for commandeering and I figure if the town centre has me coercing cats and consulting cobblestones, then I best be seeking something a little more life aquatic. From what I’d been told briefly on the ferry, Stromboli, despite its active status as a volcano, is a "perfectly safe and breathtakingly beautiful” place to visit and Grotta dell’amore (Cave of Love), despite the prominent olfactory repugnance of the nearby Solfatara Lisca Bianca, has an “infectious atmosphere of honest and enduring romance".
In the way of convincing, I needed little more than a nod in the right direction. In the way of means to get there, however, I needed a skipper and so much I did not have. Along the port, right before the first ladder, where the ‘taxi’s’ queue (while referring to golf carts as opposed to sedans), there’s a quintessential, plastic service hire stand with sandwich board to match--both spectacularly clad in blue signage with skirtings of red and yellow, in a classic primary colour graphic design feast of the mid-2000’s. While I can't be exactly sure, I believe it was somewhere thereabouts that the mind ran away with the task at hand--the pretty little snapshots, the appetite for adventure, the primed sense of fulfilment--all pleasantly colliding in a squib compelling enough to elude the reality that the stand was in fact empty and the phone number plastered across the front was ringing out. Perplexed and slightly deflated, I wandered back to the cafe to look down a local nose, as if the sign may read differently.
After consulting the waitress she pointed to a man sitting in the shade of the pergola, at the furthest boundary of the cafe, his expression gilded by dappled light and a plume of smoke, indicating that he was the man who would take me out on the ocean. I approached him as you would a sleeping animal, cautious, apparent enough to avoid baulking, yet soft enough to keep the bristles down should he be caught off guard anyways. As my focal point sharpened and the leaky lumens through the slats revealed this character to me, I couldn’t help but recreate this man completely as a subject. His skin was the kind of supple hide that only comes from a series of dedication to a certain arena; to the resignation of the idea that an occupation is something that you choose and to the animation of that acceptance in full living, breathing form. He was the binding contract between the sun and the sea--both signatories scribing their mark right there on his face. The sun had sunk his gentle brown eyes deep into the orbital cavity and the sea had forged furrows in sequential straights like fringing reefs, from eyebrow to hairline.
As I mapped his anthropology from the evidence whittled into his mug, I reached the resoundingly dense thicket of white facial hair that sat atop his cigarette, the perpetuity of smoke having yellowed a token portion on the right-hand side. My analytics were quickly derailed when the top lip of the study moved and murmured as his drawn eyes looked beyond his rimless spectacles, in my direction, in what I translated to be, “what do you want?”. Reasonably startled myself, I began to indicate, pointing to the service stand, how I wanted to see Stromboli and the Grotta and before I had finished my pitch, he disengaged and spoke off into the distance. Seeing the pallor of discourse, the waitress made tracks for the table where she began to converse with the man. She asked him if it was possible to take the boat out, as per my intentions, to which he replied, “niente”. She turned to me and explained that he said that it was too windy and it was dangerous for tourists.
I looked upon the velvet mirror of the ocean's surface and indicated to her that it was an irreverent reason to argue. She launched back in again with a bargaining tone to which he became further removed and replied again, “niente!”. Somewhat disheartened, she turned back to me and relayed that the man said there was a storm coming in later and he didn’t want to be caught out at sea. Having already read the weather report, I reached for my wallet in a bid to coax him with the most persuasive tool man has ever known and in forecasting my actions, he looked at me, calm and stoic, and uttered, “niente”. He butted his cigarette, rose from the table and left the cafe accordingly. The thing was that I knew what he was saying. I knew that “niente" meant “nothing", I just couldn’t accept it. The passivity of his disinterest, the renunciation of his instruction and obligation. It was beguiling. It was coarse and narrow but it was true.
So I suppose I ended up right where I started; welcoming the port beneath me, in pursuit of nothing, and therein I found it.
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