Back in a long ago summer I was working on a remodeling project in the suburbs of the Sicilian town of Marsala, a stunningly beautiful place where Garabaldi’s ‘mille’ made their first landing: the beginning of the work-still-in-progress known as Italian Unification.
Contrary to the myth one hears in Northern Italy, I saw southern Italian’s working hard from six in the morning until four in the afternoon with not much of a break. I recall, after lunch, laying down on the cool tile floor before launching into the next part of the project…and this poem about the often unsung pleasures of manual labour:
Caulk it all up to experience…
I’ve had enough silicone under my nails
To make a fertility goddess of a Hollywood starlette
(or at least to make five clean breasts of it).
You’d think I’d have the bank account
Of a Brazilian plastic surgeon by now…
Fat chance,
Folks don’t pay the big bucks
To have their tiles enhanced.
Will I list this work on my table of discontents?
It could be a Tuesday.
I could be anchored to an anonymous desk
In some downtown gratte-ciel looking out a window that isn’t there
Blinking against no sunlight, thinking:
“Out, out brief candle.”
“out, out.”
“out!”
then, looking down at the shame of clean and idle hands:
“If only I had enough silicone under my nails
To make a fertility goddess of a Hollywood starlette…”
Torano, Italy below the Quarries of the Alpi Apuani
Back story:
In May of 2007 our family moved to the town of Torano in Italy. Torano is a quarry town, the last one between Carrara and some of the oldest marble quarries in Italy. There were two bars, a bakery, and a small convenience store that sold milk, butter, and a few dusty bottles of wine. It was a town that was, for the most part, empty of all but retired people. A few younger couples lived down near the bus stop. The top of the hill was reserved for houses scrupulously tended by stoop-shouldered women and gardens planted and puttered over by silver-haired men.
For the first two months I was recovering from the birth of our daughter and so stayed in the house except for a few brief walks. Later I would push the baby in her stroller to make the loop of the town on the one road that circled through it. At the top of the hill on the sunniest spot there was a bench across from some houses where I would stop and look down the hill at our town and the others below. It was here that I first met Carlito. He was carrying a bag of leaves down from his garden to the dumpster by the side of the road and stopped on the way back to get a look at little Robin. Italians are crazy for babies and Tuscan people are in some sense the quintessential Italians, falling right between the extreme hospitality of people in the south and the blinkered, work-horse mentality of the north.
When I was talking to Carlito I was looking into the sun and noticed only that he had a deeply lined face and spoke haltingly…a Da Vinci drawing of a slightly grizzled old man. Several walks later I noticed that while others asked new questions, he always asked the same ones: “Is it a girl baby or a boy baby?”, “What’s her name?”, “You live in Torano?” After this brief exchange I would head of down the hill to the sound of the 4:30 p.m. detonation of explosives rumbling down from the quarries as regular as the church bells ringing vespers.
The fourth time I saw Carlito, Matthew was with me as we took the baby for her afternoon stroll. Matthew’s Italian is fluent and so he asked Carlito if he had worked in the quarries. Carlito told the story of how he got the dent in his head in a quarry accident when he was 25. Now I saw it, the concavity of the left side of his scull…I suppose that 40 years ago in a provincial Italian hospital there wouldn’t have been much they could do. There may not be much more that they can do now. How do doctors treat accidents that happen between men and 8 ton blocks of stone that make giant drag lines and front-end loaders look like bright yellow Tonka trucks?
Later, Matthew pointed out to me how dented and battered the men of the town were. One missing a leg, several limping, many wearing thick, smoke-tinted glasses to save their eyes damaged from squinting at the brilliant white stone for years on end…and above the town the quarries were stunning, beautiful. At sunset the flat white faces changed colours like a magic mirror: silver, blazing orange, downy pink as a baby’s cheek. Down from these mountains had come the marble from which some of the most famous monuments in Italy were made; The Colosseum, Michelangelo’s David. Now it goes to make, the tourist-trinket sculpture sold down in Carrara, floor tiles, and pedestal sinks; the gravel paves roads, the dust goes into toothpaste. What remains the same? Quarry men have been taking take their bite of the mountain for the last 3000 years; and the mountain…
To Carlito di Torano
‘Lizzatura’, impossibility of scale.
The slipping of the lizard ton, slow heave:
Skittering run of started stones, pale
As the knuckles above a dust-rimed sleeve.
What chemic system drives the reptilian mind
Of these men, of you, to scatter with wet
And laboured breath the dandelion seed
Of your life across this osteal range
Of unrelenting, unrepentant, white?
White, heavy enough to burn you blind;
Grind bone and work-hard skin to paste and lard.
As Atlas’ report rambles down the quarry hour;
You turn your head towards the hard, square place
That men dented, limping leave
At twenty-five to tend their flowers.
-Bonnie McClellan
To see the poem published in the “Blood Orange Review” click HERE.
Quarries in the Bacino di Torano as seen from our old house.
“A minor seventh concordant soundswith this planched hillside and my dry mouth.Acrid greenness that smells like a copper cointipped to the tongue.Secco, secchio. Mare, ammaro.”
-bonnie mcclellan
The big things, the wide things, are general. The Mediterranean coast line full of lavender, and other sun baked shrubs that exude the smell of curry and thyme. The eye and the mouth taste something astringent and ochre in this intense green baked soft. It leaves a metallic twinge on the tip of my tongue, on the basin of my retina, nickel cadmium, a licked penny.
The water diffuses everything, the small stones that line the undersea shelf shush-hush-shushing the smack-happy surface which is busy redrawing the coastline; excavating more stones to council silence. Onshore, some of these stones have gone utterly verdigris, church-dome green arching up from the general chaos of grey-scale slashed with white.
What is specific and at the same time wildly general to the vacation house terraces, repeated with small variations along the Mediterranean coast: the banality of bougainvillea and lime, the white table, the beach umbrella, the backpacks crammed with towels, folding chairs, concrete, tile, the ground scattered with ants, crumbs and a child’s plastic toys, the taut umbrella over the table and the shadow of the butterfly that crosses above it.
What is exactly here? FRAMURA, frazione ANZO the lower section but above COSTA and the train station. Folding chairs, the old kind that are made of wood and metal with a little rust, at one point they were white but have been repainted with a colour the paint store has labeled ‘azure’. The umbrella over the table is a deep cherry red. It has six wooden ribs. The branch of a lime tree with one lime has tucked up underneath the umbrella’s far edge. All the parts of the lime leaves facing up towards the inside of the umbrella are catching the reflected red, turning these sides into a chromatic shift of red-russet-brown-black. The contrast between the green of the underside of the leaf and it’s reddark surface makes each transitional edge as hard and clean as a struck blank.
I live for this hour’s light
pattering through the garden trees,
golden sources
rising through the grass.
Every place has it’s light;
here already taking on
summers’ last humid sighs.
Not the earnest, hammered promise,
of home’s light
that rises through
August’s moistureless vapor
cracking, blackening
into the pale
silhouette of
September’s false release.
Pigeon wings flapping like a flat tire on I-385.
Soft black veins of Lemon butterflies searching for a kiss.
Shutters.
Shutters.
Shutters.
Slamming out summer.
why this morning?
why that particular song?
why that 5 min. clip of my life:
the saturated taste
of anonymous food from
a particular bar and grill
salad
that tastes too much like itself
that i can’t bear to eat
my gut too full
of wanting.
only the bitter of
iced tea is
palatable,
over the garble and hum
of some game
summing itself up
behind the intentional
chaos of bar bric.
the hallowed blue
of your eyes
reaching in for something
i don’t have
your pallid tenor echoing
uncharacteristic honky-tonk
verses with the digital
hiccup-skip of a
corrupted file:
Today as i visit your page i find ads for:
Asian Parent! with writing in an ideogrammatic language;
Love Beads – do you love beading?
Three adds for vacation spots:
French House Party, Carcassonne…
Hotel Vincent, Parisian Luxury.
and a Mediterranean Island I’ve never heard of.
I imagine myself, poolside on an
anonymous island between france and
north africa
beading away
with an asian child;
She stands behind me,
bending over my beading,
and strokes my thick,
black hair.
I smile at her,
she looks like
the sister of Momataro,
a peach of a girl.
The Algorithm itself is perfect tic, tic, tic-ing away for infinity:
empty of integers,
free from the flawed intervention
of an operator fumbling,
wrenching up the equation.
A cell phone rings:
No call, no message.
I look up,
She is
black clothed tight
enough to delineate her hyperbolic curves.
She is
playing all the ringtones
on her slip of a phone.
She is
bored of them all
before beginning.
She is
still listening to this sad bird
peep out every musical algorithm it knows.
Bonnie McClellan-Broussard 