Stromboli, the fire inside and outside
We had taken the ferry in Naples. The spaghetti with octopus that we had for lunch at Ciro's before leaving didn't dispel Alvarito's gloomy mood. His silence brewed a reproach. He slept on the way; I read Huysmans.
At the port we took a golf cart that took us to the house. It was quadrangular and whitewashed, with the openings marked in indigo. The floor was mud. A garden opened in a portico over the sea.
Beneath the cane canopy was a rustic wooden table and old metal chairs. Alvarito dropped his bag and looked around the cove. The blue was deep.
I opened the shutters and remembered the Casa del Sole: the hydraulic tile rooms, the iron beds, the spirit of community, the thunder of the volcano, the shared showers.
Lara and Stefano, with whom I spent that summer, had canceled the trip due to an unforeseen event. The reunion would not take place. “Will we see _ Stromboli _ when we return?”, Alvaro asked. He had insisted on seeing the Rossellini film on the island.
Stromboli from the sea
We took two bicycles and, in a dark evening, we headed to the Da Zurro terrace. Zurro himself, a bearded old man, recited the letter in maddened Italian. The noise of the tables was lost in the waves. We ordered a Sicilian white, cuttlefish, red mullet. I drank.
Alvarito's gaze was dark. “The thing in Naples... at your cousins' party... he didn't say anything good about you. And if he did, no one understood. Not everyone is back."
He expected it. I smiled. The spiral had already been consumed.
He continued. “You need to focus. You have never needed to earn a living, but now your situation is not the same.”
“I have resumed my novel”, I answered. The plate of tomato-splattered squid fell onto the table.
"Yeah, but your writing is diluted," he said lucidly. His glass remained untouched.
"The plate of squid sprinkled with tomato fell on the table"
We went back home and I put on the movie. Alvarito soon fell asleep. I watched alone the atonement of Ingrid Bergmann.
The hostility, the rejection of the women in black, the horror of the trap, the adventure with the man from the lighthouse; the flight to the volcano and the redemption between the fumaroles. I thought that the epiphany would take her to the convent or the asylum. Perhaps it would have been better to prolong the flight.
We got up early and bought olives, cheese and bread from the island. A friend of Stefano's was waiting for us at the port with a wooden boat painted blue. It had a small engine and a green striped awning.
We're headed for the west coast. The water was calm. The background of light pebbles and black sand projected a warm color. We anchor in a cove. Alvarito asked me if he could bathe naked. I told him we were in Italy, but he ignored me. There was no one in sight.
Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli (1950), by Roberto Rossellini
The plunge woke the merman. The cloud vanished. He called me; I jumped; We climbed up the rock wall and dropped down. I walked a few strokes away from the beach and watched him climb the escarpment over and over again.
When we got back to the boat the light had changed. We deviate towards Strombolicchio. The rock emerged bristling. A ladder led to the lighthouse. Alvarito wanted to go up. While I waited for him I tried to remember the words from dinner. The echo of him was lost in liquid reflections. I couldn't catch them.
We return to the route. Behind the inhabited strip, the ash from the volcano fell into the sea. The weakness of the engine delayed the journey. We had lunch, removed the awning and let ourselves rock. His touch lost its reluctance. We slept between baths in the sun.
The little pe n of Strombolicchio
It was not yet dark when we returned to the port. Between the tourists and the buggies, Stefano's friend suggested a beer at the Ingrid bar.
There I asked him if he organized excursions to the crater. He said the climb took three hours. If we wanted to avoid the ascent, we had the option of the Osservatorio, a restaurant with views of the magma.
Alvarito said that the restaurant sounded good. He gave me a strange look when I booked a place for the next day's climb. He stayed. He would watch the movie again.
"The plunge woke up the merman"
The road was not hard. They gave me boots, a backpack and a cane. The sun had fallen. I ignored the rest of the group and stayed silent.
The vacuum was that of Rossellini, although without fumaroles. The darkness grew as we neared the top. We wait at a lookout.
After a few minutes, I heard a roar followed by a decaying flare. In the reddened light I guessed the rumor of a revelation, but I didn't hear it.
"In the reddened light I guessed the rumor of a revelation..."