Threshold Read online

  At the weekends, Coby, Georgina and I drank in Alcamo’s five or six bars. Georgina had instantly become a celebrity among the town’s young men (and envious young women), who were in a frenzy of competition to win the attentions of this glamorous new arrival. One night, as I watched her being encircled by shiny leather jackets, white T-shirts and predatory grins, an unemployed architect – everyone in Sicily was an unemployed architect, apart from those who were unemployed lawyers – described to me the Sicilian tradition of la mattanza. Each year at the start of summer, the island’s fishermen would link their boats in a huge ring just off shore, and trap hundreds of the enormous tuna that teemed in Sicily’s waters in a vast net. As the net was raised, the fishermen would hack the thrashing tuna with swords and knives, till the sea ran deep crimson.

  Another Saturday night, while Georgina was being driven around on the scooter of an admirer, Coby and I sat drinking bottles of strong Belgian beer in a bar named Jack the Ripper. Women came and went in small groups, glancing at us with fleeting curiosity before resuming the detached, bored expressions that seemed to be a requirement of young Sicilian femininity.

  ‘So why Sicily?’ I asked Coby when we were on our second beers. The DJ was playing the insipid house music that was dismayingly popular across the island. The track that came on now, which I had heard many times before, featured the refrain ‘Love, sex, American Express’.

  ‘Had to go somewhere, I guess,’ said Coby. ‘I have a buddy here too. Ricardo. He lives on the other side of the island, in Messina. Before I came here I figured Sicily was just like this little island and we could hang out. But it’s huge. I haven’t even been to visit him yet.’

  Coby had little interest in studying Italian, content to get by on whatever he picked up on nights out, bantering with locals. He was a few years older than me, in his early thirties, and had been teaching English as a foreign language on and off since he’d finished college. Every now and then he returned to his hometown in Northern Ontario to ‘get fucked up’ with his friends who still lived there, but his life had fallen into a rhythm of moving from city to city.

  ‘Bangkok was the best,’ he said. ‘I wish I didn’t screw it up.’

  I bought us two more bottles of Chimay and he told the story. He had moved to Bangkok for three years after travelling around South-East Asia. The money was good and the lifestyle pleased him greatly. ‘It’s not a myth,’ he said. ‘You can sleep with a different woman every night. Dude, the white man still holds some sway out there. And those girls … Seriously, I thought I’d never be attracted to occidental women again. It’s the way a Western guy and an Asian chick’s bodies fit together. I call it the Asian Contagion. And the psychology too. Just like how a white woman and a black guy works so well. Miscegenation – man, that is the future.’

  In Bangkok he hung around with expats, mostly teachers, went out to bars and clubs four or five nights a week. After he’d been there a while, tired of paying too much for drugs, he had a friend back in Canada post some over. First it was just enough for personal use – acid, cocaine, MDMA – but soon he realised he could supplement his teaching wages by selling to friends.

  ‘I wasn’t looking to get rich,’ he said. ‘It was mostly, like, altruistic purposes. Just shit for my friends to get high with. I liked the sort of reputation.’

  One afternoon he was coming home from work. As he got off the bus and turned on to the block in downtown Bangkok where he lived, his phone rang. It was an American woman who lived in the same building. She warned him not to come back: the cops were all over his apartment; they had knocked the door down. Now Coby could see the police cars parked around the front of the building, some cops with walkie-talkies stationed outside. He walked away and boarded the first bus he saw. After withdrawing as much as he could from an ATM, he took a taxi to the bus station and boarded a coach out of the city more or less at random. For days he hid in the countryside, even sleeping some nights in a cave.

  He finally worked up the nerve to cross the border into Cambodia. From there he flew to India and spent a month in Goa, getting stoned and drunk and ‘having a nervous breakdown’. Even now he would wake up in seizures of anxiety, convinced that the Thai police were about to come barging through the door.

  ‘Dude, there was so much LSD in that apartment. They would have put me away for life. It’s possible I would have been executed.’

  ‘So I take it that was the end of your career as a drug dealer?’

  ‘Hell, no. I’ve had shit posted here. The Italian cops are dumb. I’ve got some mescaline I’ve been saving for a rainy day. As in, a day that isn’t rainy.’

  Most of our work involved travelling out to nearby towns, some of which were not so near at all – Castellammare, Castelvetrano, Sasi. I didn’t have a driving licence, which meant either I was at the mercy of the Sicilian public transport system or I had to be driven by Coby, sometimes Georgina. For the first time in my life I regretted not having learned to drive. Back in Dublin, it hadn’t seemed necessary. In Sicily, people were appalled when I told them I didn’t have a licence. Sometimes they would stammer embarrassedly, as if I’d confessed some bizarre sexual proclivity.

  ‘Ma … how do you go around?’ asked my friend Marco one afternoon on a cafe terrace off the main street. (We met there twice a week so he could practise his English and I my Italian. Marco had a lot of free time on his hands, being an unemployed architect, or perhaps an unemployed lawyer – I’ve forgotten which.) How did I go around? It was a fair question. No more than two or three buses left Alcamo every weekend, at sadistically early hours. The Sicilians’ contempt for public transport was almost as great as their contempt for the police. Driving offered them the chance to marry their scorn for the law with their individualistic automotive pride: they weren’t happy unless they were going twenty miles an hour over the limit, accelerating into corners, overtaking blindly and generally being so reckless it was a wonder more of them didn’t die in fiery smash-ups. But then, many of them did die in fiery smash-ups – the sight of wrecked cars by the side of the autostrade, with drivers holding their heads in their hands and sirens blaring, became unremarkable. Drunk-driving wasn’t just tolerated in Sicily, it was fashionable, almost obligatory. On weekends, we stranieri would pile into the car of some local playboy keen to impress Georgina, and race from nightclub to nightclub, a trail of them specked across the north-western coast and inland hills, with the driver pounding back as many vodka and Cokes as the rest of us.

  Each Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, Coby and I drove out to teach at a secondary school in Castelvetrano. The town was inland, unrelieved by the sparkling sea that took the edge off the economic depression and social torpor elsewhere. Matteo Messina Denaro, the Sicilian mafia’s current capo dei capi – the boss of bosses – was born in Castelvetrano. For nearly two decades he had been in hiding, allegedly moving between safe houses scattered across the island. In the last known photograph of him, which the FBI used on their Ten Most Wanted posters (he was in third place then, below Osama bin Laden and ‘El Chapo’), Denaro is young and dangerously handsome in shades and a dapper suit.

  My students in Castelvetrano were in their final year. There were around thirty pupils, ranging from those with a genuine interest in learning English to those with no interest in anything at all. Among the former was Angelica, smart, lively, eighteen and, I realised within moments of stepping into the classroom for the first time, tormentingly attractive. Seeing her quickly became the only thing that alleviated the tedium of driving out there to teach those suckers in that grim town. As I sat at my desk or slouched by the whiteboard, watching Angelica was even more tempting than watching the clock, though it was tricky to watch either the clock or Angelica with thirty pairs of eyes on me, ready to pounce at any sign of weakness. After going through some grammar and vocabulary, I would give the class a written exercise and sink behind my desk to surreptitiously tinker with printed chapters of my novel. I was frequently caught gazing at Angelic
a, on one occasion by the school’s own capo dei capi (the principal), who had been standing in the doorway for Christ knows how long.

  I couldn’t help it. There is no way to avoid saying this: the period I spent living in Sicily was marked by the most acute sexual frustration. The beauty of the Italians will come as a surprise to nobody – they run neck and neck with the French in a two-horse race to be Europe’s most gorgeous people. As the spring arrived and the first glimpses of tanned bare flesh appeared, I was entranced by the beauties that paraded the alleys and streets of Alcamo, or idled on the piazza, or licked ice cream with lascivious abandon outside a ‘bar’ (that is to say, an Italian bar, namely one that mainly sold coffee and ice cream, therefore not a bar at all). Italy’s was a culture devoted to beauty, to sex and its flaunting, a purely visual culture of labels and lingerie, of sexy fascist uniforms and fascistic catwalk modelling. And yet it was also highly conservative, traditional, Catholic. Or maybe that was just Sicily – perhaps it was this conservatism, and not the dearth of jobs and prospects, that compelled the young to emigrate or head north. Perhaps they were not economic migrants but horndog migrants, lust migrants. A superabundance of beauty and sex was everywhere on display, yet it could not be touched – or not by me, at any rate. In my heart I knew that the Sicilians were as actively eroticised as they appeared to be, and the ostensible conservatism was really just a facade, a sort of ideological lingerie to heighten the dizzy pleasures it – just about – concealed. The Sicilians were fucking like rabbits. But I was a foreign teacher in a small town: it would be disastrous if I were to earn a reputation for myself as a fiend, a womaniser, a pervert. I couldn’t go for a walk in Alcamo without students waving to me, or having to bid buongiorno to a teacher from a local school. Everyone knew who we were, the three stranieri. Boiling over with frustration, every night I would jerk off to visions of Angelica – of fucking her over her desk after her classmates had filed out; of pulling aside the flimsy knickers she did or didn’t wear under those tight jeans and lapping at her like a dog; of having her straddle me in the toilet stalls amid the stench of shit and the graffiti cocks while the rest of the class hunched over some bullshit exercise, awaiting my return.

  Three months in, my sexual confidence had utterly withered. I wondered what the hell I’d been thinking, coming to this shitty island full of untouchable women; I considered getting back in touch with the woman I’d been seeing (and touching) before moving to Sicily – an Italian, just to rub my nose in it. I badly needed to get laid, but the very need made getting laid at all at first unlikely and then utterly impossible. I exuded desperation and the most unattractive thing in the world is desperation. Women instinctively rejected me before I’d even made a move, and so I would jerk off before going to sleep only to wake up half an hour later to jerk off again, my mind polluted with imagery that grew more and more questionable, more and more desperate, by the day. I would have given anything to spend myself inside her, to perish while ejaculating torrentially inside Angelica with one final howl of joy and rage, but I had to make do with pulling myself off while thinking about her. I found myself blushing and stammering whenever I saw her in real life, unable to meet her eye or answer her questions, even such questions as ‘Can I go to the toilet?’ or ‘Do you have my homework from Tuesday?’ (I did not: I had jerked off all over it and then burned it, overcome by shame.) I knew that she knew – everyone knew. In short, it was a desperate situation and it was going to end badly if I didn’t find a girlfriend, one who wasn’t my teenage student.

  One morning, after a night of jerking off, I awoke to the sound of my alarm clock. I stood under the shower, intending to cleanse myself of the night’s encrusted semen and sweat, only to find that no water flowed from the showerhead. Not a drop. Irritated rather than alarmed, I turned the tap on the sink: there was a choked gurgling noise followed by a violent spurt of brown water, and then nothing. It was the same in the kitchen. Coby came slumping out of his bedroom, muttering dazedly to himself as he reached for the cafetière.

  ‘There’s no water,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve tried all the taps.’

  ‘There’s no …?’

  ‘There’s no water.’

  ‘Then how am I gonna … make coffee?’

  ‘You’re not going to make coffee, Coby. There’s no water with which to make it.’

  ‘Dude, there’s no water?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  The lack of water was a real problem, because I was due to teach four lessons that day and I stank of dried semen, of desperation. It was already an uncommonly warm day (this was the beginning of April) and I felt like I was steaming. I hadn’t even brushed my teeth.

  ‘Fuck this shit,’ said Coby.

  ‘Yes.’

  We called our boss, the Scottish woman, because it was she and her school who had sourced the accommodation for us.

  ‘Oh yes, that happens sometimes,’ she said chirpily.

  I waited for more.

  ‘See you in twenty?’ she said.

  ‘But I haven’t washed. We can’t even flush the toilet.’

  She sighed down the phone. ‘If it’s really urgent, you can probably use Georgina’s bathroom.’

  I made a point of being late that morning, showering long and leisurely at Georgina’s, who sympathised but was a little taken aback to have the two of us in her apartment, taking turns to wash ourselves. When Coby and I returned from work that evening, tired and stressed, the water still hadn’t come back on.

  It is said that any populace is only three missed meals away from revolution, but not enough has been made of the insurrectionary potential of a water supply that unexpectedly dries up. The discomforts accumulate: you can’t wash your hands after you’ve eaten something sticky; you can’t make a cup of tea; you can’t clean the dishes that pile up smeared and encrusted, beacons to flies; you can’t flush the fucking toilet. Whenever I feel decentred and agitated I like to take a shower, but now I was unable to take a shower, could only dwell on how decentred and agitated I was feeling. Two, three, four days passed and still there was no water. It was a full-blown drought. Had there been any plants in our flat, they would have wilted. At this time the sirocco, the hot dry wind that blows in from North Africa, gusted up so that the streets outside were dusty and stinging, no refuge from the aridity of our apartment. The world was a grimy, wind-whipped desert.

  Coby and I continued to shower in Georgina’s flat, to shit in public toilets and to clean our teeth and make tea from big plastic vats of water we filled at a public fountain. Every day I told myself that enough was enough, we had to stop working until this issue was resolved. I wanted to stage a dirty protest but we were already dirty. My mood was likewise foul. At school I snapped and roared at students, belittled teenagers who couldn’t conjugate, made six-year-olds cry by mocking their grammatical errors with acid sarcasm.

  One morning, before Coby, Georgina and I set out for our classes, I went to see our Scottish boss and told her that this was the last, absolutely the last, day I would work until she got our water running again. I could not, I said, continue to teach under these Third World conditions.

  ‘Well, if you don’t work, you won’t get paid,’ she said.

  It took a monumental act of self-control, an appeal to the Buddhist principles I had studied years earlier, not to lunge at her, to throttle her, to hurl her out the window on to the street below. In the book on Italian history I was reading, defenestration was a common method of political murder, and now I was close to committing an act of defenestration myself.

  ‘Fix it,’ I said.

  ‘It’s being fixed.’

  ‘Fix it now.’

  ‘It is being fixed now. It’s being fixed as fast as it can.’

  ‘It’s been six days. We’ve been living without running water for six days.’

  ‘That’s Sicily,’ she said with her ghastly grin.

  ‘I’ll teach my les
sons today, but I’m not coming into work tomorrow if the water hasn’t come back on.’

  ‘If you don’t work, you won’t get paid.’

  ‘You barely pay us anyway.’

  I didn’t say this last line, but I wanted to, and I wanted to say so much more, so much worse. I barked at my students for the next eight hours. One little boy confused the present perfect with the preterite: I made him stand on his own in the centre of the classroom and rotate slowly on the spot while we all pointed at him and jeered loudly.

  And then, on the seventh day, as in some biblical tale, the water came back as suddenly and inexplicably as it had ceased. ‘Let there be water,’ decreed some unseen bureaucrat, and water there was. In giddy bafflement, Coby and I stood watching the tap in the kitchen sink gushing forth, a heavenly vision in the Dust Bowl of our parched apartment. There was some unfathomable parable in all this about Sicilian ways, redolent of omertà, enigmatic glances that passed between old women in sun-baked villages, whisperings amid lemon groves. One day your water was running normally, then it ceased for a week, and then it came back on again. No explanation would ever be offered. We were strangers here, stranieri in a strange land. There was no point trying to understand.

  At weekends I took trips: to Messina; Mount Etna, which was veiled in fog as I ascended it on a rickety train; San Vito Lo Capo, where the sky filled with thousands of kites during a festival; the theatres and street markets of Palermo. To get anywhere, I had to wake up at five or six in the morning, exercising all my willpower not to stay in bed. My days off were thus notable in that they began in exactly the same manner as my days on, just even earlier. One of the less remarked-upon barbarities of the five-day working week is how it imposes on the weekend a manic, anxiety-ridden quality: workers are so desperate to enjoy themselves that they can only fail to do so; they run around like convicts on day release, finally drinking themselves into a stupor because at least alcohol makes it seem that time is not passing, it is present, that we are not elsewhere, we are here and now. The worker’s grim determination to enjoy his two days off has the effect of ruining those two days, filling them with worry and the bitter knowledge that soon it will be Monday again, and he will spend five dreary shifts anticipating the next weekend, which, like all the others, will be a disappointment.