Roast Lamb
‘Pronta! Cheese!’ Beside me on the top deck
she camera-clicks at the man on whom she was slabbering
sun-cream until, when we anchored and others went down
to the steps off the stern, he climbed the rail, postured,
then hippo-plummeted smashing the bay
half out of itself, and now he floats belly up
and limbs spread like a starfish in sea so clear
you follow the drop of cliff far underwater.
A whistle shrills recalling the swimmers,
and we are landed. I stroll from the little jetty
up to the church and piazza, around them a snaggle
of flat-roofed white dwellings, under the fuming summit.
Dusk congregates among bougainvillea, eating
swordfish I hear in that hybrid accent
I’ve come to recognise, ‘Y’know what I mizz mose
back here in Stromboli? Izz the rose limb.’
‘But surely,’ the English couple demur,
‘you have sheep in Italy?’ ‘Yeah, but nothing beats
good old Aussie rose limb.’ He has prospered in Sydney,
returns as he pleases, has bought his uncle’s old house.
The English talk prices and, ‘In your pharmacies
they’ve not even heard of vegetarian toothpaste.’
And, ‘The lizards, is their bite venomous?’
He offers boat trips. ‘We’ll see.’ I doubt that they will.
Back on board I climb up onto the bow,
and after we’ve gazed up raptly at the explosions
of the volcano, when the engines start up
thrumming us through la notte serena
I talk with the girl from Palermo perched up beside me,
and her name is Serena, la mia sirena siciliana,
till a sprinkle of lights is Canneto, where she gets off,
and we round the long promontory to Lipari town.
In Via Garibaldi, wheeling her pram
is Alessandra from Ristorante da Bartolo
where last year, having walked over the heights
of Salina, I ate a enormous meal, and they wouldn’t
take a centissimo, knowing it was my birthday.
Children still up are bouncing a ball, ice-creams
in their other hand, girls with bared midriffs stroll
under a moon hung low as the street-lights over the Corso.
‘Sabenedica a Vossia, Don Bartolo!’
I hail the Captain in grovelling dialect.
He starts from his stool and doffs his berretto,
attempts a bow in response, but his girth prevents it.
He is dieting: ‘Fruits! Salads!’ the doctor orders,
which he eats, not instead of but in addition to
his chickens, pieces of fish, pastas, pastries, sauces.
Also he wants to improve his English:
he produces a sheet of paper on which is written
a phrase to attempt. He attempts it:
‘The kikken is kikkin in the kikken…’
‘No, not quite, Capitano. Try again.’
Within the shop Guy too waves a sheet of paper:
‘Does one in English say “on the sea” or “by” it?’
In front of his counter a woman beams, sipping Coke.
‘Olga asks I translate this advertisement
from her bastardised Russo-Italian, to put
on the Internet, to rent her apartment in Roma.
Which is rather, I think, her boyfriend’s.’ As well as her boyfriend
in Rome, she has one in Milazzo whom she makes take
her to Paris, much more expensive than Milazzo,
and a third, a bank clerk here. Who now rushes in:
‘Coruzza mia!’ ‘Bastardo!’ – she punches him out.
‘Her apartment,’ says Guy, ‘she writes is by the sea,
yet in the mountains, and next to il Vaticano,
and all the other famous monuments.’
‘Perhaps,’ I suggest, ‘you could say “in the sea”.’
‘Yes, and with Olga inside it!’
The Captain meanwhile has been working,
and getting it right at last he enunciates,
‘The chicken is,’ and adding a twist all his own,
‘cooking in my kitchen! So, buona notte!’
I dodge the trees in the enclave before
my apartment, hear some fruit fall thwack! into grass.
‘Roast lamb,’ I murmur: these things
that I miss most when I am back in England.
Page(s) 32-34
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