I drove out of Palermo with a film in my head.
That is the embarrassing part, so I will put it first. An hour west, the road climbing inland and then coming back down toward a sea you keep losing and finding again, and the whole way I was quietly expecting Sicily to look like The Godfather. Dry hills. A piazza at noon. Men in black who do not say much and mean a great deal by it.
I know better than that. I have always known better.
It is still what I was doing.
The practical version of this, how you get out here and what else is worth the drive, is in my complete guide to Palermo and the day trips guide. This is the other thing.
Scopello is not a town. It is a courtyard.
You come in past a stone fountain with three spouts, and then the road stops. What it stops in is a paved yard with one tree, an old estate building along one side, and four lanes going off it that are each about ten yards long and then over.
That is the village.
You can stand in the middle of it and describe every building without turning around.
I had a room off the yard. Tiles, a high bed, shutters that did not quite meet.
I woke at six because of the light coming through the gap in bars across the wall, and lay there for a while without moving, listening to somebody stacking crates somewhere I could not see.
By eight there were four men outside the bar.
Chairs out on the paving, in the shade, all four facing the same direction, the way men of that age sit in every hot country I have ever been to.
I had my film ready for them.
They were talking about a delivery.
Something had not arrived, or had arrived and was wrong, and one of them had the correct opinion about it and the other three had opinions that were very slightly different. This went on for a long time with enormous seriousness and no urgency whatsoever.
Nobody looked at me. Not pointedly. They simply had nothing to look at me about.
Then the bread came and the subject changed completely, and that was the morning.
There is a small cinema in Paris I used to go to on my own, the sort that shows old French things and retrospectives to about eleven people on a Tuesday. What I liked about it was that nobody in there expected anything of me. I had not thought about it in years.
I thought about it in that courtyard, with four men discussing a delivery, and it occurred to me that I had come a very long way to be left alone in more or less exactly the same way.
By eleven the village had shut itself.
Every shutter on the yard closed, one after another, over about twenty minutes, and then nothing. The tree did not move. A cat lay under a parked car in the only proper shade for thirty feet and looked at me with real contempt for being upright.
It was thirty-eight degrees.
Nobody was being mysterious. Everybody was just hot.
That is the correction, and I want to be honest that it took me until lunchtime to accept it. There was no great Sicilian atmosphere being staged for me. There was a small village, in August, doing the sensible thing.
I sat in the dark of my room with the shutters closed and the tiles cold under my feet and read for three hours, and it was one of the better afternoons I have had this year.
At five I walked down to the tonnara.
It is four hundred metres from the yard and about a hundred metres straight down, and you come around the last turn of the track and the whole thing is underneath you at once. A low huddle of ochre buildings on a small bay, roofs half gone, and two enormous limestone stacks standing out of very clear water immediately in front of them.
This was a tuna fishery. They ran the trap out from here into the channel, and the men worked the nets from wooden boats, and then one day that stopped.
The boats are still up on the stones. Not preserved, just left, with the paint coming off them in sheets and the iron rings in the walls gone the colour of dried blood.
It is the most photographed thing for miles and it deserves to be.
It is also, and I did not expect this, quite sad.
A working place that stopped working, sitting in perfect light, being looked at.
The reserve gate is two kilometres on and I got there with about two hours of sun left.
The path runs along the cliff with the sea always down to your left, dwarf palm and dry grass and a smell of hot dust and something herbal I could not name. After twenty minutes it drops you into the first cove.
White pebbles. No sand at all. And water so clear that a boat moored fifty metres out was sitting on its own shadow on the bottom with nothing visible in between.
There were maybe nine people on it.
I put my dress on a rock and went in off the stones, badly, the way you have to when the beach is round pebbles and every one of them moves.
The cold took the entire day off me in about a second and a half.
I swam out to where the bottom stops being a thing you can see properly and turned over onto my back, and stayed there a long time with my ears under, which is the best sound in the world and is not really a sound.
Underwater there is no atmosphere. There are no villagers and no black dresses and nothing meaning anything.
There is cold, and light coming down through it in moving columns, and the noise of your own blood.
I swam until the sun went off the top of the cliff and the water went from turquoise to something much more serious. Then I got out and sat on a hot stone and dripped and did not think anything at all for a while.
I did not remember the film until I sat down to write this.
V.
More images from Scopello
