TOLD TO ARRIVE EARLY, I was at the Big Bus Bar, just a stone’s throw from the Palermo rail station, at 8 a.m. for an 8.45 bus. Yes, the Big Bus Bar. English is everywhere. Tickets are sold with coffees and arancini. But no, I couldn’t use a credit card, the man said, though he had a credit card terminal right there on the desk, wired up and winking. He took cash, gave me a ticket, and was very friendly in coming out of the bar and pointing along the street to where I could wait for the bus.
‘That bench,’ he said. ‘It stops there.’
Buses need so much less infrastructure than trains. No stations, ticket offices, platforms or dedicated rails. Just an old bench on a broken pavement.
The seat was made of wooden slats bolted onto a tubular iron frame. It was deserted. I thought I would sit and read. Underneath the bench were plastic cups, a banana peel, a blue plastic bag, a rectangular liqueur bottle. To one end of the bench, on the seat, were two broken eggshells and a little white of egg smeared over a couple of slats. The other end looked clean. I sat down, then quickly stood. Someone had pissed. The morning was already warm. King Minos, our friendly heatwave, was up early, though the bench was in the shade. Now that I’d noticed it, the smell was overpowering and I moved off and found a post to lean on ten yards away. If a crowd began to gather, I could move closer later, I thought.
Two women arrived, one older and one younger; they sat on the clean side of the bench, hung on perhaps two minutes, then stood and moved off. Three or four others repeated the experiment. Then a man in fluorescent lime-green trousers, blue shirt and white plastic gloves arrived carrying a witch’s broom and dustpan. He began to sweep around the bench, emptying his sweepings into a tall wheelie bin. His manner was neither lazy nor assiduous. He did his job stolidly, but seemed to feel that to be too thorough would be inappropriate. Having swept well enough around the bench and adventured his broom a little way under it – say, six inches or so – he left the other rubbish under there right where it was. Perhaps the powerful piss smell was too much for him. It was not his fault that he had no means of washing it away. If he noticed the eggs on the bench, he didn’t do anything about them. Perhaps filth on rather than under the bench was another man’s territory. In any event, he seemed satisfied with his efforts to the point that he was actually whistling as he moved off with his bin.
The sunshine intensified and the smell with it. A stately old Fiat 132 arrived bringing two nuns dressed in white. The younger of the two, in her late sixties, parked the vehicle about a yard from the pavement, a couple of yards ahead of the bench, and right on a corner. Having pulled out a heavy bag, they began to discuss whether the car could be left there. They decided it couldn’t. You can’t park a car on a corner, and certainly not so far out from the pavement. The younger nun got back in the seat, started the car, frowned, turned the motor off and got out again. They had been wrong, she said; it could be left there. There was a little more discussion about this, but in the end the decision stood, and the two white-clad nuns now took up positions right by the bench at the exact point where the bus was supposed to arrive fifteen minutes later. Even their sandals were white, I noticed. The urine smell did not deter them. Perhaps years of mortifying the flesh made them immune. The driver nun stood with her hands behind her back; her fingers were linked by the car key ring on which she moved the four or five keys back and forth, as if they formed a rosary. I couldn’t see if her lips were moving. The more the sun came up, the more the minutes passed, the more I was impressed by their fortitude. A dozen other passengers were hanging well back. But the nuns showed no sign of unease – not, that is, until a young man came and stood on the tarmac in front of them, even nearer to the eventual bus than they were. This got them hopping from one white sandal to another in agitation.
Then, very unusually, the couple to my left asked me, in Italian, with local Sicilian accents bordering on dialect, what time exactly the bus was supposed to arrive, and I replied, in my northern Italian, that it should have arrived a moment ago. Then they said thanks, they had thought as much, how typical, and I said yeah, isn’t it, but it’s early in the day to start complaining. They laughed and agreed and did not appear to notice at all that I was not Italian. Was it the now overwhelming smell of urine that had masked my foreignness? The reader will have long reached the conclusion that I am obsessed by this, but it remains a complete mystery to me how people pick up or don’t pick up whatever messages I send out. Anyway, I suddenly felt pleased. No, more than pleased, moved. Here I was in my adoptive country, in a remote part of it that I had always felt would be a bridge too far for me, Sicily, the south, danger, the Mafia, calmly chatting away to ordinary folks, understanding and understood, as if I really were Italian. Fantastic. I decided to enjoy watching developments with the nuns and the insolent queue jumper.
The bus arrived fifteen minutes late. A small crowd of about twenty held their collective breath and closed in
