A remembrance of prose and places past: no (Ericean) egress

There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. – Flannery O’Connor

I didn’t anticipate the doors. The cobblestones, the castles, the pasta, and the language barriers – all of those were to be expected. But in the end, it came down to the doors. On the back end of a walk that should have been a run, except that I couldn’t seem to translate my lung capacity into Italian, I encountered the national colors. 

Two wooden doorways side by side nestled in a wall of grey cobblestone, brick, or were they plaster? I wished I shared my mother’s fascination with construction materials. One door was red, the other green. Wider than a front door, more like a garage or a stable door.  Likely a garage – the cats and dogs, friendly and feral, roamed free.  The red paint was interrupted by wood peeking through the vertical planks in spots along the bottom middle of the door, met by three smaller roughly hewn horizontal wooden planks – a repair job in progress or simply forgotten?  The tops of the red planks reached up to a metal grate where panes might have gone, if the green door was meant to be a template. It appeared that time had played favorites. 

The green door held its color – no interruptions or repair jobs and some of the panes remained intact. The foliage there was still lush and verdant, but a half crescent of leaves curved from the foot of the green door, not quite making it all the way to the red one – a taste of the fall that was to come. The air was cold and damp as the fog never quite burned off. I shivered in my orange and black running shorts, Ivy League colors that meant Halloween elsewhere. The shorts marked me as a certain kind of tourist – what kind, I left to others to determine.

The green and red doors pushed me past Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the brutal travel schedule that would await me when I got home. I thought about Christmas and how it was only a few months and a time change away. I would include a picture of those doors in an e-mail to my friends.  I was having trouble figuring out the magical word count that would prevent tipping my notes over into self-indulgent verbosity.  And so, I edited myself by also sending pictures, Sicily by the slice, even when I thought another word or two hundred would do. 

 One of my friends admires architectural stillness.  I wished she was there with me. I admire people, still and moving.  This admiration is often from too far a distance to be noticed. My ability to focus on the people who lived in Erice was unsuccessful. They seemed to hide behind doors, safely closeted in their language. Apparently there were only 200 residents there, but I had trouble meeting anyone who wasn’t a waiter or hotel staff member.

And even then, I couldn’t fake my way into conversations or coincidences by counting to ten, the only Italian phrases that seemed to stick.  I stood in front of the green and red doors shivering just a while longer – hoping the doors would tell me the stories of the lives being lived just beyond reach, right in front of my face. 

-Ara Tucker, 2013