Sicilian Espress.
Chapter 60 Sidebar…
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…And the ozone of garlic and coffee only dispatched me back to Catania’s stazione ferroviaria, where this whole espresso/caffeine fixation bedeviled a sloth like me to start with. So I drifted into memory mode along the way…
It was a bit after dawn in Sicily, already midday sweltering at seven a.m.—ten degrees hotter inside the train depot. A Tyrrhenian-coastal local was at least an hour late. Ripe olives and citrus in the air, Mt. Etna smoldered in the distance, lava flowing from its crater like molten aspic, simmering red against this brilliant blue sky. From inside the station emanated scratchy arias and raucous, indecipherable conversation. The waiting room was a squall of smoke and shadows, a catacomb of demonstrative mob mentality heatedly espressed, dimly unapproachable though mere steps from the northbound platform.
Male to maelstrom: the city fathers were mostly black-clad elderly, gathered tightly around a large, semi-circle bar on the far wall. Central to that counter was a monumental chrome vat with oxidized pipes twisting out in all directions like lightening bolts, steam billowing from their tips. Only that espresso machine’s vapors broke the shroud of coffee bean darkness. All senors, no senoras, so the molish elders seem to thrive on this gloom, as if the waiting room were their sole refuge from the blindingly colorful light of day. They basked in it, toasted it with their muddy doppio shots—their bleak beacon of brotherhood, their grim ray of hope. The dimmer its corners, the brighter their outlook; this was their smoky room, their bastion, their deep, dark domain—couldn’t ask for a better place to lose my pre-caf virginity, one tiny turbo cup at a time…
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