Et en Arcadia
The most memorable moment of our recent Sicilian odyssey did not happen in a city, but between cities. We were on one of those two hour car drives, this time our destination was ceramics from Caltagirone and chocolate from the city of Modica. We were winding our way through the Sicilian countryside. Our cars followed a well paved highway. We were surrounded by fields of golden wheat, distant hills with olive trees, and flattened sun-dried grass with bundled haystacks that looked like round suitcases left long ago by the Cyclopean race. The highway served as an unlikely wormhole through an Arcadian landscape; we passed through it encased in our vehicles. For a long while the only reminder of human contact with the land was passing trucks. They swayed with heavy loads of agricultural bounties I imagined harvested from these golden fields. I was entranced by paradise.
So what’s the urban kick here? In the midst of these isolated fields of gold, we caught sight of a figure waiting on the side of the road. We passed it quickly, enough to notice that it was a woman. We continued traveling, time with us; again we passed another woman. I had enough time to turn my head and peer through the back window to see the hiked up spandex dress, the coiffured hair. Mostly I noticed the hardness in her pose; a street sultriness that belonged not in Arcadia but on a sidewalk concrete pavement. It was like this with the next few women we passed, some forgoing the false coquettish pose, tired perhaps of being a fleshy billboard of invitation (as if saying, by now you should know what you’ll get) and simply sitting on a lawn chair reading a book. And why not?
What bothered me still was a reminder of some of their vulnerabilities. The dark skin that some of them had, which hinted at immigration stories of lives left behind, and the new ones created. Was life any better for them now? Is it worth it?
I wondered many things beside these larger questions. I wondered the logistics: where do they do it? In the middle of the wheat fields? Is the pimp nearby to collect money or maybe offer protection? Sometimes we’d see their cars parked behind abandoned buildings, sometimes we’d see the pimps. I was struck by the utter randomness of their placement in such a landscape, women selling their flesh in what to me was isolation baked golden by a relentless sun. Chaos is like this, I think. Just when you think you’ve got things figured out- the serene, virgin landscape of a still oil painting, made suddenly alive by human desire and necessity.
